The true history of Brexit: the deluded election

 This is part of what my gift from the future, The New Oxford History of England. Brexit 2015-50 had to say about the 2024 General Election:

'It has gone down in history as the 'Deluded Election'. Both the Conservatives and Labour ruled out increases in any of the major revenue-raising taxes - income tax, national insurance and VAT. With public services severely strapped for cash, this begged the question 'how are these services going to be saved from collapse'?

Both parties based their 'plans' to avoid this breakdown on growth in the economy. Neither had any satisfactory explanation of what would be Plan B if this growth was not achieved.

Bizarrely, the one policy guaranteed to deliver economic growth, reversing Brexit, was not only rejected by Labour and Conservative, but all mention of the damage leaving the EU had caused Britain was avoided. 

So fanatical was this Brexit omerta that Labour and Conservative candidates were not even allowed to discuss rejoining the Single Market, despite the fact that leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson himself, had promised that the UK would remain in the Single Market after leaving the EU.

And all this against clear evidence that by 2024 most people realised Brexit was a bad mistake, while only a tiny minority believed it had been a good idea.'

Brexitwatch: A warning from the future, for Labour

 Working painstakingly with paper and glue I have managed to put together another passage from The New Oxford History of England: Brexit 2015-, presented to me by Sybil, the emissary from the future, in the obscure corner of North London pictured above:

‘Labour was in power for 13 years under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It could have brought in proportional representation for electing MPs, which would have made it impossible for a Conservative government ever again to win power when the majority had voted against it.

Unfortunately, Labour decided that stopping this disaster was less important than preserving the chance for its own MPs to lord it over the country even when the majority had opposed them. The result was that in 2010, after 13 years of Labour, the Conservatives were back for even longer, with what was up to then the most right-wing government the UK has seen in modern times, which took the disastrous decision to leave the EU.

So when Sir Keir Starmer won the general election of 2024, there were some hopes that Labour might have learned from this bitter experience, and that this time it would put the interests of its voters and the country before narrow party advantage, but history repeated itself.

The size of Starmer’s parliamentary majority was enough to obscure the uncomfortable fact that once again most of those who had turned out had voted against the government now given virtually absolute power over them. Hardly anyone in the Labour Party had the courage to point out that this could not be regarded as democratic, and proportional representation was rarely mentioned.

While Labour wrestled with the dreadful mess the Conservatives had left them, their opponents regrouped and ruthlessly attacked the new government's performance, so that after five years of Labour, the Tories were back again with a working majority on yet another minority share of the vote, with all the catastrophic consequences we have seen.

 

Election reflections: wakey, wakey Labour!

In the General Election, the Libdems' vote increased (by 3 times more than the Tories'), while Labour's vote collapsed, so Labour's Andrew Adonis used his New European column to call on the Libdems to disband! The NE has published the letter I sent in reply

Electionwatch: Borismandias - a warning from poetry

I’ve always like Shelley’s famous poem, Ozymandias –

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

The huge ancient statue of the ‘king of kings’ who had thought such a lot of himself but who no one now remembers – reduced to a few bits of rubble on the desert ground.

Boris Johnson is such a persistent liar that it is hard to be sure of anything about him, but, of one thing we can be certain. The man whose ambition as a child was to be ‘world king’, will one day be gone. And then the Conservatives will have to share the fate of Ozymandias or start the painful project of rebuilding themselves as a decent political party.

Just as he did with the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson has built the Tories’ 2019 General Election campaign around a cynical, amoral lie: ‘get Brexit done.’ (See my blog of 20 November.)

The Tories’ tragedy is that they have allowed Johnson’s poison to infect the whole party. Every single parliamentary candidate is signed up to his lie. Any with any real loyalty to their party would be defying Johnson and telling the truth: yes, you can have Brexit if you really want it, but it will make you poorer, it will destroy jobs, businesses, savings, opportunities and rights, and severely damage the NHS and other public services, while possibly destroying the UK.

That is the choice. So will Tory candidates find the courage to explain it, or will they consign a once-great political party to the fate of Ozymandias?

‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Electionwatch: pity Conservatives - they have no one to vote for

Conservatism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary means ‘commitment to traditional values and ideas.’ So neither Boris Johnson nor any of the maniacally nodding acolytes lining up as Tory candidates are Conservatives.

Johnson is not a detail man and has only a very tenuous grasp of facts, as numerous interviews have shown, which means he needs people to work out policies for him. So the person running 10 Downing Street’s policy unit is very important. And who is she? Step forward Munira Mirza, a ‘former’ member of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party, who has been helping to write the Tory manifesto.

Perhaps that explains its attacks on democracy on the now-notorious page 48, with its threats to undermine the independence of parliament and the judiciary and to elevate the prime minister above the law.

