The Glidd of Glood Blog

Brexit Schmexit - and they all lived happily every after

I’ve been following quite a lot of Brexit over the past weeks. It’s a little like the latter stages of a cup competition. In the early rounds nothing much happens of any great importance or unpredictability but as the semi-finals and the finals approach, the tension and media interest ramps up several notches. Only a few weeks now, supposedly. Clock is ticking to the fateful 29^thof March 2019 when the UK scampers like a tide of lemmings to the cliff edge and leaps into the abyss. The chances of the lemmings spontaneously sprouting wings and soaring off into the azure seem remote, no matter what some of them believe.

The story so far: May negotiates a deal that the EU can live with. She presents it to Parliament. Parliament decides it can’t live with it. On the one hand, it just isn’t Brexit enough for the cabal of extreme Brexiteers, exemplified by Jacob Rees Mogg’s “European Research Group”. (What are they researching? Nothing. You may remember the post I wrote a few months back about spurious, innocuous-sounding names that hide a sinister intent.) On the other hand, there is half the country that doesn’t want any Brexit, of which I am one, not that anyone officially asked me my opinion. So, they are hardly likely to vote for the deal. And then the EU has already spent two years negotiating. It’s not easy with 27 countries to represent. As far as it is concerned, that’s it. No more negotiating. Take it or leave it.

The sticking point is the now famous “backstop”. This is a clause in the deal which says that there will never be a hard border in Ireland and that until something more permanent is worked out, things there should remain much as they are. It’s a huge sticking point because the Irish only stopped bombing and assassinating each other and people elsewhere in the UK when it became apparent that with no real border between the North and South, and with some laws made for both sides in Brussels anyway, it wasn’t that important whether Ireland was united or not. The rabid Brexiteers aren’t interested in Ireland. They aren’t going to go there, so they can cheerfully forget about it. But in any case, in their weird, rose-tinted view of the world, there isn’t a problem that post-Brexit Britain can’t solve that will keep them from transforming the country into a new utopia.

The politicians are making a meal out of this. In a superb moment of irony a week ago, it was revealed that although 70% of the population had no faith in the leaders of the EU, 85% of the population had no faith in Westminster MPs. Or to put it another way, although the country is determined to leave the EU and “take back control” – ugh! – they wish, by their own admission, this control to be entrusted to a load of people who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a House of Commons bar. May and Corbyn are both concerned with their own CVs, their own parties and their own soon-to-be-forgotten place in history. May doesn’t really care if we leave or remain in the EU, but she wants to be seen as strong, in a Maggie Thatcher mould. That means enforcing the Leave referendum result because “Brexit means Brexit” and “Leave means leave”. There will no doubt be some other pointless phrases before this is all over. She is also terrified of Rees Mogg and all the more charismatic Leavers like Boris Johnson splitting her party and putting her out of a job. What is really best for the country is a minor consideration. She won’t step up and say that maybe the country should have a rethink, or even openly say that as the referendum result was so close, the UK will leave in the softest manner possible and will not slam the door on the way out. So Remainers can forget any help from Mrs May. She doesn’t have the courage to really lead.

Jeremy Corbyn, it has now been revealed, was a closet Leaver all along. Not so closet, according to recent video which has surfaced of him 10 years ago berating the EU and setting out his Leave stall. Might he have changed his mind in the interim? I don’t think Corbyn has changed his mind about anything much since he was student going on demos. That is pretty much the mindset he brings to everything. All he is interested in is getting a second General Election where he will be elected supremo, he thinks. Despite the Tories being incapable or toxic depending on your point of view, this still seems unlikely as Corbyn appears to be equally as incapable if not more so. In any case, a Labour government with a Leaver in charge isn’t going to change the status quo so another General Election is a complete red herring if the country wants to break out of the Brexit impasse.

The answer is possibly to have another referendum which has been dubbed The People’s Vote. This is an amalgam of The People’s Princess, the glib moniker that suddenly got attached to Princess Diana, and The Meaningful Vote which was a superb title for the vote on May’s negotiated deal because it implied that all the other Brexit-style votes were completely meaningless. Just about sums up the entire shambles. A second vote is potentially the answer because if the country votes, upon reflection, not to leave the EU after all, then the whole problem goes away and the people of the UK, including the EU citizens that live there and the more than one million ex-pats in Europe, can go back to doing whatever they were doing before anyone had even invented the word Brexit. Naturally, if the country votes again for Brexit, well, no one can complain that they weren’t consulted.

