(Originally published on Kiltr two months ago)
Monday evening, a fortnight and a half out from the Brexit vote and as if in mute testimony to the now seemingly constantly redefining maxim, a week, no a day, no an hour is a long time in politics among the settling sands of the UK’s new political landscape, my already way too numerous notes for a promised shorter than its predecessors third and final part to ‘A Landscape of Fear’, had throughout the course of the day become far more copious and were spread out before me. How much of it had caught me in the sleight of hand, the political prestidigitation of it all and how much was strictly relevant to my overall theme, to the intended trajectory of the piece? It couldn't just be indices, democracy and 2025, not now.
Monday evening, a fortnight and a half out from the Brexit vote and as if in mute testimony to the now seemingly constantly redefining maxim, a week, no a day, no an hour is a long time in politics among the settling sands of the UK’s new political landscape, my already way too numerous notes for a promised shorter than its predecessors third and final part to ‘A Landscape of Fear’, had throughout the course of the day become far more copious and were spread out before me. How much of it had caught me in the sleight of hand, the political prestidigitation of it all and how much was strictly relevant to my overall theme, to the intended trajectory of the piece? It couldn't just be indices, democracy and 2025, not now.
I had intended to focus mainly on how the opposite of fear is so often given as hope, but fear can be so visceral, so immediate, whilst hope is at a remove, deferred. Certainly hope can help to assuage fear, to keep it at bay, but if hopes become more faint still, or less likely in their realisation, they are no antidote at all, becoming simply a seeming delay, a deferral of what has become inevitable in fear’s dark harvest. No, a more immediate counter to fear is surely happiness, contentment. With that in mind, I had intended the focus of this concluding piece to be on the indices for measuring overall happiness in a nation state, focusing on the World Happiness Report and particularly the Happy Planet Index.
Perhaps that seems a little idealistic, simplistic, now, here, against the backdrop of a landscape of fear, one which not only sees much of Europe seemingly taking some solace from the ravages of increasingly unfairly distributed advantages and disadvantages of globalisation in a retreat into a populism and intolerance redolent of the 1930s, but, as I will try to summarise a little more, areas of the world which had legislated against history repeating itself are in fact also retreating even further. Its not simplistic or idealistic, that’s part of the narrative which wants you to subsume resistance to hegemony in its prevailing trajectory, there are alternatives and some, at least when compared to the deliberately obscured, hegemonic narrative of neoliberalism, may seem deceptively simple. For now, back to those notes, some of them were still relevant, just in a slightly different context. Don't think much of it will be pulling the UK up any kind of happiness indices anytime soon though.
Yes some of them, those bloomin notes, cover the rearranging of the chairs on the deck of what is still a deeply troubled ship, despite all attempts to appear contrary to that on the surface. Everything turned a little literal, for a while at least, with the most prominent Leave campaigners having left and the least visible during the campaign of the high profile Cabinet Remainers is, well of course, remaining to be crowned, appointed, ushered in amid much fanfare to the recently vacated high heid yin’s chair for her (lack of) effort. In fact, as Home Secretary of a Government apparently being brought to task for failing to address concerns over immigration sufficiently, according to the Brexiteer’s narrative, she should have been least likely to gain the promotion she has.
Across the floor of the house, Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, appear to have missed their window of opportunity to draw the general public’s attention to the hypocrisy of this or to skewer the lack of a plan B, or even really a plan A, for a Brexit vote in either the official Leave or Government camps. Almost inevitably, they have instead been descending further into their latest bout of (as public as they can make it) internecine warfare, where the candidate who finished fourth in last year’s depute leader elections feels it apt to challenge a leader who just ten months ago was elected by the highest majority ever secured in a members' ballot. Whilst one Remainer is rewarded with the top prize, unelected, for her leadership qualities in barely campaigning at all, another is castigated for poor leadership by a fourth rate depute leader for lack of leadership in campaigning not quite enough. They appear to be very British degrees of separation.
