Is Theresa May about to sell out her country?

It is all going wrong for those who supported Brexit. British Prime Minister Theresa May appears to be close to agreeing such a bad deal with the European Union that it has prompted her foreign minister, Boris Johnson, and Brexit minister, David Davis, to resign from Cabinet. It seemed a simple thing to do, for a sovereign nation like Britain to withdraw from an economic alliance, but the problems that have arisen prove that the EU has become by stealth something much more than an economic alliance. It is a supernational entity that has become so entangled in the laws and institutions of its members that withdrawing is like amputating a leg to remove a passenger from a crashed train.

I am pro-Brexit despite it probably being contrary to my personal interests. I am an Irish citizen who has lived in Britain for more time than in any other country except New Zealand, and it may well be that I will be unable to return to live in Britain in future. So why do I support Brexit?

I am certainly no nationalist. I have written before about how I believe that all nation states are artificial constructs, no matter how old or grand they are, and that there is nothing inherently good in one national structure versus another (although I don't think the same of political systems). I believe that smaller, more local government is generally better at protecting individual rights because it is easier to hold accountable than larger, more geographically spread government. I guess that makes me a localist - I like my politics grown locally in small holdings, like those who are localists in buying their food. 

The European Union is a very big step on the road to a heterogeneous, global government, and that prospect scares the hell out of me. The type of society I would like to live in - a society that places maximum value on individual rights and freedoms and in which the government has strictly limited powers and is highly accountable to its citizens - is the very opposite of the European Union. There are so many layers of hierarchy between the people and their distant EU overlords in Brussels that it would put the Qing Dynasty to shame. There is no real representation or accountability, with all important policy decided by the unelected European Commission and its president Jean-Claude Juncker* rather than the show pony European Parliament. And that is exactly why the people of Britain voted to wrest back control of their country. Theresa May vowed to deliver the Brexit her people voted for, but I fear she has caught a dose of the Juncker hauteur and is about to sell out her own country.

* It is hardly surprising that Juncker has acted like an emperor who regards the Brexit vote as a personal slight on his majesty when you realise he has all the powers of an emperor. It is also revealing that when you click on the link to information about Juncker on the European Commission's website, you get the message "Access denied - You are not authorized to access this page." [UPDATE: The link has been fixed overnight - perhaps someone at the European Commission reads my blog!]

Let them eat cake

The people have spoken - the ignorant, bigoted, little-Englanders who are too old and stupid to know what is good for them (or so churlish Remain supporters would have us believe) had the gall to opt out of the great European superstate.

The reaction to the Brexit vote in the last few days has been unsurprising, given the contempt the political elite and their supporters showed for Leave supporters in the lead up to the vote. The irony of this reaction is that it is exactly why the Leave side won. When the political elite treats the rest of the population with contempt, they shouldn't be surprised when the rest rise up and destroy that which the elite hold dear. Thus has been the case with all political revolutions throughout history. It was 'let the eat cake' all over again.

This was only the second British referendum on membership of the EU since 1975 when Britain proposed joining what was then called the European Economic Community. Successive UK governments have since signed up to the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the Amsterdam Treaty (1997) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2007), amongst other commitments, without seeking a mandate from the British people to extend the reach of the EU into British domestic affairs. In fact, the entire political model of the EU seems to be about gaining ever-increasing power for Brussels without seeking any democratic mandate to do so.

Anyone who has a ounce of political sense could have foreseen that this carefully-crafted, undemocratic accretion of power would start to unravel sooner or later. The only question now is whether or not Britain will be the last of the EU member countries to leave, with politicians in The Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden and Denmark calling for similar referenda for their countries.

There is already a rear-guard action being fought against the Leave decision with a petition for a second referendum and for another Scottish independence referendum, but there is no reason for a British Government to respond to these calls. Those who opposed the Brexit decision need to accept the majority decision and give the British Government (whoever leads it) time to negotiate Britain's new relationship with the EU and other countries. Predictions of disaster will, I am sure, come to nothing and, given time, the Remain supporters might be surprised by the positive outcomes of the decision for Britain.

International politics provides relief from local tedium

Politics in New Zealand is soporific at the moment with a boring budget and even a quite muted response from the left-wing opposition, but politics in the rest of the world it is getting quite exciting.

