Brexit: Trouvez la Femme

So now we know, for sure; definitely.

As on the previous Sunday, when I went to get a copy of the Mail to check on the context of remarks by Vince Cable, so yesterday I bought the Telegraph so that I could read exactly the piece attributed to Philip Hammond and Liam Fix. It was cited on the radio as representing the formation of a joint strategy for Brexit, and thus the conclusion of a cabinet spat that has been reported over this year's 'silly season' by much of the media.

It was a short piece, attributed to the two men [and doubtless accepted by them] but indubitably crafted in 10, Downing Street, and polished by party professionals. It represented what had generally been understood to be Mrs May's position ever since she made her sublimely idiotic remark that "Brexit means Brexit". Since it was coined, derived from 'Grexit' which meant the threatened departure of Greece from the eurozone, the term Brexit has simply meant "the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, in response to the referendum decision of 23 June 2016". Mrs May was asked how she interpreted the terms: did it mean withdrawal from the European Common Market and the Customs Union? Did it simply require departure from the political institutions only? What mix-and-match of possible options did she favour?

None of this has been clear: either in her much-cited 'Lancaster House Speech' early this year or in her disastrous election campaign. Nor has it been any clearer whether she favours a 'hard Brexit' [undefined] or some 'softer' version. Two things that do appear to be consistent in her few and often oblique remarks on the matter are:
1. Her proclaimed determination to reduce net immigration: the great 'failure' of her six year tenure of the Home Office which she apparently thinks she can achieve from Number Ten. If she does achieve it, she will alienate industry and commerce, the universities, and the immigrant communities from the Commonwealth who had seen a reduction in EU immigration to the UK as a chance for them to bring more friends and family members into the country.
2. Her equally definite declarations that there is no place in the UK post-Brexit for the European Court are equally likely to make for an extremely difficult negotiation with M Barnier on trade matters that should be straightforward.

Lewis Carroll, in one of the most brilliant satires on society, has a character declare that they can think of six impossible things before breakfast. Mrs May, without saying anything on those lines, has made it abundantly clear that she has one impossible thing on her mind all the time: the removal of the British economy from its European Economic Community context without significant damage to Gross National Product or to the standard of living of the mass of the nation.

It now appears that Fox and Hammond have accepted that they must both support this point of view, at least publicly and for time being. This is a consensus that cannot last. The crisis in British politics will continue: well done, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Odious Osborne!

Mrs May's Curtsy

I have no idea how many people in the UK yesterday watched the live BBC presentation of the scenes near Ypres, where a solemn commemoration was rightly being held to mark the centenary of the Third Battle of Ypres. As a child, I was soon aware that almost every older man in my circle had served in the First World War: they were tight-lipped about their own roles, but they all shared reflections of the sheer horror of the Somme and what I heard as 'Passiondale': the battle that was commemorated yesterday. What was really remembered - unashamedly - was the absolutely unnecessary slaughter that marked such events.

There has been a long-running debate about the generalship that sent tens of thousands of men to be [literally] drowned in mud, for no military gain whatsoever. It has fascinated me that there have been defenders of the supreme commander Haig - of the whisky family - and his colleagues, other than their own descendants; and that a sort of stalemate has been reached on the historiography of events like Ypres III. When it started to rain, heavily, on the third day of fighting and it became blatantly obvious that over the ensuing wet days the artillery shells from both sides stirred the land into deep mud, the campaign should - at the very least - have been suspended for long enough for the suitability of the ground to bear a battle to be reassessed. But no, the 'donkeys' at HQ threw more and more men into the slaughter: and no gain could be made for over a month, until dryer conditions returned.

The centenary ceremonies yesterday and on Sunday did not re-open the historiographical debate, directly; but the general direction of commentary was that the battle stood as an example of the utter waste and devastation that war can cause. In attendance were the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, the German Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister, various Belgian luminaries, Commonwealth representatives, and Mrs May: who read from the old testament of the Bible. For once, the prime minister's clothes were not bizarre: she had chosen to wear a smart black suit, with a hat that looked like it could accommodate a substantial beehive.

