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Leadsom vs May – Two Risky Options

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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The very qualities which make Theresa May an awful Conservative leadership candidate on domestic policy mean that she is best equipped to handle our tough secession negotiations with the EU in Brussels. But the future leadership of the United Kingdom cannot be viewed solely through the lens of Brexit…

Dr. Richard North perfectly captures this blog’s dilemma in trying to choose between two highly sub-optimal candidates for Conservative Party leader and the next prime minister:

With a final contest between May and Leadsom, [if] Leadsom wins, we are faced with the great danger of having a woman as prime minister who has little understanding of what it takes to negotiate a successful withdrawal from the EU, and no capacity to develop that understanding.

On the other hand, if May is elected, we are faced with a danger just as great, in having a prime minister who brokers an exit plan which is so successful that we end up stuck with it, and in a position far worse than we are at present.

If this sounds perverse, it is. What we are seeing from the “remains” is a sudden enthusiasm for the Efta/EEA or “Norway option”, an option which, prior to the referendum, they had all been falling over themselves to demolish.

This, as readers here well know, we support as an interim option, acknowledging that it would be completely untenable for the United Kingdom in the longer term. We thus look for a different end game, which then takes us out of the EEA – with other Efta members – leaving the Agreement to collapse.

Unfortunately, the opposition is wise to the flaws of the EEA option and, from the Robert Schuman Foundation, the intellectual heart of the EU, we see proposals to modify the EEA to such an extent that it will soften some of the worst features of the EEA, and thus weaken the pressure to move on.

Dr. North goes on to describe the chicanery by which this might be accomplished – basically by making the EEA Council rather than the Council of the European Union the lead body in approving single market legislation, tackling the (already disingenuous) complaint that being in the EEA means accepting all of the rules while “having no say”.

While superficially appealing, this could lead to Britain being permanently parked in a significantly sub-optimal position on the edge of a still-integrating Core EU in which the eurozone would inevitably be dominant. It would certainly undermine one of the key benefits of Brexit to an interim EFTA/EEA access “departure lounge”, namely the restoration of Britain’s right of reservation which we could apply to new regulation which threatened to inflict significant or unacceptable harm on our key industries or vital national interests.

But while a Theresa May premiership increases the risk that Britain is sucked into a sub-optimal “associate member” status on the EU’s margins, Andrea Leadsom would do almost the exact opposite – invoke Article 50 almost immediately and then effectively let Jesus take the wheel, hoping that something satisfactory is miraculously negotiated within two years. Having recently started to appreciate the true complexity of the global trading and regulatory environment, largely thanks to my involvement with The Leave Alliance, it is immediately apparent that Leadsom’s cavalier approach to our EU secession negotiations is fundamentally unserious, no matter how genuine her euroscepticism.

Leaving aside issues of personality, experience and gravitas – for few could seriously deny that May would be the more formidable negotiator to fight Britain’s corner – it is hard to see how a Leadsom negotiation could succeed when the candidate seems sure of little besides her impulse to take Britain out of the EEA, making our trade subject to the EU’s common external tariff in the far from certain hope that doing so dramatically cuts immigration.

Therefore, from a purely Brexit-related perspective, Theresa May seems (counter-intuitively) to be the better choice if we want to maximise our chances of escaping from the EU’s always-tightening political union while disrupting trade as little as possible – even if this means that we have to remain permanently vigilant to ensure that May does not backslide from her commitment that Brexit means Brexit.

But of course this Tory leadership election is not only about Brexit – though our secession from the European Union is by far the most important issue on our national plate, and will be for some time. Still, other issues cannot be overlooked entirely. Foreign policy, civil liberties, economic freedom, education, healthcare and the role of government matter enormously too. And in many of these areas, Theresa May is extraordinarily deficient.

This is why I cannot simply swallow my distaste and endorse Theresa May outright. All of these other policy considerations must also be factored into the mix – which is what I shall attempt to do in my next blog post.

 

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Top Image: BT

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Quote Of The Day

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

 

“Not all Remain voters think the white working classes are ignorant, parochial trash, but all people who think the white working classes are ignorant, parochial trash voted Remain.”

– Brendan O’Neill

 

A welcome, witty and accurate antidote to the sanctimonious “not all Brexiteers are racists…” guilt by association theme doing the rounds on social media (and echoed by much of the commentariat) at present.

 

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George Osborne Must Resign, Now

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Worse than useless

Ben Kelly of The Sceptic Isle makes a devastating case for George Osborne’s immediate dismissal from the Treasury:

During the campaign Osborne forgot his responsibilities as Chancellor and showed himself willing to damage the economy by deliberately fomenting uncertainty and prophesising catastrophe. This has aggravated the economic fallout in the aftermath. He wasted £9million of taxpayer’s money on pro-EU leaflets and converted the Treasury into a partisan propaganda machine. He pressed public officials to publish dodgy dossiers predicting economic doom if we left the EU. This can only have increased the cynicism that the public feel towards politicians and damaged the reputation of the Treasury.

For the entire first weekend after the referendum, with the markets panicking, George Osborne apparently went into hiding. We needed him to offer reassurance and some indication that the Treasury was prepared. When Osborne finally appeared he made it “very clear” that the country would be poorer following the people’s decision to leave the EU. In an interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme, he repeated his pre-referendum threat of a tax increases and spending cuts. Instead of offering reassurance he is making the situation worse and rather than revealing contingency plans he has petulantly insisted that “it was not the responsibility of those who wanted to remain in the EU to explain what plan we would follow if we voted to quit the EU.” This is the second most powerful man in our government abdicating responsibility.

With that, it became abundantly clear that he could no longer perform his role as Chancellor and was incapable of restoring economic confidence. With this man in charge project fear will be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

We now know that Wolfgang Schäuble issued his warning that we couldn’t participate in the Single Market if we left the EU at the behest of George Osborne. I have no doubt that in time we will find out that the Chancellor spent the months before the referendum making many calls and pulling in favours in order to boost his fear mongering campaign. Just think about that! A British Chancellor appealing for authoritative institutions and economists to warn that the British economy was weak and risked collapse outside the EU. Has there ever been a Chancellor so aggressive in his desire to run his own country down?

Remainers now point to our current economic turmoil as proof that they were right all along, but it was always inevitable that a political decision of this magnitude, with such huge potential for change, was going to cause economic uncertainty and short term pain. Now we need people in government to restore confidence and map out the future. The Chancellor who has been actively sabotaging our economy is the wrong man for the job. There should be no place for him in government.

Osborne took a huge gamble with a scorched Earth policy, he lost; and we are now suffering the consequences. Now he must go. It is too late to do the honourable thing now, but he can at least finally do the right thing and signal his intent to leave office when the next Conservative leader is elected.

I am very sympathetic to Kelly’s argument. It would be one thing if George Osborne had graciously accepted the result of the referendum and then immediately and publicly got to work ensuring that Britain’s sails were perfectly trimmed as we sailed into the short-term storm of post-Brexit hysteria. It would definitely have been positive if Osborne had pulled a secret Brexit plan from his back pocket and set the Treasury to implementing it.

But Osborne did none of these things. The submarine chancellor did as he always does – disappear for days on end while others take the flak, appearing before television cameras only when it absolutely cannot be avoided (such as at Treasury Questions in Parliament).

And while it was inevitable that there would be market turbulence following geopolitical news of the magnitude of Brexit, it is hard to deny that Osborne almost certainly exacerbated this fallout – the steepness of the fall in the pound, the stock market fluctuations, the delayed investment decisions by firms – by endlessly catastrophising Brexit in his failed bid to win the referendum for the Remain side. Of course this was a difficult line for a Remain-supporting chancellor to take, wanting to make his case but careful not to “talk down Britain” at any point. A true statesman would have successfully trodden this fine line. George Osborne stepped way over it.

But most damning of all is the way that Osborne helped to furtively arrange for senior foreign voices – politicians, NGO heads and others – to make their own interventions in our national EU referendum debate, actively putting words in their mouths. In many cases these words turned out to be unduly harsh and threatening words, representing the chancellor’s own bluster more than the sincere and considered opinion of the speaker concerned – which is why we are now seeing partial recantations from the likes of Wolfgang Schäuble.

As the EU referendum campaign drew to its hysterical, bad tempered climax, this blog openly wondered what T-word best describes a senior serving politician who deliberately seeks the help of foreign leaders, business moguls and NGO heads to bully and threaten his own people into making a certain decision.

I do not regret floating the T-word for a single second. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne debased and demeaned himself and his high office. He came down hard on the wrong side of the most profound and existentially important question to face Britain since 1945, and made almost zero preparation for the eventuality of a “Leave” vote in the referendum. By his words and actions he sullied both the tone of the EU referendum campaign and contributed toward the subsequent instability.

