The Embers

23 January 2024

Give Thermonuclear World War a Chance

Russia’s conspicuous failure to make much westward progress through Ukraine appears not to have discouraged European leaders who are keen to stoke war fever and fear of ‘barbarians at the gates’ among their own citizens.

In aspiring NATO member Sweden, a minister declared ‘there could be war in Sweden’, and the head of the armed forces told Swedes they must ‘prepare mentally for war’, leading to an increase in calls to a children’s helpline.

The press leapt on the suggestion by a Dutch admiral that war with Russia may come within 20 years and that ‘We need public and private actors to change their mindset’. The German defence minister narrowed down the Russian assault on NATO to within five to eight years, Estonia’s prime minister puts it at three to five years, while the head of Poland’s National Security Bureau reckons that we only have three.

Our own Defence Secretary recently gave a speech about ‘Moving from a post-war to a pre-war world’ as the government sends 16,000 British soldiers to Eastern Europe for the largest Nato military exercise since the Cold War. Unelected Remainer baron Lord Cameron, at a Davos breakfast meeting, compared the situation in Europe to the 1930s and – of course – equated scepticism about the desirability of a third world war with ‘appeasement’. A more reasonable perspective on history and Britain’s national interest may be unlikely to come in with Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who recently described Putin as representing a ‘new form of fascism’ – although at least this means he is not as bad as Brexiteers, who are, of course, worse than the Nazis.

Meanwhile in EUtopia…

Germany: There is a campaign to ban the country’s second most popular party after it emerged that members had discussed mass deportations at a meeting.

Germany’s non-EU exports dropped 9.2% during 2023, though they rose by 19.7% to the UK, according to the Federal Statistics Office.

The Federation of German Industry forecast national economic growth of 0.3% for 2024; ‘Germany’s economy is at a standstill’, said its president. ‘Compared to most other industrialised countries, our country is falling further behind.’

Italy: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has declined to address controversy around footage of large numbers of Italians giving fascist salutes outside the Rome headquarters of one of her party’s predecessor organisations.

21 December 2023

Lockdown lowdown

A think-tank report on poverty in the UK described lockdown as ‘the dynamite that blew … open’ the ‘yawning gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom’. According to the report, during lockdown mental ill-health increased from one in nine young people to one in six, severe school absence increased by 134 per cent, calls to one domestic abuse helpline increased by 700 per cent, and households became homeless at a rate of one every three minutes.

Meanwhile in EUtopia…

Even the most maniacal of Remainiacs must by now be wondering whether the EU is the centre-left paradise they told us it was.

The bloc’s long-standing disregard for the lives of non-European migrants is now increasingly matched by overtly right-wing populist politics. The desire to act tough on migration to appeal to the right is creating common ground between British and EU governments, like that enjoyed by Rishi Sunak with EU-NATO pillar Giorgia Meloni at an Italian right-wing political festival last weekend.

As the European right got together, 61 migrants were reported drowned in the Mediterranean, apparently after Italian authorities ordered a charity rescue ship to leave the area. The survivors were taken to a Libyan detention centre.

The Guardian reported on the unmarked migrant graves along the EU’s external borders. Over a thousand of the people killed at the EU’s borders this year were buried unidentified.

Also at Meloni’s right-wing political festival was the leader of Spain’s Vox party (third largest in Spain’s equivalent of the House of Commons) who recently called for the Socialist prime minister to be strung up/hung by his feet (‘colgar de los pies’).

In Germany, the AfD just won its first city mayoral election while the Bundesbank revised down its forecast for economic growth next year to 0.4% from 1.2% and an influential Business Climate Index took a tumble.

However there was some better news for ardent authoritarian liberals as the EU’s new censorship machine swung into action against Elon Musk and his X platform’s failure to block views that Commission bureaucrats do not approve of.

10 November 2023

Just when Keir Smarmer might have begun to think that he could ride a low turnout to electoral victory, the world’s most intractable conflict has emerged from the Void to wreck his plans. The Labour leadership’s idea was to bore its way into government by saying as little as possible. But now that strategy may not survive the reappearance of Israel-Palestine.

The stand taken by an almost entirely impotent opposition party in a mid-sized European nation on a conflict quite distant from any reasonable practical view of its national interest may be enough to tear the party from its remaining base of active support in the population – British Muslims and left-ish activists for whom this distant conflict is an existential commitment. And to provoke conflict from the bottom to the top of the party itself.

