Saturday, 24 June 2017

A brief note on cladding tests to my MP

We hear updates of the number of samples from suspect buildings which have been found to be combustible - failed the test.  We are also told that "up to 100 samples per day" can be tested.  We're not told the total number of tests conducted and therefore the number of samples found not to be dangerous.

Now we have councils taking action in addition to that indicated by the state of their buildings' cladding, so the only news we get seems to be bad.  If it turns out eventually that 50%, 70%, 90% of buildings are not in fact a threat to their residents, it's going to look like scaremongering.

I believe it's irresponsible not to provide the full picture.  It won't help anybody who hasn't yet been given an answer one way or the other for their own home, but it might help with the credibility and ultimately the effectiveness of the whole exercise.

I hope you agree and can convey this message to ministers.
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Friday, 23 June 2017

Things you should never call yourself, no 13 - generous


Welcome to Brussels


Three days after the beginning of the Brexit negotiations #MrsMe turned up for the EU Council meeting to mark the end of Malta's six months in the rotating presidential chair.  And she brought a proposal on what the EU call "citizens' rights" and the UK press call "arrangements for EU migrants in the UK and UK expatriates in the EU" or some such clumsy formulation.  They're all expats, they're all migrants, and at present they're all citizens, which is really the point.

Ten minutes were allocated late on Thursday for #MrsMe to make her presentation, then out she went so they could discuss Brexit.  As has been said at least once already, Council meetings are not going to engage in negotiation - there's a dedicated forum for that.

Does this look like a party emerging after a successful day?






The press conferences gave a hint of what people were thinking.  At the UK event #MrsMe told us all about her "fair and serious offer" (at least she dropped the "generous" label;  telling people how generous you're being to them doesn't look good).  The presidential conference tried to deal with all the important things the Council was supposed to be about - terrorism, transfer of medical and banking regulators out of London - but all the questions were about Brexit.






Jean-Claude Juncker judged it "a first step but... not sufficient".  Donald Tusk's words were "below our expectations" and it "risks worsening the position of citizens".  Separately, Angela Merkel called it a "good start".  BBC News repeatedly expressed surprise at such an ungrateful response.  Jo Coburn on BBC2's Daily Politics observed that we hadn't yet seen anything from the other side and had to be corrected - a detailed proposal was published on 12 June.  If the BBC was unaware of it that was nobody's fault but their own.


By the standards of British immigration policy, particularly over the May years, her "offer" could certainly be called generous, right down to the promise of an easy application process (we'll believe that when we see it), but the fact remains, she wants to take rights away from people, while the EU can keep the high ground - they're trying to preserve the rights of both sets of citizens.  Somebody will have to move.

The proposal was discussed well in this thread of tweets, and summarised as "If you have right of permanent residence you keep it.  If you don't, you can apply":





It seems unlikely that the detail of the UK plan has been held back so that it can be announced first to the Commons, as is "correct" (early release of information is a frequent cause for complaint by Speaker Bercow).  So is the proposal not yet finished, or don't our Brexit team care how much negotiating time they waste, or can't they count?

At one point #MrsMe came up with the bright idea that the subject of expats' rights would be "one of the first things" the talks would cover.  As if that was all a UK initiative.  As if the EU27 don't care about it.  As if it isn't one of the top three topics which have to be progressed far enough before negotiator Barnier will even be allowed to mention a future UK-EU relationship.  And as if the talks hadn't already started.


Many people on all sides have proposed throughout the last year that we should make an early unilateral declaration that "EU migrants' rights will be protected" in the full expectation that it would be matched by the other side.  Late to this particular party is the London Evening Standard, under the direction of George Osborne:  "The Government should announce unilaterally that any Europeans who are living here will be able to remain here, work here, pay taxes here and use the public services they help pay for. You wouldn’t need any complicated reciprocal agreement with Europe, or provide any role for the European Court of Justice."

There's one problem with this approach:  what rights do you protect?  Full EU citizenship rights, such as bringing in a spouse of non-EU citizenship and recourse to the ECJ, or the limited set that was proposed today?  It would become a subject of negotiation whatever you hoped for.  You couldn't close it down by speaking first, because it would all have to be the subject of international agreement.


Don't forget why we're doing all this






The Article 50 process

Days between 29 March 2017 and 29 March 2019, with six months reserved at the end for approving whatever treaties and agreements come out of the process (before talks continue on trade relationships etc).


Results so far: a timetable






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Thursday, 22 June 2017

Dress down speech day


When #MrsMe announced her snap election it was accompanied by a date for the state opening of Parliament, that event where the Commons shows its superiority by refusing to let the Queen's messenger Black Rod through the door for - ooh - several seconds before being ordered down the corridor to stand away from the seated baronry while Her Maj reads a list of the government's proposed bills for the coming year.


Black Rod, about his business

That date was 19 June, which was a problem.  The Queen was already booked for an event at Windsor Castle that day, to formally invest new Companions of the Order of the Garter then host a lunch for them and the other surviving holders.  Affairs of state eh?  Add to that the Trooping of the Colour the weekend before and there was just too much going on.

So the Queen's diary was hacked about - cancel the Garter thing on Monday, do the Queen's Speech thing, but the horses won't be available for rehearsals so it would have to be a cut down ceremony - no horses, no coaches, no great gold-embroidered gowns, no crowns.  Though the crown would still be there, on a cushion, driven in its own car, with escort, and never put on before being driven back.  At least the rest of the week would be available for Ascot.

Then came #MrsMe's less than brilliant performance at the election, and talks with the DUP on a not-coalition, and Monday was looking difficult, so some poor flunkey had to be dispatched to inform the Palace that it would definitely be Wednesday.  Definitely.  (And Wednesday came, amid laments from the DUP that they were being taken for granted, and simultaneous comments that the UK government doesn't seem to have much idea of how to go about negotiations.  That augurs well.)

And there still is no deal.  "Sod it,"  I imagine the monarch hissing,  "it's Wednesday morning or never.  Then I'm orf to Ascot and they can whistle if they need me."  Then, after a good Tuesday at the races, husband Philip falls ill and she goes into Take your Child To Work Day mode.  "Charles, your father's acting up again.  Get your good suit on, you're coming with me."

Various people had a chuckle about the EU flag motif on the royal hat (they're flowers if you look closely) to such an extent that Nigel Farage felt duty bound to reprimand a Belgian upstart.





The speech itself is rarely interesting - dead, rather than deathless, prose - "My government will do this... my ministers will do that..." - but this time there was the added frisson of trying to guess which bits of the Tory manifesto were being discarded at DUP request, and which because she couldn't even get them past her own party.  The manifesto they were backing ardently until 12 days ago. Whoever wielded the pruning shears, there wasn't a lot of the document left in terms of bills which, for the planned two-year session, really indicates the overpowering (not to say deadening) effect Brexit is expected to have.

