Britain • Topic • Inside Story https://insidestory.org.au/topic/britain/ Current affairs and culture from Australia and beyond Thu, 21 Mar 2024 22:27:44 +0000 en-AU hourly 1 https://insidestory.org.au/wp-content/uploads/cropped-icon-WP-32x32.png Britain • Topic • Inside Story https://insidestory.org.au/topic/britain/ 32 32 Born to laugh https://insidestory.org.au/born-to-laugh/ https://insidestory.org.au/born-to-laugh/#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2024 22:15:14 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=77599

Is British comedy pervaded by the worldview of the Oxbridge graduate?

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It was hard not to be charmed by the race between a lettuce and Liz Truss’s prime ministership. It was gallows humour sharply poised between self-deprecation and outright deprecation, somehow typical of British humour. The whimsy worked as a coping measure, but was it also an agent of change?

On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

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Lord Salisbury’s message for the housing ombudsman https://insidestory.org.au/lord-salisburys-message-for-the-housing-ombudsman/ https://insidestory.org.au/lord-salisburys-message-for-the-housing-ombudsman/#comments Tue, 20 Feb 2024 06:48:23 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=77278

… and the housing ombudsman’s message for Australia

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“Complaints have the ability to reveal the truth,” says England’s housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway. And the truth, as he sees it, is that Britain’s social housing system has lost focus, particularly on the intimate connection between housing and health.

Blakeway receives a lot of complaints. More than one in six people in England live in social rentals (compared to fewer than one in twenty in Australia). That’s about four million households, and Blakeway’s office is the place to go if they have a beef with their landlords, whether those institutions are not-for profit housing associations or local councils.

In 2022–23, the ombudsman made 6590 orders and recommendations designed to make things right for residents, including £1.1 million (A$2.1 million) in compensation. The call on Blakeway’s services is escalating at a phenomenal rate. “This financial year we’re up 91 per cent for formal investigations,” he tells me in an online interview. “We’re trending towards 10,000 formal investigations a year.”

Demand will grow even faster if the ombudsman is empowered to extend its services to another 4.4 million households in the private rental market, a change Blakeway would welcome. Most private tenants can’t currently access the free, independent, impartial redress his office provides, but a Renters Reform Bill could make his office the single venue for managing conflicts without the need to go to court.

Blakeway took up his role in 2019. His previous experience included serving as London’s deputy mayor for housing (when Boris Johnson was mayor) and as a director of the government housing agency, Homes England. Answering my questions, he is thoughtful and considered, and not prone to strong statements. In official verdicts on the failures of social housing providers, though, he is more direct.

Last July, for instance, he delivered a scathing judgement on the consistent failings of London’s largest social landlord, L&Q, which provides homes to a quarter of a million people. He found L&Q demonstrated little empathy in responding to residents’ complaints and in some cases was overtly dismissive, heavy-handed and lacking in respect. He ordered the organisation to pay £142,000 in compensation and apply 500 remedies including apologies and repairs. He has been equally critical of other big housing providers.

Resolving individual cases, though, only achieves so much. In a new report analysing complaints by vulnerable tenants, the ombudsman identifies patterns of landlord failure around attitudes, respect and rights. A fundamental reset is needed, he writes, and a royal commission into housing and health is the way to do it.


Remarkably, the ombudsman reaches back to the 1880s for inspiration. The Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes was, he writes, the “only inquiry of its kind to explore the relationship between housing and public health.” The commission was set up in 1884 by Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, who appointed himself — along with the Prince of Wales, former union leader Henry Broadhurst and several others — as one of its its members.

Salisbury believed that government-sponsored housing initiatives were vital to improve morality and health — a view criticised by the Manchester Guardian, among others, which described it as “state socialism pure and simple.” Despite the critics, the commission’s report produced “an explosion of transformative government-backed interventions, from council homes to garden suburbs.”

Britain’s subsequent tradition of regarding housing as a health issue saw significant housing developments led by health ministries. The ambitious 1919 Housing Act, for instance, which made housing a national responsibility, is generally called the Addison Act in reference to Dr Christopher Addison, the health minister who introduced it. After the second world war, Labour’s health minister Anuerin Bevan not only created the National Health Service but also, as minister responsible for housing, oversaw the construction of more than a million new dwellings in five years.

Public inquiries like Britain’s 1884 commission have also played an important role in Australia. Most notable is the Commonwealth Housing Commission initiated by postwar reconstruction minister Ben Chifley in 1943. Its report concluded that “a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need, but the right of every citizen” and recommended that the national government “sponsor a government-financed housing programme.”

Up to that point, federal engagement in what was seen as a state issue had been limited. The commission provided the impetus for Commonwealth–state housing agreements over subsequent decades. While the scale of its ambition was never realised, more than 14 per cent of dwellings completed nationally between the end of the war and 1956 were built as public housing.


Richard Blakeway’s call for a royal commission “to reimagine the future of social housing” in the twenty-first century echoes similar calls in Australia. A 2021 report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre argued for a royal commission to tackle “the scale and complexity” of the housing problem. More recently, the Centre for Equitable Housing urged the federal government to review its many and disparate housing-related outlays and bring them together in a single portfolio with clear objectives.

But both England and Australia are awash in reports from a succession of inquiries and housing research. Is the problem really a lack of data? Or is it a lack of political will?

One barrier in both countries is a basic disagreement about how to move forward. Proponents of the supply side argument say planning restrictions are limiting home building, driving up prices and rents. For them, the solution lies in looser planning and zoning rules to free up private development. Build more housing and rents will fall.

The contrary position is that market players have no incentive to build the type of homes that low-income earners can afford, especially when the tax system encourages investment in housing as an asset rather than a public good. The corollary of this critique is that government must reform taxation to reduce speculation and invest more public funds in low-rent housing.

These views are not mutually contradictory, and some action is happening on both fronts, but the supply-side argument seems to hold more sway with governments in both countries. In its 2019 election manifesto, Britain’s Conservative Party promised that it would lift residential construction to make sure 300,000 new homes are built annually in England. As parliament approaches the end of its term, completions are falling short of that figure, with about 234,000 new dwellings added to the housing stock in each of last two financial years. In a new initiative, secretary of state Michael Gove hopes to turbocharge development by compelling councils to speed up approvals for home building on former industrial or “brownfield” sites.

In Australia, the Albanese government aspires to deliver 1.2 million homes over five years, spurred by incentives to streamline planning and zoning rules at state and local levels. To hit this target developers would need to increase construction from 40,000 to 60,000 dwellings per quarter. Expert observers like Alan Kohler doubt the industry can build at such an unprecedented rate, particularly in current market conditions.

Investment in social housing has surged in Australia thanks to federal Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund, or HAFF, and renewed state government initiatives. But after decades of neglect these projects won’t be enough to put roofs over the heads of Australians with unmet housing needs, including the 175,000 households on state and territory waiting lists for social housing.

In England, almost 1.3 million households are waiting for social housing, a dire statistic that manifests in clusters of tents pitched on the pavements of central London. In some parts of the city, more than one in ten children and teenagers live in temporary accommodation and are effectively homeless.

The Tory government says it has invested £11.5 billion since being elected to fund an affordable homes programme. It has just doubled a low-cost loan scheme from £3 billion to £6 billion to enable providers to build an extra 20,000 dwellings.

Historically, though, these numbers appear modest. In the thirty-five years after the second world war, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million dwellings; by 1981 almost a third of the English population lived in social housing. The share has halved in the decades since, not because demand has fallen but because there are far fewer socially provided homes. This month, the magazine Inside Housing reported that the number sold or demolished in England last year was nearly three times greater than the number completed.

An alliance of England’s largest housing associations has urged Michael Gove to invest £15 billion annually over the next decade to build 90,000 homes a year, a third of them in London. But having just lost two seats to Labour in recent by-elections and facing a wipe-out at the next election, prime minister Rishi Sunak is more inclined to woo voters by cutting taxes than by investing billions in public services.

Labour, meanwhile, is playing a cautious hand. It has promised the “biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation” but not the funding to match. Anxious to appear economically responsible, Labour has just scaled back the £28 billion green investment plan that was to be a central plank of its election manifesto. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, a big spend on housing looks unlikely.


As waiting lists for social housing grow, tenants lucky enough to have a subsidised roof over their heads can still find themselves in dire circumstances, reminiscent of the conditions that gave rise to Britain’s first housing inquiry in the 1880s.

In December 2020, in a case that’s become emblematic of the problem, two-year old Awaab Ishak died from a severe respiratory condition caused by persistent mould in the council home his family rented in Rochdale north of Manchester. Mould — one of the systemic problems identified in the ombudsman’s files — is also recognised as a major health threat to tenants in Australia.

Awaab’s parents had been complaining about the mould since 2017 but the local authority failed to act, saying the problem was caused by the family’s “lifestyle.” The ombudsman found many cases of social landlords adopting an accusatory approach rather than investigating other possible causes.

“Health and housing are closely aligned,” says Blakeway, “but the system doesn’t necessarily respond in that integrated way. There’s a real risk that complaints are treated in a kind of transactional way or become personalised. The risk is that they are treated in isolation, and you lose thematic qualities that complaints have, or you don’t do a root cause analysis.”

One housing worker told the ombudsman that tenants who challenge providers are “seen as troublemakers to be quashed.” This view gels with management’s dismissive response to Grenfell Tower residents who warned of urgent fire safety problems ahead of the 2017 inferno that killed seventy-two people.

Community outrage at Awaab’s death has prompted Michael Gove, the minister responsible for housing, to include Awaab’s Law in a new Social Housing Regulation Act. Landlords will now be required “to investigate and fix reported health hazards within specified timeframe.” But whether local authorities and housing associations have the resources to make quick repairs is another question.

More than one in ten dwellings in the social rented sector fail to live up to the Decent Homes Standard, the government benchmark for minimum housing conditions. And the English Housing Survey found that almost two-thirds of tenants who complain to their landlords are not happy with the response.

Tenants told the ombudsman that social landlords were quick to inform them about increased rents and service charges but poor in communicating about all other matters. Not surprisingly, this created a perception that social housing providers are “only interested in money, rather than the condition of their homes or the landlord/tenant relationship.”

An expert panel concluded that communication between tenants and their social landlords is hampered by the high turnover of stressed frontline housing workers. The panel’s Better Housing Review also found that tenants lack a strong voice and face-to-face contact with staff. Blakeway’s research confirms this finding: residents told his office that a simple knock at the door can help to maintain and improve the landlord/tenant relationship.


Funding shortfalls undoubtedly underpin these problems, and the housing crisis has been compounded by the perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, higher interest rates, labour shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. But Blakeway sees other factors at play too.

With around 2000 councils and not-for-profit associations providing social housing in England, a great variability is inevitable. Understandably, the providers’ focus has been on increasing housing supply, but Blakeway says that’s rarely balanced by consideration of what to do about ageing houses and flats in urgent need of upgrades.

He believes that providers hold to a fixed view that social housing is better than any alternative on offer to low-income tenants in the private rental market, which leads them to neglect residents’ needs.

Then there are long-term societal shifts. “If nothing else had changed,” says Blakeway, “the current population in social housing would have got older, above the national average.” That means more vulnerable residents, often concentrated coastal and rural areas.

Housing providers need to think about how to respond says Blakeway: “What does that mean for our services, for adaptations, for understanding of issues like dementia?”

This demographic transition has coincided with residents’ growing understanding of what they can demand under recent human rights, equality and care legislation. The ombudsman says housing providers haven’t done enough to modify residents’ homes in line with these laws. This has been exacerbated by cuts to other government supports. “Social landlords will very clearly say that they feel like they become a surrogate for social and health services,” says Blakeway. “That’s because they are one of the most visible and immediate touch points.”

To survive financially, housing associations are also compelled to become savvy commercial operators. Torus, for instance, claims not only to be the largest affordable housing provider in northwest England, but also “one of its biggest and fastest-growing developers and commercial contractors.” One Housing describes itself as “a group of complementary businesses driven by a clear social purpose, with a charitable housing association at its core.” Alongside social and affordable housing, it offers homes for private rent and private sale.

A lack of funding has forced providers to sweat their assets, a strategy the Better Housing Review panel said “is fast reaching its limits.” The expert panel worried that commercial considerations are distracting providers from their core purpose of providing “decent, safe homes for those who can’t afford the market.” It warns that mergers to achieve economies of scale run the risk of “working to KPIs more related to business efficiency” rather than “complex indicators such as tenant experience and satisfaction.”

Blakeway says consolidation in the social housing sector is driven by noble ambitions but notes organisations become more reliant on processes and systems as they grow. “If a resident doesn’t fit into the neat box or their issues are more complex than the system can cope with, that’s where we can see things being fractured and people through falling through gaps.”


In a 1942 pamphlet, Housing the Australian Nation, prominent Melbourne social reformers F. Oswald Barnett and W.O. Burt surveyed the appalling housing conditions experienced by Australia’s working classes and called for much greater government investment than previously imagined. Health was at the top of their concerns. Without better housing, they worried, efforts to improve health would be “seriously retarded.”

Today, the evidence is even more compelling. In England, the research group BRE calculates that it costs the National Health Service an annual £1.4 billion to treat people made sick by poor housing. Yet there are relatively inexpensive and cost-effective ways of dealing with the major risks: insulation to counter excessive cold, hard-wired smoke detectors to alert residents to fires, handrails to cut the risk of falls, ventilation to minimise mould and damp.

BRE estimates that spending to reduce these hazards would quickly pay for itself in savings to the NHS. In the private rental sector, the payback time would be between eight and nine years; in the social housing sector it would be twelve to thirteen years. (Social housing tales longer to generate a positive return because overcrowding is a major hazard and is more expensive to fix.)

The costs of poor housing go beyond healthcare to include such things as lost earnings for those who fall ill and those who must care for them. BRE calculates that total annual cost to society of leaving people living in poor housing is around £18.5 billion. As well as generating NHS savings, fixing housing hazards would create jobs, reduce energy costs, lower carbon emissions and improve property values.


Looked at this way, public investment in housing seems like a no-brainer, whether as a way of improving lives or as a prudent fiscal move. As the housing crisis deepens, the social and economic price we pay further outstrips the cost of action.

Australia is moving down a similar path to England where, in the 1980s, not-for-profit housing associations began taking on a role traditionally played by local government. Since 2006, the number of dwellings owned or managed by Australia’s not-for-profit providers has more than tripled, mostly thanks to stock being transfers from public housing authorities.

Funding from the HAFF and state programs to build new dwellings will increase the size of the not-for-profit sector and raise pressure on providers to consolidate to achieve efficiencies.But as in England, there is a risk that commercial imperatives could distract from the core business of providing decent homes for Australians priced out of the private market. This is more likely to happen in the absence of consistent public funding and clear government direction.

England has also had sixteen housing minsters in the fourteen years since the Conservatives took office. As the Better Housing Review panel commented, this revolving door means “a lack of consistent and strategic thinking and action.”  Yet the panel insists that government cannot outsources its obligations and must remain “fully accountable for the provision of decent housing nationally,” just as it remains responsible for health and education.

Like England, Australia lacks a coherent housing strategy and consultations to develop one have proved disappointing. For almost a decade, Coalition governments in Canberra insisted that housing was a state matter. While this has changed under Labor, we still have a housing minister with no housing department. As the Centre for Equitable Housing argues, the lack of a dedicated department or a consolidated housing budget statement makes impossible to properly shape or evaluate public policy.

Housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway thinks a royal commission could help solve England’s housing challenge and revive understanding of the close connection between decent homes and good health. Housing, he says, is a complex problem where solutions must be built on expertise, impartiality, independence and a long-term perspective — all things that a royal commission has the potential to deliver. Australia’s problems might be different, but they are just as serious. Perhaps here, too, it’s worth considering a public inquiry with the capacity to probe, publicise and make recommendations. •

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Lost in the post https://insidestory.org.au/lost-in-the-post/ https://insidestory.org.au/lost-in-the-post/#comments Mon, 12 Feb 2024 07:06:25 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=77211

Britain’s Post Office scandal, kept alive by dogged journalism and a new drama series, still has a long way to run

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It’s a David versus Goliath struggle that began a quarter of a century ago and is again generating daily headlines. One of Britain’s most venerated institutions, the Post Office, falsely accused thousands of its subpostmasters of cooking the books. Around 900 were prosecuted, 700 convicted and 236 jailed. Hundreds more paid back thousands of pounds they didn’t owe, had their contracts terminated, lost their livelihoods and often their life savings, and had their reputations trashed.

There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.


The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.


With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

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A love gone wrong https://insidestory.org.au/a-love-gone-wrong/ https://insidestory.org.au/a-love-gone-wrong/#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2023 06:35:40 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=76841

Diplomat, adventurer, politician, podcaster: the instructive life of Rory Stewart, One Nation Tory

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This book might look like it’s about politics, but don’t be fooled: this is a story of a love gone wrong.

Let me give you the Hollywood pitch. In his youth, a boy develops a crush. As a young man, he pursues the desire of his fledgling heart by achieving several eye-catching successes. Approaching middle age, and seemingly running out of time, our hero finally declares his hand and consummates this life-long infatuation. And then, in less than a decade, love lies bleeding.

Since early boyhood, the former British cabinet minister Rory Stewart has been romantically inclined to regard the political life as the sine qua non of existence. Taking charge, getting a grip, getting things done, touring the facility, picking up slack, making the world a better place, fulfilling one’s destiny: these were the ideas that sent Young Rory’s heart aflutter.

And the portal to this personalised Narnia was hidden somewhere in the Palace of Westminster.


From his birth in 1973 until he entered parliament in 2010 — as he tells it in his new memoir, Politics on the Edge — Stewart led a privileged, fulfilling and adventurous life.

His father was the British war hero and spy Brian Stewart, who every morning gave him fencing lessons in Hyde Park. He boarded at Eton, then spent a short stint in the Black Watch, his father’s old regiment, before going up to Oxford, where he attended Balliol, said to be that university’s oldest college. Around this time he became a friend to the future King Charles, and a tutor to his two sons.

After a teenaged dalliance with the Labour Party, Stewart returned to the party of his class. Politics for Stewart is about respect for British tradition and history; the importance of grace under pressure; and the majesty of His Majesty.

His book is filled with beautifully written passages about the natural world and the symbolism of architecture that you don’t normally find in books by politicians. “My office had been that of the Secretary of State for India,” he explains at one point. “A Mughal domed ceiling, plastered in gold leaf, soared above my head. The two curved doors were doubled so that two maharajahs could enter simultaneously with no problem of precedence.”

Stewart is no boorish right-winger; he’s an instinctive One Nation Tory — firmly planted on the left of the Conservative Party — and writes without embarrassment about the need for honour in public life.

For all his veneration of the fruits bestowed on Britain by its long-gone imperial past, he is also a modern human, with an appealing self-deprecatory wit. (During a stoush between his faction and the Tory hard right, he comments, “We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.”)

He’s free of the racism usually associated with his class and nation. He’s supportive of gay marriage; convinced about climate change; genuinely curious about Earth and the people who live on it. He is also admirably suspicious of his own desire for power.


After university Stewart joins the Foreign Office — naturally — and serves in Indonesia in the lead-up to East Timorese independence, and in Montenegro during the Balkans wars.

In 2000 he makes an eccentric but telling career choice: he leaves the FO and spends eighteen months trekking across Iran, Pakistan, the Himalayas and then, just after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan. Walking stick in hand, an Afghan blanket across his shoulders, and relying on the ingrained culture of Afghan hospitality, he lives off the kindness of strangers as he strides through this roadless landscape like a character out of Kipling.

He writes a bestseller about the journey; Brad Pitt buys the film rights. By luck or design, Stewart has acquired an interesting patina of fame — and in a peculiarly British way.

Like his hero T.E. Lawrence, he enjoys travelling to exotic places, where — occasionally — he’s shot at by the locals. In 2003 he is appointed to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, where he runs a province at the ripe old age of thirty. Like many Eton-educated Balliol men before him, he is commanding a dangerous outpost of Empire; but as this is the twenty-first century, it’s the American Empire.

He begins as a supporter of the Iraq war but is soon disillusioned. It is a telling moment. Stewart is too insightful and intelligent, and too wedded to his values, to trim his jib to the prevailing winds. He doesn’t recognise it at the time, but it’s a sign that he might not be best suited to modern politics. Screenwriters would call this an example of foreshadowing.

Stewart is immensely talented, but his talents — for writing, debating, organising and enthusing others — don’t satisfy him. He wants, he says, the power to do good in the world. After a stint setting up and running a charity in Kabul, and then some teaching of human rights at Harvard, he takes the plunge.

In 2010 he gains preselection for the rural seat of Penrith and the Borders, located far away from London in chilly Cumbria. Typically, one of his first acts is to set out on foot and visit every village in the electorate. But the tougher footslog awaits him in London: it is the beginning of the end of the affair.


Stewart must have committed some terrible crime in a previous life: as a junior minister, his first three bosses are Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson.

Truss — who will later become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history — is like the Queen of Hearts made incarnate: capable of thinking up six impossible policies before breakfast. And then not caring if anything happens, so long as a press release is generated.

Stewart attends a meeting with Truss after rushing to the bedside of his gravely ill father. She asks how his weekend was. “I explained that my father had died,” he writes. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the twenty-five-year environment plan would be ready.”

After a reshuffle he falls into the orbit of Priti Patel, who’s been made Secretary of State for International Development, a department she had frequently called to be abolished. When Stewart — who genuinely believes in giving aid to poor nations — tries to engage her about policy, Patel, who has a habit of enunciating every syllable of key words, tells him: “Look Rory, I want you to roll the pitch. Okay? In the end this is about ac-count-a-bi-li-ty.”

Stewart’s time working under Boris Johnson during the future PM’s short and unlamented tenure as foreign secretary is equally instructive. He finds Johnson, ruddy of cheek and untidy of hair, in his magnificent office, his “air of roguish solidity, however… undermined by the furtive cunning of his eyes, which made it seem as though an alien creature had possessed his reassuring body and was squinting out of the sockets.”

Stewart is an expert on the Middle East, so Johnson naturally wants him to become the minister in charge of Britain’s Africa policy. “You’ll love it Rory,” Johnson assures him. “A Balliol man in Africa.”

Stewart had the misfortune to arrive in British politics at a time and place when the performative side of the job was viewed as the only necessity for political success. Like right-wing populists everywhere, Truss, Patel and Johnson loved the spotlight but couldn’t be bothered actually running the show.

And then there’s Brexit. Stewart was a Remainer, and after the disastrous referendum vote he becomes an advocate for a soft Brexit.


The final scenes of a film are the most important. As Sam Goldwyn probably never said, “Start with an earthquake, then build up to a climax.”

The last chapters of Politics on the Edge tell the story of Stewart’s quixotic bid in 2019 to become leader of the Conservative Party and — in his view — save it from itself. Like an episode of Survivor, prospective PMs, including Stewart, fall by the wayside in a series of votes until only Boris the Hutt remains.

Brexit has finally delivered its apotheosis: a man without a moral compass has been chosen to set a new course for Britain.

Meanwhile, somewhere in China, a virus is born. Its hour come at last, Covid-19 slouches towards the old and the weak. Prime Minister Johnson responds with all the alacrity of a distracted sloth.

Soon after losing the leadership ballot, Stewart resigns from the cabinet, the government and the Tory Party and retires hurt from political life. He returns to his family home in Scotland and learns to breathe again by becoming a flaneur of nature.

“One morning” as Stewart is out walking “a roe deer, leaping from the lower field, lands next to me. Startled eyes meet startled eyes.” And then with a bound, “the veins straining against the tight surface of his frightened body,” the deer heads for freedom. •

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Fear of falling https://insidestory.org.au/fear-of-falling/ https://insidestory.org.au/fear-of-falling/#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2023 06:05:04 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=76838

Why would high earners have a mistaken view of where they sit on the income ladder?

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Sometime late last century I spent a couple of weeks filling in as a producer on one of ABC radio’s afternoon programs in Melbourne. Each day we’d comb through the morning’s papers looking for interview ideas that might have escaped the four programs before ours in the day’s schedule. My secret was to scan the Financial Review rather than the already-pillaged Age and Herald Sun.

During those two weeks the Financial Review began a series on “the new middle class.” It opened with a long article analysing survey results that revealed how households on $140,000 a year — a lot of money in those days — didn’t consider themselves particularly well-off. Great, I thought — this’ll make for a solid ten or fifteen minutes. I hurried over to the presenter of the program and showed him the article. “Good God,” he exclaimed after reading the opening paragraphs. “How do people manage on that kind of money?”

Sociologists Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell open their new book, Uncomfortably Off, with an incident that makes a similar point in a slightly different way. In an episode of the BBC’s Question Time during the 2019 British election campaign, IT consultant Rob Barber accused a Labour MP of lying when he said the party’s plan to lift taxes on high earners would only affect people on the highest incomes. Labour wouldn’t be lifting taxes for the remaining 95 per cent, the MP promised.

“But you are!” Barber replied angrily. “Because I’ve read your policy!” The tax would apply to incomes above £80,000, and that meant he’d be among those who’d pay it. “I’m nowhere near the top 5 per cent, let me tell you. I’m not even in the top 50 per cent.”

Barber was wrong: a salary of £80,000-plus put him comfortably in the top 5 per cent of earners. (At around the same time, an Australian earning $180,000 would have snuck into the same bracket here.) His likely mistake, according to Hernando and Mitchell, was to habitually compare himself with people who earn as much as he does or, more importantly, those who earn much more.

As its title suggests, Uncomfortably Off attempts to explain why people on relatively high incomes don’t feel particularly affluent. (Hernando and Mitchell’s interviewees, all British, were drawn from the top 10 per cent of earners, though not the top 1 per cent.) Partly it’s because, like Barber, they compare themselves with people who earn more than they do. Partly it’s because their spending has increased as their incomes have risen and they have to find the money to cover increases in school fees, rising private healthcare costs and mounting lifestyle expectations.

These pressures contribute to what the authors call a fear of falling — the fear that they or their children will end up further down the income ladder. And those pressures have only worsened in recent years. The Conservative government’s austerity program of 2010–19 encouraged wealthier households to abandon overstretched public schools, healthcare and other publicly provided services, adding to the pressure on household finances, and the growing crisis in British schools, hospitals and community care has only added to the incentive to bail out.

But why would well-heeled earners look up rather than down when they’re assessing their own position? Increasingly segregated schooling and housing, more marriage within rather than between income groups, much less shared experience of healthcare and other social services, a greater focus on paid work and its monetary rewards — these are a large part of the explanation, say Hernando and Mitchell.

“All these tendencies,” they write, “mean that it’s increasingly rare for high earners to get to know people outside their usual interaction with friends, family, work and education, especially when other networks (such as those based on religion or hobbies) either dwindle or move online.” Asked to place themselves in the income hierarchy and feeling under pressure, they compare themselves with the relatively small segment of the population that seems typical to them.

This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that wealthy people have disproportionate political power. Once they withdraw from the spheres that most people inhabit — government-provided schools, healthcare or childcare, for instance — it’s no longer in their interest for those services to be adequately funded. This sets up a malign cycle: underfunded public services push people who can afford it into the hands of private providers. Their services cost more — often much more — and that puts pressure on their own finances, increasing their resistance to taxes and making them more likely to support government cutbacks.

Some of these trends are hard to reverse. We can’t do much about people marrying within their own milieu, for example. But we can begin the slow process of changing that milieu. The obvious place to start is in the school system, where private schools (generally the preserve of the wealthiest families) are reinforcing social segregation to an alarming degree.

Hernando and Mitchell conclude that cracks are opening up in the fearful barriers wealthy Britons have erected against an increasingly underresourced public sphere. “This book’s aim is to invite the top 10 per cent to consider a future in which, for the price of giving up the barriers through which they seek to distinguish themselves from the rest” — a price that would include higher taxes — “they could become less anxious, more secure and less isolated.”

Can Australia learn from Britain’s uncomfortable wealthy? While 7 per cent of British children are educated in private schools, the Australian figure is 35 per cent. Add in selective government schools, particularly in New South Wales, and our school system rates among the most segregated in the Western world. But the groundswell of support for the Gonski report (before it was fatally compromised by federal and state governments of both varieties) shows the soil is fertile. •

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality
By Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell | Policy Press | £19.99 | 256 pages

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Modi’s expatriate army https://insidestory.org.au/modis-expatriate-army/ https://insidestory.org.au/modis-expatriate-army/#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2023 03:43:07 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=76829

Western leaders are distancing themselves from the Hindu nationalism popular in some sections of India’s diaspora

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It was an effusion that Anthony Albanese might now wince about. Hailing his official guest, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, before thousands of wildly cheering Indian residents in Sydney, he enthused: “The last time I saw someone on the stage here was Bruce Springsteen, and he didn’t get the welcome that Prime Minister Modi has got… Prime Minister Modi is the boss!”

The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.


That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.


Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.


Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

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The enemy within https://insidestory.org.au/the-enemy-within-2/ Tue, 14 Nov 2023 02:56:37 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=54242

How David Cameron — who returned to the British cabinet this week — fed the beast that eventually destroyed his prime ministership

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Whatever your take on Brexit and the unravelling of Britain’s political establishment since the 2016 referendum, it’s hard to dispute the fact that the foundations were laid well in advance. Just ask any journalist who covered the European Council’s post-summit media conferences during the years of David Cameron’s peak anti-EU belligerence. The former British prime minister’s contempt for the European project was stunning; anyone in the room would have known that this kind of rhetoric couldn’t be unwound. Ultimately, the only one who seemed surprised that his words might set the stage for what Britain is grappling with today was Cameron himself.

Here’s how the press conferences would work. The summit would break in the early hours of the morning and hundreds of journalists would rush to their home country’s briefing room to receive their quotable quotes. Interpreters would scramble; the basement’s unflappable audiovisual team would swoop into action. As twenty-eight heads of government or state took to their podiums, the biggest show in Brussels would reach its climax amid a frenzy of mostly upbeat activity.

Twenty-seven press conferences would follow a similar script. The leader would tell journalists that, yes, negotiations had been tough but middle ground had been found (the passive voice was perfect for EU leaders not wanting to lay blame or take responsibility). If a deal had ultimately been struck it had been in the name of European solidarity. The message was reliably similar: you don’t always get what you want, but it was worth the compromise.

The British press conferences were very different. It was as though Cameron had attended a meeting in a parallel universe. The unelected bureaucrats had tried to put one over on Great Britain, the prime minister would tell us. But fear not — the ever-vigilant British government had seen through the ruse and stepped in to stop another case of continental thieving. And before you had time to take it in, Cameron would move on to domestic affairs, making a point of only taking questions from British journalists and speaking straight down the camera into the houses of the British public. Then he’d skedaddle — no conciliatory statement, no acknowledgement that this political union had brought years of peace, prosperity and a sense of democratic purpose that would have been unthinkable in the Europe of the early postwar era.

As an Australian in Brussels, I didn’t have a horse in this race. You could be objective about the European Union’s achievements without believing that Britain needed to be part of the project. But you could be under no misapprehension that the over-the-top Euroscepticism of British politicians was inflicting real damage. The repeated assertion that the EU was inherently undemocratic — ignoring its directly elected parliament and a European Council made up of twenty-eight democratically elected heads of state or government — was simply untrue. Why would he say that? Britain could have argued that it didn’t agree with the political direction of the EU without suggesting that it was unrepresentative and illegitimate.

Cameron’s decision to take a baseball bat to the EU at every opportunity may have made good political sense and no doubt played well with the popular press that brought the narrative of thieving continentals to the masses. But when it came time to back-pedal and tell voters that, all things considered, Britain was better off as part of the EU, Cameron lacked the credibility to pull it off. The narrative he had built couldn’t be demolished overnight.

I may not have had a stake in this fight, but I was intrigued to observe the Cameron narrative as it weaved its way into Australian reporting on this issue. It wasn’t so much the Euroscepticism that was percolating into the writing of Australia’s London-based European correspondents, but a broader misunderstanding of where to place the EU on the political spectrum.

The British conservatives’ political spin was that the EU was supported by urban, progressive, not-quite-British types — what Theresa May later referred to contemptuously as “citizens of nowhere.” It was a political narrative that put the EU on the left and, by implication, all opposition to the EU on the right in the political firmament. This was a preposterous reimagining of the political reality of continental Europe and one that any observer on the Brussels side of the English Channel would have seen through. Yet conservatives in Australia appeared to lap it up. The fake narrative was there for all to see in the recent Spectator article by Tony Abbott, in which the former prime minister supported not just Brexit, but a no-deal Brexit.

Of all the misunderstandings our European correspondents could have assimilated from their London vantage point, the notion that the EU is something “of the left” is possibly the most pernicious. On the continent, where most of the bloc’s 512 million people lived, the political atmospherics were quite different.

Both European liberals and conservatives — in fact, any centre-right party outside the populist or neo-fascist mould — tend to be pro-European. On the mainland, big business loves a single market, while free marketeers applaud the EU’s largely successful attempt to break down the anticompetitive residues of an old Europe dominated by guilds and vested interests. The EU itself, through its consistently pro-market executive, has pushed member states towards free-trade agreements, including a deal with Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and a range of regional groupings — not to mention the now almost-abandoned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States. When France’s gilets jaunes protesters take to the streets they are fighting president Emmanuel Macron’s pro-European liberalism, in the sense of classical liberalism.

In fact, strands of the European left have often expressed ambivalence about the liberalism that underpins the European project. The EU hostility expressed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which harkens back to before the 1980s, is arguably more recognisable to a continental European. The school of thought that suggests the EU is merely a construct of the forces of global capital — a view popular among supporters of Italy’s Five Star Movement, say, or Greece’s Syriza — doesn’t take long to bubble up to the surface.

Europe’s competition commissioner, the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager, may be applauded when she takes on American tech giants, but she’s viewed with disdain by many for her role in fighting national governments as they pick industry winners, meddle with the economy and attempt to violate the EU’s tough rules banning state aid. Northern European states — in particular the Netherlands and Britain — are reliably blamed for promoting economic liberalism within the bloc, and old-school European lefties either despise the EU outright or regard it with extreme scepticism. Europe’s left was Eurosceptic from way back, before Cameron was born.

So, how did we fall for it? Why would Abbott and others on the right of Australian politics take sides against the pro-market, liberal EU?

Australian journalists need to take some responsibility for this state of affairs. Covering European news from London by repurposing Reuters copy without spending time in Frankfurt, Strasburg, Brussels or Paris was never a good look. But now, with Britain heading for the door, covering European affairs from London is even harder to justify. With the French–German relationship central to the power play at the heart of the bloc, eastern European EU members and Baltic states at the centre of geopolitical struggle with Russia, the Nordics providing increasingly attractive models of governance, and Italy and Spain still reeling from the implications of corruption scandals, you can’t afford to get your news through the filter of the London press.

A post-Brexit world requires a better, more nuanced understanding of EU affairs. It’s time for Australian journalists to go continental. •

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From net zero to rock bottom https://insidestory.org.au/from-net-zero-to-rock-bottom/ https://insidestory.org.au/from-net-zero-to-rock-bottom/#comments Mon, 25 Sep 2023 11:03:40 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=75735

With an eye to the next election, the British government has backtracked on climate initiatives to try to drive a wedge into Labour

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What do you do if you are fifteen points behind in the opinion polls and a general election is due within a year or so? This was the question prime minister Rishi Sunak was wrestling with over the British summer as he contemplated his post-holiday relaunch.

We learned his answer last week. You abandon and attack climate change policy, invent unpopular measures you claim your opponents support, and pledge you will never force such monstrous burdens on hard-working voters.

To the dismay of many in his own Conservative Party but the joy of the right-wing press, Sunak has come out fighting on the territory his predecessors had been careful to avoid. Climate change policy has been the subject of consensus among all of Britain’s major political parties for nearly two decades, giving the United Kingdom an enviable reputation as a global leader not just in emissions reduction but also in making climate policy with public consent.

Sunak has decided to rip all that up. The government is still committed to achieving its statutory target of net zero emissions by 2050, he said in his much-anticipated speech last week, but it isn’t willing to impose “unacceptable costs” on ordinary households to achieve it. It would therefore reverse three key policies introduced by previous Conservative administrations. The ban on new petrol and diesel cars would be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. The ban on new gas boilers (to be replaced by heat pumps and biofuels) would be pushed back to the same date and would no longer apply to poorer households. And landlords would not be required to insulate tenants’ homes. Sunak also took the opportunity to rule out four other policies: taxes on meat, higher taxes on flying, the compulsory separation of household waste into seven different recycling bins, and compulsory car sharing.

As intended, Sunak’s speech caused an immediate uproar. Environmentally minded MPs in his own party condemned the decisions. Green groups proclaimed themselves appalled. Business groups decried the ad hoc changes to regulatory frameworks and warned that investment would fall in sectors generating rising numbers of green jobs.

At the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, meanwhile, there were celebrations. Their collective view was expressed in a triumphant Mail editorial congratulating Sunak for finally “shatter[ing] the cosy consensus, which has let an out-of-touch Westminster elite think it can bully a compliant public into footing a mind-blowing climate bill… This motley assortment of eco-zealots, the liberal Left and posh Tory rebels — egged on, of course, by the BBC — are invariably comfortably enough off to be able to swallow such costs. But for hard-working and practical-minded voters… Mr Sunak’s rethink will make life less tough, less cold and less poor.”

Sunak’s election strategists didn’t write the Mail’s leader, but they might as well have done. The prime minister’s purpose is transparent. He wants to create a clear dividing line between his government and the Labour Party, which has made strong climate policy a central plank of its platform, and in doing so to present the opposition as an out-of-touch elite and his own party as the defenders of ordinary people. He has, in short, decided to drag climate change into a culture-war battle and make that war the foundation of his election strategy.

If this sounds somewhat Australian, it is. Sunak’s chief election strategist is Isaac Levido, protégé of famed Liberal Party election guru Lynton Crosby and architect of Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory. His strategy for Sunak comes straight from the Crosby playbook: use culture-war framing to drive a wedge between your opponents and their own supporters, forcing them to defend unpopular policies on your favoured territory. And don’t worry too much if this requires a measure of blatant dishonesty.

As many commentators observed — and as a BBC interview with Sunak expertly highlighted — it was the dishonesty that most marked out the prime minister’s speech. Every single policy Sunak claimed to have overturned was falsely described.

Neither the ban on new petrol and diesel cars nor the prohibition on gas boilers would have required consumers to fork out “£5000, £10,000, £15,000” more on their alternatives, as Sunak claimed. Innovation in battery technology has so rapidly reduced their cost that electric cars are expected to be cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors as soon as 2027. In practice, postponing the petrol and diesel ban will have very little effect on consumers’ decisions. In any case, 80 per cent of cars bought each year are second hand, to which the ban would not apply.

Heat pump costs are also falling rapidly — driven by the government’s phase-out plans. Consumers also get generous subsidies to install them, making their actual costs to households far less than Sunak claimed. And the requirement to insulate their homes was not on all property owners, as Sunak implied. It was only on private landlords. So, far from saving money for ordinary households, its abolition will actually leave tenants facing higher energy bills.

As for the four other measures Sunak claimed to have scrapped — from taxes on meat to compulsory car sharing — not one of them was government policy, or had even been considered. Nor are any of them Labour policy. They are all mythic inventions of the tabloid press designed to whip up public anger at the general notion of stronger climate policy. The claim to have got rid of them was pure Crosby/Levido: imply that these “extremist” absurdities are supported by your opponents and only you can save voters from them. Within minutes of Sunak finishing his speech Tory central office had put out social media messages highlighting these apparently abolished policies and linking them to Labour’s green spending plans.

(Within another few minutes a whole series of memes had appeared ridiculing Sunak’s remarks and listing a variety of other policies Sunak had saved a grateful public from, including compulsory badger-racing and limits on the number of invisible friends children would be allowed.)


Rishi Sunak’s new strategy has finally revealed his political character, and it is not what his supporters claimed it would be when Conservative MPs made him — without a contest or a vote — Britain’s fifth prime minister in five years last November. He was intended to represent a return to normality, a sensible hand on the tiller who could steady the country’s rocking ship of state.

After David Cameron (who called an unnecessary referendum on Brexit and lost it), Theresa May (who called an unnecessary general election, lost her majority in the House of Commons and failed to get Brexit through parliament), Boris Johnson (who illegally suspended parliament, oversaw 180,000 Covid deaths, associated with Russian spies, failed to disclose personal loans from party donors, promoted corrupt government procurement, lied to parliament about lockdown parties, tried to overturn rules on MPs’ standards of behaviour, and promoted supporters accused of bullying and sexual harassment) and Liz Truss (who introduced a budget that crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring, and was forced to resign by her own MPs after only forty-nine days in the job), it was generally agreed that British politics needed something a little more stable. Though he had only been an MP since 2015, the smooth, very rich and apparently sensible former hedge-fund manager Sunak seemed to fit the bill.

But he has struggled to keep the Tories’ heads above water. On the five modest priorities he spelt out at the beginning of the year, he has so far failed to make any progress. Economic growth has been anaemic, with the economy teetering all year on the edge of recession. Inflation has fallen from 11 per cent to just under 7 per cent, but only after fourteen straight rises in interest rates (from 0.1 to 5.25 per cent) which have led to huge increases in monthly mortgage costs for householders. Sunak pledged to bring down National Health Service waiting lists, but instead they have reached a record high, with more than seven and a half million people now waiting for treatment in England, over three million of them for more than eighteen weeks.

Sunak’s most high-profile pledge, to reduce the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, has also been his most conspicuous failure. Not only have the numbers continued to increase, but each of the measures aimed at tackling the problem (or, to be more precise, aimed at appearing to tackle the problem) has hit the rocks. The courts have prevented anyone at all from being deported to Rwanda, as the government wanted, to seek asylum there. And the hired-in barge moored off a south-coast port, intended to house 500 asylum seekers, had to be closed after a week when Legionella was found in its water supply.

Meanwhile Britain’s privatised water companies have been discharging raw sewage into the country’s rivers and seas, schools have been forced to shut because they contain dangerously unsafe concrete, and the country’s air-traffic control system was closed down by an error in a single flight plan. Callers to radio phone-in programs and newspaper columnists alike lament that nothing in Britain works anymore and the country has gone to the dogs.

All of which has duly been reflected in Sunak’s polling numbers. Labour has been fifteen to twenty points ahead of the Conservatives in national polling for a year now, sufficient to return it to government with a comfortable majority. Sunak’s approval ratings have fallen to minus 30 per cent, with Labour leader Keir Starmer ahead on almost every leadership quality listed by pollsters. Voters now say they trust Labour over the Conservatives on every major issue.

A general election doesn’t have to be called until January 2025, but May or October next year are seen as the likeliest dates. That gives Sunak a year or less to turn his dire fortunes around. After this week’s relaunch and with Levido in charge, we know how he will seek to do it. Reinforced by relentless tabloid attacks on Labour in general and Starmer in particular, the culture-war framing will be used to try to separate the opposition from its traditional working-class base.

This was how the Brexit referendum was won, and it was how Boris Johnson increased the Conservatives’ majority in the general election of 2019. Labour’s heartland voters in towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England were told that the party they and their families had always supported had become detached from their concerns: pro-EU, insufficiently patriotic, too supportive of immigration, soft on crime, uninterested in the armed services, and too London-centric (read, culturally liberal).

With Labour having governed while the post-2000 globalisation was creating an economic boom in London and the affluent southeast, but largely leaving old industrial areas behind, and having then presided over the great financial crash, many of these voters proved ripe to change their allegiance. Johnson’s stunning election victory in 2019 included a whole swathe of former Labour seats thought to be unwinnable by the Tories. That was why, despite everything, Johnson was tolerated for so long by Tory MPs and members: he had won in areas of the country that had not for years, if ever, returned a Tory MP.

It is these “red wall” seats that Sunak must retain in order to have any chance of winning the next election — and equally that Labour must win back if it is to do so. Both parties are focused laser-like on this task. From now until he calls the election we can confidently expect Sunak to attack Labour for its profligate tax and spending plans and economic recklessness, for wanting to rejoin the EU single market, for trying to reduce prison numbers while the Tories want to lock more criminals up, for wanting higher immigration and less defence spending, and — because the party has been taken over by the woke trans-rights brigade — for being unable to define a woman. This week’s climate row-back was just the start.


Will Labour take the bait? On all but one of those issues, it won’t. Over the past year Keir Starmer — also explicitly influenced by the Australian example — has adopted a classic small-target strategy. If you’re this far ahead in the polls, his reasoning goes, and the Tories keep spectacularly demonstrating their own incompetence, don’t blow it by giving your opponents easy wins.

Like a Roman phalanx curling itself into a tight circle with its shields on the outside, Labour has been busy closing off any available lines of attack from the Tories and their media spear-bearers.

On fiscal policy, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves has insisted that Labour will cut government borrowing and only increase spending if it can identify a way of paying for it. And she has since ruled out almost any tax rise, including higher-rate income taxes, the capital gains tax and a wealth tax, that Labour supporters had hoped might allow some spending commitments to be made.

On defence policy, on crime, on immigration and asylum seekers, Labour has attacked the Tory record but has not committed to any significant changes to government policy. On trans rights, Labour has ruled out gender self-identification without a medical diagnosis.

All eyes were therefore on Starmer for his reaction to Sunak’s anti-climate policy speech. Would he take the same approach he had on all the other wedges the Tories had been trying to hammer between him and his voter base? Would he again cleave close to Tory policy and refuse to allow a gap to open up through which he could be attacked?

Signs suggested he might. Reeves had already watered down Labour’s “climate investment plan” to spend £28 billion a year on green infrastructure and innovation: facing rising borrowing costs, she announced that a Labour government would now only get spending to £28 billion by the end of the parliament.

When the party then lost a by-election in London it had been expected to win, amid widespread voter opposition to the (Labour) mayor’s plans to extend a charge on polluting cars, Starmer had a very public wobble, openly questioning the policy. The Tories took their by-election victory as evidence that green policies imposing costs on voters are unpopular and ripe for attack, and Starmer seemed to be drawing the same conclusion. The environmental movement — inside and beyond the party — was alarmed.

They need not have worried. Starmer’s response to Sunak’s anti-green speech was subtle. Refusing to fall into the trap of a debate about the costs of climate policy to ordinary households, he made no public comment at all on the speech apart from a couple of tweets emphasising that Labour’s renewable energy strategy would create jobs, reduce bills and improve energy security. He left it to his shadow climate minister, former party leader Ed Miliband, to castigate Sunak for “not giving a damn” about climate change, describing the PM as “rattled, chaotic and out of his depth.”

Labour would retain the petrol and diesel ban by 2030 and the responsibility of landlords to insulate their tenants’ homes, Miliband said, both of which would cut ordinary households’ costs. (He notably didn’t promise to restore the ban on gas boilers.) As for the four fictional policies Sunak said he was scrapping, Miliband was scathing. Not only had the Labour Party never proposed a tax on meat, he said, but it was not even the policy of the Vegan Society.

Miliband is well known as strongly committed to climate action. Yet it was not he but shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who was the decisive figure in Labour’s choice to pick up the climate gauntlet Sunak had thrown down. Reeves, who has been assiduously wooing business leaders over the past year, has been struck not merely by how fed up with Tory incompetence they have become, but also by how green they are.

With US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act driving record investment into environmental technologies and sectors in the United States, and the European Union’s Green Deal following suit, Labour has made “green prosperity” the centrepiece of its economic and industrial strategies. It will have been delighted at the furious reaction of business leaders to Sunak’s speech. Why get Starmer to attack Sunak when the UK head of Ford will do it for you?

For party members and activists, Labour’s response will have come as a relief. The leadership’s small-target positioning has been deeply frustrating for those who believe the party needs radical policies to tackle the legacy of thirteen years of Tory rule. Starmer’s bland persona and extreme policy caution have left both members and many political commentators despairing that Labour was not offering the public a positive reason to vote for it but rather merely relying on the Tories to mess up. With the NHS, social care, schools, policing and local government all in crisis, but Labour not promising to spend significant money on any of them, they fear the party will succeed in the general election but fail in government.

In this context Miliband’s climate policy platform has offered a ray of hope. He has managed to persuade Starmer and Reeves to support a bold plan to achieve 100 per cent renewable power by 2030, create a new publicly owned energy company, and insulate nineteen million homes over ten years, generating a claimed 200,000 new jobs across the country. Most radically of all, Labour has pledged to end new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea fields, which would make Britain the first major economy to do so.

Labour hasn’t committed to these policies in the hope that the public supports them. It knows the public does: it is one of the consequences of the eighteen-year cross-party consensus on climate policy. Climate change is now ranked third when voters are asked about the biggest issues facing Britain, behind only the economy and inflation. Over half of voters want to see the government take stronger action, with a quarter happy with current policies and fewer than 20 per cent believing the government is moving too fast. These numbers vary little across Labour and Tory supporters and different parts of the country. Red wall voters are as green as people in the rest of Britain.

Tory strategists think these numbers are soft. They point out that the majorities in favour of tougher climate policy fall when voters are reminded that this might involve them, not just other people, paying more. Levido is convinced that continuous campaigning on the cost of achieving net zero for ordinary households will reduce public support even further. If this means making fictitious claims about those costs, or about Labour policy, so be it. He believes the Tories can peel enough voters away from Labour to make the election competitive.

He may be right. And this is what dismays moderate Tories the most about Sunak’s new stance. They know that their own voters care about climate change, and that strong policies will attract business investment and jobs in the new global green economy. But they also know, from Australia, the United States and elsewhere, that mendacious culture wars can be remarkably effective means of undermining voter confidence in political parties and policies of all kinds.

Britain has been spared this kind of social and political division up to now. But it is about to find out what happens when concerns about the future of the planet are sacrificed on the altar of election strategy. •

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Labour’s long road to power https://insidestory.org.au/labours-long-road-to-power/ https://insidestory.org.au/labours-long-road-to-power/#respond Thu, 03 Aug 2023 07:34:56 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=75047

How a restless party found a new way of thinking about socialism

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Thirty years ago, after stepping down as the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Neil Kinnock was invited to present two documentaries for the BBC entitled Tomorrow’s Socialism. His mission: to update socialist ideology for an era that was adjusting to the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism.

He had lost two general elections in his nine years as party leader, but he had also saved Labour from annihilation and laid the ground for Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. He continued to command respect across the party.

I worked with him on those programs. For some weeks we struggled to find a new, succinct definition of socialist ideology that would be fit for purpose. It was Neil who solved the problem, and with the utmost simplicity. Modern socialism should not be an ideology at all, but an ethic. The party’s long-term aims should leave out any reference to the ownership of businesses. The relationship between labour, capital and the state should be determined by the circumstances of the day. The party should abandon the goal, set out in 1918 and inscribed on each membership card, of “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” Instead, it should define itself in terms of liberty, social justice and opportunity for all.

This excursion down memory lane is prompted by a new book, more relevant to today’s centre-left throughout the democratic world than is suggested by its clunky title. In Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997, Colm Murphy tells an important story more completely than anyone has done before: how Labour, step by painful step, shed its constitutional commitment to the abolition of capitalism and redefined its basic doctrine.

Everyone who played a part in or followed the drama at the time will have their own take on his analysis. Mine is that Murphy exaggerates the impact of some of the party’s fringe groups and understates the personal roles played by successive party leaders. But his book is likely to remain for some time the fullest account of what happened during those years.

Murphy’s story brings to mind Humpty Dumpty’s famous remark to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” The etymology of “socialism” has ensured that disputes about its definition have been weaponised in a bitter struggle to wield power on the left. The word dates not from the time of Karl Marx, as many assume, or even from Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen’s cooperative model. Henri de Saint-Simon, a French politician and economist, invented the term in the 1820s. He wanted to replace autocracy with a more meritocratic society, one in which the arbitrary, self-serving power of the church, aristocracy, landowners and the military was replaced by that of merchants, manufacturers, scholars and workers coming together for the common good.

For pre-democratic times, Saint-Simon’s “socialism” was a radical vision of dispersed power. He fiercely opposed an over-mighty state. What Marx did was appropriate the term as part of his dream to replace capitalism with communism. At their heart, and for more than a century, the battles over the meaning of “socialism” have been over whose ideas to update for a more democratic age: Saint-Simon’s or Marx’s?

Labour’s adoption in 1918 of “common ownership” in Clause 4 of its constitution put the party closer to Marx (though, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, its authors tried to make it not too close). For the next forty years, Labour leaders espoused the language and adopted “Clause 4” policies: up to a point, that is. Clement Attlee’s post-1945 government nationalised the energy, transport, and iron and steel industries, but left most of the private sector alone. Although hailed by subsequent left-wingers as the radical model for future Labour governments, Attlee stopped well short of implementing the strategy demanded by the party’s grassroots. In December 1944, the party conference backed the nationalisation of land and all heavy industry. Attlee simply ignored it.

Attlee’s government lasted for six years. It was Britain’s first majority government with the freedom to secure parliamentary backing for its full manifesto program. By supporting a mixed economy rather than pursuing the eventual abolition of capitalism, it provoked the question: what kind of socialism did the party really believe in?

Hugh Gaitskell attempted to answer it. He succeeded Attlee as party leader in 1955, four years into thirteen years of Conservative rule. In 1960, following Labour’s third general election defeat, he told the party’s annual conference that he wanted to amend the party’s aims. The delegates thwarted him. A messy procedural deal prevented a vote in which Gaitskell would have suffered an acutely embarrassing defeat. Instead the issue was dropped. It would be more than thirty years before it would be picked up again.

How then, could Labour square the circle of being nominally in favour of “collective ownership” but not really in practice? Harold Wilson, who became party leader following Gaitskell’s death in 1963 and led Labour to victory the following year, offered an ingenious solution. He drew on the work of the party’s “revisionist” thinkers to argue that socialism was not purely an ideology; it was also an ethic. He said that the Labour Party owed “more to Methodism than to Marx.” He didn’t disown Marx; he argued for the state to have a major role in planning a modern economy rather than just leave the private sector alone.

In government, Wilson didn’t oversee much planning; but in terms of keeping on board the rival wings of the party, he was successful.

The ethic-plus-ideology compromise held for the next three decades — though only just. In the early 1980s, following the defeat of the Labour government in 1979, the party’s left made a determined effort to restore the primacy of ideological socialism. Its most prominent MP, Tony Benn, challenged Denis Healey, the incumbent, for the party’s deputy leadership and came within one percentage point of victory. Though the left was defeated, the vote was so close, and the danger from Benn’s faction seemed so great, that almost thirty Labour MPs ended up defecting to the newly formed Social Democratic Party, which explicitly repudiated the ideology embedded in Clause 4.

These divisions contributed to Labour’s worst postwar defeat in 1983. In October that year, Kinnock was elected leader. His Welsh roots were on the left of the party, but he opposed the stance of Benn and his followers. A charismatic speaker, Kinnock was Labour’s best hope for holding the party together and hauling it back to electability.


During his nine years as Labour’s leader, Kinnock took his party on a journey of ideological reform. His starting point was an updated version of the conventional critique of capitalism. In his party conference speech in 1984 he warned of “the irrational response to technological and economic change which the market economy and the social market economy makes, and has always made — huge numbers of unemployed, millions more who live in constant fear of unemployment and the insecurity which it brings.”

In 1987, Kinnock shifted towards a more nuanced critique: “whilst the market is an adequate system for deciding the price and availability of many goods and services… the market alone will never ensure that flow of investment in machines, people, skills and ideas which is necessary to gain and sustain long-term economic strength and the employment that comes with it.” Instead of rejecting markets as such, he now rejected markets “alone.”

The following year he went further: “There are those, like the government, who simply say ‘private good, public bad.’ There are those who say, in a mirror image, ‘public good, private bad.’ Neither of them are dealing with the realities… Neither are asking the real question ‘does it work?’”

Kinnock went on to attack Labour’s left wing even more directly: “Comrades, the day may come when this conference, this movement, is faced with a choice of socialist economies. The debate will be fascinating as the Labour Party conference chooses between the two. But until that day comes… the fact is that the kind of economy we will be faced with when we win the election will be a market economy. That is what we have to deal with and we will have to make it work better than the Tories do.”

In his final conference speech before the 1992 election, Kinnock took his evolving argument to its logical conclusion: “An innovation-driven economy needs a tax system and economic policies which promote sustained investment. It needs monopolies and mergers regulations that promote competition and safeguard company programmes of research and development. We shall make those changes.” Common ownership? Forget it.

Despite gaining almost fifty seats, Labour lost the 1992 election and Kinnock resigned as party leader. But one piece of unfinished business remained. Labour’s membership cards still set out the goal of common ownership. As long as it did, left-wing party members could point to Clause 4 of the party’s constitution to insist on sticking to their ambition of one day killing off capitalism. This was what made Kinnock’s TV documentaries so significant. For the first time, someone who had led the party explicitly renounced ideological socialism altogether.

At first Kinnock’s plan found few takers. Even Blair was sceptical. In June 1994, a few months after the programs were broadcast, Blair stood for party leader. Asked in a TV interview if he would change Labour’s stated aims, Blair dismissed the suggestion. “No one,” he said, wanted it to be “a priority for the party.”

He soon changed his mind. Three months later he told the party that he wanted it to do just that. The following April a special party conference voted to abandon the aims it had espoused for almost eight decades, and committed the party instead to the ethic of serving “the many not the few.” In July 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of Attlee’s 1945 election victory, Blair set out his concept of socialism in a lecture to the Fabian Society.

“Since the collapse of communism,” he said, “the ethical basis of socialism is the only one that has stood the test of time. This socialism is based on a moral assertion that individuals are interdependent… This concept of socialism requires a form of politics in which we share responsibility both to fight poverty, prejudice and unemployment, and to create the conditions in which we can truly build one nation — tolerant, fair, enterprising, inclusive… Once socialism is defined in this way — as social-ism — we can be liberated from our history and not chained by it.”

By inserting the hyphen — “social-ism” — Blair was putting himself firmly on the side of Saint-Simon and against Marx. He underlined the point by rebranding his party as “New Labour.” In going on to win three general elections and remaining prime minister for ten years, he could ensure that his philosophy took root.


Murphy’s book ends in 1997, but it’s worth bringing his story up to date. Ideological socialism returned for a spell after Jeremy Corbyn was elected party leader in 2015. Asked in a TV interview in 2018 whether capitalism got anything right, Corbyn floundered. He knew that it would be electorally disastrous to say he wanted to kill off the private sector, but his life-long opposition to it was clear from his answer: “Well, it does invest, mainly for its own benefit. But it does of course get challenged. Isn’t that what social movements are about, isn’t that what trade unions are about? Isn’t that what our democracy is about?”

In 2019 Corbyn led Labour to an even worse defeat than in 1983. Enough party members got the message of that trauma to elect the more moderate Keir Starmer as leader — one who has become more moderate still by ditching some of the more left-wing policies he had espoused in the contest to become leader. He picked up the “ethical socialism” baton that Kinnock had passed to Blair and Brown, and which Corbyn had not so much dropped as thrown aside.

In May this year he went even further. “I believe in the power of dynamic government,” he told the British Chambers of Commerce. “But I also believe in the brilliance of British business and I’ve changed my Labour Party to reflect that. We’re not just a pro-business party, we’re a party that is proud of being pro-business, that respects the contribution profit makes to jobs, growth and our tax base, gets that working people want success as well as support. Understands that robust private sector growth is the only way we pay our way in the world.”

Not even Blair’s embrace of ethical socialism in his early days as leader was as effusive in its praise of capitalism.

Within the next eighteen months, Britain’s voters will elect a new government. All recent evidence — from by-elections, local elections and opinion polls — points to Starmer becoming prime minister, though whether he will enjoy the luxury of a clear overall majority remains to be seen.

What also remains to be seen is how what Starmer calls “the moral case for socialism” will look in practice once he is running the country rather than devising plans from the frustrating comfort of opposition. He will face huge challenges: climate change, the uncertain future of globalisation, making sure AI does more good than harm, the fallout from Brexit, and a weak British economy where living standards have stalled and poverty spread. Can ethical socialism rise to these challenges, or will it be vulnerable to another Corbyn-style assault from the left?

Even if ideological socialism has been laid to rest, the doctrine of ethical socialism is certain to evolve. Murphy rightly links the modernisation story to a broader range of issues, such as gender and race. At its core, is “socialism” becoming more a cultural than economic project? Its purpose looks set to be a continuing source of debate and dispute.

Murphy’s conclusion from Labour’s painful transition from ideology to ethic is that the party’s “irresistible restlessness and creativity” is its “enduring virtue,” even if this makes for a bumpy ride. The story of how bumpy, and how successful, that ride turns out to be over the next decade or so will deserve a sequel. •

Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997
By Colm Murphy | Cambridge University Press | $160.95 | 320 pages

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’King oath https://insidestory.org.au/king-oath/ https://insidestory.org.au/king-oath/#comments Mon, 08 May 2023 07:29:07 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73965

Eight months a king, Charles finally took the coronation oath. Did the wait matter?

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At the linguistic centre of Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III was, unsurprisingly, the “coronation oath.” Its first and most important line required the King to intone, before God and the world, that he did

solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [my] other Realms and the Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs.

Having inherited the throne the instant his mother died eight months ago, Charles is not a new king. Decoded, the oath involved him pledging to abide by the most fundamental principle of the rule of law under a constitutional monarchy like Australia’s or Britain’s. It was a “crucial” moment of “commitment.”

If anyone paused during the elaborate forty-page liturgy they may have thought: “Hang on, we’ve had a king for eight months and he’s only now agreed to the rule of law?” Did it matter that Charles waited that long to solemnly pledge not to reassert the Crown’s once limitless powers? The answer is no, and yes. Unpacking this ritual and performance is a lesson itself.


As millions saw at the weekend, a crown (which must sometimes have felt Damoclean to the man formerly known as Charles Philip Arthur George) finally came to rest on a fresh, if greying, head. That lowering of what the Historic Royal Palaces trust calls the “most important and sacred of all the [British] crowns” was the ultimate visual symbol of the ceremony.

Amid all the pomp and pomposity, there was plenty of legal magic and palaver too. In its current meaning, the oath dates back to 1688 — a momentous year in a momentous century, not just for Britain but also for the system of government that Empire brought to this continent.

The Coronation Oath Act of 1688 was passed in the wake of a civil war that had culminated in the first King Charles losing not just his crown but also his head. The act reinforced a Protestant ascendancy whose sectarian ripples irk Charles III and are felt in Northern Ireland to this day.

For the secular world, the Oath Act reinforced the claim of parliament to be not just the ultimate lawmaker but also sovereign over the Sovereign. Charles gets to be King because parliament allows it, not because God ordained his bloodline.

As the monarch, Charles is not subject to legal proceedings. Like his mum, he has deigned to pay taxes on the income from his vast wealth; unlike his local subjects, he has inherited yet more wealth free of estate duties. But his bejewelled crown is a titular symbol: “the Crown” is a virtual space in which the law of the three branches of government reign.

The long delay in holding the coronation seems partly due to Charles’s desire to settle in: to be seen out and about in a job held by his mother since 1953. Partly, also, he wanted to rejig the ceremony and oil the rusty cogs of a logistically complex show not performed for seventy years.

Besides shaking hands and opening fetes, what had Charles done formally to signify and “accede” to his kingship since the Queen’s death on 8 September last? The Westminster parliament happened to be sitting that week, so when it met the next day a kind of mutual obeisance took place. MPs all swore allegiance to Charles and, for his part, he gave his first, brief, King’s Address. In it, he paid tribute to “darling Mama” and said he would “uphold the constitutional principles at the heart of our nation.”

Although parliament must, by law, keep sitting on the “demise” of a monarch, it filled eleven hours’ worth of Hansard with further tributes before adjourning for an extended mourning period. A day later, Charles appeared with “his” Privy Council, whose members publicly proclaimed him King. Before them, he repeated the sentiment that he’d “strive to follow” his mother’s example “in upholding constitutional government” across his realms.

None of those words were a binding oath. An oath is a kind of visible, audible and public contracting. As a University College London report puts it, the coronation oath

requires the sovereign to declare and identify with the effect of the law at a public moment of great solemnity… [It is] performative and affirmative rather than legislative… The weight of the oaths lies overwhelmingly in their symbolic significance and, moreover, in making that symbolism intelligible, acceptable and inspiring to a modern population.

As Prince of Wales, Charles became well known for his public pronouncements on everything from the built environment to the natural environment. He couldn’t help sharing his opinions with the British government as well, via letters he handwrote to ministers in spidery black ink. As a friend, a retired miner, quipped, “Let’s hope he keeps his oath better than his wedding vows.” To be fair, he has been more circumspect as King: a folksier but no less bland version of his mother.

The coronation oath is hardly the only source of the principle of sovereignty under the law. The highest courts in the United Kingdom and Australia have reiterated and applied the idea in various cases. Despite the possibility being imagined in an award-winning 2014 play, if Charles did ever lose his (mental) head and begin directing affairs, governments would pay as much heed to him as plants do when he talks to them.

For Australia’s part, the King’s men in Canberra — the governor-general, flanked by our prime minister — proclaimed him King of Australia on 12 September. Similarly circular instances of viceroys proclaiming the “Roy” occurred at state level too. The “King of Australia” title dates to Whitlam-era legislation, and he is concreted into our 1901 Constitution as our head of state.

Nowhere does Australia’s Constitution explicitly recognise that our sovereign is not our dictator, except in occasional cryptic references to his agent, the governor-general, “acting in Council.” In other words, acting after formally receiving advice from the ministers he appoints. Given that the Constitution doesn’t even mention the office of the prime minister, those appointments are seemingly at his discretion.

We are neither a dictatorship nor a republic, of course, but a constitutional monarchy. The Constitution makes little sense without a brace of unwritten but deeply held conventions. Australians usually feel we are not just less class-bound than Britain but also more modern. At least our governor-general can be of any or no religion. But when it comes to issues of sovereignty we are not always ahead of the Brits.

They may still have a Coronation Oath Act of 1688 that spells its legislature “Parlyament,” but they have several times modernised the words of the ceremony. Flexible convention can even nuance legislation.

In 1688 the United Kingdom was a unitary state, ruled solely from London. Now it has three sub-national assemblies with significant power over the more Celtic countries of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Indigenous Australia may only later this year gain a merely advisory Voice to Parliament if we embrace the idea by referendum. In 2016 Britain elected to leave Europe; in 1999 we voted to stay in the arms of a distant Crown.


What then is the point of an event like the weekend’s crowning? For many Brits it was an excuse for cheers — for others, boos and jeers — at a fraught time politically and economically. For most Australians it was a sideshow, even a yawn. Yet even a few republicans responded less with curmudgeon than curiosity. Rituals catch something in the spirit. They punctuate and help us measure and remember the passing years.

So, too, do assassinations and wars. This means that rituals have to be more than events, and must embody positive meaning. Simon Schama in the Financial Times mused on whether the coronation spoke to modern Britain. He assayed the colourful (literally and euphemistically), millennium-old traditions surrounding the comings-and-goings of kings and queens. When most surviving monarchies have trimmed down to be more “of” the democratic state than above or apart from it, “our” monarchy looks distinctly odd.

During seventy coronationless years, Queen Elizabeth watched her “family firm” straddle dysfunctional celebrity status and gilded, performative rituals whose traditions are meant to bind. It would have been a wee bit more coherent had Charles not waited so long to bind himself to the democratic principle embodied in his oath.

Yet the demos wants more than promises or traditions, it wants clickbait. Hello! magazine recently featured Charles’s daughter-in-law Kate on twenty-one consecutive covers, all in flattering poses. Its rivals in the media chase his other daughter-in-law, Meghan, like bloodhounds. As the King returns to more mundane duties in the shadow of the rising brood of royals he begat, he might reflect on traditions old and new. •

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King, country and the Conservatives https://insidestory.org.au/king-country-and-the-conservatives/ https://insidestory.org.au/king-country-and-the-conservatives/#comments Fri, 05 May 2023 23:00:59 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73931

Local election defeats across England make it a better day to be a monarch than a prime minister

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Future historians may identify 6 May 2023 as the day when Britain’s monarchy rediscovered its mojo and the Conservatives lost theirs. When King Charles decided it would be the day of his coronation, he would not have known that his prime minister, Rishi Sunak, wouldn’t be in a mood to celebrate, for the Conservatives would be nursing a giant electoral hangover. And, to extend the comparison between Crown and government, the basic reason for the stark contrast is that while few Britons are eager to replace the monarchy most are only too eager to kick the Tories out of office.

The elections for local councils didn’t cover the whole of Britain. There were no contests in London, Wales or Scotland. But the elections were sufficiently widespread for a clear picture to emerge of the country’s mood six months after Sunak became PM and tried to steady a ship of state that had almost run aground under his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The picture is of the Conservatives heading for defeat at the next general election, likely to be held late next year.

The results showed something else too. Britain’s anti-Conservative majority is divided. Smart targeting by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and tactical voting by savvy citizens can help to overcome this; but it remains touch-and-go whether the next general election will produce a clear Labour victory or a hung parliament, a minority Labour government and a second election within a year or so.

Australian readers will recognise the issue — and, for progressive voters, the solution. If Britain replaced its age-old first-past-the-post system with Australia’s preferential system, the Conservatives would be heading for opposition with no early chance or reprieve.

Let’s fill the picture in. More than 8000 councillors were elected on Thursday. The Conservatives, defending 3500 seats, lost more than 1000. But the gains were spread around the Tories’ opponents: Labour gained 500 in round numbers, the Liberal Democrats 400, the Greens 250.

In a general election, fragmentation would be less. Right now, the Greens have only one member of Britain’s 650-seat parliament; at the most they might gain one or two extra next year. More likely is that they will win a million-plus votes in seats that they will come nowhere near winning. In closely fought seats between the Conservatives and Labour, or between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, these Greens votes could save a Tory from defeat, by denying the local Labour or Lib Dem challenger the few extra votes they need to win.

Britain’s parties, and some but not all voters, understand this. On Thursday, tactical voting was widespread. That is, many Labour supporters were happy to vote Lib Dem where this was the best way to defeat the Conservatives locally — and Lib Dem supporters returned the compliment in tight Conservative–Labour contests. In a way, many British voters applied the principle of preferential voting to a first-past-the-post electoral system.

But many didn’t — and many would stick to their preferred progressive party in a general election even if this meant local victory for the Conservatives. To the extent that this happens, the Tories will continue to reap the benefit of having a near monopoly of the right-of-centre vote, while the left-of-centre vote continues to be divided.


To this we must add a further complicating factor. Half a century ago, Britain’s elections were essentially simple. Blue-collar manual workers voted Labour, while white-collar office workers and professionals voted Conservative. Not everyone, of course: politics is never that simple. But it was a pretty good approximation of Britain’s electorate. As in much of the industrialised world, all that has changed. Economies have changed, education has changed, jobs have changed — and party loyalties have changed.

Social class is no longer an indicator of how Britons vote. Age and education now matter more than anything else. Voters under thirty with a degree seldom vote Conservative these days. People over sixty who left school at sixteen seldom vote anything else.

The 2016 Brexit referendum, when Britain voted to leave the European Union, accelerated this process. Many lifelong working-class Labour supporters voted for Brexit and then, in 2019, switched to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to “get Brexit done” — that is, complete the withdrawal negotiations with the European Union. That, and the fact that Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, an uncompromising, lifelong and utterly unelectable enemy of capitalism, ensured the biggest Conservative victory in 2019 since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday back in the 1980s.

Labour turned to Keir Starmer as its leader — a decent, public-spirited man with strong progressive values but light on ideology. He has asserted his leadership by, among other things, expelling Corbyn from Labour’s parliamentary ranks, following evidence of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism (a charge, it must be said, that Corbyn rejects). Whatever else happens, the man who led Labour to catastrophic defeat at the last election won’t be able to stand as a candidate for the party at the next one.

But Starmer’s larger problem remains: how to reunite the two blocks of voters that have combined to give Labour its past election victories: manual workers on average and below-average incomes; and liberal-minded graduates committed to progressive reform. In the Brexit referendum, the former group voted strongly to leave the European Union, while the latter group voted even more strongly to remain.

These issues are part of a wider and deeper debate about the future of Britain and the social basis of political loyalties. But Labour doesn’t have the luxury of waiting five or ten years for this debate to be settled. It must decide before the next election where it stands on a range of issues, of which the trickiest is Britain’s relations with the European Union.

Most (though not all) people now agree that (a) Brexit was a mistake, and has been bad for Britain’s economy, but (b) there is no realistic prospect of rejoining the EU anytime soon. So what should Labour do? In particular, is there some way it can win back the keen Leavers who used to be such a large part of its electoral base, while holding on to the pro-European graduates who never wanted Brexit in the first place?

Starmer’s answer has been to be as vague and say as little as possible, beyond making nebulous promises of a more constructive relationship between London and Brussels. His hope is that pro-Brexit ex-Labour voters will be happy enough with this to return to their old political home, while the younger, radical graduates will be so determined to see the back of the Tories that they will hold their pro-European noses and vote Labour wherever this will help remove Tory MPs.

Which brings us back to Thursday’s results and the fragmentation of the anti-Conservative vote. Part of the reason for the gains made by the Liberal Democrats and Greens is that they are now more clearly pro-European than Labour. Maybe Starmer is right to believe that pro-Europe Britons will vote Labour where it matters in a general election. But not all of them will.

The warning for Labour from the local elections is that in just enough seats (and in the absence of preferential voting), just enough anti-Brexit anti-Tories will withhold their support from Labour to enable the Conservatives to retain a number of seats they would otherwise lose. This is why the Conservatives may not win the next election at all, but Labour may struggle to win it outright.

As newly crowned King and constitutional monarch, Charles III must be relieved that this issue is, to invert the old saying, below his pay grade. •

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Mayo Joe, son of Ballina https://insidestory.org.au/mayo-joe-son-of-ballina/ https://insidestory.org.au/mayo-joe-son-of-ballina/#respond Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:15:57 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73666

Did the American president’s deeply personal sense of Irish history meet the moment?

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The timing of US president Joe Biden’s visit to Belfast and Dublin this week could not have been more delicate. The occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, but the trip was as much an exercise in salvaging a peace process that has been teetering for some time.

The fallout of Brexit in 2016 brought an immediate souring of relations between the British and Irish governments, the likes of which had not been seen in decades. More critically, though, it rekindled communal tensions north of the border, culminating in the closure of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and the suspension of power sharing in May last year.

Much is now riding on a new British government with Rishi Sunak at the helm, signalling a more pragmatic approach to the Northern Ireland border. The recently negotiated “Windsor framework” for regulating goods crossing the Irish Sea has produced a tentative thaw in relations with the European Union, renewing hopes that Stormont might soon be reopened. Biden’s hastily planned visit was thus a calculated move to tip the balance at a crucial juncture.

His devout Irish Catholic affinities, however, also risked achieving the very opposite by raising the question of whether a presidential visit was the very last thing Ireland — north or south — needed at this time.

At his first and only public engagement in Belfast on Wednesday morning, Biden called on the people of Northern Ireland to leave their history behind and embrace the opportunities of a shared future. “Renewal,” “progress” and “repair” were the dominant themes in a speech that made only scant reference to the divisions of the past.

It was a big ask of a community only just emerging from the “decade of centenaries” — a rapid succession of major anniversaries marking some of the most difficult moments in modern Irish history, from the Ulster crisis of 1912, through the Great War, the struggle for independence, and the fateful partition of Ireland in 1921.

Historian Ian McBride recently said of his country’s acute sensitivity to the weight of history, “We’ve come to believe that dealing with the past or working through the past is somehow good for us.” But it’s only ten years since many people feared that the coming wave of commemorations would be anything but good for the peace process in Northern Ireland. Academics, politicians and community leaders were enlisted to find ways of ensuring that raking over the past would not spark a recrudescence of communal discord.

In the end, the decade of centenaries came and went largely without incident, foreshadowed by a historic visit to Dublin by Queen Elizabeth II — the first of its kind since her grandfather George V in 1911. Even the bedrock enmities evoked by the iconic year 1916 — Dublin’s Easter Rising and the loyalist veneration of the Battle of the Somme — produced few complications when it came to the commemorative program.

But 2016 brought dim tidings of an entirely different kind with the Brexit vote of June that year. Ultimately, it was not the inner workings of Irish memory that tested the mettle of the peace process, but the entirely unforeseen exigencies of a crisis manufactured in England.

