The tragedy of inevitability

Some of those who know my views on Brexit were commiserating with me about last week's election result.

In truth, I had given up hope of reversing the referendum decision. I still think that, economically, politically and strategically, Brexit is a blunder, wrapped in a fiasco, inside a catastrophe; but the rift has gone too deep already. Between the EU's disastrous governance - which has grown even worse since the (genuinely) moderating hand of the UK was withdrawn from its deliberations - and the UK's own schizophrenic posturing, the two have already drifted too far apart to simply reglue them and pretend nothing happened.

No, Brexit has to happen now, in the same way as Corbyn had to be given his shot at leading Labour, and - so David Cameron argues, at least - the Brexiters had to be given their referendum in the first place. There's simply no other way to finish it.

One of the stupider takes I've seen on the election - basically from Americans who, I presume, are plugging for someone from the Warren/Sanders wing of their own party - is that "moderation doesn't pay". True, the traditionally-moderate Lib Dem party was crushed - but it was crushed by a Tory party that frankly ate their lunch. The vast distraction of Brexit seems to have blinded a lot of people to it, but on social and economic policy - Johnson's Tories were, by far, the most moderate party on the ballot.

Which brings us to Labour.

Tony Blair tried to tell them - and Blair, for all the hate, remains one of only four leaders in Labour's history who have ever won a general election. But maybe this is something that every generation has to learn for itself. Now it looks very much as if Labour's next leader - or at least, its next serious leader - will have to fight very much the same punishing internal war against Momentum as Neil Kinnock did against Militant in the 80s. Which will probably cost the party at least one more election, very likely two - it depends on the calibre of the new leader.

The thing is - success in British politics is inversely correlated to ideology. The more convinced you are of your own rightness, the less likely you are to win. (Before you hold up Thatcher as a counter-example, consider who she ran against.) The most damaging word you can throw at a British politician, if you can make it stick, is "dogmatic".

Johnson is a brash, lying, cynical, self-serving, manipulative, entitled bully. Supporters of Trump, and detractors of Johnson, like to compare the two - but any fair comparison shows up more difference than likeness. Johnson has none of Trump's "aggrieved" schtick, none of his "outsider" baggage, nor his petty vindictiveness, nor his boundless and groundless self-confidence. Johnson is a man who seeks expert advice and listens to it. He habitually follows up rows with charm offensives, and even apologies. His opponents' efforts to paint him as a xenophobe and bigot fell flat, as they deserved to - those are not labels you can credibly slap on a two-term mayor of London with a long record of supporting socially-liberal causes.

Most of all, Johnson has what Trump never had - a plan to govern. I wish him luck.

#MAGA

Simon Jenkins gets it.

There's no real way to stab allies in the back and come out looking like anything but scum. And Trump, to his credit, hasn't bothered to try. He is utter scum and he doesn't care who knows it.

But - with the Kurdish withdrawal - he's achieved something that Obama could only aspire to. He's tied the hands of every US administration to come for the next generation. At a stroke, he's made it vastly harder for the US to intervene in future wars anywhere in the world - because only the very foolish or the very desperate would ally with them. Nobody trusts a traitor.

This may be the Suez moment of the American empire - the moment when everyone, even Americans, are forced to accept that they just don't matter that much any more - because it doesn't matter how invincible your army is, if the taxpayers back home have lost the will to use it. If so, Trump deserves a deal of credit for getting there so quickly. Obama may have hunted bin Laden down, but it takes a Trump to surrender to him and get away with it. #MAGA - Make America Go Away.

Just to be clear - I personally think this is a horrible thing. I think the world was a better place for American intervention. I am aghast at the despicable treatment of the Kurds, and I think this treachery will haunt America. But given a choice between fighting until they were beaten, and simply giving up and going home - it's hard to fault the USA for choosing the second option. Generations of brave, decent and honourable US presidents, trying desperately to do the right thing - "to lead the cause of freedom", as George W Bush once put it - have led the US into seemingly endless wars. Now Trump, who combines in one man the personal courage of a diseased rat, the integrity of Pontius Pilate and the morals of a Bangkok pimp, has shown how to end them.

I hope people elsewhere who are placing their hope in US support - such as in Hong Kong, and Israel, and even some poor fools in Britain - are taking note.

