Fantasy Island

BREXIT voters are living in a fantasy world every bit as made up as Middle Earth or Westeros. Unfortunately, it's a shit one.

Nigel Farage's next poster idea

A small child is refusing to eat her dinner. Her father, having exhausted logic such as food assuaging hunger, attempts to exploit her childish mind.

"If you don't eat your dinner," he warns. "Mice with the legs of giant spiders will wrap you in webs of melted cheese and carry you away."

The girl looks at her father as if she was peering over glasses, even though she doesn't wear them. "Don't be silly, Daddy," she replies. "I'm not daft, you know. If there really were mice with the legs of giant spiders that spun webs of melted cheese, the giant cats with squid tentacles and faces made of herring would have eaten them."

Welcome to the intellectual world of the EU Referendum, where facts are routinely ignored in favour of who can spin the most persuasive lie. 

I refuse not to be disappointed in the politicians responsible for this situation. One has to maintain a level of disappointment: it's like putting oil in your car - as soon as you stop being disappointed the whole system grinds slowly to a halt. But I'm mostly disappointed by the people of England, the country of King Arthur, Robin Hood and The Lord of the Rings. It's not even that they are clearly living in some sort of fantasy world, like transdimensional beings whose bodies are present in this reality but whose minds are active on a different plane entirely. No, it's just that given some sort of collective derangement has made them reinvent their reality, why have chosen one so unremittingly shit?

The last few years in Britain have not exactly been Utopian. If half the British population want to "get away" in their heads, "escaping" like Sam Lowry at the end of Brazil, imagining he can escape bureaucracy, pollution and torture to live an idyllic life in a mobile home on the slopes of rolling hills, who can blame them?

Except that's not really what they've done. Like Bilbo in The Hobbit, they escape from goblins to be caught by wolves. Their collective delusion takes a slightly disappointing reality and replaces it with a really disappointing fantasy. At least David Icke believes we are in thrall to lizard people. What have we got?

A fantasy world where Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are your last hope. A Middle Earth where orcs don't cut you to pieces, they undercut your friend's friend's painting and decorating business. A medieval kingdom in the thrall of a dragon that takes £350m a week from you instead of virgin princesses*. They’ve conjured a world in which a reality which is already grimly disappointing is unspiced by the idea that’s it’s all about to get worse because the EU (standing for the Empire of Unbritishness, presumably) is planning to replace you with a Turk, in some sort of racially confused remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

If you tell these low-rent fantasists that immigration is good for the economy, they don’t believe you.  It’s true that we’ve not been very good at sharing the benefits of immigration (thanks, austerity); then again we haven’t been very good at sharing the benefits of being a country stuffed full of rich people, but membership of the Communist Party doesn’t seem to be burgeoning. 

This is because people are incredibly selective about their lies, and they’ve picked one they like. And that’s the disappointment.  If you’re going to live in your own world, it says something rather horrible about you if populate it with a zombie apocalypse of benefits-eating foreigners rather than, say, talking manta rays and synchronised-swimming badgers.

I fully intend to exploit my imagination not to exaggerate my misery but to protect me from the bleakness of Brexit Britain. The fact that our collective, mean-spirited delusion is about to compound the evils of the financial crisis and pointless austerity means that I may have to spend the next few decades believing I'm a magic yo-yo. Don't do that to me. Vote Remain. 

* the true number of virgin princesses** claimed by dragons is heavily disputed, thanks to a rebate and a misunderstanding over whether you get a certain number of princesses back before or after the dragon has eaten them.
** Note the lack of a capital letter. This has nothing to do with Richard Branson.

Blues’ “Mid Term Blues”

 There’s recently been quite a lot of wriggling, particularly by the Tories, but also by the media as they desperately try to show ‘balance’. This wriggling has mostly taken the form of pointing out that Governments seldom do that well in mid-term local elections, and pointing out that even the mighty Blair Government lost over a thousand seats two years into their landslide 1997 term.

The problem for them, and for people who believe Ed is nothing but Labour’s answer to William Hague, is that although it’s true that Labour struggled in 1999 there is one crucial difference.

They still, technically, won it.

The 1999 share of the vote was this: Con 34%, Lab 36%, Lib 25% - that’s very similar to the national election of 2005. The Tories will probably be forced to admit they lost that one.

