Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement is “a deal a nation signs only after having been defeated at war"

Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek Finance Minister at the time when the EU forced austerity on Greece, said on the BBC TV programme Question Time, on the day Britain was supposed to Brexit, March 29th, that Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement is “a deal a nation signs only after having been defeated at war".

"Theresa May. Look, first she triggers Article 50 on the basis of red lines that boxed her into impossibility – and that is a crime against logic. Secondly, it failed to recognise that Michel Barnier, when he announced the two-phase process, announced a declaration of hostility against the Government. May never even saw this coming.

“If I come to you and say let’s have a negotiation between us, and I say, first, you tell me everything you want, and then, we will tell you everything we want, clearly, you will say ‘No mate. I’m not going to have a negotiation with you along those lines.’

8 reasons why young voters are turning away from the Conservatives

Here are eight reasons why few British voters under thirty intend to vote Conservative, collected by James Kanagasooriam. 

They include: the fact that 20% of voters under 30 are non-white; the young's dislike of Brexit; their approval of progressive measures likes single-sex marriage and euthanasia that most Conservative MPs opposed; left-wing indoctrination in universities, for which the Conservatives steeply increased the fees, is a double whammy; and, above all, high property prices.

If you want to understand someone's political outlook think of how the world looked when he was 20. The young grew up in a time of financial crisis attributed to greedy bankers and deregulation of financial services. The youngest formed their world view taking account of the result of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump. 

Socialism is something from history lessons and my nephew was taught at school that Lenin was an improvement on the Tsars.

Only one Church of England bishop voted Leave

If slam dunk proof were needed that Britain should leave the EU, I offer it. 

112 Bishops of the Church of England voted Remain, according to well informed Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer, and one voted Leave. I am a bit doubtful about there he got the figures. I suspect he knew of one Leaver and assumed the rest were Remain, but the assumption would have been based on studying the hierarchy closely for years.

Catholic bishops in Great Britain probably have similar views. Oddly, though UKIP was the only party that opposed single-sex marriage, it is said to have fairly few adherents among the Catholic clergy, who tend to read anti-Catholic newspapers like the Guardian and Observer. Pro-abortion, pro-feminist parties get their vote instead.

“For the vast majority of people Brexit isn’t about the EU"

“For the vast majority of people Brexit isn’t about the EU, it is a proxy for a world view that includes their attitude to diversity and climate change as well as Europe. They would prefer to have parties which much more clearly reflect those values. Either Labour and the Tories rotate into those positions or they will be challenged by new parties rooted there.”

This is a quotation from Lord Cooper of Windrush, the Downing Street director of strategy under David Cameron, in today's Times. His lordship is right that attitudes to Brexit are about deep emotions that have little to do with the question in hand. This is the most interesting and least examined aspect to the crisis through which Great Britain (not to mention Northern Ireland) is living.

Of course, he is also completely right in thinking that cultural politics is now more important than economics.

How odd that important people who write newspaper articles find this surprising or hard to explain, when the reasons are obvious: grave threats to nation-states. These, of course, trump (no pun intended) everything else.

Quotations

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” 

Benjamin Franklin

“The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under a lamp, a book spread before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.”
The 14th-century Japanese priest Kenko in the Tsurezuregusa (“Grasses of Idleness”)

“All country people hate each other. They have so little comfort, that they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure or advantage . . . From not being accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it — stupid, for want of thought — selfish, for want of society. There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have it. They had rather injure themselves than oblige anyone else.”
William Hazlitt reviewing Wordsworth's Excursion.

The Marxist capture of knowledge

Claire Lehmann is the founder of the wonderful magazine Quillette and a very good thing. She is a genuine liberal and a few years ago I'd have thought real conservatism and real liberalism were very close - now, in the era of Brexit, Trump, Merkel and Salvini they are obviously very far away. She is an instinctive internationalist, admires the EU and dislikes populists intensely.


I enjoy her stuff very much and urge you to watch this interview about the way in which a form of Marxism has taken over academia and public discourse and turned arts disciplines into examinations of power and oppression, centred on class, feminism and post-colonialism.


Her hope is that new forms of university education on the internet will take over from conventional universities. I have long argued that this is inevitable, desirable and needs to be hastened (to break down the academic closed shop and the use of degrees to strengthen class barriers). Rather obtusely of me, I did not make the connection between breaking up the academic industry and the restoration of freedom of thought.

A customs union does not mean frictionless trade

Trade policy is extremely complex and even professors of European law get it badly wrong. The best source of information I know of is Richard North's irascible blog in which he speaks contemptuously of the crass ignorance of politicians and journalists on the subject. In fact the tone is very unattractive but the contempt seems often to be justified. Almost all British MPs are scandalously ignorant about the EU, as are leading columnists.