Demotivated reasoning

So, a lot of normally calm people are crowing that Trump is going down.

Like them, I really want it to be true - but based on a lifetime of being disappointed in politics, I don't believe it. And since I have a solid track record of incorrect predictions, I'm hoping this one will prove to be wrong as well (but to bring that about, I have to publish it): "impeachment" is making him stronger.

Now, I'm not claiming he knows exactly what he's doing. He's not some supra-genius level grandmaster who's playing twenty moves ahead of us all. But this isn't chess. What he is, is a past master at opportunism. Let him so much as sniff a lifeline, and he will not only haul himself to safety, but also lash it around his opponents' necks and do his redoubtable damnedest to haul them into the soup in his place. He doesn't yet know what form that lifeline will take (although he has a few contingency plans, obviously) - but he has faith, based on a lifetime of avoiding consequences, that it will come along in time.

To deny him such a lifeline? - would take a laser-focused prosecutorial intellect, a party of unwavering discipline, media who can maintain an attention span of months while retaining detachment and perspective, and two parties that are still committed to pluralistic republican democracy and the rule of law. How many of those ingredients are present in Washington right now?

Failing all that, it would take a more convincing case than that phone call. Because I read the published "transcript", and while it is appalling, it still contains enough plausible deniability to give talking points to Trump himself and his highly-motivated allies in the media and elsewhere. And talking points is all they need. They don't need to be convincing, they just need to keep talking, and Trump's followers will keep listening.

Impeachment will fail, Biden is sunk, and Warren will lose to Trump next year because (I don't pretend to know why this is, but the polling data is clear) working-class blacks won't vote for her, just as they didn't for HRC. It's time to resign ourselves to a second term of Trump.

An open letter to Greta Thunberg

My son asked me the other week: "who starts wars?"

The sheer anger in his question was palpable. At eight years old, he knows enough to hate and fear the idea of war. Why would anyone do such a thing? What kind of villain would condemn so many people to so much pain? I tried to tell him that people don't, usually, mean to start wars - it's something that happens when things go wrong, and the leaders lose control. They misjudge their enemies - or their friends - and do something that provokes a much stronger reaction than they wanted.

Like everything we tell children, that's only partly true. Of course lots of wars have been started on purpose, sometimes by people who were every bit as evil as the cartoon villains of young Tilly's imagination. But even they were reacting to pressures - trying to solve problems of their own, although these may not have had anything to do with the enemy they chose to fight.

It is our nature to see problems as like obstacles - things to be overcome one at a time, each one letting us make a little more progress to reach the next problem. We seldom give much thought to the issues behind us, that our ancestors overcame to get us this far - they don't seem relevant any more. Nor, when a problem seems very pressing, do we think that much about the legacy our "solution" will leave to the next generation. It's not easy to foresee what the next generation will see as their most critical problem, so there's not much we can do to help them with it - but if we can clear this one out of the way first, they'll be that much better placed to handle - whatever they decide to.

Thus from 1945 to 1991, the first priority for every decent European - politician or not - was to prevent another major European war. Some of those politicians did great things, others - less so, but one thing they all had in common was a cold determination that World War Three should not break out on their watch. Everything they did, they did with one eye on keeping the peace. It was to that end that they made "economic growth" the yardstick of progress: if you can create "more" (of everything), that means less fighting about how to share it.

Now there's another danger: climate change. Which, if we don't figure out what to do about it, threatens to bring about WW3 anyway, despite all our efforts to avoid it through other routes.

Greta Thunberg and her followers are right to be scared. But whether they are right to be angry, that's another question; anger may not produce the reaction they are looking for. Because although climate change is a huge threat to us all, it's not the only such threat. And in demanding that leaders focus solely on this - Ms Thunberg is every bit as guilty of tunnel vision as those same leaders she is hectoring.

