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.

Miscellaneous links

1. Why Birmingham is not rich - poor public transport. Is good public transport (part of the reason) why London is rich?

2. She was 0-6 0-5 and matchpoint down - and she won!

3. The facts are true, the news is fake: why Taleb will not talk to English journalists (apropos of l'affaire Roger Scruton).

4. How quickly mores change. 20-something adult woman gets engaged to man of similar age she has known for many years - and is met with disapproval. Her love-life would have been nearly the world's most boring story a generation ago. Now it is a news story - or at least, an online magazine story. I am sorely tempted to take the (old-fashioned) feminist line on this: would anyone have expressed disapproval if she were a man? (By which I mean: a man marrying a man?) Human societies are capable of some weird varieties - don't be at all surprised if teen marriage comes back into vogue one day.

5. The gender gap in voice pitch has halved in the last decades, with women moving toward the lower pitch levels of men. Sounds like a laboured metaphor for a worthy novel.

6. Why the world of sperm donation helps the likes of Wickham and hurts the likes of Darcy.

7. The world as seen from America: a woman goes to the Gaeltacht and suggests it is one of few places where promoting native identity is uncontroversial. I suggest: most of the world.

8. "Thus, in several dimensions, areas in the US where Scandinavian descendants live resemble a ‘Scandinavia in miniature’." Worth looking at together with this piece on inequality in the Economist.

The Entitled Under Attack

Here are two articles, about completely different topics, but which struck me as having a common theme.

The first is this. It's an enjoyable piece by Caitlin Flanagan dealing with the American university entrance cheating scandal: Flanagan once worked at a posh Los Angeles school with children of the kind who feature in the scandal.

The second is this. It's Giles Fraser continuing his controversial thoughts on Brexit, this time responding to a point Will Self made about listening.

As I say, two completely different stories. So what is the common theme?

Entitlement - and the wrath of the entitled when scorned.

From Flanagan's piece: "These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA."

From Fraser's: "The Brexit debate can be characterised, without too much deformation, as one between a group of people who are used to being listened to and a group who are not. The Remain heartlands are in London, and university towns like Oxford and Cambridge. These places were most enthusiastic in signing up to the petition to cancel Article 50. They are used to being listened to. ... Pin your ears back. In 2016, the clear majority of those who spoke asked to leave the EU. Yet ever since, the political class have pretended not to understand, thus insinuating that what was said was itself unclear. It wasn’t unclear, they just didn’t like it. And so what we need now is not more coffee and chat. We need a whole new political class." (See also this, polite comments by Rob Ford in reaction to more overt signs of Brexit Derangement Syndrome on the part of Jolyon Maugham.)

Still, those entitled people will probably be OK. The abolition of slavery in the southern states of the US was a massive blow to the wealth of the wealthiest (must of which was held in the form of slaves). But within 10 years, they had bounced back. I'm sure that Remainers and doting parents of the coddled mediocre will bounce back too.

Unknown unknowns

There are lots of problems out there. Just think of any of the ones you have heard of: climate change; the weird debates about transgenderism (whatever you think about this issue, you must think there is a problem of some kind); stagnant wages in the West; the threat from automation; the impending insect apocalypse; Brexit.

You have heard about all of these issues. You might even think that you have heard too much about some of them. So consider this: because you have heard about these problems, you can be sure that there are lots of other clever and important people who have also heard about them and who are desperately thinking up solutions. That means - surely - that there's a decent chance that these issues will join the Schleswig-Holstein Question, anarchist terrorism and the hole in the ozone layer in the ranks of difficult problems that have been solved. Not necessarily easily or cheaply, but solved all the same.

Take, for example, the threat of a return to the politics of the 1930s: extremism, fascism, racism, lack of faith in democracy, succour for the (nearly as bad) enemies of fascism, such as communism. We can all agree that this would be awful. Indeed, we pretty much all do agree about this, from the most ardent Remoaner to Dominic Cummings. So if that is indeed what is happening, despite the united views of anyone who is anyone that it should not happen, then it's not exactly creeping up on our blindside: you can hardly move without bumping into someone who has detected real-life fascists or is busily comparing some political nobody to Hitler.

So I don't think you need to worry about this problem. There are lots of clever and important people out there who are on the look-out for a return to the 1930s: if someone suggests building concentration camps or uniformed parades of party members or a dictatorship of the proletariat or special clothing for Jewish people, you can be sure that those clever and important people will spot the parallels and put a stop to it.

So those are the known unknowns. But what are the unknown unknowns? While our guns are pointing out to sea to ward off the fascists arriving by boat, what dangers are creeping through the jungle behind us?

Here's one thought.

The 1930s led to World War II. There are lots of bad things about the politics of the 1930s quite apart from the War, but the War was very bad.

There was also another very bad war - World War I. And just as WWII resulted from the world and politics of the years that preceded it, so WWI resulted from what came before it.

When we look back at the 1930s, we see the terrible harbingers of doom: economic hardship, the gathering storm clouds, rearmament campaigns, militarism, revanchism, people in uniforms with funny salutes. So when we look back at the 1900s and 1910s, we should also be seeing the harbingers of WWI. But we don't. We see the wonderful Edwardian summer of the world, the sophistication of fin de siècle society, the culmination of the long period of peace, the first era of globalisation, the developments of modern thought and technology, female emancipation, psychiatry, etc, etc. The Vienna of Wittgenstein and Freud! The Paris of Picasso and Apollinaire! Doesn't your heart swell to think of it?