What was first introduced as the Great Repeal Bill is now simply labelled Repeal Bill.  There are rules against aggrandisement and policy promotion in bill titles, so they'll have to come up with a less chest-beating name for the final article.  My money's on European Communities (Withdrawal) Bill though I'll always know it as the Great Copy And Paste Bill, since it implements or reimplements a vast array of EU directives and regulations so that our rules are basically the same on Brexit Day as they were the day before.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride


The proposed bills can be seen in all their sketchy glory in the document which accompanied the speech, but a few points should be made about the Repeal Bill:
  • In the introduction to the Repeal Bill are the words "The Bill does not put any constraints on the withdrawal agreement we will make with the EU and further legislation will be introduced to support such an agreement if and when required".  Does this recognise that all options remain open at the negotiations or just that this bill, like all the Brexit laws, can't really be finished until the withdrawal agreement, or even a later trade deal, is signed?
  • The bill is intended to ensure that the UK Parliament (and where appropriate devolved legislatures) will be free to make any future changes to our laws.  Subject, of course, to any agreement we've reached, to maintain our standards and regulations in line with EU developments post-Brexit.
  • This will be the main bill which creates powers (we're assured they'll be temporary but they will be extensive) allowing government to change parts of the legislation after it is passed.  This is called secondary legislation and it's controversial because it is subjected to little parliamentary scrutiny.  This bill, however, also allows such changes to be made to any other laws which are found not to operate "appropriately " once we have left the EU.  This is big, the kind of "Henry VIII clause" which the Lords in particular have campaigned against.
  • Finally, it's possible that this and perhaps other bills will impinge on powers devolved to the Scottish and other national assemblies, and will therefore require one or more Legislative Consent Motions from Holyrood, Stormont and/or Cardiff Bay.  This is seen by some, of course, as "The SNP can block Brexit", but is part of the asymmetric, uncodified constitution we've saddled ourselves with over the centuries.

At the end of the day, the government wouldn't field a minister for Newsnight on BBC2, perhaps recognising the disastrous failures of Boris Johnson earlier on Radio 4's PM and Channel 4 News (presented here with characteristic completeness by @imincorrible).





Johnson had a mild toasting on subsequent programmes but I'm not putting a penny on him suffering the same 24-hour, top-item-in-every-bulletin savaging that befell Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn over their various fluffed interviews.


Things already negotiated

#MrsMe's Brexit is driven by her obsession with immigration and her fixation on the talismanic net immigration figure of 99,999 per year.  There's no denying that immigration was a big public issue before the referendum and remains a significant concern  now, though perception of how many immigrants there are is rarely accurate.

From a 2014 survey

The EU principle of Freedom of Movement of people is most often blamed, though net migration from outside the EU (which has always been under UK control) is usually at least as great - significantly so for the latest annual figures.



The Freedom of Movement rules allow a host country to require incomers from any other EU country to return home if they have not found work.  UK government after government has chosen not to enforce this rule, though they have never told us.  This thread of tweets gives the best introduction to the rules I've seen.




Finally, remember David Cameron?  Remember the deal he came back with last February, with its rather complex "emergency brake" on Freedom of Movement?  One part of that negotiated deal often overlooked was protection of non-eurozone countries from developments tailored for the eurozone.  A single non-euro country could force a debate of proposed eurozone laws which might disadvantage those which don't use the single currency.

This was seen as a very useful protection by other countries - Denmark and Sweden for example - but like all the other features of the agreement it ceased to be available to any country when the UK referendum vote went in favour of Leave.

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Monday, 19 June 2017

Through a humiliation, briefly


A day trip to Brussels


Lots of words have been spilled, some much more usefully than others, on the subject of David Davis's Brussels "humiliation".  Having promised the "row of the summer" over the order of Brexit negotiations, Davis appeared to have given in to the EU timetable last Friday, and it was confirmed today.

As has been described hundreds of times, and as I tried to describe on Mayday (!), The UK government was expecting to negotiate withdrawal from the EU and the future UK-EU relationship (seen only in trade terms) in parallel streams, while the EU wanted to complete the withdrawal arrangements before starting on anything so complex as trade.

Every now and then a government spokesperson, usually Davis himself, has proclaimed support for the parallel negotiation idea from somewhere within the EU27, but it has been a single voice.  The 27 have maintained a united front on the basic structure of the talks, though here might be some disagreement on how "significant" the progress on withdrawal should be before the EU Council issues a directive to allow Barnier to move on to stage 2.

Some seemed to think there were still chinks in the EU armour...





Which makes you wonder how many times No 10 has to be told before it takes something on board. 

So now May's team has accepted the sequential model for talks and we have a basic timetable for dozens of negotiators and lawyers to hammer out the detail for Davis and Barnier to present to the world about every four weeks.  Davis still talks as if the later parallel part defines the process - they'll still be discussing Ireland right at the end, he says, because the trade and legal relationships will have to be known before the border across Ireland can be finalised.  But fewer people seem to be believing him.

Davis ended by throwing the EU's own maxim back at it - nothing is finished until everything is finished - as if it proved his point.  But we're talking about more than one agreement, and Barnier reminded us that a trade deal can only be finalised by the EU with what it calls a "third country", which the UK will become only after withdrawal.

A little Brexit tête-à-tête

We can still expect the occasional row over the coming months until the edges are knocked off the two positions and a bit of shared realism emerges (perhaps).

And finally...


I've been publicising the EU's web pages which contain all the documents relating to the negotiations and complaining that the UK doesn't have a similar resource.  It turns out that there is one, but they haven't really shouted about it.

We'll have to keep count as the work proceeds.







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Friday, 16 June 2017

These times are far too interesting


Following the election on 8 June we have a prime minister on probation, who has selected a cabinet by asking just about all of the top ministers who are still around to carry on doing their jobs, and filling a couple of gaps (sorry Liz Truss).  But this is also a government on probation, without the authority (or even the legal status) to do much until they can demonstrate majority support in the Commons.

#MrsMe has also appointed a full set of junior ministers, whose legal status is even shakier until the queen's speech is past.  MPs don't get paid until they've taken the oath (which all of them should have done by the end of Thursday), but what triggers payment of higher salaries for the various grades of minister?

What they're all waiting for, the queen's speech, depends on the Tories reaching a confidence and supply agreement with the DUP, thereby creating a minority government which can command a majority in the Commons on the big things at least.  As Thursday progressed there was doubt that the deal was anywhere near finalised.  This thing was taking longer than it took two parties to reach a real coalition agreement in 2010.  It has to be ready for Wednesday 21 June, however, because we've been told that's the date.






Later reports suggested the "Confidence" bit, allowing the DUP to support a "revised Queen's Speech" had indeed been agreed.  People will be laying bets on which pages of the Conservative manifesto have been ripped out at Arlene Foster's request and which because of Tory embarrassment and weakness.  The speech itself might need a few final touches but the major sticking point is elsewhere.

Enter, stage left, another villain, the Treasury.  Everybody and the family pets have been saying the DUP will be asking for money.  They're very conservative in some ways but rather welfarist in others, and they see the province itself as a claimant, which habit has grown through the Troubles and emergence from them.  Northern Ireland receives more public money per head than any other part of the UK, and has had a sizeable chunk of "peace money" from the EU.

Philip Hammond's people will be concerned if any promised allocation has implications for Scotland or anywhere else under the Barnett formula.  (This was put together in 1978 as a "temporary expedient", has "no legal standing or democratic justification" and which its author Joel Barnett was still wishing to see replaced until his death in 2014.  It's now a major factor in budgeting across the central government and devolved nations of the UK, and one of those stupid things whose replacement would be hellishly difficult to define and agree.)

