It was good to see so many Tory MPs getting their knickers in a twist over Speaker Bercow’s decision to allow a vote on an amendment forcing the government to come back with Plan B within three days if May’s Brexit deal falls next week. I certainly don’t recall them making the same racket when May pulled the vote on her deal which was due on the 11th December, and delayed it for five weeks. Bercow is right to challenge the government’s disdain for parliament. It’s not as if time is running out, is it? Bercow may look and sound like a bit of a prick, but he is doing his job.
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I’ve finished reading Yanis Varoufakis’s book Adults in the Room, in which he clinically dissects the stupidity and intransigence of those great financial wizards who ensured that Greece remains impoverished for ever and a day. The question that arises is – are there lessons here in the context of Brexit? It’s not as if we are part of the single currency and have to abide by the dictats of the German Finance Minister, but many of the players are the same.
I think many of the lessons from Varoufakis's book have to be learnt in the whole E.U., not just the Eurozone. On the latter, its members may want to consider whether it’s a good idea to continue with a single currency, but that’s up to them. For the wider E.U. there is a clear need to take stock of where the E.U. now finds itself in an open and rational atmosphere of honest discourse. I don’t detect any sign of that, even after one of the E.U.’s largest members has chosen to leave. Perhaps there is a pervasive sense of sticking together, and self-satisfaction. Sticking together because, as in the case of Greece’s potential departure from the Eurozone, there is a fear that others might follow leading to the collapse of the project. So some are arguing for the continuation of an ever closer union, rather than thinking a reflective pause might be a good idea. Maybe they think such a pause signals weakness. But something that is flexible is more likely to last than something that is brittle, and I detect a lot of brittleness, with defensiveness at the core of it. And self-satisfaction because they think they’ve just done such a wonderful job and can’t really understand why anyone would want to leave. They believe their own propaganda. Some of my thoughts on E.U. reform echo those of DiEM25 in which Varoufakis plays a key role. But I could add one or two extra bits, seeking to enhance E.U. democracy. Judging by the way Greece was kicked about it is clear that lines of accountability are blurred – to put a gloss on it. There needs to be a reform of the structures – I note for example that the European Parliament was not mentioned once (in a relevant sense) in Adults in the Room. There is no direct accountability to this elected body for much of what goes on. That needs addressing. I would also get rid of the multiplicity of ‘presidents’ in the E.U. – most people couldn’t tell their Juncker from their Tusk. Perhaps one directly elected president for the lot would do – with very strict rules on her accountability requirements. Yes, that would mean a mammoth election, across Europe, but it would be an election that forced voters to think outside of their parochial box for once. Then there’s the issue of financial accountability – countries like Hungary, whose president believes that E.U. grants are there to swell his personal patronage fund need to be reined in much faster. The miss-spending of E.U. funds I think is a big issue in people’s minds. As for a second U.K. referendum, (moving on a bit) some intelligence has to be applied to its design – something that was missing last time. There has to be at least a threshold set on what constitutes a majority. This is necessary to ensure that the result can be lived with by both sides. I would say a minimum majority of 60/40 for whatever outcome, although it may also be a good idea to insist on a sufficient turnout as part of the equation. I’m afraid 52/48 on a two thirds turnout doesn’t settle anything. Should the required bar not be reached, then as we all might say, it’s status quo ante and that should be it for another ten/twenty years. By which, I hasten to add, that means no Brexit. I enjoyed watching Brexit: The Uncivil War on Channel 4 last night. I thought it worked as a drama, and had some comic touches which leavened the unwholesome nature of some of the characters. Lucy Mangan, reviewing it in the Guardian this morning obviously mistook it for a documentary and gave it only two stars. One of her criticisms was that it portrayed Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks as buffoons. Perhaps it was a documentary then. I suppose many of the words spoken by the Cummings character were extrapolated from interviews the playwright James Graham had with him and others. But in one of the final scenes, I assume the words that issued from Cummings’ mouth in a select committee hearing were taken from a verbatim transcript of those proceedings. If so then they neatly summed up the whole sorry affair – a burst of anguished incoherence aimed at the establishment’s inability to take Britain forward (into what?). From the man who worked with scions of the establishment that got us to where we are now.*
