Cicero's Songs

The fundamental problem of Brexit has not been that the UK voted to leave the European Union. The problem has been the fact that the vote was hijacked by ignorant, grandstanding fools who interpreted the vote as a will to sever all and every link between the UK and the European Union. That was then and is now a catastrophic policy. To default to WTO rules, when any member of the WTO could stop that policy was a recipe for the UK to be held hostage by any state with an act to grind against us. A crash out from the EU, without any structure to cope, was an act of recklessness that should disqualify anyone advocating it from any position of power whatsoever. That is now the most likely option because the Conservative leadership, abetted by the cowardly extremism of Corbyn, neither understood the scale of the crisis, now had any vision of how to tackle it. Theresa May is a weak and hapless Prime Minster, and her problems started when she failed to realize that there was a compromise that...

The weeks pass and the position of the Conservative Brexit government grows ever more unreasonable. Many people who voted to leave the EU would still have been perfectly happy with an "economic association", indeed it was the default option for probably the majority of those who voted to leave: "we should have an economic not political union". Leaving aside the practicalities of how much economic issues require political engagement, the idea of limited economic cooperation is not unreasonable. However the current position of the Conservative government is that Brexit means the end of British membership of any European cooperation groups, whether political or economic. Brexit means not merely withdrawal from the EU, but the outer group of European Free Trade Area (EFTA) nations that are members of the EEA. It even means the withdrawal from the EU customs union. This total withdrawal is not the majority position of the British people: 48% voted to remain full member...

I think the major shock about the UK vote to leave the EU was the transformation in British culture that the vote seems to represent. From having been in the vanguard of the global economy and the globalized society, the UK seems to have rejected much of what it seemed to stand for. The aftermath of the vote- racist statements, racist attacks and all seemed to have turned the conventional wisdom about Britain on its head. The country was not as open or tolerant or globalized as it purported to be. This is despite the fact that a significant faction of the Leave campaign believed that the the problem with the EU is that it is not globalized enough. The reality is that whatever the Libertarians amongst the Leave camp thought they were getting, it is now all too clear that the isolationists, not the globalizers, are the big winners from the vote... at least so far. If Brexit is a process, not a destination, as we are now being told, then it is still totally unclear what the destination ...

Listening to the BBC one might think that, intellectually, the debate about British membership of the European Union was a finely balanced argument. It isn't. As Kate Hoey admitted to Andrew Neill , there is not one single independent study that suggests that leaving the EU would benefit the UK economy. The Leave campaign could have put up a "sock puppet" study up to suggest they were right, but they could not even do that- so damning is the factual evidence. The press is suggesting that they are reporting the debate evenly- but the reality is that there is no factually based support for any of the statements put out by the Leave campaign- it is not supported by any sustainable facts at all. I have made comments about the rise of stupidity in politics before, but quite frankly the utter failure of the media to recognize that one side is intellectually bankrupt implies either stupidity or bias. In the case of the Daily Mail, it probably implies both. O...

When people take a position in any argument, in principle they should base their views upon a platform of facts. Sometimes those facts might be interpreted in different ways, but as the old Guardian motto had it, "Comment is Free, but facts are sacred". This "Dialectic" has been the basis for rational argument for centuries. Not any more. We are seeing the rise of political comment and political practice that is not based on any kinds of facts at all. "Evidence based policy" is so rare that these days it has to be specially commented on. The fact is that, from Donald Trump to Katie Hopkins, emotion and not truth is now becoming the primary source of policy. OK Katie Hopkins makes her money from being a pantomime villain, but in fact very few people get the joke. Her opinions, like those of Donald Trump, or most of the Brexiters in the UK are not based on facts- they are almost entirely made up, and border on the irrational. In a single speech that D...

With 100 days or so left until the EU referendum, it is clear that David Cameron is getting a good air war. The "leave" campaign is a shambles, and through a mixture of incompetence (Boris Johnson) and his own ruthlessness (Michael Gove), the Prime Minister is seeing off his political enemies. The betting is all one way, and perhaps the PM will maintain his position as one of the luckier and more astute political figures of the past decade. However, post referendum, the clouds are already beginning to darken for both the Prime Minister and his party. Mr. Cameron has already said he will stand down before the election due in 2020. When and how he does so will dictate not only the future fortunes of the Conservative Party, but even, quite possibly, its survival. The problem is that the Tories remain split top-to-bottom on the subject of the EU. More than half of Conservative MPs and probably a far higher percentage of the party membership are strongly in the "leave...

