Not The Brexit Election

Sick and tired of Brexit?

Sticking to the Tory script, Sky News is running every single new bulletin with a "Brexit Election" tagline, even when the subject doesn't feature on the news for a rare change. Similarly, the one-trick ponies that are the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats feature their respective demands on Europe prominently, if not in their actual name then at least on the side of their bus.

Yet, after almost four years of relentless debate about our EU membership, are the public really aflame and up for another five weeks of intensive debate about it? As Jo Swinson hypes her mission to save us from ourselves, Johnson bumbles about unleashing creative forces not even his grandiose imagination can comprehend and Farage drinks for England, they need to hope that everyone else is ready to squeeze into their Brexit Bubble, where nothing matters more than whether we are outside a trade block pissing in or inside pissing out.

The Green Party co-leader Sian Berry yesterday argued that "some things are even bigger than Brexit" as she declared this to be the Climate Election and outlined ambitious plans to tackle the global warming crisis with £900 billions of investment over ten years to make the UK carbon neutral by 2030. It is perhaps surprising that just a day later her party has made a deal with the Lib Dems, who, as well as accepting funding from frackers, take a much more leisurely approach to the climate crisis with a net zero target put well back to 2045. This is just a mere five years ahead of their former Tory partners' mid-century "objective". Nevertheless the Greens' core point is well-made and the urgency palpable.

Her words echoed the declaration a few days earlier by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that "This election is our last chance to tackle the climate emergency with a Green Industrial Revolution at the heart of Labour's plan to transform Britain." Backing this up was a pledge to insulate every house in the UK to cut energy costs and carbon emissions, as well as massive investment in clean public transport and bringing the energy companies back into public control. Labour have also dwelt heavily on a range of other issues including ending austerity, redistributing wealth, ending student fees and investing in the health service.

It might be argued of course that Labour wouldn't want to talk about Brexit given their complex history on the issue. Yet Corbyn has devoted a speech to this too - reflecting on the need to talk to "the 99" rather than "the 48%" or "the 52%" he accused the other parties of focusing on to the exclusion of roughly half the UK. But it is clear that his strategy is to campaign on a much wider range of issues - the General Election should be just that, a general election on a variety of policies and initiatives stretching across the next 4 or 5 years. It should plainly not be a substitute referendum - Corbyn has made clear that Labour will hold a real one if they become the government.

So are Labour ignoring reality by moving on from Brexit to other issues?

Possibly, but probably not. Already several polls show that the NHS is seen as a bigger issue than Brexit by most voters, and this is an area where Labour remain more trusted than any other party and where the Tories and Lib Dems are vulnerable given their opening up of front line services to private providers from 2012 onwards. And while it doesn't register as the highest concern, there is little doubt that climate change is a much higher priority for many voters than previously - and 56% of voters back the Green and Labour 2030 date as the zero carbon deadline. Even 47% of Tories support that compared to 16% for the official 2050 one. A YouGov survey shows that 25% of voters view the environment as one of the top three issues compared to just 8% at the 2017 election.

Similarly, crime has risen substantially as a concern with 26% rating it compared to 11% previously, and the Tory/Lib Dem slashing of police numbers back in the Coalition days make them vulnerable. So too the fallout from the initial Grenfall report has highlighted a range of concerns from cuts to fire services from austerity through slum housing, underhand contract deals and Tory elitism to the rampant inequality that stains our country.

Faced with this battery of critical issues, although it remains a key issue for now, it seems that a public that is palpably sick to death of Brexit is less than likely to want to think of nothing but Brexit for the next month and a bit. Given this, Labour have everything to play for and their slow but steady trend upwards in the polls, matched by a slow but evident decline for the Lib Dems, is evidence for this.

Heath's winter election gamble

Boris Johnson claims to be a historian. So he might want to dust down the archives from winter 1973 when one of his predecessor Tory Prime Ministers, Ted Heath (ironically the man who took us into Europe), faced a crisis when a national miners' strike left electricity power plants short of coal. Simultaneously, after the Yom Kippur war between Israel and the Arab states, oil and petrol prices were rising sharply, offering little in the way of any affordable or practical alternative to coal for much of Britain's energy.

Heath dramatically declared a State of Emergency.  His Chancellor, Anthony Barber, implemented a crisis budget just before Christmas. A three-day working week was introduced, TV stations were compelled to stop broadcasting at 1030 pm each night to reduce energy consumption and regular power cuts were implemented with householders huddling round candles to keep warm. All in the middle of winter.

In spite of the crisis, the Tories' poll ratings were generally favourable and a much-trumpeted "Liberal surge" seemed to damage Harold Wilson's Labour Party most. Enjoying as much as an 11% lead, Heath was convinced that because of Labour's close relationship with the trade unions, he would be able to sweep to victory.

So far, so familiar.

And so he went to the country in our last winter election (February 1974) believing that he could triumph on the single question he pompously put to the nation in a Prime Ministerial broadcast: "Who Governs Britain?"

The voters' answer, when it came?
"Not you."

March 1974 - Labour's Harold Wilson began his third term as Prime Minister

Boris Johnson - A Pericles for Our Time?

The man who would be Pericles

History can teach, warn and inspire us. If we don't understand the past, how can we fathom today? And as the many times over-used phrase goes, if we don't learn from history, we are bound to relive it.

Our esteemed Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is no exception. He has penned a few histories of varying quality and sometimes at striking odds with his other pronouncements. For example, his Dream of Rome is a deeply Europhile work and the TV version concludes with an unbroadcast peroration where Johnson looks forward with great enthusiasm to Turkey joining an expanded EU as some sort of recreation of the Roman Empire.

But the locus of his historical inspiration is much earlier, and their identity is more than a little instructive as to how the ludicrous occupant of Number 10 views himself as well as his personal hero. For the hay-haired chancer apparently fancies himself as a modern day version of the 5th century BC Athenian leader Pericles, who presided for almost 40 years over what is known as the birthplace of democracy - notwithstanding the exclusion of women and slaves from the "Demos" (citizenship). He keeps a bust of him in his Downing Street office for his visual musings and even quoted him in his first PM phone-in back in the balmy days of August.

On that occasion, as on others, Johnson promoted the idea of Pericles as a cultured champion of democracy and, superficially, you can see what he means: this was after all the man who presided over the construction of the final phase of the Acropolis. This fantastic range of buildings perched above Athens symbolised the city's devotion to the Hellenic gods as well as highlighting its imperial status as the leading power of classical Greece, its powerful navy exporting its form of Peoples' Government to rather reluctant neighbours on the points of their battering rams.

The Acropolis project has echoes perhaps in some of Johnson's own doomed attempts to commission prestigiously wasteful taxpayer-funded initiatives such as the London Garden Bridge that never was or, more recently, to issue a Brexit coin tomorrow morning which has now had to be melted back down. Yet, while Pericles' project was actually completed and substantial parts remain almost two and a half millenia later, when you look at the two men what might initially seem a pompous, facile comparison with the Athenian orator by Johnson actually holds more weight than might be apparent, though perhaps not for the same self-serving reasons.

For as well as divorcing his wife of some years to live with a much younger woman, Pericles had pretty much the same cavalier attitude towards public finance as the PM. On several occasions, he and his associates were accused of wasting Athenian tax money, although there was no charge of inappropriate personal benefit - as a contemporary historian, Thucydides, noted, he was already sufficiently wealthy to not be overly concerned about his own financial gain. Prestige seems to have been the main motivation, and so accusations of unfitness for office would bite all the harder on his noble ego.

