Uniting the Left to Fight for an Ecosocialist United Ireland

Written by Cian McMahon and first published at Irish Broad Left

After December’s Westminster general election, which returned a majority of nationalist MPs in the North for the first time ever, it’s clear that the entire Brexit debacle has dealt a potentially fatal blow to political unionism.

As DUP MLA Edwin Poots commented, reflecting on the historic and symbolic loss of DUP Deputy Leader Nigel Dodds’s seat to Sinn Féin’s John Finucane in North Belfast – the cradle of the Northern Irish statelet and a unionist stronghold going back to Edward Carson – “Ultimately, if we are going to protect the union, enhance the union and secure the union, then we’re going to have to have people voting unionist.”

The lingering threat of a hard Brexit and a harder border has nonetheless reignited the political debate surrounding Irish reunification. Indeed, there appears to be a growing consensus right across civil society that, for better or for worse, a united Ireland is now in the offing.

It seems only prudent then to start planning for the eventuality. 

Guarded comments to this effect from the former leader of the DUP and former First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson, have been well publicised. As have recent, credible opinion polls indicating that, again for the first time, a majority of Northern Irish voters favour reunification in the event of a border poll. History may have needed a push, but the winds of economic, political, social, and demographic change have been blowing in the direction of Irish unity for some time.

This conjuncture has also witnessed a marked shift in attitudes south of the border, with a majority now polling in favour of a referendum on Irish reunification within the next five years. Even the traditionally partitionist southern political establishment are increasingly anxious not to be left behind by the course of events.

Absent an effective political strategy for Irish left-wing revival, however, Seán Byers of the insightful Brexit, Europe and the Left blog has argued that, “increasingly it looks like this united Ireland will be delivered by bourgeois and civic nationalism in cooperation with liberal Unionism”.

That is to say, without a shift towards left cooperation and a shared vision of a socialist united Ireland, any conceivable ‘new departure’ will be guided by the forces of neoliberal continuity, North and South, Orange and Green.

If the Irish Left is to assert itself in this debate, then the articulation and planned implementation of a socialist programme of all-Ireland economic integration will be paramount. This holds especially true against the backdrop of deepening economic stagnation and financial instability in the global economy, quite aside from the economic impact of Brexit in and of itself.

Establishment split over reunification

The rift in the Irish establishment caused by the Brexit crisis is perhaps best exemplified by the recent, rather public disagreement between high-profile economists at the state-sponsored (and, hence, generally conservative) Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), regarding the economic implications of a united Ireland.

On one side of the debate, former ESRI Director Professor John Fitzgerald argues against Irish reunification, for the foreseeable future at least, on the basis that any conceivable adjustment would be too costly (economically, socially, politically) for both North and South. This analysis assumes a narrow set of policy options, however, whereby the transition is taken to be relatively immediate, and where there is a convergence, rather than a co-transformation, of economic structures – all within the bounds of what economic orthodoxy considers “sound finance” (i.e. balanced state budgets) and “necessary structural reform” (i.e. privatisation and deregulation).

 

On the other side of the debate, ESRI Research Professor Seamus McGuinness believes that a united Ireland is workable in the nearer term, once the combined effects of a sensible transition period and a transformational, all-Ireland industrial policy are factored in.

As McGuinness concludes in his thinly-veiled rebuke to Fitzgerald: “There is little to be achieved through a static analysis of Irish unification whereby the estimated current costs of administering Northern Ireland, which are themselves highly debatable, are simply superimposed on the current tax and welfare systems of the Republic. Such a scenario would never seriously be proposed, or ratified, in any border poll.

“Responsible debate on the economics of Irish unification should be based on facts that have been established through rigorous research that fully accounts for the likely dynamics associated with any unification process.”

‘Cost’ of unity is overstated

McGuinness is backed in this view by the current ESRI Director Prof Alan Barrett, who has likewise called for a more sober economic analysis ahead of the very real possibility that a border poll may be triggered sooner rather than later under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Yet, as McGuinness alludes to, even at the level of crude accounting there is a case to be made that the economic costs of subsuming the North into the southern statelet are frequently overstated.

Former Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI) Director Tom Healy points to the so-called “non-identifiable expenditure” component of the UK subvention to the North, which is primarily composed of the North’s contribution towards servicing the UK federal debt and UK military costs.

