Echo Two

Two interesting editorials from the tail end of the year: the first is the less interesting one, from the Guardian on democracy; the second is from the Economist on liberalism.

Both detect the failings the year found in their chosen strand of political philosophy and understand that changes are needed to restore vitality to them. The Guardian editorial tries to put the tension between democratic passions and reflection into a historical context and correctly identifies both the resurgence of political engagement in Scotland as a result of the independence referendum and the broader lack of engagement in turnout and politics beyond niche area campaigning.

Sadly it doesn't offer much in the way of suggestions for correcting this. One thing I felt was important from 2016 was the disconnect between popular democracy and the first past the post system of electing MPs. UKIP's failure to turn their popular vote into parliamentary representation was a bad outcome for both their supporters and their critics. While that Alternate Vote system was rejected for general elections, the fact that it is used so widely for other forms of elections means that it would be worth finding a vote system that might find general agreement. One that might avoid the curse of safe seats and wasted votes. If the government is decided by tens of constituencies not by all of them then we should expect a cynicism about the value of turning out to the polling station.

The Economist on the other hand is full of fight and proposals, it points out that the early challenges to liberalism resulted in universal suffrage and education. It is worth thinking big and trying to genuinely tackle the hard problems of our times rather than reheating a Cold War capitalism to ever diminishing returns.

Distribution of wealth, opportunity and a better understanding of the consequences of global equality are worthy problems. Looking at what the future of education should be and how people can genuinely reskill and retrain rather than be deskilled is of real social value.

Reversals of progress are disappointing but inevitable, it is when the will to respond with new answers fails that the rot truly sets in.

This weekend was the Battle of Ideas, this year instead of challenging the concept of Identity politics is basically piled in with a wild leg-breaking two-footed tackle. In the midst of the melodrama though it did help me think through something that has been bugging me, namely the concept of being an "ally".

I've primarily seen this concept in terms of feminism and Black Lives Matter and superficially it seems a positive thing. In the particular case a way for men or white people to declare themselves as active supporters of a movement. However during a panel discussion on the struggle for black civil rights one of the panellists pointed out that people claimed equal rights not because they are black but because they are human. A movement that claims rights merely for one particular group was weaker than one that claimed them for everyone.

There is no need to be an "ally" for equal rights, civil rights or human rights. You can believe in them and want to create a system that ensures that everyone has access to them and recourse when they are denied them. Your personal identity is completely irrelevant to your belief and your commitment to it.

Generalising this the principle of equality is universal and anyone can believe that people should have equal access to society and government. Your gender, sexuality or lack of it, race or any other personal characteristic is irrelevant.

Mass-movements and universal principles seem to have fallen out of favour or are expressed in only absolutist terms like the concept of the caliphate. I think there is much to be gained be reviving them and no movement based on affirmation of identity loses by participating in them.

The LRB seems to me to have done the best in-depth reporting on the referendum and the surrounding issues that I've read. How to grow a Weetabix is a wonderfully wide-ranging piece that looks at the nature of Britain as it actually is and the various issues that have built up to this moment.

It also nailed a point I was struggling to see for myself, that the Leave campaign can do and say anything and be a protean figure that anyone can get behind. I was already wondering about the fact that the money currently going to Europe has been re-spent ten times over during the debate.

This quote from a Brexit-supporting farmer, Stuart Agnew, wonderfully summarises the magical thinking.

As we talked I realised he was treating the referendum as if it were a general election; as if, instead of resolving a single issue, whether or not to stay in the EU, a vote to leave would usher in a new Britain, where farmer-hampering officials, Agnew-unfriendly regulations, scientists whose analysis he disagreed with and popular hostility to genetically modified food would fade away of their own accord.

He blamed the EU for forcing him to bury sheep rather than cremating them. He blamed the EU for stopping him growing GM crops (he was one of England’s trial growers). He blamed the EU for excessively tight control of pesticides and for forcing him to place an electronic tag in the ear of each sheep.

As the writer points out, leaving the EU isn't going to magically convert the British into feeling different about GM food or mad cow disease or foot and mouth disease. Climate change isn't going to depend on whether Britain is a European Union member or not.

But Remain is fighting for the status quo and Leave has the freedom to offer everything to everyone. Since no-one really knows what will happen after handing in notice of Britain's membership there is a chance, no matter how small, that anything might be possible. Farm subsidies might go up, migration might go down, we might be able to deport more people, we might be better off, wage might go up.

Saying yes to every possibility ends up with absurdity though. Some of the things that the Leave campaign are starting to promise are in direct contradiction to one another.

I loved this article, entitled Europe's sullen child, on the London Review of Books.

