Wednesday, 31 May 2017

The "If we get Brexit wrong the consequences would be dire" election - day 44


Labour devoted the day to campaigning on the NHS and other public services, but apparently today was going to be another one based on Brexit and leadership for the Tories.  May's afternoon speech in Bath seemed little different from any of the other versions of "that speech" I've subjected myself to, but the main media topic was sparked by Jeremy Corbyn's announcement that he would after all be at the BBC debate in the evening.

A bad deal is worse than no deal?


"Nobody voted for Brexit to make themselves poorer" is a mantra I hear frequently, but it's not exactly true. A survey last December (by YouGov for Open Britain) suggested that some people expect to be worse off, and many Leave voters are prepared to lose significant amounts of money (and, of course, for everyone else to lose money as well).

Asked "What impact do you expect the UK’s departure from the European Union to have on your personal finances, taking account of income, taxes and prices?" Leave and Remain voters at the 2016 referendum replied:


The subset who confirmed that they would vote to Leave when asked again in December 2016 were then asked "What is the maximum amount of money, taking account of income, taxes and prices, you would personally be willing to be worse off by in order for the UK to leave the European Union – or would you not be willing to lose any money at all?" and replied:


More than 300 people in this sample appear to have voted to Leave, not in order to be poorer perhaps but certainly prepared to be poorer.

[Update ( 01/06/17):  Of course, you can read these numbers to say that few people who think they know expect to lose very much and around 80% are not prepared to lose more than £20 a month if anything at all, so we'd better make Brexit as close as possible to what we have today.  This is the way the commissioners of the study interpreted it.]

****


#MrsME suggests the effects of "not getting Brexit right" would be "dire", and all the estimates I've heard recently (including one from Andrew Lilico, a Brexit supporter) are that the economy would shrink after Brexit, but the question of individuals and families actually losing money isn't a live issue in the election.

She makes great play of the idea that "in eleven days" it will be either Strong And Stable™ #MrsME or chaotic Corbyn sitting down at the table across from the bloody foreigners, and at a time when the Labour leader would be desperately trying to pull together a cabinet from his disparate and sniping ragbag of support.  In fact it would be the likes of David Davis or Keir Starmer, with a gang of civil servants, taking the Eurostar, and #MrsME would also have recently been engaged in cabinet making.

As I noted yesterday, Jeremy Paxman couldn't persuade #MrsME to say that she's changed her mind on Brexit, or that she actually believes in it now, only that she believes in "making a success of it".  And the idea of coming away with no deal at all is everywhere at the moment, which to her could be classed as a success if the alternative was that undefined horror, the "bad deal".

What does "no deal" even mean?  To start with, we're looking at at least two deals, one covering withdrawal from the EU (which is what the Article 50 process is actually about) and one or more on trade and other aspects of our future relationship.

The Tories would do their damnedest to negotiate a new trade relationship in parallel with Article 50 (Labour haven't really indicated how they would approach this, but they have rejected the "no deal" option) but I've yet to hear anybody serious suggest that this negotiation (as opposed to the one in their head, which might be fine and dandy but doesn't start with the world and people as they are) could be finalised in two years.

Presumably #MrsME is threatening to walk out of any set of talks at any time, because "you need to have that option in negotiations".  But what does walking out actually mean?

Abandoning trade talks would result in everything remaining as it was at the time.  If we were still inside the EU at that point we would be working exactly as we do now but we would have decided to move to "WTO terms" at the moment of leaving (let's call it 29 March 2019).  And then negotiations would start on what those terms actually would be, to be agreed by all 164 WTO members, including the EU.  (That work would have to be done on leaving the EU in any case, to define our relationship with the rest of the world, regardless of ongoing negotiation/transition/implementation work on a UK-EU agreement.)





Walking out of the Article 50 talks would be more inconvenient for the EU, and therefore might be thought to be a more powerful tactic.  But we would still be in the EU, we would still be attending EU Council meetings, our MEPs would still be attending Brussels and Strasbourg as often as they do now (eh Mr Farage?).  Under Article 50 there are only two ways to leave the EU:  with a withdrawal agreement, or without on the passing of 29 March 2019.

(Some will protest that we could just cut ourselves off, stop paying the contributions and repeal the 1972 European Communities Act (and that's what we should have done months ago) but at present the government insists that it will do things according to our legal obligations, as David Davis might say.)

At the point of walking out, unless it was already mid-March 2019, parliament would be in the middle of considering the Great Copy And Paste Bill, fighting to shoehorn 42 years worth of EU legislation into UK law and, I hope, fighting to prevent the executive changing too much without parliamentary scrutiny.  It's to be hoped also that we would have begun setting up (staffing, equipping and paying for) all the regulatory bodies which would be needed to duplicate - sorry, replace - all those that do it for the whole EU.  Time-critical IT projects across the board anybody?

And, most important, walking out would not result in no deal.  It would leave many individual deals undone until the date of exit, which would then cripple the UK economy and society, and any attempt to go back and tackle one or two would now be hindered by acrimony, frozen trade, travel gridlock and financial meltdown:
  • with Euratom, to make it possible to transport and process nuclear fuel legally
  • over air travel, so that flights between the UK and US could continue;  without the EU-US Open Skies agreement they would have no legal basis
  • over security and justice arrangements, so that access to EU security databases and arrest warrant cooperation would not be withdrawn
  • over customs and tariff arrangements, so that there would be a legal basis on which imports and exports can be made
  • over whether banks and services companies could work and sell in the EU
  • over whether professional qualifications would still be recognised
  • and dozens of other matters
Top of the list would be two problems on which the EU27 are demanding "adequate progress" before Michel Barnier will even be legally allowed to talk future relations.
  • that expats in the UK and other EU countries would still not know that their residence and rights were protected
  • that the status of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland would still be undefined
Walking out and staying out of the Article 50 negotiations would disadvantage everybody, but most of all the UK.  And we could only countenance "no deal" if we had decided truly to cut ourselves off from the world.

As Stephen Bush concludes in the New Statesman:

"Forget Theresa May’s claim that Britain is ready and willing to walk away from “a bad deal” – as it stands, Britain isn’t even ready for what her government thinks a good deal is. We haven’t staffed up to deal with a greater volume of customs checks when we are outside the customs union. We certainly haven’t prepared for capabilities we might lose, like safety inspections. No deal is better than a bad deal? Don’t believe a word of it."

But still, every Tory allowed out in front of a microphone parrots the "everything depends on a good Brexit" slogan.  No deal could not be a good Brexit, so maintaining both lines is contradictory and ridiculous.  Yet rumours still spread that "no deal" is the preferred option.






Saboteurs department

As Schona Jolly QC concludes this Twitter thread,  "May called this election. If she wants a mandate, she must answer the questions."





