Remembrance

Yesterday and today the British commemorate the people killed and injured in military campaigns: the official ceremonies are usually focused on those who were serving the crown in the armed forces and the police, fire and ambulance services [as in the London bliz and in Northern Ireland], but allied and associated units are also remembered as thought appropriate. In Australia and New Zealand 11 November stands coequal with Anzac Day, when those two countries recall the carnage wrought upon the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps [hence, the Anzacs] under incompetent British generalship at the invasion, siege and retreat from Gallipoli in the First World War. That tragedy is regarded as the episode that made both Antipodean countries aware that being loyal to the British crown - or even to the British Empire - was not the permanent best bet for the future of their peoples. So far they have stuck with the monarchy, but it is very widely anticipated that on the death of the Queen both countries will take the opportunity to review their constitutional position.

It is absolutely incredible that the Queen still reigns in Australia and New Zealand - obviously, under total constitutional restraint - 101 years after the disaster of the Dardanelles became apparent. It is incredible that Britain and Northern Ireland settled down in 1919 to live under a constitutional settlement that was temporarily patched up until the Irish Free State could be set up in the 'twenties without full-scale war between the Republican/Fenians and the Ulster protestants: a conflict in which the British army, navy and newly-minted Royal Air Force would have been of ambiguous loyalty.

I have mentioned in recent days that the headbanging Brexiteers will not have their way because the Irish question will prove intractable. Peace in Ireland can only be maintained - 99 years on from the first Armistice Day - by keeping the Good Friday Agreement and all that stems from it. Edward Heath combined his failed attempt at peace in Ireland [epitomised in the Sunningdale Agreement] with Britain and Ireland joining the European Common Market together in the expectation that the two would eventually surrender their statehood to the 'ever-closer Union'. John Major led huge steps towards peace in Ireland based on keeping the UK tightly within the Union [as it had become with the agreement - however completely understood - by Mrs Thatcher]. Then the apparently fresh, young Tony Blair was able to bring the process to a very satisfactory conclusion entirely within the EU context. Ireland has always been a major constraint on British policy, and anyone who dismisses that issue as unimportant in the run-up to 'serious' Brexit negotiations is in for a very major shock.

Returning to the main point of today, we can note that the monarchies which had obviously been defeated in the war - the many sovereign German princes, the Empire of Austria and Kingdom of Hungary, and [in effect] Russia - were wiped out; and red revolutions were attempted in Vienna, Budapest, Munich and Berlin. Soldiers with their weapons in hand put down the risings in central Europe, while the navy and the army mostly sided with the workers in Russia to permit Lenin to grab power.

But in Belgium, where much of the country had been devastated by the war, the king returned as a national hero. In Britain during the war there had been rumblings about the king being a German - which, in ancestral terms, he was - leading to the proclamation of Windsor as the royal family surname. The king loyally supported his ministers, while intervening to keep crass generals - first French, then Haig - in supreme command even though their stupidity could not be concealed. Haig accepted assurances that the third major assault on the Somme, known as the Battle of Paschendael, would succeed because such an efficient artillery barrage would be launched before troops were sent 'over the top' that all the barbed wire in front of them would be destroyed and 'not even a rat' would be able to survive the gunfire. The men went over the top, the barbed wire was in place; and as soon as the artillery barrage was lifted the Germans restored their machine-guns to be ready to slaughter the British, Canadian and Indian infantry who were sent forward. Then came the rain, and the churned-up ground turned to deep mud; but Haig sent more and more troops forward for four months, until the Canadians' capture of a small ridge of land enabled the idiots at HQ to proclaim the battle a 'success'. That was just one of the most conspicuous, crass, wastes of human lives that went on from Mons in 1914 until November 11, 1918.

Almost every street and every extended family in the United Kingdom - including, then, Ireland - suffered casualties. Yet the regime, the politicians, the generals and the king were exonerated from blame: individual generals were the subject of loathing from conscripts whose companions had been killed, injured and deprived of their reason as a result of the commanders' stupidity and arrogance, but the regime was not seriously challenged on the mainland of Britain. However, the losses of the war - in men, industrial output wasted, foreign debts incurred and international power - could not be ignored. So a huge propaganda effort, such as had never before been seen, was launched: with massive effect. A temporary 'Cenotaph' - a tall plinth for a coffin - was erected in Whitehall for the first anniversary of Armistice Day, and 'the Glorious Dead' were honoured as national heroes. A couple of years later the 'unknown soldier' was disinterred from a war grave in France and moved to Westminster Abbey, so that every bereaved mother could imagine that her son would ever after be honoured by kings, princes and politicians. That could only continue if kings and princes were kept in place; and so the regime was more deeply cemented in national sentiment than ever before.

