The Embers

10th October 2023

British politics has been overshadowed this week by news of the atrocities committed by Hamas in its attack into Israel. Peter Ramsay reflects here on the responses from British commentators, too many of which fall into one or other of ‘two poisonous half truths’.

Below Ollie Richardson takes a look at other recent news:

Down with the Labour Party

Sir Keir Starmer gets a lot of stick for being a little cautious, circumspect, insincere, spineless, U-turning, a ruthless chameleon, giving Labour a well-deserved reputation for shiftiness. Not fair, I say. Starmer has been quite clear and consistent on the most important issue.

He is happy to preside over the void at the centre of Britain’s hollowed-out national democracy, not to challenge it. Starmer’s Labour Party is intensely relaxed about seeking authority by taking part in inter-governmental networking and military co-operation, bureaucratic and business convergence, from the blessing of bankers, not the democratic sovereign authority of representing the mobilized interests of a majority of British citizens.
Maybe Sir Keir will surprise us this week at the Labour conference and reveal proposals for reforms in the spirit of national sovereignty and democratic-self government that could begin to tackle the UK’s political void: proportional representation, an end to business funding for parties, Brexit from NATO. But I would not bet on it. The Labour Party is a creature of the void.

In Scotland: the Brexit disaster has led to… a decline in secessionism and a Labour revival?

In Scotland, Labour’s hopes have been raised after it doubled its number of Scottish MPs by winning a by-election on the outskirts of Glasgow, thanks to a bigger-than-expected swing from the SNP.

A pro-Union party on the rise in Scotland would suggest that Remain warnings that Brexit could lead to a speedy Scottish secession may have been overstated. There is very little to celebrate in a Labour victory itself, but success in Scotland would show that it is far from impossible for Scotland to overcome secessionism – the chief manifestation there of the British political void.

Down with the Conservative Party

Meanwhile, the Tories have been indulging in one of the political class’s favourite electoral strategies lately: driving down political horizons and watering down or simply dumping commitments to voters. The ‘northern leg’ of HS2 to Manchester now joins ending private schools’ status as charities, ‘Net Zero’ targets, £28 billion a year for ‘green’ investment, scrapping university tuition fees, nationalizing public services other than the railways, increasing tax on the top 5% of earners, overhauling Universal Credit…

Lies, damned lies, and the Remain campaign

It is cold consolation for those of us who took Remain predictions to heart and reverted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in anticipation of economic apocalypse outside the EU. But the narrative that Brexit Britain’s economy has been trailing EU peers’ suffered a blow from a major revision to economic figures announced in September and now incorporated into the latest official quarterly release on UK gross domestic product (GDP). According to the revised figures, the UK’s post-lockdown recovery has been stronger than Germany’s, roughly matching France’s.

Wrong about the Right

Brexit Britain ‘hasn’t got a hard right to reckon with’, noticed a FT columnist. It currently looks like ‘Europe’s haven of moderation’, and thanks in part to Brexit.

Readers may note that some of the column’s better parts echo a New Statesman piece from July this year by The Northern Star’s very own Philip Cunliffe. Curiously, the FT failed to note that this situation is a serious reversal of Remainers’ predictions. As Dr Cunliffe put it: ‘After Brexit, Britain was supposed to float adrift of our liberal and progressive neighbours, as we became a gloomy island buffeted by storms of imperial nostalgia, xenophobia and nativism … leading us to “Weimar Britain”.’

There was some notable Right-populist wind at the Tory conference, however. Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s latest emission (aiming to please the small audience of right-wing activists she hopes may back her for party leader) was a ‘hurricane’ of migration, threatening western beach parasols.

But there are signs that a Project Fear about a ‘migration crisis’ is today a cause to justifying closer co-operation with the increasingly Right-populist EU. A couple of days later, on Thursday, the Prime Minister produced a joint article with his Right-populist Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni on the ‘European crisis’ of migration, ahead of a round-table on the subject organized for the European Political Community summit in Granada.

