General election 2017 – The view through a smoked glass mirror

On one side of the House of Commons sits an opposition leader whose confidence is growing by the day.  Originally elected almost by accident and against the wishes of the parliamentary party, that leader enjoys huge support among the party rank and file.  Although slated as an extremist and as unelectable by the MPs, journalists and academics that make up the “Westminster Bubble,” there has been a growing surge of support for the leader from Britain’s young (18-35) generation.

On the other side of the House is a Prime Minister whose standing in the country is falling by the hour.  No longer able to command a majority in the house, barely managing to quell backbench hostility, and dependent upon the votes of Ulster Unionists to govern, it is only a matter of time before the government falls.

This is a reasonable description of the situation Britain awoke to this morning.  It is, however, also a description of the British parliament 40 years ago.  The difference was that in 1977 it was a right-wing Tory leader that stood on the threshold of tearing up the political “centre ground” consensus and replacing it with one of her own – the neoliberal orthodoxy that has been coming apart at the seams since 2008. 

Margaret Thatcher had been unexpectedly elected in 1975 after the favoured right wing candidate, Keith Joseph, was obliged to withdraw from the contest after expressing sympathy for the idea of compulsorily sterilising the poor.  The candidate favoured by MPs, William Whitelaw (who later became Thatcher’s Home Secretary) was regarded as being too similar to the defeated Edward Heath.  The expectation once Thatcher became leader of the opposition was that she would abandon her (in their day) extreme policies in favour of a platform closer to the post-war consensus that had prevailed since 1951 – when instead of reversing the 1945-51 Labour reforms, the Tories embraced them and extended them (for example, abolishing prescription charges and building more council houses) with the result that the Tories went on to govern for 13 years.

By the late 1960s, the post-war consensus was breaking apart.  Full-employment had resulted (predictably) in a wage-price spiral that made Britain’s industry uncompetitive in international markets.  This resulted in a falling pound and a growing balance of payments (current account) deficit.  Attempts by successive Labour governments to persuade trade unions to voluntarily weaken their bargaining position failed in large part by pressure from grassroots union members.  A proto-Thatcherite attempt by the Heath government to achieve the same aim was similarly defeated.

What Thatcher sensed was that there was a new anti-consensus mood in Britain, particularly among those younger voters who had not lived through the privations of war and depression which had shaped the post-war consensus.  As Ed Howker and Shiv Malik note:

“In 1979 Margaret Thatcher received a 16 percent swing in support from young people aged 18-35 – the baby boomers – significantly more than any other group… Without their support she wouldn’t have gained power.”

This is how political and economic consensus breaks down – as Max Planck once put it – “one funeral at a time.”  It is a political given that older people are far more likely to vote than younger people.  It is also a given that older voters are more conservative (with a small “c”) than younger voters.  This means that where there is consensus between the two major parties within Britain’s archaic first-past-the-post voting system, politics tends to gravitate to the so-called centre ground.  In the period 1945-1975, this political consensus – built around Keynesian economic ideas – was centre-left (i.e. social democratic rather than socialist or communist).  In the period since 1985, the consensus – built around the Monetarist ideas of economists like Hayek and Friedman - has been centre-right.  Rather like the 1951 Tories, in 1995 Labour’s Blairite “modernisers” embraced what by then was known as Thatcherism, and then went on to do it better than the Tories (e.g. cutting social security and beginning the process of privatising Britain’s public services) with the result that they, too, enjoyed 13 years in government.

There is some irony that so many people projected the ghost of Margaret Thatcher onto the flawed and damaged personality that is Theresa May.  Far from being strong and stable, Mrs May turned out to be an insecure and bullying control freak, whose fear of criticism caused her to exclude even her own ministers from drafting her election manifesto or from mapping out her election campaign.  The result was that she turned a 17 seat majority and an apparently unassailable 20 point lead in the polls into a minority and – if today’s polling is correct – a 5 percent lead for a newly invigorated Labour opposition.

But the deeper reason why Theresa May cannot channel the spirit of Margaret Thatcher (any more than Donald Trump can resurrect the ghost of Ronald Reagan) is that everything has changed.  In the mid-1970s:

• inflation was high
• profits were low
• employment and wages were high
• governments and unions were powerful
• business and finance were weak
• interest rates were high
• access to credit was limited
• taxes were high
• inequality was low

These are the exact opposite to the problems we face today.  Since 2008 we have experienced severe deflation which weak governments have failed to resolve through low interest rates, tax cuts and debt-based quantitative easing.  Nevertheless, there is huge structural opposition to any shift away from the neoliberal economic orthodoxy with its insistence on “sound finance” and austerity cuts.  In a foresighted paper from 1943, Michael Kalecki more or less predicted current economic policy:

“In current discussions of these problems there emerges time and again the conception of counteracting the slump by stimulating private investment. This may be done by lowering the rate of interest, by the reduction of income tax, or by subsidizing private investment directly in this or another form. That such a scheme should be attractive to business is not surprising. The entrepreneur remains the medium through which the intervention is conducted. If he does not feel confidence in the political situation, he will not be bribed into investment. And the intervention does not involve the government either in 'playing with' (public) investment or 'wasting money' on subsidizing consumption."

The failure of quantitative easing (i.e. “subsidizing private investment”) tax cuts and historically low interest rates to reverse the post-2008 depression has been felt most profoundly by the young.  Unlike their parents and grandparents, who enjoyed free education and cut price council house sales, today’s young face crippling student debt and house prices far greater than they can ever hope to afford.  Moreover, as the economic slump continues, the young are increasingly aware that it is their generation that is going to be asked to pay the price of an aging population and the tax costs of bailing out the banks while receiving no support to pay back their own debts.