In the US, leading Democratic political candidate Hillary Clinton has been found by the Inspector General of the State Department to have breached government policies by using a personal email server for departmental business. What is worse is that she repeatedly lied about it (as even MSNBC, which is usually hugely sympathetic to Clinton, now admits). The Inspector General's report puts the onus on the FBI, which is running a parallel investigation, to decide whether she and her staff should face criminal charges, and if that happens her run at the presidency is over. Does that mean the Democratic nomination will go to Bernie Sanders? Not necessarily. The Democratic Party seems intent on tearing itself apart into implacable Hillary vs Bernie factions, and Democratic Party rules allow the delegates pledged to Hillary to switch to a candidate more acceptable to the Clinton faction like Joe Biden or John Kerry (as Karl Rove points out in this Wall Street Journal article).

Meanwhile the mainstream media continues to do what it can to undermine Donald Trump's run at the presidency, with the New York Times leading the charge by giving legitimacy to claims that Trump is a fascist. I think Trump is a big government cronyist and a racist, sexist demagogue, but I don't think he even begins to qualify as a fascist. Such claims just add to the perception that Trump is the antagonist of the political establishment and that is a lot of the reason for his increasing popularity with American voters. I wonder whether the geniuses at the New York Times will ever realise this and that they are helping pave Trump's road to the White House.

In the United Kingdom, the prospects of a decision to leave the European Community in next month's referendum are on a knife-edge (the polls are currently averaging 40% to 39% in favour of Remain). I believe we may see a last minute surge in support for Leave due to the Remain campaign's increasingly desperate appeal to people's fears with their ridiculous claims that Brexit will lead to World War 3, worsening climate change and national economic collapse. Whatever the outcome, British politics will not be same with the Brexit issue having created new alliances and splits that cross the traditional left-right divide and many in the Conservative Party are already calling for David Cameron's scalp for his dishonesty during the Brexit campaign.

It is all entertaining, if nothing else.

Give me a principled Marxist over an unprincipled Tory squib any day

There has been a great deal of comment about the removal of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his replacement with that country's sixth prime minister in eight years, Malcolm Turnbull. Tony Abbott deserved to be defenestrated - not because he was (as some pundits have claimed) too ideological, but rather because he compromised his ideology where he shouldn't have and didn't compromise it where he should have done so. He stuck to his guns on gay marriage in spite of the mood for change but broke a lot of election promises in areas such as health and education reforms, lowering taxes and repeal of the Orwellian Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. He did stand by his position on repealing the repressive climate tax (which Labor PM Julia Gillard had introduced after breaking her election promise not to), but that was a rare show of backbone in an otherwise invertebrate performance.

Malcolm Turnbull's admiration for John Key says everything any New Zealander needs to know about the new Australian PM. John Key may have his strengths (um...his common touch and a nice smile, perhaps?) but standing on principle is not one of them. Key promised in the 2008 election not to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme and that went out the window with many of his other promises as soon as he was ensconced in the office at the top of The Beehive.

The interesting thing about principles in politics is that it is only those on the left are allowed to have them. Liberal Party politicians in Australia, Conservatives in Britain and National Party members in New Zealand are all condemned as too ideological if they stick to their ostensible principles like small government, free markets and freedom of choice in education and health. But you can have the most extreme left-wing views and the mainstream media and chattering classes will give you a free pass. You can be an out-and-out Marxist, willing to nationalise all manner of private businesses without compensation, want to withdraw from any Western defence alliances, and be a supporter of terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and your reward is to be elected Leader of the Opposition in Britain.

But I actually admire Jeremy Corbyn more than Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull or John Key. Give me a principled Marxist any day over an unprincipled Tory squib like David Cameron. At least you know where you stand with a Marxist.

Time to Sell Biased State Media

One of the first and most significant appointments David Cameron has made after his landslide UK election victory was that of John Whittingdale as Culture Secretary. The reason this appointment is significant is that Whittingdale will be the minister responsible for the BBC and in his previous role as chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee he has been very critical of the BBC and the licence fee that funds it. Some are going as far to suggest that Whittingdale's appointment is the Conservative Government's payback to the BBC for its very biased (i.e. pro-Labour Party) coverage of the election.

