Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Ever wanted to weave grass? If so, this is your place.
- News on the possibly imminent traditional Easter strikes.
- Here's something from El Paìs - in English - on our Galician drug barons. The source of our local wealth that never makes official stats, I suspect.
- I find it hard to believe anyone wants to be the next leader of the Tory Party. And almost impossible to believe is the claim that there are as many as 12 such aspirants. Which surely proves you have to be mad - or a raging psychopath - to have high political ambitions.
- It's surely obvious by now that none of the Brexit outcomes on the table can last very long. Even if there's no Brexit, the issue will return quite soon. As it will, if there's only a BINO. Macron is right to fear that the Ex-empire will strike back. But wrong to believe that letting the UK go will be the end of the matter. Perhaps when the EU breaks up as a whole.
- Meanwhile:-
- Brexit has broken the system – prepare for a European-style realignment of politics. See the first article below for details.
- I have long suspected this . . . In one respect, however, we remain proudly uncontinental. Talking to Austrian friends about the great Brexit “mess”, I detected, along with a fair amount of Schadenfreude, a sneaking admiration for the democratic theatrics that the House of Commons has been providing.
- Politicians need to rebuild trust. Our political class said the economy would be the thing most damaged by voting for Brexit; in fact the greatest casualty has been the reputation of the political class, thanks to its hysterical predictions, broken promises and incompetence.
- The Prime Minister’s tragedy is that she cannot see her time is up and that she must go; the Conservative Party’s tragedy is it lacks the courage to tell her.
- Something that prompted thoughts of Fart: Nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex.
- The White House is increasingly streamlined in order to maximise presidential power. “It all streams up to the executive, that’s how he likes it,” said another former administration official.
- Says Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University: Seventy years ago this month Nato was established to protect western Europe and the freedoms of its inhabitants from the threat of Soviet communism. It has become clear to me that we now need a similar organisation to protect western intellectuals from a growing threat to academic freedom. See the second article below for his (persuasive) rationale.
- We live in an era that prizes warmth and informality yet has also rendered such ease of manner a minefield. Well, yes. Certainly in the Anglo-sphere but much less so in (still) tactile societies such as Spain
- More people a year are killed by their collapsing sand structures than are killed by sharks. But who fears sand?
1. Brexit has broken the system – prepare for a European-style realignment of politics: David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics.
Watching our exasperating Brexit dispute from the safe distance of Vienna, where I was staying for the past month, it struck me how strangely Europeanised our party politics has become, with the prospect of it becoming even more so as our party system reconfigures.
In one respect, however, we remain proudly uncontinental. Talking to Austrian friends about the great Brexit “mess”, I detected, along with a fair amount of Schadenfreude, a sneaking admiration for the democratic theatrics that the House of Commons has been providing.
In a Europe of often sterile national parliaments – where people tend to read out pre-prepared texts and vote along the lines of deals agreed between party leaders – our domestic drama has provided a refreshing alternative. Since the 2016 referendum we have been having an intense family argument and, unlike the gilets jaunes challenge to the authority of the French state, with little violence.
That said, the lack of a government majority since the 2017 election has had the effect of “Europeanising” party politics by creating a kind of nascent multi-party democracy within the tottering structures of the old two party, first-past-the-post, system.
The case for the traditional two-party system is that it provides decisive government, albeit at the price of disenfranchising quite large parts of the electorate and making it harder for new political forces to emerge. By contrast European-style multi-party democracy with various forms of proportional representation (PR) is more fluid and open but tends to hand out vetoes to more political players and can therefore lead to stasis.
So May’s Withdrawal Agreement has been blocked not only by Labour but also by the SNP, the DUP, the Liberal Democrats, the inner Tory party ERG grouping, and could in plausible scenarios even be blocked by the new Independent Group of MPs.
European political classes have developed over decades the skill of cross-party consensus building to unlock vetoes that our own adversarial political class lacks, admittedly exacerbated by two further factors: the rigid political style of Theresa May and the fact that the main opposition party is led by members of an unclubbable, far-Left political tradition.
A further Europeanisation looks likely as the parties reconfigure away from socio-economic class politics to socio-cultural identity politics. Initially this is likely to be a top-down movement, exemplified by The Independent Group of MPs, as the parties adjust to the fact that less than a third of voters strongly identify with the party they voted for in 2017 but more than three-quarters strongly identify with their Leave or Remain vote.
