The idea that democracy stops when you get the decision you like is getting more prevalent unfortunately. I say that regularly in response to comments on Facebook, although it never seems to get through. Only yesterday some ignorant low life tried to tell me I'm refusing to accept a democratic decision because I am critical of St Boris. The same low life also told to go to Europe if I didn't like it here.
I'm 74. I was born here, and I have lived here all my life. My father was born here and served in North Africa in WW2. He was nearly killed in Sicily. In a bizarre way that could well have saved his life, since his regiment took part in the Normandy Landings. My Grandfather was born here and served in France in WW1. He was injured too but survived. My uncle was born here and took part in D-Day. I could go further back too, so I’m not going to have some ignorant #### (insert your own choice of epithet – this isn’t so far a sweary blog) try to tell me I don’t belong here.
The reality is the opposite. The behaviour of this buffoon (on this occasion I don't mean Boris Johnson) is not democratic. It is not patriotic. It is a betrayal of everything my Father, Grandfather and Uncle put their lives on the line for. It is a betrayal of everything he claims to be standing for! It is him and people like him who are undermining democratic processes. It is him and people like him who are undermining the rule of law. It is him and people like him who are enabling and encouraging the growth of racism and xenophobia.
Do not let them get away with it.
Challenge them at every opportunity.
Do not give up.
Another really worrying aspect is the overlap between Brexiters and the COVID19 deniers. It isn't 100% by any means, but enough to be concerned not just about our political and economic future, but literally about our very existence. I've no doubt that we will eventually got on top of this Pandemic, but we also need to learn from it, because there will be another one.
There is little sign though of any capacity to think rationally and logically in either the loudest Brexiters or the COVID19 deniers so the chances of any learning taking place are slim. (It occurs to me that the only Flat Earther I've ever come across in the wild was also a Brexiter...)
A final story.
Ten years after my father was nearly killed in Sicily he almost died again, seriously injured in an industrial accident that with hindsight was probably due to cutting corners by his employer. Leaving the EU also means leaving the umbrella of their worker protection and Health and Safety rules. Tories have already started demanding we cut back on them and on environmental standards.
Don't let them have their own way.
Past generations fought to get us here. We owe it to future generations to go forward, not back to some fantasy of the Empire.
Europe is dealing with its “second wave” of COVID-19. And governments seem powerless to stem the tide. Dutch political leaders find it difficult to convince their citizens to wear face masks. A large majority of French voters think that Emmanuel Macron’s government has handled the pandemic badly. And Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, is facing anger from all sides about the circumstances that led to a new English lockdown.
According to these leaders, the arrival of a second wave has nothing to do with their own policy failures, or poor communication. No, the numbers are rising because Europeans are freedom-loving people and it’s hard to make them follow rules. “It is very difficult to ask the British population, uniformly, to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary,” said Johnson for example, in response to criticism of his government’s testing policy. Similarly, in the Netherlands some were quick to attribute soaring infection rates to the fact that the Dutch are famously averse to being “patronised”.
The same explanation is often invoked to account for why Europe is doing significantly worse than countries in East Asia, where the disease seems more under control. According to some commentators, the authoritarian, top-down political culture of countries like China and Singapore makes it far easier to implement strict measures than in liberal Europe.
Singapore’s “effective crisis management”, for instance, was supposedly made possible by the fact that its government “has always wielded absolute control over the state, with an iron fist and a whip in it.” Conversely, many believe that a devotion to “individual liberty” doomed the west to its ongoing crisis.
A coronavirus screening centre in Singapore.EPA-EFE
Is this true? Is a poorly functioning government indeed the price that must be paid for freedom? If that is the case, then perhaps we had better give up on liberty. After all, anyone who is dead or seriously ill does not benefit much from being free.
Collective freedom
Fortunately, that’s a conclusion we needn’t draw. As history shows, freedom is quite compatible with effective government. Western political thinkers ranging from Herodotus to Algernon Sidney did not think that a free society is a society without rules, but that those rules should be decided collectively. In their view, freedom was a public good rather than a purely individual condition. A free people, Sidney wrote for instance, was a people living “under laws of their own making”.
Even philosophers such as John Locke, it is worth noting, agreed with this view. Locke is often portrayed as a thinker who believed that freedom coincided with individual rights, rights that should be protected at all costs against state interference. But Locke explicitly denied that freedom was harmed by government regulation – as long as those rules were made “with the consent of society”.
“Freedom then is not … a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any law,” he wrote in his famous Second Treatise. “But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.”
It was only in the early 19th century that some began to reject this collective ideal in favour of a more individualistic conception of liberty.
A new liberty
In the wake of the French Revolution, democracy slowly expanded across Europe. But this was not universally welcomed. The extension of the right to vote, many feared, would give political power to the poor and uneducated, who would no doubt use it to make dumb decisions or to redistribute wealth.
