O, wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!”

A new book by the ex French Ambassador to Britain is reviewed in an interview with the author, Sylvie Bermann, in The Times today. She is seeing ourselves as others see us, not least the fact that we have chosen to have a liar as our Head of Government

From Biden and Obama to Merkel and Macron “others see us” as, frankly, fools. Ms Bermann has the insights and the courage to say and explain why. National pride and delusion (not to mention personal ambition) has stopped our leaders (or most of them) from telling the truth about where we are. Up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

In 2016 after the disastrous Referendum vote and the obscenity of the American election putting Trump in the White House I was talking with an American friend – a rather “drowning our sorrows” conversation. “You can get rid of the monster in four years” I said. “We will be stuck with our insanity for twenty” . “Don’t bet your house on it” he said regarding Trump and he was nearly right. But that worked out alright in the end, thank God. Brexit, of course, not.

The problem is that we never took a collective pride in our Europeaness . We should have. At an intellectual level a United Europe was something from Churchill onwards we approved of. Whilst, like Churchill, our continued Imperialism and fantasy about the “Special Relationship” made us think that Europe, in some way, stopped at Calais, the geography, and reason, should have told us otherwise.

The British sense of humour is indeed one of our assets – especially the “self-mockery”. I have been re-watching “Allo Allo” in lockdown and one of its themes is the gentle but affectionate laughing at the British. The French and Germans are mocked as well of course but this quintessentially British comedy is never unkind. Even to those with swastikas on their arms.

I think it’s insecurity which makes us so faux-patriotic and which prompts the obsessive flag display of our leaders. From time to time we are told the truth by our friends – as here by Ms Bermann. And we do have among us those who are honest as well. Peter Oborne’s “The Assault on Truth” documents forensically the mendacity of Boris Johnson that she refers to here. It’s a best seller, but it won’t change anything – not that Peter thought it would I guess.

Robbie Burns would lament that for all too many of us no “Power” has gifted us self-awareness. Had we had it a few years ago we would have seen the benefits of being a major player in Europe. Back in 2012 a French athlete in the Olympic Village told me that “London was the Capital of Europe”. It was. It could still have been. 😢

Right Wing polemicist Gerard Baker has a go at “Right On” artists like Bruce Springsteen in The Times today. Burned any books recently Mr Baker? OK a slight exaggeration that, maybe, but once you start dictating what artists can or cannot do you are on the censorship road and that leads to only one place and that is authoritarian control on artistic freedom.

If a novelist wants to write a new story highlighting climate change they will. What may be denigrated as a “consensus nostrum” by the philistines could tell a story that makes people think.

The “prevailing mandates of the age” are not determined by a committee of woke folk deciding what they should be believe. Throughout history great art, verbal and visual, written and spoken , has recorded and displayed the opinion of the artist.

Art doesn’t tell me what to believe it tells me what the artist believes. I can choose to agree or not. Political communication is different. Remember the anti EU message on the bus ? No self respecting artist would do anything as crass as that. Propaganda uses the same tools as Art – the camera, symbols and the word – but in a civilised society the people will see through it. Many are seeing through Boris Johnson’s addiction to the Union Flag for example.

Art does not have to be iconoclastic. For every ground-breaking Beethoven symphony there are celebratory paeans to convention – the lyricism of Debussy or Elgar for example. The greatest artists can be light, comical or pastoral and then tear down barriers in successive works for example. That Shakespeare fellow did a bit of that.

Two people looking at the same scene will see different things, at least on the margin. The “creative type” Mr Baker sneers at might express what they see with different words and fewer brushstrokes than you or me. The poet might use a few words where the journalist might need paragraphs.

Artists are not following convention even though they may come independently to the same conclusions as their fellows. They flourish if they have untrammelled freedom to express themselves. The goal has to be their perception of the truth.

At a time when the veracity of leaders is questioned daily to seek the truth is a noble cause. If the reality is that Trumpism and Brexit were in no small measure consequences of ignorance the artist may choose to say so. If telling this truth is interpreted by the Right Wing as “villainisation of the reactionary working class” then so be it.

