Are We An Extreme Country?

In the run-up to the European referendum on June 23rd, I wrote a blog about the issues involved. You may have forgotten all about the referendum now as things have been very quiet in politics ever since. However, I thought that it was about time that I wrote a follow-up.

For those who missed the low-key coverage of the result, 37% of the country voted to Leave the EU, a result now hailed by the likes of Andrew RT Davies, Leader of the Welsh Conservatives, as being ‘a clear majority of the British people’. Whereas I would agree that 52% of those who voted did indeed vote to leave the EU, I do wonder why Mr Davies frames it in a way that is simply untrue. I have asked him on Twitter and he has not replied. However, this is hardly the worst untruth bandied about currently.

To show you a bit of balance, also peddling Twitter silliness is Leighton Andrews, former Minister for Public Services in Wales. He lost his seat in the elections in May 2016 and he lost it to Leanne Wood, leader of Plaid Cymru. I am unsure if I am being uncharitable in noting that he never misses an opportunity to criticise the woman who beat him. Leanne Wood, despite leading a party with a higher percentage of Remain voters than any other, has said that the referendum result must be respected and that the task now is to work for a settlement with the EU which will benefit Wales. This seems a remarkably mature and adult stance – sadly maturity is not catching. Leighton Andrews has been quick to take to Twitter to decry her as giving up and refusing to fight. I humbly pointed out to Mr Andrews what the result of the referendum had been (I suppose that he may have missed it). I had no reply.

In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, we had the evidence of the rise in attacks on anyone who ‘looked like an immigrant’. This had some particularly unpleasant manifestations, including when a friend of mine was talking to her child in Welsh and was cornered by a man demanding that she went back to Poland. Whereas we can all condemn these attacks and be fearful about what will happen when those making them realise that we will lose a large number of students and well-qualified EU professionals but they will still be served by a Polish waitress in their local cafe, it is easy to mistake this for simple racism. Never forget that there has been a 147% increase in homophobic attacks since June 23rd – the referendum result has not just encouraged violent racists, it has encouraged anyone who would use violence to enforce their idea of what ‘being British’ means. Remember, this is a world in which the Daily Mail can feel initially confident in using a headline attacking a senior judge for being an ‘openly gay ex-Olympic fencer’. They are not suggesting that being a fencer disqualifies you from having an opinion on the legal process of leaving the EU.

This is not going to get better. When Radio 4’s The News Quiz started with a question on leaving the EU, the audience sounded restless. Francis Wheen admonished them by saying that if they were bored of the topic now, how bored were they going to be in thirty years’ time when the first question on The News Quiz was ‘how is Brexit going?’ I would like to think that things will be settled in thirty years, but I suspect that he is right.

Meanwhile, further confrontation is being prepared. The word ‘betrayal’ is already being used. You know that this is the end point. There is a certain sense in saying that the EU needs the UK and the UK needs the EU. As many have pointed out, the supply chain for manufacturing any product is complicated and after forty years of integration within Europe, it cannot be disentangled easily. Basically, you want to make a ‘British’ product, you are probably moving your components around over borders as you do so. As soon as you start putting taxes and customs barriers in the way, you give a disincentive to anyone to involve the UK in the production of anything. A friend of mine gave the example of Airbus, who exist across various European countries because no single European country could take on the American and Russian aeroplane manufacturers on their own. If you make the UK an unattractive place to be part of the supply chain, you can say goodbye to all sorts of industry.

Forget the talk of proud and plucky Britain going it alone and the talk of the EU not needing the UK. Beyond the posturing, there is a sensible deal possible. Yes, someone is going to have to square the circle around free movement of labour and free movement of goods, but compromise is possible. Will compromise be acceptable though? I see any remaining link with the EU now viewed as ‘betrayal’. One of the 7/7 bombers was picked up in Italy on a European Arrest Warrant. That would be useful to have in place ... no, that would be betrayal of ‘the people’, who wanted to leave. One of the Leave campaigns has launched ‘Operation Beacon’, a plan for a co-ordinated series of demonstrations and disturbances to counter the ‘betrayal’ and Nigel Farage talks darkly about people taking to the streets like never before. It is as if the threat of violence is now a legitimate part of our political discourse.