Even more important than Mirza is ‘Johnson’s brain’, Dominic Cummings, who has never denied that he is not a Conservative. Indeed, Cummings seems to be consumed with contempt for anyone who is not Dominic Cummings.

He was formally ruled to be in contempt of parliament because he refused to be questioned by a committee investigating fake news. Cummings has a particular disdain for our politically independent civil service and wants to abolish it. Civil servants have an infuriating habit of telling the truth.

And then there were those three mysterious years in Russia. Of course, the degree to which Boris Johnson and his party are under Putin’s thumb remains shrouded in mystery because Johnson is suppressing the official report that might shed some light on it. But what was Cummings doing while he was there? What links did he form with politicians and the security and intelligence services?

The modern Conservative Party is decidedly not conservative. A better label would be 'anarchist' or 'nihilist'. More than anyone they remind me of the 19^th century left-wing Russian extremist, Mikhail Bakunin, who said he would be happy only ‘when the whole world is engulfed in fire.’ He advocated smashing everything up in the hope that something better would arise to replace it.

Just so for today’s Tories: smash up the UK, the NHS, our links with the EU, Parliament, the judiciary, the civil service, your jobs, rights, opportunities, etc. And maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes: perhaps a hyper-Thatcherite capitalist paradise, red in tooth and claw, with no nonsense about a welfare state or workers’ rights or the rich paying tax?

If you really have nothing to lose, you might consider voting Conservative. If you have ANYTHING to lose, think very, very carefully before you put the nihilists into power.

Electionwatch: the great Brexit 'nothing to lose' illusion

‘No matter how bad things are,’ said the film star Kirk Douglas, ‘they can always be worse.’ And yet we are told that a lot of people voted for Brexit in 2016 because they believed their lives were so terrible, they couldn’t possibly be worse, so leaving the EU was worth a try.

A nanosecond’s reflection, of course, would have revealed that Kirk Douglas was right and they were wrong. Ever heard of Syria, Somalia, Ukraine? Are you homeless, or are you unable to get the medicine you need to keep you alive because of a no-deal Brexit? Have you got a job, do you use public services? If you really think you have nothing to lose, you may soon get a very rude awakening, because (apart from a few of the hyper-rich) those who voted most enthusiastically for Brexit are the ones most likely to be damaged by it.

What I find most striking about the 2019 General Election campaign is that with the UK taking the biggest decision it has faced in nearly half a century, there is virtually no discussion by the ‘major’ parties – Labour and Conservative – about the damage Brexit will inflict: how much poorer will it make us, how many people’s rights will be destroyed, how badly will public services be damaged, how much weaker will it make the UK, indeed, will the UK survive it? And the media also largely ignore these questions. No wonder the whole thing seems like an exercise in self-deception.

If you don’t care about the above questions. Fine. Sleepwalk into Brexit. If you do, you’d better start thinking about how you stop it. This election perhaps presents the best chance so far, but also probably, the last.  

Electionwatch: the latest Great Brexit Lie

The whole Brexit project was and is based on lies, and one particular lie is now central to Boris Johnson’s campaign – that electing him as prime minister will ‘get Brexit done’ and that the country will then be able to forget about it.

Why anyone would believe anything Mr Johnson says is a mystery to me, but apparently some people do, so let everyone understand that the one thing a Tory win will not do is ‘get Brexit done’.

Let’s assume Johnson gets a majority. He then presumably brings his ‘deal’ back to parliament. It passed second reading once with a majority of 30, but with Brexit, the devil is in the detail. When the UK decided to join the EU nearly half a century ago, MPs gave approval by a much bigger majority – 112, but when the detail was voted on, the margin shrank to 8 votes, so Johnson is likely to be extremely vulnerable.

If MPs decide to do their job and read the legislation properly, there will be lots of amendments and, bearing in mind his ‘deal’ is even worse than Theresa May’s, on some of them Johnson is likely to be defeated – People’s Vote, giving MPs control over negotiations? Which, is why he pulled his ‘deal’ from parliamentary scrutiny in the first place.

That is obstacle one. But let’s assume Johnson clears that and gets his deal through parliament. Brexit done and dusted? No way. Far from being the end of anything, that is just the start of a long and complex negotiation of a new trade deal with the EU.

It took Canada seven years to reach agreement with the EU. Some people will tell you the UK can do a deal much quicker, but they tend to be the same people who promised that we would be able to have our cake and eat it, that the Withdrawal Agreement would be the easiest negotiation in history, that Brexit would make us richer not poorer etc, etc.

All their promises have turned out to be worthless. And the UK’s position is fatally weakened by the Brexiters’ inability to agree on what they want: no deal, May’s deal, Johnson’s deal, soft Brexit, hard Brexit. They fooled you once. Are you really going to fall for it again?