What a complete shambles our school system is. If education is a human right then in Britain it’s one offered with staggering inconsistency. Pretty much anything goes. Schools open to all, others that are selective. Single sex schools as well as mixed ones. Faith schools of any denomination or religion. Schools that you can attend if Mummy and Daddy are rich enough. Comprehensive schools which completely replaced Grammar schools – except in the 163 cases where they didn’t. Very good schools in the higher rollers’ postcodes, Dodgy ones where the poor live.. And so on.

Ah, you might say, we have freedom of choice but in the main this freedom only applies to those that can afford it. 7% do that and their kids get a fine Private education as a result. Many others with the resources to do so move into the postcodes where the best state schools are.

I see zero prospect of change. Levelling up the poorer schools requires investment and expenditure we don’t have. Faith schools will continue to narrowly indoctrinate children when they should be broadening them. Private schools and Grammar schools will be available to a tiny few where family wealth or student ability at eleven allows it. Of course some pupils overcome difficulties and triumph – but in the main it’s a lottery where the outcome is predetermined.

Oh , and I nearly forgot, Gavin Williamson is the Secretary of State for Education.

There is an outstanding report on Afghanistan in The Times today by Anthony Loyd. But what a continuing tragedy this godforsaken country and western involvement in it is.

The driver of the post 9/11 military action in Afghanistan was revenge against Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. But the bringing to justice of this terrorist and his brutal gang required the defeat of what was effectively the de facto government of a sovereign state – the Taliban. America showed it had learned nothing from Vietnam and the developing failure in Iraq. Overwhelming military power is not enough to beat guerrilla armies that disappear overnight into the jungle or the desert hills.

Negotiations with the likes of the Vietcong or the Taliban (there are many other examples in history) always end in failure. The military structure of rebel armies is different to that of conventional national forces. The latter are subject to political control to start with. We knew where we were in 1918 and 1945 – our enemy, political and military, had been defeated. The same does not apply in Afghanistan. Whilst ostensibly legitimate political governments were put in place in Kabul the Taliban didn’t go away. They took a long term view knowing that their time would come again. And it has.

The hard truth is that the West does not understand Afghanistan. The culture and ideology of the people is singular and not open to the entreaties of a western government or diplomacy. Charging blindly, guns blazing, into a conflict between competing parties none of which you understand had fatal consequences. As in Iraq the defeat of conventional forces was straightforward. The defeat of guerrillas as impossible as the task of winning hearts and minds.

America has an arrogant belief that might is right – and it certainly has plenty of might. But the reality is that the use of this might in modern times, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been an unmitigated disaster. Time to go.

James Forsyth has another of his Uber-deferential articles today in The Times under the headline “Johnson’s great climate change challenge”. It’s sycophantic nonsense as usual.

Serendipity has meant that Britain will Chair G7 and COP26 at a time when it is uniquely unqualified to do so. The irony of the idea of the U.K. leading any global initiative when it has become the most isolated major nation on the planet is profound. And the idea that Johnson’s government can be a “Green” one is almost comical.

Progress on environmental issues demands transnational cooperation. The destruction of the environment on Earth by excess carbon emissions can only be avoided by working together. The forces of Nationalism that govern everything that the current British government does run utterly counter to this. If you break away from productive cooperation with your neighbours on trade and every other economic matter , as we have, how can you credibly lead or even participate in global initiatives that demand cooperation?

The ideological drivers of Johnson’s government are far from the political mainstream. They are libertarian, individualistic and profoundly anti socialist. They embrace cheering on the individual rather than the community and free enterprise rather than collectivity. They certainly subscribe to the view that there is no such thing as society, only families.

The political positioning of the influencers on Johnson’s motley crew hail from the world where climate change scepticism is as much a creed as Euroscepticism and a horror of taxation. There is a perfect correlation between ardent Brexiteer and ardent anti tree-hugger mindsets. Look at the likes of James Delingpole and his friends if you doubt that.

Individual behaviour is not primarily altruistic. David Attenborough’s recent cry from the heart on “Perfect Planet” was moving but in the main as individuals we either won’t or can’t respond to it. Change can only come at the highest level of governance in Europe or internationally. And among the tools of change taxation is the most important and most effective one.