But whilst the window closes and the opportunity to land as many blows as possible on the exposed flank of the Conservative party for a Labour party hobbled by its commitment to ghosts of recent past, whilst the smoke and mirrors give the illusion of competency, of a plan forming, of continuity, of moderate, one nation conservativism, the apparently ‘landmark’ speech given by Theresa May, which at once saw off her final challenger and assured her coronation as unelected Prime Minister, given the ‘form’ of a government where she has played an integral part, the doublespeak spoke loud and the final reversal of Blair’s triangulation appears complete. When working class voters have given their approval in such huge numbers for an enabling of further right wing policies its clearly wise, for the perpetrators of the ruse, not to scare the horses. Soothing noises are obligingly being made.
It was almost, but not quite, easy to forget during the twenty minutes or so of that speech in Birmingham, that Prime Minister May (and just how many times did she say when rather than if she was PM, of course it was a done deal!), as the continuity candidate, will be set on continuing the rightward veer of post Brexit vote UK, and on taking those ‘ordinary, hard-working people’ deeper still into almost every carefully opined social and economic ill visited upon them, with those least able to bear it likely to take even more disproportionate a share of the burden, by her own government’s ideological choices. I watched it three times on Monday evening just to be sure, then decided to wait a beat before finishing writing this.
Then on Wednesday watched Hansard savaged, again three times over in incredulity (the only saving grace being Angus Robertson’s wily oppositional entry into Hansard as regards why his compatriots would not be applauding the outgoing PM’s leadership), and the truths for so many, the actualities of Prime Minister Cameron’s reign, smoothed over by well placed questions, designed of course to stroke an ego in no need of it. But Hansard is not all of the record and it is wholly fitting that as the final nails are sharpened for the arch triangulator Blair’s political coffin, his diametric apprentice hums off over the horizon, with no inquiries as yet into the rampant social and economic, domestic and international consequences of his ineptitude. He will of course lose much less sleep, if any at all, over any of it, than his erstwhile tutor shows in the preternatural aging of his countenance.
By far the largest part of Davie and the PR men’s ‘reverse triangulation’ of Blair’s success has been/is aimed at those areas which have suffered the most economic adversity, by and large the same areas which were led to vote so strongly for Brexit. Two consecutive governments have repeatedly blamed an ongoing economic crisis in Europe post 2008 and subsequent pressures on the economy from immigration as the necessitating factors for a brutal and persistent austerity regime. During the referendum debates it was an all too simplistic finger to point, given more than a decade’s long narrative trajectory, towards stagnation in wage levels being attributable to cheap imported labour from Europe. However, it is the manner in which those factors may be more accurately, directly attributable to ideological austerity and the manner in which policies led by it have been pursued in the UK, rather than the easy scapegoat we were supposed to look at and millions did, which was the subject of last week’s unusually critical report from the UN. It was the news from experts you didn’t get to hear where you are.
Whilst the, its becoming almost tedious to write but write it we should every single time, overwhelmingly right wing British media have circled the wagons and set up an almost constant barrage of smoke and mirrors to allow a modicum of retrospective forward planning and organisation to be mustered, it shouldn’t be surprising, but nor should it be any less galling for it, that the prestidigitation not only distracted from the continuing dance around the 31 year low of the pound and the lack of genuine resilience in any of the wider markets, with a deep recession predicted for next year as a direct result of the Brexit vote compounding failed austerity economics, but also from last week’s UN judgement of the UK Government’s austerity programme. It is no surprise, because as the UK, under Ms May’s new stewardship, will be set to continue its pursuit of a Great British Bill of Rights. Among many other ills too numerous for me to face amidst what was to be my summing up of where we stand now in the landscape of fear, before getting back to the happy, I’d like to spend a little time on just two overlooked developments (overlooked in the sense that the compliant UK media reckoned, what with the hell and handbasket situation generally, it may just be best to say ‘oh look, a squirrel’ and subsequently keep saying it for as long as need be), that human rights report and the elevation of ‘the social partners’ in a European context, which relates back to that other Great British Bill, the latest Trade Union legislation.