The view from India via France





Agreements with the EU would only be the beginning.  We have the benefit of many deals - large and small - with many countries across the world, and all of them would lapse at Brexit.



The BBC debate will be all over the news when this goes out, so I'll restrict myself to Caroline Lucas's comment on leadership:  "The first rule of leadership is to turn up".
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Tuesday, 30 May 2017

The "No debates please, we're British" election - day 42


A Brexit deal on security cooperation?


The day's Lib Dem theme was security cooperation with the EU after Brexit, with the central claim that UK authorities would lose access to important shared databases if #MrsME came away with a deal which put us outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

May's letter notifying the EU Council that she wished to start the Article 50 process said "In security terms a failure to reach agreement would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened".  Opponents criticised this as a "shameful threat" (Tim Farron) and "completely irresponsible to threaten, gamble or bargain on national security" (Yvette Cooper).

From Brussels Guy Verhofstadt (EU parliament coordinator on Brexit) used the word "blackmail" to say he wouldn't say it was blackmail, and President (=chair) of the EU Council Donald Tusk, in pacific mood, said "Our partners are wise and decent.  That is why I am absolutely sure that no one is interested in using security cooperation as a bargaining chip."

May herself told the Commons: "There are certain elements of the European Union in justice and home affairs that we're currently members of that in leaving the European Union we would not be members of, and we need to negotiate what the future relationship will be... the aim of this will be to ensure cooperation on these matters".

So, as with the Irish border and anything else you might think of, the carefully guarded position is that cooperation is important to everybody, it's in nobody's interests to lose it, so we will aim not to - a vague declaration of positive intent which conveys nothing much.  And so it will be until the negotiations actually start (19 June is pencilled in, but it'll be talks about the order of talks first, so who knows?) and information starts to feed out (not from the British side if May has anything to do with it).

The subject of Clegg's campaign statement was the Schengen Information System (SIS II), which is used to pass information about criminals, suspects, missing persons and a variety of other things between EU member states and associated EEA countries.  His argument was that "the UK would lose access to the database under Theresa May's plans to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.  Unless this position changes, UK authorities will see their access to the database cut off on 29th March 2019".

He went on to ask May how she hoped to "maintain access to SIS II without accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice", how she planned to "mitigate the loss of this information on the movement of terrorist suspects across the continent" and how she hoped to "issue instructions to other EU countries to stop and question terror suspects if we are no longer part of this system".

Similar questions can be asked about several other EU databases of law enforcement information.  For a national government to agree to upload and to be allowed to download details from other member states there need to be agreed rules, and a way to resolve disputes.  To maintain access, the UK would have to declare its conformity to data protection and other regulations overseen by the ECJ.  Similar considerations would apply to participation in Europol, Eurojust and the European Arrest Warrant.  No other country has access without accepting ECJ jurisdiction in this area.

Amber Rudd responded with nothing but "We will need to have a new form of agreement" and "I am confident".  So that's all right then.  Lib Dems will demand to know what #MrsME "intends" to get, and her team will refuse to say any more than "it'll be fine".  Labour will probably prefer not to mention it, though there are obvious questions to ask about Salman Abedi.

Labour's manifesto says of this:  "We will introduce legislation to ensure there are no gaps in national security and criminal justice arrangements as a result of Brexit.  Labour recognises the vital role that cross-border agencies such as Eurojust and Europol have played in making Britain safer and that European Arrest Warrants have been invaluable. A Labour government will seek to retain membership of these agencies and continue European Arrest Warrant arrangements."

The Tories "want to work together in the fight against crime and terrorism" and "there may be specific European programmes in which we might want to participate and if so, it will be reasonable that we make a contribution".  Those might include security and policing programmes I suppose.  Words like "database", "Schengen", "Europol", "Eurojust" and "arrest warrant" don't appear in the document at all.

This is much weaker than the government white paper which came (late) with the Article 50 bill in the Commons.  That document listed the strength of current British work with these various systems and bodies and said "we will therefore look to negotiate the best deal we can with the EU to cooperate in the fight against crime and terrorism. We will seek a strong and close future relationship with the EU, with a focus on operational and practical cross-border cooperation"  which is about as informative as it's likely to get.

Two topical questions arise.
  • The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi is reported to have flown from Libya to the UK via Turkey and Düsseldorf.  What were systems such as the Schengen Information System supposed to tell us about his movements?  What did they tell us?  Clegg is raising the question of what they could do for us after a new agreement with the EU.
  • The causes of British Airways' troubles over the weekend are still "emerging" while the effects on many thousands of would-be passengers are all too obvious.  In an unsatisfactorily curtailed interview on Radio 4's World At One a GMB official told us that BA had been unable to supply the Home Office with passenger details during this time.  We don't know for how long or for which flights.  What effect does that have on police operations now, and how do we ensure that the same process is included in a Brexit agreement?

The Nutkipper's Ball


Offered a full half hour with Andrew Neil in front of a (possibly) mass audience, Paul Nuttall seemed happy to talk about torture, internment and execution quite a lot, as well as integration by burqa ban, longer sentences (an old favourite: you don't even need to know how long sentences are at present) and race as an aggravating factor for sexual offences (it already is when considered  as motivation, but you mean just membership of a race, prompted Neil).

At least the last few are in the UKIP manifesto.  Torture, internment and the death penalty are Nuttall's own hobby horses.  A more careful party leader might keep things to his party's programme, but UKIP is different.

Nuttall's favourite phrases are "Hang on" and "Let me finish" and he would probably rather be an MP than an executioner.  He dodged Neil's question about internment in Northern Ireland being a recruiting sergeant for the IRA.  Did he not hear it?  Does he have no answer?  Doesn't he care?
UKIP's policy on expats' rights in the Brexit negotiations seems to be: See what the prime minister (who isn't going to be him, he knows) gets, and carp from the sidelines.  And apparently UKIP's future is assured, even if it attracts votes in homeopathic proportions,  because if #MrsME backslides in Brussels "we will be bigger!" in some unspecified way and within an unspecified time. 

The Main Bout

Does it do #MrsME any good to show that she (or her staff) are good at negotiating a debate format which gets her out of the one thing that terrifies her most, debate?  Did Corbyn not think it important to mention, or did he forget?  Anyway, each of them faced a carefully selected audience with Sky's Faisal Islam as moderator of the audience questions and Jeremy Paxman to do the hard stuff.

With Corbyn it was the same old questions, so no, he doesn't want to talk to ISIS but he does want to get just about everybody else who's currently fighting in Syria round a table in Geneva because danger springs from large ungoverned spaces, of which Syria has lots.  And no, he wasn't going to condemn the IRA as such, but he would talk a lot (and fairly well) about the peace process.