And then there's the Renewable Heating Initiative, whose cost is pushing up towards £500m and which caused the collapse of the Northern Ireland executive and a new Ulster election in March of this year.  Forming a new executive is now an urgent task, since it is legally required by 29 June.  It's hard to imagine the Treasury simply covering that bill, but I'd be amazed if it wasn't somewhere in the workings.  So the people at Horse Guards Road will be questioning the total cost of this not-coalition and also any loose ends which might look tempting to Holyrood or Cardiff Bay.  This thread from Faisal Islam sets out some of the story.




What else is happening next week?  Wasn't there something in Brussels?  Oh yes, the opening of the Brexit talks.  When we don't actually have a government.  And, it appears, when #MrsMe hasn't consulted the putative opposition about "her team's" approach.  When the "Gina Miller" judgement was delivered at the Supreme Court and the prime minister starting to close down any talk of further parliamentary scrutiny I thought "it's royal prerogative all the way from here".  She still has that attitude, but she's now so weak, and making so many mistakes.




I've seen claims that David Davis is regarded as stupid by civil servants and won't read briefs, that his department hasn't consulted academic lawyers in its research, and many claims that industrial companies and bodies have been listened to more attentively if they are basically "on board with the project".  Select committees have made extensive use of outside expertise.  Of course government should have the best lawyers to hand, and the civil servants who work with EU law all the time will be invaluable in this exercise, but a department which won't open itself up to scrutiny, or even leads us to think it won't because it is excessively secretive, doesn't engender confidence.

The problem was exemplified in testimony to the Treasury select committee just two weeks after the referendum vote.  Michael Dougan, Professor of European Law at Liverpool University stated that the "having regard to" clause in Article 50 means that there must be talks on the future UK-EU relationship during the negotiations starting next week (what Davis wants to hear), but strictly speaking the EU can only negotiate in the legal sense with a "third country", which the UK would only become after leaving (which Davis doesn't want to hear).

Anyway, the EU27 have released an anodyne agenda for their opening meeting.  They'll talk to Davis, whatever his credibility level.




BBC News reported on Friday that Davis had agreed to the EU27's timetable - progress to be made on expats' rights, the financial settlement and Northern Ireland before Michel Barnier will even be allowed to address the subject of a future relationship.  DExEU issued a denial imprecise enough not to directly contradict the BBC report.  David Allen Green, the FT's legal commentator chased the department to clarify whether the simple statement that "UK has agreed to EU sequence", as tweeted by the BBC's Damian Grammaticus, is true. 

After several hours the press office responded,  “We have nothing further to add to our statement.”

 
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Monday, 12 June 2017

A fine mess



Certainty for the road ahead





At the launch of the Conservative party programme for the election #MrsMe promised "a manifesto to see us through Brexit and beyond".  By the fourth day after polling day large parts of it were being junked as we watched.  Having changed policy on social care at the first sign of opposition, May was widely reported to be in such a weak position that the manifesto the Tories were elected on is no longer tenable.  That's just so #StrongAndStable™

Labour's manifesto said little about Brexit, so their "varied" approaches are not very obvious (though Barry Gardiner and John McDonnell will be pursued for whatever reporters think they hear, out of habit).  The Tories on the other hand are falling apart on the subject, but it hardly shows among the rest of the shambles.


A few horses and a goat





MPs start swearing their oaths to the queen on Tuesday (with all the usual crossed fingers, muttered "nots" and non-standard Welsh wording from the republicans ond other objectors) then the parliamentary session is supposed to get properly started with the Queen's Speech, that event of much pomp and little content, on Monday 19 June.

Except that it's all up in the air.  With #MrsMe's small working majority dependent on agreement with the DUP, and policies to be dropped and added according to inter- and intra-party "discussions", nobody knows what it will say or when the text can be agreed.  We were told it couldn't happen on Monday, then that it might, then that they would let us know.

The timetable, we were also told, really matters.  The queen has already had to cancel a traditional Order of the Garter service to make way for opening Parliament next Monday, and declared that it would be a "dressed down" state opening because it clashes with Trooping the Colour.  The queen might not show her displeasure, but I bet her staff are tearing their hair out.

If it can't be Monday, when can it be?  The Royal Ascot race meeting begins the day after and that's "really important" to Her Madge.  And after that comes a full calendar of garden parties.  All this messing about "does not send a good signal to the rest of the world,"  observed the royal historian Kate Williams.  (Please don't think I'm an ardent  royalist or a fan of all this flummery, but it is how we run this country.)

Along the way the media picked up the kind of thing that makes it worth their while getting out of bed in the morning.  Somebody was quoted as saying that, since the document itself is written on vellum and the ink takes days to dry, the timetable is actually very tight.  There's been a year-long battle between the Lords (which wanted to stop using vellum for printing laws) and Commons (whose traditionalists thought this suggestion an abomination - yes, it really is that way round), and I thought, here's another chapter.

We then went into great investigations of how vellum is made, and uproar in defence of the goat or goats to be sacrificed for the few sheets which would be carried in the Lord Chancellor's little bag.

Michael Gove as Lord Chancellor, with his little bag, 2016

The aforementioned royal historian assured us that no goats are involved in the process, let alone harmed, since the speech is actually printed on vegan goatskin parchment (no goats) rather than goatskin vellum (goats).  Then even that was cast in doubt as somebody who should know stepped in.




Which left us with the mundane explanation for the uncertain date, which had seemed right all along - Monday can't be guaranteed until the negotiations with the DUP on what they will and will not support as not-coalition partners are complete.  Worries that arguments over traditions and social policy in Northern Ireland would intrude were reinforced by suggestions that contentious Orange marches should be unbanned.  That will cause some trouble, with Sinn Féin and Labour's sister party in the province the SDLP both warning that #MrsMe is endangering the "rigorous impartiality" required of the government by the Good Friday Agreement.

You wait for one important date...

Something else is scheduled for Monday 19 June - the beginning (at long last, say the EU27) of the UK's negotiations on withdrawal from the EU.  Correspondents from around Europe were asked how this election and its outcome are viewed.  The BBC's man in Paris, Hugh Schofield, talked of "cacophony, confusion and speculation".  Ex-prime minister of Sweden Carl Bildt tweeted "The new European pattern now is stability and confidence in the EU and mounting uncertainty in the UK."

Katya Adler, BBC Europe editor, told us "the UK is abuzz with cross-party debate about the most basic of basics - what kind of a Brexit this should be" and that David Davis's position as chief negotiator might not last long.  "Brussels is sharply aware of that."  She has heard "backrooom talk" already of possibly having to extend the negotiations and "Europe's secret wish" that the Article 50 notification might be withdrawn.

While the UK works out (again) what it supposedly wants from Brexit... "One source commented that he's never seen Brussels so sanguine over a contentious issue.  For once, EU member states really are aligned and calm, he told me, We have done our homework and we are ready for Brexit. It's the Brits who have to sort themselves out. In the meantime, the EU is concentrating on other pressing matters: security and defence, Russia, eurozone problems in Greece and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland."