By means of deflection, Pericles was happy to launch personal attacks on his enemies and to play to the mob, claiming to be an opponent of the conservative establishment in spite of hailing from precisely that quarter (his noble-born father was an army commander and his mother the descendant of a tyrant) and even using the Athenian speciality of ostraka (ostracism) to exile his key political opponent. Johnson has often cited Pericles' alleged skills as an orator as a personal inspiration, and so it is no surprise that a contemporary of the Athenian leader, the poet Ion, described him as having "a presumptuous and somewhat arrogant manner of address, and that into his haughtiness there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others".

All rather familiar somehow.

Similarly, Pericles' introduction of restrictions that limited Athenian citizenship to people who could prove both their parents were Athenian-born smacks of at least the same Tory attitudes towards modern immigration - all the more so as he hypocritically made an exception for his own son by his foreign-born partner Aspasia. His policy of imperialist expansion in the name of spreading democracy again has some parallels with Tory fantasies of "Empire 2.0" floated in the wake of Brexit. Perhaps not so much of a similarity was Pericles' opening up of public offices to less affluent Athenians, while in stark contrast the new electoral identity rules Johnson is implementing for voting seem designed to make it much harder for many poorer people to exercise their democratic rights.

Pericles of Athens

Yet if that is a difference, we need to hope that it is not the only one. For Johnson's hero funded his Acropolis project by embezzling funds from the Delian League, the official term for what was in effect the Athenian Empire. Money was purloined in what Greek historian Angelos Vlachos has claimed was perhaps the largest incidence of fraud in human history and contracts were dished out to Pericles' personal friends to oversee the construction.

He courted further controversy by having a friendly sculptor, Phidias, insert a likeness of himself onto one of the friezes, drawing accusations of impiety. When he finally faced formal charges of impropriety with the public finances, the historian Plutarch claims he provoked the devastating Peloponnesian War to divert attention.

If so, it was a fatal move on several fronts. The war was to vanquish Athens and reduce it to a vassal of Sparta. The democracy Johnson claims Pericles championed was destroyed for good. His hero however did not witness the apocalyptic denouement - as war raged, refugees crowded into the city, creating cramped conditions where hunger and disease became rife. Pericles duly succumbed to plague along with a good number of his compatriots just two and a half years into what became a three decades long conflict.

So let us hope indeed that the comparison is just the fevered imaginings of Johnson's own self-aggrandising hubris. If he is indeed a modern Pericles, inspired by his ancient hero's imperialist adventurism and readiness to sacrifice his country for the sake of his own beleaguered reputation, it is  absolutely imperative that on 12 December he suffers the fate of so many of the classical politician's opponents and is firmly and permanently ostracised from office.

A vote (unsuccessfully) cast in 444BC to ostracise Pericles from Athens.

The Time of Monsters

It's almost passe to say the world is in turmoil. And while to some degree it always has been, a glance at today's news shows just how much: mass street protests from Baghdad through Beirut to Barcelona and beyond to Chile. Governments in paralysis of one kind or another in Israel, the UK, Canada, the USA. Violent protests in Hong Kong, military conflict in Rojava,Yemen... and so on.

Underpinning all of it are two consistent factors. Extreme levels of economic inequality, often accompanied by increasingly visible poverty, and a collapse of faith in political classes seen as self-serving, corrupt and alienated from the Governed. Liberal democracy is teetering on the edge, its once universal nostrums of elected parliaments overseeing a modicum of public services in market economies with private property and supposedly "free enterprise" stripped bare and exposed for the lies that they have been.

Increasingly, we see the vast wealth accumulated by tiny, tiny portions of the population, acquired through a hypocritical combination of ripping off taxpayers through state-appointed contracts for tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds, euros or dollars and in turn corporate and personal tax avoidance. As the system slowly breaks down, no longer responding to the macroeconomic management of the past fifty or sixty years, the social contract is under ever growing pressure.

While as many as two million domestic properties are empty each night in the UK, 25,000 people sleep on the streets. While hedge fund managers speculate and earn millions betting on the future price of food, "gig" economy workers die at 53 years of age because they can't afford time off to visit their doctor - and in one recent Amazon case, they are sent back to work immediately the removal of the corpse of a colleague who collapsed and died on shift after being told to get on with his job by the company doctor.

Globally, resources once prized as being for the common good of all - such as the rainforests and natural sources of water - are seized and commodified by multinational companies with the backing of compliant governments and international agencies such as the World Trade Organisation. Trade treaties like the EU-Canada partnership allow companies to sue the taxpayer if, for example, a hospital contract is taken back into public hands, damaging the private firms profits. The whole system is stacked in favour of the wealthy becoming ever wealthier, even at the huge risk it creates to the future of life on Earth. As the Roman writer Tacitus once lamented of his own society's colonising of all it could grab hold of, "they make a desert, and call it peace."

Here there are dangers and opportunities, and both are already becoming nakedly apparent.

Unreformed, the system will stumble on, the super-rich gradually incorporating it even further to serve their own ends through funnelling public contracts and taxpayer cash into their ever deeper pockets. They will continue to extend surveillance over everyone else, initially in the name of consumer support, but already to control our thoughts, expectations and actions. In such a culture, they will continue to foster and sponsor division - between old and young, white and black, indigenous and migrant. They will fund wars and build walls. To divide is to conquer.

We can see the fruits of this just this week - a survey in the UK, divided between pro- and anti-Brexit supporters, found that a substantial majority on both sides support violence where people can be seriously injured as a valid means of achieving their respective objectives of remaining in or leaving the European Union. This includes those who claim to be anti-populist liberals, their anti-democratic prejudices showing a bit more nakedly than their leaders' spin doctors might ideally like. While actual political violence against individuals remains relatively rare in Britain, we only have to look at the 2016 murder of Jo Cox and the death threats routine received by her successor and other predominantly female MPs to sense that it doesn't lurk far beneath the surface.

Political violence in the USA has risen sharply in recent years - many of the mass shootings covered so luridly as the work of unstable loners in truth the work of politically motivated fascists and white supremacists, while a 2018 survey found that one in five Americans on both sides of the mainstream political divide felt that the country would be improved if a large number of  supporters of the other party could "just die". Similarly, 17% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans believe that is is acceptable to send threats to public officials. One in ten support violence if the candidate of their choice doesn't win the 2020 Presidential election.

In "The Common Good", the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

Noam Chomsky

This could not be truer than now. The poisonous Brexit debate in the UK has pitched ordinary people against each other in ways that have destroyed any faith in ballot box democracy and in each other: different groups denounce each other as traitors and morons, both sides parade guillotines and scaffolds on marches and politics have growing into a new form of sectarianism. Facts do not matter on either side: it is sheer, naked, visceral hatred and distrust. All in the name of what type of trading relationship we have with a free trade block which in truth is neither the colonising behemoth claimed by its opponents, nor the guarantor of civilisation claimed by its supporters.

Happily skating above all this, moving with some ease between both camps, is a rich elite, untouched and unmoved by whether the UK is in the EU or not, but either way continuing to rip off society on an almost unparalleled scale and quite content for the paralysis and division to continue: for as long as it does, they are unchallenged and untroubled. The real issues are ignored.

We can take on the rich and make a better future. For we already live in a world of abundance. There is already more than enough food to feed almost 50% more souls than currently walk our Earth. And just this week a study showed that offshore wind power alone could provide more energy that the world is every likely to need - clean, cheap, and permanent. Artificial Intelligence is posited to "do" almost half of current paid human work by just 2030 - a decent society could use that to give every worker 4 day weekends. A capitalist society will put half of the workforce on the dole: it won't pay a company to keep humans on where robots can take over.

The choice seems obvious, but with all the vested interests and established Power in place, change will not come easily. It will take much more than a visit to the ballot box once every four or five years. The mass demonstrations we see around the planet now have to be the harbingers of wider, deeper change.