Far from ‘getting Brexit done’, uncertainty will rule for years with Johnson landing the UK with a whole new set of nail-biting cliff edges. 31 January - if we have not agreed a deal, we will have to ask for another extension or leave without a deal. If Johnson can negotiate that obstacle, the UK goes into a transition period. By 1 July, Johnson has to decide whether he wants to extend that beyond the current end date of 31 December 2020. If he agrees, and if the EU agrees, the next cliff edge comes on 31 December 2022. At every cliff edge, a disastrous no-deal with food, medicine and fuel shortages looms.

Meanwhile, Scotland, Northern Ireland and probably Wales will be determinedly fighting Johnson’s plan to take them out of the EU against their will.

There’s as much chance of a Johnson victory ‘getting Brexit done’ as there is of me playing centre forward for England. If you want to stop Brexit dominating our politics for the foreseeable future, the only way is to stop Brexit altogether.

Brexitwatch: why May will stay

Not so long ago, the main interest of the Tory Party was winning elections. And they were rather good at it, so that of the first 50 years of my life, 39 were lived under Conservative governments. Their next (and closely related) big interest was running the economy efficiently.

In that Tory party, Theresa May, who called a completely unnecessary election and threw away a parliamentary majority, would not have lasted five minutes. But the modern Tory party seems quite uninterested in the economy or winning elections. Indeed, the only Conservative leader who has won one in the last 25 years was dumped barely a year later.

So in this new Tory party, expect to see Theresa May stay on for at least another couple of years. She has a crucial job – scapegoat. The vast majority of Tory MPs (including, I suspect, a number of those shouting loudly for Brexit) know that leaving the EU will be a disaster. So it is vital that May stays in office until Brexit is completed and all doubt about its disastrous consequences dispelled. Then she can be blamed for the disaster and cast aside, so that a new leader can fight the next general election.

But there is another reason why May is likely to stay. At the moment, It would be hard to prevent any Tory leadership election from turning into open war between supporters of moderate and extreme Brexit. But once we have left the EU, the question of how damaging a Brexit we choose will have been resolved, and with a bit of luck there will seem to be no point re-fighting old battles.

Whether any of this will save the Tories is another matter. With Labour finally threatening to show some common sense, Brexit is likely to be seen increasingly as a Conservative project. And the unprecedented incompetence with which it is being executed could do permanent damage to the Tory brand.

UK general election - 5 things we learned

1. The Conservatives have managed three surprise election wins in the last half century – 1970, 1992 and now 2015. Labour have achieved none.

2. The British electoral system is as undemocratic as ever. The Tories now get to rule us even though nearly two voters in three were against them. UKIP won nearly three times as many votes as the SNP, but they got 1 MP while the SNP got 56. So far, the Labour-Conservative coalition has blocked any move towards real democracy, but if Labour begin to feel they no longer benefit from the current unfairness, will they abandon the road block?

3. It was refreshing to see Messrs Miliband, Clegg and Farage accept responsibility for their failures and step down (though Farage rather devalued his resignation by saying he might try to get his job back). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if politicians in power took a similar attitude?

4. There is such a thing as a good election to lose. If Labour had lost in 2005, as they should have done after Iraq, they could have held to account the conspirators who created the war, and made a fresh start, while, through serendipity, the Tories would have been landed with the world economic crisis. Today David Cameron is a hero, but with a tiny majority, he could soon find himself the prisoner of the Tory extremists, and by 2020, he may have lost Britain’s place in Europe, and lost Scotland.

5. They say countries get the politicians they deserve. The Liberal Democrats made many mistakes, but when Britain faced a severe economic crisis in 2010, they put the British people before party interests by going into a coalition that many Lib Dems found unpalatable. The British people responded by giving them the worst electoral drubbing in modern political history. It may be a long time before another party puts the national interest before its own selfish interests.

UK election: the next government should.....do nothing

One of the more bizarre criticisms of the UK’s coalition government was that in its latter stages, it entered a ‘zombie’ phase. In other words, for once, MPs were failing to carry out their supposed duty of rushing through poorly drafted new laws which they have not read properly, and which have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

It is the kind of mentality that saw Labour inventing 3,600 crimes in 11 years, and we wonder why the prisons are overflowing. Or that had the Tory-dominated coalition mounting yet another complete reorganisation of the NHS – something David Cameron had specifically promised not to do.

What we seem to get more and more is government by vanity project. After all, how is a politician meant to get into the history books by making sure the health service or public transport ran efficiently? No, they want to be the man or woman who shook up the NHS, or built HS2.

How many times have you heard governments promising to ‘cut red tape’? But power is so delightful, and the temptation to boss other people around just too great to resist. Back in the nineteenth century when a colleague demanded that Prime Minister Lord Palmerston should pass a new piece of legislation, he replied: ‘There are too many laws already.’

Somebody once said the trouble with elections is that whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Whichever government wins this time, expect a flood of new laws and regulations.

More on this from Simon Jenkins -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/02/government-ministers-public-servants-change-reform