An extraordinary inattention to the past was arguably Brexit’s defining characteristic — and its most potent legacy in Ireland. The referendum was notable for the almost complete absence of debate about the possible effects of leaving the European Union on a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement — keeping the Northern Ireland border as invisible as possible. It was one thing to dispense with border checks when both sides were members of the EU single market, but another matter entirely after the imposition of a hard border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Even as these problems came painfully to light in the referendum’s protracted aftermath, advocates of a so-called “hard Brexit” continued to display a callous disregard for the Good Friday Agreement’s brittle compromise. “Softer” options were available to successive Tory governments, but any dilution of Britain’s freedom to chart its own course proved unacceptable to the Brexit ultras. Polling data corroborates this, suggesting that the most passionate leavers were less likely to care about the peace dividend in Northern Ireland.

Biden’s heartfelt message to his hosts — that “for too long, Ireland’s story has been told in the past tense” — somehow failed to capture the issue in all its complexity. Much of the recent turmoil might have been avoided had the past tense — not least the astonishing gains of the last twenty-five years — been given considerably more airplay.


In any event, Biden soon dispensed with his own maxim as he crossed the border into his ancestral home of Carlingford in County Louth. Suddenly, talking “in the past tense” seemed the only thing on the president’s mind in a place that felt “like I’m coming home.” It was as though he had stepped into an entirely different world. The fifty-mile drive from Belfast might as well have been fifty years.

Addressing the Irish parliament in Dublin the following day, Biden notched up eighteen references to “history” and the “past,” reflecting on the “hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors upon “leaving their beloved homeland to begin their new lives in America.” These stories, he urged, comprised “the very heart of what binds Ireland and America together” — a story of shared “dreams,” “values,” “heritage,” “hopes,” “journeys” and, crucially for Biden, “blood.”

The remainder of his trip was an act of personal homage, flying to County Mayo to visit a family history and genealogical centre before proceeding to the Catholic pilgrimage site of Knock Shrine (the scene of a purported holy apparition in 1879). He rounded off his visit with a major speech to a crowd of some 27,000 outside St Muredach’s Cathedral — another site of deep family significance. “I’ll tell you what,” he assured his audience, “it means the world to me and my entire family to be embraced as Mayo Joe, son of Ballina… the stories of this place have become part of my soul.”

As only the second Catholic president of the United States, Biden rivals John F. Kennedy for the sheer intensity of his identification with his Irish “soul.” As with Kennedy, his Irishness is bound inextricably to his Catholicism, which is why his equally English heritage (on his father’s side) consistently plays second fiddle. Moreover, it is a memory of Ireland rooted in a bygone age — “that fusion of ethnicity and religion,” as Fintan O’Toole puts it, “that has lost much of its grip on the homeland.”

Conspicuously, it is also an Irishness aligned with the very atavisms that the Good Friday Agreement was meant to transcend. Biden’s uncorked nostalgia for his family ties can be irresistibly endearing in its simplicity and humble authenticity. But it also carries unnerving undertones given the tragic consequences of tribal loyalties over the last fifty years.

Little wonder, then, that leading Unionist figures spent much of the week dismissing his credentials as a potential peace broker. Former first minister Arlene Foster was the most forthright in declaring that the president “hates the United Kingdom.” Other Democratic Unionist Party figures concurred that Biden was by far “the most partisan president there has ever been when dealing with Northern Ireland” — suspicions that were only compounded by Biden’s veiled criticism of a UK government that “should be working closer with Ireland” to resolve the wreckage of Brexit.

Though Biden seems largely unaware of the recidivist slant of his Irish colours, he nevertheless understands that his appeal is limited in the North. There would be no reprise of Bill Clinton’s celebrated role in brokering the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The trip itself was cobbled together hastily, at unusually short notice, with an itinerary shrouded in secrecy.

At no stage did the president sit down for direct talks with the key stakeholders or engage directly in problem-solving of any kind. Indeed, the total length of his stay in Belfast was barely sixteen hours (much of it in bed). No press conference ensued from his brief encounter with Rishi Sunak, nor was it possible to deliver his keynote address from the symbolic chair of the Stormont Assembly.

This may have represented a form of political leverage in its own right — holding Sunak and the DUP at arm’s length until they commit fully to implementing the Windsor framework and minimising the disruptions of Brexit. In that sense, the contrasting warmth in Carlingford sent its own clear message.

But if the president had hoped that his mere presence in Northern Ireland might move the dial on a rapid restoration of power sharing, the decision to mix the political with the personal was probably ill-judged. In a week when petrol bombs were hurled at police in Derry by the “New IRA,” he might have chosen instead to prolong his stay in Northern Ireland and leave the family history tour to his retirement. •

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Riding high in April, shot down in May? https://insidestory.org.au/flying-high-in-april-shot-down-in-may/ https://insidestory.org.au/flying-high-in-april-shot-down-in-may/#respond Sun, 02 Apr 2023 23:29:23 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73524

May’s local elections across England will be closely watched by parties and pollsters alike

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Britain witnesses a political ritual every May that shines a fierce light on the fortunes of the main political parties. Twice in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher decided to call an early general election on the basis of the scene it illuminated, and the next few weeks will be studied with equal care by Britain’s current prime minister. But Rishi Sunak won’t be watching because he is likely to call an election. He will be hoping this year’s ritual solves a conundrum set by Britain’s crowded opinion-polling industry, in which fourteen companies jostle for attention.

The conundrum? They flatly disagree on whether the country will have a Labour government with a clear majority within the next two years, or whether it could be heading for a closely fought contest — or even a fifth consecutive Conservative victory for the first time in British history.

The May ritual I’m referring to is the annual round of local government elections. Not every British voter will be able to take part — there are no local elections this year in Scotland, Wales or London — but most will have a chance to decide who runs 230 cities, towns and local districts across much of England. On Friday 5 May, while much of the country prepares for King Charles to be crowned the following day in Westminster Abbey, party strategists and media pundits will be paying less attention to the coronation than to the local elections’ impact on another historic building, just across the road from the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament.

In a way, this is all rather odd. Voters will be choosing who should run their local services — schools, public housing, parks, social care, libraries, refuse collection and so on. The 8000 councillors they elect will have no say on income tax, immigration, energy prices, Brexit, help for Ukraine or any of the other great national issues that decide the fates of governments. And yet decades of experience show that most people consider not the qualities of the particular candidates standing in their neighbourhoods but the rival merits of the national parties they represent.

Not everyone: thankfully for the cause of democracy, outstanding local candidates can defy national trends. And some parties — notably the Liberal Democrats — win more votes in local than national elections. But, overall, when all the votes around the country are added up, the national picture is what matters.

Older readers may recall the Falklands war in 1982. Before the war, Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular. Unemployment had trebled in three years from one to three million; the polls said the Conservatives were doomed to lose the following election. Yet Thatcher’s party triumphed in that May’s local elections because British troops were heading to the South Atlantic and most of Britain’s voters backed Thatcher’s quest to reclaim the islands from Argentina. Not a single local council in Britain had anything to do with any of this. Yet it was national sentiment, not local judgements, that decided which party should run each town and city.

Given all that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the national picture will be what really matters when this year’s local votes are counted. What gives the results added significance this time, though, are the disputes among pollsters. They agree that Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party is ahead but they disagree by how much. Some give Labour a lead of around 25 per cent, others nearer 15 per cent.

To be sure, both are big leads. (They might sound very big to Australian readers, but remember: Britain uses a first-past-the-post system and Labour’s votes are geographically concentrated, so the national vote translates into seats quite differently.) Repeated in a general election, Labour would be back in power. But there are two reasons why a big Labour victory is by no means certain.

First, governments over the past six decades or more have consistently lost support in the middle of each parliament, only to recover, at least to some extent, as the next general election approaches.

Second, changes in the relationship between votes and seats mean that Labour needs a bigger lead than in the past if it is to win outright. In 2005 — the last time Britain elected a Labour government — the party secured a comfortable majority with a lead in the popular vote of just 3 per cent (Labour 36 per cent, Conservatives 33 per cent). Today, a 3 per cent lead would leave Labour well short of a parliamentary majority; it might not even be the largest party in the House of Commons. Depending on a variety of factors, Labour will need a lead of at least 8 per cent, and might need a lead of as much as 13 per cent, to win outright. That was the margin by which Tony Blair led Labour to a landslide 179-seat majority in 1997. A repeat of those nationwide figures would mean a far closer outcome in terms of seats, and possibly a wafer-thin majority that could make it hard for Labour to remain in office for a full five-year term.

Given all that, a 15 per cent lead today would mean that even a modest Conservative recovery could jeopardise Labour’s chances of a clear victory. On the other hand, if Labour really is 25 per cent ahead, then it has a cushion against a Conservative recovery.

(A note for nerds: a narrow Labour lead in national votes at the next election is unlikely to mean the Conservatives stay in office. A more likely outcome is a hung parliament, in which neither Labour nor Conservative commands an overall majority. In those circumstances a minority Labour government is more likely than a minority Conservative government, because the great majority of smaller-party MPs, mainly Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party MPs, are viscerally anti-Conservative. But a minority Labour government would be limited in what it could do, and would probably hold another general election within a year or two. Britain’s longer-term future would effectively be on hold.)


Given all that, what will the pundits and parties be looking for on 5 May? Above all, they will want to see the BBC’s estimates of how the local vote maps nationally, taking account of the fact that parts of Britain won’t be voting at all. Assuming the Liberal Democrats repeat their usual trick of doing better in local than national elections, and Labour worse, a good rule of thumb is to add eight to ten percentage points to Labour’s lead.

So, if the national vote share in the local elections shows Labour fifteen or more points ahead of the Conservatives, this suggests a “true” Labour lead of around 25 per cent. Pollsters showing the bigger Labour leads will be vindicated and the Conservatives will have reason to be dejected. But if Labour’s lead is below 10 per cent then its “true” lead would be in line with polls reporting smaller leads just now. And any significant Conservative recovery would jeopardise Labour’s hopes of outright victory at the next general election.

Doubtless the television cameras will show us the expressions on the faces of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer as they enter Westminster Abbey for the coronation the following day. They will do their professional best to look positive; but experts in facial expressions might be able to detect their true feelings as they absorb the news of the local election results. •

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Torpedoes ahead! https://insidestory.org.au/torpedoes-ahead/ https://insidestory.org.au/torpedoes-ahead/#respond Tue, 14 Mar 2023 06:26:28 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73341

The AUKUS submarine announcement has immediately raised thorny questions about cost, timing and design

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This week’s tri-nation announcement by Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Anthony Albanese kicks the Royal Australian Navy’s acquisition of the subs far into the future. The navy has a wait of a decade or more before the first nuclear-powered submarine is handed over.

The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

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The elusive quest for decent homes https://insidestory.org.au/the-elusive-quest-for-decent-homes/ https://insidestory.org.au/the-elusive-quest-for-decent-homes/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 23:28:35 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73196

Not-for-profit associations are taking over as providers of affordable rental housing. What can Australia learn from Britain, where the trend is well advanced?

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In London’s bustling East End a circular garden of surprising calm sits on a mound at the centre of the giant Arnold Circus roundabout. The still hub of a wheel, its radiating spokes are formed by broad avenues lined with four-storey terraces built in the Art and Crafts style: solid red brickwork shot through with decorative bands of yellow; ornate porticos sheltering entrances with solid timber doors; generous, white-painted windows hinting at high-ceilinged rooms within. With its mature plane trees and hexagonal bandstand, the garden and its surrounding architecture have a stately feel.

This is the Boundary Estate, a public housing scheme that has provided quality homes to working-class Londoners since 1900. It was Britain’s first council housing project and one of the earliest examples anywhere of public investment in affordable homes.

The rise of the estate’s circular garden is reminiscent of an Anglo-Saxon burial mound — and it is a burial place of sorts, interring the rubble of Old Nichol, a notorious East End slum demolished in the 1890s. Described by the Illustrated London News as a “painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty,” Old Nichol was a place of disease and deprivation. Thousands of families crowded into dwellings of just one or two rooms, the walls held together by cheap “billy-sweet,” a mortar that never dried out. Babies born in the slum had a one-in-four chance of dying before their first birthday.

For about eighty years after the Boundary Estate opened, almost all public housing in Britain was “council housing,” built and operated by local authorities. In Australia, state governments took the lead. In both cases public investment dried up in the closing decades of the twentieth century, ushering in a period of decline in the quantity and quality — and the reputation — of public housing.

In both places, housing construction and management increasingly shifted away from governments, local or state, to not-for-profit housing providers, although this process is further advanced in Britain than Australia. What was once known as council or public housing is now generally covered by the broader banner of “social housing.”

My guide through the Boundary Estate is social historian John Boughton, and I’ve drawn liberally on the opening chapter of his book Municipal Dreams, a chronicle of the rise and fall of council housing in Britain, in describing its history. The book grew out of his blog of the same name, launched a decade ago as a retirement project after he left his job teaching history to senior high school students.

Boundary Estate

“It was completely normal”: the Boundary Estate today. Peter Mares

For Boughton — whose long-term Labour Party membership included what he calls a brief, unremarkable stint as an elected local government official — the neglected subject of council housing chimed with existing political and academic interests. It deserved greater attention, he thought, but he never expected his blog to prove so popular.

“It just took off,” he says. “It caught a moment.” Boughton thinks the contemporary housing crisis has spurred interest in his writing by exposing the limitations of a neoliberal reliance on private capital and free markets to address complex social challenges. “People are starting to look with more sympathetic eyes on the role of the state, in housing in particular.”

Perhaps, too, the blog hit a chord with a generation shaped by council housing. Many of Boughton’s relatives lived on council estates, as did friends and acquaintances. “It was completely normal,” he says. One in three Britons lived in a council home in 1981, and it was often the best housing they had ever experienced.

Today, though, council housing suffers from an image problem almost as bad as Old Nichol’s in the nineteenth century.


I met Boughton soon after the final episode of the hugely popular Happy Valley screened on the BBC. As in many British crime series, part of the action took place on a council estate — in this case in Yorkshire, where a troubled woman was exploited by an unscrupulous criminal duo.

The image of crime- and poverty-ridden housing estates, reinforced time after time in fictional series and news coverage, has stuck. “The tendency to associate council housing with criminality has exaggerated and denigrated the experiences of millions of people currently and in the past,” says Boughton. “That is not to deny problems and missteps along the way. But it is a negative stereotype, and it is self-reinforcing.”

Where problems do arise on particular estates at particular times, they are always shaped by larger forces, he says, and especially the profound effect of demographics.

He cites the Pepys Estate, just south of the Thames in the Borough of Lewisham, which was very popular when it opened in 1973. Built on the site of a former naval dockyard and accommodating 5000 people in 1500 homes, it was one of the Greater London Council’s largest and most prestigious projects. Design innovations included basement garages to separate pedestrians from cars and elevated walkways between blocks to encourage neighbourly interaction. In TV dramas, these same locations are now likely to feature as hangouts for loitering gangs and escape routes for villains.

High-rise flats have become particularly reviled for facilitating antisocial behaviour, as if the fault resides in the very fabric of the buildings. Boughton insists the architecture isn’t to blame. “A great variety of estates have suffered problems,” he says. “Low-rise estates too, not just tower blocks.”

The roots of such ills lie elsewhere. In the decade from 1978, Lewisham lost 10,000 jobs and unemployment trebled. By the mid 1980s more than half the borough’s residents aged sixteen to twenty-nine were jobless. The Pepys Estate was hit hard, and an alternative economy sprang up based on drugs and crime. Racism was rife. Rather than fighting to get into a flat, people were begging to be transferred out.

Boughton tells a similar story abou the Park Hill Estate, a 996-flat scheme that replaced some of the worst slums in Sheffield. Completed in 1961, it also had “streets in the sky” — elevated walkways wide enough for children to play on, which enabled neighbours to chat without the noise and disruption of passing traffic. It had shops, pubs, schools, clinics, community centres and, in the words of one resident, other unaccustomed luxuries: “Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night when it’s all lit up.”

By the early 1980s, though, Park Hill was another towering symbol of council housing failure, its celebrated brutalist architecture blamed for criminality and vandalism. What rarely gets mentioned is that in the intervening decade Sheffield had lost a massive 40,000 jobs.

“Council housing does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a social and economic context,” says Boughton. “What is happening to these communities is the product of policy and political choices.”


Attitudes towards council housing also changed as Britain became more affluent. “Into the 1960s, it was the best housing most working-class people could aspire to,” says Boughton. “But as owner-occupation became more widespread, council housing was seen as less desirable for sure. There was a psychological shift.”

As the economy declined in the wake of the oil shock and stagflation in the 1970s, public spending fell too. Repair and maintenance were neglected. Labour, which had once believed council housing should meet “general needs,” moved closer to the Conservatives’ view that it was better seen as a welfare safety net reserved for the vulnerable.

At one level, the shift (which was mirrored in Australia) makes sense: the fairest way to manage limited public resources is to prioritise the neediest. Over time, though, social housing was transformed into housing of last resort — an ambulance service that picks people up from the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence preventing anyone from falling.

Forty years later, social housing in both Britain and Australia accommodates an increasingly narrow stratum of society — the very poorest and those experiencing the most layers of disadvantage. This “residualisation” makes it easier, in turn, to stigmatise residents as “troubled” and point to “failed estates” as evidence that public investment in decent housing is a fundamentally flawed ideal.

Residualisation was compounded in 1980s Britain by the hammer blow of Thatcherism. The national government cut investment in council housing and stopped new construction in its tracks. In the year Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher took office, building commenced on nearly 80,000 new council homes in England and Wales. Within a decade, annual new starts had fallen to just 400. But when councils stopped building in England — the green band on the chart below — the private sector failed to pick up the slack. The overall supply of new housing dropped precipitously and has never recovered.

Source: Live table 213, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government

Determined to convert Britain into a nation of homeowners, Thatcher also introduced the right-to-buy scheme. By the time the Conservatives lost office in 1997, one-in-four council homes had been sold, with prices discounted by between a third and a half of market value (up to a ceiling of £50,000). It amounted to a massive, highly subsidised transfer of public assets into private hands, and most of the receipts went straight to Treasury to retire debt.

Tenants with means were supported to become owner-occupiers; those without got less assistance than before as public investment in council housing dried up. “Typically, the best, most desirable homes got sold and the less desirable units got left,” says Boughton. “It was another form of residualisation.”

For many, this brought windfall profits. Boughton gives the example of a security guard living on a council estate in Camden who bought his flat for £39,000 under the scheme. It was valued at £70,000 at the time. Three decades later, his home was worth £600,000. Not surprisingly, he thought the scheme was “perfect.”

“The irony is that generally the first generation of former tenants who became owner-occupiers then sold off those homes,” Boughton says. Forty per cent of homes bought by their tenants are now back on the private rental market, though in poorer condition and with higher rents than the council houses next door.

“If you walk onto a suburban council estate, the well-maintained and modernised houses are council owned, while those sold under the right-to-buy scheme are least well maintained and equipped,” says Boughton. “The market does not do a very good job.”


About 40 per cent of the homes in the Boundary Estate are now in private hands, and those that are rented out are seen as desirable properties. At the “guide price” of £450 per week, a one-bedroom flat would eat up the entire pay packet of a full-time worker earning the London Living Wage.

The rest of the estate’s residents remain tenants of Tower Hamlets, the local authority. In 2006, the tenants vetoed a plan to transfer the estate from the council to the not-for-profit Southern Housing Group, even though the housing association had promised to redecorate the flats and install new kitchens, bathrooms and boilers.

In hundreds of other estates, tenants have voted to switch from the local authority to a housing association. Back in 2001, two-thirds of all social housing in England was owned and operated by local governments and one-third by registered housing providers. Today, those figures are almost reversed, and fewer than four in ten homes remain in council hands.

For the Conservatives, the shift from local authorities to housing providers was — like the right-to-buy scheme — ideological. Boughton says the Tory government genuinely believed that council housing was “the state at its worst, bureaucratic, distant and inefficient.”

While acknowledging that an era of austerity made it difficult for councils to maintain the quality of housing, he says there was some justification for the Thatcherite critique. “It varied from council to council, but some took their eyes off the ball, neglecting maintenance and repair,” he says. “Ongoing expenses were not always budgeted for.” The results weren’t all bad, he adds: local governments responded by decentralising decision-making and devolving management.

The shift to not-for-profit housing associations continued after Labour took government in 1997. Smaller and locally based, housing associations were seen as more agile than councils, more attentive to tenants’ needs and better aligned with Tony Blair’s “Third Way.”

These arguments are familiar in Australia, where the not-for-profit, or “community,” sector is also growing. The Community Housing Industry Association’s chief executive, Wendy Hayhurst, recently urged the Albanese government to direct all the proceeds from its $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to her sector rather than do the “easy thing” and divvy the money up among community, state and private providers.

Hayhurst argued that community housing scores better on ratings of quality and resident satisfaction, a claim supported by the Productivity Commission’s most recent Report on Government Services. With its charitable status, the community sector is exempt from GST, land tax and stamp duty, which Hayhurst says enables it to build more houses for any given amount of money than state governments or businesses can.

Duncan Maclennan, a housing expert at the University of Glasgow with extensive experience in Australia, argues that not-for-profits provide better management than state authorities and better integration with other services. He says they are more effective at using their housing assets to secure low-cost private capital for additional investment. “There is a strong case to see much stronger policies of transferring public stock to non-profits,” he concludes.

Though not as advanced as in Britain, the shift from state governments to community providers is already under way in Australia. Over the past five years, more than 21,000 homes have been transferred from public sector to registered housing providers, two-thirds of them in New South Wales. Around 70 per cent remain in state hands, but this is down from 85 per cent in 2008.

The trend is clear, yet the British experience gives pause for thought. Or at least the English experience — thanks to devolution, policies differ in Scotland and Wales.


Take the Juniper Crescent estate, for instance, which won architectural awards after it was completed by inner-north London’s Camden Council in 1996. Across the road from the estate, near some once-hip but now-tawdry markets, builders are hammering away at a £1 billion development, Camden Goods Yards. What was once a commercial site is being transformed into a mixed-use neighbourhood with 644 homes, Grade A office space, a supermarket, a rooftop farm and “landscaped open space for the whole community to explore.”

Thanks to inclusionary zoning requirements, the developers are supposed to include some affordable housing as well — as they are in all new housing projects in England. As a planning requirement, an agreement on the quantity and price range is generally negotiated between developers and local governments, though John Boughton says developers sometimes wriggle out of these commitments and, besides, “affordable is a pretty loose term.”

Sound from the construction site at Camden Goods Yard is audible from Juniper Crescent, which is now run by One Housing, one of London’s largest housing associations. Juniper Crescent might need some upgrades, but it is far from past its use-by date. Yet these 120 terrace homes in stylish yellow brick will soon be demolished as part of a redevelopment more in line with the high-end condominiums being built across the way.

The knockdown rebuild plan required the consent of Juniper Crescent residents, but in a 2020 ballot they voted the proposal down. One Housing’s response was to engage “with residents further about the regeneration proposals in order to understand the ballot results more fully.” In other words, keep trying until the residents gave the right answer. After consultations fuelled by glossy brochures, free pizza and live music, residents voting narrowly in favour of demolition.

One Housing has promised that all current residents will be able to return to the redeveloped estate. Residents will have more open space than before, it says, and their new better-quality homes will be just as spacious as their present dwellings. Each household will receive a £7800 “home loss payment” to compensate for years of disruption.

The demolition of an estate built less than thirty years ago reflects the way markets are structured, says Boughton. Little incentive exists to refurbish and upgrade existing council housing. The financial imperative is for developers to demolish and rebuild, tapping in to profits from new homes for sale and private rental. Projects are justified, with some plausibility, because they bring densification.

The soon-to-be-demolished Juniper Crescent estate. Peter Mares

Redeveloping Juniper Crescent will create about three times as many homes as the estate has now, adding much-needed supply to London’s over-taxed housing market. What remains unclear, though, is how many of these additional homes will be truly affordable for low-income tenants. As even its supporters acknowledge, One Housing’s motivation in this partnership with a private developer is as much financial as social: it needs to generate income from commercial projects to fund its broader operations.

For Boughton, this attempts to turn necessity into a virtue. Housing associations cross-subsidise their social mission by building housing for private sale or market rents. A touted benefit is the creation of “mixed communities,” where rich and poor, renters and owner-occupiers, live side by side and share facilities. Boughton welcomes this aim, noting that this is what all council estates originally were. But he adds, wryly, that no one seems to worry about the lack of social mix in middle-class suburbia, let alone in the exclusive neighbourhoods favoured by plutocrats.

Yet Boughton also fears that housing associations increasingly look and behave like property developers. Even when they separate their commercial and social operations in different divisions, they risk letting the for-profit tail wag the housing-association dog.

“I’m not criticising good housing associations with local roots and a strong grasp of social purpose,” says Boughton. “I’ve got plenty of time for those. But now they have consolidated and got bigger, many are suffering from some of the same evils once attributed to councils.”

There is a compelling argument that Australia’s nascent community housing sector must also grow, professionalise, and consolidate into fewer larger organisations if it is to operate efficiently through economies of scale and a deep well of corporate knowledge. Yet in England, signs suggest that some of the biggest housing associations are losing touch with their residents and becoming disconnected from their social purpose.

CEOs now command impressive salaries and privately lobby government to let them charge tenants higher rents. One Housing is accused of leaving some of its elderly tenants without heating or hot water through winter after bungling boiler repair work. Another big provider, L&Q, was recently rapped on the knuckles by the Housing Ombudsman with two severe maladministration findings over its treatment of a tenant with physical and mental vulnerabilities.

In one chilling case, the Peabody Group apologised after one of its tenants was left dead in her flat for more than two years. Neighbours had complained about a foul stench and Peabody had cut off the woman’s gas because of unpaid bills yet failed to check on her welfare.

Anecdotes are not proof of system failure, nor evidence that things would have been better if councils had remained in control. The G15 alliance of London’s biggest housing associations provides homes for around one-in-ten Londoners: in a sector so large things will always go wrong. Yet the potential for social purpose to be eroded remains real, especially when the sector remains starved of public funds.

This is apparent in the types of housing that are now getting built. Rather than “social rent housing” — that is, homes for people on the bottom rungs of the income ladder — housing associations in England are increasingly building other types of “affordable” housing, including properties rented for as much as 80 per cent of the local market rate — which, whether in London, Melbourne or Sydney, is often still very expensive. One “affordable” property currently listed by Australian social venture HomeGround Real Estate is a two-bedroom apartment at $1100 per week.

Affordable housing is often portrayed as “key worker” housing. It is intended to enable teachers, nurses, childcare workers, police officers, hospitality staff and sales assistants to live closer to their jobs. These are tenants that private developers would welcome in joint ventures like the Juniper Crescent rebuild — if they can afford it. Social renters, who often rely on government benefits, don’t fit so comfortably in marketing brochures.

Boughton warns that social rent housing will always come second under a cross-subsidy model. “You will never have the amount of social rent housing that is truly affordable being built. It will always be neglected.”

The statistics seem to bear him out. In 2021–22, about 60,000 homes were added to England’s “affordable housing” stock, almost half of them resulting from inclusionary zoning agreements. But only about 13 per cent of the total — or 7500 dwellings — were designated as social rent. That proportion has been steady for about ten years.

In the previous decade, though, social rent housing made up 50 to 60 per cent of new dwellings. In the decade before that, it was 70 to 80 per cent. When sales and demolitions are taken into account, Shelter England calculates that England has lost more than 165,000 social rent homes in the past decade.


Today, London south of the Thames is more affluent and desirable than it was in the 1970s, and the Pepys Estate has been rehabilitated. “The Pepys Estate was famous, then it was infamous, now it just looks and feels like a pretty decent place to live,” writes Boughton in a blog post.

After Lewisham Council transferred the estate to a housing association, it underwent an award-winning redevelopment during which many original buildings were demolished, especially those closest to the river. In what Boughton describes as “pure and unabashed gentrification,” a twenty-four-storey tower block with 144 flats was sold to Berkeley Homes, which stacked an additional five floors with fourteen penthouses on top and flogged off all the apartments at a premium.

In this case, the tower block design didn’t seem to be an automatic generator of crime and dysfunction, though the tower did get a new entrance to avoid any taint of council estate. As Boughton explains on his blog, this was another example of financial considerations determining social outcomes:

Lewisham Council claimed to have run out of money and it’s true enough that the rules of the game were — and are — designed to curtail the ability of local councils to improve and expand their housing stock. But it suited, too, a gentrifying agenda which sees some London councils only too keen to bring the middle-class and their money into their boroughs.

For those with municipal dreams, providing decent housing that caters for all, including people with the fewest resources, has been a challenge right from the start. When Old Nichol was cleared to make room for the Boundary Estate, only eleven residents from the original slum made it into the new apartments. Housing generally went to the members of the artisan working class, skilled tradespeople with reliable incomes who today might be described as “key workers.”

Whether housing is built and run by councils, by state governments, by not-for-profits or indeed by private enterprise, it will only provide decent homes for all, including the most disadvantaged, if it receives substantial and ongoing public investment. One persistent hope in Australia is that superannuation funds will invest in social housing, but as the Community Housing Industry Association’s Wendy Hayhurst and Matt Linden from Industry Super Australia write, this can only work if there is consistent and long-term government subsidy to generate the returns institutional investors require for their members.

As Australian housing policy expert Vivienne Milligan warns, only governments can fill the gap between the rent poor tenants can afford to pay and what it costs to build, run and maintain their homes, let alone generate a profit. A reliance on inclusionary zoning and cross-subsidies from commercial projects is just not going to cut it.

Boughton has an abiding sympathy for old-style council housing but is far from dogmatic about whether it should be in local government hands or run by not-for-profits. “Anything that provides genuinely affordable housing and looks after buildings and tenants is welcome,” he says. “A significant share of the population will never own their own home, and housing association, or local authority housing, should and can cater for a broader range of the population.”

But, he adds, “I do advocate for local authority house building as a cost-effective and affordable means of providing housing, as demonstrated from the 1890s to the 1970s.” Between 1945 and 1979, councils built an average of 126,000 dwellings each year. “Local authorities were able to borrow from the national government and use rents to repay loans. They had the resources, organisation, financial clout, and political will to build at scale. That’s what we’ve lost.”

Local authorities also build to a higher standard than commercial developers, says Boughton. “No one is looking to Barratt for best practice,” he says, referring to one of Britain’s biggest mass home builders. “But the very best council housing is something to aspire to.”

Boughton’s new book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, concludes with a profile of Goldsmith Street, a Norwich City Council project of around a hundred highly energy-efficient homes. Awarding it the 2019 Stirling Prize, judges from the Royal Institute of British Architects called the project “a modest masterpiece.”

“Not everywhere can be like that,” says Boughton, “but it’s not a pipe dream to think that local authorities can play that role.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Getting Brexit undone https://insidestory.org.au/getting-brexit-undone/ https://insidestory.org.au/getting-brexit-undone/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2023 07:10:48 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=73072

Voter sentiment has shifted decisively, leaving the major parties in a quandary

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The speed at which the British public has turned against Brexit has taken the political establishment by surprise, with no one quite sure how to react. After all, the reason “Get Brexit Done” was such a successful slogan during Britain’s 2019 election was that most people, including a large chunk of Remain voters, were heartily sick of the topic. It was never going to go away as an issue — Britain’s relationship with continental powers has been a key factor in its politics for centuries — but there was an expectation it would be a while before serious conversations about a different relationship began.

Up to mid 2021 this looked about right. Although enthusiasm for Brexit had gently declined since 2016, sentiment had not shifted dramatically. But since then, support has fallen much faster and, fuelled by Britain’s economic malaise, debate has intensified. In August 2021, 46 per cent of people told YouGov Britain was wrong to leave the European Union and 42 per cent said it was right. Those figures are now 54 per cent and 34 per cent. Just 18 per cent think the government has handled Brexit well.

Both the government and the opposition are studiously, and understandably, ignoring this shift in opinion. Within the Tory membership and the parliamentary party, support for Brexit remains strong. Prime minister Rishi Sunak is in a weak position, doing poorly in the polls and under attack from the most aggressively anti-European faction in his party, supported by his predecessor Boris Johnson. The government can do little beyond quietly trying to improve relations with European partners, as we are seeing with its attempt to resolve vexed issues over Northern Ireland.

Labour’s base strongly opposes Brexit but, given Remainers have nowhere else to go, the opposition’s focus is on winning over socially conversative but economically left-wing voters in marginal seats. Attacking Brexit would be actively unhelpful with this group. Labour leader Keir Starmer and his team are also clearly terrified about being attacked as soft on immigration — hence his repeated emphasis that free movement of people would be off the table under a Labour government.

But if opinion continues to shift against Brexit, this can only be a temporary strategy for both parties, and will eventually become unsustainable.


Support for Brexit was always likely to decline over time because of the age profile of the groups that voted Yes and No in the 2016 referendum. A majority of under-fifty-year-olds voted Remain; pensioners were always the biggest backers of Leave. Given very few Remain voters have changed their minds over the past six and a half years, and people who were too young to vote in 2016 overwhelmingly oppose Brexit, natural voter replacement is generating an inevitable shift.

Professor Simon Hix and colleagues estimate around 35 per cent of the drop in support for Brexit since 2016 is due to this replacement effect. It’s likely that if the initial referendum took place next year Remain would now win — even if everyone who could vote in 2016 voted the same way.

Brexit enthusiasts always ran a risk in depending so greatly on older voters, which makes it all the more strange that they doubled down on appealing to their existing supporters rather than attempting to make a case that might appeal to younger, more liberal voters. As a result, alongside the replacement effect, the age gap has got even bigger. An analysis of YouGov data shows people born between 1985 and 1994 have shifted hardest against Brexit, whereas those born before 1944 are even more supportive than they were in 2016. This will exacerbate the impact of replacement over the next five to ten years.

This powerful effect means that Brexit will continue to get less and less popular even if no one else changes their mind. So those who want to stay well clear of the EU need to convince younger voters that it was a good idea. At the moment, that clearly isn’t happening — the proportion of Remain voters who’ve changed their minds is tiny. Nor is there are any reason to believe this will change in the next few years, given that no obvious benefits are about to become apparent.

The only factors that might push opinion in the other direction would be a strong economic recovery for which at least some credit was given to Brexit, deserved or not, or, more possible though still unlikely, a major crisis within the EU that makes Britain look like a safe haven. Tensions certainly exist that could turn into something more existential. For instance, in late 2022 we saw Hungary blocking a bailout to Ukraine as part of an ongoing argument over Viktor Orbán’s undemocratic rule. And many EU states, including France, are still unhappy with Germany’s behaviour over the energy crisis.

But at the moment nothing seems likely to give Remain voters pause. That puts the focus on Leave voters. If they stay supportive of Brexit then it will take longer for a major shift in policy to become a political necessity for the main parties. At the moment 18 per cent of those Leavers are telling YouGov they now think leaving was the wrong decision — higher than a year ago — but 74 per cent are sticking with their initial decision.

Yet when you dig into how people feel about Brexit, that support looks like it could drop a fair bit more, especially among younger Leave supporters. JL Partners’ polling in October showed that just 24 per cent of Leave voters think Brexit has helped the economy compared with 34 per cent who think it’s made it worse. Across every area JL Partners tested — from better public services to the cost of holidays — Leave voters were more likely to say Brexit has made their lives worse than better. A Public First poll in December for the charity More in Common found that, of Leave voters who had changed their minds, 69 per cent cited damage to the economy as a reason.

Why then do 74 per cent still say it was right to leave? Mainly, it seems, because they are still hopeful there will be benefits in the coming years. While JL Partners found little hope among Remainers that any benefits might be forthcoming, a majority of Leavers felt trade deals with the rest of the world and “better UK laws” would bring future improvements. Critically, though, most expected to see those benefits in the next five years. My sense is that if they don’t, and there’s no reason at the moment to think they will, then support among Leavers will continue to drop, on top of the age effects.


If it seems fairly clear that people are unhappy with Brexit so far, even if some are still hopeful, what people want instead is harder to read. This is partly because, as ever, most people don’t spend much time thinking about politics, let alone policy detail, and so don’t have formed views on the benefits of joining the single market versus a bespoke trade deal. It’s also down to the complexity of the issue.

Thanks to the kind people at focaldata I’ve been able to ask some of my own polling questions to test how well people understand one of the key concepts that comes up in discussions of how Britain might deal with the post-Brexit malaise. To do that, I gave four short (and by necessity simplistic) descriptions of the single market to see if people knew what it actually means. Thirty-eight per cent correctly chose “Agreeing to participate in the free movement of goods, people, services and capital with European Union states” and 35 per cent nominated another option I’d phrased to be almost right. But another 27 per cent chose options — “a bespoke deal with the EU” or “rejoining the EU” — that were completely wrong.

There’s also the matter of how you frame the questions. As ever, small changes in wording can make a huge difference. When I asked if people thought Britain should join the single market but stay out of the European Union, I found 55 per cent in favour and 26 per cent opposed. Opinium Research asked if people supported “gaining access to the European single market” and found 63 per cent supporting and 14 per cent opposed. Both JL Partners and Public First asked (different) multi-option questions that gave quite different results for how many people would prefer joining the single market versus some other type of closer relationship.

Given all this, we have to be careful about overreading the data. But I think we can say the following: not many people want to keep the status quo and only a very small minority want to move even further away from the EU. A substantial majority, including most Leavers, want some kind of better relationship, though short of rejoining. They are particularly concerned about the economy but are also bothered by the inconvenience of travelling abroad, and they support closer security relationships and sharing of police information.

What is really hard to judge is which trade-offs people are prepared to accept. Things can be done to develop a closer economic and security relationship with the EU, short of single-market membership or rejoining, but they are limited. Both single-market membership and rejoining would certainly help the economy, but both would have costs, including payments to the EU, accepting free movement (though most people don’t want higher immigration) and, if Britain were not a full member, having to follow rules that it had no say in forming.

In my poll I tried to get at this issue by asking people what would worry them most about rejoining the EU — with a list of options. My hypothesis was that free movement would be way out in front as the biggest concern. But it wasn’t at all. Just 12 per cent said it was their main concern, and only 19 per cent of Leavers. The greater worry, at 21 per cent (24 per cent of Leavers), was paying money to the EU, which I guess shouldn’t have been a surprise given the arguments about that damn bus advert. The other concerns that registered double figures were loss of sovereignty (15 per cent); going back to political arguments about membership (12 per cent); and concern about overturning the referendum (10 per cent).

Of all the public’s views at the moment, how strongly people feel about immigration is one of the hardest to get a grip on. But I can’t help thinking that politicians are overly worried about it compared with other factors, particularly the state of public services and the economy.

When YouGov and Public First explicitly cite free movement as a consequence of joining the single market or striking a “Swiss-style” deal, they seem to get similar responses to when they don’t, and in each case they register clear majority support for these options. LSE researchers explicitly tested a “free movement” deal with the EU and found majority support among Leavers.

But that doesn’t mean the real-world argument for these options, or rejoining, would be easy to win. Only 19 per cent of voters, and only 30 per cent of Remainers, had no concerns at all about rejoining. While the concerns are more diffuse than I expected, they are there, and would, of course, come more to the forefront of the debate if the government pushed for a more dramatic change in the EU relationship.


Given the shift in opinion against Brexit, and given that, barring a dramatic economic recovery or the implosion of the EU, the trend is very likely to continue, what does that mean for the current Tory/Labour positions?

Neither party faces any immediate pressure to change policy. Sunak has no room to shift even if he wanted to. The Tories will go into the election citing “Get Brexit Done” as a success, though they won’t make it a centrepiece given how little benefit voters have seen.

Labour will stick to its current position too — “Make Brexit Work” — and stay out of anything that would require the return of free movement. What making Brexit work means in practice is harder to define, but it will include closer regulatory alignment on a number of areas, trying to reduce trade barriers, and closer security arrangements. This is extremely safe ground, backed by most Leave voters and an overwhelming majority of Remainers.

I suspect Starmer could go a bit further, without talking about any specific mechanism, in his warmth towards future relationships without doing any harm electorally. And he certainly doesn’t need to pretend, as he did the other day, that joining the single market wouldn’t bring economic benefits.

But, of course, I can understand the caution. Proposing to rejoin now would undoubtedly be a mistake. As Luke Tryl notes, his More in Common polling shows that “swing voters — those who have either switched to Labour since 2019 or who voted Tory and now are undecided — say by a margin of 47 to 16 per cent that if Labour pledged to rejoin they would be less, rather than more likely to vote for the party.”

I suspect things will start to move a bit faster after the election. Labour will have to engage with the issue within its first year because Britain’s 2020 trade agreement with Europe is automatically reviewed every five years. The party base will urge the new government to maximise alignment.

My view is that Labour should, on taking office, immediately commission an analysis of the costs and benefits of Brexit to inform the review, and should try to bring in sensible Leave backers to make the conclusions as widely accepted as possible.

If a new deal, following the review, has some limited benefits, and goes down okay with key voter groups, pressure will grow for something more comprehensive. The timeline here will depend on a number of things:

• Will Leave voters start to shift in greater numbers, or will ongoing drift in opinion depend entirely on replacement?

• Will anything happen that might push against that drift (economic recovery/EU crisis)?

• Will a disgruntled Labour faction — perhaps built around ministers fired in an early reshuffle — make getting back into the EU a loudly popular cause among the base?

• Will EU states be keen to bring the UK back into the fold, given that its politics would further complicate existing dynamics and there are some advantages of keeping it outside as an example of why holding the EU together matters?

• What will the Tories do?

This last question is a hard one to anticipate. On the one hand, parties that lose elections tend to retreat into their comfort zone quickly and for some time. It’s easy to imagine someone like business and trade minister Kemi Badenoch — a figure popular with the party base and the current favourite to take over the Tories after an election loss — doubling down on Brexit and choosing to fight Labour on immigration and culture wars. But if the result is really bad it may force an earlier acknowledgement of reality than happened after 1997.

Yes, a complete reversal on Brexit among Conservative MPs seems implausible given how committed so many in the party are to it, but a gentle back-pedalling is possible if they have a leader who sees how precarious their position is among younger voters. If they choose to downplay it, and not make it a big part of their pitch, that makes it easier for Labour to change position too.

One way or another, though, things will feel very different as we approach 2030. Britain is likely to be moving towards a closer relationship with the EU rather than the intransigence that has marked the past six years. Voter opinion will very likely be overwhelmingly in favour of this and substantially in favour of a more formal relationship of some kind. It will, by then, be fourteen years since the referendum. There will be thirty-two-year-olds who weren’t old enough to vote in 2016.

I don’t know if Britain will ever formally rejoin the EU, but I would be very surprised if it doesn’t have a dramatically different relationship within a decade, and that may well include de facto, if not de jure, membership of the single market. •

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Not enough houses? https://insidestory.org.au/not-enough-houses/ https://insidestory.org.au/not-enough-houses/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2023 05:15:50 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=72632

Britain’s housing crisis has lessons for Australia

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When it comes to housing, Australia and Britain have much in common. Both countries are committed to the notion of a “property-owning democracy,” both see this vision threatened by escalating house prices, and both have responded to the threat in similar ways. Before he won Britain’s 2019 election, Boris Johnson promised the Conservative Party would build “at least” a million new homes in England (since devolution, other parts of Britain have their own housing powers) over the five-year life of the new parliament. In his first budget, Australian treasurer Jim Chalmers made a similar pledge — a million new homes in five years.

They weren’t offering to build or finance these new houses; they want private developers to do that.

Sitting behind these policies is the commonsense view that the key to bringing down the cost of housing is building more dwellings. This accords with our everyday experience of how markets operate: when something is scarce, prices go up, and the best way to bring prices down is to provide more of it.

When it comes to housing, though, the relationship between price and supply isn’t so clear-cut.

We know this partly because we have an alternative to house prices — rents — as an indicator of housing demand. Rents track demand for housing as a service, whereas real estate prices also reflect demand for housing as an investment.

It turns out that rents have risen far more slowly than house prices over the past twenty years (although now they are rising sharply in England and Australia). And despite low wage growth, the average share of household spending devoted to rent has also remained fairly constant in both places.

That’s not to say that rents are affordable, especially for low-income tenants in expensive cities like London and Sydney. If rents were already excessive twenty years ago, they are still excessive today, reflecting a persistent shortage of housing. The point is that rent increases over time have been relatively modest; if the pace of house building had fallen well behind the growth in demand then we might have expected sharper rises.

We know, too, that factors other than supply can have immediate and dramatic impacts on property prices. As interest rates have gone up in recent months, house and apartment prices have dropped back from their 2022 peaks.

Prices tend to go down when it’s harder to get a loan (which is why regulatory authorities tighten bank lending rules when they want to dampen the market). And prices go up when governments stimulate the market with first homeowner grants or tax concessions. The construction industry is also notoriously volatile, so the supply of new homes fluctuates as the number of dwellings completed rises or falls from year to year. What’s more, new homes make up only a small proportion of overall housing stock and real estate transactions, so the impact of construction on prices is slow and muted.

Over time, such ups and downs should even out, revealing the underlying relationship between housing supply and housing demand. So, what does twenty years of census data tell us about the housing challenge in Australia and Britain? Is the core problem that we don’t build enough houses or are other factors also at play?


Australia’s population grew by 35 per cent between the 2001 and 2021 censuses, and the stock of dwellings grew by 39 per cent. England’s population grew by 15 per cent, and its stock of dwellings 17 per cent. In short, in both countries, population and dwelling supply moved roughly in tandem.

Of course, as with rents, if there was already a housing shortage in 2001 then that shortage would have carried through to 2021, keeping prices high. In principle, if we’d built more housing then prices should have come down. Proportionally, though, the scale of the problem has stayed roughly the same, so again, a lack of building doesn’t appear to account for the rapid escalation in real estate prices over the past two decades.

But a simple comparison between population growth and dwelling growth can be misleading, for a number of reasons.

First, housing demand is driven not by the overall number of people but by the overall number of households. This might seem like splitting hairs: average household size has remained roughly constant in England and Australia over the past twenty years, and so the relationship between household numbers and dwelling numbers held steady.

Here things get complicated, though, because in an ageing society, with more people living alone, household size should fall. This means more households overall and a need for more dwellings to accommodate them. In both Australia and England, average household size was projected to fall to about 2.2 people by 2021, but has remained higher.

One view is that the projections were wrong, because they failed to anticipate social changes such as fluctuations in birth rates, falling divorce rates and a preference by some recent migrants to live with extended family.

But perhaps housing shortages prevented the decline in average household size? A lack of housing can induce adult children to stay in the parental home longer than they’d prefer or force two families to squeeze into the same accommodation. The formation of new households is suppressed, and the demand diverted into “hidden” or “concealed” households. According to one estimate, two million adults could be living in concealed households in England.

Linking population and dwelling numbers over time also disguises regional differences. Greater London, for instance, gained more than 1.6 million new residents between 2001 and 2021, but the population of Sheffield hardly changed and remains below its 1950s peak. Barring a new industrial revolution to bring factory jobs back to Sheffield, the demand for housing there is likely to remain relatively flat.

Dwelling growth in the City of Melbourne has far outstripped population growth over the past twenty years thanks to a boom in high-rise residential towers. On census night 2021, a quarter of all the municipality’s homes were unoccupied. Covid alone is unlikely to account for all those empty apartments. Rental vacancy rates in the CBD are significantly higher than the rest of Melbourne.

The population of the City of Hobart, by contrast, has grown faster than dwelling supply since 2001, and the share of unoccupied dwellings was below the national average at the last census. This might help explain why Hobart is the toughest capital city for tenants, with the fewest vacancies and the highest rents relative to income.

So, is it possible that we may have been building enough houses, but in the wrong places? London School of Economics geographer Paul Cheshire blames planning failures for “actively preventing houses from being built where they are most needed or most wanted — in the leafier and prosperous bits of ex-urban England.”

Does his thesis gain more weight if we drill down to a more local level and can compare two local government areas in the same city and the same labour market?

Tower Hamlets, in London’s inner east, and Camden, in the inner north, are in many ways similar. About a third of their residents live in social housing, but both also have pockets of considerable wealth. In 2001, each of the boroughs had a population of about 200,000 people and a comparable population density.

Since then, however, their paths have diverged. Tower Hamlets has gained more than 100,000 residents, while Camden gained only 12,000 (and its population declined after 2011). Tower Hamlets is now the most densely populated local government area in England, home to 112 people per soccer pitch–sized piece of land (as the Office of National Statistics calculates it). Camden has “only” sixty-nine people per soccer pitch.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Perhaps Tower Hamlets council is more pro-development than Camden, and better planning has enabled more dwellings to be built there to accommodate new residents? Perhaps Tower Hamlets simply had more room to grow, with disused industrial sites like the docklands at Canary Wharf available for redevelopment? Or maybe the residents of Camden, which is home to an older demographic, have begun to consume more housing per head of population than their younger counterparts in Tower Hamlets?

Camden has double the share of residents who own their homes outright and more than double the share of households with at least two spare bedrooms. It also has a higher percentage of vacant dwellings than Tower Hamlets, and its residents are far more likely to own a holiday house.


The contrast between the two boroughs highlights a third objection to simple comparisons between numbers of people and numbers of dwellings: demand for housing is a product not just of population but also of income.

As leading British housing economist Professor Geoff Meen puts it, housing demand comes “not just from newly forming households, but also existing households as incomes rise.” In other words, as people get wealthier, they want bigger, better houses as well as second homes and holiday houses. Cheshire says his research shows that a 10 per cent increase in incomes leads people to spend about 20 per cent more on extra space in houses and gardens.

We could express this differently: as the rich get richer they consume more housing; as the poor get poorer, they consume less, to the point of living in severely overcrowded homes or without a home at all. If we look for the roots of the housing crises in England and Australia through this lens, then we might shift focus from the supply of housing to its distribution.

When we do that, the challenge becomes not just to build more housing but to find ways to make its use fairer and more efficient — by altering how housing and land are taxed, for example. More progressive land taxes or capital gains taxes on housing could both redistribute wealth and help dampen property speculation.

Or we could adopt the German approach to capturing the value of changes in land use. When land is rezoned from, say, agricultural to residential in England and Australia, dramatic increases in land value generally accrue to the landowner. In Germany, much of this “planning gain” goes instead to public authorities and is used to fund infrastructure or social housing.


The complex relationship between housing demand and housing supply suggests there are no simple solutions to the challenges that we face, and we should be wary of claims that the answer is just to build more dwellings. If high prices are the product of a speculative bubble rather than undersupply, then building more houses will cause a different set of problems.

Economist Ian Mulheirn from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change points out that high real estate prices fuelled residential building booms in Spain, Ireland and parts of the United States in the first decade of the 2000s. When that boom went bust, it contributed to the global financial crisis and left “a large overhang of vacant and decaying ghost estates.”

The “build more” argument often goes with the view that the supply of new houses is held back by planning and zoning “red tape.” It then becomes an argument for scrapping the rules that limit incursions into land set aside for other purposes, such as London’s green belt or Melbourne’s green wedges.

This is contested territory. Once developed, the environmental or agricultural benefits of that land are lost forever. But if green space effectively subsidises elite pursuits like “‘horseyculture’ and golf” then the case for turning some of it over to housing might carry more weight.

Planning has been the subject of persistent reform efforts in many parts of Australia without, as yet, delivering lower house prices. “Of right” approvals have been introduced for code-compliant projects, decision-making powers transferred from elected councils to expert panels, “special purpose” bodies created to deliver urban redevelopment, and ministers given greater powers to override local decisions on major projects.

Strong arguments exist for rules-based planning systems because the alternative of assessing each application individually is time-consuming and costly, especially if decisions are made at a hyperlocal rather than city-wide level. But planning regimes should align with environmental and social goals, including affordability, rather than simply empower developers to respond to a housing “demand” that may be driven by growing inequality.


Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the task ahead is not just to build more homes, but to build more “well-located” homes. Boris Johnson’s one million homes promise was predicated on every local government area having its own mandatory housing target, although councils were very critical of the algorithm used to determine what to build where. Those targets have since been scrapped anyway, following opposition from Conservative MPs who feared a backlash against new developments in their prosperous constituencies.

This is a reminder that building homes where they are most needed — that is, with good access to jobs, transport and services — tends to throw up the biggest challenges.

In cities like Melbourne, this could be done by replacing postwar family homes with smaller, more energy-efficient, medium-density apartments and townhouses to better accommodate today’s smaller households. But it is in exactly these suburbs that not-in-my-backyard opposition tends to be most intense.

It is also in these areas that commercial barriers are greatest. It is easier to build on a rezoned greenfield site on the edge of the city, or in a rezoned brownfield area like a former dockland, than to transform a middle-ring greyfield area, especially if the aim is to retain the benefits of suburban streetscapes like tree canopies and gardens.

In such cases, what is needed is not so much liberalised planning, as consistent and supportive planning to assist developers to consolidate individual house blocks into larger sites, while also responding to community concerns about loss of amenity.


The number of dwellings is clearly important for the affordability and availability of housing, whether to buy or rent. But along with supply we also need to think about distribution, both spatial and economic. The question is not “do we need more houses” but rather “where do we need more houses, and who needs them most?”

To put this another way, is the challenge to keep up with housing demand, or to respond to housing need?

If it is the former, then the market is likely to meet the demand for a new holiday home more quickly than it meets the need of a low-income family to move out of an overcrowded, overpriced and damp apartment. Property developers have no incentive to provide housing for people who cannot pay prevailing rents or prices. Either we need to help those households participate in the market by boosting their incomes, or we need to build homes they can afford.

Another thing that Australia and England have in common is a sustained fall in public investment in social housing. If governments in both countries had continued to subsidise social housing at the rates they did in the postwar decades, then many thousands more affordable houses would be available today.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government has no chance of delivering Boris Johnson’s 2019 pledge of a million homes before next year’s election. Let’s hope that Jim Chalmers has more success in building a million “well-located” new homes in Australia, and that a decent share of those homes are affordable for the people who need them most. •

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The plutocratic city https://insidestory.org.au/the-plutocratic-city/ https://insidestory.org.au/the-plutocratic-city/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2022 05:29:05 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=72268

How London’s “haves” and “have yachts” are reshaping the city

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Are Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel alive and well in London? Virginia Lee Burton’s classic children’s book recounts how Mike and his hard-working steam-powered sidekick, Mary Anne, are threatened by a new generation of diesel-powered diggers. Refusing to consign Mary Anne to the scrapheap, Mike bets they can excavate a cellar for the new town hall in just one day — or do it for free. The cellar gets dug before sunset, of course, but in their haste Mike and Mary Anne forget to create an exit route and find themselves stranded in a deep pit.

The story came to mind while I was reading Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, sociologist Caroline Knowles’s perambulatory new book about how wealth shapes the English capital. Inspired to tread some of the same streets myself, I soon came across one of the spectacles Knowles documents: a “basement conversion” more accurately described as a large-scale excavation to create extra rooms under an elegant Kensington terrace. Sometimes, Knowles tells us, builders find it’s not worth their while to crane a mini-digger out of a multimillion-pound project, leaving “dozens of them… buried in the foundations of houses.”

It sounds like an urban myth, though Knowles says she spoke to builders who confirm it. Either way, the extravagance of efforts to create what have been labelled “iceberg homes” makes the tale credible. On the project I came across, the planning approval posted on the builder’s hoardings said the owners had allowed ninety weeks for construction.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Some excavations go down as many floors as the original house went up, and then extend under rear gardens to create space not just for wine cellars but also for gyms, cinemas, swimming pools and car parks.

Not surprisingly, basement conversions are the source of bitter neighbourhood disputes. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and pop star Robbie Williams engaged in a five-year stoush over Page’s fear that excavations for a pool under Williams’s £17.5 million (A$32 million) Holland Park mansion might weaken the foundations of his own £12.5 million pile next door.

Williams won out in the end, but no mechanical diggers will be buried in the basement of his Woodland House — building approval is conditional on the cavern being hollowed out by hand to minimise vibrations. Avoiding cracks in the stained-glass windows of Page’s French Gothic Tower House will add £1.5 million to Williams’s renovation bill, but this is small change for the singer and his wife, Ayda Field. They recently sold estates in Switzerland and Britain worth more than £30.75 million and splashed out US$50 million on another spread in Los Angeles.

The clash between a 1960s rock star and the lead singer in a 1990s boy band might not qualify as a contest between old and new money, but it could well be an example of the conflict between the “haves” and the “have yachts.” The “haves,” in Knowles’s terminology, are the merely wealthy. The “have yachts” are super-rich. Also known as UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals), they can afford to keep fully crewed multimillion-dollar boats moored in Monaco in readiness for the occasional Mediterranean jaunt.

As for yachts, so for cities. In the words of sociologist David Madden and planner Peter Marcuse, when housing enters global investment circuits “its use as a living space barely registers.” The built form becomes “a tangible, visual refection of the organisation of society” and global wealth is “congealed” into bricks and mortar — or indeed underground swimming pools.


As a writer, Knowles places herself in a literary tradition that takes in Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin and Teju Cole, figures whose work “exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape.” As a social researcher, she upends the established focus on poverty and the poor to turn the same “unforgiving framework” of research on the very rich. She walks and talks her way across London, trying to understand how very rich people shape the city, and how they live in it.

She struggles to meet many actual billionaires. Russian oligarchs who use “complex financial instruments provided by London firms” to hide their riches from Moscow prove to be a reclusive bunch. She does meet a lesser billionaire she calls Sturgeon (she gives all her informants pseudonyms), who is investing some of his excess wealth in an “experimental sustainable caviar business” (anaesthetising and milking the fish to harvest the eggs instead of killing them). But Sturgeon is reluctant to discuss the source of his wealth, his compatriots’ lives or any security concerns wealthy Russians may have.

The same goes for the art collector and philanthropist she calls Soviet, who is only a multimillionaire anyway. Middle Eastern oil royalty, British aristocrats and other UHNWIs who moor their wealth in London’s safe financial harbour are no more forthcoming.

Instead, the bulk of Knowles’ insights are gleaned from those who work or live within the gravitational orbit of extreme wealth, like the retired civil servant she calls Officer.

Officer “patrols” the streets of Kensington, keeping an eye on basement conversions and other developments in case the residents’ association can intervene to prevent the worst excesses. Officer himself doesn’t have “serious money” and is disdainful of those who do. He says many of his super-rich neighbours rarely spend much time in the mansions they acquire. That’s if they hang on to them — others buy, renovate and move on.

The super-rich might purchase a terrace house divided into apartments and consolidate it into a single multi-storey home, or knock through the walls of adjoining terraces to create a mansion. As Officer’s friend Historian points out, the next buyer will also have to be super-rich to afford what’s now an even more expensive property, and the neighbourhood will be forever changed.

When Officer’s “ghost neighbours” are in residence, they swim in their private pools, watch films in their private cinemas, work out in their private gyms, and use the vehicle lift to enter and leave their mansions in luxury cars. They don’t frequent neighbourhood cafes or pubs, let alone walk to the corner shop, contributing nothing to the viability of local enterprises or a sense of community. “It spoils things for people who do live their normal lives here,” says Historian’s wife Opera. “Rich people,” Knowles decides, “are poor neighbours.”

Knowles gains further insights into the lives of the rich from Wig, a barrister. One of Wig’s clients wanted advice on whether to seek a divorce in London or go to the considerable expense of shifting his wealth overseas. Advising on the latter course, Wig saved his client tens of millions by avoiding English courts, which are “comparatively generous to partners who are not directly involved in generating the money.”

These manoeuvres don’t always go so well. In another case Wig represented a woman whose husband tried the same trick. Wig stymied the multimillionaire’s claim that he lived offshore by proving that he was still London-based. He had a British shotgun licence, which is only legal if the owner lives at the British address listed on the certificate, and he had a Transport for London seniors card that is only available to residents.

Alerted that divorce proceedings are public documents, Knowles does her own digging. It may be voyeuristic, but it’s also revealing. One divorcee, seeking a settlement that will enable her to live in the manner to which she is accustomed, asks the court for an annual travel budget of £2.1 million, and half as much again for fashion and jewellery — enough to cover a yearly fur coat, fifteen cocktail dresses, fifty-four pairs of shoes, eighteen handbags and much besides.

In this world of extravagant display, domestic staff adorn already elaborate homes. Butler is one of an estimated two million people who work in domestic service in Britain, “the highest number since the Victorian era.” Butler acknowledges that he “looks good in a suit,” which means he can be employed on day shifts and seen by visitors.

He also knows he is easily disposed of. He recounts how a colleague was fired after twenty years’ employment for being “a bit too old.” He witnessed another boss bawl out a valet because he didn’t know how to wind his £250,000 watch, and he saw a team of butlers draw the wrath of their employer at the end of a sixteen-hour day because they failed to serve tea in a Meissen porcelain cup. Money gives the rich the authority “to humiliate those who serve them.”


Money rises early and retires late, and Knowles follows its arc from east to west. Her walks begin amid the glass towers and brash nightclubs of Shoreditch and the City of London, where the finance machine “churns, expands and skims,” redistributing money “into ever fewer hands.” This is where “the building blocks of the plutocratic city” are manufactured, to be reinforced by bespoke advice on estate planning, tax shelters and family trusts.

She moves through Mayfair, Belgravia and St James, where new and imported money mixes with inherited wealth in places that have “the sort of hush which only lots of money can buy.” Hedge funds, private equity firms and family offices hide discreetly behind brass plaques — no names, only numbers.

She examines domestic life in Kensington and Chelsea, discovering that men still mostly go out and make the money while women mostly stay home to manage the household, staff and children who live in a triangle between city residence, country estate and elite boarding school. After hanging out with twenty-year-old Bags and her boyfriend Barbour in Sloane Square, Knowles observes that their lives mimic those of their parents, “heavily prescribed by gender and tradition” with “little room for imagination and manoeuvre.”

Knowles concludes her journey by following the “vortex of extreme wealth” upstream along the Thames to Richmond, home of Kew Gardens, then further west beyond the city fringes to Virginia Water, a London commuter suburb described by the local real estate agent as “the most expensive village in Britain.”

At the heart of Virginia Water is the Wentworth Estate — 1100 large homes built in the 1920s Arts and Crafts style. This is where Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet endured house arrest in the late 1990s while efforts were made to extradite him to stand trial for genocide and torture. An interior designer tells Knowles that it’s tricky and expensive to find the right materials for building in Wentworth. Bricks, for example, must be “tumbled… so they don’t look new and shiny, or too bling.”

The Wentworth Estate is built around a golf club of the same name, another site of struggle between the haves and the have yachts. After billionaire Chanchai Ruayrungruang bought it in 2014 he doubled the fees and halved membership numbers, pushing out the merely wealthy in favour of a richer, more exclusive clientele. Talk show host Michael Parkinson was among those who offered stiff resistance in the courts.

Knowles finds herself on “sinister and silent streets” where walkers are neither familiar nor welcome. Signs remind her Wentworth is a private estate and members of the public use its roads at the pleasure of the owners. She wonders if driving would be any better and learns that estate managers, with a direct line to Surrey Police, use number plate recognition software to identify vehicles that have no business there.

In other parts of Virginia Water, residents have clubbed together to privatise their streets as well. Road ownership “has spread through the area like a rash,” supported by CCTV cameras, private security guards and signs reading “only residents and guests.” Properties are defended by approach lights, alarms, “tactical landscaping” (fences) and yet more guards.

For Knowles, this is “Johannesburg in Surrey.” While rich white South Africans might fortify themselves “against the imagined depredations of the impoverished black masses,” the source of potential threat in Virginia Water is unclear. A private security consultant tells Knowles that London is a lucrative market because of its lack of actual risks. But if you’d like four black Range Rovers to follow you around, he can arrange it for £10,000 a day.

Like yachts and good-looking butlers, security is another performance of wealth, “an eye-catching display of money that few can afford to stage.”


Art can be spectacle too. On her way to meet “Banker” in the City of London, Knowles admires the paintings in his foyer by Damien Hirst, the British artist best known for putting a Queensland shark in formaldehyde and encrusting a skull with diamonds. In Mayfair alone Knowles counts twenty private galleries: on offer in one of them (in the catalogue’s words) is Hirst’s “delectably freshSummer Breeze, sixteen butterflies fluttering against a blue sky, “punctuated by soft formations of luminous white clouds.” The painting subsequently sold for £435,000, about 25 per cent above the gallery’s top estimate.

“As money accumulates,” observes Knowles, “it struts in the clothes of high culture.” But art is not just for display; like property, it is another convenient way to launder money or stash funds in a “safe deposit box.” And if you are prepared to forgo looking at it, you can also avoid Britain’s 20 per cent value added tax by warehousing it offshore.

Culture and finance share the same streets, notes Knowles, and this is true of public art too. Further east, at Canary Wharf, Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman is one of three large bronzes gracing a small square. Under a 1960s scheme to place works by leading artists in housing estates, schools and other public places, Moore sold the sculpture to the London City Council at a 25 per cent discount. For three and a half decades, residents of the Stifford Estate in Stepney enjoyed passing by the familiar figure, which they fondly dubbed “Old Flo.”

When the estate was demolished in 1997, Old Flo was loaned to a sculpture park in Yorkshire. Two decades later it was back in its original borough but remained lost to the housing estates of Stepney. Placing the statue in a forest of concrete, steel and glass “constructed on the dispossession of London’s poor” could be described as artwashing — not least because Canary Wharf, like the Wentworth Estate, isn’t a public space.

Here, you’re on private property and “no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged.”* It comes as little comfort to be told that you are also under twenty-four-hour CCTV surveillance for your “safety and security.”

As I traced Knowles’s steps I experience more direct surveillance in Belgravia’s Eaton Square, one of London’s most exclusives addresses. With its Georgian townhouses straight out of a BBC period drama, this is “a world coated in fine aggregate render [and] painted in off-white magnolia,” with matching columned porticos and black wrought-iron fences. In the late afternoon gloom, I watch a resident emerge from her taxi to be ushered inside by a doorman in bowler hat, coat and tie. Then I realise I am being observed too, by a burly figure with a military stance standing watch further along the footpath.

Eaton Square’s heritage-listed terraces surround a series of six rectangular parks accessible only to residents. All the land belongs to the Duke of Westminster: “these streets are his, the squares and the statuary.” Under the rules of primogeniture, the seventh duke, otherwise known as Hugh Grosvenor, inherited the £9 billion estate at the age of twenty-seven despite having two elder sisters.


In one of the most powerful sections of Serious Money, Knowles walks the increasingly gentrified streets of Notting Hill. Here she interviews residents who chose the area for its vibrant “social mix” but found themselves floundering after “the parallel tramlines of the rich and poor, along which the neighbourhood usually ran, suddenly, dramatically and momentarily crossed.” That was on 14 June 2017, when the shoddily renovated Grenfell Tower exploded into flames, killing seventy-one residents and rendering hundreds more homeless.

Knowles speaks to “Palace” and other well-heeled residents who rushed to help distressed Grenfell neighbours. Their efforts were earnest and genuine, but ultimately served to emphasise the gulf between them and their neighbours. “The chasm between rich and poor narrowed in the immediate aftermath of the fire, as lives entwined; and then reopened as social inequalities as usual were resumed.”

Today Grenfell Tower is shrouded in white cloth, awaiting a decision on whether it will be demolished. Across the top floors a banner with a big green heart reads “Forever in our hearts.” At ground level, the white hoardings blocking access to the site host art works, floral tributes and scribbled texta messages to lost loved ones.

Grenfell sits at the northmost end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which hosts extremes of wealth and poverty. A quarter of all homes in the borough are social housing, though the Notting Hill Housing Trust, in a sign of the times, now accommodates some of its tenants further east in the Borough of Hackney, where properties are cheaper.

You don’t need to walk far south from Grenfell Tower to enter a different social world. The plaque on a last surviving bottle kiln reminds passers-by of “the nineteenth century, when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London.” Today, the local estate agent lists a one-bedroom “mews house” in Pottery Lane at £700 a week. A worker earning the London living wage of £11.95 an hour would need to work a fifty-eight-hour week just to make rent.

Among the property’s selling points are “the green open spaces of Holland Park” just to the south, which boasts an Opera House, an elegant Japanese garden and a statue of its namesake, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, Third Baron of Holland. In 2020, activists daubed the statue’s plinth with red handprints and placed a cardboard sign in the statue’s arms reading “I owned 401 slaves.” Then as now, London’s wealth is found “in bricks, stones, bodies and bones.”

Southwest of Holland Park is Cromwell Road, where three lanes of rush-hour traffic pass more rows of white stucco, the terraces broken by the occasional squat supermarket or multi-storey hotel, including the old Holiday Inn, an ugly example of 1970s brutalism. Now empty, it’s the site of another protracted planning dispute. In 2018, when developers proposed demolition to build a larger, more contemporary hotel, the Royal Borough received 750 objections arguing that the project would “replace one ‘out-of-place monstrosity’ with an even bigger one.” Approval was denied, but two years later, London mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to give the project the green light. His price was a little bit of additional housing — the developers will build sixty-two units (up from forty-six) for residents on low incomes under the mayor’s affordable homes program.


It is a perhaps-inevitable irony that the architectural splendours we admire in London are the product of violence and exploitation. As Knowles writes, “Imperialism’s industrial, artistic and cultural swagger are stamped into the streets.”

But wealth can leave beneficial legacies. On the western side of Hampstead Heath sits a curious structure known as the Pergola. The 245-metre-long walkway, entwined with wisteria, roses and other climbing plants, affords vistas over the heath and its woodlands. It was built in the early twentieth century by Lord Leverhulme, aka William Lever, whose fortune came from the manufacture of soap and other cleaning products.

Lever was a progressive industrialist who supported universal suffrage and built housing for his workers at Port Sunlight, though there is evidence of forced labour and other abuses in his Congo and Solomon Islands operations. As part of Lever’s private estate, the Pergola was designed as a place for Lever to take a solitary walk, have a think, or stroll after lunch with fellow politicians and business figures.

Today, the Pergola is much-prized public space. As cultural geographer Timothy Edensor writes, this “structure for pleasurable walking” serves as an example of how contemporary city planners might better promote “pedestrian pleasures” into urban design.

Will London’s latest “gilded age” bequeath comparable legacies? Knowles’s observations suggest the diggers excavating the city are driven by a “vacuous rapaciousness” that hollows out urban life. A “troubling and secretive presence,” the super-rich have “a profoundly damaging impact,” with their “endless search for new frontiers of luxury” constituting an environmental disaster.

Stringent personal security, she concludes, is merely a way of hiding the indefensible from public scrutiny. And yet for the rich themselves, the money that drives such wasteful, hidden opulence seems to create increasingly isolated, lonely and paranoid lives.

In Virginia Lee Burton’s book, Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne can’t escape the pit they have dug for themselves. But their story nevertheless ends well. At the urging of a young boy who has been watching them work, the new town hall is built around them. Mary Anne is converted into the boiler that keeps the building warm and Mike is invited to be its permanent caretaker. They become the warm heart of the community. For the diggers of London, no such ending is in sight. •

Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London
By Caroline Knowles | Penguin | $55 | 320 pages

* After this article was published, Inside Story received an email from a senior account executive at the The Academy PR, a public relations firm whose clients include Canary Wharf, to say that “in fact Canary Wharf is a public space, open to the public at all times and free to access.” When I visited Canary Wharf, I read and photographed a sign with the following text:

PRIVATE PROPERTY: CONDITIONS OF ACCESS.
This is private property and no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged over it. Any use of this land is with the permission of the landowner.

Although I wrote that Canary Wharf “isn’t a public space,” it would be more accurate to describe it as a “privately owned public space” in line with the definition used by Greenspace Information for Greater London: “publicly accessible spaces which are provided and maintained by private developers, offices or residential building owners.”

My overall point is not that the residents of Stepney housing estates are no longer free to visit Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”; rather, its relocation to Canary Wharf means it now resides in an entirely different world.

— Peter Mares

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Rishi redux https://insidestory.org.au/rishi-redux/ https://insidestory.org.au/rishi-redux/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2022 22:52:19 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=71394

Does Britain’s youngest prime minister for more than 200 years have what it takes to end the country’s crisis of leadership?

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Had the last three years of British politics been pitched to Netflix as the plot for a follow-up drama series to The Crown, it would surely have been rejected as too implausible.

The country’s second female prime minister, elected to take Britain out of the European Union, is deposed by her own MPs after torturous negotiations fail to secure a parliamentary majority. She is replaced by a chaotic, philandering buffoon who suspends parliament illegally and expels pro-Europeans from the Conservative Party — but then wins a general election promising to “get Brexit done.” He does so by agreeing to a deal he’d attacked when the previous prime minister proposed it, putting peace in Northern Ireland in jeopardy.

The world is struck by a deadly pandemic; the buffoon very nearly dies. Mishandling its response to the virus, the government presides over 180,000 deaths, among the highest per capita in the developed world. It’s revealed that while the PM was passing laws prohibiting people from socialising, he and his staff were holding regular parties at 10 Downing Street, about which he lied to parliament.

Fined by the police, the PM is then discovered to have had clandestine relationships with a former Russian spy and current party donors. After he tries to bend anti-corruption rules to save a colleague, his second in command resigns. He rapidly loses the support of his cabinet and is ousted. In the subsequent election for party leader his number two, the favourite to succeed him, is beaten by a slightly unhinged free marketeer prone to mimicking Margaret Thatcher, who becomes the country’s third female prime minister. Two days after she takes office the Queen dies after seventy years on the throne. Two weeks later the new PM’s chancellor of the exchequer announces a “mini-budget” comprising huge tax cuts, targeted at the rich, paid for by massively increased borrowing.

The pound falls to its lowest-ever level against the US dollar. The financial markets go into meltdown and the Bank of England is forced to step in to prevent pension funds going bust. Conservative MPs say they will not pass the measures. The PM sacks her chancellor. His replacement reverses almost the entire mini-budget while the PM looks on stony-faced and humiliated. She then faces chaotic scenes in parliament as she tries to force her MPs to vote in favour of fracking, which many oppose.

The next day the PM announces her resignation, making her at fifty days the shortest-lived occupant of 10 Downing Street in British history. For a brief moment it looks like the buffoon will return as the new party leader. But eventually the crown passes to his former number two, the loser of the previous race. Britain’s first-ever non-white prime minister stands in front of the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, pauses, and walks in. The credits roll.


That new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is not just the first from Britain’s Asian community — his parents came to England from East Africa in the 1960s — but at forty-two is the youngest prime minister for more than 200 years. Even more remarkably, he is the first-ever prime minister richer than the reigning monarch. This is thanks to the £730 million fortune he shares with his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of the Indian billionaire and founder of Infosys, N.R. Narayana Murthy. (King Charles’s personal wealth is estimated to be a mere £370 million.)

Sunak’s rise to the top has been swift. A former hedge fund manager educated at one of Britain’s poshest public schools, he has only been an MP since 2015. But when Boris Johnson needed a new chancellor in February 2020, the field of economically literate Tories who had voted for Brexit was not a large one. Sunak took up the position just as Covid-19 struck.

The crisis made him unexpectedly popular. A generous furlough scheme, which at its height was paying the wages of around nine million employees, kept the British economy alive as society locked down. Later, to revive the hospitality sector, Sunak introduced an “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme giving the public £10 off restaurant meals. It seemed that Sunak could do no wrong. As it happened, the scheme was later found to have contributed to a spike in Covid cases. By this time, though, Sunak was embarked on a new project, that of restraining Boris Johnson’s spending plans.

Little was known about Sunak’s economic views before he became chancellor. But once the Covid crisis was largely out of the way, it emerged that he was a “sound money” fiscal conservative who believed in balanced budgets. After his own Covid spending and borrowing spree, that meant public spending had to be kept firmly under control.

The result was an increasingly abrasive relationship with Johnson, who wanted to spend money. Almost every one of Johnson’s political goals — reducing regional inequalities, reforming social care, moving towards net zero — required higher spending. But Sunak not only refused to provide the money Johnson demanded, he also introduced the largest series of tax rises in a generation to try to bring down debt, now approaching 100 per cent of GDP. It almost seemed as if he was trying to sabotage Johnson’s premiership.

And then — just a year ago — a strange thing happened. A leak to the press revealed that Sunak’s wife was avoiding millions of pounds in tax by claiming that she was not resident in Britain. Such information is known to very few people, so it was widely assumed the leak had come from Boris Johnson’s team. Sunak said his wife’s tax arrangements were a matter for her. But given he was chancellor, and therefore responsible for the tax rules, his response didn’t suggest the most astute political judgement.

When it then emerged that Sunak himself still held a US green card, an American work permit that has to be applied for annually, the reaction — much of it from his own colleagues — was explosive. Did this former Silicon Valley executive believe his involvement in British politics was just a temporary thing, and if he got bored with it he could always return to America to make some more money?