Why not though? We are already there on social media. Gina Miller, an American sports presenter, started to receive e-mails this week that said ‘I hope you die. I hope you get cancer and die’ and much worse. This is because she shares her name with the woman who made one of the legal challenges to the government’s right to start negotiations without consulting Parliament. Note the wording here. She was not challenging the referendum decision or saying that the result should be reversed, it was a legal point about the limits of government action. You would not know that from the headlines about ‘the judges who blocked Brexit’ or interviews with people saying that judges should not be able to overturn the referendum decision. Andrew Marr did ask Nigel Farage what he thought of the abuse meted out to Gina Miller (both of them) and he replied that he had had abuse for years. Think about that argument – abuse is not worth complaining about because everyone receives it. How about a political discourse in which no-one receives abuse? Should we not be working for that? Besides, I wonder how many men threaten to brutally rape and torture Nigel Farage? I suspect that the abuse that women in public life receive is different to that received by men but, even so, I will say it again, how about condemning all abuse of public figures?

As someone who cares about politics, it is hard to see any hope in the current situation. We seem to be in a spiral of ever-increasing conflict and hatred, fuelled by those who should be showing a little bit of leadership in the face of extreme language in newspapers and online. Liz Truss was sworn in to her role as Lady Chancellor (I prefer that title to using Lord Chancellor for a female holder of the post) by committing to defend the independence of the judiciary. Clearly that was the bit of the job description that she thought that could quietly ignore once she got the job – you know, like making the tea for the whole office or updating all the Excel spreadsheets. It was only after several days of prompting that she gave a rather grudging support for the rule of law.

The Prime Minister is no better. I imagine her going into the Pumpkin Cafe Shop in Gloucester station and demanding a coffee. ‘What kind of coffee?’ she is asked, at which point she starts to yell ‘coffee means coffee!’ and refuses to be drawn on whether she wants a latte, a flat white, an Americano or something with Christmas sprinkles. Only this morning I was told online that ‘people voted to leave the EU, it’s simple’. It is not simple. Anyone who tells you that any decision that you make as an adult is simple has not ever had to deal with any problem, let alone complicated sets of international diplomatic ties. I did mention earlier that adult discourse is sorely missing in this debate.

Among my father’s collection of books I found ‘The Rise & Fall of the House of Ullstein’. It was written in 1938 when Hermann Ullstein fled from his native Germany to the USA. It is a history of the Ullstein publishing company but it is also an account of how the Jewish population of Germany was targeted and hounded by the Nazis. The key thing is that it was written before the Holocaust and all the horrors that came with it were known about by the general population of either the UK or the USA. If you wrote a history of the experience of a Jewish company owner in Germany in the 1930s now, you would probably feature concentration camps, ghettos and all that followed. Hermann Ullstein’s book gains from not knowing those horrors though.

Slowly but surely, he explains how the Nazis gained a grip on the national consciousness, allowing no opposition and portraying themselves as the guardians of the patriotic pride of Germany. There are some details I never knew – for instance, the Nazis removed pictures of Jesus Christ from churches and replaced them with pictures of Adolf Hitler. I feel as though Ullstein has a sense of frustration as the Nazis grow in popularity and otherwise friendly employees in the company start to say that maybe that Adolf Hitler has a point and he does seem very popular.

Comparisons with Nazi Germany should be used rarely and sparingly. We do not have concentration camps, we do not have pogroms, we do not have widespread terror. What we do have is a climate of ignorance and fear in which much can be achieved by those who find those emotions useful. Anyone who has studied politics (or even seen the film ‘Election’!) knows that you have those who propose laws, those who debate and make laws and those who enforce the laws equally on everyone. You can mess with the exact nature of those functions, but they are the key ones of law-making. However, it suits some people to claim that it is wrong (‘a betrayal’) for the judiciary to fulfil their function of deciding on the law. People are encouraged to think of judges as politically-motivated and ‘against them’. It is that easy to undermine the basis of our democracy but, no worries, the next time Vladimir Putin interferes with the judicial system in Russia, all the newspapers will be complaining.

Last Sunday I visited the Bull Street Quaker Meeting in Birmingham. A man there talked about having met a strict Roman Catholic friend while he was on the way to the Meeting House that morning. They vote different ways and have very different opinions on politics. However, they both agreed that the current political climate in the UK was horrific and that they were frightened for the future of the country. Both agreed that they had to work together to promote a more sensible way of behaving. He was shocked to hear people on the allotment expressing more and more intolerant views.

Are the people on the allotment different to the otherwise reasonable people in the Ullstein publishing house? Are we really on the road to extremism? Go and ask the Germans living in the UK who have been told not to speak German in public for fear of it ‘encouraging’ violence? Could we become a more extreme country? We are already there. The question now is how we try to get back.