One thing we'd like to ask about this National Food Strategy
Well, another thing. Much blame is placed upon the consumption of “ultraprocessed” food. The argument then being that we should all be eating unprocessed foods. Or rather, foods that are not processed in a factory, but are processed in the kitchen, at home.
Hmm, well, OK. Who is going to do this?
Or, to put it another way, why are we trying to abolish the washing machine?
As both Hans Rosling and Ha-Joon Chang have been known to point out the washing machine matters. For the former it brought him books, the latter has insisted - and he’s probably right so far at least - that it’s a more important technology than the internet.
Neither are really referring to the machine itself, rather it’s a symbol of all those domestic technologies which have saved that unpaid labour in the household. The very things which have allowed the economic emancipation of women over the past century or so.
The demand now is that the processing in factories must stop. Thus, someone, somewhere, is going to have to be doing it at home. So, who is that going to be?
To put this another way, has Mr. Dimbleby actually thought through the effects of adding another 5 to 10 hours (perhaps a 50 to 100% rise) to the household weekly labour budget? We’re really pretty certain that he hasn’t and also that he should.
Decolonization
There is a current trend by people in education or in our institutions to “decolonize” the culture they work within. It is quite an amorphous project, and it is quite difficult to focus on what the term actually means. One of its exponents put into words what its programme entails.
“Decolonizing the curriculum means, first of all, acknowledging that knowledge is not owned by anyone. It is a cumulative and shared resource that is available to all.”
Does anyone suppose that knowledge is owned by anyone? Most people would probably think that knowledge is already a cumulative resource available to all. People can access it because it is not hidden and restrictive but open to all.
Delving more deeply into what “decolonizing” the culture might entail, we are confronted with the notions that logic, mathematics and physics are “Western,” and have “Western” values and assumptions built into them. To think that these disciplines might be objective and open to all of humankind is thought by some to represent “colonial” thinking. The assumption seems to be that there is a more “inclusive” kind of logic, and a mathematics and physics that do not have to follow the rigour of systematic linear thinking.
It is quite difficult to conceive of a logic that does not follow the rules of logic, or indeed a mathematics in which the numbers and equations do not have to follow the remorseless rules of that discipline. For that matter, it seems unlikely that there can be an alternative physics in which theories do not have to predict and explain, or be tested against the world of our observation.
It could be that “decolonization” simply means declaring that the British empire and all others that preceded or succeeded it were bad. This is a value judgement that could be supported or contested. All empires have involved conquest, but some have been more benign that others. In Roman Britain, for example, the citizens who enjoyed roads, villas, mosaics, clean water and central heating were not, for the most part, invading Roman overlords. They were the British people who had fought against the Romans initially and then became Roman themselves, to enjoy a lifestyle they preferred to the one previously available to them.
The British empire saw its share of conquest and war crimes, but most people would rate these as less atrocious than the mass exterminations of Nazi death camps, or the brutal murder and starvation of many more millions in the Soviet empire of the dictatorship of Mao’s Communist China. The strange woman who teaches literature at Churchill college thinks otherwise, of course, and in a free society is allowed to express views that would have led to swift execution in those other empires.
The British Empire was the first advanced nation to abolish slavery, a practice that had been endemic in every previous culture. It spread science, technology, and ultimately democracy to parts of the world that had seen little of it, and in doing so raised living standards, together with the advance of moral and ethical standards that tend to accompany that.
It spread trade, enabling people to interact and exchange with distant other people beyond their villages. It helped raise the prospects and the aspirations of peoples within it.
There were atrocities, as there have been throughout history, and armed with our present-day morality, we condemn them as we do the others. But they lived by the standards of their day, not by ours. Most of the great thinkers and the virtuous lives we revere in history owned slaves because this was the norm. The fact that it is not now owes something to the people of the British Empire who campaigned for decades to make that so.
If “decolonization” means condemning all the past because it is not the present, it seems to offer little, and puts at risk the heritage we have acquired, and through which we have gained what we today regard as moral improvement.
Planes are significantly cheaper than trains
An interesting little finding here:
Train trips in the UK are on average 50 per cent more expensive than flying on the same routes, forcing travellers to choose between price and the environment, a new study has found.
Taking the train is more expensive on eight of the 10 most popular routes across the UK, according to research by consumer organisation Which?.
The biggest price difference was in a plane fare between Birmingham and Newquay, at £67, and a train ticket at £180, more than 2.5 times as expensive. However, travelling by train would emit just a fifth of the carbon emissions that would be produced by flying on that route, the consumer outlet said.
The ‘plane is cheaper in that cost charged to the consumer. But there is that little point of the costs of the externality, the CO2 emissions. Fortunately, we already have a system that deals with this, Air Passenger Duty. This is £13 on a domestic flight.
Emissions - just to be rough about it - are 50 to 100 kg on a domestic flight. From the Stern Review we know the social cost of carbon, $80 (or perhaps £60 today) per tonne CO2-e. APD is more than covering this externality.
We can and should go further too. Passengers on the rail network, roughly enough, cover the operating costs of said network through their ticket payments. There is considerable subsidy to the capital costs of the network from taxpayers. Aviation gains little subsidy from the taxpayers - no, we can’t shout that avgas is tax free because so, near enough, is train diesel etc. Plus, the train isn’t paying anything at all for that externality of emissions while aviation is more than covering it.
That is, when including all costs, aviation over certain distances is cheaper than train travel over the same distances. It’s also quicker, reducing the time costs to the passengers.