Admittedly, poor Sir Keir Hardly did inflame the issue rather by blundering a little close to the position of publicly implying support for collective punishment. (But then who among us can say they have not inadvertently backed a category of war crime at one time or another?) However his backing for Israel’s right to self-defence is part of his overall technocratic strategy aiming to signal ‘credibility’ both on the international stage and to an abstract atomized voter. It is a strategy that goes beyond merely distancing Labour from Corbynista Left-populism, and beyond the entirely admirable goals of stamping out anti-semitism and recognising the sovereignty of the Israeli nation.

Starmer’s policy not only deliberately obfuscates the government of Israel’s longstanding policy of violent repression against its Palestinian subjects but also obscures the way that policy undermines Israel’s own aspirations to sovereignty. In the process he has been careful to remind the world of the UK’s own subservience to US interests by trailing behind Biden’s call for a ‘humanitarian pause’. But it looks like New Labour 2.0 is already past its sell-by date.

The Northern Star authors elsewhere

‘Perversely, Palestinian solidarity cast in humanitarian terms is strengthening the likelihood that Palestinian freedom will be eclipsed for the foreseeable future.’

Over at UnHerd, Philip Cunliffe looked beyond the current tensions between Israel and the UN to note that ‘historic tendencies to international oversight in the region are being reinforced by the dynamics of the current conflict.’ The Palestinian solidarity movement’s humanitarian focus and the Israeli government’s inability to accept responsibility for Gaza suggest an increasing possibility of the territory becoming subject to ‘some kind of UN-approved international protectorate’.

In other news

Failing politician Rishi Sunak made a reach for some global technocratic authority, as failing politicians are wont to do. But seeking authority in the international landscape without having first secured it at home is practically asking to be upstaged by bigger international players. The prime minister embarrassing himself acting as a fawning participant in an oddball billionaire’s delusions of intellectual grandeur suggests one eye being kept on his future job prospects as election time grimly approaches.

Brexit Perplexity, or A-Voiding the Issue

Brexit has exposed the void where national democratic politics should be. And the void leaves an awkward silence in public life, the collective interests of citizens are left unformed and unvoiced due to the lack of adequate representative institutions. Commentators, rather than face up to the void, have been trying to fill the silence with speculation about what voters might really want from their Brexit vote:

More state spending

‘the UK voted to leave the EU essentially to become more European – to have more spending on public services’
Stephen Bush, Financial Times

Anti-capitalist culture war

‘Brexit was a vote against this progressive culture of capitalism, with its moral detachment and disrespect for the traditional and the parochial.’
Jonathan Rutherford, Compact

Pro-capitalist culture war

‘The appeal of issues like Brexit, gender and conspiracy is that they elevate cultural divisions over economic ones, while the influence of millionaires and billionaires over our politics is relegated from the conversation.’
Samuel Earle, The Guardian

Quiz: EUtopia or Brexit Britain?

It should be no challenge at all to spot which of these recent news items are from EU member-states and which are from the rainy fascist island of Brexit Britain, given the much-touted night-and-day difference between life inside and outside the EU:

A report found people of African descent reporting increased experience of racial discrimination since 2016. (Answer)
Asylum seekers’ access to benefits is to be restricted to ‘reduce the attractiveness of the welfare state’. (Answer)
The economy failed to grow in the third quarter of 2023. (Answer)
The economy shrank in the third quarter of 2023. (Answer)
A politician from the country’s second-most-popular political party was arrested for possession of Nazi material. (Answer)

News from EUtopia

Italy: Prime Minister Georgia Meloni struck a deal with former (short-lived) Italian colony Albania to host ‘centres’ for ‘processing’ thousands of migrants. Meloni hailed it as ‘a truly European agreement’.
Netherlands: Prime Minister Mark Rutte has hopes of becoming NATO Secretary General following the collapse of his government at home. International institutions continue to play their important role as a welfare safety net for failed national politicians as the EU-NATO doom loop rolls on.
Poland: Donald Tusk is hoping to make a transition back to national elected office after a leading role at the EU, as the recent election results in Poland offer him a chance to form a new coalition government. When it comes to national democracy, however, Tusk’s heart does not seem quite in it: he quickly jetted off to Brussels hoping to gather support and funds from EU bigwigs to pressure Poland’s institutions into appointing him prime minister.

24 October

Ollie Richardson pokes about again in the smouldering ruins of our politics.

The commentariat have been examining every twitch and fart of the Labour Party’s decomposing corpse for any reassuring parallels with New Labour in the run-up to 1997. Even by the standards of Blairite propaganda, it is a show of chutzpah to cast Sir Keir Starmer as the moderate saviour of Labour from electoral humiliation under a 1980s-style ‘Loony Left’. In reality it was Sir Keir himself and his very New Labour anti-Brexit policy that caused that electoral humiliation. Sir Keir’s hands are still dripping with the ink from Labour’s 2019 electoral suicide note: lecturing Red Wall voters about how they had screwed up in 2016 and would need to try again.