Hence, liberal elites embarked on a campaign against democracy – and they did so in the name of freedom. Democracy, liberal thinkers ranging from Benjamin Constant to Herbert Spencer argued, was not the mainstay of liberty but a potential threat to freedom properly understood – the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods.
Throughout the 19th century, this liberal, individualistic conception of freedom continued to be contested by radical democrats and socialists alike. Suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst profoundly disagreed with Spencer’s view that the best way to protect liberty was to limit the sphere of government as much as possible. At the same time, socialist politicians such as Jean Jaurès claimed that they, and not the liberals, were the party of freedom, since socialism’s goal was “to organise the sovereignty of all in both the economic and political spheres”.
The ‘free’ West
Only after 1945 did the liberal concept of freedom prevail over the older, collective conception of freedom. In the context of cold war rivalry between the “free West” and the Soviet Union, distrust of state power grew - even democratic state power. In 1958, liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in a one-sided reading of the history of European political thought, stated that “Western” freedom was a purely “negative” concept. Every law, Berlin stated bluntly, had to be seen as an encroachment on freedom.
The cold war is of course since long over. Now that we are entering the third decade of the 21st century, we might want to dust off the older, collective concept of freedom. If the coronavirus crisis has made one thing clear, it is that collective threats such as a pandemic demand decisive, effective action from government.
This does not mean giving up our freedom in exchange for the protection of a nanny state. As Sidney and Locke remind us, as long as even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom.
I can’t deny that the outcome of the election is a huge disappointment and also a huge worry. With the most right wing government in years, Brexit now inevitable and the consequences of climate change looming over us, we are faced with existential risks to the right to dissent, to the UK economy and most seriously to our capacity to survive as a species.
What’s done is done. We need to move on. In particular we need to exert unrelenting pressure on National government to address the consequences of climate change, despite the heel dragging of the US and now Brazil. The opposition needs also to start rebuilding, to develop a coherent policy framework for the next election including tactics to counteract the inevitable demonization of the opposition by the print press. The BBC is a spent force as shown by this election, too willing to fold under pressure from the government of the day and already under threat in terms of the license fee.
What I want to do here – and via social media is to bring forward my own thoughts on policies for #thenextfiveyears. Some are already here in the bowels of this blog and will be brought out, dusted off and represented in the new context. Others will require new ideas and new thinking.
It isn't undemocratic to oppose government policy. That includes the policy of leaving the EU and it certainly includes the terms on which we leave. Despite the garbage like 'Brexit means Brexit' or the shouty 'you lost, get over it' mantra from too many people who should know better, there is no clear way forward. Cameron created this mess for party political ends, but screwed it up by his incompetence. May's incompetence has deepened the divide in this country while simultaneously making it even harder to reach an agreement with the EU. Now we are expected to believe that one or other of the challengers for the leadership and hence to be PM will be able to to break through all that with a sprinkle of fairy dust, magically creating unity at home and miraculously changing the policy of EU negotiators. That would be, to say the least, unlikely but when the person leading it all is likely to be Johnson? Johnson? It would be intolerable if he was the bumbling buffoon he pretends to be, but given the number of recent reports of just how calculated that public persona really is (Andrew Marr) and generally how nasty and unpleasant he is (Max Hastings) I think the next couple of years are likely to be painful. If Ken Clarke is correct and there are enough Tories willing to put country before party then we might be lucky and get a General Election fairly quickly. That won't solve anything, but it gives us an opportunity to catch our breath and retreat from the insanity. If he's wrong, then it's looking more and more like the opening of Years and Years. But then, for a significant portion of the Tory Party that's the utopian scenario anyway. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride!
If the sort of chaos we've seen in the Commons and in Government over the past months had been reported as happening anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage would have wasted no time in sneering, if not in so many words, about incompetent foreigners. Yet, after almost three years of needless confusion and division we still don't know what will happen come April.
Calls for a third (yes third!) referendum are dismissed as undemocratic despite the fact that there have been three votes on the Withdrawal Agreement - without any part of it having been discussed at the time of the referendum - and despite the fact that some of the most ardent Brexiteers have been campaigning against our membership from day 1 of joining without drawing breath. Almost 6m people have signed the petition to revoke Article 50, 16m voted to Remain, but these are dismissed as irrelevant compared to a fraudulent vote on an incompetently designed Referendum, called by an equally incompetent politician trying to defend his position as leader and his party's control of the country. But no - asking to confirm the outcome of hree years of further incompetence is undemocratic and only an attempt to reverse the outcome of the referendum.
Well in part yes, of course it is an attempt to reverse the outcome.That's how democracies work. Discussion and debate leading to a decision. It doesn't stop. If arguing against something already enacted is undemocratic then no laws would ever change.
Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.
Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”
The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.