The aforementioned report was issued by the UN’s committee of independent experts which monitors states’ protection of economic, social and cultural rights, with a particular eye on disadvantaged groups. There are a set of internationally recognised legal norms ‘designed to ensure everyone’s rights are progressively realised using the maximum available resources’. The group takes into account that in the post 2008 landscape difficult choices had to be made and ‘respects the considerable scope for legitimate political disagreement about how deficits should be reduced in the pursuit of prosperity’. Above all the group is a legal institution valuing the rule of law and evidence over all and any propaganda, spin or rhetoric. Jamie Burton, writing for Social Europe, sums up the report’s findings perfectly:
‘After considering extensive evidence submitted by the Government, national human rights institutions and civil society groups and conducting two public dialogues with the UK Government’s delegation…its findings are stark: social security reforms and cuts to public services have had a disproportionately adverse impact on low income households and should be reversed. Regressive reforms to corporation and inheritance tax, and VAT have diminished the UK’s ability to “address persistent social inequality” whilst not enough is being done to tackle tax evasion by corporations and high net worth individuals. The housing deficit is now “critical” and contributing to “exceptionally high levels of homelessness”. Insufficient action has been taken to address the growing dependency on food banks. Benefit levels leave many in states of destitution. Benefits sanctioning is being misused.’
None of this is anything new to anyone genuinely concerned. Those concerns may have been dismissed as politically motivated, the report can’t be. In it the committee goes on to admonish the UK Government in stating the new ‘National Living Wage’ is ‘not sufficient to ensure a decent standard of living’. It also fully acknowledges that employment levels may appear to be increasing but much of that increase is fuelling the crisis which sees too many people in low paid, low skill jobs or precarious zero hour contracts. In submitting evidence to the committee, even before the Brexit vote, the Institute for Fiscal Studies projected child poverty to increase by 50%, with almost one in five living in absolute poverty by 2020.
Burton concludes, ‘as we enter this period of unprecedented political and economic uncertainty, it is critical that we claim the right to honest, informed debate and evidence based policy to carry us through it…A robust public discourse backed by enforceable human rights and the rule of law is integral to ensuring that it does. An honest and responsible government would welcome, not fear it.’. But we clearly do not have an honest or responsible Government, the track record detailed in the report gives the lie to that, redefining human rights would render it redundant though, phew, said the champion of the Snooper’s Charter in kitten heels. Strangely enough, almost every subject in which the government’s actions were decried in the report was mentioned in that carefully calculated speech, its almost as if she was party to a trick or two in earnest doublespeak from all that time in power alongside those shiny PR boys. How much easier in times of national crisis and strife to have the minister’s daughter delivering the lines, how much more believable that sincerity will be, almost a PR masterstroke, funny that.
Whilst platitudes echoing expectations of control over their own lives litter every speech the new PM gives aimed at those ‘ordinary hard working people’, it seeps away with every right wing, hawkish appointment to cabinet. Eyebrows may be raised beyond foreheads for some of those new appointments and roles but in every key position where the UK must negotiate or be represented internationally, a Brexiteer now stands proudly at the helm; where the UK should look outward those tasked with doing so have shown themselves as rooted in xenophobic isolationism, the (often not so) closet racists now control the UK’s borders and international diplomacy.
In a wider context, beyond the narrowing confines of Great Britishness, beyond the borders of a continent petulantly blamed for all ills and turned away from, beyond the failed foreign policies and illegal wars, beyond the complicity in creating an age of terror which they represent, baited breath won't save us from the diplomatic land mines they all now represent scattered across the globe. If the UK’s isolationism is turning the clock back to a mythical 1950s and the rise of populism, intolerance and fascism here and across Europe, around the globe, are aiming a populist time machine roughly at the 1930s, in the South China Sea a contest for primacy is brewing which seems to be taking things a step further back yet, appearing more redolent of the 1910s and, according to Dr John C Hulsman, ‘will probably do more to tell the tale of what our multipolar world will evolve into than anything presently happening in Europe’. He explains:
‘Asia today, like Europe then, is bristling with nationalistic states with armies and navies, determined to throw their weight around. In Prime Ministers Abe of Japan and Modi of India, and in China's President Xi Jinping, the leaders of the three major regional powers are all strong nationalists, unchallenged masters of their domestic political realms, who would be unable to easily back down if a crisis occurs.
