Another Day Closer to Brexit.

Labour put down an amendment on Brexit Withdrawal Bill that LOOKS, for a couple of minutes, like it might mean something. That Her Majesty's Opposition, unlike Her Majesty's Government, might have made some sort of decision about some sort of Brexit. 

But no, there they are spinning and briefing against each other as usual. And we are still nowhere. It can't just be because both parties are made up of loonies and feckless bastards, can it? Why does no one ever decide anything? Because they can't. It's the only explanation. 

Brexit CAN'T be done. Not SHOULDN'T be done. Can't. We are on a set of islands off the coast of Europe. Europe is run by the EU. We are going to remain in the EU...just not members of it. It's a lie. A delusion. This is why neither party ever makes any decision as to policy. Any decision the politicians make...ANY decision...is pure fantasy. We decided to leave the EU. That was our LAST decision. That was the last decision the UK is ever going to make. All we've done is abdicated ourselves from any future decision making. The EU will decide the terms on which we leave and redefine the relationship. This was ALWAYS how it was going to be. 

Maybe it's a good thing...for Europe...in the end. The Brits were never comfortable in the real world. Always moaning about their place in the sun, always opting out of everything. Very tiresome. They will be...they already are...glad to get us out of the room.

The EU will decide on Britain's future status. Britain imagining otherwise was an illusion born of the same imperial nostalgia as our "special" status within the EU. We were indulged in that rubbish for forty years. That's done now. The only strategy the UK had was trying to pick off EU member states one by one for "special" deals, as if our leaving would make the EU fall apart. The moment that strategy failed (by about mid day on June 24th 2016)...we had NOTHING else to bring to the table.

This is why the Tories have spent two years fannying about while the Labour party fannied about letting them. This is why we've made no proper preparations for any Brexit realities. Because there's NOTHING we can do. This is why BOTH major parties have already fallen to bits. They can't talk about Brexit seriously, because to talk about Brexit seriously would be to admit that they, like Wyle E Coyote have ALREADY run off the edge of the cliff...but they haven't looked down yet. They KNOW what will happen if they do. The implication of REAL Brexit is that we hit everything with a hammer...smash it all to bits and start again. Now there are some on the far left and some on the far right to whom apocalypse/revelation is a consummation devoutly to be wished. In their imagination, a lean capitalist beast with no foreigners or a socialist paradise with no bankers will ensue next March. Let us be clear. NOTHING like either is going to happen. Tories and Labour have both dropped the Brexit ball and are waiting for the EU to pick it up. Eventually, the EU will be forced, out of self interest, to save the UK. What will then happen is that the EU decide both the terms on which we leave, and the terms that suit them as to how we continue to trade. The truth is that both parties are COUNTING on this happening. Both main political parties and the entire media are meanwhile complicit in a bizarre conspiracy of pretending otherwise, of "agency." But they know that Britain will decide NOTHING. I suspect sensible parliamentarians, and even David Davis and Bojo, KNOW this.

This is why we've handed over ostensible political control to the loonies. It's why Jacob Rees Mogg is never off the telly. It's pure showbiz. I guess we might use WTO Rules for a year or two...then we'll be back at the EU table, BEGGING for them to sort it for us.

But I suspect we've already "chosen" the easy way, the lazy way...deciding nothing at all, so that the grown ups in the EU will decide everything for us in time for next year. Playtime will go on. The delusion will go on. Of course, the Tories will still bitch and whine about the beastly Europeans, and Labour will bitch and whine about the beastly Tories. But British politics will be pure theatre even more than it already is. Things will be a bit harder. Living in Britain will be a bit crappier. London will continue to be a city of huge, dodgy wealth pit with a servant class in deeper poverty. The North of England will continue to rot. The racists will continue to blame everyone brown. 

What do we do next? "We" meaning Scotland this time? We might well choose to do nothing but whine and bitch about the Labour Party while Labour whine and bitch about the Tories while the Tories whine and bitch about the EU. After all, in 2014 we also chose not to choose.

It might be that we are the ghost of a country attached to a ghost of a country. The only difference..maybe...is that Scotland's ghost is MAYBE...maybe... a ghost of the future as a small country in Europe, not of an Empire lost in the past.

So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"

"A presumption of acting with consent"...what that means is that if the Scottish Parliament does NOT consent to anything decided by Westminster in the context of Brexit...(which can mean ANYTHING), for the next seven years, politically forever...it will be treated if it did...Thus breaking every principle upon which devolution is founded.

Our elected representatives...our opinions....and our votes...will amount to exactly nothing.