Had the prime minister been a man, he would have greeted the various royalty with a handshake and a 'neck bow'; which can be made to look like a friendly nod: but Mrs May went the whole hog, and curtsied: which is a pretty abject form of submission. It seemed normal for the Duchess of Cambridge to curtsy to the Queen of the Belgians - it's what royalty do, within the trade - but for the prime minister of Great Britain to make such obeisance to junior royalty in a foreign country in the second decade of the twenty-first century seemed strangely out-of-place and out of time.

It was even more surreal, for me, when the news bulletin that followed the broadcast from Belgium cited  a 'Downing Street source' as shutting down the open Cabinet rift over how Brexit is to be implemented. The prime minister had, apparently made it clear [before or during her trip to Ypres] that the free movement of EU citizens into Britain would end on the day in March, 2019, when the two-year negotiating period begun in March 2017 would end.

So while she was showing anachronistic subservience to present and future kings and their consorts, the prime minister was wielding the muscle of a modern head of government in the most damaging possible way. It will not be practicable to shut the ports and airports in March, 2019 without absolutely devastating the economy. There is no way a government committed to austerity that is working with a quantitatively and qualitatively devastated civil service can set up the border posts and the equipment and trained manpower that would be needed to effect a 'hard Brexit'. Far from reasserting her authority, Mrs May has again demonstrated her uncomprehending irrelevance.

This is not a matter to gloat about: it is as tragic for the people of Great Britain as were the events that the prime minister went to Belgium to recall.

Home-Grown British Bananas

The descent of the United Kingdom in the league table of banana republics continues apace.

The Mail on Sunday tells us that Mrs May is tempted to undertake a U-turn on student fees ahead of the anticipated election that is at present expected to deliver a Corbyn government, perhaps even this year. If the Tories plan to buy back any significant proportion of the student vote, plus the votes of people who are repaying student fees, plus those of parents who have made sacrifices to spare their children the full burden of potential debt incurred in higher education, they are going to have to throw billions of pounds a year into the pot. Since it is problematic whether students and ex-students will be conned so simply, it will be necessary to recover lost ground with the old: so guaranteed real-terms pensions and free transport will have to be retained, even if the winter fuel allowance is to be means tested.

Ministers are openly talking and writing, lobbying and leaking about the imperative need to retain some votes from the 25-60 age group by ending the arbitrary 1% cap on public sector pay increases in the face of rising inflation of the goods in the shops. Relaxation of that cap is inevitable if the National Health Service is to survive and the forces of law and order are to be maintained. As the probability of Mr Corbyn going to Downing Street is proclaimed more and more, so the potential that some self-appointed 'patriot' will attempt to assassinate Corbyn [whose record justifies extreme hostility to him in some quarters] increases. The level of protection allocated to Corbyn needs to be at least as much as the serving prime minister, regardless of cost: the nation could not afford another Jo Cox type of tragedy if some aide to Labour leader were to be struck down in an attempt on his life. So more millions of pounds will have to be found, whether Corbyn wants it or not.

Meanwhile the chaotic wanton self-destruction of the government continues. It is now announced that they intend to abrogate the 1964 London Convention by which fishermen from some European countries, including France and Germany, can fish within British waters up to six miles from the coast. The Convention was signed a decade before Britain's accession to the Treaty of Rome, so it cannot be construed as any part of our membership of the EU. But the government announces the intention to repudiate it now, carefully souring the attitude of the Continental members of the EU ahead of the Brexit negotiations. It will be interesting to see what other irritants and insults the government will be able to find, to ensure that the 27 remaining countries in the EU feel that they are well rid of us; and that they owe us no concessions at all.

It is increasingly painful to try to keep up with the News.