Tag: UK politics

Government intervention

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.

People’s Front for Britain

Life of Brian

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.

Is Donald Trump British?

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:

  1. Viewing all human interactions as sporting competitions.
  2. The delusion that they are brilliant master negotiators (“deal”-makers, would be Trump’s expression).

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.

Keeping out the riffraff

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.

At least we don’t get ID cards

… because that would be fascism! Instead, we’re likely to get the NHS checking people’s passports and utility bills (for proof of address) before they can get medical treatment.

As I’ve commented before, the British seem obsessed with not having national ID cards — when they came into power one of the first things the Conservatives did was to cancel a Labour programme that had been in the works for about five years to provide ID cards — because carrying an ID card is inimical to Anglo-Saxon freedom. They don’t object to round-the-clock video surveillance, police stopping foreign-looking people on the Tube to ask for proof of right to be in the country, or now checking nationality documents at the hospital.

They just object to providing people with the documents they need to meet the authorities’ demand (given that one in six Britons has no passport, and they cost about £80). Instead, they leave it up to easily falsifiable electric bills to attest their address.

Freeing ourselves from the grim Brussels bureaucrats…

… because London bureaucrats are so much cheerier. According to a recently leaked memo,

The document, compiled by consultancy firm Deloitte and obtained by the Times newspaper, says Whitehall is working on 500 Brexit-related projects and could need 30,000 extra staff.

On the other hand, according to this document there are are fewer than 33,000 staff in total working for the European Commission. Maybe there are some other “EU bureaucrats” who don’t work for the Commission, but pretty much, the total number of Brussels bureaucrats is very nearly matched by the additional bureaucrats in Whitehall. Small-government conservatives rejoice!

I guess this is what the government meant by stopping the hiring of foreigners to do jobs that British workers can do.

Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy

Something I’ve been thinking about since the Brexit vote: There was a prevailing sentiment at the time that the British people are inherently conservative, and so would never vote to upend the international order. In fact, they did, by a small but decisive margin. But how was this “conservatism” imagined to act? The difference between 52-48 for Leave and 48-52 is happening in the minds of 4% of the population who might have decided the other way. Except that there’s nothing to tell them that they are on the margin. If you are negotiating over a policy, even if you start with some strategically maximum demand, you can look at where you are and step back if it appears you’ve crossed a dangerous line.

A referendum offers two alternatives, and one of them has to win. (Of course, a weird thing about the Brexit vote is that only one side — Remain — had a clear proposal. Every Leave voter was voting for the Leave in his mind. In retrospect, the Leave campaign is trying to stretch the mantle of democratic legitimation over their maximal demands.) There is no feedback mechanism that tells an individual “conservative” voter that the line is being crossed. Continue reading “Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy”