I struggled to see themes in this morning's news that were initially worthy of comment. Then I realised that is almost certainly deliberate.
The UK is set in course to leave the EU in two weeks time. No one has ever successfully explained why we are so desperate to depart the single market and customs union, most especially given that the former was Margaret Thatcher's creation, which is a point the Tories seem keen to forget.
GDP remains rocky. The Tories are not delivering on their promises.
The NHS is having the crisis that was all too predictable. There will be excess deaths compared to trend data as a consequence that can only be explained by an absence of funding.
A war between Israel and Iran has only been avoided because they backed away from the conflict Trump tried to create.
Data on the climate crisis just gets worse. Large parts of Australia are still on fire.
Scotland is being denied a referendum.
The government is not saving Flybe: it's giving a bung to an airline without obvious explanation and cutting carbon taxes to do so, which is going to seriously backfire, and very quickly. It's early evidence of incompetence because ministers simply do not have real experience of decision making, let alone a strategy to guide them.
But what is happening according to the news? Harry and Meghan. And fury over Big Ben bonging. Those are the stories. It's as if the media would wish that we be distracted from the big issues that an election did not in any way resolve and which should be at the top of every agenda.
I am but especially into conspiracy theories. I am not saying conspiracies do not exist by suggesting that. But by and large my belief is that if you can spot what looks like a conspiracy it is almost inevitably more like a cock up. And I don't, for example, think Harry and Meghan timed their family row to suit Boris Johnson's needs. But, even so it would seem that, as usual, there are elements of the media more than pleased to play to a Tory tune. And right now distraction is suiting Boris Johnson very well indeed and the media seem more than willing to play along. I would wish it otherwise. On this occasion I have little hope of change.
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Wellcome to the freedom of press UK-style!!
I do like your single paragraph emphasis on the Scottish referendum denial.
Over the past few years I’ve started listening out for one-topic overwhelming ‘news’ and that’s my cue that something else is happening that’s far more likely to affect my life:
I noticed it most acutely when I wanted coverage of the Trident renewal vote (final one) in parliament but heard not a peep – I can’t remember what was in the news now, but it was blanket coverage of something odd (a poor dead toddler in Syria maybe, presidential inauguration perhaps – and royalty is rolled out on a regular basis) – oh, it was the unfettered spying bill that was being passed (removing all our rights to privacy) that was happening during the presidential inauguration – something I’ve never seen in my puff never mind 24hr blanket coverage.
Once you start spotting it, it’s not very subtle. So, there ARE conspiracies, it’s just that the theories are usually wrong – secrecy means that often you are unlikely to ever know and it’s pointless speculating. As for the latest royalty distraction, there have been indications that the mass media delayed the coverage by a couple of weeks – it wasn’t the shock-horror-they’ve just announced this, story as was given to us anyway.
There are a lot of bad decisions being made by the uk government, and like you say Richard, there has been very little explanation or reasoning for most of them – and the mainstream media really isn’t questioning anything – so they could be trying to suppress any number of things that could have a negative direct impact on our lives.
On the referendum denial, there is a first stage legal case to test if the Scottish Parliament can go ahead without ‘permission’ – I commented on it in John’s blog, that he duly published if you want to know more:
https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2020/01/16/does-the-scottish-parliament-have-the-right-to-hold-a-referendum-on-scottish-independence-with-the-law-as-it-currently-stands/
Thanks for the link
I think SDturgeon’s reluctance is misplaced
The wholly political route is stagnant – you could argue about timing and if more should have been done before now, but I think we can say for certain more actions need to be taken outwith politics now, and quickly. The longer this is allowed to stand, the more ‘normal’ it will become – and that view will be promoted by the media, not the real view of people, which should be outrage. Denying democracy is becoming more and more accepted throughout the UK.
I think talking and moaning about what the SNP should or should not do is pointless speculation, they chose a strategy that has stalled at this juncture, and changing the situation can be done by the people – nothing groundbreaking, but lots of little things.
Also, remember that the people of scotland did not get a choice in joining in a Union with England originally – and by all accounts it wasn’t a popular decision at the time despite widespread anglicisation already in place – we really need to examine closely, and repeatedly if necessary, if it is the best thing for Scotland (spoiler: it’s not).
The SNP need a powerful friend who’ll use it’s power of persuasion to get Johnson to do what’s democratically and therefore morally right. That friend can only be the EU who’ll refuse to engage in further trade deal negotiations unless the Johnson government offers Scotland the right to determine whether there’s a “taking back control” mandate in that part of the union. It’s debatable, however, whether the EU will use its clout for a variety of reasons. The next few weeks will see which “side” of the Rule of Law argument the EU is on or whether it prefers to be mealy mouthed for the sake of some nebulous pragmatism.
No chance of the EU backing Scotland in this manner that I can see, especially following their unwavering support for the actions of the Spanish state against the Catalan separatists.
I realise that Spain is to remain part of the EU and we are (regrettably) leaving, but I think it would be a bad move which would bolster support for the anti-EU groups within EU member states. Much as they would like to help the Scots (and perhaps, perversely, to make things awkward for rUK), making sure that their own back yard is on order is of much more importance.
Re; Helen @11:57 AM Today – Scotland is less in need of a powerful friend to ‘kick the hornets nest’ than to successfully drum up Scot’s own home support such that it becomes normal to see that 60%+ want independence, not just want a referendum, but want independence.
The SNP should be making independence look good. That likely will involve activity outwith ‘normal’ devolved limitations. It will certainly involve building a framework of language which beats off the coming Unionist’s negativity and builds confidence if our desired strong nation.
Oh Mariner!
Regarding this: “No chance of the EU backing Scotland in this manner that I can see”….”Much as they would like to help the Scots (and perhaps, perversely, to make things awkward for rUK)”.
Are-you-kidding? The EU likes nothing more than to teach a lesson to those who would break ranks. It likes to make an example of them and it would like nothing more than every EU member and the world at large to see the UK disintegrate as a result of Brexit.
I say this as someone that supports the Remain cause but nonetheless understands something about realpolitik. It would also appear that a lot of people in Britain have got too caught up in their own perspective to realise how deeply pissed-off the EU are about Brexit.
I suspect that they will find out in due course.
The pdf of the legal opinion on Scotland‘s power to unilaterally run an indyref is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1bkihw5dbltfwpv/Advice%20of%20Senior%20Counsel%20%28FINAL%20at%2014-01-2020%20at%201218%29.pdf
Thank you Nigel. I see The National has a piece on it, and is far better than my rough explanations:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18166514.scottish-government-hold-indyref2-without-pms-permission/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Update23382078onTheScottishPeopleVsTheUKGovernmentonIndyref2January172020&utm_medium=email
I suspect that with Brexit being a done deal in many people’s minds and with all the weariness which that created: there has become a bit of a vacuum and some seeming relief from the ordeal. Combine that with Jeremy not doing much, some anodyne stuff with the Labour leadership ‘race’. The result is any number of tired journalists trying to cajole some life out of a dead cat and a public that is no longer engaged.
Basically, it is a very human response to the last three or more years.
Naturally the schemers are totally happy with this and are using their time to smooth the way through whatever it is they want. There is a lot you can get done under the cover of darkness when all are sleeping.
Possibly time for you, Richard, to come up with something suitably controversial and join a phone in on LBC, or get the 8.10am slot on Today on Radio 4.
Shouldn’t be too difficult and they do need something to lift the ratings – put on some sloppy jeans and think (just for a moment) like Dom. Keep the technical arguments in the background and make it highly engaging/confrontational (so that’s a no to country by country reporting).
The best I am going to do is record for BBC South West on Flybe this afternoon
For those who make the effort to be informed there will always be more than enough to make one despair, if only occasionally. But most people are repelled at some stage by a continuing diet of doom and gloom. Sometimes a bit of (literally) gallows humour helps – as in Eric Idle’s ditty “Always look on the bright side of life” in “The Life of Brian”. The Economist’s Bagehot columnist recently noted that one of the Tories’ secret weapons is jollity – and their use of it frequently strikes a chord with the public. The PM is always in the business of seeking to recreate a Merrie England that never existed and he frequently gets away with it. The left is too much infected with the traditions of po-faced puritanism and Marxist sectarianism and intensity.
But there is no need for enforced jollity. There are good reasons for celebration and optimism. The recently dominant mutation of capitalism – badly labelled as neo-liberalism – is in its death throes. Much of the distraction to which you refer is being orchestrated to distract people’s view of this. You rightly celebrate the painstaking hard-won incremental changes in the reporting of accounts (to which you have contributed much) that will change the landscape. But there is much much more afoot.
And yes, we’ll be inundated with coverage of the impeachment and the elections in the US for the next year, but the US is in retreat as a hegemonic global power in much the same way as Britain following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 – and it will probably take a century, as it has for Britain, to come to terms with this. This century will be dominated by what will happen in South America, Africa and Asia, though Europe (sans Britain) will continue to have a role.
And, for a host of obvious reasons, developments in Europe will have the greatest impact on Blighty. But, in contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage of US politics over the next year, we’ll learn little about what is really happening in Europe. Insoafar as there’ll be coverage it will fixate on Johnny Foreigner trying to do plucky Britain down in the negotiations on Britain’s future relationship with the EU.
Most of the long-established advanced economies in the EU may be characterised as Co-ordinated Market Economies (CMEs) – in contrast to the “Liberalised” Market Economies (LMEs) of the US and the UK. These CMEs have been infected by neoliberalism – and Germany, as the dominant economy, has been infected by a particularly virulent combination of neoliberalism and ordoliberalism. But the neoliberal virus is being beaten back – mainly to counter the more damaging infection of illiberal economic nationalism. The war has not yet been won, but battle has been engaged across the continent and I have no doubt about the eventual outcome.
However, one would learn little from the media in Blighty about this existential struggle. We need to abstain from this unhealthy navel-gazing, look outwards and we might learn things that will cheer us and encourage us.
The ability of many Britons to “look outwards” is in very short supply I fear. The country is close to being a backward back-water. I say this as I continue to work my way through Mitchell, Wray and Watts book “Macroeconomic.” In the Chapter 9 they explain that a fiat currency for the purposes of global trade can be floating or managed.
In the context of Trump’s “trumpeting” this week in regard to the first round bilateral trade agreement his government has reached with China nobody in the mainstream British media is asking why the two countries are no longer relying on WTO tariff rates.
In reality WTO members countries have failed to stop China using its currency management approach to capture price point in global markets and as such weaken floating currencies. Fed up with this failure to act the United States has basically discarded the WTO in favour of bilateral trade treaties knowing it has the upper-hand in regard to market clout to have good leverage over China.
How so many British voters and politicians are able to believe that after leaving the EU the UK will have anywhere near the same level of trade deal negotiating clout as the USA, EU or China beggars belief and in trade value or volume these are the big global trading entities!
Oh dear. Please don’t succumb to the “woe is us” narrative. I agree that any objective analysis of the counterfactual, i.e., the UK remaining in the EU, clearly indicates that the UK will be worse off. But the economy retains its considerable heft and there will be adaptation. Over time the salience of any counterfactual will evaporate. The current distraction may be being manufactured to avert our gaze from what is likely to be a painful adaptation, but it may also be responding to a public demand.
As for global trade, the rules of the WTO and its predecessor, GATT, were developed by the then dominant advanced economies and were inevitably skewed in their favour. It was always going to be difficult to adapt the rules to accommodate the rise of the BRICS and that of other rapidly developing economies. Not surprisingly the organisation is breaking down and we are seeing the emergence of huge national and regional trading blocs applying a mercantilist mentality and hammering out bilateral deals. It’s an inevitable phase in these things and is more than likely to lead eventually to a new set of global rules once the economic power relations stabilise.
Inevitably the focus is on China, but the emerging economic heft of the other BRICS and of regional blocs should not be ignored. Prior to the GFC, China’s principal focus was on joining the WTO; during and after the GFC it decided to pursue its mercantilist path unilaterally. It is also undergoing a huge transformation from an investment-driven economy to a consumption-led economy. And the pace and extent of this transformation is being driven by the need to address the legacy of the ‘one child’ policy and to maintain the dominance of the CCP.
Closer to home, the pursuit by Germany (and the economies in its orbit) of a mercantlist policy (coupled with its combination of fiscal and monetary policies) to strengthen the heft of the EU as a trading bloc in the global arena has had serious and damaging internal EU impacts. Perhaps if Britain had been fully engaged over the last 20 years, these policies might have been re-directed or modified. But Tony Blair’s Iraqi adventure provoked a serious split with France and Germany, Hague took the Tories out of the EEP, Gordon Brown was intensely irritated and bored by European Council meetings, Cameron took an instrumental and transactional approach with the EU merely as a counter-party and Labour was taken over by instinctive Lexiteers. The reality is that the UK has never been engaged in any meaningful way since the Single Market legislation was enacted and has been retreating progessively from the EU since the early years of this century. The 2016 referendum merely confirmed the reality. However, the pressure (both internal and external) is increasing on Germany to mend its ways.
And I remain convinced that the current mercantilism will run its course and be superceded as it was in the 19th century and again when it re-emerged in the inter-war period when the balance of economic power reaches some sort of equilibrium.
See what I have just written Paul
Woe is us is entirely appropriate given government plans
And there will be adaptation, I agree: business will leave.
To understate this is simply wrong. I suspect the risk is much bigger than forecast because no one has believed anyone could be quite as stupid as Javid
Richard,
I share your frustration and exasperation, but I don’t think donning the sackcloth and ashes will help. I would much prefer an alternative.
In a similar manner to Bagehot’s differentiation of the dignified and efficient components of the constitution, it is necessary to differentiate the political/theatrical elements of governance from the practical elements of governance. To shore up its popular support the current government will seek to deliver “bread and circuses” in the most eye-catching manner possible regardless of the unintended consequences.
But underneath and behind the scenes, the institutions of governance and a competent civil service are focused on the practical elements of governance. For example, in the context of your link to Colin Hines’s Guardian letter, considerable effort is being put in to converting the gas network to deliver initially a hydrogen/methane blend and then to switch to hydrogen. Combine this with a comprehensive programme of building insulation (to reduce the volume of energy required) and CCS and one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions (the heating of households and business premises) would be reduced and removed. As another example, considerable effort is being put in to a consumer protection white paper. And these are just two examples of the work of practical governance that is continuing apace. This is the painstaking, tedious work of practical governance that is difficult to dramatise for the purposes of political theatre, but it is crucial.