The graph above is taken from the recently published report by Shelter. It shows the parlous state of social house building since 1923. I've written quite a lot about housing on this blog but this report makes it clear that things are as bad as ever.
From the Second World War up to 1980, we were building an average of around 126,000 social homes every year. Last year, there were only 6,463 new social homes.
...
If we continue as we are, only half of today’s young people are likely to ever own their own home – and a generation of younger people and many who are retired will spend their lives struggling with insecure, expensive renting. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands more people will be forced into homelessness by insecure tenancies and sky-high housing costs.
We can't afford to continue as we are. The collapse of social housing began with the Right to Buy enshrined in the 1980 Housing Act but has continued through successive governments of both main parties and during the coalition period. The ballooning welfare bill is not down to the recipients of housing benefit, Universal Credit or any of the other myriad forms of support available, in theory anyway, to those who can navigate the bureaucracy. It is because those successive governments have simply ignored the problem, the Tories giving way to nimbyism while Labour targeted Tory voters by shifting right and embracing Thatcherism.
We estimate that public expenditure on housing in England was £26.8 billion pounds in 2016-17.
Public spending on housing has lagged behind expenditure on other public services over the past twenty years and the focus of spending has increasingly been on housing benefits rather than investment in new social or affordable housing.
Real terms housing benefits payments in England have been on a long-term upwards trend, more than doubling since the start of the 1990s. The increase is mainly due to rising housing benefit payments per caseload as real terms rents for all tenures have increased. However, an increased reliance on private rented sector tenures has also raised the housing benefit bill and the cost in rents to tenants.
Reduced investment has lowered the number of additional social rent homes being delivered each year. Social rent housing additions have fallen by 79 per cent since the first half of the 1990s.
Grant funding for social housing has been limited since 2011. Instead, the focus has predominantly been on making funds available for affordable rent homes or the Help to Buy equity loan scheme.
In another background paper, Shelter provides estimates of existing unmet need for housing:
Homeless in temporary accommodation
79,900
Rough sleeping and hidden homelessness
128,000
Overcrowded
240,000
Living with poor conditions in the PRS
631,000
Ill health/disability
194,000
TOTAL
1,272,900
On top of that they estimate a need for a further 1.2 million homes to address the anticipated increase in existing and newly forming lower income young households who are not expected to be able to afford home ownership in their lifetimes and some 690,000 homes for older (aged 55 and over) households on lower incomes currently in the private rented sector (PRS).
According to Shelter, this 20-year programme will provide a return on investment in 39 years, and would cost £10.7bn a year on average. However by reducing the demand for housing and other benefits by reducing housing costs this would be reduced to £3.8bn a year. It isn't a part of the Shelter proposals but these savings would be significantly enhanced if these new homes were built to the zero energy standard described in this earlier post
We are now ten years on from the financial crisis, and a worsening housing crisis is affecting more and more people. Adding this to the social polarisation triggered by Brexit it is clear that we need a new political consensus. Building such a consensus around an ambitious commitment to improve social housing offers a way out of that divide.
Back in 2014, I wrote a post looking at the dominance of London and the disproportionate spending on infrastructure in London and the SE compared to the rest of the country. Since then things haven’t improved.
Up to now this has been a Brexit free zone, but inevitably as I disengage from Facebook, that must change.
A frequent mantra from the leave side has been the call for an 'end to free movement of people'. It's worth deconstructing that statement to expose the illiberal elements behind so much of the Leave campaign.
The argument is of course couched in terms of stopping 'them' from coming here and taking our jobs. There is no evidence of that in reality, but we'll pass that by for now. Creating the idea of the 'other' is one of the first steps of dictators and would-be dictators everywhere. That 'other ' doesn't even have to exist of course, but if you have a visible target it makes it so much easier. That's what's behind the hyperbole of the leavers as they endlessly and angrily froth at the mouth every time any of the 'little people' has the temerity to speak up.
But we'll pass over that for now, too.
What none of them are saying is that the end to free movement cuts both ways. As we stand, anyone in the EU has unlimited ability to trade, work or study anywhere else in the EU - that's over 500m people and a collective economy worth around $19m representing about 22% of the world economy. The UK economy makes great use of that facility - watch any news item about medical or scientific research and you will see them. According to a report produced by the British Academy some 40,000 non-UK EU staff work in UK universities. These people are critical to maintaining the high standard of UK Universities in international league tables. Looking the other way, research by the Royal Society (pdf) indicates that almost 70% of active UK researchers in the period 1996 – 2011 had published articles for which they were affiliated with non-UK institutions, indicating that they had worked abroad at some point during that period. Some of those researchers may have moved for relatively short periods, but UK-based researchers also move for longer periods: 21% of UK-based researchers worked abroad for a period of two years or more during the same period.