Carbon taxes require that the biggest polluters pay not as punishment but as an incentive for them to change. Vehicle emissions are one of Britain’s major environmental threats but we do little or nothing to curb this. To substantially increase fuel duty would be the most effective way to encourage a switch to public transport and to reduce uneccesary journeys. For years no British government has had the guts to do this. Johnson’s certainly won’t.

When the “Economy” plays the “Environment” and when “short term profit” plays “long term environment protection” in Johnson’s world there can only be one winner. He might get in trouble over the breakfast table but “Green Boris” is a hypocritical oxymoron.

I think that the conventional way of describing voters and political positions as “Left” or “Right” is an anachronism, and a lazy one at that. Most of us who bother about politics try and think through important issues on their merits and come to a conclusion rather than follow a “party” line.

Brexit was not primarily a Party divide issue, Europe never had been. And as the Brexit badge you wear also seems to determine your position on other things it’s time political analysts started to look at this rather than reach for the Left/Right stamp.

A straight line with Hard Left at one end and Hard Right at the other really doesn’t work any more. Is Euroscepticism Left or Right, likewise opposition to Lockdown ? There is no logic to true believers in Brexit also being the most vociferous opponents of lockdown. To call these people “Hard Right” is an oversimplification.

I joined CND in the 1960s and remain a supporter. But I also strongly believe in a mixed economy, support some contracting out in the Health Service and worked for forty years in an oil company – I’m a neoliberal Lefty perhaps?

In the USA “Socialist” was used recently as a term of abuse by some who one suspects had no idea what it means. If we follow a Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey or even Tony Blair approach (I do) then it’s quite legitimate to call it Democratic Socialism. Try explaining that to a Trump supporter – or Trump himself for that matter.

The term “Woke” as an insult is used as a catch-all condemnation of us liberals, often by self-described “libertarians”. But I believe in “freedom” just as much as they say they do. But a different kind of freedom – one restrained by logic and the law. The term “Centrist” is abusive from the Corbynite Left as if it is in some way impure. The truth is that it is , like “woke” , a silly over-simplification.

I like “liberal” to describe myself because it is undoctrinaire and not prescriptive. Social liberalism was a great cause when I was growing up and many battles have been won along the way since. But some of Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms could also be described as “liberal” – the social democrats Blair and Brown didn’t unwind them did they?

Modern day politics is complex and in general the labels used are unhelpful or old-fashioned. Politicians and political commentators should be encouraged to explain without resorting to over-simplifications in speech and symbols. Do I ask too much ?

There is some ill-informed PR puffery in The Times today about Shell’s “Zero emissions by 2050 “target” .

Shell, and BP for that matter, plays an essential part in the global economy’s demand for oil and gas. But let’s be crystal clear about this. Oil companies do not create demand, only supply it. If we want to reduce our dependence on hydrocarbons look to the oil companies’ customers not to the companies themselves.

As some sectors, like power generation, switch from (mainly) gas to renewables Shell may choose to try and compensate for lost sales revenues by creating renewables businesses of their own. There’s plenty of huff and puff about this. I’m sceptical. Shell has an abysmal record of failed diversification away from their core hydrocarbon business. There is little or no collective corporate memory about Wind or Solar Power in Shell and frankly little genuine expertise or interest.

Providing recharging points at Shell petrol stations, also mentioned in The Times article, does not make Shell a renewables supplier any more than providing a shop made them a grocery retailer. It’s simply a response to change and what customers will want. No big deal.

Shell has long pursued a policy of reducing energy consumption and pollution in its own activities like production, refining and distribution. But the fact that oil and gas consumption at the point of end use can be environmentally damaging is frankly not the corporation’s concern. Nor should it be.

Few of us seem bothered by the genocide being perpetrated by the Saudis in Yemen. British-made arms play their part in that horror. And we have kowtowed to the human rights abusing Saudi Arabia with impunity for decades.

It won’t be easy for President Biden to set an example given the power of the American armaments sector. 9/11, masterminded by a Saudi national and put into effect by others, was barely even a blip in long term US/Saudi relations.

Britain is a significant player in the arms industry but whether this will continue in the new world of our international isolation and diplomatic impotence remains to be seen. The British ambassador in Riyadh along with sycophantic and self-interested commercial interests have always been tools of the armaments producers never saying Boo to the horrific geese of the House of Saud.

