Three footnotes to my post-election analysis

1. Following up on my point that parties need not to be hated, here, from before the election is some data on the ongoing de-toxification of the Conservative Party in some parts of the Midlands and the North. "Around 80-90% of why certain seats vote for certain parties is explained by the demographics of the area e.g. – how many graduates are there, how rich is the seat, how many people have gone to university, what is the ethnic composition and what type of jobs do people have". But some seats stand out (or did before the last election): they 'should' be Tory but, for historical/cultural reasons they are/were not: "the leave voting 55yr old plumber living in a detached house is more likely to vote Tory in Bournemouth than Wigan, even on the same salary. If the Tories manage to culturally de-toxify in certain seats there is a huge unlocked vote there". And Johnson managed, with help from Corbyn, to unlock that vote. (There are even people who did not vote Conservative who now wish they had.) I don't have the data to hand but it is not hard to think that one of Blair's great successes (with help from Major's failures in Government) was de-toxifying the Labour Party among people historically disinclined to vote Labour.

2. This is a tweet-storm from (what appears to be) a Labour Party member that is getting some publicity. The writer sets out the policies he would like. Some excerpts: "A ban on all foreign home/property ownership. Criminal sentences for landbankers. Then build an absolute shitload of council houses - but nice ones, terraces, with gardens, not Barrett-built lego sets made out of reconstituted cardboard", "A nice bit of military Keynesianism, uncompromising on security. A strong fleet, a strong RAF - all new military hardware to be built in Britain, by British workers. Make Barrow what it was 50 years ago. Renew Trident, and put a bloody Union Jack on it", "No more patronising nannying. Cut duty on fags and booze and stop lecturing people. Revive the Great British Pub and two fingers to the middle class Public Health Nazis". You get the picture. Speaking as someone who lives in London, he does not at all sound like a Labour supporter: in London terms, he sounds like a funny kind of Tory.

3. It seems that Lisa Nandy is the best hope for the Labour Party. I take it back about Jess Phillips: she is Matthew d'Ancona choice. Do you remember when Jacob Rees-Mogg and Jess Phillips used to pal around on TV together? Well, just as JRM is what an old northern socialist thinks a real Tory is like, JP is what a London softy like myself thinks a real Labourite is like. Sorry for the confusion.

Merry Christmas!

Let the microwaves sing!

(From here, which is stuffed stocking-full with good things.)

A way forward for the British Left?

Everyone has diagnosed the problem for the British Left: it is a coalition between upper middle class social liberals and poor people, and that coalition has broken down. Here's a good little piece on the problem, but you'll have seen plenty of others in a similar vein, many quoting Orwell.

Fine. But how is that problem to be solved? Answers below.

The 2017 election versus the 2019 election

I went back to what I wrote about the 2017 election here and here. It stands up pretty well. More (much more) below by reference to the 2019 election.

Some interesting things

1. Do you remember when Nixon gave his eulogy for the tragic loss of the astronauts on Apollo 11? No? But it's here. (Brilliant deepfake.)

2. "It’s been a long time now since, at age 53, I became a woman." The inimitable Deirdre McCloskey of course. Happy? Sad? Honest, anyway. "My daughter still lives in the Midwest; she is married and has a child. I’ve told in Crossing about how, a year later, when she was still in college, I saw her that one time, very early in my transition, a weeping father in a dress begging for a hug. ... Her lone letter in reply said “Thanks for the money. I still don’t want you in my life.” ... My son lives not too far from me. He too won’t speak."

3. Pregnancy reduces criminal behaviour, both for the mother and the father. There is some great economics-speak at the link: "pregnancy reduces discount rates and gives men and women a reason to invest in human capital and work for the future." Also: people should get married and have children earlier.

4. On "liberalism" and liberal societies. Well put.

5. Abortion. Again, well put, I thought, which is quite a feat when the author is an American calmly and sympathetically putting forward both sides of the debate.

6. Rory Sutherland, the Wiki Man. "One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of the rise of populism might be the journalists themselves, and the extent to which the once noble aim of impartiality has led to something ridiculous — where almost everyone in authority is treated as a liar. // For the past three decades, Britain has had centrist governments led by mainstream politicians. And in that period, did we find that journalists devoted much airtime and column inches to reporting this as a good thing? We did not." To be fair, we are always fighting the last war. The "why is this lying liar lying to me?" type of interview is a reaction against the "Prime Minister, is there anything you would like to say?" interview of yesteryear. But I think Sutherland's point is a good one: even if deference is dead, common sense, decency and a sense of proportion ought not to be. And there is a market for long interviews that are not all bash-bash-bash: see podcasts.

7. Cheer up everyone! It's not that bad.

8. More on what happened to New Atheism.

9. Is there a more predictably awkward social interaction than buying the Big Issue? This morning I walked past the vendor, aware that I had no change, then, appreciating that I did have a note, I walked back to him. I gave him £10 and asked if he had change. I'll see, he said. It was cold. He reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of pound coins. The Big Issue costs £3. I had already decided that I would pay £5. I could see that he had 6 £1 coins in his cold hand. He counted them into my gloved hand one by one. His breath condensed in great clouds as he counted the £1 coins. Three. Four. I waited. I took my £5, said thank you and walked away feeling like an idiot.  Anyway all of that is just a prelude to this:

Look at the order of the politicians. At the last general election, the LibDems got about 2.4m votes and the SNP got under 1m. (Did you know that more Scottish people voted Leave in the 2016 referendum than voted for the SNP in 2017: 1,018,322 versus 977,568?) And yet there is Sturgeon on the top line, with Swinson sitting at the children's table. Yes I know, number of MPs, percentage of vote in seats contested, yes, yes, yes. But surely, not so long ago, the leader of the third national party would rank above a regional separatist?

10. How humans and other modern animals would look if drawn from their skeletons in the same way dinosaurs are, if you see what I mean.

Poor young women

As I mentioned before, the BBC reported that, in England, "Among 16 to 24-year-old women in 2014, 19.7% reported having self-harmed at some point in their life", a growing trend.

It also appears that "more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex" (again from the BBC). In addition to the "unwanted" occurrences, there have also been a large number of "wanted" ones:

I'm not going to go all statistics-y on this: England is not the same as the UK; 16-24 year olds are not the same as 18-39 year olds; survey reports about personal stuff like this are no doubt less reliable than "did you eat a sandwich for lunch"-type surveys. (Also: I can't make full sense of the statistics in this piece. On the one hand, the above graph suggests that the majority of these kinds of activities were "unpressured", on the other hand, "More than a third (38%) had experienced these acts and said they were unwanted at least some of the time, while just under two-thirds of women had either experienced it and said it was never unwanted (31%), or they had no experience, didn't know or preferred not to say (31%)." Is the 38% in that quotation the same people as the 42% in the graph above? One reading of this is that most women experience these activities, but they are mostly "wanted" or "unpressured". I don't think that is what the article says, but I can't be certain.)

But the long and the short of it is that there is a large number of young women in this country who are the victims of violence, a lot of it "consensual", i.e. inflicted by themselves on themselves or by their partners on themselves, and a lot of it is straightforwardly non-consensual.

I am far from alone in thinking that self-harm, consensual though it is obviously is, is a Bad Thing. Worrying. A sign of disturbance, unhappiness or mental illness. No one in the article on self-harm regards its increase as an interesting development in leisure activities for young women: it is something "alarming", something that needs "prevention" and "intervention".