As pictures of Sunak’s four multimillion-pound homes (three in Britain and one in California) were paraded in the media — in one property he was installing a £400,000 swimming pool whose heating bill would exceed that of most entire households — it seemed that his ambition to be the next leader of the Conservative Party was over.

But Sunak didn’t quit and return to America. He remained chancellor, received a fine for attending one of the infamous Downing Street parties during Covid, and awaited his moment. It came in July when Johnson finally made one corrupt error too many. Sunak resigned as chancellor and called on Johnson to stand down. His departure triggered a wave of other ministerial resignations. Johnson was left unable to form a government. He resigned two days later.

Sunak started out as favourite in the Tory leadership race that followed, his former transgressions apparently forgiven, at least by his fellow Conservative MPs, who gave more of their votes to him than to any other candidate. But he had not reckoned with the party membership. Many Tory members were furious with him, both for his role in Johnson’s defenestration and for his tax rises. (While some, it was whispered, noted that he was not white.)

He warned that Liz Truss’s radical tax-cutting plans were “fantasy economics” that would not stand contact with the reality of the financial markets. He too was a Thatcherite, he declared, but one who believed (as Thatcher did) in fiscal responsibility: bringing borrowing and inflation under control first, and then cutting taxes when the economy was strong enough to do so.

His warnings went unheeded. Truss beat him comfortably to claim the party leadership and become prime minister. The rest, as they say, is history.

And so, now, is Liz Truss. In the truncated process that a traumatised party chose to elect its leader last weekend, Sunak promised to bring unity, with a cabinet appointed from across all the party’s warring factions. He duly won the support of more than half its MPs. Boris Johnson returned from a holiday in the Caribbean to try to regain the crown. But this time even the Tory Party preferred bread to circuses, and he was forced to withdraw.

Sunak was elected unopposed. The next day he was asked by King Charles to form a government. Constitutional order was restored. Who knows, the two men may even have discussed wealth management strategies. •

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Boris Johnson, outside in https://insidestory.org.au/boris-johnson-outside-in/ https://insidestory.org.au/boris-johnson-outside-in/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2022 05:34:57 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=71387

Kenneth Branagh portrays the former PM’s behaviour with startlingly accuracy. But what’s going on behind the eyes?

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When Kenneth Branagh’s Boris Johnson quotes Shakespeare in the trailer for Sky’s new six-part docudrama This England, he ends with the words, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” But the original speech, from Richard II, doesn’t end there. After evoking “this happy breed of men,” John of Gaunt’s account of the state of the nation turns dismal. Under a weak and ineffectual monarchy, England is destroying itself from within.

While the rest of the speech could serve as commentary on the pandemic-ridden country portrayed in the series, Branagh interprets Johnson as the eternal optimist — or at least the inveterate performer of optimism. The camera repeatedly follows him from behind the scenes, as he braces himself for yet another grim meeting or fraught public announcement, to his ever-buoyant performances before an audience.

This England opens as results of the 2019 Tory leadership contest are awaited. But there has been a prior announcement: Johnson has been contracted, for a princely sum, to write a biography of Shakespeare. In reality, this caused tensions during his early months of government, with those around him believing he was distracted from the larger and more urgent role of prime minister.

Here, though, the bard seems to serve as a kind of spirit guide for Branagh’s Johnson, putting words in his mouth and a spring in his step at critical moments, allowing him the passing illusion that he is a second Churchill. Behind the role-play he’s a bumbling, incoherent mess, always on the verge of meltdown.

His usual strategies of reality-denial and clownish bravado prove ineffectual in the face of the pandemic, and the full meltdown occurs when he has to be taken to emergency after contracting the virus himself. It’s a defining moment in the series but also points to a fundamental problem in its conception.

Shakespeare’s histories offer many dramatic models of how the fate of the country and its people can hang in the balance. Treachery, corruption and civil war, threats of invasion, plague and famine — all may contribute, but the deciding factor is the character of the head of state. A weak monarch like Richard II enables all these evils to take hold; a bad one, like Richard III, actively fosters them. In dramatic terms, the distinction is radical.

This England attempts a Shakespearean vision of how tides of chaos wash across the land when things go wrong in the seat of power. Sequences filmed in hospitals and aged care homes, created with such realism they might be documentary, alternate with the crisis meetings in Number 10 and scenes from Johnson’s private life. But this Johnson, like Richard II, is weak rather than bad.

That portrayal not only blunts the dramatic edge but also — and more seriously, in view of the ongoing crisis in British government — fudges the political dynamics. As a figure whose mental world is composed more of poetry than politics, Branagh’s Boris has an air of pathos. Like everyone else, he’s caught up in the workings of fate, and if he lacks the grit and courage to take up arms against the sea of troubles, well, that’s kind of sad — for him as well as all the good people we see weeping on the phone to dying relatives.

Perhaps writers Michael Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke were too readily seduced by the idea of 10 Downing Street occupied by a classically educated political maverick with a lot of Shakespeare in his head. Quirke has a first in classics and Winterbottom’s credits include a series of films in which virtuoso mimics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon exchange literary impressions in romantic locations.

Their title, This England, signals association not just with Shakespeare but also with a larger range of mythic and symbolic traditions: the Arthurian legends revived in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Blake’s “Jerusalem” and the national hymn derived from it, Churchill’s exhortation to fight on the beaches, and the arcane ceremony of royal funerals and coronations. Mythic England is also, significantly, free of all the fraught political heritage of modern Britain.

Why produce such a dramatisation at a time when Britain is in crisis on so many fronts? As the pandemic recedes (perhaps) the country still faces the desperately serious problem of child poverty, which UN rapporteur Philip Alston attributed in his 2018 report to the Conservative government’s “punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach.” Recent legislation has cleared the way for sewage dumping in rivers and coastal waters. And the disasters of Brexit continue to roll out.

Many viewers may nevertheless be drawn to the series (as I admit I was) by the lure of Branagh’s performance, which takes its place in a newer tradition. Since Michael Sheen made the transition from comedic political impersonator to nuanced performances as Tony Blair in The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006), a succession of star actors have taken on the challenge of embodying a public figure in a tour de force transformation that blurs the line between acting and impersonation.

Standout examples include Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady (2011), Gary Oldman as Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice (2018) and, most recently, an unrecognisable Sean Penn as John Mitchell in Gaslit (2022). The difference between a dramatic interpretation — Claire Foy’s rendition of the young Queen Elizabeth in The Crown (2016–17), for example — and the virtuoso challenge in these cases begins in the makeup chair.

Deciding whether to work “inside out” or “outside in” has been core business in actor training for generations, and the question has become even more acute as advances in camera technique have made it possible for viewers to almost literally see what lies behind the eyes of a character on screen. A fine actor can evoke the elusive inner life of a well-known person through psychological interpretation, but is it actually more effective to access the psyche through the forensic capture of voice and manner?

In the case of Branagh’s Boris, the question must be answered in the negative. Branagh portrays his behaviour with startlingly accuracy but, as the camera closes in, the face just doesn’t seem to belong. An image search for close-up shots of Johnson shows that he never stops mugging for the camera, which rarely catches him off-guard. When it does, the eyes are hard, almost blank, in stark contrast to the thoughtful, reflective qualities of Branagh’s expression.

The producers’ quest for verisimilitude led to a search for actors who bore a physical resemblance to key members of cabinet. The results are, if anything, a bit too subtle and, in line with the approach to Johnson, a bit too nice. Shri Patel as Rishi Sunak seems keen to provide assistance to British workers under lockdown. Really? Simon Paisley Day’s Dominic Cummings is a convincing backroom apparatchik, and the only cast member true to the ruthless banality of the original.

For all the fine art Branagh and the production team have brought to this docudrama, a more accurate picture of the rogues gallery currently occupying Westminster is to be found on Spitting Image. It seems Britain has been spared another spell of Boris in the latest leadership debacle, and Sunak may settle unease in the financial sector, but John of Gaunt’s original England, “the envy of less happier lands,” shows no sign of return. •

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The Truss effect https://insidestory.org.au/the-truss-effect/ https://insidestory.org.au/the-truss-effect/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:55:01 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=71109

The British PM and her allies have launched an enormous and potentially disastrous experiment

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Few prime ministers — of any country, surely — have made such an impact so quickly. The figures tell their own story. Within a fortnight of Liz Truss’s entering 10 Downing Street, the pound had fallen to its lowest ever value against the US dollar, the cost of government borrowing had risen by more than a fifth, and one polling company had Labour’s lead over the Conservatives up from 8 per cent to 33 per cent.

We must assume Truss didn’t intend these outcomes. But she can hardly have been surprised by them. They were the direct and immediate result of her first major policy initiative, a “mini-budget” announced on 23 September by her new chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng. Describing it as the government’s “Growth Plan,” Truss and Kwarteng declared that it would set the country on a new course for economic growth.

The centrepiece of the statement was a huge package of financial support to cushion households and businesses from the steep rise in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From around £1300 in 2021, the average household energy bill in Britain had already risen to almost £2000, and, had nothing been done, was projected to hit around £6000 next year. So the government announced that it would be capping domestic bills at an average of £2500 for the next two years. At the same time it would subsidise energy use by businesses for at least six months.

The cost of these measures will depend on how far wholesale gas prices rise over this period. But Treasury’s estimate for the first six months was an eye-watering £60 billion. To put this in context: the cost of the government’s furlough scheme to keep people in work for eighteen months during Covid was £70 billion.

The general verdict on these measures, nevertheless, was favourable. Costly, yes, but necessary — with the added bonus, as Kwarteng noted, that they reduced the headline rate of inflation, since the government’s subsidy is defined as cutting the price of energy, rather than adding to households’ incomes.

But it was not this part of the budget that caused such a reaction. It was the rest of it. Alongside the energy measures Kwarteng announced a £45 billion package of tax cuts, the largest made in a single fiscal statement since 1972. They included the repeal of an increase in National Insurance contributions introduced by Boris Johnson’s government just a few months before; the abandonment of another Johnson commitment, an increase in corporation tax; a cut in the stamp duty on house purchases; a cut in the main rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 19 per cent; and — in a move that took everyone by surprise — the abolition of the 45 per cent top rate of income tax, levied on people earning over £150,000 a year.

How was this largesse to be paid for? The government had nothing to say on that topic at all. Not only did the budget contain not a single revenue-raising measure; Kwarteng had explicitly prevented the independent Office for Budget Responsibility from publishing its usual analysis and forecasts. This was indeed why he was at pains to call it a “mini-budget”: had it been a proper budget, the OBR would have been required by law to publish an analysis of its impacts.

The UK’s think tanks, of course, were quick to fill the gap. They calculated that the government’s plans would require over £400 billion of extra public borrowing over the next five years — with no end in sight beyond that. That would represent a 50 per cent increase on last year’s level of borrowing every year — taking annual borrowing to five times its pre-pandemic level.

The response of the financial markets was immediate. The interest rate (or yield) on government bonds shot up, and the pound plummeted. If the government was going to borrow so much more, lenders were inevitably going to charge them more to do so. Indefinite higher borrowing suggested a government with no plan.

In reality, part of the pound’s weakness reflected the strength of the US dollar; but since the pound fell against other currencies too, there was no doubt it was also a verdict on the British government and the country’s future economic prospects.

The shockwaves were rapid. Banks started withdrawing mortgage products, as it became clear that interest rates were about to rise even further and their mortgage offers would soon be unprofitable. Pension funds revealed they could rapidly become insolvent; they were having to sell government bonds to cover heightened risk, but the value of these had plummeted. In response, the Bank of England announced overnight an emergency program under which it would buy up to £65 billion of bonds to shore up their value and prevent financial contagion.


By now — just days after Kwarteng’s fiscal statement — the financial markets were in turmoil. The Bank of England was not meant to be buying bonds — it was in the middle of a “quantitative tightening” program that involved selling bonds to push interest rates up.

A vicious spiral was now in prospect: the combination of tax cuts, monetary loosening and a falling pound would push inflation up, forcing the bank to raise interest rates further and more quickly. As interest rates rose the cost of government borrowing would increase, requiring even more borrowing to cover it. Rising mortgage rates would hit household spending and could lead to a housing market crash, both of which would exacerbate the recession into which Britain was now predicted to fall.

And just to add insult to injury, the IMF at this point decided to flout its usual rule of not commenting on individual fiscal statements in developed countries. The budget, it declared, would have serious negative consequences — not just in Britain but more widely across a still-fragile global economy. It urged the government to reconsider. Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was just one of several financial commentators who likened Britain to an emerging economy, its currency under speculative attack and being told off by the IMF.

Extraordinarily, Truss and Kwarteng went missing for almost a week while this happened, refusing to calm the markets or reassure voters. When the prime minister did emerge, it was to do a series of local radio interviews, no doubt expecting them to be easier than national TV. Confronted by presenters keen to make their names, her performance was squirmingly bad (and of course, immediately broadcast on national TV).

Truss refused to apologise, frequently seemed stumped by the questions and repeated the same talking points with wooden monotony. Resorting to the classic politician’s defence that the policies were fine, it was all a problem of poor communication, her only concession was that she could have “prepared the ground” better. But that was hardly true — all the budget measures apart from the top rate tax cut had been leaked or announced in advance.

The reaction of the financial markets was only half the problem. The distributional impact of the government’s tax cuts was extraordinarily regressive. Income tax cuts always benefit the rich more than the poor, since the rich pay more in tax; and those below the tax threshold don’t benefit at all. But the abolition of the 45 per cent rate meant the beneficiaries of the budget package were concentrated among the very rich.

Analysis quickly demonstrated that almost half the gains of the overall tax package would go to the richest 5 per cent of households. A person earning a million pounds a year would find themselves £55,000 better off, while someone on £20,000 would gain just £157. Coupled with a separate decision to abolish the cap on bankers’ bonuses imposed by the European Union after the 2008 financial crash, the budget demonstrated a remarkable desire to give money to those who already have it.

In the context of a severe cost of living crisis, with inflation now running at 10 per cent and families on the lowest incomes facing choices about whether to “heat or eat” this winter — the use of charitable food banks has rocketed over the last year — it was a politically tin-eared approach. Radio phone-in programs fairly crackled with public anger.

Tory MPs, in turn, reacted with dismay. Unfortunately timed for the prime minister, this week’s annual Conservative Party conference gave them plenty of opportunity to express their views on TV and radio. Former cabinet members indicated publicly that they would vote in parliament against the abolition of the 45 per cent tax rate. As the revolt spread, it became clear that Truss would not be able to get it through the House of Commons. Nine days after announcing it, the government declared that the cut was to be abandoned. It was never a major part of the package, Kwarteng said, and had become “a distraction.”

But Truss’s travails were still not at an end. Abandoning the top rate cut would save only £2 billion; attention now turned to how the government would pay for the rest. Would it have to inaugurate a new period of austerity, with swingeing public spending cuts to bring borrowing back under control?

The prospect caused further alarm to Tory MPs. The National Health Service faces another post-Covid winter crisis, with long waiting lists and deepening staff shortages, and most other public services have been pared to the bone by a decade of austerity. So the only obvious target for cutting was the welfare budget.

When Liz Truss duly refused to say that welfare benefits would be raised this year by the rate of inflation — a commitment given by Boris Johnson’s government — uproar ensued. Few Tory MPs were prepared to support this; several openly declared that it would be immoral and wrong (not to mention “electoral suicide,” as one put it) to pay for tax cuts for the rich by cutting the incomes of the very poorest. They would vote against this too. Truss loyalists in turn accused the rebels of organising a “coup” against their leader.

As the Conservative Party conference descended into open blue-on-blue warfare, the prime minister made a defiant speech. Truss dismissed her troubles as the inevitable “disruption” caused by a radical program and declared herself determined to take on the “anti-growth coalition” that was now ranged against her.


How did it get to this? To understand that, we need to go back to 2012, two years after both Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng entered parliament. The Conservative leader David Cameron had become prime minister at the head of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. His pitch to the electorate was that the Tories had changed: no longer the Thatcherite “nasty party” of the rich and selfish, they were now “compassionate Conservatives” in favour of a caring society and protecting the environment.

Truss and Kwarteng demurred. Together with other new Tory MPs they set up a new Free Enterprise Group in the Commons and wrote a pamphlet entitled Britannia Unchained, a strident manifesto of free market economics and libertarian politics. Their solutions to Britain’s economic and social problems were simple: lower taxes, lower public spending, a less interventionist state, more deregulation, fewer workers’ rights, freer enterprise. Two decades after Thatcher left office — and just three years after financial deregulation had almost crashed the global economy — it was Thatcherism on speed.

Truss became a minister in Cameron’s government in 2012, Kwarteng in Theresa May’s in 2018. Now close friends and neighbours as well as colleagues, by 2019 they sat in Boris Johnson’s cabinet together. When Johnson fell earlier this year, Truss seized her chance. Her campaign for the Conservative Party leadership, strongly backed by Kwarteng, proudly boasted of her Thatcherite philosophy. And now she had a receptive audience.

Convulsed by the arguments over Brexit, which has seen almost all senior pro-European MPs kicked out of the parliamentary party — and others on the left and centre abandoning it — the Tories have become much more ideologically narrow. Despite winning the support of fewer than a third of Tory MPs, in the final ballot of party members Truss won convincingly against the “sound money” fiscal conservative Rishi Sunak, architect of the tax rises they so despised.

Truss and Kwarteng see themselves as revolutionaries. The chancellor’s first act in his new job was to sack the chief civil servant at the Treasury, an experienced and respected figure but someone the new Tories demonised as a representative of the old regime. Truss installed as her chief economic adviser the leader of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign for low taxes and deregulation. Other advisors were brought in from neoliberal think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Announcing his mini-budget in the Commons, the chancellor declared that “we are at the beginning of new era.” For he and Truss the last decade of Conservative rule has not been radical enough. “Treasury orthodoxy” had placed far too much emphasis on balancing the public accounts and reducing public debt. After the huge expenditures to support the economy through the pandemic, taxes had risen to a seventy-year high, which could only stifle enterprise and hold back growth. The state had grown too large.

In her Tory conference speech Truss declared her three economic priorities to be “growth, growth and growth.” In recent years, she declared, there had been far too much emphasis on redistribution and not enough on growing the economy. (As various commentators pointed out, this was a somewhat odd claim, given that the Conservatives had presided over stagnating wages and a huge increase in wealth inequality). And the way to get growth was to cut taxes, and to reform the economy’s supply side.

The government’s supply side reforms have not yet been spelled out in detail. But the Growth Plan indicated the general direction. “Investment zones” will be established across the country, where businesses will have lower taxes and fewer regulatory requirements. The planning system will be reformed to speed up infrastructure construction and housebuilding. The financial sector will be deregulated to make it more globally competitive. Childcare regulations limiting the number of children per worker, and environmental regulations affecting farmers, will be relaxed.

Such policies may or may not work to stimulate economic growth. The economic evidence on investment zones is weak, with most similar schemes simply poaching investment from other areas. Planning reform has been notoriously difficult, with Conservative MPs among the most vociferous opponents of new housing developments and infrastructure (such as windfarms) in their own constituencies. Financial deregulation did not go well last time round.

But the problem for the government is that, even if they are successful, none of these reforms will generate growth in the next couple of years. And while in theory tax cuts might provide a short-term boost, this will almost certainly be overwhelmed by the recessionary forces the government’s fiscal package has unleashed.

On the morning of the budget the interest rate on a typical two-year mortgage was well under 5 per cent. Now it is over 6 per cent. Hundreds of thousands of people whose fixed term deals are ending soon have been on rates between 2 and 3 per cent. So they will see their mortgage payments rise by hundreds of pounds per month, vastly outweighing the tax cut they will receive. Their disposable income will be lower next year, not higher. Many will not be able to pay at all.

Politically, this is disastrous for the Conservatives. Britain’s ten million mortgage holders, and the many young people who want to buy a first home, are among their core constituencies.

Across all polling companies, Labour’s lead has more than doubled to 23 per cent. In a general election, that would translate into a comfortable Labour majority. Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, is now seventeen points ahead of Truss as “best prime minister,” and Labour leads on every significant policy issue. Truss’s approval rating has dropped to minus 37 per cent, a fall of 28 per cent in a week.

The next general election is still two years away. But it is now almost impossible to find a political commentator who believes Liz Truss can recover from these figures after such a disastrous first month in office. Many are predicting an electoral rout worse than 1997, when Tony Blair won a landslide victory to end eighteen years of Conservative rule.

The mood among Tory MPs has become correspondingly grim. Many are now privately telling journalists that Truss will have to be got rid of. No one thinks it would look good for the Conservatives to impose a fifth prime minister on the country in six years. But the economic turmoil she has precipitated, and the polling deficit the party now faces, make anything better than this. If she doesn’t reverse course, warn some, she could be gone by Christmas.

One veteran Tory, a minister in John Major’s government in the 1990s, put it even more starkly. Without a fundamental change of direction, he said, Liz Truss would be “quite probably the last-ever Tory prime minister.” •

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Swimming in molasses https://insidestory.org.au/swimming-in-molasses/ https://insidestory.org.au/swimming-in-molasses/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2022 04:22:57 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=70718

Elizabeth II leaves a mixed legacy in Australia — and not just for republicans

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It seems almost indecent to add to the barrage of words accompanying the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The rise of twenty-four-hour television news and the reach of the internet mean we can now follow the progress of her casket through the United Kingdom, marvelling at a society that through one side of its mouth proclaims itself free and democratic but through the other tells the handful of dissenters issuing mild protest via word or placard that “you’re nicked, son.”

What does all of this mean for Australia? Possibly not much. Nothing seriously resembling national grief has prevailed, whatever the politicians and media are telling us. The passing of a woman who has simply been there throughout the lives of most of us has a certain poignancy, and she commands respect for being good at her job and being willing to do it to the best of her ability to the very end — which quite reasonably translates into “devotion to duty” in the seemingly endless tributes.

Media companies have been on the lookout for anyone who has ever found themselves in the general vicinity of Her Majesty so I might as well share my experience. I did but see her passing by just once. It was the centenary of the office of Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom in 2010 — what could very loosely if not quite accurately have been called the centenary of British–Australian diplomatic relations — and I was at a function in Australia House in the Strand, which was also the occasion for the launch of a book I had helped edit.

The royal couple sat on the stage of the grand Exhibition Hall during the formalities and then made their way around the room, the Queen politely formal in the usual way, Prince Philip more chatty. Their progress complete, they took their leave — I suppose they were there an hour — and it was hard not to admire two elderly people who had performed duties of such formidable dullness for much of their lives. And here they were still at it long after most people were enjoying their retirement.

They lived lives of great privilege, of course, and it is right — in an age when the descendants of those oppressed by the British Empire draw attention to that legacy — that her reign should be seen as entangled in a messy, difficult and often brutal imperial history. Elizabeth II’s life began when that empire was at its greatest extent, and the early part of her reign coincided with some of its most appalling violence. It would be a remarkable act of erasure — and a highly political one — to pretend that the only thing that matters in her career is that she was the kind of woman willing to dance with Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah at a ball in 1961. (But that matters in judgements of her role, too. In the United States of the time, African-American men were still occasionally being lynched for forwardness with white women.)

Older Australians will have memories of royal visits and of Australian Women’s Weekly covers from a time when the Queen herself and the monarchy as an institution did express something important about the country’s national identity. Many — perhaps most — Australians were proud to be British, proud to belong to the Empire and then, when that disappeared, grateful to belong to the Commonwealth, even if only because it gave the country’s athletes a decent show of a solid medal haul.

That pride gradually declined as Britain turned to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and Australia turned to the United States and Asia. The monarchy itself has come to matter a great deal less to most of us than it did back then. One of the most striking features of the Palace Letters — the correspondence from 1974–77 mainly between Sir John Kerr and Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, released in 2020 after Jenny Hocking’s High Court victory against the National Archives of Australia — was that they evoked a world in which the monarchy still seemed to matter.

Kerr took seriously the idea that the monarch’s place in Australian life could be protected and even strengthened; it helps explain his outrageous behaviour. Charteris also clearly believed that this battle was still one worth fighting, which might help explain why he so foolishly engaged in discussion with Kerr about the nature of the governor-general’s reserve powers.

It was much more common in my youth to see pictures of the Queen on the walls of public buildings than it is today, and in some subtle way she still seemed to be one of us — not like, say, Olivia Newton-John and Paul Hogan, but not quite a foreigner either. Yet it is still startling to watch footage of old Olympic ceremonies of the late 1960s and early 1970s — in full colour — with Australia’s rare gold medal victories accompanied by “God Save the Queen.”

Royal visits evoked greater excitement in the 1970s — and in the 1980s, too, with the arrival of the young and glamorous Princess Diana — than they did ever after. Writing to the Palace in early 1984, Sir Ninian Stephen, the governor-general of the day, said of republicanism that “even its most optimistic supporters see it as a far-off beacon rather than as any at all immediate goal. It counts for little in practical affairs but is always good material for articles in Sunday papers or for questions in opinion polls.”

Most Australians, if they bothered thinking about such matters at all, continued to see the monarchy as worthy of retaining in their Constitution, even as public opinion shifted toward a sense of its unimportance to them — at least that is what political scientist Luke Mansillo’s research on polling tells us of the 1980s. I can’t recall the last time I was invited to toast the Queen at an event in Australia; was it the evening, at our end-of-school dinner in 1986, when we also toasted Pope John Paul II?

Things did change in the 1990s, with the rise of republicanism in the Keating era. While the nation debated that issue we also, from 1994, ceased to expect new migrants to pledge allegiance to the monarch. The monarchy, especially in light of the family problems of the Windsors, suddenly seemed less relevant to a confident, multicultural, Asian-facing Australian society. Ninian Stephen had distinguished nationalism from republicanism in 1984; by the early 1990s, though, republicanism had become an expression of nationalism for many more Australians. Cultural and political identities were coming into alignment.

The Queen’s death will inevitably make the question of Australia’s becoming a republic more pressing. Some republicans — Malcolm Turnbull has been the most prominent — urged Australians simply to put off the matter until the Queen’s passing. But Turnbull’s attitude to this question belongs to a much longer tradition whereby politicians proclaim the republic inevitable while always finding reasons to put it off until the week after never. Anthony Albanese’s position, at least superficially, looks a bit more promising for republicans. Labor’s priority is constitutional recognition for Indigenous people and the Voice to Parliament. The republic will come after that. Or so we’re told.


My own feeling is that the aftermath of the Queen’s death will provide republicans with little comfort. It is true that the often embarrassing media coverage — which seems rather like I imagine it would be to swim in a pool filled with molasses — will place in the spotlight some of the absurdities of the system, especially for a country such as Australia that likes to imagine itself as independent.

Yet, while monarchy means little to Australians in practical terms, it is still meaningful as celebrity and spectacle. The pageantry around the monarchy will be in full flight in the time ahead. Leaving aside the Queen’s funeral, which will be a grand, solemn and sombre ritual, the coronation of Charles III will follow, presumably in the new year. I doubt that the parlous state of a post-Brexit United Kingdom will do anything to encourage economy or restraint. It is more likely to have the opposite effect, for a cynical and failed British elite has every reason to promote fantasy and escape when the prison of reality is so cold (quite literally for many in the coming winter) and discomforting.

Presumably, an investiture of William as Prince of Wales will also follow before too long — the last was of his father, in 1969. And we’ll no doubt get our own royal visit from the new king in due course, and it will be different — carrying the gravitas of a serving head of state — from those he made as a mere prince and Geelong Grammar old boy. The Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales will also need to tour as the Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales. So it goes.

These occasions will be a joy to many journalists and perhaps to many other Australians, too. For a time they will relish the novelty of a new king with all of the changes that will bring to everything from the heads on our coins to the names of lawsuits. Yet even after this novelty wears off, the old problems for republicans will remain. What will the republic look like? How do we elect its president? They were the rocks on which the ship was wrecked last time, in 1999, and they still loom treacherously.

Almost a quarter of a century on, we trust our politicians even less than we did back then. Overcoming such obstacles will be no less formidable in the post-Elizabethan age. •

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Who is Liz Truss — and why? https://insidestory.org.au/who-is-liz-truss-and-why/ https://insidestory.org.au/who-is-liz-truss-and-why/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:55:04 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=70563

Does the new British PM have the capacity to deal with Britain’s gathering crisis?

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Not many countries give the right to choose their head of government to 172,000 predominantly elderly and affluent people comprising just 0.3 per cent of the national electorate. But the rules and membership of the British Conservative Party mean this is precisely how Britain’s new prime minister has been decided — and it is also why Liz Truss looks set to be Britain’s most right-wing leader since Margaret Thatcher.

Truss’s decisive victory over her opponent Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the exchequer, in the ballot of Tory Party members was by no means guaranteed at the beginning of the two-month leadership campaign. When Boris Johnson’s serial cronyism, misconduct and untruth-telling finally led to his ouster as Tory leader (and therefore prime minister) in early July, Sunak appeared his likely successor. He came out ahead in the initial series of votes among Tory MPs to identify the top two leadership candidates to be put to the wider membership. Truss was supported by less than a third of her own colleagues.

But over recent years the Conservative Party at large has changed. Once a broad church stretching from centrist “One Nation” Tories to ideological free marketeers, the party’s membership has narrowed since Brexit. With those who voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum now dominant, many of its pro-European moderates have quit the party altogether. The desire to leave the EU was driven partly by anti-immigration sentiment and partly by a patriotic nostalgia for Britain’s free-trading past. But leaving was also seen as a means of liberating the economy from the alleged constraints of EU law and red tape.

Above all, for many in the party, Brexit’s purpose was to restore the small state, deregulatory agenda championed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Vigorously encouraged by the still highly influential newspapers the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, the party has consequently shifted decisively to the right. And Liz Truss understood this much better than Sunak.

Truss’s campaign emphasised her Thatcherite views from the outset. Her central message was that she would cut taxes: income tax, corporation tax and possibly even the value-added tax (Britain’s GST). Never mind the impact on public finances, with debt already at 100 per cent of GDP, post-Covid health spending rising sharply, and Truss herself promising to increase the defence budget following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tory mythology remembers Margaret Thatcher as a great tax-cutter, and so Truss made this the centrepiece of her appeal to the party membership.

(Critics pointed out that Margaret Thatcher actually raised taxes in her first term of office to help reduce inflation, and only cut them when the public finances were in better shape. But this unwelcome fact failed to dent Truss’s appeal.)

For Truss — though for very few economists — cutting taxes and deregulating markets is the way to stimulate growth in the underperforming UK economy. Challenged about her proposed income tax cuts (via national insurance rates), which will give the richest ten per cent of the population an average benefit of £1800 (A$3050) a year and the poorest ten per cent less than £8, she described them as “fair,” arguing that growth was more important than distribution.

At the same time she has promised to scrap all Britain’s remaining EU-based laws by the end of 2023, including a swathe of employment, environmental and consumer protections. She proposes new low-tax and low-regulation “investment zones” to attract overseas finance. And, just in case this were not enough to ensure support among the Tory grassroots, she has promised to bring back selective grammar schools and scrap local house-building targets.


Liz Truss was not always a Thatcherite. Indeed, she was not originally a Tory at all. Born in 1975 to left-wing parents — her father was a professor of mathematics, her mother a nurse and teacher — Truss was an active Liberal Democrat as a student at Oxford. (One of the more entertaining features of the campaign has been footage of Truss at the Lib Dem national conference in 1994 proposing the abolition of the monarchy.) But two years later she joined the Conservatives, beginning her shift to the right.

After entering parliament in 2010, she founded the Free Enterprise Group of MPs, and co-wrote a right-wing manifesto entitled Britannia Unchained. Arguing for deregulation and lower taxes, the pamphlet notoriously described British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world.”

After a number of junior ministerial positions, Truss was appointed to David Cameron’s coalition cabinet as environment secretary in 2014. There, she became known primarily for a bizarre speech to the Conservative Party conference in which she criticised as “a disgrace” the fact that Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese. She campaigned for Remain in the 2016 EU referendum but changed her mind swiftly after the result, becoming a vociferous Brexit advocate.

As Boris Johnson’s international trade secretary Truss trumpeted her negotiation of a number of post-Brexit trade deals. Observers noted that most of these simply rolled over existing EU agreements. Her 2021 UK–Australia trade agreement, meanwhile, was widely criticised for giving Australian farmers greater access to the UK market without any reciprocal benefits for their British counterparts. Subsequently promoted to foreign secretary, Truss was frequently ridiculed in the media for carefully managed photo opportunities in which she appeared to be imitating Margaret Thatcher.

Truss’s performance as a minister didn’t commend her to many of her colleagues. As one put it recently, “her ambition is, undoubtedly, considerably greater than her ability.” Another branded her “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament.” But her loyalty to Boris Johnson — backing him to the end, even as many of his cabinet (including Sunak) abandoned him — made up for that among party members, a majority of whom still don’t believe Johnson should have been deposed. And during the leadership campaign her ideological fervour won her the critical support of the party’s new right.

This is perhaps the most striking feature of Truss’s victory. Her campaign was backed both by supporters of Boris Johnson and by the party’s ideological vanguard. The latter are the same MPs who pursued the hardest form of Brexit and got rid of former prime minister Theresa May when she would not deliver it. During Covid they organised a libertarian resistance to lockdowns. Today their new target is climate change policy, which they see as a left-wing cause requiring excessive state intervention in the economy.

And they have already influenced Truss. Faced with Europe’s overdependence on Russian gas, which has seen its price skyrocket, Truss has come out not for more renewable energy but for a big expansion of domestic oil and gas drilling, including fracking. Leaving aside its impact on global warming, new oil and gas would take more than a decade to come onstream, far longer than an expansion of wind and solar power. For the party’s new right, though, climate change is a “culture war” issue that divides older Conservative voters from young metropolitan graduates, and being pro–fossil fuels is part of the strategy. Next in their sights is the repeal of Britain’s target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.


Liz Truss therefore starts her term as prime minister with a well-prepared agenda. Her only problem is that very little of it bears any relationship to the crisis in which the country finds itself.

Next month Britons will see their energy bills rise by 80 per cent as the persistently high price of gas on global markets feeds through to customers. Following earlier price hikes, this will raise the cost of energy to consumers to three times what it was just a year ago. And this process has not ended. Under Britain’s regulatory regime, energy prices are due to rise again over the next six months, with independent forecasters predicting that by next April prices will reach almost 600 per cent of their level a year ago.

The impact on British households can hardly be exaggerated. Next month’s increase will take a typical household’s energy bill to £3500 a year. With the UK median income standing at just over £31,000, that will mean half of all households paying over 10 per cent of their income on energy, which is the official definition of “fuel poverty.” Around four million of the poorest households, including many pensioners and families, will see their energy bills rise to almost half of their disposable income.

Poverty campaigners warn that the inevitable result of these rises will be destitution, with households unable to heat their homes during the winter or children going without food (or both). Many elderly people are predicted to die of cold-related disease. The country’s most famous consumer champion, Martin Lewis, has described the situation as a “catastrophe.” It is widely expected that many households will be unable or will simply refuse to pay. Police forces are reportedly making plans to deal with civil unrest.

Over the past six months Boris Johnson’s government has provided some help to households to cope with rising bills, including a £400 payment to all, and up to £1200 targeted at those on the lowest incomes. But this was before the latest increases were announced, and the government is now under heavy pressure to do more. During her leadership campaign, though, Liz Truss insisted that her proposed tax cuts would be sufficient, and rejected the idea of further “handouts” to consumers.

Described as “a holiday from reality” by a senior Tory during the campaign, this position is not expected to survive contact with the real world once Truss is in Downing Street. Since income tax cuts will do nothing to support the poorest households, whose incomes are too low to pay the tax at all, it is clear they will not prove a publicly acceptable solution.

The Labour Party has argued that the new energy price increase should be scrapped altogether, with government picking up the tab for the costs. This would be partially paid for by a higher windfall tax on oil and gas companies, whose profits have soared during the crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its approach is hugely popular, including 85 per cent support among Conservative voters.

It is therefore now widely expected that Truss will abandon her campaign stance and provide further help to households. A version of Labour’s approach is considered likely, with energy prices ordered to be frozen. The policy will be paid for by a mixture of public spending and a long-term financing scheme in which consumers will pay gradually for higher bills over a period of ten years or more. The government outlays will blow a further hole in the government’s budget. Truss’s team has already hinted that other areas of public spending will have to be cut, and — in a major reversal of previous Tory orthodoxy — public borrowing will need to rise substantially.

Will this spending be enough to give Liz Truss the kind of voter honeymoon usually granted to new prime ministers? Few observers think so. Having focused her leadership campaign entirely on policies designed to please Conservative Party members, Truss has said very little about other aspects of the immediate economic crisis Britain faces. With inflation running at more than 10 per cent and still rising, Britain is in the middle of a wave of strikes as workers across the economy seek to prevent further cuts in their real incomes. The Trades Union Congress has even mooted the idea of a general strike.

Meanwhile, soaring energy bills are likely to lead to a wave of company failures over the coming months: one study suggests that as many as 70 per cent of British pubs could be forced out of business. The Bank of England forecasts that Britain is about to enter a recession that will last the whole of 2023.

Liz Truss enters Downing Street with the Conservatives 9 per cent behind Labour in opinion polls. Translated into parliamentary seats, this would make Labour the next government, though not with an absolute majority. The two years before the next general election would be extremely difficult for the most gifted politician. Truss’s leadership campaign, conducted largely in a parallel universe, has left even her own supporters anxious. •

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China syndromes https://insidestory.org.au/china-syndromes/ https://insidestory.org.au/china-syndromes/#comments Sun, 04 Sep 2022 05:24:52 +0000 https://insidestory.org.au/?p=70490

Both Britain and Australia need to overcome a curious amnesia about their dealings with China

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Increasingly frustrated by the airy pontifications of British politicians, public figures and lobbyists who rediscovered that place called China after the pandemic began in early 2020, I decided to do something. For my own sanity at least, I set aside time to work out why Britain, despite its long relations with that vast Asian country, had arrived at a policy so barren, contradictory and self-defeating. In fact, it’s worse than that: even to talk about a policy is to flatter incoherence, visceral panic and opportunism.

The evidence isn’t hard to find. For a few hours during last month’s debates between contenders for the Conservative crown, prime ministerial aspirants Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak talked tough about how they were going to deal with the People’s Republic. What did they plan to do? Close down a few barely functioning Confucius Institutes, set up an inquiry and stand up to Beijing. In other words, they plan to pretend, Yes Minister–style, that action is happening where inaction prevails.

Truly, I wondered to myself, is this the best we can do about such an important issue?

So I started to read as much as I could about Britain’s relations with China — going back to the beginning, to the moment at the end of the sixteenth century when Elizabeth I sent three letters to the Ming emperor Wan Li. Those messages had two striking characteristics: first, they were purely about trade, and second, they never arrived. The ships carrying them either foundered or gave up trying to reach their destination.

More than 400 years later, Britain’s messages still don’t seem to be reaching their intended recipient. And trade and self-interest are still at the core of its approach to China.

The mercantile ambitions that determined British policy during the first 200 years of contact became mixed up with something more potent once the first Anglo-Chinese war broke out in 1840. Industrialisation, colonisation and economic efficacy had made Britain stronger than Qing-era China. That asymmetry, in a relationship driven by the era’s supply chains and economic flows, almost inevitably led to conflict. Britain, as the more powerful, prevailed.

The modern Chinese history of that period recounts exploitation by the British, who carried in their wake the United States, France, Germany and then, most destructive of all, Japan. Strangely, Britain doesn’t have an identifiable narrative of those events. Most debates about the period concern whether the imperial project, more broadly, was in any sense justified. China figures as a minor part in the Oxford History of the British Empire, for instance.

Looking over the post-1840 history I was struck by just how strongly Britain’s mindset rested on a view that China’s weakness and dysfunctionality were both a curse and a blessing. London’s policy through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was to exploit the country’s weaknesses while doing what it could to ensure that the Chinese empire — what Lord Palmerston, the British leader most associated with gunboat diplomacy, called “a rickety ship of state” — stayed afloat to perform whatever useful tasks it could.

This strategy helps explain Britain’s odd decision to help the teetering Qing defeat the Taiping rebellion in the 1860s. It also explains the remarkable fact that the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, a significant part of the Chinese state, was run by a foreigner, Ulsterman Robert Hart, from 1863 to 1910.

A China that was frustrating and sometimes fickle — a country that didn’t like foreigners but had to endure them, that needed propping up because the alternatives were less palatable — was a place Britain and other developed nations grew comfortable with. Reading the history, it dawned on me that this mindset has lingered, even to this day, and underlies the increasingly panicky response to Xi Jinping’s dramatic rebuttals of the tale of rickety dependence.

Nineteen forty-nine, the year Xi’s communist predecessors took power, is one of those dates that becomes more significant as time goes on. Despite the parlous state of the Chinese economy during the 1950s and 1960s, and despite the often self-harming policy contortions and mass campaigns of the Mao years, 1949 was when China started not just saying no to the outside world but also behaving like it meant it.

Clues as to how the new rulers intended to do business came thick and fast. Regarded as unlikely to intervene in the clash between North and South Korea in 1950, they mobilised more than three million “volunteers” and stopped the UN forces in their tracks. Seen as mere lackeys of the Soviet Union, they detonated their relationship with Moscow by the end of the 1950s and went it alone.

Whether Britain has ever really come to terms with that new, pushy stance is moot.


Has Australia been any more adaptable? As historian James Curran writes in his new history of the Australia–China relationship since the second world war, Australia’s China Odyssey: From Euphoria to Fear, both Britain and Australia briefly flirted with the idea of conferring diplomatic recognition on the newly established People’s Republic in 1949. Like London but unlike Washington, Australia didn’t view the victorious communists as an existential threat needing to be repelled at every step. Canberra’s view was ambiguous and pragmatic. But while Britain made the leap in January 1950, antagonising the Americans was a risk Canberra couldn’t take.

Just like their British counterparts, Australian leaders from Robert Menzies to Gough Whitlam, Malcom Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were gripped by the notion that China needed to be handled dextrously, with a view to the long term — while all the time keeping an eye on how the Americans reacted.

The high point of this attitude came in the Hawke era (at least before 1989) when, as Curran reports, the Australian leader apparently enjoyed such rapport with leaders like Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang that he had twenty-hour meetings on visits to Beijing. Hawke and Hu even held each other’s hands from the airport to the city when the latter came for a visit to Perth in 1985. It’s hard to imagine such bodily intimacy between Xi Jinping and any recent leaders of Australia.

The lingering notion of China as a place to be engaged with — not so it could carry on as it was, but so it might become something else — always offered a decent counterargument to the many in Australia who worried about its rising economic and military power. Even after the dark days of 1989, when the Tiananmen massacre saw Hawke overrule his officials and tearfully grant 20,000 Chinese people the right to stay in Australia on compassionate grounds, the language of engagement was quickly reasserted. The problem was that no one in China had ever been asked what they thought of the hopes being projected onto them.

The thwarted expectation that the Chinese would change has been exacerbated by China’s mastery of plot twists. On Mao’s death in 1976, Australia’s ambassador to Beijing, Stephen FitzGerald, was one of the very few to wonder whether the country was about to do the wholly unexpected and renounce radical leftism. Within two years his maverick view was proved prescient, and Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up era began.

By then, China’s political system was generally assumed to be on its last legs. Tiananmen had been its moral unmasking. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, its isolation seemed complete. Yet, against all logic and predictions, the Chinese economy began experiencing one of history’s most explosive periods of growth. In fact, after 2001, it could be called the most explosive.

Australia was an early beneficiary of this new economic power. But the fact that China was not behaving quite as expected created deeper and deeper quandaries. On a prosaic level, though, Whitlam and Fraser’s gambit had worked. Engagement had yielded a huge material and economic dividend for Australia. During John Howard’s prime minstership alone, from 1996 to 2007, Chinese–Australian trade grew more than fivefold. By 2007, as Curran reports, China had become the country’s largest trading partner. Other countries always hoped for Chinese trade to make them rich, and even during the great financial crisis Australia proved this might actually be possible.


This plotline would have been fine had a friendlier and more politically and diplomatically compatible China emerged alongside it. In another twist, though, the richer China got, the more entrenched its one-party Marxist-Leninist system became. Even the missionary zeal of the Americans sputtered out by the mid 2010s. From 2012, under Xi Jinping, the world faced a partner that not only didn’t perform to the West’s expectations and ideals but also, to add insult to injury, was brazen and outspoken in its defiance and increasingly regarded the West as chaotic, incompetent and lazy.

When the facts change, as John Maynard Keynes famously counselled, then so should minds. What is truly puzzling is that the main response to China’s defiance of expectations — in Australia, Britain and elsewhere — has not been a deeper reconsideration of why we are where we are but little more than an intensifying resentment.

This attitude is widespread, but in Australia its emotional depth has been truly striking. Curran provides a good summary of what Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, that key period of 2007–10, reveals. What was not to like about Rudd as an interlocutor? A Mandarin speaker with a stellar understanding of Chinese history, language and culture, he knew more about China than any other leader of a major developed country.

The enigma of the Rudd era was not that it was incoherent but that it was so deeply bifurcated. Rudd veered between declaring that Australia would fight alongside America against China (in ways that unsettled even the Americans) and intensifying the language of engagement in China itself. Visiting Beijing straight after Washington in 2008, having thought deeply and had long discussions with Australian scholar Geremie Barmé, he decided to use a new term for the bilateral relationship — not pengyou (friends) but zhengyou (true friends).

There was nothing wrong with the idea, in theory at least. What was truly baffling was Rudd’s decision to announce it during a public lecture at Peking University, and only formally communicate the shift to elite leaders later in the day. Is it really too hard to understand why politicians on their home turf might be rattled by a visiting dignitary declaring a significant policy change in a public meeting before even bothering to run it by them? Rudd’s idea was that Australia wanted a relationship in which both partners could talk frankly and critically to each other. He got it in spades when he met the then premier Wen Jiabao, who was furious at his diplomatic tactlessness and apparently made that clear.

While Curran’s chapters on the period from the 1950s up to Rudd are driven by a narrative coherence and internal logic, after this the story falls apart. This is no criticism of the author: he does a sterling job of tracing a lamentable series of events and decisions. The story he tells is disjointed and sometimes bewildering simply because he is trying to track rapid shifts and panicky changes.

Julia Gillard just about maintained some stability, but since then Australia has been blighted by abrupt changes of prime minister. That lack of stability, combined with what Curran calls a stunning poverty of ideas, contributed to the parlous situation we see today. Symptomatic of the lack of imagination is the way Malcolm Turnbull and then Scott Morrison shuffled through the words of Menzies, Howard and other former PMs to dredge up ideas that worked before to see if they could be recycled.

The result was sloganeering rather than sound policy, reinforcing an unsettling sense that what really drives contemporary Australian policymaking is a visceral fear, bordering on obsessional, of abandonment by the United States and a rising self-revulsion over the country’s lingering addiction to exporting commodities to China. Australia, seemingly economically dependent on its worst enemy, is unable to stutter out even a barely audible word of thanks.


Curran supplies what is usually absent from contemporary Australian discussions of China — a well-grounded sense of historical perspective. As I’ve already indicated, Australia is not alone. Becoming a little more familiar in recent months with Britain’s own long engagement with China, I’ve concluded that the one policy recommendation I would make to any major country is for the government to commission a trusted, objective historian to write a comprehensive history of its relations with China, a history that would help it work out where it has come from rather than always obsessing about where it wants to go.

As Curran writes in his introduction, until Australia picks up a mirror and looks at itself and its behaviour towards China more critically, its fears will continue to undermine good policy. Only by facing the past, as James Curran does in this book, can Australia move beyond panicky responses to Beijing’s shrill and unpleasant tone. That might not solve all the problems, but would at least help understand them, and even that modest step would be a huge improvement. •

Australia’s China Odyssey: From Euphoria to Fear
By James Curran | NewSouth | $34.99 | 352 pages

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Between the idea and the reality https://insidestory.org.au/between-the-idea-and-the-reality/ Thu, 14 Oct 2021 06:46:24 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=69124

The British PM will need to shake off his party’s deepest beliefs to reform the British economy

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It takes a certain chutzpah to proclaim that you are building a brand new economic model when the supermarkets are short of food, you’ve called in the army to help deliver fuel, and record gas prices have left whole industries on the brink of closure. But brazen cheek is one thing Boris Johnson has never been short of. He even had enough of it to holiday in Spain this week in the middle of Britain’s energy crisis.

Johnson’s claim — made in an upbeat, joke-strewn speech to last week’s Conservative Party conference — looked like a novel way of brushing aside Britain’s current woes. The country’s troubles, he said, were just the growing pains of the country’s post-Brexit transition to a “high-wage, high-productivity economy” no longer dependent on immigrant labour. Castigating both Labour and Tory governments over the last thirty years for failing to deal with structural weaknesses, he declared that his administration would at last fashion a different and better kind of economy.

To most observers Johnson’s optimism seemed outlandish. Britain is currently experiencing a welter of economic problems. Tens of thousands of East European workers have gone back home since Brexit, leaving critical labour shortages in key sectors. A scarcity of lorry drivers has meant long queues at garages; too few seasonal fruit pickers has left produce rotting in the fields; an exodus of abattoir workers means healthy pigs are being shot on the farm. Not just supermarkets but toy shops are warning they will be short of stock at Christmas. As global gas prices rocket, meanwhile, Britain has been hit particularly hard. The government is subsidising vital fertiliser-making plants; energy-intensive industries such as steel and paper are desperately seeking government support to stay solvent.

The idea of drawing anything positive out of this might be dismissed as fantasy. After all, Johnson can’t argue that losing so many immigrants was simply misfortune: this was precisely what the “Leave” campaign he led during the Brexit referendum promised voters. With a small exception for 5000 lorry drivers (and only till Christmas), the government has steadfastly rejected business pleas to issue more visas for key workers, instead telling industry bosses that if they want more staff they should pay higher wages. Yet it is already painfully obvious that this won’t be enough: in key sectors there simply aren’t enough workers in the population both sufficiently skilled and willing to do the manual work previously done by East Europeans.


And yet Johnson also has a point. For it is indeed the case that over the past four decades Britain has become a predominantly low-wage, low-productivity economy. Since its dramatic deindustrialisation in the 1980s, the country has lost manufacturing jobs much faster than its comparator economies. Manufacturing now makes up just 10 per cent of GDP, compared with 19 per cent in Germany and 16 per cent in Italy. The financial sector, Britain’s major export industry, continues to provide high salaries and skilled work. But the country’s once-lauded “flexible” labour market has proved a powerful driver of low productivity.

Fifteen per cent of the UK workforce is now self-employed, many of them contracted to just one client — a convenient way for the employer to avoid paying social security and providing holiday and sick leave and other employee benefits. Almost a million people are on “zero hours” contracts, with their working hours determined just a few days (or hours) in advance, and no level of work guaranteed. This has kept employment levels high — much higher than in other European economies. But it has also kept wages low, and given employers little incentive to invest in the skills or capital equipment that would raise productivity. Output per hour in Britain is around four-fifths of German and French levels.

Where Johnson is wrong is on immigration. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that immigration reduces wages. Though it does mean a bigger labour supply, it also means higher demand (immigrants are also consumers) and therefore higher employment. The two effects largely cancel one another out. And, as Britain is now painfully discovering, immigrants do (or did) jobs that Britons simply don’t want to.

If his views on immigration are put to one side, Johnson’s criticism of the British economic model is much more usually heard on the left. This is, after all, a classic critique of modern capitalism: dominated by financial capital, more concerned to extract short-term profit than invest in long-term prosperity, seeking to pay workers as little as possible. And the solutions too come more naturally from the left: a stronger role for government in directing investment through active industrial policies; stronger trade unions to bargain wages up; reforms to corporate governance and finance to end the fixation with short-term returns.

Johnson didn’t propose any of these things, of course. His conference speech was almost entirely rhetoric, with virtually no policy content. But the implication of his remarks was not lost on the Conservatives’ ideological bedfellows. “Vacuous and economically illiterate,” railed the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute. “An agenda for levelling down to a centrally-planned, high-tax, low-productivity economy.” It would be fair to say that they didn’t like it.

And the reason is not hard to identify, for Johnson is confronting the legacy of the Conservatives’ great heroine, Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who initiated the deindustrialisation of the British economy; who deregulated the financial sector and let foreign capital flow in freely to buy up Britain’s most valuable companies; who destroyed the power of the unions and created the flexible labour market. The British economic model is of the Tories’ own making, and if Johnson is serious about reforming it he will have to break decisively with the party’s free-market nostrums.

This is not just about raising Britain’s productivity and investment levels. All of Johnson’s stated priorities will require leftish policies. He has promised to reform the country’s poor-quality social care system — and has already raised income taxes to pay for it. He has pledged to “level up” Britain’s disadvantaged regions — which are more or less everywhere that isn’t London and the southeast of England. But that will require both higher public spending and more directed investment; he has already established a state-owned National Infrastructure Bank for the purpose.

He is also committed to tackling climate change, with a goal of achieving a 78 per cent reduction in emissions (on 1990 levels) by 2035 and “net zero” by 2050. That will require even more extensive regulation of the energy sector and industry, and public investment in energy efficiency and sustainable transport. None of these policies is comfortable territory for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party, and his critics on the right have not been slow to say so.

It is still possible for Johnson to differentiate himself from the Labour Party and the left. The new battleground is Britain’s version of the culture wars, in which the Conservatives cast themselves as the defenders of British nationhood and tradition against the “woke” metropolitan liberals who criticise the country’s colonial history and proclaim their multiple identities, none of them patriotic. This political dividing line, virulently reinforced by Britain’s largely conservative press, may work to bolster Tory support of a particular kind. But it doesn’t look like a strategy to win elections.

And this, in the end, is how Johnson’s foray into a new ideological positioning will surely be judged. If he can succeed in reviving the British economy with interventionist policies and higher taxes and spending after the pandemic — and if his plans to reform social care, reduce geographic inequalities and tackle climate change begin to look as if they might work — then the next election, due in 2023 or 2024, could vindicate his optimism. But if the coming months spiral downward into a Shakespearean winter of discontent, and the prime minister’s rhetoric proves to be as unhinged from reality as it looks to many today, then all Johnson will have proved is that he can wield words with boisterous skill.

But that has never been in doubt. It is on whether he can govern competently that the jury of British public opinion remains out. •

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An intersection society no more? https://insidestory.org.au/an-intersection-society-no-more/ Mon, 04 Oct 2021 01:04:24 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=68954

Australia’s retreat to the Anglosphere has implications beyond defence and trade

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Not so long ago, many Australians hoped that Australia would be an intersection society linking East and West — an East not defined by China and a West not defined by the United States, although Australia hoped to play a role in reducing tensions between the two. We were to be an independent middle power, forging our own way in our region and the world, retaining old friends while strengthening relations with other powers in the region, including France, and with our Southeast Asian neighbours.

It was not to be. The creation of the AUKUS alliance shows we have been lured back into our old Anglosphere fold, prioritising relations with Britain and the United States.

Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a role. Having failed to protect us from Covid-19, Morrison is now banking on pledging to protect us from China. The Coalition has a long tradition of using fear of China to try to wedge Labor. Indeed, the 2019 election campaign showed signs that it was gearing up for an assault on Labor as too soft on China. As a result, the opposition has been treading very carefully in response to AUKUS, acknowledging legitimate fears about China while questioning aspects of the government’s approach.

The military and trade implications of the AUKUS alliance have been widely canvassed. Australians are rightly concerned about an increasingly authoritarian, assertive and aggressive China. But after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam decades earlier, many Australians are also cautious about being too closely aligned with American military strategy. Polling suggests that most Australians want our country’s complex relationship with China to be managed carefully.

The trade implications don’t stop with our worsening relationship with China. They also involve France. Under the Turnbull government, France was to be not just a key defence ally but also a key friend in facilitating relations with the European Union now that a post-Brexit Britain could no longer play that role for us.

Nor should we forget the cultural and intellectual implications of this shift. Australia’s projected role as an intersection society involved a different conception of our national identity. The hope was that we could forge a more independent, multicultural and cosmopolitan identity while still valuing our links with Britain and the United States. It was a vision that seemed to be developing an element of bipartisan support, at least during Malcolm Turnbull’s moderate Liberal prime ministership.

But Scott Morrison (ably assisted by Peter Dutton) is increasingly sounding like John Howard–lite when it comes to issues of cultural and national identity. Howard repeatedly emphasised Australia’s Anglo-Celtic identity and its closeness to Britain and the United States, thereby distancing the Coalition from Labor’s more cosmopolitan and multicultural view under Paul Keating.

It’s true that the government’s defence policy has also embraced the Quad of India, Japan, Australia and the United States. But Morrison’s comments regarding India often depict it as an extension of the Anglosphere with common values, including a commitment to democracy and religious freedom. It’s a view that seems particularly inappropriate given prime minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly authoritarian, Hindu-nationalist India, and has echoes of John Howard’s somewhat banal highlighting of the two countries’ shared love of cricket and experience of British influence. Kevin Rudd, by contrast, had a much more nuanced understanding of India’s postcolonial history.

A shift towards the Anglosphere also has implications for our cultural institutions and academia, and not just because of the increasing scrutiny of university research on security grounds. Many academics hoped that Australia could become an intellectual intersection society — that our universities would draw on all that is best of the knowledge produced in European and North American universities and all that is best from the great universities of Asia. We argued that this would position us well in the changing geopolitics of knowledge that characterised the Asian Century and would position us differently from the European and North American universities with which we compete for international students.

Such a vision would have built on and transformed the initiatives of past governments, Labor as well as Coalition. After all, it was a Liberal foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who oversaw the development of the brilliant New Colombo Plan, whereby Australian students would be encouraged to study in Asia. Such intellectual exchanges seem far from the Morrison government’s priorities. Indeed, the Coalition has been accused of carrying out a culture war against universities, starving them of funding at a time when the pandemic’s impact on international student enrolments is wreaking havoc on their budgets.

For all these reasons, AUKUS signals more than a defence decision about submarines and sharing other technology. It also potentially signals a cultural shift that has major implications for Australia and its role in the world. We have to hope that Paul Keating is wrong when he claims that AUKUS marks the moment when “Australia turns its back on the twenty-first century, the century of Asia, for the jaded and faded Anglosphere.” Because that would not be a good move at all. •

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Boris Johnson’s high-stakes gamble https://insidestory.org.au/boris-johnsons-high-stakes-gamble/ Wed, 29 Sep 2021 07:20:12 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=68865

Britain’s shape-shifting PM wanted to take the lead on climate, but he didn’t anticipate how hard that would be

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Boris Johnson couldn’t help himself. Speaking to the assembled leaders and ambassadors at the UN General Assembly last week, the British prime minister, whose principal schtick is jokey literary and historical allusion, asked them to remember Kermit the Frog. Specifically, he wanted them to recall Kermit’s song “It’s Not Easy Being Green” so that he could inform them that, in fact, the opposite is true. Being green isn’t hard at all. And that’s why the world needed to make stronger commitments on climate change in advance of next month’s COP26 UN climate conference in Glasgow.

Judging by the bemused looks in his audience, few were familiar with the musical oeuvre of Sesame Street circa 1970. But it was not really them that Johnson was seeking to convince. It was his own Conservative Party and his own government back home. For the prime minister has found himself facing an acute difficulty as COP26 approaches.

It’s not merely that Johnson has something of a reputational problem of his own. Only six years ago he was a paid-up climate sceptic, accusing global leaders of being “driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear — as far as I understand the science — is equally without foundation.”

Given that Johnson’s entire career has been one of political shapeshifting according to the views of his audience and his prospects of personal advancement — he’s the socially liberal mayor of London who became the figurehead of the Brexiteers’ “Leave” campaign — Johnson’s conversion to climate advocate has surprised no one. His problem, rather, is that being green is actually proving much more difficult than he had bargained for when he blithely offered to host the crucial UN climate talks a couple of years ago.

His rationale was that Britain needed to show after Brexit that it remained a big international player: no longer central to Europe, but still a “global Britain.” What could be a better signal than leading the world in tackling the climate crisis? Unfortunately for Johnson it is now clear that Britain is almost completely failing to do that.

At home, the Conservative government boasts that Britain is the first major country to put a “net zero” emissions reduction target into law: under the amended Climate Change Act, the government is obliged to achieve this by 2050. It has also adopted one of the world’s most ambitious medium-term targets, a cut in emissions of 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. (Of this, 44 per cent had already been achieved by 2019.)

But setting targets is the easy bit. Meeting them is more difficult. And here Britain is well off track. As the government’s independent Climate Change Committee has been warning for some years, policy has lagged well behind promises. In its latest report on the government’s progress, the committee didn’t mince its words. “This defining year for the UK’s climate credentials,” it declared, “has been marred by uncertainty and delay to a host of new climate strategies. Those that have emerged have too often missed the mark. With every month of inaction, it is harder for the UK to get on track.”

To respond to this criticism, the government has for some time been promising a “net zero strategy.” But this has been repeatedly delayed amid disagreements between Johnson and his ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak. The Treasury under Sunak has been preparing a review of the costs of achieving net zero, designed to show that it will hit middle- and lower-income earners hard through higher energy, transport and food prices. The review’s methodology is highly contested. It takes almost no account of innovation, which has already pushed the costs of green technologies — wind and solar power, for example, and electric vehicles — far below the levels predicted when policies to promote them were introduced. In this way, the Treasury’s critics argue, the review will considerably overstate the actual costs of achieving the net zero target.

But this is not really an argument about obscure economic methodologies. It is an entirely political one, for Sunak is pitching himself as the Conservatives’ next leader, and to do that he wants to appeal to the sizeable chunk of Tory MPs and party members who are not at all signed up to the net zero idea.

There are two sources of resistance. One is cost: the genuine anxiety that moving to a net zero economy — even over thirty years — will hurt Conservative supporters, and that any government pursuing it will pay a political price. The other is that it is patently obvious that the only way to make such a transition is for government to intervene much more actively in the economy, through industrial strategy, regulation and taxation, and such a prospect makes most Tories deeply uncomfortable.

This resistance has already spurned a new Conservative organisation, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, designed to rally political opposition and slow down the government’s climate ambitions. Not coincidentally, it was founded by the same backbench MP, Steve Baker, who led the hardline Tory Brexiteers in parliament and harried Theresa May’s government into successive concessions and defeats until Boris Johnson replaced her and acceded to their demands.

These factors mean that Johnson is feeling the squeeze. On the one hand, he needs to go into COP26 with an ambitious domestic plan to achieve net zero. It will hardly do for the conference hosts, desperately trying to persuade other countries to take stronger climate action, to be so visibly unable to produce a plan to do so themselves. On the other, Johnson can’t afford to risk producing a plan that in its implementation could cost the Conservative Party votes among its core supporters — and give Sunak the ammunition with which to succeed him.

This is not, of course, a problem unique to Britain. Some version of this political squeeze is occurring in almost every advanced economy. Most governments accept that they must take stronger action to reduce emissions. Most will say (rightly) that the green transition offers huge opportunities to develop new industries and create new jobs. But all are worried that higher-carbon industries will lose out, and that consumers and households will face higher costs and punish them at the ballot box.

And this is why Johnson has a problem with COP26. The conference in Glasgow is just a month away. But the media triumph that Johnson envisaged when he decided to host it looks increasingly unlikely. On the contrary, he could be facing a PR disaster: a conference denounced for its failure not just by Greta Thunberg but by many of the UN climate negotiators themselves.

And the reason is that, if no major advanced country is doing enough to achieve net zero, the global emissions trajectory is even further off track. With China’s economic growth having resumed after Covid, Brazil experiencing rapid deforestation, and Russia and India largely uninterested in the climate agenda, the collective commitments of governments are not nearly enough to hold the global average temperature rise to the “well under 2°C” goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, let alone the 1.5°C that the poorest countries demand.

The numbers are these. To have a reasonable possibility of being on track to hold the temperature rise to 1.5°C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global emissions in 2030 must be limited to around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e. Announced emissions reduction pledges for 2030 will reduce global emissions to 46–49 GtCO2e. The “emissions gap” of 20–23 GtCO2e, between where the world needs to be and where it is currently likely to be, represents almost an additional 100 per cent of maximum desirable emissions.

If many countries were still to announce their commitments, COP26 might still have a chance of success. But among large emitters only China has yet to make its new 2030 pledge. The European Union, the United States, Japan, Britain, Brazil, Australia and most others have already submitted their “nationally determined contributions,” the UN term for emissions pledges. As COP president, Britain is desperately trying to persuade China to announce an ambitious target — for example, to have its emissions peak earlier, in 2025, and commit to stop building coal-fired power stations. But China has never been amenable to external pressure of this kind, and after the recent defence pact announcement between the United States, Australia and Britain, it is particularly resistant to British overtures. China will make a big commitment. But it can’t bridge the global emissions gap.

So what will happen at COP26? There will be negotiations. But the gap to 1.5°C will remain. And in those circumstances it will be almost impossible for the poorest and most vulnerable countries to agree on a final communiqué, except one that acknowledges the conference has failed. And it will be very hard for the global media to report anything else.

One of the popular stories about Boris Johnson is that as a small child he wanted to become “world king.” Perhaps he thought COP26 might fulfil his dream. Right now it looks as if it could turn into his worst nightmare. •

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Going nuclear https://insidestory.org.au/going-nuclear/ Thu, 23 Sep 2021 00:55:48 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=68733

The AUKUS alliance represents a dramatic step away from multilateral diplomacy. Or is it a first step towards an independent nuclear deterrent?

 

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The French-designed, Australian-built project to create a fleet of hugely sophisticated submarines had been plagued with cost blow-outs, problematic technical choices and deteriorating public optics. It was nevertheless on track to deliver exactly what had been originally promised: up to a dozen conventional submarines, built in Adelaide, that would provide the Navy with a massive boost in capability. It seemed to have the trifecta — local industry, military punch, intellectual know-how.

So what went so terribly wrong? What could possibly explain last week’s sudden and abrupt decision to throw the project overboard and substitute a vague promise of embarking on a new build in two year’s time? Defence analysts increasingly believe the only way to make sense of the move is to see it as the first step in the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

The key is in the vessels themselves.

It’s evident the new submarine must offer something pretty special, although there’s been no indication, so far, of exactly what this might be. The public statements have been anodyne, simply emphasising the advantages of nuclear propulsion and building on an existing design. Both points are accurate. Conventional submarines regularly have to “snort,” rising to the surface to take in oxygen and expel contaminants, increasing the risk they’ll be located. Nuclear vessels don’t. They can remain on station for months and possess far greater range than normal subs. There’s much more to it, though, than just this.

These new submarines will be nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines, or SSNs. The critical issue is capability. The design that’s been abandoned, the so-called “Attack class,” would have delivered (roughly) 5300 tonne vessels with six torpedo tubes capable of firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which have a thirty-four-centimetre diameter and range of about 300 kilometres. At 7400 tonnes, however, the Astute class (on which the new design will be based) is much larger and with size comes huge potential. They carry larger, fifty-two-centimetre diameter silos capable of holding Tomahawk Block IV cruise missiles. As well as accurately hitting a small target (something the size of a house) from more than 1600 kilometres away, the route of these weapons can be changed in flight.

Perhaps most crucially, they can also be fitted with nuclear warheads.

The massive range of the weapon dramatically changes the nature of the boat’s capabilities. Instead of being forced to sail close in, where it becomes vulnerable, the vessel stands off, lurking deep in the ocean well away from land. This submarine represents a sudden escalation in Australia’s strategic capability, which perhaps explains why concern has come not only from China but more particularly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They understand how this decision could change the world.

There are, of course, no current plans to acquire nuclear missiles. Indeed, such a capability hasn’t been mentioned in all the speeches and interviews. But that’s not the point.

What’s relevant is that owning this sort of submarine is a game changer. It opens up options Scott Morrison (and, perhaps more particularly, defence minister Peter Dutton) are well aware of, and are probably seeking.

Perhaps this is the vital background to why the French project was abandoned.

Both weapons systems are potent. But the shift can’t be explained away as simply an acknowledgement that Australia’s submarines need to be nuclear-powered. If this was the only requirement, talks would have already begun with the French, who produce highly sophisticated nuclear vessels. Indeed, we’ve been working hard to convert one of their nuclear subs to a conventionally powered boat, so swapping in a new engine block would have been simple.

The only way to make any sense of the move is to understand it as, quite possibly, the most significant strategic decision Canberra has made since the second world war, wedding the country decisively to a US/UK alliance and catapulting Australia into the ranks of potentially nuclear-armed states.

This also explains the initial silence from navy officers who were surprised — or perhaps stunned is a better word — by Morrison’s out-of-the-blue announcement.

At press conferences like last week’s, viewers would normally expect politicians to be surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed commanders, bedecked with medals. But the military was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the implicit change in the strategic role such vessels might have and lending weight to the thesis that the change originated with the politicians rather than the strategists. Similarly, the lack of a plan to immediately commence work doesn’t sound like the way the navy would initiate work on the submarines. In fact, absolutely nothing other than “scoping” — perhaps another submarine analogy — will be done for at least eighteen months.

The other possibility — one that’s almost too depressing to contemplate — is that Morrison was persuaded to overturn decades of careful defence planning by a couple of determined advocates in his own inner circle of advisers. The remarkable secrecy surrounding this announcement suggests the PM’s office was well aware it faced the danger of significant pushback. Perhaps that’s why the deal was presented as very much a fait accompli. The possibility remains that Morrison has just tossed away billions of dollars and years of research, in return for vague promises of future cooperation on subs that will, inevitably, be built overseas.


The best way to understand what’s happened is to go back to the very beginnings of the fraught program that Defence once labelled SEA 1000: the project to build twelve “regionally superior” conventional submarines in Adelaide. Back in 2009 Kevin Rudd promised (with trademark aplomb, if slightly less engagement with possible realities) to build a fleet that would not merely defend the sea lanes but also provide a foundation for industry and kick-start a vibrant technological and scientific future. What was not to like?

It offered a single, neat solution to a multiplicity of different issues — defence, industrial and intellectual. It was about using knowledge to do things better.

But then, just two years later (and before any work on fleshing out ideas had begun) Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard. She didn’t hesitate to shelve the project and concentrating instead on budget repair. Then it was Tony Abbott’s turn to move the project forward. He chose to adopt a Japanese design only to have his plan aborted when a Liberal senator from South Australia threatened to vote against the government if the build didn’t remain in Adelaide.

Having caved in, Abbott bequeathed the problem to yet another PM, Malcolm Turnbull. By 2016 the prospect of building a dozen world-leading conventional submarines as a cornerstone of the country’s defence had become deeply problematic but the big difference was Turnbull had an energetic “can do” defence minister in Christopher Pyne.

Pyne engaged again with the original problem, never for a moment doubting that he could pull a solution out of the hat and, if it was one nobody else had thought of, well, so much the better. He looked around again, noticed the French, and liked what he saw. Voilà!

Naval Group — once known as Direction des Constructions Navales — had been around, in one form or another, since Cardinal Richelieu had taken command of France’s shipbuilding policy back in 1624. It had produced France’s ultimate deterrent, when Le Redoutable entered service as a ballistic missile submarine in 1971. It made everything from aircraft carriers to drones and, to Pyne, appeared as reliable as a good glass of fine Bordeaux.

Australia had already dated, and discarded, Japanese, German, and Swedish partners. A second-rate French conventional design — not the one that would be perused by Pyne — had already been ruled out as inadequate. Canberra’s traditional allies, London and Washington, only made nuclear submarines and, as these were out of contention, a flirtation with the French began. Perhaps they would be prepared to convert their nuclear boat to a conventional one?

Of course there would be problems because that’s what relationships are like. But “how hard,” Christopher asked, “how hard could it really be to pull out the nuclear power-plant and slip in a conventional engine?” Naval Group was willing.

There was enthusiasm, excitement, on both sides: a preparedness to experiment and, who knows, even the prospect of a massive breakthrough in submarine technology.

But the detail of the abandoned project reveals much more about Canberra’s incapacity to focus on the future than it does about the failure of a huge company to listen, or the simple preference of the French for a long lunch and fine wine. If this breakdown is the result of a culture clash, well, there were certainly two parties at fault.


It’s difficult to determine the exact moment disillusion entered the union.

Perhaps it was because this was never, really, a partnership of equals. Although both sides — the French builders and the Royal Australian Navy — wanted to end up in what was the same place, there were still fundamental theoretical disagreements about exactly where this might be. The rapid speed of technical progress further complicated issues. A pre-2020s design was attempting to anticipate an operating environment some twenty or thirty years into the future, but the constricting envelope of the submarine meant that difficult decisions needed to be made early in the process.

One simple example was propulsion. Obviously the system would involve some form of battery — but which type? The tested and reliable solution was lead-acid, but new advances in lithium–ion technology looked as if they’d soon offer significant advantages. It wouldn’t be simply possible to rip one type out and replace it with the other, though. The boats’ weight, trim and basic stability would be dramatically altered.

Technical arguments raged over this and other issues, including what used to be called torpedo tubes, or the way missiles would be launched from the vessel. Should these be located forward, in the bow, or would upward, as in the original design, and appropriate for firing a ballistic missile? How many and what size of missile would be stowed?

With limited space available choices like these inevitably affected not merely the capacity of magazines but also the number and type of weapons that could be carried. These questions are critical because they went to the task and possible missions the boats could be sent on. It was a given that there would never be enough space, so what should the room that was available be allocated to? Spare missiles, or room for commando teams and food? Extra diesel, or more batteries?

The real problem was there were no “right” answers, simply choices that would result in different outcomes. Fundamental disagreements were inevitable, and festered until minor cultural difficulties had grown to become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The French team felt the Australians were making impossible demands, but they adopted the new requirements and the cost kept growing. The navy felt Naval Group wasn’t listening or working with them to achieve a positive result. Feelers were put out to SAAB Australia, the company that had built the earlier (and initially trouble-plagued) Collins class submarines and was now working on an interim refit of these vessels.

Details of what was happening were scarce — submariners aren’t called the “silent service” for nothing — but it was obvious big issues were in play. The original contract with the French had been broken into different parts precisely so that either side could opt out at fixed points. The conclusion of the design phase appeared to be the obvious point to make the breach final. As that came and went, however, it appeared as if both sides had reconciled their differences and would move forward together.

That was not to be.


On 13 June this year Morrison was in Cornwall, where he’d been invited as a guest to attend a scheduled meeting of G7 leaders. There, beside the sands, Morrison quietly sealed a deal with British PM Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden to scrap the French team’s efforts. Macron was also in town but had no idea a plot was being hatched behind his back to dump Naval.

Exactly what had happened is still obscure. Naval Group makes the damaging charge that it was string along while secret negotiations began with the British, first, and the United States second. They believe Morrison, prodded by new defence minister Peter Dutton, had already made a firm decision to switch builder long before he finally met French president Emmanuel Macron for private talks in Paris on his way home from Britain.

It was all smiles and warmth as the two leaders reviewed ranks of be-plumed soldiers from the steps of the Elysée Palace. Macron even dispensed with the cold elbow-bump and instead pulled the Australian PM into a traditional Gallic embrace. Incredibly, Morrison seems to have said nothing of his plans to his host. If he’d intended to give any hint to Macron that an irreparable breach was imminent, he failed badly. It’s the secrecy accompanying the Australian manoeuvre — together with the way the sudden switch to build a nuclear submarine was announced without any consultation or pre-warning — that’s more than partly responsible for the almost universal negative worldwide reaction.

What changed in Canberra was the political leadership. Morrison didn’t share Turnbull’s appreciation of the French or nuanced understanding of international issues. He and Dutton brought a new determination to make things happen and to do so in their own way. They looked for allies where they were comfortable; they found them in the Anglo-sphere.

The only other alternative is to assume the government really is completely incompetent and has been sold a pup.


This story really ends where it began — in politics, driven by personality.

Sometimes, huge defence industrial projects — like Australia’s attempt to build the best conventional submarine in the world — simply fail. And sometimes there’s more to the story than first appears. Nobody will, or is even likely to provide the full facts in the middle of all the acrimony. All one is left with are questions — but one, in particular, stands out.

After spending massive sums of money attempting to convert a nuclear submarine into a conventional one, if all that was required was a nuclear powered boat, then why not just revert to the original successful French design? What extra oomph did the British vessel (widely believed to be the frontrunner as replacement) offer to make it worth the angst and furore that’s accompanied the decision to scrap the project? Is it really worth a close to $3 billion write-off, simply so we can pay more to get an Anglo design that will probably be built overseas anyway?

