Sometimes you just have to stand back from what is going on and reflect on it. I am trying to do a bit of that right now.
It is not greatly encouraging. Such reflection must be spiced and informed by reality, of course. This morning the news that the government plans that a second motorway is to be used as a lorry park in the event of Customs chaos after 29 March adds that input. That I actually had to check where the motorway in question was did not matter. What did was that we have reached the stage where the government appears to be responsible by planning for economic chaos that is entirely of its own creation. And, despite the obvious absurdity of that situation, this government still seems to have as much popular support as the Opposition, at least in England.
We live in surreal times. The danger is we have become used to them. But worse, we live in a time when government has ceased to have any direction at all. I say that because the reality is that no one really knows what Brexit is actually about. We can speculate endlessly as to why people voted to leave. The truth is every answer may be true. And so none is collectively. But we are doing it anyway. Because apparently that is what democracy demanded, even though we do not know why.
Hence, bluntly, the mess. The Tories can't agree.
The Cabinet is hopelessly divided - with no sign of any solution.
Labour still has at least four Policy options it might adopt and no one seems clear which might prevail.
Only the SNP of the major groupings in Parliament seems to know what it might do. And no one is paying them much attention.
In the meantime, chaos ensues because no one ever knew what Brexit was about and no one still does, but we are doing it anyway.
Despite which no one seems willing to ditch the government that created this complete mess - because this is a Tory creation from beginning to end.
Standing back what does this imply? I would suggest that it is the end of coherence. There is now no goal. That is true as a nation. It is true of much of the body politic. It may also be true as a society. We no longer know what we want. And the result is we have got what our incoherence inevitably delivers, which is a mess.
But why? That's the harder one to answer. I'll suggest this. Too many believed Thatcher. She did mean ‘there is no society now'. The mantra of individualism has played out. And we can no longer find a reason to live with each other. Our neighbour has ceased to be our problem.
There is, however, just one problem in all this incoherence. And that is that our neighbour is still there. And they still have an opinion. And we can't do without them, much as we try to do so.
The difficulty is that we have lost the narrative of community, but we still live in communities. The result is much more worrying than lorries parked in the M26, absurd as that will be. The consequence will be that until we can find a new narrative that brings us together the age of incoherence will last. And the risk is that the new narrative may be as divisive as the incoherence, or even build on it.
I am worried.
When I was a teenager my elder brother assured me often that when the glorious day came, whoever's glorious day it was, I would find myself up against the wall. I would always be too awkward to survive. I feel that the threat of that wall is there for far too many now. And the risk that it will be used to enforce coherence is all too real.
The need for community has never been stronger. It cannot be built simply by solving the Brexit mess. Sometime it will have to be built on common aspiration of the people of this country, and others, to live in harmony and not fear. The price of the alternative is much too high.
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You could always cheer yourself up with some cake.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/11/patisserie-valerie-to-cease-trading-without-immediate-injection-of-capital
Oh – hang on….
Go straight to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.
Hmmmm…. Who changed the rules ?
https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20181003/local/brussels-to-issue-unprecedented-warning-to-maltas-fiau-financial-times.690630
“The European Commission is expected to issue a stern warning to the Maltese Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit on what must be done to tighten up its money laundering monitoring, saying that concerns raised by the EU’s banking authority had been ignored. The EU’s justice commissioner, Vera Jourova, told the Financial Times that a “formal opinion” would list the actions that the FIAU must take, which had first been raised by the European Banking Authority in July. The commission’s opinion will be formally binding on the FIAU. The opinion will be issued by mid-November, and the FIAU will need to specify within 10 days how it intends to rectify the situation. This is the first time that the Commission will intervene in a member state to insist on enforcement of its anti-money laundering rules, the FT reported.”
This may be behind it, this and similar regulatory enhancement threatened to come, as the City won’t want to be on the receiving end of anything like this. As most of the Tories appear to work for the City rather than the electorate, Brexit appears inevitable in order for the City to survive and prosper. I would expect there to be no real consideration for the interests of anyone else.
Are you implying that to survive and prosper the City has to launder money? To which I expect the answer will be, “You may think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
You may think that. My thoughts are… elsewhere 🙂
Richard, I have been reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism for possible clues as to what’s going on. It is not a cheery read.
“Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results from depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.