Without wishing to take anything away from Corbyn/Labour’s campaign – which proved far more competent that any of the Westminster Bubble commentators had suggested – it was these deeper structural issues that caused so many young people to come out to vote to prevent another majority Tory government.  It is no surprise, that Corbyn – who was regarded by opponents and allies alike as an anti-establishment (i.e. anti-consensus) extremist – became the repository for youthful discontent .  If you have reached the point where you need to change the way politics and economics are done, you are going to look to the extremes for a solution. 

Nor were Britain’s young generation the only ones to rally behind Corbyn/Labour.  A large part of the older UKIP/Leave vote – which delivered the Brexit shock to a complacent political elite – switched to Labour too.  Since these were the voters that Theresa May assumed would embrace the politics of the hard-right, their switch to Labour was in its way as crucial as the youth vote.  It is likely that they broke this way for similar reasons – stagnating incomes, insecure employment, poor housing and public services, etc… issues that May either ignored or promised to worsen.

This isn’t 1979 all over again.  But I am minded of the words attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme.”  It might well be that the neoliberal economic/political consensus is coming to an end.  If so it will be helped along by the deeper political arithmetic of Mrs May’s failed attempt to secure a massive majority.  At the start of April, Mrs May was stood in front of three hundred cheering Tory MPs.  Today she is stood in front of at least 100 Tory MPs who face losing their seats at the next election.  They are no longer cheering; several are already sharpening metaphorical knives.  On the other side of the House, Labour MPs who stood despondent when the election was called – seeing it as no more than a mercy killing for their supposedly unelectable party – are rallying behind their leader.  Mr Corbyn now has around 100 MPs sat behind him who are only there because of the strength of the campaign that he ran.  Former critics are swallowing humble pie and jostling for their places in the new shadow cabinet.  Like the despondent figure of Edward Heath after 1975, only the most embittered Blairites continue to carp behind Mr Corbyn’s back.

We cannot know if we have reached one of those historical moments where everything changes.  For all of the euphoria around Mr Corbyn’s campaign, Labour still lost the election.  Mrs May is still Prime Minister and, with the help of the DUP, the Tories can maintain a majority in Parliament – the numbers simply do not work for any Labour-led “rainbow coalition.”  Nor should we rule out LibDem treachery at some point (perhaps with a new Tory leader) in the parliament – similar deals with the Liberals and the Ulster Unionists kept Labour in power from 1974-79, so we should not assume that the Tories will be gone anytime soon.

What matters now is whether Labour can cement a new coalition of political forces in the country.  This will involve developing a platform that can offer hope not just to Britain’s youth, but also to the downtrodden voters in Labour’s neglected ex-industrial heartlands.  That, in turn, means escaping the neoliberal consensus that says that rising incomes are always bad; that low taxes are always good; that public borrowing and investment are always to be avoided; and that public ownership is always wrong.  It is up to Labour politicians and Labour supporters to demonstrate that it is precisely these neoliberal ideas – that were entirely appropriate in the conditions of the 1970s – are the very things that are now holding everybody back, and that a new economics and politics can meet the needs of Britain’s young and old alike.

This election is rigged – here’s how to make your vote count

Theresa May, her rich supporters and her mass media cheer leaders would all like you to believe that you will be voting for a Prime Minister on Thursday.  The main reason why they are doing this is to encourage millions of people across Britain to waste their votes.  This is because the more parliamentary constituencies (aka “seats”) they can remove from the election, the more chance they have of securing a majority on a minority share of the votes.

To understand this, you need to understand how Britain’s somewhat antiquated electoral system actually works.  Because Britain is a representative democracy, in theory we do not have a single election where we vote for the governing party – still less the Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is chosen by the majority of MPs elected to parliament.  While this is almost always the leader of the largest party, there is no constitutional requirement for this.  For example, in 1931 parliament elected Labour’s Ramsey MacDonald as Prime Minister even though the majority of MPs were Conservatives.  Voting for Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn no more guarantees that they will be Prime Minister until 2022 than voting for David Cameron guaranteed that he would be Prime Minister until 2020.

During a general election we participate in what are in effect 649 separate, winner-takes-all  local elections (the Speaker’s seat is usually uncontested) to decide which MPs will represent our respective constituencies.  It is these MPs who decide which party/parties will form a government and who will be Prime Minister.  Normally, this would be the party with the majority of constituencies unless – like in 2010 – there is no winner.

Constituencies contain roughly the same number of voters.  However, the way the boundaries have been set up tends to favour the two largest parties – Labour and the Tories.  If you look at an electoral map of the results in 2015, it appears as if the overwhelming majority of England and Wales is Tory:

However, this is because most of the UK population lives in cities where Labour tends to do well.  The Tories, in contrast tend to fare better in rural seats.  This matters because it results in the overwhelming majority of parliamentary constituencies being “safe” for one or other of the two largest parties (since 2015 a large number of Scottish seats have become safe for the SNP).  The majority of the largest party in each of these seats far exceeds the vote of all the other parties combined.  Votes for losing parties in these seats are simply wasted.

This means that the entire general election can turn on a couple of thousand votes in fewer than 100 of the 650 constituencies.  Encouraging voters to cast their votes for parties or potential Prime Ministers ensures that the number of seats – and the number of voters within those seats – whose votes actually make a difference remains small.  This gives the advantage to the party with the deepest pockets (i.e. the Tories) as they can focus their advertising effort on the relatively small number of voters who will actually make a difference on Thursday.

There is a means by which people could thwart this cynical means of winning elections.  However, it relies on voters doing a bit more homework than we usually do.  It also involves our making hard choices about where to put our votes.