Talk of rats and plots is in the air, with #MrsMe's chair of policy development George Freeman MP tweeting "Yep. This is a moment for Cabinet to drop HardBrexit message & return to that messiahnic message of hope on the steps of No10 last summer" and Mark Pritchard MP calling for a "pragmatic Brexit, not ideologically driven".  Tim Montgomerie, of the forthcoming new media website @UnHerd can sniff a conspiracy almost anywhere (though these things are being discussed fairly openly):





Saboteurs department

A lot of saboteurs have popped up in the Conservative party, as noted above.  Gavin Barwell, after losing his Croydon seat, told BBC Panorama that austerity & angry Remainers were behind lost Tory votes in his constituency, remembering a teacher who had understood pay restraint immediately after the 2008 crash but would not accept it for ten or eleven years.  (A few hours later Barwell was offered the job of #MrsMe's Chief of Staff.)

Ruth Davidson is talking in the same language as Yvette Cooper - reaching out, cross-party discussion of Brexit.  And #MrsMe herself deserves another mention, after her pledge to the 1922 committee:





The real problem, however, is the voters, who (almost) everybody seems to have got wrong.





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Sunday, 11 June 2017

In search of certainty

"I want to return to the crucial question of leadership," #MrsMe told us on Monday, three days before the election, "because that's what this election is about."  That turned out well.

"Give me a mandate to lead Britain, give me a mandate to speak for Britain, give me a mandate to fight for Britain and give me a mandate to deliver for Britain,” has been part of that speech, delivered two or three times a day over the weeks in a standardised setting of Me And My Team backdrop and dragooned, vetted workers and/or local party members.  Total control.





And now?  I don't like talking about people's looks and choice of clothes - it's petty - but it's hard not to sometimes.  #MrsMe's wardrobe during the campaign has been on the tweedy side of fashionable, and you have to wonder whether it was her own choice or "recommended" by Lynton Crosby.  At her count in the wee small hours of Friday all I could see was the red Red RED battle lipstick.


And to pledge "certainty" in the middle of Downing St (with Mr May at her shoulder rather than a dozen paces away out of any likely camera shot) it was a severe and very Tory blue suit.


Men - political men in particular - have a much more boring palette of symbols to choose from - the boring suit and possibly a "daring" tie.  Pete Wishart (SNP, Perth and North Perthshire, 2017 majority 21) can carry off a dark lilac two-piece, but Robert Halfon (Conservative, Harlow, 2017 majority 7,031) once chose yellow and drew a lot of catcalls.  Nadhim Zahawi's musical tie and Peter Bone's silly hat drew reprimands from the Commons Speaker.

****

Anyway, to certainty, and leadership.  #MrsMe's "strong and stable" mantra took hold with a lot of people if a thousand vox pops are to be believed, but I think I was starting to detect a bit of ridicule along with the repetition, and among real people, not just politics nerds.  And despite all the spending on Facebook attack ads the Tories had got the young wrong, or was it the kippers, or maybe the militant non-voters?

Whatever it was, #MrsMe had succeeded in frittering away her slim majority to achieve a slim minority.  Yet she emerged from the big black door on Friday to promise certainty.  Her words were meant to convey a stiff backbone and "getting to work" but the manner was very tense.  She disappeared inside having thanked nobody and said nothing to the Tories who had lost their seats.  Only later did somebody force a human pill on her, but even then she was sorry for her fallen colleagues, not to anybody.

She claimed "What the country needs more than ever is certainty, and having secured the largest number of votes and the greatest number of seats in the general election it is clear that only the Conservative and Unionist party has the legitimacy and ability to provide that certainty by commanding a majority in the House of Commons... As we do, we will continue to work with our friends and allies in the Democratic Unionist party in particular".

****


Over the course of Saturday #MrsMe was threatened with a leadership challenge unless she got rid of her advisers/chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.  Tories just aren't supposed to do that kind of thing unless they've been out of power for a few years with a Blair to beat and no direction.  Since they still had several fingertips on the prize it was a bit of a surprise.  Nonetheless, by the end of the day she had no special special advisers.

And by the end of the day she had also appointed Gavin Barwell, ex-MP for Croydon Central, ex-housing minister, out of work for perhaps 36 hours since his defeat by the London Labour surge, as chief of staff.  Party sympathisers hailed it as a good appointment, and the man has held several junior minister roles so he must have something about him.  Others criticised her for falling back on an insider who had just been rejected by the popular vote.

Chief of staff is not an elected position, but it has become a very visible one since #MrsMe's selection as leader and prime minister (the question of whether she could legitimately claim that position has emerged again, with observations that she had never been voted in by the party membership as the Tory constitution demands).  Barwell shouldn't be assumed to be such a superhuman that he can do the work of two, so we should expect further appointments.

This brought to mind a conversation with my mother in 1992, when Lynda Chalker was voted out in the Wallasey constituency (replaced by Angela Eagle, sometime would-be Labour leadership hopeful).  That day I was stung by the realisation that I was already more cynical than was good for me, because I expected nothing better, while my mother protested at Thatcher's rejection of the democratic decision and immediate "elevation" to the Lords so that Chalker could could carry on as Minister for Overseas Development with little break.

****


The thing on #MrsMe's mind between that strained Maidenhead count and the visit to the palace was obviously survival.  Her brief statement made it clear that she had been on the phone to Belfast and achieved an agreement in principle with her "friends and allies in the Democratic Unionist party".  Three strands of objection opened up immediately.  The first was the party's illiberal reputation, and it wasn't just the right-on brigade who protested.



It didn't help that one man chosen to represent the largest unionist grouping in Northern Irish politics was Nelson McCausland.  He appeared on Radio 4's Money Box (Paul Lewis has been incisive and scrupulously fair in his reporting of money issues during the election) to tell us that not all of the DUP's supporters deserve the labels being bandied about - homophobe, Christian fundamentalist etc.  What he didn't quite say was that the accusations are unjustified in the first place.  (And what many commentators neglected to mention was that other Ulster parties have similar views - the Social Democratic and Labour Party for example, on abortion.)

McCausland and (some) others in his party believe the Ulster Protestants are a lost tribe of Israel. He has claimed that a third of Northern Ireland's population believe in intelligent design or the young-earth creationist view that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago.  As culture minister in the Northern Ireland assembly he demanded that the Ulster Museum should display exhibits based on anti-Darwinian theories as a matter of human rights, to represent that strand of local thought (as opposed to the usual job of a museum to seek after scientific truth).

Then there's the little matter of the DUP's choice of friends.




Many people wondered what the DUP might want in return.  When ex-Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson suggested that "scientific progress" might make it possible to restrict abortion in ways that might cheer them, alarm bells rang.  They would certainly want the UK government to act to reduce pressure on the province to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

What about Brexit?  The DUP was a strong voice (but lonely, in Northern Ireland) for leaving the EU, but they want the fabled "frictionless" border with the south, which might be hard to reconcile with #MrsMe's "no single market, no customs union, no ECJ" stance.  And they will definitely demand a deal.  No Deal would leave them dangling.

The Financial Times offered a considered view and several writers picked up on demands prepared for the eventuality of a hung parliament in 2015 and the party's normal interest - more money and consideration for their patch, no reduction in any kind of benefits.

May seemed likely to grasp the Ulster influence as a way to soften her perceived attack on the elderly (the deficit and the cost of social care perhaps finding themselves in even longer grass) and Brexiters, as they are wont to do, smelled betrayal.  The wrong sort of soft border might leave us closer to the evil EU than "the people" voted for last June.