At which point one possible observation is how remarkable is that? A 20th century technology is better than a 19th century one? Even, one that really got going in the 1950s is better than one that did so in the 1840s? Hush now, isn’t that a surprise?
Another observation is that the ‘planes are the better technology, all things considered. So why is it that we’ve all these demands for the constriction of the better and the subsidy and expansion of the worse?
No, carbon doesn’t cut it, we’ve already internalised that through the APD.
Anyone with any answers might consider jotting them down on a postcard for Grant Shapps. We do have this vague feeling that policy based upon facts is going to work better than that based upon shibboleths.
Rule by scientists
H G Wells wrote prophetically about a world ruled by the dictates of science. His book, “The Shape of Things to Come” was published in 1933, and he collaborated on a movie version released as “Things to Come” in 1936.
In Wells’ futuristic vision, the world undergoes a long and debilitating war, and humanity enters a new dark age. The world’s cities are in ruins, their economies destroyed by hyperinflation. The only technology that survives is a primitive military one. As tribes fight turf wars, a new aircraft lands to proclaim that the last surviving engineers and mechanics who control global transport have taken over the world. They are called “Wings Over the World,” and are rebuilding civilization anew. Their leader declares, “And now for the rule of the Airmen and a new life for mankind.”
Their dictatorship has total power, using the “gas of peace” to enforce compliance. They promote science, enforce Basic English as a universal language to replace all others, and eradicate all religions, setting the world on the road to a peaceful scientific utopia. Their aim is to “educate” all humanity to a sensible, forward-looking, intellectually-based outlook. They build a technologically advanced civilization that tolerates other human aspirations, such as artistic achievement, with an amused disdain. To Wells this represented utopia.
Others might take a different view, having seen what scientists do when government follows their lead, sheltering controversial decisions behind their immaculate white coats. To many of them basic human desires, such as the need to interact with friends and family, to hug, to have fun together, to travel, and to engage in communal activities, are all things that have to be suspended or suppressed in the interests of what they call safety. Some want permanent changes to the way people live, with face-masks, social distancing and travel restrictions to continue “indefinitely” because they make for a safer world.
“Scientific” advisers in and around the Department of Health would probably have us live in a world without alcohol, sugar, salt, or most of the foods we enjoy. Those in and around the Department of Transport have a similar mindset. Helmets would be compulsory for cyclists, and seat belts would be required on buses and trains. Everything that might involve a degree of risk, no matter how small, or how ready people were to accept it, would be controlled, banned, or made sufficiently unpleasant that people would stop doing it.
Most of us in our daily lives routinely do cost-benefit analysis and make its trade-offs. Yes, driving a car is risky, and people are killed or injured doing it, but the convenience of being able to reach places is reckoned to be worth the small risk to each of us. Yes, sports such as scuba diving, rock-climbing and parachuting have their dangers, but many of us trade the risk for the thrill. Indeed, the risk for some is part of the thrill.
In a world controlled by the scientists we’d all sit quietly and safely in a risk-free environment, waiting for the bell to ring that leads us all out to pasture. In this world, though, we’d rather weigh up the risks and benefits of living the sort of lives we want to live and regard as worth living, and make our own decisions.
Things that are, in fact, not true
From The Guardian:
Eliminating plastic pollution, reducing pesticide use by two-thirds,...(...)... among the targets in a new draft of a Paris-style UN agreement on biodiversity loss.
That’s not in fact true. From the UN document itself:
Reduce pollution from all sources to levels that are not harmful to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and human health, including by reducing nutrients lost to the environment by at least half, and pesticides by at least two thirds and eliminating the discharge of plastic waste.
It is the pesticide runoff which is to be reduced, not the use of pesticides. It is possible to accuse us of pedantry here but when discussing plans to rule the world we do think such details are important.
The little bit that amuses though is this:
Goal C
The benefits from the utilization of genetic resources are shared fairly and equitably, with a substantial increase in both monetary and non-monetary benefits shared, including for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.
Milestone C.1
The share of monetary benefits received by providers, including holders of traditional knowledge, has increased.
The logic here is that if in those rainforests someone discovers something like quinine again then the government of the forest should receive oodles of cash. About which, well, OK, maybe?
It’s just that this seems to rather conflict with the other current UN insistences that those covid vaccines must be delivered free, without patent restrictions, to all.
Which does seem to be the wrong way around. Those genetic resources, that biodiversity and so on, those are things that already exist. There is therefore no need to provide incentives to bring them into existence. The vaccines did not exist a year back - maybe 18 months - and the necessary vaccines for whatever next escapes from a laboratory do not as yet. Therefore some system of incentives to create them was needed, is and will be.
Yet the UN insistence is that everyone had better cough up to create incentives where none are needed, should not have to where they are. Which does seem to be alarmingly the wrong way around.
Perhaps this idea of running the world by committee isn’t quite the way to do it?
Do we save the high streets?
The traditional High Street with its row of small shops was already in decline before the pandemic and its associated lockdowns came to put more of its businesses in jeopardy. Changing demographics and changing lifestyles had led to changed behaviour. More women went out to work and no longer had the time to shop locally each day. Visits to the out of town supermarkets, partly made possible by higher car ownership, led the big shopping trip to replace the many smaller ones.
The changing face of High Streets was evident four or more decades ago. As businesses closed, charity shops often replaced them, having the advantage of lower business rates, sometimes with up to 80 percent discount on what commercial premises would incur. After the wave of charity shops the High Street businesses that closed tended to be replaced more recently by the coffee shops that proliferated everywhere. And after the coffee shops it was the turn of the sandwich shops.