In addition, neoliberalism is in its death throes. Its demise will not be accompanied by state-organised public obsequies, but, quietly and sereptitiously, the practical work of governance will administer the new order, while all the time conveying the impression that nothing really has changed. And the political theatrics will be modulated to reinforce this impression.
Furthermore, the PM is well aware that his grip on popular support is tenuous. Of the 31.6 million votes cast on 12 December, the Tories and their erstwhile/possible allies garnered 15 million votes – leaving 16.6 million non-Tory or anti-Tory votes. Even if the SNP and smaller parties are excluded the combined Labour and Lib Dem support just exceeded the Tory total of 14 million. The electorate is very evenly divided and it would not require an enormous switch in support to unseat this aspiring Tory hegemony, but only if Labour and the Lib Dems were prepared to co-operate to leverage their support under FPTP.
And there, of course, is the rub.
I know you don’t do party politics and will support specific party policies if and only if you deem them to be in the public interest, but for anyone who wishes to cherish some optimism and hope I would strongly encourage them to join or rejoin the Labour party asap so they can vote to remove the grip that ultra trades unionism and neo-Stalinism have on the party. Diminishing the potency of this virulent sectarianism is the only way that Labour will have any hope of becoming a government-in waiting.
” The left is too much infected with the traditions of po-faced puritanism and Marxist sectarianism and intensity.”
In your obsolete imagination. “Po-faced” – oh dear. You could get a column in the Murdoch press.
To cheer up – I suggest reading Putins speech – reminiscent of JFK’s inauguration oration & pretty close to the Labour manifesto – free internet, nurseries, school meals… AI, Environment … democracy for the many… no dual nationality Government ministers.
Here’s a translation from the Russian at Off-G
https://off-guardian.org/2020/01/15/transcript-putins-address-to-the-federal-assembly/
——
Of course there was a conspiracy to rig our election. Of course the Andrew story was a deadcat to disrupt the Labour campaign as was the hype around the ‘terrorist’ on London bridge – they took out two whole weeks news cycles and removed attention from the policies.
Of course we have been subjected to a coup.
Honestly, if anyone still believes in an impartial MSM – they are choosing to remain deluded.
Like believing that taxation pays for government services!
The British public has always been happy to submit to sacrifice when their ‘betters’ ask them and worship and obey the aristos because they love the Queen. All our upbringing is based on that nonsense, as is our education and entertainment.
It will now become very painfully clear how easily we allowed the narrative to fool us – hopefully allowing a truly radical awakening.
Enjoy the weekend.
That was an amusing post, Dungroanin
This bit is interestingly ambiguous: “Of course there was a conspiracy to rig our election. Of course the Andrew story was a deadcat to disrupt the Labour campaign as was the hype around the ‘terrorist’ on London bridge — they took out two whole weeks news cycles and removed attention from the policies”
It is ambiguous in as far as it is perfectly feasible but, in the absence of specific evidence, it could just as easily be conspiracy theory speculation and little else besides. I honestly don’t know which although I suspect that you may be right to some extent at least.
What I do know is that 45% of the British voting public bear some of the responsibility for the election outcome (43% Tory, 2% Brexit Party) and virtually none of those people will accept responsibility when the worst of the Brexit fallout hits the fan. That’s the one and only silver lining in their big parliamentary majority. There’s no ambiguity as to who gets the blame.
The more I think about this deliberate, political distraction idea the more feasible it becomes. It is reminiscent of the “Bernie Blackout” phenomena in the US:
https://www.thenation.com/article/sanders-blackout-electability-over/
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/08/the-bernie-blackout-is-in-effect-and-it-could-help-sanders-win/
Yes it’s deliberate. We no longer have a press interested in holding the government to account. Though the Idea that the main way in which it should be publicly accountable is through a press staffed by people mainly from the same background as politicians and owned by billionaires is itself problematic. The citizen really has no way of enforcing accountability and is emasculated. This is only a truly mature free society by comparison with, say, China.
Much of the press’s output is comic book stuff to distract people from actually thinking – when they’re not attacking enemies such as the EU or SNP with lies.
Regarding Flybe, it’s worth pointing out that their Q400 aircraft are around 30% less efficient than the competing ATR72 and their E175s are even less efficient than the Q400s on the short sectors Flybe typically operates. If APD was made directly proportional to emissions then perhaps there would be an incentive for airlines, not just Flybe, to operate less polluting and more efficient aircraft but it isn’t so there’s no incentive. Quite the opposite in fact.
Thanks