****


The final problem is the Good Friday Agreement.  Under that national and international agreement a responsibility is placed on the UK government to be neutral in its dealings with the various political parties of the province.  A legal deadline of 29 June this year has been placed on establishing an executive for the devolved Stormont government, and the secretary of state (the uninspiring but ultra-reliable James Brokenshire again, it would appear) should be an honest broker in those talks.  I chose the word referee, and have other tweeters to thank for the news that the new Commons intake includes an experienced whistle-blower.




This is important in national politics - too much favour shown to one side in Stormont could provide a pretext for blocking demands by the other.  But it is also important to the Brexit negotiations.  #MrsMe's letter triggering the beginning of the Article 50 process said "In particular we must pay attention to the UK's unique relationship with the Republic of Ireland and the importance of the peace process [and] continue to uphold the Belfast Agreement".   The EU27's negotiating directives stress "Nothing in the Agreement should undermine the objectives and commitments set out in the Good Friday Agreement".

All sides of Northern Ireland politics might eventually tolerate a single soft-border proposal, but any hint of partisanship by the UK government (and what could be more partisan than a coalition with one of the parties?) might prejudice its agreement.  Sinn Féin representatives in the EU parliament, and all the MEPs from the island will take a particular interest.  I don't think this is going to be easy.



And then the Sunday Times reports "sources" suggesting that the DUP is pressing for Nigel Farage to be included in the Brexit negotiations.  This was something I was wondering about, what with UKIP-DUP connections and that rather odd purchase of pro-Leave advertising in newspapers which aren't available in Northern Ireland.





****

On Sunday morning neither the Tories nor the DUP could supply a spokesperson for the ordinary news.  When you're really busy...

George Osborne, reviewing the Sunday papers, dubbed #MrsMe a "dead woman walking". while Toby Young told him he was considered by Conservatives the "honourable member for Schadenfreude Central".  Osborne told us the prime minister had told him he "needed to get to know [his] party better" when she sacked him, which could have been pursued rather further after Thursday's result and Friday's coldness from No 10.

Ruth Davidson is today's star of the Conservative party, and a worrying one for some people, since her dozen Scottish Tory MPs might be a force for a softer Brexit (I wonder how David Mundell, #MrsMe's only representative north of the border until this week, and her Scottish secretary, will handle it).

Michael Heseltine came out to raise the possibility of a new EU27 proposal on immigration which would make it possible to stay in the EU but at present it looks rather like wishful thinking, though none of the Tories have ever explained in detail why they didn't use the options open to them under the freedom of movement rules.





Michael Fallon, still defence secretary as far as we know, faced a series of horror stories about DUP attitudes with his normal stony face, not so much fending them off as ignoring them completely.  We're not in coalition with them, he argued (though that might have changed again by tomorrow morning), so we don't have to agree with them.  He also dodged the Stormont neutrality question, though at least Marr asked it. 

Jeremy Corbyn was last on Marr, the momentum if not the result giving him pride of place, and he was in full Monsieur Zen mode, ready to open up to anybody in his party who wanted to help.  We'll see how long that lasts.






Saboteurs department

Today's chief saboteur is #MrsMe herself.  Hostages to fortune were plentifiul during the campaign, and it's worth dipping into something issued under her own name.  It starts with "If I lose just six seats I will lose this election, and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down to negotiate with the presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of Europe".

And when Boris Johnson tries to help, issuing a call for loyalty which attracts support from Michael Gove and Conor Burns (who?)...





and (as is his habit) gets it all wrong, he really doesn't help..





And in response to Julia Hartley-Brewer and the many other pundits telling us that 80% or more of the votes went to parties with "pro-Brexit" manifestos, the manifestos are far from detailed and specific and, most important, parties can be held to a manifesto to some extent. Voters can't.
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Thursday, 8 June 2017

The "Year Zero" election - day 51


Standing back a bit


The last three readings at Tuesday night's writers' group were all a bit political one way or another.  It wasn't planned that way - it never is - but some kind of theme often emerges to tie a few pieces together.

A northern English city's demonstration to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall provided the backdrop to a faltering love story and the ego which had to be told it was faltering.  The swelling of the crowd around you, the little group you're really "with", the odd people, sounds, smells that pass by on a march, I remember them well.  But here we had jokes that the government were starting to become their Spitting Image characters and a long litany of "what Thatcher has done to the country".  Rather familiar.

We usually know how one of our longest-standing member's little poems are going to go, but this night something had gone wrong and it was (a bit) serious.  He remembered a big bus, and a message, and wondered how to remind certain people of what they had once said.

The arrival of AIDS in the 1980s, when for far too long there was nothing specific that anybody could do about it, is just one episode in the autobiographical jottings of our retired doctor.  It's only an editor's contribution to a series of memoir sketches by different people, not the full Henry Marsh, but a quick wander through budgeting, acquisition of new equipment and development of new methods, and the passing fashions of medicine and policy suggest that some things never change.

And then my taxi arrived and I had to make my excuses, but after the usual challenging array of work in progress I suddenly felt emotional.  If we heard the same set of readings next week, after the election, might they sound rather different?

****


It's Ramadan, which can be inconvenient when you live in an area where many of the evening taxi drivers are Pakistani-Brits and you need a ride home at 21:30.  The company had done me proud though, so I loaded walking stick and rucksack in, and we were off.  It wasn't one of the chatty drivers, so I had nothing to add to my catalogue of knowledge when I got home.  I've had talks on rearing brine shrimps and pruning roses, and discussions of comparative religion, Pakistani social care conventions and how certain families in what's now Bangladesh profited and suffered in the colonial era.

(I've also talked about the possibilities of building a thriller on the goings-on at Stockport council with a local lad, and the dating of Easter with a local Italian.)

And Ramadan sometimes comes up.  Last year I had to direct a driver from out of town to the nearest mosque at the end of his shift and a couple of times we've discussed this month of the Islamic calendar, a month of fasting and devotion, of which Daesh seems to think the finest expression is the fervent killing of others.  This last horrifies most Muslims, including taxi drivers.

I've worked closely with a few Muslims in my time in the IT industry.  The ex-store-manager consultant without whom we'd never have set up those large-scale demonstrations, the football-mad programmer, the visitor from newly free South Africa who I directed to another colleague for prayer arrangements.  If your Muslim mate disappears for a few minutes that's no problem - after all, he could be a smoker - but imagine fasting all day.

The Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycle, as the months of Roman, Christian and modern calendars have been, and as Easter is fixed in part.  But it isn't aligned to the solar year, so Ramadan migrates around the now-standard year.  When it's in May-June, as this year, the fasting day is pretty long.  But five years back it was July-August, and in 2027 it'll be mostly February.  The length of the day is more constant, more amenable in the middle east, where three religions of the book originated.

Imagine having to fit a 28-day fasting and prayer regime in with the demands of a Western capitalist society.  They seem to manage it, but I can imagine wishing for a sudden semi-tropical sunset.  Lots of other people have their own date-related prayer and fasting habits, but they tend to be more or less closed groups.  But what about your brilliant programmer who simply won't work Sundays because she's a Free Presbyterian, or the Jewish system designer who's definitely restricted all weekend?

I had to put up with fish on Fridays and giving things up for Lent when I was growing up, but then some people plan their lives round the Manchester United fixture list.  A metaphorical plague on all their houses, but respect to every one of them as a person unless they prove themselves unworthy of it..

