Category: Politics & Society

The rivalry of Britain and France since the late seventeenth century, starting as war and continuing as divergent views of the world, defines not just their relations with each other but, through a combination of depth and longevity, has affected the rest of the world more than the rivalry of any two other nations.

Isabelle and Robert Tombs are historians married to one another. Isabelle is French and mostly a historian of England. Roger is English and mostly a historian of France. As well as writing compellingly about how England and France viewed each other through their intertwined history, they add occasional debates where Isabelle articulates the French view of a period in history and Robert the converse. (Robert later wrote the absolutely superlative The English and Their History https://theobliqueview.com/2015/11/03/the-english-and-their-history-the-first-thirteen-centuries-by-robert-tombs.)

One of the joys of the book is the way it shows how one country’s national myth looks from the other side. For example, We are all currently delighting in Dunkirk, that defining moment (in perception and probably reality) in modern, perhaps all, British history when the island people snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by living to fight another day, giving refuge to those fleeing Europe to continue the battle against the forces of darkness and finally saving the world.

To France, Dunkirk was the moment the British deserted in the face of the enemy to leave France on its own against Germany. France’s plan had been to create a redoubt in Northern France, supplied from the sea, which would force the main German advance to divert north, away from Paris, allowing France to re-gather itself, as it had been able to do in 1914. Sure, the redoubt may have been liquidated but fighting the Germans was costly. Instead, the British, as they had threatened to do at similar vulnerable moments in late 1914 and early 1918, left. Who was it, do we think, who really held the perimeter at Dunkirk to allow Empire troops to embark? “England will fight to the last Frenchman”.

The flight from Dunkirk convinced France, Vichy and in due course Gaullist, that the only solution to the German problem was a deal with Germany. A strategy of containment was fundamentally flawed because it depended on an alliance with Britain that was unreliable. De Gaulle believed the differing destinies of Britain and France was all geography; France was a cape at the end of Europe, Britain an island. Perhaps, but the Tombs offer another view.

Their story starts in 1689. Our Glorious Revolution was, to the rest of Europe, when the Dutch successfully invaded Britain in order to prevent it becoming more fully part of Louis XIV’s sphere of influence. Britain under Charles II had been pro-France, fighting wars with the Dutch but had been a little semi-detached from the continental struggle. James II’s Catholicism and consequent policy threatened to move Britain into a fuller alliance with France to the detriment of its enemies. William of Orange struck first.

At that moment, Britain was a modest part of a broader alliance. France was, on all measures, the dominant force in Europe – population, land mass and wealth. Moreover, France, at that moment, was as much of an overseas power as Britain. It had a presence in the all-important Caribbean, as well as North America, North Africa and Asia. In 1689, you would not have concluded that Britain would become the dominant European and global power. So what happened?

Their narrative is that from 1689 to 1815, Britain benefitted from a self-reinforcing cycle where victory and the accumulation of overseas territories and assets allowed it finance ever greater sea power allowing it to accumulate yet more overseas wealth and so on. France started the period with vibrant Atlantic and Channel ports supporting merchant shipping and naval power. As, however, Britain naval power grew and suffocated French naval activity, the ports withered and economic emphasis moved to the east.

They remind us that there were many moments right into the Napoleonic period when France threatened to invade England and where it might have had a reasonable chance of success. Had it been successful, the story would have reversed. France would have continued along the path of maritime power. Even without a successful invasion, the paths taken by Britain and France were not straight. Britain’s defeat in 1783 at the hands of the French, nominally the Americans, led British politicians to believe their imperial days were over. They were back to where they had been pre-1689. But what finally emerged was that France became the dominant force by land and Britain the dominant force by sea.

That said, the Tombs do recognise there is more to it than accident. There were cultural differences. One of abiding differences was in relative formality and elegance. The British were relatively informal in their dress, manners, relations between classes, use of language, structure of literature and so on. The French were more formal and more elegant. They cover too the interplay between the two nations in social, economic and political ideas. There was much sharing. Britain was politically avant garde until the Revolution. Thereafter it seemed relatively reactionary. But some stuff does not travel. As the Tombs point out, the French have never bought into Adam Smith. An abiding French metaphor was that Britain was Carthage and France Rome.

Wrapping things up, the Tombs point to the profound gap between a top down and bottom up view; principle versus pragmatism. The British ask why you would stick with a plan when it evidently is not working. Why stick with a social model that creates perpetual unemployment? The French ask why you would sign up to plan with which you disagree. What did the British think “Ever closer Union” actually meant?