So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"

Actually, that's not just a flip remark. "Take Back Control" worked so well as a slogan in the Brexit Referendum because it answered a very specific social and psychological need. For the English people to take back something they felt they'd lost. The globalised economy was felt to have robbed economic life of a sense of identity and purpose. The systematic destruction of the welfare state over the last thirty years had robbed people of a sense of "us"...the people "they" were supposed to look after. Brexit, ever more explicitly , is an English nationalist moment...and Scots should not be entirely surprised by it, or feel unconnected to many of the impulses behind it. After all, many Yes voters also voted to Leave. However, it is now becoming clear that a suppression of the qualified autonomy represented by the Scottish parliament is very much among the things that Brexit is "taking back control" of.  Resentment of noisy jocks is absolutely smack dab at the centre of the agenda. This English national Moment is, in the usual confused way, mixed up with BRITISH hegemony. What the next few days and weeks will tell us is just how explicit the consequences of the English National Moment are for us…and whether this grotesque insult to the principles upon which we thought devolution were built is as accidental and unthinking, or a deliberate act of bureaucratic violence springing from the same poisonous source as the Windrush scandal.

(Surely there can be no one left who thinks that this generation on West Indians were targeted by accident!)

The events of the last few days in Scotland and Westminster, and the provisions of the bill now published, are an absolute vindication of a simple proposition. You can have a unitary Brexit, or you can have effective devolved government. You cannot have both.

Brexit, as I’ve indicated, is an expression of English national feeling...which is hardly something in itself to criticize from a website that supported the Yes campaign in 2014.  But it is taking the twisted form of a nostalgic resentment of 21st Century reality. Part of the Resentment of Empire is the visible…hence annoying…limited autonomy of the "regions." The fact that all that was really "added" to the constitution in the late 1990s was a democratic element to a federalism that already existed...is neither here nor there. The Union settlement itself is a triviality in contemporary British politics. What matters is the irritation. All that matters politically is that the irritation be soothed or removed.

The Labour Party have now removed Wales from any future consideration as a stone in the pathway of a "Smooth Brexit."  And the voters of Wales will reap the harvest of obedience. But Wales at least VOTED for Brexit as well as devolution. Scotland voted decisively against Brexit and for at least a measure of democratic participation in specifically Scottish matters...such as agriculture, fishing and energy policy that were themselves partially devolved to EU coordination. Can those who devised that Parliament now act with the Tories to strip back that measure of democratic self government in the name of a Brexit that the country voted decisively against? On what possible grounds? The devolution settlement of 1997 is now untenable. It cannot survive Brexit. The alternatives are either an absorption into a unitary UK State that has never existed in this form before...(the Barnett Formula, for example, is unlikely to survive)...or fundamental re-negotiationThis may or may not be called "Independence." , itself a very 20th Century term in a very different set of realities in the 21st Century. But be sure that unless Scotland remains as a "problem" for Brexit, Scotland will cease to exist politically in the UK except as a footnote. Any consideration of the needs of the people of Wales in the context of agricultural or regional policy is already fading into irrelevance. Everyone who supports devolution as a meaningful element of Scottish life HAS to stand firm with the Scottish Government, or face oblivion.

Just as a footnote of my own, the influential Tory think tank, The Institute of Fiscal Studies has just reporterd that they see no future for the Barnett Formula after brexit.  Taking control of the portfolios coming back from Brussels is very much the thin end of the wedge. This is the essential context for the "deal" that WM has offered Scotland. If we take the deal, we are handing all control over ScotGov funding to Tory Government discretion. Not just a bit of it. All of it. Is that really okay with everyone except Nicola Sturgeon?

http://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/keeping-barnett-formula-not-appropriate-after-brexit-warns-institute-fiscal-studies#

There are lots of things about Brexit we in Scotland can’t do anything about.  If this point of principle is conceded on the Continuity Bill, there will be nothing we can do about any of it – which is precisely the idea.  What we can and must do right now is defend the devolution settlement itself…and hold accountable the Labour and Liberal MSPs whose predecessors designed it.  Are they really happy to give it away for the slim chance of a Brexit supporting Corbyn government?

No wonder Carwyn Jones resigned as Welsh Labour Leader rather than countenance cancelling devolution till we "sort" Brexit?  A time frame of seven years “while they sort Brexit out” is a political eternity. Brexit is a car crash that can't be sorted. Do we really just amble on with our heads in a light proof rubber sack till the Tories win a General Election in 2022?

What Does Brexit Mean for Independence? What does “ Independence” mean in the context of Brexit?

The period from 2011 to 2016 might be characterised by future commentators as the Independence Moment in Modern Scottish History. 