Michel Barnier and European leaders hope Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn will agree to leave the EU with "a" customs union (a non-EU country cannot be part of "the" EU customs union, apparently) and thus avoid a long delay to Brexit. But it is important to understand, in spite of what you have read, that exiting the EU on customs union terms does not mean "frictionless trade" between the UK and EU or even prevent customs being levied at the Irish border. 

Anyone who has crossed the land border between Bulgaria and Turkey, which is in a customs union with the EU except for agricultural produce, coal and steel, should know this. 

Also, of course, a customs union does not cover services, which make up three quarters of the UK's economy but this is a different point. No tariffs are levied on services. Regulatory alignment is what matters with services.

The Economics Editor of the Guardian argues that the value of the customs union to the UK is overrated here. 

Where we are today - heading to a delayed Brexit

The Solicitor-General, Robert Buckland, came clean on the BBC Radio Four’s Westminster Hour last night.

“Whilst I don’t pretend it’s ideal — I think there are some real drawbacks with it — it does mean we deliver the end to freedom of movement, and it does mean that we deliver the vast majority of the aims of Brexit. It’s not perfect, but frankly in this particular hung parliament none of us can get perfection. We need to compromise … Something approximating a customs arrangement or customs union I think would be the most likely outcome.”

A Labour source told the Sunday Times that they were happy to let Downing Street give the customs union a different name, (“Customs arrangement” and “customs partnership”?) to persuade Tory MPs that it’s not a customs union.

“They can call it ‘Alan’ if they want to. But it needs to have a common external tariff and comply with the WTO definition of a customs union.”

Rod Liddle, writing on Saturday in the Spectator, thinks the mess we are in is because Brexit is in the hands of a Conservative party three quarters of whose MPs are Remainers - and, also, not conservatives at all.

"If there were a few more Conservatives on the Conservative benches then the government wouldn’t have dreamed up a bill designed to inform infant school children about the undoubted joys of transgenderism, nor indeed voted for its passage by a huge majority.

Tories need to ditch Mrs May and her plan

"I did a random phone-around of Tory MPs, candidates and activists on Saturday. With the exception of one MP, I found not a single one of them who would be voting Conservative in the European elections. To a man and woman, they all said they would be voting for The Brexit Party. Interestingly none mentioned Ukip, a party which is now identified with rampant Islamophobia, rather than Euroscepticism."

Ian Dale in today's Sunday Telegraph.

Customs union forever

At talks with Labour on Thursday and Friday the government’s team, including Olly Robbins, effectively said that their deal contained measures that they had publicly said they were against. Said one source, quoted by the Observer,

“They were essentially setting out why the deal was very good and how we hadn’t quite understood how good it was. How, if you look carefully, it is a customs union and it is alignment with the single market. It was a really good, interesting technical exposition of the deal – but it was pretty clear they were selling their deal rather than explaining how they would change it.”

After lunch, the two sided discussed how the UK could be required to copy changes in EU law relating to workers’ rights. Sir Keir Starmer asked how could Labour have any confidence that a new Tory leader, perhaps Boris Johnson, would keep Theresa May’s promises.

Both parties want to keep the UK more or less in the customs union, which the civil service considers vitally important. Much worse, the backstop means a future government can never leave the customs union. But leaving is, in any case, impossible unless customs are levied on the Irish border.

We are at Germany's mercy

Charles Moore today sees Great Britain entirely at the mercy of Germany since Mrs May and Sir Oliver Letwin will not permit us to leave the EU without a deal.

"Enticing us by hints on the backstop, the EU could then pick its moment to work out how best to hold us down in the customs union and, if we remain as weak as we are now, demand a second referendum, too. Then, from the EU’s point of view, the worst that can happen is that it neuters us: its best is that we decide to stay in after all, humiliated. Angela the Mild will avoid crowing, but her European Germany/German Europe (same thing) will have confirmed its reign, and she can happily hand over to her designated successor.

"That is the way things are going."

Mr Moore thinks the Tories only hope of not being annihilated is if large numbers of constituency associations deselect Remainer MPs and replace them with Leavers. He doesn't think that likely and nor do you or I.

I think whatever happens the only hope for the Tories to survive at this moment and for decades to come is to move a long way to the right. From now on preserving national identity and sovereignty will be what European politics is going to be about.

Brexit talks break down - a recurrent headline

The Labour Party has withdrawn from negotiations with Theresa May after two long days complaining that she will not accept any genuine, real changes to her proposals. Now they understand what the cabinet has put up with for months.