The irony, of course, is that, if Britain and France started in 1689 as divergent entities, by the twenty first century, no two countries are quite as similar as Britain and France on so many metrics. But in that time, despite our growing similarities, our sense of how the world does and should work has not converged. And because Britain and France remain influential powers, it affects others. If Britain and France are a couple in restaurant (John Bull and Marianne), when they argue, it is not with muted voices and sullen silence but with loud voices, gesticulations and calls to other diners to take sides. You cannot help noticing.

De Gaulle’s vetoes of UK membership of the European Economic Community in 1963 and 1967 look prescient in light of the June referendum. He seems to have been right that British membership would have been a mistake for the European Community. But, perhaps it was his vetoes that made the UK’s eventual departure inevitable. By making us join in the 1970s when we felt especially weak, rather than the 1960s, we ended up with a poor deal that we have forever after regretted.

This is one of the many points so ably made by Robert Tombs in his outstanding “The English and Their History” (https://theobliqueview.com/2015/11/03/the-english-and-their-history-the-first-thirteen-centuries-by-robert-tombs/). The UK’s relationship with the EU has been poisoned by the poor deal struck on entry in 1973 when Britain was at the nadir of its declinism. Indeed, if you had to pick a year between 1945 and 2016 when the UK was at its lowest ebb, when would you choose? 1973 looks a pretty strong candidate.

Let’s imagine, by contrast, that the UK had joined 10 years’ earlier in 1963. Sure, we had suffered a great loss of national confidence at Suez, but, so too the French, who had been in the fight. And they had had the disaster at Dien Bien Phu as well as defeat in Algeria. The UK was, in 1963, still a global economic and military power. De Gaulle’s “L’Angleterre, ce n’est plus grande chose” was not really true, otherwise he would not so have minded us joining.

Instead, by 1973, we had announced the withdrawal from East of Suez, endured a devaluation and seen industrial relations worsen. From the vantage point of 1973, the preceding 18 years since Suez had been of accelerating decline. So we struck a deal in desperation and it was a pretty poor deal particularly on budget contribution, the CAP and governance.

Margaret Thatcher then had to use her considerable skills and power to re-negotiate our relationship with EC to try to get the deal we should have had in 1973 with collateral damage to the national perception of the EC. Indeed, imagine that the UK had not joined in 1973 and it had been left to Margaret Thatcher to negotiate joining the EC ten years’ later in the imperious aftermath of the Falklands campaign, with an ironclad relationship with the US and landslide election victory. Would we have got a better deal than in 1973? I rather suspect so.

The fundamental weaknesses of the 1973 deal only became apparent in the years that followed as our perception of ourselves recovered. What had seemed attractive in 1973, and which attracted 67% to 33% support in the 1975 referendum, looked less and less so as the recovery of 1980s restored national self-confidence. The original sin of 1973 deal damned all that followed.

A vote for Brexit is a vote to have a something of our own. So, interestingly, said a (British) friend to me last week as we discussed the referendum, with him somewhat sympathetic to the out cause. He went on that the challenge for the British was that we no longer had anything that was special about us; that was just ours. We did not, for example, even have our own language – a language that we had that no one else did. A vote to be independent was a vote to have something that was ours and not shared.

This thought echoed during the past weekend spent in Copenhagen. Everyone with whom my wife and I had to deal spoke fantastic English; the hotel receptionist, the taxi driver, the waiter, the woman to whom I apologised after having inadvertently knocked while passing on a narrow pavement: “No problem”. The most trailered forthcoming programme on Danish TV was, as far as we could see, live coverage of the forthcoming FA Cup Final. On another continent, my little boy has, at his school in Bangkok, the chance to train with the Chelsea football academy.

Alongside our language and Association Football (and most other global sports), so much of our culture is shared. Shakespeare is the only global playwright. Our popular music is everywhere. You hear Adele on all continents. London is now clearly only geographically British. You could add the Royal Family to this. They are ours in some sense but only so far. The Queen sees herself as head of the Commonwealth. And they are global celebrities in a way that is not true of other royal families.

And this took my friend and I to the temperamental heart of the referendum debate. It is about how we feel and what we want to be. It is a question of identity. There is not a bigoted bone in my friend’s body (he happily grew up on the continent) but he likes the idea of a world comprised of distinct identities living together. My dream would seem to be of a more singular global identity; a global identity, I would add, comfortably containing lots of our DNA.

Where my friend and I agreed was that the long-term economics is a sideshow. We are going to be a lucky, rich and productive economy whether we choose to stay or go. I would argue that there are significant and needless short-term costs and risks associated with departure. His retort is that there may be, or may not be, but, regardless, it won’t make a difference in the long run and, anyway, is a modest price to pay.

Whilst, personally, I sincerely hope not, what would happen if the UK voted in June to leave the EU? My best guess is that we would stay in. Instinct tells me that, in the event of an out vote, we would take the Danish path, or the Irish path, and keeping asking the question until we got the right answer, which would be to stay, albeit on different terms.