The experience was a little how I imagine surfing to be…catching a wave of what felt like unexpected then irresistable momentum that carried its passengers towards a golden shore that seemed so close we could touch i Even defeat in the referendum in Sept 2014 scarcely seemed to dent the euphoria for long.  Through the 2015 SNP electoral landslide we went, scarcely even noticing that something beyond our ken was stirring elsewhere in the pond, a corresponding yet very different, diffuse wave of English Nationalism…with Jeremy Corbyn riding one surf board, and Boris Johnson another. 

Then all the waves crashed at once.  Like Wile E Coyote, we looked down and saw that there was nothing holding us up, and we plummetted into the confused, confusing wash of a brand new reality.  Brexit was happening, and Donald Trump was in the White House.  And as we tried to stand up in the surf, spitting out a mouthful of seaweed…with a jelly fish trapped down our Speedos, we had lost all sight of the beach.

There are those among us who claim to still see it.  That all we need to do is get back on the surfboard and another wave will come to lift it home. But most people aren’t so sure. We look around like we don’t know the rules of tides and gravity yet…and we hesitate.

To attempt to escape the metaphor in which I seem to have trapped myself as completely as Scottish Constitutional politics is stymied at the moment, let me suggest that the political hesitation is purely pragmatic. We had an election in 2017 in which the result was multiply equivocal and confused on both sides of the border.  We have a Brexit process that is itself mired in the strange feeling, even now, with a year till we are supposed to be leaving, that it’s not really going to happen. The electorate are nothing if not nervous of change.  At this moment, if anyone came along with a claim that they could make it all go away, they might win a couple of by-elections.

Like the Trump presidency, none of this was supposed to happen. There was a much cleverer and more lucrative scenario where Trump and Farage could shout “Treason” and “Fraud” after they lost...and go on to nice, comfortable careers on Fox News. Even now, nobody leading the Brexit campaign in 2016 or the shambolic sham negotiations over the divorce that have been going on in a pretendy kind of way for the last year or so is acting like any of this is actually real. I think that from the perspective of the helpless and futile periphery (to which status the 2014 vote condemned Scotland as a political entity) of a process that is quite so surreal, “hesitation” is not only natural as a political strategy, it is unavoidable.  In an era of Red Lines being invisibly drawn all over the place, the Red Line that the Scottish Government have drawn around the transfer of powers and the principle of the Single Market make exactly as much symbolic sense as anything else going on.

But here and in Wesminster, a sense of unreality prevails.  The Scottish Government are trying to finesse a rider to a UK Deal with the EU that still doesn’t feel as if it is really going to happen.  In these circumstances, to try to summon back into being some nostalgic reboot of a previous epoch in the shape of “IndyRef2” seems chronologically inept as well as politically dubious. There is no sense in the air that anyone beyond the Faithful are remotely interested in that wish attempting to become real.

“But if we wait till after Brexit happens, it will be too late!” comes the anguished cry.  To which I can only respond, “It IS too late. The vote in 2014 was a vote to put the decision out of our hands.” The helpless rage this makes us feel is quite real.

Because undeneath the layers of unreality with which the Brexit Slippage is encircled, still feeling like an “if” rather than a “when”, something real is nonetheless happening.  The EU are responding to reality rather than the vague and impossible wish list which is still the only available (and quite hopeless) articulation of what Brexit might look like from the UK point of view - the picking of cherries from the cake that the unicorns are baking somewhere in Empire 2.0 – by producing legal documents for the divorce.  “You told us you are leaving, “ they say. “So sign here.” And Westminster howls with outrage that the Eurocrats would dare to introduce anything so vulgar as “consequences” to an entirely imaginary decision - a decision that they simultaneously insist is “sacred” and must be “respected.”

The very use of terms such as “respect” and “democracy” is a dead giveaway, perhaps, that none of this, as with Trump’s Tweets, is meant to be taken literally, that nothing is real. In such a context, there is nothing to be done specifically in Scotland but to defend devolution, which is our local political variant on the theme of “You can have Brexit or reality, but you can’t have both.”

The upshot of all this is that we are condemned, like it or not, to a long game in which we have little practical say.  This was the “Old Normal” of Scottish politics before 2011.  Trying to finesse whatever situation the UK got itself into, for good or ill, for Scotland’s benefit, or at least to minimise harm. Devolution itself started as such a gambit, before the SNP's victory and the blithering response from London made it into something else, maybe...

It was a game played with a mixed record of success and humiliation from Whigs through the Unionists through Labour to the present: a sequence of local hegemonies in constant negotiation with where the power REALLY lay.

