From the ridiculous to the scary

Welsh politics was taken over a few weeks ago by the introduction of a new law. The default speed limit in urban areas was reduced from 30mph (miles per hour) to 20mph. Local councils were left with the power to exempt major wide major thoroughfares with good visibility to maintain as 30mph zones. The reason for the policy was to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible. Many small villages in Wales have a major arterial roads running through the middle of them, indeed many of these villages spread along these major thoroughfares, and modern fast noisy vehicles speed through these villages, not how things used to be at all.

The law was voted though parliament in April 2023 with support from all the major political parties, and 20mph zones had already been implemented in parts of major towns and cities and in other countries. There wasn’t really much fanfare about this law, until a week or so before implemetation day and the hard right Conservative party suddenly U-turned and started a major campaign seeking to overturn this law; a law they had voted for and senior members of the Conservative party had promoted pictures of themselves supporting the campaign of “20’s Plenty”.

Welsh Conservative Leader Andrew RT Davies [left]

This kicked off Welsh media into a frenzy. For many it seemed this was the issue of utmost importance. I was a little baffled. To me, a centre-left Social Democrat, it seemed like a sensible enough idea to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible with a relatively low inconvenience cost. If it works, great, if it doesn’t scrap it. I can understand centre-right folk being a bit more sceptical and as they value individual liberty a little more highly and social cohesion a little less highly and tend to be more averse to social change unless there is a very clear case fot it. However for those on the hard-right this was the number one issue, loudly proclaiming how ridiculous and somehow viscious an attack on individual liberty it was to drive slightly slower where there are children and the elderly people trying to live their lives. When the right to protest or human rights to be taken away, these people were not bothered about, iso it’s not freedom as such that they care about? It made me wonder what was going on. How has our political world become so emotive and divisive?

I believe it’s understanding the difference between centrists, whether they lean right or left and the hard right and the hard left. The left generally support the 20mph law, as it intention is to improve road safety, to improve society, so it ticks the boxes of the key principles of socialism. For the hard right it ticks the boxes of restricting individual liberty and and an overly-prescriptive “nanny state”.

This is perhaps the key difference between centrists and the extremists. For centrists the pragmatic solution, of what works, of policy where the benefits outweigh the costs and this can be tested by data. Centrists only support a law like this 20mph law if it actually reduces the cost of road accidents more than the cost of slightly increased journey times. Or at least to then modify the law so it targets where it does have advantages and leaves areas it doesn’t at 30mph. Whereas for the extremists, what actually works in the real world is of less importance than whether the policy aligns with key facets of their beliefs, whether the policy chimes with their worldview or not is mnore important than whether it is a policy with measurable benefits. That it is more important if something feels right rather than is demonstratably right. So to the hard-right this 20mph rule feels wrong and even if it actually saves many lives, or even improve traffic flow in congested urban centres.

The hard right don’t acrtually believe in liberty, freedom and democracy, just the parts that they like or the parts that affect them as a social group, it’s th enature of th eright to be selfish perhaps. In reality, freedom for us and not for everyone else, which to an expert or an academic is not a definition of freedom or liberty that stands up to scrutiny, as liberty only works if everyone in a society has freedom and liberty.

The difficulty of this ‘common sense’ approach, with ideas feeling right and a belief in principles that don’t actually hold up to close scrutiny that can be a real problem. I’ve used this example before, pre-Copernican people believed that the sun orbits around a flat Earth because that’s what you see in your everyday lives. Once you send cameras into space you can then see that the Earth is a sphere that spins around with a daily day night cycle. If humanity had never embraced abstract thought we’d still be banging flint together to make sharp stone edges to use on axes as the ultimate expression of human endeavour as we did for millenia

It was even pointed out that during the fuss they campaigned for 20mph zones only near schools and hospitals, the fact that most urban areas are near schools and hospitals and that it would cost far more and be less productive for towns to me a mess of 20mph and 30mph zones, that a default law was the cheapest, easiest and lkikely most effective way of making this change, with local democracy able to opt the roads out where it didn’t work. The objectors hadn’t thought it through, but that didn’t matter, the rabble rousing rhetoric was all of what was important.

Politics wasn’t always like it has been for the last 10 years or so. We used to kind of operate with a political consensus. Change didn’t happen unless a majority were convinced or that experts would be the ones making the case and the arguments for policy. This doesn’t happen as much now, particularly in the UK and the US. Centrists are now vilified as politics has moved to the extremes. We are now ruled by those who don’t trust expertise, don’t test ideas and rely on ideas and policy matching the dogma of political ideas from generations ago that were created to resolve particular problems of the time, that are not universal truths and simply damaging to the world we now live in. The politicians have worked out that reason and logic don’t get you very far, educated people have worked things out for themselves, of far greater political probity is rhetoric to appeal to the uneducated about politics, and this shift has proved successful for politicians. The UK and the US thus elected buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

How does this rhetorical game work. You start off with a truth, somethind hard to dispute, but also something that chimes with people’s gut feelings or “common sense”. For Trump it was that the political class are corrupt and don’t represent ordinary people’s interests, For Putin that NATO and the Western Alliance are really not good guys. Truths that are hard to dispute and of course not mentioning that Trump, Johnson and Putin are all very much a part of the establishment they claim to despise.