None of these were the traditional small shops that sold things, the butchers, ironmongers, bakers and haberdashers. But their replacements still produced the footfall of visitors that businesses depended on, and therefore kept the High Streets going as local centres. The pandemic has accelerated the change, with locked down shoppers buying in record amounts online, and with home delivery replacing the shopping trip. Working from home means much lower footfall in city centre offices, and therefore fewer customers for shops, cafés and sandwich bars.
Now most High Streets feature boarded up windows and doors, and many will not reopen. According to the Centre for Retail Research there were around 50,000 fewer shops on our High Streets than were there just over a decade before the pandemic. There will be many fewer still after it has passed. Recent losses have included Debenhams, Topshop, BHS, the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, and many other familiar household names. With them have gone most of their jobs. And as fewer people come to the High Street, it can accelerate the cycle of decline. The High Street for some is no longer a pleasant place to visit, especially after dark.
People ask the question “Can the High Street be saved?” And there are several organizations and initiatives attempting to do that. It seems unlikely, however, that High Streets will be remade to suit the preferences of a group of planners, and perhaps more likely that creative market decisions will interact to produce an outcome that cannot be predicted in advance. Even so, we can speculate on what might happen.
For example, housing is in short supply, and High Streets are places where people might want to live, close to their work. The space above High Street premises might be more extensively used to create flats for more urban dwelling. And more premises might move away from competing with online sales and home deliveries, and adapt to services less easy to perform online, services such as beauty parlours, nail salons and yoga classes.
In some places green spaces are replacing car parks, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius might provide an example. The city centre is being transformed into an open-air café where hundreds of bars and restaurants are setting up in plazas, squares and streets. It is possible that the High Streets of the future might become communal open spaces with flowers, fountains and sculptures, with free wifi and street food and coffee stands. They might become places where people will meet, rather than shop.
The important thing is to facilitate the flexibility that will enable High Streets to adapt to changing habits and lifestyles, rather than trying to preserve them unchanged, like insects preserved in the amber of their past.
We don't believe the Resolution Foundation in the slightest
The Resolution Foundation tells us that the wealth gap has soared in the course of the pandemic and therefore something must be done about it. One of the things they recommend is exactly why we don’t believe a single word of the analysis:
The distribution of debt and savings changes provides extra justification for keeping the pandemic support of an additional £20 per week to UC
Changing universal credit quite obviously changes the wealth distribution. £20 a week is £1,000 or so a year, capitalise that (using the method Saez and Zucman use in their iconic paper) and that’s a change in wealth of about £20,000 per recipient. More if we use current interest rates to discount future income.
The way the Resolution Foundation - and to be fair to them this is true of the entire field measuring the wealth distribution - measures wealth the wealth distribution isn’t changed in the slightest by this. Which is a basic problem with the measurement of the wealth distribution of course.
We do not include any of the things which government does which reduces wealth inequality in our estimation of wealth inequality. This also means that anything government does to reduce wealth inequality doesn’t change wealth inequality as it is measured.
We move vast sums from richer to poorer each year. Total social spending is some 20% of GDP - a fifth of everything in the economy. Capitalise that again, using the approved method, that’s about £8 trillion in wealth moved around out of total household wealth of about £15 trillion. Absolutely none of this, at all, is included in the usual estimations of the wealth distribution.
We don’t believe the usual stories about the wealth distribution. Simply - and accurately too - on the grounds that it takes no account whatsoever of what is already done to reduce wealth inequality. Once someone comes back with estimates that include the effects of the welfare state then we’re willing to start discussing whether more should be done - or perhaps, less.
Essay: Why are Remainers still so cheesed off?
Remainers, however much they got right about Brexit, lost the argument. Now, five years on from the referendum, what matters most is what they got wrong — and why.
Most Remainers do not see it this way. Even so, they will have begrudgingly noticed that six months after Brexit, the supermarket shelves are full, the lights are on and trucks flow freely down the M20. The UK retains the top destination in Europe for investment, the City of London continues to dominate European financial services, sterling is on the up and the FTSE is nudging all-time highs. They will certainly know that the UK stole a march on our neighbours in rolling out Covid vaccinations, panicking Brussels; and that this has something to do with paddling our own canoe.
To summarise the argument of this essay, the Remain cause made much of its high-mindedness over the last five years of the Brexit saga. It is now obvious that the Remainer sense of superiority distracted from their low dishonest campaign, which has left the country divided and its supporters bereft.
What Remainers got right
Remainers called the negotiations accurately. They were not as simple as the Leave camp claimed; the EU’s negotiating team stuck to a legalistic process; it was unrealistic to expect EU member states to defect from their collective position; and there is a trade-off between regulatory sovereignty and market access. They were also on the money about the complications of Ireland, trade deals with the US and other major partners, plus the empty promises made to the fishing industry.
They also got elements of the outcome right: businesses are suffering from the loss of freedom of movement; there are likely to be problems in the supply of unskilled labour; trade with the EU has suffered at least frictional disruption; expats are facing everyday difficulties; Brexit delivered a shock to international institutions; and leaving will not end our dealings with the bloc.
Some of these arguments were better than others, but even the best failed to change minds. They were undermined by Remainers’ inability to mount compelling arguments for their cause; weakened by their association with the overwrought “Project Fear”; overshadowed by the self-defeating attack on the referendum’s legitimacy; or wasted as supporting the “soft Brexit”, which challenged the sovereignty prized by Leave voters.