Let’s stop being tribal

Far too many of us treat political allegiance as being hereditary.  That is, we vote the same way as our parents did, just as they voted the same way as our grandparents.  However, what may have been appropriate when our parents or grandparents were raising families, building careers, buying a home, etc. need not be appropriate today.  For example, a lot of today’s older voters supported Margaret Thatcher because she sold off Britain’s social housing stock at a discounted rate at a time where the large baby boomer generation was struggling to find accessible private housing.  For young families today the situation has reversed.  Under Theresa May’s Tory party there is plenty of – often unaffordable – private property, but a serious shortage of affordable social housing; particularly in the areas where people want to work.

Many others among us treat political allegiance in the same way as supporting a football or rugby team.  We assume that we have to stick by our chosen team through thick and thin, no matter how atrociously they perform on the pitch.  There is a psychological reason why we tend to do this.  It is called “the law of previous investment.”  In effect, to change the team we support or the party we vote for can appear to make our previous choices wrong.  But again, the policy position of the parties has changed dramatically over time.  For example, the Tories “support for business” in the 1980s involved considerable support for young entrepreneurs, many of whom went on to create the successful businesses of the 1990s.  Today, that “support for business” amounts to little more than corporate welfare handouts to large multinationals and banks; many of which do not even pay their fair share of tax for the public services and infrastructure they benefit from.

It’s about policies

Tribalism and hereditary voting emerged in the past because of the difficulty in finding out what the various parties stood for.  For most of the twentieth century this resulted in people voting along class lines.  The rich, the middle class and those working people who aspired to join middle class tended to vote Tory, while working people and many among the academic middle class tended to vote Labour.  The decision to vote in this way was a matter of tradition and gut feeling coupled to those elements of the various parties’ manifestos that were presented through the biased lenses of newspapers, radio and television.  Very few people were able to go directly to the parties’ manifestos to see for themselves what was being proposed.  Even as recently as the early 2000s, we often only discovered the unpleasant small print in manifestos after a government had been elected.

However, the development of Internet-based apps provide us today with the means to check our personal policy preferences against the proposals made by the major political parties.  The ISideWith political quiz, for example, provides a pretty comprehensive questionnaire that allows you to give your preferences on a range of policies.  Based on your responses, it will list the parties in order of your preferences.  This information is essential to bringing more constituencies into play in the general election.

Alternative vote (sort of)

The biggest drawback with the British electoral system is that it forces us into a political duopoly in which most of the votes cast are wasted.  (This brief but informative video by CPG Grey explains why this is inevitable in a First Past the Post electoral system).  All too often, voting for the party we would prefer runs the risk that the party we dislike the most will actually win the constituency on a minority of the votes.  There is a similar – but fairer – system to the British one known as the Alternative Vote (AV) system which removes this risk.  Under AV instead of putting a cross next to a single party – as we have to do on Thursday – voters list parties according to their order of preference.  If a candidate wins more than 50% of the first preference votes, they win.  If, however, none of the candidates has a majority the one who came last is eliminated.  Their second preference votes are then added to the remaining parties.  This process is repeated until a candidate has the majority of the votes.

The exciting possibility today is the fact that because the last general election was just two years away, it is possible to calculate a likely Alternative Vote for yourself.  Wikipedia have all of the 2015 results by constituency.  These will provide you with a reasonable guide to how your preferences might work under an AV system.  Let me use the constituency where I live together with one where a Labour-supporting friend lives for an example of how you might do this.

Using my own results from the ISideWith quiz, my preferences would be:

1. Green (70%)
2. Plaid Cymru (68%)
3. Labour (57%)
4. LibDem (40%)

Since I would not vote for UKIP and really do not want the Tories to win, these are the only parties I would want to vote for; and I would ideally vote for them in that order.  If I look at the 2015 election result, I get a good idea of what would happen to my vote if I voted for my first choice – the Green party:

My vote would be wasted, and I risk seeing the Tories win the seat despite having a minority of the votes.  But suppose the green’s 1,254 votes were added to my second preference?  That would give Plaid Cymru a respectable but still worthless 3,555 votes and the result would be the same – the Tories get in with a minority of the vote and my vote is wasted.  But suppose the Green, Plaid Cymru and LibDem votes were transferred to Labour, even though this would not be these voters first choice:

This would give Labour more votes than the Tories, but still not quite enough for a majority.  That would depend on where those 3,953 UKIP voters go.  Nevertheless, anyone who does not want to see another Tory government – particularly one with a big majority – can see that in the seat where I live, voting Labour is the only alternative.

My friend lives in St Ives (Cornwall).  The 2015 election result there was very different.  My friend is also more pro-Labour than I am, dislikes the Greens, and personally loathes the LibDem candidate:

This said, the St Ives constituency is contest between the Tories and the LibDems.  If the Green, Nationalist and Labour votes were transferred to the LibDem candidate, this would give them more votes than the Tories:

Although closer, this doesn’t quite give the LibDems 50% of the vote.  Again, much depends on what happens to the UKIP voters.  Nevertheless, the best hope for avoiding a Tory victory in St Ives is a vote for the LibDem candidate… which is precisely what my friend – while holding his nose – decided to do.

The best of what is least

Okay, not everyone is interested enough to check the results in their constituency before voting.  But if you are unhappy with the way the government has performed over the past seven years and you want to vote for change, you might want to check the Tactical2017 website.  Simply type in your postcode or select your constituency and it will tell you which party is most likely to defeat the government candidate where you live.