This is especially the case when the British boats have been plagued for years with their own technical problems and also suffered (in the case of their first submarine) similarly huge cost blowouts.

Apportioning blame for what’s happened is as pointless as pontificating on the breakdown of a bad marriage. Perhaps, in the end, each partner just wanted something different and it simply took a while to work it out. Maybe in the end there were so many reasons cascading together, large and small, that dissolution became inevitable.

If so, the problem appears to spring from an attitude that seems to encapsulate Scott Morrison’s entire approach to politics. Change partners swiftly, strike and never look back; whether your aim is to become PM or buy a new submarine. By partnering in AUKUS, Australia’s back in an older, much more familiar relationship — and, what’s more, a threesome! What’s not to like about that? It comes with all the excitement and hope that springs from the sudden blooming of a whirlwind romance.

What could possibly go wrong? •

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A party on the edge https://insidestory.org.au/a-party-on-the-edge/ Mon, 24 May 2021 08:01:31 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=66866

A strategy exists to revive UK Labour’s electoral fortunes, but would it work?

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Suddenly, Britain’s Labour Party has become interesting again, though not for the reason its supporters would wish. Battered by the voters, well behind in the polls, and provoking a coruscating 3000-word assault from its most successful leader, Tony Blair, the party is undergoing something close to a collective nervous breakdown.

This is obviously important for British politics, but it also has wider relevance. Labour’s crisis flows from challenges facing progressive parties around the world. Indeed, there are clear parallels between Britain and Australia: in both countries support for Labour/Labor peaked at around 50 per cent in the early 1950s; both parties performed much more poorly in national elections in 2019; and both parties recorded (first-preference) support of just 33 per cent that year.

Despite many obvious differences, both countries — along with many others — have seen massive economic and social changes in recent decades. The question for progressive parties is fundamentally the same everywhere: how do they revive their appeal to voters in the twenty-first century when conditions are so different from those that enabled them to build their appeal in the twentieth century?

Much of Blair’s broadside, in the left-of-centre New Statesman, inevitably dealt with the specifics of Labour’s recent past, especially the failings of its lurch to the left in 2015 when it elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. After Corbyn led Labour in 2019 to its worst general election defeat since 1935, the party elected Sir Keir Starmer, a far more centrist leader. (Starmer received his knighthood for his time as director of public prosecutions, a senior non-party legal position to which nobody with extreme political views would ever be appointed.)

But Blair cast his net more widely: “Joe Biden’s victory in the United States apart, progressive politics across the globe is badly placed: four election defeats for the UK Labour Party and no one betting against a fifth; the German SPD placed behind a moderate Green Party; the French Socialists, who won the presidency in 2012, now polling at 11 per cent; the Italian left imploded and divided; the Spanish and Swedish socialists hanging on to power, but way below their earlier levels of support… Around today’s Western world there are only flickers of a progressive agenda with deep majority support.”

What, then, is to be done? Here are some of the key numbers that illuminate Labour’s dilemma in Britain. Those numbers will vary from country to country, but the broad direction of change is likely to have been much the same in most of the world’s better-off democracies.

Until the 1980s, more than two-thirds of Britain’s workers had manual, blue-collar jobs. They and their families provided Labour’s core vote. The party’s typical voter was a trade union member working in a coalmine, a shipyard, a steelworks, a mill or a large factory. The term “identity politics” has recently come to prominence, but the concept is not new: Labour’s core vote was as much to do with working-class identity as living standards. Rooted in solidarity, it gave Labour huge majorities on large turnouts in its industrial heartlands.

Today, the mines are gone, the shipyards closed, the steelworks shrunk, the factories automated and the mill jobs exported to Asia. Manual workers now comprise just 43 per cent of the workforce, and only a minority of them belong to a trade union. Gone is the widespread workplace culture that fostered the values of solidarity. At the last election, blue-collar voters divided six million Conservative, four million Labour.

On the other side of the scale, Labour has gained ground among white-collar voters. Until the 1980s, around 80 per cent of Labour’s vote was working-class; that proportion has since halved to 40 per cent. Today’s typical Labour voter is a white-collar social liberal, living in or around a big city and working in health, education, finance, technology or public administration.

In a way, these big, long-term changes are good news for the left, for it is capturing a growing share of a growing demographic. But two problems block the path to electoral triumph. The first is that its appeal to working-class voters is declining too fast. In England’s industrial heartlands, Labour has lost dozens of once-safe constituencies to the Tories.

The second problem is that Labour’s support has begun to fray among middle-class social liberals. In local and regional elections earlier this month, the Greens made gains in big cities at Labour’s expense. In other countries, this trend has gone much further. In Germany, the latest polls show the Greens with 25 per cent support, level-pegging with the centre-right Christian Democrats. Support for the Social Democrats has collapsed from 39 per cent in 2002 to 15 per cent ahead of this September’s election.

Germany provides a stark warning to Britain’s Labour Party — and centre-left parties around the world — of what can happen if things go badly wrong. As a broad rule, progressive parties need an alliance of working-class and middle-class voters to gain power. Historically, Britain’s Labour Party offered its working-class base a better life in a series of practical ways: through better housing, healthcare, schools, pensions and so on.

At the same time, it attracted middle-class voters who approved of that instrumental agenda but were passionate social liberals as well. Post-1945 causes such as abolishing capital punishment, legalising abortion and gay sex, and outlawing racial discrimination were adopted by successive Labour governments. Labour’s white working-class voters didn’t generally care for these policies, but, on the whole, they didn’t mind Labour MPs’ promoting them, as long as the party delivered practical improvements to everyday life.

An occasional exception was race and immigration, which in some places in some elections cost Labour working-class votes. In retrospect, those localised battles in the 1960s and 1970s provided an early warning of what has happened in the past few years.

Brexit has fractured Labour’s working/middle-class alliance. Whereas the social liberal agenda used to be irrelevant but unthreatening to Labour’s working-class base, it is now blamed by many traditional Labour supporters for the stalling of their living standards in recent years. “Brexit” is not just a huge event; it is a label that encompasses a wide range of resentments: the power of Britain’s elite and metropolitan liberals as well as specific features of Britain’s membership of the European Union, such as freedom of movement, which led to a sharp rise in immigration.

Today, then, Labour faces a challenge specific to Britain in its detail but universal in its fundamentals: how can it reconstruct the alliance across classes that it needs to return to power? Can it retain its socially liberal middle-class voters while winning back the working-class voters it has lost?

Squaring that circle won’t be easy, and might even be impossible. If it can be done, it will be through instrumental policies for a post-industrial era that improve lives in the rundown towns that have turned away from Labour, combined with a form of social liberalism that helps every part of Britain, not just the thriving cities. This means making the practical, and not just moral, case for three main efforts: revising Britain’s flawed Brexit deal with the European Union; creating an immigration policy that helps the economy without undercutting incomes or job opportunities for low-paid workers; and accelerating the switch to a low-carbon economy.

Here’s the rub: nobody can be sure that such a strategy will succeed. But it might be the only strategy that has even a chance of success. As Blair says in his New Statesman article, tackling the economy’s “most far-reaching upheaval since the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution… is the central political challenge of our time.” In Britain, as elsewhere, the big decisions that progressive parties make (or avoid) in the next few years will determine whether social democracy has a bright future or merely a glowing past — whether it improved lives in much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century but turned out to be unable to compete successfully in the twenty-first. •

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Signing up for an invasion https://insidestory.org.au/signing-up-for-an-invasion/ Fri, 16 Apr 2021 00:45:41 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=66316

How did two very different leaders — Tony Blair and John Howard — come to join George W. Bush’s “march of folly”?

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On the face of it, Tony Blair and John Howard were the most unlikely partners. The young, idealistic British prime minister was the charismatic leader of New Labour, the political personification of Cool Britannia. His Australian counterpart was conservative, pragmatic, cautious and, well, dull. Not so much a daggy dad as a daggy granddad.

But despite their differences in politics, personality and style, they enlisted in US president George W. Bush’s modern march of folly that led inexorably to the invasion of Iraq and the multiple calamities that followed.

Why and how they joined Bush’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is the subject of Judith Betts and Mark Phythian’s new book, The Iraq War and Democratic Governance. The two academics show how democratic structures and processes — parties, parliaments, cabinets and bureaucracies — can be co-opted, sidelined or neutered when prime ministers, driven by sentiment and perceived national interests, are determined on a course of action — in this case, to follow a powerful ally on the road to disaster.

Betts and Phythian tell the tale well, methodically comparing the factors and processes that led Howard and Blair to send armed forces to support the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The two men’s shared belief in the importance of their countries’ relationship with the United States was the primary reason they went to war, though they downplayed its importance when justifying their decisions.

Britain has seen its much-vaunted “special relationship” with the United States as a way of retaining global influence after its empire disintegrated and America supplanted its physical power in the wake of the second world war. Australia’s alliance with the United States, expressed in the ANZUS treaty, was based on the fear of abandonment made real when Imperial Japan gave the country the fright of its life in 1942.

Both countries adorn this relationship with sentimental references to common ties of democratic values, cultural affinity and shared wartime service. (US officials go along with Australia’s mawkish marketing of the alliance as “one hundred years of mateship,” politely overlooking the fact that Australia’s contribution to US military adventures is sometimes tokenistic and always carefully circumscribed — as was the case with Iraq.) Implicit in the relationship, particularly for Australia, is the view that military contributions are insurance premiums, periodically paid to maintain the alliance.

For Blair in particular, a strategic assessment of the relationship’s benefits was overlaid by an emotional belief in America’s fundamental goodness. Howard was determined to strengthen the alliance, which also had the political benefit of wedging the Labor opposition. Already mentally and politically attuned to the importance of the United States, both leaders were galvanised by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Blair’s reaction was evangelical in its tone: standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush against al-Qaeda was an opportunity to reorder the world, or at least the Middle East, by influencing US policy.

While Howard’s outlook was narrower, his response was heightened by the fact he was visiting Washington at the time of the attacks. He knew then that the Americans would respond militarily. He, too, promised to stand by the United States. Britain and Australia both sent forces to support the US action in Afghanistan in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda. Both knew Bush and his crusading advisers already had their sights set on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, despite the fact he was not involved in 9/11, as part of a bigger project to rearrange the Middle East and rid it of despotism.

By mid 2002 they knew Bush was planning an attack on Iraq, and both had given clear indications of support, which they kept from the public. Howard carefully crafted his response to allow him to insist that he had made no commitment until the very eve of the invasion. Yet, as Howard writes in his memoir, after he met Bush in June 2002 the American president was entitled to assume that if the United States took military action “in all likelihood Australia would join.”

Getting troops into position meant months of managing and manipulating parties, parliaments, cabinets, bureaucracies and the media, in an environment where public opinion in both countries opposed military action. On the evidence forensically mustered by Betts and Phythian, Blair and Howard managed this task with considerable skill.

Blair believed modern decision-making meant that traditional ways of doing things — bureaucratic advisers drafting policy papers to be subjected to cabinet debate leading to consensus decisions — were slow and dated. Having risen to power through an obsessive control of media messaging, he made sure his government was on a perpetual election footing. Old ways of governing created the risk of dissent and media leaks. In this controlled environment, as former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock observed, “disagreement was only characterised as rebellion, not as a divergence that was based on rational consideration and open to persuasion.”

To manage dissent and minimise debate, the detail of Iraq policy was kept to a small circle of insiders, with potential leadership challengers — principally Gordon Brown — excluded. Although Iraq was mentioned in twenty-six meetings of Blair’s cabinet in the twelve months before the invasion, only five substantial discussions took place. Blair limited the information that went to cabinet and ensured there was never a frank and open consideration of risks, options and alternatives. Robin Cook, who was to resign as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the invasion, wrote in his diary: “Tony does not regard the cabinet as a place for decisions.”

Howard’s challenges were different and somewhat easier. His cabinet and MPs were united behind his election-winning leadership and were, in any case, controlled by strict party discipline. Unlike Blair, he faced an opposition that was against the war but had cracks in its unity that Howard could wedge. While he increasingly confined discussion on Iraq policy to cabinet’s national security committee, Howard ensured wavering MPs were soothed by an informal process of consultation, sometimes lubricated with a calming cup of tea.

If Blair shut dissenters out, Howard sought to lock them in while leaving the traditional sources of strategic advice — senior public servants in key government departments — on the sidelines. The heads of the foreign affairs and defence departments later recounted how their advice was neither sought nor offered because the government had already made up its mind. The only advice the government sought was on the nuts and bolts of logistics and capabilities — how Australia could contribute to the war — rather than on the merits, risks and consequences of doing so.

Betts and Phythian offer two explanations for the silence of top bureaucrats who are paid to provide frank and fearless advice. One is that they were cowed into compliance by Howard who, in his first days in office, had sacked six department heads. The second possible explanation is that they agreed with Howard that joining the war was the price that had to be paid to maintain the alliance. This, of course, was not the main reason Howard gave for joining Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Mention of the alliance was subsidiary to discussion of the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, his potential nuclear capabilities, and his links with terrorism.

Claims about WMD dominated prime ministerial messaging in the months leading up to March 2003 — most notoriously in the dossier produced by Blair’s government a month before the invasion, which, in the words of Betts and Phythian, “did not so much report on a threat as create one.” The dossier, including the headline-grabbing assertion that Saddam could deploy biological weapons in forty-five minutes, led to claims the government had “sexed up” inconclusive intelligence assessments.


The failure to find WMD prompted a series of post-invasion inquiries in Britain and Australia. The most exhaustive of these, chaired by Sir John Chilcot in Britain, was initiated by Gordon Brown after he succeeded Blair as prime minister in 2009. Chilcot confirmed that the US alliance was the determining factor in Britain’s decision to join the war, found that claims about the threat posed by WMD were “presented with a certainty that was not justified,” and concluded that, despite clear warnings, the consequences of invasion were underestimated.

Chilcot also revealed that the pressure on intelligence agencies to provide unequivocal evidence of WMD verged on the farcical. At one stage, British intelligence was citing an Iraqi source who falsely claimed first-hand knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs. It turned out the source was passing on information from a “sub-source” who had been coached by the source to fabricate reports.

Parallels exist between Chilcot and the two post-invasion Australian inquires, the most significant of which was conducted by the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, chaired by Liberal MP David Jull. It found the government had exaggerated the “moderate and cautious” assessments of Iraq’s weapons made by the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It found the DIO to have been the most accurate and sceptical, and that the two organisations diverged in their assessments from September 2002, when ONA was influenced by US intelligence reports, some of which were based on the untested claims of Iraqi defectors.

Despite this divergence, the agencies both found that any Iraqi threat was limited and in decline; its nuclear program was unlikely to be advanced; its long-range missiles were in poor condition; there was no known chemical weapons production; and no links existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Jull totally discredited Howard’s stated reasons for going to war. Howard, however, deftly dodged any subsequent storm. In February 2004, selected portions of the Jull report were leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, the only major metropolitan newspaper that had opposed the war. The leak was a master stroke of media manipulation, as the Herald’s report, based as it was on carefully culled excerpts, largely focused on the finding that the government had not doctored the intelligence it received.

This reporting effectively absolved the government and framed subsequent news coverage when the entire Jull report was released two weeks later. With just a few exceptions — notably Patrick Walters in the Australian — most of the media declared the government had been cleared of “sexing up” the intelligence, while missing Jull’s key conclusion that, on the basis of the intelligence the government did have, no compelling case existed for war. Betts and Phythian rightly judge this to be a massive failure by the media, “which by and large had either not read the [Jull] report or failed to grasp its significance.”

Despite the inquiries’ findings, and well after the war, Blair and Howard continued to insist they acted in good faith while being let down by poor intelligence.

The consequences of the invasion differed for the two prime ministers. Politically, Blair never recovered, the revelations of Chilcot and other inquiries leading to disillusionment and a loss of trust in the Labour Party and among the general public. A total of 179 British personnel died in Iraq, most of them after Bush declared in May 2003 that major combat had ended and that the United States and its allies had prevailed.

Howard had a better war. Unlike Blair, he didn’t face internal party dissent. He had carefully crafted his words in the run-up to the invasion by maintaining he had not made a commitment until the eve of the war, thereby keeping the opposition off balance. Crucially, he ensured Australian forces remained in Iraq only for the invasion phase and in carefully limited roles to avoid casualties. No Australian troops were killed. By June 2003, when the troops were back in Australia for welcome home marches and medals, the insurgencies triggered by the invasion, which would rip Iraq apart, were only beginning.


Betts and Phythian set out to examine how democratic institutions operated in a decision to go to war. They tell this story systematically, comprehensively and with clarity, drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with key players. On any reading, our democratic institutions failed. This book is all the more powerful because of its sober style. It deserves an audience much wider than international relations specialists. Members of parliament and press gallery journalists should be first in line.

Thirteen years on from the invasion, Howard said that “the hardest decision I ever took as prime minister, along with my cabinet colleagues, was to commit the men and women of the Australian Defence Force to military conflict.” In the wrong circumstances, based on the evidence in this book, crafty prime ministers can quite easily lead their countries into wars. •

The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War
By Judith Betts and Mark Phythian | Palgrave Macmillan | €79.99 | 236 pages

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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English vices https://insidestory.org.au/english-vices/ Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:01:58 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=63804

Pioneering Australian publisher Carmen Callil — who died this weeek — traces her family’s trajectory

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In an interview when her book Bad Faith was published in 2007, Australian-born Carmen Callil — now Dame Carmen Callil for her services to literature — spoke about being scared. She says she was scared when she started Virago, the first and arguably the premier feminist publishing house in the English-speaking world. She was scared when she started writing Bad Faith, she said, and also of speaking in public. She never stopped being scared until she learned to ignore it. Which is a little like how I’m feeling now, embarking on this review of Oh Happy Day.

For this a whopper of a book. It sweeps through three centuries of British and British-Australian history, tracking the lives of her working-class English ancestors, those “busy insects of the early Industrial Revolution.” Driven by the concerns of genealogy, it’s a history that makes little pretence of objectivity. As Callil warns in the preface, “a book such as this, both story and history, requires a different approach to history” — an approach that still relies, after “copious investigation,” on intuition and supposition. I’m not sure this differs much from the way any history is written, but that’s another discussion. What isn’t in contention is Callil’s passion, in life and in letters.

Bad Faith was likewise propelled by a personal connection. Her first major book after retiring from a dazzling, indomitable and astoundingly successful career in publishing, its catalyst was the shock suicide of her own psychotherapist, whose father had been exposed as one of wartime France’s most odious anti-Semites, responsible for sending many Jews, including children, to their certain deaths in the camps.

Callil’s biography of the father, Louis Darquier, was meticulously researched and compellingly written, yet it managed to infuriate many of its readers. These were found mainly among those who still dismiss the suggestion that the French were anything but heroic in their resistance to the German occupation and its Vichy collaborators. But the Israeli government also condemned her for taking a swipe at Israel’s occupation of Palestine and treatment of its people.

So whom does she swipe at this time? The answer may be found in Oh Happy Day’s subtitle: Those Times and These Times. Right from the start, Callil makes clear the parallels between what have been called the “heroic years” of Britain’s Industrial Revolution and the austerity set in train by the neoliberal capture of Anglosphere democracies in our own. This sets the stage for examining where her forebears sat on the rigid class pyramid that characterised British society in those days and still, with a short-lived dismantling in the postwar years, stands effectively unchallenged.

Callil’s pyramid has the monarch at the apex, royalty next, with the aristocracy, gentry, middle classes, artisans and tradespeople, servants, the labouring poor and paupers in descending order to the base. It doesn’t take much imagination to extend the analysis further, as she does, comparing the forced migrations of earlier times and the refugee populations of our day. All of which flies in the face of narratives of human progress championed by the Anglosphere’s conservative politicians and historians.

But this is a family story as well as a record of the times. It opens with a woman named Sary, Callil’s great-great-grandmother, known throughout by that diminutive to distinguish her from all the other Sarahs dotting the family tree. An illegitimate child, she was born in 1808, when Britain was still at war with France, and lived a precarious existence on the lowest two steps of the book’s pyramid. Her descendant, Australian-born but residing in England since the 1960s, takes pains to situate Sary in the historical settings of her remarkably long life, which began in penury in Leicestershire and ended in relative comfort in Melbourne at the height of its 1880s boom.

The other forebear we follow is George Conquest, who made a living as a bargeman on the East Midlands canals until the coming of the railroads ate into the business and he was convicted of stealing a roll of hemp. From the diligent records kept by the ruthless criminal court system of the time, we learn that he was five foot seven-and-a-quarter inches tall and had hazel eyes, freckles and a scar near his right eyebrow.

After a year and a half’s imprisonment on a hulk, George was transported to Sydney in 1830, where conditions had improved somewhat and the settlement had begun its inexorable spread. Such was the demand for convict work when Conquest arrived that he was immediately assigned to a property north of Sydney in the Hunter Valley. It turns out he was as careful a businessman as he was a reliable worker and ended up, after marrying Sary, owning a row of cottages in what was then the outlying Melbourne suburb of Prahran.


These are only some of the bones on which Callil hangs a narrative in which she vents a great deal of justifiable spleen. The times her forebears lived through were routinely hard and sometimes unspeakably horrible. The effects of the commons enclosures, the end of the Napoleonic wars, the rise of liberalism, the shortcomings of the Great Reform Act, the horror of the workhouses established by the 1834 Poor Law, the pettifogging criminal system and its ever-increasing catalogue of capital crimes — all of this and more is interrogated with forensic diligence.

As Callil prosecutes each case she convinces us, if we needed convincing, that far from being the benevolent colonising force its defenders insist it was, British rule abroad was at least as cruel as it was at home. She singles out the “English vice” of flogging as a prime example of a system so dedicated to torture it gives rise to a suspicion of some deep psychotic compulsion:

There is a suggestion of vengeance in the violent beating of convicts in the early years of white Australian history. Also a sense of tremendous anxiety, a vulnerability almost, on the part of the British flagellators, is evident on every page of the meticulous records they kept documenting the punishments administered to their own people. The passing centuries, and understanding that habits, beliefs and traditions were different in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannot obscure a feeling that such treatment has echoes in the systemic inequality that curdles the British body politic today. It is sometimes argued that these punishments were standard practice for the age, and thus, no acknowledgement, apology, restitution or pity is necessary. But blood spurting out of a back in the eighteenth century caused the same agony as it would now; human suffering remains the same, whenever it is inflicted; it is not ahistorical to understand this.

It’s impossible in a review of this length to give proper due to the thoroughness of Callil’s research. I don’t have room to describe her other significant forebears, or the book’s short diversions into the journeys of her Irish and Lebanese ancestors.

It seems presumptuous of me to suggest that what this doyen of British letters needed was a good editor, yet so much of the background gets in the way of the biographies. Another way of putting it is that, unlike Bad Faith, her canvas here is just too large for her characters. As the reader — this reader anyhow — is absorbed by the dire economics of the stocking-knitting trade, or the fates of Leicestershire and Lincolnshire towns, or how the Independent congregations that thrived there turned them into centres of dissent, or where convicts awaiting transportation slept in the rotting hulks, she loses sight of Sary and George, not to mention the Mary Anns and Jameses. Nor is this always helped by an excellent index, and copious endnotes and bibliography.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked this book, and I think it worth reading, even if that can be a struggle. Sometimes Callil’s history tips a bit far into polemic for historians whose apprehension of the past is more nuanced, though given her project it’s understandable. But it seems that she ran into that fundamental dilemma confronting many a writer basing a work on historical figures. She was lucky that the records available were accessible and revealing, but the very fact of the low status of her ancestors meant that gaps would need to be filled by historical imagination. All along I kept thinking that the stories would work better as fiction, but what would be gained as a novel would be lost in documented veracity and gravitas.

The capacity for cruelty lies within each of us — this is the truth of psychology and novel-writing. The historian may demonstrate, as Inga Clendinnen did, how political and social conditions will allow for its systemic expression or, conversely, encourage our better angels. All I can contribute to the controversy is the idea that the task for each of us, biographer, novelist or historian, is to find a valuable place on the continuum.

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Captain Abbott’s pick https://insidestory.org.au/captain-abbotts-pick/ Fri, 02 Oct 2020 06:11:46 +0000 https://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=63431

Britain’s man-gets-job frenzy was less about Tony Abbott than it seemed

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A great national drama takes its ingredients from a common repertoire. A big cause. Worthy protagonists. A strong narrative arc. Gripping episodes. Intriguing tributaries. A public engrossed. Affecting rhetoric. Defining phrases and images. Moments of humour, poignancy and surprise. A theatrical resolution. A genuine sense of catharsis. A stock of binding memories. And a media knocked out of its socks by the sheer thrill of it all.

Margaret Thatcher’s epic fall had the lot. The vertiginous week that followed Diana’s death came close. Since that 1990s peak, the pictures have got small. Brexit, Scotland, wars, elections: all have dipped well below the decade’s high bar (though the first two are having another go in extra time). Between the craving for release and the means to satisfy it there now lies an abyss, whose hallmark is the political–media spasm, or PMS. Facilitated by classical politics’ and canonical media’s submission to social media, the PMS is defined here as an unhinged, self-cannibalising public furore that debases whatever is ostensibly at issue. Not just the rotten fruit of this millennial declension, the PMS is its very avatar — as is exhibited, with fitting bathos, by Tony Abbott’s starring role in a recent production.

More dirt bucket than welcome mat, the instant local reaction to a Sun report on 25 August trumpeting the pick of “our wizard of Oz” for an undefined role promoting London’s post-Brexit trade was also impressively viperous. The ousted member for Warringah was described as a “failed Australian prime minister” (passim), “right-wing Australian anglophile” and “antipodean mercenary”; a “man of primitive opinions” and “one of the most notorious attack dingoes of Aussie politics”; “a has-been from the other side of the world of whom we know little and care less” yet also a “travelling player on the right-wing thinktank circuit” and one of a “clown parade of other fruit loops”; an “unreconstructed example of Australian chauvinist manhood”; a “walking dinosaur… defective, morally bankrupt, intellectually inadequate”; and a “strange” and “unnecessary” choice because of his antediluvian views on climate change, same-sex marriage and labour rights, and his “political gunslinging,” “inability to command loyalty” and “directionless leadership.”

Haughtiest of all, naturally from a Guardian star columnist, was Abbott’s depiction as an oddball “from the remaindered bin in Australia” who “might see his role pushing British exports as an escalating scale of rugby club dares,” and the move itself “like learning that Theresa May had accepted a part on Neighbours, possibly as some kind of Mrs Mangel reboot.” Abbott, congeniality itself in a Zoom chat with the House of Commons foreign affairs committee three days later, told a bumptious Labour MP, “I do not normally read the Guardian; I am sure it is a wonderful newspaper, but it is not my staple reading.” This didn’t get into the paper.

The prize for invective-solely-designed-to-go-viral (from a strong field) went to Labour’s shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry, carrying the unfair advantage of five years in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet: “[A] man addicted to picking fights — confrontational, aggressive, thin-skinned and nasty,” “sexist,” “sleazy,” “Islamophobic,” an “offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change–denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist.” Her 800-word volley began with responses from among the “host of Australian political contacts” she had texted with the news (variations on “that must be a joke,” their “uniform theme”), and ended: “[If] Tony Abbott is the best answer Boris Johnson can come up with [to Britain’s trade deal void], we’re in even more trouble than we think.”

“During his brief, two-year premiership,” those contacts had told her, “his trade minister — Andrew Robb — succeeded in translating the previous Labor government’s legwork into agreements with China, Japan and South Korea, as well as progressing Australia’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All Abbott did was come along at the end of the process and sign the treaties. He has no hands-on experience of trade negotiations whatsoever.”

The one–two punch — he’s a cad, and clueless on trade — was something everyone could pitch in with, from arts, environmental, LBGT+ and sporting celebrities to MPs and diplomatic veterans of the Uruguay round. London mayor Sadiq Khan (“misogynistic and homophobic views”) and Scotland’s premier Nicola Sturgeon (“He’s a misogynist, a sexist, a climate-change denier who shouldn’t be any kind of envoy”), neither of them ever slow to hitch a ride on a passing bandwagon, drew from the now ubiquitous litany, though Labour leader Keir Starmer once more proved to be a canny operator: “I have real concerns about Tony Abbott and I don’t think he’s the right person for the job. And if I was prime minister I wouldn’t appoint him.”


Abbott’s exact status was still unknown, as the man himself confirmed on 1 September at that Commons hearing: “I think I would call it a role rather than a job… there is nothing official as yet.” Responding with good humour to grandstanding darts from Labour and Scots nationalist MPs (“a bit of lively banter and partisan sparring… brings back happy memories [of] the parliamentary chamber floor”), his message, consistent with many op-eds and speeches since the 2016 Brexit vote, was that London should follow up a bilateral trade deal with Canberra by joining the interim Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

More spicy were comments on end-of-life care and lockdown’s “psychic damage” at a lecture that morning to the Policy Exchange think tank — whose chair is Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s high commissioner in London — which showed the Guardian’s diplomatic editor “how Abbott’s courting of controversy made his possible appointment by Johnson a high political risk.”

On the other side, the cheerleading of the Sun (or “Murdoch’s Sun,” to use the correct vernacular) lacked the paper’s usual fizz, given its exclusive that the “forthright Aussie” is “to be unveiled as Britain’s new trade deal supremo” or, more formally, “joint President of Britain’s relaunched Board of Trade.” Johnson himself, as so often in these months, was absent from the front line, leaving ministers to defend the still-hazy appointment.

A mannequin could plausibly have done better. Health secretary Matt Hancock, a gung-ho crusader amid every Covid-19 setback, quailed at a Sky News presenter’s checklist of Abbott quotes. Liz Truss, the Panglossian trade secretary who doubles as minister for women and equalities, when asked “why is it right that someone who is widely viewed as sexist, homophobic and a climate-change denier should be representing Britain around the world?” replied, “What I’d say about Tony Abbott is that he’s a former prime minister of Australia. Australia is a key ally of the United Kingdom and he has done a very good job in areas like trade.”

Through this wan defence, Australian ex-diplomats had already bowled some scornful zingers. Abbott would be “a sporadic distraction, as is his wont” in any Australian–UK process, not “window dresser” but “window breaker,” former trade negotiator Tim Ward opined in the right-wing Telegraph, adding that “[given] how destabilising his very presence seems to be, it could even be viewed as a cunning ploy by Australia to rattle the other side.” Mike Rann, who preceded Downer as high commissioner, said Abbott was known for “picking a scrap with anyone,” then nailed press coverage with a sly mention of Johnson’s most hapless cabinet placeman.

A trio of ex–Australian PMs who had jousted with Abbott, now regulars in London’s media firmament and treated with the deference that status entails, also joined the fray, thickening the flavour of an Australian proxy war fought on British shores, a kind of contrived semblance — once more, the second time as bathos — of ABC’s spellbinding The Killing Season.

Beyond doubting that Abbott could actually negotiate on behalf of the UK (“awkward to say the least”), Malcolm Turnbull added little to the caustic portrait of “wrecker” Abbott in his hefty autobiography, while Kevin Rudd (“Is the UK joking?”) took another chance to assail “Bozo the Clown’s” climate and health record. “If the UK goes through with this, he will be an albatross around their neck.” Julia Gillard’s own Sky News gig was a model of message discipline, first in promoting a book, then in holding to a tight script over her viral 2012 speech, fixedly not naming its targets. (“I stand by every word but I don’t think I need to add to it. It’s not for me to work out who should be the UK trade envoy or specialist.”)

For their part, some of Abbott’s ideological confrères were initially stunned by the way that the Sun’s 250-word pebble had, Withnail & Ilike, set off an avalanche by mistake. A more downbeat tone might have served them better. (“Oz reject is Brit pick,” or “Aussie ex-PM bats for Blighty” — more originals on request.) Talking to themselves, they had omitted to game-plan his character and record becoming headline news in the old country. But as the vitriol fed on itself, as per the modern PMS, a retaliatory barrage, notably male-heavy, was let loose, its gist that Abbott was being traduced and merits the post.

Lamenting “personal abuse” and “cheap caricature,” the monthly Critic’s political editor Graham Stewart saw Abbott in eminent terms: an “Anglophile former prime minister of one of Britain’s friendliest allies” and a former Rhodes scholar and monarchist on whom the Queen bestowed the Order of Australia “for his life of public service” (accolades become a mite rickety) with an effective record of “bilateral diplomacy.” Daniel Hannan, prolific evangelist for Brexit and the Anglosphere, echoed the claim (“He knows how to get ambitious trade deals done. We are lucky to have him”), as did Downer (“Tony has huge experience of navigating through the thorny bushes of trade agreements”), while the Adam Smith Institute’s Matthew Lesh said he can “provide the advice and advocacy to get deals over the final, contentious hurdles that inevitably develop at a political level.”

Lesh’s vigorous polemic conceded “some questionable comments” by Abbott “in the past,” but defended him by referring to the supportive testimony of Abbott’s sister Christine Forster and late gay friend Christopher Pearson, the “deranged hatred” of a left now “rushing for the pitchforks,” how British views of Abbott have been “twisted” by Gillard’s “out-of-context speech,” and even Peter Hartcher’s morning-after column in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Being a conservative, with traditional social views, should not disqualify someone from all positions in public life,” Lesh argued.

That same day, 4 September, former Abbott adviser Terry Barnes published an eerily similar piece (a “flawed” man who “has said unwise, even stupid, things in the past — who hasn’t?”… whose image is “framed by his political enemies”… “vicious caricature”… “a skilled negotiator who can reconcile competing interests”… “nobody remembers the context of that fiery speech”…).


The PMS, imperious offspring of the pre-internet era’s “media circus,” is happiest in a vacuum. Information tends to get in its way. By now this one had lasted for nine days without a single new fact. Equally familiar was this PMS’s pattern: an ogre, affixed with twittified bio and shaming quotes, becomes the pretext for cartoonish, self-inflatable sloganeering that not only elicits an imitative defence but also shapes even the less reductive outpouring. The only thing in doubt was how it would exhaust itself.

Whispers of another backflip, a motif of Johnson’s premiership, began to spread. But on 4 September, with Julia’s Sky interview also doing the rounds and another weekend’s torrid headlines in sight, a hard-hatted Boris, asked where Tony stood in light of the row, delivered a typically writhing answer: “There’s going to be an announcement about the composition of the board of trade. I obviously don’t agree with those sentiments at all, but then I don’t agree with everyone who serves the government in an unpaid capacity on hundreds of boards across the country. And I can’t be expected to do so. What I would say about Tony Abbott is this is a guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal-democratic nation of Australia. It’s an amazing country, it’s a freedom-loving country, it’s a liberal country. There you go, I think that speaks for itself.”

By late afternoon, it was official: “the Honourable Tony Abbott” would be one of nine advisers to the board of trade, just as the Nine group’s Bevan Shields had intimated on day one, channelling an evidently impeccable source. (Abbott will serve in “some sort of advisory capacity,” he had posted.) The board, one of eleven committees tasked with refuelling UK strategy in key policy areas, includes Patricia Hewitt, the Canberra-born former trade secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Linda Yueh, economist and broadcaster, and investment banker William Russell, also mayor of London’s financial district as well as a member of the previous board suspended in July. That Russell functions as a friend of China’s establishment, with the ineluctable tangles the position now involves, raised zero interest amid the PMS.

That, for the present, was that. Now, between quarterly meetings with new colleagues, Abbott can get down to the work — unpaid, expenses aside, and scarcely glamorous — of “[engaging] extensively with industry, communities, farmers and consumer groups across the UK, to ensure a range of voices are heard as the UK develops its independent trade policy.” As he customises this bland spec, Zoom-networking an Australia–East Asia–UK triangle, progress will also depend on Brexit’s endgame with the European Union (in short: a trade deal or not?), and even on how Britain’s stew of economic and political uncertainties, not least the course of Boris Johnson’s government, plays out. Among these, a “growing Tory love for Australia,” albeit tendentious and needy, is cohesive for the party, with Abbott himself the emblem. It’s not you, it’s us, might well be the unspoken declaration.

More tasty are incipient signs of a roving commission for Abbott. The Financial Times reports this week that home secretary Priti Patel’s pondering the idea of sending far afield the migrants (Iranian, Afghan, Sudanese and more) who crossed the English Channel on small vessels “is further evidence of the influence of Tony Abbott’s ideas on Boris Johnson’s government.” Ascension Island in the south Atlantic was one candidate, Shetland in the North Sea another. (This chimera jolted recall of an observation by the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner in 1949, regarding the doomed Anglo-American venture to oust Albania’s communist regime, as recounted by the KGB spy Kim Philby: “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British own an island within easy reach.”)

Here is the second potential seed of the next Abbott spasm, the first being the fintech entrepreneur Anne Boden’s barbed declaration of pride when her own trade board membership became known: “[It] is important that we have challenging voices at such an important body. I support diversity and so did this woman,” linking to Julia Gillard’s famous speech.


The PMS was wilting from the moment of Johnson’s interview, though the Guardian’s autopump turned Friday’s front-page lead “Pressure on PM to drop ‘misogynist’ trade adviser” into Saturday’s “PM appoints ‘misogynist’ Abbott as trade adviser.” By then the next spasm was being given lift-off by Extinction Rebellion’s two-week protest carnival, as the eco-activists’ blockage of roads and newspaper deliveries, plus its mounting of a Titanic-themed posh tea party and a model lighthouse named Greta Thunberg, incited the gamut of reaction from fury to ridicule.

Abbott fever left no trace. That may have owed a little to the swift handover to Extinction Rebellion. But two factors are more fundamental (and also fit XR, Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip, and Black Lives Matter in its local variant). First, the PMS exists in an eternal present, absorbing into itself all other temporalities. In a flash, it dominates. Once popped, it vanishes. Thanks to a first in human history — the melding of instant amnesia and instant retrievability — it is also ever available for an encore. When that hits, and the manic carousel is unblushingly reprised, there is no sense of a previous iteration, since everything now belongs to the new eternal present.

Second, the PMS is always primarily about itself, reducing to effluent its notional subject and putative ethical concerns. Driven way beyond its natural life or level by value-spawning attention, clicks and noise, it operates to disallow any resolution or release. It can never offset the vast resources it devours and the coercive hyperbole of its language. Thus the PMS is a guarantor of disappointment.

From the consumer side, to accept the PMS on its own terms would be to overlook its many foreclosures. An oblivious British public was given no hint that Abbott himself, if unlikely ever to be stuck with the most plangent judgement in The Killing Season’s four hours — Jenny Macklin’s “people are complex” — might be viewed in other than Manichean terms. Neither his own capsule self-portrait in response to David Marr’s Political Animal — “a more nuanced and complex character than perhaps many of the standard left-leaning critics would concede” — nor the book itself, nor anything else from the Abbott oeuvre, got a look-in. The PMS can’t accommodate nuance, complexity — or curiosity.

Neither did themes pertinent to Abbott’s heralded job receive much attention during the PMS: the contours of an Australia–UK trade negotiation, the tenability of the Anglosphere, and the wider Tory infatuation with down under (Isaac Levido’s key strategic role in Number 10 as but one example) — or even the fate of its Labour counterpart. The British Foreign Policy Group’s Sophie Gaston, viewing “today’s antipodean dalliance” in equable terms (“something feels unique about the Australian influence in British politics in 2020”), was an exception.

The political–media spasm can well afford to ignore such laments. The now-unguarded public realm, beneficiary of and in thrall to social media’s flattening of silos, is its playpen. No wonder the great national drama — as music hall to film, or silents to talkies — could not survive. What the PMS can offer in place is less than clear. But when so many are happy to play Bozo the Clown, perhaps that hardly matters. •

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Imperial lives https://insidestory.org.au/imperial-lives/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:03:38 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=62500

Books | Three intersecting figures illuminate an age that is still with us

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Students in many countries have campaigned for the “decolonisation” of universities and their curricula. The debate following the death of George Floyd and the reactions against the protests have lent urgency to efforts to come to terms not only with racism but also with empire and its legacies. But what was colonialism? The obvious answers refer to states controlling and exploiting territories and peoples beyond their borders, and often overlook the substance of the many relationships, international and interpersonal, that made up whatever colonialism was.

Among the British, notwithstanding several decades of scholarship that has insisted on and explored the global relationships constitutive of modern Britain, a sense that empire was nevertheless an add-on has endured. Yet Edward Said demonstrated nearly thirty years ago, in the discussion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park that kicked off his powerful and persuasive book Culture and Imperialism (1993), that slavery and commerce energised the most domestic and provincial dimensions of English life. If it does not make literal, geographic sense to say that the Caribbean was located in England, it was and is true in a more profound sense that England was in the Caribbean and that the Caribbean was in England.

Kate Fullagar is a historian of the eighteenth century who teaches at Macquarie University. Her first book, The Savage Visit (2012), reconstructed the stories of Indigenous individuals who visited Britain from the sixteenth century onwards, some of whom became objects of feverish interest and fantasy, the vehicles for whatever European theory of the exotic was most salient at that moment. If it drew attention to one sense in which empire might have been more a two-way street than is typically assumed, that book’s core argument retained a British focus: it dealt with changing metropolitan interests in the “savage” and exotic. The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist returns to some of the same characters and themes but exemplifies a more genuinely cross-cultural and multi-local history through three intersecting biographies.

The warrior is Ostenaco, a Cherokee born in the 1710s in territory that embraced parts of the modern states of Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas. He became prominent from mid-century in diplomacy and conflict with the British, which was complicated by British–French hostilities in the American southeast, the separate operations of colonial governors and other agents in Charleston, Williamsburg and elsewhere, and older rivalries among native nations.

Following a period of war, Ostenaco led peacemaking with the governor of the Virginia colony, and in early 1762 signalled his interest in travelling to England to meet George III. He undertook a nine-month trip and met the king twice before returning home to difficult years through the 1770s, marked by Indigenous resistance but also by successive Indigenous concessions in the face of the expansion of colonial settlement.

The voyager of Fullagar’s title is Mai, celebrated in Pacific history as Omai, and perhaps the best known of all Indigenous visitors to Britain in the eighteenth century. He was preceded by Ahutoru from the island of Ra’iatea, who was brought to France by Bougainville and spent a year there over 1769–70, and by Tupaia, a priest, navigator and artist whom Joseph Banks hoped to host but who died in Batavia on the Endeavour’s passage home. Captain Cook was disinclined to bring Islanders back to England, but Mai travelled with Tobias Furneaux, the captain of Cook’s consort, the Adventure.

Mai’s motivations for visiting England were well documented: he too was from Ra’iatea — like Tahiti, part of the archipelago of the Society Islands — and his community had suffered invasion by the warriors of Bora Bora. He sought an alliance with George III and weapons that might enable revenge. Hosted by Banks in London, his company was famously celebrated by high society. He joined Banks on several journeys, including a summer tour of Yorkshire, and eventually returned to the Pacific on Cook’s third voyage. Though he reached home with gifts of all sorts, including a suit of armour and a horse, he fell out with Cook as to where and how he should be resettled. He was afterwards able to launch some kind of assault against the occupation of his home island, but with inconclusive results.

Ostenaco and Mai were linked by “the artist” of the title, Joshua Reynolds, who painted them both during their London sojourns. Mai’s celebrity is reflected in the fact that he was depicted not only by the president of the Royal Academy but also by several other eminent painters of the period — Nathaniel Dance and William Parry as well as William Hodges and John Webber, the latter the official artists of Cook’s second and third voyages respectively.

Reynolds notably painted the Polynesian at scale — the finished work is nearly two and a half metres high, an ambitious portrait by the standards of the period. Fullagar is undecided as to whether it was successful. In the context of the twenty-first-century art world, the painting has become a hallmark of British interest in the exotic, though it has been controversially sequestered in a private collection. The contemporary response was apparently muted, though the artist kept the painting on show in his studio, implying that he personally considered it an important achievement. Its oddity is perhaps its relative neutrality: although the tattoos on Mai’s wrist and forearms are accurately depicted, Reynolds otherwise evokes an almost generic non-European, albeit one with a distinctively noble bearing. (A widely circulated print, based on a painting by Nathaniel Dance, localised Mai more explicitly, showing him holding Polynesian artefacts.)

In any event, the work was more successful than Reynolds’s portrait of Ostenaco, painted nearly fifteen years earlier, which the artist himself consigned to storage. In the context of this triple biography, Fullagar’s account of the painter’s career, commitments and interests is absorbing. While scholars have long regarded Reynolds from the vantage point of his success and his prescriptive Discourses on Art, he comes across here less as the establishment’s aesthetician than as an intellectual unable to make up his mind about the most burning issues of the day, and particularly the question that divided his friends Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke: was empire an expression of rapacious injustice or a progressive endeavour that advanced global civilisation through commerce? In fact, as Fullagar puts it, Reynolds was a consummate society artist who found ways of pleasing opposed political constituencies, and was able to sustain a “two-way position with more flair than flailing.”

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist is imaginatively conceived and engagingly written. It builds on biographic experiments such as those of Natalie Zemon Davis and the historical anthropology of Greg Dening and Anne Salmond, acknowledging that the lives linked by Reynolds’s portraits were not all the same, and not those of “selves” of the modern individualistic sort. Any cross-cultural narrative will struggle to evoke the inner life of Indigenous subjects as precisely or persuasively as the motivations and reflections of those who left personal writings behind or were intimately described by others. If asymmetry is inevitable, it is nevertheless critical that historians attempt to do justice to the diversity of perspectives and experiences that made up “an age of empire” — not least because that age, of global interaction, commerce, conflict, exploitation and danger, is with us still.

In the latest round of the “culture wars,” colonialism has become a thing that people defend or condemn through posts on social media. No doubt contemporary polities and communities need to position themselves by, in effect, voting for or against passages in world history. But our understandings and imaginative lives are enriched not by those sorts of binary adjudications but by stories we weren’t aware of, by going the distance, as Fullagar’s book does. As Julian Barnes once wrote, “There’s one thing I’ll say for history. It’s very good at finding things.” •

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“I think you are playing the ‘Vice-Regal’ hand with skill and wisdom” https://insidestory.org.au/i-think-you-are-playing-the-vice-regal-hand-with-skill-and-wisdom/ Tue, 14 Jul 2020 23:31:28 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=62067

The Queen’s private secretary walked a very fine line during the months leading up to the dismissal

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Among the insights provided by the Palace Letters, released yesterday by the National Archives, is Sir John Kerr’s description of himself as “an extrovert and activist.” The comment comes in a letter on 24 November 1975 — thirteen days after his dismissal of the Whitlam government — to “My dear Private Secretary,” Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s right-hand man.

It’s clear from the letter that the governor-general is hurt by the attacks on him but is taking the advice of “my few close friends and advisers” not to defend his position publicly, although “this is difficult for an extrovert and activist.” He suggests he could still be tempted, though, if “the calumnies and criticisms become unbearable.” The message that comes back from Charteris is unambiguous — please don’t — and that advice is accepted.

With due allowance for hindsight, Gough Whitlam made a bad choice in appointing Kerr to a position where he revelled in the trappings of office and refused to see himself as a “cipher” — the description once used by Whitlam — who was duty-bound to follow the advice of the democratically elected prime minister. It points to one of Whitlam’s weaknesses: he was a poor judge of character.

The letters confirm what Kerr has previously claimed: he did not tell the Queen beforehand of his action on 11 November. In his letter to Charteris on the day of the dismissal, he writes: “I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because under the Constitution the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance, though it is, of course, my duty to tell her immediately.”

This is an impeccable exposition of the principle that the Queen should be kept away from political controversy. But the letters reveal much more: the months of voluminous correspondence between Kerr and the Palace that not just kept the Queen informed of the unfolding political and constitutional crisis but also canvassed all the options available to him, including dismissal. Most strikingly, the response from Charteris, who was passing much of the correspondence on to the Queen, was to support Kerr in his view that he could use his reserve powers and to commend him once he had done so.

On 4 November, a week before the dismissal, Charteris writes to Kerr in the following terms:

When the reserve powers, or the prerogative, of the Crown, to dissolve Parliament (or to refuse to give a dissolution) have not been used for many years, it is often argued that such powers no longer exist. I do not believe this to be true. I think those powers do exist, and the fact that they do, even if they are not used, affects the situation and the way people think and act. This is the value of them. But to use them is a heavy responsibility and it is only at the very end when there is demonstrably no other course that they should be used.

Here Charteris was taking a partisan position, even if the legal position was accurate. It was Whitlam who argued that the reserve powers did not exist or, if they did, that they were a dead letter. It is the difference between law and convention. The governor-general is the constitutional head of the armed forces, but no one suggests he or she should be the one calling out the troops. Whitlam’s argument was that in a democracy the power to dissolve parliament and call an election could be exercised only on the advice of the prime minister. Others disagree, but that is not the point: Charteris was siding with Kerr and the Liberals against Whitlam.

More than that, he was actively supporting Kerr: “I think you are playing the ‘Vice-Regal’ hand with skill and wisdom.” While Charteris counselled that the reserve powers should be used only as a last resort, he never suggested they should be avoided altogether.

After the speaker of the House of Representatives, Labor’s Gordon Scholes, writes to the Queen on 11 November asking her to restore Whitlam to office as prime minister on the grounds that he continued to command a majority in the lower house, Charteris replies that only the governor-general could do this. “The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution.” (My emphasis.)

This too was siding with the Liberals, who argued that the governor-general had no alternative but to act, and against Labor, which argued he must not.

Charteris not only supports Kerr: he is effusive in his praise of him. When Kerr tells him after the dismissal that he received a complimentary letter from Sir Robert Menzies, Charteris says he is “delighted… It must have been reassuring to find that he thinks history will credit you with having acted rightly.”

History has not been so kind. Though it is generally accepted that the reserve power of dismissal does exist, there remains fierce argument over whether it should have been used.

Kerr was faced with a deadlock created by two implacable political enemies unwilling to give ground. But there is substantial evidence that the situation could have been resolved politically. By 11 November a number of Liberal backbenchers were prepared to concede defeat and pass the budget. Kerr made a series of political judgements: that the opposition senators would not break ranks; that Whitlam’s proposal to temporarily fund government services through the banks would not work; and that an election had to be held before the end of the year.

At the same time that Kerr was canvassing his options and ultimate intentions with Charteris, he was keeping Whitlam in the dark. More than that, he was actively deceiving him by suggesting he was playing a passive role, and giving no hint of his intentions for fear that Whitlam would ask the Queen to sack him first. At the same time he was leaving Malcolm Fraser confident enough to stick to his guns in blocking the budget at a time when he was coming under enormous pressure, including from members of his own party, to buckle.

Kerr’s justification for deceiving Whitlam was to avoid exposing the Queen to an impossible situation. As far back as September, before the opposition had blocked the budget in the Senate, Kerr is expressing concerns that Whitlam would ask the Queen to sack him before he had a chance to sack Whitlam. Charteris is sympathetic but ultimately offers Kerr no comfort, writing on 2 October:

If such an approach was made you may be sure that The Queen would take most unkindly to it. There would be considerable comings and goings, but I think it is right that I should make the point that at the end of the road The Queen, as a Constitutional Sovereign, would have no option but to follow the advice of her Prime Minister.

Nine days after the dismissal, Kerr raises with Charteris whether he should have given Whitlam prior warning of his intentions to give him the option of calling an election rather than be sacked:

History will doubtless provide an answer to this question but I was in a position where, in my opinion, I simply could not risk the outcome for the sake of the Monarchy. If in the period of say twenty-four hours, during which he was considering his position, he advised The Queen in the strongest of terms that I should be immediately dismissed, the position would then have been that either I would in fact be trying to dismiss him whilst he was trying to dismiss me, an impossible position for The Queen, or someone totally inexperienced in the developments of the crisis up to that point, be it a new Governor-General or an Administrator…

Maybe, but this didn’t justify the ambush of Whitlam. It was one thing for Whitlam to threaten to go to the Queen as a means of putting pressure on Kerr; it is uncertain whether he would have acted on that threat. Kerr was more focused on protecting the monarchy than on safeguarding Australian democracy.

The correspondence captures the bizarre nature of our system of constitutional monarchy: the Queen, sitting on the other side of the world, has a role in our system of government that, though largely symbolic, can on rare occasions involve real decisions. Kerr’s fear of dismissal points to a flaw in the system that has yet to be addressed, along with the Senate’s power to block supply — the trigger for the 1975 constitutional crisis. The Queen has less independent power in Britain than she does in Australia.

The National Archives released the Palace letters on Bastille Day, a celebration of the French revolution. The Palace letters deserve to revive the debate on an Australian republic. •

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Universities, a shared crisis, and two centre-right governments https://insidestory.org.au/universities-a-shared-crisis-and-two-centre-right-governments/ Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:11:07 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=62009

Britain and Australia have reacted very differently to the pandemic’s impact on higher education

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We are deep enough into the pandemic to know the world won’t snap back. For months, academics have been pushing back their conference dates, hoping to convene when the virus passed. But that hope has faded.

Slowly but inevitably we have moved to the Zoom symposium. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, log on. Many participate enthusiastically, flooding the chat box with commentary on proceedings. Others half-listen amid email and social media. It is a new space for scholarly debate and discussion, yet to develop its own rituals and courtesies.

Among such conferences last week was the fifth Buckingham Festival of Higher Education, co-sponsored by the University of Buckingham, a rare private institution in Britain’s largely public system, and the Higher Education Policy Institute in Oxford.

The British know that policy ideas flow between our nations. Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme, or HECS, became the basis of student funding in England, while Canberra imported the idea of research and teaching assessment reviews from Whitehall.

So it was an honour to be the Australian speaking in an opening session alongside the former Conservative minister for universities, science, research and innovation, Jo Johnson, and prominent policy adviser Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative election manifesto for Jo’s brother Boris.

To Australian ears, a British policy discussion about higher education is slightly surreal. Johnson, like his distinguished predecessor David Willetts, is extraordinarily knowledgeable about universities, alive to the nuances of policy choices, and committed to incentives rather than regulation to influence institutional behaviour.

As minister, Johnson stressed the importance of research in transforming the British economy, and brought together funding agencies in a single entity, UK Research and Innovation. Since retiring at the last election — he opposed Brexit — Johnson has accepted roles at Harvard and King’s College London alongside a return to journalism.

In his Buckingham presentation, Johnson reiterated two themes from his ministerial career: concern for teaching quality (he established the Office for Students) and a focus on innovation. Through research, he suggested, Britain can renew its industrial base.

This central role for universities was picked up by Rachel Wolf. She noted the decline of productivity across the Western world and argued that innovation driven by research and development is the most plausible way of creating new prosperity. Wolf referred to speeches over the past decade in which Boris Johnson suggested that strong university research underpins national prosperity — a view that is now a tenet of the Conservative Party.

Linking productivity to the good health of universities is not an argument often articulated by the Australian government, so it is worth reflecting on how tertiary policy in two similar systems has responded to the disruptions of Covid-19.

Buckingham vice-chancellor Sir Anthony Seldon opened the conference by describing the pandemic as “the biggest challenge to the university sector in history.” It is certainly confronting. The Black Death permanently closed five of Europe’s thirty universities. We might imagine destruction of similar proportions as this infection, and those that follow, cut their way through the sector.

As with the Black Death, major dislocation also encourages innovation. We are living the future already — the end of the familiar lecture, the arrival of virtual instruction, universities operating for months at a stretch with no one on campus. Covid-19 raises questions about expensive investment in infrastructure and invites students to put together a degree selecting courses from many different institutions.

It may also change how governments see universities. For if everyone can teach online, if courses look interchangeable, and if the nexus between teaching and research looks ever more tenuous, can we still assert that each university is unique, separate and necessarily autonomous?

Amid these challenges, the policy responses in Britain and Australia tell us something about contemporary party ideology.

Both countries are led by right-of-centre governments, each tested and returned in elections during 2019. Australians study at universities at a similar rate to their British counterparts, and both nations have benefited greatly from a flow of international students.

We might anticipate, therefore, similar responses to the crisis.

The enthusiasm for tertiary education evinced by Jo Johnson is not the only narrative around. On the contrary, both nations have heard sustained criticism of universities, some of it levelled by senior ministers — a chorus of complaints about arrogant universities resisting government priorities, valuing research over teaching, and failing to tackle community ambitions.

In Australia, politicians criticise universities for supporting their operations by recruiting students from China. In Britain, as John Morgan wrote in Times Higher Education, Conservatives trying to attract non-graduate voters “may find universities a tempting target for economic and cultural hits.”

There is ample evidence of voter resentment against the perceived privilege of university graduates. Antagonism is accentuated by the collapse of familiar vocational careers, the eclipse of apprenticeships, and the destruction of certainties about hard work, fairness and opportunity. The world no longer seems predictable or navigable. People hoping for careers in stable organisations find their moorings kicked away.

So, if a government wanted to act against universities, the Covid-19 crisis provides the ideal moment. It could be used to crystallise the public critique built over recent years and justify major policy changes.

How then to read the signals?

In Britain they seem decidedly mixed. In May, Boris Johnson’s government turned down requests to bail out institutions facing huge losses from falling international enrolments. More recently, universities minister Michelle Donelan criticised English universities for offering dumbed-down courses to keep up student numbers.

It seems Covid-19 will coincide with the end of a long period of growth in higher education in Britain. Universities are to be held to their current student enrolment, with caps on further domestic expansion. Yet the government has also worked to reopen access for foreign students and promoted Britain as the preferred destination when international education resumes.

But the most significant British response reflects the policy priority articulated by Jo Johnson and Rachel Wolf. Whitehall has announced two packages to support research by universities and institutes, which will see the government covering up to 80 per cent of lost income from international students, with a further £280 million to support key research projects, particularly responses to the pandemic.

The two packages acknowledge a truth in both nations: income from international education is essential to underwrite research, supplementing funding from governments and philanthropy. Without global education, British universities face a projected shortfall of at least £2.5 billion in the year ahead.

This response recognises the centrality of higher education to Britain’s research effort. As Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told Nature in June, “If a vaccine were to emerge from the United Kingdom, it would emerge from a UK university.”

To an outsider, two logics seem at work in Britain — a scepticism about the value of universities among education authorities and a contrasting view among economic agencies that universities are vital to recovery.

To the detriment of universities, there is less ambiguity in Australia. The federal government has not offered to compensate the sector for the loss of international students, who until recently contributed Australia’s fourth-largest export earnings. Canberra did guarantee current domestic student numbers, though these enrolments were not under threat. On four separate occasions the federal government changed regulations to exclude public universities from support offered to other employers.

As one government senator enthusiastically posted on social media, there is “no need to bail out bloated universities” — they should feel the pain of relying on Chinese students to pay the bills. The senator didn’t criticise the similar dependence of other sectors — notably agriculture and tourism — on exports to China. Unlike universities, they were provided with access to JobKeeper subsidies.

In late June, federal education minister Dan Tehan announced funding changes allied to new regulations. The government will reduce funding per domestic student by an overall 15 per cent. This includes a dramatic reduction in public funding for the study of humanities, law, economics, business and social sciences.

The minister also used the opportunity to cut any tie between research and teaching; in future, university funding is solely for student learning. A new translation fund, financed by cuts to teaching, will encourage “linkage” with industry, but early estimates suggest 7000 university research staff will lose their jobs as a result of the minister’s package and lost international income.

The minister subsequently announced a panel to consider research policy, but has so far given no commitment to countering universities’ revenue shortfall, estimated at between $3 billion and $5 billion annually.

In other words, like-minded governments can reach different conclusions about the future of higher education. They can seek to rebuild the sector as a national resource quickly, as in Britain, or they can use the opportunity to constrain public expenditure and reduce the span and reach of higher education, as in Australia.

The differences may reflect the personal view of leaders, but they can also be structural. Britain has many manufacturing and service industries that draw on university research, and a strong scientific tradition. The House of Lords includes former senior scholars, and links between key industrial, cultural, political and academic worlds may be stronger.

While governments diverge, the response of British and Australian universities to the pandemic has been consistent and impressive. Necessity favours invention, and changes that might otherwise take years were achieved in weeks. Entire courses were transferred online, and technology was deployed to handle student administration, exams, course guidance and counselling, and even graduation ceremonies.

International research collaboration has accelerated as public health authorities turn to universities for expert advice and vaccine development. The medical workforce has been bolstered by students volunteering in hospitals and mobile clinics. The sector demonstrated its public spirit and a determination to contribute amid adversity.

At a difficult moment we should take pride that academics, administrators and institutional leaders have demonstrated impressive ability to adapt and change. Though some perished, most universities survived the Black Death, and went on to shape much of the world we now inhabit.

We can do so again. •

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Before the dust settled https://insidestory.org.au/before-the-dust-settled/ Thu, 04 Jun 2020 05:55:44 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=61357

Television | The ABC’s satirical take on the Maralinga tests captures the confusion and the wilful blindness

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The rousing strains of “Jerusalem” play in the background as Maralinga’s less-than-savvy camp commandant, General Lord “Cranky” Crankford (James Cromwell), combs his beard in front of a mirror draped in Union Jacks. “Everything tickety-boo?” he asks when he is interrupted by famed Australian soldier Major Leo Carmichael (Ewen Leslie). After a moment’s hesitation, Carmichael responds, “Not quite, sir.” Something is amiss at Maralinga — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.

In six pacy episodes, the ABC drama series Operation Buffalo takes its viewers on a cold war adventure. From the red-and-blue regalia of Cranky’s lodgings at Maralinga, viewers are whisked into the burnt-orange mulga-dotted landscape where Britain’s Operation Buffalo is taking place. But the story stretches well beyond the perimeter of the nuclear weapons testing site to 1950s Adelaide suburbia, the dark corners of Whitehall and the corridors of Parliament House in Canberra, all under the ever-present watch of ASIO, MI6 and the KGB.

In these settings, among the sex, scandal, intrigue and espionage, the true tale of Britain’s nuclear testing program in South Australia is synthesised, dramatised and satirised. Despite the humorously exaggerated characters, each episode is introduced with a reminder that Operation Buffalo was real. “This is a work of historical fiction,” the producers tell the viewer. “But a lot of the really bad history actually happened.”

While the satirical elements of Operation Buffalo can make it difficult to discern fact from fiction, several of the series’s key themes hew closely to the documented history of the Maralinga operation. Between September and October 1956, Britain tested four nuclear weapons in the heart of the South Australian desert. Because the tests were deemed essential for imperial defence, Australian soldiers were heavily involved, though not well informed. British scientists ran the show, and little was known — or at least revealed — about the likely effects of radiation on Australia’s landscape and population. Aboriginal people were gathered into missions to keep them off Country, though the efforts of just one man, Walter MacDougall, were not enough to secure Maralinga’s perimeter completely. Each of these elements is enough to ensure that the Maralinga story has been cast as one of the great betrayals of Australia’s land and people by the British Empire.

Much like those who served at real-life Maralinga, the characters in Operation Buffalo search for the facts about the operation. But will we ever know the “truth” about this episode in Australia’s history?

As that interaction between Cranky and Leo shows, Australia’s place in the British Empire is fundamental to this story. Nuclear weapons emerged from the second world war as the ultimate measure of scientific prowess and military might. The image of a mushroom cloud ballooning upwards was a sign of virility; a dud weapon, lying on the sand in the outback, was a sign of impotence. Or, in the case of the bumbling boffins whose task it was to ensure detonation, a sign of imperial incompetence.

Through Cranky and his colleagues in Whitehall, viewers get a glimpse of the imperial intricacies of this historical period. Before he was posted to Maralinga, Cranky served for decades as an Empire soldier, fighting “Boers, Hun and Nazis.” He is as befuddled as he is British, and has been sent to Maralinga to see out his days. Donning his military redcoat, he spends his days drinking bloody marys in his private dining room.

In other words, Maralinga is the place where Britain’s doddery former heroes and disgraced career diplomats are “sent to die.” But even in an area as remote as this, the Empire lives on. “God Save the Queen” is frequently played over the speakers, and a portrait of Elizabeth II hangs in the mess hall. Maralinga’s new meteorologist, harking from Cambridge, is none other than Dr Eva Lloyd-George (Jessica De Gouw), the fictional granddaughter of former British prime minister David Lloyd George.

Interestingly, several of the series’s most devout servants of Empire struggle to reconcile their involvement in the nuclear tests. In much of the literature on Maralinga, this was a moral position held only by Australians. By building this complexity into characters who have traditionally been cast as unquestioning followers of Queen and country, Operation Buffalo raises one of this history’s key anxieties: to what end were these tests actually striving?

It is not only government officials or those in charge who question the point of the testing through the series. The viewer is provoked to ask whether anyone understands the consequences of what they’re doing. Tests are nonchalantly rescheduled, often for the sake of drawing attention away from other events in camp. The scientists squabble like children. The meteorologist ignores unfavourable weather patterns. The soldiers and nurses know to keep quiet about the horrors they witness.

The viewer is slapped by the lack of understanding of — or concern about — the effects of radioactivity, acutely represented by the multitude of characters struck down by radiation sickness and delivered to the Maralinga hospital under the care of nurse Corinne Syddell (Adrienne Pickering). Most of these characters are left unnamed — they are simply soldiers undertaking daily manual labour around the camp — but these scenes point effectively to the real experiences of Australia’s nuclear veterans. Many fell ill and died young, without having had confirmation of what they knew to be true, that this had something to do with their work at Maralinga. They were not compensated.

The soldiers and workers on the ground were not the only ones exposed unwittingly to radiation. Little heed is given in popular accounts of this history to the families of those who served at Maralinga. Veteran testimonies from the 1980s Australian royal commission into the British nuclear tests demonstrate that it was not uncommon for wives to be exposed to radioactivity when they washed their husband’s uniforms. In Operation Buffalo, Leo Carmichael’s home and work lives collide violently when a balloon tracking radioactive fallout floats into the backyard of a young family in Adelaide and attaches itself to their Hills hoist, where two children play with it happily. Word of the balloon travels fast and Leo’s own children are invited to marvel at the mysterious object.

While there were no reported cases of meteorological balloons finding their way into suburban backyards during the tests, historians can confirm that invisible clouds of radioactive fallout tracked across the country. High readings of radioactivity were taken as far away as Queensland. As the series suggests, all of this was made possible by countless administrative errors and the impatience of two governments desperate to prove their military might.

Australia’s Anglophilic prime minister Robert Menzies is usually seen as bearing a heavy responsibility for this episode. But other Australian ministers and departmental officials were also complicit in the testing. Placated by booze and women, these politicians toddle along behind their British counterparts, leaving a trail of destruction. But for fictional attorney-general Dick Wilcox (Tony Martin), who has hopes of overthrowing Menzies, the happenings at Maralinga present an opportunity to win favour within the party.

Despite their vices and ambition, the one thing the politicians in Operation Buffalo seem conflicted by is the presence of Aboriginal people at Maralinga. At the beginning of the series, the defence minister asks Wilcox about the inhabitants of the Maralinga lands. “We both know there are people out here Dick, don’t we?” he asks nervously. Wilcox responds with a sigh, “Depends how the Constitution defines people.” This sentiment slowly unravels as several of the main characters are confronted head-on with the reality that Aboriginal people inhabit the test area. No amount of denial — government or otherwise — can change that fact.

But Britain’s testing program needed to maintain the illusion of terra nullius in order to be legitimate. This meant denying the presence of Aboriginal people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Having intimately researched this history, I found Operation Buffalo’s depiction of the systematic erasure of Aboriginal peoples to be its most important contribution. Characters in the series look an Aboriginal woman, Ruby (Frances Djulibing), and her children in the eyes and deny their existence. The lack of humanity afforded to Ruby’s family will evoke shame or disbelief in many viewers.

Ruby’s fictional story echoes the tale of a very real Aboriginal family, the Milpuddies. Mother Edie, father Charlie and their two children were found with their dingoes within the Maralinga testing range in 1957. Having spent the night sleeping on the sand near the bomb crater of Marcoo, they were decontaminated by soldiers and driven to Yalata mission. They spoke no English and didn’t understand why they weren’t supposed to walk on Country. In Operation Buffalo, Ruby’s story follows a different trajectory, but her very existence highlights the stark fact that this was not terra nullius.

One character in Operation Buffalo is more aware of this reality than others. Dalgleish (Angus McLaren) — nicknamed “Orange” by Ruby and her family — is Maralinga’s “border rider” whose job is to secure the perimeter of the testing zone. This is official jargon for keeping Aboriginal people out. Dalgleish’s character is cleverly spun off the real-life figure of Walter MacDougall, who patrolled the missile testing range at Woomera, in South Australia, from 1947 on. Once the nuclear tests commenced, he was promoted to native patrol officer and given the job of patrolling 100,000 square kilometres of desert. MacDougall’s knowledge of Aboriginal people is echoed by Dalgleish, who provides the camp’s only means of interacting with Aboriginal people.

MacDougall’s real-life role at Maralinga, and the effects of the tests on Aboriginal communities, was captured in the documentary Maralinga Tjarutja. Screened the week before Operation Buffalo’s first episode, it was intended to provide viewers with a better understanding of what unfolded at Maralinga. The documentary was created in close collaboration with the Maralinga Tjarutja community, which has been displaced from the lands encompassed by the Maralinga Prohibited Area since the early 1950s. Photographs, paintings, landscapes and stories highlight how this vibrant landscape was peopled for tens of thousands of years prior to the tests. Viewing the series in tandem with Maralinga Tjarutja makes Operation Buffalo’s satire all the more striking and uncomfortable.

In taking its viewers into South Australia’s deserts and the centre of Australia’s nuclear past, Operation Buffalo grapples intimately with the history of Britain’s nuclear testing. While the story of Maralinga is a decidedly Australian one, the series encapsulates the broader peculiarities of the cold war period. Through its quirky characters and engaging plot, viewers are provoked to laugh, to question, to feel emotions ranging from guilt to disbelief, and — it’s to be hoped — to pursue the history of this period further. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Film as history https://insidestory.org.au/film-as-history/ Fri, 29 May 2020 08:33:07 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=61243

Books | The big screen offers a unique perspective on the past

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Films are a unique source of historical information. Perhaps no other medium has the same capacity to render with such visual exactitude details of the past. “Novels capture shifting relationships, photographs show the appearance of people and places,” writes Philip Gillett, “but film is unrivalled in allowing the historian to observe the minutiae of everyday life, what they wore at home and at work, what they ate and how their homes were furnished.” That is a large claim, but Film and the Historian supports it persuasively.

Gillett’s concern is with what films can tell us about public tastes and mores at the time of their production. He is not generally speaking of art-house fare — he examines an extraordinary range of British films, across decades and genres — and indeed it becomes clear that films don’t even need to be good to be useful in this way.

Film and the Historian eschews the theory-infested methods of much scholarly writing about film in recent decades. Gillett’s earlier book, The British Working Class in Postwar Film, established him as a film scholar more concerned with representation than criticism. Not since Raymond Durgnat’s 1970 study, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, do I recall a book that so examines film as a source of social information, whether wide-ranging or in up-close detail.

This book’s seventeen chapters explore what we can learn of life in the decades following the second world war from British films produced over the second half of the twentieth century. Its socially oriented themes are suggested by chapter titles that include “In the Aftermath of War,” “The Changing Face of Crime,” “Having a Flutter,” “Science and the Cinema” and “Crimes of Passion.”

Few may remember the superior B-movie Private Information (1952), in which a widow (Jill Esmond) takes on the local council over poor standards of construction in a newly built council estate. The shortage of good-quality housing was a crucial matter after the war but — as Gillett points out in a chapter titled “Intimations of a Changing Society” — “criticism of housing standards is unusual in feature films, lacking obvious dramatic potential,” which probably meant that a modest-budget “supporting film” of this kind was more likely to venture into it.

Better known was the car-rally comedy Genevieve (1953), in which the comfortably off couple (John Gregson, a barrister, and Dinah Sheridan) live in a London mews cottage, “a prized location in postwar days and one that appeared regularly in films.” Further details of their financial situation include the fact that Sheridan’s character comes home with a bulging shopping bag, signifying that food rationing was no longer a problem, a notion confirmed when she fails to become upset when the eggs are broken. They have a telephone, numbers of which had rocketed since the war, at least in middle-class homes.

Class is of course a matter of ongoing concern in British film, and in “Play Up and Play the Game” Gillett notes how it makes itself felt in sports-related films. In films ranging from Quartet (1948) to Match Point (2005), tennis is generally “for the upper classes.” In The Final Test (1953), the story of a professional cricketer, Gillett shows how a game aimed at “unifying the classes” also revealed a class distinction in the matter of who has television to follow it and who has only “a radio on the sideboard.” The cinematic problem with cricket, Gillett claims, is its leisurely pace, while “football and rugby come closer to concentrated drama” — though class distinctions are maintained even there between players and management.

Another sort of division charted by films was that between town and country. Gillett points to the importance in wartime film of presenting rural life as a means of enshrining British values. Tawny Pipit (1944) shows a village unified in its attempts to preserve a rare bird species. In Poet’s Pub (1949) there is a sense of a village trying to uphold unchanging views about the countryside; and in Conflict of Wings (1954) the villagers are again up in arms on behalf of birds that may be threatened by RAF activity in the district. Cities of course were more likely to be associated with crime and with changing attitudes to sexuality, as in, say, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947).

Even “Escape to Fantasy” (chapter four) can nudge our understanding of what films with elements of fantasy “reveal about the concerns of the time, providing a means by which hidden worries could be articulated.” Though The Halfway House (1944) never mentions the war explicitly, war is central to its theme of “looking forward to a better world,” as guests seek refuge in an isolated Welsh inn that was bombed out of existence a year before.

Released the following year, A Place of One’s Own, again with a strand of fantasy, offers a different reflection on its time of production. As Gillett writes, “By setting the story in the past [1906], any issues it raises could be seen as resolved long ago. One factor that cannot be set aside so easily is the place of the upper-middle-class woman, who in this era was confined not only in her corset, but in her home.” How would such a perception have been received in 1944?

It is difficult in a short space to do justice to this book’s rich dealings with what films can tell us about lives lived in a given period. My only quibble is with some minor errors an editor should have noted (for example, Terry-Thomas’s name requires a hyphen!), but overall this stylistically unpretentious book makes the fruits of exhaustive research appetising to a large readership. It offers a different and valuable approach to a popular art form. •

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Covid-19’s awkward couple https://insidestory.org.au/covid-19s-awkward-couple/ Tue, 26 May 2020 05:47:40 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=61169

Britain’s book of government blunders has a new chapter

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Big break, revolutionary pause, transformative hiatus or cathartic suspension? Only when it’s over will the half-world that Britain entered on 24 March, with its strange blend of movement and stasis, gain definition. Two months in, a form of shutdown syndrome makes exit on the other side hard to imagine. There is no going back to a pre–Covid-19 age. That leaves a present easier to itemise than to grasp.

In hospitals and care homes, staff and patients are on the front lines of a daily struggle for life against the fiendishly complex virus that is SARS-CoV-2. Scores are still dying each day, an undue proportion black and Asian, making the country’s toll of deaths per million inhabitants the world’s third-highest.

The economy is stripped to the manufacture, import, delivery and sale only of essentials. Schools, universities, arts venues, libraries, places of worship are closed, as are most shops. Millions are confined to home, excepting forays to buy, exercise, get medical help or make limited social contact. Windows in residential streets are festooned with children’s rainbow drawings and tributes. “Thanks to key workers and our NHS! Better times ahead!” is one of dozens in my neighbourhood.

The workforce is in limbo: the more secure on furlough, the bulk of their wages guaranteed until October by the exchequer and then by employers; others are increasingly on site; many depend on welfare, emergency funds or savings. A deep recession is under way, officials projecting a 30 per cent fall in GDP between April and June this year as state borrowing balloons. Railway and coach travel is near frozen. Business models that assume close physical contact (sports, aviation, tourism, hospitality, high-street retail, fashion, catering, gyms, restaurants, cafes) are on ice.

Parliament, TV punditry, teaching, festivals and conferences are scrambling onto Zoom or Pexip. Broadcast news has segued from journalists’ stopwatch need-to-know explainers into endless heartbait. Newspapers’ print versions, already embattled, are further shrinking as advertising revenues plunge.

The government is assailed for shortcomings in basic duty of care, testing, equipment and communication, its early delays and missteps having made its subsequent efforts a colossal but flawed catch-up. Prime minister Boris Johnson, visibly sapped after a close call in intensive care and facing a competent new Labour leader in Keir Starmer, is needled by Scottish and Welsh leaders, rash in defending his chief adviser Dominic Cummings over an alleged breach of lockdown rules, and breezing his way through every encounter.

Never in the United Kingdom’s post-1945 history have so many ingredients fermented so quickly into so heady, and contradictory, a brew. They include the state’s own fissures, with the post-1997 devolution of powers to authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland effectively reducing the United Kingdom to England in health and education policy.