But first, we need to make peace with each other and turn together on the real issue, the real problem before the Monsters in charge of our world finally make a desert of it and continue to charge us admission to the "Peace Experience."

Boris and the Boys: An Eton Mess of Misogyny

He speaks for us. Seriously, he does.

Somehow each and every week seems to bring ever more bizarre unravelling of our crumbling Political Class and a deeper and deeper plumbing of new depths of appalling behaviour. Tuesday's shock becomes Wednesday's norm and on and on. Representative democracy dies before our eyes.

This week was no exception. The biggest political tremor may have been the Supreme Court's controversial finding that the reasons for the prorogation of Parliament were unlawful. Yet perhaps the most memorable moment came when the PM was challenged by Labour MPs Paula Sherriff and Tracy Brabin to moderate his language which, deliberately, invokes World War 2 tropes of "surrender" and "betrayal" in the face of the Continental enemy.

Amplifying this has been the Tory press, the Daily Mail in particular, decrying their political opponents as "enemies of the people" and "saboteurs", again language more akin to 1939 (when of the course the Mail was actually very pro-Hitler in its sympathies). The wording is calculated - they may not explicitly state it, but in the past such designations would see the recipients jailed or even executed. The permission to commit violence in the cause of the Nation is not long in coming to minds so inclined.

Sherriff, since 2015 the MP for Dewsbury, who, like many MPs and especially female ones, has been subject to literally thousands of threats and incidents of abuse, reminded Johnson of the murder of her friend and former neighbouring MP Jo Cox, stabbed and shot in the street by right-winger, Tom Mair. The last words she heard from her assassin were "Put Britain first" and in court, asked to confirm his name, he responded, "My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain."

In better times: Jo Cox and Paula Sherriff

Johnson's response to a passionate but clearly upset Sherriff was to pompously declare, "I've never heard such humbug in my life." He was equally dismissive to a follow up question from Brabin, who is Cox's successor as Batley MP, and went as far as to suggest that the best tribute to the murdered parliamentarian would be to "get on with delivering Brexit." 

Echoing him, whether as Master or puppet it's not entirely clear, his adviser Dominic Cummings, an Orc-impressionist whose grasping bitterness would put Sauron to shame, mumbled that given the failure to deliver Brexit, it wasn't surprising some voters are angry with MPs. Yes, of course, threats of murder and rape are just par for the course to these guys. 

And this is where we need to look behind Johnson's dismissal of Paula Sherriff and Tracy Brabin: two women, speaking up in a place where, deep down, it seems likely that neither our Prime Minister nor a good number of his Boys' School chums really feel women should be in the first instance - not unless they're hoovering the carpets, or perhaps polishing the Mace rather than dispensing it. Their anger at his boorish rhetoric is dismissed out of hand, just the hysteria of the weaker sex. 

Why should we expect anything better from these men? Sent to male-only schools where misogyny headed the curriculum and for the crucial period of puberty their first and longest encounters with girls would usually be in the pages of glossy porn magazines, they were inculcated with an unquestioning belief in their superior status over everyone else, women in particular. So when he casually disregards the protests of female MPs, we should not be surprised, for this is how Johnson and his ilk have always been. 

Mogg and Nanny

From the first suckle on the Nanny-proffered bottle through the rare warmth of Nursey's blanket at boarding school, women's roles have been clearly set as the silent, suffering Support, fully indulgent to the fully self-entitled Lads. The Father of the House, the languid, loping Rees-Mogg has kept Nanny ever with him from his cradle until, it would appear, at least until one of them is in the grave.Like a child's comfort rag or maybe a human teddy bear, she has been on hand through all his days, serving his needs and dutifully knowing her place. (Though, candidly, viewing an official photo of the two of them does elicit unfortunate thoughts of some Guillermo del Toro production.)

A comedian mused tonight that we shouldn't expect the Johnsonites to be kind or self-aware. Nor should we - these are the Bullingdon bullies who trashed restaurants for fun knowing Daddy would pay, the guys who set toilets on fire for a laugh, and who even today burn money in front of homeless street-sleepers. 

And in Johnson's case, he has suggested women only go to university to find men to marry, that those who do have careers have caused house prices to rise and at the end of the day don't work as hard as men. As the Mayor who hosted the London Olympics he was moved to describe dedicated female volleyball players as "glistening like wet otters" and more recently decried investigations into child abuse as w*nking money onto a wall.

Bad enough, but this, too, is the man who helped a friend plot to have a journalist beaten up, and who allegedly threatened a young woman for giving refuge to his first wife so seriously that she has remained scared of him for over thirty years. And continuing the theme, this is the Prime Minister in waiting whio had a visit from the police when neighbours were concerned for the physical safety of his partner. 

Little wonder that, this Old Etonian views threats to women who, in his little World of Misogyny, shouldn't even be MPs as being of zero concern. As we have seen with Trump, lauded by Nazis and the KKK, when a national leader uses such belligerent language, the fascists who, like Mair, live among us feel legitimised and entitled to act. But, like his American Idol, Johnson's sociopathic behaviour suggests he simply does not care. Indeed, quite the opposite - the terrifying truth is that what may come across as unscripted and spontaneous is in fact carefully considered to raise the tempo and appeal to what he sees as his base. With our crazy voting system, that may be more than enough to see him returned comfortably at a General Election.

Army Dreaming

Politics has always had an element of bombast, of insult and metaphorical allusions between debate and conflict even. No one is asking anyone not to display passion or even anger - there is after all plenty to be angry about.

 But politicians of all parties have deployed increasingly inflammatory language that actively plays to violence, particularly against other people. Within the Brexit debate, Remainers are just as capable as Leavers of displays of aggressive hostility to those who disagree with them. Labour's Jess Phillips has talked about her fears and her office was attacked this week, but she has herself talked of "knifing (Jeremy Corbyn) in the front", while the Lib Dems' Ed Davey urged "a Remain alliance to decapitate that blond head", i.e., Boris Johnson. Invective knows no party boundaries it seems.

Yet between the leaders of the two main parties there is a sharp contrast. When Jeremy Corbyn was faced with a plot to oust him by Blairites, he made clear to some of his over-eager supporters how he wanted them to respond:“There should be no bad language used, there should be no abuse used, and I don’t like the use of the word ‘traitor’ either.”  Johnson's snivelling insistence this week that he should be able to continue with his verbiage without even acknowledging the concerns raised to him are more than adequate testimony to the great difference between the two men in terms of the respective content of their characters and suitability for office.

If Clauswitz characterised war as "politics by other means", increasingly, it seems at least some of our divided legislators see politics as war by other means. 

Yet while Farage may talk about picking up a rifle and Johnson compares the EU to Hitler's Nazis, eagerly posing with generals to associate himself with the military, their "wars" are little more than the adolescent fantasies of self-entitled rich kids who might have got to play with guns a bit in the school cadet corps, but would run a mile at the first hint of any real trouble. Cripes chaps, scarper!

It is fairly clear who are the strong people here.

While male MPs and members of all parties receive abuse, it does need to be noted that Black Minority Ethnic and female MPs, particularly Labour ones it seems, receive far more than any other category of parliamentarian. Formal criminal incidents have almost trebled in three years and formal police protection is almost the norm for our elected representatives, a fact that is bound to deter at least some people from entering politics.

Yet they persist: Paula Sherriff continues with her parliamentary duties in spite of receiving over 200 threats (3 serious enough to call the police) in the 24 hours after she challenged Johnson, and Yvette Cooper similarly works on even as her daughter tweets about her anxieties at the sight of an anti-bomb sleeve installed in their home's letterbox. So too do many other MPs, including Lib Dem Jo Swinson, who received threats to her children this week and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbot, who at times has received more threats that all other MPs combined. 