In almost all cases in England and Wales, this will be the LibDems or Labour.  In one or two seats it will be the Greens.  There are also a couple of Welsh seats where it is safe to vote Plaid Cymru as an alternative to Labour.  In Scotland, the SNP are likely to be the best opposition party.  I fully understand that this will grate with many people desperate to see their favourite party make a breakthrough.  But against that desire, you really have to ask yourself just how you will feel if you wake up on Friday to discover that Theresa May is back with a large enough majority to do more or less as she pleases.

A tactical vote on Thursday may not give us what we most desire.  For me there will be no Green party breakthrough to raise environmental concerns higher up the political agenda (although I hope Caroline Lucas holds onto her seat).  Nor will Plaid Cymru be doing more than holding onto their three parliamentary seats (even though I would like to see them make a breakthrough in the south Wales valleys).  I wish it were otherwise, but previous results and current polling is clear that outside the Celtic fringe a vote for Plaid Cymru is a wasted vote; and in seats like Newport West, Bridgend and especially Gower, by splitting the anti-Tory vote it could be the difference between a Tory majority and a hung parliament. 

Even Labour voters will not get the majority government that they long for if they vote tactically in seats where the LibDem is best placed to defeat the Tory candidate.  But what tactical voting does give them/us is the best prospect of delivering a coalition for change – not just a change of faces around the cabinet table, but a shift away from the neoliberal ideology that has held us in its grip for the best part of four decades.  If successful, a tactical vote on Thursday will give us all some of the things we need from our government even though none of us will get everything we want.  The (still most likely) outcome, in contrast, is a winner takes all, two fingers up to everyone else, Tory majority that rides roughshod over any group that did not vote for it (and several groups – like pensioners – who did).

The choice is ours.  Let us hope we have wisdom to use our votes intelligently.

Is this the end of May?

With support for "Theresa May's Team" collapsing in the polls, the word hubris comes to mind:  “Excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis (the inescapable agent of someone's or something's downfall).” 

It is worth noting at this point that there was absolutely no need to call an election.  Between 1992 and 1997 John Major managed to run his government on a majority just half as big as Theresa May’s, in the face of a resurgent New labour, and despite his party being divided over Europe.  May, in contrast, could have continued unencumbered by a parliamentary Labour party more concerned with conspiring against its leader than with opposing the government.  Moreover, with the Brexit referendum done and dusted any Tory backbench opposition over Europe could be easily fended off.

What of those crucial Brexit negotiations that May claims the election is all about?  If the Brexit negotiations are as crucial as May says, why on earth are we spending the best part of two months out of the 24 month negotiating window to fight a general election?  More practically, since the election is limited to around 40 million UK voters, how deluded is May to think that the result will cut any ice with EU negotiators who represent close to 500 million people?  The truth is that the size of the government's majority will have no bearing whatsoever on the Brexit negotiations.

The reality is that this election is all about power.  Having carried out a palace coup last year, when she sacked all of Cameron and Osborne’s special advisors, and having confined the remaining pro-Cameron Tories to the back benches, May was still saddled with the 2015 manifesto – which backfired spectacularly in March when her chancellor was forced to U-turn on plans to raise taxes for the self-employed.  The more personal reason for the election is May’s darkly Machiavellian personality and her need to quell the perceived ranks of knife-wielding Tory backbenchers waiting for an opportunity for vengeance.  As one Tory supporter in a now deleted Telegraph article put it:

“Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to Westeros in Game of Thrones: no one who challenges her survives undamaged, while the welfare of the realm is of secondary concern.”

This election – which May herself ruled out time and again – is personal.  Indeed, May has made no secret of that fact.  The campaign literature, the social media advertising and even the campaign bus are all about “Theresa May’s team.”  Any foreign visitor to these shores would struggle to discover that the Conservative and Unionist Party had anything to do with it.

The timing of the election is opportunist too.  It is rumoured – and I have no reason to doubt this – that an unexpected by-election win in Labour’s Middlesbrough heartland prompted the decision to go to the country.  The result appeared to confirm what the opinion polls were saying – that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour looked like losing its Welsh and Northern English heartlands.  With the Tories more than 20 percent ahead of Labour in the polls, there would never be a more opportune moment to call an election.

From the outset, however, things began to backfire.  Two of May’s communications team resigned immediately after the election was called, citing differences with May’s unofficial Deputy Prime Ministers - Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy.  These are the unelected guards at May’s keep, preventing any and all bad news from reaching the delicate ears of their revered leader.  Even cabinet ministers are unable to get past Hill and Timothy unless May has actually summoned them.  Messengers bearing bad tidings are simply turned away.

One such messenger was psephologist Professor John Curtice from Strathclyde University.  Curtice cautioned against taking for granted that a high poll lead would translate into a big majority:

“An awful lot of Labour seats are astonishingly safe and therefore even with a 15-point lead, well yes I think Theresa May at that point will get past the 100 majority mark.

“But let’s just imagine that the lead falls back to seven, back in 2015, a seven-point lead over Labour was only enough to get a majority of 12 and that was only achieved by winning a lot of seats off the Liberal Democrats.”

Whether this message got through to May is questionable.  This is because, in addition to the handful of loyal courtiers who stand between May and the outside world, the Tories have successfully created an outer wall of media mirrors to reflect back the glory of the great leader.  By packing the once respected (and increasingly despised) BBC with Tory insiders like Tony Hall, Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg, the Tory party ensured that Jeremy Corbyn would never get a fair hearing.  The flip side of this particular coin, however, was that Theresa May and her “team” no longer faced anyone brave enough to tell the truth to power.

