Brexit is never out of the news. Every day it occupies space in social media and mainstream media, yet still there is hardly a whisper in Westminster. This inexplicable silence has long been deafening.
Revelations in the press are about what Brexit is costing us, and arguments on social media are about what needs to be done and why isn’t anybody doing it. After all, it looks like an open goal. (What isn’t often discussed is that the emergence on our streets of racist and neo-Nazi thugs is a direct result. Before Brexit that would have been unthinkable. But abuse and violence against foreigners began literally the day after the referendum.)
The right doesn’t want to talk about Brexit now, for obvious reasons; but what about Labour and the Liberal Democrats? The EU doesn’t rank among Ed Davey’s priorities to discuss at this year’s conference, apparently. We would be surprised if Labour did any better.
Pecksniff has been trying (often in vain) to talk to MPs about it for five years. At one time MPs were actually forbidden to mention it. So here is the authoritative truth. Both Labour and the LibDems are terrified of the mob. The shock of Brexit made both parties shut their ears to the word. Brexit assumed the identity of a bogeyman: the fear it inspires isn’t rational, it can’t be explained. It is a blind funk.
It is ignominious and it is disgraceful, but Labour has allowed itself to become emasculated by fear, and the great names of the past will be turning in their graves. The party of high principle and the brotherhood of man has caved to the racists and the fascists, without a fight. Will Andy Burnham make the difference?
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“Talk of mass deportation is Nazi f*cking bullshit. In order even to countenance it, you must reach a point of hatred towards a minority group which is reminiscent of the very worst moments of human history.”
So writes Ian Dunt, who so often has les mots justes (even if one of the mots is a little too juste for EAB consumption). He is letting off characteristic steam over Shabana Mahmood’s immigration policy, established under Keir Starmer and inherited by Andy Burnham. And to the horror of many, apparently embraced by him too.
“But perhaps only for the time being,” Pecksniff has tried to argue… But let’s face it, embracing a policy which attracts comparisons like Dunt’s for a few months till you get the furniture straight in No 10 is not much of an excuse. Readers who are prepared to give Mr Burnham the benefit of the doubt on most issues make it clear they draw the line at the deliberate bullying and intimidatory dog whistles used by the home secretary.
Simple humanity ought to be enough to reject a policy which moves the goalposts for people who came here legally, have lived and worked here for years, and now face waiting far longer before they can settle permanently. Does she seriously believe this is in any sense a moral policy, or is she doing it just to win the votes of the racists? Does it really matter which? Shabana Mahmood has no business being a senior government minister in the Labour Party.
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Professor Sir John Curtice reveals this week that 61% of voters would now vote to rejoin, the highest level of support yet. He expects the trend to continue.
“Public opinion has shifted quite considerably, partly for demographic reasons, even though prior to 2024, apart from the Greens and the nationalists, nobody was arguing in favour of rejoining,” he points out, confirming your diarist’s points above. “The public has shifted despite the fact that they have been given very little indication from their political leaders that they should do so… If you were to start to make the argument, if you come up with arguments that are anywhere halfway decent, then you should be able to move the dial somewhat further in your direction.”
Curtice still believes a further referendum might be on a knife edge. But this is a straw man: a referendum isn’t necessary and wasn’t necessary last time. (It was just a tactic of party management by David Cameron which went horribly wrong.) Margaret Thatcher declared referendums to be a “splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators”. She was right. They have no role in our parliamentary democracy.
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Andy Burnham says he doesn’t want to return to the past, no doubt specifically thinking of all the poisonous arguments over Brexit. But it ought to be possible to devise a strategy to return to the EU which avoids all that. The strategy would probably be to bypass anything which meets the old Brexit head on. Voters would see it as sensible to become closer to the EU, but might balk if the case was made in terms which hark back to challenge a judgement made last time.
So the idea would be to bypass those arguments. (Is anybody in the cabinet working on this? Wouldn’t that be nice?) For example, this week Canada accepted an invitation to become the EU’s first ‘associate member’. As that new relationship develops and is reported, it seems likely that arguments in favour of the EU will begin to pluck the voters delicately by the sleeve.
Would it not be considered odd for such a major and respected world player to seek such a relationship, a whole ocean away, whereas we who can actually see Europe on a clear day refuse to have anything to do with them?
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What is that soft frou-frou of sandals we hear? It can mean only one thing… The Liberal Democrats are coming!
Their conference opens today in Brighton. It begins the usual three-week attempt by each party at political chiaroscuro, each trying to convince us of the existing gulf between their own wise words and the lunacies of the other lot. But in these days of fighting over the same stretch of turf, that becomes increasingly difficult. Those of us with long memories and a taste for something a little less regimented and a lot more rococo have few hopes.
But at least the LibDems are scheduled to debate Europe, even though their statement says: “Liberal Democrats have been the only voices in Parliament consistently and unashamedly championing closer economic, defence and cultural ties with Europe, following the Conservatives’ botched deal with the EU”.
The claim of consistency is only true of course if you don’t count the eight years from 2016 to 2024 when they were as scared stiff as the other lot, and on one occasion Ed Davey almost walked off stage when a member had the temerity to mention the dread word “Brexit”.