…the still-dominant Americans are forced to shuttle bilaterally between their various Asian allies, scuttling about like a headless chicken trying to keep the geostrategic show on the road. For there is an utterly unresolveable strategic tension lying at the heart of the increasing controversies in the waters surrounding China: the US is the dominant power in East Asia, and China wishes to be the dominant power in East Asia. Nothing can wish this basic strategic reality away.’
The rivalry playing out in the South and East China seas (now being further complicated by an emboldened post election Abe, overseeing the world’s third largest economy, intent on amending Japan’s pacifist constitution, imposed by the US after WWII and which prohibits it from waging war, whilst Emperor Akihito, a committed pacifist, has expressed his intention to abdicate, a step unprecedented in modern Japan), to use Hulsman’s analogy, resembles nothing so much as 1913 Europe, sitting precariously on the edge of a powder keg. The US resembles 1913 Britain, China approximates the Kaiser’s Germany, Japan looks like Third Republic France and India even makes a decent rough stand in for Tsarist Russia. None of it appears to bode well for the UK’s new international diplomats. Lets remember too that nascent US presidential candidate Donald Trump, has gone on record as ‘having no problem’, with any of those aforementioned nations ‘protecting their own interests’ by accelerating their nuclear defence interests.
As things move on apace, as everything changes and everything stays the same, only more so, with added pre WWI and WWII tensions, shadows lengthen across the landscape of fear. Whilst day after day the UK’s newly acclaimed moderate, continuity (but in actuality, in lobby voting practice and on which policies have most drawn her support, is at the very least hard right) Prime Minister cites the result of a plebiscite with no integral legal, actionable threshold as mandate or democratic basis for the tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit!’; in retort, rightfully and of course, the First Minister of Scotland has pointed out that for Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly against Brexit, ‘Remain means Remain!’.
Those opposing standpoints and what is likely to be the first significant debate and vote of PM May’s tenure, that on Trident renewal, may even now be front and centre of her immediate thinking, should tradition hold. As one of his last acts as chief of Defence Staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton, will at some point in the early days of her premiership walk Ms May through a briefing on the country’s nuclear plans and the damage which could result from a nuclear attack on the UK. Based on the information given, May will then be tasked, as has every PM of the nuclear age before her, with handwriting what is known as the ‘Letter of Last Resort’, in fact writing four copies, one for each submarine commander in the UK’s fleet, to be sealed until after the event of her death and the country being destroyed in a nuclear strike.
The letters are expected to detail instructions for the commanders, telling them what to do with the UK’s nuclear arsenal, housed in their subs, if the country has been under nuclear attack. The subs’ commanders and their deputes, who are the only ones with access to the safes within safes on the subs where the letters are stored, must decide together when the country has been entirely destroyed, and only then access the instructions.
Sometime, maybe it has already happened or will be happening very soon, those letters are being, have been, composed and will be winging their way to the UK’s nuclear submarine base at Faslane; this is also wholly contrary to the expressed anti nuclear views of a resounding majority of Scottish MSPs, all but one of Scotland’s MPs in Westminster and against the wishes of a majority of the Scots electorate. Do we, in Scotland really feel included, warmed and welcome in Ms May’s ‘democracy that works for everyone, so we can restore trust in our most important institutions and the political process itself’? Or is it just she forgot to count us in when she said she was ‘not going to ignore the public when they say they are sick of politics as usual’?
In the meantime, back at that wholly unreformable shibboleth of an unworkable, we need to get out of it if we want control of our borders, our laws, our lives, the universe and everything back, European Union, at least some reforms which would give genuine control over many areas of ‘ordinary working people’s’ lives where it has diminished, were already recently put in place, and we didn’t hear a jot of it during the stramash of a Tory leadership contest which wasn’t.
For over thirty years the EU has been enabling employers’ and workers’ representatives to negotiate on improving working conditions and workers’ rights across Europe. What has been called the European Social Dialogue has achieved much in the areas of part-time work, parental leave, workplace stress and harassment and violence at work, lifelong learning and plenty more besides. More than forty different sectors have launched their own Social Dialogue committees, negotiating concrete, real world benefits for ‘ordinary hard-working people’.
