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

Last Brexit to Bullingdon

Bullingdon Boys - Cameron (2nd left back) & Johnson (front right) at Oxford together

 "This is the most important decision Britain will make in a generation," quivered the worried voice of Tory grandee Lord Heseltine on the radio this evening. "But it is turning into something nasty."

The plaintive plea of a serious man, perhaps, but one likely to fall on deaf ears as the European referendum campaign grows ever more shrill.

Remain have deployed the Project Fear tactics of the Scottish referendum (forgetting how that in fact almost lost Scotland from the UK). Unlearning, the Remain camp has choreographed an endless succession of bad Brexit days on what would happen if the Eurovote is to leave the European Union: we will all be £4,000 worse off, we will pay more for our goods, we won't get a trade deal with the USA, we will lose influence, European scientists won't talk to British scientists any more, and, today, according to Prime Minister Cameron, the bloodthirsty terrorist leader of Daesh will apparently be delighted if Britain opts for Brexit.

So far, so fear.

Brexit are no better however: we are long used to Farage and Co proclaiming the imminent death of Britain as more Bulgarians and Romanians than actually exist allegedly prepare to decant to Margate. But now we are also told by the increasingly hysterical Boris Johnson that the EU is in fact the realisation of Napoleonic and Nazi dreams of conquest (although curiously he seems to applaud the Roman invasions) and now today he has claimed Cameron has been bribing business leaders to support Remain in return for public contracts.

So what are we seeing here?

Just two men define the debate: David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

All along, the referendum has been David Cameron's high-risk tactic for managing his party. Aware of how Euroscepticism and "bastards" round the Cabinet table did for the last Tory PM, John Major, his offer of a referendum was only ever designed to rally his own dissidents and take the sting out of the rising UKIP. But, now that the time is here, the real reason for this national vote is as clear as crystal. The debate they really care about isn't Europe, but rather who will be Cameron's successor?

Boris Johnson supported remaining in the EU until over a weekend in February he decided to campaign to leave, largely to give him a platform to promote himself to succeed Cameron as leader and PM when the latter stands down, as he has pledged to do sometime before 2020. Similarly wearing his convictions lightly, Cameron reportedly prepared two articles for publication, one for staying and one for leaving, until he assessed his chances (and those of his friend and desired successor George Osborne) after the concluded his notional negotiations with other EU leaders.

So now, instead of a meaningful debate of the merits and possibilities of In or Out, their shrill, personalised and ever more ridiculous baiting of each other exposes not only the immature level of their European debate, but also the truly nasty natures of both men. This should be of little surprise, of course.

These men were contemporaries at Eton and in the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. The latter institution, which takes stipends rumoured to be up to £10,000 pa from each member, distinguishes itself with schoolboy rituals, such as smashing up the rooms of new members, holding an annual breakfast involving such excess that each person is given a sick bag to allow them to vomit without leaving table and, allegedly, burning money in front of a homeless person.

Our protagonists were no exceptions. Boris Johnson's biographer notes:
"I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."  Meanwhile Cameron has reminisced fondly that,“Things got out of hand and we'd had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”

These men are bullies. They have grown up in a culture where self-entitlement and bullying (thinly disguised as upper-class joshing) are de rigeur. It has shown in how Cameron has run a Government targeting the vulnerable with his relentless austerity economics and in how Johnson allegedly ran City Hall via eclectic demands for half-baked ideas to be implemented and then growing angry with those who failed him.

Both men have tried hard to cultivate more positive self-images - Cameron as a regular family guy, Johnson as a happy buffoon on a bike. All too often their masks have slipped for a moment - such as when Cameron described a handful of desperate refugees as a "swarm", like human insects; and Johnson when he screamed abuse at a taxi driver for no reason other than his own pomposity. But of course, there is nothing as bitterly vitriolic or fascinatingly unpleasant than two former allies scrapping jealously with each other. Whatever the outcome of the Eurovote, the medium term future not only of both men but of their party and its Government must now be in serious doubt. We can but live in hope.

In the meantime, however, we will have been required to make a major decision on our national future with the arguments mired in mutual loathing between different wings of the Tory Party. It is to be hoped that in the weeks remaining more sensible voices, on all sides, can come to the fore and debate the issues without the distraction of either of these smug egotists.

