The Deplorables vs the Hysterics - from Maastricht to Trump
2016 led to a clear divide between the Deplorables and the
Hysterics. Where did this come from? What is the historical context
of Brexit? What should we in the UK make of President Trump? What role
did technology play in making this division?
This is another long read typed at the speed of thought, as always,
corrections and improvements are appreciated.
1. Where to begin
In my first essay on Brexit, Rome Vs The Matrix, I started at the last
Ice Age and went through each of the attempts to include Britain in a
United Europe project. This post will be somewhat more modern.
The 1975 referendum was a Labour affair, the pro-EU yes campaign led
by Harold Wilson and the No campaign led by the great Tony Benn.
In 1975, Benn and the leavers were accused of wanting to turn the UK
into an island of socialist utopia, it is not so relevant to this
current hysteria.
Therefore, I will start my story at 1992, for in retrospect, this is
where the Leave campaign began its march to successfully winning a
referendum on leaving the EU in 2016.
1. Maastricht Rebels - the battle of the bastards
One of the reasons that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s long and
electorally successful leadership was challenged by her own party was
her resistance to further European integration.
Under her more successor, John Mayor, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty was
negotiated. This converted the European Community to the European
Union, including European Economic and Monetary Union (the Euro being
finally set up on in 1 January 1999), but also lots of other areas of
policy being handed over to the European level.
This was not popular in the British parliament. Ratification was not
easy or quick and took another 18 months. A vote on one wrecking
amendment was tied 317-317 and only defeated because of the 1876
convention of the speaker breaking ties by voting no.
Prime Minister John Major famously called three members of his cabinet
(Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo), the “bastards” -
which was a still a controversial insult back in 1993.
Meanwhile, while this Tory civil war was happening in Parliament, over
at the Bank of England and the Treasury, there was a different
European problem.
The inability to find an interest rate that would fit both Germany and
the UK led to a run on the pound and consequently the UK being ejected
from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, further
pushing the UK away from Europe.
The combination of Black Wednesday, the way Thatcher was deposed and
the way Prime Minister John Major ruthlessly pushed the Maastricht
Treaty through parliament, splintered his party and the wider
conservative movement, and now in retrospect, sowed the inevitable
seeds of Brexit.
The elite MPs in control of the party machine had become de-anchored
from the mass of the Conservative party membership and the general
public. This led to a landslide defeat at the 1997 election and 13
years out of power.
However, those anti-EU forces created in the Maastricht ratification
process continued in the background.
Some of the leading 1992 rebels are still in parliament, for example,
Sir Bill Cash. While some of the younger ones, such as Dr Liam Fox and
Iain Duncan Smith, became the backbone of the Leave campaign.
Outside of the Tories, UKIP was began in response to the Maastricht
Treaty, it came into being between 1991 and 1993. On the day John
Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, an up and coming 27 year
-old conservative called Nigel Farage quit the Tories and became
UKIP’s first nationally recognised leader.
2. The great Euro non-debate
By 1996, Britain’s place in Europe was not clear, with the Tory
members and much of the public wanting less Europe, while the pro-EU
John Major and big business wanting the UK to join the Euro in time
for its launch in 1999.
For ten years between 1995-ish to 2005-ish, there were two
competing campaigns on the Euro.
There was the campaign, financed by big business, for Britain to join
the Euro, with prophesies of doom and irrelevance if the UK didn’t join.
This culminated in the group Britain in Europe led by Tony Blair (in
theory but unwilling to expend political capital on it), Gordon Brown
(in theory but in practice going the other way, as we shall see below)
as well Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Charles Kennedy and so on.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the was No Campaign primarily backed
by Sir Tim Rice of musical theatre fame and supported by all the
“bastards” from part 1 above.
All this preparation by the two campaigns happened in a kind of
political-geek parallel universe, it never bothered the general
public. Eventually, the money ran out and the two campaigns faded out
before they really started but it was a practice run for 2016 when
many of the same characters and same old arguments would re-emerge.
