It’s a crowded field, but as an example of the destructive uselessness of ESG (an investment “discipline” based on analyzing how companies measure up against somewhat vague environmental, social, and governance standards), this story from Bloomberg takes some beating.
Read MoreLoosening the ties that bound the U.K. into the EU was always going to be complicated. Dropping out of Brussels’ relentless trudge towards political integration is not in itself too great a challenge, but doing so in a way that minimizes the damage to Britain’s economic access to its European markets is an entirely different matter. To Brussels, economic and political integration are inextricably intertwined. Preserving as much of the benefit of the former while escaping the latter needs patience, diplomatic savvy, a realistic understanding of the EU’s workings, and the ability to weigh the strength (or otherwise) of the U.K.’s negotiating position. Since the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, Britain’s Conservative government has displayed no sign of any of these qualities.
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The Velvet Underground Experience, New York City, December 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford
If you can remember the 1960s, goes that quote with many authors, you really weren’t there. I was about six when the Sixties properly got going and living somewhere where the last person to truly swing had botched a rebellion against a Tudor. So sadly, I remember those Sixties pretty well, a distant party glimpsed mainly on the telly, colorful, whimsical, and saturated with bright, shiny music — coffee-flavored kisses at Clarksville station, love is all you need, gentle people with flowers in their hair.
What I never heard was this:
Cut mouth bleeding razor’s
Forgetting the pain
Antiseptic remains cool goodbye
So you fly
To the cozy brown snow of the east
That was the Velvet Underground doing their best worst in The Black Angel’s Death Song, a torrent of words, melody, and screeching electric viola that, played once too often before puzzled audiences in Greenwich Village’s Café Bizarre, brought an abrupt end to their stint there in December of 1965. The Velvets had started taking shape the year before, but after the departure of their first drummer, an eccentric who later came to an unsatisfactory end in Nepal, assumed the form (Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker) in which, with one brief, spectacular addition, they ultimately entered rock legend. The band’s name was stolen from the title of an, uh, investigativepaperback (“a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age”) found on the sidewalk or — pick your myth — the gutter. Another early song, inspired by a book by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (yes, that Masoch), was a further sign that the Velvets were not headed for Main Street, Pleasant Valley, or Penny Lane.
Given the time, the place — New York City — and the Velvets’ direction, it is not so surprising they spun into Andy Warhol’s orbit. He became their ringmaster, handing them a chanteuse — the German-born Nico, who had trouble holding a tune — and the role as the band in a series of multi-media events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was a chance, said Warhol, “to combine music and art and films,” a Gesamtkunstwerk of a kind, if not one that Wagner would have appreciated.
The collaboration lasted longer than Warhol’s “15 minutes” (about 18 months), and — despite some entertaining reviews (Cher grumbled that their gigs would “replace nothing, except maybe suicide”); The Velvet Underground & Nico, their astonishing debut LP; some media attention; and even the approval of Marshall McLuhan — it didn’t leave the Velvets particularly famous, at least then. The album flopped.
But more than anything else, those 18 months explain why, after more than half a century, The Velvet Underground Experience, a sprawling, “immersive” exhibition, opened, after a run in Paris, in New York City this fall (it closed in December) not so far from the location of the long-vanished Café Bizarre. There are reportedly plans for it to reappear in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Most exhibitions dedicated to a band struggle to offer a new perspective on what is, primarily, an aural experience. Ancient guitars and fading posters will please only the saddest of fanboys. But when the music was part of a broader cultural moment, there are possibilities for something better, an opportunity that the curators of this show (backed by Citi, among others, a sponsor that Warhol, no foe of the dollar, would have relished) grabbed and then fumbled.
The first hint of trouble was lurking on the placard — “Welcome to America” — by the entrance to the main hall, a dreary proclamation enlivened only by a three-way fight between banality, cliché, and groupthink:
In the aftermath of World War II, America’s consumerism spread more than ever, often carrying with itself conformist and family-centered values as broadcast in the image of the Good American in the newly-booming media.
This gave rise to a provocative counter-culture of artists and thinkers, who rejected the era’s fake smiles and condemned the rigidity of a supposedly liberal society in which non-conformity was thought to be deviant and dangerous. These individuals . . . defended radically different ways of life, took alternative paths and questioned prevailing rules and taboos. All of this was embodied in the life and work of the indefatigable figurehead of the Beat Generation poets, Allen Ginsberg.
Allen Ginsberg. Not again. On one side, the sound of the sage of the East Village reading America, and on the other, a selection of film footage designed to contrast vintage blandness with uncomfortable truth and vintage woke. That the consumer society was infinitely more revolutionary than some bearded “prophet” bemoaning materialism (a commonplace nuisance for thousands of years) went unnoticed, an error Warhol never made.
But that “provocative counter-culture” was indeed flourishing — and self-aware. One reason the Velvets took their name was the “underground” in the book’s title. They also defined themselves by reference to where they were — downtown Manhattan. Rifling through a pile of words that someone had left on a laptop, the writers of the “about” section on the exhibition’s website expanded on the latter:
This was where experimental musicians, underground filmmakers, taboo-busting poets and young people challenging the diktats of the heterosexual norm all converged. In this unique context, the verses of the Beat poets the audacious harmonics of La Monte Young and the experimentation of underground cinema would rub off on Lou Reed and John Cale before they brought the Velvet Underground to life. At the intersection of pop culture and the avant-garde, conceptual art and tribal beats, juvenile shenanigans and the most sophisticated of theories.
Juvenile shenanigans! The most sophisticated of theories!
The convergence was real enough. Classically trained John Cale, the band’s viola player (and much, much more), was involved with New York’s avant-garde music scene. It was an experimental filmmaker, Barbara Rubin, who introduced the Velvets to Warhol. The exhibition managed to convey an impression of this world with photographs of a grubby East Village, the band, their associates, and long-forgotten happenings — among them an 18-hour piano recital and a performance featuring wet paint, sausages, raw fish, and writhing. For all the typos, overwriting (“music that was both schizophrenic and fluid”), hyperbole, malapropisms, chaotic grammar, and, on at least one occasion, chaotic chronology, the various displays gave a useful sense of who was doing what. Some films from that milieu were on continuous loop. Watching Peyote Queen with only Anacin to hand is, I now know, a mistake. Behind a closed door promising X-rated material was Rubin’s Christmas on Earth, a movie (filmed in Cale’s apartment) that used to bear a less misleading title. Step away from Google, people.
The Velvet Underground Experience, both conceptually and literally, revolved around the band’s Warhol connection. Visitors could lie back on silvery cushions, a nod to the décor of Warhol’s studio, the Factory, in a wood-framed central space and stare at multi-screen projections — another mid-Sixties fad — of mini-documentaries made for the exhibition as well as of original footage of the Velvets and other Factory denizens. The band was shown performing or (filmed with the paradoxically passive voyeurism the Factory had made its own) just doing not so very much. Other spots elsewhere were dedicated to the band and its individual members. But gazing up at those images was the best way to understand the magic — often a dark magic — of Warhol’s universe and the role that the Velvets filled within it.
In another room, more footage, this time dedicated to Nico (Christa Päffgen), tall and blonde with a Warholian remoteness. Nico had been an actress, a model, and a Marianne Faithfull in more ways than one, and had previously recorded a bouncy pop song on which a friendly Rolling Stone had played. Warhol calculated that she would add glamor to a foursome that rarely looked better than down at heel. He was right. Her contributions — including three deceptively dulcet counterpoints to some of the more obviously harsher moments on an album where her apartness was underlined in its title — The Velvet Underground & Nico — were some of the most memorable in the band’s history. But clashing egos and Nico’s uncertain relationship with the clock ensured that her history with the Velvets didn’t last long.
The other members of the band received their due too, and so did the albums that followed the break with Warhol and their breaks with each other. There were fewer artifacts than might have been expected, although this sad boy enjoyed seeing two copies of the first album’s original cover — one signed by the band and another where some wicked soul had peeled the notorious banana. This shortfall was in line with this exhibition’s somewhat slapdash quality, which extended beyond carelessly written materials to encompass a gift shop that combined a scarcity of anything that anyone might want to buy (Edie Sedgwick iPhone covers, anyone?) with prices ensuring that they would not even be tempted. Maybe the organizers thought that the Velvets’ brand was enough of a lure, and maybe they were right.
That said, there was just enough, other than nostalgia, to merit a visit by more dedicated fans, notably those films from the Factory. And there was one marvel: a short, animated documentary in which Tony Jannelli (one of the two directors) recalled the bewildered and appalled reaction when the Velvets played at his New Jersey high school. Any visitors unfamiliar with the Velvets’ music (not many, I reckon: Most attendees I saw were north of forty) might have wondered what all the fuss was about. But not only newbies would have been taken aback by the claim, made in a section dedicated to the band’s ‘legacy’, that the “spirit and range of their New York City rock” eventually “won over the entire planet”. They talk of nothing else in Pyongyang.
How much the Velvets influenced the way things were going and how much they merely anticipated what was already on the way is impossible to know. Where they were, perhaps, at their most innovative was lyrically. This was not so much for their matter-of-act descriptions of drug use. There had been popular songs on that topic (sometimes camouflaged) decades back. So, in I’m Waiting for The Man the Velvets sang of a junkie (“sick and dirty, more dead than alive”) traveling “up to Lexington, one, two, five” to meet a (heroin) dealer, but thirty years before there was this about a weed, er, retailer from Stuff Smith And His Onyx Club Boys:
Where’s the man with the jive?
