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.