"Your manifesto's fine but I'm not convinced by you" brought a stumble then something quite good about always wanting to meet people whether they agreed with him or not "because they always know something you don't know".

And no, he wouldn't promise to cut immigration (though it probably would fall) because #MrsME had tried that three times now and not got anywhere.  He talked about blocking undercutting of wages by stopping bad employers importing lots of low-paid immigrants, said immigration would be needed because of the long standing skills shortage and pledged funds for communities hit by sudden inflows.

Corbyn needs much harder questioning on Brexit.  He's a paid-up member of the unicorn brigade, expecting, nay promising, a close relationship with Europe and continuing membership of "important agencies".  I was waiting for an "exactly the same economic benefits" but it didn't come.

A representative of a successful small business in Manchester condemned Corbyn's many "taxes on aspiration" including VAT on school fees.  Corbyn didn't try to placate him but launched into a defence of improving the lot of many by asking the few to pay "a little bit more".  Then came the pledge to protect small business from bigger business which might have helped with the questioner but we didn't find out.


Corbyn received several rounds of applause, May perhaps slightly more as her airy pledges on Brexit started.  But Corbyn also had the audience laughing along with him a couple of times while they laughed at May after one of her protests that "government is putting record amounts of money into something or other and Labour's sums don't add up".  It was a polarised audience, with equal thirds said to be pro-Labour, pro-Conservative and undecided, so that laughter might all have come from the Labour group, but those were the impressions on the night.

****


May's researchers had done their work, and she wished Islam a happy birthday before facing the questions.

A long-service policeman asked how many extra officers she'd put on the streets and how she would pay for them.  The answer was, after we'd been round the houses, none, but she would invest in "enabling different policing".  This is a perfectly good argument - there are new types of crime and changing frequencies, it's not just how many you have but what you do with them - but hanging over us is the accusation that police ears on the community ground just aren't there in many places. On armed officers "we're having an uplift", but she didn't deny the initial cuts to armed police and the force as a whole.

The dementia tax will stop me passing my house down to my family, protested a man of a certain age.  "A lot of people are thinking about that,"  opined May, but "we've put a cap" on the amount which has to be paid for social care.  (Last week it was "we've discarded any idea of a cap", then "we'll include a cap in the consultation"; now this.)

Is it fair that old people are to receive winter fuel allowance in Scotland while you would remove them elsewhere?  And she made the reasonable point about many people not needing it but that was about it.  Islam prompted her on how many would lose the payment and May fell back on "We will consult".  She intends to consult on this, social care and many other things it seems, yet she's quite precise about the new things she needs the money for.  I smell an uncosted manifesto.

The next standard question was on school funding and how many schools faced cuts.  And the standard answer was that there was a new fair funding formula coming in (this is one of the reasons for cuts, the other being a plan for lower funding per pupil in real terms).  It was around here, when she seemed to be protesting in several directions at once, that May heard a smattering of laughter directed at her.  She recovered with her usual mantra about more good school places.

****


To a great extent Paxman asked the same kind of questions as the audience, but picked again and again to try to entrap or elicit a simple, straight answer.  He didn't have much success with that but he did tie each of his victims down to a very specific refusal to answer.  Corbyn's was over Trident - the party dictates that Trident should be renewed but do you think it's morally defensible?

And May was asked "When did  you change your mind on the biggest issue of the day (Brexit)?", then "Are you trying to achieve something that you think is bad for us?".  (Both questions are rendered approximately but fairly, I hope.)  And she wouldn't say that she had changed her mind on Brexit, or that she actually believed in it now, only that she believes in "making a success of it".  

Won't the fact that you signed off an increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, then withdrew it within a week, tell the EU27 you're "a blowhard who collapses at the first sound of gunfire?" came the next, which she denied.  "I have achieved..." - which is true - several detailed matters in her old home portfolio, "which people said we'd never get".  I'd like to see a list of the latter.
"How many times did you maintain that there would not be a general election?"  asked Paxman.  And she admitted that she had, but had realised as far back as March that "other parties" intend to frustrate the will of the people (even though there were different versions of that, and we won't know what the final "will of the people" is until an actual agreement emerges, and some of us can't see a great deal of difference between Tory and Labour positions).

"You've failed repeatedly on immigration" was accepted quite brazenly, as if to protest "So?", but "it's coming down now".  (Will somebody simply ask "why do you think that is?"?  Paxman didn't.)  But have you costed the effects of significantly reduced immigration, which George Osborne (!) describes as economically illiterate.  May told us she's still working on post-Brexit immigration rules (so no answer).  She fell back on the need to train people up to fill the long recognised skills gap, and that we should "recognise what people feel" about immigration.
She fended off a question on how much she was willing to pay for Brexit with "we'll put forward a fair settlement", then tried to described a couple of the "bad deals" that leaving without a deal (applause) would be better than - some in the EU are talking about "punishing" the UK and there are some here would would "do anything" to get a deal (which wouldn't happen on her watch so it's really irrelevant).  And yet she couldn't bring herself to say she was actually willing to walk out with no deal.

Paxman pressed both of them pretty hard (a tweeter who claimed to have counted made it rather more interruptions for Corbyn than for May) but neither was completely trapped at any stage.  My impression was that neither would have converted many who have already plumped for a side but that Corbyn's demeanour might well have pulled in some of the unconvinced and May's attempted recovery from an unusual exhibition of weakness, inconsistency and uncertainty would have weakened her support in others.

****

A selection of comments from pundits...


Tom Newton Dunn on BBC2's Newsnight quoted an old spoof Volvo advert to describe Theresa May - "boxy but good".

Saboteurs department


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Saturday, 27 May 2017

The "Know your enemy" election - days 39-40


Thursday night

On Thursday evening, extracts from Jeremy Corbyn's Friday speech were released.  Andrew Sparrow of the Guardian presented them for the record.

"On fighting terror threats generally

"This is my commitment to our country.

"I want the solidarity, humanity and compassion that we have seen on the streets of Manchester this week to be the values that guide our government. There can be no love of country if there is neglect or disregard for its people.

"No government can prevent every terrorist attack. If an individual is determined enough and callous enough sometimes they will get through.

"But the responsibility of government is to minimise that chance - to ensure the police have the resources they need, that our foreign policy reduces rather than increases the threat to this country and that at home we never surrender the freedoms we have won and that terrorists are so determined to take away.

"On domestic policy and terror threats

"To keep you and your family safe, our approach will involve change at home and change abroad.

"At home, Labour will reverse the cuts to our emergency services and police. Once again in Manchester, they have proved to be the best of us.