[this doesn’t stop Adam Lent, whom I like, saying “incredibly Hague wiped the floor with Labour in 1999” – losing by 2% doesn’t sound all that floor-wipey to me. Iain Dale is fixated on the number of council seats won, but the number of seats contested this year was only 36% of the number contested in 1999. As an adjusted figure (reducing seats won by the percentage difference in those up for grabs), Ed’s team did 57% better than Hague did in 1999, while Cameron did 63% worse than Blair. Clearly, I have no data on the type of seats in play in each year – but it shows the danger of basing an analysis purely on seats won.]

The 2000 election (comparable to next year’s vote, one would say) is lot more helpful to the Tory argument – they won it convincingly in the year of Labour’s first crises, such the fuel protests and blockades (though these were yet to happen). But again, the problem is there’s more going on. The ICM historical polls are helpfully published online, and they tell us that in 2000 the national polling only gave the Tories one lead, of 4%, right slap bang in the middle of the fuel crisis. 4%. And that glimmer is the only, the only poll-lead the Tories scored in ICM national voting intention between 1997 and 2005.

Conversely, since the coalition ‘win’ the ICM polling has metronomed back and forth between the two major parties, and the most recent poll, just before the local elections, puts Labour on an 8% lead. The April poll in 2000, before that doubtless encouraging Tory local triumph?

National Voting Intention April 2000:

Con32%           Lab 45%           Lib 15%

For the Conservatives, the bad news is not that they lost the 2012 local elections, but that the results closely mirrored polling of the British people’s national voting intentions. Either the polls are back in pre-1992 error mode  (and there’s lots of comment arguing based on the precedent of Kinnock!), or there’s something very different at work here. For me, Ed has already proved that he’s not William Hague.

Gay Gordon, Gloomy Dave

I was having a thought this morning. Just a little one, but it kicked off a lot of other thoughts like someone dropping a pebble on a neatly arranged cluster of marbles.

Gordon Brown is a vilified figure, to the extent that it's embarrassing for Labour a politicians to be seen to have been too close to him (The Guardian this morning felt the need to point out that Shadow Foreign Sec Douglas Alexander had "fallen out" with his former mentor) . Biographies and documentaries paint him as a bullying monster and a raging megalomaniac. I'm not in a position to argue with any of these things, but it's interesting to compare one aspect of him with his shiny faced successor in Number 10.

When the global financial crisis - which most people who don't have foam dripping from their mouths will concede was mostly born of reckless behaviour by US banks - hit Britain, Gordon had a choice. He could immediately blame said American institutions and start warning us how terribly, terribly bad the whole thing was going to be. Gordon didn't do this, however, understanding as he did that the more terrible he told people it was going to be, the more terrible it actually would be. This is a fairly basic part of economics that even duffers like me understand - if people are terrified of the future they stop spending, making any contraction in the economy that much worse. Or he could be upbeat - Mr Brown insisted repeatedly that Britain - although hugely reliant on the financial services sector since the 1980s - was actually well place to weather the economic storm.

"Tell 'im he's dreamin'" was the basic response from many, but although the financial crisis hit us harder and longer than most countries, we did actually start to pull out of trouble at a decent lick in early 2010.

But this was too late for Gordon. By insisting that we would be all right, he left himself in a weak position when it came to blaming international causes. If Britain is "uniquely well placed", then it's different to other countries. If it's different to other countries, recessions of international causes do not necessarily have to happen here. If they still *do* happen here, it must be the Government's fault. However, there's a very real chance that the recession was less severe because of the constant reassurance issuing from Number 10. Alistair Darling couldn't stop himself from prognosticating gloom, but at least he kept it to newspaper interviews rather than banging on about it in every speech opportunity that came his way.

David Cameron is a superb political operator. There's no way he's going to make the same mistake as Gordon and leave him unable to blame international circumstances for the floundering state of the economy. The only problem is that Gordon's approach wasn't a mistake. It was the right approach. We've now had weeks of Cameron and Osborne warning us that the Euro-crisis would precipitate some sort of financial Armageddon that Britain cannot escape. On top of high inflation and wage cuts (in real terms or just real) and with VAT increases and far rises, we're now being prepared for some sort of economic pebble to drop down right on our neatly clustered marbles. It's hard to imagine consumer demand recovering any time soon.