The arguments for and against the second referendum go like this:

Against:

• We’ve had one referendum. Leave won, Remain lost, get over it and give us the Brexit we voted for.
• The mood of the country has not changed since the first referendum
• There is no time
• If Leave wins again, Remain will just ask for more referendums until they get the result they want
• It will divide the country even more than it already is.

The real fear is that both May and Corbyn want to leave for the reasons mentioned above and don’t want to run the risk of losing a second referendum which might very well mean Remain. There is much parroting of potentially ruining our democracy by having another vote. But really, Leave is terrified that their precious Brexit, cloud-cuckoo-land utopia will not materialise if people vote for the status quo.

For:

• After 3 years, people may well have changed their minds
• The people who want Brexit are predominantly old and some of them will have died since the last vote, and younger people will have come on to the register. That might make all the difference
• 3 years ago, the Leavers didn’t know what they were voting for (the Leavers hate this argument) but they do now. All sorts of wonderful Brexit promises haven’t been delivered and they are now shown up to be the pack of lies that they always were. The electorate is wiser and better informed now.
• Now the vote can be on Remain, Leaving with the negotiated deal as is, Leave with no deal.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple as if the questions are put like that, then the Leave vote would be split and Remain would be the obvious outcome. Not very democratic. Equally, if it was done on a preference system, leaving with the negotiated deal would be the outcome, because it would be everyone’s second choice, assuming it wasn’t their first. So, you’d have to have an In/Out face off, and if Out won, then a second round of voting on the deal or no deal. Still, it all makes more sense that what we have now.

There is a reason why you can’t just get divorced straight after a blazing row. Here in Switzerland, you need to be separated for 3 years (or is it 2?) and only then can you get divorced. It gives everyone a chance to cool off. Do you really like living on your own and being poor and rarely seeing your kids? Was the marriage that bad? Maybe it’s better than the alternative. Maybe not, but at least you get a second bite at the cherry.

And so it seems obvious that there should be a second referendum just to make sure, seeing as it is going to create so much misery for so many people.

But the Leavers do seem to be becoming more entrenched. Lots of them want to leave without a deal, which is the equivalent of hurling obscenities at your wife or husband, slamming the door and keying their car on your way out. People like Nigel Farage try to whip up this feeling as demagogue-in-chief on LBC radio. These Leavers are just permanently outraged and can’t be bothered with trying to solve any problems because in their eyes, there aren’t any. It is by no means guaranteed that they won’t have their way. I find them so annoying that I rather start thinking, go on then, leave. See if I care. Because living in Switzerland with no intention of returning to the UK, it’s not really my problem. Maybe it’s people like this that convinced me to do my own leaving in the first place.

Fear by Bob Woodward - the story of a very stable genius

It is not uncommon to meet stupid people, but I have noticed that many of the most stupid are too stupid to know how stupid they are. It’s almost inevitable. After all, if they were aware that they were somewhat thick, then they would not, ipso facto, be amongst the most stupid. Added to not being aware of how challenged these people are intellectually, they are often the ones who make the most noise. They constantly have their mouths open where they parrot away any old gibberish, unsubstantiated by facts, that takes their fancy and present it to the world as truth. It comes as no surprise to find that these people are often adepts of social media.

Which leads us to Donald Trump.

I have just finished Bob Woodward’s Fear which is an insider account of the first year of the Trump presidency. It’s the fourth Woodward book I have read on the machinations of the Whitehouse and three of them were good. The two Bush ones, Plan of Attack and State of Denial, were fascinating because the Bush presidency was so dysfunctional and the principals in his administration were so unpleasant and hated each other. The Obama one, Obama’s Wars, was rather dull. He and his advisors were not nearly so cartoonish. Bush junior was famously not the sharpest knife in the draw but he looks like a fully paid-up member of Mensa compared to the current Whitehouse incumbent who fits neatly into the description in the paragraph above.

It’s not so much that I have a dislike of Donald Trump; I have a disdain for him. He is grossly lazy for a start. Here is a man with the biggest job in the world, one which you could never hope to do adequately, no matter how hard you worked, but one that would seem to merit at least an honest effort. Trump’s answer to this is to start his day at about 11 am and pack it in by the early evening. He watches about six hours of TV a day, endless talk shows and news shows all about himself. At weekends he plays golf. Although his aides prepare a menu of easily digestible morsels to prepare his meetings for him every day, he rarely if ever looks at them preferring to approach issues with his gut – something that the younger Bush also favoured. Well, it’s a lot less work.

And then he is a pathological liar. The book actually ends with this sentence: “In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News”, the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd (Trump’s personal attorney) knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar”.