Let them go back to Bullingdon, shout bullshit at each other and vomit together. Then the rest of us can get on with the grown up stuff. Like deciding the future of our country and Continent.

Godwin's Downfall - Boris Johnson, Or The Historian Who Should Know Better

There is in social media a term called "Godwin's Law", which asserts that anyone with a tenuous or false observation to make on the internet will eventualy invoke Adolf Hitler.

We've had two former London Mayors cite the Austrian Corporal in the last two weeks:

Labour's Ken Livingstone ended up suspended by the party after extrapolating from an arrangement permitted by the German Fuhrer to let Jews leaving Nazi Germany in late 1933 go to Palestine as meaning Hitler endorsed the Zionist belief in a Jewish State. While the Havaara accord is undeniably historical (if short lived), the claimed Zionist intentions of the author of the virulently anti-Semitic Mein Kampf were rather more dubious.

And now, this weekend, Ken's successor, Boris Johnson, less than a week after leaving office, has derided the European Union as being akin to Hitler's Nazi project to conquer Europe. In a lazy attack, the Brexit leader compared the EU bureaucracy to the Napoleonic and Nazi wars of conquest, indulging in cheap rhetoric and ignoring key aspects of history which he is more than well acquainted with.

For Johnson is a historian and is more than aware that the genesis of the European Union was one of ensuring peace and reconstruction after the end of the devastating Second World War. Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, called in 1946 for a United States of Europe to ensure the reconstruction of the European family - whether he wanted Britain to be part of it or not is open to debate, but it makes the EU hardly the pursuit of a Nazi dream as Johnson has so crassly claimed. Indeed, most of the founders of the EU were people who had actively resisted Hitler and Mussolini or been persecuted and imprisoned by them, the like of which Mr Johnson has had the historically unusual good fortune never to have experienced. Several of the eleven so-called Founding Fathers were resistance fighters, while others were arrested and one fled Nazi-occupied France concealed in the false bottom of a truck.

So it is a travesty of the truth for Johnson to compare the European project with the dictatorships of the jackbooted militarists - all the more so as it is the Nazis' own spiritual heirs in the growing neo-fascist and far right movements who are keenest of all to destroy the European Union.

If Britain leaves, the likes of Le Pen and the AfD will see that as the first of many dominoes to fall until the whole Union is undone and we return to dozens of nation states peering suspiciously at each other over reinforced borders. If this is what Johnson wants from his call for British voters to be "heroes of Europe" (like something out of a bad 1960s war movie), he should know better.

For as a historian, Johnson will also be more than aware that we have never before now had over 70 years without a large-scale war on the European Continent. To be sure, there have been bloody localised conflicts in former Yugoslavia and in Ukraine and parts of the Caucasus (all outside of the EU), but for the first time in history there has been no major war blighting our previously blood-soaked part of the world. Go back, as Mr Johnson curiously does, to the glorious days of authoritarian Imperial Rome, which he does for some reason seem to laud as a "golden age", and not only under that Empire but in every subsequent century you can find not one or two but dozens of large scale military conflicts between European states. That is until 1945, and the new emphasis on a Europe that shares its future rather than fights over it.

Has the EU realised that future?

The simple answer is No, of course not. The EU is beholden to big business interests. It is not sufficiently democratic and in some respects, especially in the Eurozone which Britain is not part of, it is over-centralised and obsessed with austerity economics (like our own Government). But that is a case for staying in and making it change; it is not a case for deriding it as the realisation of a one-balled bloodthirsty narcissist's dream and walking away to do deals with these nice democrats in Beijing and shake hands with President Trump.

On so many issues - tackling climate change, taming big multinational corporations, keeping the social and political peace on our fractured Continent - a democratised EU is essential. Leaving it won't somehow magic an alternative into being. We need to campaign, argue, push for change. And if in the meantime we argue ceaselessly with other Europeans, well, equally we will work with many others too, and in any case, surely shouting is better than shooting?

Mr Johnson, as changeable as his spliced-at-conception twin Trump, should take his tawdry careerism elsewhere and leave history alone.

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