Tim Farron has, famously, compared the resilience of the Liberal Democrats in the face of discouragement to the supposed indestructibility of cockroaches even after nuclear war. Paddy Ashdown too, often praises the strength of will of the activists of the party. In the face of the worst general election result in more than half a century, the surge in membership applications for the Liberal Democrats is a small sign of optimism after the disaster. Yet the scale of defeat is so large that to rebuild in any conventional way will take many decades. Indeed, with the significant economic, social and demographic changes underway in British society, the grim truth is that a recovery in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats may not be possible at all. Meanwhile all of us are working through the stages of grief that this defeat has caused us. The lessons of both the coalition and the general election are slowly emerging from the smoke of disaster, and the first lesson is that this defeat, ...

Well, let's not kid ourselves, it was another pretty gruesome night for the Liberal Democrats.  Yet although losses in Kingston, Cambridge, Portsmouth, and Haringey are all painful (with, doubtless more to come, as I write), the fact is that the Lib Dems actually do have a few gleams of comfort amongst the ash. Although these gleams come not so much in the results, but in the implications of the results.  The surge in UKIP support this time is creating problems across the board for both Labour and the Conservatives. In fact Labour must be deeply concerned that they are not hitting as many of their targets as they did in the last round of voting. So although a pretty horrible night for so many Lib Dems, the fact is that in relative terms our pain is not so severe as it has been.  So far, based on these results, we can begin to see the floor of Lib Dem support, and that floor may yet allow the party to defy predictions and play king-maker again in 2015. There is stil...

It is easy for me to say "I told you so". For years this blog has warned about the aggressive despotism of Vladimir Putin. For years, the use of violence and money to corrupt and weaken the West has eroded our ability to work against one of the most vile regimes ever seen. For years these warnings, and those of people like Edward Lucas, have been ignored. Now we are paying the bitter price of our greed and hypocrisy in our dealings with the Kremlin. The fact is that democracy is not all about creating the best economic standards for its citizens- although that tends to be the result of good democratic governance. At the heart of democracy is a core of moral values which have little to do with money. An open society: the rights to free opinions, freedom of assembly and the right of every citizen to not just debate but to decide  and control what is best for them, both individually and collectively, is a just cause.  After a serious of pin pricks- the Iraq war, expenses s...

Across the European Union- indeed world-wide- there are huge projects to develop high-speed rail systems. The pioneering days of the Japanese Shinkansen and the later French TGV network are now being followed by investments across the EU, and -especially- in China. Yet there is a problem. Railways may be more energy efficient once built, but they are hugely capital intensive- all of the components- track bed, signalling and rolling stock, must be built together and the project must be complete before it can operate.   The power of rail is in the network, and without such a network, it does not work to anything like peak performance.  Whereas road improvements can be made piecemeal and fit in with existing road infrastructure, high-speed rail lines are generally built from scratch. So the cost of such projects as HS2 in the UK or Rail Baltica (to link Tallinn with Warsaw) run into tens of billions of Euros. Even the Chinese are beginning to balk at the huge costs involved, ...

The FT reports on the sharp rise in support for the limitation of the powers of the European Union - even amongst traditionally strong supporters of the bloc. The context is interesting- the suggestion is that the backlash against the EU is coming as a result of the rapid growth of immigration. The rise of immigration has indeed been rapid, and there is obviously generally pretty limited support for expanding the rights of free movement to the citizens of Bulgaria and Romania. Yet the majority of immigrant attacks are not made against EU migrants but against those coming from the Arab World, the sub continent and sub-Saharan Africa. To my mind, the issue of immigration is a kind of referred pain: discontent is far more entrenched than merely a right-wing backlash against immigration. The creation of giant government-lead projects, such as EU funded rail construction, is a symptom of a Brussels elite which is seeking to buy the support of the voters. Yet the elite is very isolated a...