Buit these are not those times.  This is not the Old Normal no matter how hard Scottish unionists pretend to believe that it is.  Because one of the things that is REALLY happening with Brexit is the discovery, by the English, of what the limitations of “Independence” are in the 21^st Century.  And our corresponding future discovery, perhaps, that power doesn't really lie where we thought it did.  That the very nature of power is changing.  That the very meanings of "Nation" and "Independence" are in flux.

The crashing disappointment of Brexit both now and in that future, for the English, is something of which those of us who still perversely cling to the expectation of serious constitutional change somewhere in Scotland’s near if not foreseeable future must most carefully attend. The "moment" is going to change again...in a way that is as hard to see into now as it was in say, 2008, to foresee a Scottish Independence referendum getting pretty close to a Yes vote in 2014.

My guess, for what it’s worth, about the NEXT few years, is that there is no avoiding the realities of Brexit, despite the concerted efforts of Corbyn on one side and May on the other to clamp their hands over their eyes as they walk us off the cliff. My second guess is that we will have another UK General Election which will elect one more UK government to try to “make a go of it” no matter what “it” turns out to be.  And that meaningful constitutional change, a decisive transfer of sovereignty from London to Edinburgh, which may or may not be called “Independence” will happen as part of the recovery from this catastrophe, and not, as we hoped, as Nicola Sturgeon hoped, in its anticipation. 

In short, I think that we are going to have to wait for the wave, for the reality, AFTER this one.  And that it is quite impossible to anticipate exactly what that moment will look like.  My hope is that that when that time comes, it will be ALL of the historic nations who are asking themselves questions about what "nationhood" might mean in the future...and that the answer will involve as few torchlit parades and as little broken glass as possible. but which will nonetheless be as near as that 19^th century concept comes to meaning what we think it does in the here and now…

In short, that all this will come, if it does, will not come as part of the UK’s exit from the EU in 2021, but as part of the process of getting back in somewhere around 2028. And it will seem as natural as did the referendum to establish the Parliament in in Edinburgh in 1997 that the UK will be reconfigured.  As natural as rain. There will be people on the fundamentalist wing of Scottish Nationalism who will complain that it’s not the Real Thing.  But as with Brexit, one of the things we have learned in the New Normal is that the “Real Thing” doesn’t exist.

This is a counsel of hope , by the way, not of despair.  The Break Up of Britain is coming closer faster than anyone could have anticipated on September 19^th 2014, let alone after the 2017 election.  But it will not look like the past.  It will not look like yesterday’s dream no matter how fervently some of us might wish. It will look like something wholly new, something that is already happening in Scotland, and Ireland…and London, actually. Reinventing nationhood is one of the real things that is happening to all of us. Brexit is an attempt to use nostalgia and hatred as a template for that change. We can do better.  We already have.  We may be restricted to holding action for the moment…the 2014 vote saw to that…but change is underway. It is up to us to be inventive as we go through it, and to insist on a principle of Scottish Popular Sovereignty as a rock to cling to.

Whatever else the vote in 2014 meant, it established that our future, in the long term is up to us, even as it condemned us to a present tense of helplessness and apparent stasis.  The chance will come again, but it won’t look like any of us think it will.  Prepare for fancy footwork. Reality is bound to make a comeback sooner or later.

Janis Joplin is Seventy Five

Janis Joplin would have been seventy five years old on Friday. It seems impossible to think of her as ever being that old.  It also seems impossible that all this time later, she would still have been that young, that all that was effectively only yesterday. She died, as everybody knows, as the great wave of “the sixties” broke, leaving the debris of those whose vulnerability as well as talent seemed to define that still extraordinary era. 

Even at the time, there was something of an air of ritual inevitability about it. First there was Jimi…then a few weeks later there was Janis…then Jim Morrison a few months after that. All damaged, all publically bearing their wounds to the hungry world, all burning out with a rapidity contiguous with the brightness of that burning. All 27, of course, famously, and all, too, in the process of renegotiating the congruence of personal, cultural and world history that focussed on their unready persons, and devoured them raw.

In Janis’s case, there was never anything private about what was happening to her.  Heart on her sleeve wasn’t in it. The whole basis of her sudden fame had lain in what she had represented as female, freaky and young.  Bewildered hurt was what she did, it was her schtick. In the way she sang, tearing at herself to find and display her damage, in her rambling but poetically focussed monologues in between songs on stage, in her alternately reckless and needy personal relationships, at any time and place, Janis Joplin would have been a troubled soul, dangerous to know, or know too well. But it took a very particular time and place to take her out of the provincial, hip coffee bars of Austin, Texas, and make her personal pain into the global cultural commodity that it was…and still is.