The macro level forms but half the story, the other being the virus’s myriad psychic impacts on everyday lives. That can mean fears of losing health and job, and the pains of separation and the stresses of a constricted world, yet also the joys of car-free streets, freedom from commuting, cleaner air, thrilling birdsong, nature exultant. Everything, outside and inside, is in movement at the same time.

No wonder questions of meaning, purpose, choice and change, both individual and national, have acquired a new sharpness. Visions of the post-epidemic future — more green, equal, united and caring, or an authoritarian dystopia — abound. So do toolkits and slogans: build back better, great reset, new social contract. Henriette Roland Holst’s ageless poem on her native Holland lends itself to the moment: England, you give no space but to the mind.

Such dreams will be shaped, if at all, in the forge of corona-age politics. For now, their undoubted allure carries a hint of twin flaws: wishful thinking, and self-distancing from a moment whose nub is that the youthful SARS-CoV-2 continues to run the show.


In step with the struggle to define the future is a contest over the pre-epidemic past. Eventually, at least one official inquiry will assess the UK state’s performance in the context of its plans for an emergency of this type. This is already much discussed, even as the country’s share of the Covid-19 trauma has just got going. Close scrutiny of Boris Johnson’s own role is as certain as that of Tony Blair’s over the Iraq war, which was examined in Sir John Chilcot’s 2016 report. So too is attention to the performance of government departments, affiliated scientific committees, public health agencies and political advisers. Still, a lidar-like focus may be needed to penetrate layers of hindsight, covering of backs, shuffling of responsibilities: all familiar from the legion of “blunders of our governments.”

On previous form, the flagship inquiry — likely to pre-empt the one on Brexit, whose final curtain Covid-19 may well hasten — will take years (Chilcot lasted seven). By then, the court of public opinion will long have delivered its own verdict, which could land severely on some experts as well as the prime minister. Already published committee records and detailed media reports converge on a story of initial, fatal misdirection compounded by a series of analytical and logistical errors. Even in a fluid crisis where so much is provisional, that account will be hard to shift.

The story’s first part notes that Britain’s pandemic plan, drawn up in 2011 and still operative, foresaw the principal threat as a new strain of influenza. This judgement reflected the swine flu outbreak of 2009, sparked by the composite H1N1 virus. In that case, around £1.2 billion ($2.2 billion) was spent to allay the expected thousands of deaths, though they ultimately numbered only 214 out of 540,000 cases. Dame Deirdre Hine’s official report on H1N1 advised an incremental, follow-the-data approach when the next epidemic hit, plus wariness about worst-case assumptions. A contiguous factor here is that there was painful institutional and local memory of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, when a frenzied response saw millions of animals slaughtered and £8 billion ($15 billion) burned, but no memory at all of SARS-CoV-1.

Influenza, not corona; wait and see, not get ahead; and, to complete the set, darkness not light. In October 2016, a big simulation of an H2N2 flu pandemic was held under the aegis of Public Health England. It found that the National Health Service would be overwhelmed, identified likely shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and highlighted care homes’ vital role in relieving hospitals. Alarming as the exercise was, its report stayed under wraps. That the simulation took place just as Britain was walking deeper into the all-consuming Brexit mire under Theresa May might be contributory to the lack of practical follow-up. In shadow, the seeds of yet another blunder germinated.


The story’s second part begins weeks after the novel coronavirus had been identified in the wake of the Wuhan outbreak, and its full genome sequence released by Chinese scientists on 10 January (which allowed Sarah Gilbert of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, among others, to immediately start working on a vaccine). Relevant British bodies were tuning in to its spread, even more so when the first local cases, of two Chinese family members in northern England, were recorded on 31 January — by coincidence, the very day Britain left the European Union and entered a transitional period for trade talks.

Those distractions partly explains why, until late February, coronavirus was seen by the political-media class almost exclusively as “over there.” A collective jolt arrived in the first week of March, with the first local death, the number of cases passing a hundred and Johnson announcing a £46 million (A$86 million) fund for testing and vaccine research. Still, a sketchy government plan (“The UK is well prepared to respond in a way that offers substantial protection to the public”) had zero sense of urgency.

In public, Westminster’s stage-set approach, with its reassuring mantras (“contain, delay, research, mitigate”) and studied politesse between government and scientists, projected harmony. But the twenty-one days until the lockdown began on 24 March would incubate problems so fatal as to make what came later a giant work of repair. Test-and-trace plans aborted, care homes exposed, medical stocks insufficient, frontline staff under-protected, border monitoring and quarantine procedures absent: each of these had a distinct source, but linking several of them was a lack of reliable data and of systems capable of delivering, processing and acting on that data. Notionally in charge, government — inevitably, perhaps — floundered.

Much of this was owed to the way the ambiguous inheritance of those what-to-do-in-an-emergency files played out against the baffling unfamiliarity of the latest epidemic. The government in early 2020 was “hypnotised by its own plan,” writes Ian Leslie in the New Statesman: “Faced with the novel problem of an untreatable, highly transmissible virus, the government’s current advisers seem to have found it hard to break with the plan they had — now unfit for purpose — and think anew.”

An initial failure to gauge the disease’s threat had shrunk the bandwidth that, if available, might have allowed different options to be explored. Practical lessons from East Asia were neither sought nor applied. There was a crucial deficit of imagination. That bland 5 March plan was wrong: Boris Johnson’s government would lack not just knowledge and tools in taking the initiative against Covid-19 but also the ability to remedy that lack. In contrast to supermarkets’ pinpoint circuits, it had no way to conjure instant operative resilience out of sparse warehouses and uncertain suppliers in a just-in-time economy.


Among the many compelling sub-themes of this two-part story is one with a singular local twist: a shift in science’s public profile from neutral expertise towards competitive partisanship. Its pivot was the government’s mid-March volte-face from an overhyped “herd immunity” approach to a more interventionist one. The notion of allowing mild infection of the healthy young while shielding the vulnerable, mentioned on the BBC by David Halpern of the Behavioural Insights Team and repeated by chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance at a press briefing, was first twisted into a form of eugenics, even genocide, then buried over a frantic weekend when a paper by the Imperial College mathematician Neil Ferguson and colleagues found that without rigorous physical distancing, Covid-19 deaths could reach 250,000 or more. The path to shutdown on 24 March, ranking among the most consequential days in British history, was set.

The switch was opposed by a vocal libertarian minority that cited evidence of Covid-19’s varying risks and impacts to argue against social closure. Some fire was directed at Ferguson himself, whose costly advice in the 2001 outbreak was disinterred. Behaviourists, economists and public health specialists widened the fray in lamenting epidemiology’s new stardom. Most telling was that the contretemps began to deflate harmful veneration of what ministers were jarringly calling “the science.”

This nebulous entity had been the government’s face-shield from Covid-19’s onset, invoked to parry every doubt over its decisions. It had the additional benefit of implicitly defusing a barb dear to opponents of Boris Johnson, his government and Brexit, its flagship cause: that these Brexiteers held “experts” in contempt. That barb dated from a late stage of the 2016 referendum campaign on EU membership, when justice secretary Michael Gove, still a key Johnson ally, told Sky News’s Faisal Islam during a gladiatorial interview that Britain would be “freer, fairer and better off” if the country voted to leave the European Union.

To Islam’s litany of twelve power centres whose leaders wanted the country to remain in the Union — including the US, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, NATO and the NHS — Gove retorted, “The people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” Seizing on a fatal pause in mid sentence, Islam’s sharply incredulous double repeat of Gove’s first ten words launched these as the story. Gove’s unwise “had enough of experts” rode the media carousel — nonstop, into every crevice, for four years — as a symbol of crass, self-harming populism.

It was a gift that kept on giving. Never mind the sources, feel the clicks. Post-corona, dozens of “the experts are back” columns and “who needs experts now?” jibes wrote themselves. At the food chain’s pinnacle, “Boris Knows He’s Out of His Depth. Suddenly Experts Are Useful Again” was the Times headline on its 9 April interview with the geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel laureate and director of London’s state-of-the-art biomedical Crick Institute, whose Brexit views go without saying. “It’s galling when people who have denounced experts then come on the stage and start talking about experts. It doesn’t fill you with great confidence.”

The spectacle of experts’ disagreement over Covid-19 pulls the plug on the mirthless funfair. To the extent that this bombshell reflects dimly on Britain’s general level of scientific literacy, anti-Brexiteers’ pathological reductionism bears some responsibility: no chance of an “experts” sneer ever made way for a defence of the scientific (far less the democratic) value of pluralism.

The breakthrough here is that scientists (the “experts” du jour) are now part of the same cacophonous public space as everyone else. Many — along with active politicians, TV anchors, sportspeople, clerics, lawyers, academics, novelists — are now daily commentators, even capable (another thunderbolt) of drawing unfounded conclusions from false assumptions and dubious data. That the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or SAGE, has spawned a dissident body, Independent SAGE, led by former chief scientist Sir David King, is the paragon’s last breath.

This is but one sub-theme of the British story that the virus has acted to dissolve and reconstitute: in effect, as an agent of influence. So when ministers are chided for leaning on “the science” they don’t disclose to avoid questions they don’t answer, when Neil Ferguson “steps back” after admitting to private assignments that violated lockdown codes, or when the public health guru John Ashton and Lancet editor Richard Horton are — as a duty to the audience, and at long last — gently reminded by broadcasting hosts of their political credentials and rhetoric, it is another little victory for SARS-CoV-2.


A forlorn government is differently exposed when its crutch, “the science,” is kicked away. No more can it so limply pass over responsibility for judgements it needs to own. That presents a new maximum test to ministers: can they convey the balance of risks with a literate awareness of scientific and political complexity? An immediate test too, as the government now plans for schools in England to reopen on 1 June as part of the lockdown’s staged easing, against strong resistance from teaching unions and parents.

Boris Johnson looked unready to reach this high bar even before the latest drama to consume his government. This was the furious reaction to Dominic Cummings’s family drive from London to his parents’ farm near Durham, northeast England, where the adviser and his journalist wife Mary Wakefield, both showing symptoms of illness, wanted to deposit their small son while themselves going into quarantine in an outhouse. Every detail of that choice is now being parsed for clinching evidence of what Cummings denies, that the trip broke the government’s then guidance to “stay home.” Genuine anger mixes with revengeful glee as the co-architect of Brexit and of Johnson’s general election victory in December, hated by many on both counts, flirts with Nemesis.

Cummings’s hour-long press conference in the Number 10 rose garden on 25 May, hours after the morning’s paroxysmic headlines, began with his chronicle of a family under pressure of illness and overwork. He described his movements as “reasonable” in the context of “weighing complex decisions to do with the safety of my child and my desire to go back to work.” Lobby journalists then all but accused him of arrogant, elitist hypocrisy in flouting orders he expected the plebs to observe.

Always careworn in appearance, Cummings is an independent-minded strategist whose intellectual seriousness, ambition and impatience radiate equally from his fertile blog. The media’s reflexive hostility over this (in British terms) uncommon radical recently erupted in intense criticism over his attendance at SAGE meetings, on the grounds that he was a political pollutant in scientific waters. This fizzled out when a few SAGE members said he mostly listened or sought clarification for the prime minister’s benefit. SAGE member Jeremy Farrar subtly wishes for more such interaction “so that advice goes directly into policy,” while blaming “not right” decisions made early in the crisis for a UK epidemic “that at least to some degree could have been avoided.”

The latest Cummings episode may also fade, though the Independent’s John Rentoul holds that only his departure can allow the people’s trust in Johnson to be rebuilt: “The public has already decided that he and Boris Johnson think that the rules for the little people don’t apply to them.”

The government’s errant choices pre–Covid-19 await their moment. So do incipient tensions between that other awkward duo, politics and science. Beyond the half-world, SARS-CoV-2 remains in charge. Those better times ahead will be a long haul. •

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The Covid-19 kidnap https://insidestory.org.au/the-covid-19-kidnap/ Wed, 25 Mar 2020 08:27:58 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=59771

The virus looks like being the catalyst of yet another British revolution

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A toothache halts an Everest climb. A geek destroys an industry. A hacker topples a bank. An armed band wounds an empire. A market trader sparks an uprising. Now a virus kidnaps the whole world. The asymmetry game is over: Covid-19 has won. Something like it was long foretold, and that sounds a warning of its own.

Any route back from, or through, the abyss will be hard. Neutering Covid-19 is essential to minimising the pandemic’s human toll and economic hit, each measured in lost lives. A further test lies in the variegated nature of the emergency: global and national, and not just threatening health, livelihood, business, finance or governance, but all of these together. Europe’s states are stretching to their max, with no certainty that will be enough.

In Britain’s case, early caution has given way to urgency as the silo-busting scale of the challenge dawns. The government’s initial strategy projected four phases in tackling the virus: “contain, delay, research, mitigate.” Its public faces were the chief medical and scientific officers, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, flanking Boris Johnson and giving the prime minister the ballast that he can’t help but seem to lack.

The pair’s kindly gravitas made even stark detail and advice sound reassuring. Then, a fortnight ago, though it seems years, came a perceived stumble over “herd immunity” — the notion that harmless infection at scale among the fit populace would safeguard the whole, allowing more gradual management of the epidemic by “flattening the curve” and thus keeping deaths to (it was whispered) around 20,000.

The theoretic case was marred by uneven (or outright poor) messaging. Some critics baulked at the idea in principle, others noted the contrast with SingaporeTaiwanSouth Korea and Hong Kong’s proactive coordination, a lesson from SARS in 2002–03: “test, trace, isolate.” Equally, Britain’s resistance to the incrementally tighter lockdowns of European states made it seem an outrider nearer home. Scientific disquiet and media debate were prompting hints of a change when its accelerant materialised: a paper by the mathematician Neil Ferguson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, published on 16 March to immediate alarm and refocus.

Drawing on Italy’s medical trauma, its data modelling found that a staged approach would result in Britain’s health services being overwhelmed, and a death toll of perhaps 260,000. The policy priority had to be suppression of the virus, not mitigation:

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over… [Thus] epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound… [Even] those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so immediately.


From that Monday, directives — initially poised between advice and command — tumbled over each other at the now-daily briefings: self-isolation of the over-seventies, social distancing, home working, school closures, venue shutdowns (pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas). Since these measures would push many businesses and workers towards liquidation, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced £330 billion (A$664 billion) of loan guarantees to keep Britain’s largely service economy afloat. His acclaimed budget’s £12 billion to fight the epidemic, a week earlier, was already a distant age.

The blizzard of initiatives culminated on Friday with two more bazookas and a depth charge. After talks with business and unions, Treasury’s “job retention scheme” committed to paying 80 per cent of employees’ wages (up to a monthly £2500, or A$4970) for three months, plus sick pay to the self-employed and welfare supplements. Some details are still to be nailed down.

By then, so punch-drunk were newshounds that the Bank of England’s launch of £200 billion in quantitative-easing bond-buying and an interest rate cut to 0.1 per cent were barely noticed outside the financial pages. These few life-changing hours also saw the lightning creation of a 320-page coronavirus bill with bracingly wide statutory powers (for example, detention of miscreants or the mentally ill to enforce lockdown).

Over five extraordinary days — surely destined to produce a companion to John Lukacs’s classic Five Days in London, May 1940 — health, financial, business and governance emergencies melded. And a further, intimate emergency joined them, for the cumulative effect of the PM’s daily checklist was to impose on families and individuals across the land an obligation to reconfigure their lives for an indefinite period. “Unprecedented,” rare in this old country’s political discourse, had its moment in the sun. Only the 1940 crucible of the “people’s war” had vague plausibility as an analogue, not just via its jumble of mythicised memory.

A colossal week had already called forth a touch of martialism in a Britain always ready for the parade ground. Johnson declared “war” on the virus and pledged to “defeat” the “invisible enemy.” Then his Dad’s Army–ish “send coronavirus packing,” harmless as it was, let slip his bonhomous urge to test tonal etiquette, reprised in a wayward quip promoting ventilator output as “operation last gasp,” which many affect to find enraging.

More intriguing was the glow around hitherto mundane “key workers,” evidently a capacious bunch going well beyond the uniformed, badged and suited (with even some journalists passing muster). The British state has often looked threadbare over these two decades, at times an outright failure. This latest spine-stiffening exercise, forced by impossibly acute domestic demands, incorporates its own version of herd immunity.

By last weekend, the country’s twin paths — stepping into a new economic era while approaching a door into the medical dark — were palpable. Yet daytrippers lured by bright weather packed rural scenic spots and London parks were still in la-la land, their blithe spirits at last pushing a brittle Number 10 towards quasi-curfew. Johnson’s live Monday evening broadcast, delivering its you must stay at home mantra with passable high seriousness, was as stern as this natural libertarian can manage. (“The way ahead is hard… Join together to halt the spread of this disease, protect the NHS, and save lives.”) The exceptions to staying in — buying food, medical need, essential work, a lone bout of exercise — were clearer than the compliance regime. But the twenty-seven million–plus who watched on TV alone, almost half the population, could have no doubt about the main point.

Hours earlier, the coronavirus bill, its terms and two-year lifespan agreed with opposition parties and awaiting assent by the Welsh, Scots and Northern Ireland assemblies, was given sober treatment by a depleted Commons before passing without a vote. After the House of Lords’s brief scrutiny and the Queen’s sign-off, it grants ministers “wide and robust powers” (provisional as they are intended to be) to subdue Covid-19. The second week of this latest British-style revolution — for such it is, only three months after the previous one — had begun.


These volcanic events, their perilous background fortifying social unity insistently cultivated by broadcasters — have eased the political temperature. A YouGov poll released on 24 March put Johnson’s favourability rating at 55–35; Ipsos MORI on 19 March showed 48–41 satisfaction with the government (the first such positive score since 2010). A tilt to the Conservatives is plain. But incumbents often benefit when a crisis breaks, and such findings could well change as pressures on health staff and equipment shortages rankle, and Labour’s new leader (probably the London lawyer Keir Starmer) gets a chance to shine.

In play are two other factors: bubbling fury at the government’s early dithering or inattention over Covid-19, and confidence that the state’s massive interventions (several possibly irreversible) presage a decisive left turn.

The former links scientific appraisal of strategic failings to personal weaknesses of leadership, in particular those of Johnson and Dominic Cummings, the PM’s driven, sometimes abrasive senior adviser. Their reckoning is keenly anticipated, as much as Tony Blair’s ever was over Iraq. Their many enemies’ visceral loathing, hitherto ineffective as a political tool, can now draw on epidemiological expertise. That said, the politics of science around Covid-19 is complex and dialogic at many levels, the environment fluid, arguments unsettled. The chips may fall in ways few expect, just as they have in other areas over Britain’s last five years.

The latter puts fresh wind into sails tattered by four election losses, even vindicates the Marxist determinism of the Jeremy Corbyn–John McDonnell circle at the very moment it leaves the stage. Bliss it is in this dusk to be an ageing revolutionary. Their optimism is reinforced by centre-right marketeers who back Sunak’s splurge. But only the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard grasps the dialectic. He is scornful of Number 10’s “staggering ineptitude” over the pandemic and hails the chancellor’s “executive action befitting the wartime threat that we face” while declaring: “To avert socialism, we must briefly become socialists. We must spend whatever it takes to save free market liberalism.”

What will remain of an economy if the shutdown lasts up to a year, and how the state will keep things ticking, are moot. People everywhere, the bedrock of society, are going to be co-shapers in any outcome. The last paragraph of the report by the team led by Neil Ferguson (he now in self-isolation after being infected) makes a version of the same point:

However, we emphasise that it is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear.


All this because a tiny viral agent composed of proteins and nucleic acids became a transformative force to beat them all. The WHO’s Bruce Aylward strikes an uncommon note, but the right one: “This is a new disease. Respect it and learn as it evolves.”

Covid-19 has barely got started. Here as elsewhere, the information deluge’s endless instancy can act as an infectant of its own, blocking awareness of time’s, and life’s, true rhythms. The thought struck home for me on that pivotal day, 16 March, during leg-stretching early-evening fieldwork in six large supermarkets on the fringes of a northern English city, each one clean out of the same everyday staples: pasta, rice, oatmeal, flour, eggs, soap, toilet paper. There was no supply shortage or interruption of delivery, I was told: it was just that some patrons were over-buying.

Such behaviour is not “panicking,” writes the psychiatrist Simon Wessely in that day’s Financial Times, citing 9/11 and the 1918 influenza epidemic to exemplify his case: “We have been warned to prepare ourselves for the [likelihood] of spending two weeks in self-imposed isolation. Stocking up on necessities is… a rational and appropriate response.”

True enough, but those vast bare shelves jolted me into recall of a 1960s joke from communist Poland. A customer at Warsaw’s Smyk emporium asks if this is the cheese section. “Nie, prosze panę, this is the department where we have no sausages. The department where they have no cheese is upstairs.” I could recite the differences in my sleep, but in that moment of psychic dislocation all I could think about was equalisation, and the cunning of history. The years fell away. I had become that customer.

Only a fortnight ago, but it seems an aeon — and that, like its correlatives above, is part of the problem. In this respect, Britain’s share of the global pandemic really is the new Brexit (a word I had hoped to avoid). With the enigmatic Covid-19 in rapid transmission, a repeat of the last four years’ manic inertia will hasten genuine disaster. Soon, these weeks may well come to resemble the “phoney war” whose mental force field was brutally vaporised in 1940 as the actual conflict became all too real. •

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Going down from Melbourne https://insidestory.org.au/going-down-from-melbourne/ Thu, 05 Mar 2020 04:45:41 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=59385

Extract | Historian Ken Inglis finds his vocation, reveals a talent for journalism, and embarks for Oxford

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Especially in his later life, Ken Inglis pondered how it was that he found his way from Tyler Street State School to an academic career. The question was at the back of his mind as he exchanged emails with contemporaries, followed the suburb’s changing fortunes and recalled formative moments in his childhood. One such moment occurred in 1937 when the teacher of fourth grade carefully wrote the word “noun” on the blackboard and then explained its grammatical function. Some days later Miss Kinnane followed that revelation with another, equally arresting — “verb.”

Ken had a preference for nouns and verbs, though he was no slouch with adjectives and adverbs, and appreciated the effects that could be achieved by variations of structure and rhythm. An early influence was George Orwell, whom he discovered through the 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism.” The rules of composition that Orwell laid down in the following year in an essay on “Politics and the English Language” were already apparent in Ken’s writing: never use a stale figure of speech; never employ the passive when the active is available; never use an unnecessary word, or a long one when a short one will do, or jargon when there is an everyday English equivalent. Orwell added a sixth rule — to break any of the above rather than say or write anything outright barbarous — though it is hard to find instances of that escape clause in Ken’s prose.

He grew up in a house with books and was an avid reader of the press from boyhood. Another writer who influenced him was the American journalist A.J. Liebling, whose contributions to the New Yorker spanned politics and popular culture, and who also wrote a pungent monthly survey of the American press. Ken later sent a copy of his book The Stuart Case to Liebling in homage and was delighted to receive an acknowledgement.

Ken’s interest in journalism was established when he transferred from Northcote High School to Melbourne High in 1945 so that he could progress from his Leaving certificate to the new qualification of Matriculation; it was in his second year of Matriculation studies in 1946 that he resurrected the school newspaper, the Sentinel. Already fascinated by broadcasting, he also worked after school on the radio program Junior 3AW.

Towards the end of the year his father arranged an interview with the editor of the Age. Harold Alfred Maurice Campbell — generally known as “Ham,” though he became Sir Harold in 1957 — was a courteous and kindly man, yet unfamiliar with the Sentinel. “Oh, we all do that,’ he said when Ken referred to his editorship, clearly thinking it was another of those school magazines that record deeds in the classroom and triumphs on the sporting field. The sixteen-year-old was too shy to explain that his was a fortnightly publication of much greater substance and purpose.

In any event, Campbell said that it was not a good time to be embarking on a newspaper career when so many able reporters were returning from war service; he led Ken to understand that distinguished military correspondents were reduced to emptying wastepaper baskets. So the youthful aspirant’s hopes were dashed. “If the Age had taken me on as a journalist in 1946,” he subsequently stated, “I’d have gone there.”

By this time there was another possibility. Northcote High did not teach history beyond the first few years, but at Melbourne High he was able to pursue a rich variety of history subjects as well as literature and French. Too young to go to university, he did a second year of Matriculation, this time winning a general exhibition and sharing first place in the state for English literature. A friend who accompanied him from Northcote to Melbourne High had meanwhile commenced an arts degree as a resident of Queen’s College. Ken visited him there in 1946 and was persuaded to sit for a resident scholarship. Having secured one, he embarked in 1947 on an honours degree in history and English, and found his vocation. As he recalled nearly fifty years later in a retirement address, “From almost the moment I arrived at the university, I knew that was where I wanted to spend my working life.”

Having obtained a first in his combined honours degree in 1949, Ken became a temporary tutor in history in 1950, senior tutor in 1951, assistant lecturer in 1952, and in 1953 was appointed to a tenured lectureship. Meanwhile he took over a history of the Royal Melbourne Hospital from Max Crawford in 1952 and submitted it as an MA thesis in the following year as he began doctoral studies at Oxford.

While an undergraduate and for two years after graduation he was a resident of Queen’s College, the third of the men’s residential colleges attached to the university and at that time probably the most lively. Contemporaries included Geoffrey Blainey, Herb Feith, Sam Goldberg, Murray Groves and Arthur Huck; the economists Max Corden and Murray Kemp; and the legendary George Nadel, a Dunera boy of boundless ambition whose silhouette was always visible through the curtain of his study window, working at his desk, until someone discovered he had imitated Sherlock Holmes and rigged up a dummy.

Beyond College Crescent, Ken was involved in the university film society, theatre and music but not politics until 1949, when he helped form the ALP Club as an alternative to the communist-dominated Labor Club. This coincided with his joining the Student Christian Movement, or SCM, after his boyhood Presbyterianism had lapsed. It was here that he met Judy Betheras, a philosophy student. They married in 1952 and had their first child shortly before leaving for Oxford.

Ken’s religious interests informed both his doctoral research and his subsequent understanding of Anzac remembrance. They also stimulated some of his first public statements of what he believed. He was attracted to the SCM, I think, because of the way it bridged faith and reason. Arthur Burns, that gifted but wayward ordained academic who returned from England to the history department in 1949, introduced him to the new theology with its rigorous reading of the scriptures and commitment to public engagement. “I am a democratic socialist and a Christian,” Ken told an SCM conference, and said that he shared communists’ anger at the economic organisation of capitalist society but could not subordinate his conscience to “the God of the party.”

The cold war had brought the world perilously close to destruction and it was the zealotry of both camps that created the danger. In a series of articles written for the Victorian branch of the Institute of International Affairs, Ken refuted the polarised claims of the combatants in the Korean war and other flashpoints in the region. “We live in a secular age,” he preached in the Queen’s College chapel in 1950, an age that saw the forms and adherents of Christianity falling away. Ken’s was a form of Protestantism that affirmed the personal conscience of the believer, “the voice of God” finding expression through the individual bearing witness in public endeavours.

He was also involved in student journalism. We find him in the pages of Farrago reviewing the 1949 Melbourne University Magazine, edited that year by Max Corden and Henry Mayer, who were destined for distinguished careers in economics and political science. They were a mettlesome combination — Max said that at one point he challenged Henry to a duel — and Ken observed that their arguments could have been resolved by both turning their weapons on the cover designer. When he and Murray Groves became editors of the 1950 edition they immediately approached William Ellis Green, better known as WEG, the chief cartoonist for the Melbourne Herald, to provide a more arresting cover. The 1950 Melbourne University Magazine was redesigned in a smaller format based on the lively British pocket monthly Lilliput, and the editors sought contributions that displayed “passion and a point of view.” “Hack-work,” they warned, was “unacceptable.” It was here that A.D. Hope’s Dunciad Minor had its first outing.

One of Ken’s early contributions to the Age was aimed at the hack-work that appeared in its Saturday literary section. Assuming the identity of the Rev T.J. Ransome, he submitted a lengthy essay on “The Fascinating Bee,” strewn with bogus literary allusions and sonorous analogies. “Poets have sung of it, and philosophers seeking to discover the elusive truths which, if found and believed, would enable men to live in concord, have been drawn to study and wonder at the harmony of the hive.” It appeared with a photograph of busy bees, and Ken worried when he became a regular contributor to the newspaper that someone would say, “I see you’ve fooled them again.”

The first of his Age pieces that I’ve been able to find (not all are identified) was a review of two recent productions of Elizabethan plays in 1949, and he continued to write on literary and historical publications. But as early as 1950 he wrote a striking discussion of the English comedian Tommy Handley, who had died in the previous year. Handley’s weekly radio program, It’s That Man Again, was recalled for its “verbal cartooning” of wartime sacrifice and postwar austerity, “conjuring up a crazy world in which his listeners could forget their worries for a half-hour.” Ken drew attention to the distinctiveness of Handley’s humour, noting that he did not rely on a stooge, as American comedians such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny did. “It was a craziness,” he observed, “made possible by the medium of broadcasting.”

He also contributed to a short-lived quarterly, the Port Phillip Gazette, modelled on the New Yorker. An early piece for its equivalent of “The Talk of the Town” related a pipe-smoking contest at the Town Hall where a field of twelve each loaded 3.3 grams of tobacco (weighed out by the city council’s weights and measures department) and were given two matches to light up. At ninety-four minutes and thirty-five seconds (measured by technicians from the Chronological Guild of Australasia), the record held by a native of Schenectady in New York, which was the headquarters of the International Pipe-Smoking Fellowship, fell and a veteran pipeman, Bill Branfield, finally stopped puffing after 107 minutes and nine seconds.

Ken’s deadpan report concludes that it might have been as well to have the weather bureau people present to check the humidity in case Schenectady ruled that local conditions gave too much assistance — and I concluded that this must be another hoax until Trove provided newspaper reports of the event. The Age’s reporter asked the winner if he was concerned by the British Medical Association’s recent warning against smoking, to which Bill Branfield replied, “BMA, never heard of ’em.”


It was probably inevitable that Ken would go to Oxford, as so many Melbourne historians did. By my count, eighteen of them were there in the postwar decade, against three who pursued postgraduate studies in London, three in Cambridge, one at Columbia, one at Smith College and one at Harvard. It is noticeable also that three of the five women, Dorothy Crozier, Pat Gray and Dorothy Munro (Shineberg), went elsewhere to train in anthropology, sociology and Pacific history. The men followed a well-beaten disciplinary track, whereas the women felt it necessary, or perhaps desirable, to be more adventurous.

“No Melbourne person, particularly a history graduate, need feel a stranger in Oxford,” Owen Parnaby wrote in 1950 after Hugh Stretton, Laurie Baragwanath and Sam Goldberg welcomed him and his partner Joy upon arrival, and soon John Legge and Frank Crowley called on them. The Australian colony at Oxford sent back intelligence on college admission practices and expenses to guide those who were to follow; Max Crawford provided the references, helped secure the scholarships and on several occasions obtained additional money for those who needed it. When he noted at a departmental farewell to the 1951 contingent that John Mulvaney was headed for an archaeology degree at Cambridge, he added, “We have nothing against Cambridge, it is just that we don’t know it.”

There was a joke among the Melbourne graduates who taught in the history department and undertook a local master’s thesis while preparing for their time abroad: “Which aspect of the Australian labour movement are you going to write your MA on?” The expectation attests to the progressive sympathies of staff and students, many of whom cut their political teeth in the Labor Party, if not the Labor Club. Ken expected to do the same but was happy to take up the hospital history, for he was interested in the way Australians had adapted social policies and institutions to their circumstances.

In formulating his doctoral research project he was strongly influenced by Alan McBriar, who returned from Oxford at the end of 1948 after completing a DPhil thesis on Fabian socialism. A gentle and witty man with a memorably distinctive laugh, McBriar had abandoned his wartime membership of the Communist Party (to which he had recruited Amirah Gust — later Amirah Inglis — even though her parents were party members) but remained “wistful” about the Marxist legacy. Ken tutored for Alan and gave his first few lectures under his sponsorship. On Alan’s advice Ken wrote in 1952 to his former supervisor, G.D.H. Cole, asking for guidance on a suitable topic among the social movements of the late nineteenth century. He had the Socialist League in mind, but Cole advised him that a man called E.P. Thompson was working on that and suggested he might instead consider the arguments between socialists and the philanthropic organisations, or perhaps the endeavours of the Labour Churches and other ethical movements of the period. This combination of socialism and religion sparked an interest, and soon Ken settled on a study of “religion and the social question, c.1880–1900.”

Admission to Oxford was through a college and Ken chose University College, which made few demands on its postgraduates, since he was a married man with a baby and would live in rented accommodation in Summertown. Initially he and Judy had the company of his sister Shirley, who interrupted her Melbourne degree in English for fifteen months abroad, first as a governess in Paris, then as a waitress at the Lyons buffet at Wimbledon for the tennis, and finally working in Oxford (she borrowed Ken’s gown to sneak into lectures). His friends Jamie Mackie and Kit McMahon were pursuing undergraduate degrees as college residents and were more fully exposed to college life. Ken, who hated exams, thought they were the heroes. Judy chose the examination path, though, for a postgraduate diploma in anthropology — the course that Murray Groves had taken and Shirley Inglis would follow. The Inglises were supported by a scholarship Ken had obtained from the Australian National University, which during its early years sent Australians from across the country abroad to obtain higher degrees. The catch was that the scholarship lasted just two years.

At least initially, he found Cole a satisfactory supervisor. In an early letter back to Crawford, he said Cole knew “an enormous amount about the subject” and professed great interest in it. That favourable impression did not last. Cole was in his mid-sixties and in poor health. He came up from his London residence for just a few days each week during term, and was always busy. When Ken gave him a draft chapter, he would return it promptly but with little comment on its substance. Most worryingly, Cole failed to see what Ken was trying to do, for he was an old-fashioned institutional historian with little interest in a social history of religion.

Ken was enrolled in the faculty of divinity rather than modern history (for his topic was deemed too modern to be history) and no seminars were given in modern history except for one on imperial history, which did not interest him. He found his stimulus among other doctoral students at a cafe near the Bodleian Library. Over grey coffee and Woodbines they would compare their supervisors. An American remarked of Cole’s minimal assistance that “Ya put in a nickel and he plays.” Chushichi Tsuzuki spoke warmly of the assistance he received from his supervisor (and mine at Cambridge) Henry Pelling, and Henry would take a keen interest in Ken’s work. Peter Cominos, another American, gave glowing praise to Asa Briggs, the unstuffy, energetic and pioneering young reader in recent social and economic history. Ken had read Briggs’s short sketch 1851, published by the Historical Association in 1951 and foreshadowing his 1954 re-evaluation of Victorian People. Through Cominos, Briggs invited Ken to drop in and discuss his research. “He saw at once what I was trying to do.”

The principal outlet for Ken’s journalism during this period was the Sydney-based magazine Voice. It began at the end of 1951 as AIM, the Australian Independent Monthly, an anti-communist, social democratic forum aligned with the Fabian Society and Workers’ Educational Association, which attracted contributions from Heinz Arndt, Macmahon Ball, John Burton, Sol Encel, Peter Russo and a young Don Dunstan. Ken’s first recorded contribution came in 1954 after he, Murray Groves and Kit McMahon attended a conference in Brighton organised by the Quakers, where the successor of the jailed Jomo Kenyatta defended the nationalist uprising in Kenya. It was a sympathetic but measured report of the violent insurgency.

That was followed by an equally sympathetic but more stringent review of a book by Adlai Stevenson on world affairs, in which Ken drew attention to the way that “Mr Stevenson’s language” went “foggy” when the politician prevailed over the egghead. A subsequent account of Moral Re-Armament made the same point: “Ideology is MRA’s favourite word. It is modern, versatile, and sounds solid. Again and again it is used to introduce a string of commodious nouns and adjectives” that remained airy and rhetorical generalities. Finally, in 1956 he wrote a “London letter” on the displeasure of Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury, at the anti-apartheid activities of Fr Trevor Huddleston in South Africa, contrasting the “diplomacy of Dr Fisher” with the decline of his church’s membership.

I say finally because a London letter had appeared in Voice in September 1953, just as Ken arrived in England. It discussed the division in the British Labour Party between the Bevanites and the “powerful trade union bosses” and was followed two months later by a discussion of the BBC. The author of these and subsequent London letters was “Preston,” a pseudonym that someone who went to Tyler Street State School in north Preston might have adopted. “Preston” first appeared three months before Ken left Australia, writing on what was likely to happen to Sir Keith Murdoch’s newspaper empire following his death at the end of 1952, when Rupert was studying in Oxford (it was his tutor, Asa Briggs, who broke the news to him). Then, in 1954, “Preston” wrote a feature article on the implications for the Argus newspaper of a change in the management of its British proprietors. The correlation of interests between Ken and “Preston” is marked.

By 1954 Ken’s friend Kit McMahon had taken over the London letter and soon Jamie Mackie would begin writing a regular column on “The Asian Scene.” From January 1955 “Preston” reappeared, this time as the author of reports on “The European Scene”; indeed, he was identified as “our correspondent in Europe.” We know from a letter Ken wrote to Max Crawford that he had travelled in Europe during 1955, “buzzing around France and Italy on a motor scooter.” “Preston” discussed French politics at length, but in subsequent reports he referred to time spent in Germany and Yugoslavia. This seems to stretch the resemblance too far — and I learned when speculating on the identity of this peripatetic “Preston” that he was, and always had been, the young economist Max Corden. Max worked for the Argus after completing his Melbourne degree and then proceeded to doctoral studies at the London School of Economics.

Ken did not intend to become a British historian. Rather, as many other Australians did, he thought of his research as a preparation for writing about Australia. He had no desire to stay on in England and recoiled from its class-bound distinctions — “If you did stay you would have your children talking like toffs or cockneys.” A fellowship at Nuffield College after his ANU stipend ran out was more congenial, and he taught extension classes in Kent and Gloucestershire, but he was not going to stay. In May 1955 he submitted an application for a newly established chair at Melbourne, at the insistence of colleagues there. Even after Kathleen Fitzpatrick decided not to seek it, there was little chance with John La Nauze and Manning Clark in the field; but almost immediately Hugh Stretton sent him a copy of the advertisement for a senior lectureship at Adelaide. Soon it was agreed that he would take up that appointment in the first half of 1956.

His thesis title had by this time become “English Churches and the Working Classes 1880–1890, with an Introductory Survey of Tendencies Earlier in the Century” and had grown to more than 150,000 words, for one advantage of enrolment in the faculty of divinity is that it set no word limit. Cole had little to suggest on the final draft but did invite Ken to suggest who should examine it; hence his viva with Asa Briggs and R.H. Tawney in May 1956.

Cole apologised for not seeing Ken before he departed but thought he should succeed in finding a publisher; Asa Briggs was more practical and passed a revised version of the thesis to Harold Perkin, then a young lecturer at Manchester University who was assembling a series of studies in social history for Routledge and Kegan Paul. Perkin was greatly impressed but wanted a book that would take in “the sweep of the Victorian age,” so Ken rebuilt the study to open with a survey of the failure of the churches to reach the working classes and then an examination of their efforts between 1850 and 1900. Interruptions and other tasks such as The Stuart Case delayed completion until 1962; “the trouble with contemporary history is that it goes on happening,” he remarked when apologising for a further delay. But Perkin was a patient and sympathetic editor, his series impressive and influential.

During their time at Oxford, Ken and Judy expected to return to Melbourne, where they owned their home and he had a tenured lectureship. “I’m still not used to the idea of not coming back to Melbourne,” he wrote to Crawford in July 1955. Crawford assured him that “people should not be dissuaded from moving to other places, rather the reverse.” In moving on, Ken told Crawford of what he had taken from Melbourne — and I read his tribute as something more than filial respect, for it carries with it an implicit criticism of what he had missed while in Oxford. “One of the things I’ve seen more clearly for being away from Australia,” he wrote, “is that an education as good as we were given is very rare. We knew we were in a very good history school, but we (or at any rate I) didn’t realise how rare its virtues were.” He named three of them, and all read oddly in the current lexicon of higher education: first, “to have such an emphasis on shortish periods and primary sources”; second, “to have such close relations between teachers and students”; and third, “to make its students worry about why they are studying history.” Ken went down from Melbourne but he carried those virtues with him. •

This is Stuart Macintyre’s contribution to “I Wonder”: The Life and Work of Ken Inglis, edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark, released this week by Monash University Publishing. The book will be launched on 10 March in Melbourne by Tom Griffiths (details here), with a Canberra launch on 2 April.

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Global Britain’s frayed edges https://insidestory.org.au/global-britains-frayed-edges/ Fri, 07 Feb 2020 02:04:58 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58914

In the South Pacific, France is the likely beneficiary of Brexit

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As Britain withdraws from the European Union, much attention has focused on whether prime minister Boris Johnson can reforge relations with his country’s former EU partners. But Brexit has global implications, with some Conservative politicians promoting the idea of Empire 2.0, linking countries with historical ties to imperial Britain.

The recent opening of British high commissions in Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu has been widely touted in the Australian media as a sign of this global engagement. At a time when China is building stronger economic and political ties with many island nations, Australia has welcomed Britain’s increased activity, along with France’s renewed focus on the region under president Emmanuel Macron.

Courtesy of its fourteen dependencies — whose maritime domain spans 6.8 million square kilometres — Britain effectively controls the world’s fifth-largest exclusive economic zone, or EEZ. But the post-Brexit dream of a revived British empire has limits.

Although its withdrawal from Europe has significant implications for all these territories, only Gibraltar was eligible to participate in the 2016 Brexit vote. Residents of The Rock, desperate to retain economic ties and easy access to Spain, voted 96 per cent in favour of remaining in the EU.

The European Commission can still negotiate direct agreements with Britain’s overseas territories as part of the EU Overseas Countries and Territories network. But Britain’s only remaining colonial possession in the Pacific is Pitcairn — the bolthole for the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions after they escaped Captain Bligh’s bad language. Fewer than fifty people remain on Pitcairn, but its EEZ, designated as a protected marine reserve, covers 834,333 square kilometres.

The tiny island symbolises the decline of British imperialism in the Pacific. In December 2004, the government in London announced the closure or downgrading of thirty diplomatic missions in the developing world, aiming to save £6 million a year. As a consequence, Britain formally withdrew from the Pacific Community, the main technical agency serving the islands region.

With reduced diplomatic capacity, Britain channelled significant development assistance to the region through the European Development Fund. Post-Brexit, this pathway to influence is closed.

But the push to create a post-Brexit “Global Britain” means that British Conservative governments have begun re-engaging with the region. At the April 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, then foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced that London would open or reopen nine new diplomatic posts in Commonwealth. The new posts, he said, “are in regions which provide huge potential and opportunity post-Brexit for British businesses and will help us to deepen our relationships across the Commonwealth.”

The initiative followed Australian lobbying to draw more funding for Pacific nations from Britain’s overseas aid agency, DFID, at a time when Australia’s official development assistance is at the lowest level ever recorded as a proportion of gross national income. Three months after CHOGM, the 2018 Australia–UK meeting of foreign and defence ministers reaffirmed the importance of Britain’s “Pacific pivot.” “At CHOGM in April,” the ministers said, “we committed to launching an Enhanced Partnership for the Pacific to support regional stability, security and resilience. Australia welcomes the UK opening three new diplomatic missions in the Pacific, which will make it the best-represented European country in the region.”

The new missions are now in place: British diplomat Karen Bell re-opened the resident high commission office in Port Vila in July 2019, and the outgoing high commissioner to Vanuatu, David Ward, presented his credentials in Samoa in December 2019. After an absence of fourteen years, the British high commission in Nuku’alofa has reopened, with the delightfully named Thorhild Abbott-Watt taking up her post as high commissioner to the Kingdom of Tonga this month.

All this is being done on the cheap, however. During a visit to London in January 2019, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern agreed that British diplomats could co-locate with their NZ counterparts and “utilise New Zealand’s current infrastructure to make the UK’s work in the region more cost-effective and collegiate.”

Global Britain is desperately trying to draw on support from the Commonwealth, which marked its seventieth anniversary in 2019. Eleven of the fifty-three Commonwealth members are in Oceania and — in a royals-led recovery — the British government is using longstanding regional attachment to the House of Windsor as a diplomatic tool across Pacific Commonwealth states.

In 2018, just three days after the media furore over a purported Chinese military base in Vanuatu, Prince Charles and Australia’s foreign minister at the time, Julie Bishop, visited Vanuatu aboard an RAAF VIP plane. In October that year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex toured Oceania promoting the Invictus Games for injured service personnel. In November last year, the Prince of Wales made his first-ever visit to the Solomon Islands, making a speech in pidgin and launching a new ocean conservation initiative and malaria elimination road map.

But even the royals are struggling. Charles’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, hasn’t visited the South Pacific since 1998, and is currently off the diplomatic roster because of his association with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Even as the Invictus Games celebrate the courage of wounded warriors, Prince Harry’s 2018 visit to Fiji was notable for his silence about Fiji’s nuclear veterans, who are suffering the health effects of their service in the British armed forces during the 1950s British nuclear testing program in Kiribati. Post-Megxit, the new Royal Sussex brand is more likely to find markets in North America than the South Pacific, even though British troops did burn down the White House in 1812.


Throughout this year, Boris Johnson will be renegotiating Britain’s trade relationship with the EU. Hedging his bets, though, Bojo is also looking to Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada as potential trade and security partners. Conservative politicians have tried to talk up liberalised trade with former British dominions and colonies, with one-time international trade secretary Liam Fox even promoting a post-Brexit “Empire 2.0.”

When I met the Commonwealth secretary-general, Baroness Patricia Scotland, at the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, she was boosting a 2015 research report, The Commonwealth in the Unfolding Global Trade Landscape, suggesting the global network can advance the trade interests of both Britain and the Commonwealth countries.

“As the UK comes out of the European Union,” she told me, “it enables them to be freer in terms of the nature and extent of the agreements they are able to make. But trade facilitation opportunities are already there. Although we are looking for trade agreements, we need to exploit that 19 per cent advantage we already have now. What the United Kingdom had already indicated and identified even before Brexit was that there was literally gold in terms of the intensity of our relationship. There was already an awakening of a keen interest in how we trade with our whole Commonwealth family.”

But the Anglosphere powers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, while eager for free trade deals with post-Brexit Britain, are not blind to the economic reality. Only 1.4 per cent of Australian exports go to the United Kingdom, one-third of the amount going to other EU countries. Highly regarded London Times columnist Matthew Parris, formerly a Conservative MP, describes Empire 2.0 as “a dangerous post-Brexit fantasy,” noting that “over the past half-century Australia’s trade with Asia has risen from less than a third to more than four-fifths of her total. Nothing — and certainly not Brexit — is going to reverse that trend.”

Beyond this, both the European Union and Britain have failed to expand trade relations with the island states of the Pacific, even during the good times. For twenty years, the EU failed to finalise an Economic Partnership Agreement with the Pacific under the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, despite years of fruitless preparation and negotiations. Under World Trade Organization provisions, Britain has wound down subsidies for imports of Fijian sugar. The current negotiation of a post-Cotonou treaty, to be finalised this year, prioritises African nations over smaller Caribbean and Island states.

The main interest among ANZUS allies is Britain’s potential strategic and security roles in the Pacific, through the Five Eyes intelligence network, counterterrorism coordination and possible deployments of the Royal Navy in the South China Sea. The navy has already announced that the new HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group could be deployed for freedom of navigation operations alongside the US navy in the South China Sea.

But even the security sector is fraught with complications. Five Eyes relations are strained by the Johnson government’s recent decision to allow the Chinese technology giant Huawei to play a role in Britain’s 5G mobile network rollout, a policy that is anathema to hardliners in Washington and Canberra. Many analysts also question whether the Royal Navy has enough capacity and funding to prioritise naval deployments in the Asia-Pacific region at a time when the Trident nuclear submarine force is draining Britain’s defence budget. As British naval specialist Geoffrey Till has asked:

Is a significant naval presence in the Indo-Pacific really feasible these days given the dramatic decline in the Royal Navy’s numerical strength, both in platforms and people? And second, would a significantly more substantial naval force in the area contribute to regional peace and security, and would it be cost-effective for Britain itself?… There are certainly risks that it could all go horribly wrong, especially if the British return with a bombast that antagonises, or at least worries, local opinion.

The Royal Navy is also spooked by the possibility of an independent, nuclear-free Scotland — a far more likely outcome than Empire 2.0 — which could force the relocation of Trident submarines from their Scottish base in Faslane.


Despite their public enthusiasm for greater British involvement in the Pacific region, island governments are hedging their bets. In 2016 the Pacific Islands Forum formally invited Germany to become a Forum Dialogue Partner, recognising Berlin’s central role in the EU and in global funding for development.

Under Emmanuel Macron, France too is seizing the new geopolitical opportunities. In April, the French president will visit Tahiti to host a France–Oceania summit with island leaders. The 2016 decision to admit the French colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members of the Forum has allowed Paris to assert a growing influence on regional policy on the oceans, fisheries and the exploitation of deep-sea minerals, oil and gas (despite the ownership of these resources by the colonised Kanak and Maohi peoples).

French diplomacy in the Blue Pacific is amplified by the uncertain EU status of Britain’s overseas dependencies. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, French government ministers have been gleeful about the many opportunities the Brexit vote creates for France. At the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, France was represented by secretary of state Sébastien Lecornu, who told me that “Brexit will create something new in the Pacific.” With France now the only member nation of the European Union in the region, “the three overseas collectivities, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna — the pays et territoires d’outre-mer as we call them — are the incarnation of Europe in this part of the world after Brexit.”

One symbol of France’s new assertiveness is the appointment in September last year of the French ambassador to Fiji, Sujiro Seam, as the new EU ambassador to the Pacific.

For France, with its far-flung colonial empire, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides significant advantages. Metropolitan France has only 340,290 square kilometres of EEZ in Europe, but its overseas dependencies add eleven million square kilometres of EEZ worldwide. Without these territories in the Pacific, Caribbean, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, France’s EEZ would rank forty-fifth in the world, rather than second.

More than seven million square kilometres of France’s EEZ are in the Pacific. French Polynesia has an EEZ of more than 5,030,000 square kilometres, while New Caledonia adds 1,740,000 square kilometres and Wallis and Futuna a further 300,000. Even uninhabited Clipperton Island — near the vast seabed resources of the Clipperton-Clarion fracture — has a larger EEZ than metropolitan France.

This vast maritime domain has a geo-political as well as economic role for France and the EU. As a 2014 French Senate report noted:

These are spaces which involve both the reaffirmation of the role of France’s overseas territories, but also the place of France and Europe in global governance in the 21st century… the 11 million square kilometres of EEZ and their potential resources pose an opportunity both for France and for Europe in the economic competition on the international stage. Furthermore, by their specific characteristics, France’s overseas possessions bring Europe an opportunity for opening unequalled in the world.

As the EU moves to finalise a new treaty with the members of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, Brexit will reverberate far beyond the English Channel. Will Britain’s old enemy across La Manche benefit most from the changing geopolitics in the South Pacific? •

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The Brexit blame game https://insidestory.org.au/the-brexit-blame-game/ Fri, 03 Jan 2020 02:11:55 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58379

Some supporters of Jeremy Corbyn think Brexit explains Labour’s defeat. But the evidence is scant

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Last month a culture-war fable finally came true. For years, decades, across the Anglo democracies at least, centre-right partisans have fantasised about the “working class” switching to their side. In Australia this fairy tale occasionally leaks into the mainstream media. We suffered it during the Howard years and again after this year’s election, with pundits claiming, against all the evidence, that most low-income voters backed the Coalition.

Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the United States produced similar narratives, also based mainly on a confusion between votes and swings.

But on 12 December 2019 it actually happened. Surveys strongly suggest that the Conservatives received a higher proportion of votes from low-income people than from high-income ones, and more from low than high “social class.”

Was that because of Brexit? Certainly. It turbocharged a long-term trend: the rich have become not so reliably right-of-centre, the poor not so predictably left-of-centre. The same is happening in Australia and other advanced democracies, although in Australia we’ve not yet seen a crossover.

Brexit was also responsible for another dramatic feature of the result: the huge difference in voting by age. There’s nothing new, anywhere, in young people voting left of centre and old people voting right. But Brexit turned around a long-term trend. Over the decades, the old have become slightly less conservative and the young a bit less progressive — as the flattening lines prior to 2017 in this graph show. But at the two British elections since the 2016 Brexit vote, the gap widened, and then widened again.

So Brexit had an influence at the ballot box. Does that mean it determined the outcome? Is Jeremy Corbyn right to blame it for his big defeat?

As tempting as it is to read the result as a sign of the battle-weary British electorate’s resolve to get the thing over and done with, that can’t be sustained empirically. Across the United Kingdom, only around 47 per cent of people voted for a party that promised to leave on 30 January. Some 53 per cent voted for a party — Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish Nationalist Party and a bunch of smaller ones — that either wanted to ignore the 2016 Brexit referendum or have another one.

But 12 December wasn’t a plebiscite; it was a general election under a first-past-the-post system, the Conservative Party won triumphantly, and Labour received its lowest share of House of Commons seats since 1935. It wasn’t Labour’s 32.1 per cent vote that did it — its vote was even lower in both 2015 and 2010 — but the high Conservative one of 43.6, the party’s biggest since 1979.

That 11.5 per cent national gap was the killer. Johnston cobbled together nearly all right-of-centre and pro-Brexit voters. The Brexit Party did its bit by not contesting electorates where it could have cost the Tories victory, and by running against Labour in others, siphoning off Labour-leave support.

Surveys tell us that that the 53–47 overall vote split roughly matches how people feel about Remain versus Leave. Does this mean that virtually everyone voted according to their position on Brexit? Not remotely. That percentage match is pure coincidence. For one thing, a sizeable slice, around a quarter, of remain supporters don’t want a second referendum because they believe the 2016 verdict should be honoured. If every elector had been motivated purely by a wish to “get Brexit done,” the Tories and the Brexit Party would have won a majority of the vote between them.

Brexit probably made a difference around the edges. But the edges are where elections are often decided.

When a Lord Ashcroft exit poll posed a hypothetical that began, “If Brexit had not been an issue in this general election…,” just 15 per cent responded that they “would probably have voted for a different party.” Some 77 per cent would “probably” have voted for “the same party,” 2 per cent would “probably” have not voted, and 6 per cent were “don’t knows.” Eliminating the last two gives 16 per cent for “probably a different party” and 84 per cent for “probably the same.”

Even throwing in lots of allowance for error and less-than-full human knowledge about how one would behave in a hypothetical situation, that’s very lopsided. Sixteen per cent might sound like a fair chunk of the electorate, but you’d expect the flow to go both ways, if not necessarily quite summing to zero.

Of course, a majority didn’t faced a conflict between party of choice and attitude to European membership. Survey after survey has shown that big majorities of people who voted Labour in 2015 and/or 2017  (around 70 per cent) were remainers anyway. And similar proportions of Tory voters were Brexiteers.

Recently a Corbyn supporter tweeted this graph (from that same Lord Ashcroft poll), noting the “loss of 25% of @UKLabour Leave voters to Tories, but only 2% of its Remain voters” as evidence for the Labour leader’s explanation. But that’s a selective reading. For one thing, he’s comparing 25 per cent of a smaller number with 2 per cent of a larger one. More importantly, the graph shows a lot more 2017 Labour remainers fleeing, with some 9 per cent going to the Liberal Democrats. In total the party lost 16 per cent of its 2017 Remainers.

How would Brexit have motivated people to do that?

That graph also has 66 per cent of people who voted Tory in 2017, but supported remaining in Europe, voting Conservative again in 2019. The proportion of 2017 Labour-leavers who voted Labour in 2019 was pretty much the same, at 64 per cent. The big majority of these people, at least, did not let Brexit influence their vote.

That 64 to 65 per cent is just a minimum, because some people would have changed their party vote for reasons other than Brexit. People vote for many reasons.

And while 25 per cent of Labour leave supporters went to the Conservatives, only 8 per cent of Conservative remainers switched to Labour, and 21 per cent went to the Liberal Democrats.

(Obviously the 2019 Liberal Democrats vote was heavily made up of Remain supporters — a ratio of around nine to one, excluding those who didn’t vote at the referendum or can’t remember.)

Without disappearing down the rabbit hole of this and other surveys and constituency-by-constituency results, it seems reasonable to believe that while Brexit didn’t produce the landslide result, it did make it a bit worse for Labour, and it is responsible for the unusual make-up of the votes, as I described at the beginning of this piece. But whether or when to leave the European Union was not a major vote determinant for most electors. Labour lost relatively few Remain votes to the Conservatives, but a lot more left them for other Remainer parties in 2019. The numbers are consistent with Corbyn and the general state of the party being mostly responsible for Labour’s electoral flogging.

There’s been a lot of shoehorning of this result, and our own May election, into the “populist” genre alongside Donald Trump’s 2016 win. Every centre-right victory earns a guernsey it seems.

Actually Corbyn’s better-than-expected 2017 result, and our own Bill Shorten’s in 2016, are better “populist” fits. Like Trump, they were considered easybeats — big, irresponsible targets, by conventional standards — and they did very well thanks largely to those low expectations. (Trump lost the national vote by 2.1 per cent, Corbyn Labour by 2.4 and Shorten Labor by 0.7 per cent.) But in only one of these contests did the losing vote take them into office. 

And what about British electoral life after Brexit? Once it’s done and dusted, will voters revert to the mean?

We’ll probably have to wait five years to find that out. •

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Echoes of revolutions past https://insidestory.org.au/echoes-of-revolutions-past/ Tue, 31 Dec 2019 09:04:55 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58440

A dizzying 2019 ends in a Conservative upheaval with distinct traces of Tony Blair’s New Labour

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England’s electoral revolutions arrive once in a generation. Whether long foretold, as in 1997, or half suspected, as in 2019, they deliver an instant and profound sense that everything has changed.

These two epic moments have an odd symmetry. Tony Blair’s landslide for New Labour and, twenty-two years later, Boris Johnson’s thumping win for the Conservatives, were alike powered by cross-class support, kinetic leadership, demotic edge and skilful use of the other side’s schisms (not least over Europe). But the strongest link is the deepest: a palpable awareness that not just politics, but history — and even, perhaps, geology — has shifted decisively.

Sure, the two events differ greatly in context and detail. New Labour’s hegemony in Scotland and Wales made 1997 a pan-Britain triumph, unlike Johnson’s dependence on English votes. While Blair’s offer of (British) national renewal was served with emollience, Johnson’s pledge to break the Brexit logjam invited a partisan style. Both points reflect the divisions forged by the 2016 referendum on the European Union, which put the two men on opposite sides of a chasm. In this light, Johnson’s teasing echo of Blair’s celebratory cry on the morrow of victory (“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”), followed by a visit to none other than Sedgefield, Blair’s old seat and New Labour touchstone in England’s northeast, were also a wave from the future.

Across the gap, in other words, there is correspondence. Blair’s was an anti–status quo revolution, but so was Johnson’s. It may not look like that: Blair ended the Conservatives’ run of four election wins after eighteen years, while Johnson caps another foursome, thus granting the Tories a second decade in office (the first a story of coalition followed by desperation). But just as Tony ran against Labour’s own past of extremism and defeat to burnish his newbie credentials, so Boris seeks to avoid any taint of the David Cameron (2010–16) and Theresa May (2016–19) governments — and Brexit is the perfect solvent. That wave is also a salute.

Even the figures stand comparison. Blair’s party took 43.2 per cent of the vote on a 71.3 per cent turnout, gaining a working majority of 177. Johnson’s has 43.6 per cent on a 67.3 per cent turnout (compared to 68.8 per cent in 2017), securing an eighty-eight-seat cushion. (The seat figures take note of Sinn Féin’s boycott of the House of Commons, the Irish party having nominally gained two MPs in 1997 and seven in 2019.) The earth clearly moved more for Tony than Boris: his record 10.2 per cent Con-to-Lab swing broke Margaret Thatcher’s 5.3 per cent Lab-to-Con swing in her 1979 revolution. But Johnson’s unique sweep, as both pro-insurgency and pro-incumbency, is in its way equally stupendous.

Elective affinities, and contrasts, go further. Labour’s astonishing 1997 haul of 418 seats (out of 631, discounting Northern Ireland, where British parties don’t stand, and the Commons speaker) included fifty-six (of seventy-two) in Scotland and thirty-four (of forty) in Wales. These countries also elected ten nationalists, six from the Scottish National Party and four from Plaid Cymru, the Welsh party. But John Major’s Conservatives were wiped out there, losing their eleven Scots and eight Welsh MPs.

Those results, a boost for Blair’s devolution plans, also painted the Tories as irredeemably — guess what? — an English nationalist party. The mordancy here is that Major, a bitter opponent of Brexit and Johnson, accuses the latter of taking the party into an English ghetto. Yet after a mixed performance in 2019, the Johnson-led Tories are second in seats and vote share in Scotland and Wales. They retained just six of their thirteen Scottish MPs, taking 25.1 per cent of the vote on a 68.1 per cent turnout, but in Wales added six to reach fourteen MPs, a record 36.1 per cent on a 66.1 per cent turnout. In England itself, the Conservative vote share was just short of 48 per cent.

A future Scottish referendum will be competitive, as was 2014’s vote of 55 per cent to stay in the United Kingdom. But to say independence is nearer, the consoling wisdom of bruised anti-Brexiteers in London media-land, is overplaying it. Electoral cycles, and multiple contingencies, can still give destiny a run for its money. The dizzying events of 2019, accelerating in the five months since Johnson became prime minister, are clinching evidence.


No one owns the future. But a period when the UK is living close to the edge suits leaders claiming steerage rights over history’s tides. Amid so much insecurity, people want leaders with a higher sense of direction as well as an ability to keep the show afloat. Thatcher and Blair, at their zenith, had it; Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May didn’t. Cameron acted the part well, but after winning four big contests (two elections, two referendums) out of five he ended a loser. Now Johnson is a candidate for the pantheon. A twist in his wipe-out of Corbynism is to make Blair’s placement there, as controversial as Thatcher’s, look steadier.

A whiff of destiny came earlier for Boris, the proto-“world king,” than for Tony, whose artless, pretty-straight-guy memoir ups gear in a riveting dissection of the Labour left grandee Tony Benn’s politics of half-willed failure. Johnson, a decade younger, also had a more zig-zag route to the summit than Blair’s conventional lawyer-to-MP trajectory: journalism, souffle TV, London mayor, scandals all the way. His persona, mid nineties onwards, was a perfect fit for a popular culture ever more blokey, vacuous and right-on. Many who invested in him then are now big loathers thanks partly to buyers’ remorse, as I sketched in 2011:

[This] was also a period when comedy was becoming a major cultural industry, and — for a media that loves contrarians and the facade of difference — when “political satire” was filling the gap left by the end of ideology and the infirmity of political opposition. Boris was funny and clever; he stood out; he charmed; he got into scrapes, but even this seemed part of the Just William–style deal; and perhaps most effective of all, in a media-political culture becoming ever less serious, he reflected back to the audience a fashionable unseriousness, the sense that it — political argument, public life — was at heart all a jolly jape…

But the media, and certainly his left-wing opponents (very many, and what material he delivered them!), seem to have got Johnson wrong. Behind the charm offensive and the prolific journalism was always a formidable brain and a cold ambition. When the critics began to catch up in 2007–08, the sound of intellectual gears changing — from Boris ridiculous to Boris dangerous — was thunderous.

Still, they were wrong-footed. The left had loved, embraced and championed comedy’s colonisation of politics — most of it still does — but this was a step too far. The big mistake, it seemed, had been to characterise Johnson as above all a media figure (even if in the modern era every successful politician must be that), and to miss the possibility that the deceptively jocular exterior was also a mask. Could Boris even be more serious than the left? It was a question too fearful and disturbing to ask.

From this angle, Johnson’s ascent may be less unlikely than it can appear — as long as those contingencies are factored in. Blair too was a beneficiary of randomness, in particular the sudden death in 1994 of John Smith, which catapulted him to the Labour leadership after a much mythicised trade-off with rivalrous ally Gordon Brown. Thus was New Labour born. The steel he acquired in winning the party round proved its mettle in first-term foreign-policy crises, from the Kosovo war to 9/11. Thus was the road to Iraq opened. Blair, by then up against destiny with ever fewer tools in his kitbag and an enemy next door in 11 Downing Street, made a fair fist of the asymmetrical combat.

A third win in 2005, with a majority of sixty-eight on 35.2 per cent of the votes, turnout being 61.4 per cent — an anti-war surge having rewarded Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats with 22 per cent — was the graffiti on the wall. Blair lasted two more years, armour-plated now as he had to be, before leaving the piteous Brown to fritter New Labour’s already drained capital while lashing at phones, doors, keyboards and voters in frantic search of a governing purpose to keep Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne at bay. He never found it. In the event, Brown’s three years, ending in electoral defeat, Ed Miliband’s five, and Jeremy Corbyn’s four (and counting) saw Labour’s most baleful leaders drive the party into, respectively, ditch, pit and sewer.

In 2007, no one saw that coming. Many still blame Blair for it all (and everything else), which is an oblique tribute to his stature. “We have to rise to the level of events,” Johnson told cheering supporters on the morning of 13 December. Blair did so, destiny his motor and undoer, and every later British politician since is in his shadow, as he was in Thatcher’s. In the utterly changed context of 2020, Johnson — his vow of a “new golden age” another edict to self and colleagues — has to make good on those words. That electoral revolution is now his energy source and compass.


Johnson, well advised by Dominic Cummings, played a blinder between July and December in turning parliamentary zugzwang into checkmate of many adversaries: Tory grandees, backbench coup-makers, a calculating speaker, a casuistic Supreme Court, the BBC, Channel 4 and the opposition parties (the SNP excepted). So much had to happen, and not happen (for example, Labour possessing a mite of strategic nous), to ensure this. Hindsight alone lays inevitability’s false trail. Had the Europeanist remainers tied Johnson down, blocked an election and fixed a new “people’s vote” — their campaign name, which the luminous Times columnist Janice Turner describes as “blood-boiling” — everything would look different. Democracy had a close call.

That said, Brexit always had on its side an iron logic, rooted in the 2016 “no” to the EU: democratic legitimacy, popular sentiment, unbending belief — and redemptive “for all that” fairness (perhaps the supreme English value, exalted in the Scots-universal New Year song). These elements, strikingly, are now being quietly ceded by leading remain voices. Yes, populism also came into it, as how could it not, though endless Trump and far-right comparisons in New York Times-land and Guardian-land (to cite only these outlets) are wildly overcooked.

Lost in translation is that Brexit’s principal impulse was always democratic patriotism. Johnson’s adjusted withdrawal agreement with the EU having passed its second reading by a Commons’ majority of 124, the UK is on course to leave on 31 January.

In winning the establishment contest and now redrawing England’s electoral map, Johnson became voters’ conduit more than their ruler. If references to “the people’s government” sound bombastic, populist if you like, he seems to get this: “The voters of this country have changed this government and our party for the better. We must work to repay their trust.” The significant reference to the Tories, and cautionary insistence that so many ex-Labourites “lent us their votes” (italics added) again recall Blair’s victory speech: “we ran for office as New Labour, we will govern as New Labour… This new Labour government will govern in the interests of all our people — the whole of this nation.”

In the hinge elections of 1979, 1997 and 2019, millions of voters also wanted tangible, visible improvement in the public realm and their own lives. In the first two cases, that took until the second term. Thatcher benefited from a Labour split and a close-shave war with Argentina (contingency again), while Blair — who inherited a better economy than Thatcher or Johnson — was given a long Tory trauma, only some of it cast by his own spell.

Will voters be so patient with Johnson, or he so lucky? Given difficult economic terrain, steep policy challenges, perilous geopolitics and often-unhinged media, maybe not. A high-spending agenda joined to better public services — what the Independent journalist John Rentoul calls Johnson’s “sudden conversion to Blairism” — will be imperilled by a financial downturn. There are early glimpses of tension. Free-market Brexiteers like the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne feel “politically homeless” and fear their saviour may prove baby-snatcher. Nigel Farage plans to nibble at the Tories’ right flank by turning his Brexit Party vehicle into an anti-system Reform Party. And any attempt “to suppress the chaos-inducing entropic forces of Westminster/Whitehall,” as Cummings described his mission in 2014, will meet resistance inside these citadels.

“[In] every great victory lie the seeds of subsequent defeat,” the novelist Robert Harris observed of the election. How might it happen? A conceivable trajectory is that the new era’s first big scandal revives a “they’re all the same” mood, policy foul-ups ensue, Johnsonites tire and tussle (where is the flame, and who lost it?), voters seethe, by-elections are lost, recession hits, Scotland boils, Labour claws back in the north, LibDems in the south — and a general election looms. The now impossibly distant catharsis is cut up in a zillion ways to mock Johnson’s spoor of bombast, fantasy and broken promises. “2019, not such a big deal” columns mushroom.

Some are being written already.


What gives further pause is another bond between Johnson and Blair: the obsessional, onanistic abuse hurled at them. In part a subset of the vicious targeting of public figures, its impulse often misogynist and racist, the two men’s treatment has a distinct history. The anti-Blair hate-fest began, significantly, in a left–right media–political alliance that was forged over Bosnia and Kosovo, escalated after 9/11 and reached a paroxysm with Iraq. His 2007 departure brought no let up. Then came Jeremy Corbyn and a new swamp. Rentoul, co-author with Jon Davis of the best survey of New Labour to date — Heroes Or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered — classified the pathology as “Blair rage.”

Johnson’s more niche infamy, earned by serial misdemeanours, a lax private life and high-grade froth in his Telegraph and Spectator columns, morphed into serious villainy when he became Brexit champion then a careless foreign secretary. Earlier, in 2004, Johnson had backed a vain Commons attempt to impeach Blair led by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price, now party leader and Wales’s own man of destiny. But in 2016 the left–right front trained sights on Boris too. When Johnson ran for the Tory leadership in May-July, the virulence was eye-popping. “Boris derangement syndrome,” a phrase lifted from Brexit’s generic ability to madden, came into its own.

Such tags matter less than the wider discourse they signify. Complex as it is — and that mingling of left and right is an overlooked part of Britain’s last two decades — it bespeaks a politicised herd instinct, encouraged by social media, that often starts with an absolutist conclusion and then works backward to join the dots. Politics must always be made to fit the already known, auto-validating story. Blair was nothing short of evil and must be seen to have failed; then Brexit; now it’s Johnson’s turn, as dictionaries are raided to keep the spittle flowing, column after tendentious column.

A grave harm of this thought-blocking babble is that it squeezes the room for justified, rational criticism, and not just of Blair and Johnson. Its withered natural partner, contrarianism, is summoned to pre-empt the vacuum. The ensuing semblance of debate between these terrible twins reinforces an asphyxiating conservatism, often in radical guise. A voracious 24/7 news-and-comment mincer pumps febrility everywhere, preferring noisy partisanship and repetitive banality to informed, independent analysis that admits of complexity. Many institutions too have become fearful cheerleaders of entrenching orthodoxy. Although there are blessed oases in the desert, Brexit’s four-year limbo fortified this entire condition.

On 12–13 December, four hours of ballot counting brought catharsis. “Remember, if you are Britain, something always seems to turn up,” I wrote in 2017, channelling Dickens’s Mr Micawber. That something arrived as another implacable deep rumble from England’s middle earth. Oh, and Boris Johnson too. The way it has sent hearts and minds reeling is the best thing to happen in Britain for a generation. Voters have broken the lock and thrown open the window. Wherever the winds now blow, 2019’s end is a big new beginning. •

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The choice: Johnson in, Corbyn out, Brexit done https://insidestory.org.au/the-choice-johnson-in-corbyn-out-brexit-done/ Fri, 13 Dec 2019 08:33:25 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58278

Britain has voted for clarity, but the aftermath will be muddy

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On election day in a northern English city, the young female shop worker who handed over my subscriber’s Guardian, after a glance at the smiling photo of Jeremy Corbyn on the front page, said with emphatic curtness: “I would never vote Labour. Not a cat in hell’s chance.” After a couple of years of exchanging only everyday pleasantries, I was too startled to offer more than a non-committal mumble in reply.

The unprompted remark, not least its tone, was hard to shake off. Was it just a twist on everyday familiarity, sharing recognition of a big event, or was it an augur? Wild hours of driving rain piled more doubt. Would such weather be a greater deterrent to working-class voters: and now, after the great post-Brexit political switcheroo, was this worse news for the Tories than Labour? What does everything mean, and where is Erving Goffman when you need him?

Parsing life’s daily moments for political signals is a fool’s errand if taken too far. Equally, it’s forgivable on the day votes are being cast, when the rivalrous media cacophony stills and, as in 2017, tightening polls make the result hard to call. The mind, veering between relief at the campaign’s end and longing for the 10 pm exit poll, can’t help seeking cues in every grain.

This time, as in 2015 and 2017, the ritual moment brought a shock: neither a narrow Conservative win nor hung parliament, as most projections had suggested, but a substantial victory for Boris Johnson’s party. The Tories would have 368 seats in the 650-member House of Commons, an increase of fifty, the exit poll said; Labour 191 seats, a loss of seventy-one; the Liberal Democrats thirteen, up by one; and the Scottish National Party fifty-five, boosting their number by twenty. (The figures were revised through the night: with under thirty to be declared at the time of writing, the Tory estimate is 364, Labour 203, SNP 48, and LibDems ten). The Tory vote share is around 44 per cent, 1.1 per cent up from 2017, while Labour’s fell to 32 per cent, 8 per cent down on its great surge that year.

An instant verdict, even assuming less than pinpoint accuracy in the figures, was that Johnson can now take the United Kingdom out of the European Union by 31 January and have a working majority in parliament for a five-year term. The first outcome will cap an astonishing six months, the prime minister having won a Tory leadership race, governed without a majority, faced serial Commons defeats, party defections, legal rulings, revised the Brexit deal with the European Union, been twice denied then ceded the general election he wanted — and after a tough campaign, winning by the clearest margin of any PM since Tony Blair in 2001 and, on the Conservative side, Margaret Thatcher in 1987.

Scotland’s result casts an instant shadow on his achievement, however. The SNP has nearly matched its 2015 hurricane, when it took all but three of the country’s fifty-nine seats and became the third-largest cohort at Westminster. That came a year after the 2014 independence referendum, and Nicola Sturgeon’s party will now be invigorated in their effort to force a repeat. Johnson’s consent is required for such a vote, which would again imperil the UK’s integrity, but a refusal could trigger a Catalan-style showdown. The challenge is unavoidable. And other major policy tests, from the economy and security to health and infrastructure, ae equally pressing.

The early results trickled in as usual from England’s northeast cities, where constituencies are small and counting quick (a reminder that a long-frozen redrawing of boundaries, taking account of population drift, might now actually happen, to Tory benefit). They showed Labour holding its bastions despite a sharply falling vote and smaller Conservative upswings. Then came fractures in the northern “red wall”: Leigh, part of Manchester, Labour since 1922; Wrexham in north Wales, Labour since 1935; Grimsby, fishing port and Brexit icon, Labour since 1945; now fabled Workington, whose only non-Labour MP had served for two years after a mid 1970s by-election.

On it went, but with another huge test on the horizon: can a Tory party that has won Workington now govern as Workington’s party? Johnson’s victory speech to his supporters evinced recognition: “We have to grapple with the consequences of [victory], we have to change our own party, we have to rise to the level of events, we must answer the challenge that the British people have given us.”

For the Liberal Democrats, a likely one-seat advance is dismal when set against the party’s inflated ambition to hold the balance of power. Consoling wins, such as taking the North-East Fife super marginal, were set against the London losses of Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna, high-profile ex-Labourites, though neophyte leader Jo Swinson’s loss of her own seat in Dunbartonshire East may allow the LibDems’ post-election argument to be less personalised and more strategic.


But everything comes back to Labour and, even more, Corbyn. In this topsy-turvy world, Labour had its own moments in the south: defending Canterbury and Norwich South, toppling Tories and expanding majorities in Putney and Battersea as its London heartland grows. But the big picture is grim. This is the party’s fourth successive defeat, one to compare with Michael Foot’s in 1983 (though his 209 seats exceeds Corbyn’s, whose total is Labour’s lowest since 1935). The party’s culling across England’s north and midlands, both in marginals and its old fastnesses, echoes its collapse in Scotland (where it lost six of its seven seats, already a historic low).