What happened next will have been as surprising to Labour supporters as it was shocking to the Tories.  Labour had a manifesto!  One of the benefits of calling an early election is precisely that it catches the opposition parties unaware.  They are forced to cobble together in just days a policy platform that they would have expected to carefully craft over three years.

Not only did Labour have a manifesto, their communications team – who have been widely criticised for not being media savvy – understood the huge gains that could be made by “leaking” the manifesto to the media ahead of its official launch.  The media played their part brilliantly simply by unconsciously sticking to the narrative that Labour’s manifesto was going to be a repeat of the 1983 suicide note.  Before they knew it, the media were highlighting popular policies like renationalising the railways, energy and water infrastructure and properly funding police, schools and the NHS.

The Tory manifesto turned out to be exactly the one that their strategists had expected Labour to produce.  Ill-thought through, lacking detail and un-costed, May’s manifesto looked like it had been scribbled on the back of a sheet of A4 on the way to the launch.  As Fraser Nelson in the pro-Tory Spectator lamented:

“Not since Labour’s 1983 ‘Suicide note’ has a manifesto launch done so much to cheer the other side. I’m not sure quite what the thinking was behind those fervent disavowals of right-wing politics and the embrace of bad Labour ideas, but if the aim was to lure Labour voters then it doesn’t seem to have been a great success.”

Within days of the manifesto launch, Labour had closed the gap with the Tories.  One YouGov poll put May’s lead at just 5 percent.  However, all of the polls followed the same trend, showing the gap between the parties narrowing.  Baring a miracle, May’s dream of 100 or more new Tory MPs all owing their position (and thus their loyalty) to her looks to be over.  On a five percent lead, May would be lucky to keep the majority she has.

The news today – ironically the last day of May – is that a YouGov poll predicts that Britain will vote for another hung parliament with the Tories emerging as the largest party, but unable to form a government.  Were this to be the case eight days from now, Theresa May can look forward to another long walking holiday in the Welsh hills.  Because the only way that she can remain as Prime Minister is to win a majority.  This is simply because the arithmetic doesn’t work for the Tories.  The SNP are expected to hang onto 50 of the 54 seats they won in 2015.  Short of Theresa May offering Scottish independence in a coalition deal, they will not go near a Tory party that is toxic north of the border.  The LibDems are expected to get ten seats (up from 9); not enough to form another coalition with the Tories even if their remaining MPs were foolish enough to repeat their 2010 mistake.

The alternative of some kind of “rainbow coalition” involving some or all of the nationalists, greens, LibDems and Labour is as implausible.  If today’s poll were to be correct, such a coalition would still fall 5 seats short of a majority.  Even if the polls continue to move in favour of Labour, it is impossible to see how a pro-leave Corbyn leadership can be reconciled with the passionately pro-Remain LibDems and nationalist parties.

Of course, with a week to go, and given the unreliability of previous polls, the election could still go either way.  But if you wanted to place a ten pound bet at very good odds on an outcome that we have not seen since the 1930s, you might want to consider the possibility of some kind of national government.  This would occur simply because once it becomes clear that neither May nor Corbyn can command the majority in parliament, the only three options remaining would be:

• to follow the Belgian example of not having a government for the foreseeable future;  
• to inflict yet another unwanted general election of the British people; 
• or do what many councils across Britain do when the votes work against them, and form a coalition out of the two largest parties.

In the face of the ticking Brexit clock, only the last of these is acceptable.  Moreover, whatever else may be happening in Britain, inside the Westminster Bubble, large numbers of Tory and Labour MPs have more in common with one another than with their respective leaders.  With this in mind, in the event of a hung parliament, I wouldn’t rule out a centrist coalition put together with the explicit aim of seeing the country through the Brexit emergency.

A weak and insecure woman

There are many facets of yesterday’s hack of the NHS computer systems that can be laid squarely at the government’s door.  Most obviously, the discovery that among the “inefficient back office functions” that Jeremy Hunt had happily taken the axe to was the small matter of keeping the NHS computer security up to date.  As the BBC reported:

“Up to 90% of NHS hospitals are still using the Windows XP programme, with experts suggesting that the 2001 operating system has made the NHS vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”

Perhaps less obviously, it is now clear that the malware that shut down the NHS systems was created by the security services.   The development of these tools – and the risk that they would fall into the hands of criminals – was a key reason that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (and many others) warned Theresa May that her Snoopers Charter would lead to exactly the kind of events that unfolded yesterday:

“This snoopers charter has no place in a modern democracy - it undermines our fundamental rights online. The bulk collection of everyone's internet browsing data is disproportionate, creates a security nightmare for the ISPs who must store the data - and rides roughshod over our right to privacy. Meanwhile, the bulk hacking powers in the Bill risk making the internet less safe for everyone.” (My emphasis)

On these two grounds alone, the government must be held to account.  There is, however, another facet of yesterday’s events that is far more worrying than a serious but transitory computer hack.  This is the haste with which Prime Minister Theresa May abandoned the campaign trail in order to “take control” of the unfolding situation.

I had studied this behaviour before, but in a different context.  It reminded me of the antics of General Neil Richie, the dangerously incompetent commander of the British Eighth Army in North Africa whose attention to detail and constant interference in the work of his subordinates led to the piecemeal destruction of his army, the fall of Tobruk, and, were it not for the last ditch actions of Auchinleck to hold the Germans at El Alamein, might well have cost Britain the second world war.  Too much attention to detail and too much interference with one’s subordinates turn out to be common traits that define incompetent leaders.  According to General Messervy (quoted in Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence):

“Richie was all haywire by then.  All for counter-attacking in this direction one day and another the next.  Optimistic and trying not to believe that we had taken a knock.  When I reported the state of 1^st Armoured Division to him at a time when I was planning to use it for counter-attack, he flew to see me and almost took the view that I was being subversive...