What happened, basically, upon the discovery by corporate America that there was money to be made out of “rebellion”, was that the outcasts and losers…they self-identified as freaks…who have always and will always be on the failed fringes of home owning consumerism, were handed guitars and money and the very best of them conquered the world.  Whenever you watch film of them, something like the Band’s great, elegiac concert movie, The Last Waltz, for example, you find yourself thinking, “would any one of these funny looking fuck ups have been signed to a record label at any other time in history?” The answer is probably “no.”  It was a particular moment of cultural dislocation combined with economic expansion that brought these culturally dislocated people into the economic mainstream.  For a giddy year or two, in their early and mid-twenties, still children, really, with the Beatles at the top of the pyramid, these glorious inmates had the run of the asylum…and produced what are still some of the most arresting and brilliant “moments” in the history of popular culture.

The version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” on Janis’s “breakthrough” album with big Brother and the Holding Company is one of the musical highlights of the century for me, never mind of the decade.  A voice breaking into chords over Sam Houston’s visceral, tearing guitar, reinventing the personal in the appropriation of a black woman’s blues by a young white woman that, for me anyway, transcends a later era’s cross-cultural queasiness through the sheer force of that individual witness. It couldn’t have happened before the moment that it did happen.  And it sure as hell couldn’t have happened afterwards.

The dumb accidental tragedy of her death, which is brought to mind by thinking of her as alive today - a cackling, life affirming firebrand of a certain age, on her fourth marriage to a younger guy with a hell of a stock of memories and who can tell what other achievements - is that like all the icons born in the first half of the forties who burned brightly in the sixties, she was in the process of re-negotiating her own life.  They were all doing it, that whole generation who suddenly found themselves nearer to thirty than twenty…

Some reinvented themselves as corporations in their own right, some found a niche in the rather quieter, less dangerous world of jazz or country rock (Janis was heading in that direction). But every change, as in the case of the Beatles, had a price of breaking something.  Perhaps it was easier if you in a group, that you had to break up the gang…or turn it into a brand… in order to survive into adulthood.

And maybe somewhere in there is where we find the real link between members of the 27 club. Not so much in their numerology as in their singularity, their isolation. Janis changed bands three times in three studio albums, but it is in her unaccompanied “Mercedes Benz” song that she most wistfully yet definitively sang to us of her plight. Unable to fit in with what she had been, and with her very existence defined by her being estranged from herself, she called herself and her last Album by the name of a black prostitute, , “Pearl.” 

That her she destroyed herself just at a time when she had put the worst of her self-destructiveness behind her, and that her lonely death on a hotel room floor is so synonymous with her very real achievements as a musician is every bit as much our tragedy as much as it is hers. It would have been better for all of us if that remarkable person still lived on, rather than what we do have left of her…the comparatively cheap currency of a legend. 

A Lesson from History

By any measure, the Battle of Britain stands with the October revolution as among the most historically decisive few weeks of the 20^th Century. Little wonder its spirit is evoked so often in our national mythology  and popular culture.  It really was, bu any reasonable measure, “Our Finest Hour.”

As a playwright I try very hard to look at historical stories in the present tense, as if we didn’t know how it was going to come out.  Because that’s what it must have been like at the time.  And in the late summer of 1940, what had happened in the past year, from a British point of view, was not going to fill you with confidence.  

True, the Chamberlain Government, which would have almost certainly have made a deal with Nazi Germany rather than fight on alone, had been replaced by Churchill leading an unlikely coalition (still forming) consisting mainly of the Labour Party and a few Tory rebels. The most dangerous potential Quislings had either been interned, like Mosely and the Tory MP for Peebles, Colonel Ramsey…while other less immediately dangerous but untrustworthy individuals, including the ex King, were being put out of harm’s way.  True, the British Army and a good chunk of the French had escaped from capture and death at Dunkirk…but even a successful retreat is still a retreat.  

To the shock of the world and the Germans…and the French…Churchill had recently ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Oran …with the loss of 1500 French lives…partly to keep the ships from being added to the German navy, but also to show the Germans…and the Americans, crucially, that he wasn’t going to mess about, that he could be as big a criminal as he had to be to win. At this point, the Germans were forced into serious preparation for invasion of Great Britain…the prerequisite of which was, of course, air superiority, without which an invasion across the Channel was unthinkable. (As it was in 1944.) 

So the RAF had to be bombed and blown out of the war. 

Had we lost the Battle of Britain, then, the Germans would almost certainly have invaded the South of England before the bad weather came in October 1940…Roosevelt would likely have lost the Presidential election in November.  And the King...or his older brother... would have shaken hands with Hitler on the balcony of Buckingham palace. The Americans could never have supplied the Russians when the Nazis inevitably turned on them and the Americans would have had no forward base in Europe from which to launch the invasions of North Africa, Italy and France.