This is a spectacular achievement, adopted throughout the Empire and the United States; and with a similar set of events in France and Belgium. Its force in maintaining the socio-economic order is rarely recognised: but the Irish dimension is again being exposed.

Tinkering With Time

During the First World War it was considered a masterstroke to create 'daylight saving': now known as 'summer time'. The idea was copied among the combatants, and during the second such war most countries adopted it, with several opting for a period of 'double summer time' to increase the effect of shifting the clocks forward during the northern summer.

This was in a horsepowered world, where almost all factories and homes were lit by gas, as were the streets and places like railway stations. The best force in the Second World War, the German Army, suffered in Russia particularly badly because it was still reliant heavily on horsepower, and as the horses died [often to feed the under-provisioned troops] the mobility of the army was massively diminished.

At the end of the Second World War it was simply taken for granted that the annual shift to summer time, by at least one hour, was economically [and thus militarily] efficient; and summer time was carried forward all over Europe. In the few years when the date that Britain [or some other country] opted for a different date from other countries' choice to change the clocks, massive chaos was ensured. So even though Britain's clocks are one hour behind those on the continent all year, the date on which they shift to summer time is mutually agreed.

There is now a growing lobby of those who argue that with a different technological environment there is no need to retain summer time. Poland has indicated that they may opt out of the shift to summer time as early as next year. There then follows the subsidiary argument, should a fixed all-year time be based upon the present winter time, or on one [or more] hours away from that?

The UK was able to impose the Greenwich meridian as the zero point for the global navigation system, and Greenwich mean time followed as a norm for the Empire [only after the failure of a huge push from the French for the Paris meridian to be adopted]. It seems obvious to Brits that if there is to be a standard all-year time frame it should be Greenwich: after all, the mornings are brighter for more of the year that way, and street lighting nowadays is sufficient for children to get safely home after school. Farmers point out that their animals do not understand the eccentricity of humans shifting clock-time, so they have to work by GMT all year anyway.

There will be no quick resolution of the issue, even after Brexit; but it would be a relatively low-cost way of the Brexiteers emphasising the difference that quitting the EU could make; regardless of what the Poles may do.

FOOTNOTES:

1. I was not at all surprised when the 'heroes' of the Catalan independence movement scuttled off to Belgium yesterday. Their stance always seemed to be a posture; but I did not think that they would cave in so completely. People who believed in them must be hugely disappointed, especially the young. As all the opinion polls show that the minority in favour of independence is shrinking, even without the unnecessary police violence in the recently aborted 'referendum', it seems that the election this December will settle the matter, at least for a generation. In this context, the flight of the leadership should be a major turning point.

2. Equally unsurprising is the gathering news that crooks and spivs joined the Trump bandwagon last year; and some are now being arraigned. The whole campaign was an ad hoc affair: populism necessarily depends on such eclectic coalitions, and Trump himself is not necessarily damaged by the present revelations.

Catalonia and the European Union

The Spanish state, with the specific endorsement of the King, has made very heavy weather of the ongoing attempt by a bunch of Catalan nationalists to set up an independent state. These Nationalists have achieved a majority in the regional parliament; but there is no reason for an external observer to believe that there would be a majority vote of eligible electors in Catalonia in favour of full international statehood if a full and fair referendum was held. Many Catalans are dubious about the prospect; many other Spaniards live within Catalonia who value to unity of the state, and many non-Spanish EU citizens may have voting rights.

The regional government was crazy to hold a 'referendum' that the central government simply had to declare illegal and disrupt. The very heavy-handed methods used by some police will affect the debate for months to come, and will scar some people for life [and some of them will pass on visceral hatred of 'Madrid' to future generations].

It appears that up to a quarter of the population did manage to fill in ballot forms - the exact number will never be known - and the regional authorities announced that 90% of the votes they have received were in favour of a split. Thus they claim that they will declare 'independence' within a few days; and bring their region under Spanish martial law. A few individuals will leap onto a bandwagon from being demonstrators to seeking 'martyrdom', mostly by getting themselves imprisoned but some  may put themselves at risk of being killed, either in skirmishes or by committing terrorist offences which could be subject to the death penalty.

The exclusive responsibility for bringing the situation to such a crisis point lies on the regional government. It has no evidence that even a narrow majority of the population wants this high level of confrontation; even if they do resent the net payment that is extracted from their taxes to support the less-affluent areas of a large and complex country. The regional hotheads have mistaken a populist fad for a massive and well-founded 'national' consensus of the Catalans: and in so doing have set back the negotiation of a well-justified extension of their region's autonomy for a generation.