****


My driver on Wednesday morning was a Pakistani-Brit who's never voted before. He was surprised that we don't vote directly for the prime minister, so he found the  idea of a tactical vote confusing.  He wondered what effect recent atrocities would have on the vote and I had lots of questions for him, but on a £2 ride back from the supermarket there was time only to urge him to go along and cast his vote, then catch up with the results.  

There was certainly no time to discuss #MrsME's threat to change (or rip up, as various newspapers put it) human rights laws if she's reinstalled as prime minister.  Commentators objected that there's nothing in the Human Rights Act or the European Convention on Human Rights it incorporates into British law which prevents action against terrorists.  How fragile is our law if we need a different human rights framework when three attacks have actually happened, as opposed to three months ago, when an attack was "only" highly likely and we're told that eighteen plots have been foiled since 2013.

Review the law, certainly.  It's what you do when something goes wrong, but resorting to "More powers! Tougher measures! Longer sentences!" smacks of hasty legislation and leisurely repentance, or even pure electioneering.  The Financial Times legal commentator made the general point...





and told a cautionary tale.

 



France has derogated temporarily from some parts of the convention, and the UK could do likewise if, after serious consideration, it was considered necessary to declare a state of emergency.

As the day ended we realised again that throughout this "Brexit election" we had learned nothing new from any party about the process of withdrawal.  Just confirmation that some people who claim to be ready to govern this country know nothing - they profess themselves ready to settle for "no deal" for example - and that UKIP think unskilled immigration can be halted immediately because "they're already here" according to spokesperson John Bickley.

We had also learned that Theresa May is terrified of the world, or a control freak, or both.  We might discover in coming months how much that's natural and how much was dictated by Lynton Crosby, but who can take her seriously when she finally grants an interview to Channel 4 News and won't even allow them to drag out a couple of chairs.

Well Prime Minister, just why are you so timid?

Even many of those who want him to crash and burn in this election admitted that Jeremy Corbyn's campaign has been far more effective than they expected.  It's amazing what two years of practice can do, and how you can get your message across rather better when the broadcast media are legally required to give you a fair look in to counteract the rabid right wing press.  It makes you wonder what public service the broadcasters think they're delivering at other times.


Saboteurs department







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Tuesday, 6 June 2017

The "A strong leader answers no questions" election - day 49


These are serious times


Returning to the book-lined London room in which she launched her leadership campaign less than a year ago #MrsME told us all about leadership, an important consideration when this election ushers in "five years that will define the future of our country for generations to come".  It wasn't just that speech, though some of it was very familiar.  She is seeking the strongest mandate possible to start the Article 50 negotiations and that's still "the most critical issue in this campaign", though terrorists have raised additional questions.

The Brexit talks are "perhaps the most difficult set of international negotiations this country has ever known", and "everything we want as a country depends on getting these negotiations right".  And future prosperity and the rest "depends on having the strongest possible hand".  I'm forced to ask how any election result would affect the hand we have to play.  And "if we fail, the consequences for Britain and for the economic security of ordinary working people will be dire. If we succeed, the opportunities ahead of us are great".

"The British people made their choice and it would be a scandal to do anything other than respect [my interpretation of] their decision. And it is right to respect the view of other European leaders also when they say we can’t be half-in, half-out of the European Union... So we will leave the European Union and take control of our money, take control of our borders and take control of our laws."

 "Our money… so we no longer pay huge sums to the European Union every year but spend that money on our priorities here at home. Things like the new Shared Prosperity Fund we will put in place to reduce the inequalities that exist within, and between, the four nations of our United Kingdom."  This fund, according to the manifesto "will use the structural fund money that comes back to the UK... to create a United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund... to reduce inequalities between communities across our four nations [and] will be cheap to administer, low in bureaucracy and targeted where it is needed most".  Only good things.

"Our borders… so while we continue to attract the brightest and the best to work or study in this country, we can be confident that we have control over immigration and that our immigration system serves the national interest."  Despite the opinion of every economist, including the Office for Budget Responsibility, that just aiming for an arbitrary number (tens of thousands anyone?) will reduce national income by more billions than might eventually "come back" for a shared fund.

 "Our laws… so we bring the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to an end and return decision-making authority to this country, as [I have determined that] the public demanded we should."






Needless to say, all this achievement will be accompanied by a "new deep and special partnership with Europe – allowing us to trade and cooperate with our nearest neighbours – but we will also reach out beyond Europe to strike new trade deals for our goods and services with old allies and new friends around the world too"  Starting with some of the many such deals we will drop out of at Brexit.

We know a little of what Jeremy Corbyn would do. He openly says he would throw all of our work away on day one by scrapping our White Paper...  [Which white paper? The one supporting the Article 50 notification?  The one on the Great Copy And Paste Bill?  Neither was acclaimed as a particularly thorough document.  And if those represent "all our work", what have hundreds of civil servants been doing for the last nine months?]

 He says he wants tariff-free access to the EU, but cannot say if he wants to remain a member of the single market...[the Labour manifesto talks of "retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union" not membership, rather as David Davis uses the inelegant phrase "the exact same benefits"] ... and with it, remain subject to the rulings of the European Court [possibly, for the things Labour would want to share with the EU] and to European free movement rules [though Labour have repeatedly said "freedom of movement ends" at Brexit.

 He cannot say if it means remaining a full member of the customs union [see above - perhaps the Labour approach would be to leave everything on the table and discover what has to be given up in negotiations, rather than throwing most of it away up front and then ttrying to negotiate as much as possible back] – which would deprive us of our ability to strike new trade agreements around the world [having lost membership of many trade and trade-easing agreements to begin with].

 Having set up these questions, May accuses Labour of not answering them.  But we do know something that Jeremy Corbyn says he would do on day one... He would throw away our negotiating position at a stroke by rejecting the very idea of walking away with no deal... Jeremy Corbyn seems to think that any deal... is better than no deal.

As we know, "no deal" can mean any of several different things.  No deal on a future trade relationship would be expensive, involving tariffs and customs costs, but we could come back and try again.  No deal on security cooperation would mean loss of access to shared databases and European arrest warrants, but again we could at least try again.  But no deal on withdrawal itself would leave us unable to fly (until the absolutely necessary deal was done), with EU and UK expats in a legal limbo, with the status of the border across Ireland undefined, and a thousand other things.

Is pretending to offer that as a solution "leadership [or] abdication of leadership" #MrsME?

Labour and the Tories seem to be aiming at fairly similar Brexits from different directions and neither of them has dared to estimate the cost of the process, or even admit that there must be one.

Response to recent attacks

A familiar sounding gathering took place at the east London mosque, with representatives of Muslim, Jewish, Christian and civic bodies.  The Anglican bishop of Stepney called on the public to reject “any tendency to scapegoat our Muslim neighbours” and the chair of the mosque described the attackers as “evil terrorists” who espoused a “twisted narrative and perversion of the religion of Islam”.

But he went on to say that extremists had been turned away from the door, and that they “continue to harass out worshippers” and "their hatred of mainstream Muslims rivals that of the extreme right".

The chair of the Finsbury Park mosque, once  known as a centre for extremism but now a "model of community relations", expressed concern at #MrsME's words on Sunday.  “The measures she might take could affect the whole community, not just extremists,” he said, whereas “Muslims have to be part of the solution” and “the prime minister shouldn’t put all the blame on others when she’s been in the government for the past seven years. Does she expect us as Muslims to stop these things alone? It’s for all of us to do.”