A close run thing.  At the time, entirely unpredictable 

So far, excepting with a few minor details of interpretation, I imagine I’d be in agreement with Boris Johnson and William Rees Mogg…at least in the summary of what was at stake when “we” took to the skies over the South East of England to take on the Luftwaffe in August and September 1940.  Where we might differ is in recalling the details of who “we” were…who WERE the “few” to whom so much was and is still owed by so many.

Nearly three thousand pilots – fought in the Battle of Britain. Nearly 600 of them, 20%, were not born in Britain. Around 300 came from the Commonwealth…Canada, New Zealand, Australia…Jamaica, India… Nearly 300, however, came from future EU countries. France, Belgium, Ireland…and from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The most "kills" by any Squadron during the fighting was 201...by 303 Squadron. Who were ALL Polish... 

They don't just do kitchens, you know.

So the only REASONABLE conclusion from the Battle of Britain...and of the fact that 20% of the few weren't British...and that 10% of them, including the single most effective group of them...were from Europe... is that it was a jolly good thing they were here.  And that Britain was saved from Nazi Invasion in 1940 not by standing alone, but by welcoming immigrants...

Sometimes history doesn’t quite teach the lessons that everybody thinks it does.

Speak for England, Jacob!

On September 2^nd 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down in the House of Commons, his speech having delivered distinctly equivocal support for Poland, invaded the day before by the Nazis, despite all the previous promises of solidarity, Arthur Greenwood was rising to his feet to reply for Labour when an angry voice came from the Tory Government backbenches, and shouted possibly the most famous and most spine tingling set of four words uttered in that Chamber during the Twentieth Century : “Speak for England, Arthur!”

The words were spoken by Leo Amery, an anti-appeasement Tory MP in a moment of angry shame that, in his judgement, his Conservative and Unionist colleagues were preparing to bow the knee to the Nazis, that the terror of another war with Germany was about to push The United Kingdom into further acquiescence in the Nazi take over of central Europe that had begun in earnest with the unopposed invasion of Czechoslovakia in March that year. Those words were spine tingling for a reason not usually part of the story we tell ourselves about Our Finest Hour…that right from Munich in 1938 until the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, it was by no means a settled certainty that the hour in question would have been anything other than one of shame, betrayal and collaboration.  It was, as the Duke of Wellington observed on another European occasion, "a close run thing."

I’m thinking of this pivotal moment in our national history (as the UK of GB and NI) partly because I am dead certain that Leo Amery’s defiance of a weak and vacillating Tory Prime Minister is not ever far from the thoughts of Jacob Rees-Mogg as he characteristically - and not without the courage of his own convictions - identifies so clearly what is at stake as we go into “Phase Two” of the Brexit negotiations.  Jacob Rees Mogg, in his heart of hearts, knows he is speaking for England, and that what is at stake is what “England” and the “UK”…mean. 

This second stage of talks with the EU will focus on the so called “transition” after the UK putatively leaves at the end of March 2019.  The Chancellor , Phillip Hammond, confirmed yesterday that during this period, the UK will follow EU Trade Rules…even though it will no longer have any say as to what those rules are. Rees Mogg, and the rest of the “Conviction Brexiteers”…still a minority in the Tory party in the Commons, if not in the country, are horrified.  Rees Mogg has described this transition status as being equivalent to the UK being a “colony” of the EU. (Able and highly educated though he is, irony seems to be entirely lost on this scion of a newspaper dynasty and the 18^th Century.) 

Mildly absurd though the rhetoric is, it does point us to the beating heart of what Brexit means to its advocates, both consciously and unconsciously: The Independence of England.  If that Independence is sacrificed to expediency and pacifying the Irish, why then, Old England really is Done…as the song nearly says at the beginning of Dad’s Army.

When Amery used the word “England” in 1940, he meant Britain, of course.  An England equivalent to Britain…and Britain a Greater England… was as natural for him as it was for George Orwell, who in his own defining statement on the war in 1940 had to add a rather irritated footnote to the effect that Scottish, Welsh or Irish readers might object to the lumping together of the four nations under the name of one of them , but that he thought they were being a bit silly about it. Thing is, that in 1940, and for some considerable time afterwards, most Scots would have agreed with him that the differences between us added to our cultural richness and “diversity” (to use a later term) but were of no real political account.  This was and remains the opinion of those who campaigned most coherently for a No vote in 2014.