So why should we treat the "consensual" infliction of harm by sexual partners any differently? Indeed, the BBC article treats the whole business of violence during sex as a Bad Thing, consensual or not: "People do it because they think it's the norm but it can be very harmful. What we see is that for many, it devalues the relationship but - at its worst - violence becomes acceptable". Quite: as with self-harm, consent to the injury is a sign that things are bad, not good.

The modern rule for sexual morality is "always and everywhere, consenting adults = ok". I say "modern", but, what with the #MeToo movement and now violence during sex, it is already looking rusty and obsolete. But, having abandoned Christianity, what do we have to replace it?

Jon Kelly - part 2

I once came across a journalist called Jon Kelly. I made fun of him (just a little bit). He replied. He was, I think, not upset, but I suppose I felt a little bad about it.

So I decided to look him up again - and I am pleased that I did. Kelly is now working on BBC Stories and he is doing some really good stuff. Here are some examples.
- This is about a woman prisoner.
- This is about a woman who married two haemophiliacs - and was widowed twice, by the same infected blood scandal.
- This is about how hard employment is when you have dementia.

And there are more.

Each of the ones I have read is a proper article, interesting or affecting as the story demands. They also reflect well on Kelly: these are people currently facing, or at least remembering, some pretty  hard times, and he treats their stories with care and respect. I recommend that you forget about politics for a few moments, read a couple of his articles and you'll be reminded why you pay your licence fee.

The BBC was wasting Kelly by getting him to write frivolous rubbish. But now he is doing what he should be doing. Well done to both of them.

Some unusual links

1. This is a surprisingly interesting and non-stupid article about being a psychic. We all have our blind spots and sometimes find it hard to remember that [insert category of people here] are people too, with all that that entails. (That's what I find most bizarre about the whole Brexit palaver: the human ability to invent wholly new categories of people based on their attitude to an international organisation and then to demonise them on that basis.) I suppose psychics and astrologers would tend to be the sorts of person I would write off, viewing them as just frauds who take money from the gullible. But they are people too. Well worth a read.

2. The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling. For Remembrance Day, a few days back.

3. Momentum knows about Bruce Wayne's company's tax arrangements. And Momentum is not happy about it. But ... hang on: isn't Bruce Wayne himself resident in Gotham City for tax purposes, so wouldn't he pay vast amounts of income tax? Or maybe he over-uses charitable deductions? The plot thickens! But if Wayne Enterprises did pay tax but nonetheless paid Wayne sufficient dividends to maintain his bat-lifestyle then would that be OK with Momentum? After all, Gotham City has pretty good tax receipts. I wonder if Momentum have thought through the property tax and VAT angles. And as for whether there is a double taxation treaty with Krypton ...

4. This is pretty amazing: real-life invisibility cloaks.

5. If you liked the Education Bicycle then you might like these, including the Well-being Umbrella, the Health Doughnut and the Vaccination Bicycle.

6. Good old Wittgenstein. Just a charmingly positive article about Ludwig.

7. You should support open borders because it will make rich countries more like South Africa! Reading this link is a lovely insight into how economists think and write among themselves.

8. Life on Mars? I remain to be persuaded.

12 unrelated links

1. Here is the Jewish Chronicle, advising all non-Jews not to vote Labour because Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic. You have probably tired, as I have, of people saying "I know everything is extraordinary nowadays but this is REALLY extraordinary". So what do I say? This is now normal, I suppose. As you were - how many days are there left to save the NHS?

2. This link I am giving you for two reasons. First, as part of my ongoing project of giving you access to Zadie Smith's writings. Second, because it is well worth a read anyway. It's about an artist called Celia Paul, who seems to be, at the risk of sounding utterly bourgeois, really quite odd. Or, to put it differently, it's about one of Lucien Freud's muses and lovers. If you've ever wondered why on earth all those women put up with Freud then read this - and continue to wonder.

3. Do you remember all the fuss about atheism a few years back? And do you wonder what happened to it? New Atheism, social justice and hamartiology answers your questions in great style. (In genuinely unconnected news, it will not have passed you by that Kanye West has released an album called Jesus is King and that Kim Kardashian and her children got baptised in Armenia.)

4. The European Convention on Human Rights (which is the basis of the Human Rights Act in the UK) makes it illegal to abolish private schools. But of course it does! When, in 1950, the drafters of the ECHR surveyed the ruins of Europe, reviewed the atrocities of WWII and vowed "Never again!", they clearly had in mind the fundamental threat to human dignity - none greater! - that might result from forcing nice children to associate with the sorts of children who go to state schools. Indeed, if only Herr Hitler had been to the right kind of school, who knows what unpleasantness could have been avoided ... Seriously, whether you are on the left or the right, you should remember that human rights law is a well-intentioned but doddering and ridiculous force for wishy-washy conservatism - a kind of spectral Dominic Grieve. There are many worse things out there, but it is not an infallible source of wisdom.

5. Someone you might want to follow: Wolfgang Munchau and Eurointelligence. Interesting accounts of what is really going on in Europe. Not just Brexit, of course. How about this, for example: "If you read the German business press, you get an immediate sense of the country's dependence on CO2-emitting technologies. Three of the top stories in FAZ this morning were the final go-ahead for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a new coal-fired power station going online, and a rise in SUV sales at Volkswagen. We sometimes feel as if entering a parallel universe time warp when reading German newspapers. The country is not even pretending to try and reach the Paris climate targets." If that makes you think that the British press does not really tell you much about Europe and you want to know more then Eurointelligence is worth a look.

6. Someone else you might want to follow: Niall Gooch. Likes murder mysteries, Ravilious, trains. Not a fan of Dr Beeching. Wrote this: "Have you ever actually seen an old maid hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning? I have." Also on Twitter, rightly admiring Uxbridge's Civic Centre, for example. Here's what he wrote about Brexit (he voted Remain ... and yet ...).

7. You know Conway's Game of Life? No? You should. This is a bit fiddly but otherwise fun for all the family.

8. You know that the European Court of Justice has held that individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Google de-lists a lot of BBC web pages as a result. This is the BBC's reaction: "As a contribution to public policy and debate, the BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been impacted by publishing this list of links." Intrigued? See some here. Not an example of the Streisand effect. Or at least not yet.

9. Private firefighters in California.

10. The signature film of every major city. Well, a lot of US cities and some others.

11. Switzerland.

12. This is pretty cool.

Matthew Parris leaves the Conservative Party

Parris' piece saying that he is leaving the Conservative Party really is immensely silly. I have no joy in saying that. I am someone who has a great deal of respect for him - indeed, someone who has met and enjoyed talking to him. I am truly sorry to see such an unfortunate example of pure Brexit Derangement Syndrome.

In 2016 a Conservative Government held a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave it. Now, Parris believes that leaving the EU is "folly". He might be right: even Dominic Cummings has said that in some of the forking paths of the future, it would be better to have stayed. Lots of clever people agree.

But there are degrees of folly. There is the folly of forgetting your packed lunch at home and having to buy a sandwich instead, and there is the folly of failing to secure your bungee rope before jumping off a bridge. Parris obviously puts leaving the EU (even with Johnson's new and improved deal) in the latter category.

That means that he should have abandoned the Conservative Party when Cameron called the referendum. (Instead: see here.)

Look at it this way: what would you think about a party that called a referendum on something as reprehensible as the slaughter of the firstborn or as self-destructive as the abolition of all formal education? You would not wait a few years after the outcome of that referendum before deciding that that party was not one you wanted to support. Deliberately opening the door to a monster is an appalling thing to do, even if you are confident that you can shut the door before it gets in.

