People's Vote - the post-mortem

There is a terribly interesting article on People's Vote in the FT.

It is quite right to say that we got very near to a second referendum happening: the monied and media classes were broadly keen on it, in many cases excessively so and, had they been better led, I suspect they could have achieved it. But the fact that their beliefs were quite different from those of the country as a whole is mentioned only in passing.

"Campbell, Baldwin and Mandelson didn’t want to be explicitly anti-Brexit. Citing their polling, they argued instead that the campaign had to be about resolving the blockage in British politics — thereby appealing to both Leavers and Remainers.  This also chimed with what Downing Street saw. James Johnson, who ran polling for May, recalls: “In every focus group I did, the reaction was always the same: ‘It’s done, we voted, we just need to get on with it’ . . . The only shred of credibility [People’s Vote] ever had was when it was framed as a way to resolve things. ... 

 The marches also didn’t win over floating voters, such as those in the north and Midlands who had backed Brexit in the hope of better public services. Instead, they may have skewed the campaign towards a passionate, pro-immigration minority. Baldwin concedes: “The proportion of soft Leavers supporting a People’s Vote was going down and down.” ”

 And there we see the problem: Remain's most vocal, prominent, enthusiastic and well-off supporters were its own worst adverts. (Much the same was true of Leave, as Cummings realised, which is why Johnson, Gove, Stuart and co were so important.)

 Of course, as Ed West points out, there is nothing terribly unusual about the majority of the country feeling distanced from their own native elites - or indeed favouring foreign ones (e.g., many Remainers). How about this: "But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote." (That is from this interesting piece.)

As for the future of People's Vote: "In June, four years after the referendum, People’s Vote — with its large email lists and half a million Facebook followers — renamed itself “Democracy Unleashed”. It has warmed up with attacks on Cummings but is yet to mention the word Brexit. Its eyes are on the general election due in 2024. Its slogans include “Campaigning to put power back in the hands of the people” ...". Is it just me, or is that slogan not the worst ever paraphrase of "Take Back Control"?

Our relationships with inanimate objects

I was prompted to consider what is going on in the 'relationship' between a dog and his/her/its owner. It proved to be surprisingly hard. So I thought I would start with the easier case, namely human relationships with inanimate objects - mere things. But even thinking about this turned out to be both more tricky and more interesting than I had suspected. Some thoughts below.