The day after the out vote, financial markets would weaken. Sterling and sterling assets would fall sharply for fear of the uncertainty ahead. The Euro would weaken too. The poor Swiss franc would again see inflows, so too the USD and perhaps the Yen. Gold goes up. It is possible, given the febrile state of markets at the moment, that it would trigger a global risk sell-off and engender the global recession that we all fear. Regardless, we would start to hear announcements of assets, businesses, people and investment leaving the UK.

David Cameron would surely have to go, as too George Osbourne. The leadership election would be about what to do about Europe. A new leader, perhaps drawn from Theresa May, Sajid Javid and Boris Johnson, would start their first day as PM with briefings from ministers, civil service department heads and legal advisers laying out the extraordinary complexity of leaving the EU and the time it would take to negotiate. It would tarnish everything between their arrival and the next election date in 2020. Don’t forget the damage done to the Tories by Black Wednesday.

Around the UK, Scotland, and possibly Wales, would bemoan English voters having forced them into a constitutional change for which they had not voted. Calls for independence would return and in loud voice.

In the meantime, fellow European leaders would digest the consequences of having lost the game of chicken. There would be the immediate financial market consequences. There would the impending awfulness of the divorce negotiations. There would the loss of the UK; its economic weight, its budget contributions, its largest in the Union defence budget, the link to the Anglo-Saxon world, London etc. And, most profoundly, it would burst the dream, represent the high water mark of expansion and provide ammunition for other leavers. They would want the problem to go away.

And don’t think the Americans have any interest in this. Of all the things to be dealt with in the world – China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia etc – and the Brits have to go and light a fire in our own tent. What were they thinking? The White House will publicly support whatever the British people decide but advise caution and careful reflection, and, in private, lobby and manoeuvre for a compromise.

So, I think the new Prime Minister stands up and tells the British people that he/she has heard them, “je vous ai compris”, and their message that they do not want to belong the EU on the current terms, and that he/she intends to set off forthwith to Brussels to negotiate a deal that the British people can accept. European leaders with sombre faces meet him/her professing to do what it takes in order to keep the Union together.

By 2017, the UK will be part of the Union with its own special name for its membership status, some new powers and a lot of bad feeling.

 

 

As a committed floating voter, I am encouraged by Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent progress to the leadership of the Labour Party, as it will stretch the political spectrum. He will move the left hand edge a little wider in the same way that UKIP has done on the right. I do not have any tribal loyalties so I can share neither the pain that some Labour supporters feel as they perceive their proximity to power diminishing, nor the joy of some conservatives for whom the elevation of the second Michael Foot seems to presage another three outright General Election victories.

At the simplest level, a wider spectrum offers more choice. Whilst they might be ruing it, the Labour MPs, who gave Corbyn votes in order to encourage a broad debate, had a point. It has all been couched in terms of whether or not to have austerity. In practice, no sensible policy-maker really believes in outright austerity; the Paradox of Thrift dealt with that. The austerity debate is really an extension of the eternal debate about what is the right size for government and what should it be doing.

A wider spectrum may also create more breathing room for the middle. It is striking that the left has kept its most leftward mainstream manifestation inside a mainstream party. That is not true on the right. We shall see if that proves a benefit or a hindrance. It might be helpful in Scotland. A Corbyn Labour Party might do better in Scotland against the SNP by adopting some of its language and attitudes. Is Corbyn deft enough to assemble a broad coalition of the left by recovering votes in Scotland with his strong language whilst retaining the soft left with concessions on what he actually implements?

Perhaps, though, it gives the battered Liberal Democrat Party space to re-establish itself. A strong conventional or a Blairite Labour leader would surely have further starved it of oxygen when it is already badly injured. Can it use its experience of power to produce sensible centrist economic policies to sit alongside its socially liberal stance? That is, does it have the strength to resist its socially liberal outlook dragging it into what Americans would call economically liberal policies? It might find this job easier, or more necessary, if it has to use such sensible economic policies to distinguish itself from its neighbour to port.

In the aftermath of David Cameron’s achievement of both a clear victory and overall majority, the polls again appear to have been wrong. But I wonder if this is right. I do wonder whether there is an argument – hard to prove mind you – that it was the polls in the run up to the election that led to the result: at least in part. That is, the polls were right at the time about people’s voting intentions (voters were telling the truth) but as people noted what the polls were telling them about other people’s voting intentions and digested the implications, it caused them to vote differently to the way that they had intended.

This might represent a political version of reflexivity; individuals’ decisions are, in politics like finance, affected by the decisions of people around them and, indeed, by their expectations of what others are going to decide. A French friend cites the case of the Front National in France. The party, as well as its core following, has a floating constituency of people who will vote for them as a protest vote but who will not vote for them if they fear they are likely to win elections. That is, these floaters watch what other voters are likely to do and accordingly adjust their voting.