The next stage is to pretend that your big idea follows logically from that truth, even if the logic falls down under scrutiny, but their target audience isn’t people interested in philosophy or abstract concepts, so it works. For example: Politicians are educated and corrupt, climate activists are educated and corrupt, therefore climate change doesn’t exist, it’s just suits these educated folk to make money out of it. This isn’t logical as it falls into the pattern of: Brian is a bad cat who likes sleeping , Megan is a bad cat who likes eating fish, therefore fish do not exist.

It’s also that pursuing the divisive policies of the extremes of the political spectrum, also divides society and creates social unrest. Turning society into an us and them, rather than a people with a common cause and this is dangerous. The Hard Right are playing these divisive culture wars, because it works to convince the socially conservative majority (and people are naturally socialy conservative I believe) that they need to support them because it feels right, that homosexuality is a sin, that war against Bongo Bongo land is fine as they are all bad people there, that children in poverty deserve to be in poverty because their parents are not exactly like us and don’t live in “our” neighbourhoods.

How did this become socially acceptable? My other thought recently was that is is due to the decline of the church in our lives. For me going to a church does a couple of things. It gives everyone a space to think. The material given to attendees to think about comes from an educated person, the priest, who has plenty of time to think and reflect on events affecting the members of their church, that they are too busy working or raising children to consider and find a way to present these ideas in a thoughtful way and join everyone together for a bit of a sing song. This is the Episcopal Church of Wales I grew up with and attend now. We don’t accept the dogma of a religious text written 2000 years ago as being literally true but is a path to guide us to God’s truth, wisdom and peace that we seek to understand. To accept science and other academic disciplines and use those truths to also inform how we understand the world.

I mention this as when I was a teenager a lot of people left the church behind, I did too, Wales is now a very secular country, because it didn’t seem relevant, we could work this stuff out for ourselves and make our own decisions as confident young people without the church. Yet we’ve grown up into a society that doesn’t reflect, that just accepts dogma whether religious or political without thinking things through, without scrutiny and the decline of attending religious services in the UK may not be such a good thing.

All this is scary. Most of the time whether we drive at 30mph or 20mph doesn’t matter as we rarely knock over other people and many of us have never hit someone with our vehicles. Whether the staistics for next year show a percentage decrease in road accidents or not isn’t all that important (well unless the numbers are huge!).

However this media frenzy was overtaken by events, by the tragic escalation of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I was deeply saddened as the reports came in daily of the mounting thousands of deaths that have been part of this escalation by extemists. We pray in church every week for the victims of war, whether Israeli, Palestinian or in wars that are ongoing elsewhere. It is such a human tragedy that we should reflect on that in 2023 there are still people firing bullets and flying drones and missiles at other people, killing children, destroying hospitals, destroying lives.

Yet it seems that not everyone shares this view of these events as human tragedy. My social media feeds are full of people condeming Israelies and sharing the tragic tales of Palestinian families. Others share the stories of the Israeli families who have sufferent and condemn the Palestinians. I don’t get this need to pick sides, this isn’t football, it’s human life and death. I also don’t get why the Hard Right side with Israel and the Hard Left with Palestine. or indeed that the Hard Right are more sympathic to Putin’s war on Ukraine and everyone else solidly backs Ukraine, it just feeds into more extremism. In Wales people have been so incensed that they are taking things out on the Jewish and Muslim communities in Wales. This just makes the conflict worse for everybody. I know decent Russian, Jewish and people from the Levant, it’s not these people’s that are to blame for this, but people don’t think it through.

Extemism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t resolve conflict. You need to instead work on solutions, because they exist or can be found. To do that you need to understand why there is a conflict and what will end that conflict and those answers don’t come from a gut feeling, a political principle or “common sense” they are complicated.

Mother Russia

International Relations is a fascinating subject I haven’t yet delved into on this blog. However while the UK debates the fripperies of the Prime Ministers Covid period parties, Russia has built up enough military personel and hardware on the Ukraine border to constitute a potential invasion force. It’s difficult to understadn what exactly is going on here, what Putin’s endgame is and does it raise any interesting political questions.

The idea that a European country would simply declare war and invade another European country kind of sounds arcane, something that had been banished to the history books. Yet it happened recently with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Balkan wars after the break up of Yugoslavia are not all that long ago. Perhaps it has been premature to regard wars between states as consigned to history.