By-election in Mid-Voidfordshire

Still, Labour won by-elections in two safe Tory seats on Thursday, thanks in large part to Tory voters deserting the Conservatives. Increasing volatility in party support is a key symptom of the void between rulers and ruled. Both parties’ remaining roots in the population are snapping; as Labour cannot take their Red Wall for granted after 2019, the Tories’ Blue Wall is now crumbling. If the parties’ husks can be cleared away, perhaps genuinely representative democratic structures can have the chance to grow.

‘All we need now is for the voters to ratify the shift in power’

So wrote a Bloomberg columnist, observing the brain-dead shuffle of Britain’s zombie establishment over to the zombie Labour Party, and accidentally displaying admirable honesty about the expected role of the electorate in our post-member-state. Still somewhat shaken by the democratic eruption of the Brexit vote, the establishment looks to Labour as the better bet for managing a continuation of safe, hollow member-state politics.

Lord Sir Keir of Starmer is attracting such glittering gems of the twenty-first century as: a lawyer who used to be married to Boris Johnson, some civil servants, and an ex-Tory PR man (his firm’s motto: ‘Redefining communications to deliver meaningful change’). Panto has higher standards.

‘If Starmer and Sunak were to go to Davos together, Starmer would be the one attracting the crowds’

It is easy to sneer. But Labour has pulled some bigger names too, doing particularly well among international finance capitalists with a history of failed anti-Brexit predictions.

Labour offers hope to non-voters like the US billionaire and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink – someone who could look at failed politician George Osborne and think, ‘there’s a man worth £650,000 a year’. In 2016 Fink was among the sages who predicted a recession to punish the UK for voting for Brexit. He then failed to pop back up again later to accept any responsibility once the figures began to show the UK economy continuing to grow in quarter after quarter following the vote.

At the Labour conference, Rachel Reeves was strangely unashamed to publicise an endorsement from Mark Carney – the whiz appointed by David Cameron and George Osborne to head the Bank of England. In 2016 Carney disregarded the supposed political impartiality of his position to warn the electorate against voting for Brexit by invoking the threat of a recession which, of course, failed to arrive. Unemployment too failed to rise after the Brexit vote – especially his, as his spurious political intervention was met with no especially noticeable accountability.

Donor organs

The Financial Times struggled to disguise tumescence as it described how Labour succeeded in selling out in one day £400,000 of tickets to what sounds like a thrilling corporate event next February.

While mass political participation and party membership have died away, the charade of party politics has been able to continue in the UK thanks in no small part to infusions of resources from corporations and other moneyed elite sources. The corporate funding of political parties should be outlawed in order to force parties to rely for their existence on mass democratic participation.

Scottish Notional Party

The SNP conference suggested further that, for all its talk of independence, it is not serious about popular sovereignty. The party has decided that winning a majority of Scotland’s Commons seats would be a mandate for pressing for another independence referendum, drawing back from aiming for a majority of the Scottish vote. This means that the SNP could lose 13 of its current 43 seats at the next election (out of 59 Scottish seats in the Commons) and claim this as a popular mandate pressing for independence.

Meanwhile in EUtopia…

Our regular look at headlines from the EU member-states, where the complete absence of political, social or economic problems reminds us daily of the folly of Brexit:

Poles polled: To great applause from the technocratic wing of the voidocracy, Poland’s Right-populist government looks beaten following the recent election. Government of this erstwhile bastion of EU Right-populism looks set to be taken over by a coalition led by EU replicant Donald Tusk. However, the out-going Polish government – with its history of causing trouble by butting heads with the EU leadership and recently squabbling with a NATO proxy – may only represent a less-developed form of EU Right-populism. Perhaps now the more advanced Right-populist, like Italy’s Georgia Meloni, is clearer in surrendering overarching loyalty to the EU and NATO, while busying themselves with culture wars within their own satrapy.
Germany: The government cut its forecast for economic growth; it now expects the economy to contract overall in 2023.
Germany: A regular survey of the business climate in the residential construction sector found it at its worst since the survey began in 1991.
France: The government pushed the first part of its budget legislation through the lower chamber of Parliament without a vote
France: A poll suggested that Marine Le Pen’s party is the single most popular ahead of elections to the EU’s ersatz Parliament in June.
Sweden: The second-largest party called for the military to be deployed to the streets of ‘vulnerable areas’ with high immigrant populations.

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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