While individual politicians all over the EU have expressed regret at the heavy approach from Madrid, the EU institutions have been united in support of the central government, which is the member of the Union. There are far too many minorities, all over Europe, who would claim various degrees of separation - ranging from autonomous status to full sovereignty and EU membership - or their allegedly separate status. Hence the Union shrugs off such disruptive aspirations, and [in the way of all bureaucracies] discounts the claims of populist 'nationalism'. Left over from the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, a couple of million 'ethnic Hungarians' live in Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine. Slovakia grants minority rights to the Hungarian language and to Hungarians, but takes careful steps constantly to adjust county boundaries so that none of then ever shows a majority Hungarian population that could then opt for secession [notionally taking their Slovak minority into an alien state]. Left over from Stalin's ruthless realignment of frontiers and populations in 1944-8 are at least twenty million German descendants of the expelled populations of East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, Danzig, Sliesia, the Saxon settlements of Transylvania, Sudetenland and many more areas that were ethnically cleared.

Bundled into a single country as Belgium, Netherlandish-speaking Catholics were allocated with French-speaking Walloons and given a foreign king to 'unite' them: a bizarre settlement that just about works, but is repeatedly threatened. Two small German-speaking areas were allocated to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty, and remain within the state with local linguistic exceptionalism. It is now a strange thought that most of Napoleon's 'French' subjects did not speak Ille-de-France French, but used a whole host of regional languages; many of which are related to what is spoken in other territories under different governments, as was his own native Corsican patois. A rigorous policy of enforced use of French was imposed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: most notably on the Germans of Alsace and Lorriane between the two world wars. Several regions of Italy are home to vissiparous movements; and there is no clear linguistic frontier of demarcation between Poland and Belorussia or Ukraine. Latvia and [to a lesser extent] Lithuania and Estonia have an uneasy endowment of Russian-speakers whose families were settled there by Stalin.

Ireland is providing a serious sticking-point in the Brexit negotiations. Brittany and Cornwall have minorities who cherish a fondly romantic view of their common separateness from the states in which they subsist. Hundreds of thousands of Austrians were given Italian first names by decree in the South Tyrol when it was ceded to Italy as a shabby reward for its belated entry into the First World War on the winning side. Greece still prevents the statelet of Macedonia from using that name because it has its own province of Macedonia, complete with a suppressed Slav minority population.

In the ignoble but undoubtedly aristocratic tradition of Metternich, the EU simply prefers not to know about these nationalist issues. In the high-level scenario building around Brexit, some ScotNats though that there was a chance that a suddenly-independent Scotland could retain the UK's membership of the EU. The fact that there has been a decline in support for independence since the referendum on that subject opted for retention of the UK made a snap referendum too risky; and EU sources made it clear that a post-Brexit breakaway Scotland would have to go to be back of the queue for EU membership applications.

Spain has now been brought to the brink of a massive and wholly unnecessary confrontation, by a minority of a minority who are trying to impose a new constitutional order on a putative statelet. They are more appallingly ignorant even than they are overwhelmed by ambition. It will be tragic when people start getting hurt as a result of their irrational ambition.

Democratic Deficit

One of the discredited Rating Agencies has downgraded Belgian government debt: apparently on the grounds that they have not had an established government for well over a year. The cause of the bickering between political parties arises from an excess of democracy, that pretty well ensures that there is never a predominant party with a parliamentary majority. Belgium's policy options are restricted by the fact that the state is a member both of the European Union and of the euro: the national capital, Brussels is overshadowed by a few buildings within that city from which the EU is run and by Frankfort where the European Central Bank is located. Every opinion and brand of Flemish nationalism is represented in the Belgian Parliament; as are all the factions and aspirations of the French-speaking Walloons. This wonderfully democratic outcome is impotent: the politicians can't agree formally how to share out ministerial posts, so they have just shuffled the pack and carried on from week to week as 'caretaker' ministers; and operationally it doesn't matter. But cosmetically it looks untidy, so Standard & Poors have chosen to give Belgium a kick by reducing their rating from AA+ to AA: this will license market traders to have a whirl at making a bit more money by selling Belgian debt short: a great game for the insiders, and a worry for ordinary folk, who know that policy on trade and industry is made by the EU, and well understand that the euro is completely beyond influence from any Belgian government.

A Belgian is President of the EU Council of Ministers, but he has no power: he can merely try to co-ordinate 27 heads of state and heads of government. The EU Parliament remunerates it members exceptionally well, in the combination of salary [related to the local parliamentary salary in the members' home countries] and EU expenses; but they have no real power. The Commissioners are nominated by the governments of the member states without any convincing pretence of democratic consent. Britain's Commissioner is a Labour Party hack who has never held national elected office, was totally unknown to the public on her appointment [made in haste when the sitting Commissioner was recalled to serve in Brown's despairing government], and whose rare appearances on the British TV News cause a surge of national embarrassment.The democratic deficit on the EU probably exceeds 100%.