There is a man from way up town
Who will take away your blues
And any time the man comes round we like to spread the news
What was new was the Velvet Underground’s treatment of characters from subcultures that had been largely invisible in pop music, such as the transvestites whose orgy goes so wrong in Sister Ray (sailors, a murder, heroin, the police at the door, could happen to anyone), subcultures they simultaneously mythologized and helped usher into some sort of mainstream.
Musically, the Velvet Underground may have been at the cutting edge, but other bands were also beginning to blend pop, rock, and avant-garde. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was not the first light show. What distinguished the Velvets was not their sales (lamentable at the time) but that they were, if only briefly, very, very good. People in the next city this exhibition is destined to visit who don’t know much about the band but are curious about their work should give The Velvet Underground Experience a miss. They should immerse themselves instead in the first three albums (forget the fourth, Loaded, whatever critics may say): The Velvet Underground & Nico, its successor, White Light/White Heat, with its madcap amphetamine rush, and finally the quieter and strangely unsettling The Velvet Underground. Then they should scour YouTube for footage of the Factory at its peak. If they do all that, they will learn more and spend less.
Afew weeks ago, a British actor died at the grand old age of 90 (probably). Peter Wyngarde’s death was accompanied by wryly affectionate obituaries and, among Brits of a certain age, a certain sadness: For a brief iridescent moment, one of the zanier icons of their youth had shone. Now he was gone.
According to an early-1970s survey, 40,000 Australian women chose Wyngarde as the man to whom they would have liked to lose their virginity. He was voted Britain’s best-dressed male personality, admittedly no great feat, in 1970 and then again in 1971. Mobbed by tens of thousands of women — how many virgins is unknown — on his arrival in Sydney, he took three days in hospital to recover.
Despite an “amorous” crowd, held back by 50 policemen, there was a gentler conclusion to Wyngarde’s opening of a menswear store in Plymouth, a city in the more sedate southwest of England. A writer for the website Hellfire Hall, “part of the official Peter Wyngarde Appreciation Society,” recalled that Wyngarde, “wearing a grey speckled suit with a mauve shirt and matching tie, tried on several garments…before settling for a black leather jacket and an aubergine-colored suit.” (Aubergine is British English for eggplant.)
This might be the moment to mention that Wyngarde, or rather Jason King, the character and self-caricature (“a romantic extension,” he explained) he played on television as the Sixties seeped into the Seventies, was the inspiration for Austin Powers. An old episode, or even a still, is all it takes to understand why.
Wyngarde reached this peak after appearances on the stage, in a film or two, and, increasingly, in television drama. The Sixties being the Sixties, he gravitated towards roles in telly-time treats designed for a Britain beguiled by James Bond. He showed up in The Prisoner, The Saint, and (most notably as the Hellfire Club’s John Cleverly Cartney) The Avengers. The latter two were part of a stable of not-always-so-serious action and adventure shows produced by ITC, a company run by a wily British TV mogul with an eye on the American market.
ITC enlisted Wyngarde (he signed his contract on a napkin over a meal) in Department S, a new series about three agents working for a crack Interpol unit. There was a former G-man and a female computer expert, and then there was King, best-selling crime writer, ladies’ man, charismatic, eccentric, flamboyant, witty, ingenious. His moustache was dramatic. His tailoring was epic. His fights didn’t always work out too well, but his shrewd, knowing performance stole the show, and in Jason King he was given his own.
King’s big-knotted wide ties were often — just as on that day in Plymouth — the same color as his shirts, another trademark. His boots were snakeskin, his dressing gowns silk, his foulards silk, his cravats silk, his voice silk. His coats were sweeping, his caftans evoked decadence in Tangier rather than a grubby pilgrimage along the hippie trail, and his tight leather outfit was worn with obvious and unashamed delight.
Wyngarde fell short of the matinee-idol standard (ITC’s boss grumbled about his failure to look like The Saint’s Roger Moore), but women, sometimes in hot pants, sometimes in less, sometimes in more, didn’t seem to mind as they succumbed, not always one by one, to King’s louche charms. A medallion swung and so did King, a Lothario, but despite the occasional appalling comment (a habit he shared, like so many others, with Wyngarde), no Weinstein.
Nearly a decade after Jason King had ended its run, readers of the X-Men comic books discovered that the original name of the villainous mutant Mastermind, a member of another Hellfire Club who looked — how can I put it — somewhat familiar, was Jason Wyngarde, evidence — as if any were needed — of how tricky it was to work out where Wyngarde ended and King began. To judge by some unflattering comments from one or two of his colleagues, Wyngarde may have not found it too easy to do so himself. He even “lent” King his clothes, and with them, much of his style: “I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy, I used to go to the tailor with my designs,” he confessed later, surprising nobody.
On the show itself, King’s adventures were interwoven with those of Mark Caine, his fictional creation and alter ego: In its first episode, King, the author, pitches a Mark Caine adventure to an American TV producer. The fictional Caine is played by the fictional King and the fictional King by the real — that adjective will have to do for now — Wyngarde playing Wyngarde as Wyngardewanted Peter Wyngarde to be seen by his fans.
The X-Men’s Mastermind had the ability to project illusions, to make people see what he wanted them to see.
In 1970, capitalizing on the success of Department S, Wyngarde released an LP, modestly called Peter Wyngarde. RCA had told him he could do what he liked. Fools! What the record company got was what Wyngarde’s obituarist in the London Times describes as a “revoltingly seedy album,” a bizarre and pretentious collection of songs, more spoken than sung, and, in its saner moments, designed (we must hope) as a not entirely serious showpiece of what a Jason King (who gets a shout-out at its nadir) might relax to or seduce to:
Do go in
No, the lights haven’t fused – it’s candlelight.
Now what would you like to drink — I’ve started on Champagne.
That is a beautiful dress! Do sit down
No, not over there – it’s too far away.
Come over here, it’s closer to everything.
Other tracks veered onto far more dangerous ground, most notoriously the supposedly jokey, undeniably very creepy “Rape,” about which the less said the better. RCA pulled the album after its first pressing. Decades later it was reissued by an independent label under the title “When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head.”
By then, sex had done rather more than that: In 1975, Wyngarde was found guilty of committing an act of “gross indecency” with a truck driver in a provincial British bus station. This followed an official warning for something similar the previous year. Wyngarde blamed a “mental aberration” (the first incident had been a “misunderstanding”). He received a token fine, but the spell was broken. His career never recovered. Prejudice played its part, but the scandal had shattered an image inextricably connected to that of King’s globe-trotting Casanova. Making matters worse, within a year or so, the bleakness of late-1970s Britain, and the fashions that came with it, had reduced King to an embarrassing memory too recent for nostalgia to rescue. Wyngarde’s mannered style of acting only reinforced the impression that time had passed him by. A battle with alcohol and a reputation for being “difficult” won’t have helped either. His best-known role after his fall was in Flash Gordon, where he played the sinister General Klytus, face hidden behind a golden mask.
But Wyngarde’s mask was subtler, a flickering, layered creation. Sometimes it wasn’t even there at all. If he hid, this King’s Road magnifico, known (some say; along with so much else in Wyngarde’s biography, there is a debate about this) in some showbiz circles as “Petunia Winegum,” hid in a way still possible before the Internet’s panopticon gaze, not quite in plain sight, but not far from it either. There are hints in Department S and Jason King that all was not as it seemed (and even more so in that infamous LP), although the reality may have been less clear-cut than newspaper headlines and men’s-room walls after Wyngarde’s conviction liked to suggest. We will never know for sure: Thus there was a marriage in the 1950s, and something seems to have happened with Vivien Leigh, Scarlett O’Hara no less. Years later, when there was no longer any need to pretend, there was still a touch of King in the way Wyngarde described past encounters with the opposite sex, perhaps even with an approximation of accuracy. Who’s to say? The mask was allowed to slip only so far. It had, after all, been the work of a lifetime, a product of necessity, fantasy, and ambition.
The early sections of Wyngarde’s Wikipedia entry (at least as I write) are evidence of a wild reimagination at work: “Peter Wyngarde’s date and place of birth, his birth name, and his parents’ nationalities and occupations are all disputed.” Well, yes. He was born between 1924 and 1933 in either Marseilles or Singapore (probably in Singapore in 1927, although Wyngarde preferred to cite Marseilles in 1933). His father was not a diplomat named Wyngarde, but Henry Goldbert, a naturalized Brit from Ukraine, who seems to have been a merchant seaman, at least for a while. His mother was either a French or a Swiss national and may have been Eurasian. Wyngarde said she looked like Claudette Colbert and was a racing driver. Then again, Wyngarde also claimed that he was a nephew of the French actor Louis Jouvet (he wasn’t), that he’d studied for a few months at Oxford (he hadn’t), and that Peter Wyngarde was the name he was born with (Cyril Goldbert just wouldn’t do).
It is true that he was interned by the Japanese during the later stages of the Second World War in a camp near Shanghai. The British writer J. G. Ballard, a rather more highly regarded teller of tales, was also there (an experience that inspired his Empire of the Sun) and remembered him (as Goldbert) from those years. For his part, Wyngarde said that he had no memory of Ballard. Maybe it was too awkward to admit to the connection: Ballard had known him while the mask was first being assembled. Goldbert, unlike Ballard (who was interned with his parents), was alone. It was there that he turned to acting and not, I suspect, only in the camp’s makeshift theater. His performances included a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which he played every part.