So why has Parris waited until now? He suggests that he is now "unwilling to support a leader who is a stranger to honesty or principle and who surfs a foolish populist wave for the sake of ambition alone, leading a governing party whose centre of gravity has shifted decisively away from the broadly centrist political force Conservatism once was." None of this makes any sense. Johnson is, I grant, a man whose personal life is perhaps more in line with Bill Clinton's than Richard Nixon's (I choose my examples advisedly), but whose time as Prime Minister has been spent doing nothing other than trying to leave the EU. If doing so is surfing a foolish populist wave and shifting away from being a broadly centrist force then I repeat: giving that option to the country in 2016 was every bit as bad - and probably worse. Charming old Cameron and diligent old May were surfers or extremists both.

On the other hand, if you believe, as I do, that the folly of leaving the EU, if folly it be, is well within the range of legitimate decisions a country might make, that becoming a little more like Switzerland or Canada and a little less like Austria is nothing like the slaughter of the firstborn, and that the fact that a majority voted for Brexit provides at least some reason for thinking it a "centrist" position (for what that is worth), then nothing Johnson has done in office merits the bizarre invective Parris has chosen to deploy. The decision that has faced the British political classes since 2016 has been whether the fact of Brexit would be sufficiently disastrous to outweigh the moral and prudential imperative of respecting the result of a high-turnout referendum; the question has been whether to dispense with democracy in order to preserve Britain's half-in, half-out status in the EU. To any reasonable objective observer, even accepting that all the economic forecasts are true (a 3.5% reduction in GDP over 10 years, i.e. an annual rounding error), it is surely clear that there is nothing extreme or "populist" or indicative of "zealotry" or any of the other words Parris uses in deciding that it is better to live in a democracy in which a referendum is respected than to live in whatever alternative system of government the likes of Dominic Grieve, Keir Starmer or the Liberal Democrats would wish for us. At the very least, is it not a reasonable view for Johnson to take? Is it not exactly the same view that May in all her sensible greyness took?

The emotional response to Brexit that has animated so many of our leaders and commentators is going to look very silly in a few years time. "I was right," they will say, looking at a large-ish holiday mobile phone bill and spotting the EU snubbing our diplomats in Davos. But they will say it quietly. And, as their friends and families watch the sun continuing to rise in the east and set in the west, and as new fads and crazes occupy their children, and as new outrages as yet undreamt of animate the opinion columns, and as the people of Britain continue to grumble their way through the minor annoyances that would dominate their lives regardless of the scope of the European customs union, they might wonder why it seemed so important to be right on this issue. Was all that Brexit fuss really happening at the same time as Hong Kong - and Yemen - and Syria - and Greta Thunberg - and Huawei - and Universal Credit and foodbanks and ...?, they will ask themselves in wonder. And I thought that Brexit was the issue worth marching about?

On the American 'Deep State'

I am in no position to give my own view on whether the so-called 'Deep State' in the US is anything more (or less) than a rather glamorous name for the American equivalent of our own dear Establishment. But I can give you a clutch of articles from disparate sources, all better-informed than I, that makes for good reading.

First we have Matt Taibbi, the man who described Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid. It's pretty punchy. Then this from Robert Merry. "When the president canceled large war games with South Korea, the military held them anyway—only on a smaller scale and without fanfare. Diplomats negotiated an agreement before a NATO summit to foreclose any Trump action based on a different outlook": Yes, Minister played as tragedy rather than farce. And finally, this, an interview with Angelo Codevilla that ranges widely over all sorts of topics in a lively fandango. It has also introduced me to Branson, Missouri, which looks like a great place for a holiday.

The Supreme Court's ruling on prorogation

You can find the judgment here. It's fairly short and punchy so you should read it if you're at all interested. If you want some temperate and balanced comments from me then read on. Warning: there is nothing about the Establishment below, very little relevant to the prospects for Brexit and something about James I.

Brexit stuff - UPDATED

Consider yourself warned by the headline. But there is something for everyone here, I think, whatever your views on the subject.

1. Ivan Rogers on no-deal Brexit. A lot of sense here. One minor caveat from Bruno Maçães: "Rogers like many is wrong,though, that the backstop is something the UK not the EU wanted. And he admits this by saying EU will not scrap backstop. Why would you insist on having what you don’t want?" Interesting stuff. One big point: no deal is not the end. And what is the end? Revocation is not the end. A second referendum is not the end (what about a third?).

2. Why hasn't Brexit happened yet? asks Christopher Caldwell. Again, good stuff, although, after you have read Rogers himself, you may feel that Caldwell is too harsh on Rogers.

3. Historical prorogations.

4. The one iron-clad law of Brexit discussion prevails again. Jonathan Freedland, writing in the New York Review of Books, starts his piece as follows: "An easy way to measure how much and how swiftly Britain has changed in the age of Brexit is to compare the Britain of 2019 with the image the country projected of itself [in the past]. The last time that pre-Brexit Britain showed itself to the world, the last time it thought hard about its identity, even its own meaning as a country, was ..." I pause here to see whether you can finish Freedland's sentence. When was it, this solemn occasion on which Britain last thought hard about its identity? At the 2017 General Election? Maybe at some point during the 2016 referendum - or in the aftermath of its surprising result? No, of course not. The last time that the 60-something million citizens of this country sat down and truly considered our own meaning as a country was - yes, you guessed it! - "... on a warm summer’s evening in 2012 when, under the guiding hand of the movie director Danny Boyle, London staged the opening ceremony of that year’s Olympic Games." (The rest of the article writes itself and can be safely ignored.) Mr Boyle's achievement in channelling the thoughts and desires of an entire nation into one evening of made-for-TV entertainment is truly remarkable. Unfortunately he is not a politician and so not available for helping us out of our current mess. Perhaps instead we could turn to the politician who presided over the amazingness that was London 2012 - the man who was the triumphant Mayor of that at-ease-with-itself city now sadly one with Nineveh and Tyre. As I recall, that man, whoever he was, was "a huge asset to the Games, as a jovial Master of Ceremonies, the right mayor for the right place and time. He lifted the mood before Team GB golds rolled in, and became a totem for many of the British characteristics Danny Boyle sought to showcase in the opening ceremony, the mildly deranged humor, the appearance of chaos that overlies purpose...". If only that human representation of the London 2012 opening ceremony were available to serve as Prime Minister now! How unfortunate that we are stuck with Boris Johnson, the very antithesis of everything that we loved in 2012.

5. UPDATE. Here's a pleasant coincidence. This is the LRB, with an interesting article about the intellectual background to the Single Market (an international free-trade zone horribly insulated from the passions of the populace) and how awful it is. Meanwhile, here is the Economist, describing the Single Market (an international free-trade zone wonderfully insulated from the passions of the populace) and how it has failed to go far enough. The two articles largely agree about the facts. And here (with a bit from Alan Walters!) is how this all plays into Brexit: "What happened was single market in services never happened in part because it would favor UK and the largest part of the British economy was never fully integrated into the EU". It is perhaps fair to say that the UK is to services what Germany is to manufacturing, and would have dominated the service sector of Europe in the same way that Germany dominates manufacturing had it been allowed to do so. I doubt it is as simple as saying that the Brexiteers' mouths could have been stuffed with gold, but perhaps enough mouths could have been stuffed.