“Totalitarian movements are possible whenever there are masses (of people) who, for one reason or another, have acquired the appetite for political organisation. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited and obtainable goals…. Potentially they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”
Arendt makes the point that those who wish for a totalitarian state do not wish to govern, but to destroy government, the rule of law, and the practice of justice, to atomise the population so that every man and woman feels they are on his own, and can turn to no-one except the ruler for help.
Looking at the demonisation of immigrants, the opaqueness of the Brexit movement, the neglect of the justice system, the lawlessness of the police, the suborning of politics by businesses, I would say someone is following Arendt’s precepts.
See above 🙂
I doubt that “someone” has even read Arendt. Philosophy is what you do when you step back from and above events.
Whoever is steering the boat towards the iceberg is in a state of greed and power-led action, not reflexion.
Perhaps action planned over years. I have no one in mind…
What’s been happening over a few decades now is deconstruction of a model, as Arendt predicted might happen.
A take over by corporations, or a take over by autocratic leaders?
Certainly none of our political leaders in the West have either the intellect or the knowledge to offer any answer.
Democracy was always a flawed system but is still the least bad for most countries.
It allows for education progress and freedom of information, but those two cornerstones of democracy can be subverted. They are at the moment.
Some countries with low levels of economic development, general education and political engagement, are not ready for democracy’s complex demands.
Other systems may work better at improving life conditions in those countries while they work at improving levels of education, and some do, with hiccups along the way.
Some never get to democracy, their autocratic governments keep them in the dark ages in order to stay in power. “Enemies of the People” are identified within or without. The Police, the Church and the Army help to keep control.
We seem to be back at that dark stage now ,with the City in control, in a dysfunctional democratic model, with controlled mass media.
Incoherent. No one giving directions, no one keeping watch. Turmoil.
The Age of Trump and Brexit. Flat Earthers and mass consumers.
Ignorance is bliss. Give them a bit of “Bake Off” and they’re off.
Meanwhile, in communities, whether of the old type or the Social Media type, information gets shared. Some of it true, some of it Fake. We can teach and learn to tell.
Groups get formed. Under the impression they can influence, make a difference, mobilise. And some do, to a point, at micro levels.
But we need more than that to avoid that iceberg, no number of rowers will turn the Titanic. No captain either.
We need a new engine altogether, and smaller icebergs.
Just an addition to my comments. Some analyses in this have relevance to the points made.
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5296/have-postmodernist-thinkers-deconstructed-truth
Opinion polls keep telling us that 40% of the electorate supports a government that seems intent on flushing us all down the toilet.
Yes, that’s a bit worrying.
I expect we’ll just KEEP CALM and have another cup of Rosie Lee. We don’t want to make a fuss, do we ?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-drugs-medicine-shortages-medication-nhs-final-say-eu-uk-a8579921.html I’m already fussed 🙁
Mustn’t grumble!
It’s nutty idiot Anglos all the way down, in the UK and the USA
The Pale Scot says:
“It’s nutty idiot Anglos all the way down, in the UK and the USA”
A bit thinner on the ground the further north you go in the UK, fortunately. 🙂
My take is we are trapped in a Persian participative management scam called democracy brought on in the voyage of Mardonius 2,500 years ago. Most of the illusion would pass if we used sensible technology to track money properly.
SNP MPs are indeed being ignored – if it was up to me, I’d bring the SNP MPs home to Scotland and put them to work on Indyref2 strategy. I believe at least two of them understand MMT basics and, perhaps with a little more help, would get involved in countering the currency fearties.
Being ignored is not of course a new phenomenon. All the amendments the SNP tabled to the Scotland Bill 2016 were defeated. The SoS for Scotland then made a great play of putting the consent principle in law in that Bill. Despite his many protestations, we all knew that was rubbish and were proven to be correct by the judgement of the Supreme Court.
Finally (and I could go on), Scotland has the largest fishing interest of the UK nations, but has never been properly represented by the UK at the EU meetings on fisheries. The fishing quotas are held by a few large companies, as reported by Greenpeace (not news up here).
In any other sphere, the Tories would have taken account of those big business interests – but it’s Scotland so they didn’t. They were happy to sell the (mostly Scottish) fishing silver when it suited them, but make a big play of it now as a reason to leave the EU.