Theresa May has just three key matters to attend to in what ought to be the death throes of her shattered premiership. The first is to cut a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party good enough to give her a de facto, if precarious, parliamentary majority. As I write, that’s nearly, probably, maybe there. The second is either to postpone the first round of the Brexit talks with the EU (due to start in a few days) or to ensure that they proceed without any blow-ups. The third is to announce that she is resigning as leader of the Conservative party and will leave 10 Downing Street as soon as her successor is chosen.
As she sorts through the statistics of her defeat — and even if the Tories emerged as the largest party, it was a defeat — there are some scraps of comfort. The Conservatives’ share of the vote (42.5 percent) was the highest since the 43.9 percent that Margaret Thatcher, still basking in Falklands glory, secured in 1983, and the Tories did better than they had in Scotland for a very, very long time, thanks mainly to the efforts of its charismatic Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, someone who both adapted Conservatism to local conditions while preserving its essence and, while she was at it, helped take a second Scottish independence referendum off the agenda for quite some time.
But none of this counts for much when measured against the scale of the disaster that May has inflicted on her party and on her country. She has thrown away a small, if not entirely reliable, majority and (if she’s lucky) replaced it with a fragile less-than-coalition. She has greatly complicated the treacherous Brexit process. She has squandered one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest legacies: The hard Left is now dangerously close to power. Labour won some 40 percent of the vote last week, its highest share since Tony Blair’s heyday, an era when it was a very different party.
Calling a snap election was a forgivable gamble, forgivable because it looked like a safe bet. Burdened by an extremist and in some cases none too bright leadership, Labour was vulnerable. A popular figure (particularly when compared with Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn), May seemed set for a substantially increased majority, maybe even a landslide, something that would have strengthened her hand at home during the Brexit negotiations.
Meanwhile, pushing out her mandate to 2022 would buy her potentially valuable breathing space. Under the timetable set in motion when May gave notice under Article 50 of the EU treaty in March (an act of extraordinary irresponsibility if she was already contemplating an election), the two sides have two years to work out the terms of their divorce (which does not, incidentally, include sorting out what their post-separation relationship should look like). If they don’t come to terms, there is (in the absence of an extension or transitional agreement) simply a break, after which trade between the UK and the EU would be governed by, to use the shorthand, WTO rules. Whatever some Brexiteers like to claim, that would not be a happy state of affairs. There are signs that uncertainty over what may lie ahead is beginning to unsettle business. That uncertainty — exacerbated by May’s unwise decision to opt for a “hard Brexit” rather than one of the gentler “prix fixe” alternatives — will weaken the economy, at least for a while. May presumably calculated that by 2022 the worst of this turbulence would be behind her.
A gamble is still a gamble. Good odds are no reason for carelessness, for stupidity, or for hubris. May’s campaign displayed all three in abundance. One survey has shown that 57 percent of Labour voters swung behind the party in the last month before the vote, 26 percent in the final few days. To butcher a storied Sun headline: It was the campaign wot lost it.
Among many blunders there were two that stood out. The first was proposing changes to the rules governing state-funded “social care” (including plans for a predatory “dementia tax”) that were seen as an attack on the elderly (typically among the Conservatives’ most loyal supporters), especially those who had the effrontery to own their own homes and the desire to pass something on to their children, achievements and aspirations that once were at the core of Thatcherism. It was a gesture that might not have delighted those children either: According to one poll, 50 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds voted Labour, but only 30 percent for the Conservatives.
Throw in the suggested changes to a free schools meal program and, in just a few self-destructive paragraphs in a manifesto that was ill-conceived enough as it was, May had revived the legend — one of the most powerful in British politics — of the Tories as the “nasty party” (a phrase, ironically enough, that she had made famous).
Then there was the decision to base so much of the campaign on May. Say what you will about Stalin and Mao, mass murderers and all that, but they earned their personality cults. May, by contrast, had been prime minister for less than a year, and before that a home secretary (interior minister) whose time in office was notable primarily for its longevity and failures over immigration. What’s more, by becoming the centerpiece of her own campaign, May seemed to repudiate some of the qualities that Brits most appreciated about her — understatedness and, by politicians’ standards, self-effacement. Then, in a cruel paradox, she was brought low when those aspects of her character proved to be all too genuine. Awkward in the spotlight, she stalked from Potemkin event to Potemkin event, too grand or too unsure of herself (take your pick) for debate and serious questioning. Voters were offered the repetition of slogans (“strong and stable leadership”) and evasive sound bites that grew emptier and more embarrassing by the day. She was a more likable robot than Hillary Clinton, but one with even less vim.
She also chose the wrong battleground, casting herself as the defender of the Brexit she had (tepidly) opposed, a battle that has already been won. (Most Britons now accept, if in many cases reluctantly, the referendum’s outcome.) And she did so not solely on the strength of her (much bragged-about but largely untested) negotiating skills, but also by promising that she would be going for a “hard Brexit.” That includes withdrawal from the “single market” in which Norway and other non–EU members happily participate, a promise that would not only prove economically expensive but also cost May dearly at the polls. Yes, the half-truth that “hard Brexit” would be hard on immigration delivered the Tories votes and some seats in working-class areas not previously known for their enthusiasm for May’s party, but the extra twist of the knife it applied to resentful Remainers in the south of England cost the Conservatives more.
With the Tories facing a Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn, this was an election that needed to be about more than Brexit and May’s managerial skills. Corbyn, a man of the hard Left, an extremist ably backed by extremists rather brighter than he is, should have been confronted on his record and on his ideology. But despite some tabloid venom, Corbyn was treated by the Tories with disdain rather than subjected to the more forensic treatment that was called for. The result was that this courteous fanatic was able to get away with being repackaged as a genial old codger, progressive, pleasantly eccentric, and principled. The last, at least, was true, but those principles — atavistic, intolerant, and irreconcilable with respectable democratic practice — were never properly examined. To be sure, a good number of people liked what they saw of Corbyn’s program, but many were either beguiled by its mood music — “hope,” “fairness,” an end to “austerity” — or just used a vote for him as a vehicle to express annoyance with May and a more general resentment, sometimes justified (for example, real wage growth has been dismal for years), sometimes not.
That resentment is strongest among young voters, and it delivered them to Labour. Convinced that coffin-dodgers and boomers are robbing them of their future, whether by voting for Brexit or by imposing tuition charges for university or by driving up house prices beyond their reach, “generation rent” hit back, its choice of weapon — a vote for Labour — unaffected, willfully or otherwise, by any understanding of Corbyn’s past association with terrorism or, for that matter, of where his brand of socialism will lead, an ignorance reinforced by left-wing bias in the educational system and a convenient forgetfulness of what the 1970s were really like.
This rejection by the young means trouble for the Tories for a long time. But they have horrifying short-term problems to contend with too. Should May’s government fall any time soon, the momentum behind Labour is likely to sweep Corbyn into power. The most immediate threats revolve around Brexit and the search for a new Tory leader, two closely connected conundrums. Whatever she might think or hope, Theresa May is finished, and her party does not have much time to find a replacement. The idea that May would ever be able to negotiate a satisfactory “hard Brexit” was always, to put it mildly, unconvincing, but with the EU fully aware of her weakness, it’s now impossible. And there is no fallback. May has argued for a while now that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” a characteristically vacuous argument that sidesteps the distressing reality that “no deal” (which would mean trading under those WTO rules) is a bad deal, a very bad deal indeed.
A breakdown of the Brexit talks would create chaos in Parliament and trigger the election that would take Corbyn to Number 10. As mentioned above, May should, given the circumstances, try to suspend the negotiations for now, and there were signs over the weekend that the EU is expecting just that. Failing that, begin the talks, and do everything possible to keep them going. In the meantime, the Tories must pick a new leader, a process complicated by the small matter that, at the time of writing, the incumbent shows little sign of wanting to go. But assuming that she can be prevailed upon to accept the inevitable, there are a number of alternatives.
Naturally there is talk that Boris Johnson (the former mayor of London and current foreign secretary) is “on maneuvers.” Naturally, he has denied it. But Johnson has been left badly tarnished — a joker turned into a knave — by his role in the Brexit campaign and the turmoil that followed it. He’d be unlikely to tempt errant Tory voters back into the fold, and as he appears to be loathed by much of the EU leadership, his chances of striking a decent Brexit deal would be minimal. David Davis, the tough and intelligent Brexit minister, would normally be someone to consider, but his bewildering failure to master his EU brief ought to rule him out — although it may not. In the last few days Davis has, intriguingly, edged — just a bit — away from hard Brexit. Ruth Davidson’s triumph in Scotland saved May on Election Day, but she still has plenty to do in her home country. She has also said that she’s not interested in the national leadership, for which she’s not, in any event, eligible (as she doesn’t sit in the British parliament). Davidson, who like most of her compatriots favored remaining in the EU, has now suggested that the Tories should consult with other parties on the shape that Brexit should take. Those other parties would probably run a mile, but in principle she’s not wrong.
If I were in a position to choose the next Conservative leader, I’d either skip a generation and opt for, say, a promising up-and-comer such as Priti Patel or — spoiler alert, crazy thoughts ahead — perhaps look for a Nixon to go to China. Ken Clarke may be 76, a euro-fundamentalist and a man on the Tory left, but he was an effective chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), and he’s a well-liked figure both in the UK and, I would imagine, within the EU’s hierarchy. If Clarke could be persuaded to stand (unlikely) and to endorse a soft Brexit (maybe less unlikely), he — or if not him someone of similar views, such as Dominic Grieve (a former attorney general, respected in Parliament on both sides of the aisle and a holder of the Légion d’honneur, no less) — might be best placed to deliver the “soft Brexit” (of which the ‘Norway option” continues to be the best variant) that is the only realistic way for the country and the Tory party to get out of the current mess.