Remainers’ central problem
These days, former leaders of the Remain camp reminisce that they dared not make a political case for the EU, as any attempt to do so repelled focus-groups. They could never overcome the obstacle that any political proposition for the EU rests on a picture of the world which most Brits just don’t buy into.1
Europhiles like to talk up the part played by the EU in promoting Europe’s postwar peace. There is something to this, notably the reconciliation between France and Germany, but Britons incline to place more emphasis on the part of NATO in holding the line against the Soviet Union, with some also remembering that France detached itself from the alliance for forty years.
The prospect of an “ever closer union” puts voters off throughout the continent. This applies all the more to that majority of the UK electorate which is relieved to have avoided the Euro and Schengen, worries about the standards of EU accounting and democracy and would run a mile from the prospect of a standing EU army. Remainers also press the view that the EU is such a central part of the postwar “rules-based order” that Britain’s departure weakens the entire set-up. This doesn’t wash with most British voters, who see the risk as far-fetched. So much for the politics, but even economics was less help to Remainers than they might have hoped, with trade sovereignty (discussed further below) presenting the evidence that while we were in the EU, its trading regime penalised the UK.
For lack of positive arguments, the Remain campaign changed the subject. Its principal moves were to promote “Project Fear”, warnings about universal disruption, conspicuous for their hyperbole; and to challenge the legitimacy of the referendum. They ignored, obfuscated or traduced sovereignty, Leavers’ central concern. Remainers also raised various further points, some largely ill-conceived, eg, reputation, relations with the US, trade agreements and other minor matters; and some with a measure of substance, eg, fishing and Ireland. None, however, justified the catastrophic construction placed upon them by Europhiles.
“Project Fear” — disruption, long-term economic adversity
During the referendum campaign, it was often asserted by commentators that while the Leave cause had the best of the political argument, Remainers had the best of the economics. This was half true. We have already seen that the dirty little secret of the Remain campaign was that its leaders knew almost immediately that they could not mount a persuasive positive political argument. Worse still, trade sovereignty below presents the evidence that the economic argument on which Remainers relied was so easy to answer that they had no choice but to double down with the exaggerations of “Project Fear”. Initially, Remainers promoted it to get out the vote for the 2016 referendum. Thereafter, it survived to push along a second referendum; failing that, to press for a “soft Brexit”, with a view to minimising alterations to the status quo; and to provide the powder and shot for parliamentary ambushes. Leavers argued that the gain was worth the pain — Johnson’s “Nike tick”. Nonetheless, the psychology textbooks tell us that the fear of loss outweighs the prospect of gains, so Project Fear’s warnings should have found an audience. Instead, they were discredited by their hyperbolic precision, eg, Osborne’s forecast of a cost of £4,300 for each household; and Remainers’ coincident attacks on legitimacy and sovereignty. All of these seemed to confirm the truth of the Leave camp’s earlier mockery of “experts”.
Nonetheless, these fears represented the overwhelming official and professional consensus. Just one or two maverick economists — for example, Tim Congdon and Patrick Minford — pointed out that they failed to recognise second-order effects, with clunky economic models taken too seriously. It is true that the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, stated that he expected Brexit to have the same effect on growth as joining the EU in the first place, that is none at all; but he was up against strenuous warnings to the contrary from his successor, Mark Carney.
Covid has complicated the immediate outcome and its measurement but so far, Project Fear turns out to be without foundation. Osborne’s threatened “punishment budget” was self-defeating. Indeed, it never made sense: how could it be delivered, given that he was bound to resign on losing? Queues at Dover and empty larders have never happened; there has been no loss of jobs. European traders reported disruption early in the year, but recent figures are returning to pre-Brexit levels. The UK continues to hold the largest stock of inward investment in Europe and the City jobs on as ever.2 Meanwhile, long-term concerns have been softened by the post-Brexit vaccine success.
Delegitimising the referendum
Although Remainers made much of their claim on the moral high ground, they betrayed this and damaged themselves by withholding losers’ consent for over four years. This was opportunism: they were seeking to lay the ground for popular and political support for the “people’s vote” campaign for a second referendum; or, failing that, to press for a “soft Brexit”, as befitting a poll with a small majority, or failing to specify an outcome. The reduction in May’s majority after the 2017 election reinvigorated Remain MPs, who represented the result as throwing the referendum into question. This was also unprincipled, as candidates from both major parties had campaigned on manifestoes promising to honour the referendum result.
Even so, Europhiles continued to protest about constitutionality, destination, demographics, manipulation, racism, lies, and executive overreach. None of this changed minds and voters became irritated at hearing that they’d given the wrong answer. The Leave camp saw they were on to a winner and joined in with gusto, arguing as to “advisory” — legally correct but politically tone-deaf in the face of the huge turnout, Cameron’s promise to honour the result and his resignation; “super-majority” — also tone-deaf plus constitutionally irrelevant; “destination” — disingenuous as only a “hard Brexit” made for regulatory, border and trade sovereignty; “older, less-educated voters”, etc — anti-democratic, distasteful and incoherent; “racist,” etc — challenged by poll and crime data; “manipulated” — no convincing evidence, with the Guardian taking its conspiracy-theorist, Carole Cadwalladr, off the story after she lost a libel case to Arron Banks, the founder of Leave EU; “lies” — voters know that campaigning politicians are not on oath; and “overreach” — at odds with the UK’s political culture.