Whatever happens, the Tory party is destined to become the Brexit party. But that means a more overt working class-middle class alliance clustering around the sort of “hidden majority” policies represented by the 2017 Tory manifesto (shorn of its suicide clauses about social care). That means: market-friendly but social democratic in economics, broadly liberal in politics and somewhat conservative in social and cultural matters.
That begs many questions, of course. What is “somewhat conservative” for one thing? It would surely not mean reversing gay marriage, for example, but it might mean greater respect for more traditionalist, Roger Scruton-esque sentiments in social policy and, say, making it easier for one parent to stay at home for longer when children are very young.
But a low immigration, high-ish public spending party that throws money at universal credit, builds more social housing and nationalises social care (to save middle class people having to sell their houses) would be a potentially popular British version of Christian Democracy, speaking for the suburbs, smaller towns and countryside.
I happened to see this nascent potential future Tory party on show at George Freeman’s Big Tent political event last September when Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was shouted down by Tory activists in a debate about the future of capitalism for taking the traditional low-tax, free market line.
Meanwhile, the more socially liberal voting bloc based in London, the metropolitan centres and university towns will be divided between some version of the old Blair/Cameron status quo – a Chuka Ummuna/Nick Boles double act – and the new model Labour party which will be aggressively “woke” socially and statist in economics.
Curiously, this leaves little room for the old Thatcherites who occupy the free market, low tax, pro-business but socially traditionalist corner of the graph, what one might call the golf-club voters. They might have to vote for the Nigel Farage party. The other disenfranchised group is young people who are militant about sex and race equality but don’t like a big state and high taxes.
Although one can see the outlines of these three parties already emerging, lasting political reform tends to come from the bottom up not the top down: see the emergence of the Labour Party in the early 20th century or more recently the Five Star Movement in Italy. A new grand constitutional settlement, including greater representation for English voters and a reconsideration of PR-type voting systems, would hasten bottom up reform but does not seem imminent.
Yet it seems pretty obvious that our two party, first-past-the-post system belongs to an earlier age. Continental PR systems are appropriate for a more fluid age with a more diverse and less class-conscious electorate.
Moreover, they have more successfully absorbed, accommodated and domesticated legitimate populism by giving it a political voice. Once given political responsibility, some populist parties, like The Finns in Finland, have split between pragmatists and true-believers. Others, like the Freedom party in Austria, have been largely co-opted and de-fanged by the larger centre-Right coalition party.
A good recent example of this has come in Italy where the Five Star Movement (and Liga Nord) have both been seduced by the anti-MMR vaccine cult. But when the Five Star education minister was faced with thousands of school children going down with measles, the party abruptly dropped its opposition to vaccinations.
People used to say, rather smugly, that populism had been held at bay in this country by our first past the post voting system. But the truth is it just took a different and, ultimately perhaps, more disruptive form, by focusing on our exit from the EU.
But changing the voting system can only get you so far. The big problem that we are facing in the future is that it is easier to fashion compromises over socio-economic differences than it is over socio-cultural ones like national identity, immigration and the pace of social change.
The 1970s socio-economic log-jam was eventually broken by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. The value impasse between liberalism and social conservatism cannot be broken in the same way. It must instead be transcended by a political leadership that can build bridges between the two ways of thinking and being.
2. Join my Nato or watch critical thinking die: Niall Ferguson
A new red army is out to silence debate. We must rise up and resist it
Seventy years ago this month Nato was established to protect western Europe and the freedoms of its inhabitants from the threat of Soviet communism. It has become clear to me that we now need a similar organisation to protect western intellectuals from a growing threat to academic freedom.
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by 12 governments in Washington on April 4, 1949, was a treaty of mutual defence “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. Article 5 of the treaty states that “an armed attack against one or more of [the signatories] . . . shall be considered an attack against them all”.
It would be an oversimplification to say that this alone deterred the Soviet Union from attempting to extend its power any further west than the River Elbe. Nevertheless, the commitment of successive American presidents to Nato, along with the presence of US troops and missiles in western Europe, may be said to have worked. During the Cold War, Moscow sought to expand its influence in Latin America, the Middle East, east Asia and Africa. It left western Europe alone.