In Britain the BBC has a dominance over broadcast media that state media outlets in former Soviet bloc countries could only dream of.  It owns nine television channels and sixteen radio stations as well as numerous digital media outlets and cultural assets such as symphony orchestras. The BBC paints itself as unbiased but it is certainly not. It is partisan, secretive and ruthless in pushing its biases, and it is incredibly arrogant in refusing to concede its errors. 

Some examples of the BBC's behaviour are its cover-up of accusations of child abuse against Jimmy Savile, its promotion of the scandalous libel against former Tory peer Lord McAlpine and its reliance on a secretive panel of so-called independent climate scientists for its coverage of climate change issues (that turned out to largely comprise non-scientists from environmental lobby groups). The BBC is, in short, a malevolent presence in British culture.

In New Zealand over the last few weeks there has been a minor furore about the likely cancellation of TV3's current affairs Campbell Live. I have written before about left-wing bias in the the coverage of politics by the New Zealand media and in particular about how partisan John Campbell is. I said that I didn't have a particular problem with Campbell Live because TV3 is a privately-owned broadcaster and that eventually the market would sort him out. The uncertain future of the show is proof I was right. The BBC and our own state broadcasters Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand are a different matter. State-owned enterprises, even those like Television New Zealand that are commercially-focused, are not subject to the economic realities of private enterprises. The market cannot sort them out.

Thomas Jefferson said that 'to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical'. State broadcasting, particularly state broadcasting that is politically biased, does exactly that.

If there were ever valid arguments for the state to own media outlets (presumably around the lack of sufficient scale in small countries to justify private sector investment and monopolistic practices of a small number of private media outlets even in larger markets) those arguments no longer exist. The internet has reduced the cost so dramatically that anyone can afford to broadcast to millions from their bedroom and there are literally millions of news and opinion outlets of every possible political persuasion. It is time for the state to get out of broadcasting. Cameron's government should break up and sell the BBC and the New Zealand government should do the same for Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand.

I'm sure Rupert Murdoch would be interested.

Scottish Yes Vote the End of 'Great' Britain

While here in New Zealand we wrestle with the choices of who is the least bad political party in a crowded general election field, on the other side of the world a more crucial vote is about to take place. I am writing, of course, about the Scottish referendum on independence, which, if you believe the polls, is going down to wire.

Like most distant international observers, at first I regarded this referendum as something of a sham. Early indications were that the 'No' vote would win by the best part of 20 percentage points and that the Scots would soon get back to complaining about the weather and their lack of success on the football turf. My reaction to the latest poll, which has the 'Yes' vote one point ahead, initially was shocked disappointment. Britain is the country in which I have lived the most years of my life after New Zealand and I have a immense fondness for the place.  But on consideration, another part of me concludes that 'Great' Britain died a long time ago and the dismembering of the corpse is overdue.

Britain today is a country that ignores mass child abuse in the name of tolerance. It is a country where you can be arrested for quoting its greatest prime minister. And it is a country that chose to launch the Olympic Games with a celebration of a moribund public health system in which people are much less likely to survive cancer than in other countries. In other words, it is not a country its citizens should be particularly proud of. However, does that justify the Scots seceding?

The problem for the Scots is that the things they want to preserve by becoming independent are the things that have caused Britain to decline from its former glory. They want more National Health System, more welfare and more government interference in their social and economic lives. They think they are a more caring society than the rest of Britain and they want even more of it. The problem for the Scots is that England, or more specifically the Southeast of England, pays the bill and they delude themselves that North Sea oil will continue to pay for their already over-extended Socialist economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. North Sea oil is already starting to run out and without it the Scottish economy will look more like that of Greece or Portugal.

But in my view the worst thing about a Yes vote in the referendum is that it is a point of no return. Britain seemed like a lost cause once before - in the 1970s - but Maggie Thatcher dragged it kicking and screaming back into a position of world political and economic leadership. I have liked to think that the decline since Thatcher was just one more good prime minister away from being reversed. A Yes vote will lock in that decline and Britain will never be Great again. Personally I feel that is a very great shame.

What Has Happened to Great Britain?

I have a soft spot for Britain. I lived there for several years in the 1980s and as a New Zealander of predominantly British extraction I look to it for symbols and trends that inform me about life in my own country that shares so many institutions and traditions with the Mother Country. Unfortunately, these days I do not like what I see.