Even suggesting those last two individuals (however improbable it is that they would want the job) will shock euroskeptic readers, but whoever the new Conservative leader turns out to be, the reality of what lies ahead is clear. Corbyn or “soft Brexit”: Choose one.
Two years ago, in a vivid reminder of why Mensheviks have a way of losing out, Jeremy Corbyn was handed the chance to run for the leadership of Britain’s Labour party by some soft-headed members of the soft Left. To be eligible, Corbyn needed to be nominated by 15 percent of Labour’s parliamentary party. That was a problem. Corbyn was far to the left of most of his fellow MPs and had made little effort to build bridges to those who failed to show the ideological purity he expected — and that was almost all of them. There was also the small matter of his appeal to the broader public, which was then considered — happy days — to be minimal. The necessary 35 nominations looked beyond reach, but growing grassroots pressure and some deft work on social media persuaded a handful of MPs to “lend” Corbyn their support by agreeing to nominate him. Their justification for doing so was that it would be healthy if the hard Left were allowed to play its part in the debate over the party’s future direction. Corbyn received 36 nominations, one more than he needed. Pandora’s ballot box was now primed. On September 12, 2015, Corbyn became Labour’s leader. If some recent polls are correct, he now has an outside possibility of becoming Britain’s prime minister after the general election set for June 8.
Margaret Beckett, a former deputy leader of the Labour party, later described those MPs who “lent” their nominations to Corbyn as “morons.” She confessed that she had been one of them. She was right: They had thrown a lifeline to someone who, given the opportunity, will strangle them with it.
Brought up in a left-wing family that was reasonably well-off, Corbyn could easily be mistaken for one of those 1960s student radicals who breathed in whatever was in the campus air and never got over it. Sadly this — how to put it — less than academic individual (he left the equivalent of high school with two Grade ‘E’ A levels — ask a Brit what that means, and he or she will tell you once the laughter subsides) was only able to stick with “Trade Union Studies” at the Polytechnic of North London for a few months.
Never mind: Family tradition, the spirit of the times, and the peculiarities of Corbyn’s personality were enough to do the trick. Before long, he was a hardworking and effective member of his neighborhood Labour party, austere, consumed by politics, a union organizer, an activist on his way up, a true believer on the march. He eventually arrived in Westminster in 1983 as the MP for Islington North, a part of the city being gentrified by the educated, metropolitan Left; Corbyn’s radicalism played well there.
It was also a part of London that hosted a prominent Irish diaspora, something that may have reinforced Corbyn’s focus on the conflict in Northern Ireland as the “anti-imperialist” struggle closest to home. It may have been an era of terrorism and sectarian violence in the province and of bombings on the U.K.’s mainland, but support for the Republican cause (Troops Out and all that) was nothing out of the usual in the redder corners of the British Left. Nevertheless, a number of Corbyn’s associates took it further than most, and Corbyn then took it further still. It was Corbyn who invited two convicted IRA members (one of them convicted for explosives offenses) to the House of Commons (to discuss, it was said, prison conditions in Northern Ireland) shortly after the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton that killed or seriously injured a number of leading Tories, while narrowly missing its main target, Mrs. Thatcher. It was remarkably tactless of John McDonnell, a longstanding friend of Corbyn’s with intriguing connections to the IRA himself, to joke publicly in 2010 that he wished he could go back in time to the 1980s and “assassinate” Mrs. Thatcher. (McDonnell will be chancellor of the Exchequer if Corbyn wins.) He apologized for the quip, but in 2014 he “jokingly” returned to his earlier theme, saying that there had been “massive support for actually assassinating Margaret Thatcher.” McDonnell was Corbyn’s campaign manager in the Labour leadership contest.
Corbyn’s association with the IRA was more than a matter of one meeting in the House of Commons. For years, he had dealings with leaders of Sinn Fein, the party often labeled the “political wing” of the IRA — a distinction, despite denials, without much difference, at least at its highest ranks. In Comrade Corbyn, her excellent biography of Labour’s new leader, Rosa Prince describes the reaction of Kevin McNamara, Labour’s “shadow” Northern Ireland secretary (the party was in opposition at the time), and a supporter of Irish reunification himself, to Corbyn’s decision to invite Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams to speak to a meeting at the annual Labour-party conference in 1989. Speaking of Adams, McNamara said that, as far he was concerned, “there is no place for people who defend murderers at the Labour-party conference.”
And yet, years later, Margaret Beckett was prepared to “lend” her support to the man who thought that there was.
Corbyn now maintains that his actions helped pave the way for the peace process, an argument (Rosa Prince notes) dismissed by the Catholic Northern Irish writer Eilis O’Hanlon, a fierce critic of Sinn Fein:
When they [Corbyn, McDonnell, and the rest] were out defending the IRA . . . [they] didn’t know when, or if, that campaign would end. They still happily supported, or had an ambivalent attitude towards, Republican violence. They knew exactly what they were doing, and how their solidarity was used by the Republican movement to paint its murder campaign as part of some wider campaign for social justice.
To call them useful idiots is to be naïve.
To “lend” one of them a nominating vote was, yes, moronic, but something worse than that, too.
Fast-forward a few decades, and Britain is again facing a terrorist threat, this time from Islamic extremism. Corbyn’s response has been instructive. He condemned the Manchester bombing but didn’t neglect the opportunity to connect it to “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries,” a claim that might have had more force had it not come from someone who so frequently blames Britain or, more generally, the West, for the world’s evils.
On other occasions, he has just taken the other side. Thus Corbyn opposed the Falklands campaign as a “Tory plot,” the war to stop Serbia’s attack on (a touch ironically) Muslim Kosovars, and (naturally!) the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. (He was, however, pleased to write for the Communist — and pro-Soviet — Morning Star newspaper while the USSR was fighting in Afghanistan.) He was against the Iraq War, a respectable enough position, but not so much when coming from him.
The crisis over Ukraine showed that little had changed. Writing in the Morning Star (itself little changed) in 2014, Corbyn repeated Kremlin smears about the new “far right” Ukrainian government and described Moscow’s adventurism in Ukraine as “not unprovoked.” Three years later, Corbyn (no friend of NATO during the Cold War or now), argued that no more British troops should be sent to the Baltic States and, undermining notions of deterrence still further, refused to commit to the principle of collective defense enshrined in NATO’s Article 5 (a principle, while we’re talking about it, that President Trump should do more to affirm).
Long antagonistic to the United States, Corbyn seems to have a softer spot for Iran, using the 35th anniversary of that country’s Islamist revolution to call for an end to the ‘demonization’ of its regime.
Long antagonistic to the United States, Corbyn seems to have a softer spot for Iran, using the 35th anniversary of that country’s Islamist revolution to call for an end to the “demonization” of its regime by the West and for the immediate lifting of sanctions. (This was before Obama’s nuclear deal — such as it is.) It would be reassuring to think that the cash Corbyn received (up to £20,000) for appearances on Iran’s propagandist Press TV between 2009 and 2012 had helped shape those views, but unfortunately they appear all too sincere.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that he has also referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends,” something he now says he regrets. He has also said that he regrets the remark he made to a parliamentary committee investigating anti-Semitism in the Labour party (it’s come to that): that Jews were “no more responsible for the actions of Israel” than Muslims were for the “various self-styled Islamic states or organizations.” Quite a few read that as an attempt to equate Israel (a nation for which Corbyn has — shall we say — scant affection) with ISIS. This, explained Corbyn, was a misinterpretation: “It would have been better . . . if I had said Islamic countries rather than states.”
It might also have been better had he not compared the U.S. with ISIS, but in 2014 (in other words before Labour MPs “lent” him those nominations) that’s what Corbyn did. In the course of one of his many interviews on RT (the rebranded Russia Today) he explained that what was needed was a “political compromise” with the Islamic State. Some of what ISIS has done was “quite appalling,” he conceded, but the same could be said of “some of what the Americans did in Fallujah and other places.” The following year, Corbyn told Press TV (them again) that the American “assassination” of bin Laden was a “tragedy”: There had been no real effort made, you see, to put Osama on trial.
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June 1, 2017 8:00 AM
(Reuters photo: Darren Staples)
Friend to terrorists, thugs, and anti-American zealots from east to west
Two years ago, in a vivid reminder of why Mensheviks have a way of losing out, Jeremy Corbyn was handed the chance to run for the leadership of Britain’s Labour party by some soft-headed members of the soft Left. To be eligible, Corbyn needed to be nominated by 15 percent of Labour’s parliamentary party. That was a problem. Corbyn was far to the left of most of his fellow MPs and had made little effort to build bridges to those who failed to show the ideological purity he expected — and that was almost all of them. There was also the small matter of his appeal to the broader public, which was then considered — happy days — to be minimal. The necessary 35 nominations looked beyond reach, but growing grassroots pressure and some deft work on social media persuaded a handful of MPs to “lend” Corbyn their support by agreeing to nominate him. Their justification for doing so was that it would be healthy if the hard Left were allowed to play its part in the debate over the party’s future direction. Corbyn received 36 nominations, one more than he needed. Pandora’s ballot box was now primed. On September 12, 2015, Corbyn became Labour’s leader. If some recent polls are correct, he now has an outside possibility of becoming Britain’s prime minister after the general election set for June 8.
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Margaret Beckett, a former deputy leader of the Labour party, later described those MPs who “lent” their nominations to Corbyn as “morons.” She confessed that she had been one of them. She was right: They had thrown a lifeline to someone who, given the opportunity, will strangle them with it.