When such expenditures are excluded, as in a negotiated united Ireland scenario, the North’s fiscal deficit (the difference between government expenditure and revenues) falls from around £9-10 billion to more in the region of £5-6bn (i.e. “identifiable expenditure” relating directly to the North’s public services). Even accounting for the additional spending needed to align living standards in the North with those of the South, it’s likely that the shortfall could be covered by a solidarity tax amounting to around two per cent of current Irish GDP.

This figure would be less again if, as Sinn Féin Finance Spokesperson Pearse Doherty advocates, the £3-4bn of identifiable expenditure attributed to pensions were to remain the responsibility of the British state, to which the North’s workers have been paying their pension contributions. Taking all of this together, the economic costs of Irish reunification start to look like much less of an insurmountable barrier.

Transformation must go beyond green Keynesianism

This is before we have even considered the potential economic benefits of a progressive, pro-worker structural transformation of the all-Ireland economy, as advocated by the trade union-backed NERI¹.

SIPTU economist and researcher Michael Taft highlights that this will require more than simply increasing taxation on high-income and wealthy households and corporations to help fund better public services, necessary and all as that may be. He calls for a greater focus on increasing social insurance contributions (particularly from employers), alongside a state-led industrial policy to develop Ireland’s historically weak indigenous enterprise base.

Indeed, some of the policies that were developed by the British Labour Party under former leader Jeremy Corbyn indicate how the latter might be achieved in the face of technological advance and globalisation – all the while privileging democratic worker and community ownership and control across both state and private enterprise². The Thinktank for Action on Social Change (TASC) has advanced complementary ideas regarding the future of work in an Irish context.

Still, a Left Keynesian programme, however ‘greened’ and ‘worker controlled’, will ultimately prove insufficient, and even counterproductive, given the nature and seriousness of today’s environmental crisis.

The esteemed Canadian journalist, author, and activist Naomi Klein warns against such ‘climate Keynesianism’ in her latest book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. She writes that: “Any credible Green New Deal needs a concrete plan for ensuring that the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates aren’t immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions – a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap…

“What we need are transitions that recognize the hard limits on extraction and that simultaneously create new opportunities for people to improve quality of life and derive pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle.”

This speaks to a more general issue concerning the fetishisation of Nordic social democracy within the Irish and international labour movements. While boasting impressive scores on most indices of national human development, the Nordic economic model has only been able to achieve this relative success through the super-exploitation of the environment as well as workers in the global south.

Dr Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics (LSE) shows how, even allowing that the Nordic countries regularly top human development rankings (based as they are on purely economic and social criteria), they fall way down towards the bottom of the list once environmental impacts are factored into the analysis.

The Cuban model

Rather than attempting to replicate a flagrantly unsustainable social-ecological model, people and planet would be better served by turning instead to socialist Cuba for inspiration. Cuba tops Hickel’s Sustainable Development Index (SDI) as the only country in the world to have achieved such high levels of human development combined with such low levels of environmental impact.

By contrast, though southern Ireland ranks third place on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), it falls well down the list to 128th place in the SDI. The state is also a noted climate action laggard amongst its European peers – the most environmentally active of whom are still implicated in outsourcing their carbon emissions to the global south. And the UK, which presently includes the six-county Northern Irish statelet for statistical purposes, comes in at 131st place via the SDI – well below its corresponding HDI ranking of 15th place.

An organic farm in Alamar, Cuba. Photo: Melanie Lukesh Reed/Flickr 

Without ignoring the unique historical circumstances in which Cuban socialism arose, and the continuing challenges and shortcomings of that experience, sustainable development has been demonstrably achieved through state-led economic, social, and environmental planning. This is in spite of the devastation wrought by an aggressive and illegal six-decade long economic blockade by Cuba’s nearest and largest potential major trading partner, the United States3.

As an initial thought experiment at least, one then wonders what could be achieved by participatory and decentralised (within reason) socialist planning in the overdeveloped (as opposed to overexploited) national economies of the global north – and, in particular, within a united Ireland. No doubt, this still seems far ahead; yet the carbon bomb is ticking, and material conditions are changing rapidly. 