Bad feeling was amplified by parliamentary chaos, including dissident ministers and officials given to leaks, together with guerrilla lawsuits, some persuading the judges but none stopping the train. The increase in temperature led the public to lose patience and to question Remainers’ other messages. The “people’s vote” campaign imploded.
Regulatory sovereignty
Sovereignty was central to Leave voters and the final negotiation, but Remainers never got it. Some could see it only through the lens of immigration, leading to accusations of prejudice. Others relished the thought of binding the UK with the Lilliputian threads of European Court rulings, with a view to undermining Brexit altogether. Remain campaigners minimised the issue, stigmatised it as racist and obfuscated it with “shared sovereignty”, which no-one understood, let alone took seriously.
Leavers were initially divided over their own construction of sovereignty and deliberately failed to specify an outcome during the referendum campaign. The preparations for, and early stages of, negotiations established that only a “hard Brexit” delivered freedom from intervention by the European Court and freedom to strike trade deals. As this emerged, Leavers ignored Remainers’ insults and stuck to their guns. Towards the end of negotiations, “sovereignty” was reframed as “regulatory divergence”, at which point the complications of Ireland entered the limelight. Within a few months, the post-Brexit headlines were “vaccine, nimble, speedboat”, confirming sovereignty’s substance and auguring well for the future.
Border sovereignty — freedom of movement, immigration
Remain campaigners sought to discredit border sovereignty as racist, or as making EU immigrants ill at ease in their new home, or as placing British expats at risk, or as destroying the ideal enabling Britons to “live, love and work in Europe”. They talked up negotiating difficulties, though this was tricky in the face of the strenuous efforts on all sides to minimise human friction.
They also argued that restricting the flow of EU immigrants would lead to labour shortages. There is something in this, though the taint of prejudice prevented discussion of the implications of Commonwealth or other third-world immigrants replacing low-skilled arrivals from the EU. Leavers spoke of the opportunity to substitute better-capitalised or more highly-skilled locals, though it was never clear how this would apply directly to (eg) care homes or hospitality. Long-term expatriates face teething troubles, which the authorities are trying to sort out. “Live, love and work in Europe” turns out too ethereal to interest the general public. Our immigration policy is a work in progress.
At first the Covid epidemic seemed to soften the topic, with one million EU migrants said to have returned home. Attitudes may harden, however, with the number of EU citizens presenting themselves for settlement as much as 66% above estimates, with six million European applications for settlement at the end of June 2021, compared to 3.6m estimated residents in 2016. This suggests that the number at the time of the referendum was close to twice official figures, calls into question the bases upon which the original debate was conducted and gives many millions of reasons to reject the smear that Brexit has made EU immigrants to the UK ill at ease.
Trade sovereignty
Early on, both sides struggled with the ins and outs of the endgame. Remainers warmed to what came to be known as soft Brexit as closest to the status quo — always articulated as minimising disruption; but at the outset Leavers declined to offer a clear destination, offering models including Norway, Switzerland and even Turkey. It took some time for the underlying issue to be definitively flushed out as membership of the Customs Union and of the Single Market. All then ignored the elephant in the room, the UK’s pre-Brexit trading within the EU. By their silence, Remainers conceded the lack of a positive argument. The Customs Union was transparently more useful for European than British exporters of goods. In part, this is because the post-WW2 decline in duties has put emphasis on non-tariff measures, where the EU is a notable offender. Similar considerations apply to the Single Market, in principle more important for the UK as the world’s number two exporter of services, but with years of data showing that it hasn’t done much good for anyone, including this country.3
Unable to make headway on the specifics of trade sovereignty, Remainers instead dwelt upon the sheer proximity and size of the European market, as the “gravity model” of trade beloved by economics geeks, but irrelevant given the EU‘s dysfunctional regime; or on dangers to the City, the taxman’s darling but otherwise too unpopular to attract sympathy; or on the economic implications of the loss of freedom of movement, accurate enough but doomed to fall on deaf ears given Leavers’ appetite for sovereignty. Leavers were happy to aim off such technicalities, as they had so much the best of it on legitimacy and sovereignty. The latter also emerged as the basis for resolving hard vs soft: if the UK was determined to negotiate independently on goods, it had to leave the Customs Union; if similarly inclined on services, it had to leave the Single Market
The Remain camp also ventilated other issues during the campaign and afterwards.
Influence in world, reputation
The Remain camp sought to undermine Brexit by talking up the institutions of the EU and other European bodies (eg, the Human Rights Court), on a view that that British defection would undermine the post-WW2 settlement in Europe, if not the entire “rules-based order”. This was overwrought but understandable, given the coincident chaos of the Trump administration. Remainers also talked up the British courts, which from time to time seemed an avenue to frustrate Brexit altogether. Throughout, they demonised Johnson as irresponsible, with EU figures adding fuel to the flames.4 In the late stages of the negotiations, Remainers made much of the UK on the back foot over prorogation and official hints of walking away from the Northern Ireland Protocol. Concerns about international standing were goosed up by a drip-feed of interviews with retired ambassadors and unattributable leaks from a Foreign Office devoid of direction under May.
