Saturday 13 May 2017

The "Trespassing on others' territory" election - day 25


Catch-up

I've caught up with the full leaked Labour manifesto, and it's still causing ructions today.

It's actually quite an old joke, but a relevant one today:  The government (and most of the papers) are quite happy with state control of British industries;  as long as it's a foreign state.  Rail "renationalisation" is probably the easiest such proposal to achieve, though it does assume (at least) two Labour (or sympathetic) terms in government.  Who are the current franchise holders?


Abellio has three franchises or part-franchises and is owned by the Dutch government.  Deutsche Bahn, whose largest shareholder is the German government, owns Arriva, which has six franchises or part-franchises. Trenitalia has one franchise and is owned by the Italian government, and Eurostar is part owned by the French and Belgian governments.

Then there's energy.  Of the big six gas and electricity suppliers, EDF Energy's parent company is largely owned by the French government.  EDF and Chinese government finance are responsible for the Hinkley Point C project, and a Chinese government company has options on two further British nuclear plants.  And the Qatar state investment authority is a major share holder of the Spanish company Iberdrola, which controls Scottish Power.

Oh, and the British government is already part owner, with the Dutch government and two German power companies, of Urenco, which enriches uranium. 


Do other European countries, with their major state industries, live in the 1970s (© Telegraph, Mail and all points to the right)?  You know, that time when there were boy jobs and girl jobs.

The Daily Mirror has the latest in a series of similar polls which basically tell us that Labour's leaked proposals are popular but Corbyn isn't.

Is it because I is not a pacifist?


Emily Thornberry (Labour, Islington South and Finsbury, majority 12,708) put her name to a scene-setting article for Labour's day, while the party primed journalists with "what Jeremy Corbyn is expected to say", which boiled down to "I am not a pacifist".

The BBC's Norman Smith opined that Corbyn had voted against every military engagement imaginable, including the Falklands war... which happened the year before he was first elected (though I'm sure he would have voted against it). "Perhaps some preconceptions to clear up" on Corbyn's military stance, said newsreader Annita McVeigh later.

Corbyn's speech when it came was a thoughtful tour d'horizon of things defence, development and diplomacy.  He quoted Eisenhower's 1961 "military-industrial complex" speech and lamented the lack of progress on Ike's warning not to "let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes".  He observed that current thinking is presented as being either for or against strong defence, with anything but the former "unreliable".

He criticised Theresa  May for having a "coalition of risk and insecurity" with Donald Trump, and promised that under Labour there would be "no more hand-holding" with the US.


"The war on terror has not worked" was a main point, leading to a stress on diplomacy - fine, but several invocations of the United Nations were formulaic and uncritical.  Perhaps with the weight of leadership on his shoulders, perhaps with the weight of conference decisions contradicting his own views, Corbyn pressed for the 2% defence spending target to be maintained with a view to building troop numbers back up and looking after them better.

What everybody was waiting for was the passage on nuclear weapons.  The question "would you order use  of nuclear weapons" was "an extraordinary question when you think about it – would you order the indiscriminate killing of millions of people? Would you risk such extensive contamination of the planet that no life could exist across large parts of the world? If circumstances arose where that was a real option, it would represent complete and cataclysmic failure. It would mean world leaders had already triggered a spiral of catastrophe for humankind."

I hope it's hard to argue against that analysis objectively, but nuclear deterrence theory for NATO (and several other countries with nuclear weapons) has moved beyond "you hit me and I'll hit you back" to "you look like hitting me and I'll hit you first".

Many military operations might be judged to be war crimes but it would be hard to class a nuclear strike in any other way, if any courts survived.  As Michael Fallon (Conservative, Sevenoaks, majority 19,561) has told us before today "In the most extreme circumstances, we've made it very clear that you can't rule out the use of nuclear weapons as a first strike."


Corbyn left it to be inferred that he would never order such a strike, and explicitly stated the party's opposition to a first strike.


"A high level of strategic illiteracy" was the judgement of a former senior naval officer.  Declaring no first use is "absolute nonsense... the man can't be trusted".  Then, in order to appear "unpolitical" he observed that "even the present prime minister" isn't too good at stepping up to help the US.


Theresa May revisits an old stamping ground

#MrsME was in northeastern England, hoping to appeal to wavering Labour voters and those who had already transferred their support to UKIP.  Not that she was actually going to met any of them of course.  In her speech to Tories in Tynemouth she mentioned another election campaign in 1992, when she contested Northwest Durham against a young Tim Farron... and lost to Labour's Hilary Armstrong.