Her negotiating strategy is based on repetition and boring her opponent into submission. It hasn't worked but is very draining for everyone. It is rarely that I sympathise with Jeremy Corbyn but I do this evening, as I sip my wine in a cafe.


He drinks only coconut water. Perhaps a struggle with his allotment at the weekend will relax him.


Yet he and Mrs May have much in common. Her plan would lead to Britain accepting something close to the customs union. She hates the idea of a low tax, low regulation country.


He on the other hand disliked the EU and EEC all his career and is an isolationist, whereas she is a typical European Social Democrat bureaucratic politician. A typical Euro-nonentity in fact, only distinguished from other European leaders by her lack of talent for the job.

Her only impressive quality, to quote Catch 22, is her unimpressiveness.

"It should not have been like this," Arlene Foster leader of the DUP said in a wonderfully schoolmistressy tone. "The United Kingdom fighting European elections almost three years after a clear majority voted to leave the EU sums up the disorganised and slapdash approach taken to negotiations by the Prime Minister.

Well, yes 

Margaret Becket suggested the Prime Minister needs a psychiatrist. Men like Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are deterred by chivalry from saying what they think of her, but women are not gentlemen.

Though I suspect there is nothing a psychiatrist could do to put things right. 

What would Jeremy Corbyn do if Theresa May agrees to his Brexit plan?

Theresa May left it very late indeed to talk to the one man who can ensure (probably) that Brexit passes the House of Commons, Jeremy Corbyn. She should have done so in 2016.

She is partly doing so to let him share the blame for a Brexit with no deal or a Brexit with a bad deal, which seem to be the only two choices. 

But the two parties have in theory very close views about Brexit. Labour is in theory in favour of a Brexit while remaining in a permanent customs union, in other words having a permanent intended backstop, while an unnamed government source told the Times: 

“We can’t say this but if you look at the political declaration you could argue that we’ve signed up to a customs union in all but name anyway" 

adding that the big difference was that Labour wanted that the UK to have a seat at the table in the negotiation of future trade deals between the EU and third parties. 

“We don’t think Brussels will offer that. But that is their problem not ours.”

In the end, Theresa May in the twilight of her rule came down against the Brexiteers and in favour of any deal being better than no deal. 

The Pope and the 'neo-rigorist homo-sexophobic reaction' to the sin of Sodom

On the flight back from Morocco, the Pope recommended the press read this article by Gianni Valente, which criticizes the 'neo-rigorist homo-sexophobic reaction' to the cases of priests buggering and sexually assaulting boys and girls (but mostly boys). 

His Holiness is very talkative with journalists in general which makes all the more noteworthy his refusal to comment on the allegations, by Archbishop Vigano, that he informed the pope of credible accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, who helped the Pope be elected and who has since been defrocked.

The new Archbishop of Washington sounds like he is not homo-sexophobic. Homo-sexophobia is definitely of fashion in this papacy. The article I linked to contains the startling information that

Archbishop Wilton Gregory was a protégé of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who played a leading role in the Gaying of the Catholic Church in America. In a nod to that legacy, Bernardin requested the Windy City Gay Men’s Chorus perform at his funeral. 

Pope Paul VI said in a sermon in 1972 that the smoke of Satan was in the Church. This is still the case.

Cabinet government has been suspended by a calamitous and unnerved Prime Minister

"One former prime minister told a private audience recently that if he had been asked about the EU customs union during his time in office, he would not have known what they were talking about" (Jennifer Rankin, who also doesn't understand it, in the Guardian today).

Laura Kuenssberg‏ of the BBC quotes a cabinet minister saying that, at today's seven hour cabinet meeting, fourteen ministers opposed asking the EU for another delay of Brexit and ten approved but she is doing so anyway.  

She insisted that the cabinet remained in No 10 while she addressed the nation from the street.

Why on earth did they accept being made prisoners? But it's a metaphor for their predicament  - and their cowardice.

The Prime Minister's behaviour is of course completely unconstitutional, even if the Cabinet Secretary, who wrote a paper about the baleful consequences of No Deal that was obviously written in order to be leaked, says untruly that the Cabinet never takes votes. 

(No need to go back to Mr. Gladstone's cabinet which took votes. Mr Blair's did.) 

The mainstream media expects cabinet ministers to resign. They would be fools to do so - if they do, Mrs May gets a majority for her policy. 

Mrs May has invited Jeremy Corbyn to talks and he has, of course, agreed. 

Her purpose is to make him share the blame for leaving with no deal and he knows this. 

His purpose is to avoid sharing the blame for no deal, or any Brexit, but without opposing Brexit, which in fact he wants. 