Rory Sutherland on London

Sutherland is always worth reading. Always. I am sure he is wrong about this and yet I can't see how.

"two married London teachers in their early fifties owned a small house now worth just under £1 million. The husband was originally from East Anglia, and wanted to move back there. His London–born wife refused to leave.

The choice was clear. They could move to a very nice house in Suffolk and continue to teach while having £500,000 in the bank with which to retire early, buy ostrich-skin elbow patches, donate to the Guardian website every day — or whatever it is teachers do with half a million quid. Or they could continue as before.

I don’t know the ‘right’ answer. It’s not for me to judge how much the wife values living in London. But I do know a telling question you could ask them. Can you imagine the same decision happening in reverse?

Imagine a couple of teachers living in a nice house in Norwich who one day win £500,000 on the National Lottery. Is it likely that one of them would say, ‘Oh, thank God for that. We can move to a much shittier house in London and work until retirement age’?"

A short Dominic Cummings Reader, with digressions

Cummings' blog, to which I have linked on a few occasions, is of course the primary source for understanding him. It's not all Bismarck, physicists and abuse of MPs: he compares Jeremy Heywood to Michael Quinlan, he quotes from Citizen Kane, he tells you about Colonel Boyd and the Apollo Program. It's not to be missed.

What you need to understand about Cummings is that, unlike the vast majority of politicians, he is interested in how to make things happen in politics. Do you remember the Blair Government getting all worked up about they pulled levers in Westminster and nothing happened? Cummings' life's work is all about not repeating those mistakes. That is why he cares so little about media/political commentary - all about making oneself look good - and cares much more about data.

So, e.g., "The measures were devised by the prime minister’s senior aides who have spent the summer in their Downing Street bunker war-gaming how to respond to potential parliamentary manoeuvres by MPs determined to block no deal. The rebels, by contrast, spent the August holidays debating whether they would back Ken Clarke as a potential caretaker prime minister in an unlikely government of national unity." Well, quite. (To be fair, they also spent some of it wondering whether Caroline Lucas' fantasy all-female cabinet was sufficiently ethnically diverse.) At a very basic level, what are you trying to achieve and how can you achieve it - and do you have the will and discipline to do what it takes? Remember that it was Parliament, stuffed with Remainers, that voted itself 6 weeks off when it could have been plotting against Leave. Parliament failed, says Vernon Bogdanor. And largely because it did not properly plan.

Another example: I read that “Cummings is trying to goad Grieve and co - he says the more they appear babbling on TV, the stronger the support in focus groups for the prime minister to end the nightmare on October 31”. Absolutely. Dominic Grieve is the Remainer-Remoaner from central casting: "the son of Percy Grieve, QC (the MP for Solihull 1964–83), and of an Anglo-French mother, Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain (d. 1991), maternal granddaughter of Sir George Roberts, 1st and last baronet. He was educated at the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle ..., Colet Court ... and Westminster School. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford .... He was the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1977 ... Queen's Counsel in 2008". You can't make this stuff up: Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain - descended from a baronet - went to more posh schools than most Leave voters can even name? He is Jacob Rees-Mogg without the charm! He gives TV interviews from his holiday house in France! Just as David Cameron was (rightly, from the point of view of Remain) keen to make Farage the face of Leave, making the face of Remain be a bunch of people like Grieve who get worked up about proroguing Parliament rather than anything of any concrete concern to real people is just what Leave needs.

(To digress for a moment: what was the right response to the famous bus with £350m a week and the NHS on it? As I understand it, the canonical response from Remain is (a) it's not £350m a week, it's really about £250m and (b) even if you were to eliminate the net payments to the EU budget then that money would not be available for the NHS because the overall reduction in the UK's GDP as a result of leaving the EU would result in a reduced tax-take in excess of the savings from the budget contributions. Did you even stay awake to the end of that?

How about this reaction instead:
- this £350m figure is rubbish and they know it
- but this campaign has shown divisions in the country that we in Remain want to deal with
- as we have been telling you, EU membership is really profitable for the country, particularly the City of London
- so, the day after the referendum, there will be an extra £500m a week for the NHS paid for by a new tax on the City - the EU Membership Dividend Tax!
- that money will disappear if we vote to Leave
- and that is real money, not the phantom money that Leave is promising you?

At least it would have been an offer to the voters. Leave had offers and Remain had nothing but threats.)

Anyway, back to Cummings. The people that Cummings reads are interesting, e.g. Slate Star Codex, perhaps the single most consistently interesting thing on the internet. This guy has also spotted that fact: worth a read for someone who understands where Cummings is coming from and yet disagrees with him on his own terms. (But yet he considers small blips in GDP growth to be equivalent to head-on car crashes ...)

Cummings = Varoufakis? There is something to this too.

Details

1. "... nobody believed me whenever I said I was broke. I usually kept this to myself during my time in college, but sometimes, in strange circumstances, it would come up.

Once, I was shamed in front of a crowd for not donating to a society—even when I had donated a different gift just a day ago—and I confided my feelings to a close friend. His response: “What, so you’re upper-middle-class?”

In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”
...
And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account."

From this often interesting article, which is really about the deplorable lack of noblesse oblige among the modern meritocracy.

2. Also on the meritocracy: 

"At one elite northeastern elementary school, for example, a teacher posted a “problem of the day,” which students had to solve before going home, even though no time was set aside for working on it. The point of the exercise was to train fifth graders to snatch a few extra minutes of work time by multitasking or by sacrificing recess." 

"In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days." From here.

3. If you do very well in the meritocracy then you get to go to this nameless conference.

4. The people who do very well are in the 1%. What a shame Britain is so horrible and unequal, not like Germany, those lovely Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. What's that you say?

Oh. (See here.)

4. But at least we British have a sense of humour. "Once, it would have been absurd to claim that humor was the most prominent British characteristic, as if we archly established the world’s biggest empire, wittily squashed revolutions, and humorously prevailed in two world wars. But ..." "It has often been suggested that the British desire for Brexit has been driven by imperial nostalgia. I think Brexiteers are more nostalgic for its decline — for that little period of history where the establishment was strong enough to maintain order but weak enough to seem essentially comic. A time when Britons were not powerful enough to be imperial but self-assured enough to make fun of others as well as themselves. Looking back to when the market was strong enough to offer people comfort but not pervasive enough to have a stranglehold on life." From here, apropos of John Cleese. Is it fair to say that both Leavers and Remainers are nostalgic for the time when John Cleese was funny?

5. Also on the subject of Britain, The Old Vicarage, Emneth is for sale. You know, where Rev W. Awdry lived. And yes, there are toy trains there.

The world we live in

1. MEPs. You might have missed the fact that the South East of England now has more MEPs called Alexandra Phillips (i.e., 2) than either Labour or Conservative MEPs. One Ms Phillips is a Green and one is in the Brexit Party. Brexit Party MEPs also include Christina Jordan, who "came to the UK from Malaysia in 1985. She completed her nurse training at Winchester General Hospital before working there as a staff nurse" and Henrik Overgaard Neilsen, "a Danish citizen who has lived in the UK for over 20 years with his British wife and two children. He has worked as an NHS dentist, becoming a senior trade union official representing 30,000 UK dentists". I'm not the first to note that the Brexit MEP candidates are a pretty diverse bunch, and here is Lance Forman noting that "Amongst our eight London candidates we have white and black, men and women. // We are three Jews; one person of dual Jewish and Bahá'í faiths; one Hindu; one half-Muslim of Pakistani descent; and two Christians – of African and Northern Irish origin." Before the euro elections, "Of the 17 MEPs of an ethnic minority background, eight [were] from the U.K.", and the Brexit Party became a further major contributor to ethnic diversity in the European Parliament after the elections.

