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Evening in America
Evening in America
Editorial
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Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commis-sioner, serves as an inspiration for the main character in ‘Borgen’,
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The EU has been the most important force for social, economic and environmental progress and peace, in Europe – no petty agendas – for sixty years
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The people who brought us Brexit didn’t know what the effect of the breach would be. No one did; or does. Leading British Leave campaigners, including Boris Johnson, appeared to consider that Britain could retain access to its single market but implement some limits on free movement. In fact, if Britain is to be in the internal market for goods then it will have to accept, on all existing precedents, free movement of people, the application of EU rules that it will have no part in framing and the continuing surrender of substantial financial contributions to the EU budget. Even then it will not have full access to the internal market in services such as banking, hammering the British economy. Unfortunately for the UK, a lethal blend of ignorance, racism and manipulation of an undereducated and vulnerable working class, genuinely threatened by globalism and immigration (which on balance serves the country well) by opportunists in the Tory Party and UKIP, threatens the fundaments of the country’s economy and polity. It is primarily because it is a class-riven society with low educational standards that the UK, or more particularly England and Wales, has chosen to exit. Anyone with an understanding of history or economics would not want the EU’s collapse or Britain’s exit. It turns out that average levels of education of the people in a region correlate strongly with their Brexit orientations. People in areas where many residents have college degrees were far more likely to vote Remain, particularly in central London, where more than two thirds of the city population has a bachelor’s degree. Ironically but encouragingly, hosting a sizeable immigrant population seemed to sway communities against Leave, and denser cities tended against Leave, overall. Other factors mattered less. The median age of a community, despite the much emphasised youths-versus-retirees clash that many said would define the referendum, ended up correlating only slightly with how the vote actually went. Nevertheless it appears that of 18-24-year-olds, the age category that’s going to have to live with the consequences of this vote for all of their working lives, 75 percent voted to stay. Among over 65s the figure was only 39%. Britain is fissured to the detriment of the most dynamic, outward looking and young. Behind the now spreading turmoil, Europe faces extraordinary crises: from immigration to terrorism, from declining competitiveness to inequality to climate change and species loss. In the Netherlands, once a bastion of tolerance, at the moment Geert Wilders is topping the polls. He is “channelling” Donald Trump, with slogans like “Make the Netherlands great again!” He is preparing for a general election early next year – promising that, if he becomes prime minister, his first act will be to call an in/ out referendum on EU membership. Prime minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals, with 47 per cent in favour of staying and 45 per cent in favour of going it alone. Marine Le Pen, ascendant in Presidential polls, is promising a referendum in France. In Italy the populist Five Star Movement has emerged as Italy’s leading political party, overtaking Matteo Renzi’s ruling Democratic party and promising a referendum. There is a dangerous democracy-light nationalist government in Hungary and a court-ordered Presidential re-election in Austria that may facilitate the ultra-rightist Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party. In the face of all this, the EU, led by secondraters cynically put up precisely because they are second-raters, has no plans beyond regurgitated schemes to boost EU economic growth through investment, to agree greater co-operation to boost security, and to work on creating job opportunities for young people. Above all no simply-stated fresh Vision for a volatile continent. The EU, if no other institution, needs charismatic and accountable leaders with big and popular egalitarian ideas. Let’s hear more about an agenda of people not capital or bureaucracy, of equality not commerce. The EU needs to become an agent of equality and the environment, driven in every case by efficiency, accountability and the common good. This institution, once so sharp and so idealistic, needs urgently to register a new Vision and a Passion for progress. In 1992 the Danes voted to reject the Maastricht treaty. The Irish voted to reject both the Nice treaty in 2001 and the Lisbon treaty in 2008. The Netherlands rejected the Maastricht treaty in June 2005 by a stinging 61.6 per cent. There were revotes in every case. The UK has two years to withdraw from the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. It is likely there will be a general election within that period. Indeed since Brexit has precipitated a 10% decimation in the value of Sterling, extraordinary stockmarket volatility and will lead to job losses – in financial services but more importantly in the English heartland that voted Leave, it seems likely that there will be time for a realignment of British politics to the centre, occasioning a Remain majority that will have a mandate to call a new referendum. It is to be hoped that such a referendum would concentrate the minds of Britons on the benefits of the EU, as well as of the EU on the need for a revamped Vision and Message. Before it really is too late.