Great Britain gave us the Magna Carta, the Common Law and the rule of law, the (original) Bill of Rights, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, the abolition of the slave trade and the bulldog spirit that stood alone against fascism for the first two years of World War II.  These great traditions made Britain by the 19th Century not only the wealthiest and  most powerful country in the world but probably the best to live in for the vast majority of its population. And it wasn't just the homeland that enjoyed this great, liberal tradition - it was the template for successful nation states all over the world. But today Britain is choosing to abandon all that has made it great and, in a sad irony, is adopting the characteristics of the despotic regimes its people have fought against down through the years.

Britain has more surveillance cameras per person than any other country on earth with an estimated 20% of all the world's public CCTV cameras - 5 million in total or 1 for every 11 people. It has revoked the right to silence in criminal cases (an important historical protection against the use of torture for obtaining evidence). More recently British judges have started jailing people for abusive comments on Twitter and following the Leveson Inquiry into hacking of cellphone records by News of the World journalists, the three major British political parties have agreed to introduce the regulation of all content of newspapers and other media. And in the latest assault on a free press and on free speech, a proposed 'deregulation bill' enables judges to authorise the seizure of journalists' notebooks and digital files in secret hearings.

That great British writer, George Orwell, would recognise all of this from his prescient novel, 1984. Orwell modelled his fictitious society on the Soviet Union when he penned his novel in 1948 but he was sounding a warning for his own country. It is a shame that the model for liberal, democratic society all over the world is now looking like the model for Airstrip One.

Governments are useless at most everything

It has been amusing, if somewhat predictable, watching the unravelling of the 'Obamacare' healthcare legislation in America. The US Government spent $200m on a health insurance website that doesn't work, but that is the least of the problems. The penny has finally dropped for most Americans that their existing health insurance plans will have to be abandoned and a more expensive scheme purchased, giving the lie to the name of the legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The British National Health Service is held up by Britons and by all advocates of socialised medicine worldwide as the exemplar for state-run healthcare, even to the extent of it being the centrepiece of the London Olympics opening ceremony (in a disgusting misappropriation of the supposedly politically-neutral Olympics for political ends). God knows why - as this Forbes article reports, you are 88% more likely to die of breast cancer in the UK than in America and less likely to survive all other major forms of cancer. So, why would Americans want to give up private medicine for socialised medicine?

In my consulting business in recent years I've been doing a lot of work for the New Zealand Government, much of it quite important stuff in terms of delivery of the Government's main policy initiatives. I work for government because Wellington, my home town, does not have much of a private sector any longer (and I've blogged on Wellington's economic situation before). In my work I see many public servants who are dedicated to their work and who genuinely strive to serve the public to the best of their ability. But I see a great deal of incompetence too - monumental computer systems failures like the Obamacare website, construction projects that produce buildings that are faulty from the day they are finished and ships that can't serve the purpose for which they are acquired.

The problem is that some of those who work in government believe that there is no limit to their role and moral mandate, that they can poke their noses into any area of citizens' lives that they see fit.  Any problem, be it social, economic, scientific or environmental is not so daunting that our elected representatives and unelected officials don't think they can fix it. Never mind that they have no expertise in the field concerned - there is always some patsy 'expert' (usually an academic with no practical experience of the subject) ready to support their view that the problem can be fixed by more government interference in citizens' lives.

The truth is that government can never compete with the market in terms of providing solutions to human problems. The reason for this is obvious - the market is the collective result of millions of people applying their knowledge to achieve individual goals, whereas even in the largest government agencies there can be only ever a fraction of the effort and wisdom applied to the problem. The market will always beat the bureaucrat and those who work in government should have the humility to accept this.

The Narrowing Gap Between the Forbidden and the Compulsory

I was recently talking with a friend of mine about the inexorable encroachment of the power of the state into every area of our lives and he made a very insightful comment. There have always been things that are forbidden by the government - traditional crimes against person and property such as murder and theft; and there have always been things that are compulsory as well - taking care of your own children, for example. For most of the last few hundred years, in Western nations at least, the gap between these two areas of state proscription has been large and the State did not consider it to be its business to interfere in areas as broad as where and how you work, whether you save for your retirement, whether you make provision for personal medical care, how you are educated, what you eat and drink, and what you sell to your neighbour. We regarded countries that did try to interfere in all these areas of its citizens lives to be feudal and dictatorial.