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Brought up in a left-wing family that was reasonably well-off, Corbyn could easily be mistaken for one of those 1960s student radicals who breathed in whatever was in the campus air and never got over it. Sadly this — how to put it — less than academic individual (he left the equivalent of high school with two Grade ‘E’ A levels — ask a Brit what that means, and he or she will tell you once the laughter subsides) was only able to stick with “Trade Union Studies” at the Polytechnic of North London for a few months.
Never mind: Family tradition, the spirit of the times, and the peculiarities of Corbyn’s personality were enough to do the trick. Before long, he was a hardworking and effective member of his neighborhood Labour party, austere, consumed by politics, a union organizer, an activist on his way up, a true believer on the march. He eventually arrived in Westminster in 1983 as the MP for Islington North, a part of the city being gentrified by the educated, metropolitan Left; Corbyn’s radicalism played well there.
It was also a part of London that hosted a prominent Irish diaspora, something that may have reinforced Corbyn’s focus on the conflict in Northern Ireland as the “anti-imperialist” struggle closest to home. It may have been an era of terrorism and sectarian violence in the province and of bombings on the U.K.’s mainland, but support for the Republican cause (Troops Out and all that) was nothing out of the usual in the redder corners of the British Left. Nevertheless, a number of Corbyn’s associates took it further than most, and Corbyn then took it further still. It was Corbyn who invited two convicted IRA members (one of them convicted for explosives offenses) to the House of Commons (to discuss, it was said, prison conditions in Northern Ireland) shortly after the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton that killed or seriously injured a number of leading Tories, while narrowly missing its main target, Mrs. Thatcher. It was remarkably tactless of John McDonnell, a longstanding friend of Corbyn’s with intriguing connections to the IRA himself, to joke publicly in 2010 that he wished he could go back in time to the 1980s and “assassinate” Mrs. Thatcher. (McDonnell will be chancellor of the Exchequer if Corbyn wins.) He apologized for the quip, but in 2014 he “jokingly” returned to his earlier theme, saying that there had been “massive support for actually assassinating Margaret Thatcher.” McDonnell was Corbyn’s campaign manager in the Labour leadership contest.
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Corbyn’s association with the IRA was more than a matter of one meeting in the House of Commons. For years, he had dealings with leaders of Sinn Fein, the party often labeled the “political wing” of the IRA — a distinction, despite denials, without much difference, at least at its highest ranks. In Comrade Corbyn, her excellent biography of Labour’s new leader, Rosa Prince describes the reaction of Kevin McNamara, Labour’s “shadow” Northern Ireland secretary (the party was in opposition at the time), and a supporter of Irish reunification himself, to Corbyn’s decision to invite Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams to speak to a meeting at the annual Labour-party conference in 1989. Speaking of Adams, McNamara said that, as far he was concerned, “there is no place for people who defend murderers at the Labour-party conference.”
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And yet, years later, Margaret Beckett was prepared to “lend” her support to the man who thought that there was.
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Corbyn now maintains that his actions helped pave the way for the peace process, an argument (Rosa Prince notes) dismissed by the Catholic Northern Irish writer Eilis O’Hanlon, a fierce critic of Sinn Fein:
When they [Corbyn, McDonnell, and the rest] were out defending the IRA . . . [they] didn’t know when, or if, that campaign would end. They still happily supported, or had an ambivalent attitude towards, Republican violence. They knew exactly what they were doing, and how their solidarity was used by the Republican movement to paint its murder campaign as part of some wider campaign for social justice.
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To call them useful idiots is to be naïve.
To “lend” one of them a nominating vote was, yes, moronic, but something worse than that, too.
Fast-forward a few decades, and Britain is again facing a terrorist threat, this time from Islamic extremism. Corbyn’s response has been instructive. He condemned the Manchester bombing but didn’t neglect the opportunity to connect it to “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries,” a claim that might have had more force had it not come from someone who so frequently blames Britain or, more generally, the West, for the world’s evils.
On other occasions, he has just taken the other side. Thus Corbyn opposed the Falklands campaign as a “Tory plot,” the war to stop Serbia’s attack on (a touch ironically) Muslim Kosovars, and (naturally!) the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. (He was, however, pleased to write for the Communist — and pro-Soviet — Morning Star newspaper while the USSR was fighting in Afghanistan.) He was against the Iraq War, a respectable enough position, but not so much when coming from him.
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The crisis over Ukraine showed that little had changed. Writing in the Morning Star (itself little changed) in 2014, Corbyn repeated Kremlin smears about the new “far right” Ukrainian government and described Moscow’s adventurism in Ukraine as “not unprovoked.” Three years later, Corbyn (no friend of NATO during the Cold War or now), argued that no more British troops should be sent to the Baltic States and, undermining notions of deterrence still further, refused to commit to the principle of collective defense enshrined in NATO’s Article 5 (a principle, while we’re talking about it, that President Trump should do more to affirm).
Long antagonistic to the United States, Corbyn seems to have a softer spot for Iran, using the 35th anniversary of that country’s Islamist revolution to call for an end to the ‘demonization’ of its regime.
Long antagonistic to the United States, Corbyn seems to have a softer spot for Iran, using the 35th anniversary of that country’s Islamist revolution to call for an end to the “demonization” of its regime by the West and for the immediate lifting of sanctions. (This was before Obama’s nuclear deal — such as it is.) It would be reassuring to think that the cash Corbyn received (up to £20,000) for appearances on Iran’s propagandist Press TV between 2009 and 2012 had helped shape those views, but unfortunately they appear all too sincere.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that he has also referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends,” something he now says he regrets. He has also said that he regrets the remark he made to a parliamentary committee investigating anti-Semitism in the Labour party (it’s come to that): that Jews were “no more responsible for the actions of Israel” than Muslims were for the “various self-styled Islamic states or organizations.” Quite a few read that as an attempt to equate Israel (a nation for which Corbyn has — shall we say — scant affection) with ISIS. This, explained Corbyn, was a misinterpretation: “It would have been better . . . if I had said Islamic countries rather than states.”
It might also have been better had he not compared the U.S. with ISIS, but in 2014 (in other words before Labour MPs “lent” him those nominations) that’s what Corbyn did. In the course of one of his many interviews on RT (the rebranded Russia Today) he explained that what was needed was a “political compromise” with the Islamic State. Some of what ISIS has done was “quite appalling,” he conceded, but the same could be said of “some of what the Americans did in Fallujah and other places.” The following year, Corbyn told Press TV (them again) that the American “assassination” of bin Laden was a “tragedy”: There had been no real effort made, you see, to put Osama on trial.
Beyond Corbyn’s attraction to Islamism (a movement with far-from-Islington views on women, gays, and just about everything else) as an ideology that can be portrayed as “anti-imperialist,” there is also some old-fashioned political calculation at work. Britain has plenty of Muslim voters, and they tend to favor Labour. Corbyn’s foreign-policy positions may go too far for quite a number of them, but they still help lock in the idea of Labour as a pro-Muslim party.
There’s also something else. Looking back over Corbyn’s career, it’s difficult to miss the way that he appears to be drawn to the hard men, the killers and the thugs — the IRA, Castro (whom he called “a champion of social justice”), Chávez (“he made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world”), Trotsky, or, indeed, Islamists. In person, Corbyn may be quiet, shy, and courteous, but there is steel there, too. (He split with his second wife over her insistence on an ideologically inappropriate selective school for their eldest child) as well as a whiff of sulfur, whether in his fan-boy enthusiasm for those hard men, or in choosing to surround himself with an entourage of inquisitors, enforcers, and commissars-in-waiting, not least the clever, sinister McDonnell and strategist Seamus Milne, a somewhat incongruous Stalinist among all the Trots.
Looking back over Corbyn’s career, it’s difficult to miss the way that he appears to be drawn to the hard men, the killers and the thugs — the IRA, Castro, Chavez, Trotsky, or, indeed, Islamists.
There is also the nastiness he clearly inspires in some of his followers. In Comrade Corbyn, Rosa Prince recounts the role that Corbyn played in edging out moderate Labour-party members in a constituency where he was active early in his career. Corbyn himself was “never confrontational,” but one of his contemporaries recalls that “he would be part of whipping up an atmosphere of hostility.” Three decades later, Prince explains how “the tendency for political discourse to turn ugly is writ large in Corbyn’s Labour party.” His social-media followers have shown themselves more than capable of bullying, sometimes purely political, sometimes including threats of physical violence, and, sometimes, when it comes to women at the wrong end of Corbynista wrath, disturbingly misogynistic. Prince adds that “some of those who have found themselves on the receiving end of such treatment feel Corbyn and his allies have failed to do enough to address it.” I am shocked, shocked to hear that intimidation might have been going on.
Labour’s manifesto promises tax-and-spend, heavy-handed intervention in the economy, some nationalization, and various other stupidities too depressing to mention. That’s all bad enough, but if Labour were to win and Corbyn and his team tightened their grip more, what follows would be much, much worse.
The news that Emmanuel Macron, the nice centrist candidate, was going to win the first round of France’s presidential election was greeted with undisguised delight by the European Union’s ruling elite. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is not meant to weigh in on elections that are still underway in EU member states, but rules are for little people. He was quick to pass on his congratulations and wish Macron well in the run-off against the National Front’s not-always-so-nice Marine Le Pen two weeks from now. Juncker’s ‘foreign minister,’ Federica Mogherini, gushed that seeing the EU and French flags fly at Macron’s victory celebration was “the hope and future of our generation.” Michel Barnier tweeted that, as a “patriot and European,” he was confident about Macron’s prospects on May 7, and added that “France must remain European.” What Barnier, the faintly sinister former European Commissioner and member of France’s defeated Republican party who will serve as Brussels’ chief negotiator in the Brexit negotiations, meant by “European” was that France must remain in the EU, something that Le Pen might well put in jeopardy. That’s what really mattered.
