An emergency exit from the culture wars?

Not so long ago, the term culture wars signified nothing in the UK. No, this was the term for the entrenched resentment between the conservative rednecks in humid, ex-Confederate southern states of America and the bits with the real political power - California, Washington DC and New York - where there's a consensus in favour of moderation and, to a greater or lesser extent, liberalism in politics and economics, if not social policy. 

The same faultlines seemed to glow as Brexit simmered beneath the crust of British politics in 2015 and 2016, and the volcanic shock of the referendum unleashed a slew of cruel neologisms - some pre- and some post-referendum result - that helped us articulate what was going on: gammons, boomers, Remoaners, traitors, enemies of the people.

First we felt our intelligence and integrity threatened. Then we seemed to reach a boiling point which saw us pitched into a near-permanent state of anxiety-driven mutual loathing between factions defined, not wholly but usually as culture wars, by both left and right. The Momentum "takeover" of Labour and the "cult" of Corbynism was another facet in this dull jewel. The increasing hysteria between pro- and anti-trans rights activism groups is another. Twitter itself has whirled around uselessly in the eye of the maelstrom, although recent decisions have seemed to confirm that it is wanting to right itself in a way that Facebook cannot. 

Today, we have an article by the wonderfully verbose Will Self, surely a sleeper agent in some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign by Roget's Thesaurus, but still producing thought provoking and mature assessments of the landscape that surrounds us - or at least those of us who still insist on crawling through the scarred battlefield of British public life at the start of what we thought were going to be the new roaring Twenties (sardonic laugh). 

Self's article correctly roots the "culture wars" of today in the outworking of the attitudes that have plagued our public life forever - the arrogance of self-delusion (or vice versa) which has been a prerequisite, it seems, to most political or cultural power in this country. But he makes one point which should be elaborated upon: as it seems to me, it is the key to a way out. Best read to yourself in Self's hangdog voice, it reads: "neither party is capable of envisioning a viable future". 

There's the rub. None of the sides, parties, groups, angles, factions, movements that fuel these culture wars, if that's what they are, are about a coherent future. The exception is #BlackLivesMatter, which is more of a global cry than a movement and has long, deep roots in every direction. Other than that, they're all principally about rightness. We lack any sense of direction; we just have criticism. The past is either right or wrong, but none of that gives anybody a programme for all our future. The causes are no doubt just, but they seem to offer no guidelines for ourselves and our children in building a country that aspires to be better for everyone, or even most - whatever better might look like. We no longer seek to instruct or guide those who come after us; we just want to end the resentment we feel against those who came before or are with us now. We want our interests protected, and to hell with yours. 

So if we are to find an exit, it's not through any door offered to us by the protagonists of our culture wars. We're stuck on a neverending ghost train in a fairground where everybody's arguing. We didn't know where the exit was, we just presumed there was one. But it turns out that there isn't, and everybody else on the train is now screaming about why they think that's everybody else's fault. 

So is Self right? Yes. Nobody is proposing a viable future, or even an aspirational one. But is that the full story? No. Times change. Nothing lasts forever (though it has, and will be, repeated). But as long as we're on this train, the problem of no exit will remain. 

We need to start making the case not for one view or another, but for a changed approach to difference. We need to learn again what toleration has meant in this country, We've been torn apart before, but we've muddled through, and we need to show that muddling through is actually a constructive, creative act of reconciliation and patience, not a failure. When the loudest voices silence their critics, they haven't won. Everybody's lost. Stridency is not success.

The deathly centre ground that Self describes deserves its fate if those who seek to sustain it want it to be a kind of intellectual zone of compromise for everybody. If you buy into that you're just presenting yourself as fodder for the next time somebody starts screeching uncharitably about something you happen to agree with (or, more likely, disagree with).

Moderation is not necessarily about moderating our views, although that may well be the natural consequence - may be, but by definition cannot always be. Compromise can still be a dirty word. Moderation is not about diluting your beliefs. It is about how you treat others' beliefs. Yes, it's difficult when that means you have to move into the space of making public policy to achieve things, and you can't always work out what that should mean in practice. But the sign of proper moderation is that this can be done respectfully, that I can feel your pain and you can understand my discomfort; that we agree we want something done but that the way to doing it is to find the right way forward, not to dig in until you throw in the towel and submit to being dragged behind my aggressively-revving vehicle. 

Obama knew this. Blair, to some extent, espoused it, although so did John Major and the old-school Conservative party before the great right-wing hijack of the 2000s. Today, we are led by power-seekers who have no need for moderation, because they know that vision is not the instant gratification that people seek. You don't share power, but you can afford to spread a sense of rightness and self-righteousness around because that way you build your coalition of the bitter. The system we have now means that this approach can work, and because Dominic Cummings realises it he can present himself as a maverick genius. 

When a consensus finally starts to build that those who fuel these "culture wars" are like the generals who fear scrutiny above all lest their empires start to fray; when we begin to reevaluate whether our righteousness is more important to us than our humanity; when we begin to consider the future, only then will the lights go on, the fake ghosts stop screaming at us, and the emergency exit out of all this be flung open. Roll on the day. 

A minor collision between politics, law and constitution

In Facts, the website which nobly attempted to inject a clear dose of reality into That Campaign, has raised an interesting point about the government's potential responses to the legal challenge to Brexit.

With merciful concision and clarity, it points out that the most compelling legal argument in the government's defence is that it CAN trigger Article 50 because in doing so it doesn't take away any rights; that is the basis for the legal challenge, but it is also only true if the government acknowledges that Article 50 can be revoked. That would mean that the invocation itself would not deprive any citizen of any rights.

However, in making this acknowledgement, argues InFacts editor Hugo Dixon, Theresa May would incur an unbearable backlash from the Brexiters, who would instantaneously smell treachery, this time without a smile on its face, and threaten to overturn her apple-cart, so recently arranged with many of the rotten ones apparently near the front, and here we would find ourselves once again in 1996, a Tory government led by a hard-working but hapless leader in tatters because of the frothing madness of the Europhobes.

Dixon's argument is clear, and it allows us to hope that the government might reveal itself a little in the coming weeks and months as it responds to the appeal. Were Mrs May to permit the presentation of a defence along these lines, acknowledging the reversibility of Article 50, we may begin to hope. Of course we still have her strident rhetoric to leave us quaking in our boots that she may drag us out anyway. But as we've posited before, for Theresa May, this could all come down to hard-nosed pragmatic choices about the impact of all this on us, our families, our households. As the economic misery builds up, and we approach the first full quarter since 23 June, she may reasonably calculate that Brexit is destined, in the end, to become an unpopular choice which we are itching to reject.

Faint hope

 1. Theresa May is not a convinced Brexiteer. She campaigned for Remain.

2. But she was a bit lukewarm. So we can deduce a) that she does not favour Brexit, but that she is pragmatic about her support for Remain.

3. She landed in Number 10 in August or whenever it was, and her immediate action was to start repeating "Brexit means Brexit" all over the shop.

4. She didn't trigger Article 50 straight away even though she could have. She put three Brexiteers in charge of Brexit. These are both very pragmatic choices. She doesn't seem to be the world's No 1 Brexit fan.

5. And going on about "Brexit means Brexit" steadied the economy, her party and everything else for a bit. So I think she was firstly concerned not with Brexit, which is years away, but with stability. And she achieved it.

6. By the end of the summer we were all getting a bit antsy because "Brexit means Brexit" means frog all. Did she return from the recess and trigger A50? Nope.

7. So while she has successfully kept a lid, so far, on the mouth-frothing lunatics in the Tory party, she has also done nothing substantive to make Brexit happen.

8. Meanwhile, some of what she has done has created the conditions for Brexit to be stopped. She has now given a date for triggering Article 50, but she has allowed time for the view that this is reversible to gain traction. She has continued to show that she is committed to delivering what the Leavers wanted, but that includes some very ugly consequences which are likely to become very awkward. She has axed the £350m commitment giving those who promoted it nowhere to hide.

9. Lastly she was very emphatic that the Union (UK) is important to her and there's been no doubt that Brexit could splinter the Union.

10. So it's entirely conceivable that she imagines a future in which a second vote, or some other occurrence which makes Brexit obviously undesirable (such as the end of the UK, economic disaster, food price hikes, etc etc) is rejected by the public and she can say: "I did everything I could to deliver on that referendum result. This is what you asked for, and I did it. It's not my fault if you now realise that you voted for a bucket of sick and have changed your minds."

Every silver lining has a dark cloud

Optimistic possibility: Theresa May, having decided that stability and purpose are the most needed qualities in government at the moment--whether needed by her, her party, or the country--has decided to allow a pathway to Brexit to develop. She will be supportive, Brexiteers will lead on the detail, and either Brexit will become a reality or not. She may hope not, or she may be sanguine about it, simply wanting to hold on to power beyond the moment when a decision either way is finally made. 

Personally, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility. Of course I hope for such an outcome, but I'm encouraged that little Theresa May has done seems to suggest that she really wants to follow a course other than this: she could have activated Article 50 by now. She could have come out openly against Brexit by purging Johnson, Fox and Leadsom from her Cabinet rather than installing them near the top. 

Another reason to suspect that this could be the game plan is to see the world from May's perspective: she is a politician, and politicians usually try to navigate their way through whatever waters are ahead. She probably feels she can live with Brexit if it happens, even though she believes politically that it's best not to quit the EU. 

Even if we indulge this view, there is an increasing worry. May may seek to offer decisiveness, security, optimism, but the referendum unleashed forces and views in British society that, while they may not result in the kind of revolution we've prided ourselves on avoiding by comparison to the Continent, are certainly damaging our social cohesion. 

Amber Rudd's disappointingly stupid proposal to list foreign workers is one. This news, that the Government has decided not to listen to 'foreign' academics, is another. Even if we believe that Theresa May's course will allow us to retain EU membership, to fight the madness of Brexit and win, the journey will leave us damaged, exhausted, a shade of the country--and the society--we were. 

Tony Blair's legacy was overshadowed by Iraq, inevitably. Inevitably, David Cameron's legacy--those positive steps for which he was rightly praised, in the end, by Jeremy Corbyn, such as equal marriage--all that will be eclipsed utterly by the lost gamble of 23 June 2016, which failed to save the Tory Party and on which date our divisions finally cut so deep that we may reasonably fear that they may never heal.   

What's Cameron's game?

David Cameron has quit as an MP. When Tony Blair finally went, the applause in the Commons made no real difference to the obvious fact that his legacy, ultimately, would be consumed by the history of the war in Iraq and the madness that surrounded it, before and after. That has become increasingly true as recollections of his achievements, many substantial, all recede into recent history and grow pale by comparison with that war.

Cameron, on the other hand, was much less of a colossus. My view is that he has been an important figure in our recent political history, playing an interesting and eventually successful game in order to purge the Tories of their recent record of abject failure and return them to the position they now occupy, a party of government with further majorities in sight. He has reunited the Conservative Party with electoral success. That is important, because his three immediate predecessors all proved unable to penetrate the miasma of stupidity that infected the top layers of the party for ten years after the destruction of John Major.

He is also important because he set a tone. Yes, the Big Society was quietly laid to rest in 2013 or so; yes, some of the successful Tory policies that propelled them to victory were in fact Liberal Democrat ones painted blue (and, in the case of tuition fees, one of their most objectionable policies was simply painted yellow and hung like a stone around the neck of his deputy prime minister). And yes, there was a marked tack to the right in the later years of his premiership, not surprisingly given the cutting of the Liberal Democrat brakes.

But Cameron did show that Conservative solutions can be at least tolerable again, and that potent change meant their return to the other side of the Commons was possible.

There is equal marriage, often cited (even by Jeremy Corbyn on Cameron's departure from office) as a change for which we should all be grateful to him. (We may wonder, of course, whether this would have proceeded as smoothly had Cameron never been shacked to Clegg). There could have been Universal Credit, if Iain Duncan Smith had not proved unequal to the task of its completion. There is, undoubtedly, the avoidance of complete national disaster in the economic mess that engulfed us all during the last Parliament, whether or not you feel that the extent of austerity was justifiable or the targets, now abandoned, were necessary to get us through. The fact is that we didn't suffer as much as we could have done.

And then Brexit.

And then he quit, and we have Theresa May, his own Home Secretary, who has proved a stable pair of hands and a calming influence - as she clearly intends to be, with her regular, stabilising incantations of "Brexit means Brexit". The wounds are open, and the only reason the party is not bleeding to death just yet is that both sides of the debate feel they have a chance of victory. For Remainers, the challenge is to present Brexit as unpalatable and not, ultimately, what the electorate voted for; for Leavers, it's to show us that any Brexit is better than remaining in the Brussels clink, stymied and emasculated and apparently not in control.