The death of former Italian president and veteran Stalinist Giorgio Napolitano saw a slip of the mask at The Guardian, where a columnist eulogised:

His achievements were not small. In 2011, he oversaw the departure of Silvio Berlusconi from the prime ministership. … A lesser public figure might not have achieved these things. “Italy was certainly fortunate to be guided in difficult times, among obstacles of all kinds, by a man like that,” commented no less a witness than the late Pope Benedict.

He failed to clarify that ‘the departure of Silvio Berlusconi from the prime ministership’, overseen by the late Signor Napolitano in 2011, consisted of the executive stepping in to replace an elected head of government with an unelected former EU commissioner to impose unpopular austerity policies on the Italian people.

The Northern Star in other publications

‘A military strategy that was serious about restoring Ukrainian sovereignty would not have wasted so much Ukrainian manpower on pointless assaults.’

In the New Statesman, Philip Cunliffe argued that Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive does not seem justified in terms of reasonable military objectives on the ground or a plausible chance of restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty. Instead it seems to have been waged, as though a real life-and-death ‘simulation’ of a military operation, crucially for its impact on an audience very far from the front: Ukraine’s NATO backers.

‘the relish with which some commentators seem to discuss accusations of criminal wrongdoing is a marker of a political culture that is instinctively repressive and simultaneously unserious.’

Peter Ramsay wrote in UnHerd on the presumption of innocence in law and in public opinion:

‘the same considerations that lead the state to maintain the legal rule should lead ordinary citizens to be very cautious about public statements concerning the guilt of a person accused of wrongdoing.’

Philip Cunliffe argued in UnHerd that ‘the end of Europe’s postmodern empire is now in sight’ as the bonds holding the EU together may be loosening. Recommendations in a recent expert report for multi-tiered EU membership could become more than recommendations thanks to ‘the geopolitical bind that the EU now finds itself in’.

‘the idea of “associate membership” of the Union is more threatening to its coherence than any populist demagogue’

Meanwhile in EUtopia…

The belief that Brexit Britain is somehow uniquely troubled by political, social and economic problems should not survive a glance over a few headlines from the EU member-states.

The Mediterranean graveyard: ‘The Mediterranean Sea has become a cemetery for children and their futures’, according to UNICEF. The organization put the number of people who have died or disappeared trying to cross the central Mediterranean between June and August this year at 990 or more, three times the number from the same period last year.

Germany’s deindustrialization continued. The quarterly joint economic forecast by economics institutes revised their forecast for German GDP in 2023 sharply down by 0.9 of a percentage point to a 0.6% contraction for the year. Germany’s construction sector continued to deteriorate in September, according to a regular survey of managers, ‘sinking deeper into the quicksand’, according to an economist. A business survey reported that Germany’s chemical industry deteriorated in September; ‘Bright spots were essentially non-existent in September. Germany’s chemical industry is experiencing a severe crisis’, commented an industry expert.
Germany’s Right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gained its best ever result in a western German state, coming second in an election in the state of Hesse, according to exit polls

Italy, Europe’s second-largest manufacturing power, saw its manufacturing sector deteriorate for the sixth month running, according to a regular survey of managers.
Sweden’s government (which enjoys support from the Right-populist Sweden Democrats) is deploying military support to the police, together with drones and surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, in response to gang violence.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria imposed temporary controls on their borders with fellow member-state Slovakia due to tension over migration from the east. In total, one-third of the members of the free movement Schengen Area have now imposed border controls, the FT reported.

And finally, euphemism of the fortnight: being ‘part of the international conversation’;
e.g., ‘Tony Blair … ensured Britain was part of the international conversation, committing troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan’
Kitty Donaldson & Alex Wickham, ‘Has Britain Finally Found Tony Blair’s True Heir?’, Bloomberg, 27 September 2023.

The Embers, 10th October 2023

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