One thing this troop build up has led to is high level talks between Putin and the Western Powers or the NATO alliance. Perhaps these talks were what was wanted. In these talks Putin has been making the case for withdrawal of influence of the Western powers from areas of Russia’s influence. The suggestion is that Russia has been unhappy with former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact states joining NATO and the EU. It seems unhappy about this loss of it’s sphere of influence.

Arguably the two Slavic nation states remaining within Russia’s sphere of influence were Ukraine and Belarus. However in recent decades both in Ukraine and Belarus there has been growth of movements seeking to become Western style liberal democracies and perhaps Russia fears isolation. Such movements for democratic reform exist in Russia too but have been more effectively repressed. Perhaps Russia sees itself as simply helping Ukraine and Belarus repress these democratic movements, to retain it’s autocratic systems.

I can kind of get my head around this as Western style liberal democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After all I spend time on this blog pointing out how weak and ineffective the democracy of the UK actually is and how we are moving towards a more authoritarian autocratic regime.

The fairly recent Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in favour of moves for Ukraine to join the ‘Western European club of membership of the EU and NATO’ were repressed. Other Central and Eastern European states have joined, the Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia, Czech republic, Bulgaria, Romania. Why not also Ukraine, Belarus and Russia herself?

Is this whole situation simply seeking a holding onto power over the Russian people. Yet are not Russians just as much Europeans as the rest of us? What is the difference in this cultural melting pot of a continent? Perhaps it’s yet another example of the Culture Wars?

Western Europe has slowly come to accept LGBT rights, to the extent that they are for most of us and particularly those under 40, normalised. Yet in Russia the LGBT rights movement has been repressed. LGBT rights and individualism are perhaps very Western concepts, they are seen as other and not Russian or even Slavic. Perhaps Russia (as in it’s ruling elite) see value in the tradition of repressing LGBT rights and wish to help similar Slavic states like Belarus and Ukraine in so doing. I believe these culture wars continue to rage in the other Slavic former Warsaw pact states like Poland.

Perhaps as an inhabitant of one of the oldest Western liberal democracies in the world, the UK [whether it’s currently breaking up or not] it is easy to forget history and that change takes time. Post-1945 history for the ‘East’ the Slavic nations of Central and Eastern Europe has been very different that of the ‘West’ in that they were Communist states under the influence of the Soviet Union. Whilst the West had this period of post war Social Democracy where such things as universal healthcare, social housing, unemployment benefits, trade union rights, rising living standards and individual rights blossomed. Then the Thatcher-Reaganism of laissez-faire market capitalism took hold, slowly dismantling Social Democracy and lowering living standards. The big corporations took over and Social Democracy waned. The West moved into this new era of capitalism retaining some of the institutions built by Socialism (they take a while to dismantle), wheras the East completely abandoned Socialism in an eagerness to embrace the new capitalism without retaining the institutions of Social Democacy (to an extent and I’m broadly generalising here) as Soviet style Communism was abandoned in it’s entirety. Without such a period of Social Democracy where LGBT rights could mature, such individualism and human rights causes haven’t developed as part of a general civil discourse.

Of course these culture wars are still playing out here in Wales, there are still very much live issues. The difference is that here in Wales those against such things as LGBT rights are now in the minority and slowly dying off, but in the East they are still the majority.

The West really doesn’t want to get involved in armed campaigns in Eastern Europe, yet there is a tinge of guilt that they should be doing something to protect those in Ukraine who share what we call Western values. Yet, the Right has been on the rise in West in recent years and I suspect that in the UK regime there is some sympathy with Putin’s cause, a rejection of the wokism of Gen-Z. I suspect Putin knows this. Putin also knows that sabre rattling and shows of strength are an effective means of achieving his aims and also help his ratings in domestic politics in Russia. However I fail to see the logic in destabilising Ukraine when it seems Putin wants to retain Ukraine in the Russia sphere of influence.

Maybe it’s all to do with the decline of the nation state. What matters in culture wars is culture and spheres of influence. The UK basically joined the EC (now the EU) to retain it’s influence as a former superpower nation state, with it’s culture of dominance and global influence, that the UK could express itself better through influencing the EU more than it could as ‘little Britain’. Perhaps Russia is simply well aware that it has more influence as Russia with a general backing of some former Soviet states, than it could as an albeit large EU member, so is simply doing what it can to slow the spread of the EU in the East and military shows of strength work domestically in Russia, especially when the West is extremely reluctant to engage Russia militarily.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I’m sure Putin has wargamed the potential outcomes. Ukraine has now long been a pawn between Russia and the West. I suspect Putin’s aim is to install a pro-Putin pro-Russia regime in Ukraine. This will be bad for Ukraine as Putin is bad for Russia. I hope that peace will return to Ukraine one day soon.