"Austerity has to stop at the A&E ward and at the police station door. We cannot be protected and cared for on the cheap.

"There will be more police on the streets under a Labour Government. And if the security services need more resources to keep track of those who wish to murder and maim, then they should get them.

"On foreign policy and terror threats

"We will also change what we do abroad. Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.

"That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and held to account for their actions.

"But an informed understanding of the causes of terrorism is an essential part of an effective response that will protect the security of our people that fights rather than fuels terrorism.

"We must be brave enough to admit the ‘war on terror’ is simply not working. We need a smarter way to reduce the threat from countries that nurture terrorists and generate terrorism."

More police on the streets, no austerity in A&E, hardly got a word of acknowledgement.  In the late evening programmes, and again in the morning, it was as if the third section was all that we knew about.

The argument


And then at 11:00 on Friday morning came the actual speech - 1644 words, of which about 300 concerned foreign policy.  What were the media interviews about?  Foreign policy.

The speech doesn't contain the word "Iraq".  What were many minutes of intemperate criticism based on?  Iraq.

The speech said "Those terrorists will forever be reviled and implacably held to account for their actions".  What were the criticisms?  Corbyn was apparently offering excuses for horrendous cruelty.




Tom Harris, ex-Labour ex-MP, now writing for the Telegraph, at least admitted that he hadn't read or heard the speech but poured scorn on the idea of any link between terrorism and UK foreign policy.  Charles Clarke, once a home secretary under Tony Blair observed gruffly that he hadn't consulted Corbyn on security matters for many decades (I think he might have meant about three), though he neglected to mention that he had commissioned a report in 2006 which observed that "the war in Iraq contributed to the radicalisation of the July 7 London bombers and is likely to continue to provoke extremism among British Muslims".

Johnny Mercer (Conservative, Plymouth Moor View, majority 1,026), Tory backbench pin-up who saw action in Afghanistan took any suggestion of a link as a personal slight and Michael Fallon (Conservative, Sevenoaks, majority 19,561, currently Secretary of State for Defence) joined his voice to those who hadn't read the speech, only remembered a bit of it, or were quite happy to criticise Corbyn for something they knew he hadn't said.

Perhaps Nigel Dodds (Democratic Unionist, Belfast North, majority 5,326) distilled it best:  "Jeremy Corbyn is entirely wrong.  Responsibility for terrorism lies where it always does:  with those who carry it out...  Those who excuse, justify or celebrate terrorists only make the job of the security forces harder."

Nothing in Corbyn's speech does any of those things ("That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and implacably held to account for their actions").  His history might lead some to doubt the sincerity of his words but they should say that, instead of pretending that the speech says something it doesn't.

That link


Corbyn might have been teasing when he said,  "Protecting this country requires us to be both strong against terrorism and strong against the causes of terrorism."  So, is there a link between foreign policy and terrorism?  And what do we mean by foreign policy anyway?  Attitudes to countries and their activities?  Things done as a result of policy?  Or is it just choosing friends (and customers) - yes to Saudi Arabia and rather less so to Iran for example?


Let's start with the big stuff.  Did George Bush create ISIS or was it Barack Obama? Spoiler: not quite and definitely not.

As we've known for years, disbanding the Iraqi army left a couple of hundred thousand armed and mightily pissed off men with military training, many of whom "formed the foundation of the insurgency".  That insurgency (Islamic State in Iraq at that point) was largely neutralised by 2011, when Obama withdrew US troops (at the demand of the Iraqi government), but ISI seized the option of the chaos just opening up in Syria to rebuild.


ISIS and al Qaeda have both claimed that attacks were in response to attacks, by France, UK, USA... on Iraq, Syria, Libya...  We've heard that link made in claims of responsibility after outrages and in at least one suicide video.  This might be opportunistic rather than the result of a plan - they'll claim anything they think they can away with, even if they had nothing to do with it - and they have other motives and objectives as well but it's said and it sticks.  It's part of the "West v Islam", "why are they attacking Muslim countries?", "war between civilisations" story.

From interviews with potential travellers to Syria to preachers like Anjem Choudary, who blamed Lee Rigby's murder on British foreign policy (the killers themselves "said they had attacked the off-duty soldier to avenge the deaths of Muslims at the hands of British troops" - we hear that "Western" involvement in wars in the middle east and north Africa is a motivating factor in recruitment and support.

Among the more respectable subscribers to the idea of a link are

  • Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College, London and member, lest we forget, of the Chilcot inquiry panel
  • The House of Commons foreign affairs select committee who said that David Cameron, through his decisions, was "ultimately responsible" for the collapse of Libya and the rise of Daesh in that country
  • Richard Dalton, UK ambassador to Libya 1999-2000 (who also suggested that the UK needs a moral-strategic foreign policy but is likely to go mainly for commercial interest post-Brexit)
  • Marc Sageman, former CIA case officer, who said "Iraq [was] the moment when British jihadists started focusing on attacks inside the UK, because the British government had invaded an Arab country".
  • and many others
Freedman develops it well - it's "self-defeating to try to work out our responses to these challenges in terms of whether or not it will ease the risk of terrorism" but "self-evident that anger with Western policies in the Middle East is one... factor behind Islamist terrorism".



In 2005, when he was a mere back bench MP (and recently sacked (for lying) shadow minister) one Boris Johnson wrote a colourful but reasonably well considered piece, arguing:

"It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the Told-You-So brigade. As the Butler report revealed, the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment in 2003 was that a war in Iraq would increase the terror threat to Britain.

 "The threat from Islamicist nutters preceded 9/11; they bombed the Paris Métro in the 1990s; and it is evident that the threat to British lives pre-dates the Iraq war, when you think that roughly the same number of Britons died in the World Trade Center as died in last week’s bombings. In other words, the Iraq war did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists, though the war has unquestionably sharpened the resentments felt by such people in this country, and given them a new pretext. The Iraq war did not introduce the poison into our bloodstream but, yes, the war did help to potentiate that poison. And whatever the defenders of the war may say, it has not solved the problem of Islamic terror, or even come close to providing the beginnings of a solution. You can’t claim to be draining the swamp in the Middle East when the mosquitoes are breeding quite happily in Yorkshire."