Unemployment in France is approximately 10 percent, more than twice German levels. About a quarter of those between the ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. French GDP growth has been sluggish for years, and government spending accounts for around 57 percent of GDP, compared with 44 percent in Germany.
Then there is terror: the Charlie Hebdo murders that began 2015, the massacre in Paris that ended it, the truck plowing into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice last year, and, most recently, the shooting in the Champs-Élysées that left one policeman dead and two other people seriously wounded just days before Sunday’s vote. These attacks are part of a wider Islamist assault on the West, but they are also symptomatic of failings in the effort to integrate France’s large Muslim minority, failings with consequences that have done more than their bit to contribute to the growth of the hard right. In 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, told a parliamentary enquiry that he feared a “confrontation between the far right and the Muslim world.”
And Federica Mogherini is cheered up by some flags.
Observing the behavior of the Bourbons and their aristocratic entourage on their return to France after the fall of Napoleon, the French statesman Talleyrand is said to have remarked that the king and his entourage had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For some reason that quip came to mind as I read those tweets and other celebratory commentary from, it seemed, every corner of Davosworld,
Looking at Emmanuel Macron, it’s not difficult to understand why. He is one of them — likable, clever, the son of a professor and a doctor, with degrees from the right places, impressive stints in both investment banking and government to his credit, and a fondness for the EU, free trade, and the politics of the Third Way or whatever the old Blairite snake oil is known as these days. As a Socialist minister of the economy, he put together the Loi Macron package of reforms in 2014 and 2015 as a modest — very modest, and it says something about French politics that they had to be forced through by decree — step in toward deregulation. At about the same time, he left the Socialist party, before quitting the government the following year amid speculation about the independent presidential run that duly came to be.
There’s another problem for the tale of populist retreat: Between Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote (roughly 21.5 percent) and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left-wing maniac and standard-bearer of France Unbowed (about 19.5 percent), four out of ten first-round ballots were cast for champions of the hard right and left. At 23.9 percent, Macron came out ahead of both of them, but not that far ahead. As establishment triumphs go, this looks a touch thin, even more so after you remember that neither of the two main parties managed to get their man into the final round. Former prime minister François Fillon, of the center-right Republicans, had looked at one point to be a strong challenger, but his campaign was dragged down by scandal. He is under criminal investigation, as is his wife, so the fact that he still managed to reach nearly 20 percent of the vote gives a hint of what might have been. As for the official candidate of the Socialist Party, poor Benoît Hamon, he was eclipsed by Macron and left with barely more than 6 percent of the vote.
So what now? Le Pen will press on, as candidates described as far right so often do, with a mix of policies from both ends of the political spectrum, a mix that has not harmed her blue-collar appeal. Her tough line on immigration and Islamic extremism is accompanied by a somewhat protectionist economic platform designed to appeal to those who have found themselves struggling to keep up. This blend runs through into Le Pen’s Euroskepticism, driven from the right by nationalism and from the left by her suspicion of the EU’s attachment to what is, by French standards, an over-fondness for the free market. Oh yes, she’d also pull France out of NATO.
When Macron (who has been endorsed by Fillon and Hamon, but not, interestingly, by Mélenchon, who has said he won’t be endorsing anybody) wins in the second round — and he will — the next hurdle he’ll face is the parliamentary elections in June. No one knows how his fledgling party, En Marche! (echoes of Jeb!) will fare, but assuming that coattails and a honeymoon work their magic, enough of his team may make it into the National Assembly to form the nucleus of some sort of centrist coalition. But putting that together is still likely to involve horse trading of a type that won’t make it easy to build even on the meager reformist achievements of the Loi Macron, let alone address the mess in which France — statist, sclerotic, and stuck with the Euro — now finds itself.
Away from the economy, Macron appears to believe that there is not that much that can be done about mass immigration (climate change is, he explains — of course he does — one of its causes). This is not something that appears to worry him much, and it’s not only National Front voters who will find his lack of concern off-putting. As for doing a better job of integrating France’s Muslim minority, it’s far from clear that Macron has anything new to offer. The same may hold true of terrorism. “This imponderable, this threat,” Macron explained after the Champs-Élysées shootings, “will be a fact of daily life in the coming years.”
France’s next presidential election isn’t until 2022, but Marine Le Pen — or someone like her — will be waiting, and that wait may not be in vain.
The Red Lion, Whitehall, London, March 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford
Last week, Britons voted themselves out of the European Union, but the seeds of Brexit were planted decades ago.
‘Nothing,” wrote the Duke of Wellington, “except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” The vote for Brexit was a necessary victory. And that it was necessary is a tragedy.
Its origins lay in the fact that many Britons never fully grasped the nature of the European project into which they had been enrolled. They saw it as a trading bloc with extra benefits (and, yes, some annoying costs and meddling regulation). It was a misunderstanding encouraged by those who took the United Kingdom into the “Common Market,” a misunderstanding that left a legacy that bedeviled Britain’s domestic politics and soured the country’s relationship with its European partners.
The entities that evolved into the European Union were inspired by two world wars within a single generation, and they were about a great deal more than trade. Their most important founding fathers (men like Jean Monnet) believed that the nation-state could not be trusted to keep the peace. What was needed was a post-national federation, not exactly the superstate of sometimes fevered euroskeptic imaginations, but something softer, subtler, and, arguably, more insidious. People liked the nation-states they already had; the post-national would have to be built by the post-democratic. As Monnet anticipated, this was a process that would have to be patient, and, often, oblique (“by zig and by zag”), and that’s how it’s turned out. Piece by piece, swaths of domestic policy-making have been transferred to “Brussels,” safely beyond national democratic control.
Monnet recognized that voters in the six founding members (France, West Germany, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and Italy) of what eventually became the EU, countries that had known military defeat and occupation, would be reluctant to jettison their nation-states. What then would be the case with Great Britain, a kingdom comfortable, even too comfortable, with its past?
Well, according to one poll, the most important reason given by 49 percent of those who voted last week to quit the EU was that “decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.” That thinking shades, I suspect, into the second-most popular (33 percent) first choice (leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”) and the third (13 percent): Sticking with Brussels would mean being left with no choice “about how the EU expanded its membership or its powers.” The top reasons why Remainers wanted to stay in the EU were primarily economic. Only 9 percent cited “a strong attachment to the EU and its shared history, culture and traditions.” After more than 40 years in the Brussels club, national still trumped post-national.
Some of those who led the U.K. into what were then the European Communities in 1973 understood their true nature. Others convinced themselves that talk of “ever closer union” was grandiloquent continental verbiage, nothing more. The refusal of the English, wrote George Orwell, “to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.”
Despite the best efforts of more erudite opponents of membership, the debate over whether Britain should join and (after the question was put in a 1975 referendum) then stay in the “Common Market” largely revolved, as that misnomer suggests, around trade and the economy, leaving far too much that needed saying unsaid, an omission with consequences. In the 2013 speech in which he agreed to hold his fateful referendum, David Cameron noted how many Britons were asking “why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” The problem, of course, was that they had, in reality, voted for something that was very much more than that. Forty years later, the memory of what they thought they had voted for still haunted Britain’s political landscape.
People felt, claimed Cameron, “that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to.” It would have been fair to add (although he didn’t) that British politicians had done their bit to set — or at least go along with — that course. For example, Margaret Thatcher helped push the union toward a greater acceptance of economic liberalism. This led to the EU’s Single Market, a major achievement, but it came with a catch, the Single European Act, a new EU treaty that diluted the veto power of individual member states. Mrs. Thatcher believed that the sacrifice of another slice of sovereignty was worth it. Yet again, economic promise trumped political price. The pace of integration duly picked up: No need to zig or to zag on this occasion.
By the time of her famous speech in Bruges in 1988, the lady was beginning to turn. Brussels was using its expanded powers to pursue an interventionist (and integrationist) agenda that Thatcher did not appreciate. Even so, to reread that speech is to notice that, like so many of her countrymen, she still didn’t get it: “The [European] Community,” she said, was not “an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept.” On the contrary, it was, and it always had been — and there was nothing “abstract” about the “intellectual concept” that underpinned it. “Ever closer union” meant what it said.
The Bruges speech (essentially) set in motion the conflict that toppled first Thatcher and, indirectly, her successor, John Major. Trivialized by the media and opposition as an internal squabble, the “Tory Wars” were the result of a serious attempt by some Conservatives to come to grips with where the European project was going. They were at their bloodiest in the aftermath of Major’s signature of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Maastricht turned the European Communities into the European Union and paved the way for the introduction of a single currency. Major negotiated an exemption from any obligation on Britain to sign up for what would become the euro, at least. But he didn’t use his veto power to try to force through a deal that might have carved out a niche for the U.K. that was more realistically aligned to the aspirations of its people. It was a missed opportunity.
Instead the ratchet of ever closer union had turned again — and a Tory government had helped out. Frustrated by all this, a small euroskeptic group reinvented itself as the United Kingdom Independence Party. One of UKIP’s founders was a Thatcherite commodities’ broker named Farage. Few noticed and fewer cared.
