We’ve just about finished the first week of the Trump presidency. Just 208 more to go.
(I appreciate that it is anything but determined that Trump will be stepping down on January 20, 2021. I’m just guessing that, when future historians come to write about this period, January 2021 will mark the transition from the Presidency to the Imperial Reign.)
It seems Theresa May has found her strategy for rescuing the British economy from the political damage the Tories are planning to inflict:
The prime minister will publish the strategy at a cabinet meeting in the north-west of England, setting out five sectors that could receive special government support: life sciences, low-carbon-emission vehicles, industrial digitalisation, creative industries and nuclear.
She will say the government would be prepared to deregulate, help with trade deals or create new institutions to boost skills or research if any sector can show this would address specific problems.
Great idea! As one of the people working on developing “skills and research”, I’d like to suggest that it might be a good idea to arrange an agreement to share students, workers, and researchers with our neighbours, who are similarly technologically-developed and share common scientific and educational traditions. We could call it the Anglo-European Union, or something like that.
But no, that would help “old institutions” like my own. The Westminster Pharaoh is only interested in boosting skills or research if it can create “new institutions” as a monument to her greatness.
I pointed out a few days ago that we need to take seriously the idea that Trump’s British mother* indoctrinated him with radical colonialist ideologies. Now Trump has installed a bust of an arch British colonialist in a prominent place of honour in the Oval Office.
Imagine if Barack Obama had, as one of his first acts as president, installed a bust of Jomo Kenyatta in the Oval Office.
* An English colleague to whom I mentioned this theory said, “No, she was Scottish.”
This is probably the best title for a reality TV show ever proposed in a presidential inaugural address. And then there’s this.
Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.
And you have to admit, most of us really are tired of our education system being flush with cash. Such a burden, and what do you get for it? Early-onset gout from the rich cafeteria food, and gold-plated textbooks that give the children scoliosis from having to lug them around, that’s what. And the rest of the economy starved for talent as the best and the brightest compete for the overpaid classroom posts. We really don’t know what to do with all that money, and our young and beautiful students won’t learn anything anyway. (We don’t care much what happens to the non-beautiful…)
That’s why we need Trump as president: Someone who has learned his whole life to cope with the burden of extreme wealth, and is willing to lift it from us.
From the new Brexit sequel to The Life of Brian:
Theresa May: If you want to join the parliamentary front benches, you have to really hate foreigners.
Jeremy Corbyn: I do.
TM: Oh yeah? How much?
JC: A lot.
TM: Right, you’re in.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse that he probably isn’t really xenophobic. But as I observed when I first arrived in this country,
In the U.K. context, it’s barely controversial to bash legal immigrants, much less illegal immigrants. In the most recent prime ministerial debate, the one thing David Cameron and Gordon Brown agreed on was that the Liberal Democrats’ proposal of an amnesty for long-term illegal residents was simply insane and indefensible. They didn’t even have to respond to his counter-arguments, pretend that they had an alternative solution for the problem. It’s the putatively left-wing party in power for the past 13 years in the U.K. that can’t think of enough new ways to attack foreigners, that they have to invent bizarrely creative ways to attack foreigners, like the law banning foreigners from marrying without Home Office approval, or instituting new proposals that immigrants need to perform “volunteer” work to earn citizenship.
Former Muppets understudy and current foreign secretary Boris Johnson reported yesterday
“That means – crucially – that we will be able to do new free trade deals with countries around the world. They are already queuing up.
The whole world is queueing up! That’s what they mean by spreading British values.
In some formal sense the answer is yes: His mother was Scottish, after all. But I’m thinking of two pathologies that are dominant in British politics, and observable in the purest form yet seen in Trump:
I’ve written before about the British compulsion to turn everything into a sport, so that it is impossible to imagine anyone winning without someone else losing. This is, at least, modulated by a charmingly deep-seated concern with “fair play” and being a “good sport”. (It is no coincidence that modern German has adopted the English word “fairness”. It is a peculiarly Anglo-American construct, not well covered by such overlapping concepts as Gerechtigkeit.)