2. On a related theme but on the other side of the world: "What Singaporeans need to understand better is that, under present circumstances, there may be no sweet spot we can occupy that will keep both the Chinese and the Americans simultaneously happy. There is no silver bullet, and it is a fool's errand to look for one. // Neither can we just lie low and hope for the best. You may not look for trouble but trouble may come looking for you. And trouble is all the more likely to seek you out if either side thinks you are, or can be, intimidated. // Our more complex domestic politics is a complication. I see still faint but distinct signs that some section of our population - how large, I do not know - either for transactional economic reasons, or unthinking ethnic sympathies, or sheer chauvinism, is beginning to look at the current US-China tensions through a racial lens. // As US-China competition heats up, this tendency may be accentuated. This is the greatest danger to Singapore in this new phase of US-China competition. It is still at a nascent stage and must be checked, if necessary by the prophylactic exercise of the coercive powers that are the legitimate monopoly of the state, before external and internal forces act and react with each other in a vicious spiral downwards."

3. On a different note: "Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore. ... We could have a Hurricane Katrina five times a week, every week – imagine how much attention that would receive – and it would not offset the number of annual lives saved by the decline in heart disease in the last 50 years."

4. "Hard left protester who screamed ‘Nazi scum’ at Donald Trump supporter as he was covered in milkshake is company boss selling private services to the NHS". That's my entry for most 2019ish headline of 2019 anyway.

5. Leavers in Bristol have found a safe space.

An extraordinary story

It's hard to precis this story, but let's just say it involves a Harvard law professor who meets a woman in a hardware store (in one of the many impossible-to-invent details, the fact that she is wearing a dress is a key part of her allure), becomes involved with her, in a way, and also caught up with her transgender friend - and then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. It is a cracking story and so much of the delight resides in the details that I shouldn't tell you more.

There is a further irony. At a point when he was feeling more friendly towards his on-off girlfriend's transgender friend, the professor wrote this weirdly odd piece speaking ill of the late Justice Scalia - but accurately describing himself as a naive fool. 

The United Kingdom

Some glimpses of this country.

1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")

2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.

3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.

4. A literary map of the UK.

5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)

6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.

7. Here is something written by a transwoman who became a Catholic after transitioning: Durham University's Centre for Catholic Studies' "nurturing, dialogical community showed [her] the possibility for reconciliation with the ecclesial tradition that had nourished [her] theological imagination".

Links for fun

1. In 1587, Urbano Monte made the largest known early map of Earth. You can play around with a digital version made into a globe here.

2. A really annoying flight of stairs.

3. Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine! "You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl")." Mark Steyn - and with observations on Titanic too.

4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.

5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.

7. Christopher Walken dancing.

Manioc and Maniacs

This is an absolutely fascinating Scott Alexander review of The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. Read it. There are plenty of interesting things in it that I do not touch on below (see here for more of the interesting details).

The book is about the importance for human life of the transmission of cultural practices, and how difficult it would have been for anyone trying to interrogate those cultural practices using (what we might describe as) pure reason.

The best example concerns manioc, a tuber native to the Americas that contains cyanide. "In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid."  If you don’t carry out these arduous and time-consuming steps then you die. You might think, if you were being critical about it, that these steps are really designed to make the tuber palatable. But if that is all you want to do then you can skip some of the steps and you will end up with a perfectly decent-tasting manioc product and have more time to spend on other things. But then - a long time later and in a way that you would find hard to link to the fact that you skimped on manioc processing - you would die. So your best bet is to follow all the steps of manioc preparation, even though you cannot understand why they are necessary and even though you could not understand them if you tried. Free-thinking rationalism is not your friend; blind obedience to tradition is.

You can see how this kind of story, a beefed-up Chesterton’s Fence, potentially explains lots of taboos and other cultural practices. You might think that it explains them away: once you see that, say, the dietary restrictions of Leviticus have health benefits (do they?) then you might say that you don’t need the hypothesis that God ordered them. (Not that that is a strictly logical conclusion: isn’t it more likely that a beneficent God would order you to follow rules that are beneficial to your health? I don’t think it is a disproof of the existence of my parents that I have discovered reasons for washing my hands independent of the fact that they told me to.) 

But I want to go beyond this. Let’s go back to the manioc. One way of reading the story is that, by some means (trial and error, cultural evolution/memes, beneficent intervention of a deity), humans landed upon cultural practices that have practical benefits that they could not justify to themselves, but which "We", with the benefit our scientific knowledge of (e.g.) cyanide, can now understand. So now "We" can look critically at the cultural practices we have inherited - and of course "We" do so with a respectful and admiring eye, knowing that they are the result of centuries of cultural evolution, not just dismissing them as superstitious nonsense (as we would have done before we heard the manioc story) - and decide which to keep and which to throw away. So, for example, let’s say that we hear that people haven’t built in such and such an area despite humans having lived nearby for centuries. The locals say that the area is haunted or that it’s bad luck to live there. We don't just laugh. We have a look and maybe find out that it’s in a flood plain or has groundwater with some carcinogenic properties.

That’s all well and good. But we should take more from the manioc story than that. The moral I want to press on you is that even if "We" think we have understood the objective benefit of the taboo, we might be wrong. We might remove the bitterness of the manioc, so to speak, and then die - but without being able to understand the link between our deaths and our breaking of the taboo.

What I mean is this: even now our scientific knowledge is not sufficient to give us confidence that we understand the objective justifications for all our cultural practices. I’m not being dismissive of the hard sciences here: I’m sure "We" understand quite enough about which food taboos are worth keeping and which are not; there’s no replication crisis in chemistry. But our understanding of psychology and social science has not reached the same levels. Sure, we can throw out the rules of Leviticus on pork and mixed fibres if all we care about is our bodily health. But what about when it comes to our psychological and social health?

Let’s take just one example of a disturbing psychological/social development in a rich Western country, namely the alarming rise in self-harm in England: "Among 16 to 24-year-old women in 2014, 19.7% reported having self-harmed at some point in their life, compared with 11.7% in 2007 and 6.5% in 2000", says the BBC. (There are plenty of other such sad developments to choose from, e.g., "Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces", but let’s just stick to one.) What has caused this?

The BBC’s article on self-harm says: "The triggers can be complex, but experts suggest academic pressures, and problems such as bullying or body image, are increasingly significant factors." Maybe. Or maybe those things are just the bitter taste of some underlying cyanide poisoning. Who is doing the bullying? Why are they doing it? Where does this body image problem come from?

Some might see no difficulty in saying that, obviously, growing up in the age of social media and Tinder is tougher on women than growing up in the age of Blockbuster video and landlines and so more self-harm is inevitable. But is that right? You don’t know and no one does. There is no proper, replicable, reliable science here. Think of the manioc again: you can deal with the readily observable bitterness without eradicating the long-term invisible threat of cyanide poisoning. Are mental illnesses not capable of being brought on as subtly as physical ones?