Making matters more difficult for Major, a modernizing Labour party had embraced the EU both as handy post-democratic bulwark against Tory reform and as a branding device: New Labour not Old, united (unlike certain parties) and forward-looking (unlike certain parties). But what Labour had not done — at least to any significant degree — was buy into the integrationist dream. Its interest in the EU was as a cudgel to batter the Tories.
To be sure, Tony Blair was a genuine europhile (he would have taken Britain into the single currency if he could), so it’s perversely appropriate that he accidentally prepared the ground for Brexit, starting with the decision to give the right to work to migrants from the bloc of formerly Communist countries that joined the EU in 2004. Most EU member-states insisted on a transition period. Blair’s Britain did not. The initial estimate was that there would be a net 5–13,000 new arrivals a year. That’s not how it worked out. The cumulative net total is (conservatively) thought to have exceeded 400,000 people between 2004 and 2012, just part of a huge influx of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU and beyond. This played poorly with the U.K.’s working class, and Brussels took the rap. That was partly (I suspect) because — in an era of political correctness — Brits were wary about criticizing immigration from further afield, and partly because the EU’s freedom-of-movement rules meant that EU migrants could only infrequently be turned away. Their numbers were not only large, but, effectively, uncontrollable.
#share#Immigration was the topic that transformed UKIP from (more or a less) a single-issue euroskeptic party to a far more potent force and propelled it into Labour’s old heartlands, territory where it had hitherto rarely been seen. German chancellor Angela Merkel only fueled the fire, whether bungling the migrant crisis last autumn or refusing to cut Cameron some slack on the EU’s immigration rules during his disastrous “renegotiation” earlier this year. The chickens came home to roost on Thursday: Seventy percent of Britain’s skilled working class supported Brexit.
And it was Merkel who pushed through the Lisbon Treaty as a substitute for the EU constitution that had been rejected by referendums in France and Holland, a brutal reminder that the cause of European integration trumped democracy. Britons had also been promised a referendum on that constitution, but the constitution had been killed off before they could vote. When it was (for all practical purposes) revived in the form of the Lisbon Treaty, Blair’s referendum promise was not. To repeat the message: Ever closer union meant ever less democracy. Walking away from a referendum was also a wasted opportunity: It would have been a relatively (compared with what was to come) low-stakes chance for the U.K. (which could have vetoed the treaty) to consider what it wanted from the EU. Oh well. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, signed the treaty, seemingly unconcerned that it reduced Britain’s shrinking ability to block additional integration, a fact that forced more euroskeptics into the “out” camp.
Meanwhile, opposition leader David Cameron had reined in Tory grumbling about the EU. A modernized party had to stop “banging on about Europe,” he said. Divided parties lose. Voters were bored with the issue. Euroskepticism gave a bad impression: It was retrograde, nostalgia tainted with poison. To be sure there was UKIP, but they were “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly,” Cameron said — cranks who were not to be taken seriously. As a political tactic, Cameron’s approach made some sense, at least in the short-term (he became prime minister in 2010), but it alienated euroskeptics still further. And there were more of them than in the past, their number boosted by the crisis in the euro zone, a crisis accompanied by the insistence that the only solution was more Europe, not less. It was a demand made all the more alarming by the British eurofundamentalists who claimed that there could still come a time when the U.K. might adopt the single currency. Britain had its safeguards against that, but would they survive the election of a europhile government?
In 2012 Jacques Delors, one of the European Union’s most distinguished senior statesmen, appeared to accept that Britain and its partners would never agree on what the EU should be. He floated the suggestion that “if the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis.” He could imagine, he said, “a form such as a European economic area or a free-trade agreement,” and as Conservative MEP Dan Hannan recalled last week, it was not the only such deal being touted. Finally, Brussels was signaling its willingness to try to solve its “British problem” in a constructive and innovative way.
Cameron should have jumped at the opportunity — a get-out-of-jail-free card if ever there was one — but this surprisingly unimaginative politician still believed he could play the game by the old rules, throwing a few scraps to the euroskeptic rabble at home, while continuing with business as usual in Brussels. He even neglected the chance to wring a few concessions out of Britain’s EU partners in exchange for agreeing to a change in the Lisbon Treaty prompted by the euro-zone crisis.
He was wrong to be so complacent. Euroskeptic attitudes were hardening in Britain and with UKIP on the rise, euroskeptics had somewhere to turn. Indeed, it was to head off the UKIP threat to the Tory vote that Cameron committed to the referendum he had never wanted — a referendum he could quite possibly have junked in the event of a renewed coalition government with the eurofundamentalist Liberal Democrats after the 2015 election. But remarkably, the Conservatives won an outright majority. The referendum couldn’t be dodged.
\Then Cameron blew his last best chance. The threat of a pending in/out referendum ought to have given him the leverage to cut a better EU deal for Britain. After all, he presided over the union’s second-largest economy and the U.K. made the third-largest contribution to the EU budget. But his much-vaunted “renegotiation” failed to secure any significant changes. Perhaps, thinking like almost everyone else (including me) that the Brexiteers had no chance of winning, Cameron didn’t press the EU hard enough. Perhaps the EU’s leadership, confident that they too had little to risk, felt that they could get away with tossing no more than a few crumbs London’s way. Or, perhaps, realizing that the Brits would always stand in the way of ever closer union, they no longer cared.
Whatever the reason, Cameron was left with a renegotiation that proved the EU would concede no more to Britain. The rest is history.
In a new article posted elsewhere on this website, my old friend Rupert Darwall has, with characteristic elegance and precision, dissected some of the issues surrounding Britain’s referendum on its membership of the EU, a vote set for June 23. For anyone interested in what’s at stake (and I appreciate that not everyone on NR’s side of the Atlantic will be), it’s a must-read.
As Darwall explains, this particular chapter in Britain’s unhappy European union began in 2007, when then–opposition leader David Cameron gave a “cast-iron guarantee” of a referendum on the EU’s notorious Lisbon Treaty. That treaty, another of Angela Merkel’s gifts to the Continent, was a disgrace to democracy, designed to bludgeon through the functional equivalent of the EU’s rejected constitution. Unfortunately, it came into force before Cameron became prime minister. His referendum would have had no legal effect. Being a pragmatic sort, Cameron dropped it.
Cameron could have gotten away with that flip-flop but for a pattern of behavior, both before and after that decision, that gave the entirely fair impression that he neither shared nor even understood euroskeptic concerns. Thus he made clear his irritation with those Conservatives who were “banging on about Europe.” He denounced UKIP, at that time more clearly a tribe of the ex-Tory Right than it is today, as a party of “fruitcakes, loonies or closet racists, mostly,” a slur that backfired badly.
Compounding this — and whatever eurofundamentalists might claim to the contrary — Cameron was generally cooperative in his dealings with the EU, something all too typical of what Darwall accurately describes as the prime minister’s “steady-as-you-go” politics.
But his clubbable approach generated no gratitude in Brussels and fueled mounting suspicion among euroskeptics at home. Darwall writes that if Cameron’s “party had trusted him more on Europe, he would have been better placed to withstand the pressure for [the] referendum” that now lies just ahead. That’s true. It didn’t help him that the increasingly uneasy Tories also felt threatened by a UKIP insurgency that was itself boosted by Cameron’s inability or unwillingness to fight Britain’s corner in Europe. The result was that, in 2013, he had to concede an “in/out” referendum that, if the voters opt for Brexit, could bring his premiership to an end.
Ranging more generally, Darwall argues that “other than the cap on net migration, there is little from the EU that constrains [Cameron’s] policy ambitions for Britain.” There’s quite a bit to that, but it should come with the important qualification that this is true of Cameron’s ambitions. As Darwall notes, in many areas the prime minister’s ideas converge with those of Britain’s European partners. Once those ideas are enacted into law at the EU level, they are nearly impossible to repeal. A future Tory prime minister, more interested in the free market and, say, scientific realism (Cameron is a climate warrior), will find such faits accomplis very frustrating indeed. With the EU in an increasingly dirigiste mood, that poisonous legacy will only get worse.
But all this is, in a sense, a sideshow, ignoring, as Darwall puts it, “the nine-tenths of the iceberg below the surface”:
How can a Union on the path to becoming a full-fledged political union — what the agreement Mr. Cameron secured in Brussels at the weekend calls “further political integration into the European Union” — accommodate a large nation that is on a diverging path?
It cannot. The EU is what it is, and what it is is a machine grinding relentlessly in the direction of “ever closer union,” a phrase that is both aspirational and of profound legal and institutional consequence. Allowing exemptions from the EU’s forward march — such as those releasing Britain and Denmark from the obligation to sign up for the euro — grows more difficult by the year and needs, well, “cast-iron” legal protection of the type that Cameron has notably failed to secure in his current “renegotiation” with the rest of the EU.
That’s why Cameron’s deal largely covers what Darwall rightly dubs “second-order issues.” The British prime minister desperately wanted his country to stay in the EU, but he had to give the euroskeptic hordes something. Because of the nature of the EU, “second-order” was all that could ever be on offer. The result, fears Darwall, is a distraction, a package that enables Cameron “to trap euroskeptics in a manufactured choice when the real one is still over the horizon.”
In a way, that’s too pessimistic. The deal Cameron has struck is so feeble that, at best, all it can do is give a hand to waverers wanting an excuse to vote to remain in the EU. That’s not nothing, but the deal will not be center stage other than as comic relief. Rather, the debate will probably slide out from underneath Cameron’s control and into more important territory. On the euroskeptic side it will be focused on Britain’s regaining control of more of its own destiny, not least where immigration is concerned.