Another expected response was from Sadiq Khan:  "The act of these three men on Saturday night was cowardly, was evil. And I’m angry and furious that these three men are seeking to justify their action by using the faith that I belong to in order to justify their actions.  The ideology they follow is perverse, it is poisonous, and it has no place in Islam."

Then government minister Sajid Javid told the Times:  "Speaking as a Muslim myself, we need to ask ourselves searching questions… There’s no avoiding the fact that these people think they are Muslims... And they carry out their attacks – ignorantly, offensively – in the name of Islam. That’s why, although we all share the responsibility for tackling terrorism, there’s a special, unique burden on the Muslim community…We need to offer not just a counternarrative, which rebuts the extremists, but a positive and self-confident narrative that promotes pluralistic, British values – and their compatibility with an Islamic life. And that message can best come from within the Muslim community."

The Muslim Council of  Britain agreed with #MrsME that "enough is enough".  “We are ready to have those difficult conversations," said Harun Khan, the secretary-general,  "as equal citizens with an equal stake in this fight".  It's in everyone’s interest to stop the perpetrators of such attacks. "We know that many of these people have previously led a life of delinquency [and] the path towards extremism is outside of the mosque and at the margins of society... This is an ideology that makes killing and hating cool, and uses the words of Islam as a cloak to justify it."

British Muslims must play their part in turning “people’s minds away from this death cult”, Khan continued, and the MCB would escalate its campaign for a “grassroots response to the terrorist challenge”, with mosques would be encouraged to report suspicious activity [and] work together keep our country safe.”



Mak Chishty, the highest-ranking Muslim officer (a commander) in the Metropolitan police told us "It is the Islamic duty of every Muslim to be loyal to the country in which they live" and more than 130 imams and religious leaders from diverse backgrounds have refused to perform the funeral prayer for the London attackers.


It's to be hoped that this concentration of responses is down to the number of attacks and not just because the latest was in London, but it looks like the kind of "joint concern", official and community-based, we need.  It's to be hoped also that such combined energy stays visible and overtakes the implication of #MrsME's Sunday morning speech, that her "uncomfortable conversations" would be "done to" Britain's Muslims.

Bubbling under the surface

The unfortunate Karen Bradley, never the current government's greatest communicator toured the studios to field questions on #MrsME's approach.  One of the Sunday speech's topics - technology companies and "online hiding places" - falls in her brief, but most of the questions concerned police numbers.  She repeatedly refused to acknowledge that the number of police, and especially firearms officers, has fallen since 2010, though she eventually blurted out on Today that there have been reductions in police numbers "across the board".





#MrsME herself claimed that Met commissioner Cressida Dick says she has all the resources she needs.  Then Ms Dick herself told a variety of outlets "we need investment in community policing".  On Daily Politics, attack dog Dominic Raab "explained" that the police have what they need, that new firearms officers undergo more rigorous training than they used to ("SAS on the streets" was the description elsewhere, which is "reassuring") and Labour's emphasis on community policing was a distraction.

It would be ridiculous to expect community officers to tackle such an attack, Raab told us.  Unfortunately one of Cressida Dick's interviews looked at "the resource that the police have, both the counter [terrorism] police, but also our neighbourhood officers.  The majority who responded on Saturday night aren’t counter-terrorist police.”

All the Tory criticism of Labour includes the claim that "in 2015" Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench (of which, of course, he was not a member at the time) "called for" a further 10% cut in the police budget, implying that it was a policy at that election.  The 2015 Labour manifesto said "We will protect neighbourhood policing... different choices – to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, end the subsidy of firearms licenses, mandate police forces to work closer together... safeguard over 10,000 police officers".

This attack in fact rests on what Andy Burnham, then shadow home secretary, said in a speech 30 September 2015, shortly after Corbyn became Labour leader: “Of course, savings can be found. The police say 5% to 10% over the parliament is just about do-able.”  So he was reacting to further proposals by the Tories, who were by then in government.

Other emergency services pitched in, various interviews with NHS staff stressing yet again how busy they were (and one describing the racial abuse suffered by a Muslim nurse on her way home from a long shift in a London A&E ward looking after stabbing victims).  And the fire service too:





Another standard Tory attack line is that Corbyn is "against shoot to kill", backed by a clip from an interview with Laura Kuenssberg.  That interview was labelled misleading by the BBC Trust (though BBC News rejected the judgement), but Labour have only themselves to blame for this subject running on so long.

In Corbyn's formative political years "shoot to kill" was the label for a policy - much suspected but always denied - of shooting mostly IRA suspects without even attempting to arrest them.  I've long suspected that the label is still there in many minds, but Emily Thornberry on Rado 4's Monday World Tonight is the first I've heard to actually discuss it.

The official police policy is "shoot to stop", which does usually means to kill, but there has to be a perceived fatal threat to the public or to officers themselves for a firearm to be used at all, and every discharge is investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.  Labour's public pronouncements seem to back this position in general.  I wish they had addressed this definitional problem earlier.

Just a thought

Alex Carlile, the last but one official reviewer of terrorism legislation, has been seen a lot recently.  He left the Liberal Democrats because they were "too soft" on national security and can be counted on to take a line supportive of the current government.  I'd like to hear also from David Anderson, who held the post until earlier this year and has been a much more open communicator about the imperfections of the Prevent programme and whether bulk collection of internet communications data is justified.


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Saturday, 3 June 2017

The "There are real people out here you know" election - day 46


Picking winners


Thursday night's BBC2 Newsnight featured a piece on Britain's "lopsided low-productivity economy" and what to do about it.  How to get skills and pay and tax take up?  Train the people and wait for the jobs, or create the jobs and they will come?



 And our national imbalances are closely related to the productivity gap.



And all the parties agree that we have to do something about it.  As they have done for many years.  So when might something happen?

David Gauke for the Tories and Labour's Peter Dowd, who face each other as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and shadow Chief Secretary, spouted mostly the same words: infrastructure, fiscal credibility (Gauke), Northern Powerhouse, transport, innovative, forward-looking, role for government, R&D, skills, innovation, training, qualifiation, no austerity (Dowd), investment (in capital and labour), education from cradle to grave (Dowd), private investment (Gauke) but there was too much of a feeling that they were just words.

The Tories ran a consultation on industrial strategy earlier this year and presumably the results would be available from 9 June.  Labour's work is unpublished, as far as I know, but Mariana Mazzucato's name is thrown in quite frequently, and her work on the entrepreneurial state is well known.  The two parties' ideas are not a million miles apart in presentation.

Three observations:
  1. Even if it's done perfectly from 9 June onwards, can a significant difference be made within two years?
  2. We should and could have been doing it for decades.  Brexit is utterly irrelevant to making these plans.
  3. But the idiocy of Brexit makes it even more vital that we succeed and even more likely that we fail in the short term.
Both sides exhibited a measure of blithe optimism - Dowd on investment continuing despite business tax rises, Gauke on costing of government contribution not really needing to be talked about - which boil down to "just let us get on with it and we'll work it out".

****


Then to York on Friday for a launch of the Labour industrial strategy with Jeremy Corbyn, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Chi Onwurah.



We know from the work they've done since Corbyn took the reins that Labour has been talking to a lot of people - companies, academics, like-minded parties in other countries - about running an economy.