Such complaints were ill-founded. May dismissed Trump’s proposal of a claim against the EU and no-one took up Dominic Cummings’ plan to disconcert Brussels by declining to serve Article 50 notice. Instead, the UK has been scrupulous about treaty procedures and timetables. This goes so far as to include the Northern Ireland Protocol, despite what Macron describes as its incohérences, which have led both sides into unmannerly post-agreement jostling. At time of writing, Johnson is holding his own, while remaining a controversial figure. The Foreign Office is pulling out the stops to make the new dispensation work, working up the recent Cornwall G7 and forthcoming COP26; and testing appetites for a D10 group of democracies and a welcome from the CPTPP (Pacific trade pact). If anything, reputational damage is going the other way, what with the EU’s discomfiture over its vaccine roll-out, failures of pragmatism in Ireland, fishing kerfuffles, and the collapse of its deal with Switzerland.
Ireland
Barnier’s memoirs make no secret of his determination to protect the EU’s borders: none of the three alternative frontiers for Ireland works well. The topic came to the fore relatively late in negotiations. Hat-tip to John Major, in other respects so relentless a Remainer as to make it hard to pick out this prescience from his other jeremiads.
Remain campaigners were ostensibly trying to defend the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. Some, however, were happy to use the issue to undermine Brexit altogether — the backstop threatened to keep the UK under EU regulation indefinitely — though so far, I’ve seen no evidence that they were in cahoots with Brussels. Even so, they made no bones of talking up the issue, dwelling on Nationalist sensitivities. They also sought to bring in the US, as a natural sympathiser to the Republic and Nationalist sentiment, as well as a sponsor of the Good Friday Agreement.
The reaction was fury from the Democratic Unionist Party, at the time supporting May’s government; and from the European Research Group, the Brexit ginger-group of Tory MPs. The parliamentary arithmetic plus the Attorney General’s formal opinion kyboshed the backstop and obliged May to resign. In the best case, as things now stand, all parties are stuck with the final arrangement, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which miscalculated the province’s politics by overlooking the Unionists. In the worst case, we’ve all been thrown into uncertainty because the EU entertained the backstop as a gambit to undermine Brexit and the Commons sniffed it out. Either way, the fragile balance in Ulster has been unsettled by disobliging EU officials. A border in the Irish Sea may be better than the intolerable backstop, but it’s hard to see the current set-up lasting for long.
Relations with the US
During the campaign, the UK Government used Obama’s popularity and authority to push for a “Remain” vote. Afterwards, Remain campaigners invoked Trump’s disrepute to tarnish Farage as his buddy and Johnson as (in Trump’s unhelpful words) “Britain Trump”, so as to discredit Brexit as similarly populist. At worst, Europhiles sought to use US influence to inflame the complications of Ireland, lobbying Nancy Pelosi and others, with a view to derailing Brexit altogether.
Obama’s “back of the queue” remarks — intended as a favour to Cameron — turned out self-defeating with UK voters. Trump’s chaos and disrepute prevented any advance on trade during his term. After initial jitters, Biden has reset relations, confirming the UK as a much-trumpeted (but naturally, junior) partner, with trade not yet on the agenda. Ireland is a continuing bugbear: if America's purpose in revealing its démarche on the subject was to mollify domestic sentiment, or placate the EU ahead of the Cornwall G7, or even to clear the air, the leak also recalls Obama’s clumsiness and runs the risk of similar blow-back.
It is true that the US fostered the EU and would have preferred Britain to stay. Nonetheless, the US takes its allies as it finds them: since WW2, it’s weathered greater storms, for example France, Greece, Israel, Korea, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; and eighty years of strategic intimacy count for much.
Fishing
Europhiles used fishing as a parable of the futility of an independent trade stance, in that the ambitions of the UK’s fishing fleet were unrealistic. They talked up the insignificance of the sector, its disproportionate emotional weight on both sides of the Channel and the impossibility of obtaining sovereignty over our waters while our fleet needed access to European markets for its own catch. The public was uninterested, while Leave campaigners kept as quiet as possible, knowing that Remainers had the best of the argument; and that the UK’s fishing fleet is perennially bloody-minded, fragmented and undercapitalised. So far, we have seen bad-tempered stand-offs with French fisherman and disruptive treatment of British imports by EU officials. These teething troubles have been amplified by French electoral politics. The only way out is for HMG to underwrite investment in (and negotiate access for) intercontinental delivery chains, sufficient to leave our fleet relatively invulnerable to the EU market, when both sides revisit the deal in the mid-2020s.
Trade agreements
Remainers argued that the UK could never replicate the EU’s network of trade pacts. They talked up the number of such deals and the difficulty of achieving them. The reaction was indifference by the public and the odd unread monograph from the Leave camp. It was hard not to smile when, during Brexit negotiations, the EU completed agreements with Canada and Japan, formerly stuck for years. A few days after Brexit, the UK rolled over sixty-odd agreements with the marginal economies with which Brussels had struck pre-Brexit deals. Serious-ish deals are now done or close with Australia, India & Japan. Concerns were based on a flawed understanding — sometimes wilful — of the EU’s disappointing performance.
Other issues
Remain campaigners also flagged up data protection, where the UK now has the option to free itself of gold-plated GDPR regulations; defence and foreign policy, from which the MOD was delighted to drop out and where France Germany and Italy are now soliciting bilateral links; the Erasmus scheme for overseas study, although second-eleven European universities never attracted our best and brightest, with twice as many EU students coming here; medical co-operation, where defection has made for Britain’s headline Brexit success; and police and judicial cooperation, which so far is operating satisfactorily at working level. Once again, Remain concerns rested upon a flawed reading of the record.