This week Johnson (now a supposedly responsible minister) condemned Corbyn's speech for seeking to link terror in the UK to the country's military interventions as "absolutely monstrous".  It was "extraordinary" that "there should be any attempt to justify or to legitimate the actions of terrorists in this way" and such comments were "inexplicable in this week of all weeks".

son has condemned a speech by Jeremy Corbyn which sought to link terror in the UK to the country's military interventions as 'absolutely monstrous'. - See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/politics/international/2017/05/27/boris-johnson-slams--monstrous--corbyn-speech.html#sthash.uMbaCT1r.dpuf
There seem to be a number of logical errors in the critics' arguments:
  • If it can't explain everything it explains nothing - how can you claim that terrorists commit these crimes as a result of our decisions and actions when they have other motivations and objectives (as well)?
  • There were terrorist attacks before [insert foreign policy decision] so terrorism is nothing to do with foreign policy.  Michael Fallon makes a particularly bad attempt at this in his Channel 4 interview ("7/7 came before Libya."  "But it came after Iraq."  "Yes, but it came before Libya.")
  • Words are being confused.  A link is not an explanation is not an excuse is not a justification.  John Major once said,  "Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less", perhaps using "understand" to mean "condone" rather than the normal meaning.  Surely "understanding less" should never be an option, and understanding can still lead to condemnation.
It's as if Sun Tzu's motto "Know your enemy" frightens those in power.  I hope the next line - "Know yourself" hasn't also been dropped along the way.


Saboteurs department


For your delectation, here is the full interview with Michael Fallon.






said they had attacked the off-duty soldier to avenge the deaths of Muslims at the hands of British troops.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/02/michael-adebolajo-adebowale-killers-of-british-soldier-get-life-sentence/
said they had attacked the off-duty soldier to avenge the deaths of Muslims at the hands of British troops.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/02/michael-adebolajo-adebowale-killers-of-british-soldier-get-life-sentence/
said they had attacked the off-duty soldier to avenge the deaths of Muslims at the hands of British troops.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/02/michael-adebolajo-adebowale-killers-of-british-soldier-get-life-sentence/
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Friday, 26 May 2017

The "Cranking it all back up" election - day 38



After two painful days, proper campaigning struggled to get back underway.  UKIP's manifesto was launched on Thursday and national campaigning activity was scheduled by other parties to start again on Friday.

It was probably left to lower party ranks to inform the other sides of campaign intentions this time, with no further mention of the kind of middle-of-the-night phone call in which May and Corbyn were reported to have agreed the pause.  I'd love to know how that call went after the poisonous things she'd been calling him on Monday (and how cynically relieved she was to have the nation distracted from her poor performance with Andrew Neil).

Did the campaign ever really stop? 

Donations have been coming in, as the Electoral Commission report each week.  We'll see next week whether the Manchester tragedy and campaigning pause had any effect.


Tim Farron replaced Thursday's planned Lib Dem party political broadcast with a personal message after the killings in Manchester - his “capital city” as he put it, where he had spent "many nights of his teenage years".

The main campaigning-that-wasn't-campaigning saw Theresa May continuing to do her job as prime minister.  Her addresses to the nation, convening the famous COBRA committee, calling for a national minute's silence showed her doing the big, important things while everybody else had to watch.

She flew to Brussels for NATO and EU events knowing that Trump would be on her side on most things (which he turned out to be, except for one point - see below):

"[The Manchester attack] I think, shows why it is important for the international community including Nato to do more in our fight against terrorism and that is what I am going to be pushing for today.

"I am also going to be pushing the UK’s agenda on burden-sharing and we are proud, as the UK, that we meet the target of spending 2% of our GDP on defence and 20% of our defence budget on equipment.

"And other nations must be prepared to take responsibility and that includes more investment in defence."

She also confirmed that she would be telling President Trump that intelligence shared with the US must be shared securely:

"On the issue of the intelligence-sharing with the USA, we have a special relationship with the USA, it is our deepest defence and security partnership that we have.

"Of course, that partnership is built on trust. And part of that trust is knowing that intelligence can be shared confidently and I will be making clear to President Trump today that intelligence that is shared between law enforcement agencies must be shared securely."

And, behind the scenes, researchers for parties, charities and academic bodies carried on poring over the manifestos.  Thursday saw discussion of the Tories' free school breakfasts which had been in and out of the news for several days.  May & co have decided that the "fair funding formula" they would have been introducing if an election hadn't got in the way was not quite right (as in, it akes money away from schools in Tory-held constituencies).

The chosen solution was to find some money to protect those schools which would be likely to suffer budget cuts, while other schools still receive more money.  Having done this once, I suspect they would come under pressure next year to protect the best funded schools again and lift the others up a bit more - levelling up to the level of the highest funded.  Which is not what they had intended.

And where would this money come from?  Abolishing Nick Clegg's scheme to give every child in the first three years of primary school a free hot lunch regardless of their parents' incomes might yield about the right amount.  (It might also annoy some school managers who had to bust guts a couple of years ago to upgrade their catering facilities.)

But snatching food from the mouths of poor little children doesn't look good, so along came the breakfasts.  In a remarkable echo of a few other unfunded/badly explained policies recently, it appeared that each breakfast could cost no more than 6.8p, and that staffing had not been allowed for.

Figures from Education Datalab suggested that no scheme with a better-than-derisory take-up could be delivered for the suggested £60 million a year.


   
As the Independent reported, "backtracking on previous statements made, the party is now refusing to confirm the correct amount set out in the plans".

UKIP "resuming hostilities"

UKIP didn't use that phrase;  usually supportive news provocateur Guido Fawkes chose it. With friends like that...  And one of the MEPs that UKIP didn't manage to keep hold of (questions of expenses irregularities) appeared to have a topical suggestion.





Paul Nuttall launched the party manifesto in London - none of the targeted seat visits that other parties had opted for (the Scots Nats are reported to be moving their delayed launch from Edinburgh to the seat of Pete Wishart (SNP, Perth and North Perthshire, majority 9,641) which the Tories have their eyes on).

The theme of the day was UKIP's claim to be the only party "brave enough" to tackle Islamic terrorism, with thousands of extra police, troops, prison and border guards.  Nuttall "refused to rule out" interning terrorism suspects without trial and proposed that anyone found to have fought for Islamic State overseas should forfeit their citizenship and not be allowed to return (not that the country such a person was dumped in would necessarily be forced to go along with that, under international law).


Nuttall remembered to stress that "the vast majority of the Muslim population of this country are peaceful people and a great asset to our society" (I believe the same can be said about Mexicans) but had nothing to say about his senior MEP Gerard Batten's argument that all Islam is barbaric and primitive.

The robust approach to integration proposed at their April event, the one which led Arron Banks to label parts of the policy a "war on Muslim religion" and James Carver MEP to resign as a spokesperson, was refined but still posed hard questions (on sharia, which May has been "consulting on", and FGM, a continuing, scandalous embarrassment, for example) which I feel UKIP are unqualified by attitude to answer.

On the ban on (certain) face coverings Nuttall claimed that a "burqa ban" had "worked" in France and Belgium.  "Worked" in what way?  Has it somehow improved integration or worked against terrorism, or has it just successfully reduced the number of women seen in the wrong clothes?  He also quoted with approval Manfred Weber MEP's proposal of an EU-wide burqa ban (but not, strangely, Weber's recognition that such a thing is not within the EU's competence).