When someone tells you that they see parallels between today's world and the world before WWI, especially anyone who writes for The Economist, they are normally telling you that they are seeing something nice, particularly about global free trade. But surely seeing such a parallel should be every bit as worrying as someone seeing a parallel between the world of today and the world of the 1930s?

Let's talk about probably the single most successful political actor of 1914: Gavrilo Princip. He assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne because, as he said during his trial, "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria." Sure enough, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was set up in 1918 and became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. The pomp of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became one with Nineveh and Tyre, thanks to a short guy who was born a serf. Princip - 1; crowned heads of continental Europe - 0.

What Princip perhaps saw was that a terrorist act could trigger a massive over-reaction from a large, multi-ethnic polity, governed by nervous leaders worried that their regime that did not enjoy the complete support of their population, and that such an over-reaction could cause a massive crisis and the overthrow of that regime. That's not a unique insight: terrorists always seek an over-reaction from their opponents - that's the only way they win. But some regimes are particularly prone to it: the paradigm case is the colonial regime garrisoned by a few soldiers far from home and outnumbered by the local population, reliant on their acquiescence and fearful that that acquiescence will quickly turn to hostility.

Note that Princip's story is not the story of the 1930s. The story of the 1930s concerns what were recognisable nation states based on broadly ethnic lines (Japan, Germany, Italy), with irredentist/expansionist ambitions, being taken over by very unpleasant but not altogether unpopular regimes that were (wrongly) confident of their prospects in a war.

The story of the 1910s, by contrast, is of multi-national empires (Austria, Russia, Germany) that were governed by broadly pleasant but not so popular regimes that were (rightly) not confident of their ability to survive domestic turmoil. The result of World War II was regime change - Italy, Japan, Austria and Germany are still with us (albeit Germany spent some time in 2 parts), but with nicer people in charge; the result of World War I was redrawing the map: Poland! Czechoslovakia! The Baltic States! A bigger Romania! Yugoslavia - still ruled by a royal family - but a new royal family!

This story of the 1910s was not one that only took place on the continent: WWI ended with the multi-ethnic United Kingdom, again ruled by pretty decent people, also divided into something more closely resembling British and Irish nation states based on ethnic lines. And you don't need to know much Irish history to know that it also involves terrorism being used to generate over-reaction by the British authorities.

(You could say that both WWI and WWII were about the triumph of the single-ethnicity nation state over the multi-ethnic empire: WWI was about dismantling the old empires, benign though they were in many ways; while WWII was about preventing Japan and Germany from creating unpleasant multi-ethnic empires. The next set of wars to be fought in Europe also fits the pattern: it was about dismantling the multi-ethnic state that was Yugoslavia. All credit to the Scots, Balts, Czechs and Slovaks for going about it peacefully.)

We have terrorists today. Those terrorists, both in their white supremacist and Islamist flavours, seek the same thing, namely over-reaction from a nervous liberal elite, unsure that it really commands the support of the population it rules, triggering a crisis from which their favoured reforms might emerge.

We also have multi-ethnic states today, governed by cultivated, educated and reasonably decent people - the equivalents of the rulers of Europe in the 1910s. Even leaving aside the multi-ethnic nature of the EU, it is not news that the individual big member states, Germany, France and the UK, are themselves becoming multi-ethnic in the manner of old European Empires (or Yugoslavia) and less like the (broadly) single-ethnicity nation states who were the problems in the 1930s.

History does not repeat itself. But that does not stop us learning from it. And the learning is not just that there are bad people out there, fascists and so on, who might take over your country and lead it astray. It is also that the problem might be the good people who are already running your country: good people who might over-react to the actions of people they see as bad (terrorists, certainly, but also "extremists"? "populists"? people who say nasty things on the internet?) in order to send a message to dissatisfied, restless, divided or unconvinced populations. There's more to avoiding war than stopping bad people from taking power.

Of course, WWI also involved a rising continental power, a declining English-speaking power, a weak/powerful Russia and some alliances that were meant to create stability. So no worries there. But I seem to recall that train timetables came into as well ...

The Dangerous Sports Club

"I first met David Kirke founding member of the Dangerous Sports club at a Piers Gaveston party in Oxford."

"A young Nigella Lawson played croquet from a sedan chair supported by 4 members of the club."

"Xan Rufus Isaacs managed to get his double decker ( complete with passengers who had won the trip as a prize in a tv show ) half-way up the slope. The plan was to attach skis to the bus. It was the smart bus conductors uniform he was wearing that probably made the Swiss realise he was deadly serious."

"I look after an archive of pictures of club activities which include an early attempt at skiing on grass in the summer by attaching blocks of ice underneath skis."

"Much effort went into selecting a decent vintage and designing the label. But no-one knew how to market the wine. I think we were drinking it at a party David gave in Fulham. There was someone there who after drinking his glass of wine proceeded to eat his wine glass. I could hear the crunching sound."

If you want to see the archive of pictures referred to above (sample captions: "Hugo Spowse jumping over Basingstoke"; "David Kirke and Mark Chamberlain, after the failure of the Midori Melonball ( the Bubble) to get to France due to adverse winds, Dover, 1987") then this is the link for you.

Harbin after the Festival

Not long ago, I gave you the link to photos of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival in all its finery. Now you might interested to see what it looks like as it melts.