But this interacts in peculiar ways with the peculiar conviction that they are particularly skilled at business and diplomatic negotiation. What they did have was an idiosyncratic blend of ruthlessness, geographic advantage, and technological prowess that they parlayed into a position of global dominance. Through stubbornness and admiration of their own idiosyncracies (“British values”) they have managed since then to turn their dominant position into a position of a weak, economically mediocre nation on the fringes of Europe, plagued by extreme inequality. But they think they’ve been winning or, where they have lost, it has been because of the perfidy of foreigners.
With Brexit, this delusion has entered its perhaps final stage. The UK has an incredibly weak hand in Brexit negotiations. They could appeal to comity and sentiment, but that doesn’t fit their vision of themselves as tough guys. They believe they know how to get what they want haggling with the lesser races — you have to show them you’re willing to walk away, and destroy both parties. That’s why the foreign secretary is threatening to turn the UK into an offshore tax haven saying the UK would “do whatever we have to do” if the EU doesn’t cave in to British demands.
Of course, that makes no sense for the UK economy, even if it wouldn’t be likely to result in crushingly punitive measures from Europe. But they think they’re brilliant, and by showing their willingness to damage themselves in order to punish Europe, the EU will agree to a “fair” deal (i.e., benefitting Britain). What is really likely happen is that the EU will be more inclined to bolt the doors against the lunatic, and leave Britain to complete its destiny as an offshore colony of Donald Trump’s America.
This is Donald Trump’s opinion of NATO. And possibly of the U.S. constitution.
I’m reflecting now on the various US presidential elections of my lifetime. I have always supported Democrats, and have tended to disparage Republican presidents and presidential candidates personally as well as disliking their policies. I thought it irresponsible of Republicans (and the new media) to cover for Reagan’s increasing mental deficiencies, particularly in his second term. I thought George W. Bush’s first election was tainted by the problematic vote in Florida and the ridiculous intervention of the Supreme Court, and that he owed it to the country to bend over backwards to govern in a moderate, middle-of-the-road manner. (At the same time, it was clear to me that there wasn’t really a clear winner to the election. The electoral system simply failed. Though I believed, and still believed, that the most legitimate resolution would be an absolutely scrupulous full recount of the state which, it turns out, according to later studies, would ultimately have given the election to Gore.)
But it is quite clear to me that I have never watched the impending installation of a new president with such fear and loathing. Genuine fear. I worry about social programs I care about in the US, but having lived outside the US for more than a decade, and without any likelihood of returning, I feel pretty detached from day-to-day politics in the US. What I feel is existential dread for the fate of a country that is still my own, and for the world, which seems generally more unstable than it has for a long time, and where the US still has overwhelming influence, and even more overwhelming destructive power.
I was just interested in comparing the conditions for citizenship and annual number of new citizens between the UK and Germany. The UK numbers I found on this government website. Under “Key Facts” the first thing they have to say is
Applications for British citizenship fell by 29% in the year ending June 2015 to 137,406.
There were 112,407 decisions about British citizenship, 40% fewer than in the previous year (188,910). Correspondingly, there were 42% fewer people granted British citizenship (-75,908 to 105,043). This was the lowest annual figure since 2002 (120,121).
It seems like they’re really proud that British citizenship has become so unattractive. The number of people acquiring German citizenship in around the same timeframe was slightly higher — 107,181 according to the Statistisches Bundesamt — which also notes that this represents a slight decrease (1.1%) from the previous year.
The Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel commented on these statistics with concern:
Deutscher Pass verliert weiter an Attraktivität
Die Zahl der Einbürgerungen in Deutschland ist seit Jahren rückläufig. Das ist ein beschämender Trend.
German passport continues losing its lustre
The number of people acquiring citizenship in Germany has been going down for years. This is an embarrassing trend.
The Statistisches Bundesamt also compares these numbers to the “Einbürgerungspotenzial” — the “potential acquisitions of citizenship” — finding that only about 2% of the available citizen material has been “ausgeschöpft” (made use of).
I might note at this point that the Germans take only 255 euros as a citizenship fee, as opposed to the £1,236 that the British take. (One wonders if the whole Brexit thing is just a scam to get Europeans living here to apply for citizenship. If all 3 million apply, that will be worth nearly £4 billion.
Common Infirmities 