The Flat Mars Society

I am surprised the Conservative Party is polling around 40% in the UK, yet I should not be. It’s a sign of how broken our democracy is. It’s an attempt to answer the question of ‘How can the worst Prime Minister in UK history, leading the worst UK government in history, presiding over an economy in recession and the worst Covid-19 death rates in Europe, be getting 40% support?’

A big part of the problem is the antique First Past the Post Electoral system, designed for two parties of gentlemen, elected by the land owning elite. You vote for one party or the other and you have to accept that “your party” are doing incredibly, impossibly badly to even consider voting for the other lot. All one party has to do is establish itself as the “natural” party of government to guarantee hegemony. The lives of ordinary people, even the performance of the economy does not matter as long as this status of the ‘natural’ party is maintained.

That ‘natural ‘ party is the Conservative party, the clue is in the name, ‘Conservatism’ or not changing things unless there is undoubtedly a case for doing so. For the last forty years the Conservative Party, have not dropped below 30% support in UK elections and at best get 43%. This is enough to ensure hegemony. However thsi conservative party have realised that don’t even need to follow this principle of conservatism. They can just hold a fire sale of the UK economy for the benefit of the of the upper escelons of the party and their wealthy chums in the corporate world. How does such a regime maintain power?

Control of the media helps. Right-wing media barons, such as Rupert Murdoch, control the vast majority of the UK press. Hence the conservative party can set the media agenda and choose what gets reported. The Conservatives hate having a public service broadcaster like the BBC, but they control the purse strings and who is on the board, so the BBC in it’s current affairs content is severely hampered in it’s journalism by having to be ‘balanced’, at a time the whole system is unbalanced anyway. For decades the BBC walked this tightrope with equal criticism from the Right and the Left, but they are finally losing public trust.

Being this ‘natural’ government, forces the other party, the Labour party, to exasperate themselves in the question ‘What on earth do we have to do to beat these idiots?’ A common strategy is to have a bland moderate leader, take uncontroversial policy decisions, or even just be a lighter version of the Conservatives as Tony Blair did. Of course the Labour party and the electorate got exasperated with this policy, they wanted someone who would deliver an alterative government, to put things right rather than merely get elected, so they got Jeremy Corbyn, who then got slated by the right wing media. This moderate alternative, isn’t enough. The LibDems have trod this path for decades, they got over 30% in the 1980s, but never enough to break through. They did offer the much needed electoral reform and argued for PR (Proportinal representation) electoral systems. It wasn’t enough.

There needs to be another way to break this stranglehold. Whilst the Conservatives always get 30 to 45% in elections, opposition always gets 55% to 70%, non-Conservatives are the majority in the UK, yet never win UK elections, partly because of FPTP and because opposition is divided, by how radical the alternative needs to be.

There is an alternative that has worked. Scotland. The Scottish National Party (SNP) have succeeded in breaking the cosy two party FPTP system. They are not particularly radical, being Social Democrats. However simply be emphasising local need or the needs of Scotland that a centralised London government ignores, they made the breakthrough, partly by offering a campaign for National Independence. they now have 55%+ of the vote in Scotland, which they have acheived by destroying the vote for Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Scotland. It was perhaps simply making the case for the needs of Scotland, rather than trying to be everything to everybody that failed the other opposition parties. A simple appeal to the principle of democracy rather than a specific policy agenda. Yet this was enough to make that Copernican leap.

A Copernican leap is a change in mindset. A argument to take away one vital piece of traditional thinking that maintains an older way of thinking and begins fresh new thought. For Copernicus it was the belief that the Earth is the centre of the Solar System, surrounded by other planets doing very odd orbits, which people believed as Earth being the centre made ‘natural’ sense. However take idea way that away and the Sun makes much more sense as the centre of the Solar System, the whole system becomes instantly more rational.

Once a Copernican jump has been made the older belief becomes laughable, silly, incoherent. however we should be aware how powerful the hold of such ideas is, how people will twist their thoughts to maintain this illusion. If you have a media that constantly rejects Copernicus and pushes the old order, it makes it harder for people to see the light and make that Copernican leap.

Really the SNP have been successful in Scotland because of the Scottish Media, independence from the rest of the UK. There was an alternative media for the Copernicans. Once people have made a Copernican leap they don’t go back as the new way of thinking is more sensible, more clear, more straight-forward and at least somewhere making this clear to them.

Back to contempory UK politics, the Flat Earthers are still in control and still being believed. However they are weaker than they have been. Brexit, Trump and now Covid have sown more confusion, essentially far-right crackpots making the case that what is needed is an even furthur lurch to the right, to double down on past mistakes, making the Copernican jump harder to see, less comfortable. The world doesn’t make sense to them so instead of realising they hold an outmoded belief, they seek conspiracy thories everywhere to try and explain this crazy pre-Copernican world. However relative UK economic performance is declining and support for the Conservative party is waning slowly. There is still just a lack of a sensible effective alternative in England. The Green party is too much of a leap for most people.