 “Confident and decisive in his speech, but one did not always feel he was quite so confident and decisive in his own mind.”

Dixon suggests that the drive to leadership that produces both successful and incompetent leaders is a matter of motivation.  The first are those who seek success, the second are those attempting to avoid failure:

“Although these two sorts of achievement-motive may bring about rapid, even spectacular, promotion, their nature and effects are very different.  The first is healthy and mature, and brings to the fore those skills required by the job in hand; the second is pathological, immature, and developing of traits, such as dishonesty and expediency, which may run counter to those required of high command.”

The comparison of military leadership (and competence) with government is apt.  Not least because in Brexit the UK undoubtedly faces its worst crisis since the end of world war two.  Get it wrong and the consequences could be truly devastating .  So we need to be sure that the leader we choose to lead the negotiations is up to the job.

There is good reason to believe that May is not the strong and stable leader we need.  She has surrounded herself with incompetent ministers – not only her useless Health Secretary but also a Justice Secretary who fails to uphold justice and a Foreign Secretary who is so dangerous that he is apparently locked in a cupboard somewhere in the middle of the Gobi Desert where there is no chance of his getting in front of a camera or microphone until the election is over.  If May is the strong and stable leader she claims to be, how is it that these buffoons are still in her cabinet?  And if they are not buffoons, why is it that May interferes in their work and refuses to let them out on the campaign trail?

Nor is it only her dealings with cabinet colleagues that suggests that May is not the strong and stable character that she claims.  She has form when it comes to her staff too.  Back in February Mrs May effectively fired the esteemed Sir Mark Lyall Grant for what the media chose to refer to as “mansplaining” but might more accurately have been a senior civil servant patiently explaining why Mrs May could not have her own way.  If this were an isolated case, we might give Mrs May the benefit of the doubt.  But far from a one off, it is beginning to look like May’s modus operandi.  At the start of the election campaign, Mrs May lost both her Press Secretary and her Director of Communications:

“Both Ms Perrior and Ms Loudon had experienced frustration in accessing key meetings and information in Downing Street since their appointments last July.”

These resignations give us some indication of what Kenneth Clarke meant when he referred to May as a “bloody difficult woman.”

The very decision to call a snap election at the start of a brief 24 month window in which the UK’s exit from the EU has to be negotiated smacks of incompetent leadership.  If May truly was strong and stable, she would be overseeing her ministers and senior civil servants as they negotiated Britain's exit from the EU.  Instead she is on a bus that makes clear the election is all about her fragile ego (no obvious mention of the Tory party). 

The risk is that she will do to the Brexit negotiating team what she has previously done to her own staff, and what she did to the hapless Hunt in the face of what turned out to be a fairly ordinary malware fraud.  That is, like General Richie in the North African desert, she will interfere and flip-flop to such an extent that her negotiating team is paralysed in the face of an EU team that simply cannot afford to let the UK leave the EU with a good deal.

If the polls are correct, then Mrs May will be back in Downing Street on 9 June.  If so, I fear that a weak and insecure woman who is motivated more by fear of failure than any true desire for her country's success is about to deliver the worst possible Brexit – the one the EU bureaucrats on the opposite side of the table want; the one that punishes Britain as an example to any other member state that contemplates leaving.

Don’t drop the ‘H-bomb’

It is a temptation that is all too easy to give in to.  You either cannot be bothered, or are intellectually incapable of arguing your case on its own merits.  Instead you look for a single world that can be deployed to demonstrate just how important your case is.

Sean Spicer – the man charged with keeping a straight face while announcing the latest twists and turns that pass for Donald Trump’s policies – is merely the latest high profile individual to come unstuck.  Rather than resist temptation, Spicer dropped the H-bomb. 

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Spicer told journalists, was worse than Hitler, because – in the alternative universe of the Trump White House – Hitler never gassed his own people.

Even the most rabidly Trump-supporting, Fox News journalists’ jaws dropped to the floor at this point; since it is precisely because Hitler did gas an awful lot of his own and especially other countries’ people that he is treated as the yardstick against which evil is measured.  After all, there are plenty of dictators who were/are adept at murdering their own people – Stalin may even have beaten Hitler on absolute numbers, while you would have to go a long way to beat Pol Pot on percentages.  Starting wars of aggression is no big deal either – even the freedom-loving USA has engaged in wars of aggression when its economic interests were threatened.  No, what marks the Nazi regime out as uniquely evil was the ruthlessly organised rounding up and industrial slaughter of Germany's and Europe’s Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, political opponents, disabled people and the mentally ill.

That’s the point.  You cannot trump Hitler.  Whichever regime or dictator you are seeking to vilify, whatever crime you are accusing them of having done, the fact is that it was nowhere near as bad as the organised atrocities carried out by the Nazis.  To suggest otherwise automatically means that you belittle and trivialise the Holocaust.

Unlike many on the left, I do not believe that Sean Spicer intended to deny the Holocaust.  His remarks were simply unthinking and ill-advised.  In the same way, I do not believe that Ken Livingstone was being intentionally anti-Semitic when he made the historically contentious claim that Hitler had once aligned himself with Zionists.  The point is that Livingstone’s comments had no bearing on the argument he was trying to make, which boil down to “anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Zionism;” which I guess we already knew.  And clearly, even an unintended implication that what Israel (and Egypt, by the way) is doing to Palestinians in Gaza is on a par with murdering at least six million people and launching a war of aggression that resulted in perhaps 80 million deaths, is simply inflammatory.