Tone of voice
In addition to imperfect arguments, the Remain camp suffered from an off-putting manner. Political campaigners have learned to rely upon emotion to win over and retain support. It is no disgrace that leaders of the Remain campaign found it expedient to do so, but their three big emotional themes were inauspicious. First, they made much of their own expertise and authority, together with the support of international economic bodies and local industrial interests. This turned out to be self-defeating, as voters bridled at being asked to take instructions from spokesmen whom the Leave campaign was able to reframe as elitist, remote or self-interested. Second, Remainers dwelt upon the disproportion between Britain and the EU, arguing that the big battalions were bound to have the best of it. If anything this undermined Project Fear, as most voters declined to flinch from, let alone support, the neighbourhood bully. Finally, Remainers claimed to occupy the moral high ground. As already touched on in Delegitimising the referendum and Reputation — influence in the world, they promptly undermined themselves by acting as though this gave them permission to attack Leave voters as ill-informed, racist or otherwise to be disregarded; and to attack the UK government as disreputable, when its tactics brushed up against legal or other norms. Any merits in this last were undermined, as linked to episodic attacks on the UK’s negotiators for proposing “unicorns”, a term popularised by Brussels as rubbishing Britain’s position. Although I have noted the lack of evidence of deliberate co-ordination, nonetheless Europhiles hurt themselves by appearing to delight in undermining the home team. All in all, Remainers’ tone of voice failed to change voters’ minds but here too, we face its aftermath.
Conclusion
Post-Brexit Britain has passed its first test, but there are plenty more to come. Meanwhile, Brexit has been mainland Britain’s most protracted disharmony since the sixteen years of turmoil between the rejection of Castle’s In place of Strife and the defeat of Scargill’s miners. It was prolonged by lack of certainty and May’s unsuccessful leadership; and intensified by the chagrin of defenestrated incumbents and the lefty self-righteousness consistently attested by poll data.5 Good people lost their sense of proportion, but let’s not exaggerate: Home Counties dinner-parties may have been tricky, but at least there was no violence. Compare the coincident gilets jaunes over the Channel, or the violence throughout the West in the 1970s. If we look for a lesson, it would be that Remainers don’t realise that their devastation and anxiety arise because the leaders of their campaign shaved the dice for lack of persuasive arguments. Unfortunately, some still do so.6
This goes some way to explain why Brussels officials and Leave campaigners railed so fiercely against Johnson’s mischievous journalism, which they argue poisoned the British public against the EU with fibs. This is a bit stiff from cultures delighting in Rabelais, de Bergerac, Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo (France); Böll, Brecht, Grass and Simplicimus (Germany); not to say Swift, Hogarth, Dickens, Private Eye, Viz and Rod Liddle (here).
It is some sort of corrective that a poll taken in late April 2021 showed that most French voters have a favourable opinion of Johnson, going so far as to prefer him to Macron. Source: Institut français d'opinion publique. https://www.ifop.com/publication/le-regard-des-francais-sur-boris-johnson. Extracted 4 June 2021
This is despite the failure to implement the commitment that both parties should “by March 2021, agree a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the framework for [financial services] cooperation. The Parties will discuss, inter alia, how to move forward on both sides with equivalence determinations…” (Annex 3 to the Co-operation and Trade Agreement between the EU and the UK). Instead, we have seen bad-tempered exchanges on fishing, Ireland and vaccinations. The City is now preparing to go its own way, independent of EU regulation.
While the UK was a member of the EU, its regime of non-tariff measures (NTMs) put our exporters of goods at a consistent disadvantage. For many years, the OECD has measured these as trade restrictiveness indices (TRIs), with the UK showing by far the lowest NTMs. The EU nudges the Americans but is mercantilist by the standards of Australia, Canada and ourselves.
The OECD also measures TRIs within the EEA (the EU plus Iceland and Norway). The 2019 figures show that the EU has higher internal NTMs than the UK in 20 out of the 22 sectors measured. The worst offender is Austria with barriers 2.5x UK levels; Italy is 2.3x, Germany 2x and France 1.6x. Ireland is closest to the UK at 1.08x, no surprise as Dublin generally follows London. Such differentials have always been present, telling us that the reality of the Customs Union put the UK at a systemic disadvantage: everyone else could sell goods to us more easily than we to them.
The Single Market did equally little for UK service exporters. In August 2020, the EU published its own analysis of internal TRIs for business services (accounting, architecture, computer, engineering and legal). This shows that internal and external barriers for competition are identical in 104 of 115 measures, meaning that by this standard too the Single Market was close to useless for the UK. Sources: OECD. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=STRI; and https://qdd.oecd.org/subject.aspx?Subject=STRI_INTRAEEA; and European Union: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121443. Extracted 21 January 2021. Author’s analysis.
Parenthetically, no-one knows how much co-ordination there was between Brussels and Remain campaigners in this country. In the heat of the moment, some Leavers claimed there was a seamless web between the two. If there was, no-one is talking and so far, there’s no smoking gun. Maybe this is another conspiracy theory.
The poll question is that used for over sixty years to flush out racial prejudice: “How would you feel if your child married a…?” For US data see YouGov America; https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/09/17/republicans-democrats-marriage-poll; 17 September 2020. For UK data, including Brexit affiliation, see YouGov: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/relationships/articles-reports/2019/08/27/labour-voters-more-wary-about-politics-childs-spou; 27 August 2019.