For Charlie Falconer, a Blairite minister who made his peace with Corbyn, the attitude of Labour’s old supporters in these regions was: “You are offering us nothing and don’t connect with us anymore.” He posed the question, “What do we do to start having a conversation with them again?”

Corbyn’s own response, at his Islington North count, had none of this. Graceless, media bashing, lacking any shred of contrition or humility, it was just another stump speech. Here on display was his, and Labour’s, true measure. The tragedy is how few in this degraded party can see it, even now, and indeed how many — including swathes of so-called centrists, trading silence on anti-Semitism and extremist links for the chance of stopping Brexit — are implicated.

In this sense Corbyn’s address, with its lack of imagination or insight even at his moment of political truth, is symptomatic. He has Corbynised Labour, in its soul as well as its power structures, and that contaminates the entire political world. Other toxins are at work, but Corbynism is the worst: and part of that worst, as the speech confirmed, is that it is so certain of its own moral superiority and so trapped inside itself.

Britain has long needed a government, and now has one. It also needs a decent opposition. But above all, what gives hope is that on the big issues at stake, the people got it right. This was another good day for democracy. Now I’m off for a word with my new friend. •

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Why Labour lost https://insidestory.org.au/why-labour-lost/ Fri, 13 Dec 2019 02:25:30 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58252

How important was Brexit to the British election result?

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In May this year, Australians voted against raising the Newstart allowance. Maybe that’s no surprise, as dole-bludger bashing is a longstanding tradition in this country.

Stranger, though, was that we also gave a thumbs down to Labor’s policy to “increase the numbers of doctors in remote, rural and regional Australia.” More bizarre still, the strongest opposition to this plan came from the very areas that would have benefited.

And let’s not dwell on climate change, something most Australians want acted on. In droves they voted for the party riven on the issue, infected with denialism — the party whose leaders have trouble even uttering the words lest their rabid base erupt in fury.

The answer to these apparent conundrums, of course, is that the vast majority of Australians voted not on these individual things. They were motivated by other matters, most importantly party loyalty, followed by perceptions of economic competence, with a long dwindling tail of others.

Not everything under the campaign sun is a vote-shifter. “Salience” is the word pointy heads use to describe how greatly an issue influences votes.

Which brings us to yesterday’s election in Britain. It’s a convincing Tory majority, just as the opinion polls were predicting and most pundits expected; if anything, the polls underestimated its size. (Like our own Victorian election last year, pollsters got the overall outcome right, so not too much self-flagellation in public is required.)

Brexit, of course, had a high-profile campaign presence. But the fact that the parties and the media carried on about it a lot doesn’t in itself make it an important vote driver. Surveys showed a plurality but not a majority of Brits nominating it as the most important issue. That means something. But here in Australia people invariably list health and education as top election issues; if they voted purely with these things in mind Labor would never lose an election.

Still, Brexit is binary, it either happens or it doesn’t, while health and education are matters of degree. A party that promised to withdraw the government from either would be in for a difficult time.

Brexit was obviously a vote-decider for a small minority, as it was at the last election, in 2017. But was the election really a referendum on getting Brexit done?

Twenty-one years ago the Howard government was re-elected despite an unpopular tax policy. It would have won by more had it not promised to introduce the dreaded GST. A standalone referendum on the GST would have crashed badly, yet it was re-elected despite lumbering itself with this turkey of a policy.

That wasn’t an election about a GST. But the government got a mandate to implement it. (Leave aside the fact that the Coalition lost the national vote.)

Brexit is not as unpopular as our GST was. It has divided Brits down the middle, as we know, with polls tending to show a slim majority for remaining.

The wide takeout, that this is a vote for Brexit, with all its tiresome, lovingly crafted corollaries — another clip under the ear for out-of-touch elites, another blow for populism — is as predictable as it is overwrought. It was a general election, with the big majority deciding who they wanted to govern them for the next several (perhaps even five) years.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was like our own Bill Shorten. He led his party to a close, better-than-expected result on his first outing — which meant his party kept him and his general policy approach — and was then done like a dinner on his second attempt.

Under a preferential voting system like ours, the Tories would still have won, but not by as much. Perhaps Boris Johnson’s main achievement, by taking such a muscular pro-Brexit stand, was to minimise the leaking of support to the Brexit Party, which instead took votes from Labour. (Potential Brexit Party voters were obviously part of the minority who voted solely or predominately on the issue.)

The soap opera, which even from this side of the planet has been difficult to bear, will soon be coming to an end.

Then Brexit can go from being a minor driver of partisan support to, once again, a negligible one. •

Update: it looks like a little over 50 per cent of UK voters went for a party that wanted a second referendum on Brexit — adding together Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Green (at least their implicit position) gets you there.

Another parallel with Australia’s 1998 election, where Labor plus One Nation plus Greens (all against the GST) received a majority of the national primary vote, and Labor won the two-party-preferred one.

Which, again, is not to say most people voted with Brexit front and centre, as if it were a referendum. But it does weaken the claim that the election shows a popular revolt against the cosmopolitan elites and blaah blaah blaah.

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Britain’s elusive epic https://insidestory.org.au/britains-elusive-epic/ Wed, 11 Dec 2019 06:39:17 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58216

A fragmented election campaign nears its big reveal

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“In all my years filming elections, I’ve long suspected that certain candidates have set up friendly voters to make them look more popular. But this is the first time we’ve caught one blatantly in the act.” Trust a formidable reporter to scoop a comedic grain from Britain’s sunken general election. In Ashfield, a former coalmining town and Labour-held marginal in England’s east midlands, Michael Crick — having made the intriguing move from left-leaning Channel 4 News to the right-wing Daily Mail’s video team — joins the Conservative hopeful, Lee Anderson, for a spot of canvassing. Lee is already a headliner in the area: a Brexit-supporting Labour defector who wants misbehaving council tenants downgraded to tents and put under military discipline.

As they prepare to set off from the town square, Lee is accosted by a resident, Jennifer Barker, who coolly lambasts him as a racist and misogynist given to “whipping up prejudice.” He is also shown making a furtive call warning Steve, the constituent he plans to doorstep, not to let the visitor from London know they’re pals. When the clumsy ruse dissolves, the ex-pitman’s “you’ve killed my career” feels unfazed, as if he’s quite enjoying the attention. In context, Crick’s endnote is a touch ponderous: “A lesson to us, journalists and viewers, that in this world of fake news, we should be a little more sceptical about what we see on screen.”

Ashfielders are blunt, the kind of trait that a media presence tends to amplify. Labour candidate Natalie Fleet tells the Economist of a male constituent who raged against her party’s votes-at-sixteen policy. I was a mother at that age, said Natalie. “Well, you should have kept your legs closed.” “Well, you can fuck off.” A vote lost, then? Not necessarily. Ashfield is “perhaps the strangest seat in Britain, with enough characters and subplots to fill a political soap opera,” says the newspaper. The seat’s three-way contest, with the insurgent Ashfield Independents also pitching to overturn Labour’s 441 majority in 2017, lures party strategists and media outlets alike.

Around a hundred near-marginals, out of 650 first-past-the-post races, will decide the colour of the next parliament. The most competitive include historic Canterbury, where a student vote helped Labour take the 185-year Conservative bastion by, yes, 185 votes in 2017; Crewe & Nantwich in the northwest, which Labour snatched by forty-eight; and North-East Fife, where a Scots nationalist is defending a two-vote margin from Liberal Democrat and Tory contenders.

In England, whispers of volatility reach to Workington in the far northwest, with its 3925 Labour majority. Were the Conservatives to win coastal Cumbria’s ex-mining redoubt, a few miles and a world away from the famed Lake District’s western fringe, a renewal of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street tenure would be assured. Indeed, this campaign kicked off with a flurry over “Workington Man,” distant offspring of 1990’s (Thatcherite) Essex Man and 2001’s (New Labour) Worcester Woman as a London politico’s idea of the must-have voter. Today’s version — according to Onward, a centre-right “ideas factory” — is a middle-aged grafter, fan of rugby league and Brexit, now notionally ready, like his peers in similarly neglected towns, to junk Labour red for Conservative blue.

This newly identified beast was soon being avidly scouted by journos in search of earthy wisdom, then just as quickly discarded until the post-election inquests. But the passing frenzy served to focus attention on a churning electoral market, in which voters’ greater readiness to shop around intersects in unpredictable ways with Brexit’s effect of polarising much of the electorate into “leave” and “remain” camps. The British Election Study finds that 49 per cent of voters didn’t vote for same party across the general elections of 2010, 2015, and 2017. Two years ago, 40 per cent of Labour’s voters switched to the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s vigorous campaign.

Such volatility makes for caution about the result tomorrow. Both 2015’s Conservative majority and 2017’s hung parliament came as exit-poll stunners at 10pm on election night. Most projections this time veer between those two outcomes. Current indicators — a Tory squeeze of the upstart Brexit Party to reach 42–43 per cent of vote share, a Labour creep to 33–34 per cent at LibDem expense, and the Scottish National Party’s guaranteed forty or so seats — could produce either. On election eve, YouGov’s vaunted MRP model projects an overall Conservative majority of twenty-eight, down from sixty-eight a fortnight ago.

Much depends on how strong Labour’s northern “red wall” proves to be, and how vulnerable southern Tory seats are to the anti-Brexit LibDems. Amid larger uncertainty, those local jousts and regional swings will be pivotal. So will variable weather on a deep-winter, pre-Christmas Thursday, which may affect turnout. This time, excuses for defeat might well be more entertaining than the election has been.


The campaign has had a bad press. Boring, joyless, dire, empty and depressing, say many commentators. Sheer length underlies the mood: after a pretend war lasting months, a few weeks of round-the-clock airtime for yet more repetitive hyperbole can hardly create a spark. Brexit’s unrelieved four years, and politics’ banal colonisation of every crevice of public life, add to the mix. What else should be expected?

Especially so, given that fragmentation now extends as much to election campaigning as to the political system, its parties, and the United Kingdom itself. The comforting surface of leaflets and rallies, head-to-heads and vox pops is reduced ever more to a palliative, while unseen marshals deploy much sharper tools of viral grooming — attack ads, rousing videos, targeted messages — to hustle key demographics towards the voting booth. No wonder modern elections feel so elusive, in a Kundera-like “life is elsewhere” sort of way, and to many, so frustrating.

Michael Crick himself observes “almost a conspiracy between politicians and journalists to pretend there is a vibrant contest on the ground. In reality, most voters have no personal contact from candidates beyond a few leaflets. That seems true even in many marginal seats.” What’s left of elections is a wall of noise: both ubiquitous and ungraspable.

But lay aside expectations, and the imprint of this deep background is tangible. The Tory high command is haunted by 2017, when a dud leader and stuffed manifesto led to a calamitous victory. This time, a risk-averse Conservative document has helped shield a distrusted Boris Johnson from close policy scrutiny and allow him space to bore “get Brexit done” into every voter’s skull. At headquarters, Isaac Levido and his Kiwi partners Sean Topham and Ben Guerin — credited with Scott Morrison’s win in May — lead an agile online strategy of experimental provocation, pithy sloganeering and constant rebuttal. Move fast and shake things, give Boris his lines, and let his presence do the rest: it’s not pretty but it is coherent.

By contrast, Labour’s sense of its near miss last time has prompted a straight remix at even higher volume. The proposed state control of capitalism, its £83 billion (A$161 billion) starter cost to be conjured up by taxes on high earners, runs with the grain both of Jeremy Corbyn’s lifelong ideology and his makeover of the party since 2015. That brings a catch: his often-popular ideas are sold with vengeful rhetoric that lifts believers but worries the unattached. This matters more as Corbyn himself is both better known than in 2017 and anathema even for many traditional Labour supporters. The ten leadership approval polls since mid November, gathered by five companies, have given him an average net rating of –39.5 per cent, against Johnson’s –5.3 per cent.

For all their flaws, Johnson and Corbyn have been their party’s undisputed figureheads in interviews, staged workplace or hospital visits, and at gatherings of the faithful. The prime minister often seemed distracted, the opposition leader flat. The whole circus’s robotic air and want of electricity again suggested, for all the accompanying hype, a backroom script. True, the BBC’s half-hour studio debate, after a dismal one on ITV, offered a good contrast between Corbyn’s lucid if formulaic droning, honed by decades of all-purpose platform speeches with no stopwatch, and Johnson’s digressive burbling, a hit-and-miss procession of forays and darts that equally eludes skewering. Jellyfish met butterfly, the result — despite the ludicrous avidity of rival post-match “spin room” teams — a tie.

The Boris–Jeremy duopoly sucked up much of the TV oxygen, and made the contest look heavily male. Still, the LibDems’ Jo Swinson — hyperactive, green, feminist and Europhile, like her party — contrived to miss the breakthrough bus. Her initial branding as “next prime minister” was absurd, her promise to cancel Brexit by fiat (“let’s make all this go away” in the ineffable words of her brief rival Layla Moran) felt undemocratic even to many remainers. Swinson’s own average poll rating is –24.5 per cent. But if the party over-promised, its energetic focus on target seats could garner high-profile Tory scalps such as foreign secretary Dominic Raab.

Adding lustre to the LibDems are the smooth Chuka Umunna and the dauntless Luciana Berger, ex-Labour centrists and Corbyn critics, and the ex-Tory rising star Sam Gyimah, all now standing in Tory-held London marginals. The first two reached the LibDems via the short-lived Independent Group (created in February, an aeon ago in British politics). Berger’s experience of sustained anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s party, a scourge whose scale and depths are still being uncovered, is echoed by many others in a party once seen as British Jews’ primary political home. Their fear of a Corbyn premiership is real.

For their part, ex-Tories standing as independents, such as Dominic Grieve, are backed by grandees from the 1980s and 90s — John Major, Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten — whose raging embitterment against Brexit and Johnson, reminiscent of postwar empire loyalists, is accorded reverence on the BBC. On the Labour side, Gordon Brown, an addictive thunderer of doom, similarly resembles a lost soul from a distant era. Of this caste, Tony Blair alone retains the capacity to make an actual argument about Britain and Europe now, misguided though his call for a hung parliament is. (Juliet Samuel, who sees politicians’ abandonment of responsibility as today’s fulcrum, writes in a brilliant column: “Rather than defending liberal democracy, a hung parliament would only endanger it more.”) Nonetheless, given the self-inflicted wreckage of the more demented remainers, Blair’s relative sanity could still be influential.

If the above broadcasting reference is not gratuitous, it’s because the shallowness of much political coverage may become unignorable after the election. The best of BBC journalism is excellent, but is submerged in a trivialising and patronising sea. To be fair, the networks’ problems overlap with those of politics as a whole, with both sides now existing in the shadow of voracious social media and spending most of their energies trying desperately to keep up. That dynamic visibly turns fine journos, and mediocre politicians, into manic puppets.

Some impresarios of the bearpit, on BBC and C4 in particular, but also ITN and Sky, now act less as public-service journalists than as squall merchants for social media. A gleaming exception is Andrew Neil, ex-Sunday Times editor turned incisive BBC interviewer, who above all works for his supper and thus allows the viewer-citizen to share it (in both old and new senses). His granular, relentless dissections of Corbyn’s economic illiteracy and of Nicola Sturgeon’s abysmal record as Scotland’s first minister were joyous in great part for being unheard of — and this after the two leaders’ four and five years in charge — but mainly for the quasi-dissident thrill of “Blimey, is this allowed before the watershed?!”

Neil didn’t net the butterfly, however, for Johnson avoided his show with lame dissembling. The interrogator then, after a studied demolition of Nigel Farage, challenged the PM direct to camera on this “question of trust.” It was a huge viral hit, and no more. Johnson’s evasion looked cowardly, though the shoddy snub may also reflect his notable obedience to the Tory campaign playbook. In turn, Michael Grade, respected former TV executive, responded that Neil’s reaction “crosses a line” of impartiality, and went on to criticise his and C4’s “empty chairing” of politicians who decline to appear. “Neither the BBC nor ITN [which supplies C4] is Fox News — yet.”


If modern politics lives ever in the moment, this election is no exception. Its disruptive events are already consigned to the great churning maw — flooding in Yorkshire, an Islamist atrocity, Trump’s presence at a nervous NATO summit — though Johnson’s “empathy bypass” (© Jo Swinson) on Monday when shown a distressing hospital photo might linger until voting day. In parallel, the world — Hong Kong, Iraq, Ukraine, Chile, Lebanon, China’s Uyghurs, Zimbabwe, Australia’s blazing eastern states, even the WTO’s fraying, to name only a few — made no imprint. In these times, Britain’s amnesia is reflexive, its bubble impermeable.

Much needs to change to let memory, light and the world flood back in, and so to move forward. Everyone will have their own ideas about what that change should be. In my long-held view, a clear government, leadership and direction is the sine qua non. Juliet Samuel is so right: “[A] democracy can only learn by doing, not by trying to wind back the past… Blame is a risk inherent in any action. If there is no one to blame, there is no democracy.”

But what do the people want, and what does their decision make possible? Soon, Britain will find out. •

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People power https://insidestory.org.au/people-power/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 05:09:28 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=58017

The tide of populism doesn’t always run the same way

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We live in a time of “populism.” It’s “populism” this and “populist” that. Brexit in June 2016, Donald Trump in November. Marine Le Pen’s progress to the second round of France’s presidential election the following year.

Then there’s the failed Italian referendum to curb the powers of that country’s Senate, also in 2016. Talk about populism! But Australians need only imagine such a vote in Australia, at any time, to see how dubious that classification is. A referendum to allow our House of Representatives to expand without a proportional growth in the Senate crashed badly way back in 1967.

This year, our own Morrison miracle was described by the New York Times as “another swell in the wave of populist fervour that swept President Trump into office and set Britain on a path out of the European Union.” A centre-right government winning re-election on a ferocious scare campaign about taxes and spending — is this something new?

That’s not to say the upsurge in “populism” is imaginary. The old centre has been collapsing across advanced democracies for years, and was accelerated by the global financial crisis. Many voters no longer seem happy to eat their greens when instructed. The result in Europe has been the rise of far-right — and, to a lesser extent, far-left — parties.

But populist gains usually strike a blow against business as usual, which is another reason why our May 2019 election doesn’t fit.

What Trump, Brexit and Australia 2019 do have in common are failed opinion polls. Before each of those votes, the final polls were out by several per cent. At most elections this would go unnoticed, but not when the error reverses the outcome. The 2017 British election was also a bit of an opinion poll miss; the pollsters picked the late movement to Labour but most of them missed its size. British pollsters had got 2015 wrong as well, seeing a neck-and-neck Tory–Labour result rather than the big Conservative win that eventuated.

They’ll do much better on 12 December. Of course they will.

The poor polling added ballast to a crucial component of the “populist” narrative: that “the elites” are misreading the people. The surveys pointed to one thing, but “the voters” didn’t follow the script. Hoorah! Score one against the establishment.

In the annals of “populism,” our 2016 election result was actually a better-qualified entry than this year’s. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 stunner, election night went against the tide of expectations. The Coalition won the national vote by only 0.7 per cent and barely kept its majority. The polls did get the aggregate vote about right, but general expectations (well, mine anyway) were that they had understated likely Coalition support or that those figures would translate into a bigger seat win for the Coalition. Sitting federal governments tend to do well in the vote–seat trade-off. But not that time.

These unexpected results have an important feature that doesn’t neatly fit with the popular takes. It wasn’t just “the elites” who got a shock. The hoi polloi were astonished too. They approached the ballot box (and, outside Australia, decided whether to bother voting) with expectations that made some of them feel reckless, and free to throw the dice (and others to stay at home because the result was in the bag).

In 2016 it was Labor that benefited from these lost-cause expectations, with few people contemplating the prospect of Bill Shorten emerging as prime minister. For some, the option of putting the government in its place with a spot of protest voting was hard to resist.

Shorten certainly didn’t enjoy that advantage in 2019, when he and his policies came under scrutiny so fierce it veered at times into fiction.

There’s also a big difference between Brexit and Trump. Surveys and election returns showed that most Brits on low incomes voted to leave, and most Remainers were better off. Trump, by contrast, won greatest support among high-income Americans, while most poorer people voted for Hillary Clinton.

That might surprise some, but it was a presidential election, after all, and Trump received the votes of the vast majority (about 90 per cent) of registered Republicans who turned out. Clinton got most (also around 90 per cent) of the Democrats who voted. What was decisive were the low-income swings to Trump and the high-income (smaller) swings to Clinton, compared with the 2012 election. Holding everything else constant, the low-income swing probably decided the result.

Brexit, on the other hand, was just a plebiscite on a topic that most people had barely contemplated until the vote was announced. That’s quite different from an election, when people decide who they want to rule over them for three years and party loyalty still plays a big, if declining, part.

Our own 2017 marriage-equality survey produced a similar income split to Brexit, as did the republic referendum two decades ago. High-earning urban folks mostly voted Yes, while low-income outer-suburbanites and people outside the capital cities were more likely to vote No. For most, it was a tenth-order issue.

Our marriage survey romped home, yet our republic referendum had failed. Like Brexit, that result brought forth a lot of crowing about out-of-touch elites, and about how Labor was estranged from the ordinary, unpretentious, salt-of-the-earth types it’s supposed to represent.

But these commentators’ fetishisation of people power tends to be conditional. You might recall their querulous pre-election columns this year about the reckless Australians who appeared so easily bribed by Labor’s magic pudding of spending promises. As the recent Victorian election had already shown, they lamented, the system was now rigged against any party of economic responsibility. But faith in humanity was quickly restored on election night. The voters always get it right, after all.

Here’s a thought. Imagine the Australian government suddenly decided to hold a plebiscite on quitting the refugee convention? That would be a decent equivalent of Brexit. Or leaving the World Trade Organization, or undoing all free-trade agreements? Maybe tariffs should be reimposed to revive our manufacturing industry? Get rid of the GST and make everything 10 per cent (actually 9.1 per cent) cheaper — how good would that be?

We don’t know how votes on these and other facets of the cosy bipartisan political-technocratic consensus would go. (The GST, despite Labor’s cynical opposition at two elections, is bipartisan policy.) You can be sure it would pit the cosmopolitan “insiders” against the “outsiders,” inner against outer urban, urban against regional, “elites” against “real Australians.”

Some might even get through, in which event there’d be lots of gloating. Just not necessarily from the usual suspects.

Populism can cut both ways. •

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A vote beyond the void https://insidestory.org.au/a-vote-beyond-the-void/ Wed, 20 Nov 2019 07:34:57 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=57901

Boris Johnson’s election may yet restore the pith to Britain’s democracy

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Does more voting mean better democracy? If so, Britain would be well on track. The general election on 12 December is its fourth since 2010. The same period has seen four other pan-UK votes: referendums on electoral reform and Brexit, and two elections to the European parliament. There have also been two elections each to assemblies in London, Scotland and Wales, and three to Northern Ireland’s. A third referendum, on Scotland’s independence, was a UK event even if a Scotland-only decision. Around forty mayoral posts in English city-regions or local authority areas (including London’s high-profile mayor and assembly) were contested, and a similar number of police-and-crime commissioner, or PCC, roles across England and Wales. Council and borough elections continued to come around. These days it’s wise — just in case — to sift junk mail for a polling card.

This electoral amalgam was seeded by New Labour’s devolution reforms of the late 1990s. Not everything came to fruition: a regional plebiscite said no to an assembly in England’s northeast, thanks to the feisty Dominic Cummings (now a Downing Street aide), thus quashing plans for a sequel in the northwest. In several cities, people rejected offers of a mayor; in others, they chose one after the model had been decreed. These signs were, or should have been, an early warning that hustlers of engagement can induce apathy or disillusion.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and David Cameron after 2010, framed their institutional bustle as a refit of British democracy. But the jargon used to finesse new outfits and voting channels — citizenship, access, participation, empowerment, civil society, progressive, accountability, closing the people–power gap, devolution and engagement — helped disguise their often top-down impulse.

Perhaps inevitably, rhetoric outran delivery. More seriously, mushrooming elections coincided with democracy’s growing deficits of performance and trust. From 2004, a host of studies measured citizens’ alienation from their rulers and core institutions, citing the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, austerity, MPs’ misconduct, and business greed as key factors. A Pew survey in 2019 records 70 per cent of people disputing the notion that elected officials care what they think. Democratic Audit’s 2018 report shows “unprecedented declines in the core institutions of the UK’s democratic system, particularly at the centre.” The Hansard Society’s 2019 audit of political engagement finds public views of Britain’s governing order bleaker than any in its fifteen-year history: as many (or perhaps as few) as 63 per cent of respondents think the system is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful, and 72 per cent say it needs big improvement.

This democratic recession permeated the 2016 vote on European Union membership and its ensuing, endless limbo. Brexit, as both political logjam and immense psychic weight, is now well into its fourth year. The whole experience deepens the slump. (True, the recurring contrarian argument that Britain’s system is gamely coping has merit, but is fixated on process.) The Hansard study says 73 per cent have little or no confidence in MPs’ handling of Brexit, with 42 per cent even agreeing that “many of the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament.”

Such decay — David Van Reybrouck calls it “democratic fatigue syndrome” in Against Elections: The Case for Democracy — seems all the more corrosive in light of the surge in voting channels preceding and running alongside it. Britain’s recent history, its lowest point the non-enactment of the 2016 decision, suggests the link between voting and democracy is indeed broken: that ever more injections have enabled immunity. If that is so, the latest general election will be just another Thursday, leading to yet more delay and obfuscation.

But could the link yet be restored? At heart this election sets Boris Johnson’s attempt to uphold the EU referendum verdict against parties seeking to reverse or cancel it. Brexit thus remains the raw power struggle it became under Theresa May’s wretched premiership, eventually driving the new Conservative leader to Downing Street on 24 July with a pledge to “get Brexit done.” Losing, over three volcanic months, a tiny House of Commons majority, a tranche of Tory defectors or expellees, a series of votes, control of the daily agenda, and a Supreme Court ruling on his proroguing of parliament, he earned a lifeline by signing a revised agreement with the European Union. Still confined by brute Westminster numbers, unable to secure his preferred “deal-then-election” tango, escape came via a Liberal Democrat–Scottish National Party démarche: by 24 October, this “election-then-what?!” was on.

Its early phase echoes Brexit’s years of frenzied torpor. There’s no uplift yet from the parties’ combat over health spending, floods and broadband, nor from a hyped-up and numbing TV debate on 19 November between Johnson and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. But if this election is to be different, then a brief look at what people actually turned out to vote for (or, notably, didn’t) during Britain’s two-decade voting boom might yield a countervailing glimmer.


Turnout statistics are the enduring Cinderella of Britain’s election reporting. Hugh Brogan, respected historian of the United States, would periodically write to the Guardian lamenting their absence among its acres of comment. In a country where voting is voluntary, the neglect gives politicians a free pass and skews understanding of the salience of politics in people’s lives.

A portion of such figures from these years, albeit lacking the granular detail they deserve, is sobering illustration. Turnouts in Wales’s assembly and Scotland’s parliament have, in four later elections, never matched their inaugural 46 and 59.1 per cent in 1999. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that the 1997 referendums on whether to create these bodies drew just 50.1 per cent of voters in Wales, of whom 50.3 per cent said yes, and 60.1 per cent in Scotland, of whom 74.3 per cent said yes to the principle and 63.5 to the institution having tax-varying powers. (The pro-independence SNP, in power in Edinburgh since 2007, ever presumes to speak on behalf of — in effect to own — Scotland, but has never won the votes of even 37 per cent of the country’s electorate in any election.)

A 2011 referendum on extending the Welsh assembly’s powers drew 35.6 per cent. In two PCC cycles, a turnout rise from 15.1 to 27.3 per cent was “clearly influenced by combining the PCC contests with other elections,” while much-heralded 2017 metro mayor elections in the greater Manchester and Liverpool areas lured 28.9 and 26.1 per cent to the polls. This year’s council elections in England had 32.6 per cent, within the usual range and shared by five mayoral run-offs on the same day.

Northern Ireland, in the UK’s variegated realm of (at least) four nations, is particular in its own way. Belfast’s assembly too has never reached the heights of 69.8 per cent in the first, 1998, election, but a domestic scandal and Brexit’s strains helped catapult turnout in a snap 2017 poll to 64.8 per cent, a ten-point increase over a year. That said, the body is in a three-year limbo due to the stranglehold of hegemonic ethno-religious parties without whose agreement no executive can form.

In eight European parliament elections since 1979, the peak UK vote was 38.5 per cent in 2004; this year’s tally was 37.2 per cent, an increase of 1.6 per cent from 2014. Even amid Brexit’s morass, most Brits can’t be induced to rate Brussels and Strasbourg’s torpid palaces.

By the same token, the higher the stakes are perceived to be, the more voters join. Scotland’s 2014 referendum had an 84.6 per cent turnout, over twice the 42.2 per cent in the UK’s 2011 poll on ditching first-past-the-post for the alternative vote in electing the Commons. Only the tight general elections of 1950–51 (turnouts 83.9 and 82.6 per cent), the Churchill–Attlee era’s last hurrah, come near. And the UK’s 2016 vote on EU membership, at 72.2 per cent well exceeding the 63.1 per cent average of the four general elections between 2001 and 2015, in turn echoed the 71–78 per cent range of the twelve held from 1955 to 1997. To a degree, the popular investment in both events was a throwback to the long post-1945 era.

These votes by turn shook and toppled pillars of UK statehood: 44.7 per cent of those cast in Scotland in 2014 were pro-independence, 51.9 per cent of UK ones in 2016 pro-Brexit (including 38 per cent in Scotland). Although the first was a near miss — and establishment panic on the eve was palpable — both results incorporated a verdict on those wider failings of governance: this time communicated not by mass apathy but by mass involvement. Against the feeble post-1997 institutional mishmash, with its slow draining of initial modest enthusiasm (where that existed at all), the big-issue referendums stand as acts of great democratic affirmation.

That’s not all they were, of course. Their disfiguring by vicious abuse, most of it online and perpetrated in the name of strident nationalism, reached a nadir in the murder, a week before the EU vote, of Labour MP Jo Cox by a neo-Nazi shouting “Britain first!” This inherent ambiguity will forever haunt them. Neither should it eclipse their infusion of therapeutic, if abrasive, vigour into a lethargic body politic where leaders’ promise of renewal had long gone sour.

Here is that glimmer. If the outcome of this general election allows the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union by 31 January, the fourth such deadline, the 2016 vote will at last be honoured and the link to democracy — in this vital instance at least — restored. The psychological impact will be multilayered and profound.


But an open-ended election, at a time of exceptional volatility in British party politics, holds no guarantees. For one thing, keen regional contests allied to unprecedentedly fluid party loyalties make the Commons patchwork hard to forecast. For another, the main anti-Johnson forces have two arguments with strong partisan appeal: Labour’s, that the Brexit obsession of a trio of Conservative PMs since 2010 has relegated a mounting pile of economic and social problems, which must now be the priority; the LibDems’, that Brexit is a disaster which must be stopped. For yet another, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, even after half its candidates were stood down or withdrew, may thwart Tory gains in crucial target seats.

Were Labour to recreate its 2017 momentum, Jo Swinson’s LibDems further advance, and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP restore its 2015-style dominance north of the border, the arising anti-Johnson majority would likely assent to a Corbyn premiership (though not a coalition). Yet bar ousting Johnson, nothing else unites these parties. On Brexit, unavoidably urgent after the election, Labour plans quick negotiation of close alignment with Brussels, then a vote between its deal and staying in the EU. The SNP, trumpeting Scotland’s pro-EU credentials, is pressing Labour to concede a second independence vote in 2020. The LibDems, having attracted pro-EU Tory and Labour dissidents to the fold, would simply revoke the UK’s choice to leave. Keeping any pantomime horse upright will be testing.

A pitch of clarity against opposition muddle may be Johnson’s ace in clinching a seasonal coup, ending Brexit’s deadlock and lifting its mental weight. Once the Commons pushes through the redone EU deal, the UK will wave farewell to Brussels, and hello to knotty trade talks, within weeks. At last, the end of the beginning, then down to work. But if not? More ruling the void, and the prospect of Brexit endless. •

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The rise of megaphone bureaucracy? https://insidestory.org.au/the-rise-of-megaphone-bureaucracy/ Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:13:34 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=57020

How civil servants are adapting to a hyper-partisan world

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What an extraordinary phenomenon Brexit has become. The UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the prorogation of parliament was unlawful is just the latest dramatic development in this real-time stress-testing of the British constitution and the Westminster system. All parts of the body politic have been drawn into the maelstrom, including that once most unobtrusive of institutions, the British Civil Service.

In late August, Lord Kerslake — himself a former head of the civil service — argued that civil servants must consider putting their “stewardship of the country ahead of service to the government of the day.” Not surprisingly, a chorus of critics attacked the idea that the civil service should consider itself some kind of arbiter of Britain’s fate.

Which raises the question: what exactly should civil servants be doing in these extraordinary times?

It is indisputably true that the civil service exists to serve the government of the day. Constitutionally, it is an indivisible part of the executive government.; it can’t pick and choose which bits of policy it sees as worthy of support. Equally, though, another core role of civil servants is to “speak truth to power,” to offer unvarnished and evidence-based assessments for ministers to consider. The civil service doesn’t exist simply to tell ministers what they want to hear.

Where, then, is the line between appropriately “serving” and blindly “obeying”? To answer that question, we need to take a step back from the noise of Brexit to assess an underlying shift over the past two decades, and not just in Britain. It’s a swing away from what we might call “governing in private” to “governing in public.”

Where once civil servants could give their frank and fearless advice privately to ministers in the quiet rooms of Whitehall, they now find themselves drawn into a brighter light. The anonymous mandarin of the Sir Humphrey era has given way to something more public and more confronting. In this age of real-time leaks on social media, freedom-of-information laws, a 24/7 news cycle and select committee investigations, the room for civil servants to reflect privately has shrunk dramatically. As the former cabinet secretary Lord Wilson observed in 2002, the civil service “has a strong gene against this.”

This does not mean that our civil servants have suddenly become Beyoncé-like bureaucrats, cultivating millions of followers on their Twitter accounts; but it does mean they face new challenges. As they become more public, they are exposed to the perceptions of those keen to criticise what is seen as the politicisation of their position.

The late Canadian academic Peter Aucoin once highlighted a type of “promiscuous partisanship” creeping into the work of public servants in Canada under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. Public servants were increasingly acting as the political agents of the government of the day, he argued, toeing the line in their dealings with citizens. Of course, allegations of politicisation can be easier to make than they are to refute, but Aucoin’s thesis reveals the degree to which the persona of administrative leaders is being tested by the new realities of modern governance.

That is not to say it’s somehow novel for civil servants to be tested by politics. What is new is the extent to which that test takes place in public. One way to draw out the contrast is to look back to the Suez Crisis of 1956. It is now a matter of historical record that Britain and France secretly supported an Israeli invasion of Egypt in order to wrest control of the Suez Canal back from Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Having disingenuously called for an Israeli withdrawal, Britain and France followed up by sending in troops of their own on the pretext of separating the warring parties. When asked about these events in the House of Commons, prime minister Anthony Eden insisted that there had been no foreknowledge of the Israeli invasion.

The reason this tested the civil service leadership is that the cabinet secretary, Norman Brook, knew very well that there was documentary evidence of the agreement between Britain, France and Israel. He knew this because he had been asked by the prime minister to destroy it. What is salient here is that the full extent of Brook’s insight was not revealed until segments of his diary were released by the National Archives more than fifty years later. In 1956 he acted with maximum discretion in an environment of close trust with the politicians he served.

Both that level of trust and the capacity for working in secret are much diminished in the twenty-first century — and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Of course, even now not all ethical challenges for civil servants are as dramatic as the one Brook faced. Many of their forays into the public domain occur despite their best efforts, rather than from an innate desire to get involved in political battles. Think, for example, of someone like Britain’s former EU negotiator Olly Robbins, whose conversations were overheard in a Brussels bar and splashed across the newspapers the following day. Similarly, permanent secretaries have little choice when, having been berated by select committees, they find themselves on the front pages.

But the contemporary setting also allows for more proactive interventions. For example, former UK treasury secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson supported the release of his advice to government during the Scottish referendum campaign on whether it would be viable to maintain a currency union with Scotland if it voted for independence. His conclusion that it would not be advisable for Scotland to be allowed to retain the pound was widely reported in the press.

This is just one episode among many that suggest the former ideal of the anonymous civil servant is no longer commensurate with the demands of modern government. Until the 1990s, for instance, the British security services did not publicly release the names of who was leading them. The same desire for secrecy saw the British establishment go to extraordinary lengths to try to prevent a former spy, Peter Wright, from publishing his memoirs in the 1980s in the sensational Spycatcher saga — the legal battle that first brought Malcolm Turnbull’s name to public notice. Yet within a decade, the new head of MI5, Stella Rimington, had not only released her name and her photograph during her time in office but went on to publish a memoir within five years of leaving the job. The current director-general, Andrew Parker, freely provides media comment and travelled to Berlin in 2018 to give a speech on the current security challenges facing Europe. He is “governing in public.”

Officials in charge of other arm’s-length agencies have embraced an even greater licence to intervene. For instance, in 2017 the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, publicly criticised the then foreign secretary Boris Johnson for continuing to claim that Britain would regain £350 million per week once it leaves the European Union. Norgrove labelled this “a clear misuse of official statistics” in a public letter of rebuke released via the authority’s Twitter feed.


Is this a good thing? Is there a line between frank and fearless advice and an unwarranted attack on the government of the day? And where should civil servants draw the line in supporting their governmental masters if they are to avoid becoming “promiscuous partisans”?

Practice from other parliamentary democracies operating on some variant of the Westminster system of government suggests that there is room for public servants to stand their ground without bringing the institutions of government crashing down around them. During the 2013 Australian election campaign, for example, the heads of Treasury and the finance department put out a media release effectively rebuking the then prime minister Kevin Rudd for suggesting their departments had provided advice on opposition financial costings. They took care not to make an overtly political statement, simply expressing a desire to correct the public record.

Practices of public sector leadership in the United States — with its balance-of-power system of government — have long allowed for greater visibility for administrative leaders, who carry a more obvious level of public accountability for the agencies they lead. In the age of Trump, this has dialled up to new levels of combativeness. In its most dramatic manifestations, we find confrontations like the one between the president and the former head of the FBI, James Comey. This kind of public slugging match through the medium of Congressional or Senate committees gives non-elected administrative leaders the opportunity to speak truth to power in very public ways.

Less dramatically, but just as importantly, some American leaders simply bring uncomfortable facts to the public square, knowing that in the process they will undermine the political wishes of their president. The extraordinary story of Hurricane Dorian, with its pathway mapped out by a presidential Sharpie pen, is a case in point. President Trump had been convinced that the storm would take in Alabama — an assertion that was contradicted the same day by the National Weather Service in Alabama.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration then weighed in, saying that the National Weather Service had been wrong to assert quite so categorically that the hurricane would pass Alabama by. Either the National Weather Service had in fact got it wrong or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took a politically expedient position. Either way, what makes it remarkable is that this three-way conversation between the president and two scientific government agencies happened in full public view.

Is something similar happening, or going to happen, in Britain? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? The key distinction here is between being “political” and being “partisan.” No civil servant has any business openly supporting one political party against another. But at the same time civil servants — especially at the permanent secretary level — deal with politics every single day. Policymaking always has a political element. There is no concrete divide between politics and administration.

Every comment founded in evidence-based policy is capable of being read in political ways. In the current environment, it is hard to conceive of any public statement about the potential impact of Brexit that all sides would accept as “non-political.” Just as any statement about the effects of Hurricane Dorian would be read through a political lens, so any civil servant who says anything about Brexit is walking into uncharted territory.

Today’s civil servants, like their ministers, operate in a noisy public square that is full of ideas, opinions and comments — wrapped in a heavy layer of antagonism and political hyper-ventilation.

But in an era of fake news, constant real-time critiques and hyper-partisan politics, having voices prepared to bring data and evidence to the table has benefits. Civil service leaders are well placed to contribute to well-informed discussions — not in an overtly political way, but simply by providing evidence and facts about the likely impact of events on policy outcomes. As they do so, they must also be aware that observers will seek to draw them further into partisan debates. Politicians may well take umbrage at their views and argue back — as indeed they are entitled to do. It is part of the cut-and-thrust of democratic debate. Civil servants have in fact been arguing with ministers for centuries.

That brings us back to Lord Kerslake’s observation, which is not nearly as revolutionary as it at first appears. What civil servants must do is speak truth to power in frank and fearless ways. That’s actually what they’ve always done. In doing so they are serving the government of the day and playing a stewardship role for the country. The difference is that it now happens in more public ways and in the middle of the most turbulent period in British politics in living memory. No one is saying it’s easy. •

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We, the establishment https://insidestory.org.au/we-the-establishment/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 04:50:11 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=57012

Britain’s Supreme Court overrules Queen, prime minister — and people

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Boris Johnson is no Gough Whitlam. But in making sense of a judicial coup that corners a prime minister, stupefied Brits might today seek one instant lesson in the Australian giant’s 1975 dismissal. The UK Supreme Court’s ruling that Johnson’s request that Queen Elizabeth grant a five-week proroguing of parliament was “unlawful, void, and of no effect” will reverberate for decades. As soon as Brenda Hale, the court’s president, finished reading a summary of the eleven judges’ lucid — and unanimous — verdict, it was clear that 24 September 2019 will also be long cited as a landmark constitutional moment.

In which direction this moment leads is less sure, however. Above all, that’s because the judgement is also a deeply political one, with its timing and character inevitably embroiled in the bitter national debate about Brexit. The gleeful partisanship of its backers outside the court — jostling for the cameras to pour anathemas on Johnson and advance their favourite anti-Brexit solution — was stark evidence.

So was the reaction of Britain’s semiofficial historians, pumped up with now rather formulaic gravitas. The national treasure Peter Hennessy welcomed “one of the greatest days in the history of the British constitution,” excoriated Johnson for “insensitivity and illegitimacy towards the Queen” in requesting the suspension — and called for a written constitution, which is rapidly becoming the new orthodoxy.

Equally striking was the personalised adulation of Lady Hale, who had just cited a 1611 precedent to the effect that “the King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.” The reference is doubtless to Johnson rather than Elizabeth Windsor, the Bill of Rights and regime change of 1688–89 having taken the state beyond absolutism. But as with Hennessy’s commending the judges for “penetrating the most intimate part of the UK state — the monarch-prime minister relationship,” it’s plain to see that today’s judicial interventionism and its ecstatic embrace are inseparable from the campaign to render illegitimate the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union.

Indeed, the Supreme Court case itself was part of that campaign. It follows three others in English, Northern Irish and Scottish lower courts initiated by anti-Brexit MPs and activists, the first two of which failed. The judges held that Johnson’s proroguing of parliament was designed to silence it in the crucial period before 31 October, when Brexit falls due, and thus was a democratic outrage. In the Supreme Court’s words, the move “prevented [parliament] from carrying out its constitutional functions for no good reason.”

Johnson’s advisers responded that the current parliamentary session is the longest since the 1640s; that the government needed room to conclude a deal with the European Union (with which, it could scarcely add, opposition members were colluding); that a suspension was routine during the party conference season; and that only five extra days were at issue before parliament was anyway to return on 14 October. Nonetheless, the court, having received a forensic submission from barrister David Pannick representing lead appellant Gina Miller, held that “the effect [of proroguing] on the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme.”

What is also extreme is the formalism of this judgement. It could only be reached by ignoring the House of Commons’s degeneration — taking its lead from John Bercow’s speakership, and amid Brexit’s three-year paralysis — into a theatre of narcissism. The court cannot countenance the brutal fact that Brexit has become a raw struggle for power, in which it is now not just referee but player.

Even before the legal cases, Johnson was charged with attempting a coup in planning to leave the EU by the agreed (and twice-postponed) deadline of 31 October. When his slim majority vanished as Conservative MPs defected or rebelled, the opposition cohered to pass a law requiring the government to ask the European Union for yet another extension and accept without demur Brussels’s timing and terms. Johnson pressed for a general election, but MPs — Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, independents, Greens, dissenting Tories — stymied this, as they feared Johnson would win and implement Brexit. Given that the people voted to leave the European Union in 2016, whose is the coup against democracy?

Then, at the moment of proroguing, Bercow’s permissive belligerence overflowed. Many MPs boycotted the ceremony in the neighbouring House of Lords, instead staging a demo in the Commons around his chair, posting selfies and singing political hymns. MPs’ social media posturing is now a more urgent concern than breaking the country’s deadlock, and the Supreme Court has vindicated them. Such judicial overreach, opening a new front in the anti-Brexit strategy, will make Britain’s polarisation all the more intractable.

At heart this is a political crisis, not a legal one. The evasion of that reality requires an unrelenting effort to cancel or censor the past “as it really was” (messiness and all) in favour of an approved, self-satisfying version. I am reminded here of a scene in The Ploughman’s Lunch, Ian McEwan’s second film partnership with director Richard Eyre. Begun in 1981, two years into Margaret Thatcher’s era, its motif — politics and commerce’s manipulation of history — would be vitalised by her South Atlantic war with Argentina in 1982, which the work cleverly incorporates.

The film portrays a cynical young mover through the newly porous silos of media, advertising, publishing and academia who plans a revisionist, pro-establishment account of the long discredited British–French–Israeli invasion of Suez a quarter century earlier. Its social lens, reaching from patrician gatekeepers to a women’s peace camp, probes deep and with scalpel precision. Its title, an adman’s boast of how the fake rurality of a cheese, pickle and crusty-bread combo lured customers into failing pubs — “a completely successful fabrication of the past” — was triply effective. It identified a source of regenerating power and acknowledged its meretricious appeal, yet proposed no easy route for those who might wish to resist its charms. The work’s bleak prescience still resonates.

At one point James, our antihero, visits a country house to collect grist for his mill. There he encounters a precocious little swot who offers to recite a chronology of the kings and queens of England. Six centuries in, a breathless shift from Charles I to Charles II — in reality separated by a civil war, a war of three kingdoms, and a revolution — triggers James to a mild query about the interregnum decade: “What about the Cromwells?” Instantly, the proto-Rees-Mogg sprog retorts: “They don’t count.”

This week McEwan, who in 2017 welcomed a death-harvest of ageing leavers and their replacement by enlightened young remainers, publishes a smug Brexit satire (The Cockroach) and describes leaving the European Union as “self-harmingly loony.” Every day in Britain, you can quite randomly encounter similar views from a dozen cultural panjandrums, often looking down from a great height at what they candidly imagine — vilely, and wrongly — to be an ignorant, racist, empire-obsessed mass: their fellow citizens.

Three years ago these citizens turned out to vote on a declared once-in-a-lifetime issue and were promised their choice would be enacted. Now they, and their votes, don’t count. Once, self-styled democrats might have spoken up for them. No longer. And you wonder why Britain is divided? •

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Moving fast and breaking things https://insidestory.org.au/moving-fast-and-breaking-things/ Mon, 02 Sep 2019 09:43:22 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=56725

How much damage will Boris Johnson and his circle inflict on Britain?

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As August gives way to September and the political turmoil deepens, London seems like the perfect place to be reading David Runciman’s new book, Where Power Stops: The Making and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University who happens to be the heir to his family’s viscountcy, is probably best known for his frequent contributions to the London Review of Books. He also hosts a highly regarded weekly podcast, Talking Politics, recorded in his office at Cambridge.

Where Power Stops opens with a story frequently told about, or by, presidents and prime ministers. These unusual people, driven by a mix of ambition and ideals, have often spent half a lifetime working their way into the top job. But when they reach the summit, they find the authority they expected to exercise doesn’t really exist. “They issue their instructions,” writes Runciman. “Dutiful officials nod along encouragingly. But nothing really changes… It feels like true power is still somewhere out of reach.”

How do leaders cope with this reality? Some deny the problem exists. Some try pulling any old lever, and often find that the one linked to the armed forces turns out to be the most responsive. (Tony Blair is a prime example of the latter, says Runciman.) Others leap on a crisis — any crisis — and turn it into an opportunity.

Boris Johnson and his circle have certainly leapt onto a crisis, but they’ve also done something more novel, at least in British politics. In essence, they’ve attempted to suspend the normal rules of government and parliament, not just by proroguing parliament last Wednesday but also by centralising power, not so much in the prime minister as in the prime minister’s office. In some ways, it’s like the early months of the Trump presidency, when Steve Bannon seemed to be running the administration.

Playing the Bannon role with the same dishevelled intensity is a shadowy figure named Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s special adviser, who was a key figure in the Vote Leave campaign in the lead-up to the Brexit vote in 2016. Once described as a “career psychopath” by former Conservative prime minister David Cameron, the combative Cummings propelled himself to the centre of the debate this week by summarily sacking a member of the staff of the chancellor, Sajid Javid, and having her escorted from Downing Street under police guard. Her crime was to have been in touch with a former colleague who works for one of Johnson’s critics within the party, former chancellor Philip Hammond.

Javid wasn’t told about any of this until after it had happened. In fact, despite having been appointed chancellor just a few weeks ago, he appears to have been comprehensively sidelined by Johnson and his inner circle. Earlier in the week Downing Street ordered him to cancel his first scheduled speech as chancellor, and recent announcements in his portfolio area have come straight from the PM’s office.

Another turn of the screw came on Sunday, when Johnson told rebel Tories they would no longer be considered members of the parliamentary party if they voted against a no-deal Brexit, and would be refused party endorsement for the next general election. Among the potential targets are some of the Conservative party’s most senior MPs.

This strategy, with its echoes of Facebook’s “move fast and break things” (and a dash of Beijing’s politburo), will be a further test for those Conservative MPs who’ve had to retreat from a series of lines in the sand in recent weeks. Former members of the no-Brexit-without-a-deal camp are suddenly in favour of a hard Brexit on 31 October, regardless of its likely cost. Former adherents of the no-proroguing viewpoint now unabashedly favour last week’s dubious strategy. The very real possibility of an election, and the belief that Boris Johnson is the man to win it, have proved remarkably potent.

There is another way of getting the machinery of government moving, and it is personified in Runciman’s book by another Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. “First as majority leader in the US Senate, then as president, Johnson achieved his goals by his ruthlessness, his relentlessness, his attention to detail and the sheer force of his political personality,” writes Runciman. “Johnson passed the legislation that had defeated his predecessors, including the great civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s.”

Ruthless Boris Johnson might be, and his battered political persona still has some force. But “attention to detail” doesn’t sound much like him. It doesn’t capture the seeming carelessness at the heart of his government, and at the heart of the whole Brexit enterprise, and the apparent yearning for the heady days when slogans dreamed up by people like Dominic Cummings stood in for reality, and the messy business of negotiating deals — the routine business of government, in other words — wasn’t necessary.

Reality, meanwhile, is getting uncomfortably close. As the Financial Times reported on the weekend, the “most comprehensive” study yet of Brexit’s impact on British companies — a survey of more than 6000 businesses — reveals that productivity has declined by 2.5 per cent as a result of Brexit-induced cuts in investment. Despite the majority vote to leave in 2016, public opinion could easily sour when the reality — a crashing out of Europe — proves so much less attractive than the one-liners promised.

The FT’s widely read columnist Robert Shrimsley thinks that the damage won’t just be economic and reputational. Last week’s decision to prorogue parliament was damaging not because it broke any rules but because it broke a convention, and conventions have a habit of staying broken. “Even if it proves decisive,” says Shrimsley, “Conservatives may still come to rue his contentious but legal gambit.”

David Runciman might be a little more sanguine. In one of his earlier books, The Confidence Trap, he makes a strong case for the intrinsic durability of democracies. (Italy, which weathered yet another crisis last week, is a prime example.) Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can be surprisingly brittle. The question Boris Johnson should ponder is whether his government has begun adopting some of the characteristics that make those regimes vulnerable to abrupt collapse. •

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Brexitannia on edge https://insidestory.org.au/brexitannia-on-edge/ Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:10:52 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=56619

Boris Johnson’s team, clutching European exit visa and election plan, flies towards the sun

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“Things take longer to happen than you think they will, then happen faster than you thought they could.” Britain’s protracted severing from the European Union is on the brink (at last!) of some kind of genuine denouement, as Westminster approaches a great tussle in which the fate of Boris Johnson’s government and the Conservative Party are also at stake. Yes, the coming stand-off is but one episode in an epic, convoluted saga of three years going on seventy. It may even come to be seen as no more than the end of the beginning. That said, the economist Rudiger Dornbusch’s words, like the cool air now heralding an English autumn, match a definite change in the political weather. This time, as has not always been the case, it might be worth tuning in.

The immediate background is Johnson’s replacement of Theresa May as prime minister on 24 July, which has given Britain an actual government where a protracted void had been. A restless new order in Downing Street has two linked imperatives: leaving the European Union on 31 October — with a deal if possible but without one if need be — and then winning a quick general election. These aims serve to energise a still-united team of committed Brexiteers, the product of Johnson’s sweeping change of personnel in the days after he took office.

Success is far from assured. No real dialogue with the European Union is in train because it rejects Johnson’s precondition (namely, willingness to amend the futile agreement it made with May, especially over the “anti-democratic” Irish backstop) and is waiting to see if he is ousted. Johnson’s meetings this week with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, ahead of the G7 summit in Biarritz, will be the first attempt to break that deadlock. His artful letter on 19 August to Donald Tusk, head of the European Union’s intergovernmental council, says that “the UK is ready to move quickly” and he hopes “the EU will be ready to do likewise.” But such interlocutors — and this is new in Brexit — are not the main concern of Britain’s prime minister; the home front is.

Domestic policy announcements, reflecting focus group concerns — a splurge on hospitals and police numbers, a harsher approach to criminal justice, skills-based immigration — have earned a modest, wait-and-see polling boost. But a defection or illness could in an instant erase the Conservatives’ notional majority of just one in the House of Commons, where seething hostility to the PM and his plan extends to the Tory benches. The former chancellor, Philip Hammond, who resigned as Johnson took office, reopened hostilities in mid August with a scathing attack on the government and a promise to resist any effort towards a “no-deal Brexit.” At the next opportunity, around fifty Conservative MPs (out of 311) could join him in voting with the opposition.

This chance will come on 3 September, when the chamber meets after the latest long recess. (For all the talk of parliament’s vitality, MPs have had little to do since 2016 except vent, gossip, plot and click.) In advance, various cross-party cells scour Erskine May, the Victorian-era procedural bible, for any device that might thwart a no-deal Brexit. An intense if deep-cover positional war sees rival Westminster files bulge with flow charts, game plans and media lists. The “anti-no-deal” side consists of the Tory dissidents, most Labourites (247 MPs), Scots and Welsh nationalists (thirty-five and four), independents (sixteen), Liberal Democrats (thirteen), the lone Green, and the brazen speaker, John Bercow. The rivalrous ambitions and vast egos in play hinder cooperation. But the shared aim of averting a “cliff edge” fall or “crash out” from the European Union compels a diplomatic dalliance.

The shift to attritional war in parliament could begin with a motion of no-confidence in the government, its text given a nonpartisan flavour to maximise its chances. In the sole post-1945 precedent, James Callaghan’s 1979 defeat triggered a general election (which the Labour prime minister lost to Margaret Thatcher). This time, victory’s reward is uncertain, partly thanks to the blundering Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011. Designed to transfer power of dissolution from PM to Commons — and shield the monarch from any controversy — it mandates an interval of fourteen days after a no-confidence verdict, during which a putative new leader (or the recharged incumbent) can seek to win a new vote and thus avoid an election short of the “fixed,” five-year term.

Here, the dilemma of the anti-Johnsonites (or anti-no-dealers) comes into focus: namely, they outnumber Boris’s Conservatives but lack the latter’s leadership and unified purpose. By itself, a no-confidence vote will only magnify these tensions: in those circumstances, there is simply no plausible Commons candidate for prime minister. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, is beyond the pale for too many MPs, though on 14 August — between a Romanian holiday, a celebration of Allende’s Chile and a trip to Ghana — he offered himself as a caretaker PM. Not to worry, was his signal: he would govern only as long as it takes to halt no-deal, create more time for EU talks, and call a general election (which, few seemed to notice, he would oversee from Number 10, with all the leverage of pole position).

This received a dusty answer from Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems, a mind-bending welcome from disaffected Tories, and contained glee from Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party, which sees London Labour’s flirtation with an anti-Tory pact and agreement to a new independence referendum as a windfall. Soon, the media buzz switched to promoting veterans Kenneth Clarke (a garrulous Tory Europhile) and Harriet Harman (a New Labour–era minister and aspiring speaker) as potential saviours.

These forlorn quests confirm the endurance of August’s political “silly season.” But there’s a serious side. A no-confidence vote without a leader of stature and clear next steps is a bad move. It will descend into a febrile two-week scramble dominated by a clamorous media, counter-demos in central London, haywire markets, and the release of latent hysteria in every direction — the flames fanned all the way by Westminster’s new tribe: obsessively clicking, publicity-addicted MPs. Queen Elizabeth’s embroilment in politics would then be the fitting nadir of Brexitannia’s three corrosive years. How public opinion would react is hard to tell, but the likeliest beneficiary is the man with the plan.


Aware of the hazards of a frontal assault, some anti-Johnsonite MPs favour a less pyrotechnic approach: seizing the parliamentary agenda and then passing a law requiring the PM to seek a further extension of EU membership, in principle allowing time for a revised agreement with Brussels. (After Britain missed the initial leaving date of 31 March and was given a respite until 12 April, the European Union granted a “final” extension to 31 October; on that date, as is often forgotten, it has the unilateral right to employ the guillotine.) A debate on Northern Ireland’s suspended executive on 9 September is a potential lever for the Commons’s notional rebel majority to deliver a late reprieve. This legislative path would echo the strife of January–April, when backbenchers tried, and intermittently managed, to take hold of the day’s business and sideline May’s flailing government.

Again, everything depends on this being more than a one-hit wonder, and on rebels being able to turn the no-deal flag of convenience into a banner of — not principle, it’s far too late for that — credible authority at least. The mixed response to Corbyn’s démarche (even setting aside his invariant EU-phobia and trust deficit) and to other candidate PMs signals the difficulty, which goes beyond leadership alone. Strands of the opposition to no-deal variously prioritise a new referendum (options unclear), repeal of the decision to leave the European Union (wrongly assumed to return Britain to its 2016 status), a newly negotiated “soft” Brexit, a general election, a “national unity” government (exclusively composed of, ahem, pro-EU figures), and a role for citizens’ assemblies (status vague). All take for granted patience and amenability from the European Union, whose own internal politics are strikingly ignored by its warmest fans. How to find a straight road among all this, even as the clock runs down?

The legislative route could well give the anti-Johnsonites at least a short-term win. In turn, that prospect might lead Johnson to call a general election, preferably held just after 31 October to ensure Brexit, the legal default, happens; or, reluctantly but to avoid being toppled, before that date. The former circumstance would oblige him to parley with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in order to avoid splitting the anti-EU side’s vote, but Farage’s near-inevitable competition — if the cast-iron promise to deliver Brexit were on hold — might well sink the Tories’ election chances. In either case, Boris’s election theme, drawing on widespread pro-Brexit and anti-Corbyn sentiment, would be a variant of “people vs parliament.”

Johnson has the initiative; his opponents are boxed in. A revealing clue to their morass is that ugly but necessary term, “anti-no-deal(ers).” It covers two broad groups, as “anti-Brexiteer” now does not: unbending supporters of EU membership and tolerators of agreed, or soft, withdrawal (of the type signed by May’s insiders and thrice spurned by the Commons, albeit with narrowing margins). Tactically, the relentless, even obsessive focus on no-deal has served each half of the campaign very well: in targeting a shared enemy, deflecting scrutiny, gaining solid backing in opinion polls, and keeping options open. Now the decisive battle is near, its strategic deficiency is plain: no leader, no message, no endgame, no positivity. Brute politics are all the anti-no-dealers have left.

Switching mode from vehement “anti” into binding, heart-lifting “pro” looks impossible at this late stage, even more as the ingrained style of Britain’s pro-EU orthodoxy is the male rant: preening, haranguing, sneering, alienating. Johnson’s operation is hardly sweetness and light; it is coordinated by the fertile anti-establishment maverick Dominic Cummings, architect of the libertarian (as opposed to nativist) wing of the Brexit campaign in 2016, and an unforgiving if stylish polemicist on his own account. But the contrast in mood music is becoming stark. Receiving aural muggings by the likes of Alastair Campbell, James O’Brien, Ian Dunt, Andrew Adonis and Stig Abell — however much or little such names resonate beyond their fevered world — is to be reminded that the deepest enemies of any cause are its most fervent advocates.

Anything might happen now. Without the millstone of the wasted years since 2016, it could even be exciting. Brexit by 31 October looks at the same time doable and impossible. A general election is a safer bet. Conceivably, Johnson could deliver the first and lose the second — and at last earn a link to Churchill. It’s about democracy, and a people’s vote that, one way or another, simply must be honoured. Only then can Britain begin to breathe again, take stock, and move on. If not now, when? •

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How Hollywood saw England https://insidestory.org.au/how-hollywood-saw-england/ Thu, 01 Aug 2019 04:05:45 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=56346

Books | American filmmakers viewed England through the lens of contemporary history

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Think of Greer Garson bravely dealing with a Nazi escapee in her “English” kitchen, or the little boats headed off for the evacuation of Dunkirk, in MGM’s Mrs Miniver (1942). Or all those classy Oscar-winning American adaptations of English literary works — Cavalcade (1932) and Rebecca (1940), for example — or how American finance ensured the brief efflorescence of England’s Swinging Sixties films. Hollywood always needed British markets, and that influenced how Britain, and England especially, was depicted in films “projecting the English past,” as Jonathan Stubbs puts it in his subtitle.

The idea of film as a source of historical information, different from what can be found in novels and other art forms, let alone what is usually thought of as historical research, has led to some provocative studies over the years, so it is probably no more than coincidence that two other such volumes have come my way in very recent times.

One of them has this to say on the subject: “film is unrivalled in allowing the historian to observe the minutiae of everyday life, what they wore at home and at work, what they ate and how their homes were furnished.” That is the view of Philip Gillett in his Film and the Historian: The British Experience. In examining an extraordinary range of British films over six decades, Gillett persuasively suggests that the “popular art” of film inevitably reveals much about the nation’s life both at the time of production and, in the case of the historical film, the time of setting, but that the former is the more pertinent — to the historian anyway. Kent Puckett’s War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 explores the ways in which three archetypal British films of the early 1940s (Henry V, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Brief Encounter) may be viewed in the broader cultural context of the war years.

Jonathan Stubbs sets out not to make a close reading of the films he is concerned with — though more of that would sometimes have helped his case — but rather to consider how Hollywood dealt with aspects of English history. This recalls an earlier book, Mark Glancy’s When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939–45 (1999), which considered in detail the wartime period that scarcely figures in Stubbs’s book, but also echoes Hollywood’s ongoing concern — thematic and commercial — with Britain.

Stubbs chooses to limit his concern to “England” on the grounds that Hollywood dealt less prolifically with Scotland or Wales. His aim is “to explain the prevalence and the apparent popularity of Hollywood films set in England’s past… and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America.” He proposes four perspectives from which to consider this phenomenon: practices of representation (mainly of the past rather than the English present); how the historical films reflect the contemporary conditions of their production; the relationship between popular culture and the broader historical context in which it is circulated; and the question of who gains from American film’s “projection of English oldness.” By “historical film,” he means one that in some way engages with the past, a definition that he realises embraces a wide range from detailed engagement with a specific period to the more informal manner in which some films simply reflect it.

What distinguishes Stubbs’s book from the other two I’ve mentioned is that he is at least as much concerned with film as an industry as with the individual films he has chosen to consider in his seven chapters. He is particularly interested in how the box office needs of American films (and the effect of Academy Awards on box-office potential) have influenced the films of his choice.

His first chapter, “The Uses of Literature: Adaptation and Englishness in the 1930s,” takes on screen versions of Dickens (David Copperfield, 1935), Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1935), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights, 1939) and Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1940). With the imminence and then outbreak of war, films like the latter two took on a new significance: as well as making an appeal to middle-class sensibilities, they assumed importance for their deference to the literature of the nation that would become the US’s prime ally.

Other chapters include reflections on how, in the lead-up to the war, US filmmakers engaged with English imperialism in such films as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Gunga Din (1939). Stubbs identifies “a growing closeness between representation of the British Empire and the American Wild West,” both seen as white incursions into territories where indigenous ways of life were under threat. With war looming, he points out, the sites at which English imperial adventures were examined tended to move to, say, Africa, whose “imperial locations proved to be less contentious than Indian settings.” Stanley and Livingstone (1939), for example, was released just before the outbreak of war and, while it returns to England’s imperial past and its heroes, it can also celebrate the American reporter who found the missing American missionary-doctor (“Dr Livingstone, I presume,” as the famous one-liner has it).

Other chapters focus on postwar medieval adventure films such as Ivanhoe (1952) and The Knights of the Round Table (1953), in both of which Robert Taylor swashbuckled his way heroically against threats to “merrie England.” Stubbs also looks at how Hollywood-funded “epics” such as Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) echoed changes in American attitudes in the cold war era. With the films now less overtly at one with the notion of British imperialism, the political context of these co-productions was apt to be more ambivalently realised.

The chapter on the Harry Potter franchise is almost entirely concerned with the business of getting the films made, and indeed my main issue with the book as a whole is that, thoroughly researched as it is, it becomes so preoccupied with the machinations involved in putting such productions together that it tends to lose sight of how “the English past” is being represented. This tendency, along with the films’ placement in their contemporary political climates, accounts for much more of the book’s length than interest in their artistic achievement.

This is essentially a book for film historians rather than buffs. The latter will want a bit more about the films as artefacts; the former will find some valuable resource material. All readers may feel that Stubbs’s concluding chapter attempts to reiterate the premises the book was based on, some of which seem to have been sidetracked along the way. •

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A good day for democracy https://insidestory.org.au/a-good-day-for-democracy/ Wed, 24 Jul 2019 03:45:28 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=56201

Boris Johnson the showman needs to become a statesman. Can he?

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A tarnished figure, unfit to be prime minister, whose honeymoon is over before he even lands the role. This damning verdict on Boris Johnson in swathes of the media, European and American as well as British, has been endlessly rehearsed during the two-month slog between Theresa May’s resignation and his capture of the top job. Overlooked amid all the venom is that this interlude, in its grotesque length, is one more symptom of the British polity’s debasement.

At last the finale — which is also a prelude to a new crunch — is imminent. Johnson’s 66–34 per cent win over Jeremy Hunt in the Conservative Party leadership run-off, announced on Tuesday morning in London, is followed at Wednesday lunchtime by May’s last House of Commons question time. Then come Boris’s anointing at Buckingham Palace, the limousine ride to Downing Street, and the obligatory pieties on the steps of Number 10. In Britain, rituals ever run smooth while policies (from Brexit downwards) ever mean pratfalls. Go figure.

Now that the ball has indeed “come loose from the back of the scrum,” as Johnson wittered in 2013, and this “great, great thing to have a crack at” is almost in his hands, what else awaits but satisfying confirmation of that verdict?


The fifty-five-year-old’s charge sheet is long. His sacking from the Times for embellishing an article with an invented quote from his godfather, an Oxford historian. His taped conversation humouring an old schoolmate (a fellow Etonian, inevitably) who plans to beat up a journalist. His years painting the European Union in lurid colours for the Telegraph and Spectator, seducing credulous minds (it is said) to fatal pro-Brexit effect. His affairs as a faithless husband, and his lying about one costing him his shadow cabinet place. His parodic language, as lovingly rumpled as his blond moptop, that strays towards insult of minorities. His woeful stint as foreign secretary and affinity with Donald Trump. His criminally bad book about Churchill, one might add (Shakespeare is forthcoming). And these are just the headlines.

Even in an era of brazen politicians, this bounder’s CV (to use Johnson’s own picaresque argot) has seemed prohibitive. That it has proved a stepladder rather than a barrier testifies to the upside-down world inaugurated by the UK-wide vote to leave the European Union. The vacuum of leadership and direction since then has sent emotions as well as democracy haywire. The feeling of malaise now feeds the despairing hope of Tory members, and more widely of Brexiteers, that Boris’s “can do,” “guts,” “will,” “drive,” “optimism,” and “do or die” resolve will at last honour the 2016 vote.

But personality politics of this kind horrifies anti-Johnsonites and supplies the other leg of their scathing verdict. So politically divided is Britain, so vulnerable its global status, so economically perilous the threat of a no-deal crash out of the EU, so tight the parliamentary arithmetic, that the madcap man-child Boris is the last type in charge the country now needs.

Look around and shudder, continues the prosecution. Iran’s bold seizure of a British-flagged merchant ship in the Persian Gulf, compounded by London’s lack of foresight and infirm response, is the tip of Britain’s foreign policy drift. After the European Union, a future squeezed between a wayward United States and an overbearing China beckons. A hard Brexit will deepen cross-border tension with Ireland and refuel Scottish separatism. A currency already listing amid Brexit uncertainty, yet bringing no improvement in the alarming trade deficit, faces a whirlpool. Domestic social problems — housing, health and elderly care, education, prisons, transport — are neglected, ill-funded or poorly managed. A wrong ’un in his own right, the blustery, attention-deficient Johnson is set to worsen already grave problems.


This swingeing critique reaches far inside his own party. Johnson’s arrival is already provoking resignations among ministers, including chancellor Philip Hammond, opposed to no-deal or to Brexit in any form (the categories are still blurred in practice). In depriving him of even the wafer-thin working majority inherited from May, their departures augur more of the grinding procedural combat that saw the deadlocked chamber vote down May’s deal with the EU three times, though without endorsing an alternative.

Johnson promises to break the logjam. He is adamant that, by agreement or not, Britain will exit on 31 October — the date decreed by the EU after the British government missed its initial deadline — which in turn became a pledge crucial to his leadership win and chances of outflanking Nigel Farage’s insurgent Brexit Party. With the domestic and European arms of his challenge so intertwined, he will need agile diplomatic skills at Westminster as well as among an understandably sour EU. Yet the repertoire needed in each is subtly different: hand-to-hand versus jaw-to-jaw.

In the House of Commons, a fiercely motivated ad hoc coalition will use every means — including seizing the legislature’s timetable — to prevent a no-deal Brexit. The numbers are there to stall the process. But 31 October is the current default: to reverse course, the rebels need to overturn MPs’ decision in 2017 to invoke Article 50 of an EU treaty that compels departure. Short of that, the EU is free to say “nee, c’est fini. te vas, Tschüss…” And who could blame it?

In any case, the EU’s own half-decade leadership carousel, the latest particularly bruising, leaves scarce appetite for more negotiations with London. A government now led by a man committed to (or trapped by) his offer of a quick Brexit further limits negotiating room. Any such narrow ground (a term once used to characterise the Northern Irish dispute) may yet lie in a codicil to the withdrawal agreement that amends the contentious “backstop,” which, as it stands, guarantees a frictionless Irish border at the cost of UK sovereignty. Add other small concessions, eased by frank personal contacts across the divide, and let Boris present the deal as diplomatic triumph.

That might prove too much for either Johnson or the EU to swallow. Much depends on how the shock of highest office changes him. So far, he lacks the statesman’s art of dousing as well as arousing fervour among his supporters, and indeed of successful negotiation. The ambiguous rationale of his no-deal case is relevant here. Only such a threat will shift Brussels’s position, his backers argue, and thus facilitate compromise — but many have come to believe in it for its own sake, embracing “very well, alone” as a positive strategy. This is just one side of Britain’s mutual radicalisation into hard leave and remain camps: May’s most harmful legacy, if not hers alone.

The tribal stand-off is the undertow of every Westminster discussion. Tories are fixated on avoiding a general election before Brexit is done, while Labour demands one. Outright pro-remain parties — Greens, Welsh nationalists, and Liberal Democrats (led by Jo Swinson since their own leadership election this week) — have reached a single by-election pact to dislodge a sitting Tory, which may be a harbinger. They want a second referendum to cancel the first, the term “confirmatory vote” having succeeded “people’s vote.” In Scotland, the priority is different, as the nationalist government is eager to use the English toff’s unpopularity north of the border to secure a repeat independence ballot.

For his part, Johnson’s aim is to get Brexit through before levering a mandate, perhaps in early 2020 if he lasts until then. (George Canning’s 117 days in Downing Street in 1827 is the unwanted record to beat.) With no majority, a no-confidence motion looms. But not yet, for after the 24 July drama the Commons goes into recess until 3 September. Unless, as so often in history, an August crisis intervenes.


Brexit accomplished and a general election win are the two routes to Boris Johnson’s holy grail. One could conceivably happen without the other. But without the first, a quick unravelling of his premiership is likely. Do or die, all or nothing: the stakes could not be higher. That unforgiving verdict aside, such absolutism of choice and the prime minister with the task of navigating it look perfectly matched.

But this also focuses his great political challenge. Brexit’s polarisation, buttressed daily across the twittified political–media world, now squeezes classic politics as “the art of the possible.” Johnson, the former’s beneficiary and target, can only succeed, even in his own terms, by using its logic. That means bringing the less committed onside, in practice via a big-tent populism lodged in a recognisable Conservative–British idiom. His victory speech hinted at this before it descended to blather: “[At] this pivotal moment in our history, we again have to reconcile two noble sets of instincts. Between the deep desire for friendship and free trade and mutual support in security and defence between Britain and our European partners. And the simultaneous desire, equally deep and heartfelt, for democratic self-government in this country.”

It might be hoped that his cabinet jigsaw and the larger tone he sets will bring greater clarity. But that is not Johnson’s way. The blah-blah, with all its hostages to fortune, is integral to the act. In this sense there is pathos in his remark that, across two centuries, “we Conservatives have had the best insights into how to manage the jostling sets of instincts in the human heart.”

His more ideological allies, today exultant, are strangers to such complexity. Mature friends make a subtler case. They cite Boris’s ability as mayor of London to build a team, delegate and win loyalty as a template for his government. Harry Mount, who edited his Telegraph column for five years (“always late, always word-perfect”), calls him “essentially a cerebral introvert” whose various influences — a Turkish grandfather named Kemal, a mother stricken by mental illness, childhood semi-deafness, his family’s financial insecurity (albeit at high level) — gave him an “outsider status” that renders him “strangely unknowable.” They also “made him play up his P.G. Wodehouse Englishness.”

Such portraits occupy the narrow ground between adulation and hatred, as do Sonia Purnell’s critical biography and Andrew Gimson’s more sympathetic one. The formulaic animosity is feeding on itself to an extraordinary degree, as Brexit catastrophists seek new channels for their addictive fury. Many high-profile writers and publications, already hugely invested in a disastrous Brexit outcome, now equally have bet their reputational house on a Johnson government taking the UK to perdition.

In fact, there is no certain outcome of this or any other kind. The European Union does not represent “reality” and Britain “fantasy,” as is obsessively said. What is happening in the UK, and between the UK and EU, is politics rather than destiny. Boris Johnson may be more likely to fail, or at best reach another messy trade-off, than to reach his grail. But in the end it’s not about him. After three years on Theresa May’s desolation row, politics — old and new mixed — is breathing a little freer. Whatever happens next, this is a good day for democracy. •

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The sulphurous intrigue of the past https://insidestory.org.au/northern-irelands-sulphurous-intrigues/ Thu, 11 Jul 2019 23:29:58 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=56067

Books | The shifting allegiances of The Troubles are brought alive in this year’s Orwell Prize winner

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What happened when the genteel world of the university library met the grubby world of journalism and the grim milieu of the Provisional Irish Republican Army? A disaster, that’s what. But here’s the twist: the party at fault was not the terrorists, nor really the journalists, but the professors.

The story comes to us courtesy of Patrick Radden Keefe, who has written what the judges of the Orwell Prize for political writing describe as a “haunting and timely portrait of The Troubles.” His book, Say Nothing, received the prize late last month.

A staff writer for the New Yorker, Keefe traces the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland from its beginnings in 1969 when republicans, most of them Catholic, rioted against the primarily Protestant loyalists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom. The Troubles ended nearly three decades later, in 1998, with the Good Friday ceasefire agreement. By then, 3500-plus people had been killed, more than half of them civilians.

Keefe blends a clear explanatory narrative with nuanced portraits of key figures, beginning with Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was abducted by the IRA in front of her children, accused, probably wrongly, of being a “tout” or informer, and murdered. Then there are the Price sisters, Marian and especially Dolours, who committed terrorist acts for the IRA but eventually split bitterly with their commander. The commander was Gerry Adams, who held to the fiction that he had never been a member of the IRA, after he switched to leading the political party Sinn Féin and took a key role in hammering out the Good Friday agreement.