Elsewhere in the manifesto are a proposal to reallocate most of the overseas aid budget to health and social care, and abolishing the House of Lords and "replace it" with an English parliament.  This would leave four nations running themselves and a UK-level house of some sort which would leave government with even more untrammelled power than at present.  The manifesto seems more concerned with detailing electoral systems at each level than how to deal with the royal prerogative and how to ensure the quality of law.

One item which people really wanted to be a part of the manifesto (but, I promise, I haven't been able to find it) was





Both Nuttall and manifesto author Suzanne Evans told us that Theresa May must take some responsibility for the Manchester bombing, but later denied they meant personal responsibility.  It was her "record as home secretary" they were criticising.  Pardon me, but that's one person's record, which she often relies on to demonstrate her experience.  I'd go with the criticism on police cuts and not on other things, but UKIP seem not to be "brave enough" to make it personal.

Saboteurs department


Amber Rudd was "irritated" with the US:





or "furious":





In the current atmosphere the idea of using security cooperation as a Brexit bargaining chip might "lack credibility" and it doesn't look like a good time to be talking about post-election Tory reshuffles:





Amber Rudd thought it was good that the net immigration figure was down, but the Institute of Directors wasn't convinced:

"Today’s migration figures underline the importance of immigration to the UK workforce and are a warning of the damage a significant reduction could do. Alarmingly, the fall in net migration is being driven as much by people leaving as by fewer arriving. This is a big worry for employers who risk losing key members of staff in positions that cannot easily be replaced from the home-grown pool available. The IoD has repeatedly called for the government to guarantee the status of EU migrants already living here. Doing so would allow businesses to start planning for the future.

"There is a well expressed public desire for increased control of immigration but all parties in the general election should set out clearly the costs of any proposals they make. The Office for Budget Responsibility have calculated that cutting immigration to the “tens of thousands” would add £6bn a year to the national deficit, just in terms of the direct reduction in the taxes collected and so not including wider economic impacts."

And, as May looked to the US president for support in furrin parts...  Trump's Team Told EU Leaders They're Worried Brexit Could Cost US Jobs.
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Monday, 22 May 2017

The "Nothing has changed; nothing has changed" election - day 35


#MrsME is the focus of the news, and not in a good way


We woke to news that many councils are not providing social care clients with the currently available option of deferring their payments.  This has been discovered within four days of the Tory manifesto launch, and suggests that the rumours are right - the now much-discussed social care policy was a late addition and wasn't checked with the cabinet.  Or sanity-checked from the looks of things.

The Tories had spent the weekend defending the social care proposals, often fluently but in rather similar (scripted? surely not) terms, and you had to question their sincerity.  On Thursday, "manifesto day" itself, Jeremy Hunt had said "... not only are we dropping [the cap on charges] but we are dropping it ahead of a general election and we're being completely explicit in our manifesto that we're dropping it.  We're dropping it because we've looked again at this proposal and we don't think it's fair."

At  lower levels within this party, the activists who actually canvass real people, the mood was more confused, shading into tentative rebellion.  The pound slid a little at the beginning of the day, with City types in part blaming uncertainty over social care (and therefore doubts over #MrsME's #StrongAndStable™ leadership).

The biggest sign of jitters might have been the paid ads, noticed at least as early as Sunday night.





Theresa May took her backdrop to Wrecsam, but as she spoke many were reading George Osborne's latest contribution to the Conservative cause, followed by a tough Evening Standard editorial:  "This isn’t for consultation after an election — it’s an issue of honesty before an election".





"Since my manifesto has been published it has been subject to fake claims by Jeremy Corbyn,"  May claimed.  And then she "clarified" the policy, telling us  "This manifesto says that we will come forward with a consultation paper, a government green paper. And that consultation will include an absolute limit on the amount people have to pay for their care costs".  We all strained our ears for the sound of ministers swearing.

The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg was given the first question and challenged May to account for the social care U-turn.  The #StrongAndStable™ prime minister waffled a large amount of detail, dodged the direct question, implied that there had been no change and launched into another attack on Corbyn.  All the questioners followed the U-turn line.






BBC News and Reality Check spoke only of U-turns and rapid climbdowns but #MrsME wasn't giving in - the Financial Times reported  "an agitated Mrs May insisted:  'Nothing has changed; nothing has changed'".

Earlier in the speech she celebrated Welsh voters' decision to ignore "hysterical warnings" from Labour, the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru during the referendum campaign.  She seemed to forget that her own government, and she herself, had taken the same position.  At one point she accused the other parties of "ignoring Wales".  Plaid Cymru ignoring Wales?  Perhaps I misheard.

David Butler, the man who knows everything about elections so that the rest of us don't have to, considers this policy change to be unprecedented.





One thing that "#MrsME and my team" keep saying is that the measure still protects £100,000 "so you will always have something to pass on to your family".  Does she think we all have that much to give to our children?  Do all the Just About Managings have £100,000?  I know I haven't.

And finally a word from somebody who recently worked in the Home Office:  "May... used to 'consult'.  Staff received loaded questions and later were told  'This is what you agreed to'."  An attempt to provide an advisory statement (surely the function of the civil service) was met with criticism that these "actions were considered disruptive... personal views were not relevant"



Sing-along-a-Labour


Labour had moved on to Hull (UK City of Culture 2017) to launch their culture manifesto.  Emma Hardy (Labour, Hull West and Hessle, candidate, majority to beat 9,333) introduced Tom Watson (Labour, West Bromwich East, majority 9,470), who had a hairdo which would have gone well with a set of leathers.  He told us about his university days and about popping into a club the night before to see three bands for £3!  "Arts and culture bring us together,"  he said,  "which we need in the divisions which have followed the referendum".

Then on came Jeremy Corbyn, with his customary litany of thanks.  He referred to a replica of Amy Johnson's Gypsy Moth, which was made for this year's celebrations by inmates of Hull prison.


"Well done Hull.  Well done the prisoners. Well done Amy Johnson (!)"  The next celebration was of a series of photographs of naked Hullensians painted blue.  "In a very nice way, the people of Hull made an exhibition of themselves."

Both Corbyn and Watson showed knowledge of the local venues, which can be researched, but also of the way musicians and artists work.  I can't imagine #MrsME being this comfortable (with anything).  Jeremy Hunt, in his early incarnation as coalition culture minister might have pulled it off, but he'd never have been so relaxed.