The political divergence of the past decade, tracing back to the 2008 global financial crisis and intensified by Brexit and environmental degradation, can be expected to sharpen further in response to continuing financial instabilities in the global economy. Recently the Financial Times reported that the pre-2008 neoliberal financial deregulation agenda is back with a vengeance – just in time to accentuate the next downturn. 

As its finance editor Patrick Jenkins wrote, well before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, “President Trump’s bellicose trade policies and a domestic Chinese slowdown are hurting global growth. And in financial markets, asset bubbles remain ripe for puncture, as quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates have inflated the value of everything from house prices to private equity targets.” 

A programme for an ecosocialist republic 

If the Irish Left is to outflank the neoliberal and far Right in response, who together offer only a sordid path to what Klein terms “eco-fascism” and “climate barbarism”, then a worker-led popular front of our parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces will be necessary – united in diversity. 

The present historical juncture calls for a Green New Departure towards a 32-county, ecosocialist workers’ republic, drawing on Ireland’s rich heritage of national liberation struggles for popular democracy and environmental stewardship. 

The raw materials for such a programme already exist, in the combined output of progressive left researchers and activists across the island. Professor Kathleen Lynch and her colleagues at the University College Dublin Equality Studies Centre and UCD School of Social Justice, for example, have studiously documented and critiqued the economic and social inequalities that blight contemporary Irish society. 

Likewise, left-leaning (some further than others) research and advocacy organisations such as TASC, Social Justice Ireland, NERI, Trademark Belfast, Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance, and Development Trust Northern Ireland, amongst others, have produced valuable policy analysis that can begin to cohere and form the basis of an all-Ireland manifesto. 

Lessons can also be learned from the successes and shortcomings of the left-wing Right2Change political initiative. In future alliances, can such a policy platform be devised on an all-Ireland basis? Take, for example, the potential for a detailed policy proposal around an all-Ireland universal public health service to mobilise cross-class and cross-community support, particularly in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. 

That said, the implementation of a transformative economic, social, and environmental programme in a united Ireland will also very likely require breaking with the neoliberal straightjacket of the Eurozone and EU institutions. But that isn’t to say either that the strategic terms of disengagement is a straightforward matter for the Left, as UCD’s Dr Andy Storey argues with some authority. Trade Unionists for a New and United Ireland could potentially play an important role in coordinating the necessary debate and policy development in all of this. 

Left must reject neoliberal prescriptions for unity 

It is unfortunate that, to date, economic arguments in favour of Irish unity have tended to be couched in the language and theoretical assumptions of mainstream, ‘orthodox’ economics, which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

A prominent example is the oft-cited Modeling Irish Unification report, written by consultants and academics based in Canada. The dynamic analysis therein argues that the all-Ireland economy could reap the benefit of “significant long-term improvement” through a programme of economic liberalisation (particularly benefitting the North) – low-tax harmonisation; the removal of barriers to trade and foreign investment; and all-Ireland membership of the Eurozone. 

While the assumed parameters of the model are certainly open to question, the broader concerns are twofold: (1) these so-called ‘general equilibrium’ models, by definition, generate fairweather projections that are blind to even the very possibility of the kind of systemic economic and financial instability and crisis that befell the Irish and global economies in 2008 (recall, a consequence of economic and financial liberalisation in the years prior); (2) even a relatively resurgent neoliberal economic structure cannot create the broader conditions for sustainable social and environmental development, as the southern Irish political economy currently attests. 

Breaking out of our silos 

Left economics requires not only the development of progressive, pro-worker policies and models; but also a strong sense of, and connection with, the class-based political movement that can make them a lived reality. 

This kind of radical political economy approach can be distilled from the rich traditions of non-mainstream, ‘heterodox’ economics – the class struggle emphasis of Marxist economics; the monetary and financial focus of left Keynesian economics; the institutional economics concern with social structure; the feminist economics study of unwaged and caring labour; and the social-ecological economics study of the metabolic relation between human society and non-human nature. 

Both in theory and practice, we need to stop working away in our own little silos, and instead be prepared to play a small part in something much bigger. 

A Tory Brexit, modelled on Trump’s ‘national neoliberalism‘, is unlikely to set about the conditions for a revival of the UK’s forlorn political economy. As Duncan Weldon, a rare left-wing economics correspondent with The Economist, writes: it is likely that “Brexit will not generate a new model for the UK, but simply an inferior version of the existing one. . . . The results are likely to be messy.” 