The backlash is inevitable.  Instead of looking at the alleged crimes of Assad or the Israeli state, the media spotlight is immediately focussed on the motives of the person who dropped the H-bomb.  Livingstone’s alleged anti-Semitism looks set to cast a shadow over the British Labour Party right up to the next General Election.  The best Spicer can look forward to is to be a figure of ridicule from now on – how on earth are we to give credence to anything that issues from the mouth of someone who apparently didn’t even know that the Holocaust was a thing?  More likely, Spicer will be asked to resign, and will be lucky to get a position in United Airline’s PR department.

These are just the high profile cases.  But they are an echo of a much deeper seated malaise in our modern discourse.  Although for the most part we avoid dropping the H-bomb directly, far too many of us are in the habit of doing so obliquely.  As George Orwell observed as early as 1944:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else…

“All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

Things have only got worse since then.  In 2017, dropping the H-bomb or its F-bomb cousin has become no more than a foolish ad hominem attack.  As with Spicer and Livingstone, the result is that it detracts from the case you are trying to make.  In a sense, it serves to trivialise the horrors committed by the Nazi regime.  At the same time it lets your opponent off the hook.  Farage, Cameron, May and Trump can quite reasonably profess outrage at being compared to Hitler; and their outrage becomes the story.

If you are going to call people names, at least take the trouble to find out what those names mean.  Because people stop listening when it is all too clear that:

“On the Left, the word “fascist” is frequently used to mean “authoritarian-seeming person I don’t like,” or sometimes “militant racist.” It’s just a term of abuse, and the Left has plenty of those already. Maybe if people read the definition, they’ll realize the absurdity of using the term in connection with perfectly lovely people like Pope Benedict XVI.”

As should be patently obvious to anyone on the left at this point, dropping the H-bomb is simply bad tactics.  Not only doesn't it work, it is counterproductive.  It drives the very people we need to win over into the arms of the very people we seek to defeat.  How do we know? Because Donald Trump.  Because Theresa May.  Because Brexit.  Because who knows what in 2017?

So next time you are tempted to drop an H-bomb or an F-bomb, remember what happened to Sean Spicer and Ken Livingstone, and just don't do it.

Looking through the wrong lens?

Sigmund Freud observed that when someone is desperately trying to suppress something, they will likely give themselves away unconsciously.  Thus, the idea of the “Freudian slip” was born.  Why do I bring this up?  Because Britain’s liberal elite just made an almighty Freudian slip – unconsciously giving away its deep-seated fear and hatred of Muslims. I speak, of course, about the unconscious response to events last Tuesday which may or may not have been an attack on Parliament.

Let me ask you this – how do we know that this was a terrorist attack? 

The only rational answer is that we do not.  We assume that it was a terrorist attack.  But – at the time of writing – nobody in an official investigatory role has yet put forward conclusive evidence for this assumption, and we are beginning to see signs that it may not have had anything to do with terrorism.  In the end, it will take a coroner’s court hearing (together with any other official inquiries that take place) to establish the full facts behind the case.

Now, I am not saying that it was not an act of terrorism (which would have to be an organised conspiracy for political ends, not the violent act of a lone individual). I am simply saying that at this point we do not know.  We are currently dealing with narrative rather than fact.  It is a narrative that began with the first pictures of the attacker – a man with brown skin and a beard – on the floor with an armed policeman standing over him.  Just consider for a moment whether the media would have leaped to Islamic terrorism if the attacker been a white male who had gone on the rampage or if a car had been driven into a crowd somewhere other than Westminster.

It is entirely understandable that the security services treated the attack as terrorism.  Without a doubt they will have put into action a tried and tested emergency plan for securing Westminster in the event of a potential terrorist threat.  They will have followed the plan to the letter, and unclouded by personal assessments of the situation.  Obviously the plan needed to err on the side of safety.  So any perceived attack on Parliament will have been treated as terrorism.

The media together with our political leaders have no such justification.  Their task is to ask questions, raise doubts and interrogate the evidence.  Failure to do so can lead to injustice.

In the same way as media coverage of the Hillsborough disaster resulted in the widespread belief that the cause was drunken fans – an injustice that took decades to overturn – the media coverage of events last Tuesday have created the belief that “Britain” has been the victim of a terrorist attack. Confirmation bias will do the rest – ensuring that evidence that supports the terrorist hypothesis will be brought into focus while anything that casts doubts will be brushed over.

To arrive at the Islamic terrorism narrative the media and politicians had to put on a particular pair of lenses.  These brought certain facts into focus while blurring many others.  Most obviously – and this is why I charge the liberal elite with fear and hatred toward Muslims – the fact that the perpetrator had brown skin and a beard, later turned out to be a convert to Islam and had once gone to teach English in Saudi Arabia was taken as sufficient proof that he was a terrorist.  Because, all brown skinned and bearded Muslim men (especially those who have visited Saudi Arabia) are terrorists, right?  (This is what passes for reason in UKIP and the English Defence League, not what we should expect from our political representatives or supposedly respectable journalists at the BBC).

The point is hammered home by the fact that the attacker crashed his car into the wall outside Parliament, stabbed and killed a policeman, before being gunned down just inside the grounds of Parliament.  After all, that’s a little bit like those lorry attacks in Brussels, Nice and Berlin (except they involved hi-jacked articulated lorries because these would cause far more damage than a 4x4 – whereas this was more akin to entirely non-terrorist incidents involving cars mowing people down).  Confirmation apparently came when someone purporting to speak for ISIL claimed that this was their work (although ISIL would lay claim to every car crash, stabbing or gas explosion in the UK if someone else didn’t claim them first).