One irritating little irony watching this was the continual interruption, every 15 minutes in fact of adverts. It was one reason I avoid commercial TV – it’s just too bloody irritating. The irony is in the fact that with the advent, made clear in Brexit of targeted individual advertising and messaging facilitated through the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this blanket approach must be a waste of money. Why do they still do it? Co-incidentally, I’m about half way through Yanis Varoufakis’s excellent book Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment, first published in 2017. So I’ve come to it a bit late, but given that the government he served in is shortly to hit the buffers, not that late. Syriza is going to be trashed if the polls are correct about this year’s Greek parliamentary elections. The Greek conservative party, the New Democrats seem to be the favourites to win. Such a result has an inevitability about it, representing the likelihood that the electorate feel very badly betrayed by Alexis Tsipris and the false hopes he raised. Swing one way and then the other, what else does the electorate do? What else can it do? I do hope Corbyn understands the lesson. I do hope that Adults in the Room is compulsory reading for all Labour’s shadow ministers. I’ve just got to the point where Varoufakis has made it to being Greek Finance Minister and is embarking on his first great tour of European capitals to drum up support for the restructuring of Greek debt. His arguments are unimpeachable in my view, and what is interesting is that many of the finance supremos he meets agree with him. In private. But in public they toe the line, which is to say that social democrats (for it is they) are fearful of upsetting the conservative apple cart which I paraphrase as the ideology of ‘sound money.’ Varoufakis tells of one conversation after another in which common sense proposals for progress on the Greek economy were simply sidestepped in order to maintain a pretence of order in the financial system. He is confounded by people like Sigmar Gabriel, then Germany’s SPD leader and vice chancellor in the then Merkel coalition government agreeing with his analysis but then immediately on a public platform rebuking that analysis. That of course is because his position wasn’t dependent on agreeing with Varoufakis. His position was within the Merkel coalition – Varoufakis mistook social democratic politicians for their potential for solidarity. However, in his meetings with the Eurozone’s all-powerful and hawkish Eurogroup of finance ministers and Eurocrats, Varoufakis is cheered by messages he receives from France’s finance minister – one Emmanuel Macron. I wonder if they’re still in touch. So I’m looking forward to the final half of Varoufakis’s book. It’s like one of those murder mysteries where the murderer(s) are introduced at the very beginning. And yet there’s still a mystery to be solved. Why? In this case the mystery is still being played out, at least for the Greeks. What a shame that with Brexit we’ve all lost interest in this Greek tragedy and the lessons it has for us. Which are? I’ll have to have a think about it. * I've now learnt that this part was fictitious - Cummings has never appeared before a select committee. I'm still prepared to believe his contribution to history stemmed from incoherence. I have two departure points for this new year’s ramble in the bleak mid-winter. The first is the big feature of the time of year itself, when traditionally millions of people - if you believe the media hype - will be making resolutions. The common feature of these resolutions will be that in some way the resolvers will be indulging the idea that they are going to make their lives better in some way (or even of those around them).
The second departure point is a recent article by George Monbiot in the Guardian in which he reflected with due horror on the not-so-new story that people in the advertising industry (with assistance from their servants in academia) are trying to manipulate us with ever more sophisticated techniques. First off then. New Year’s resolutions. These could be very basic expressions of existentialism in my simplistic definition of the term, which is to say that we should try to define ourselves and not assume our destiny has to be defined by others (frequently represented in the form of institutions it has to be said). A common feature of these new year resolutions will be the result of at least some self-reflection, and self-reflection is essential for anyone who wants to take control of their own life. I know in many cases the ‘big’ resolution will follow a pattern (stop drinking, lose weight, earn more, quit smoking, etc.) which fits snugly into society’s perceived expectations, but any self-reflection is better than none, even if it only lasts for a couple days. And who knows, perhaps the mindfulness trend may follow in these tentative brief moments of self-reflection and generate longer periods of self-awareness? So far, so painless. These days, what is mindfulness but a bit of day dreaming wrapped around a nugget of hygge? (I am pleased to see that spell checker hasn’t caught up with that one yet.) But as Frankie Howerd might say, ‘twitter (sic) ye not!’ After all it was only last week when to be vegan was to be as mad as an early Christian and look where they are now! So I can detect serious if as yet still marginalised signs that consciousness raising with a bit of effort could be a growth industry. This is where our companion with his anti-shepherd’s mitre, George Monbiot joins us, with his latest discovery of a new breed of mind manipulators who are shamefully and shamelessly ensconced in the redoubt of The Enlightenment – our universities! We should be taking a lead from academia and NOT being led by them in the way Monbiot rightly decries – working as they are for corporate mind-benders (Monbiot, by the way is our latter day Dante, guiding us gently by the hand around the rings of Hell). Beholden to corporate interests, many academics are seeking to destroy all possibility of self-reflection and individual autonomy. Self-awareness will be subjugated to algorithms which ivory tower laboratories of learning create. Talk about false consciousness? In this new age, the possibilities are endless! (Digression: Is this shift in our seats of learning a result of the commodification of higher education? Silly me.) False consciousness, aka cognitive dissonance, is essential to economic growth – how else might we overcome the limits of our environment? False consciousness is now being developed as never before. In Marx’s day it was a kind of accidental happenstance. Now it’s an industry in itself, part of the twenty first century’s silent industrial revolution. Our path shows signs of wear. It is being worn down by the competing boots of the seekers of truth and the makers of truth. The latter camp wear the path down faster (I’ve noticed this on my walks) because they drive literally and metaphorically four wheel drives and quad bikes over everything worth preserving and generally couldn’t give a fuck about silly people like me clutching our hiking sticks, we who follow old paths which are often too narrow and ill-defined for them to get their fucking machines down (I have a gripe you may have noticed – it’s the sound of carbon in the countryside). But having aired my rambler’s discontent, I know that an accommodation has to be struck between us and them, because this is their land and they cannot be dispossessed with a mere flick of the switch. If we tried that we’d be put down (defenceless veggie ramblers I mean). But a digression. Rambles are good opportunities for ranting. Back in the 1990s I once or twice organised (with the assistance of the Ford Maguire Society) rambles in the footsteps of the Luddites in West Yorkshire – how those paths resonated. Marvellous! (And who knows, in the not too distant future the route of the A2 into Dover may resonate with the memory of smashed looms – sorry lorries – from the great Brexit struggle.) In terms of longevity, most of our history is marked by the still extant, ancient thin slivers of paths and packhorse trails that criss-cross our moors and plains. Between the Romans’ departure and the first toll roads of the 1700s, roads were little more than glorified paths. Thinking about it, many Roman roads probably outlived the empire by a thousand years. But I’ve drifted off down a sheep track. That’s one of the joys of rambling, always provided you can rediscover the correct route marked on your OS map, hopefully without the cloud closing in. Where was I? Something to do with competing definitions of truth, the great dialectic of our day. What I’m coming to is the nature of existential truth, which in philosophical terms led to a whole post-modernist misunderstanding of what is to be understood as reality, and led into an age when relativism suggested we could all possess our own truth. The philosophy of Existentialism is partly to blame for this, but then so is science per se – the Uncertainty Principle, the counter-intuitive non-determinism of evolution, the continuing realisation of our diminishing significance in the universe. Ironically in these circumstances our leading post-Truther Trump needs neither God nor science to proclaim that the Sun rotates around his Imperial Arse. He is an arch existentialist, and brings out the nihilism which gets existentialism a bad name. So. I think I’m coming to the end, with a bit of a sweat on, and despite the vicissitudes of a lack of beer ‘on the tops’ I’m in good cheer and ready for the next little ascent and all importantly the last descent of this meander. Then to the pub (which always follows a descent). What I’m looking for is a true path – a true existential path – and I’m thinking this is not about some profound theory of Being and Nothingness (I’ve got the book but never read it. Sartre’s novels were a better intro) but it’s about the quality of actuality, the quality of Being. Being which could be represented by self-resolution - or destroyed by Monbiot's devils. I remember I had another introduction to this sense of beingness – perhaps a sideways introduction to this concept – doing an Open University course in the late 1970s (Art and the Environment, known to supplicants with the revered code TAD 292) Our tutor at our summer school held at Sussex University in 1977 was none other than Captain Reality, who has left no trace on Google (how real is that?). We studied the concept of reality by turning ordinary situations into uber-real situations. Our then unprecedented living sculptures and frozen tableaux actually made some passers-by nervous, even paranoid. An exposure to over-real reality can be unnerving, especially when there’s no explanation, when there’s no question and no answer. This can lead to aggression. Better then to give ‘em tuppence and a lick of ice cream to assuage their fears. Which of course is today’s prescription – climate change? What? When you’ve still got ice cream for gawdsakes! (And will need more of it.) I know that in the later stages of a good ramble it’s possible that one can be imbued with a feeling of satisfaction and with it that enervated yet energised sense of harmony which encourages one to say anything generally optimistic as soon as the pub veers into sight. The best rambles and rants always end with a pint, a pleasant substitution for anything conclusive. As long as the beer's on form of course. I’ve been watching a video discussion about the so-called ‘Integrity Initiative’ (a semi-private UK black propaganda outfit) which was linked in a post by Jewish Voice for Labour. The ‘initiative’ as we now know has received millions of taxpayers’ money and has beavered away seeking to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. In this discussion there was a mention of the British Army’s 77th Brigade, which deals with ‘Influence and Outreach.’ Talk about euphemisms. This is not what we might normally associate with social work and community development. The 77th Brigade’s website says:
SOME OF THE WAYS WE HELP Conducting timely and appropriate audience, actor and adversary analysis. Planning and integrating information activity and outreach (IA&O). Supporting and delivering IA&O within pre-designated boundaries. Supporting counter-adversarial information activity. Support to partners across Government upstream and post-conflict institutional development/reform. Collecting, creating and disseminating digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks. Monitoring and evaluating the information environment within boundaries or operational area. The second to last sentence deserves more scrutiny so far as the media is concerned. When did you last see an attribution to the 77th Brigade in the news? I wonder how many (e.g. Guardian) stories are sourced from the 77th Brigade? How many journalists have been cultivated by the 77th Brigade? The problem with establishment journalists’ unattributable intelligence briefings is that one never knows to what extent the source has been interrogated or at least tested. How can their info even be verified? How far would a journalist risk losing their precious (pay cheque giving) source? Now we must rely on a second tier of ‘interrogation’ (such as the video referred to above) which of course is considered less reliable – which is to say it doesn’t appear in the mainstream media. We are now in a position where every story touching on this sort of stuff has to be cross referenced on the internet in order to gain a more rounded view, or even just to be able to ask the questions we know need to be answered. I know the 77th Brigade’s type of activity has always gone on but now it is being legitimised like never before. Not that long ago the very existence of such activities would have been a state secret. The existence of our intelligence and security services was never officially acknowledged. The internet has cemented a new faux openness, but I’m not sure it’s changed anything of substance even if MI5 runs Christmas quizzes (I’m sure I read that somewhere). What we’re getting is more state chaff as we revert to a Cold War mentality which prohibits efforts to develop trust as the basis for building sensible engagement with our ‘adversaries.’ Who cares if a mission statement or two is published for public consumption, written in ever-so-clever goobledespook? The objective seems to be to rule out trust as any kind of possibility. Perhaps in the case of Russia this is a reaction not just to the perception of Putin as the all-seeing, all-knowing adversary, but the Western elite’s disappointment at its failure to capture Russia after the fall of Gorbachev. Russia’s development didn’t proceed according to plan! Let’s revive the Great Game! Crimea! Half a league forward, all in the valley of Death! No. 10 Downing Street
GOVERNMENT EYES ONLY Date: 1st January 20 . . errr, can we postpone that? To: Cabinet Secretary (for distribution) Department/Sec. of State/Task FCO/Hunt/Contact Sheikh Hasina Wizard and find out how we could win a general election. (n.b. use the phone box in Berwick and take a lot of change. She’s in Bangladesh) Home Office/Javid/Finish your hols and come back when I tell you to Exiting the E.U./Fox/Hand your Air Miles over to MoD – they’ll offset cost of Royal Flight Defence/Williamson/Check out Walmington-on-Sea. How are we fixed? Education/Hinds/Must find out who this person is Health/Hancock/Get those hospital waiting times down! Less than 4 hours please. Shouldn’t have to wait that long to get into a car park. Transport/Grayling/I read somewhere we’re converting Pacer trains into Amphibious Refugee Detention Centres. Make sure they’re replaced by 2030! You’ve got until 2040 to do it! Treasury/Hammond/Use any of Fox’s surplus Air Miles to reduce deficit. (n.b. walk across to MoD to get them, don’t use a taxi) N.I/Scotland/Wales/Chamberlain (it’s a team name)/Loved your comment about being a ‘little country far away about which we couldn’t care less.’ Keep up the good work! Environment/Gove/Time to stop counting sheep and counting your chickens, etc. We’ll need more rhubarb on March 30th. Only you can do this! DCMS/Wright/I want a slot on the Today prog. We’ll call it ‘Thought for the May’ or something like that. Get on with it. And make sure we can have a PayPal account attached to it. DfID/Mordaunt/Sorry, can’t afford you. Bugger off! BEIS/Clark/’Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’ sounds like a bit of a mouthful to me. From now on you’ll be the 'DFA' – the Department For And – or FA for short. Commission a team to design a new letterhead and report back to me in six months’ time. Attorney General/Cox/You’re a sucker for punishment you are! I need you more than ever! Love, T.(M.) Housing, etc., etc., etc./Brokenshire/Remind me. What is it that you do again? All the rest/…/Don’t know what to do here. I know! We’ll sell ‘em all off! Hurrah! Another job done! Strong and Stayable, Strong and Stayable, We shall live for evermooooooore! |
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