BiasFuzzball

Breaking a long silence of being too busy for any of this to say, congratulations to the first female occupant of the office of European Commission President. Shame that the position has been turned into a sock-puppet for the national leaders. And doubly a shame that it's been done by putting all the candidates who actually ran in the election in the bin while relegating the Parliament to its old rubber stamping role.

And if that's not enough damnation with faint praise, let me just add that I'm sure Ursula von der Whoever will rise to the occasion and that contrary to my initial expectations we will probably still have some sort of European Union once this five term is up.

Not sure how successful it's possible to be with the whole Stop Brexit thing if this sort of backsliding can just happen. And I'm getting so very tired of Parliaments opting for the stupid or the cowardly choice by single digit majorities...

So, long story short, Theresa’s just finished shoving a Brexit position that Europe can’t accept down the collective throat of a party that didn't want to compromise at all. She was hoping that this would have moved discussions along, pushing a European Parliament that doesn't want to help her into arguing a negotiator who can’t help her into going against his bosses in the 27 member states and agreeing to carve up the Single Market for her personal convenience, which nobody in the 27 is interested in doing. Today she tried to turn the question around and told the European Union that she’d done her homework, now it had to get serious and start negotiating on the basis of her position.

And now, in the middle of the night, her chief negotiator appears to have just resigned. The obvious retort now is, negotiate? Any time, but who with? 

To be fair, David Davis was perfectly aware that the particular recipe of fudge Theresa was using would never work. He even told her, it seems, but of course listening to the people whose job it is to do a thing when discussing how that thing should be done is dangerously close to following expert opinion. And we’re tired of experts, so resignation it is.

Where next, then? Well, I have no clue. Some punditry is suggesting we’re looking less likely to be facing a hard Brexit, but my feeling is this makes it more likely for the whole thing to just fall to bits and leave us just watching as Britain drifts out on the arranged date according to the Article 50 timetable, with no plan in mind, no course set and nobody in command.

If this move by Davis is part of something planned then I suppose it’s leadership challenge time. Of course, the man is a muppet so it could either be part of a planned intervention, or just the latest item in the cavalcade of incompetence that is his career, his ministry and frankly the whole Brexit process to date. 

The Tory Party works by a system of absolute rule qualified by occasional regicide, with a particular backbench committee having the ability to just start a contest if it gets enough of the parliamentary party to write a letter to it. Perhaps they will now have enough letters to do this, landing us right back where we started in June 2016, with no prime minister and no idea what we’re supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on and the deadline looms.

Well, that’s the local pride event attended. For me, these days, it’s less about pride and more about grim defiance, but still.

And it looks like someone there has by chance distilled my entire political position into a simple representation consisting of two flags. Going to have to get myself one of those Scotland ones.

One thing about holding protests in Edinburgh is that if you frame the photo carefully, it looks for all the world like you’ve marched a couple thousand people out into the Highlands for the day to make a point.

The London Fish Party - a gang of dissidents dress in traditional costume of tweed and take to the river in order to dump, well, from what we can see about three individual fish into the Thames in protest against Britain having any relationship at all with the European Union.

History repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, yes?

It’s amazing to think that, two years ago, the situation was the US in the final stages of securing vast trade agreements, TTIP and TPP, that would have tied Europe, Japan and the Asia-Pacific into a vast network of economic dependency centred around the US and anchored to its ideas, foreign policy and ethos.

Today, a similarly composed trilateral meeting is a damage control exercise that looks pretty much doomed to fail. I suppose if a week is a long time in politics, then two years might as well be a geological epoch.

This clown keeps trotting out the line that New York and Singapore will do better out of Brexit than any European Union centre of finance. He doesn’t get it - the European Union doesn’t care what non-EU centres of finance do well, particularly. And if London decides it wants to be just another non-EU centre of finance, then that is exactly what it will be. Just another non-EU centre of finance.

Didn’t he get his own government’s memo? Brexit means Brexit.

Something sober on the Italian elections. Before we write liberal democracy’s obituary (again...) we must remember that this is happening in Italy in 2018 and not England or the USA in 2016.

Is Italy facing political chaos? Absolutely. But sometimes a little chaos is just what’s needed to get things moving again.

And chaos that discredits Matteo Renzi and forcibly retires Silvio Berlusconi might just be the kind of good chaos that will do Italy a whole lot of good in the near-term future.

Even if nothing works and we end up watching the country go back to the vote in six months time having failed to work this result, we’d be seeing a centre-left presumably led by Gentiloni rather than Renzi, who is slightly less popular than a selection of venereal diseases. And although it’s probably too early to write Berlusconi’s political epitaph (again...), we may well have a right wing no longer united behind his comfortingly familiar if rather odious figure.