It was two years after that agreement when Paul Bew, a professor of Irish history at Queen’s University in Belfast, conceived the idea of commemorating the newfound peace with an archive of oral history interviews with key participants from both sides. Documenting the conflict was a sound academic impulse born, partly at least, of the silence surrounding the signing of the agreement. As Keefe writes, “In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past.” In South Africa, by contrast, the end of conflict in the early 1990s had been marked by the setting up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Though by no means flawless, the South African process was a serious attempt at a public accounting of the damage wreaked by apartheid. The Troubles concluded without any formal process for commemorating, let alone understanding, what had taken place. “This queasy sense of irresolution,” writes Keefe, “was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA.”

He quotes Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” one line of which runs, “O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod.” While people in Ireland welcomed the prospects of peace, Keefe observes, “the sulphurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.”

To advance his plan, Bew teamed up with Bob O’Neill, head of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College in the United States and overseer of its internationally famous Treasure Room, and recruited Ed Moloney, an Irish Times journalist who had reported on The Troubles and had a reputation as a straight, careful, tough-minded reporter. Moloney had deep sources on both sides of the conflict, giving him access to people who not only had committed terrorist attacks but would refuse to talk to outsiders knowing it could bring retribution, even death.

To persuade key figures like the Price sisters and high-ranking IRA member Brendan Hughes to talk, the team needed to recruit other members whose similarly thick contact books were combined with solid academic credentials. Moloney brought in Wilson McArthur, an East Belfast resident with strong connections among loyalists and a degree from Queen’s, and Anthony McIntyre, a tattooed former IRA member who had served seventeen years in prison for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary. Known to all as “Mackers,” McIntyre had got the study bug while in prison and eventually gained a PhD under Bew’s supervision.

Thus began several years of clandestine recordings of interviewees who had been assured their words would remain secret until after they died. One of them, Brendan Hughes, made Moloney promise that after Hughes’s death, his recollections would be published in book form. After Hughes died, Moloney published Voices from the Grave (2010), with a preface by two Boston College academics who described the book as the first in a planned series drawn from the Boston College Oral History Archive on The Troubles.

The book contained stunning revelations. Not only had Gerry Adams been an IRA commander, Hughes testified, but he had also personally ordered murders, including Jean McConville’s, and had directed the notorious 1973 bombings outside London’s Old Bailey courthouse that injured around 200 people. Adams strongly denied the allegations.

Having advertised the secret archive in spectacular fashion, Boston College seemed to be blindsided when the Police Service of Northern Ireland (known before the ceasefire as the Royal Ulster Constabulary) came asking for transcripts of the oral history to build a case against their long-time nemesis Adams.

Urged on by an anxious Moloney and his fellow interviewers, the college initially resisted. But the academics soon realised that they had failed, despite requests from Moloney, to get legal advice when they drew up the contracts they had asked participants to sign. If they had, writes Keefe, their lawyers would have told them that any guarantee of confidentiality would probably not survive a court order, which is what the police were threatening to seek if the college didn’t hand over the transcripts.

It also become clear that the university had failed to create a promised board of overseers when the archive was established. Indeed, the archive had been set up in such secrecy that other Boston College academics were disinclined to support the few who did know about it when they invoked academic freedom as a defence against the police demands. If they were going to stand up for academic freedom, they harrumphed, it would not be for a project conducted by non-specialist historians, one of whom had spent nearly two decades in prison for murder.

Universities are often accused (with some justification) of burdening themselves with overly cautious committees. But interviewing paramilitaries who had committed terrorist acts is scarcely what universities term a “low-risk ethics application,” and would clearly have benefited from more careful planning. The project drew on the expertise and contacts of the journalists but failed to protect them, or to protect interviewees who had divulged life-and-death information. The journalists weren’t blameless — Moloney had been the first to open the vault with the publication of Voices from the Grave, but at least in that book some names had been suppressed for legal and security reasons.


What were they all thinking? Perhaps there’s a clue in the epigraph to Keefe’s book, which comes from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

For most of us, using violence for political ends can’t be justified. But others see things differently. That doesn’t mean they all sleep easy at night. As Keefe explores in portraits that are morally engaged but rarely judgemental, Dolours Price suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder while she, her sister and Brendan Hughes’s lives unravelled in alcoholism and physical illness, partly as a result of long periods in prison but also because of their struggles to reconcile their political ideals with their bloody actions.

This was one reason why they grew increasingly bitter — and felt impelled to speak out — about their former comrade Gerry Adams, who seemed entirely untroubled by his past. Adams has been questioned by police about the murder of Jean McConville but never charged.

In his Boston College interview, Brendan Hughes compared the armed struggle of the IRA to the launch of a boat: “This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the mud and the dirt and the shit and the sand.”

It may be possible to sympathise with Hughes emotionally, writes Keefe, but it’s a folly not to acknowledge Adams’s trajectory from activist (at the least) to politician. “He may have possessed a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation,” Keefe writes, “and there is something chilling about how Adams, secure in his place on the boat, does not cast so much as a backward glance at those comrades, like Hughes, who are left behind. But, really, it was history leaving Hughes behind.” Adams may have been callous in his motivations and deceptive in his machinations, Keefe concludes, but he “steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace.”

And I would add that a reading of Say Nothing underscores both the value and the limitations of journalism and works of contemporary history. Historians like to wait until the dust has settled, but that leaves them prey to gaps in the record, inadvertent or deliberate. Journalists are forever itching to catch the moment, to fill the gaps in the record, but often fail, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. Contemporary historians like to have a bob each way, but even they need to leave the door ajar: witness the potential for Brexit to reopen the split between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

If the experience of the Boston project shows just how unhappily contemporary history can end, then Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing shows what can be achieved by combining a historian’s sense of perspective and respect for primary sources, a journalist’s earthy engagement with the here and now, and a novelist’s sense of story and the meaning beneath the conflict that drives it. •

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Britain’s trapped transition https://insidestory.org.au/britains-trapped-transition/ Fri, 28 Jun 2019 07:44:52 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=55880

One thing is needed before Brexit: a coherent government

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Britain’s power shifts get longer as its politics get messier. When Theresa May announced her departure outside 10 Downing Street on 25 May, the gulping climax of her address dominated the news agenda for days. But that instant ballyhoo eclipsed another snag: her six-minute homily was but the prelude to a slow goodbye. A month on, as exhibitionist Boris Johnson and urbane foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt vie to replace her, Therexit is just halfway to the finishing line.

May remains Britain’s prime minister and the Conservative Party’s (acting) leader until the bout’s winner is declared on 23 July, triggering a double shuffle the next day between Buckingham Palace and Number 10 — and, if Boris wins, a likely no-confidence vote from the Labour opposition. A scrappy House of Commons, whose triple snub to the PM’s withdrawal deal with the European Union belatedly sealed her fate, might soon be fluked into a general election. After insurgents battered the two main parties in recent local council and European parliamentary elections, there is no safe bet on the outcome.

Après May, le déluge, then? In its way that would be an apt sequel to three stagnant years. But there’s one already on show, for May’s two-month valedictory brims with “legacy” business: plans to splurge over £27 billion (A$50 billion) of public funds on favoured causes (now meeting Treasury pushback), video messages, Donald Trump’s state visit, two EU summits, the G20 summit in Osaka, and more. Decorous some of it can look — a prime minister bidding a stately retreat — but the whole performance is another sign of how Brexit’s paralysis has further degraded British politics.

PM-to-PM transitions, once brief, have been stretching. In 1997, a couple of hours in the blissful dawn of New Labour’s rout of the Tories did the job, with Tony Blair arriving in Downing Street minutes after John Major left, the very choreography an uplifting emblem of popular sovereignty.

In 2007, it took three days for Gordon Brown to succeed Blair in a mid-term, vote-free stitch-up; in 2010, five for Brown’s loss of Labour’s majority to usher in David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s rose-garden bromance. In 2016, though, nineteen days passed from the Brexit referendum and Cameron’s vanishing to May’s quiet rise.

That interval was an augur of Brexit’s disabling impact on the polity. It might have been longer, for the vote to leave the EU had shattered an unready government and rattled even the victors. No one knew what to do. A pyrotechnic Tory struggle left May the unexamined winner. Her implicit job contract, which was granted at that stage by all but the extreme partisans, was to reach acceptable Brexit terms while forging a consensus that bridged the deep fissures reflected in the referendum’s 51.9–48.1 per cent result. A tall order for a first-rate PM, but Theresa May proved to be a dud. Under her care Britain became a GINO (government in name only) country.

That became unmistakable at the snap 2017 election, when the Commons majority she had inherited from Cameron was lost and her authority shredded. A stultifying cabal mentality vaporised cabinet trust. She had no leadership skills, shrank from the people, and spoke in robotic and oft-repeated phrases. Her approval ratings plunged close to (though only once below) Jeremy Corbyn’s. With a bare policy cupboard, even as challenges accumulated, Brexit was May’s crutch — but it acted as homework not strategy, far less vision. Here she made crucial blunders. Only when her backchannel EU deal had been spiked did the walls at last close in. Even then she went reluctantly: “the sofa is up against the door,” an insider’s barb, was at the end almost believable.

Incapable as May was for so long, the Conservative Party kept her in place and then allowed her to set her terms of departure. (Such a reward for epic political failure is pervasive in Britain’s honours system and elsewhere.) It was among the most socially corrosive of deeds. The party’s next step? It rebooted the 2016 formula with a more bloated and protracted contest — ten candidates, eight weeks — as if the last three years never happened and hadn’t shown, foremost, that treating a national crunch as a partisan game only delays the reckoning. As a spectacle, the brawl for the Tory crown offers unmissable drama in real time. But in its snail’s pace and indifference to the public, it is a fitting coda to Britain’s three locust years in Theresa’s dismaland.


May’s GINO had many facilitators. The fact that survival became her chief goal, fed by recurrent advisers’ own bunker mindset, ranks high. The Tories’ wafer-thin Commons advantage, courtesy of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, and cold fear of a general election that might well bring Corbyn’s Labour to power, shrivelled horizons. The dire fixed-term parliaments act of 2011 cushioned the incumbent’s weakness. Brexit’s endless ennui fortified and toxified the core leave-versus-remain division: the worst of all possible outcomes, but giving May — who had nothing to say about it — more reason to hunker down.

On a major question of statehood, an equally riven political class could give disaffected citizens no direction or assurance. In response, millions tuned out or switched parties. Polls, think-tank reports and the occasional by-election confirmed growing alienation. A bigger measure arrived with the five-yearly elections to the EU parliament on 24 May, the first pan-UK choice since 2017 and thus a quasi-referendum.

The event had a bizarre aspect, in that the United Kingdom would be sending representatives to a body it wanted to break from. But having missed its 29 March deadline to leave the EU, and having secured from Brussels an extension until 31 October — “Please do not waste this time,” was the not unfriendly advice of Donald Tusk, president of the European Council — it had a legal obligation to hold the European parliamentary vote. Conditions were perfect for a two-sided backlash from those angered by Brexit’s delay (“Get on with it!”) or encouraged (“Call the whole thing off!”). And the results were chilling for Conservatives and Labourites, as Nigel Farage’s start-up Brexit Party took a 30.7 per cent vote share, and the firmly pro-EU Liberal Democrats (19.7 per cent) and Greens (11.7 per cent) did well, while Labour won only 13.7 per cent and the Tories 8.8 per cent — the two parties’ smallest-ever proportions in a national election.

Tory and Labour voters’ mass defection to parties with an unambiguously pro-Brexit stance recasts the historic giants of British politics as dinosaurs. Most Conservatives now agree that leaving the EU on 31 October is central to the party’s survival, for otherwise the populist Farage will cannibalise their base. The EU must, they say, agree to remove unacceptable elements of May’s deal (principally the “backstop” ensuring an open border in Ireland, which affects UK sovereignty), else the UK should opt for a “no deal” departure. The latter is now equally within the EU’s competence — and leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, fed up with London’s muddle, are tempted.

All this bolstered Conservative members’ wish to see Boris Johnson as their clear first choice to follow May. A tight race for the runner-up was edged by Jeremy Hunt amid claims of Borisite MPs “lending” him votes to ditch Michael Gove, seen as a deadlier rival. Johnson began the one-on-one stage in a graceless mood, avoiding a scheduled Sky News debate and then, at the first Tory hustings, lazily muttering about tough questions (“There’s some quite hostile bowling, I may say”). This win-by-shirking approach was soon replaced under a reshuffled team. Mark Fullbrook is the supremo, while C|T Group comrade Lynton Crosby advises BoJo by phone. If the polished Hunt starts winning hearts among the grassroots — and he has made a bright start — things could yet go according to the ugly playbook so well reviewed by James Murphy in Inside Story.

In a parallel Borisesque farce, a late-night, high-decibel row at the Camberwell flat of his partner, campaigning PR executive Carrie Symonds, led neighbours to call the police then pass to the Guardian an audio of the incident. When this turned out to be harmless, and the arty couple’s sympathies turned out to be pro-Labour/EU, culture warriors’ fuel tanks overflowed. More seriously, an alleged juicy morsel from Carrie’s harangue (“You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt! You have no care for money or anything!”) struck Dominic Lawson and Rachel Sylvester, respected columnists, as speaking truth to character.


About that, no one reading Sonia Purnell’s incisive and deeply researched 2011 biography, Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, can have any doubts. Now, for the umpteenth time in his career, the media is filled with details of his rakish personal life (which, with reason, he now refuses to discuss) and professional misdeeds. The extreme virulence of many assessments is striking, especially from Tory warhorses (and thus long acquaintances) such as Max Hastings, Chris Patten, Michael Heseltine, Matthew Parris and Simon Heffer. If concentrated gut loathing could bring a man down, Johnson would be toast.

Yet the original celebrity politico thrives on all the abuse, or so it can seem. The constant noise around him may even help drown out his actual record: paltry as an MP (2001–08, and from 2015), mediocre as London mayor (2008–16), facetious as foreign secretary (2016–18). Tory loyalists’ affection is impervious, though, while street-level recognition remains more buoyant than hostile. Two-thirds of the 160,000 party members — 71 per cent male, 97 per cent white, average age fifty-seven — say they’ll vote for him.

Where they at least are concerned, the editorial overkill (as in Trump’s America) likely damages the purpose more than the target. By way of contrast, Johnson supporters’ quiet misgivings deserve more attention. Endorsing him, the Spectator admits a “wide range of risks,” such as “he could self-destruct at any point,” but this is a “gamble the Tories have no choice but to make.” Paul Goodman, wise editor of Conservative Home, notes Johnson’s indifference to “the irksome restraints of conventional morality,” concedes that he is perhaps “not the prime minister that the British people deserve,” but gives the journal’s approval “on a wing and a prayer.”

Alarmingly close to the summit as Boris now is, the guarded tone of those two endorsements resonates far more than the de rigueur fulminating. Between the lines is a lurking fear: that after the obligatory bromides on the steps of Number 10, pitched into emergency mode from the first hours, facing the relentless demands and pace of the job, with harsh mood music at home and abroad, the clanger and insult meter already whirring, cabinet members jostling for preferment in the court of the “world king” and a Commons seething with no-confidence and election calls, all Boris Johnson will deliver is his own GINO.

A polity stuck in Brexit limbo has been forced into fantastic contortions to prove itself alive. Anointing a clown-messiah would cap them all. Rosa Prince, ace biographer of Corbyn and May, sees karma in the way Conservatives “will be giving Brexit Britain the prime minister it deserves — a clown.” In a country so out of shape, such absurdism makes perfect sense. But gifts can be sent back and limbs revived by exercise. Ahead of anything else, Britain needs what has been lacking for three years: a coherent government with real authority. Time, then, to prepare for the Borexit power shift. •

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Boris’s brain https://insidestory.org.au/boriss-brain/ Fri, 31 May 2019 23:27:18 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=55479

Australian tactician Lynton Crosby could win the prime ministership for Boris Johnson, but at what cost?

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The race is well and truly on to replace Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister of Britain. It’s a crowded field, with enough jostling to make the outcome less than certain, but Boris Johnson, former foreign secretary, former mayor of London and Brexiteer-in-chief, is touted as the man to beat. That’s a function not just of his charisma, which is undeniable, but also of the legendary abilities of his chief strategist and confidant, Australian political guru Lynton Crosby.

Sir Lynton has been with Boris a long time — in fact, since his first run for the London mayoralty in 2008. At the time, the Australian styled Crosby as Jeeves to Johnson’s Wooster, the man who could keep the colourful conservative on message, who could stop him bumbling around, cracking jokes and seeking plaudits from constituencies that would not, ultimately, count. He succeeded — Boris affected just enough professionalism for the people of London to think he was not too much of a joke to vote for. But Sir Lynton’s value is not, first and foremost, as a candidate wrangler. It is his dexterity in the dark arts of political campaigning that make him a force to be reckoned with — a man to hire or, if one is too slow or squeamish for that, a man to fear.

What is it that he does? How did this son of a South Australian cereal farmer come to be the not-so-secret weapon sending shudders down the spines of senior Tory ministers — and, indeed, Labor leaders in Australia, back in the days he ran John Howard’s campaigns? How did he become this electoral bogeyman? Perhaps it is part sorcery — Fleet Street routinely refers to him as the Wizard of Oz — and Sir Lynton is handy with a “dead cat” distraction, but there is a broader Crosby method, a modus operandi we can see running through most of his campaigns over the past forty-odd years.

It is a technique Crosby largely imported into Australian and then British politics from the United States. He was once introduced to president George W. Bush as “Australia’s Karl Rove,” Rove being Bush Jnr’s campaign mastermind (also known as “Bush’s Brain”). It was a neat description on several levels. Not only was Rove, like Crosby, a lifelong, aggressively conservative election man, but both inherited much of their approach from Republican strategist-in-chief of the late 1980s, Lee Atwater.

Atwater’s toolkit was not for the faint-hearted: belligerent rhetoric, personal smear campaigns, push polling, and dog whistling on race. As campaign manager to Bush Snr in the 1988 presidential election, he focused almost entirely on linking the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, to crimes committed by convicts allowed out of prison on weekend furloughs in his state. That effort included the iconic “revolving door” commercial, as well as others even the notorious “dirty trickster” and Trump strategist Roger Stone felt went too far. When Stone told Atwater one ad was simply too nakedly racist, Atwater reportedly dismissed Stone as “a pussy.” Dirty or not, it helped Bush win an unlikely victory, and another term for the Republicans in the White House.

Four years later, Lynton Crosby was instrumental in importing Atwater’s style of politics to Australia. As state director of the Queensland Liberals, he oversaw the 1992 campaign against Wayne Goss’s Labor government featuring claims that Labor had blood on its hands after a prisoner out on early release murdered Sunshine Coast teenager Cheree Richardson the previous year. Liberal ads in the states’ papers told readers Cheree was “dead because Labor’s policies freed her killer from jail before he’d finished his sentence.” In TV ads, Cheree’s father told votes “you’ve got to blame the government.”

It wasn’t an election-winner — at least not that time around. Labor won a comfortable majority and the commentariat largely baulked at the dirty “American” tactics, which had perhaps been imported by two Republican strategists serving as consultants, or perhaps by Crosby himself as a keen observer of the right’s fortunes internationally. Either way, this Atwater approach — exploiting unstated fears in the electorate, aggressively attacking the opposition as not just wrong but positively lethal — has remained the Crosby signature, visible in a whole series of elections he’s managed over the years.

It was most spectacularly on display in the 2001 federal election in Australia, which saw him guide John Howard to an unlikely victory by hammering home fears about border security and terrorism. In 2005, Crosby exported the same rhetorical style to Britain when he took a job advising Conservative leader Michael Howard. As one campaign line had it, “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration. Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” For Boris in 2008, the attack ads against Labour mayor Ken Livingstone were about teen homicides and Islamic extremists allegedly running Red Ken’s campaign.

In 2015, the Tories claimed Ed Miliband had “stabbed his own brother in the back” to become leader, and was ready to ditch the country’s Trident nuclear deterrent for a deal with the Scottish National Party, or SNP. For Conservative Zac Goldsmith’s run to succeed Boris as mayor of London, Crosby’s campaign featured claims Labour’s candidate, Sadiq Khan, was an apologist for Islamic extremism. Goldsmith’s campaign even penned an article in the Mail on Sunday — accompanied by images of the 7/7 terrorist attacks — asking Londoners if they could vote for a party that counted terrorists among its friends. A Crosby campaign, like an Atwater one, goes negative and it goes for fear.


So much for tactics — what of strategy? Again, a theme runs through Crosby-managed campaigns, and again it was inherited from the Republican Party of Bush and Reagan. Sir Lynton’s long-time business partner, pollster Mark Textor, reportedly learned his craft directly from Reagan strategist Richard Wirthlin, the man who identified and successfully targeted the so-called Reagan Democrats — white working-class voters who felt forgotten by the left.

That has been the Crosby-Textor approach in nearly all the campaigns they’ve worked on. In Australia’s 1996, 1998 and 2001 election campaigns they targeted the same kind of group, “Howard’s Battlers,” in key marginal seats. For Boris in London, Crosby pursued a “blue donut” strategy, targeting Tory-leaning commuters and simply not bothering with inner-city cosmopolitans. For David Cameron in 2015, the advice was to ditch the “big society” nonsense and focus instead on the fears of a Labour–SNP coalition held by small target groups in eighty marginal seats.

So, at a strategic level, a Crosby campaign zeroes in on disgruntled voters in marginal seats and speaks to their deep fears, and only their fears. Legend has it that when he was asked why he hadn’t made the most of an opportunity to meet the Queen, Crosby replied that she was not a target voter in a target seat.

This is a minimalist approach to elections: seek out just enough votes to get over the line, speak entirely to a relatively small target group, and don’t worry about the broader effects of your rhetoric on the body politic. Indeed, don’t worry about obtaining a mandate for a broad policy agenda or building political capital to spend in government. Just get the votes, and just from the places that matter.

Sir Lynton’s formula has not always been successful. Michael Howard put a dent in Tony Blair’s majority in 2005, but that election is not remembered as a big endorsement of the Crosby method. Indeed, David Cameron subsequently had to pour masses of political capital into assuring voters his was not the “nasty” party. Zac Goldsmith’s campaign against Sadiq Khan not only failed to get the Tories across the line; it also caused a significant backlash, including among many senior members of the Conservative Party, and sullied the reputation of Goldsmith, who had been seen as a rising star. Indeed, Crosby even failed to make magic happen for Boris in the last Conservative leadership contest.

But Crosby has also engineered miraculous victories. He was the architect of Kate Carnell’s surprise win for the Liberals in the Australian Capital Territory back in 1995, of John Howard’s four election victories, of Boris Johnson’s two wins in London, and of David Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015, for which he was knighted. And Crosby’s firm (and thus his formula, if not the Wizard himself) was a key force behind Scott Morrison’s upset victory a fortnight ago. In other words, there is a reason why Sir Lynton and his method are in heavy demand.

Perhaps his latest, greatest coup is now in motion, and his man, Boris Johnson, will be elevated to Number 10. Who knows, perhaps Sir Lynton can even deliver Boris something approaching a majority in a snap general election, if one comes. But to get there, Crosby will feed rather than soothe the bitterness that now consumes Britain. His method salts wounds rather than heals them, and divides and polarises rather than forges compromises and consensus. Britain is already riven by Brexit. Can it really afford another Crosby campaign? •

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“Our house is burning” https://insidestory.org.au/our-house-is-burning/ Fri, 24 May 2019 03:06:43 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=55308

A young prophet of apocalypse invigorates Europe’s climate debate

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Greta Thunberg won’t be hitting Canberra any time soon. Beijing and Washington too are off limits. The sixteen-year-old environmental prophet, whose weekly sit-downs outside Sweden’s parliament since last August have inspired a transnational “school strike for climate,” shuns air travel. That, and becoming vegan are modest steps in the change she is sure the world must make to avert ecological breakdown. Her family has taken her lead, at some cost to the career of her mother, an opera singer who — somehow, inevitably — once represented Sweden in the Eurovision song contest.

Yet judging by her March–April procession through Berlin, Strasbourg, Rome and London — all journeys made by rail — Thunberg also needs to go (or at least talk) to those capitals and their hinterlands if her message that “our house is burning” is to take effective hold. This is but one paradox in a meteoric rise that seems already to hold both room for lasting good and risk of early burn-out.

Thunberg’s simple protest beside the Riksdag, drawing peers and publicity as the “Fridays for Future” accumulated, quite soon took her to the larger stages of Katowice’s COP24 and Davos, a would-be prop for anxious summiteers. Thence to encounters with Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and other dignitaries — though not Theresa May, whose plea of a full diary was met with a scornful empty chair. With no time to waste, Thunberg aims at the top and isn’t easily fobbed.

Here too her attitude is consistent with the belief that the highest stakes, the very sustainability of a habitable Earth, now require an unfailing sense of urgency. This driven, self-possessed, whip-smart young person acts as if her very being contains the despoliations inflicted each day on air, soil, seas and nature. Her Asperger’s syndrome, and the outsiderish sense it fostered, was an enabler of her insight, she says. “It makes me different, and being different is a gift, I would say. It also makes me see things from outside the box. I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”

The same guilelessness was plain in a February interview with Leslie Hook, the Financial Times’s environment and clean energy correspondent, who in quoting her riposte at a Davos gathering — “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic” — reflected: “Thunberg doesn’t believe in offering cheery prescriptions for change. The world she sees is a dark one, and she wants other people to feel the same way.”

If media coverage in Sweden initially amplified her propaganda of the deed, it was her emotional truth that cut through to the public. “Why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future?” she asked at a TED talk in Helsinki. Such lucid sentiments evidently reached the inner ear of many young people around the world, who made their own personal sense of Thunberg’s anguish and longing. An amorphous movement was born or, more strictly, as a student strike had marked the opening of Paris’s COP21 in 2015, revived.


The movement reached Britain in mid February via walkouts from school in London and other cities, with teachers’ blessing in many cases. A month later their numbers and reach were far larger. By then the Scottish Highlands campaigning of Holly Gillibrand, a thirteen-year-old from Fort William, had earned local stardust and a seat beside Thunberg at the politicians’ table. But the children’s crusade was but one game in town. Its mid-April protests coincided with those of Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a politically itinerant band of creative professionals trained, since its formation in April 2018, in the agile use of direct action to flummox authority.

Held on a bank holiday weekend to maximise numbers and impact — and given a serendipitous boost by Thunberg’s London visit — XR’s followers clogged main city arteries in a mini carnival whose vibe was more Glastonbury than end of the world. At Westminster, a naked dozen superglued themselves to the security glass of the House of Commons’s public gallery. Whether these tactics best served XR’s manifesto — “We are rebelling against the government for its crimes against humanity… [because] we are so very nearly out of time” — was unclear.

Well aired amid the passing annoyance and bemusement was actor Emma Thompson’s flight from Los Angeles to join the throng, brandishing a clenched-fist salute and a “There is no planet B” top, thus inverting one of Thunberg’s pithy one-liners: “You are never too small to make a difference.” For all that, the double dose of catastrophism won some favour in polls: clear majorities agreed on climate change’s peril and human responsibility for it, and as many as 26 per cent supported XR’s aims and tactics.

Outside the box: Greta Thunberg is applauded by (from left) environment secretary Michael Gove, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, former Labour leader Ed Miliband and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas during a forum in the Houses of Parliament in London on 23 April. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

There was plentiful disdain in the press, of XR as bourgeois-bohemian-tree-huggers and of Thunberg as an oddball in murky league with Europe’s grandees and luvvies. But many columnists, including centre-right ones, were notably positive about both. The FT’s Camilla Cavendish, now at Harvard after heading David Cameron’s policy unit, sensed among the protesters “the kind of courteous regret that is deadly serious,” and defended XR from the charge of privilege. After all, “it is the middle classes who must alter our lifestyles if change is to come,” while “this group’s leaders have the right credentials: Gail Bradbrook has a PhD in molecular biophysics, and Farhana Yamin, arrested after gluing herself to the pavement outside Shell’s HQ, was a lawyer for UN climate negotiations.”

Thunberg’s own schedule included meetings with needy Westminster figures, whose awkward lionisation met the antidote of her reproachful stillness. The politicians — Green, Labour, Liberal and Scottish nationalist, including the Commons speaker and the Conservative environment minister Michael Gove (“We have not done nearly enough. Greta, you have been heard”) — blathered away before posing for group photos. This riveting politics of the spectacle knocked the tedious strippers into a cocked hat.


Such encounters, and London’s festive days as a whole, illuminated rival approaches to climate politics. The conventional one sees a crisis with multiple stakeholders and many divergent short-term interests, requiring patient brokering of least-worst agreements whose tacit maximal aim is to fail better. Thunberg and XR see an existential threat mandating action equal to its unprecedented character — meaning wholesale transformation, not just retail trade-offs, guided by planetary needs rather than national interests.

In practice the contrast blurs when technocrats gesture to vision and radicals to pragmatism, as in XR’s proposal of net-zero emissions in Britain by 2025 or Thunberg’s saying the European Union “needs minimum 80 per cent reduction by 2030, and that includes aviation and shipping.” In Strasbourg, she even reflected that she has “learned how things work, how complicated everything is.”

Moreover, even these radicals’ actions and claims are made in the wake of pragmatist achievement (however limited) by “their own” governments. Thunberg’s self-propelled campaign, which Stockholm University’s Karin Bäckstrand credits with lifting climate change from “priority number eight” for Swedes, began three weeks before a general election amid a northern summer of heatwaves, drought and forest fires. Stefan Lövfen’s centre-left government had passed a Climate Act in January 2018 mandating pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2045, meaning an 85 per cent cut in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 (including offsets). Its successor, a more centrist coalition — with Lövfen and Isabella Lövin, the law’s architect, still in post — upholds Sweden’s image as one of the European Union’s climate pioneers.

The Swedish plan draws on Britain’s own Climate Change Act of 2008, whose target of an 80 per cent fall in CO2 emissions over the 1990–2050 period will now, after an advisory panel’s report published on 2 May, be extended to net-zero. Progress is steady: UK emissions on the producing side are 43 per cent less than in 1990, though the figure tumbles if shares of shipping and air transport are included. Periods without any coal-sourced electricity are becoming commonplace, an outcome charted by John Quiggin in Inside Story: a new milestone is the first coal-free week since 1882.

Meanwhile, the problems are growing, although Britain’s flash floods, heatwaves and coastal erosion pale before Australia’s MurrayDarling dystopia and much else. The energy sector is a mix of incoherence and, over nuclear and fracking especially, paralysis. Transport, health, agriculture and housing sectors are wheezing, with environmental impacts adding to their ills. And Britain’s burden on others, as Thunberg and XR argue, includes the accumulated legacy of early industrialism and today’s top-heavy global footprint. In London, the young Swede denounced Britain’s “very creative carbon accounting” and “ongoing irresponsible behaviour [which] will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.”

Still, Sweden and Britain’s climate record shows everyday politics making a difference. Too little too late, Thunberg and XR retort — and a failed politics too. Thus Thunberg told EU parliamentarians, or MEPs, that since “everyone and everything has to change” it seems pointless to “waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first.” Time magazine’s portrait of the grand tour reports her “brief smile” at mention of Barack Obama’s tweeted praise, before the language of ultimacy kicks in: “I believe that once we start behaving as if we were in an existential crisis, then we can avoid a climate and ecological breakdown. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We have to start today.”

For its part, XR’s urban swarm is an effort to turn Thunberg’s “as if” to purpose, and it has a manifesto: Common Sense for the 21st Century, a thoughtful booklet by the group’s co-leader Roger Hallam, aimed at inciting “high participation civil disobedience concentrated upon a single event: a rebellion.” The mechanics include “symbolic disruption” to “create a national conversation” and “bring the regime to the table,” and a national citizens’ assembly, chosen by sortition, which will eventually reduce the Commons to an advisory role. Despite the 1917-ish echoes, Hallam’s model of non-violent civil revolution is conceived as “an act of universal service and duty” in the “civic and republican tradition.”

Hallams work-in-progress — a rare blend of movement strategy, framing and ethics — is grounded in the world of English radicalism, as its Tom Paine title declares. That points up another paradox in the radicals’ case: that all climate politics (as opposed to diplomacy) are local. With favourable conditions, which usually means winning elections or at least arguments, the nation-state allows real progress. But the best of it will always be parochial as Earth’s emergency grows. More than most, Thunberg and XR are living in this truth.


The outlook, from Brazil’s Amazon to the Antarctic, is grim. CO2 emissions are still on an upward curve as the Paris agreement measures go awry. The International Energy Agency’s latest status report finds energy emissions grew by 1.7 per cent in 2018 to a historic 33.1 billion tonnes, thanks to Asia’s coal and the United States’s air-conditioning boom. Over 80 per cent of global energy production remains fossil-based.

Every year in which global emissions are not reduced, writes Oxford University’s Myles Allen, equates to another forty billion tonnes of CO2 being pumped out yearly for “today’s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.”

The Arctic is but one of the world’s “potential tipping cascades” mapped by the Hothouse Earth report, a collaboration of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. This forecasts temperature rises over double the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s precarity levels, even were its core targets to be met. Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams, former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, chides the IPCC in his book A Farewell to Ice for, as he sees it, hedging the “Arctic death spiral” (Mark Serrezes phrase). Wadhams, noting that in his half century of research the area of summer Arctic sea ice has reduced by more than half, says that “rapid and drastic” change there amounts to “a spiritual impoverishment of the Earth as well as a practical catastrophe for mankind.”

Both sources are cited by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph’s compelling Cassandra, who references another PNAS study from 2018: a paper on the geohistorical analogues of near-future climates, by the paleoecologist Kevin D. Burke and five colleagues. “As the world warms due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations,” they write, “the Earth system moves toward climate states without societal precedent, challenging adaptation.” John “Jack” Williams, one of the co-authors, says, “We are moving toward very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend [tracing back at least fifty million years] in a matter of centuries.”

The unprecedented warming trend is confirmed in studies published in early 2019 from, among others, the World Meteorological Organization, the UK Met Office, and NASA/NOAA. The UN’s assessment of retreating global biodiversity, from corals to insects, came in May as bleak reinforcement. In Evans-Pritchard’s words, addressed not least to sceptics among his newspaper’s own readership, “Frightening reports are constant fare for those paying attention.”


The weight of evidence could justify almost any response: crisis diplomacy, intensified protest, clean-one’s-house regional or neighbourhood plans, personal regimes — as well as Greta Thunberg’s gut-wrenched mix of despair and defiance.

But technological and economic currents are also opening new horizons of possibility, albeit with concerns over pace, scale, finance, and (as with lithium-ion batteries) green tech’s own blowback costs. Wind and solar power, battery capacity (with electric-hybrid aviation one prize), plus carbon-neutral electricity and hydrogen to fuel transport and heating, are key innovation areas. So too is carbon capture, including ambitious plans to capture atmospheric CO2 via dual-purpose (energy and storage) bioenergy.

Renewables’ falling long-term costs and greater efficiency are central to the transformation under way, according to analysis on Carbon Tracker, IRENA and Energy Watch. Fossil fuel’s burnout could accelerate sooner than all but optimists now envisage. In another data-rich article on this race against time, Evans-Pritchard turns into Pangloss: “It is easy to succumb to paralysing pessimism. Yet the technology exists to crack the problem… We are reaching the inflection point where market forces may suddenly start to drive fossil fuels out of the energy system.”

The implication is that climate apocalypse will always be with us (alongside other, nuclear or pandemic, kinds). There is no guarantee of escape, for that is in our capacity only if the latter is put immediately to good use. The Hothouse Earth paper has a checklist:

Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System — biosphere, climate, and societies — and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.


For all this to come together, the world must “unite behind the science — make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy,” as Thunberg instructed Europe’s MEPs. In turn, that needs working ingredients now in deficit across a boiling planet: world security, core freedoms, legal order, social and informational trust. The reverse engineering involved — echoing Roger Hallam’s method of “first [working] out what success looks like and then work back to how it would be created” — looks even more forbidding than the XR strategy of “thousands of people breaking the law to create a transformation of political structures.”

Evans-Pritchard, who says XR is “right to raise the climate alarm in apocalyptic terms,” has faith in “cutting-edge technology and the creative élan of market forces” to do the job. These would depend on the same framework of law and freedom, unless environmental gains are so rapid as to release new, liberatory dynamics in other areas.

But the mood has shifted this year in Britain and Europe. Those reports, and timely broadcasts such as David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary Our Planet, capped by Thunberg and XR’s irruption, handed radicals a precious hat-trick of science, moral force and cultural momentum. Technocratic politics is taking ever more account of the new clamour, and conceding at the edges: British and Irish parliaments’ declaration of a climate emergency, France’s consultative citizens’ assembly. Elements of a lost political centre, craving a semblance of authenticity and the elusive youth vote, are only too glad to mingle with XR’s well-groomed principals, and proliferating media outlets to feature them.

The next big day of school strikes is 24 May, coinciding with elections to the European parliament, where Greta’s crusade is a boon for green parties. Its carousel aspect is also in full swing: press interviews, conference panels, festival invites, magazine features, celebrity encomiums, honorary degrees. A book of her speeches is out in days. Time’s profile makes “the teenager on strike for the planet” foremost among its “next generation leaders,” soliciting an all-purpose tweet from foreign minister Margot Wallström, a star in her own right: “Proud to be Swedish.”

The “invisible girl” felt the Earth’s pain as adults could not, and sent an SOS for them to act on. Instead of looking in the same direction, will they gaze at her finger, and turn the distress call into a feedback loop? Europe alone can’t answer. A breakout east and west, if a way can be found, would allow Greta Thunberg’s fierce urgency of now its true test. •

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If… A Brexit fable https://insidestory.org.au/if-a-brexit-fable/ Tue, 02 Apr 2019 03:34:53 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=54250

Suppose the Remainers had narrowly won the 2016 Brexit referendum. What happened next?

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It was not supposed to be like this: a Britain still sharply divided about its membership of the European Union three years after the June 2016 referendum delivered a remain victory of 52 per cent. Then, the bleary early-hours judgement was that the country’s EU status was now guaranteed for the next decade. As with Scotland’s 55–45 vote against independence in 2014, precious continuity had been secured, Britain’s instinct for stability confirmed — and prime minister David Cameron’s place in history triple-locked.

By dawn, though, the doubts were setting in, fuelled by the vote’s closeness and its fearful segregations of age, social geography and nation (Scotland and Northern Ireland’s clear Yes to the European Union neutering England and Wales’s slim No). Cameron’s strained bonhomie at 7am outside 10 Downing Street (“Unity at home will secure our influence in Europe. Let’s go to it!”) felt as off as his invocation of the English question on the same spot two years before, which had galvanised support for the pro-independence Scottish National Party.

The morning scrum instantly switched to the Brexit campaign’s rival figureheads, each notably upbeat: first the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, bellowing exultancy (“Britons will not long be denied our freedom!”), then Cameron’s erstwhile Conservative Party colleagues Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, sprinkling emollience with cod-Churchillian gravitas (“We respect and accept the verdict. But for our vision of a new Britain, this is but the end of the beginning!”). In a striking mood again reminiscent of Scotland, the losers were behaving like winners, and vice versa.

By lunchtime on the 24/7 media carousel, the referendum was being treated more as the latest skirmish in Britain’s decades-old European argument than as any sort of conclusion to it. Anti-EU voices were all over the airwaves, saying the verdict was skewed by the remain side’s huge funding lead, rock-solid establishment backing and (after a turnout of 72 per cent in the UK’s non-mandatory voting system) support of just 38 per cent of the total electorate. An English drumbeat — we voted out, the Scots are keeping us in — thudded across phone-in land. It all felt very much like day one of a hard-edged new effort.

The long campaign had itself been nasty. Leavers’ slogans, notably “take back control,” had played to populist and anti-immigration sentiment, whereas the pro-EU camp, welding status quo reassurance to pocketbook alarmism, exuded complacency. A nadir was the brutal murder of a Labour member of parliament, Jo Cox, by a constituent (soon revealed to be a Neo-Nazi) shouting “Britain first!” The collective intake of breath proved all too brief, although some held that the atrocity, a week before the vote, may have stalled the Brexit momentum.

In any event, the referendum’s aftermath brought no sign of a let-up in the scars it had opened, or revealed. Cameron had pleaded for a healing process. Instead, voters’ in–out alignments hardened, to the extent of overtaking the Conservative–Labour split in numbers and valence. More broadly, the event capped social media’s remaking of the political realm in its own image, as a machine for turning citizens into tribalists.


The post-referendum mood soon turned vengeful. As the “hollow victory” headlines stuck to Cameron, his authority frayed. Personal tensions in his government now complicated policy ones. Only a year after unexpected election success had freed the Conservatives from unhappy partnership with the Liberal Democrats, every disagreement was evidence of a second “coalition of chaos.” Cameron, long derided as a lightweight, “essay-crisis” premier who outsourced strategy to his wily chancellor George Osborne, got no credit for his premiership’s 2014–16 hat-trick.

Nor were mitigating factors in the pallid “yes” to Europe much cited. One was the lack of a strong Labour effort, thanks partly to the absence of Jeremy Corbyn from the hustings, Labour’s leader being a lifelong (if now coded) EU opponent. Another was the low-energy contribution of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalist parties, their leaders reluctant to stand alongside despised adversaries — Cameron, Tories, the UK itself — in any cause. In the event they saved Britain’s position in the EU while accentuating English exceptionalism: a double win.

With surprising suddenness, Cameron looked not just unpopular — he had often been that — but out of time. The smooth operator stood down at the Conservatives’ September conference with a rueful, acclaimed valedictory (hypocrisy still the Tories’ secret weapon) quoting Wellington: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Regime change inevitably embroiled Osborne, his closest ally, whose apocalyptic warnings of Brexit’s economic impact had earned him particular enmity among leavers.

A pro-Brexit successor was inevitable: inside the Conservative Party as outside, the anti-EU virus was merrily circulating in the very teeth of a process designed to eradicate it. After an operatic leadership campaign, Gove and Johnson formed the new axis of power in party and cabinet. Their improvised pact — echoing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s, this time sealed in Paddington not Islington — envisioned a medium-term shift to a “post-EU” Britain via a ramshackle menu of education and localism, greenery and globalism, trade-centred Anglosphere-ism and Asia-ism.

The mishmash was driven by aptitude more than policy: the punctilious, cerebral Gove, adopted son of an Aberdeen couple, driven by ideas but open to persuasive new ones; and the carefully shambolic Johnson, a self-promoting crowd-pleaser of high schooling and undimmed ambition (who nonetheless, the top job on hold, embraced with gusto his newly minted responsibility for “London and the UK”).

Beyond formally reopening the Brexit file, their serendipitous alliance lacked a modernising core of the kind that had animated Cameron’s decade. Most in the pro-EU professional classes, and many in their own government, were hostile. But in two ways Gove, Johnson and the team around them were lucky.

The first was the Labour opposition, transformed by Corbyn into both a mass party and a sect, impervious to events, plagued by feverish disputes of its own, and continuing to trundle several points behind the Tories even during the latter’s leadership convulsions. The second was the EU itself, whose economic troubles, advancing populisms, political divisions, security weaknesses, and strategic paralysis were becoming unavoidable — and being prominently reported — in the wake of the UK’s choice to stay a member.

All this proved, if hardly yet a strategic opportunity for the “Govement,” at least a messaging one. With predictable cussedness, Brits’ default scepticism about the EU had returned to normal after the referendum. Little appetite existed for a fresh in–out vote. But amid mounting domestic pressures, fierce Europhile criticism, and the Faragist right’s zealotry, Gove’s agile poking of the EU’s flaws had, over the next couple of years, evergreen political utility.

Yet there were downsides for a government with economic priorities and a preference for a longer Brexit game. The referendum’s toxic potions had long brewed into furious fixity, its sides equally absolutist in temperament and vehement in language. Brexiteers, excited by their nearness to nirvana, were bent on an early rerun of the vote; Remainers, appalled at their proximity to the abyss, sought ways of eliminating the risk of an EU departure by constitutional means. Even for those in power there was no immunity from the fervour. Indeed, most were plugged in.

By 2019, a year before a general election is due, British politics is still defined by the 2016 referendum. It entrenched the country’s polarisation along new lines that overrode, if not fully eclipsed, traditional party ones. It accelerated the now insistently febrile cast of Britain’s political life, enabled by social media but itself enabling nothing. And far from answering the UK–EU question “once and for all,” as everyone involved said at the time, it supercharged the question for another electoral cycle at least.

Brexit advocates, encouraged by consistent if small poll leads of around 55 to 45 per cent, are now pressing for a new referendum. Remainers, veering between worry and fury, are building funds and databases. The momentum for a rematch in 2020, perhaps on the same day as the election itself, is growing.


So unfolds one of the zillion-and-one futures that didn’t happen in 2016–19, though it still seems almost more plausible than the future that did — that is — happening: Britain’s political self-implosion, chiefly owed to the staggering ineptitude of Theresa May, though with many others’ complicity. In a strict sense, the UK state’s failure over Brexit is far greater than over Suez, Bloody Sunday, Iraq, Grenfell and Windrush, without diminishing any of these dark episodes of the past seven decades.

This all-consuming three-year quagmire is desolating enough. Yet the above trip down fantasy lane also cautions that, with a near-exact reversal of the 2016 result, Britain’s schism over the EU would have deepened in much the same way. Why so? Because the referendum allowed the schism to become the lead driver of British politics. The campaign sharpened it, the close result solidified it, and the zero policy outcome incentivised it. With a remain choice, Europe’s inescapable crises would have done the same trick.

It’s worth noting that such bitter division represents departure more than continuity in the UK’s history with the European Union, whose main feature was ambivalence: a “living together, apart.” Lukewarm support for membership and underlying suspicion of the body long coexisted, within as well as between people. The ardent on either side, whether professional Europeanists or national populists, were always a minority, though their voices tended to eclipse the noncommittal majority.

In contrast to founders France and Germany, neighbouring Ireland, or ex-communist states such as Latvia and Poland, the stand-offish Brits (especially English) forever saw the EU in transactional rather than existential terms. Encased in their island fortress, conscious of bonds with more distant lands, and holding to a still-potent idea (if often forlorn in practice) of freedom of action, their relationship to the EU was doomed to half-heartedness. The job of British politicians was to use this rooted ambiguity about Europe as a means of curating Britain’s interests, and on the whole they did pretty well.

The referendum, with its newly stark choice, made the balancing act harder. Fervour was in, nuance out. Here, Scotland’s independence vote of 2014 offered a lurid preview of the Brexit one. Both took place as social media was extending its colonisation of politics and journalism. Many in the political class had scrambled on board, embracing a competitive extremism of attitude in search of media share, routinely hyperbolic language, and self-dramatising emotional display. There was, is, no way back.

Brexit’s morass now creeps towards a denouement. Its latest stage began on 29 March, long planned as the UK’s farewell from the EU, when instead the House of Commons for a third time rejected the withdrawal deal agreed with Brussels. This gave various cross-party groups of MPs a second chance to seize the legislative agenda and win acceptance for their own preferred options. On 1 April, they lost four more motions, amounting to twelve so far. Representative, plebiscitary and executive democracy tussle for priority, while the verbose Commons speaker, John Bercow, is nakedly partisan. The next big date, 12 April, might see a long extension of UK membership — or a France-led guillotine. Queen Elizabeth is, for now, above it all.

Without the vacuum at the heart of government, the engines of fracture might have been contained. Now it is too late. Everywhere, division is in charge. The UK is a failing state. Its descent continues, there is no simple fix, and all are losers. •

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How Britain kicked coal https://insidestory.org.au/how-britain-kicked-coal/ Tue, 02 Apr 2019 01:11:22 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=54234

Once heavily reliant on coal-fired power, the British economy has taken the shift in its stride

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Despite the chaos of Brexit and the difficulty of expanding renewable generation in a country where sunshine is notoriously scarce, and despite strong opposition to wind turbines, Britain has just about ended its use of coal-fired electricity. The last coal-fired power stations are set to close by 2025, but the process is almost complete already. How was this achieved?

The answer can be found in this graph released by Ofgem, the British electricity regulator. As it shows, coal (shown in orange) supplied around 40 per cent of British electricity in 2006, yet by 2018 its contribution was negligible. (The graph on Ofgem’s site is interactive, so you can see the actual numbers there.)

British electricity generation by fuel source 2006–18

Generation from gas and nuclear plants displaced substantial volumes of coal-fired power during the second half of the twentieth century, but has been virtually constant since 2006.

Coal’s elimination has come from two main sources. First, total electricity use has declined, reflecting increased efficiency. Second, wind (offshore and onshore) has expanded to the point where it is about as big a source as nuclear. Solar photovoltaics have also grown strongly, though they contribute only about 3 per cent of total generation. The few remaining coal-fired generators operate as backup supplies, used only to meet peak demand in winter.

The result of the end of coal-fired power, and the twentieth-century shift away from coal-burning heavy industry, is that Britain has reduced CO2 emissions to the levels of 1888. A complete phase-out of coal-fired electricity generation is anticipated by 2025.

Given Britain’s substantial reliance on gas, further reductions in CO2 emissions from the electricity sector are more problematic. At least Britain, unlike Germany, didn’t hamstring its decarbonisation efforts by mandating the early closure of its nuclear power plants. The contribution from nuclear power may even increase if the Hinkley Point C power plant, now in the early stages of construction, is ultimately completed. But the massive cost of that project has led to the abandonment of most remaining proposals for new plants. Over the next couple of decades, most of the existing nuclear fleet will reach the end of its scheduled operating life and will need to be replaced or refurbished.

If the costs of renewable electricity continue their steep decline, some of the older gas-fired power stations built during the 1990s “dash for gas” may be retired over the next few years. A complete shift away from gas is a long way off, however.

Even with these problems, decarbonising electricity is just the easy bit. Reducing, and ultimately eliminating, emissions from transport and industry will be much more difficult.

Against the general trend of declining emissions, CO2 emissions from Britain’s road transport industry have risen recently, driven by the shift away from diesel engines and from passenger cars to SUVs. The only long-run solution is electrification, which will require further expansion of renewable generation.

The British government has promised to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040, but the task of conversion will need to begin almost immediately. The same is true in Australia, where Labor has announced that it will seek to make electric vehicles 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030 and to ensure the government fleet reaches that goal by 2025.

Reducing emissions from industry is even more difficult, since each industrial process has its own needs, and most of them are built around carbon-based fuels. One positive recent step has been the announcement that Britain’s largest remaining steelworks, at Scunthorpe, will construct an electric arc furnace for recycling scrap in order to offset recent reductions in raw steel production capacity. This raises the global issue of the need to improve scrap recovery and shift the balance of steel production from crude steel to recycling.

Despite these continuing challenges, the ease with which Britain, the birthplace of the modern industrial economy, has abandoned coal-fired electricity gives the lie to those in Australia who claim that decarbonising the economy will be ruinously expensive.

In nearly all respects, Australia is better placed now than Britain was in 2006 to break with coal-fired electricity. Admittedly, we are starting from a higher coal share, in part because we avoided the false promise of “too cheap to meter” nuclear power back in the 1970s. Against that, we have substantial existing hydro resources, with Snowy 2.0 as a possible expansion, far more sites for onshore wind and, of course, a massively greater potential for solar energy. Even more importantly, we can take advantage of more than a decade’s worth of technological improvement that has driven down the cost of renewable energy and storage by factors of 80 per cent or more. •

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All at sea in Brexitannia https://insidestory.org.au/all-at-sea-in-brexitannia/ Mon, 11 Mar 2019 05:26:53 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=53896

The mutinies continue, but the endgame of Britain’s European drama could also be an opening

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Any long journey ends with distinct new flavours: a change of air, a view of land, a shaft of light, a burst of sound. It’s somehow fitting that as the United Kingdom’s scheduled departure from the European Union nears, it is wrapped in fog. After three years of agonised limbo since the June 2016 referendum, and two since prime minister Theresa May began the legal process to make its verdict effective, Brexitannia — ever mired in wrangling among passengers and crew — still drifts towards an unknown destination. But if the course is uncertain, the skipper hapless, and the on-board vibe surly, an imminent tussle over the deck chairs will bring some clarity before the iceberg is due to hit on 29 March.

The latest epic week with its vital votes — terms that need a health warning, so drenched in hyperbole has the voyage been — finds a fractious House of Commons again at centre stage. Members of parliament, who rejected by a thumping majority the withdrawal agreement May’s team clinched in November with the European Union, are on Tuesday (12 March) being given a second dollop of the same stew. This one is garnished with Brussels’ reassurance over the contentious issue of the “backstop” preventing a hard border in Ireland, which most MPs see as an infringement of UK sovereignty. Above all, its backers insist that this deal is the only one available. Another government defeat, they say, carries the risk of Brexit not happening at all.

That outcome would distress most Conservative MPS, and relieve most of their Labour counterparts, though significant minorities among each take a contrary view. The more unbending “leavers,” who want a clean break with the EU, and the most ardent “remainers,” who wish to stay inside it, will vote against the deal with conviction. Many regard the prime minister’s word as a stopped clock in any case, and have ceased listening. After endless missteps May’s authority is frazzled, with Brexit seen as but a peak symbol of her wider ineptitude. Even her efforts to turn the Commons tide — which include a hasty new investment fund for deprived Labour-held, pro-Brexit northern English towns — are ill-thought and clumsily delivered. In these circumstances a good number of MPs, served her cold dish once more, will stay loyal to the classic British faith that something (else) will turn up.

If indeed the Commons again snubs the UK–EU agreement, Britain remains on track to leave the EU on 29 March. After Tuesday, the immediate options are narrow but may quickly expand. Horror at the prospect of a “no-deal exit” ensures that on Wednesday it, too, will be rejected. Next comes a vote requesting the EU to extend negotiations for a limited period. Were all twenty-seven EU member states to agree terms, further oven-ready domestic proposals will soon fill the gap: another referendum, a general election, citizens’ assemblies, a “Norway-plus” relationship, a reversal of the Article 50 decision that triggered departure.

Each has its parliamentary advocates, often now aligned in informal cross-party clusters of like-minded MPs who, this week, will try via clever amendments to advance their pet course. This bonding — for example, between Labour’s Yvette Cooper and the Tories’ Nick Boles, both former ministers — is seeded by frustration with the main parties’ leaderships. It also reflects the government’s slender majority since 2017, which has given backbenchers more space and voice, and pressures from constituents and lobbyists to halt Brexit (or, as with the Norway-style solution, reduce its pain). The Independent Group, a proto-party of seven moderate, pro-remain ex-Labour MPs later joined by three ex-Conservatives, wagers that its offer “to reach across outdated divides and build consensus” will find an echo among a fed-up public.

Such cooperation is in principle a welcome reaction to the era’s bitter political schisms. But in trying to stop Brexit, most initiatives inevitably also reinforce them. If compromise alone offers escape from this trap, voting for the UK–EU deal or joining Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway in the European Economic Area are the realistic choices. It’s just possible that after spurning the former this week, the Commons will be given a last chance following the EU summit on 21–22 March and, with backs to the wall, comply.


Soon after, Theresa May might well be gone (and conceivably before, via a Commons vote of confidence then a cabinet revolt). Whatever the timing, her steerage has acted as both amplifier of Brexit’s divisions and self-protector from them. The damage to Britain and its reputation is immeasurable.

A telling index is her favouring of mediocrity over professionalism and independence of mind. Her foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who in Beijing referred to his Chinese wife as Japanese, then praised Slovenia’s “transformation from a Soviet vassal state” (he presumably meant Slovakia) while standing beside his counterpart, Miro Cerar, in Ljubljana; her goofy defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, elevated from the whips’ office, who said Russia should simply “go away and shut up” and lauded British forces’ role in Lithuania (he meant Estonia); her Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, who stated that killings by British state forces during the conflict there were “not crimes” (untrue in a substantial number of cases). These humiliations are bad enough. Go even a touch deeper, over China and Japan for example, and the picture is far more serious. British statecraft is all at sea.

The focus on political leadership, or its lack, might seem overdone. More fashionable current themes are Britain’s “broken” constitution and electoral system, England’s “imperial nostalgia,” and the “reality” the country faces (the last of these three incessant Brexit clichés denotes “whatever the European Union says, does, rules, and thinks”). Such arguments, though in practice very often tendentious and uber-partisan, have their value.

But what the UK needs now, and has since at least the 2017 election, is a prime minister who speaks to the whole country, promotes the best, sets high standards, and looks ahead. Nothing less can lift Brexitannia from its pitiful state. Without a change of air, light, land, and sound, these years of frenetic stasis will prove the overture of yet more of the same. •

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Exclusion, prosecution or restricted re-entry? https://insidestory.org.au/exclusion-prosecution-or-restricted-re-entry/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 19:50:52 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=53462

The controversy over Shamima Begum’s bid to return to Britain from Syria has parallels in Australia

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Last week Britain’s home secretary, Sajid Javid, started the process of revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a nineteen-year-old from east London detained in a Syrian refugee camp. Begum was one of three teenage friends who left Britain in February 2015 to join Islamic State. She now wishes to return home with her newborn son, and the government’s efforts to stop that happening are creating considerable controversy.

That was not Javid’s only option. In its 2018 report CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism, the Home Office provided a quite different “illustrative example” of how it might deal with a British woman and newborn baby who had fled Islamic State territory to return to Britain. “Given that the mother has lived in Daesh-held territory,” says the strategy, “the Home Secretary and a judge [would] approve the use of a Temporary Exclusion Order to manage her return.” It goes on:

On arrival in the UK the police launch an investigation into the woman’s activities in Syria to determine whether any crimes have been committed. If there is evidence that a crime has been committed then the mother will be charged and the Crown Prosecution Service will conduct criminal proceedings. If there is no evidence of criminality, the mother is assisted in reintegrating into society, for example, by requiring her to attend a series of sessions with a specially trained deradicalisation mentor. In the meantime, the mother is also obliged — as part of her Temporary Exclusion Order — to report regularly to a police station and to notify the Home Office of any change of address. The local authority is involved to ensure that the child is not at immediate risk and appropriate measures are put in place to help safeguard the child’s welfare.

The British Nationality Act allows the home secretary to deprive an individual of citizenship if he or she is satisfied that this is “conducive to the public good.” But the British law follows international law in specifying that people can’t be deprived of citizenship if they would be rendered stateless. Naturalised British citizens can have their citizenship revoked only if the home secretary “has reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, to become a national of such a country or territory.”

Because Begum is British by birth, Javid can only cancel her British citizenship if she is a dual national. In attempting to do so, he appears to be relying on a belief that Begum holds dual citizenship with Bangladesh simply because she is of Bangladeshi heritage. Echoing the response of the Fijian government to Australia’s recent decision to deprive Islamic State fighter Neil Prakash of his citizenship, both Begum and the Bangladesh government argue otherwise.

While Begum is challenging the home secretary’s order, she will remain in the refugee camp with 39,000 other former residents of Islamic State’s caliphate, which is not a particularly viable long-term solution. So what are the British government’s options if revoking her citizenship doesn’t work?

British law offers the government three main options: prosecution; temporary exclusion orders; and terrorism prevention and investigation measures, or TPIMs. Despite their name, temporary exclusion orders were not designed to exclude British nationals from the United Kingdom (though this was prime minister David Cameron’s original intention). Their role is to facilitate the return — on the government’s terms — of people suspected of terrorism-related activity. Those terms can include the requirement to report regularly to a police station, to notify the police of residence details, and to attend deradicalisation programs.

Australia doesn’t yet have a similar system of restricted re-entry, though the Counter-Terrorism (Temporary Exclusion Orders) Bill, which was introduced into parliament at the end of last week, aims to remedy this. If enacted, it would grant the home affairs minister similar powers to those available to Britain’s home secretary. The bill lists a range of “post-entry conditions,” including a requirement to provide specific information (place of residence, employment and education, among others). Unlike the British temporary exclusion orders, though, Australia’s orders don’t entail deradicalisation and reintegration programs.

It isn’t entirely clear what temporary exclusion orders would offer that Australia’s existing control orders can’t provide, other than to prevent the return of a suspected foreign terrorist fighter for up to two years — potentially a delaying tactic to allow citizenship to be revoked. The Australian system of control orders, based on the British regime of the same name (which has since been repealed and replaced with TPIMs), enables far greater obligations, prohibitions and restrictions to be placed on individuals in much the same circumstances.

There is one important difference: a temporary exclusion order can be issued by the minister, whereas control orders can only be made by a court. Just four control orders have been issued by Australian courts since Islamic State declared a caliphate in mid 2014 — and, despite several amendments to ensure that the legislation applies in this context, none of them was made against returned fighters. Numbers are low in Britain too: only eight TPIMs have been imposed there, though it is not known whether any of these relate to returned fighters.

The difficulties Australia might face issuing temporary exclusion orders can perhaps be anticipated from the British experience. Around 900 British citizens are believed to have travelled to Syria and Iraq over the past five years. The government estimates that two-in-ten have been killed, four-in-ten have already returned, and four-in-ten remain in the conflict zone. Of the approximately 360 people who are estimated to have returned to Britain, only nine have been subject to temporary exclusion orders. The vast majority have not, it seems, been subject to any state action at all.

A further forty returnees have been prosecuted. Is this a better option? One of the main difficulties of prosecuting returned fighters is the collection of evidence. Australia might have solved this problem five years ago by creating a new offence of entering or remaining in a declared area, an option Britain has only recently shown any enthusiasm for. Just last week a new offence of entering into or remaining in a designated area, based on the Australian legislation, was enacted. Whether it will apply to Begum is uncertain.

The home secretary can use this new power if he or she is “satisfied that it is necessary, for the purpose of protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism, to restrict United Kingdom nationals and United Kingdom residents from entering, or remaining in, the area.” As yet, Sajid Javid has not designated any area for this purpose. But even if he were to designate the part of Syria where Begum is detained, it is still unlikely that the offence will apply to her, for the legislation stipulates that a person does not commit an offence if he or she enters or remains in a designated area involuntarily. No matter how anxious to return to Britain, Begum would find it very difficult to leave the Syrian refugee camp without the British government’s assistance. •

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The London spring https://insidestory.org.au/the-london-spring/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 08:42:04 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=53378

A split from Labour is a shaft of light amid the Brexit gloom

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A coincidence of seasonal and political events can itself bring release. Perhaps that’s why, on a light, chirruping Monday morning, when news came through that seven centrist Labour MPs were leaving the party to form an “Independent Group” in parliament, it was Wolf Biermann’s perennial song-poem “Ermutigung” (Encouragement) that floated into my mind. Written for a friend in hard times, lacing recognition with advice, it makes the cycle of life itself a source of hope:​

The buds burst from their branches ​
We want everyone to see ​
Then they’ll know the truth.

Soon the reverie was overtaken, as the seven gave their pained individual reasons for departing: Labour’s indulgence of Brexit, its foreign policy leanings, its anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. “I am leaving behind a culture of bullying, bigotry and intimidation,” said Luciana Berger, one of Labour’s three Jewish MPs. Labour has been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left,” said Chris Leslie. The last contribution, by the group’s figurehead, Chuka Umunna, was also aimed at like-minded, if wavering, Labour backbenchers: “Politics is broken. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s change it.”​

By midday, as the group dealt with a crashed website and a minor racial gaffe, the initial more-in-sorrow response of Labour loyalists had turned to apoplexy, scorn and demands that the quitters fight by-elections. But by evening the venture’s emotional impact was becoming clear. Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson released a heartfelt five-minute video message, saying, “I love this party, but there are days when I do not recognise it,” and warning that unless the party changes, “we may see more days like this.” Then, at their weekly meeting, Labour parliamentarians reportedly broke into applause at the (pro-Corbyn) chair’s mention of their ex-colleagues’ departure. ​

In other words, the day was a triumph for the politics of the deed. Just by existing, the independents have given a welcome shove to an inert polity devitalised by the mind-numbing combination of the Brexit negotiations and the humiliating Theresa May–Jeremy Corbyn duopoly. As Philip Collins, who has used his Times column to argue for the creation of a new ex-Labour formation, remarked, “Politicians who act decisively always grow. That is happening today.”​


Where now? Britain’s political system, with its built-in preference for two-party hegemony through first-past-the-post voting (at least for general elections), is a bleak house for splitters. An oft-cited precursor is the Social Democratic Party — Atlanticist, pro-European, market-friendly, constitutional reformist — launched by four ex-Labour cabinet ministers in March 1981, when the party was led by the decent but ineffectual Michael Foot and heavily infiltrated by the far left. The SDP burned brightly, won media hearts, allied with the Liberals, narrowly failed to pip Labour in 1983 and become official opposition to the Conservatives — and never regained its lustre.

Even if the broad parallels between 1981 and 2019 are discounted, the larger obstacle to an insurgent party stands. Just as the SDP–Liberal alliance was handicapped in 1983 by its even geographical distribution of support, the UK Independence Party’s 3.9 million votes in 2015 earned just one member of parliament, and that anti-EU party is now a far-right shell. But there was a catch. In practice, the cost of marginalising UKIP was to mainstream its Europhobia, just as (more benignly — though Corbynites would disagree on that) the victory of Tony Blair’s rebooted Labour in 1997 was in part an unheralded victory for the SDP. Could such a trajectory be made to work for Chuka and company? ​

Today’s circumstances are so dire as to be almost propitious. Both major parties are poisonously divided, Brexit amplifying their vacuum of leadership. The Independent Group is a symptom of this crisis and also an agent. In this situation, and with the assistance of a media ravenous for movement after two years of frenetic stasis, its démarche may yet contribute to the political opening, even realignment, that alone (or so it seems) can bust the present sclerosis.  ​

Brexit — the process of leaving the EU rather than the decision itself, if such a distinction can be made — has paralysed British politics. Theresa May is the single-issue prime minister of a single-issue country. So retarding are Brexit’s effects, so consuming its emotions, that no one can any longer imagine anything outside or beyond. As the 29 March departure date nears, the fate of the UK–EU withdrawal agreement — negotiated by the prime minister’s team but rejected by the House of Commons, mainly over guaranteeing an open border in Ireland (the “backstop”) — remains unresolved. With survival in power her sole aim, May strings everything out in hope of a last-minute fix. But if the main responsibility for this purgatory is May’s, nationalist Tory diehards and socialism-in-one-country Corbynites — covert pals, equally hostile to Europe — share it too. ​

A centre-left option for voters, positioned between extremes, morally responsible in tone as well as policy, has always been Labour’s route to victory. The party’s discredit of recent years, in and out of government, together with politics’ tug to the left in response to economic failures and the storming Corbyn-led electoral campaign in 2017, has cast a shadow over this truth. Does the electoral basis for a centrist appeal of this sort still exist, however? In at least restoring the question to the public agenda in an explicit, high-profile way, the independents’ split is a big moment symbolically and may become so politically. ​


The measure of that will lie partly in how many more disaffected Labour MPs they attract. As well as the existing seven, three more previously resigned the whip and are sitting as independents. Several more are said to be “thinking hard,” though there are good reasons to hesitate over such a wrenching step. This split has a way to go to match the scale of Australia’s Labor split of 1955, but it is more likely to grow than stall.   ​

The popular and grassroots response is also a factor. Survation’s instant poll finds respondents endorsing the group’s creation by 56 to 20 per cent, and has it leading Corbyn’s Labour by 40 to 23 per cent as the party that “best represents the people of Britain.” For its part, Labour’s expanded membership tends to be educated, middle-class, and strongly anti-Brexit — and thus unhappy with Corbyn’s equivocal position (though he ostensibly backs a customs union with the EU and the “option” of a new referendum, as campaigned for by Umunna and others). That looks to be the group’s natural base, including in any elections. But greater reach will require a distinctive social and economic argument too, including among more traditional voters now caught between rival Labour and Tory versions of populism. ​

Whatever happens over Brexit — a last-minute unblocking, an agreed extension of the deadline, or a parliamentary coup to avert a no-deal outcome — will test the group, as it will everyone. But the independents have, for the moment, the rare asset of moral autonomy. By acting, not waiting, they have lit out for new political territory. In Britain’s enfeebled landscape, it’s hard to overstate how encouraging is that springtime gift. •

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Appealing to the country https://insidestory.org.au/appealing-to-the-country/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 03:23:16 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=53346

Parliament unworkable? There are precedents for sending MPs back to the people, but they might not embolden the governor-general

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It used to be said that the so-called “reserve powers” of the British crown (and hence of its vice-regal representatives, including Australia’s governor-general) included the power of “appeal to the country.”

If parliament became unworkable, the idea went, then the crown — without dismissing the prime minister, but also without relying on his advice — could call an election on its own initiative. In the parliamentary crisis of 1975 it was clear that Sir John Kerr intervened prematurely; but if the crisis had escalated to a level where the governor-general had to intervene, I always thought that he should have “appealed to the country” by calling an election without sacking Whitlam but also without relying on his advice. The result would have been the same, but Kerr would have avoided the cardinal sin of taking sides in a political battle.

According to the conventional wisdom, the last uncontroversial exercise of such a power was in 1784, and the last controversial case half a century later, in 1834. In fact, neither of these examples conformed precisely to the description above.

What happened in 1784 was that George III, in calling a fresh election, did in fact engineer the collapse of the uneasy coalition led nominally by the Duke of Portland, and appointed William Pitt the Younger as a caretaker prime minister. It was only as a result of the ensuing election that Pitt assumed his full powers. And in 1834 William IV did in fact dismiss Lord Melbourne from his office as prime minister, and appointed Sir Robert Peel to hold that office until the ensuing election. But at that election, and again in 1837, Melbourne was re-elected; Peel did not finally replace him until 1841.

In short, the events of 1784 and 1834 were more similar to what Kerr did in 1975 than to the nonpartisan action he arguably might have taken later on. The idea that an election can be called without a dismissal, and indeed that it can be called without taking sides in a political battle (as described earlier), thus appears to be a later invention.

George III was right in perceiving that Pitt was the preferred prime minister in 1784; William IV was mistaken in believing that the election would favour Peel in 1834. The difference has sometimes led to an assumption that what happened in 1784 was constitutionally proper but what happened in 1834 was not. According to A.V. Dicey, though, this interpretation is itself a mistake.

The first edition of Dicey’s Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution appeared in 1885, but it remained the dominant authority on the conventions of the unwritten British constitution throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The very ideas of “constitutional convention,” “parliamentary sovereignty” and “the rule of law” are still largely associated with Dicey. But whereas older authorities (perhaps influenced by the parliamentary triumph in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688) saw the sovereignty of parliament as an end in itself, Dicey (perhaps influenced by the democratic reforms that began in 1832) saw it only as a means to an end.

For Dicey, parliamentary sovereignty, along with all other constitutional conventions, had only “one ultimate object”: to ensure that parliament “shall in the long run give effect to the will of that power which in modern England is the true political sovereign of the State — the majority of the electors or (to use popular though not quite accurate language) the nation.” The parliament at Westminster, he wrote

is, from a merely legal point of view, the absolute sovereign… But if Parliament be in the eye of the law a supreme legislature, the essence of representative government is, that the legislature should represent or give effect to the will of the political sovereign, ie of the electoral body, or of the nation.

Accordingly, said Dicey, the ultimate purpose of all constitutional conventions must be “to secure harmony between the action of the legislative sovereign and the wishes of the political sovereign” or, more simply, “to secure the conformity of Parliament to the will of the nation.”

It was on this basis that Dicey explained the precedents of 1784 and 1834, though perhaps with some rewriting of history. For Dicey, what was significant in 1784 was not that George III had a personal preference for Pitt as prime minister but that he “believed that the nation did not approve of the policy pursued by the House of Commons.” Similarly, what was significant in 1834 was not that William IV preferred Peel to Melbourne but his “belief that the House of Commons did not represent the will of the nation.” The emphasis is on perceptions of public sentiment rather than on personal preference, and on policies, not on personalities.

Thus, for Dicey, what justifies an appeal to the country is not that the monarch prefers a particular individual as prime minister, nor even a belief that a majority of electors have a similar preference. What justifies such an appeal is a belief that the legislative body no longer reflects the wishes of the people:

[T]he reason why the House can in accordance with the constitution be deprived of power and of existence is that an occasion has arisen on which there is fair reason to suppose that the opinion of the House is not the opinion of the electors. A dissolution is in its essence an appeal from the legal to the political sovereign. A dissolution is allowable, or necessary, whenever the wishes of the legislature are, or may fairly be presumed to be, different from the wishes of the nation.

On this basis, since the outcome in 1784 proved that George III had in fact correctly perceived and responded to “the wishes of the nation,” Dicey concluded “without hesitation” that his appeal to the “sovereignty of the people” was fully “in conformity with the principles of the constitution as they are now understood”:

No modern constitutionalist will dispute that the authority of the House of Commons is derived from its representing the will of the nation, and that the chief object of a dissolution is to ascertain that the will of Parliament coincides with the will of the nation. George the Third then made use of the prerogative of dissolution for the very purpose for which it exists… [His action] affirmed decisively the fundamental principle of our existing constitution that not Parliament but the nation is, politically speaking, the supreme power in the State.

The position in 1834 was less clear. Again Dicey interpreted the King’s intervention as based on his belief that the House of Commons no longer reflected electoral opinion; but in this case the belief proved to be wrong. The ensuing election showed that the tide was turning in favour of Peel and his Conservative Party but had not yet turned far enough: contrary to the King’s expectations, Melbourne and the Whigs were returned. But as Dicey saw it the King’s mistake was merely a mistake of fact:

The belief itself turned out erroneous, but the large minority obtained by Peel, and the rapid decline in the influence of the Whigs, proved that, though the King had formed a wrong estimate of public sentiment, he was not without reasonable ground for believing that Parliament had ceased to represent the opinion of the nation. Now if it be constitutionally right for the Crown to appeal from Parliament to the electors when the House of Commons has in reality ceased to represent its constituents, there is great difficulty in maintaining that a dissolution is unconstitutional simply because the electors do, when appealed to, support the opinions of their representatives. Admit that the electors are the political sovereign of the State, and the result appears naturally to follow, that an appeal to them by means of a dissolution is constitutional, whenever there is valid and reasonable ground for supposing that their Parliamentary representatives have ceased to represent their wishes.

Thus Dicey concluded that, regardless of the outcome, a crown “appeal to the country” is constitutionally justified so long as it is based on “reasonable ground” for believing that a majority of electors want a change.

Whether his requirement of “reasonable ground” is necessary, and how such a requirement could be tested, remains unclear. It might be thought to be sufficient that the relevant belief is sincerely held. It might also be said that, in any event, a dissolution is justified by the fact that the end result, whichever way it goes, is a lower house reflecting the views of a majority of voters, and is therefore ultimately a reaffirmation of popular sovereignty. (But, of course, this last argument has sometimes been used to defend Kerr’s premature and partisan action in 1975.)

In his influential book on The English Constitution, first serialised in 1865–67 (twenty years earlier than Dicey’s work), Walter Bagehot had also recognised the possibility of an “appeal to the country,” but had argued that — at least in the United Kingdom — such a power should no longer be exercised. He conceded that, especially in other parts of the Empire, it might happen that an elected assembly “cannot be induced to maintain any administration,” but instead “shifts its selection now from one Minister to another Minister, and in consequence there is no government at all.” An effective party system might reduce those risks, but “itself tends to aggravate party violence and party animosity.”

Besides, wrote Bagehot, such a parliament must have its own “peculiar prejudices” and “peculiar interests,” and might “pursue these in opposition to the desires, and even in opposition to the well-being of the nation.” In such a context he saw “appeal to the country” as potentially “the regulating wheel of our Constitution”:

It does not impair the authority of Parliament as a species, but it impairs the power of the individual Parliament. It enables a particular person outside Parliament to say, “You Members of Parliament are not doing your duty. You are gratifying caprice at the cost of the nation. You are indulging party spirit at the cost of the nation. You are helping yourself at the cost of the nation. I will see whether the nation approves what you are doing or not.”

Moreover, Bagehot saw powerful arguments against leaving the timing of an election to the existing prime minister:

He will temporize; he will try to give a seemly dress to unseemly matters; to do as much harm as will content the assembly, and yet not so much harm as will offend the nation. He will not shrink from becoming a particeps criminis; he will but endeavour to dilute the crime. The intervention of an extrinsic, impartial and capable authority — if such can be found — will undoubtedly restrain the covetousness as well as the factiousness of a choosing assembly.