As Ben Kelly says, the time for George Osborne to do the honourable thing has long since passed. But this failed chancellor – who proved himself unable to deal with Britain’s deficit and unable to plan strategically in the event of a Leave vote – must now do the right thing and quit the British political scene at the earliest responsible opportunity.

 

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Top Image: Daily Record

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Andrea Leadsom vs Theresa May – An Impossible Choice, On Which The Fate Of The Conservative Party Rests

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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At this difficult time we can take inspiration from our recent history and our last successful effort at national renewal

So it’s Theresa May versus Andrea Leadsom – the final two candidates in the Conservative Party leadership race whose names will now go forward to the wider Tory Party membership in September.

I’m delighted that the Conservatives will soon have given Britain her first two female prime ministers, I really am. When it comes to equality of opportunity the Tories deliver, while Labour bang on endlessly and fruitlessly about equality of outcome, peddle in tawdry identity politics and choose one white male after another to lead them onwards.

But does the successor to Ted Heath Mark II David Cameron really have to be one of these two women? When she entered 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher already had the “Stepping Stones” report in her pocket and on her mind. By contrast, Andrea Leadsom brandishes an overhyped yet still rather thin CV, while Theresa May has your entire internet browsing history and the paranoia to use it against you.

And so, when deciding who to support in this battle to be the next British prime minister I find myself faced with an impossible choice – one may as well flip a coin.

This blog will inevitably write more about the Conservative Party leadership race in the coming days and weeks as I try to make a decision – right now I see pitifully few upsides to either candidacy, and great risk behind either option.

But for now I content myself with re-reading the seminal “Stepping Stones Report” authored by the late John Hoskyns, that masterful diagnosis of everything which ailed Britain in the late 1970s when the state socialist cure had almost succeeded in killing the British patient.

This report – and the solutions contained within it – quite literally saved this country when Margaret Thatcher, who had studied it, came to power in 1979. Without Stepping Stones, Britain would quite likely be a colder, more populous but equally poor and dysfunctional version of Greece. I say this to underline the amazing good which the Conservative Party can do when under the right leadership, and the thread by which such hopes often hang (Margaret Thatcher was considered a rank outsider when she first declared her candidacy for the Tory leadership in 1975).

At this time I am drawn to this passage in particular:

We must know what a Tory government will have to achieve, before thinking about the way in which it must win office, because simply “winning a majority” on the wrong terms may not give it the authority it needs for success.

In normal times a majority is enough. The task of government is to steer a basically healthy socio-economic system past hazards which are primarily external, while ensuring that the system’s fabric is maintained and making improvements to it here and there.

But once the system itself starts to show signs of fatigue, instability, disintegration, then we start to talk of discontinuity. In discontinuity, solutions can only be found by breaking constraints which we had assumed were unbreakable. It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.

It is safe to say that the Conservative government of David Cameron and George Osborne has been in office but not really in power since being re-elected with a tiny outright majority in 2015. And aside from their creepy manifesto pledge about having “a plan for every stage of your life” it has been almost impossible to discern what the Tories actually stand for, besides staying in power.

Winning a majority has not been enough because the majority was won on the wrong terms – by a prime minister who often pitched himself to the left of Tony Blair in the tawdry hunt for centrist votes. And these are far from ordinary times. As this blog recently pointed out, quoting Lincoln, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

Theresa May is an accomplished technocrat, but also a fierce and implacable authoritarian. Even her more restrained actions – such as denying the former London mayor Boris Johnson the power to use his expensively purchased second hand German water cannon for crowd control – smack more of political chicanery rather than any shred of liberal principle.

On civil liberties, May is utterly monstrous. But more to the point, Theresa May came down on the wrong side of the most fundamental, existential question to face this country since the end of the Second World War.Worse, she supported the Remain campaign with a calculated half-heartedness, refusing to boldly commit and make the public case for her position. What kind of leadership is this?

Andrea Leadsom is no better. She has publicly and irresponsibly spoken about triggering Article 50 almost immediately, well before any initial scoping discussions have even had the opportunity to commence and well before the British government has had the proper chance to decide how best to implement Brexit, and seems intent on taking us out of the EEA as we secede from the European Union. Her haste is not evidence of super-virtuous commitment to democracy or an uncommon respect for the will of the people, but is the conclusion reached by what seems to be a rather glib and uncurious mind.