(bit of an incoherent rant from me, but heyho)
George S Gordon says:
“(bit of an incoherent rant from me, but heyho)”
By comparison with the incoherent drivel we get from Westminster it’s worth a Nobel citation. 🙂
Is there a Nobel citation for common sense? If so, I’d award it to most of the other folks here.
And roll on March 2019, not for Brexit obviously, but for the publication of *Macroeconomics* by William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray and Martin Watts. The perfect title, shame we don’t have a UK-based author involved! 😉
[…] Par Richard Murphy, comptable agréé et économiste politique. Il a été décrit par le journal Guardian comme un «militant anti-pauvreté et expert en fiscalité». Il est professeur de pratique en économie politique internationale à la City University de Londres et directeur de la recherche fiscale au Royaume-Uni. Il est administrateur non exécutif de Cambridge Econometrics . Il est membre du Progressive Economy Forum. Publié à l'origine à Tax Research UK […]
Et Macron ferait bien de le lire…si son ambition jupiterienne est bien de sauver les démocraties en Europe, et le projet européen lui-même?
Mais cela est-il une posture de plus?
Même si l’orientation politique du Président est à l’opposé de celle de R.Murphy, il pourrait apprendre quelques théories fiscales utiles à son programme de réformes.
Let’s be empirical about the problems society is facing, distilling your blog post it centres the cause around individualism, that this has engineered society in a negative way, that community has suffered as a consequence. I struggle with this prescription, it’s imperative, as I see it, that only when an individual is aware of their responsibility to themselves, that they treat themselves with respect, that they matter and that they have the ability to steer the world closer to hell or heaven, is the individual then in a position where they can influence society in a positive way.
The question is, can society do this, can it create the environment that optimises the individual, or does the optimised individual optimise society.
It’s not the role of a government to instil values, this only happens when governments become tyrannical, values come from the ability to engage freely with others where subjective individuals relate their experiences of the world around them, their fears, their worries, their prescription moving forward. The political, cultural, technological landscape is constantly evolving we orient ourselves through this by talking, we have subjective realities, we all absorb the world differently, no one that has lived or will live, occupies the same space in time, this predicates our subjectivity, the goal for society is to distill objectivity from subjectivity, our tool that does this is speech.. so we understand the utility of speech, how does an individual come to know truth, objective truth, they find this by observing cultures and society’s that found harmony, enough harmony that over time they became civilizations. We must find common ground, we have knowledge, science, religion, we need to find a low resolution grand narrative to unite us, I believe this is achievable, only when the the ability speak is completely free.
Meanwhile in FT land today’s Opinion piece from and advisor to Arbuthnot Banking Group, tells us everything’s looking as though it’s going to go swimmingly, as long as we don’t do anything daft like increase public spending and make sure we maintain fiscal discipline. In fact, the Coalition’s control of spending was simply the “normalisation of spending after a splurge”. But even better, ‘with public spending …at about 38.5% of GDP, we really do not have “austerity” at all’.
Now off you go and eat your cereal.
I’ve thought a bit more about this post before commenting.
If you have worked in the public sector since 1979 I’d say you’d be very familiar with the auto destruction of society and social security from mainly Tory and Labour neo-liberal worshipping governments who like to screw things up with privatisation, PFI and false budgetary limits they impose on themselves (and therefore the rest of us).
The incoherence you speak of IS real and is driving people away from seeking answers in institutions, experts and potentially better leaders and falling back on themselves. These inner worlds they fall back on are much smaller and dogmatic too. People are beginning to lean on their beliefs instead and sometimes do not realise that this includes their prejudices.
I think that this growth in individualisation is also turbo charged by the internet. I have just read Jaron Lanier’s ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now’ (2018). Thankfully I do not do Facebook etc., with Richard’s and sometimes Jolyon’s site being the only places I hang out online (plus the odd photography site and the odd review on Amazon – but that’s it). But Laniers’ book is well worth a read – it’s only 144 pages and he hits the spot on a number of occasions.
As for a ‘narrative’ that will bring us together – I do not think it will be provided by people Richard. I think that the environment – or from a Gaia perspective – Mother Earth is going to provide a non-negotiable narrative which will sharpen our minds I’m afraid. I was reminded of this when in 2013 the family went to the Skye for a holiday and we went to well know beauty spot only to be confronted by a bay full of plastic rubbish, dead rotting Gannets and every other conceivable piece of rubbish washed up on a beach so far away from human habitation. It was a defining moment for us. It was like an overture for what we are beginning to realise only now it seems.