By contrast, Farage infamously refused to get off a bus to avoid milk shake throwers and Johnson ran from fifty Luxembourgers shouting anti-Brexit slogans at him. How would these brave armchair generals fare trying to dodge the real bullets and battles they slever and drool about so loosely from their wet, trembling lips? Hopefully, Nanny would be waiting in a nearby tank with a lovely flask of warm milk and a calming pacifier, ready to whisk them away to the safety of an impregnable Command Nursery.

It would be a forlorn quest to imagine that Johnson might somehow wind back from his extreme behaviours. His carefully crafted bumbling bonhomie has largely peeled away to reveal him for what he truly is. Once a Bullingdon, always a bully. For now, between the loss of his majority in the Commons, the mass protests planned for the upcoming Tory conference and his own narcissistic disintegration, we can only unite and work to ensure that his time is soon at an end.

Boris, quo usque  tandem abutere patentia nostra? Pericles si viveret, ad remum dareris!

The Magical Mathematics of Jo Swinson

If he could talk to the Liberals...

Back in the 1980s, the mythical two-headed psuhmi-pull-u creature from Doctor Doolittle was used as an allegory to lampoon the "Two Davids" leadership of the Liberal-SDP Alliance, referencing the not rare instances when Owen and Steel contradicted each other over the centrist parties' policies.

Times change, and this morning on Radio 4 Today, the now long-merged Liberal Democrats have only one head in charge, but several different faces on show.

Party leader Jo Swinson, walking, talking proof that there is nothing more irksome than an incompetent narcissist, held forth, chuntering on her party's latest "bold" decision - to cancel the UK's withdrawal from the European Union without even bothering with the fig-leaf of holding a referendum.

After all, she hubristically declared, if the country elects a majority Liberal Democrat government with cancelling Brexit as its major (some might say only) policy, "then that's what they'll get." PM Swinson would have a mandate to cancel.

It may seem a fanciful scenario, to say the least, but nonetheless galling coming as it does from the party that has spent decades decrying how our first-past-the-post voting system routinely returns parliaments that do not represent the views of voters. As she well knows, and must be banking on in her delusions of grandeur, if the other parties' votes split fairly evenly, a lead party can win outright power with as little as one in three of the votes cast - Tony Bliar achieved his third and final win in 2005 with just 35% of the poll.

So Ms Swinson has somehow executed a mathematical miracle whereby something slightly less that 35% could conceivably count for more than the 52% vote to Leave in the 2016 referendum.

Not so democratic Democrats, it would seem to most rational observers, though with Swinson somehow squaring this with her party supposedly championing liberalism against authoritarianism, reason may not be a word to lightly associate with this band of chancers.

Swinson was not finished though. As the BBC's Justin Webb asked her to confirm in that case that she was now against a so-called People's Vote rerun of the referendum, she changed tack. Not at all - it is party policy after all the have a new vote (perhaps with only one box to tick to approve Remain) before any General Election. It would only be different afterwards and meantime, shame on Jeremy Corbyn, just because... well, shame on him!

So, if you don't want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.
And if you do want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.

Ok, said Webb - his eyes rolling even on the radio - what about Scotland? Why is she against a second referendum on Scottish independence but apparently in favour of a second one on Brexit?

Ah, totally different, she opined. The best way forward for Britain was to be united but in the European Union.

Fine, so if she wins power at Westminster and that is a mandate to cancel Brexit without a referendum, presumably if the SNP win at Holyrood, that is a mandate for them to declare independence without a referendum.

Of course, you already know her answer was "No."
Essentially, a referendum is only a good thing if you promise to agree with Jo.

And so what we are left with is what we have always known - liberals are not democratic. Their idea of democracy is that the great unwashed turn up every few years and confirm their right to govern at their patronising best. Public votes are fine as long as they go the right way. If they don't, well, time for some of Jo's incredible, liberally illiberal Magical Mathematics.

These are testing times for our society. It was the market-liberal consensus, developed on from Thatcherite monetarism in Nu-Labour and accepted by the wider Political Class, that created the conditions for the Leave vote: the inequality, the competition between marginalised domestic labour and vulnerable migrant workers, the plundering of the state through PFI and financial deregulation that triggered the 2008 recession. The evident self-entitlement of so many MPs in the expenses scandal at the same time did nothing to reconcile growing numbers of disaffected voters with our political leaders. Not the worst by far, Swinson still didn't forget to keep her receipts for a 29p pack of dusters and 78p for a can of Mr Sheen: Lib Dems are nothing if not shiny.

And it was the continuation of this disaster capitalism by the Coalition Government that Swinson was a fairly senior member of that sealed it. And of course the referendum itself was a response by David Cameron to divisions in his own party, one backed by Swinson's party when it was voted on in the Commons in 2015 (she herself to be fair had lost her seat and wasn't in parliament at the time)  - our liberal masters assumed of course a comfortable victory would ensue.

That it didn't, as we know, has been met by furious rebuttals that Leave voters didn't know what they were doing and should effectively be disenfranchised. While some Remainers and People's Voters would protest, the Lib Dems' enthusiastic adoption of Swinson's pledge to scrap Article 50 without a vote confirms that people who claim to be democrats and who have campaigned repeatedly for equal votes are in truth not democrats and are in fact perfectly happy for their own votes to count somewhat more heavily than those of their opponents.

As so many times in history, liberals (of all party hues) proclaim their superior knowledge of the facts and through that assert an informed knowing that eludes ordinary punters but entitles them to govern. The recent resort to the Courts over both the referendum and more recently the proroguing of Parliament betrays an almost naive if arrogant take that they can prove their opponents wrong and if so, everything will go back to meritocratic normality. In doing so, whatever their technical skills level may well be, what is clearly absent is any degree of emotional intelligence.

As we saw with the tick-boxing of Lib Dem policies through the austerity of the Coalition, these people will trumpet getting a deal on introducing a plastic bag tax in exchange for agreeing benefits cuts to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. They will claim that getting some extra funding for mental health counselling somehow makes up for all the suicides caused by introducing arduous tests for disability that were designed to fail vulnerable claimants. They are either clueless or callous, or both.

They will even try to excuse the most execrable decisions by promising to review their procedures to get it right next time, as Chief Whip Alastair Carmichael assured conference doubters over worries about the influx of expelled Tory MPs into their parliamentary ranks. Apparently, each of them was subjected to a 90 minute "grilling" by him to see if they shared the party's values. In spite of this undoubted Ordeal, perhaps via trial-by-lunch, former Tory MP Philip Lee, who opposed gay marriage and introduced legislation to ban migrants with HIV, ticked the relevant boxes.
So illiberal, but so job done...

They are of course playing with fire and are dreadfully ill-equipped to do so. Their actions do nothing to reconcile the deep division in our country, quite the contrary. And with their latest wheeze, they may well have already overplayed a hand they are viewing through a centrist magnifying glass.

The polls suggest that they have already plateaued and started to fall back from their May upsurge in the local and European elections. Swinson's smug style and twisted logic are unlikely to yield many more votes from rival parties. Yet what the polls do show is that her relentless focus on misrepresenting Labour and denouncing Jeremy Corbyn opens up the path to a potentially overwhelming victory for Johnson's Tories, especially if as is not entirely unlikely, they do come to some accommodation with Farage's Brexit Party. Combined, the Tory-BP vote in the current rolling average of polls is 46% to 25% Labour, 18% Lib Dem, 5% Green and 5% Nationalists. Repeated at a General Election, this would produce a Commons with somewhere over 470 hard right MPs out of a total of 650.

Now by Jo Swinson's logic that would be quite a mandate. Even although it might still be the choice of less than half the voters, No Deal would be a dead cert. But perhaps by then Jo will have defaulted to wanting a referendum.