 What has changed in the last couple of weeks, I believe quite by accident, is that Ireland’s refusal to contemplate a hard border with the North, and crucially, that refusal being comprehensibly and unequivocally backed by the 27 countries of what we will need to get used to calling the rEU, combined with the risible mixture of incompetence and arrogance that somehow persuaded the Tories that the DUP would ever contemplate a functioning border between Holy Protestant Ulster and the Motherland, has catapulted us into UK wide “Soft Brexit” territory quite without plan or expectation…to the manifest relief of the Remainer majority on the Government benches.

Ireland has saved England from itself.  I always thought that was our job!

Anyway, Farage is quite openly spitting out his own teeth with rage, while in rather more civilised tones, Rees Mogg, on Newsnight last night, drew the battle lines for the next stage in the Tory Civil War that has landed us all here in the first place.

“We cannot be a colony of the European Union for two years from 2019 to 2021, accepting new laws that are made without any say-so of the British people, Parliament or Government,” Jacob Rees Mogg said on Newsnight last night. “That is not leaving the European Union, that is being a vassal state of the European Union, and I would be very surprised if that were Government policy.”

With Rees Mogg, as with Enoch Powell before him in the story of the break Up of Britain, the choice of language is fascinating. But I want to concentrate on the word “we.” 

 “We” are “the people”…to coin a phrase. And the people are being betrayed and hoodwinked by what Nigel Farage, despite more than twenty years salary and a fat pension on its way from the European Parliament, calls “professional politicians”  - involved in a conspiracy against the nation.

But that nation is not the place Leo Amery wanted Arthur Greenwood to speak for in 1940, it is not not the place with a Global Empire that decided to create the Welfare State in a moment of nation defining solidarity when the Labour Party, fired with a sense of British National certainty and purpose it has not had before or since, (despite “White heat” in the Sixties and “Cool Brittainia” in the 90s) swept to popular and political power in 1945. That Vision of Britain held itself together while begging to join the EU from the late fifties till the early seventies when it finally succeeded. But one part of that Britain was never comfortable with subsuming itself into the greater whole, was never comfortable with the diminution of its “place in the world”, clinging onto past greatness through folk memories of the 1940s as much as to its seat on the UN Security Council and a “special relationship“ with an increasingly bemused and indifferent United States - ALL, of course, products of that war and it's victorious but complicated conclusion. The complications of that Victory came crushingly home to the UK (and France) in Egypt just ten years after that part in a World War that came out more or less right.. I believe that "Brexit in 2016" will have the same resonance for future historians as the words “Suez in 196” do now…as a self inflicted slap in the face to British Exceptionalism based on folk memory more than current reality. And will stand with the same symbolic certainty for the difficult acquisition of self-knowledge.

Part of this learning curve is that you cannot simply pretend that the other three nations of the UK don’t exist, or rather, that they only exist when they’re being “silly” and annoying. The debacle over the Irish border saw to that. But to KEEP Northern Ireland and maybe Scotland and Wales and, crucially, LONDON, within that Greater England…then England will  have to KEEP the Single Market and the Customs Union and quite possibly Free Movement as well.  (Ask the 27...you can't have the first two without the third) 

So to keep the Kingdom United, England can’t leave the EU, in any terms that Rees Mogg and his like would accept, at all. England can’t leave the EU without leaving the UK as well.

As has been observed before, England cannot abide being “just another country in Europe.” “We”…in the Rees-Mogg sense of “we”…stood alone and unique in 1940. What Rees Mogg and his fellow Brexiteers insist upon is that once more “we” can stand alone despite the traitors and equivocators of appeasement among us. But “we”, in my view, isn’t what it used to be. “We” no longer convincingly mean the same “us.”  For example, I don’t think that even Unionist Scotland, here and now, has a problem with being “just another country.”  In fact, in Nationalist Scotland, I think a considerable number of us rather aspire to being “just another country.”

But we learned in 2014 that Breaking Up Britain was too big a job for the hesitant, equivocal Scots.  Breaking Up Britain was always a job for the English  - who went ahead with Brexit without, really, a second thought....  This despite the warnings (not entirely delivered with conviction, admittedly) that a Brexit vote in 2016 was a decisive step along that road. 

But now, as we move into the next phase of the divorce, the question of English Independence that was implicit in 2016 (Farage didn’t use the word till the next morning) is going to be explicit as the “transition” (to what?) is negotiated not just in Brussels, but in the Cabinet room, the pubs and the Parliament of England.

If Rees Mogg inter alia do decide to “speak for England” in the way I describe (though they will still call England “Britain”)…and insist that a hard, clean break with Europe is what “the people” voted for in June 2016…they will likely bring down their own government, of course.  But they will also, I think, do something else of rather more historic significance.  They will declare that the English Independence they believe in, is not only a “liberation” from the EU, and from its daily insult to English Exceptionalism. Brexit is also, in effect, an English Declaration of Independence from the UK.  