Politicians are notorious for twisting the truth and presenting a partial view of the facts. People hate them for it, but when you think about it, it’s completely inevitable. This is because in Western democracies, the press is allowed to question political leaders about anything. But you can’t expect politicians to give honest and full answers about their intentions. It might undermine a negotiating position. It might severely scupper some course of action that is only partially formed. It might really annoy some section of society, or box the politician into a corner where they will find themselves trapped in the future.

But Trump has taken this to a whole new level where he just invents an alternative universe and presents it as reality. In Trump’s universe, immigration is a major course of unhappiness for Americans – although population density in the EU is three and a half times greater - trade tariffs will restore American manufacturing to levels last seen decades ago, and climate change doesn’t exist. Fear shows Trump’s closest advisors and even his own family trying to point out that he is living in cloud cuckoo land, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on him. If you took on the ex-head of Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful bank, to be your economic advisor, you might think it wise to hear what he had to say. You might suspect that he knew more about economic affairs than you did. Unless you were so stupid that you were convinced you were a “very stable genius” and didn’t need to listen to advice. Interestingly, Gary Cohn, when he was head of Goldman Sachs, instructed his subordinates to do no business with Trump as the man was a liar who would renege on deals and default on his financial obligations. He was a sure-fire way to lose money.

The president of the US, indeed anyone in a position of authority, needs to listen to different sides of an argument and then use his judgement to plot a course of action. The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t have any judgement hence the revolving door that his staff go through. Trump has fired more people or suffered more resignations than any president I can remember. Eventually, when people insist on trying to prick his balloon of hot air, he grows weary of them and gets rid of them or, just as likely, they get weary of him and leave. It’s not easy getting to the top of a profession. If you’ve become a four-star general or the head of Goldman Sachs or the head of Exxon Mobil, you must have displayed some sort of nous as well as a huge amount of grit and determination, not to say ruthlessness. Do you really want to spend your days being subservient to some clown of a bankrupt property developer and TV celebrity who continually questions your expertise and tries to belittle you?

I have also read Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury which was even funnier and more cartoonish, and Luke Harding’s Collusion which presents a lot of circumstantial evidence for collusion between the Trump Organisation and Russia. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Trump did collude with Russia. I’m sure that Russia did what it could to help elect Donald Trump because if you were Russia, you’d be overjoyed to see a complete buffoon as president of the United States. But collusion is a two-way street and Trump is just too stupid to collude with anyone. It implies a plan, subterfuge, dissembling to achieve some future goal, strategy. Trump is incapable of these things. Trump is WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get. He is the man without a plan, the man who makes it up as he goes along. Now Steve Bannon is another kettle of fish entirely, but as he dresses like a bin man, he wasn’t ever likely to be elected president of the US. Fortunately for us all, Trump and he have fallen out.

I had another realisation as I read Woodward’s book and that was the parallels between the martial nature of the USA and that of Ancient Rome. Rome saw itself as a martial state, where the sons of notables would go to the Campus Martius to be trained in the arts of war and fighting. So, too, is the US defined by its love of violence. You only have to look at those books by Woodward: Plan of Attack which is all about the beginnings of the needless war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan; State of Denial deals with the quagmire that Iraq has become for the US; Obama’s Wars is also centred around the continuing problems posed by these wars. It’s not that the books are meant to be about war, just that US presidencies are defined by war. Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy and Nixon were all about the Vietnam War. Carter was constrained by the Iran conflict. Reagan was associated with the Cold War and its end. The only thing you can say in favour of Trump (and to be fair, it’s a big plus) is that he doesn’t want to be involved in wars. That may be so, but he has an obsession with the military.

His closest advisors include retired Marine General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, General Joseph Dunford as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, Marine General John Kelly as Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General HR McMaster as national security advisor. You might think, fair enough, it’s normal to have military people in these roles. But what is surprising is that these people seem to shape all policy, military or not. You can’t negotiate a new trade agreement without McMaster attending the meetings. There are more military people here than in your average junta. We used to laugh at Russian parades of tanks in Moscow with the leader surrounded by dour military men from the Politburo in greatcoats, but the US is essentially the same.

If you compare the US to any democracy in Europe, the amount of influence of the military on government is just ridiculous. Imagine a UK government where generals pervaded all discussions. It’s just unthinkable. But in the US with its 400 million private guns and its 30’000 firearm-related deaths annually, it’s just normal to have guys well-versed in killing people running your country. And the UK thinks it has a problem with unelected EU bureaucrats… Apart from Vice President Mike Pence, how many of the principals in the Trump administration (or any US administration) did the people elect? Answer: none.