3. Things can only get better
In the 1997 election, Labour outflanked the pro-EU John Major by pushing
the Euro question into the long grass, with the famous five Economic
Tests, reportedly invented by Ed Balls in the back of a New
York taxi.
A work of electoral genius, Labour now had defused its own European
divisions with this technocratic measure. Those against further
integration could see the tests were not currently met and could hold
faith that convergence would never happen, while those in favour of
further integration could hold faith that convergence would naturally
occur and the tests would one day be met.
As it turned out, the UK and Eurozone economies diverged and the
prospect of the UK joining the Euro stopped becoming a realistic
option to anyone but the most extreme Euro-federalists, a rare breed
in the UK.
The UK entered the 2008 financial crisis with more dodgy banks and a
bigger national deficit than most of the Eurozone, including Southern
Europe.
However, the UK having an independent currency acted as an automatic
stabiliser and the UK made it through the crisis relatively unscathed
in the short term.
Meanwhile, those in Southern Europe, lumbered with an unsuitably
strong currency, suffered immeasurably more, proving the UK had dodged
a bullet. The economic situation of Greece is what the alternative
future of the UK could have been had we adopted the Euro currency.
4. Big business credibility problem
The abortive pro-Euro campaign was led by big business such as the
City of London banks, Lord Sainsbury and so on, as well as the
international institutions and think tanks. The exact same people and
organisations that came back in the Remain Campaign of 2016. Not
entirely, some like James Dyson and JCB had moved to the Leave
campaign.
A lot of the “project fear”-type arguments had been made in the late
1990s and early 2000s about staying out of the Euro. However, the
reality of the financial crisis had proved them all wrong, not
entering the Euro had saved the UK.
The credibility problem of the UK pro-European campaigners was pretty
clear to anyone with eyes to see in the outcome of the UK financial
crisis.
Those against the EU since 1992 had been largely winning on democratic
and legal grounds but losing the economic argument. However, in the
aftermath of the financial crisis, the economic argument for the EU as
an economic magic bullet was becoming increasingly untenable as the UK
economy recovered steadily while the populations of many Eurozone
countries were being collectively punished with mass unemployment in
order to keep their economies within the Euro.
This is the background to the later Michael Gove style argument, why
trust these people and groups when they always get their predictions
wrong?
5. Lisbon Loons
The 2010 Conservative manifesto was called
“Invitation to join the government of Britain” (PDF)
and on pages 113 to 114 (pdf page number 124-125), promised a
referendum before handing over any more
powers to Europe.
However, when it came to the Lisbon Treaty, David Cameron weaseled out
and said the promise would apply to every treaty after the Lisbon
Treaty.
The Lisbon treaty was a massive step forward in the federalisation of
Europe and the last major treaty likely to be approved for a long
time, so Cameron’s promise turned out to be worthless (like all his
other promises).
Some Tory MPs tried to honour the promise anyway, here we quote a
2013 Guardian Article:
The senior Tory made the remarks - in earshot of journalists - after
being asked about the decision of 116 Tory MPs to defy the prime
minister and vote in favour of an amendment regretting the absence of
a EU referendum in the Queen’s speech.
The Conservative said: “It’s fine. There’s really no problem. The MPs
just have to do it because the associations tell them to, and the
associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons.”
Major called his rebel MP bastards, the Cameron set now considered the
largely Eurosceptic rank and file to be “mad, swivel-eyed
loons”. Cameron had the coalition with the Liberal Democrats to
average out the Eurosceptism of the Tory membership.
6. Cameron in a corner
Cameron entered the 2015 election with a promise to renegotiate its
relationship with Europe and put that to an in/out
referendum - page 72 (PDF page 74) of the 2015 manifesto (PDF).
How this was supposed to work in David’s Cameron’s mind probably
involved the context of a coalition with the Lib Dems.