Or maybe not. Maybe she'll be down at the ranch looking for a new pushmi-pull-u.

Illiberal and undemocratic - Swinson and Carmichael

Dry Cleaners of the World Unite: Democracy is in Danger!

 So yesterday in Newcastle Nigel Farage became the latest rightwinger to have a milkshake tossed over his lovely pinstripe suit.

It is a trend that started when would-be MEP Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, was hectoring a young man who, pushed to the edge of reason, poured his own recently purchased liquid confectionery over the former EDL leader. Soon after, Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, a UKIP candidate in the south-west, was milked not once, not twice but four times. Even the Peterborough stall of the re-formed Social Democratic Party, a bolt-hole for allegedly moderate former Kippers, was splattered on Monday, though their only casualties were some leaflets.

Social media has of course been abuzz with pictures and memes - from relatively mild speculation about dairy-free alternatives for would-be vegan assailants through "this is what happens when lactose meets intolerance" to rather cruder speculation about neo-Nazi sexual practices. But, while predictably the rightwing mass media and rightwing groups have howled with rage about this alleged assault on free speech, so too have some on the left voiced concerns about the thin-end-of-the-wedge. Surprisingly, what would previously have been generally viewed as relatively minor, whimsical acts of protest are seen by a not small number of progressively-minded people as a serious threat to the democratic process.

You start with milkshakes, one Green activist warned me, and before you know it, people are committing atrocities like murdering Jo Cox.

Well, no. It may be a bit silly and an arguably counter-productive act to waste a tasty cold beverage on the likes of Farage, but there is a quantum difference between someone staining Nigel's jacket and Thomas Mair gunning down an MP in Birstall market.

The milkshake option (caramel and banana, I believe) follows a long tradition in political protest, one which, while messily dramatic, is ultimately entirely peaceful with clothing the only casualties and temporarily so given the prevalence of new-fangled contraptions like washing machines. It is just the medium that is new: in the past, a variety of soft food products were a popular option - precisely because, as with milkshakes, these can express disdain and anger with very little chance of anyone actually being hurt (physically at any rate, egos may be a different matter).

In 1970, after his car was pelted with eggs during the General Election campaign, Labour's Harold Wilson's response was to quip, "If the Tories get in, in five years time no one will be able to afford an egg." In 1992, Margaret Thatcher was hit by a bouquet of daffodils, while then Deputy PM John Prescott was doused in iced water by members of Chumbawamba at the 1998 Brit Awards.

Egged - Harold Wilson in 1970

My personal experience of this was standing behind the late Labour MP Tam Dalyell at a march against the looming Gulf War in 1991 when a flour bomb struck him between the shoulders, the powdery fallout temporarily bestowing my face with a ghostly Halloweenesque quality. Dalyell however dusted himself down, grinned at me and plunged into a speech about peace.

A few years earlier, at a meeting at Glasgow University where the SDP leader Roy Jenkins was speaking, I witnessed a paper aeroplane hurtle out of the mass of a far from sympathetic audience to land squarely between his bespectacled eyes. Jenkins' response was to coolly carry on speaking while he retrieved the missile from the desk in front of him before nonchalantly launching it back in the direction from which it had come.

There are scores of similar incidents down through the years. John Major, Nick Brown, Michael Heseltine, Nick Griffin, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, Ed Miliband - all these and many more have been pelted with rotten fruit, had chocolate eclairs shoved in their hair or ended up with egg on their faces. Democracy wasn't imperilled and politicians did not call the police to report crimes against their laundry.

Until yesterday, that is, when Farage bravely called the police and made a statement which landed his "attacker" in court charged with common assault and criminal damage.(Of course, Nigel has form when it comes to wasting taxpayers money on his whims - among other charges to the public purse, he similarly insisted on a prosecution of an egg-thrower in 2014.) Whisked on from Newcastle to Wakefield, he refused to leave the "safety" of his bus while vowing (I jest not) to "keep buying new clothes" until polling day.

The cream sours on Tyneside

Well, forgive me, but I shall not weep. In or out of the carton, milkshakes do not threaten democracy. What does are people like creepy "Sargon", who ponders on twitter about whether or not to rape a Labour woman MP; or Farage himself, who has belligerently promised his "People's Army" that he will "pick up a rifle" to ensure the Brexit of his choice happens.

Little more of course than inflammatory bravado when in truth he turns tail and runs from chocolate-dusted cream, but inflammatory all the same and it is this, not harmless acts of protest, that we should be worried about. Because Farage may never lift anything heavier than a pint - but who is listening to him, and what are they thinking and doing?

The murderer Thomas Mair shouted far right slogans - "Britain first!" - as he slaughtered Jo Cox with his knife and home-made gun, and just today we learned that the police and MI5 have been tracking scores of far right extremists who have plotted to murder Labour MPs and carry out major acts of terror. In a number of cases these fascists were dissuaded from committing slaughter only by agents revealing that they were being tracked and their plans were known: the police have not been able to arrest or prosecute in many cases. Instead, they walk our streets, their minds filled with rather more sinister ideas than dispensing sugary drinks over their opponents' heads.

So forgive me, but as I look at the comparisons, I am not losing any sleep over a millionaire's dry cleaning bill.

SHORT STORY: Election '22 - Or, Be Careful What You Wish For

It was a lovely day, that June morning all these years ago in 2022. The sun was up. The sky a crystal clear blue from the very first glow of golden dawn. But down here on Earth, it was as if the solar rays playing across the rooftops of the capital were mocking them as Britain was plunged into a great darkness. It was just the first day, the first of many days of despair that now, as he clutched his drenched jacket around him and tasted the salt in the cold flecks of spray, he remembered so well. So bitterly, terribly well...

"Mr Farage is expected at the Palace in the next twenty minutes to kiss the Queens' hand and accept appointment as Prime Minister... Afterwards, he and his likely Deputy Prime Minister, his coalition partner and leader of the UKIP, Gerard Batten will meet with their MPs to begin the process of forming a new government. The Brexit Party's Foreign Affairs spokesman, Katie Hopkins, has announced that the new PM has already spoken by skype to President Le Pen, herself a recent newcomer to office, to discuss their planned Budapest Compact for a New Europe. Viktor Orban of Hungary and Matteo Salvini of Italy are expected to join them as they prepare to radically overhaul the European Union into their planned Europe of the Nations confederation..."


Hard to believe, he thought, but it was there. Staring us in the eyes. In the f*cking face, in fact.

But of course, just as they'd never anticipated it, the liberals even now denied it. Someone must have stuffed the ballot boxes. The media told lies. The great unwashed had fallen for the Facebook ads and the Twitter memes yet again. Didn't they see it...??

But this was one vote they couldn't rerun and a process they couldn't drag out.

Sure, they had won the second referendum. Back in September 2019, the ChUKs champagne corks had popped and the Lib Dems shook in exotic spresms when, pushed from pillar to post, Theresa May had caved in and agreed a second referendum. Her deal, her precious deal, or... Remain. "No deal" wasn't an option because it apparently made no sense. "Anyone who wants to vote for that, is too stupid to be allowed to vote!" declared one Nu-Labour peer as the ballot bill was rushed through a somnolent Lords.

And so they won: three and a half years' after the first referendum, Remain on 54% of the vote carried the day.  After 6 weeks of ever more vicious and divisive argument, somehow even worse than the first plebiscite, 16.9 million backed staying in the EU. Article 50 was revoked and, tail between its legs, Britain sheepishly returned to the Eurofold. Bereft of her majority already and with Rees-Mogg's ERGers in open, permanent revolt, Theresa May retired to a wheatfield in the Home Counties. A National Government under Sajid Javid was forged between the rump of 220 Tory loyalists and the ChangeUK contingent, now swollen to 80 as Blairites fled the Labour Party en mass. The SNP provided "confidence and supply" in return for its own second indy referendum being agreed for 2025, ten years after the first.