We also shouldn’t forget that there’s the party that actually came first to consider as well. Forget Salvini’s League and overlook Renzi’s Democrats, the Five Star Movement came first by a significant margin over the next-biggest single party and represent something a little more interesting than a rebranded far right outfit or a slightly tired social democratic party.

They are a political experiment that might end up almost anywhere, a rollercoaster ride that might well make you sick to your stomach but is at least an interesting ride along the way.  There’s many doubts about them, and all sorts of reasons why they’ll fail. But they bring together a new generation that’s been shut out by Italy’s stagnant elites and they throw a whole raft of new ideas, some awful ones but some good ones also, into the public sphere.

I’d say it’s time to let them into government and see what they can do.

First day of spring... 

So make Emily O’Reilly the President already. I honestly believe that if her recommendations had been implemented ten years ago, we would not now be stuck watching Britain slowly murder itself with Brexit and we would not now be scrambling to prevent a Europhobic contagion in the new accession member states.

All the activity on diagnosing and countering outside influences on the European electoral processes is still useful, of course. The campaigns of misinformation that sometimes work and sometimes fail to swing votes are a big problem. But that misinformation is given fertile ground by the lack of transparency that the European Council in particular insists on.

As it is presently constituted, the Union will be as transparent as its member states allow it to be. It really is time we stopped letting them blame the rest of the Union’s institutions for what they choose to do behind closed doors.

While we’re all paying close attention to Macron and Merkel’s announcements about sorting out a unified banking system and getting the single market to work in the digital space, we should be careful we don’t miss the other half of the problem. One of our greatest weaknesses is the lack of a shared media space that brings us all around the same table with the same access to the same facts.

In Britain last week, Macron laid out three points Europe needs. More sovereignty, more unity, more democracy. Feeding into each of these is the need for quality journalism. We can’t have more sovereignty without more democracy, we can’t have more democracy without more unity, and we can’t be more united if we don’t have a media space that brings us together.

And this article makes the key point - this does not simply mean copy-pasting some local social media content and calling it on-the-ground research. As we must surely realise by now, any old idiot can post any old rubbish to Twitter, in aid of any agenda at all, but that falls far short of anything we should recognise as journalism.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as just having lots of media resources available automatically making a country immune to misinformation and political disruption from outside. But without well-resourced media operations working on the European level, it’s going to be a lot harder.

Pretty miserable stuff, this. First off, if we want to have a grown up conversation with the Americans, then we’ll both be needing new governments and there’s really no way around that.

Then there’s the inherent sadness involved with the British creeping around in the shadow cast by the United States, perhaps in the hope that the unobservant might think that it is the UK casting the shadow after all, like in the old days. To borrow and bend quotes from famous Americans, once you get past the self-promotion, the UK is the nation that has lost an Empire, thrown away a Union and now looks as far away from finding a role as it ever has been.

And then there’s the depressing figure cut by the Foreign Secretary himself. Holder of a so-called ‘Great Office of State’, yet with a departmental budget smaller than most county councils. Technically the lead man on foreign affairs, but with a role eclipsed by an activist Prime Minister on one front, an entire spin-off of the whole Brexit shitshow on another, and an independent Department for International Development whose meetings he isn’t invited to on a third. He can’t even cast himself as the biggest name in Brexit, since Nigel Farage and Donald Trump both lay claim to that dubious honour. Boris is left shrinking into the background, even before you factor in his obvious incompetence.

And what does he do to try and claw back some stature? Well, obviously he revisits his most odious lies from the referendum campaign and claims his numbers should have been even bigger. Of course he does. Well, hopefully he and Donald will get along. They just about deserve each other.

New year, same old stuff from the British government. This clown, who the Prime Minister has been wanting to sack for more than a year now, still doesn’t seem to have caught up with reality. This attitude is the whole, ‘Fog In Channel, Continent Cut Off’ mentality that holds London to be the centre to which everywhere else is connected. Add the attitude that cake can be had and eaten, and you’ve got the classic exceptionalist nonsense that’s landed us in this mess in the first place, still the main thread of what passes for thought in the cabinet.

Deals with services involved are quite possible, they just require the UK to stick close to the rules decided on by the European Union. If the UK doesn’t even want to stick close, let alone stay a partner within the Single Market, then indeed the Union might as well allow London to fall behind Singapore, New York, Tokyo or wherever else. After all, why worry about which particular non-EU centres of finance are doing well?