In Wales we do have Plaid Cymru and in particulur YesCymru rising in levels of support. Attempts are being made of establishing a Welsh media such as Nation Cymru, to have a genuine Welsh perspective on events. But is it enough? Only time will tell.

Brexit’s Coming Home

I’ve just written a piece about British Identity and am thinking that threatened identities is a large part of the appeal of Brexit.

I’m reminded of a few years ago when I was living in Southern England and was very unhappy. I listened to the Welsh song ‘We’ll keep a Welcome‘ which brought me to tears and made me realise I needed to go home. It is a very powerful song that resonates closely with Welshness. Wales is a small country and there is a srtrong cultural idea that many people need to leave for work or to develop a career, with the understanding that as Welshmen or Welshwomen that they can always come home and there is a hope that they do.

As Welshfolk and perhaps as do people of other communities all around the world we feel that our home may be a shithole, but it is our home. So when things go badly, working with others isn’t really working and you need to go back and re-build or start again there is a hiraeth for home.

This longing for home is very similar to a longing for a time when things were better or stabler. The whole of the UK economy kind of feels like that. You only have to walk down the road outside your house to see the potholes in the road that used to be repaired, or the homeless people on the street who used  to be looked after and helped back onto their feet. So there is perhaps a collective desire to return to how things once were, when things seemed as though they were fine and getting better. From a Welsh perspective it seems that the unions we are a member of are not working for us and that applies to both the EU and the UK.

Hence Brexit, the feeling and the desire for a thing that is akin to finding a place for re-building. I completely understand this, however the problem with Brexit is that there is no plan to enable any such re-building. Brexit falls apart on any hard-headed economic or political assessment.

The Brexit position is generally supported by those over fifty years of age. Those that can remember the post-war period from 1945 to 1979. A time of strong identity with the UK state, which had just won a war with the Nazis, was rapidly losing it’s Empire and there was a consensus to build a new Britain from the broken infrastructure after a major war. A time of collective identification where everyone was working together to build a better future, to grow the pie and everyone made a contribution, whether they were a coal miner or a banker, whether a Yorkshireman or a newly arrived immigrant from a former Empire country. It was perhaps only those who didn’t work who were looked down upon if they weren’t trying hard to find new work.

Then in 1979 everything changed. Thatcherism became the new economics. The people of Britain were no longer told to work together for the common good and grow the pie, but instead to seek  to make your share of the pie bigger, even if it makes the pie smaller, so those who can do this can get more pie and those not willing to be so cut-throat in their economic actions will be the ones to disparage. ‘Greed is Good’ was now a virtue rather than a failing.

Such economics hasn’t worked as fewer people are able to grow their share of the pie and realising the pie really has shrunk an awful lot and some people seem to have very large slices of it. Hence Brexit, a desire to re-build, to return to more old-fashioned ways of doing things that at least worked and produced genuine growth. Hence a desire to leave the EU as there has never really been a true desire in Britain to grow the European pie, all that matters was it was a means to make the UK pie slice bigger, the post war consensus in the UK was never really about re-building Europe.

It seems that if Brexit does finally occur next year, the UK won’t actually be home as there is no home to go to, it is simply a leaving with no idea where to go. Indeed any suggestion  about re-building the UK home such as  electoral reform, confederalism or a return of social democracy have all failed to gain enough traction. All that seems promised by the charlatan Boris Johnson is lies and hot air, which isn’t enough to re-build anything from.

Brexit was tempting to me, I don’t like the idea of centralisation unless there is genuine option to say no and say we can actually do this better on our own thanks, some things are simply cases of too many cooks. Co-operation is great, but you always need to ensure the people tasked with making the decisions are making the right ones, and that has increasingly not been the case. All this Brexit seems to offer is taking control from the EU to give it away instantly via trade deals, in particular with a Trumpian USA.

This Tory Brexit is doomed to failure. We must never forget that we actually want things to get better and that is the motive for doing anything including Brexit. However this Brexit won’t achieve that. As I’ve said so often, we need electoral reform across the UK, to re-build structures so the right decisions get made more often. For me that’s Welsh independence, so the population has some genuine democratic control over the legislature that affects the country.

Why I am not a Tory

I am a Social Democrat, a centrist, so I both get the idea of conservatism and socialism, yet view the two as both being fundamentally flawed when applied in the extreme. A good economy an da good society is I believe best achieved by taking elements of both creeds and applying a pragmatic analysis of what works where.

So, part of me is conservative and I know many conservatives, yet I kind of feel pity for them because of the Tory party in the UK. The Tories post-Brexit immigration plan leaked this week, it is just so typical of the kind of ill-thought through damaging policy I expect from the Tories, it’s so extreme, which should be an anathema to conservatives.