It is these facts – brought into focus and then amplified by Westminster’s liberal elite – that established this as an act of terrorism in the public mind.  An act, by the way that many among the supposedly anti-Islamophobic political left also unconsciously accepted as a terrorist attack – thereby displaying their own unconscious fear and distrust of Muslims – when they rushed to vacuously point out that not all Muslims are terrorists.

At this point, you might reasonably object that there can be no alternative explanation.  “We are not being Islamophobes; we are simply weighing the evidence.”  After all, what happened was pretty terrifying.  And since events concluded in the grounds of Parliament, surely that means that our democracy, Parliament, the political establishment, the government, Ministers or MPs must have been under attack, right?

Let me offer an alternative explanation – not one that I claim to be true or intend to diminish the horror of the event; but one that, using a different set of lenses allows us to bring certain other facts to the foreground while easing Islam and the political establishment in Parliament further back. 

It turns out that the perpetrator – n. Adrian Russell Elms, aka. Khalid Masood – was an unlikely terrorist; known to the security services, but not on their terrorism radar.  His background, however, speaks of a highly disturbed individual.  The product of a broken home back in the early 1960s when that still carried huge social stigma, Elms/Masood had a track record of juvenile delinquency that led on to an adult life punctuated by occasional spells in prison as a result of various offenses; several involving extreme violence.  Having spent a somewhat transient life, most recently he appears to have rekindled a relationship and moved in with a previous partner in Birmingham.  However, about a month ago the relationship appears to have broken down.  Most recently, Elms/Masood had been staying in a cheap hotel in Brighton.

We all know what happened next.  But at this point we do not know why – and since Elms/Masood is now dead, we will never know for sure what was going through his mind when he drove to London and mowed down 40 tourists on Westminster Bridge prior to his final rendezvous with the security services in the grounds of Parliament.

As Simon Jenkins noted in the Guardian on Wednesday:

“As yet, nothing is known of the motive. All that can be said is that the attacker failed to enter parliament itself. Bystanders were killed and injured, but the massive security inevitable for such an institution was effective in protecting its occupants.” (My emphasis)

What I can say, is that when BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran an item profiling Elms/Masood on Thursday morning, what I heard was strangely reminiscent of a phenomena that emerged in the USA in the 1990s, and came to be known as “blue suicide” or “suicide by cop.”  Again, I need to be clear that I am not saying that this is what happened, I am merely pointing out that it is a credible alternative explanation in which Islam and politics fade into the background.

What we do know about some men who commit suicide is that they have a tendency to impulsive violence and self-destructive behaviour.  Homicide/suicides (in which men kill others before killing themselves) happen roughly once every six weeks in the UK.  Most often they go unreported outside the local papers because the only people murdered are the family of the murderer/suicide victim – tragic but not, apparently, newsworthy.  Sometimes when cases are particularly bloody they do make the news– such as this example from South Wales.  Occasionally, male suicide involves extreme violence that can be directed at random members of the public.  We also know that seaside resorts like Blackpool and Brighton are favoured spots for many potential suicide victims because of the anonymity provided in the B&B/cheap hotel districts.  Strangers come and go unnoticed, and hoteliers do not pry into guest’s private affairs.

One thing we might also consider is that most of the various government suicide reduction programmes since the early 2000s have focused on removing the means of suicide rather than providing services to help suicidal people.  Access to high buildings, for example, is far more difficult today than it was twenty years ago.  Bridges often have netting beneath them to prevent people leaping to their deaths.  This makes the kind of active/public suicide often favoured by men extremely difficult in modern Britain.  Combine this with a sense of grievance toward the public at large and a tendency to violent behaviour, and suicide by cop becomes a plausible explanation.  Elms/Masood’s version of Islam may have further distorted his mental state by allowing him to see himself as some kind of martyr.  But even if not, I can think of no better way of getting yourself shot to death by the security services than by running up to the gates of parliament armed with a knife and shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”  Not only this, but you would be hard pressed to think of anywhere else in Britain that such as response by the police and/or security services would be guaranteed.

Could what happened on Tuesday be suicide by cop?  It might be I have no idea.  In the same way, I have no idea whether it was Islamist terrorism.  Both are possible.  And it is instructive that five days later, the BBC conceded that:

“Westminster attacker Khalid Masood acted alone and there is no information to suggest further attacks are planned, Scotland Yard has said…

“We must all accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this. That understanding may have died with him”

However, the liberal elite’s rush to judgement means, in a sense, that it no longer matters.  For them, this was terrorism long before Elms/Masood got in his car and headed for Brighton.  Why? because in a strange perverted way they needed their terrorist attack.  Rather like the Queen (the current monarch’s mother) at the height of the Blitz in 1940 expressing relief that Buckingham Palace had been bombed: “I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye.”  Following Elms/Masood’s actions, Britain's liberal elite can look Paris, Brussels, Nice and Berlin in the eye.

Here, perhaps, is the problem.  In rushing to satisfy that strongly emotive desire for shared victimhood with our European neighbours, their rush to judgement admits their unconscious and deeply buried belief that Muslims and terrorism really are intimately linked.  And for all of the huffing and puffing about not being Islamophobic, our elites demonstrate precisely how terrified they really are.  Again, in this Simon Jenkins appears to be the one sane voice emanating from the Westminster bubble:

“Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”

Whatever the liberal elite may claim to the contrary, the reality is that by labelling Tuesday’s events as terrorism and responding accordingly long before any evidence had/has been gathered, our politicians and our mass media have demonstrated for the world to see that they are just as fearful of Muslims as the extremists on the political right – the only difference is that the liberal elite are usually better at hiding it.