In the months before the 2015 election, the media has factored in an
Ed Miliband victory or at least the unpopular David Cameron would be
scrabbling around for a coalition with the Lib Dems who might be
smaller but still significant.
Instead, the Tories won an outright majority, not least because the
referendum pledge re-united the grassroots behind the government
rather than UKIP. Cameron came back into power in 2015 with a party
more Eurosceptic than ever.
The most pro-EU party, the Lib Dems went from 57 seats to 8 seats,
i.e. an 86% loss.
While many MPs were loyal to David Cameron in the referendum, they
were answerable to extremely Euro-sceptic local parties, and
constituencies that were increasingly Eurosceptic too.
In the manifesto, David Cameron had promised to hold the referendum by
the end of 2017, however pretty much the day after the 7th May 2015
election, Britain’s place in the EU became the hot topic to the
exclusion of everything else.
Almost a year later, in April 2016, I remember thinking then that
pretty much every argument that could be made, had been made. Luckily,
David Cameron set the date of the vote to the 23rd June.
On the 24th of June, I was like phew, finally we can talk about
something else but Britain leaving Europe, but no, the losing side
didn’t disarm but carried on campaigning. We still are drowning in
this one issue. Anyway I am getting ahead of myself.
Why did Cameron hold the vote earlier than needed? Did he believe it
the European issue was preventing progress on any other issue? Did he
believe he had it in the bag? Did he want a successful remain vote to
be his legacy act before leaving the stage?
Perhaps his hand was forced by Merkel and Hollande, not wanting the UK
relationship to become an issue in the 2017 French and German
elections (well they failed there).
7. The campaign
I have talked a lot about the campaign and why leave won and the
mistakes made by remain. Remain didn’t put their best arguments
first. Remain didn’t update their arguments to take account of
the 2008 financial crisis and the situation in Greece.
The Leave campaign had seen all the remain arguments coming from 15
years before and were ready for them.
I have covered the economic side in other posts and why Brexit didn’t
cause an immediate recession as promised by the project fear (which
had lost all credibility in the previous iteration 4 - The Gove
argument).
I could talk about a lot of things but want to focus one thing, namely
what those who wanted to leave were called by the remain campaigners.
Like “bastards” and “mad, swivel-eyed loons”, the elite hysterically
called the people names. I went back to the 9th June 2015 edition of
Question Time (link will expire 12th June 2017) and made a list, in
this single program, leavers were called:
Economically illiterate
Manics that want to burn the economy
Little Englanders
Uneducated
Trying to cause third world war in Europe.
Liars
Nazis
Removing hope from the world
Causing the breakup of the United Kingdom
Want to cause a civil war in Northern Ireland
This was just one episode of one program, we had months of it. Later
in the campaign it escalated to:
Old people should not be allowed to vote
Leavers are all racists that caused the Murderer of Jo Cox and a wave of crime
My favourite was when President of the European Council Donald Tusk said:
I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of
not only the EU but also of western political civilisation in its
entirety.
If the remain campaigners were confident in their economic case, there
would not have needed to be this demonising of the leavers. It was an
act of desperation, a slow communal mental breakdown of the ruling
class, the delayed unwinding of the pre-2008 globalist consensus.
8. The people are not bothered
Despite all that constant fear mongering and rhetoric by the elite,
52% of the UK voters bravely decided to leave anyway. According to the
pollsters Yougov and ICM, many more have joined the cause since the
vote.
The institutions and elites and dire apocalyptic warnings have become
like crying wolf, they have lost any credibility whatsoever, and just
makes those who make them distrusted.
The people have become shame-proof, moan proof. But they remember who
calls them names.
I think it is pretty hard to shame anyone into anything, it is not how
you win anything. You win by building the biggest coalition. Remain
could have possibly built a massive coalition but it didn’t want to,
it preferred to call people names, especially the working class and
the old.