Look to the money applies as ever. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia notwithstanding the fall in the oil price is rich and British businesses continue to beat a path to its door. And so do the Americans. Biden will struggle to break some of these money making ties. Britain won’t even try.

Peter Oborne argues convincingly that Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister (and the confirmation of this in a subsequent General Election) represents a existential break with Britain’s political past. A past that stretches back nearly two hundred years to the mid Victorian era when the “Victorians brought high ideals into government”. These ideals included “accountability and integrity” – above all “lying to Parliament, was one of the most serious crimes any British politician could commit”. “Standards of truth telling” argues Oborne, “collapsed at the moment…Johnson entered 10 Downing Street”

The premise of the book is that in the same way that Donald Trump’s intellectually barren populist crusade exploded established convention in 2016 so Johnson’s equally mendacious accession to power three years later was a moral and political disaster. The judgment criteria we apply when looking at our leaders (competence, honesty, selfless public service, moral principle) disappeared in clouds of bluff, bluster and dishonest discourse.

Starting with his self interested backing of “Leave” in 2016 and continuing to the present day Johnson commits “Deliberate and Systematic Deceit” . Oborne lists dozens of examples of the mendacity including, and especially, the “spreading [of] lies on social media”. Here the dark arts of the likes of Dominic Cummings were employed to “good” effect – “Johnson’s Conservatives deliberately set out to lie and to cheat their way to victory”.

Peter Oborne is an experienced and knowledgeable observer and recorder of British politics over more than twenty years. He has a solid context in which to place his judgments. He says he has never seen anything like Johnson’s Government and this reviewer, who actually goes back a decade longer in his recall, agrees!

Most recently it started with the “Leave” campaign in 2016 – Brexit was achieved by fraud and Johnson played his full part in the deception. This was the beginning of the slide down the slippery slope of dysfunctionality and corruption. Along the way conspirators in the Brexit coup have been rewarded by being in Government or in some bizarre cases by elevations of the faithful to the House of Lords. More recently we have seen government contract handouts to Boris’s buddies. Boris Johnson, says Oborne, “… never needed a noble justification for lying”. Nor for largesse it seems.

We were warned, oh how we were warned, but we didn’t care. Johnson was first sacked for lying (from “The Times”) at the age of 23. As Europe correspondent of The Daily Telegraph he was an early creator of “Fake News” and he clearly saw nothing wrong in public or personal deceit. Another lie about his private life led to his sacking as a shadow minister by Michael Howard in 2004. But you couldn’t keep a bad man down. He was a charismatic, if lazy, Mayor of London for eight years. Not much of a job, in truth but a nice platform for preening and display.

Where we are now, says Oborne, is that “Ministers can lie to Parliament but escape rebuke. They can bully and harass staff and get away with it. They can undermine civil servants and not pay the price. They can award contracts to cronies and nobody minds”

The Johnson premiership has sailed ahead on falsehoods and propaganda with various management and competence failures being covered up with a succession of untruths. But when COVID-19 hit this dysfunctionality became lethal. “Prime Minister Johnson failed for a long time to grasp the significance of the crisis” days Oborne. False claims on the progress of testing were to follow along with claims that Britain was handling the crisis well when the opposite was self-evidently the case. They lied or dissembled about everything including testing and care homes – Case and death statistics (which were dreadful) were massaged. Operational failure was compounded by communications deceit.

At the core of the Johnson year plus in office there has, says Oborne, been a “wider attack on the pillars of British democracy”. You can only have a liberal democracy if it is based on truth. Oborne references Orwell’s 1984. Johnson “…has been caught out rewriting the past in very much the same way as Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.”

In his inaugural address the new President Joe Biden said “…we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.” And he went on

“… And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders…to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”

This was a response, of course, to Donald Trump but it could equally be aimed at Boris Johnson’s post-truth rule. Johnson and Trump are shown together on the cover of Peter Oborne’s book – for good reason.

“It’s time to fight back” are the last words of Peter Oborne’s courageous and timely book. In 176 small format pages he frankly demolishes the credibility of Boris Johnson who is, perhaps, the ultimate example of the “Peter Principle”. But Johnson’s unsuitability for high office goes beyond his deficiencies of competence. This is, as with Trump, about character and honesty.