The issues with the Tory party is that is a party with three competing dogmas struggling for dominance: Firstly, old school conservatism which hasn’t had the chance to develop, and has become the backdrop, or a shared idea between the other two factions:

The market fundamentalists, neo-liberals or whatever label you wish to apply. The belief that markets can solve every problem, that all the world needs is less regulation and less services to be prosperous and healthy. It’s simple and a pure idea, but it just doesn’t work.

Then there are the nationalists, the people who hold that there is an exclusive club of people, of people just like them, or people who are prepared to act like them who deserve all the fruits of labour of society. This British nationalism harks back to the glory of Empire, of Imperialism. People with the idea that they’re lot arer simpler fundamentally better than everyone else for some unstated reason.

The problem for the Tory party is that these two beliefs are incompatible with each other. You can’t have an anarchy of free trade and provide protection for your privileged group, the idea of ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’ that we hear mentioned so often these days. What perhaps holds the Tories together is that it was once possible to square this circle, Empire!

The British Empire was essentially a large free trade area, controlled by the British state, which was run by the privileged classes. So there was free trade and protection at the same time. The days of Empire have gone but the Tories get stuck thinking that somethign similar can still be achieved.

This war between the Tory factions has often bubbled over on the issue of the Common Market, The European Community and now the European Union. The Nationalists hate the idea of the UK being subservient to a supranational organisation, yet some of them believe that it is a modern equivalent of the Empire; a large free trade area and protections for the privileged few, provided you are on the top table of the club. The nationalists however really dislike the social side of Europe, the community aspects of the club, the regulations. That the free trade aspect means that EU citizens come to the UK and have successful careers appals them, simply because they are not like them. This group have never liked the EU, because they have never been in enough control of the Eu to satisfy them.

On the other hand the market fundamentalists have mixed views of the EU for different reasons. They like the free trade aspects and want the EU to less regulated and more fundamentalist (these groups loved TTIP and CETA) and also this group hate the social and community side of the EU, not because they hate other people but because a working community rubs against their fundamentalism.

Generally both groups of Tories have, have mixed views of the EU, but have a mistrust of it because they don’t have full control over it, like they do with Westminster government in the UK.

On Brexit, Britain exiting the EU, the two groups are really coming to blows as neither group can get what it really wants, the British Empire back. The market fundamentalists eye up a deregulated Britain that can be the most market fundamentalist state in the world. However they are constrained that Brexit also means losing access to the huge free trade area of the EU. This group want access the the single market and also not have to obey the markets rules. This group could probably get a deal with the remaining EU that would suit their dogma, but the nationalists want somethign else:

The nationalists want very strict immigration controls, hard borders, restrictions to free trade and protectionism and this is the opposite of what the fundamentalists want. Hence we have this internal war within the Tory party, constrained only by the innate conservatism of their membership.

The divisions within the Tories over Brexit and lack of a coherent Brexit plan encapsulate the whole question of the EU. Outside of the Tory party the people of the Uk are also divided. There is the social EU and the market fundamentalist EU. The left object to the market fundamentalism and the right to the social Europe. Traditionally the political centre supports the EU as a mixed bag as it balances these two competing forces, which is what centrists want. However the EU isn’t perfect and even those of the centre have misgivings with it. My support fro remain is the the EU is better placed to provide some balance than the UK is. After all both the EU and the UK are supranational organisations. There can be no good Brexit until the UK has electoral reform and the Tories and Labour are kept out of absolute authority.

The recent EU, post Lisbon treaty has been ‘free’ movement of people within the EU, which is a new concept in economic terms. People have rightly objected to this free movement as it doesn’t deliver economic growth, it perpetuates problems. For example the UK doesn’t train and retain enough doctors and nurses, so the UK imports them rather than make sure it produces enough of them domestically, however the immigrant medical professionals only partially go where they are most needed.

It’s this ideological dogma that causes many problems, there are very few genuine free markets. Trying to impose free market reforms on imperfect markets doesn’t work. Look no further than the UK railways for examples of overpriced poor quality service in comparison to similar states. People may desire Brexit for ideological reasons as the EU is far from perfect, but there is no mechanism at the moment to make markets function better outside of the EU.

I’ve lived under this dreadful Tory party my whole life and I’ve never understood why ordinary conservatives and centrists have kept propping them up in election after election. Partly the FPTP electoral system is fairly rigged to keep the Tories or someone very like them (‘New Labour’) in power. Really the Tory party are the very worst people to be attempting to negotiate a workable Brexit solution.

Hopefully the Tories will collapse, but don’t bet on it, their resilience  is astonishing. Maybe, just maybe, we can but hope and we can forget this whole Brexit business, reform our electoral system, have autonomy for Wales and have decisions about our communities made for the benefit of those communities, to cooperate as widely as possible, to make decisions  that make economic sense; essentially to give democracy a crack!