If 16-24 year-old women are in a bad way, and it seems that they are, then I’d blame the parents: maybe the cyanide here is something to do with parenting practices having changed in the last couple of generations. As a cultural conservative I might be interested in looking at, say, absent fathers or lack of church attendance. But there are left-wing alternatives too: changing work and income patterns arising from 1980s and 1990s privatisations, for example, or declines in trade union membership. Or it could be something completely different: increased male consumption of video games or pornography (which has not led to increased violence or sexual violence in societies proportionate to the increase in consumption - but might it have caused something else entirely?) or the long term effects of compulsory education and the end of child labour? I’m joking, but only a little: most of human history has seen 16-24 year old women making valuable contributions to the income or lives of their families, not just sitting in classrooms writing essays that no-one wants to write and no-one wants to read, and even "the experts" mentioned in the BBC article refer to academic pressures rather than the pressures of work or family life.

All we know for certain is that the last couple of generations have seen massive changes to a whole range of social practices: relations between the generations (teenage rebellion was invented and has now been un-invented again as parents and children get on better now - back to the olden days on this, I suspect), marriage and sexual relations, child-rearing, work-life patterns, gender roles, religious observance, public nudity, lengthy retirements, old people in old people’s homes, tattoos, not wearing hats, doing make-up on the train, using rude words - the list goes on. We are cooking the manioc of our minds in completely different ways. And what do we know about those minds? What was it we used to do that rinsed out the cyanide of self-harm? What can the scientists tell us?

This is the state of the art in the science of psychiatry (read the link - it’s fun). The psychological sciences have made a lot of progress from a standing start not long ago, but they are not yet at the stage where they can even tell us what makes an attractive woman attractive to a heterosexual man: it’s not the waist to hips ratio; is it nubility? Or do we have no idea (other than not looking like a man)?

I don’t think increasing self-harm is related to the fact that men don’t wear hats any more or are prepared to spend large sums of money on cups of coffee. But these things can be pretty complicated. If you read the link to Alexander’s review at the top of this piece then you will see why divination using birds or bones is in fact a good idea for hunting caribou or planting crops. If you haven’t yet read the link, try to work out why that might be before you do so. This stuff is tricky, even when we do understand what is going on.

Note also that being half-right about what is going on is not necessarily any better than blindly following tradition. Imagine visiting the Tukanoans with a feminist sensibility, seeing their women working hard on the manioc (Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of the day detoxifying manioc) and concluding that the social purpose of manioc preparation from an objective standpoint is the subjection of women in a patriarchal society. You might be half-right about that: it might be that women are forced to do the work in order to keep them down while the men swan about writing blog posts. But you’d be wrong if you thought no one needed to do the work. Liberate the women by stopping intensive manioc preparation and you would condemn everyone to cyanide poisoning. Let’s take the analogy back to England: maybe a woman’s place isn’t in the home and a man doesn’t need to wear a hat; but perhaps, for psychological health, someone needs to be in the home or someone needs to wear a hat (or someone needs to [your theory here]).

The manioc story has a sad epilogue: "At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. ... Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa." Will an African one day write a book that explains the causes of self-harm and then sadly concludes: "Even after hundreds of years, self-harm among young women remains a serious health problem in England"?

Gentleman Jack: a review

Gentleman Jack is a Sunday evening BBC-HBO co-production period drama set in the 1830s, with high production values (the scenes set in Hastings aside) and a high-quality cast. You know the sort of thing.

As I watched the first episode, I starting thinking: how would you go about constructing a villain for a modern TV show set in Victorian times? 

You'd obviously make them a wealthy landowner. No, stronger than that, they would be an absentee landowner who had no apparent interest in their estates other than the income it brought them. They'd have to return to the family pile for plot reasons (and because you'd spent a fair chunk of the production budget on hiring a nice country house), but they would openly talk about moving away again quickly, perhaps (for added villainy) by going to a slave-owning US state, say, Virginia. 

You would rub in the economics: perhaps you would give the villain a soft-hearted old relative who sometimes went easy on the tenants and then have your villain turn up to renege on a rent indulgence shown by the elderly relative, and humiliate him in front of his tenant to boot. When collecting rents, you would make sure that the villain evicted an 80-year old man who had nowhere else to live; and if any tenant, faced with your duplicity, were to venture an opinion that one day the tenants would throw the landowners off the land, your villain would respond by saying that that was all the more reason for the landowners to give as good as they got.

You could really lay it on thick. How about having the villain express an interest in exploiting fossil fuel deposits? And if the elderly relative were to opine that coal is 'dirty stuff' and then the villain ignore him in favour of profit? 

If you were not scared of going too far then you could have the characters discuss the modest widening of the franchise resulting from the Great Reform Act, the showpiece of the reforming Whig Government of the 1830s, and have your villain say "Don't talk to me about progress. It's change that's unnecessary and entirely in the wrong direction!". 

You would of course give your villain some personal failings as well. How about treating inferiors badly? Make them generally curt and unthinking with servants. But that's just for starters. You would also introduce a doctor who ventures a progressive opinion, e.g. that a depressed wealthy heiress might be better off working for a living, then allow a woman of the household to offer the doctor a drink, and then have your villain countermand the offer of a drink and order the doctor to look at your horse.

It goes without saying that your villain would be indulging in a casual adulterous affair. And the episode would end with the villain literally twirling a cane while strolling off to seduce the depressed and vulnerable wealthy heiress discussed earlier.

I have described what the supposed heroine of our story, Anne Lister, says and does in the first episode. As I understand it, because she is a lesbian rather than a man, all of these characteristics of the typical villain of a Victorian TV drama are now supposed to be signs that she is "fearless, charismatic, and determined to do things her own way ... she defies every convention of the society she lives in", as the BBC itself puts it. 

If I were an old-fashioned Marxist then I know exactly what I would say about this. This is the most egregious example of rentier-bourgeoisie propaganda: there is a very thin veneer of progressivism provided by making the main character a woman, but otherwise this is well-funded cheerleading for the worst excesses of the Victorian capitalist-landowning classes. It is a parody of Jacob Rees-Mogg in drag! Is it just like the way multinational corporations wave a rainbow flag to pretend to be progressive, and then use that as a distraction from crushing unions, oppressing workers in the third world, ruining the environment etc etc. 

But I'm not a Marxist of any kind. I'm just pleased to see that the BBC can provide a sympathetic portrait of reactionary politics and capitalist endeavour. "She’s an efficient landlord and runs rings around her coal mining rivals", the BBC says, bigging her up. I'm now looking forward to the BBC spotting that General Gordon was gay and using that as an excuse for a lavish costume drama with him as the hero. The tagline: "He's an efficient imperialist and runs rings around the natives!" Andrew Scott could play Gordon, with a few knowing, Fleabag-esque, looks at the camera. Give it a soundtrack with some pop music on and we're looking at 3 BAFTAs at least.

Anyway, the Marxists needn't worry. I'm sure the proletariat has better things to do than watch BBC costume dramas on a Sunday evening. They've got Ubers to drive, Deliveroo orders to fulfil and Amazon parcels to pack. 

The populist revolt yet to come?

I originally gave a link to this, from Lewis Goodall, as an update to my earlier Plea to Parliament post but it really deserves its own entry.

Goodall points out that the 2016 referendum was "an expression of faith in the strength and durability of the British political system and in its leaders. // Voters were certain that their wishes in the referendum would be carried out without too much difficulty: I lost count of the numbers of voters who, during the referendum and since, dismissed concerns about our withdrawal, not only from the EU but of its myriad political, economic and social auspices, with a variant of the following reply: "I'm sure they can sort it out." // In other words the Brexit vote, as well as a cri de coeur for Westminster to listen, was also an affirmation of faith by the British public in the fundamental competence of the British state to prosecute even the most difficult political outcomes."