Johnson has failed throughout his public and personal lives to develop character traits that go beyond the superficiality of blustering self-confidence. Or to show that he has the remotest capability to distinguish fact from fiction and lies from the truth. “It’s time to fight back” indeed.

“…what happened when sections of the German elites and masses of ordinary people chose to abdicate their individual critical faculties in favour of a politics based on faith, hope, hatred and sentimental collective self regard for their own race and nation”. “The Third Reich” by Michael Burleigh

At the risk of being accused of falling victim to Godwin’s Law let me suggest that if you replace the word “German” with “British” in the above quote, which is actually the very first sentence in Burleigh’s book, you have an accurate description of the cause of Brexit. And Brexit was the primary cause of where we are today.

Let’s look at the “elites” first. In politics senior politicians were mostly pro Remain but a significant body of the Conservative elite campaigned for “Leave”. Ex ministers like Michael Howard and Nigel Lawson. Ambitious active Tories like Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak. Long-standing Eurosceptics like John Redwood and Daniel Hannan and the rest.

In the media the ownership elites of major circulation newspapers almost all favoured “Leave” and their newspapers did their bidding. A study by Reuters has shown a very strong pro Leave bias in the press with only The Guardian , the Daily Mirror and the Financial Times being pro Remain.

In the business world again the vast majority of businessmen were pro Remain but those who differed – James Dyson, Tim “Wetherspoons” Martin and others got a disproportionate amount of media coverage.

In the world of celebrity , sport and The Arts the anti Remain statements by the likes of John Cleese, Ian Botham and Roger Daltry got more publicity than an open letter published in The Guardian and signed by more than 250 of Britain’s best-known actors, artists, musicians and writers which warned that if Britain were to leave the European Union it would become “an outsider shouting from the wings”.

The German parallel is relevant. Not all Britain’s opinion formers and elites supported Leave any more than all of Germany’s elite supported the Nazis. But enough did to make a difference. In the 1920s the Germans mainly voted in traditional ways and the moderate Weimar Republic which resulted was not a threat. In 1928 the Nazi Party received less than 3% of the vote and won only 12 seats in the Reichstag. It was only after the 1929 Wall Street crash that the “abdication of critical faculties” by “ordinary people” kicked off the slide to Hitler’s eventual accession to power in 1933.

Europe was a low interest subject until David Cameron started to feel pressured by the rise of Nigel Farage and UKIP . This happened at a time when he was in coalition with the LibDems – something despised by the overwhelmingly Eurosceptic Tory Right. There was a pressure cooker reaching the boil.

Dave’s solution to his troubles was twofold.. First buy off the Tory Right with an offer of a Referendum which he did in early 2013. Then destroy the LibDems – which the Wizard of Aus, Lynton Crosby, delivered for him in 2015. In between Europe shifted from being low interest to being a cause célèbre as Nigel Farage and UKIP topped the 2014 European Election poll with nearly 27%. This was seismic.

The 2014 Euro election did not show that there was a majority in the country for hard right conservatism nor withdrawal from Europe. But it did show that there was a large hard core to be tapped. The German parallel holds good. Hitler won over 100 seats and 18% of the vote in September 1930. This did not give him power, but it was the springboard for power just two years later.

The “Leave” Referendum win in 2016 was unquestionably a build by the forces of the Right on the Euroelections of 2014. Government policy and that of all the opposition Parties in Pariament was for “Remain”. But a nationalist call for “Freedom” and a blame culture aimed at the “Establishment” was seductive for many. And “Freedom”, that is “Freiheit” in German, had been used successfully by the Right before:

The Nationalism of “Leave” was to be the precursor of the equally flag-waving nationalism that has characterised Boris Johnson’s post Brexit regime. This government pitches a cult of personality-driven national fervour against the traditional political positions of the Social democratic Left and liberal Left and is wiping the floor with them. Sound familiar ? Having flirted with matching extreme with extreme with Jeremy Corbyn Labour now has a social democrat leader in the Wilson/ Blair mould. But for now the Hard Right of Johnson is prevailing. Where will it take us. The risks are clear. We should have learned from the Germans. Is it too late?