9. In a galaxy far far away
Meanwhile on the other side of the pond something else was
stirring. In 2011, Republican Senator John McCain called the
Republican grassroots “Tea Party Hobbits“
In 2016, Hillary Clinton in her election campaign said:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of
Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamaphobic - you name it. And unfortunately there are people
like that. And he has lifted them up.
Donald Trump had over 65 million votes. Any person with common sense
knows there is not over 30 million racists and sexists running around.
The situation is not 100% the same as the UK but it is comparable in
that it again demonising the population. I always thought Trump would
win the Republican primary but this speech was the moment that I knew
Hillary would lose.
10. Who is the heck is Trump anyway?
The same people calling leavers names, the people with the repeated
credibility problems are now telling us that “Trump is literally
Hitler”.
The 52% had to become thick skinned already and are suspicious of the
elite media and institutions.
I was already slightly immune to this. For almost every US election in
my lifetime, the winning President has been called evil or invalid by
the losing side. It is all very hysterical until silly season ends and
life moves on to some issue of the day.
Reagan was called a second rate actor and conman, until he lead the
fight against the Soviet Union and was considered a hero.
Bill Clinton was derided as a socialist who was going to bring back
the USSR yet many agree Clinton managed the economy far better than
many of his predecessors and successors and kept America safe. It was
the end of a golden age which his two successors largely bungled and
threw away.
Piers Morgan said that Trump cannot be worse than George W. Bush who
lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into a poorly planned
War in Iraq which led to a million civilian deaths and thousands of
American, British and other soldiers being killed and even more being
maimed.
I have a lot of sympathy for that statement.
Obama was derided as a Kenyan Muslim communist who would introduce
death panels to wipe out old people. It is all just hysteria every time.
The greatest American president in history is FDR who saved the world
from “literally Hitler” i.e. the actual Hitler.
Based on the limited amount of time that Trump has been in office,
perhaps he is somewhere between the extremes of W. Bush and FDR ... as in
no-one knows. Presidents rarely are remembered for how they started or
what they campaigned for; events happen and the narrative always
changes after the fact. Ask me in the year 2047 if Trump was good or
bad.
11. Sex is not our business
When President Clinton, a 50 year-old married man, had relations with
a naïve and impressionable 22 year-old White House intern, he was
criticised domestically.
The UK has quite strong laws and policies on the abuse of a position
of trust so a UK politician doing exactly the same thing today would
not survive but given the Jimmy Savile revelations who knows what they
could get away with back then.
However, in general in the UK, we don’t care about our politicians’
sex lives. This is a good thing.
Most people would find it hard to pick many of our Prime Minister’s
spouses or children out in a crowd. We generally leave the spouses and
children out of the public limelight. We have the Royal Family for all
that.
Andrea Leadsom ended the referendum campaign as one of the winners, a
woman on the up, she was in the running to succeed David Cameron as
Prime Minister. When she was perceived, perhaps unfairly, to be
playing the motherhood card, the media threw it back in her face in
the most extreme way and her leadership bid came to a shuddering halt.
The position of the UK government on the Lewinsky scandal was that it
was none of our business. When asked about this Blair said the words
of Ruth (1:16):
“whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”
Blair was always over the top but here he was correct. The
transatlantic alliance between the US and UK is not about the
personality of the current leaders, it is a permanent alliance between
two peoples with the same language and many of the same values: common
law, freedom, the enlightenment, strong defence against our enemies,
democracy, rule of law and so on.
What is good for the Democrats is good for the Republicans, let’s not
worry what President Trump said to a friend on a bus in 2005. I really
don’t want to go down the route of making political capital out of our
politicians’ private lives.
As Jesus (may have) said, let him who is without sin cast the first
stone.
12. We are not doing a merger
The US and the UK have many differences, often determined by our
histories and geography.
America feared the Royal Navy would lead a surprise attack on the US and
topple the government, so militias were part of the national defence.