Are they really ready for that?  Because the light will dawn in the course of 2018, that Breaking Up Britain is the price of a meaningful Brexit. 

Fasten your seat-belts and pass the popcorn.

Speech During Wartime

What this is about, after the 48 Hour news rumble which I'm sure Trump loves, is the degradation of public speech. Of the defeat of evidence by noise.

Trump and his people are inviting us not to care about whether a Britain First video is "real" or not because Trump retweeting it "elevates the conversation." This elevation is clearly not intended in any sense that Jane Austen or Henry James might have recognised elevated dialogue. No. What Sarah Huckabee means by "elevates" is "make louder." In Trump world, in what is increasingly "our world," all that matters is that an opinion be loud. That it garner re-tweets and follows. Britain First understand this principle of the new media, which is dragging the old media along behind it like your "other" Grandad, the one who isn't the boorish, embarrassing one who rants about women and immigrants and Muslims over Christmas dinner. Nice Grandad goes along with the distasteful crudity of the boor who carves the roast simply because he no longer has the conviction or energy to tell the man to shut up.

Why does the degradation of public speech matter? What is wrong with the loudest voice being the most important? With there being no agreed standards of ,if not "truth" then at least ethics in what people in positions of power carelessly chuck onto social media because it gives them a warm feeling in their tummy as their own worst, weakest most bigoted instincts are confirmed? Or indeed offers the opportunity to sneer loftily at the idiots on Twitter, one of whom happens to be Dipstick In Chief? Isn't it all just a bit of fun, reduced like all consumed news product to titillation at one level or another? Does it really matter if Rupert Murdoch was right all along? That the most cynical, bleakest view of all human conduct, elite or not, turns out to be right?

What matters to me, I think, most...is that The Triumph of Energy that Trump represents is also the Death of Hope. The triumph of prejudice over evidence, of the triumph of loudness over intellectual process is the Triumph of the Will over Reality. Reality itself gets bent out of shape so that stuff which was unthinkable a year ago is normal times now. God knows about five years from now when he's in his second term.

It isn't just Trump. It's the making of the machinery of government into his echo chamber. The reduction of government itself into loud, cheap lie machine to protect the hatreds and stupidity of a cheap crook. That a White House staff would calmly dismiss the promotion of a Neo-Nazi Hate Group as "elevating the conversation" is more than absurd: much more dangerously, it is what you have come to expect. As each line of decency is crossed, as each decline and fall of what it is publically possible for the President to say and retweet is crossed and normalised, the more we really are, as a civilization, handing over our future to the successors of the Trumps and Farages simply because they seem to have more get up and go than we do.

In the same way, cherished liberal elitist notions of "Balance" - that the media can offer a neutral platform for the debate of ideas within a commonly agreed window of responsible disagreement - are blown out of the water when you interpret this to mean giving equal time to climate change deniers and fascists on an equal footing with actual scientists and ...well, let's just say Nicola Sturgeon, or Vince Cable, or Hillary Clinton. Whatever complications one may have about any or all of these, surely we can agree to recognise that there is a qualitative difference between them and Nigel Farage and Donald Trump? "But what can we do?" bleat the newsminders. "We can't be Reithean Policemen of the Public Good anymore! This is what the democracy has chosen, it is what the new media has thrown up, this is what the market wants!"

The apparent energy of the faux authentic...of the "good bloke in the pub" Nigel Farage, and of the "No nonsense Man's Man" Donald Trump seems to just floor the equivocating, desiccated toffs who have lost all conviction about their role as "keepers of standards." Even the fact that I am putting so much of this little lament into inverted commas tells me that I too am hidebound by deadened language, crippled by quotation, unsuited by my own civilised, pussy footing irony to properly face of the enemy. It feels like dereliction of duty even to try to explore an idea rather than reach for a baseball bat.

Of course, one reaches for past parallels. One is gaining from the present debacle a tremendous insight as to what the 1930s must have felt like at the time as we drifted in apparent hopelessness towards war and genocide. But what requires no retrospection or gazing into a crystal ball is the observation that right here and now we are in real trouble. That if we continue to hand over the field of public speech to the boors and thugs then maybe will get the future Trump, the Future Farage that such equivocation deserves. Maybe it really is time to finally abandon ideas like "balance" and "truth" rather than simply imprison them in quotes. We need a new set of weapons to take these people on. Right now it feels like life during wartime. And only one side is suited up.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/30/trump-tweet-anti-muslim-far-right-white-house