As we know, there are feedback loops in all sorts of areas and in human activity it leads to the game theory dimension. What others do affects you and what you do affects others. Therefore what you think others will do will affect what you will do and so on. Feedback loops occur in dynamic systems and there were a couple of ingredients in the UK election that created stronger feedback loops and, if you believe this line of argument, produced an outcome that was so different to what was expected.

The first, of course, is that the UK election was, by the UK’s modest standards, a complicated multi-party affair. There is, after all, less game theory in US elections since you largely have only three choices: Democrat, Republican or abstention. In the UK, we have several kingdom-wide parties – the traditional three plus UKIP – a bunch of regional parties, as well as a kingdom-wide single issue party. This was true of the previous UK election but there was so much less coverage of the smaller parties.

The second ingredient, I think, was that voter preferences were more complex reflecting the weightiness of the debate. Even in a multi-party system, if voters have only strong positive single preferences, there is not a lot of gaming. You want one particular party and that is that. But I suspect that many voters had more complex preferences. They may have positively wanted A but also negatively not wanted B. Moreover, what if the preferences were multiple and negative preferences were stronger than the positive. They may have wanted a lot of A, or a bit of both C and D, but definitely not, under any circumstances, B.

Which points up that an election is a distinct dynamic system. It is dynamic between elections but then stops being dynamic on election day. So, it was reasonable for voters to express their positive single preference to pollsters because that is what they were asked to do. Then, however, as election day neared, voters saw what options were actually available, given others’ preferences, and adjusted. I may have wanted A and definitely not B. But that was not available, given others’ preferences. So, in order definitely not to get B, I had to forego A and get a lot of C.

This flurry of last minute activity resembles, to an extent, an Ebay auction. The item goes on auction to close at some point in the future. Buyers might at the outset make some modest bids but most of the action takes place in the run up to the auction closing – the moment the system stops being dynamic. I think what I am saying is that it should be no surprise that the polls were consistent, and apparently wrong, in their predictions until the last moment.

So what? A narrative has emerged in which the Conservatives were always going to win really and that Ed Milliband had always been a disaster for Labour, and voters had simply fibbed to the pollsters. That is, a Conservative victory was knowable in advance. May be. May be in part. But I think there was a lot of real surprise, it was hard to know in advance, it was the outcome of a complex game amongst millions of voters and so the subsequent lionizing of David Cameron and demonizing of Ed Milliband is probably overdone.

A seemingly eternal dialogue of the deaf between right and left is that over the role of the individual; whether the individual should be considered as a consumer or as a producer.

Empowering individuals as consumers renders an economic system efficient and productive. The needs and wants of consumers are revealed to the production side of the economy. The price mechanism efficiently transmits the relative value of different products and thus the differing profit margins of different activities. Entrepreneurs can deploy capital in the most efficient manner and production managers can optimise their production. I would add that this path is also the more sustainable since it emphasises efficiency, particularly if you use the price mechanism to bring externalities into the economic system.

But when you talk of consumerism and the now generation, it is with disappointment or contempt. Going out and buying as much as we can and then talking about it is not well received. While we might want to impress a girl by describing what we own and can buy, it would be different it we wanted to convey a sense of moral worth. We would then want to talk about what we do. It is no accident that you turn to your neighbour at dinner to ask what do you do and not what do you consume. It is a question that is meant to be flattering.

It is by working, or doing, that we have dignity and a sense of self worth. We may just be adapting to a harsh reality. After all, we generally spend more time working than consuming; even allowing for a Welfare State, our ability to consume is constrained by our ability to work and not the other way around. There was a time when to be leisured was dignified, although I would note that leisure often meant working gratis as a JP, or some other public role.

Moreover, it is one of life’s ironies that it is in our consumption that we see inequality. While working, we are more equal. There may well be hierarchy but it is in a common purpose and will usually either conform to relative, and hopefully evident, ability or, at the least, to, much more obvious, relative age or seniority. It is when we take the hierarchy of work and production, and turn it into a hierarchy of consumption that inequality becomes evident.

Yet we know that exalting the role of the individual as a producer and developing public policy to support production leads us to nationalised industries, subsidies, overmanned industries and economic failure. There are endless historical examples of which the Eurozone crisis is but the latest. Moreover, a production focused economy is unlikely to be the more sustainable. Resource efficiency comes second to worker status.

So the real topic of debate is not whether to exalt the individual as consumer in order to create an efficient economy or whether to exalt the individual as producer in order to enhance individual dignity and thus general welfare. The topic is how to get an efficient economy whilst allowing individuals to find the dignity of work.