Major themes of Labour's cultural manifesto are a £1 billion capital fund for culture and an arts pupil premium to give every child a chance to play a musical instrument and other artistic pursuits.  "We'll not just feed our children's stomachs, we will feed their minds and unleash their creativity,"  announced Corbyn.



Saboteurs department


The EU Council handed a detailed negotiating mandate to Michel Barnier on Monday to define his objectives and what he is and isn't allowed to say in the Brexit negotiations.  Knowing this was due might have been why David Davis started going on at the weekend about walking out of the talks with no deal, which attracted a lot of attention.




There are several detailed legal analyses available, but I like this summary.



And this one on walking out without a deal,



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Sunday, 21 May 2017

The "Manifestos don't actually help much, do they?" election - day 34


A lot of Sunday morning headlines told of Labour pushing for older voters, after the #DementiaTax triple whammy, and especially older Libertines fans it would appear.





Jeremy Corbyn gave an interview to Sophie Ridge on Sky in which she asked about his plans for ending the benefit freeze.  He replied "On work related benefits... we have set aside a large sum of money to deal with the anomalies that exist in the system... we’re dealing with the issue of the capability for work tests... and we will also raise the living wage to £10 an hour".

Quite reasonably, she pointed out that he hadn't quite said the freeze would be lifted, and after a bit of to-and-fro he said  "Yes, the freeze would be ended because it’s very, very unfair...". But the main point seemed to be "We’ve set aside the sum we’ve mentioned, that is set aside as a start and we’ll obviously review it as time goes on".

Which reminds me of nothing more than David Gauke, elsewhere in the media forest, explaining that his manifesto explained the approach a #MrsME government would take, the details of which would be developed and/or consulted on later.  I'd prefer a "We'll raise A and B, stop doing C and set work in motion to tackle D and E which are a bit more complex" but this is only an election after all.

Ridge pursued the old IRA theme and elicited an "all bombing has to be condemned and you have to bring about a peace process".  Of course "all bombing" includes "IRA bombing" but he does have a habit of answering the general, nothing-must-be-left-out question five times when he'd gain time for talking about the things he really wants to look at by tackling the specific question once.

Reviews of the interview later lamented that Corbyn hadn't explicitly said that immigration would fall after a Labour Brexit, only wishing for "fair immigration based on the needs of our society".  Neither have the Tories actually, though they have more aspirations and verbiage in that direction.  They might say "we will have the control" and "it should fall" but I don't think I've heard an "it will fall" coupled with a credible mechanism to make it happen.

We've got 17 more days of this fencing to go



That tousled liar Boris Johnson graced the Peston show with his considerable presence and said... not a lot really.  He claimed that Jeremy Corbyn is pushing for unlimited immigration, at pretty much the same moment that Corbyn was telling Sophie Ridge on Sky that "freedom of movement ends when we leave the EU".

He also claimed that the "minimum of £8 billion in real terms over the next five years" pledged for the NHS in the Tory manifesto is the £350 million per week promised by his Brexiter bus.  Except that it isn't.  That would total over £18 billion per year (and of course a quarter of it is the rebate so we already spend it the way we want, and a third is spent on things we won't want to drop entirely, yada yada you've heard it all before).

Oh, and Damian Green told us via the Marr programme that some of the £8bn would actually be reallocated from within current NHS funding.  How do these people expect to get away with it?  Green also opined that May would prefer to keep Johnson inside the tent.  I think we can all guess why, but how long can he last?



David Davis popped up talking about walking out of the Brexit negotiations without a deal.  Had something happened to make that worth contemplating?  Well, the process we triggered just under a year ago is still going on, with final negotiating instructions about to be sign off by the EU council of 27 and handed to Michel Barnier.  And rumours suggest that #MrsME & co won't like some of them.  Or maybe it was just intended to distract us all from the #DementiaTax problem.

Davis's cryptic closer (in this article at least) was  “I’m of the view that the likeliest outcome is the outcome we are looking for,” which could mean anything.  Talking about "no deal" was seen as foolish...





or as part of a conspiracy/plan (delete according to taste)...










Under Article 50 there's no way to just drop out.  Without an agreement, EU treaties "cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification".  There are those, in UKIP and the UDI wing of the Conservative party, who say we should just repeal our own European Communities Act and leave the 27 to pick up the pieces, but I don't think Davis and #MrsME are quite that stupid. After all, Davis ran through some of the implications of leaving with no deal earlier this year.







The social care scare definitely isn't going away.  Here's the IFS on Friday saying that the plan doesn't tackle the basic funding challenge.  Here, in more down to earth terms is the word on the street.





And here is a discussion of whether we're talking about care or inheritance.




And the Lib Dem's Tim Farron told us the Tories have chosen a #DementiaTax.  "If you or your loved one has, or will get dementia, they're coming for you."

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Saturday, 20 May 2017

The "Could this be a chink in her armour?" election - days 32-33


Glory days or glory hole for Fallon?


Michael Fallon (Conservative, Sevenoaks, majority 19,561, currently Secretary of State for Defence) toured the studios on Thursday "explaining" the Conservative manifesto and magnifying the impression gained by those reading the document that it was short on detail and devoid of much in the way of costings.

He ended up in the Newsnight studio with Evan Davis, who asked when the numbers were coming. There will be no more numbers, replied Fallon, other than output from consultations in the future (or, in the case of immigration, after the next election but three when we're finally so completely unattractive that nobody will come).

The video was doing the rounds even more indefatigably than the man himself, because even with Davis's half-embarrassed "I'm sorry to interrupt you but you're telling us nothing" and his surely-you-can-do-better-than-this laughter Fallon wasn't doing very well.  If only he'd listened to the careers advice offered by his opponent in the Darlington byelection of 1983 and picked up a guitar...



On Friday morning John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, majority 15,700) came on the Today programme to do what Philip Hammond (Conservative, Runnymede and Weybridge, majority 22,134, currently Chancellor of the Exchequer) did the day after the Labour manifesto launch.

Except that Hammond criticised the inadequacy and inconsistency of Labour's numbers and received a fair hearing.  It was pointed out that he had put together day-to-day spending and investment but he just kept going and seemed to get away with it.  His one embarrassing moment came when he gave the forecast price of HS2 as £32 billion, without including the massive contingency allowed.  That number might still exist in some treasury document but nobody uses it.

McDonnell observed that there were pretty well no numbers at all in the Tory manifesto and tried to work some out from the words.  And John Humphrys switched to derisory chuckle mode and poked fun at McDonnell's "triple whammy for pensioners" with no further reference to the substance of the manifesto they were supposedly discussing.

Kenneth Clarke (Conservative, Rushcliffe, majority 13, 829) came along a bit later to celebrate the fact that the document he will - loosely - be fighting under in June contained no numbers and not many specific commitments.  It's certainly true that Cameron/Osborne's "five year tax lock" on the taxes which bring in most of the government's money was a stupid move, but Clarke's patrician "We will do only good things" manifesto would rightly be unacceptable today.