In seeking to avoid responsibility for the problem, Cameron is very likely to make it worse. And if duffers like me get the consumer spending (and company hiring) link to confidence, so should he. He should accept that if the economy fares that badly his chances of re-election are pretty slim anyway and 'take one for the team'. He should start acting as if Britain has the ability to fight off the effects of the Eurozone crisis, even if he doesn't really believe it, because if he doesn't it's going to be a whole lot worse. If even "power hungry" Gordon can see that, surely Dave can.

SR

PS: Maybe I'm wrong - maybe Dave is an avid reader of Paul Krugman and refuses to believe in the Confidence Fairy. If so it's a shame he hasn't spotted the defence of counter-cyclical Keynesian spending while he's at it, though.

WIIFTNIMBYS?

Michael White has posted a balanced but fairly upbeat analysis of Labour's 2011 conference so far. What's got me writing is this little snippet:

"All politicians talk about devolving power from Whitehall, only to reassert themselves against local decisions they don't like, as Eric Pickles is already finding."

And I wondered - why do local people fight back against decisions (mostly planning, I would think) that the national Government thinks would be broadly positive for the country?

I grew up not in suburbia exactly, but in an off urban/rural dividing line. The front of the house faced the busiest road in the area (since slightly healed by a by-pass), while the back looked over flat arable fields. Once they put in double glazing in the front windows it was pretty lovely, but last year we heard that the council is pushing forward plans to pave over the field at the back and build a new housing estate. It's been rumoured for 30-odd years, so no-one is shocked, but it'll be sad for anyone still living there when the bulldozers roll in.

It's no surprise that there is local opposition. The main road may well become insanely busy again, the schools might get overcrowded. It's all great news for owners of various local supermarkets and other commercial enterprises, and the developers will make a packet. The Conservative Council will hold out their hands and fees from the development and massive hike in Council Tax returns will make sacrificing some beautiful green fields a very rewarding one. I'm sure voters across the district will benefit from a small cut in their taxes as a result, and of course it's undeniable that we do need to build more homes - somewhere.

But I wonder - what will the families and home owners fringing the field get? The ones whose view will be irreparably harmed? Whose cars will get stuck in the extra traffic jams, or whose children will end up lost in bigger class sizes? I suspect very little. And I'm sure the same applies to every other NIMBY the country over. The national or regional economy may well benefit from a new factory or energy plant, but do the actual locals - the people who have to look at a chimney or breathe in its smoke - get a fair share of the resultant benefits? We're probably talking money here in most cases, but if you're building a factory of buildings at the end of someone's back garden, the very least you should offer them is a slightly longer garden.

There's a sense, I suspect, for most people that councillors and developers are the only people who really get a pay off from controversial planning, or that any democratic benefits are thinly spread and as likely to apply to someone who'll never see the new developments as those who'll have them shoved under their noses.

This is a post of questions, but I can't help thinking that if we answer them it might just be a fairer way of deciding whether things go ahead than moaning about local opposition in the face of national need. And if you fix that maybe localism could be trusted to proceed unhindered for a while and we can see if it works.

Talking Round Corners

Slightly fascinated by a part of the exchange in PMQs this morning. Ed Miliband accused the Government of presiding over a rise in waiting list times. The PM responded by saying they'd gone down. Presumably there is some truth buried somewhere, but two things puzzled me. Firstly, Ed was trying to say that public sector reforms were not needed; why then did he want to suggest that the NHS was floundering? But secondly, David Cameron has not yet implemented any of his reforms on the NHS (except in a few pilot pockets that are unlikely to affect overall figures), so why does he wish to suggest that the NHS is doing well?

There must be some logic, but I fear logic has been superseded by the usual presumption that everyone else is fucking stupid and only understand "fire bad, tree pretty", or in this case Waiting List Up or Waiting Lists Down.

Can Benefits Claimants Sue the Daily Express?

I was idly thinking, as I spotted The Daily Express' latest headline "4M SCROUNGING FAMILIES IN BRITAIN" whether there is a possibility of some sort of collective legal action by recipients of benefits in the UK.

Of course, some might think it flattering to be described as 4 metres tall, but putting aside lazy typography there must be some harm befalling these people because of the misrepresentation of their circumstances. Can the Express continue to lie with impunity? I'm not quite sure how it can. You can't call millions of people scoungers and expect there to be no harm caused to them.