A wonderful example appears in the Guardian, datelined 27 June 2021, where Will Hutton, lifetime critic of free markets and former Principal of Herford College, Oxford, mixes anecdote, bile and cherry-picked statistics under the headline The case for Brexit was built on lies. Five years later, deceit is routine in our politics. Motes and beams come to mind. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/27/case-for-brexit-built-on-lies-five-years-later-deceit-is-routine-in-our-politics. Extracted 28 June 2021.
The billionaire boys and their toys
On July 11th Richard Branson flew to the edge of space, just shy of 53 miles up, just short of the internationally recognized Kármán Line (62 miles) that marks the point where outer space begins. On July 20th Jeff Bezos hopes to reach space itself in his New Shepherd capsule.
A handful of rich people are driving technology forward at a faster pace than it might otherwise develop. They are the billionaire boys, who use money made elsewhere to aim at the cutting edge of innovation. They push technological advance at a faster pace than it would achieve if left to straightforward commercial development.
They are all well-known for the products and processes they introduced to make their first fortunes. They enriched us all with search engines, home delivery and electric cars. Many of them became rich through software or internet development, but are now applying their wealth to areas that excite them in fields such as space travel and transport.
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, put up $25m of his own money to fund Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, and to help it win the X-Prize of $10m for achieving the first private manned spaceflight above the Kármán Line with SpaceShipOne in 2004. Its successor is SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle behind Virgin Galactic. Allen's original backing was not done for a return, but to speed up access to space by private citizens. As a sideline Allen, whose own fortune was estimated at £20bn, also funded the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He put $30m into the Allen telescope array to aid the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He died in 2018, having left a big mark on technology.
Elon Musk made his first millions with Zip2, an internet city guide, receiving $22m when Compaq bought it. He co-founded PayPal and received $165m when it was snapped up by eBay. Like Allen, he has helped to fund private enterprise spaceflight, founding SpaceX with $100m. SpaceX developed the Falcon rocket that launches its Dragon capsules to the International Space Station (ISS), and lowers costs by being re-usable.
Musk also founded Tesla Motors to advance electric car technology. He fundamentally redesigned the car, and pioneered battery innovations that solved the limited range problems that held back the spread of electric vehicles.
One of Tesla's backers is Larry Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin and is reckoned to be worth $112.5bn. He has also backed alternative energy sources, is reported to have donated $20m to the Voice Health Research Institute after developing vocal cord issues of his own.
His Google partner, Sergey Brin, is worth over $105.5bn, but draws an annual salary of just $1, as Page and Musk do, as Steve Jobs did. He backed the genetic research company, 23andme, founded by his then wife, Anne Wojcicki, and has also put money into alternative energy, including wind-powered electricity from kites, and funded the initial development of lab-grown meat. He invested $4.5m in Space Adventures, and has booked a flight to the International Space Station.
These billionaires are all very boyish in temperament, bubbling with enthusiasm over new gadgets and ventures. These boys play with very expensive toys, however, and their enthusiasm is bringing closer the day when their toys become available to the rest of us at more affordable prices.
A major player in this billionaire's game is Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and is reputedly worth $213bn. His toy is the New Shepard vehicle of his aerospace company, Blue Origin. The rocket lands vertically under power, just like the science fiction rockets of 1950s comics. A manned capsule will take astronauts into orbit, while the Blue Origin returns to Earth to be readied for another flight.
Bill Gates is the odd man out, preferring to fund the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable foundation rather than to advance technology that excites his enthusiasm, but even here his wealth might well conquer malaria.
The common theme is of billionaires using their wealth to bring forward the technology they dreamed about as boys, and never quite grew out of. It’s not entirely new. Britain's Industrial Revolution featured several gentlemen who used the wealth of landed estates to fund the development of inventions they thought would be useful. Some did it with an eye to future profits, but others did it to improve humankind.
What is remarkable about today's billionaire boys is the scale of the wealth they commit to pushing forward their dreams. They have money to spare, and can take risks no shareholders of boards of directors would contemplate. They push technology forward because they want to see the toys - the private space-planes, the high performance electric cars, and the driverless vehicles that will one day whisk commuters to and from work more rapidly than high speed trains can.
The billionaire boys want to see tomorrow, and are putting resources into making it come sooner. And the rate of technological progress is accelerating because of their activities.
Democracy and liberty are not synonyms
Rod Liddle points out that there are a number of authoritarians in our society:
They yearn for authoritarianism and, however they might profess their love of humanity, they distrust and despise people who are not themselves. They are, I think, anti-democrats. They live in a world that is not to their liking largely because it is too free. Lockdown is, for them, a kind of nirvana and it should continue for ever.
A certain exaggeration there for effect possibly but there certainly are those out there who are natural authoritarians. But this is not to be anti-democratic, it’s to be anti-liberty, anti-civil rights perhaps.
An important distinction that must be made.
Democracy is valuable, no doubt about it. But it’s not the ultimate value, not at all. It can - indeed often has and will always be at risk of becoming - a tyranny of the majority. Which is why we have systems of limiting said democracy.
We have Human Rights Acts, Bills of Rights, the ECHR and on and on precisely to limit what democracy may do to us. Yes they’re, in that first line, what government may not do to us but that’s just democracy - in a democratic system of course - at one remove.
Authoritarians are not anti-democratic, they’re anti-civil libertarian. It’s the risks of authoritarians managing to get elected which means we have those systems to protect us from democracy just as we also have systems to promote it.
As with so much else there’s an optimal amount of that democracy. Enough that we determine who rules us, assuredly, but not so much that the majority overrides that liberty.