No one could remember when the term zombie parliament first entered common parlance. It was probably before the referendum, but at any rate by early 2020 it was seared in permanent place. In the crumbling gothic ruins of Westminster, the patchwork of neoliberals and chancers kept things turning a little bit less each day. But outside, something was happening.

The Brexiteers had lost the referendum. But amidst sarcastic jokes of "best of three", and repeated expositions on how the winning Remain vote this time was numerically lower than the Leave vote last time, Squire Farage donned his finest tweeds and, harrumphing like a latter day Toad, proclaimed war on the Weasels of Westminster. And just as the SNP had hoovered up the YES vote after they lost the Scottish referendum in 2014, so the Brexit Party and, to a lesser degree, UKIP, found their stock rising in spite of the referendum result as they radiated and consolidated the seething anger of millions of Leave voters.

Or, as he pondered things now, perhaps because of it. For people who had switched back to the Tories and Labour in 2017 after both pledged to honour the first referendum turned away again. The shenanigans that had stretched all the way through 2019 had poisoned most citizens' views of the political system. The self-identifying Political Class never seemed so detached from reality as it did that year and, feeling no loyalty from their MPs, similarly millions of voters offered none in return.

Birthed in their successful 2019 campaign for the Euroelections they claimed should never have happened, the Brexit Party had faced something of a quandry about what to do after the second vote, but the formal defection of 40 ERG MPs from the Tories to Farage in early 2020 gave it a significant parliamentary presence for the first time. By late 2021, the rightwing collaborators stood at 29% in the polls, behind Labour's 32% but 13% clear of the Change UK party and 15% ahead of Javid's doomed Tories. Sensing its ultimate fate at the polls, the Government of the Undead stumbled on blindly with only Nick Clegg's Fixed Term Parliaments Act keeping them clinging on constitutionally to the aptly-named deadline for fresh elections in spirng 2022.

The General Election campaign was bitter indeed. The Leaders' debate between Javid, Farage and Corbyn oused with recriminations and accusations of treason, racism and corruption. Farage and Corbyn were seen as joint winners by the polls, with Javid sinking. But still, on polling day, Labour clung to a 3% lead - 35 to 32 - over the Faragists. The received wisdom was that  as UKIP had polled 14% in 2015 but won no MPs, then even with a much swollen vote, they might hope at best for "a Brexit dozen" as Ken Clarke scathingly predicted from behind a large cigar.

"Farage finished" proclaimed the Guardian, while the Independent favoured "Brexit's Last Gasp" and even The Sun cautioned "Nigel Nowhere?".

Polling was brisk, but in Leave-voting areas from the referenda, it was mobbed. Angry queues formed from early morning as Britain enjoyed the first days of a warm summer. Police fought with groups of right wingers who moved through London parks attacking black people, tourists and anyone - indeed, anything - they deemed foreign.

He spat as he remembered sitting with some Green and Lib Dem friends in a tapas bar in Limehouse. They had all been in high spirits as they traded tales of ignorant Brexit supporters on the doorsteps. As the sonorous election programme theme sounded and the red and blue graphics sparked and sparkled in the dim light of dusk, they had watched in jubilant anticipation.

"And our prediction is - Brexit-UKIP take 35% of the national vote and win with 312 MPs for the BP and 36 for UKIP. An overall majority for the alliance of 46 seats.  Labour remain the official Opposition with 201 and the SNP follow up with a much increased 49. The Tories polled 17% of the vote, better than expected, but held on to just 19 seats..."

"First-past-the-post," he heard himself mutter. "First-past-the-f*cking-post..."
They somehow hadn't reckoned on that, had they. 46% of the vote lost the Brexiteers the referendum; but just 35% won them an outright majority in the Commons, as it had done for Blair way back in 2005. 65% opposed them, but there was Farage in Downing Street and Tommy Robinson on his way to his new desk at the Home Office.

But of course, at least Britain was still in the EU. That would protect them, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't it?

As he sat now on the side of the raft on this grey day, his gaze switching from the lapping water to the distant Gallic shore, its haze-covered beaches traced with barbed wire and lookout towers, he knew better.

The distant hum grew louder and through the faint mist he watched the Border Protection Force frigate HMS Enoch Powell bearing down on the flotsam and jetsam of liberalism as it bobbed in the cold waters around him. He closed his eyes. And as the guns strafed the sea, he grew angry, his face contorting with pain.

Yet it was not from piercing bullets that his agony came, but from his seething disappointment. For in these, his final fleeting seconds, all he could think of, all that he could visualise, was David Cameron, his porcine chops grinning and puffing pretentiously, his condom-quiff wobbling and his porcelain-perfect teeth flashing with customary contempt.

A snoot laughing in the face of humanity forever...

Green Fades - a fond farewell to the party I love

(Written on 14 March)
This is, for a change, a personal piece - I rarely write here in the first person or about my own life or experiences, but today I make a possibly self-indulgent exception. Because this week, for the first time since either May 1977 or possibly 1978 - it's a while ago either way! - I am not a member of a political party, a state that, after all these years, seems mildly odd (when in truth, set against the population as a whole, it is membership of a party that is odd - fewer than one in ten people join one in their entire lifetimes).

After nearly 14 years, I have said goodbye to the Green Party of England & Wales. It may seem to some of my former colleagues and comrades a strange time to take such a step - after all, when have politics been as fascinatingly volatile as this frenetic week of Brexititis at Westminster? A hung Parliament has figuratively hung a Prime Minister, hoist on her own hubris and peculiar school-prefect-like mix of duty and disdain for lesser mortals. And of course the Opposition is little better - fracturing parties, policy changes by the day, while Brexiteers warn ominously of treason and Remainers of apocalypse. An election could be weeks away, or a referendum - or just a meltdown.

Great days for active politicos of any and all stripes in any and all capacities.

And as historic days pass by and our electorate scan the horizon for some hope, this could have been the time for Greens to have offered a new way forward - while still open to the world we care so much about, we could have been majoring on our core policies of fostering local economies and bringing manufacturing closer to home to create a fairer, more sustainable way of doing things. But instead we have been enthusiastically adding to the centrist narrative of almost any form of Brexit being the reality version of The Walking Dead.

I voted and campaigned for Remain, but the Greens' drive for a second vote from as soon as the results of the first one were declared completely ignored the reasons for the Leave victory - and fails to consider the possibly dire consequences to our politics if a second vote reversed the first by anything less than an overwhelming margin, something no polling evidence suggests even remotely likely. What better shot in the arm to Farage's Brexit Party than if say 47% still voted Leave and, as the centrists popped open the post-referendum champagne, his new party scooped up even just 35% of the vote at the next General Election? That same figure gave Tony Blair an outright majority in 2005.

But it is not only in Brexit that strange days have fallen on the Greens. After a record-breaking vote in 2015 under Natalie Bennett and a second-best ever result in 2017 in spite of fewer candidates and the Corbyn surge, a narrative took hold across the national echelons of the party that, in truth, these two amazing results were actually abject failures caused by the promotion of a far-left, almost bolshevist agenda. Apparently, there had been too much emphasis on the NHS, on renationalising the railways and energy sectors and tackling inequality. Time to turn back to talking simply about ecology and climate change - so now the strategy passed by the party last spring commits it to a path described in the document as "social liberalism".