Especially since, as usual, their figures are more than selective. It turns out that to qualify as a scrounging household you need only 1 adult of working age. They then admit that 7.25million people are living in these workless households. Wow. Small families. The average family has 1.8 children these days. 75% of households still have two parents. So that's a an average family size of 3.3 people, whereas these "workless families" are only 1.8 people strong. And there are only 1.85 million children in this equation. Who are these families? What are the definitions? Are we excluded pensioners, or is claiming your pension now considered to be scrounging? Are these older workers, whose children have long since left and might be finding it hard to keep up with the ever changing labour market (not that the Express would give a shit, clearly)? All of which is entirely unclear from a Daily Express article that finally admits, despite its screaming headline, that there are 38,000 fewer workless households this year than last, despite rising unemployment. And this is a headline? Did they just forget to mention it last year?

This is not news. It is campaigning. The Express is aligning itself with the Tax Payers' Alliance to support benefit cuts, and ultimately tax cuts. There clearly *is* a problem with worklessness in this country, but it is not one that will be addressed by the kind of economic policies proposed by the TPA. And it certainly won't be fixed by demonising the workless and exaggerating public perception of how many there are, but that is the very mission on which they have embarked. "Confusing and over-generous benefits are trapping people in worklessness" says the TPA. No mention of any other possible factors, but that would confuse there nice simple world view. How about a lack of jobs? Cut benefits, starve the economy of money, reduce jobs, fix worklessness? Is that how the TPA rolls? Good to know they can find novel ways out of the liquidity trap.

But seriously, if I allege on the front page of the Express that Jerry Kitchener of Rotherhithe is a scrounger, I imagine Mr Kitchener might be entitled to some sort of recompense. So why - if I smear 3.88 million households (probably including pensioners, single parents and those too ill to work)- can I keep doing it?

Sometimes I wish I knew more about the law. But at least I feel I'm on safe ground announcing that The Daily Express is poorly written and following a suspect political agenda. The joy of common knowledge.

He Did Everything Right

"LEO: ...in the two and a half hours we've been sitting here have you discovered one thing that he's done wrong? OLIVER: No. LEO: So, what's your problem? OLIVER: That's my problem, Leo. Are you out of your mind? He did everything right. He did everything you do if your intent is to perpetrate a fraud." The West Wing, Season2. Apparently - in this is only hearsay based on a lot of pre-election mutterings - The West Wing is one of David Cameron's favourite programmes. If it is, he certainly doesn't pay attention to it as closely as he should. The above quote is from a story line about how liberal President Jed Bartlett turns out to have concealed his Multiple Sclerosis from the US public prior to his election. Jed justifies this in two ways - he only intends to serve one term, minimising the chances that his condition will ever affect his Presidency, and he views it as a sin of omission, rather than a lie. He has always been careful not to put himself in a position where he is forced to claim that he does not have MS. Bartlett eventually realises that this carefully constructed morality is, in itself, wrong. Cameron's handling of the sticky News International phone has been steadily more sure footed over the last few days, recovering from a stodgy start where Ed Miliband was making all the running to look as though he might survive with his reputation intact. After all, he hadn't really done anything *wrong*, had he? Yes, he's trusted someone that he shouldn't have trusted, but really the blame was on Andy Coulson, and not his erstwhile boss. Cameron didn't hack phones; he was innocently exploited by someone who possibly had. But yesterday a new, interesting, angle appeared. Alistair Campbell and his Labour successors had been given the very highest security clearance (how else would Campbell have been able to get involved in the production of the "dodgy dossier"?). Such clearance requires the individual to be subject to very rigorous screening and investigation. This morning it was confirmed that Cameron's current press Chief, former BBC man Craig Oliver, also has top level clearance, and will have undergone the same examinations of his past. The really interesting thing, though, is that Coulson was not given such clearance, meaning that he did not have to undergo anything like as through an examination. This jarring blip in the sequence of high level access for Press Chiefs screams for explanation, because the one that springs first to mind is good old plausible deniability. If no-one exposes Coulson's possible misdemeanours, then Cameron can very fairly rely on the "trust" response. But if Cameron truly trusts Coulson, why was he afraid of what a security investigation would uncover? Despite that, David Cameron has insured that he really didn't know anything about Coulson's past, simply because he didn't look very hard. But there's no actual wrong-doing here, surely? Is there one thing that Cameron has done wrong? No. He did everything right. Oh dear.