England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. 

Dr Cian McMahon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Centre for Co-operative Management (ICCM) at Saint Mary’s University (SMU) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

Footnotes: 

1) Tom Healy, An Ireland Worth Working For: Towards a New Democratic Programme, New Island Books, 2019. 

2) Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, The Case for Community Wealth Building, Polity, 2020. 

3) Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Yale University Press, 2020.

People's Vote March - London - Photos and Report

On a beautiful autumn day in London, hundreds of thousands of people attended the People's Vote march. Organisers said that more than 670,000 people joined the demonstration, one of the biggest public protests since the anti-Iraq war march in 2003.

The weather helped to produce a carnival atmosphere and the demonstrators were in a cheerful mood. I saw no problems and the police presence was pretty low key.

The crowd was certainly large, but it is difficult to assess the scale when you are in the middle of it. Parliament Square was packed and the crowd stretched all along Whitehall, and I could only inch along the road because of the numbers pouring towards the stage where the speeches were being made.

Many of the marchers were young people, who said that their future was being ruined by the decision to leave the European Union. Two of these young people told the Evening Standard why they had decided to come on the protest. Alice Beal said: "All of us were under 18 at the time of the referendum," and Nicky Tarran said: "People say the British people have spoken, we haven't."

EU Calls May’s Bluff – Time to start Stockpiling Tinned Food?

The European Union (EU) has been consistent in the two and a quarter years, although it seems like longer, since the UK referendum vote to leave the EU. They stated what their red lines were: a workable solution to keeping open the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic and maintaining the ‘four freedoms’ of free movement of goods, services, capital and persons within the EU. Yes, the negotiations on Brexit, if we can call them that, have been couched in diplomatic language, but the EU’s position has not changed.

Indeed, on Northern Ireland, the UK agreed to the ‘backstop’ arrangement for the Irish border in December last year, but now wants to renege on this it seems. The EU summit in Saltzburg, Austria, appears to have displayed the utter frustration of EU nations with Britain’s delusions of grandeur, where prime minister, Theresa May was told in no uncertain terms that nothing the UK has come up with so far, is even close to addressing our Brexit relations with EU when we leave.

It was always likely that push was going to come to shove this autumn, as substantive agreement really needs to reached by the EU summit on 18 October, less than a month away, for the EU to deem it is worth holding a special summit in November, to finally make an agreement.

After farting around for over two years the British government, wasting everyone’s time with ludicrous plans, has now been put on the spot. Do we want a deal or not, appears to be the exasperated message from Europe?

Maybe we don’t want a deal, and should fess up and tell the EU this, because even a Canada style free trade agreement (no tariffs on trade) is not on offer unless the no border in Ireland issue is resolved. Certainly some people prefer the World Trade Organisation default position on the right of the Tory party and perhaps elsewhere.

This scenario would almost certainly cause a recession in the UK in the short term, eventually the UK may recover, but this will take several years, maybe ten, before we get back to anything like the situation we have inside the EU.

Some Brexiters even agree with analysis, Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks it might take fifty years for Britain to see the benefit of leaving the EU, so why is this so desirable? The rather vague slogan of ‘taking back control’ is the only justification that they can come up with. But what does this mean in practice?

Allowing US businesses to run the NHS? Eating fluoridated chicken and hormone pumped beef from the US? Allowing Genetically Modified crops to be grown in the UK? Reduced employment rights for workers? Reduced protection for our environment? Some freedom that.

It is not as though immigration will stop, or even reduce to the fabled tens of thousands when we do leave the EU. Britain is apparently trying to recruit Jamaican nurses to work in the NHS, and other sectors will need to do similarly, if the country is to function properly. After the Windrush scandal, why anyone would want to come to Britain is an open question, perhaps we will have to bribe them handsomely?    

Anything could still happen, we might crash out, we might compromise enough to get some kind of deal with EU, we might have another referendum and vote to stay in the EU, we might have a general election which if the Tories lose, could be a game changer.

But the way the Tory government is riven with division, but still clinging onto power, I now think that the most likely scenario is crashing out of the EU, which I didn’t think would happen. I thought sense in the end would prevail, and some sort of compromise would be reached. It looks like I was wrong.

So, start stocking up on tinned food and lock all doors and windows on 29 March next year. We are in for a bumpy ride.