Believe you me – I would rather avoid nature deciding to rid herself of us by blowing and flooding us away; I would rather avoid BREXIT and the break up of the Union. I would rather avoid people suffering under the Tories austerity and universal credit programmes.
But something tells me that we will have to go through this stuff in order to learn some hard lessons. It took WW2 to truly to get us to think about a better life and how to achieve it. In the absence of another World War, these equally destructive ideas may be enough to make us redeem ourselves in the long run.
Maybe this is the best we can hope for. For now at least. So – taking a deep breath – let us plough on.
Pilgrim, I think you are describing the frog in the bucket sitting on a gas ring.
It takes along time for the water to get too hot to bear.
Soon, perhaps, we may realise the bucket has a lid on it.
Andy
Except that the frog in the experiment had no choice in the matter. I feel that we do. Although we seem unable to do so.
I was reading Nick Cohen this morning and what he writes seems to me to be a parable of our times.
I find Cohen irritating as much as I find him interesting and insightful. His snide writing about the anti-Semitism in Labour nearly had me emailing him personally to invite him to ‘discuss it out side’.
Anyhow, in today’s piece he does much to speak of the BREXITERs and the Tories who have got us to this point in our history.
But he still has to tell us that Labour is full of Marxists. So there we are. We know the Tories are a bunch of shits. But we don’t like those Marxists we’ve been warned about either. Even though they have never ran this country and lost ground in the late 80’s in the European East. The Marxist bogie man still holds sway over us. Why?
So if that is the case – just what do people want from their politics? Answers on a post card please!!
Again – thinking about Richard’s post – what we could say instead of ‘incoherent’ is that the world – hyper-individualised as it, is less RATIONAL – it is more IRRATIONAL. I think that those of us who are thinkers – rationalists – need to come to terms with this irrationality – or we could even call it ’emotion’ if you will.
Instead of a courageous state therefore (maybe?), how do moral, well-meaning patriots who want a better world manage ‘The Emotional State’?
PSR
I think I that term incoherence is key. I was talking to a m,an thins week who will never in his life win from the Tories. But he votes for them ‘because they can be trusted and Corbyn can’t be’
It’s is utterly incoherent.
Richard
But he votes for them ‘because [the Tories] can be trusted and Corbyn can’t be’
Certainly you know that with the Tories you will be in the shit. Is that a reasonable basis for ‘trust’ ?
I clearly do not think so….
“…….because this is a Tory creation from beginning to end.”
If Leavers were drawn entirely entirely from the ranks of UKIP and right wing Tories there would be no Brexit. The EU itself has to shoulder its fair share of the blame for its own unpopularity. The European PTB moved, without feeling the need to ask for any real democratic popular mandate, from a structure that, albeit not ideal, worked reasonably well in EEC days to the EU disaster that we have now.
The EU consists of countries which are either economically depressed or highly mercantilistic. So they aren’t a good market for UK exporters. The resultant trade deficit means that someone in the UK has to borrow to finance it. That’s given us a debt problem. So even though we are out of the euro we aren’t insulated from the economic problems it creates. Naturally, as things aren’t quite so bad this side of the channel, we have a highly asymmetric migration pattern. Which would not be a bad thing if we’d invited people here from choice. We have a demographic problem of an aging population.
We also have an unfolding euro debt problem in Italy that few understand. The most common view, in the EU, seems to be that previous Italian Govts had previously signed up to a set of rules and the current one has an obligation to stick to them. However, in any currency union we can see that money will always gravitate to already wealthy areas. The poorer regions will end up in debt and recession and the coffers of the wealthy areas will overflow with unspendable surpluses. You can’t get around this by devising a rule to say that this shouldn’t happen. You may as well have a rule saying that water should flow up hill.
Larry Elliot is one of the few to have the right take on the looming problem of Italian and other eurozone debt. As he says ” The risk is not that one country will jump out of the burning building but that the building will eventually collapse with everybody in it.”