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1916 and the ongoing danger of conservative revolution
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If there’s been one new idea introduced into the discourse by the 2016 commemorations, we haven’t registered it. The Rising was an irrational response to a colonialist foe. The proper approach would have been to analytically survey the strengths and weaknesses of the occupying power, and to have respectively avoided and exploited them with the view of achieving specific military and then political goals. The fact the Rising was a martyrdom, with in Pearse’s case a Resurrectionist underpinning, is a very bad start to a nation. This has been debated for its ethical ramifications but the political ramifications have been more dangerous and pervasive. The indulgence of mythology in politics pervaded the civil war and the parties it spawned, the 1937 Constitution and the perpetuation of non-specific Republicanism with no stress on parties that would actually stand for something like an ideology, most obviously a left or right agenda, or the data-and-evidence-based policies it might have spawned. Connolly himself considered some of the revolutionaries were motivated, according to Edward Townsend in his recent history of the Rising, by “either vacuous romanticism, or a mindless commitment to ‘physical force’ without social content’”. The Proclamation came nearly a century and a half after the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Men. It should have been more secular and more explicitly egalitarian. While celebrating the training of its “manhood”, it did at least summon both men and women to the cause, though why it didn’t just refer to people is a good question, the phrase “suffrages” suggests some form of parallel franchises may have been intended, and worst of all for some (ungallant?) reason Cumann na mBan’s role is not registered in the Proclamation, though it is generally recognised as the unsung third participant in the Rising. The Proclamation should not have summoned in aid any (expansionist German) gallantry from Europe, assuming it was viscerally anti-colonial. It is not difficult to summon declaratory or constitutional principles. It was not then and it is not now. The principles must be transcendent. They must not date. Equality, Freedom, Sustainability, Efficiency, Openness would have done it. Article I of the Declaration of the Rights of Men [sic] isn’t bad: “Men [sic] are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good”. Not getting it quite right (and the replacement of the brutally executed culturally imaginative 1916 leaders by mediocrities and religious zealots) opened the door to the mean weirdness of the 1937 Constitution which is invoked in the name of the holy spirit “from whom is all authority” and recognises the special position of its womanhood but only because of “her life within the home”, and the associated “duties”. If Ireland in 2016 is not serious about either ideology or policy it is in part because the grounding documentation of the republic depends on mythology, on religion, on machismo. None of our politicians seems imbued with an iota of political philosophy and it passes for a credo to believe in a Republic (as opposed presumably to a monarchy) without any positive definition of what precisely that imports, for then, for now, forever. This is no small thing. 100 years on we still have parties with no ideology and no driving policies. We have a short-termism which survived one of the worst governments in the history of the state. We have as our two biggest parties, dinosaurs almost indistinguishable the one from the other. We have a Labour Party which is prepared to sell out a fundamental vision each time it enters government and we have radical left parties that prefer to campaign on opposition to water and property taxes rather than promote the simple internationalist socialist message of equality. Indeed ironically this ‘revolutionary socialist’ stance is rooted in the campaign-for-the sake-of-it mentality that drove most of our revolutionary conservatives. The proclamation and its idealistic progenitors looked to the past and the present. Their analysis was not inaccurate. But they did not lay down any or any adequate template for the future. Their lack of interest in doing so partly explains the lack of interest of our current political generation in doing so. 1916 has left us bereft in 2016.
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The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the election and its participants were a two-out-of-ten failure. Commentators from the equally idea-free media have interpreted the results in heterogeneous ways. Every sort of theory and cleverality was deployed to describe the drearily and precariously hung Dail: a triumph of democracy, a triumph of social democracy, the end of the civil war, the end/beginning of the beginning/end of the civil war. The perennial smart view that the electorate has failed the parties got several outings. If the second-rate sages had been able to they would have loved to interpret it as a triumph of angry white men. They couldn’t. Some saw it as a victory for the small parties and independents. But the Social Democrats did not increase, Renua was wiped out, the Greens gained only two seats in an era of climate-apocalypse. The People Before Profit/ Anti-Austerity Alliance finished up with only one more seat than they had before the election, and Direct Democracy did not gure. Before the election these were the only small parties. The truth is that this election was a triumph of the interchangeable FF/FG (FG/FF) duopoly, though its trajectory has been definitively defined as downward. Ideology is what political parties apply when they run out of policies. Since most of the parties’ manifestos are short and the events to which policies must be applied are unpredictable it is reasonable to expect that your candidate will have an ideology to guide her. Village for example favours an agenda of equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability. The ideology is comprehensive, it provides a solution for any situation, and a template against which policy formulation can be benchmarked. Candidates shouldn’t have to reflect Village’s ideology, but they’d be better having some sort of one. Neither civil-war party has an ideology. It is impossible to know what they will do once elected. How, therefore, could anyone who does not live under a stone be enthusiastic about a government of FF and FG? FF is a conservative party that believes in so little that it surrendered its entire ethos to a culture of provincialism and cronyism, last time it was in government. It believes in no more now so, though it is touting a centre-left agenda there is every danger it will return to populism, short-termism and promoting the only agenda it understands – the interests of the people its representatives actually know – a cronyist populism that always finishes up favouring those who shout loudest. It is naïve to think of FF as Micheál Martin and when it is the movement it has always known itself to be, of Eamon OCuív, of Barry Cowen, of Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher; and tens of marginally more presentable sons and daughters of best-forgotten FF dynasts. Kevin O’Keeffe, son of Ned O’Keeffe, anyone? FG is a conservative party currently dressed up as a Christian Democrat party. The ethos is exible enough that under Garret FitzGerald it was in effect Social Democrat. In its latest incarnation it has been right of centre, at a time when most people want fairness and an improvement in services. It failed to deliver an agenda of accountability and its representatives seem to believe in little beyond sound money, ‘Europe’ and law and order. Having once appeared to be purer than FF it is now tainted by the Moriarty Tribunal report and a perceived ongoing proximity to Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, as well as by its large number of low-grade County Councillors, whose corruption record is a hairsbreadth from as bad as FF’s. Though essentially conservative, both FF and FG contain some social democrats and liberals in their midst. These aberrations and those who vote for them are delaying the day a real Social Democratic party with coherent left-of-centre platform can become a force that could anchor a government. On the other hand it is clear that more people than is desirable voted FG in 2011 to get FF out and then FF in 2016 to get FG out. These people need to acknowledge that they are forces forconservativism. The incarnation of this is the dangerously articulate Éamon Dunphy who apparently voted FF in 2016 because he really believes in People Before Profit (or Sinn Féin. It isn’t clear). Anyone who thinks that FF was the solution to our problems in 2016 is part of the problem. So what next? FF and FG should merge as a conservative party though even coalition is for the moment some way off. FF is tactically sharper than FG and FG is in retreat so it is likely FF will tantalise FG to weaken and demoralise it during this Dáil. Nevertheless the (non-)ideological compatibility of the parties has been exposed and will generate its own momentum. While allowing this momentum its space the Left of all hues must use the logic of the momentum against FF and FG, and social democrats must colonise some of the space the dinosaur parties have occupied for tragically long.