Hoping Britain takes part in the European Parliamentary elections

Obviously it would be excellent if Britain stays in the EU long enough to take part in the European Parliamentary elections, as looks likely - they are a much better way for public opinion to make itself heard than a general election. 

In Euro-parliamentary elections people will vote for small parties without the fear that they will form the government. The elections would be bad news for both Labour and Conservatives, but less so for the Conservatives than a general election. 

All this might be the fault of Mrs May in her autistic way negotiating in secret, without attempting to take her cabinet or Parliament with her. But if hers was the only deal, the EU would ever give us then her autism is only a side-issue.

European Parliamentary elections are bad news for the EU but I have the fortitude to bear their misfortune. They are good news for Salvini, Orban and the rest of the anti-immigration, Euro-sceptic politicians.

EU, breaker of nations

Jean-Claude Juncker today called David Cameron a great destroyer. This is not the first time. Apparently in March 2017,  Mr Juncker said: 

“I have met in my life two big destroyers: Gorbachev, who destroyed the Soviet Union, and Cameron, who destroyed the United Kingdom to some extent."

In the past the EU took offence at analogies between the EU and the USSR or with the Nazi plan for a United Europe. Am I right in suspecting a nostalgia on the Luxembourger's part for the Soviet Union?  

I do not suspect the Christian Social leader of being a Communist but of sympathy for dirigiste multinational, post-national authoritarian entities. The USSR, like the EEC/EC/EU, was internationalist and always proclaimed that it wanted to save Europe from war and Nazi revanchism.

David Cameron, breaker of nations - that reminds me of the tile of a very good book by Robert Conquest called Stalin, Breaker of Nations. I think the UK will not break up because of Brexit whatever happens, but the EU is in fact the breaker of nations.

Memo to self: visit the Danube delta this year

Theresa May is one of the smallest people ever set in a great place

The British Government's Chief Whip Julian Smith will show in an interview to be aired tonight that a softer Brexit was “inevitably” on the cards once the Conservatives lost their majority in 2017 and the Government “should have been clearer” that this would happen.

The 2017 election result meant that Theresa May was badly wounded and could not guarantee to have as majority for her positions when negotiating with the EU. 

The 2017 election result took a lot of power from the Prime Minister but would she have been able to get a better deal from the EU had she won a big majority? The election did, on the other hand, give the DUP the power to prevent a backstop that might lead to customs barriers between the mainland and Northern Ireland.

Had she had only got the deal she did get it would have been defeated even had she a majority of 90. That is assuming that the same number of Tory MPs voted against it as did so in January. 

Julian Smith calls the last few weeks 

 “the worst example of ill-discipline in Cabinet in British political history.” 

Of course he is right. The British constitution is not fit for purpose and is being remade. He by saying that is being startlingly disloyal too. 

The Prime Minister ignored the cabinet, elaborated her deal in strict secrecy and ran roughshod over the idea of cabinet government. Now cabinet government is reasserting itself while the House of Commons is doing the same thing. 

If Mrs. May fails to get her deal through this week on the fourth attempt her choices will be to leave with no deal, which she could do by proroguing Parliament for twelve days, or to call an election. if she tries to do the latter HM the Queen should insist on inviting others to try to form a government.

The truth is that Theresa May became Prime Minister despite not shining in cabinet, where she was very unpopular, according to David Laws, or in the House of Commons which she never commanded. 

I am not sure if this is because of the electoral system for electing Tory leaders, which allowed Michael Gove first to back and then to stand against Boris. I know things worked better when Tory leaders 'emerged' like they used to. I think that being a woman might make it harder for Theresa May to be a leader in the House or the cabinet, both of which are still male and clubby, but maybe it is not that. Maybe she is what Lord Macaulay called Queen Anne, one of the smallest people ever set in a great place.

Happy April Fool's Day

Readers interested in Brexit would do well to subscribe to Jack Blanchard's invaluable free newsletter. Today's begins:

Good Monday morning. Brexit Day is 11 days away.
HAPPY APRIL FOOL’S DAY: This is the day you’re meant to spot the absurd, fictional, no-way-can-this-actually-be-happening stories hidden away among the real news in each newspaper. Good luck with that this year.
ANNUAL REMINDER: April Fool’s Day is also Chris Grayling’s birthday. Because of course it is.

April Fools spoofs used occasionally to be funny, though I don't like them. I don't think newspapers should intentionally print fiction as truth. Now they do all the time. 

On the other hand, satire really has died by now - satire requires a sense of a fundamentally orderly universe which is being disrupted by foolish behaviour. I am not sure in a post-modern world, whatever that means, that this sense still exists.

I am not sure what fixed points there are any more - even in the Catholic Church, which until the present papacy was the one unchanging fixed point.