The West, led by Britain and the United States of America, valued individual liberty and rights as important foundations of their ways of life. Of course, individual liberty and rights were not absolutes and there were significant exceptions to the rule, such as slavery in the United States before Emancipation, but the general principle was that the state left people alone unless there was good reason not to.  It is this principle that has been abandoned in much of the western world today where governments consider it not only their right but their responsibility to interfere in every area of every citizen's life. The gap my friend talked about is now almost non-existent. Sure, there are a few areas of increased personal freedom such as around the removal of state sanctions against homosexual relations, but the generally the trend has been far in the other direction.

Today we face new challenges to the narrowing gap that remains. Governments across the Western world are trying to ensure we do not say or do anything that is contrary to the narrow view of acceptable behaviour as defined by the small, often unelected, elite in the executive branches of our governments.  These people claim the right (often disregarding legal and constitutional restraints on their power) to watch our every move, listen to everything we say and read everything we write. As always, they claim this is for our own good, to protect us against poorly defined threats and enemies. They often claim these powers are temporary but of course they never give them up.

In the past the mainstream media would have carried the flame of the protests against this encroachment of the state but now most in the media are apologists for it. There are a few who are prepared to stand up and act against this existential threat to free, democratic society from within. Edward Snowden is one of the few. He has exposed illegal an unconstitutional activity by the US Government against its own citizens. Americans should stand up for Edward Snowden before it is too late.

Maggie Thatcher was my Prime Minister

I was in my early 20s when I went to live in England. Maggie Thatcher had already been in power for several years. The Falklands War was won but she was still doing battle with the miners' union and others who wanted to return Britain to the stagnation and apathy that characterised life in Britain since the Second World War.  British politics in the decade up until Thatcher's election was the politics of appeasement – successive governments caved into the unions and left-wing grievance groups and the moribund economy reflected a lack of enterprise and initiative that was evident to any visitor.

What I most admired about Maggie Thatcher was her courage. She was an outsider, not part of the Tory establishment at all. She was a compromise candidate when she was elected to lead the Conservative Party following the inept Ted Heath, but she quickly made the job her own. It is often a characteristic of great political leaders that their greatness does not become evident until they step into the leadership role.  I am sure that few people in the Conservative Party in 1975 would have realised that they were electing a leader who would go on to become the longest serving British prime minister of the 20th century and one who is now remembered by many, including me, as the greatest peacetime leader of the current era.

Her critics today accuse her of enriching the powerful at the expense of the little man, but my experience of living under her leadership was the opposite. She was very much of her lower middle class origins and she never forgot it, priding herself on knowing the prices of groceries and empathising with the difficulties of the average family in making ends meet. She took on the entrenched interests of the unions, but she also took on the rich and powerful. At the same time as she was pursuing her policy of a "property owning democracy" forcing local bodies to sell their huge holdings of council flats and houses to tenants, she was also doing battle with the Dukes of Westminster and Cornwall, the two largest property owners in Britain (the latter, of course, being the pseudonymous title of Prince Charles) to sell ground leases that their families had tightly held for many centuries to the leaseholders.

I didn't agree with everything that she did it. For example, I think she prolonged the conflict in Northern Ireland (although, to her credit, it has emerged subsequently that she initiated secret negotiations with the IRA that ultimately resulted in the Good Friday Peace Agreement).

Her historical achievements will be recognised long after her petty critics are forgotten – winning the Falklands War at a time when Western nations seemed incapable of winning any sustained military battle, staring down the Soviet Union together with Ronald Reagan with the resulting collapse of that evil regime and, most of all, showing Britons that they could once again call their country "Great."

I think the best tribute to "our Maggie" came from MP George Galloway, who is best known for his support for the murderous President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Galloway said that he hoped Maggie Thatcher rotted in hell.  I am sure Maggie would not be upset by such a comment from a thug like Galloway.  In any event, if that is her final destination, I imagine she will be sitting there clutching her handbag, drinking her glass of sherry, and pressing her point in a debate with Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin and Winston Churchill.

Maggie Thatcher demonstrated that a person of principle could stand by those principles and still be elected leader of a major Western nation.  The unprincipled, weak-willed, expedient politicians who dominate the leadership of almost every Western government today would do well to observe her example.