And occasionally it showed.  The new emphasis on the self-employed (with a political foot in both the gig economy and small business) was hardly in evidence here, but two small business people asked questions and those on the stage showed a reasonable grasp of what's going on in research and industrial parks around the country.

But then they had to turn it all into campaigning language and the eyes glazed over a bit.  Like the Tories, Labour are too fond of talking about the UK at the forefront of this and that, or leading the world.  A bit more humility would be justified.  We do well in some industries but we have a lot of ground to make up in general approach.

Phrases that would need a lot of fleshing out by a Labour government are "bringing back supply chains", "action on excessive energy prices" and "decarbonisation as an enabler".  "Superfast" broadband is not a convincing label after the Tories' pain of the last few years, even with a universal service obligation of three times the Tories' current promised speed (remote areas? urban canyons? really?).  Long-Bailey seemed quite bullish on easing the pressure of business rates, to enable companies to install solar generation farms or incorporate a supply chain company for example.

They all spoke in formulaic language (can you really be surprised that people start repeating themselves after a few weeks on the road?) with Long-Bailey a particular offender, but they all showed a familiarity with the subject.

Corbyn finished with an invitation to Donald Trump to come over for a cup of Yorkshire tea so that he could be persuaded to get back on the Paris accord bus.




Premature reshuffling


After the brief speculation about whether Philip Hammond still enjoys #MrsME's favour (has anyone seen Hammond by the way?) comes a new rumour.  Would Ben Gummer replace David Davis as Secretary of State for Exiting the EU in a new #MrsME administration?

Ben Gummer knows how to point - cabinet potential.

Gummer is one of the children of then Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer who wasn't filmed being force-fed a burger during the BSE scare.  He held several junior minister jobs under Cameron and was promoted to the Cabinet Office by #MrsME when she took over.  That makes him a second ranker who attends cabinet (not that there's much of that going on at the moment).

He's tough and the prime minister thinks highly of him.  Davis on the other hand, who's said some very silly thing about negotiations recently, has had rumours swirling about him for a while.  “The thinking is that Ben is the brightest she’s got and Brexit is the biggest issue, so why wouldn’t you put him in there?”  a "senior Tory" told Francis Elliott of the Times (£).

Two problems.  Gummer was a Remainer, so the hardline Eurosceptics in the new Tory crop might put their little feet down.  And giving the poor sod little more than a week to get his feet under the table and read the product of the last ten months of DExEU research and policy formation wouldn't look very impressive to those fearsome EU27 negotiators.  Maybe if #MrsME could give him a bottle of whatever she's on...

Oh, a third problem:  Davis would go to the foreign office under this plan, which would leave a certain Boris Johnson unattended to.


Contempt of court corner


Craig Mackinlay, elected as MP for South Thanet with a majority of 2,812 votes over one Nigel Farage in 2015, is to face charges under the Representation of the People Act 1983 with two others.  They are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on 4 July 2017.

Any comment on the matter might be deemed to prejudice a fair trial, so I'm going to leave it there, apart from the detail below.




Here are the detailed charges from the CPS press release:

Craig Mackinlay
That on 11 June 2015, being a candidate at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, you knowingly made the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 19 December 2014 to 29 March 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.
That on 11 June 2015, being a candidate at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, you knowingly made the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.

Nathan Gray
That on 11 June 2015, being an election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, you failed to deliver a true return containing a statement of all election expenses in the regulated period from 19 December 2014 to 29 March 2015 as required by Section 81(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, contrary to Section 84 of the same Act.

That on 11 June 2015, being the election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, you failed to deliver a true return containing a statement of all election expenses in the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015 as required by Section 81(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, contrary to Section 84 of the same Act.

That on 11 June 2015, being the election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, you knowingly made the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.

Marion Little
That you did aid, abet, counsel and procure Craig Mackinlay, a candidate at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, to knowingly make the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 19 December 2014 to 29 March 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.

That you did aid, abet, counsel and procure Craig Mackinlay, a candidate at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, to knowingly make the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.

That you did aid, abet, counsel and procure Nathan Gray, an election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, to fail to deliver a true return on 11 June 2015 containing a statement of all election expenses in the regulated period from 19 December 2014 to 29 March 2015 as required by Section 81(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, contrary to Section 84 of the same Act.

That you did aid, abet, counsel and procure Nathan Gray, an election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, to fail to deliver a true return on 11 June 2015 containing a statement of all election expenses in the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015 as required by Section 81(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, contrary to Section 84 of the same Act.

That you did aid, abet, counsel and procure Nathan Gray, an election agent at the UK General Election on 7 May 2015, to knowingly make the declaration accompanying the return for the regulated period from 30 March 2015 to 7 May 2015, delivered under Section 81(1) of the Representation of People Act 1983, required by Section 82(1) of the same Act, falsely, contrary to Section 82(6) of the same Act.


In the tens of thousands


We've heard a lot over the years about the Tories reducing net migration into the UK to a "sustainable level", which is interpreted as being "in the tens of thousands" per year.  Once a rhetorical contrast with "the hundreds of thousands", this phrase is now often a rather clunky slogan in itself.  Why not just say "below one hundred thousand"?

In 2010 the Conservative manifesto told us "we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands", which sounds like a pledge to me.  Five years later they said they'd "keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands" and this year it's "our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades".

Whatever your opinion about migration and levels of population growth, you would have to admit that neither the Cameron nor the May governments have shown any likelihood, or indeed ability to approach that target, or aspiration, or pious hope, despite "shutting down dozens of bogus colleges", hiking up visa charges and making the UK less desirable to students from India.

But they're trying it all again, and somebody's getting impatient, so #MrsME (or maybe Brandon Lewis) has said they'll achieve their objective, dream or inclination by the end of the next parliament (which might be 2022 if the next prime minister doesn't get itchy feet again) but David Davis (or #MrsME, or Brandon Lewis) has been much more careful, reminding us that it's only a yearning, inclination or something that David Cameron always hankered after.

Just believe

After Thursday's major speech, which I found so disheartening that I threw away a thousand words, I was pleased to see some smaller items.  Apparently...





Yet Jeremy Paxman couldn't get #MrsME to say that she believes in Brexit.  She only believed in "making a success of Brexit".  It was also disturbing that she had decided to lift long passages from one of last year's naive pro-Leave speeches.

Not all of her no-shows this week have been reprehensible.  After all, not even a #StrongAndStable™ leader of a team can be in two places at once, but once she had chickened out of the seven-way leaders' debate, any substitute on Mumsnet or Woman's Hour would be seized on as a sign of weakness.

Lawyer Schona Jolly found the words:  "May said this was the most important election of her lifetime, but she has treated it like a game of hide and seek."


Debate - not debate


May was back to being coherent - not so many empty phrases - but she was more ordinary as well.  She dealt with every question, but she wasn't often human.  I don't think she mentioned a single one of her fabled team, though she lampooned a few of Labour's, and the magic money tree she'd like to give them for Christmas.



Corbyn had the expected problems with "past indiscriminate extensions of fraternal solidarity", but he's grown into a pretty good campaigner.  He knows his prospectus and can call up examples, but he was stuck between his normal personal approach and the high stakes of a Question Time interrogation.

Neither of them showed a grasp of the enormity of Brexit and how hard it could hit their own programme.  I don't think May even mentioned "dire consequences" this time.





#MrsME's staff were up late.





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