All of this is at risk. In January it was reported that over 2,300 EU academics resigned from British universities in 2016-17, a 19 per cent increase in departures compared to before the EU referendum, and a 10 per cent rise from 2015-16. It seems likely that this applies outside academia too. The government recently published (pdf) an analysis showing all Brexit scenarios would hurt the economy while a separate report from the Bank of England, warned economic output in the U.K. could drop by as much as 8 percent if Britain drops out of the EU without a deal in place, compared to expectations had the U.K. stayed in. That compares to a 6.25 percent drop during the 2008 financial crisis.
Best estimates for British citizens in the rest of the EU are that there are between 1.8 million to 3.6 million British people living part-time or full-time in the EU27. This is imprecise because of the difficulties of reconciling data from 27 different countries with different definitions (so much for the EU juggernaut) but even the lowest is significantly higher than the suspiciously precise ONS estimate in April 2018 of 748,900, although much closer to the UN estimate that had been previously accepted of 1.22m. The difference lies in the fact that thge ONS definition only includes people living elsewhere in the EU for 1year or longer. This excludes seasonal workers, second-home owners, students and other mobile individuals who move backwards and forwards and who, having exercised their rights to freedom of movement, are as likely as any to be affected by Brexit. I'm a case in point - in 2000-2005 I earned a substantial part of my income from contracts in Ireland, based in the UK, but travelling regularly to Ireland for meetings and site visits.
British residents in Spain appear to be a significant issue. This paper concludes that "there are some frail, vulnerable people that may fall through a support gap, whereby they are no longer the responsibility of UK welfare services, yet not fully recognised in their new country of residence..." Depending on the outcome of Brexit many of these people may find themselves forced to return to the UK, a country they may have left decades before, possibly impoverished and requiring significant social care. The implications for an already stressed adult care system in the UK are unknown.
You have to believe in facts. Without facts there's no basis for cooperation. If I say this is a podium and you say this an elephant, it's going to be hard for us to cooperate.
As Obama said in the same speech, the denial of facts could be the “undoing” of democracy.
“People just make stuff up,” he said. “They just double down and lie some more. Politicians have always lied, but it used to be that if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘Oh, man.’ Now they just keep on lying!”
Facebook usage declined in 2018 for the first time ever - at least in the US. It wasn't just a small decline either, but back to 2015 levels from 67 percent of Americans aged 12 and older to 62 percent of that same audience. This drop is seen in every age and gender demographic as well. It’s not as if only young people, or older Americans, or women are using Facebook less. Every studied group is using Facebook less. That's still a huge number of course, but it is significant. I'm not in the US but I'm a good example I think of why this decline is happening.
Their lack of real concern for privacy coupled with the refusal of Zuckerberg to answer questions in the UK about alleged interference in the UK referendum via Facebook (and possibly also in elections via Cambridge Analytica) came together to build a real suspicion of the whole platform. Of course I never trusted them fully in the first place, any more than I trusted any other giant corporation, but now that distrust is active, based on things I suspect they did, rather than passive and based on general suspicion about lack of action on their part.
The other factor in my case, that led me about a year ago to leave almost all the groups I'm in, was a substantial number of disturbing and distressing examples of racism and antisemitism dropped into ordinary discussion threads as if of no consequence. Add to that the increasing numbers of only just literate posts on almost any topic and the apparent inability of too many people to read more than a sentence without missing the point just led to a general stepping back.
I realised that my use of Facebook was also a factor in my failure to keep up this blog. It was easy to post a short paragraph or a link, but also too easy for vituperative arguments to erupt over nothing in particular or over some alleged slight in the choice of a word or phrase leading in the end to as much time being taken, but much less fruitfully, over that paragraph as would have been the case over a couple of thousand words in a blog post. I didn't reach as many people of course, but if a reader can't follow an argument over the equivalent of a page or two of text, they are quite frankly not my target audience anyway. We need to find a way to reach those people but I'm not the one to do it.
Length is not of course a guarantee of meaningful content as the vapid outpourings from the likes of Boris Johnson demonstrate. It's at times like this that I miss the likes of Christopher Hitchens
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the Supernatural and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians. At the end of the twentieth century it is the only acceptable political option, morally speaking. I shall not dwell on this. I will merely say that, irrespective of what may have seemed apt hitherto either inside or outside the Marxist tradition, nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable. Within the constricted scope of the present piece, I suppose I might try to evoke a little at least of what I am referring to here, with some statistics or an imagery of poverty, destitution and other contemporary calamities- But I do not intend to do even this much. The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them. They are unavoidable unless you wilfully shut them out. To those who would suggest that things might be yet worse, one answer is that of course they might be. But another answer is that for too many people they are already quite bad enough; and the sponsors of this type of suggestion are for their part almost always pretty comfortable.
I can't claim to match either of these greats, but for the future expect me to spend less time on Facebook and more time writing or blogging.