What is "social liberalism"? Well, aside from it being the title of a vaguely social democratic group within the Lib Dems, it is usually used to describe a combination of mildly regulated free market economics with promotion of individual freedom. While it sees the role of government including ameliorating poverty and providing some level of social support, it does not fundamentally change capitalist economics nor challenge ownership of resources or concentration of wealth - at its heart is a policy of growth and managed/ prompted trickle down of wealth, a sort of kinder, gentler neoliberalism. How would ot could this ever provide the social and economic transformations needed so urgently to stop environmental catastrophe?

This is quite a contrast to the party I joined after hearing Caroline Lucas argue passionately on a panel about economic and social justice and about the ills of capitalism in 2005. It is a peculiar path to take and unnecessarily exclusionary for those of us who hold to ecosocialism or simply to breaking up capitalist monopolies to create new forms of economics focused on sustainable sharing of resources. The rest of the strategy explains why - social liberalism hopefully appeals to some voters from other parties, crucially including the apparent abundance of green-minded Tories who would have voted Green if only we hadn't been calling for a public NHS or for a fairer distribution of wealth.

So, sure, if you represent a party as a candidate, as I have done at local and parliamentary level, you need to be at least comfortable with what it is doing - though would the words "social liberalism" either win over or deter anyone on the doorsteps? Or for that matter, the party's current decision to abolish its formal trade union links? Nope, of course not. It is a case of activist-world problems, dear perhaps to me and others who fuss over such matters, but how crucial really in the wider scheme of things when our planet is burning up, literally, before our eyes?

Well, humans are social creatures. We affiliate to many communities and groups. Our friends, colleagues and comrades are our tribe. Like families, we might fall out, but in the end, we make up. Or do we?

British politics and society, just like pretty much everywhere else now, are divided and fractious beyond belief. The Greens are no exception.

I won't dwell over-much or break confidences here, but in 2017 I was co-chair of the Green Party Regional Council for 8 months. This is one of two bodies - the other being the Party Executive - that oversee the party's functioning. For me, previously working in my naivete with fairly harmonious and certainly positive, friendly local and regional parties, it was an unwelcome revelation: GPEW has a significant hinterland of caustic complaint, legal threats and mean-spirited, personalised dispute utterly astonishing in a party that claims - in the vast majority of cases, I believe, genuinely - to seek a better, happier world for all.

These disputes covered all manner of issues, many at core quite trivial until fermented in sometimes truly alarming vitriol. One repeating theme, mostly after my time on GPRC ended has been around transgender issues. There is certainly discussion to be had for many to understand transgender issues better - and there has also at times been some pretty harsh and inappropriate behaviour by individual transmen and transwomen in the party. But when have Greens of all people held that the actions of an individual justify pre-determined views of a whole group? And if some statements by some transactivists invite questions from others, why can't these questions be advanced in a culture of inquisitive acceptance as opposed to rejectionist hostility?

Those who complain about transactivists being overly hostile to others' viewpoints ignore the fact that these viewpoints often deny the validity of transmen and transwomen's identities, for some reason often presuming them to be lightly worn. Not rarely are these complaints themselves delivered with pretty full-on anger. Referencing the worst of US Republicans, sometimes lewd and often bizarre concerns are raised about men supposedly using women's toilets or the apparent indoctrination of children to transgenderism at school - how Clause 28 is that? It seems the history of fighting oppression has been somewhat set aside by some when it comes to transgender rights.

For me this came to a head with the posting on a party noticeboard of a lengthy diatribe in the form of a pantomime script filled with crude references to transpeople in the name of supposedly supporting feminism. Though written by a woman, it was posted by a man who described it as "hilarious" - sure, very funny if you like lots of references to f*cks and d*cks, but hardly conducive to either inviting serious discussion or fostering a culture of respect. It remained posted for several days, a veritable paean to a new sectarianism.

At the end of my time on GPRC, I organised some interviews for the chair of a commission the party conference had voted to set up to review its workings. An interviewee asked the panel what success would look like. A senior party member responded that, among other things, it would be good if Greens were kinder to each other.

So, my former Green colleagues, I hope you can learn not just to be kinder but even to love each other again. However, you will only succeed if you acquire that generosity of spirit where, even if you truly can't agree or understand, you can at least accept one another for who you are. Enquire, seek to understand, but no more exclusion, no more pejorative complaints forms or abusive social media tirades.

Because after this warmest of winters, as you well know, the world doesn't have the time any more.

Corbyn and the EU: the Clock is Ticking

The last week has seen the fissures in the Conservative Party rent open for all to see more clearly than ever. With Cabinet Ministers falling like nine-pins in what can only be assumed were well-rehearsed tantrums (even the man who wrote the deal was among those who denounced it and resigned!), Theresa May's Coalition of the Damned seemed on the brink of collapse. Opponents inside and outside ranks circled like vultures over an bloodied prairie dog, while the media salivated over a fresh delivery of meat for their 24 hour newsfeast. Even Labour's Jeremy Corbyn mused that he could muster a little sympathy for the Prime Minister on a personal level - though someone might remind Gentle Jezzer that she was of course the Home Secretary who led on inventing the "hostile environment" for migrants, so any empathy might be better directed elsewhere.

Yet, while May is on the ropes and anyone watching must wonder what she does get out of it for herself, the fact is that she will almost certainly still be PM in 6 months time (just) and the Tories will still be in Government with their DUP Orcs snapping loudly but loyal on the benches behind them. The Tories are masters of survival and this time is no exception - their incumbency entrenched by Nick Clegg's typically short-sighted Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that over 100 Tory turkeys would need to vote for Christmas before there can be a new General Election this side of 2022.

We hear that five Government Ministers - yes, there are still that many left - led by the weasel-minded Michael Gove are sticking with Theresa May to persuade her to amend the deal. This would entail both May and the EU being prepared to renegotiate, which is unlikely in both camps. So that leaves two scenarios: either one where the Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons suddenly fall into line, which will simply not happen; or, more likely, the deal is scrapped and the Tories and DUP unite around a situation where May signs up to numerous piecemeal arrangements for things like customs checks and air travel before a"Hard Brexit" at the end of March 2019.

This will not be the apocalypse that so many Hard Remainers claim: we will not fall back to eating grass flavoured with the last packets of stockpiled bisto, though without question there will be many administrative problems and disruption especially to transport for several weeks or months.

What we will have is a Conservative regime though that will use the chaos to enact all manner of contingency legislation and regulations to dismantle a swathe of employment and consumer rights, privatise yet more or the state and possibly repress some of its opponents in the name of National Unity. May, her job done (she will say) will resign in May and Gove's hour will arrive.

Unless....

There is, in the next few weeks, a wide open chance for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour to drive not just a wedge between the Tories, but a stake into the heart of the Government. It would involve neither a General Election nor a second referendum.

What if Keir Starmer were to announce that, on reflection, while May's Deal doesn't meet Labour's six tests, the party recognises that, in the short time left, it is the best deal available and the only one that will both honour the referendum result and afford some protection to workers and consumers?

Doing this, rescuing May's deal, possibly with a few amendments, would leave the Prime Minister prisoner of Labour and drive Mogg and co out either to foment ceaseless rebellion within the Tories or alternatively to the netherworld of UKIP - whose own revival, now gaining some traction in the polls where they are back in third place though on just 8%, would also be spiked. May might linger on longer at Downing Street, but her government would be paralysed and the time would come when even she would know the game was up and support an early General Election. Labour would be in pole-position to dictate the terms of the ongoing negotiations for our new trading relationship with the EU (bear in mind that the current deal is only about how we leave, not the future arrangements) and by reaching out across the political divide would be seen a force for unity in this divisive time.

Politics is the art of the possible. And while all acts should always be guided by deep-rooted principle, much of the hot air of the last few days has not been for the sake of beliefs and ideals, but simply jostling for personal and/or party gain at what is one of the most critical moments for the UK since we joined the EEC back in 1973.