In those days a small but courageous group of western academics did what they could to expose the wickedness of communism and to support political and religious dissidents in the Soviet sphere of influence. A member of that group was Roger Scruton. During the 1980s he travelled to communist-controlled Czechoslovakia to assist an underground education network run by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin. In 1985, during a trip to Brno, Scruton was arrested and expelled.
A philosopher of international renown, a prolific author, a composer and a polymath, Scruton has one of the most powerful minds I have encountered. But he is one of those rare thinkers who seek to change the world as well as to understand and explain it. There was a time when those qualities were venerated. In 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit by its then president Vaclav Havel, himself a former dissident. A knighthood came in 2016. And last year he was appointed chairman of the government’s commission on buildings.
Almost immediately after that, however, the attacks from the left began. The campaign against him culminated last week in the publication of a cynical hit-piece in the New Statesman, which misrepresented his views on a number of issues — the influence of George Soros, China’s policies of social control and the origins of the term “Islamophobia” — in order to portray him as a racist. The government took the bait. James Brokenshire, the secretary of state for housing, immediately sacked him. A spokeswoman for the prime minister described his comments as “deeply offensive and completely unacceptable”.
In reality, Scruton had been framed. The author of the New Statesman hatchet job, George Eaton, had edited quotations and inserted his own commentary with the clear intention of getting him sacked. He further massaged the “gotcha” quotes (“outrageous remarks”) on social media. Having achieved his objective, Eaton jubilantly published a photograph — later deleted — of himself drinking champagne from a bottle with the tagline: “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.”
A month rarely passes without some such tale of a conservative academic being “taken down”. In March it was the turn of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was informed by Cambridge that the visiting fellowship he had been offered by the faculty of divinity was being cancelled. The reason? At a book signing he had been photographed standing next to a man with a T-shirt bearing the (obviously facetious) slogan “I’m a proud Islamophobe”.
Before that it was the US political scientist Samuel Abrams, who now faces a “tenure review” at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His thoughtcrime? An article pointing out that academic administrators are even more left-leaning than professors.
January’s cause célèbre was that of Peter Boghossian, a philosopher at Portland State University, who is being investigated by his own institution. Why? Because he was one of the perpetrators of the brilliant “grievance studies” hoax, which exposed the ease with which supposedly scholarly journals could be duped into publishing bogus articles.
Then there’s Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who has been suspended for more than a year because of highly questionable allegations of sexual harassment. I have a hunch those allegations might never have been made if Fryer, an African-American, had not published a paper concluding that the police did not, after all, use lethal violence more readily against black suspects than white.
And let’s not forget Professors Nigel Biggar and Bruce Gilley, both denounced last year for daring to point out that not every aspect of the history of the British Empire was a crime against humanity. I could go on, but you get the picture.
In every case the pattern is the same. An academic deemed to be conservative gets “called out” by a leftist group or rag. The Twitter mob piles in. Mindless mainstream media outlets amplify the story. The relevant authorities capitulate.
The most striking common feature is the near-complete isolation of the target. Did Abrams’s colleagues step up to defend his (and their own) academic freedom? On the contrary: 40 of his fellow professors endorsed the student leftists’ demand that his tenure be reviewed. Did Fryer’s fellow Harvard economists question the way their only black colleague was being treated? Not one has publicly defended him.
My message to all professional thinkers — academics, public intellectuals, writers of any stripe — is this: we either hang together or we hang separately. Even being an avowed progressive won’t help you if you fail just one wokeness test, as Bret Weinstein did when he objected to the idea of a “day of absence” for all white students and faculty at Evergreen State College in Washington state.
A direct descendant of the illiberal, egalitarian ideology that once suppressed free speech in eastern Europe is now shutting down debate in the West. For those, like Scruton, who once helped Czech dissidents to get degrees in theology from Cambridge, the irony is bitter indeed.
The lesson of the Cold War is clear. From now on an attack on one of us must be considered an attack on all of us. I therefore invite all who believe in the fundamental human freedoms to sign a new Non-conformist Academic Treaty.
The present danger to free thought and speech is not Red Army tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany; it is the red army of mediocrities waging war on dissent within academia and the media. It is time to confront these people with the one thing that will deter them, as it once deterred the Soviets: massive retaliation.
Divided we shall fall. But united we can ensure that the reputation destroyed last week was not Sir Roger Scruton’s but the New Statesman’s.
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