May, in Tynemouth, accused Labour of turning against the "proud and patriotic working class", but most of the speech was familiar stuff, much of it set out in the letter I discussed yesterday.  "The EU 27 are determined to work together,"  she says, and  "They mean business".  Can anybody be surprised by that?

Northern Echo chief feature writer Chris Lloyd told Sky News they're "on the cusp of something" with regard to Tories making progress in the northeast.  The election of a Tory mayor for Tees Valley, the effect of the Leave vote and the dwindling UKIP vote all mean that otherwise surprising seats being targeted.


Since coverage was going to be dominated by Corbyn's speech, May made a few soundbites available - Labour voters "are increasingly looking at what Jeremy Corbyn believes in, and are appalled" - an attack on Corbyn on defence, economy and leadership, very little actual Tory policy but #StrongAndStable™ generalities.


David Cameron appeared on the campaign in Chester to argue that May needs a big mandate to escape being manoeuvred into an “extreme Brexit”. David Davis on the other hand , claimed the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, was trying to force him out of his job.

The Economist analysed #MrsME's chances with the older vote (spoiler: it should be safe):
"Fortunately for Theresa May … her retirement-age base currently looks rock-solid. Before the Brexit referendum last year, around a fifth of over-60s supported the UK Independence party. But after the surprise vote to leave the EU stripped Ukip of much of its reason for being, nearly three-quarters of that group have abandoned the party, with the vast majority shifting their allegiances to the Conservatives. As a result, the Tories are currently some 50 points ahead of Labour among the old – an advantage roughly double the size of their already-large margin with that group in 2015. Labour may have chosen a relatively aged leader in the 67-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, but the polls suggest he shouldn’t count on his sexagenarian peers for any help."


Over the last few days I've seen a few demands for more detail on Brexit (or indeed anything) but this one seemed to go well with May's criticism of Labour's policy costings.




Lib Dems on drugs

BBC World At One featured the periodic "debate" about drugs, prompted by a Lib Dem pledge to legalise cannabis.  The war on drugs has not worked,  so...





Saboteurs department

After Michel Barnier's speech to the Irish parliament yesterday, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator moved on to the border with the north to hear first hand how the wrong sort of Brexit would hit businesses and individuals in that area in particular.  He told us that some form of customs checking would be needed between an EU country and one outside.  Most of the proposals for this border seem to have been around since the referendum campaign a year ago.

"I'm not a super-technocrat from Brussels,"  said Barnier.  "I have been chosen for this extraordinary job - and I hope it remains extraordinary - because I'm a politician."  He continued,  "We want to find solutions without rebuilding any hard border."  The job is to maintain the Good Friday Agreement but it must be compatible with the single market.

Accused by a journalist of being an agent provocateur by approaching the border from the south (!) he shifted to diplomatic nothings, refusing to talk solutions, listening and showing he's totally involved.  "Everything is complicated...  There is always an answer..."  But of course the BBC cut away as soon as a French journalist started talking furrin.

At Barnier's right shoulder, Irish foreign minister Charlie Flanagan said, perhaps pointedly, that he hopes Article 50 talks can get underway "as soon as possible after June 8".

Meanwhile Tony Blair was addressing a European People's Party meeting in County Wicklow.  “A hard border between the countries would be a disaster,"  he said,  "and I am sure everyone will and must do all they can to avoid it...  Some disruption is inevitable and indeed is already happening. However, it is essential that we do all we possibly can to preserve arrangements which have served both countries well and which command near universal support.”

One thing I thought might blow up during the referendum campaign was the promise, led by Priti Patel, that Brexit would allow the UK to bring more people from the Indian subcontinent than at present.  In part this followed Eric Pickles' ill-fated attempt to train British curry chefs.  George Osborne's ever-helpful London Standard now reports that "Brexit ministers misled us over immigration, say furious curry house bosses".


Snippets

Thursday's cyber attack prompted Helen Jayne Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners to complain about NHS underfunding on BBC World Tonight and tech people to observe that a huge number of NHS systems are running Windows XP, which is no longer supported.  This could become an election issue.
Edward Snowden among others pointed out that the NSA had discovered this Windows weakness but not told people about it.

The final numbers show that UKIP is standing in many fewer constituencies than in 2015.






And the Greens will be seen in rather more places.




The effect of UKIP's choice's (though they might have been forced on the party by lack of time, willing candidates and money) could be serious for Labour.




And here's a beaut!  The conspiracy theorists will be out in force.



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