Nevertheless, at least in the United Kingdom, Bagehot concluded that the power to initiate a new election should ultimately be vested in the prime minister rather than in a hereditary monarch, whose capacity for sound political judgement was likely to be too unpredictable. Indeed, he thought that the royal interventions in 1784 and 1834 had both been misjudged. In 1784 both the King and the electorate had been mistaken: if the previous Fox–North coalition had been allowed to remain in office, “years of bloodshed might have been spared.” (In fact Bagehot’s grasp of history here appears uncertain: the American war of independence had ended in 1783.) And in 1834 William IV was right to perceive that “the English people were wavering in their allegiance to the Whigs,” but his premature intervention “impeded the reaction instead of aiding it.” It succeeded only “in hurting the party it was meant to help.”

Ironically, Bagehot thought the case for a continuing power of crown intervention was stronger in other parts of the Empire, where the holders of vice-regal authority — governors and governors-general — could be seen as ideal candidates for the role of deus ex machina:

They are always intelligent, for they have to live by a different trade; they are nearly sure to be impartial…; they are sure not to participate in the selfish desires of any colonial class or body… A colonial governor is a super-Parliamentary authority, animated by a wisdom which is probably in quantity considerable, and is different from that of the local Parliament, even if not above it.

It was clear that Bagehot attributed these admirable vice-regal virtues to the fact that those who possessed them were Englishmen, sent out to a far-flung Empire for a limited period, and looking forward to returning home. And in the end he thought the virtues he had sung were outweighed by the other consequences of a temporary absence from home. But clearly today’s vice-regal authorities are not subject to Bagehot’s negative view of the expatriates of his time, while the virtues that he ascribed to them may still be present among those in office today.

In any event, as the death throes of the Liberal Party of Australia escalate into increasing chaos, one cannot help thinking that Dicey’s view of the constitutional value of a continuing power of “appeal to the country” was right. It may be too much to predict that a majority of electors would now prefer a Labor government; but it seems beyond reasonable doubt that a majority of electors now want a change. •

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Capitalism in the dock https://insidestory.org.au/capitalism-in-the-dock/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:37:32 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=52444

Britain’s economic model has to change, and that may take another crisis

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A single person and a family, neighbours in an English city. The first survives just above a thinning welfare safety net on a daily hamster wheel of juggling jobs, chasing more, and coping with housing costs, amid the attrition of an endless cycle of bills, stress and insecurity. The adults in the second, nominally better off, face a different mix of worries: shielding kids from onerous debt, caring for parents, a pricey commute, a fear of falling.

The shrinking provision of local libraries, post offices, banks, buses and other local services, while unwelcome to both, may affect them unevenly. But they are alike in feeling bound to an economic juggernaut. And whether huddling at the stop or seething on the platform, the same news trickles down from the stratosphere: of consumer rip-offs by energy companies or pension funds, and of unimaginably high salaries and bonuses being paid to the system’s embedded insiders, often far beyond discernible achievement or even in the teeth of failure.

Such experiences, today those of millions, do much to explain the viral spread of the notion that Britain’s capitalist model is broken and in need of thorough repair. Indeed this precise sentiment, give or take the odd word, now joins more demotic views of the Brexit-is-a-mess and all-politicians-are-useless kind as a staple of public dialogue. A pillar of the stratosphere’s liberal-left wing since Will Hutton’s influential The State We’re In came out in 1985, the economy-is-broken viewpoint gained new life in 2008–09 and, as the emergency phase of the financial crisis gave way to the hard grind of retrenchment, took on its current status as the common sense of the age.

Tune out the unremitting Brexit buzz, hard though that is at present, and the most pervasive story being told today is about British capitalism’s failure. Moreover, it’s as likely to be heard from a Conservative politician as a Labour one, from the Financial Times as the Guardian, from a business owner as a trade union leader, or from the archbishop of Canterbury as an Oxford or UCL scholar. It looks and feels like an idea whose time has come, one that even Brexit’s agonies can’t long still. That is both a triumphal endorsement for radicals who long upheld it and a reprimand to centrist and rightist latecomers. And in bridging these divides the fresh consensus also has a potent self-reinforcing effect.

Yet this intellectual and political shift long proved elusive. Even as the brute facts of a post-crash economy churned the everyday social grain, upending lives and narrowing horizons, any leftward move in public attitudes and voting patterns was well hidden. The 2010 election returned the Conservatives to power after thirteen years, albeit in a coalition, and the party went on to win outright in 2015 against a Labour Party whose leader, Ed Miliband, had tacked to the left, explicitly disowning Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. Jeremy Corbyn, even more deep-dyed red than the cerebral Miliband, then took over, but for two years made no imprint. A renascent anti-capitalism, much heralded in the wake of the financial implosion, looked either stillborn or (the left’s enemies crowed) defunct.


When did that change? A hive of publications, polemics and initiatives to renew economics as a discipline (some student-led) had planted seeds. So indeed had years of pained self-examination by enlightened pro-capitalists, the Financial Times paramount. The Brexit result, ostensibly about Britain’s membership of the European Union, vivified the debate by belatedly amplifying the social distress in “left behind” areas, much as France’s “yellow vests” upsurge is doing today. Corbyn’s meteoric 2017 campaign then made the political breakthrough, with Labour’s close second in vote share making the party’s agenda — including state-led investment, banking and ownership of utilities — a tenable preview of Britain’s future.

By contrast, Theresa May’s hollow victory exposed, among other failings, her inability to offer a plausible argument about Britain’s problems, economic or other. This contrasts with 2010–16, when David Cameron and his influential chancellor George Osborne framed spending cuts as part of a long-term plan in the national interest, and the price of Labour’s excess.

That duopoly collapsed with Brexit, as Cameron abruptly resigned and Osborne was sacked with relish by his cabinet adversary, May, who had emerged from her home office cocoon to take the leadership. Many voters welcomed her quiet style as fitting the confused post-referendum mood, and her pledge to address society’s “burning injustices” by serving those “just about managing” seemed to hint at a break with the strategy of her tarnished predecessors. But her pledges fell short of a clear, costed and eye-catching economic case, a lack that her election fiasco made painfully obvious.

In the equalising conditions of a campaign, it turned out that Corbyn’s Labour did have a coherent tale. It assailed the years of stringency since the banking bailouts (“austerity is not an economic necessity, it is a political choice”) to portray a burdened society groaning for release and pledge that Labour would build an economy that works “for the many, not the few” (the demon Blair’s slogan, but let that pass). If the party was evasive on Brexit, that only helped it seize the domestic ground and highlight Tory schisms on the matter. In giving shape to what people were living through, the story hit a resounding chord.


Corbyn’s feat in taking Labour so near to power discomfited many at the higher end of business and finance. An insurgent left-winger putting a privileged elite on notice was an electrifying new alignment of electoral politics with a restless zeitgeist. It’s also true that London’s anxious City networks had themselves been hosting reports and conferences about what’s wrong with capitalism and what is to be done. In this sense at least, old and new Leninists were already on the same page. But Labour, with shadow chancellor John McDonnell emerging as a key figure, was forcing the pace. In the shadow of his menacing reassurance, the very language of an embattled corporate sector spoke of a pre-emptive re-education program.

A few examples illustrate the point. At a conference of the FT City Network in October 2017, four months after the election, Nigel Rudd of aerospace engineers Meggitt said that capitalism had been “hijacked by the management class” and “made it possible to become seriously rich without taking any financial risks,” concluding: “The general public instinctively resents this and will take revenge on a system that they see as unfair.” Carolyn Fairbairn, head of the Confederation of British Industry, referred to “a fixation on shareholder value at the expense of purpose, and the toxic issues of payment of tax and executive pay” as among capitalism’s “wrong turnings” that “stand in the way of redemption.”

Robert Scannell, ex-chair of Marks & Spencer, said companies’ and investors’ short-term focus meant capitalism had “lost its way,” while Anne Richards, chief executive of fund manager M&G, warned that “we will see capitalism rejected unless it finds a way of fundamentally addressing [current] anxiety.” A “reboot” or at least “evolution” was needed, all agreed.

Justin Welby, the ex–oil industry executive who now runs the Church of England, had just signed off a preliminary report alongside the heads of McKinsey, Siemens UK and twenty-one other luminaries for the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research, or IPPR, which noted the UK economy’s “deep and longstanding weaknesses.” Their commission, set up after the Brexit vote in mid 2016, concluded its two years’ work with Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. “The economy is not working for millions of people and needs fundamental reform,” is the core message of its 338 pages. A “rebalancing of economic power” is needed to “redress injustices and inequalities,” which can only be done if “economic justice [is] ‘hard-wired’ into the way the economy works.”

A week later, on 5 September, the archbishop returned to the theme with a visionary speech to the Trades Union Congress, where he chided a low-pay economy “that allocates rewards through power not for labour,” instancing the “economic injustice” and “oppression of the employed” that act to “diminish human dignity and treat labour as mere resource, like capital.” The gig economy and zero-hours contracts were, said Welby, the “reincarnation of an ancient evil.”

He did not name the system, as Rowan Williams, his predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, had in a 2016 lecture decrying “capitalism’s tendency to reduce everything to commodity and property.” The days are long vanished when the Anglican Church could jokily be referred to as “the Tory party at prayer,” or indeed any business organisation as the Conservatives’ natural ally.

Such top-drawer sources, spicing censure with a degree of contrition, find an echo even among cabinet ministers learning warily to deploy the obligatory “r” word. The lugubrious chancellor Philip Hammond now wants to “reinvigorate capitalism for the digital age,” while David Lidington, speaking to Onward, an optimistic new Tory outfit, goes with the sweep of history to favour a “responsible” version.

Much fiercer is the right-leaning press, where columnists have long charted where and how the British economic approach is failing. The Telegraph’s “campaign for capitalism,” launched in October, heralded more despair than cheerleading in its own pages. A gigantic pay deal at the housing company (or land bank) Persimmon, says business editor Ben Wright, “is the kind of incident that risks bringing the whole system into disrepute,” asking: “Who will save capitalism from the capitalists?” Thanks to “rapacious [corporate] behaviour and egregious executive pay,” says his Daily Mail counterpart Alex Brummer, “capitalism in Britain is making itself a prime target for Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist creed.” Citing wealth inequality, wage stagnation and unaffordable homes as examples of the system’s “crisis,” the Times’s economics editor Philip Aldrick concludes that “the tide has turned against capitalism, and is sweeping in.”

Equally harsh verdicts in left-tilting papers, if from the same end of the social scale, adopt a more professedly bottom-up perspective. The “claim that Britain’s economic model is systemically unjust was recently deemed radical and extreme. Now it is indisputable,” says a Guardian editorial, while rising star Grace Blakeley of the IPPR — the think tank kicking away New Labour dust in its own Corbynite swerve — seeks a policy agenda that “challenges the hegemony of financial capital, revoking its privileges and placing the powers of investment back under democratic control. In doing so, we might just be able to move beyond capitalism altogether.”


From across the spectrum, the critiques overlap in their insistence on justice, their focus on inequality, and their ethical dimension. Reference to power-holders’ supercharged rewards plays a crucial symbolic role, not least when lubricated by evident greed and cronyism. More vivid in the public mind than the mechanics or statistics of the financial crash, such scandals have involved top figures in banks, privatised industries, quangos and companies — recently Persimmon and Carillion (a construction behemoth, liquidated in January with vast liabilities). At a time of widespread hardship, the actions of men such as RBS’s Fred Goodwin and Persimmon’s Jeff Fairburn are lethally effective in discrediting the economic order that encourages them.

There is, of course, latent tension between judging capitalism mainly on grounds of unchecked moral breach and viewing it as systemically flawed. In practical terms the one tends to alteration of culture and behaviour, and at most better regulation, the other (as highlighted in Blakeley’s words) to institutional and legal overhaul. But most genuine change requires both elements. In principle, this remarkable convergence on the defects of the British way might create momentum for a strategic focus on a core of agreed remedies.

For a mix of generic and Brexit-centric reasons, it’s not happening. A leaden prime minister and her drifting administration have neither the imagination nor the tools needed for such a large-minded effort. Brexit’s monopoly of the government’s energy and attention has left essential reform in troubled areas — housing, prisons, transport, health, social care, education, police and crime — ad hoc and under-resourced.

More broadly, the Brexit “mess” — as Peter Mares calls it in his on-the-button survey — is levering the divisions of the referendum into abiding polarisation, sucking any instincts for compromise from the political air. In this winner-takes-all political culture, the tightness of the 2016 vote and the all-round distress since then makes everyone in Britain a loser. The optimism that drives successful change is lacking, even when, as over capitalism, the need for it — and a consensus around much of its substance — is tangible. If this logjam continues, Britain is going to talk itself out of the job before getting started, with only a Geoff Dyer–style book to show for it: Fixing Capitalism for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.


Supporters of Corbyn’s Labour can justly reply: since the party leadership and our campaigning made it a headline issue, leading to the storming advance of 2017, being bothered is clearly our raison d’être. For them, continued economic insecurity vindicates Labour’s wager, and the next election can’t come soon enough, irrespective of Brexit’s turmoil.

The case may skate over the party’s poll ratings (at best, a small lead) and Jeremy’s (a bigger lag), as well as internal divisions and scandals. But it gains credence from the Tories’ neglect of what was once their flagship economic vessel: less capitalism as such — an idea rarely popular, and now in retreat — than a strong market economy with a social purpose. The Tories are competitive when their policy mix casts the individual and national interest into credible shape. Under the secretive May, they have nothing of the kind to sell.

Labour’s own shop window is packed, and the party is staying focused on its sole objective: winning power. What animates its leadership is the view that current uncertainties will produce tactical openings that can be bent to a strategic aim. John McDonnell’s calculation in particular is that Labour, at last in the left’s grip, its economic program popular, has a once-in-a-lifetime chance not just to reach government but to transform society. Through his lens even Brexit fades in gravity beside a crisis of capitalism that must not, at any cost, go to waste.

With the case for economic remodelling now clinched, the test is whether a bullet point version can win at the hustings and from day one be implemented as the people’s will — in effect, by a government of revolutionary democrats. A Corbyn-led administration — though the steely McDonnell is infinitely more plausible as a Robespierre — would banish the ancien régime and succeed Clement Attlee’s and Margaret Thatcher’s as the third genuinely radical government in Britain’s post-1945 history.

That Labour’s diagnosis of the economy’s ills recharged the post-crash debate, and continues to drive it, is already some achievement. The party’s 2017 manifesto (promising more houses, health funding, wealth taxes, student grants, free childcare and more) was in equal measure bold and profligate. McDonnell’s recent upgrade promises to put workers on company boards and grant them a mandatory 10 per cent of equity, and to extend union rights to gig merchants.

McDonnell’s refrain echoes “the worse, the better” of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky (both men studied for the priesthood): “The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we have to be; the greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change.” The implicit admission is that Labour’s inheritance, if it gets so far, will also limit what it can do. McDonnell, whose hobby, listed in Who’s Who, is “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism,” knows well Marx’s observation that people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please [or] under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

The space between McDonnell’s pledge and Marx’s caveat gives today’s revolutionary democrats sleepless nights. At vital moments on the way to power, they will need fate (timing, luck, human factors) to smile on them. Another major transnational financial shock, inevitably hammering a vulnerable UK, is in that category. This Labour leadership would view it as ideological vindication and political windfall: a golden chance to make its changes irreversible.

Local tremors are now a daily event. Brexit has at last gone critical, the House of Commons having prised it from Theresa May’s dreary grasp. The possibilities include a Tory coup, another referendum or general election, a no-deal exit, staying in the European Union or a halfway house, party schisms and realignments. All are hostage to the desperate, self-preserving deal that May is trying to get past her party, the Commons and the people. Her late choice to pull a vote scheduled for 11 December, after devoting every sinew to it in face of certain defeat, confirms the vacuum of political judgement and impulsion at the heart of government.

No Brexit outcome can by itself solve Britain’s economic superstress or give it a shot of ideas and energy. But something has to give in both areas. So wretched is May’s version of Brexitannia as permanent limbo that the mere glimmer of a new venture is curative, not on behalf of a particular result but for the lost thrill of a true contest of politics and ideas — free of tumbrils, all being well. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may yet be coming for us all. •

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B-Day, and beyond https://insidestory.org.au/b-day-and-beyond/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 03:14:30 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=52414

At Westminster, parliament will almost certainly vote down the British prime minister’s Brexit plan. No one knows what will happen next

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On the plane from Australia the BBC was live-streaming parliament. Suspended somewhere over the Indian Ocean between Tuesday and Wednesday last week, I watched Theresa May doggedly outlining how her deal with Brussels would sail the United Kingdom safely through the shoals of Brexit. The House of Commons was about halfway through the first of five scheduled days of debate, and earlier in the session the government had lost three votes, including one that found May and her ministers in contempt of parliament.

May had been on her feet for an hour but still only part way through her speech because she kept allowing questions from the floor and taking the time to answer them. She maintained an even temper, persistent but polite. Her questioners, if not always exhibiting such a calm demeanour, were also courteous, thanking the honourable prime minister for “giving way” to their interventions. Despite the importance of the topic and the proximity in which members are packed together in the historic chamber, the proceedings were far less vituperative than an ordinary question time in Canberra.

Nevertheless, the fissures running through British politics were immediately apparent. Discontent with the shape of the looming Brexit, or criticism of specific aspects of May’s agreement with the European Union, were voiced from behind and beside her, as well as from the benches opposite. While she also received some friendly questions from loyal supporters, the process appeared random and unpredictable, at least to an observer unfamiliar with the personalities of British politics. Where was the party discipline? Why weren’t MPs staying on message? This was democracy at work and it was messy.

Visiting rarely seen relatives in the following days, I quickly discovered that the Brexit faultlines reach out from Westminster and into lounge rooms. One cousin was all for leaving. Born soon after the end of the war, she hankered for a rejuvenated Commonwealth; restoring trading links with Australia, New Zealand and countries in Africa could, she thought, provide an economic and political alternative to Europe. Her mother, my aunt, has a picture of the Queen on her lounge room wall. Visiting England for the first time in his life, my twenty-year-old son was nonplussed. He sees Australia deeply entwined with Asia, and the Commonwealth as both meaningless and irrelevant.

Another English cousin is a staunch Remainer. He was worried about the economic impact of leaving the EU and warned that a hard Brexit — that is, a break with Europe without the type of agreements brokered by May — would lead to catastrophe.

Interestingly, both cousins agreed that former prime minister David Cameron should never have held a plebiscite in the first place. They shared the view that politicians in a parliamentary democracy are elected to make decisions on behalf of the people and shouldn’t squib hard choices by shifting responsibility back to voters. And yet, as Theresa May struggles to forge a way forward on Brexit, putting the issue back to the people in the form a second referendum has emerged as one possible future scenario.


The vote on the government’s Brexit deal is scheduled for Tuesday London time and parliament looks certain to knock it back. Some advisers are encouraging Theresa May to delay the vote to give the whips more time to secure support. But with more than a hundred members of her own side of politics thought to oppose the bill, that looks like a case of postponing the inevitable.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, journalist Andrew Rawnsley compared May’s rush to a vote to the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War: “She has been given ample warnings that the cannon of the hard Brexiters are to the right of her, the cannon of the unreconciled Remainers are to the left, and the cannon of the opposition parties are in front of her.”

Yet Rawnsley believes that May is acting in the national interest by continuing with the vote. Britain is scheduled to leave the EU in just over three months, and “if Mrs May’s deal can’t be got through parliament, that needs to be established as rapidly as possible so that MPs can start trying to navigate towards a non-catastrophic resolution of this nightmare.”

What a “non-catastrophic resolution” might look like is unclear. Numerous options are being canvassed. One involves Theresa May resigning as prime minister. Having suffered a resounding defeat, she will say “I’ve tried my best, now it’s someone else’s turn to attempt to clean up the mess,” or words to that effect. This potentially opens the way for a Brexiteer like former foreign minister Boris Johnson to take office and for Britain to careen towards a “hard” Brexit, in which there are no specific post-EU arrangements in place to manage the cross-border movement of people and goods.

Some commentators see May clinging onto office – after all, who in their right mind would want the poisoned chalice at this moment — and then making a last-ditch dash to Brussels, waving the British parliament’s rejection of her deal in the faces of her Europeans counterparts and pushing them for further concessions.

Cabinet minister Amber Rudd is the latest of those who have suggested the fallback of a Norway-style option if parliament rejects the Brexit bill. This would see Britain remain a member of the single market (the European Economic Area) but not the EU. That has the economic benefit of maintaining the free movement of goods but the political disadvantage of maintaining the free movement of people, and May has made immigration control a “red line” issue in Brexit negotiations.

Another potential outcome is a vote of no-confidence in May’s government resulting in a general election. Since both parties are divided about the issue, it’s not clear that this would fix anything or merely prolong the uncertainty. Then there is the option of a second Brexit referendum, which might solve the problem by returning a Remain vote, but which would be likely to deepen the divisions and sharpen the resentments in British society.

The least likely option would be for May to build a government of national unity, and secure a parliamentary majority for keeping Britain in the EU. An opinion prepared for the European Court of Justice (in response to a case brought by Scottish politicians) argues that Britain can unilaterally revoke the Article 50 withdrawal process and call the whole Brexit thing off without the approval of other EU member states. Politicians would at last be stepping up to the plate of political responsibility, but a big chunk of voters would feel disenfranchised as a result.

The problem is that none of the available choices appears to enjoy a substantial level of support, either inside or outside of parliament. According to a poll on Britain’s Brexit options reported in the Evening Standard, 20 per cent of voters back a new referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the EU, while roughly similar shares want Britain to leave without a deal in place, or want the government to try and extract further concessions from Brussels. Eleven per cent favour calling off Brexit unilaterally, 10 per cent want a general election and 10 per cent want a referendum to support or reject the deal that Theresa May has struck.

It’s a mess, and regardless of what path is eventually taken, it looks like a majority of voters will be dissatisfied with the outcome. •

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Britain goes bung https://insidestory.org.au/britain-goes-bung/ Wed, 21 Nov 2018 01:51:42 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=52007

Brexit’s failure of governance is sending democracy haywire

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“Am I going to see this through? Yes.” Theresa May’s pay-off line to journalists on 15 November, amid a London whirl of ministerial walkouts and rumours of more, set the terms of Britain’s latest political spasm over leaving the European Union. The previous day, two documents were released in Brussels and the UK capital, the by-product of nineteen months of opaque talks: a forbidding legal withdrawal agreement of 585 pages, and a vague political declaration on future relations of just eight. May’s future as prime minister is now hostage to their reception by her Conservative Party, the House of Commons, and the people.

Her strategy combines an appeal to the national interest with a display of grit. “This isn’t about me. It’s about what’s right for the country,” May told the journalist Sophy Ridge three days later. The prime minister is a shy figure, a poor communicator, uneasy with the public, clunkily repetitive in interviews, at ease only with close allies, but given credit for stamina and a sense of duty. At this desperate juncture, eighteen months after her ratings nosedived in a vacuous general election campaign, she is again straining to align personal brand and political message.

It is a tough sell all round. From May’s side, there are positives: no more EU budget payments or judicial oversight, and ending people’s free movement while avoiding trade friction (“we will take back control of our money, our laws and our borders” is her mantra). That said, the deal entails a transition period from Britain’s departure date of 29 March 2019 until at least 2021, during which the United Kingdom stays inside the EU’s customs union and continues to follow EU rules, thus precluding any trade agreements of its own (which were one of Brexit’s main selling points).

An equally indeterminate backstop, a device to guarantee the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, also grants the EU sinuous wriggle room vis-à-vis the north and the whole UK alike. These parameters will change only with a final EU–UK settlement and a solution to the backstop. That could take a decade. Meanwhile, Britain will have paid a divorce bill of £39 billion (A$69 billion) plus various extra charges, ceding potential leverage along the way.

Whatever else these trade-offs represent, it is not freedom’s dawn. Some critics — and not all of them are ultra-Brexiteers like the antiquarian Conservative backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg — even portray it as vassalage. Jo Johnson, transport minister and ex–Financial Times journalist, left the government on 9 November, describing the exit provisions as “an utterly abject and shameful national humiliation.” But Johnson, unassuming brother of the flamboyant Boris, also describes May’s deal as making Brexit “an utterly self-defeating and pointless exercise.” He echoes widespread calls for a second referendum that takes into account the superiority of the UK’s existing terms within the EU over what May offers outside.


Could May ride her chariot through her opponents’ divided ranks, of which this example is but a taste, deploying the threat of no deal, and its attendant disruption, as a winning card? That is now a topic of fevered speculation — and of number crunching ahead of the scheduled House of Commons vote on 13 December. The government’s working majority of thirteen includes ten MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party, which represents Northern Ireland’s unionist (that is, pro-UK) and Protestant half of the population. Holding the balance of power after the 2017 election, the strongly pro-Brexit DUP struck a rewarding confidence-and-supply bargain with May. The party’s destabilising abstention on finance bill votes on 19–20 November, with more to come, piles more immediate jeopardy on the government than the hyped-up talk of a leadership spill from the Brexiteer right.

In opposing the withdrawal agreement, Arlene Foster’s DUP will be joined by a few dozen of the ideological Brexiteers among Conservative MPs (315 of the Commons’s 650). Also headed to the no lobby, for a different reason — they want to keep open the chance of staying in the EU — are veteran Europhiles such as the bombastic Kenneth Clarke and the scholastic Dominic Grieve, as well as Jo Johnson. And a few of Scotland’s thirteen Tory MPs share the fishing industry’s dismay at the deal and worry that the backstop will reboot Scotland’s independence cause. True, some MPs in all those categories might be amenable to whips’ flattery, bribery or blackmail, or they might lose their nerve or change their mind. Even then, extracting the required Commons majority of 318 (adjusting for seven Sinn Féin boycotters and other quirks) from the Tory benches alone is impossible.

That spotlights Labour, whose more workaday Brexit splits mean these tend to be overlooked. The party has plotted an artful course among the government’s travails, positing six notional tests before it endorses any government pact with the EU, while being noncommittal about a second referendum (which most of its members support). Many on the Corbynite left, following Jeremy himself, now downplay their lifelong antipathy to the EU, leaving just seven rigorous Brexiteers among Labour’s 257 MPs. More pragmatic Brexit supporters — the impressive Caroline Flint, for example — prefer May’s plan to an uncoordinated exit, which the party’s 2017 manifesto pledged to oppose.

The largest Labour group, pro-EU and Corbyn-sceptic, sees May’s deal as an obstacle to larger strategic aims. Its core members, such as the eternal coming man Chuka Umunna, are now working not just for a “people’s vote” on EU membership (as if the first one was not) but towards a new centre-left formation that could fill this putative gap in the political market. Prince-over-the-water David Miliband, lost leader Tony Blair and the outstanding Times columnist Philip Collins, author of Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics, are names associated with this project, if that’s not too strong a word.

This Labour spectrum offers thin pickings for any May love-bombing. And the rest of the opposition, the Scottish National Party’s thirty-five MPs, Plaid Cymru’s four, and the Greens’ one, offers none at all. What cannot be ruled out is a potential two-step against a background of business tremors, a currency plunge and a media onslaught: that is, a Commons debate and vote where everyone lets it all hang out and most say no, then a follow-up brimful of self-important gravitas where, to the sound of sirens, enough say yes. “Maybe we need a bit more volatility to get us to a deal,” says J.P. Morgan’s Iain Stealey, a view elsewhere given hand-over-mouth. In the end, fear could be May’s best hope.


Until the decisive moment, getting Commons approval for the deal is whips’ work. But May is already on the front line with both her party and, via broadcasters, the public. More assured and less robotic in interviews than in that dreadful election campaign, which still casts a long shadow, her utterances nonetheless run the gamut from A (grinding platitude) to B (homily, of the “I believe, with every fibre of my being…” type). The want of imagination, or the craft to simulate it, in a country so badly in need of it is lamentable.

Will May win these audiences, or rather (for such is the maximal aim) ensure their glum acceptance of her transaction? The early signs are mixed. A closed Q&A session with Tory constituency stalwarts, where questions to the leader had been screened, reportedly did not solicit any actual enthusiasm, though a London business conference on 19 November went well for her: doubtless another trade-off she would accept.

Polls give the withdrawal agreement a negative verdict, while showing a high quotient of don’t-knows and never-heard-of-its: from 15 to 27 per cent back it, 40 to 51 per cent don’t. Adding other Brexit options — renegotiation, extending the departure date, another referendum, no deal, a legal ruling, a general election — reveals only dispiriting fragmentation. Clever, end-of-tether Tories and think-tanks such as Open Europe debate a knight’s move to a Norway- or Canada-style relationship with the EU (or in parliamentarian Nick Boles’s case, Norway-to-Canada). If EU membership was a raw binary in 2016’s ugly referendum campaign, Brexit has become a game of multidimensional chess that never ends and no one can win.

A halcyon Brexit was always a mirage. Long evaporated are any illusions that departure from the EU would be easy or costless. The deal on the table, at least for the moment, blurs the other supposed choices and amplifies the difficulties in their way. A second referendum, for example, needs a new question or list of preferences, new legislation, and new broadcasting and funding rules — and input from an exasperated EU. Where is the political basis for any of this to be found?

Britain’s new normal is not merely zero consensus but, among very many, zero desire to find one. May’s second-best hope lies in this morass. She visits the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker on 21 November to discuss the (non-binding) eight-pager on future ties. EU leaders will be preparing to “finalise and formalise” the two documents at a special summit, also in Brussels, four days later. Tweaks might yet be made to the former to allow her to claim a vital late concession and give fuel to her domestic push. Like Corbyn, to whom she has an unappreciated resemblance, May is a punchbag who has a knack of turning that to advantage.

In practice, May is seeking to be the beneficiary of all the fragmentation. Her lengthy record of unforced errors — alienating half the population, fixing the exit timetable without a plan, blowing an election, misleading colleagues, and more — certainly makes her foremost, though very far from alone, among its architects. If the Brexit process is a failure of governance, she was at the controls throughout. Not only Theresa May’s but also the country’s borrowed time is getting shorter. Britain needs to be very lucky in its next prime minister. •

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Anna Burns, a Booker with soul https://insidestory.org.au/anna-burns-a-booker-with-soul/ Wed, 17 Oct 2018 11:24:57 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=51343

The Belfast novelist’s prize underlines the BBC’s cultural drift

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“What’s your writing routine, William?” “What sort of quill do you use?” “Have you ever actually seen a ghost?” “In your view, William, which is better — to be or not to be?” “What’s your opinion about the current situation in Denmark?” “Have you ever actually taken arms against a sea of troubles, and, if so, what was it like?”

This year’s winner of the Man Booker prize, Anna Burns, will soon need ready answers to the kind of query posed in Craig Brown’s imaginary Q&A with Shakespeare following the first night of Hamlet. The Irish novelist’s life changed at 10pm on Tuesday when the ceremony in London’s lavish Guildhall concluded with the announcement that Milkman, her fourth work, was the judges’ choice over the favourites, Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

Within minutes of her stunned reaction and tremulous thanks to publishers and editors, the Belfast-born writer was pitched into a round of speed dates with deadline-pressed journalists. The first mention of Brexit can’t be far off. [Stop press, 03.00 GMT: Burns’s interview reference to her book as also being about “barriers, barricades, and the dreaded ‘other’” is seen as underscoring its relevance to Brexit.]

The award to Burns’s cryptic first-person illumination of a Catholic girl in a claustrophobic urban district during Northern Ireland’s 1970s heaviness is welcome if unexpected. The shortlist looked thinner when two kinetic works, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, failed to make the cut. Powers’s tree-centric embrace of deep time, Edugyan’s epic of a freed slave, Daisy Johnson’s rural English mythos, Rachel Kushner’s tale of a mother’s survival in a California prison, and Robin Robertson’s transatlantic verse-journey all had their champions, while Private Eye’s description of an “earnest and overly issue-driven shortlist” might be truer of several recent years. In the end Milkman, with its nameless characters, immersive fears, experimental diction, stream-of-consciousness portraits, and powerful sense of a collective subject, draws the reader into its genuinely imagined world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher who chaired the judging panel, had earlier offered a few portentous words about the “dizzying array of human imagination” on offer from the six finalists, which “speak to our moment,” while admitting that — in the Booker tradition of last-minute tussles — even he “didn’t know this morning” who would take the prize.

Everyone, in short, did their level best by what is still regarded as Britain’s most prestigious literary title, its £50,000 (A$92,000) value to the recipient not incidental. (“Pay off my debts,” was Burns’s sensible answer when BBC’s Rebecca Jones asked about her plans.) A big rise came in 2002 when the Man Group, an investment management firm, took over the sponsorship, wisely choosing to keep the older name, with its happy assonance, as part of a new branding.

The baton now is returned to the publishers, booksellers, publicists, agents, feature writers and re-reviewers, whose next busy weeks aim to put author and work into the heads and hands of as many readers as possible. At the max, the “Booker bounce” can deliver great benefits, shared by the other novels who have made the long- and shortlists.

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, for example, catapulted from 13,000 to over 191,000 sales in 2016 (even excluding audio and ebooks), while George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, last year’s winner, jumped from 10,000 to 62,000: the smallest boost on record, yet still one to die for. The success of these sons of Los Angeles and Amarillo was made possible by the sponsor-led opening-up in 2014 to any novel published in English in the United Kingdom, regardless of the author’s home country, a departure from the Booker’s historical “confinement” to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. The closing words of Appiah’s announcement, “we read all these authors without ever asking for their passports,” might be seen as a coded endorsement of that decision — or rebuke to the British government over its now colder house for immigrants?

In this respect, it will be interesting to track the latest iteration of what publishers yearningly call the Man Booker’s halo effect. Anna Burns’s award will surely also deflect persistent criticism of that international (read: American) outreach, made on the grounds that the prize’s distinct character will be eroded, as well as an overlapping unease over a sequence of four awards to male writers since Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries won in 2013.

The Booker race, famously landed with the term “posh bingo” by Julian Barnes, whose The Sense of an Ending won in 2011, ostensibly seeks to make readers of punters and gawpers. Yet the compulsive social thrills of such events — the odds and inside dope, the personas and backstories — seem ever to turn the literary pleasures into also-rans.


To see how BBC television and, marginally less so, radio treat the annual Man Booker is to encounter a willing collaborator possessed of bags of complaisant smiliness but no intellectual or moral rigour. That at least is the gravamen of its two pre-Booker programs, the first of which was a thirty-minute, Friday night edition of its Front Row Late arts series. In a live event at Birmingham’s literary festival, inevitably fronted by Mary Beard, a three-person panel discussed publicity, reviews and the boom in literary prizes and festivals.

In a recorded segment, industry figures agreeably shared trade customs: dispensing proofs to “influencers,” maximising the “personal element” of meet-the-author and signed copies. Fortuitously transformative notices were also given their due. Pru Rowlandson, publicity director at Granta, recalled Margaret Atwood’s review of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and James Daunt, managing director of the flagship Waterstone’s chain, cited Ian McEwan’s live BBC Radio encomium to John Williams’s Stoner, which propelled the neglected work to 130,000 sales.

There was little revelatory in any of this, though Beard — having read “1.5” of the Booker shortlist — expressed worry about the “packaging” and “language” just voiced. Kate Mosse, founding director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, explained her rationale (“prizes matter because they give a reason for works of quality to stay on the shelf”), while the journalist and Birmingham curator Sathnam Sanghera championed more local, diverse and soulful events against expensive ones “in fields and tents, for posh white people.”

Dreda Say Mitchell, a crime writer and digital evangelist, was already way beyond. She lamented both the hard copies on show (“In a world where books have gone digital, I would expect to see Kobo or Kindle”) and the “very narrow voices of corporate traditional publishing,” instead praising online commenters, crime readers’ clubs and “the power of digital to give writers a living.” She then took aim at Sanghera’s dismissal of many Amazon reviews as “rubbish,” citing a single star for Hamlet: “Why shouldn’t they give Shakespeare one star? At the end of the day I’m a writer. I want people to buy my books. The most powerful persons to me are the people who read my books. How do you define an expert? What is an expert?”

Mary signed off with the obligatory BBC plug: following the last “hugely successful adaptation” of John le Carré, here’s a “taster” of the next, “which starts on BBC1 later this month.” Then the credits, which listed twenty-two names complicit in this mess of pottage. Though to be fair, it was enlivened by Dreda’s sorted and fearless presence. And even if the Man Booker link had proved vestigial, the professionals’ insight into the machinery driving today’s “prose factory” (the title of D.J. Taylor’s rich history of England’s post-1918 literary life) was of real interest.

An absorbing current illustration, given the author’s established status, is the pre-marketing for Jonathan Coe’s forthcoming novel Middle England, published in early November but circulated well before then among key influencers. The bucolic heritage-style cover announces its inevitable choice as a BBC Radio 4 “book of the week,” while blurbs have long circulated framing the work as the landmark post-Brexit novel (notwithstanding the genre’s busy post-2016 output). Most remarkable of all in the months up to publication is Coe’s enticing drip-feed to his followers of lines from the novel.

These literary slivers slot into place alongside Coe’s one-track political commentary in what might be termed Tribal Coeland. “England felt like a calm and settled place tonight: a country at ease with itself.” “‘It’s a shop, Dad. It’s a Marks and Spencer. They don’t make cars here any more.’ ‘Where do they make the cars, then?’ That was a good question.” “‘Luckily, there are still a lot of loyal, sensible Conservatives who appreciate the benefits of EU membership. I believe you’re sleeping with one of them.’” And so on.

The book’s high-end endorsers include Ben Elton (“An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny”); Nigella Lawson (“magisterial”); Sanghera, Coe’s fellow Brummie (“fantastic… the first great Brexit novel”); and India Knight (“This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics”). The Guardian’s John Crace even turns market pitcher to roll up the crowds: “Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe’s new book Middle England.”

Middle England’s buzz-building — a coalescing of author, publisher, festivals, friends, fans, and the politically like-minded — is a case study in literary manufacture, a topic raised, but no more, in Front Row Late. If such processes were brought fully into the light, and considered in an inquiring, eclectic spirit, not just the world of books but the common good might be well served. The chance of that being tried on the BBC is less than zero.


The second program, broadcast on BBC Four on the eve of the Man Booker ceremony, was a one-hour survey of the prize’s half-century, inevitably guided by the BBC panjandrum Kirsty Wark, with a title — Barneys, Books and Bust-Ups — sampling from the corporation’s millennial trademark: patronising populism.

Again, to be fair, the endless milling shots of big-night luminaries — filling for the lack of relevant visuals — were a bracing rapid-fire test, and insiders were again good value: the late publisher Tom Maschler, who took the idea from France’s Prix Goncourt (“I set it up because England is backward in terms of literary appreciation”); double recipient Peter Carey, on how the prize “brought new voices from beyond the metropole” before becoming a “literary juggernaut”; and the scholar Hermione Lee contextualising a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald, winner in 1979 with Offshore, being cut down on the BBC’s The Book Programme by disdainful host Robert Robinson and fellow guest Susan Hill soon after her sweet moment.

If the latter was excruciating, and a hapless TV presenter’s buttonholing of judges Angela Carter and Fay Weldon in 1983 equally so, Anthony Burgess’s reaction when beaten by William Golding in 1980 (“a small, parochial prize suitable for small, parochial novels”) was cowardly, and his feint to the Nobel, which Golding would also shortly receive, indicative of a cosmic humour at work.

Familiar rivalries and incidents were retold: Brian Aldiss and Malcolm Bradbury’s attempt to stop Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 (it was also chosen as the “best of…” after the Booker’s twenty-fifth and fortieth years); John Berger handing his prize money (“as a revolutionary writer”) to the Black Panthers in 1972 on account of parent company Booker-McConnell’s historic links to Caribbean sugar plantations; Alan Taylor’s counter-coup in 1994, which installed James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late over Alan Hollinghurst or Jill Paton Walsh. Kirsty’s anecdotal heap vaguely prompted the old joke that to find England’s real bloodsport, the place to look is the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. But there was plenty of mulch too — Beryl Bainbridge’s backache, Val McDermid ploughing through the longlist while cooking, P.H. Newby’s sister watching people bet on the outcome in 1969 when she secretly knew he had won, Anne Enright being denied a visit to the loo — before it perked up with Fay Weldon’s agent being punched.

There were omissions, such as Nicholas Mosley resigning as a judge in 1991 because he wanted a novel of “ideas” not of “style” to win. That decision was made to look sound after Ben Okri’s overblown The Famished Road was selected, a rival to Keri Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985 as the prize’s nadir. More immediately, there was a hint of recent controversies over the Booker’s expansion, but no mention of the various extractive spin-offs (such as the convoluted process that in 2018 ended by delivering a Golden Man Booker to Michael Ondaatje for his 1992 winner, The English Patient). The sponsors’ interests and priorities were tangibly out of bounds.

In editorial terms both these programs, as so often on the BBC, had no governing theme: no solidity or coherence, above all no guiding intelligence. In the end — and this can be intuited of a clear majority of BBC TV’s so-called factual output — all they aspire to do is, fundamentally, fill space. Typical here is the aural blancmange of Kirsty Wark’s script: the Booker’s “annual awards ceremony unfolds early in October in an opulent London venue,” it is “always a magnet for scandal, with backbiting and bitchiness ever present,” though “as well as amusing literary spats, [the prize] also uncovered some major new writers,” “from humble beginnings the annual award ceremony has cemented itself as the go-to literary event of the year.” And so, witlessly, on.

This week’s Bagehot column in the Economist draws a lesson from the veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time — an intelligent, long-running Radio 4 discussion program about pretty much everything under the sun. The lesson, hard as it would be to take forward, goes well beyond the BBC, but fits the limited ground examined here:

[In Our Time’s] success is testimony to the power of curiosity. Rather than being sick of experts, people are desperate to hear their reports from the frontiers of knowledge… There is nothing inegalitarian about catering to this curiosity, just as there is nothing egalitarian about doling out dumbed-down drivel… BBC producers churn out formulaic products aimed at the imaginary median viewer… Institutions like the BBC need to rediscover their cultural self-confidence.

Such words, clearly, are the beginning of an argument not its conclusion. In its large context, two forgettable BBC programs around the Man Booker prize scarcely matter. Yet the world exists in grains of sand, and (pace Walter Bagehot on the House of Lords) the cure for admiring the BBC is to look at it closely — then also look through it, to society and this moment’s needs. For the time being, Anna Burns’s narrator in Milkman nails those: “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, to be present, be adult.” •

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Corbyn and responsibility https://insidestory.org.au/corbyn-and-responsibility/ Mon, 08 Oct 2018 10:17:39 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=51233

This party leader can’t own or disown his past, nor Labour’s

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In mid 2015, an imagined community of browsers came together around a new ritual: checking the index of every book about Britain from the past thirty-two years for any mention of Jeremy Corbyn. There was a reason to hurriedly mug up. Corbyn had been a Labour member of parliament since 1983, safe in the polyphonous jostle of his Islington North seat, without leaving a trace on the national consciousness. He had held no office, piloted no bill, made no visible change — not even to his scruffy-casual attire. Now, after consecutive general-election defeats, he was on his way to the party leadership. Where had he been all our lives?

After hundreds of blanks, a couple of academic works had the gist. Philip Cowley’s 2005 study of backbench rebellion notes Corbyn’s prolific defiance of Labour policy in the House of Commons, while Emma Crewe’s anthropology of MPs at work, published two months before Corbyn’s race to the top began, evokes a mild joust in 2007 with fellow London MP Sadiq Khan, then new to the whips’ office. “Sadiq, at this point you are supposed to persuade me to support the party.” “Jeremy, I can’t be bothered. Would you consider abstaining?” “No, sorry, I can’t do that.” “OK.”

Corbyn also pops up in a handful of comrades’ memoirs or diaries. The left’s patrician moraliser Tony Benn, fellow veteran of marches and rallies, was wont to end a list of notable attendees with a cursory namecheck, as if for mere completion. Such meagre sources hint at a dedicated, reliable activist of invariant views; ever courteous and unassuming; devoted to expressive rather than practical politics; lacking distinction or presence. A future party leader? Unimaginable, including to his closest allies, until those stunning weeks when it became inevitable.

By 12 September 2015, when Corbyn became the eleventh man since 1945 to reach that position, a quietly mind-bending contrast — the guarantee of his appearance in every book henceforth written about British politics — went unremarked. Rosa Prince’s fine biography Comrade Corbyn, out in February, was first off a soon-busy production line. The more immediate change he had wrought was already symbolised by the everyday scene of Jeremy beaming on a stage, basking in the acclaim of an eager throng. Only one Labour politician, Tony Benn at his 1980s zenith, has ever attracted so fervent and personal a following.

The latest iteration of this phenomenon was at the party’s upbeat conference in Liverpool late last month, presented as the final basecamp before the summit of power. Corbyn’s confident closing speech to the impressive gathering of 13,000 reinforced the sense of a pre-victory rally. The World Transformed, the ancillary festival of the busy Momentum network, showcased his project’s ambitions. This was in effect Jeremy’s fourth annual triumph after seizing the Labour crown in 2015, winning a spill a year later, then storming to near voting parity with the Conservatives in the 2017 general election.

If such details suggest a seamless ascent, in reality this period has been among the more volatile in the party’s history. Indeed, the repeated pattern of Corbyn’s leadership is a long slump punctuated by success. For that reason, and because so many contingencies are in play, few now rule out the possibility of Corbyn becoming prime minister. Jeremy himself, with his beatific demeanour and unbending optimism among the faithful, seems free of doubt. And amid all the bumps of these three years, his temperament in public remains equable (with relevant exceptions, some noted below).

Steady too is his core mantra, namely transformation: across economy, industry, society, power relationships and foreign policy (the last often described as his passion). Two omnipresent themes are a new type of politics and besetting hostility to the media, especially newspapers.

From his first leader’s speech (a “politics that’s kinder, more inclusive; bottom up, not top down”) to the most recent (“a long overdue change that will transform people’s lives and meet the needs of a twenty-first-century Britain for all”) Corbyn’s uplifting visions ever carry an undertone of threat.

But where Corbyn has adapted since becoming leader, his much improved delivery apart, is in how he invokes the past. This includes slivers of Labour’s own history, unveiled as if wearing protective gloves: quoting the party’s first MP, Keir Hardie, elected in 1900 (“My work has consisted of trying to stir up a divine discontent with wrong”), or honouring its first female cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield, appointed in 1929. At the same time, the strikers and rebels, guerrillas and dreamers he has always honoured are now shepherded cautiously towards the Labour fold.

None of his four lengthy conference speeches as leader mentions a single post-Hardie predecessor in the job. True, his closing peroration in Liverpool conscripts three famous election victories to the cause: “We must take our message to every town, city and village. United and ready to win, ready to govern as we were in 1945, 1964 and 1997. So that when we meet this time next year let it be as a Labour government.” But he cannot bring himself to name those who led the party into 10 Downing Street on those occasions, and at their first attempt: Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.

The detail here matters less than what it says about Corbyn’s political character and where his project is taking Labour, a topic much discussed this year amid escalating rows over anti-Semitism in the party, while others over misogyny went unresolved. But first, tracing Jeremy’s rocky road since 2015 provides necessary context for his and Labour’s very different situation today.

THE SURFER

Even after Labour’s shattering loss in May 2015 under the ineffectual Ed Miliband, it took singular circumstances to turn that event into the prelude to a Corbyn coronation. These began in 2014 with a new one-person-one-vote system to elect the leader, which was triggered by a vote-packing scandal in a Scottish constituency and designed to reduce the trade union power seen as responsible. They ended with Jeremy, half-willing and half-pushed by parliamentary allies in the tiny Socialist Campaign Group to be its nominee, squeezing into the leadership contest seconds before the deadline at noon on 15 June. In the three months between then and his defeat of three centrist rivals by a first-round majority of 59.5 per cent, an astounding zero-to-hero metamorphosis unfolded.

The spectacle encompassed adulation from cross-generational hordes of supporters, a mass influx of avid new members for the cost of a cappuccino, the creation of the support movement Momentum (by Jon Lansman, an ancient 1980s comrade), and enough personalised brand accessories to make Naomi Klein weep (“Jez We Can!” t-shirts, posters, hashtags, poems). It was striking how much Corbyn basked in the acclaim and the contact: from pop-chorus chants to unstinting, often gurning, selfies. Having escaped the lab, the fossilised revolutionary operating on 1970s software had become a rock star. He even spruced up. It was all utterly bewildering.

But how much did the turnaround change Corbyn himself? Far more seemed to be occurring around than in him. His campaign offer — Labour as social movement, committed to justice, equality, peace and ending neoliberalism — was the same bromide-rich, detail-light sermon he had preached for decades. Now, it was evidently becoming a receptacle for widely felt longings, quasi-religious as much as political, seeking a home. This injected his effort with a magic ingredient of emotional lift-off, in turn creating a feedback loop of positivity.

One after another, fresh eyes and open hearts steamrollered decades of what, to people of memory — or premature anti-Corbynites — were implacable negatives. Being an unknown of minor status gave Corbyn appealing novelty; never having changed his mind about anything meant principled; a timeworn aura became vintage cool (he was fondly dubbed “magic grandpa” and “the absolute boy”); the whole anti-style package won the age’s supreme accolade, authenticity.

More prosaically, a hustings-centred format suited him: a promise of the earth wrapped in practised, repetitive language of homily and formula. And if years as a hyper-activist gave him an edge, so did the gulf between his outsider image and his shadow-cabinet opponents. Corbyn had no record to defend, no blunders to regret, no compromises to justify. The inevitable taint of having engaged in actual politics was absent. When items from his back catalogue were flung at him, they failed to land or bounced off. He was pure; they — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall — were tainted. This was the moment of surging “anti-politics,” and Jeremy Corbyn surfed the wave.

Many premature anti-Corbynites argued that the new and empowered Labour membership, after eight fruitless years of anti–New Labour lectures by dismal Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, had embraced a sunk-cost approach and chosen a no-hoper, a dud, the anti–Tony Blair incarnate. As those astonishing weeks subsided, and Corbyn’s first two years brought unremitting bad news, their view was undisturbed.

Labour’s poll ratings wilted, Corbyn’s own standing continued dire among the wider public, local and by-election results were patchy, bouts of internal feuding were legion. But the Corbyn takeover, or asphyxiation, of the party slowly consolidated. Today the leader can count on a membership more than doubled to half a million, a docile shadow cabinet, allies in control of the party’s main bodies, and a tight inner circle whose Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray are alumni of Britain’s illustrious pro-Soviet left.

One group is an exception: Labour parliamentarians, of whom a majority saw Corbyn from the start as an ideological and electoral liability. His followers are working on that, planning to deselect the more recalcitrant MPs as part of a longer-term aim to make them all delegates of the popular (that is, activists’) will.

Corbyn’s unwelcome inheritance had been a frosty shadow crew and glum backbench cohort. A long-term opponent of the European Union — he was against party policy on this as on pretty much everything else — he tested these new colleagues’ patience to the limit by his studiedly equivocal stance in the referendum on EU membership. The United Kingdom’s narrow vote to leave in June 2016 triggered a major breach when Corbyn’s move to pre-empt a coup led to the resignation of twenty-one shadow ministers in damaging sequence. Stiffened in the inner sanctum, he survived this clear attempt to unseat him, then easily crushed a vapid contender, thus gaining room to secure his hold on Labour’s machinery by patronage, nepotism and purge.

After this exultant reprise of his initial campaign came another long period of drift, interrupted by the new prime minister Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a general election. All sides, even his own, anticipated Corbyn’s shattering defeat. But mid 2017 brought another epic reversal of fortune. Corbyn’s platform populism and easy sociability — backed by a manifesto cascade of free offers on child care, tuition fees, school meals, and lifelong education — upstaged the prime minister’s distant and content-free campaign. Tory attacks on his extremist links, lacking a vital case for democracy and security, misfired. For the second time in a year, British voters showed they don’t like being taken for granted.

Although his graft fell short, here at last was external validation of the Corbyn project. Labour now had real momentum against a suddenly infirm premier, at sea over Brexit and domestic problems alike; a 10 per cent jump in its vote share (to 40 per cent) brought victory into sight; a huge membership gave the party massive social weight against the shrinking, ageing Tories. Judged by outcomes alone, Corbyn had conjured an admirable feat for any opposition leader on 8 June 2017, not least for one who had spent thirty-two years on the Commons backbenches. Corbyn had written himself into those history books. Whatever the qualifications, no one can ever take that away from him.

His supporters’ glee had an extra, exquisite sweetness in the vanquishing of the hated “Blairites.” This catch-all term, hurled with impressive ferocity at any non-Corbynite MP, party official or journalist who criticised Jeremy, now reached its zenith. The Blairites’ sin was to have scorned not just Corbyn and his agenda, but also the very possibility that such a firm left-winger could raise Labour so mightily and shake (if not yet topple) the false gods of neoliberalism and military adventurism. Corbyn had proved the Blairites wrong, giving his followers — in an echo Corbynites wouldn’t find appealing — their equivalent of Tony Blair’s first victory in 1997.

THE DRIFTER

A premier besieged, a blunder-prone government in emergency mode, party opponents fearful and fragmented: rarely since Margaret Thatcher, another unwelcome comparison, has a party leader in Britain been luckier in his or her enemies. In mid 2017, fate was telling Corbyn to refocus from protest to power. Instead, there followed a listless post-election year disfigured by furious discord over Labour’s new intolerance, in which Corbyn’s role looked permissive at best.

Election advance had thrown up strategic dilemmas. While much of Labour’s enthused new support base was urban, educated and in favour of Europe and immigration, the party was losing seats in poorer English working-class bastions that had voted to leave the European Union. In this respect, Corbyn’s dissembling over Brexit, a clunky version of Blairite triangulation that satisfied no one, also had a crude tactical logic: let the government stew and then seize the reins whenever the chance arises, most likely as unease sets in over any EU deal.

Under a first-past-the-post system in which love-bombing neighbourhood swing voters can pay national dividends, it made sense for Labour to look beyond Westminster. Yet key political and media battles still had to be waged there, from all-embracing Brexit through serious failings in economic and social policy to the shocking eruptions of GrenfellWindrush and Salisbury. The post-election landscape demanded a recharge, one Corbyn and his low-grade shadow cabinet struggled to provide.

Behind the scenes were brighter signs, however. A more coherent Labour high command — bound to the reinvented party-movement, enriched with trade union funds and membership fees, and augmented by Momentum’s motivated troops — was now seeking power by combining Jeremy’s permanent roadshow with a targeting of the marginal seats where the next election would be won. A cadre of community organisers would be the spearhead, bolstered by local unions and activists, with a gloss from the more plausible frontbenchers. The latter usually meant the sixty-seven-year-old shadow chancellor John McDonnell: twice a Socialist Campaign Group leadership candidate, hardest of Jeremy’s henchmen, now playing the eager-to-help bank manager with such ubiquity that it resembled an audition for the top job.

Such whispers aside, Corbyn himself had altered little. From mammoth Glastonbury to the toytown Labour Live festival, a rare PR embarrassment for his promoters, his insatiable applause hunger was amply fed. But no longer a novelty, his lack of craft, agility or any repertoire of skills was all too familiar. That could equally be said of Theresa May; in effect, they were keeping each other in a job. The novelist Robert Harris, writing this August, put it well: “It’s a desperate and tragic coincidence for the UK that we should have the worst prime minister in our history at the same time as we have the worst leader of the opposition.”

If the Commons question-time bearpit was not Corbyn’s forte, impromptu media stand-ups brought out a peevish side. He avoided studio exposure to tough journalists, opting for the odd pat-a-cake set piece, even there scarcely concealing his animus of domestic print and broadcast media. Anyway, he could now rely on a hyper-partisan, click-rich array of websites and social media outriders coordinating lines with the leader’s team via WhatsApp, a baleful first in British politics and journalism alike. The silos in this case have melded, and it’s not good news.

Such allies were crucial in Labour’s endemic disputes over anti-Semitism, which may have dampened Corbyn’s already low poll ratings. In the approach to the Liverpool conference, Ipsos–Mori reported that 24 per cent of the public thought he was doing a good job, and even of party members just 48 per cent were now satisfied. Over three years, he had bested his Tory opposite number just once in a fortnightly choice of best prime minister. To up the pace, Labour’s backroom strategists had intended to use the August recess to sell the party’s juicier policy ideas. The plan was derailed as the anti-Semitism imbroglio continued, in part because a rummage through Corbyn’s own basement tapes was finding ever more unsavoury cuts.

THE SYMPATHISER

After all, Corbyn’s real paper trail, and his video record, lay elsewhere, their very existence reflecting his peculiar career as activist-politician. In this connection, while those library and bookshop denizens of 2015 risked missing a trick, they also spotted early that the near absolute gap between Corbyn’s past and present, the very source of his appeal to a new fan base, may also continue to define him in harsher ways.

The more accessible registry was found via Hansard, his House of Commons speeches and copious early-day motions equally divided between domestic affairs (railways a favourite) and foreign (often liberation struggles and neo-imperial designs). Next were periodic Fleet Street reports — sober in the broadsheets, outraged in the tabloids — of his chumminess with spokesmen of the Irish Republican Army, or his long-term championing of Palestinians jailed for bombing Israeli’s London embassy and a Jewish charity. More elusive were pamphlets and bulletins from the 1970s–90s gathering dust in the basement of Housmans bookshop or Warwick University’s archives, the Pythonesque sects that produced them long residing in the where-are-they-now file.

Rare broadcasting footage included a clip of a bearded, studenty thirty-two-year-old haranguing the Bennite faithful after Labour’s incendiary 1981 conference, where the far left’s ascendancy had been checked. More sightings came when he co-founded (and later, for four years, chaired) Stop the War, a front movement set up in the wake of 9/11 by the small but energetic Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist-syndicalist sect. He struck an unassuming figure amid such groups’ predatory radicalism, but was never less than fierce against the unholy trinity (America, Britain, Israel) or other than soft on its foes.

A trickle of videos preserved Corbyn’s appearances on the propaganda station Russia Today (now RT) and Iran’s equally shameless equivalent, Press TV (which lost its British licence in 2012). He would continue to appear on the latter, receiving £20,000 (A$36,000) for an interview series in which he parlayed conspiracism about Israel and deplored BBC bias. More revelatory, even to those who keep a wary eye on the left–Islamist alliance that coursed through media and academia in Britain after 9/11, were meetings where Corbyn sat contentedly beside vile mouthpieces of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, his body language — and his own words — exhibiting not a speck of discomfort with the company or the setting, which were often parliamentary rooms that Corbyn, as MP and host, had hired.

Corbyn had come of age when “anti-Zionism” was in vogue among a younger left, as the 1967 war recast Israel’s image from kibbutz-centric (and Labour-led) socialist beacon to colonial oppressor and imperial outpost. The latter view was supercharged by the UN General Assembly vote in 1975 (rescinded in 1991) to declare Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The complex processes at work are anatomised in two essential works: Colin Shindler’s Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimization and Dave Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism.

A blend of reductive animosities — against Zionism and Israel, capitalism and racism — was on the market, its oversupply of kindling for outright anti-Semitism finding gruesome expression in West Germany during the febrile Baader–Meinhof years. In Britain’s 1970s and 80s the culture of anti-Zionism took hold among campus boycotters, local councils, factional newspapers (two subsidised by Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam’s Iraq) and Labour’s parliamentary fringe. In the far left’s schismatic milieu, it even acted as a binding agent. For Jeremy himself, anti-Zionism was among the articles of faith clasped as a young adult and ever held to.

A Labour member at ease in the world of ultra-sectarian groupuscules, he was a rare specimen who consorted with Trotskyists and supped with Stalinists without making enemies. In 2002 he inherited Tony Benn’s column in the Morning Star, a valiant daily linked to the tiny Communist Party of Britain, remnant of the pro-Soviet faction when its parent split in 1991. The column continued until soon after the 2015 coup, though the paper itself remains a mouthpiece of the Corbynite worldview, which today means being onside with Assad, Putin and Maduro.

Jeremy’s anti-war activism would add a wealth of speeches, articles and interviews to the archive. Though many were wiped from online sources, including his personal website, when he became leader, sleuthing has retrieved a good number. A valuable chronicle here is the accumulating Mr Corbyn in The Times, which has expanded beyond that initial remit to track in granular detail Jeremy’s (and by extension his chums’) before-they-were-famous file.

A perceptible feature is how, in every nationalist campaign, Corbyn identifies with the more radical, violent wing. In South Africa, the Pan Africanist Congress over the African National Congress; in Palestine, Hamas less so than the PLO as it turned peace-maker; in Ireland, the IRA and Sinn Féin, and not at all the Social Democratic and Labour Party (British Labour’s partner in Northern Ireland, as if such trifles mattered).

Few details are more luminous. To a certain kind of upper-middle-class, public-school English leftist (Milne and Murray are others), the vicarious romance of armed struggle remains compelling. So consumed are they by the crimes of “their own” side, so anti-patriotic, they are a pushover for the very worst of others. With no self-respecting “we” to uphold or understand in its own complexity, their idea of solidarity allows only for sycophancy. In many unexplored ways Jeremy Corbyn and friends are the last British imperialists: exemplifications of Jung’s axiom, drawing on Nietzsche, that you always become the thing you fight the most.

Why such information now, and so little before? After all, the spread of digitisation had made many of these older materials accessible to anyone who cared to seek them out. But few did. Corbyn was just not important or interesting enough. Dependable and congenial among his own, an affable constituency figure on his bicycle and allotment, he was fated — indeed seemed happy — to serve out his days on the backbenches, the MP as itinerant solidarity monger and neighbourhood social worker, a harmless soul forever at odds with but indulged by his indifferent party.

THE BROTHER

The new situation of Labour’s seizure by a committed anti-Zionist gave unlikely currency and legitimacy to Corbyn’s worldview. That held obvious risks which, assuming goodwill, only pre-emptive action might have had a chance of defusing. Instead, the Corbyn bandwagon with its fourfold rotation — of Labour’s leadership, membership, style and rhetoric — acted from the start as a fertiliser of anti-Semitic tropes, prejudices and recycled materials.

The sociologist David Hirsh, author of a third indispensable book, Contemporary Left Antisemitism, anticipated this. In an open letter to Corbyn published days after his election as leader, Hirsh noted his “history of leaping to the defence of blood libellers and conspiracists, consorting with Holocaust deniers and politically embracing antisemitic organisations,” saying the “new Labour Party does not feel like a safe place for Jews” and asking for “new clarity on democracy and on antisemitism.” Hirsh, formerly aligned to a far-left group with, significantly, a libertarian spirit, concluded: “Maybe you can’t do it. Maybe you have supported and defended dictators, terrorists and antisemites because doing so really is core to your politics.”

In its mix of seedy bigotry, dissembling and cronyism, the first major contretemps in March 2016 set the template for innumerable later ones. In the wake of the suspension of two Labour figures — Naz Shah MP, over past anti-Semitic posts, and Ken Livingstone, ex-mayor of London, after defending Shah by way of his own septic obsessions about Hitler and Zionism — Corbyn announced an independent inquiry into the extent of the party’s problem. An ill-starred process under human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti, newly a Labour member, resulted in a hasty document whose public launch was hijacked by another 1980s comrade of Corbyn, who made an anti-Semitic insinuation against Ruth Smeeth, a Labour MP present. Distressed, she left; at the meeting’s end, Corbyn happily chatted to his old pal. Chakrabarti, visibly protective towards Corbyn, was soon elevated to the House of Lords and later appointed as shadow attorney-general.

By this stage, Corbyn’s bland deflection of questions about anti-Semitism was invariably to pair it with Islamophobia and declare opposition “to all forms of racism.” With the number of Britain’s Jews, at around 270,000, but a tenth of the country’s Muslims, the formula sounded an ambiguous note: in principle equalising and inclusive, but also smothering and belittling. It was as if the much smaller minority did not matter in its own right, as if anti-Semitism did not exist on its own account, as if — a short step — Jews did not have a valid claim on their own experience.

Such nuances torched the ear when Labour’s four Jewish female MPs — Luciana Berger, Louise Ellman, Margaret Hodge and Ruth Smeeth — were constant targets of bullying, threats and abuse, and copious other Labour-sourced anti-Semitic incidents emanated even from the party’s councillors, candidates, university societies and constituency officers. True, Corbyn often spoke the right words and promised action. At the 2017 annual conference, he endorsed the tightening of rules on anti-Semitic abuse proposed by the Jewish Labour Movement, an affiliated group of long standing; this year he twice used a Guardian article to pronounce on the issue (“People who dish out anti-Semitic poison need to understand: you do not do it in my name”); and in Liverpool he declared: “We will work with Jewish communities to eradicate anti-Semitism, both from our party and wider society.”

The words were weightless, however, for there was no follow through. In fact, Corbyn’s lack of urgency was the most palpable feature of the entire saga. This engaged and heartful leader seemed unable to stand by British Jews in their distress. And even when in April 2018 he did appear to make a personal investment, by joining a Seder hosted by Jewdas, a spiky anti-establishment grouplet, the choice took on the aspect of a divide-and-rule snub to the wider community.

“Be clear and unambiguous about this and it will go away as an issue,” Hirsh had advised in 2015. Corbyn wasn’t and it didn’t. Throughout 2018, the debris washed ever closer to him. He had, for example, been a member of three online forums where anti-Semitic material freely circulated, and in 2012 sent a friendly message to the creator of a grotesque mural in east London, now facing erasure, which depicted hook-nosed plutocrats playing a board game over slaves’ naked backs. “You are in good company,” Corbyn wrote. “Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.” Faced with his comment six years on, he said that the mural was “deeply disturbing” and regretted “not having studied the content more closely.”

In the same year, Corbyn had reconnected on Press TV with a Hamas pal now released from prison in Israel, who had helped organise a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem cafe that killed seven people. “I met many of the [Hamas] brothers, including the brother who’s been speaking here, when they came out of prison, when I was in Doha earlier this year,” he fondly reminisced, before going on to question why “the brothers” — all convicted for terrorist offences, and now swapped for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit — had been jailed at all.

Corbyn then appeared in photographs taken at a Tunis cemetery in 2014, holding a wreath and imitating the prayerful, palms-upward gesture of his hosts beside two memorials to fallen Palestinians, including Atef Bseiso and Salah Khalaf, senior PLO officers said to be behind the Black September group who perpetrated the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes. Corbyn disputed the details, but eventually, in an interview marked by exasperated eye-rolling, conceded to being present, while saying he was not “actually involved” in the ceremonials.

A comment in 2013 provoked the biggest reaction. At an event on Palestinians’ experience since the 1948 Nakba — where Stephen Sizer, who says Israel perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, was also on the panel — Corbyn launched into a gratuitous defence of the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, Manuel Hassassian, who had been challenged at an earlier meeting by Richard Millett, an audience member on both occasions. Corbyn, angered that Millett and his companion had then “berated” Hassassian, addressed them as now “thankfully silent Zionists” with “two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, don’t understand English irony either. Manuel does understand English irony, and uses it very effectively. So I think they needed two lessons, which we can perhaps help them with.”

Just once, it seems, Corbyn the Shropshire lad had taken pride in a native sensibility, but only to use it as a weapon: releasing its latent class and racial prejudice to “otherise” and exile one group alone from the national community, while appointing himself as the amiable border guard waving through the noble subaltern. For dissident culture studies or psychology grads, there was enough here for ten PhDs. For a fair few with residual liking for Corbyn, the incident proved the breaking point.

Even the discredited Chakrabarti report had warned of “the way in which the word ‘Zionist’ has been used personally, abusively, or as a euphemism for ‘Jew.’” Corbyn’s statement, back in character, passed on the blame“I am now more careful with how I might use the term ‘Zionist’ because a once self-identifying political term has been increasingly hijacked by anti-Semites as code for Jews.” That might well be called chutzpah, as much as the man who traduces the BBC on Khamenei’s TV station might invite doubt over his grasp of, well, English irony.

THE CHANGELESS MAN

In a previous era, the revelation of a political or ethical lapse of this nature could demonstrably wound or even topple a leader. In this still-uncharted one, Corbyn survived the revelation of a dozen such episodes without a scratch. That owed something to a political environment now dominated by social media, where two ingredients — an inflation of outrage and a deficit of attention — fuse and fizz around the clock, procuring and suborning the historical rhythms and negotiated outcomes of democratic politics.

To shape this amorphous world in its interest, the adept Corbyn media operation employs, in that discreet coordination, a version of the hybrid media warfare refined elsewhere. With each incident of anti-Semitism, two things happen: while the comms team gives defusing reassurance that Jeremy’s intentions are all for the best, Corbyn’s online devotees go on the offensive, painting any fact as a smear and any critic as mendacious. As with Putin’s undeclared war, this strategy is about confusing not winning, sowing doubt not truth, exalting cheap slogans above entire histories.

Thus, beyond the precise matters at stake, did the anti-Semitism uproar also became a tool of the “vast polarising machine” dissected in a brilliant essay by the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr: “A structure that accelerates and promotes conflict is inimical to the conduct of democratic pluralism. It looks like a weapon of civic destruction.”

Corbyn the polarising populist, seizing the leftwards flank of the zeitgeist, has benefited from this environment. But there is a catch. The use of social media, online networks, apps and data mining that contributed to his rise also helped in the retrieval and spread of information about his prior career. The man without a past who took British politics by storm in 2015 turned out to have an ever-growing one of a kind that came to make repeated demands on him, soliciting casuistry (Tunis cemetery, Press TV, Russia Today, the IRA) or banality (“lifelong anti-racist,” “always on the right side of history”).

This ever-present past, the price of Corbyn’s success, is ahead of as well as behind him. He will always have to navigate its reefs, which are still forming as, under his acquiescent eye, Labour’s intolerance festers. Jeremy’s double test here is to uphold the links between his own past and present, and the party’s: to naturalise his leadership as successor of Attlee, Wilson and Blair, and to become a historic architect of Labour governance.

It’s a stretch, for the links have no fastener. This is not a matter of tale-telling, nor even probity towards voters, but of political character. Corbyn really is a far leftist drawn to autocrats, a type that, with good reason, every Labour leader and government has spurned. Anti-Zionism with its dark urges really does grip his thinking. He and his dear comrades really are in thrall to the world’s worst regimes.

Corbyn cannot own or disown his past, nor Labour’s. That would demand the impossible: seeing his political life as a continuum (thus justifying his views) or accepting its disjuncture (thus explaining their change). Either would require self-examination and accounting, which Corbyn has never gone in for.

“The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair / to turn yourself inside out / and see the whole world with fresh eyes.” Not just the Marat/Sade sentiment, but the truths it might contain, are worlds away from Corbyn’s universe. So too the words of the great Hamburg balladeer Wolf Biermann, a man of hard-won political wisdom: “Only he who changes stays true to himself.”

Most salient of all about him, Jeremy Corbyn carries no sense of personal responsibility — for his beliefs, words, actions or associates. His irritable evasions when quizzed show it, as indirectly do his endless comfort-zone love-ins with approving crowds. But Jeremy can never change.

Where he is concerned, the responsibility is all on others. •

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British eyes on Canberra’s mess https://insidestory.org.au/british-eyes-on-canberras-mess/ Mon, 27 Aug 2018 06:18:59 +0000 http://staging.insidestory.org.au/?p=50659

Letter from London | Australia’s political drama gives Britain respite from Brexit, along with a crash course in Canberrology

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“When you have Italian friends making fun of your country’s political instability, you know you have problems.” The Financial Times quote jumped off the page. Good angle on the two-year running farce that is Brexit, I thought. So much of the endless mockery comes from Germany or Fra — hold on, what’s a picture of Malcolm Turnbull doing there?

British coverage of Canberra’s latest spill motions — a term at last entering the lexicon here — has on the surface been impressively straight. The Liberals’ power games are well reported, energy and immigration policy cited, and the underlying political problems listed, though the Queensland dimension and the Labor opposition barely feature. There’s no trace of the schadenfreude that has accompanied tabloid reporting of Angela Merkel’s year of troubles. Clearly, sporting rivalries don’t transfer to politics. At the same time, there’s a perceptible motif of bemusement, tinged with the relief of being temporarily off the hook. And the sterling work of reporters on the ground has surely firmed up London editors’ grasp of Canberrology.

At the shakier end was an editorial on 25 August in the tabloid-sized Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s stable, which is currently on an investigative roll. “Democracy Down (Under)” veers from lurid (“ritual bloodletting… frenzied public humiliation… a spectacle of back-stabbing and indeed front-stabbing… leaders are roasted alive if they show signs of losing support in the heartlands”) to arch (“Friends have the duty to say: mate, your system is dysfunctional”), before settling on trite (“Mr Morrison will put the brakes on Mr Turnbull’s shift to the left but will still need to work hard to differentiate his party more clearly from Labor”).

A day earlier, as the drama was climaxing, the Financial Times’s front page had signalled its own view with that alluring reference to “Italian-style political instability.” Inside, a scorching editorial attributed Turnbull’s impending fall to a toxic fusion of culture and energy wars:

The troubles stem from dysfunction in political institutions, a shock-jock right-wing media and a shift to a US Tea Party-style populism within the ruling Liberal party… [Peter Dutton’s proposals] risk consigning Australia to another decade of energy insecurity, rising prices and failure to meet its obligations on carbon emissions… [Business support for a bipartisan approach] makes the Liberal–National coalition’s latest decision to press the self-destruct button over energy policy especially ill-timed.

The weekly Economist, going to press on Thursday, had its customary headline pun fun (“Poison spill,” “Spill will”) before getting serious. “Australians are frustrated by stagnant wages, but they have never rallied behind right-wing populists,” its reporter said. Dutton is “one of his party’s most reactionary figures.” However, “the fad for spill motions” makes the country’s politics look “alarmingly volatile.”

These three publications, while distinct in character, are each at heart centre-right, pro-business, culturally liberal and international. All are dismayed by Britain’s own populist temptations. It’s striking then that their commentaries nowhere mention Brexit, and in this respect they are typical of wider coverage. Could it come to matter that Australia’s leadership tussle is, refreshingly, not being seen through a solipsistic Brexit lens, as has almost every major overseas news story for two years?

The latter was true of the federal election in 2016, held just nine days after the UK vote to leave the European Union. And since then, London’s interest in Australia — security agencies apart — has been defined nearly exclusively by the prospects for a free-trade deal. Alexander Downer’s former status as high commissioner in London made him a fixture on the BBC, while his breezy optimism won favour in the anti-EU press: a rare double. More recently, the farmers’ plight and China tensions have had a good airing. But reaction to Australia’s latest drama, coinciding with fevered divination of Britain’s post-Brexit fate, invites a glimpse of a less inward future.

Dream on? Probably. That Scott Morrison’s early calls were to Donald Trump, Joko Widodo and Jacinda Ardern probably gives Fleet Street’s terrible twins  — the Daily Mail and Guardian  — material for default lament of Britain’s collapse into irrelevance. The Mirror, a robotic left-wing tabloid long eclipsed by Murdoch’s Sun, is already on the case, reading Trump’s empty boasts of friendship with Australia as a “swipe” at Theresa May and a “slap-down of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the Britain [sic] and America.” Whereas the Telegraph’s Jonathan Pearlman, writing in the paper’s Sunday edition, stays on topic in an overview of “this bizarre Australian phenomenon [of] revolving-door leadership.” Of the new prime minister’s first press conference, he says, Morrison “was unable to answer the question the nation, and the world, wish to know: why did his party remove another elected leader?”

Such reports are a reminder of the all-round value of the informed, connected foreign correspondent. Jamie Smyth’s reports for the Financial Times during the crisis, weaving the views of experts such as ANU’s Ian McAllister, Melbourne’s Sarah Maddison, and Griffith’s Paul Williams into a concise daily narrative, are a good complement to Inside Story’s roster. His latest, on the cabinet reshuffle, is just out. That Italian sucker punch, sourced to Kevin Rudd’s former political strategist Bruce Hawker, came from Smyth’s story on the Turnbull–Dutton bout. On the eve, he wrote a long, absorbing piece on the “African gangs” tale, focused on the Australian Rules player Aliir Aliir.

There is of course much more, not least on broadcast and social media. On BBC radio, the ABC’s Geraldine Doogue voiced embarrassment that Australia had become “the coup capital of the world in the democratic sense.” Vox pops with disarmingly contemptuous Sydney citizens provided one highlight, the scabrous politesse of Tonightly clips another. Some British viewers were rhapsodic: “Leave it to the Aussies to cut through the bullshit in the most coarse way and make it sound like you just shared a joke,” wrote one. In face of “the dog-eat-dog antics of their political class” (Roger Maynard in the Sunday Times, another Murdoch outlet), the Australian branch of the international fed-up citizens’ union, acronym optional, is evidently kicking free. ●

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