Our problems on the M26 might seem trivial by what we’ll see across the channel if they don’t get their act together. And quickly!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/20/italys-policies-make-sense-its-eurozone-rules-that-are-absurd
I have to say you appear to be playing loose with the facts and decidedly incorrect with your understanding of debt at a government level
As a result I can’t accept the arguments that follow
Peter Martin:
I listened to as much of Theresa May’s conference speech as I could handle, and actually made it all the way through last year (waiting to see if the entire backdrop was going to fall over).
My conclusion was that she lives in a world I do not inhabit, somewhere between over the rainbow and the big Rock Candy Mountain. I wondered if anybody else lived there.
Apparently you do 🙂 I hope you’ll be very happy together.
What is Brexit about?
In my view, Brexit is simply about the transfer of wealth from the masses to a concentrated few (such that we seem to have entered a new ‘feudal system’ of ‘barons and serfs’) which, due to ignorance, has mistakenly somehow been turned into a form of xenophobia.
It seems to me to be a failure of education where, for example, from my experience (as an employer of 37 years), Accounting and Finance graduates leave university with an understanding of neither accounting nor finance!
I regret Brexit and, so far as I can currently foresee, so will the masses!
Personally, I think the likes of David Davis, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have no perspective on history and what happened during the 20th century (e.g. the consequences of two World Wars).
I think they (the before mentioned politicians) are ‘economic fools’, with no true understanding of history, who will destroy the United Kingdom and, potentially, the cohesion of the European Union to the detriment of the people of Europe (including the United Kingdom).
Do they really, seriously think some type of economic ‘tug boat’ is going to drag the UK economy into the mid-Atlantic?
The UK is economically, geographically and historically is part of Europe and always will be!
Personally, I do not want to be a ‘little Englander’ and, economically, the course of action they (the before mentioned politicians) apparently wish to pursue appears to guarantee we will become very ‘little’!
The problem isn’t just the incoherence of the UK’s attitude to Brexit and the EU more generally, it’s the incoherence of the EU’s approach to itself and the co-opting of the social ideals behind the EU by the financial services sector and Goldman Sachs alumni in particular.
The 2007-2008 crisis gave the ECB the opportunity and the excuse to turn off the money-flows to the EU South, which in the absence of a European central clearance mechanism were the only thing that kept the South in touch with the North, not to mention purchasing large amounts of German white goods and BMWs.
The ECB has now effectively established the stability of the EU financial services sector as the only priority it has; the same banks that allowed Greece to fudge its accounts and turn the Italian FS sector into a morass of smoke and mirrors are now in control of the machine, which cannot last, at least not in the current form.
It isn’t a coincidence that the ECB was just as keen on the insanity of austerity (austerinsanity) as the UK Conservatives, or that the Troika would get together with the Greek FS elites to turn the whole country into an open-air debtors’ prison – austerity and the triumphalism of financial services sector imperialism are what are driving centre/centre-right/non-voting citizens into the open arms of the extreme right, whether they understand what they’re signing up for or not.
What the ECB and EU elites did in the aftermath of 2008 has therefore been incredibly dangerous in terms of giving the new fascism across Europe a turbo-charge through demonstrably privileging financial services elites over everything else. Greece (and I confess I’m someone who genuinely expected Greece to fall out of the EU and who completely underestimated the craven cowardice of Tzipras) is a concrete proof that European financial sector will condemn an entire nation of people to eternal debt servitude, with no expectation of ever being able to pay off a ‘debt’ that most of them saw no benefit from at all.
So as much sympathy as I have for the Remain cause, most of them are asking for the return of an EU that only really existed in their imaginings and whose better features are steadily being eliminated by the ECB. As things get more and more volatile, moreover, the EU elites will not change course and accept responsibility; instead, more and more they will point the finger at the scapegoat of migration, perhaps the biggest act of hypocrisy in politics, ever.
Mass migration to Europe, increasingly being driven by the destruction and instability caused by attacks by the EU and US on the countries of origin and, increasingly, the destruction being wrought by anthropogenic global warming, again overwhelmingly caused by the industrial activities of rich northern countries, of which migrants are both victims and non-beneficiaries, will get worse and worse… ultimately, as the EU goes down under a welter of toxic politics created by its own elites, as the 1930s teach us, capital will always side with fascism to keep its privileges.
So for my money it was alway going to be a case of the UK jumping from the ship before it went down or trying to swim away as it did….
Fine
And what’s your alotyernative form of international cooperation, which the left will always require? And between which states?