 

The Perils of Populism

I may have been a little unfair when i laid blame at the feet of Liberals. The true curse is populism. We seem to be a world of peak populism, with votes for Brexit and Trump. Bizarrely both of these campaigns focused their attacks on the establishment, which in itself is a populist construction. so, really the argument runs that the solution to the problem of populism is er… even more populism. The facetious populist claim of the ‘will of the people’ is really the will of populism.

As an outsider I generally do not value popularity. Some popular people i know are popular, through sheer luck, rather than from a desire to be popular. Perhaps it is the desire to be popular that is what is wrong with populism. Where there is popular [majority] support, that is not populism, that is consensus.

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time musing over politics, eventually runs into the thorny problem of populism. Allow me to describe the individual’s political progress:

Politics is essentially a subject. A subject that concerns theories of how society and the economy work with a view to exploring ways to make things better. After some time exploring politics in this academic way most people coalesce around a political position or political philosophy. What fascinated me, and I believe most people who think about politics is that everybody reaches their own consensus about the best way to improve things, but we all end up in different places, but share many things in common. you then start to notice subtle differences in how other people think which leads them to different political places. Whilst we may vehemently disagree with someone we nonetheless enjoy the rigorous debate and often friendships are formed. These friendships unite around the shared disdain for populists.

Of course, having done all this fevered thinking and finally reaching reasonably robust conclusions, we would like to actually put it into practice and make our economies better. For many politically minded this involves becoming active in political parties. Often democracy is seen as a sensible way of finding consensus and solutions that work reasonably well for most of a population. At this point the politically minded discover that they themselves are a minority, that most people do not concern themselves with politics, that democracy doesn’t really work terribly well. Because most people haven’t taken an interest in politics and flit from one position to another as the superficial ends of arguments that agitate around the general public sphere.

For example,  immigration, the issue which dominated the Brexit and Trump campaigns. High levels of net immigration are not good for an economy. They are a symptom of a poorly functioning economy. The populists focus all the attention on immigration rather than the root causes of the problems and by doing so create the impression that the immigrants are the problem , rather than innocent pawns of a bad system. There are two main reasons why immigration is a problem. Firstly lack of resources, in a bad economy resources become more difficult to obtain and these resources are essentially to a well functioning economy. The immigrants merely highlight the problem of a lack of housing, education or healthcare, as they need to use these scant resources too. The immigrants appear to make a bad situation even worse. Secondly this lack of resources means that the native population lack the ability to perform economically crucial roles, hence immigrants move into that society to plug the gaps instead of the real issues being tackled. Hence the political person will be aware of the real causes, whilst the populist will focus on the symptoms.

The trouble is often that the populists win, they win elections, they get to hold office. However we hold them is disdain because they are inconsistent, they have no solid political framework or political creed that links all their positions, they are charlatans. We become particularly intense when they claim to be ‘one of us’, from our political neck of the woods, so we seethe with frustration, that they are not truly one of us and more importantly that they besmirch the name of our political philosophy. For example, Tony Blair was regarded as a Social Democrat, so his governments record is often attacked as exemplifying why ‘Social Democracy is wrong’. The issue being that Blair wasn’t a Social Democrat at all, he just disguised himself in the clothes. The same is true of Conservatives who disdain those who wear the clothes of the right and Socialists disdain those who wear their clothes.

The thing is that in the UK, the populists have been in charge. The thing is the political class have long realised that in order to win an election that they must wear the populists clothes. Instead of advertising how they would improve things the focus is on being seen to be on the side of the populist argument, even when the populist argument is merely treating a symptom, which then allows the real problem to surface elsewhere in the economy. This lust to win power then takes over policy. Traditionally populism was merely for the campaign trail and the sensible thought through evidence based consensus policies would be implemented in government. However in modern times, populism has infected policy, so policy no longer tackles the underlying issues. Party politics has become a game about winning power, rather than using power to makes things better. And then come Brexit, where the UK government seek to satisfy the perceived popular will, for somethign they didn’t even have a poorly thought through policy for in the first place and merely ride the populist tide, forming positions retrospectively.

Something has to give, the populist bubble has to burst or we end up with even more extremes of populism than Trump or Brexit or bust.

For me the solution is bottom up democracy and proportional voting systems where democracy actually functions as it should, rather than society following the whims of the populist swirl and those who can best manipulate them for their own ends. As i’ve said before for me, from my long political journey, from root causes the answer is autonomy for regions like Wales and not the frippery of a symptomatic nationalism, that divides us from ourselves.

 

The problem with Liberals

On these pages I have often described myself as a Social Democrat and not a Liberal. These two political doctrines to the outsider appear quite close, yet I feel there is fundamental difference between the two. This difference is why I have a problem with liberalism.