That is a good point. We were given a choice and everyone thought that it was a real choice. The basic competence, honesty and good faith of the politicians offering us the choice were taken for granted. The high turnout was itself a vote of confidence in the system.

A large part of the rationale for Remainers demanding a second referendum is that things have changed because we can now see that leaving the EU is so very tricky. What does this mean?

We were told at the time that leaving would be difficult. So it must mean something more than that.

One thing it might mean is that leaving is just plain impossible. But it's not. It wasn't a referendum on making pi a more sensible number or moving the UK to the southern hemisphere or building a submarine out of cheese. There are some countries that are in the EU and some that are not, and moving from one condition to the other is politically possible. Hugo Rifkind is wrong about this. 

Another thing Remainers might mean is this: we, the political leaders of the country, are incompetent and simply can't make Brexit happen, so you'd better give up on that and aim lower. That's not what anyone was told at the time and not what anyone believed then. I don't believe it even today. Or maybe it means: we won't do it. Either way, as we lawyers observe, sometimes it doesn't matter whether someone is unwilling or unable, what matters is that they are not doing what they promised to do. 

Failing or refusing to carry out the promise to enact the result of the referendum has, Goodall says, caused the faith in the system that we saw in 2016 to disappear. Things have got so bad that, well, this is how he puts it: "How else can a working class crowd of voters on the Fylde, in Newport, in Durham, cheer figures once associated with the economic and Thatcherite right, like Farage, Widdecombe and multimillionaire Richard Tice? These are people for whom such places would once have had nothing but contempt. But now they are cheered as the true and authentic voice of ordinary people, of "real" people; politics is regearing along new, jagged and unpredictable axes."

Goodall is sceptical that that faith can re-appear. The thrust of his story is that we are in a new age of fury.

I disagree. A new age of fury is a great story. But let's just remember the 2017 General Election. That was after the referendum. Remainers were already in deep mourning for the result and worked up about reversing it: 4 million people had already signed a petition asking for a second referendum (remember that one?). Things weren't that different from today. But the two main parties agreed that Brexit should happen and we had a return to traditional two party politics: indeed, there was huge support for each of the two main parties, each of which espoused a distinctive set of policies, and each of which was reaching out, in different ways, to the left-behind Leavers recently uncovered by the referendum. The third parties that had recently flourished, UKIP and the LibDems, disappeared into irrelevance. It was democratic politics working as it is meant to work. Sure, it led to a hung Parliament, but so did the 2010 election, and that was back in the good old 'I agree with Nick' days when no one doubted the basic competence of our political classes.

All of that can be recaptured. All that has changed since 2017 is that the deadline for leaving the EU has passed and Parliament is giving every impression that it will move that deadline to 'never'. So all it will take to recapture faith in the political classes, as I said before, is for Britain actually to leave the EU. Competence just means doing the job: so do it. If the builders finish late then we sigh and put up with it: it's if the builders simply refuse to build it that we get really annoyed. So build it! Finish the job! Then politics will return to 2017: Nigel Farage will be squashed again, Change UK - The Independent Party - #Remain Alliance - whatever they are (the people whose logo is a drop-down menu icon that offers no choices) will wither, and the people who want Corbynism can argue with the people who don't in the confident expectation that one or other will prevail. 

I appreciate that that will leave a sizeable number of often quite wealthy, well-educated, comfortable, articulate and well-connected people very annoyed that Britain has left the EU. But they will be annoyed that they lost a referendum. Good. They can try to win the next one. They can have no other complaint: the system worked as it meant to. That is - by far - the lesser evil than having a sizeable number of people utterly disillusioned and furious with the fundamental political structure of the country - and rightly so. And if you think it is more important to ensure that the rich and comfortable group gets everything they want from the political classes than that the less privileged and more dispersed group gets the one thing many of them have ever asked for then you should reflect on your priorities. Or, at the very least, consider what a new age of fury would do for house prices. 

"‘This country is a blessed nation,’ he said. ‘The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts, we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.’"

This, I think, is one of the better pieces about Brexit by a self-reflective Remainer.

The writer, Tom Crewe, is not immune to patriotism. My title is taken from his quotation from Blair's farewell speech. He comments: "if tears didn’t spring to my eyes, and I’m not prepared to say they didn’t, I undoubtedly brimmed with pride". Leavers sometimes need to be reminded that not all Remainers are busy robbing poor boxes in order to avoid standing for the National Anthem.

He talks about the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. It's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to this urtext of Britain at its best: carry out a Google search if you doubt me. But Crewe is able to note that it was "a minutely calculated, essentially propagandist, publicly funded spectacle". Of course it was, you might say. So what?, you might ask. But, at some level, some people seem to have regarded it as a quasi-spontaneous outburst of feeling from the Real Britain, and there is a fair degree of overlap between those people and the most upset Remainers. I'm afraid the closest thing to a spontaneous outburst of feeling from the Real Britain that we have seen recently is the Leave vote itself. (For the record, I enjoyed the 2012 ceremony.)

Crewe also notes that it is Remainers, not Leavers, who get really worked up about Britain's influence in the world. The typical Remainer worries that leaving the EU means that Britain is leaving the 'top table', or ceasing to 'punch above its weight'. The typical Leaver would be happy if he could influence his own MP to do what he voted for in 2016, and influence on the rest of the world be damned. 

Crewe also notes that Remainers are principally afflicted by embarrassment. He asks why that embarrassment strikes now when it has not affected right-thinking people earlier, for example, given the "ideological savagery of the Tory-led governments since 2010"? (Gosh: the mild centrism of a Con-LibDem alliance is now "ideological savagery": I suppose same-sex marriage is pretty extreme by historical standards, but it was pretty mainstream at the time.) 

The answer, of course, is that Remainers feel that the world is watching them - and laughing. (Leavers have enough to worry about with Remainers laughing at them before they start worrying about what foreigners think.) It is akin to that feeling of being abroad and spotting other British people, loud and vulgar and, well, just plain embarrassing. It's ok if people behave like that back home, but it's just too much to bear when they do it in front of foreigners, making us look bad by association. (Why is that? Is it because even the most sophisticated and cultured Brits are secretly convinced that they are much less sophisticated and cultured than foreigners, and that outward crudeness from a fellow Brit will expose the truth?) I am sure that if Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau and Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron and everyone who has ever been in a Scandi-drama all turned round and said that they thought that Brexit was a jolly good idea and they wished they'd thought of it first then Remainers would be a lot more happy about it, despite all the underlying facts being the same.

Crewe concludes: "But it’s also possible to see the vote to Leave another way: as a moment when reality triumphed over storytelling. ... Brexit, whatever the dangers, is forcing Britain to get to know itself better. Not all countries are given that opportunity." He's right. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but I'm hopeful that this is an opportunity that Britain will put to good use.

The future of the Conservative Party

You are probably aware that there is a large number of people in the UK who are socially conservative but economically left-wing and who find themselves politically homeless (in the B&B sense, if not quite sleeping rough), unwelcome to both the woke-brigades of the metropolitan left and the low-tax, pro-austerity leaders of the right.

What is stopping political parties from picking up their votes?

Part of the answer is that UKIP did pick up their votes (and the Brexit Party will do so too): UKIP always had a much stronger cultural brand than an economic one.