It is hard to see at this point that David Cameron's resignation can do anything other than free the wings of his party up to prepare for a bloody civil war to cap anything he previously ended, and - certainly a sadder thought - overshadow his legacy of re-centring the Tories, injecting a little warmth and reason into their party leadership after the Howard and Duncan Smith years, his avoidance of economic disaster, and, most regrettable of all, his social progressivism, such as it was.

The price of Blair's failings - so many lives - should never have been paid. Cameron's disasters may not be in the same league in severity, but we have not yet seen the start, let alone the end, of the blighting of lives by all the consequences of the Brexit vote - from the deprivation of European citizenship all the way up to the potentially staggering economic impact. People will suffer. And, sadly, the blame must fall in great part on Cameron and his failed gamble.

The Boris Factor: 3

In which we draw lessons about Boris Johnson from his book about Winston Churchill, The Boris Factor. It's a good read about a great man, but it's as interesting for what it says about what Boris sees and values, as for what it says about Churchill, that otherwise little-known figure from British history.

"They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of [his father] Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas - to take risks that no one else would take. In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous."

Yes, Boris. So we have discovered.

"But you can't win a war without taking risks, and you won't take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers. His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue - the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others."

Right. So we're going to deduce from your little flurry of bungles over Brexit that you're fundamentally brave. And I suppose, unfettered by the consensus and nauseating community of the EU we might end up facing a war, or at least a dire threat against our lonely little nation - so perhaps these are the circumstances in which we will recall the strength of that brave old crackpot. Good old Boris. Yes, Theresa May's not good enough to get us through this crisis. We need Boris! Boris!

What was that about a primordial virtue?

"Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt."

Ah.

Boris, you may be pushing it a bit far, old boy.

Brexit: time to give up?

The prime minister's statement at the start of the Chequers cabinet talks today certainly seems to make it clear that Brexit cometh. "We must continue to be very clear that “Brexit means Brexit”,", she says:

"...that we’re going to make a success of it. That means there’s no second referendum; no attempts to sort of stay in the EU by the back door; that we’re actually going to deliver on this."

Oh, dear. Have we Remainers who hope for sanity to prevail come to the end of the road? When you add in the line at the end of the BBC's coverage of this story - that Number 10 has said Parliament won't be consulted before the activation of Article 50 - it may be time to decide between angry, sad or puking emoticons ready for use when the miserable day finally arrives.

After all, the future that Theresa May is hinting at is one where the government produces a surprisingly positive vision of Brexit, everybody starts to think it might be OK, and she just pings off an email titled "Re: thanks for everything" to Jean-Claude Juncker. Easy as pie.

Now, we can speculate (and we probably will) about Theresa May's real convictions on Europe and her motives in office. (For my part I think she's decided that clarity and firmness are for the best, and that she is taking the bull by the horns rather than allowing herself to become bogged down in a messy argument over Europe like five or six of her immediate predecessors).

But whatever we think she's up to, whether she really wants out or whether she does have a game plan to keep us in, we all have to dance to her tune. And she has made it plain that the constitutional route to salvation may not be open to us. She has to act, either through conviction or convenience, like the Brexit prime minister. She cannot be seen to be soft. She clearly does not feel that going back to Parliament is defensible - perhaps because it will enrage the frothing Leavers and terminate her ministry. She will therefore press ahead when the moment comes. We should not ignore the constitutional implications of this potential route, by any means; but what May is telling us is that we cannot rely on a constitutional hiccup to save us from Brexit.

Constitutional tools are not available to us, then. But political tools remain. May proposed to act in a way consistent with her chosen identity as a modern Iron Lady: firm, accepting of the Brexit "verdict", clear about her power. But she has yet put in place pauses and delays, which allow the debate to develop and the players to build their cause. To build a Remain cause now around the hope of constitutional salvation seems a closed road. There's not even much point arguing about whether or not such a method, of relying on constitutional diddling based on the current situation - the "referendums are advisory, dontcherknow" approach - would ever be legitimate. What we have to do is shift the sands. The avenue open to us - the avenue that Mrs May is leaving open to us, deliberately or not - is political. We may find help from the Supreme Court or the House of Lords, but unless there is real, public anger with the passage of Brexit, a feeling that the alternative we have got is indeed worse than what anybody wanted, and a proper understanding that this is madness--or at least, enough persuasion that EU membership is the better option--then nothing will stand.

We have to stop theorising, diddling, dithering, hoping and regretting. We have to start persuading. Now.