The electorate, on the other hand, seek simply a settlement: for now, none of the uncompromising politicians parading before the cameras this last week are likely to have infused anyone with what is needed above all - hope. Corbyn alone has the chance to do so, but the clock is ticking.

Brexit Reality

The Brexit process is nearing its climax. With the Green Party conference meeting in Bristol this weekend, some thoughts on their and other Remainers' campaign for a second referendum on British membership of the European Union. Is focusing on a new vote detracting from at least mitigating the reality of the now inevitable post-Brexit Britain being fashioned by the Tories?

June 2018, and by 17,410,742 - the largest vote for anything ever recorded in the UK - to 16,141,241 the decision is to exit the European Union.

Except, the Leavers lied. Their voters were misled, under-educated, and, well, just bitter about life. They didn’t know what was good for them. They were angry or racist or dead, or all three. (“Dead” is not sarcasm – one Lib Dem would-be actuary got out the mortality tables and, projecting from exit polls, declared that the Leave majority would be mouldering in the grave within 3 years - a line Nick Clegg later took in a BBC interview).

The most appalling, elitist smears have been called down on Leave voters, making it pretty clear that liberal democracy has in fact sparse room for actual democracy. Not unserious demands for people over 65 to be disenfranchised feel like a precursor to a return to the second business vote, or the reintroduction of University MPs. Some Remainer memes and arguments have sought to count non-voters and even babies as anti-Brexit votes.The People have spoken, damn them – time to get a new People.

Claiming to speak for the 10% perhaps rather than the 1%, a lobby of liberal professionals who benefit quite nicely from the opportunities afforded by the EU are irate. Extremely so. Why should their parade be rained on by an unholy alliance of Left Behinders on their grotty northern housing estates and ageing, Daily Mail-chewing Blue Rinse Zombies down in Brexiteer Bournemouth?

A second referendum must be held. One to put things right.

Except that it wouldn’t put things right at all. Aside from the fact that the polls do not show any significant overall movement either way since 2016, what would a rerun do? 

A narrow Leave vote would probably engender a revived UKIP, or worse, and a hard Brexit would turn into tungsten one. A narrow Remain win would face calls for yet a further plebiscite for a “best of three”- and again revive Ukip, or worse, as many among the 52% concluded that voting truly is pointless. 

But, aside from anything else, a second vote isn’t going to happen. The Tories will not concede one and, in spite of the hype, no one is going to make them. No one can. Not even JC at his most miraculously messianic. 

Greens are making a terrible strategic mistake in expending our limited political capital running with Cable, his Lib Desperadoes and a coterie of washed-up Blairite chancers. If the Leave campaign excelled in “fake news” such as Turkey’s imminent relocation from Anatolia to Croydon, it is now well-matched by dire warnings that by April Britain will run out of everything from cream soda to donated sperm. Much smacks of the panicked Scottish unionists during the independence referendum wildly warning YES voters that Doctor Who wouldn’t be on the telly any more, while Nicola Sturgeon would be waiting at Gretna to check your car boot for anyone smuggling Tories across the border. 

And no one made any distinction between so-called "hard" and "soft" Brexits until after the referendum result. Nor did anyone talk about any confirmatory referendum - neither Cameron when he called the vote, nor Clegg when he called for a "straight in/out" referendum in 2008, nor the Greens' Caroline Lucas when she proposed an amendment to a Eurosceptic backbench referendum bill in 2011.

Don’t get me wrong: I campaigned and voted Remain. I was as disappointed by the result as most Remainers. My support though was very much about countering the rise of racism and more positively to fostering internationalism – but that particular ship has sailed. We need to work out now how to heal divisions and address the outcome rather than try to wish it away. Just as impeaching Trump would be the biggest shot in the arm American populists could dream for, our apparent rejection of the referendum only confirms rather than challenges the beliefs that led to the outcome in the first place.

The environmental benefits of EU membership are significant, but they can be over-stated, because the economics of Europe have long been definitively anti-environmental. The EU is one of the biggest free trade blocs in the world. How can such an institution fit with the urgent need to develop localised green economies and sharply reduce the transportation of “things” across our crisis-stricken planet? All the more so when its trade policies are so harshly biased against poorer states outside the Union - it is a longstanding ally of the austerity and privatisation restructure programmes of the IMF and World Bank, disrupting the ecologies of many African and other Third World states in the process.

We are warned that apocalyptic queues of trucks will form at Dover post-Brexit. Kent will become a giant lorry park. Bad stuff - but consider what all these hordes of huge carbon waggons are doing day in day out right now as they carry their cargoes from Tallinn to Truro.

In terms of social benefits, contrary to myth, the corporatist EU does not guarantee employment rights. Apart from the discrimination directives (which notably did not stop the Coalition introducing tribunal fees for discrimination cases at triple the norm), our employment protection regulations are almost entirely set domestically. The same goes for holidays, established by UK law in the 1930s and driven by trade unions, not by international capitalists. By contrast, the EU was content to exempt Britain from key parts of the working time regulations. 

Greens talk of reforming Europe – but there is no blueprint for that in existence. Nowhere in our policies is there anything beyond a bigger say for the Parliament in the workings of the Commission. While the hard work of Green MEPs from both the UK and other EU states on social protections must be lauded, the bottom line is that zero hours contracts and the gig economy, the housing crisis, NHS privatisation and near unprecedented social inequality have all prospered inside the EU. There may be no Lexit under Theresa May, but there is no Lemain either.

We have a historic opportunity and an urgent need to portray a post-Brexit Green society: to promote wealth redistribution, sustainable agriculture, co-operative enterprises, public ownership of clean energy and transport, and the re-industrialisation of our economy using small-scale, local enterprises to manufacture infinitely more of the goods we use. In other words, to provide an alternative to the dark future being fashioned by the Tories right now. 

Green MEPs have recognised that, while unwelcome of itself, Brexit could provide "transformative opportunities" for the UK economy.

"…we recognise that Brexit does provide some opportunities for radical change in the UK economy, for example in trade relations and expenditure on agriculture. The economic challenge of Brexit has shocked the government out of the policy of austerity and offers us important opportunities in terms of making significant and timely investments in the transition to the greener economy that climate change demands." (Greening Brexit, Molly Scott Cato et al, November 2016)

This rather than pushing ceaselessly for a second vote should be the cri de coeur for Greens and their allies. This can be the springboard of creating at least an awareness of an alternative Brexit reality to the chaos of May, Mogg and Johnson.

Brexit will be a huge challenge, no doubt. There will be significant disruption, especially in the first few months. But much, much worse is coming very soon in any case as the environmental and resource crises deepen rapidly across the entire planet. The challenge for us is to engage with the majority who have no real stake in our society because so much of it is being accumulated by an ever smaller elite. 

All the liberal arguments in the world do not even begin to address the day to day lives of most people, and do nothing to resolve the barriers so many face in our current economy - a process stretching back to almost the very time we joined Europe and so not surprisingly, nor entirely inaccurately, associated with it by many. Fail to do this and, like the Russian Kadets and Mensheviks in March 1917 who fussed over the legal theories and niceties of drafting new constitutions while the Bolsheviks won the hearts and minds of the people with their demands of "Peace, Bread and Land", the momentum will stay with those who seek the harshest Brexit of all and a dystopian society for our country.

Greens and others on the Left can squander this precious time tilting at referendum windmills. Or we can focus furiously on advocating for the social justice, environmental sustainability and economic resilience we need for civilised society to survive and thrive. The choice is ours.

A slightly shorter version of this article appears in the conference edition of the Green Left's "Watermelon" journal. This can also be found on the Green Left website. Please note that this article is a personal view and not GL policy.