Another part of the answer is that many of these people are Muslims: "a quarter of Brummies, including a plurality of the city’s children" are Muslims, the Economist tells us, and "they are equally clear that others must accept them for who they are: products of a conservative Muslim culture."

Muslim people have proved a reliable voting bloc for Labour, in part, at least, because the Conservative Party has not been as welcoming to them as it should have been. Even in its heyday as a decent party, UKIP made little effort to attract to Muslims (and has no hope now), but the Conservative Party, at least, can change.

Birmingham is where we might see this change happen. You have probably heard about the protests against the 'No Outsiders' LGBT teaching programme. (I have tried - not terribly hard, I admit - to find out what is in the programme, but with no success.) The Economist (same link as above - read it) reports that "The city’s Labour councillors, who dominate local politics, range from Muslims with sympathy for the parents protesting against the gay-friendly classes, to secular left-wingers who strongly support the school." 

So the local Labour Party is split on a cultural issue. Which side does the Conservatives take? "The Conservative opposition tends to be on the progressive side; one worry among local Tories is that a new commercial development may destroy a “gay village” near the city centre." Hmm. Let's run the numbers on that one: where are the votes going to be in the long run? Have a look again at that fact about the children of Birmingham I quoted above.

Ok, so there are votes to be had in cultural conservatism. But isn't this all just grubby vote-counting, not based on any principle?

I don't think so. Read this piece, by someone called Jacob Williams, about why he became a Muslim. He was at Oxford, it seems, where "My utopian peers found their purpose in crusades against racism and homophobia, but their contempt for England revolted me. I chose a different course and embarked on a search for God. // Where could a lost soul go? Nowhere in college or country offered an answer. What the campus Conservative Party outlined was absurd: We can pick up the fragments of our culture by putting on three-piece suits, getting riotously drunk, and reviving the divine right of kings."

A serious person, a lover of England, looked for meaning in life and found it in Islam. Expect more stories like this.

Williams is a small-c conservative; he may well be a big-C conservative too. And why not? (He missed out at university, of course: you haven't had fun until you've spent an evening in a port-fuelled rampage aimed at reversing Cromwellism! And Henry VIII! And the Rescript of Honorius too! But I digress.)

Again, try this, by Ed Husain about Roger Scruton: conservative non-Muslim thinkers find plenty to like in Islam.

I would suggest, therefore, that there is a viable future for the Conservative Party as a party for conservatives, patriots and believers. Of course, that development would be helped if the party came to be led by, say, the Rochdale-born son of a Pakistani-born bus driver. Quite soon, we will get to see if the Conservative Party is still entitled to its old reputation as a party that can survive any change in British society.

Brexit - a plea to Parliament - updated

I'm sure you have seen that a couple of polls give the Brexit Party a decent chance of winning the Euro-elections. (My guess: it will come second to Labour.)

How do you feel about seeing Farage back in the news? Probably not too happy. We'd all hoped he was out of politics forever.

Well, this was all utterly predictable - and it was predicted. See this from November 2018: 

"A botched Brexit will draw renewed attention to the void between voters and the political class, which has been exposed but not closed by the referendum. The general consequence of this void is the rise of populist movements, which attract voters by pointing to this disconnect, and promising that they will smash the entrenched, corrupted “elite” and ensure that “the people” are heard once more. Populist mobilisation can be used for either “left-wing” or “right-wing” purposes, or even both simultaneously, though right-wing populism is most common in contemporary Europe. Indeed, it is rampant across the continent, thanks to the void entrenched by European integration. Right-wing populists have captured state power in Austria (the Freedom Party), Hungary (Orban’s Fidesz party) and Italy (the Lega and the Five Star Movement), while polling at second place in countries like Denmark (the Danish People’s Party), France (the National Front) and Germany (Alternative for Germany). This is not a random coincidence. It is a structural feature of the European Union.

Thanks to the Brexit referendum, Britain is temporarily inoculated from this terrible disease. In the preceding decades, voters who had been effectively disenfranchised by the convergence of the mainstream parties flirted first with the British National Party and then the UK Independence Party, in a desperate attempt to compel the establishment to listen to them. The EU referendum allowed these citizens – and many who felt so marginalised that they had never voted before – to express their disgust. Having apparently disciplined political leaders by rejecting the EU, they promptly abandoned UKIP, just as they had previously dropped the BNP. Contrary to [...] widespread Remainer predictions of some sort of post-referendum “Faragist” or even “fascist” takeover in “Weimar Britain”, UKIP’s vote collapsed in the 2017 general election.[...] Since the referendum, UKIP has also been through four leaders, lost its only MP and many councillors, and has been abandoned by its major donors.

The referendum therefore offered the British political elite a golden opportunity to restore representative democracy, neutralising the populist threat for good. ... [It] signalled to politicians that they must represent the voters again, and gave them the opportunity to do so, thereby closing the void. Unlike the Continent, where traditional parties have been all but wiped out in countries like Italy and France, displaced by populist upstarts of the right and the “extreme centre”, in the 2017 general election the two main parties gained their strongest support in decades, reversing a longstanding trend of political fragmentation. The UK’s populist party was decimated, while Labour became Europe’s most successful social democratic party. With Corbyn’s “old Labour” platform, real political contestation seemed to be back, at long last. Remainers’ predictions could not have been more wrong, though few acknowledge it.

This opportunity for democratic renewal now risks being missed entirely, with grave consequences. Any attempt to overtly overturn the referendum result, through a second referendum or similar, will result in the rapid resurgence of British populism. Either UKIP will be revived, or something similar will emerge. Its leaders will have concrete proof that, regardless of how you vote, the political establishment will not listen to you. The only alternative is to support a force willing to smash the lot of them. We do not have to imagine what this would look like: we need only look to the Continent.

Crucially, if this happens, this will primarily be the fault of Remainers, not Brexit. [...] If and when there is a right-wing populist resurgence, these very same individuals will declare: “See, we told you so – Brexit is about racist populism!” In reality, Brexit was a golden opportunity to lance this boil by closing the political void. It is the intransigence and myopia of the British left that is squandering this opportunity." 

I disagree in part: the political right is pretty bad too. Moreover, pretty much everything that pro-Brexit MPs have been up to recently amply justifies Dominic Cummings' desire to keep them locked in a dark dungeon during any political campaign.

Let's pause for a moment to note that we should be proud of our political culture: Farage is not a fascist, and he gets popularity precisely from being not a fascist.

But just for a moment. Because we need to go on to ask: who (or what) comes after Farage? There's surely only so much that some people will take before they despair of Farage's attempts to do things by the book and turn to people who don't care about the book. 

You see that phrase: "concrete proof that, regardless of how you vote, the political establishment will not listen to you". This is my plea to our politicians: don't give us that proof! Leave and then campaign to re-join the EU - if being outside the EU is that bad then we will be desperate to rejoin (the EU seems reluctant to let us go, after all)! Brexit In Name Only, as soft a Brexit as you like! But please, please don't do to the people of the UK what you would never have done to the people of Scotland: do not reverse their referendum. If you care about democracy, if you care about legitimacy, if you really care about being tough on fascism and tough on the causes of fascism, please please please do not do what you are thinking of doing, what we can all see that you want to do - do not  undermine the result of a referendum.

UPDATE: Lord Falconer (posting from Beverly Hills!) agrees with me. Read the replies he patiently provides to a large number of people making the obvious points in response.

UPPERDATE: And so does Philip Collins in the Times. This is really not rocket science.