In recent years countries like Hungary and Poland have started systematically to dismantle democracy and the rule of law within their own borders. They have weakened the judiciary, captured the media, and attacked all opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic. Brussels isn’t the great threat to the rule of law in Europe, it is increasingly authoritarian individual governments that pose a real danger not just to their own citizens, but to anyone holding a European passport; as long as they are represented in the European Council, the decisions they make affect everyone in the EU.

Because the majority of British people don't feel threatened by their own government right now (although certain segments, like the former miners, are rightly suspicious of the benignity of their government's intentions towards them) there is a tendency to forget why the rules and restrictions exist in the first place. Europe, including Britain, has never been a place of steady, untroubled progress. It is not a straight-forwardly good thing to let nation states do what they want without any external restrictions. Look at Yugoslavia, was the right time to intervene after the massacres had started?

The impression that right-wing populists like to give of themselves as defenders of democracy is, needless to say, deceptive. For one thing, the EU states have not ‘lost sovereignty’. That the UK can hold a referendum on whether or not to leave, while at the same time treaties can be amended only by a unanimous decision of all states together, is enough to demonstrate this point (which is not to say that individual states haven’t ceded many powers or that they aren’t, on a day-to-day basis, subject to bureaucratic decision-making in Brussels and rulings by the European Court that can go strongly against their national preferences).

In Britain, prisoners don't have the vote. Judgements by the European Court of Human Rights have been routinely ignored because the popular mood in Britain is that prison is a punishment and loss of voting rights is part of that punishment. When we choose to we happily ignore European rules that contradict our national desires.

The British Parliament exercises sovereign rights frequently, but erratically, making it difficult to differentiate between what is the will of British politicians and what is the result of aligning to the single market and European harmonisation. I personally suspect that that isn't a coincidence. Vote with your conscience in the lobby, blame it on Europe on the doorstep.

Populists always need enemies and conspiracies to explain why they aren’t already in power, or, when they do get to rule, why they aren’t succeeding and why there can’t be such a thing as a legitimate opposition. The EU has served them well in this regard. But it is naive to think that, even after getting rid of the supposed dictatorship of Brussels (and Germany), they would rest content.

If there are illegal migrants crossing the Channel in small boats then it is not because of the EU. The EU has not made Britain reduce its budget for the navy and border protection. That's something we've chosen to do ourselves as it is one of the "invisible" cuts we have made as part of our mania for austerity-lite.

In some ways I actually think a Brexit might be better for the country while worse for me personally. The first step towards recovery is being able to be honest with yourself and while we have the EU to be the bogeyman beyond the Channel, the whipping boy for any unwelcome news or poorly conceived policy the British nation seems incapable of seeing itself and its actions clearly.

The article is also excellent on the British abandonment of its European agenda, as a country it encouraged others to join Europe with a view of creating a new consensus on the kind of Europe we should have. After the ascension of Poland I feel we suffered a complete failure of vision and nerve and have retreated into "sullen" isolation, one that primarily seems aimed at avoiding our own failures than those of Europe and the Euro.

The Walking Dead (and its not unique in this regard) has as one of its basic tenets that it is not the zombies of its fictional apocalypse that represent the true danger to the survivors but other humans.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, how realistic is this though? Groups coalesce when faced with shared hostilities. Zombies represent a genuine existential threat to humanity and possess no common social structures. They are the ultimate "other". No human can find common cause with a zombie. A zombie regards humans purely as food, we have more empathy for wolves or tigers.

While it is true that humans require the same resources of energy and food as one another the desire to co-operate to maximise the availability of those resources seems to be the historic norm. We don't routinely steal food from our neighbours and we never have.

In addition the zombies have no interest in the resources that humans desire. They have no need for food, shelter or comfort. Destroying zombies to reclaim resources seems more sensible than attacking other humans. Violence between groups of humans negatively affects all humans but violence directed towards zombies has no negative effects on human survivors and if effectively applied then humans benefit.

There seems to be no real reason why humans would not find it easy to find common cause with other survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Normal power relationships and dysfunctions would of course continue but the conventional boundaries of politics and nationality would dissolve.

But zombies are not really zombies. They are amongst the most symbolic of monsters. In the Walking Dead with its gothic backdrop of Georgia forests and southern heat you feel that the spectre that truly haunts the survivors are not the undead but instead the rotten issue of race.

It is not zombies that want to burst inside our barricades and undo all that we have made. Only other people have the capacity to do that.

Any zombie fiction that features the "humans are the real monsters" trope seem to me to be essentially reactionary. Seeing zombies as the masses who fail to share in a dream of, often, idealised American masculinity makes you realise that the zombies are less the Others than simply others.

The friction between the bands of survivors makes more sense as a portrayal of the fratricide of fringe movements be they left, right or those of feminism or animal rights.

You can trust no-one but yourself is their badge. Individuality is their shibboleth.

The survivors are not the heroic holdouts of a better time but instead the bitterenders spitting their defiance in the face of history and indifference with a hail of bullets and a stockade.