What evades everyone so far - and Thunberg doesn't pretend to have an answer to this - is how to fix it. If we just halt all new emission-generating activity now (or, say, phase them out over the next ten years), that means crippling developing economies - leading directly to World War Three. If the elites try to impose restraint from the top down - we will get revolutions all over, leading to WW3. If we make some countries take the lead (on the grounds that they're richer and better placed to do so), then the peoples of those countries will protest because (as they see it) the rest of the world isn't sharing their sacrifice - and you get leaders elected like Trump, and Bolsonaro, who appeal to voters by promising to protect them from this injustice. This may allow us to stave off WW3 for a few more years, but only at the cost of increasing emissions.

None of these options looks particularly good.

Dear Ms Thunberg: I am sorry to break this to you, but that "67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise" is not going to happen. Nor is the 50% version. Those are the real fairy tales, concocted by scientists who have never stopped for a moment to think about politics. If you have a key to untie this knot, then please do share it - but don't imagine you can cut it with a sword, because that we really would not survive.

What you can do, and I think you may have already started this, is to help reconcile the public in the rich world to that poorer future that they will have to face. By speaking so bluntly to their leaders, you have also spoken to their voters. For that I thank you, although I fear what may come of it.

Leaders of the generation of Eisenhower and Adenauer did not foresee climate change - their goal was to overcome the problems of their time, while building as strong a system, with as many tools, as they could think of, to help your generation to overcome the challenges of its time, whatever they may prove to be.

In the same way, you don't know what will be the biggest problems of the 2070s; and if the policies you promote today tie the hands of future generations to deal with those, then it will be your turn to be unforgiven.

To return to Tilly's question, who starts wars? All kinds of people. Some wars are started by rich, strong, evil men who want to get richer and stronger. But others may be started by good, honest, innocent schoolchildren who want nothing more than "a future". There are many roads to hell.

Bad politics and bad journalism

Based on votes counted so far: the great British press has decided that Nigel Farage has thoroughly trounced the Tories, and Labour has ceded ground to the Lib Dems by its vacillation.

This is stupid. Look at the numbers (for all of England and Wales - Scotland and Northern Ireland still to report, at time of writing), as compared with 2014. (All numbers below are expressed as a share of the total vote.)

The great "triumph" of the Brexit party, taking the plurality, has come overwhelmingly not from the Tories, but from the utter collapse of UKIP. That 33.3% of voters for Brexit needs to be balanced against 25.6% of voters deserting UKIP. The net gain to (Brexit plus UKIP combined) is a rather more modest 7.7%.

(As a bonus, the separation of the two parties has allowed the respectable Brexiters to distance themselves from the swivel-eyed bigots of UKIP, and a full 90% of their voters have taken the opportunity to do just that. Good for them.)

Now, granted 7.7% isn't nothing. But it's hardly a tsunami.

So of the 15.8% of voters deserting the Tories, we can say with confidence that less than half have switched to pro-Brexit parties. Which implies that what's disaffecting them is not the "failure to deliver Brexit".

Similarly, Labour's vote declined by 10.8% (of the electorate), but the Lib Dems' increased by 14%. Which implies that even if every single one of those Labour voters turned LD (and they didn't), there must still be a substantial number of defectors from other parties. In fact, those Labour defectors must be reckoned to include at least 2.5% going to Change UK, and probably at least half of the 4.6% swing toward the Greens - call it 2.3%. So the "Labour to Lib Dem" shift accounts for less than half of the Lib Dem's gain. The rest - fully 8% of the total electorate - must have come from the Tories.

I would go on to some regional analysis, but a quick glance makes me very doubtful that anything in those figures would change my mind.

Now, the Tories seem to think that if only they can deliver Brexit, all those Brexit and UKIP voters will return to the fold. But again, the numbers tell a different story. During UKIP's rise, it gained voters from both Labour and Tory ranks; there is no reason to imagine that if Brexit happened, and those parties evaporated together with their supposed raison d'etre, they would all flock back one way.

No, the real danger for them is that they will permanently lose the 20%-or-so of their party who have (provably) defected to the Lib Dems. If they press on with a hard Brexit, the Remainers will not forgive or forget that. It hurts to have your country sold out from under you.

For Labour, the message is clearer. If Corbyn can deliver a second referendum, the coalition of voters waiting to swing behind that is overwhelming - and even better, he'll frustrate the Tory plan to draw a line under the Brexit/UKIP insurgency. The Tories are suffering because they are torn apart by this issue. Labour doesn't have to be the same.