Sea Change

We all know that the first rule of the modern world is to expect the unexpected. Corbyn, Brexit and Donald J Trump. Ex-Russian spies poisoned with nerve agent in Salisbury and ex-Russian journalists emerging alive in Kiev, having been assassinated less than 24 hours earlier. There’s really nothing that should surprise us. That Irish referendum last weekend though. A huge victory for women and a turn of events that would not have been predicted a year ago. Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar took a big risk when he pushed ahead with the poll on a pretty tight timescale. He was vindicated by a spectacular 2:1 victory for liberalisation that would simply not have been possible in 20 th Century Éire. This was, after all, a country in which the conservative Catholic Church was completely entangled with the state and the expectation was that people would always defer to the religious order. No more. But the surprise referendum produced another twist. Suddenly attention w...

David Davis is the guy who knocked on the door and persuaded you that your roof needed fixing, when it actually didn’t. He and his mates have been half-heartedly hammering away for an hour or two and you’re a bit worried about the end result, so you insist on inspecting the work when its finished. Once you’re up on the ladder, he’s dismissing your concerns and telling you that everything’s fine. He’d love to spend more time on it, but unfortunately the crew is off to another job. And that will be five grand please. So as Parliament gives itself the right to ‘scrutinise’ the final deal and hold a ‘meaningful’ vote, let’s not get carried away. All the ridiculous hullabaloo over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court a year ago demonstrates that such rights are meaningless unless you’re prepared to exercise them. Let’s think about the likely scenarios. Perhaps there isn’t a meaningful deal for Parliament to vote on. Some Brexiters online speculate that the insistence on t...

I had a short, but fairly intense, discussion with an avid Brexiter about the EU referendum the other day. His fundamental case for voting to break away on June 23 rd was to reclaim British ‘sovereignty’. He yearned for a country with a Parliament that could make its own laws. Of all the arguments advanced by the ‘leave’ campaign, the reclaiming of sovereignty is, to my mind the least compelling. Merriam-Webster defines the term as ‘unlimited power over a country’ or ‘a country’s independent authority and the right to govern itself’. It sounds fine in principle. Who could possibly disagree? But what exactly does it mean in the world of 2016? Naturally I’m keen for the UK Parliament to retain power over matters that affect the British people. But over the past 20 years or so, we’ve made decisions that have transferred much of that power to other bodies, institutions and executives. The Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament are the most obvious examples, although the London Ma...

I do feel sorry for fans of Jeremy Corbyn. No, seriously.  There’s a hell of a lot of psychological turmoil involved in playing follow-my-leader these days. I was talking to a Corbynista recently and she admitted that she signed petitions to protect the BBC, even though she didn’t actually watch or listen to any of its output. She’d gone ‘indie’ in recent years, feeling that the Corporation had abandoned its remit as a public-service broadcaster and simply followed a Tory agenda. In other words, she buys into the narrative – quite common now on the left – that the ‘mainstream media’ cannot be trusted. But still she goes through the motions with the ‘save the BBC’ stuff online, perhaps out of some residual loyalty to what she imagines the institution might have been. Pretty weird stuff. Hard to get your head around. No doubt, when confronted with the European referendum on 23 rd June, she goes through the same agonising process. In the eyes of the Corbynit...