Social democracy and Liberalism share some common world views. Perhaps most importantly that society should work for everyone, it is worth repeating, everyone; black or white, rich or poor, man or woman. However the two doctrines differ in how this society is to be realised. Social Democracy advocates working out what the centrist position is from first principles, whereas Liberalism finds the centrist position more relatively, based on prevailing public opinion. This relativistic stance is to me the weakness of Liberalism.

However, as human beings we are relativistic creatures, how we think, how we behave and what we value is determined socially. This social determination is guided by our families, our social peers and the communities we grow up in. The views of the world we hear around us, shape us. There is natural desire to compromise with prevailing views in a society, to ‘fit in’ and find our own space. To be able to compromise, you have to be able to understand and be prepared to be persuaded by arguments if you test them and find them convincing.

In many ways Social Democracy is the tougher discipline as it prescribes picking apart all this social fabric to get to the fundamental issue. Social Democracy is thus a cold discipline, relying on logic and reason,  can seem devoid of feeling. Yet it isn’t cold as the aim is to provide something for everyone. This criticism also applies to Liberalism, whilst the Liberal will listen, they may lack empathy as they are trying to work out where the centre is, rather than understand each individual.

Both the Liberal and the Social Democrat are a little jealous of those away from the centre on the left and right wings, the Socialists and Conservatives. Jealous, because the wings don’t have to think so much. To the wings political positions come easily, certain arguments just fit naturally with how they think and the opposite arguments seem alien and incomprehensible. Centrists often run into this problem that they don’t always get a reasoned argument for something. So often an argument will rest on an appeal to a common sense that runs true with how they think. The problem with such rhetoric is that is doesn’t extend beyond like minded people, to the centre or the ‘other’ wing. There seems to be this rise in division and the recent development of Nationalism in Europe and North America that raises serious concerns. I blame the Liberals.

Partly it is because the Liberals have moved from the centre, where us Social Democrats still are, towards the right as it has appeared that society has moved to the right. Electoral success has been the reward of this drift. Tony Blair, was essentially a Liberal, as were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Here in the UK, the Liberal Democrats found themselves in a coalition government with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, for the good reason of providing stable government. However, the Liberal Democrats failed to do their job as a coalition partner and went native with the Conservatives, to the horror of Social Democrats and Socialists, the ‘Liberals’ had let us down, again. It was not unexpected, Liberals, with their mode of drifting to the centre ground, working everyday with predominantly right wing Conservatives would lead you to shift your perception of the centre quite far rightwards, which is what happened.

Liberalism may he partly the cause of the recent rise of Nationalism, of Brexit and Donald Trump. Once you start drifting in a certain direction currents often speed you on in that direction, because nationalism is very good at subverting human nature.

<Slight tangent in case anyone is getting confused, I am supporter of Welsh independence, or “Welsh Nationalism” as some like to call it. We are not “Nationalists”, it’s just not the same thing, ok? (maybe I’ll expand on this next time!)>

The problem with Nationalism is that the worldviews and opinions of the people who surround in our lives, in our communities, our desire to fit in and to work to make things better are essentially positive. For social animals everyone doing their thing and working with the people around us to improve society is simply a good thing.

However, the sly fox of Nationalism achieves it’s end of replacing the ‘good of the community’ with the ‘good of the nation’. So instead of being inspired to improve our communities, we are inspired to work to improve our nation. This is not the same thing. Nations are somewhat artificial constructs and do not seek to help people, they have a life of their own and play around with our notions of self and community. Nationalism when it arises, often has a scapegoat, a group to blame for the nation not being as mighty as it could be, be it the Jew in 1930s Germany, the Socialist, the immigrant or the Muslim in recent times. This right wing nationalism, relishes competition, which is actually bullying as it slowly works it way through society, the narrative subtly changes until you find yourself in a totalitarian state, like in George Orwell’s ‘1984’. The Liberal just adapts in this environment, the Liberal remains in the social centre, even though this social centre is now way off balance. For the Conservatives, they don’t notice the true horror as to them at last society  is  chiming with their own worldview, they feel as though they have won something and even the Socialist may be happy as it appears that society is at last demonstrably ‘improving’. But, to those able to be Social Democrats and to those on the outside, it is a nightmare.

Whether we are truly caught in the  Nationalism trap in the UK and USA, is perhaps too early to say, but all the very worrying signs are there: There is stoking of fear of ‘foreigners’, the scapegoating of  minorities in particular Muslims, There have been elections won by populist extremists and possibly more to come in France and the Netherlands. and when we are told that these people win, so we now must conform to whatever they want to do, to be good “patriots”…

It just seems like that many people have forgotten the warning from history about Nationalism, that Orwell wrote about in ‘1984’. Even in Germany, the country that most painfully learnt the lessons of the perils of Nationalism, some 80 years ago, is seeing the rise of Nationalism. Remember ‘Ignorance is Strength’ & ‘We are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia’.