Triple whammies all round

One of the interesting things about the campaign is the development of Corbyn's use of humour.  He's been using it to fend off unwanted questions in place of the grumpy walking away which attracted negative reviews.  In the big speeches it might be scripted, but some of it must be coming from the man himself.

At a Friday campaign stop he said "Another party has published a manifesto. I won't mention its name because its leader doesn't like to and... I don't want to intrude on private grief".  Not Robin Williams perhaps, but a nice critical dig and perfectly good when he's on the road.

The theme was the Tories' "triple whammy on pensioners":  means-testing winter fuel payments, scrapping the triple lock on pensions and the moves on social care.  Some of the critics got it a bit wrong, as did the media, as the Tories wanted them to, with the "quadrupling the current limit" line, but Labour has run on it ever since.


It's not just Labour.  People are talking about it, and people are working out the numbers the Tories have refused to give us.  David Gauke (Conservative, South West Hertfordshire, majority 23,263, currently Chief Secretary to the Treasury) addressed an older audience through the medium of Radio 4's Any Questions.  Questions from the audience were:
  1. As I get older, will I be better off suffering from cancer or from a degenerative disease like dementia?
  2.  Has May risked her landslide with her raid on pensioners’ finances?
  3.  Is a free school breakfast as good as lunch? What’s your reaction to Tory plans to means test lunches & give free breakfast?
  4.  What’s your reaction to the government admission that they have not costed their plan to slash immigration?
The Sunday Telegraph put it on its front page.






Even the Bow Group, a Conservative party think tank which used to be fairly establishment and centrist but now concentrates on goading the leadership, called the social care proposals “the biggest stealth tax in history”.  The pundits are waiting with bated breath for the first polls after the Tory manifesto.  And #DementiaTax has caught on as a label for it.

While I was wondering how much-cut local authorities could cope with a massive expansion in demand for Deferred Payment Agreements, which is the payment method actually mentioned on page 65 of the manifesto, others were looking another way - "It all makes sense if you think about social care as a commercial opportunity".




An internet that Theresa May approves of

"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology
and the internet. We disagree,"  is the opening of a section headed A FRAMEWORK FOR DATA AND THE DIGITAL ECONOMY.  And elsewhere:  "we will take up leadership in a new arena, where concern is shared around the world: we will be the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet".

This is and has been a government which presided over the Investigatory Powers Act after flawed opposition from the Lib Dems in coalition and a heavy foot on the brake from David Anderson, the reviewer of terrorism legislation.  David Cameron (who?) and Amber Rudd (Conservative, Hastings and Rye, majority 4,796, currently Home Secretary) are both convinced that encryption must be made breakable, despite the implications for each one of us operating online.

Sometimes you need a  lawyer.  Paul Bernal lectures in law at the University of East Anglia and concludes that "though there are a few bright spots, the major proposals are deeply disturbing and will send shivers down the spine of anyone interested in internet freedom".  Later, he commented on the comments his blog post had attracted.





And then sometimes you need a laugh before getting back to the serious stuff.







Bye bye Leveson 2


On a related subject, I'll just quote a paragraph from page 80 of the Conservative manifesto.

"At a time when the internet is changing the way people obtain their news, we also need to take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy and a free and independent press.  We will ensure content creators are appropriately rewarded for the content they make available online.  We will be consistent in our approach to regulation of online and offline media.  Given the comprehensive nature of the first stage of the Leveson Inquiry and given the lengthy investigations by the police and Crown Prosecution Service into alleged wrongdoing, we will not proceed with the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. We will repeal Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2014, which, if enacted, would force media organisations to become members of a flawed regulatory system or risk having to pay the legal costs of both sides in libel and privacy cases, even if they win."

The hope is... it will keep us important


Saturday's not entirely manufactured story was Emily Thornberry (Labour, Islington South and Finsbury, majority 12,708) versus Nia Griffith (Labour, Llanelli, majority 7,095).  Thornberry had told LBC that Trident would go into Labour's post-victory defence review and you can't guarantee the outcome of a review.  Griffith could have worked on from that position but she chose to say that Thornberry was wrong.

“Nobody has raised the issue of removing the Trident nuclear deterrent from our manifesto," she told Newsnight, which stretches credulity.  Labour's policy forum and conference (with a big input from the unions) decided last year as it has done several times to "keep the nuclear deterrent".  Thus are media spats made, and John Woodcock (Labour, Barrow and Furness, majority 795) can always be relied on for an opinion.

Woodcock told Today on Radio 4 that "the policy on this is settled" and whoever wins the election would be holding a defence review.  I'm not sure the Tories would bother, since they seem to be treating the election as an interlude in continuing normal business for many policy areas, but depreciation of sterling and (whisper who dares) bad or optimistic management of the MoD have left one of those famous black holes in the forecasts.

Another gem from Woodcock was that Trident had passed the "point of no return", which is obviously not true.  Direct cancellation penalties from BAE at Barrow and the various American companies who supply the missiles and service the process would be big, as would the political blowback natioanlly and within NATO, but cancellation is always possible.  The cost to the Barrow economy of losing the submarine contract would be massive, but neither Trident nor Woodcock's place in the Commons is sacrosanct.

Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, Islington, majority 21,194) found himself telling a Birmingham audience "the manifesto makes it very clear that the Labour party has come to a decision and is committed to Trident... We’re also going to look at the real security needs of this country on other areas such as cyber-security, which I think the attack on our NHS last week proved there needs to be some serious re-examination of our defences against those kind of attacks.”

In the face of the predictable attacks (Theresa May: "A Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government could not be relied upon to defend this country") a Labour "source" told us “Trident will be renewed come what may, the continuous at-sea deterrent”.  The nuclear deterrent would be included in a Labour government’s strategic defence review, but it would be looking at issues like costings and how to protect it from cyber-attacks.
Nowadays I always return to the conclusion of Ian Jack's piece on British nukes for the Guardian:

"Nuclear weapons were never the done deal, the only way forward, that the ebullient certainties of politicians such as the present defence minister, Michael Fallon, would have us believe. They have been contentious inside the British establishment for 70 years, never properly scrutinised because opposition to them was usually based on moral and not practical grounds. If we didn’t already have them, would we want to acquire them? Nobody I talked to in the course of reporting this piece thought so, but the question is hypothetical. Trident may or may not keep us safe. The hope is, and always has been, that it will keep us important."

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UK (mostly) Bluesky starter packs

These are starter packs I've encountered ( mostly UK-based ), with the Bluesky account each one is associated with. I really did try to ...