The new Italian and Greek Prime Ministers are described as 'technocrats'. The 'technology' that they are supposed to understand is Economics, the discredited subject whose practitioners sanctioned and applauded all the excesses that have created the crises in business and in personal and in governmental debt; that none of the 'Atlantic economies' has yet begun to addressed effectively for the long term. They personally applied their Economics in bringing their countries into the tissue of lies and false hopes that enabled a very disparate group of countries to create the euro. They went on to occupy cushy roles in the unaudited EU mechanism and now have been set up as proconsuls for their cronies. They are part of the problem, not of any radical solution.

Germany has a carefully drafted democratic constitution, with a special court to protect it and a Chancellor who grew up as a subject of a militarily occupied satellite state. She is committed to democratic principles  and is accutely aware of the fraud that was committed by the founders of the euro. She is reported to be viscerally unwilling to legitimate the lunacy that has created the state debts of those eurozone countries that have systematically [and knowingly] lived beyond their means by 'monetising' those obligations under a German guarantee. So she is pressing for something like a democratic structure to be created, within which at least part of the eurozone can move close to fiscal union [a united tax and budgetary system]. Ms Merkel is not prepared to guarantee past follies and frauds in the mean time.

The EU has never been even slightly democratic: the 'European project' is the imposition of an elite who have drawn on the widespread fear of European wars to justify their own job-creation machine. Any currency zone that adopts Merkel's principles will certainly be smaller that the eurozone of seventeen states that is just about surviving into another week. A German-led outcome may be a eurozone shorn of the weaker bretheren, or it may be a Neumark zone comprising Germany, Austria, Croatia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia, probably Belgium, and possibly France, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. The Czech Republic, Hungary and the Scandinavian EU members would probably be welcome to apply to join once the system were up and running. The 'Club Med' countries would not be considered for candidacy until their devalued euro - or their separate currencies - had well stabilised and their balance of payments was restored.

Britain's desperate imbalance of payments and its structural budget deficit would become even more conspicuous when it drew comparison with the Neumark bloc. It would become clearer that party politicians cannot solve the problems, and the yaa-boo antics of the House of Commons and in the TV  'question' programmes would move from being a national joke to become recognised as evidence of the failure of the entire political structure. The British situation is worse than that of the EU: it is worse than a democratic deficit: it is an advanced case of defective democracy. This tragedy has been developing for several decades: in Can Britain Survive? [1971] Ken Watkins and I wrote:
"...there is a kind of auction of popular programmes carried on by the major parties, in which the highest bidder tends to win the lot. Since the parties do not wish to commit political suicide they are, willy-nilly, compelled to act accordingly. The fact that this inhibits them from tackling the fundamental structural weaknesses in the in the economy can be seen from the study of the elections since the end of the Second World War."
The same political auction game has continued unabated for forty more years! The deep defects of democracy, British-style, will not easily be corrected; and yet only when that correction has taken place can a rational economic strategy be formulated: then implemented over several decades. If the democratic defect is not corrected by completely fresh democratic means; a less democratic solution is quite likely to intervene.

The oldest current Constitution in the world, that of the USA, is not directly under threat. But American commentators from all segments of the political spectrum are worried about a failure of their institutions to provide clear policy in a very grave national crisis. Franklin D Roosevelt was - in effect - given exceptional powers to lead the economy out of depression, and he continued to exercise exceptional powers, sanctioned by Congress and unimpeded by the Supreme Court, for the Second World War. Harry S Truman had barely begun the process of surrendering the special powers when the emergence of the Cold War brought the Marshall Plan. Then came the Korean War, then the long stalemate of the nuclear confrontation. After 1991 the US was the unique superpower and the Clinton presidency was the first 'normal' incumbency since the mid-nineteen-thirties. It led to impeachment proceedings and a reassertion of party politics over constitutional propriety. George W Bush was continuing with the diminished role when 9/11 created a crisis and led to two overseas wars. The role of the Commander-in-Chief was once again unquestioned, and guided by the Vice-President and Secretary of Defence it transcended constitutional propriety. The limits to US global power were challenged and the end of hegemony was slowly acknowledged. Obama came into office in a diminished power and he has faced the full force of a resurgent, if uncomfortable, congressional democracy. His fluency became his greatest failing: he was unable to listen to and to interpret the diverse dialogues that had been unleashed by the collapse of the financial system and the weakening of the military-industrial complex. The attempts at bold initiatives to deal with the human consequences of the crisis that he has promoted seem to be based on the European welfare state from the nineteen-fifties: which the Europeans themselves are having to abandon under the burden of debt with which it saddled them. The result is that the USA has its own, very specific demcratic deficit: it is a real and urgent stress-point, that has been confronted by a dialogue of the deaf in a polarised Congress that exactly mirrors the depth of division in the country. Meanwhile, the prophets of economic Armageddon are having a bonanza.