But whether you are less repulsed by the flinty-eyed authoritarianism of Theresa May or the oversimplifying, CV-padding antics of Andrea Leadsom, it seems reasonable to say that neither of the two remaining candidates have anything approaching a latter-day Stepping Stones report waiting in their pockets for immediate unveiling as soon as the Queen has invited one of them to become prime minister. And that is what we need most of all right now.

Theresa May’s authoritarian streak, contempt for civil liberties and belief in wielding the coercive power of the state is incredibly objectionable to this blog – yet as by far the more experienced candidate, May is best placed to negotiate good secession terms for Britain with the EU (assuming that she doesn’t double-cross us and effectively condemn Britian to “associate membership” on the margins).

Andrea Leadsom has precious little track record in government or politics in general, and has distinguished herself by saying some downright irresponsible things about Brexit. As a result, she could potentially overshadow the democratic dividend of Brexit through unnecessary self-inflicted economic wounds (e.g. by taking Britain out of the EEA). Yet she is superficially more Thatcher-like (I won’t say Thatcherite), and has the potential, however small, to grow into a far more radical Conservative leader than the soul-sappingly ideology-free Theresa May could ever be.

Choose May and you risk turning Britain into a dystopian police state while rewarding yet another ideology-free, politics-by-numbers technocrat, the kind of person whose unambitious, managerial approach to the great issues of the day turns millions of people off politics altogether.

Choose Leadsom and you risk a tumultuous and highly suboptimal form of Brexit while taking an enormous leap of faith that an untested neophyte will successfully get to grips with one of the steepest learning curves in the world, and that they will be advised well in the process.

Who can choose between these two flawed options with any degree of certainty?

 

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Top Image: ‘Stepping Stones’ Report

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Of Course Brexit Will Not Solve The Housing Crisis

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Build. More. Houses.

Rosamund Urwin has a rather strange and unnecessary piece in the Evening Standard warning us that Brexit will not miraculously solve the housing crisis:

Brexit may well enable a fast-moving few to buy, but I doubt it can offer a solution for the majority of those who want to escape renting. It’s like letting crows snack on a carcass; the rest of the aviary will still need feeding later too.

Although it may make the average home cheaper, Brexit is also expected to deplete the number of homes (including the “affordable” variety) being built. There’s a shortage of land earmarked for residential construction in London, partly because developers keep most of their vast landbanks as empty plots, rather than putting homes on them. Given the uncertainty Brexit has unleashed, developers are more likely now to delay or mothball schemes. That will exacerbate the shortage of housing stock long-term.

To top that off, building will soon incur bigger bills. The cost of imported materials has risen with the sliding pound and labour costs would increase without EU workers.

I don’t know a single person with a functioning brain who thought for a moment that Brexit would solve the housing crisis.

The only thing which will ever solve the housing crisis – bar a lethal smallpox pandemic that wipes out half of the population – is the one thing that successive cowardly, pathetic governments have not done: Build more houses.

“But this government is committed to building a million new homes by 2020“, whines David Cameron in protest. Does he want a medal? Net migration is running at upwards of 300,000 per annum. Even the government’s most sunny estimate of future housebuilding means less accommodation per capita in 2020 than there is today. Every month of this dithering, prevaricating (and now leaderless) Coke Zero Conservative government is a month when demand for housing further outstrips supply.

If you were captain of a sinking ship, taking on hundreds of gallons of water a minute, you should not expect to be hailed as a hero for filling your coffee mug with seawater and flinging it overboard instead of plugging the massive hole in the ship’s hull. It is a worthless gesture which makes almost zero difference – much like the government’s furious pretence that building more council houses and cooking up various “help to buy” schemes is a fitting response to a festering national crisis.

It’s all quite deliberate, of course. To actually build the number and type of new homes that Britain needs – in the cities, and upwards not outwards – would cause house prices first to stagnate and then to fall. And since houses in Britain are now revered more as an investment vehicle than somewhere to put the flat screen TV and shelter from the elements, we are now blessed with a generation of politicians more than happy to waffle on about the housing crisis but loathe to do anything to tackle it.

Dishonest, NIMBYish politicians are what stands in the way of resolving the housing crisis and putting the dream of home ownership back within reach of millions of hard-pressed middle class Britons. Brexit makes little difference either way.

Unlike education or healthcare, the solution to the housing crisis is actually as simple as it looks. But we continue to tolerate politicians who almost take pride in conspicuously doing nothing about it.

 

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Top Image: Telegraph

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