As for the idea that the Union must do the work to tell Britain what it wants, the situation was memorably illustrated by the ‘Barnier Slide’. Britain has already ruled out every meaningfully deep and close partnership where the Union might retain an interest. What’s left is a choice of off-the-peg FTA deals to negotiate between, and a time limit that rules out any particularly interesting variation on any of the usual themes. Britain has made the situation worse by painting exceptionalist red lines all over its own negotiating mandate, trapping itself in a corner. In refusing to acknowledge this, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Brexit Minister, and the Prime Minister herself to the extent that she even remains relevant, are doubling down on a failed strategy.

Everyone was very surprised yesterday when Nigel Farage came out with the idea of a second referendum to unite the country. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea. This government is probably not competent enough to realise that a ratification referendum would have no drawback for them - if they win, it is then not the government’s fault the public voted to kill the country’s future. If they lose and the country turns back, then the consequences of their failure to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear will never come to pass. Sadly, a government bright enough to realise this is not one that would have ended up in this situation in the first place.

Well, there’s an interesting day. We started off with the news that the Republican Party had lost the senate seat for Alabama that it carried in 2014 with 97% of the vote. It’s lucky that the US media isn’t as obsessed with using electoral swing to predict the result of a hypothetical nationwide contest as Britain’s is. If it was, the internet would now be buried in predictions that at the next election, every public office from the local town dog-catcher on upwards will be won by Democratic Party candidates.

And we end the day in Britain with the first major legislative defeat for Theresa May and the Brexit government. Amendment 7 to the government’s EU withdrawal bill, passed in defiance of Mrs May and the Conservative whips by 309 votes to 305, is an interesting and slightly opaque piece of legislation. It calls for the Westminster Parliament to have a ‘meaningful’ vote on the Brexit deal that the government ultimately negotiates, while at the same time reserving the use of the famous ‘Henry VIII Powers’ until after Parliament gives that endorsement in that meaningful vote.

What constitutes a meaningful vote? What options will Parliament have before it at the time? When will it happen? And will David Davis or indeed the May government itself last long enough to find out? All valid questions, all without answers.

Still, it’s useful to remember that we haven’t stopped Brexit. We haven’t even begun to stop Brexit. But this does set that vote at the end of the process up to be a pivotal, era-defining moment in Parliament. Will Britain reject the government’s deal and have another great big political melt-down? Or will it endorse the government’s deal and allow the executive to rewrite the law at will in the interest of pursuing a narrow national-populist agenda? Interesting times ahead, to be sure.

The whole Brexit process is quite remarkable. Whenever I think it has plumbed the depths and reached rock bottom, some new excavation happens and down we go.

On Monday we had the farce where a sure-to-work, guaranteed win-win border deal with the Republic of Ireland fell to bits when it emerged that Theresa May hadn’t consulted with the ultra-nationalist DUP, who promptly refused to support her despite the £1 billion bribe they got to keep them voting for her government after she lost it’s majority earlier this year. Today, it’s yet more farce as we have discovered the fate of David Davis’ Brexit impact assessments.

The assessments, he assured us, were numerous and painstakingly detailed. More than fifty separate studies, he said. Work of such quality that the European Union has nothing even on the same scale, he said. Well let’s see it, said Parliament, passing a motion compelling Davis and his department to publish these reports they claimed they had.

Um. Er. The dog ate them, said Davis. Weeks passed with the Speaker of the House getting increasingly impatient. Even arch-Brexiteers started to mutter that withholding such information when Parliament had explicitly demanded publication flew in the face of the British constitution.

Only now we have his admission that the dog did not in fact eat any of the homework, but that the homework was not in fact completed at all. No impact assessments have been carried out. The sectoral analyses are not quantitative, have no numbers attached, and don’t contain any forecasts of likely impacts on any sectors of the economy at all. The whole thing consists of 850 pages of report of which Davis has read zero pages. And in any case, he regards the lot of it as being basically a waste of time and paper, as ‘forecasts are always wrong anyway’. Great.

The icing on the cake that we can both have and eat is that the Parliamentary committee that’s meant to be scrutinising this shitshow has today voted that Davis is not in breach of any constitutional norms and that his cannot be held in contempt of Parliament. The non-existence of the reports he claimed to have, apparently, frees him from any obligation to fulfil Parliament’s instruction to publish them.

Of course, with the Conservative Party taking ten places on the committee and the DUP holding one, leaving opposition parties with only eight places, it was always possible that the party line would prevail. In the immediate aftermath of the election earlier this year, Theresa ensured that the loss of her majority in Parliament would have as little effect on the day-to-day as possible by using procedural rules and slightly expensive DUP support to maintain Conservative majorities on the committees. The result is that the bodies intended for holding the government to account have government majorities and remain, unsurprisingly, quite uncritical of the negligence, incompetence and wilful political vandalism taking place on a now daily basis.

The whole thing demonstrates, yet again, that the British constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on.