We must be forgiving. But if the party still doesn’t agree to come out from behind the arras and trumpet its European credentials in terms the public can hear, then all hopes have to rest on Andy Burnham. Sir John Curtice has set out the opportunity. This is the LibDems’ chance to seize the narrative.
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So what comes next? Labour is in Liverpool a week later. At their own conference this week, the trade unions urged Andy Burnham to drop the ‘red lines’ on Europe. Will he welcome that, as providing a platform to begin his approach to doing so? Or will he see it as unhelpful and ignore it? He has had a reasonable excuse not to spell out his policies in more detail up till now. But conference is the right place to do it, especially on Europe – even just a hint of progression would lift the roof – and its absence would be telling.
And what reception will Shabana Mahmood receive? There are good reasons to tune in to the debates this year.
Meanwhile, all we know about the Greens conference at the moment is that Zack Polanski unsuccessfully asked the party executive to
postpone it. No doubt because of his forthcoming by election in Holborn and St Pancras, and the likelihood of an extremely unwelcome motion on Zionism. Nothing at all is known about debates at the Conservative conference, since evidence suggests Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) will be making it up on the train down to Brighton.
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Speaking of which, dear reader, Kemi Badenoch has enhanced an already impressive reputation for ignorance and incompetence this week by challenging the appointment of TUC chair Paul Nowak as a director of the Bank of England. Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith had said: “The last thing our country needs is a trade union leader helping to run the Bank of England”; and with her eternal infelicity in getting it wrong Ms Badenoch adds: “Only one party has ever rescued the country from trade union control.”
Trouble is, the protocol has existed since 1946. Paul Nowak replaces his predecessor as head of the TUC, Frances O’Grady, on the Court of the Bank (as the board is known), and she followed her predecessor. And the practice of offering a place to a leading trade unionist was honoured by Conservative governments from Churchill to Thatcher. John Major broke with it in 1994, but subsequent Conservative governments restored it.
Harold Macmillan once remarked: “I have never found in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance”.
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“How many assaults, how many sexual assaults do we have to wait for before the Home Office step up and do something about it?” demands Councillor Peter Harris, Reform’s leader of Essex County Council, on introducing the sinister charade of his Operation Vanguard. A few ‘security’ staff, with no powers whatever, prance about the Essex streets dressed up incongruously like Gilbert and Sullivan characters, supposedly to protect citizens against a special threat from asylum seekers.
“I wasn’t prepared to wait,” Cllr Harris adds. “Let’s take the action first.”
“How many assaults, how many sexual assaults…” he corrects himself, forgetting his script. Also, “wait” is doing some heavy lifting here. According to Essex Police, crime linked to the asylum centre is “very low” and the asylum seekers pose no special threat, but that won’t stand in the way of Cllr Harris wasting huge sums of public money in gratifying his depraved and atavistic desire to stir hatred against part of the community.
And “the action” is presumably to bully and intimidate innocent pedestrians who happen to be a bit different.
It is clear from the way the vigilantes were jeered at in the street and told to “Piss off!” that this is hardly a popular expression of the community will. Voters are far more concerned about mending potholes. So, no doubt frustrated Essex council tax payers may be even more enraged when they learn that, according to figures released by the Asphalt Industry Alliance, for the £150,000 Cllr Harris is squandering on this vanity project, just in order to cosset his prejudices, he could have filled in nearly 1,700 potholes…
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It seems a characteristic of Reform members elected to public office that they expect to be paid a munificent salary without the obligation of working for it. Public reaction to this presumption has been brought home somewhat forcibly to Norfolk’s new police and crime commissioner, Colin Sutton.
He was due to have undertaken a tour of 127 appearances, nationwide, to talk about his past career in the police. He no doubt feels himself an expert on the police, if perhaps not on politics and his responsibilities to those who elected him.
“Unfortunately, I believe policing is no longer serving the best interests of the British people,” declares. (You think!) He reassures us that he knows “what is needed to hit the ground running”. Presumably then he assumed the best interests of the Norfolk people are best served by their new PCC swanning off round the country for weeks at a time, trousering moolah, showing off and pretending to be a celebrity, abandoning his proper job and the people he is being paid to represent. (Ring any bells…?)
He now calls the 127-appearance schedule “ridiculous”. Odd that he has only just thought of it: perhaps, like his party leader, he was too engrossed in counting his money. The tour was to have been between January and November next year. That seems to mean a dozen shows every month. One run has him travelling from Consett to Tamworth, then Hunstanton, Llandudno and Leeds on five consecutive nights. Nearly 700 miles on the road.
In his election prospectus, he declared: “I think there are some areas where the public thinks it does not get the attention that it deserves.” That turned out to be a bit of a hostage to fortune.
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With thanks to those intelligencers not swanning about foreign beaches this week: Malcolm Lynn, David Patey, Liz Crosbie, JJ Jackson, Kate Viscardi, James Porter, Stace Richards, Mark Popay, James Porter and John Elworthy.
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