For their part, those looking to persuade Brits to rally behind the status quo will also, I suspect, move rapidly away from Cameron’s sad surrender and concentrate instead on the underlying case for continued membership of the EU. There will be happy talk of travel, peace, and free trade, but the key message will be negative: Leaving the EU is, they will warn, a leap in the dark, risky at the best of times, utter madness now.
Aided by the fact that Brexiteers have so far failed to unify around an easily grasped, unfrightening alternative to membership in the EU (such as the variant of the “Norwegian option” long advocated by EU Referendum’s Richard North), fear will prevail. Brits will stick with the EU, the devil they know.
That will be a tragedy, and that is the trap this referendum really represents. Darwall eloquently highlights the danger that the EU represents to British democracy. And he frets that “Mr. Cameron’s small-bore approach — asking for little and getting less — stores up problems for the future by fostering the impression that a vote in June to remain in the EU settles the matter of Britain’s relationship with Europe.” My worry, by contrast, is that that impression is correct: The vote will settle the question.
Darwall reckons that the “tensions inherent in Britain’s EU membership will remain” even after the vote to stay in that he expects. So they will. Where we differ is over Darwall’s obvious belief that they will count for something. He thinks that “Mr. Cameron’s referendum will not be the end of the story.” But my guess is that, for all practical purposes, it will. Euroskeptics are an aging segment of the electorate. Absent some truly major convulsion shaking the EU into reopening its core treaty for discussion, this vote is their last good shot at Brexit. And they are likely to miss.
To pull a rabbit out of a hat, there has to be a hat. In a speech in January 2013, British prime minister David Cameron promised to negotiate a fundamental reworking of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. There would then be a referendum to decide whether Brits wanted to quit the union or stick with it to enjoy the “new settlement” Cameron had secured. There was bold, delusional, or dishonest (take your pick, I’ll go for dishonest) talk of strengthening the EU’s “democratic legitimacy,” of opting out of the forced march toward “ever closer union,” of power “flowing back” to the member states, of an increased role for national parliaments. Euroskeptics scoffed. They were right to. There was no hat. The EU is what it is, and what it is not is some sort of super-free-trade zone: If Cameron got what he wanted, it would no longer be the EU. The rest of the EU was never going to go along with that.
And, now, three years later, the EU’s “president,” Donald Tusk, is brandishing a draft deal that makes that all too clear. Mr. Cameron doesn’t seem too fussed. Many Britons have identified Tusk’s settlement for the malevolent nothing that it is, but their prime minister is insisting that the rabbit that they don’t see is in fact there. He is, he explains, on the edge of winning a splendid new deal for Britain.
It’s customary at times like this to drag out tired old analogies with poor Neville Chamberlain, so notoriously swindled by a wily foreigner at Munich, but that comparison doesn’t work here. No one has swindled Cameron, but if he sells this deal, he will have swindled his country.
In that speech three years ago, Cameron noted how many Britons were asking, “Why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” Well, that was what they were told they were joining. But what the U.K. actually signed up for was very different — and infinitely less benign.
Yes, “common market” was indeed what Brits used to call that mysterious structure run out of Brussels, but that was a label that concealed more than it explained. In joining what were then more accurately known as the European Communities, Britain had committed itself not only to a trade pact, but also to ever closer union. And that was a project that had been grinding on for a long time. The institutional machinery was already in place to ensure that the integration process — and with it the continuous and irreversible transfer of powers away from national democracies — only moved forward.
And that has continued. The pace may not have been certain, but the direction always was. The changes that David Cameron talked about in 2013 (and before then) were not mere technicalities. They were aimed at the essence of what the European Union, the intended graveyard of the nation-state, was supposed to be. The fact that Cameron wanted quite a few of these changes to be for the benefit of all the EU’s members made things worse still. They were not only a challenge to Brussels but to the euro-fundamentalist political class across a wide swathe of the EU. To repeat myself: The idea that Cameron would secure the unanimous agreement of Britain’s European “partners” to this (because that’s what would, under EU rules, be required) was nonsense.
Cameron, no fool, must have known this, but he was playing a different game. The referendum had essentially been forced on him by the threat to the Tories posed by UKIP’s euroskeptic insurgency. The “renegotiation” would buy valuable time to safely (fingers crossed!) see him through the 2015 election. If it turned out to be a dud, well, he would sort out the problem then.
And a dud is what it has turned out to be
One Tory MP described the proposed deal as “a slap in the face for Britain.” More like a punch, I’d say, made more vicious by the contempt for the electorate with which it was landed: “Hand on heart,” boasted Cameron, “I have delivered the commitments made in my manifesto.” Hand on heart . . .
Meanwhile, he did his best to stifle dissent within a Conservative party in which many were startled by Cameron’s interpretation of what they had naïvely believed was their manifesto, too.
Speaking in the House of Commons, another Conservative MP, Steve Baker, commented that the deal looked and smelt “funny.” “It might be superficially shiny on the outside, but poke it and it’s soft in the middle.” He asked the prime minister whether he would admit to having “been reduced to polishing poo?”
Cameron wouldn’t, but, dung or not, his renegotiation was always going to be a dud. Bit by bit, he had dropped or diluted his demands. The grand constitutional rearrangements were shelved and the EU’s job-destroying social legislation was left untouched. The tough talk of regaining at least some meaningful veto rights over immigration into the U.K. from elsewhere in the EU dwindled (mostly) into snarling about welfare benefits, a telling retreat. The surge of EU migrants into the U.K. (currently running at a net 180,000 people per year) has done much to fuel British euroskepticism, but Cameron was compelled to accept that he could only nibble at its edges. The free movement of people within the EU is one of the union’s fundamental principles: It wasn’t something that was going to be bartered away.
Cameron ended up asking for little. He will receive less. Thus, so far as benefits are concerned, his proposed scaling back of “in-work” benefits for EU migrants has itself been scaled back. Even that only kicks in if Britain applies an “emergency brake” in the event of undue pressure on public services or the welfare system. And who decides whether the conditions for applying that emergency brake have been met? The EU Commission. Ah.
To be fair, the Commission has said that those conditions are met in Britain — for now.
Wait, there’s more.
The definition of those EU citizens that the U.K. can turn away on the grounds that they represent a “present” threat to public policy or security will be broadened. That’s a welcome change, but it does nothing to address the way European human-rights legislation — all too often stretched beyond reasonable interpretation — can stand in the way of the deportation of equally undesirable non-EUcitizens. Cameron once undertook to tackle this, too. (No matter that doing anything about it was — for reasons too complicated to go into here — a legal impossibility as long as Britain remained within the EU.) He gave up on that as well.
Meanwhile, the introduction of a “red card” system that would, under certain circumstances, allow national parliaments to block EU legislation is one of the few “constitutional” reforms to survive, but it would require the support of another 14 national parliaments before it could be played. The chances of that ever happening are, to say the least, remote.
Another area of British concern has been that the nine EU countries — including the U.K. — not in the euro zone might be ganged up upon by the 19 who are. So, if enough of the nine (it’s not indicated how many) get together, they will be allowed to give their “reasoned objection” to measures designed to integrate the euro zone further. How kind! These objections will then be “discuss[ed]” with a view to finding a “satisfactory solution.” And if that can’t be found, well, silence.
More helpfully, it’s confirmed that Britain will not have to contribute to future euro-zone bailouts, and there will be some protections for Britain’s financial sector from euro-zone regulators. There will also be a prohibition against discrimination against individuals and entities based on the fact that the member-state where they are established has not adopted the single currency, something that will, again, please the City.
Then there’s “ever closer union,” that lethal ratchet. Cameron has been handed a few words, of limited legal consequence, to the effect that the U.K. “is not committed to further political integration into the European Union,” whatever that might mean. But nothing direct is said about the European Court and its habit of interpreting EU law in a way that takes “ever closer union” as a guiding principle. This matters: In the event of a conflict between European law and the law of any member state (including Britain’s), European law prevails. As long as the EU is the EU, that, too, is not going to change.
Is the deal even binding? At the moment it’s only a draft. There will be more bargaining to come, but this proposal, or something close to it, will probably be agreed to by all the EU’s leaders, conceivably as early as next week. Once that’s happened, it can (arguably) be reversed only by a unanimous vote. Once filed with the United Nations, it is (arguably) also binding under international law.
Arguably: With the EU the devil is always in the details, and the law in this area is decidedly murky. The deal will commit the EU’s leadership to amend the EU’s secondary legislation to reflect what has been agreed, a procedure that will give the EU’s (reliably euro-fundamentalist) parliament an opportunity to weigh in. And if it declines to sign off on the deal, what then? After all, the British will have already voted.
Tusk also accepts that the EU treaties may “possibly” need amending at some (unspecified) point to reflect “a few elements” in the proposed deal. Forget that “possibly.” The word is “certainly,” and the amendments may have to cover more than a “few” elements. Amending the treaty is a lengthy, rarely straightforward business, requiring the agreement of all 28 member-states. If that’s not forthcoming — if a parliament votes it down, say, or a referendum gets in the way — what then? It’s by no means clear that Tusk’s agreement to agree would have the legal force that he and Cameron claim. Again, this would take place after (maybe years after) the British referendum, which may take place as early as June.
So, what’s a Brit to think? Well, even on the most favorable construction, the deal does next to nothing to restore Britain’s control over its borders, next to nothing to return any powers to its parliament, next to nothing to extricate Britain from the jaws of “ever closer union,” and nothing at all to restore supremacy to its courts. Adding insult to injury, what’s been thrown the country’s way are, for the most part, not even scraps but promises of scraps, promises that may well not be binding.
Apart from that, it’s a great deal. Hand on heart.