On Monday 27 June, the social partners, the European Trade Union Confederation and employers organisations, alongside the European Commission and Council, signed a joint statement pledging ‘A New Start for Social Dialogue’, jointly expressing that this should lead to more substantial involvement of social partners in the European Semester, a stronger emphasis on capacity building for national social partners and a strengthened involvement of social partners in EU policy and law making.
This built on decisive action taken earlier in June when, for the first time, the Council of the European Union also adopted conclusions on strengthening European Social Dialogue, recognising that ‘social dialogue is a crucial factor and a beneficial tool for a well functioning market economy’, whilst calling on all member states to involve social partners closely in the design and implementation of policies, a hugely significant step in formalising the role of unions in EU policy making.
That’s an EU which the UK was due to take over the rotating presidency of next June; one in which the rights and influence of ‘ordinary hard-working people’, their control, has just grown immeasurably and one over which the UK was set to have a greater degree of influence and control over too. In the UK, in stark contrast, the role of social partners is being curbed and the ability of unions to represent and protect workers’ rights diminished by the Trade Union Act 2016.
So whilst talk of any snap General Election fades into the background noise, mandated democracy, genuine representation of any kind other than a platitudinous doublespeak, well you gave your permission, your consent for this, Brexit means Brexit, recedes further, the dust settles on a widening democratic deficit; the wolves remain confident in a landscape of fear where they have emboldened the scavengers of extremity. The success of the right, in the UK as it is elsewhere in Europe, is the failure of the left; or, to take greater account of what should be acknowledged as a shift in focus, the narrative of social democracy, like the demagogues and populists, needs to find ways to move beyond traditional definitions of left and right. That is, at least if any hope is to be found for the restoration of redistributive social justice and the provisions of social protection for the casualties of globalisation. Reflecting on what the Brexit vote means for the left, Dick Pels has this to say:
‘…clearly the cultural and identity dimension of politics must be taken much more seriously as independent forces of division and conflict, particularly in a ‘knowledge society’ which is increasingly stratified according to levels of education. Both immigration and Europe are such virulent issues because they are located at the crosspath of the economic and cultural axes, simultaneously addressing anxieties about economic insecurity and the perceived loss of national community. Any politics of hope rather than fear therefore needs to target both dimensions, without reducing one to the other, and speak to people’s economic and cultural concerns with equal seriousness. This anti-reductionism of course also implies rejecting the populist conviction that economic problems ultimately derive from cultural ones…We can and must do better than the populists on both counts: offering robust social protection for those in precarity (the modernisation losers), while simultaneously providing a cultural narrative which is strong enough to lay their anxieties about a ‘loss of country’ or ‘loss of home’ to rest.’
Pels is a positivist advocate for a New Deal for Europe. Balanced against a continuing improvement of public services and welfare protection by nation state, within the supra national protections of a truly social Europe, he calls for ‘a cultural civilisation drive against the prison guards of the closed society and their captives’ as an absolutely necessary defence of ‘pluralism and diversity, free thinking and tolerance’. For Pels, this is a cry for a return to what the early decades of the 20th century knew as Cultural Socialism, which at the heart of a 21st century European ideal of civilisation ‘may lift up our small nations to a bigger, more generous and adventurous sense of who we are’. For Scots, with many of the anxieties he mentions at least partly laid to rest, and explicitly so in terms of how we voted as a nation in the EU referendum, this is a notion which may yet prove telling for our small nation’s fate.
So for now, fittingly amidst all the other minute by minute twists and turns, this has become an entirely different ending to the one I had intended. I maintain happiness is a greater antidote to fear than hope. Somewhere, sometime, relatively (and I emphasise the relatively, two years is a long time othered, marginalised and increasingly destitute for far too many) soon, I hope Scotland can take its rightful place among the independent small nations of Europe, perhaps emulate nations like Costa Rica on the Happy Planet Index, or 'just' the usual suspects of Denmark, Iceland, Norway or Finland on the World Happiness Report, I’m just not so happy, nor should you be, we can glean only hope as solace in an almost all pervasive landscape of fear.
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