The UK doesn’t have a second amendment because we obviously don’t fear
the British invading, we never had a tradition of mass gun
ownership. When the British Bill of Rights talked about a right to
bear arms it meant pikes. Our traditional solution to national defence
was to fill the sea around us with ships and cannons.
During the existential struggle that was World War II, most of the UK
population worked in the military or for the state directly or
indirectly, everyone became used to getting healthcare and wanted to
keep it after the war.
Churchill opposed healthcare free at the point of use in 1945 and the
population kicked him out as Prime Minister, when he changed his mind,
the voters gave him his job back.
So in the UK, there is a seven decade national consensus behind free
at the point of use healthcare.
In the US, you get what you earn. It is the American way. The
successful and hard working get the best healthcare in the world and
the unlucky, the unsuccessful or lazy get pretty basic care or nothing.
In the UK, it is full on socialised medicine and it is a mean
average - everyone gets the same - rich or poor. We do have waiting
lists, we do ration. In a crunch, the system does put the needs of
children and working age people above the old.
New expensive treatments may not be initially available like in the
US. The NHS might sit on its hands and wait for the producer to reduce
the price or for a cheaper treatment to come available. Doctors won’t
do meaningless tests for the sake of making money. People that are not
sick or have minor things that can be self-treated, are told not to
bother wasting a doctor’s time.
The minority of rich people who don’t like it, generally move to
America and buy healthcare there. However, generally it works. The
user has almost no paperwork to fill out.
While we do have waiting lists, you get on with your normal life, when
you get to the appointed time, it is generally quite businesslike and
there is not a lot of waiting inside the hospital, except when it all
goes wrong because of staff shortages or planning foul ups, etc.
Gun control and healthcare and many other issues are domestic
policies. We do not need the UK and the US to be the same.
Some people in the UK criticise the wall and Trump’s policies on
border control. The UK is surrounded by rough, cold and unforgiving
seas on all sides, it is a little bit hypocritical for the UK to
criticise. In any case, it is for their own voters to decide.
13. Allies not clones
The important issue is how can the UK and US work together better to
our mutual benefit? I agree with our Prime Minister Theresa May. It
doesn’t matter if we in the UK love or hate many of Trump’s policies,
we can still work together. We should try to work with
everyone. Engagement is the British approach.
The UK has a powerful Navy, it is even more powerful when it works
with the US military. We all need to take out ISIS and other terrorist
groups.
We have complimentary economies, we can trade together. Trump has
criticised Mexico and China for taking American jobs. The UK is not
Mexico or China. Currencies are always changing but in January, the
figures were:
US minimum wage: $7.25 per hour
UK minimum wage: $9.31 per hour
So the minimum wage is higher in the UK than the US, we can trade
together for great mutual benefit with no risk of a race to the
bottom.
14. The Hysteria is somewhat external
I am still asking for someone to tell me why President Trump is
uniquely more hysteria-inducing than his predecessors. Most
criticisms, valid or not, apply to a previous President or other.
It seems to me, the biggest difference between now and when President
Bush came into office in 2002, and especially between now and when
Reagan came into office in 1980, is the technological difference.
It was through better use of technology that allowed Donald Trump to
leapfrog the big corporate media companies and beat 16 other
candidates and the Democrats.
However, the same is true on the other side, that there is an echo
chamber provided by social media and the World Wide Web which seems to
magnify the hysteria.
Meanwhile email and the web give the ability to organise an event or
protest far more cheaply and efficiently than in the past.
15. Technology is always more important
2016 was a big year in politics but it is important to remember that
politics is merely a response to cultural change which is driven by
technological change. Politics is dealing with the
symptoms. Technology is the underlying cause.
The invention of the printing press allowed an information revolution
which led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution. The consequences continued for hundreds of years.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, it was the final
piece that allowed a new information revolution to begin. President
Donald Trump and those opposing him are political results of this
revolution but they will not be the last. This thing will run for
hundreds of years.
As Sir Winston Churchill said, “Now this is not the end. It is not
even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the
beginning.”