Nigel Farage could be name from the pen of   PG Wodehouse , and if so, it would clearly be a name to represent a bad lot .  In real life the actual Nigel Farage, with his tobacco scented, saloon bar heartiness and rather loud taste in shirts, in fact comes close to the Wodehousian archetype. He is a man who Jeeves would undoubtedly view with disfavour- too loud and somehow too... well, vulgar, a wide boy, rather than a gentleman. Mr. Farage himself would probably cheerfully concur, regarding his personal brashness with some pride, as the antithesis of the machine politician that he affects to despise. In the looking-glass world of UKIP, a gaffe is not a mistake, but proof of humanity, and populist point scoring is not political immaturity, but a respect for the democratic process. Except that in the real world, UKIP has a huge mountain to climb to even match the Green's single, lone representative in the House of Commons. UKIP support is broad, but shallow and in no Parlia...

In 26 European Union countries, (and one acceding country, Croatia) today is something of a celebration, albeit a muted one, given the circumstances of continued economic hardship- the European Union will formally receive recognition as the winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize . In one other European Union member state it is the occasion of ridicule and disbelief. Admittedly the contemptible British press prefers to hypocritically attack an Australian radio programme for an unfortunate prank that went badly wrong, so probably remarkably few people in the UK may be aware of the special recognition that the EU is getting, unless they encounter some sneering comment on page 17. Across the British political spectrum, the European Union has become a bogeyman for all of the ills that afflict the dis-United Kingdom. "Brussels bureaucrats"- although there are actually fairly few of them- are the first in line in the British political blame game. Britain is allowed to opt out of ...

The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski usually gets a good press in the UK. His fluent English and his academic intelligence help him stand out as an individual, while Poland is one of the few countries of Central/Eastern Europe where the British have a clear and generally positive view of what kind of country it is. It also helps a lot that Mr. Sikorski, as a graduate of Oxford University, has a big network of friends in Britain- including his former Bullingdon Club confrere , Boris Johnson. Mr. Sikorski's wife is the American historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her magisterial book Gulag , Anne Applebaum, and she is also a regular visitor to Britain. Yet despite his close connections with the UK, and his former British citizenship, which he only renounced on becoming Polish Defence Minister in 2006, it is clear that Sikorski is hardly an uncritical friend of the UK. Indeed the Anti-EU faction in the UK would argue that he was hardly a friend at all, as he seeks...

Brits are told every year- especially by the anti-EU press- that the EU fails to pass its own audit test. It turns out that this is not strictly true. Each year mistakes and errors are found, but, it turns out that these are most often in the 80% of the EU budget that is administered by the national governments. I n fact, the EU budget turns out to be in a far more orderly position than the "failure of the EU court of auditors to approve the budget" implies .  David Cameron intends to reduce- if possible- the total EU budget, and this, in the context of the large austerity that national governments are being forced to impose sounds wholly reasonable. However, Mr. Cameron, together with the other EU leaders, has been asking EU agencies to do a lot more in connection with the crisis that the EU faces. Several of the Eurozone governments are also asking the EU to do more- and it can not do this without increases in the budget. Thus, the challenge to reduce or even simply freez...

Over the last week the global financial crisis, as it affects Europe, has changed direction. Several of the critical uncertainties that were dogging the Euro have now been resolved. The German constitutional court has ruled that German participation in the current rescue plan is legal, and that future plans are a matter for votes in Bundestag. The Dutch electorate have sung solidly behind pro-EU parties, and the European Central Bank has begun to deploy substantial firepower directly in the markets. The countries that have advocated greater Eurozone integration seem to be winning the argument, and the focus of debate has moved on towards how and not whether a new European Federation can be constructed. Many on the right in the UK are determinedly contemptuous of these increasingly dramatic developments. As at the Messina Conference , where the founding members of the EEC sent Ministers, while the UK sent a junior civil servant, the UK has- by default- taken a decision not to be ...

Amidst all the Jubilee hullabaloo in the UK, the second- and ultimately more significant- story remains the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone and the continued instability in the markets. The signs of a slowdown in the Chinese and the American real economies have put further pressure on the Eurozone economies that are still struggling to return to growth.  The ongoing restructuring of the Spanish banking system has alerted the markets to the fact that their remains a significant capital requirement, even after the forced mergers of the Cajas . However, despite the more hysterical of the comments from UK commentators and politicians, the fact is that the Spanish economy does not have the same long term government problems as Greece does. The deficit issues are a function of the the banking system breakdown, not the series of policy mistakes that hampers Athens even beyond the banking crisis. As a result, although serious, there is far greater trust offered to Madrid- and that solidar...