Would Another Referendum on Brexit Really lead to Civil Unrest?

Nigel Farage, the ex-UKIP leader, has been warning ever since the 2016 referendum that civil unrest would result from the failure of the British government to fulfil his particular version of (hard) Brexit. In 2017, he went further saying he would "don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines."

More recently, Labour front bench MPs appear to be echoing Farage’s threat, with both Barry Gardner (shadow International Trade secretary) and John McDonnell (shadow Chancellor), opining on the issue, with Gardner predicting:

"If people want to be able to achieve change through democratic means, if they feel that that is being denied to them, they then turn to other more socially disruptive ways of expressing their views, and that is the danger here."

McDonnell added “we have to be extremely careful. A number of us now are worried about the rise of the far right in this country and elsewhere," when commenting on the possibility of another referendum on Brexit. Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary has been more positive about holding another referendum though.

Tory MP, Priti Patel went further writing on the Conservative Home website, that the prime minister’s Chequers compromise plan, would lead to people seeking “alternative ways to express their views and frustrations with those who have the privilege of governing our country.” She, like McDonnell, linked Brexit to the rise of the far right in Europe, although there doesn’t appear to be a clamour to leave the European Union in the rest of the bloc.

It is a possibility that some people might feel justified in causing trouble, including violence, if they perceive their wishes are being ignored. On the other hand, there is just as much chance, even more so, I think, that a disastrously chaotic exit, which people like Patel want, with shortages of medicines, food and other things, could lead to widespread civil unrest. Either way, we should plan for civil unrest.

As always with the Brexit debate, there are reflections on the other side of the Atlantic. US President, Donald Trump, has warned that his policies will be "violently" overturned if the Democrats win November's mid-term elections. He told Evangelical leaders that the vote was a "referendum" on freedom of speech and religion, and that these were threatened by "violent people,” meaning anti-fascist protesters, like when Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville last year, by a far right supporter driving his car into the crowd.

You have to admire the chutzpah, at least, of a Republican president, accusing the Democrats of frustrating the will of the voters, after all the trouble Republicans gave Barak Obama over his health care proposals, and even further back to the ‘gridlock’ in Congress of Bill Clinton’s Democrat presidency. And, lest we forget, Hillary Clinton, got 3 million more votes than Trump at the presidential elections of 2016.

It appears that democracy only comes into things when certain votes have gone your way in the past. Clearly, more self-seeking than noble intention. The mid-term Congressional elections in the US are just part of that country’s democratic checks and balances, existing for centuries, just like the presidential electoral college system, which handed victory to Trump in 2016.

Likewise, in the UK, as ex-foreign secretary David Miliband has said, and I hasten to say I’m not a fan of Miliband senior, by any stretch of the imagination, when he wrote in The Guardian that “democracy did not end on 23 June 2016.” If the Leavers are so confident that they represent the ‘people’s will,’ why are they so afraid of reconfirming this important decision?

There is another possibility, that a sensible compromise can be reached, but the Chequers plan is not it. I have argued before that joining the European Economic Area, perhaps for a temporary period, is the most sensible thing to do, outside of another referendum. Sensible, doesn’t come into it though, for some people.

Tory Brexiteers Finally Come Up With Alt-Brexit Plan

It is more than two years now since the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), where of course we voted to leave. It has been a feature, during the referendum campaign itself and in the period since, that those who advocated Brexit haven’t come up with any sort of plan for life outside of the union. What kind of relationship with the EU do they want, if any at all?

Lofty talk of global trade deals and vague sloganising like ‘take back control’ have been the order of the day, but no specifics have been put forward by the loudest cheerleaders for Brexit in the Tory party. At long last, the penny seems to have dropped with these people, that it might be a good idea to have one. However, this plan looks to be purely cosmetic.

I suspect that this has been forced on the Brexiteers for two main reasons. Firstly, they don’t like the prime minister’s Chequers plan, as they see it as not really leaving the EU. Secondly, public opinion in Britain seems to be shifting to favour either a ‘soft’ Brexit or another referendum on the final agreement between the UK and EU, which could well result in a vote to remain in the EU.

Whatever the motivation, the Sun reports that the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory MPs are to ‘ambush’ Theresa May with a plan for a ‘clean Brexit’ just days before the Tory conference in September. A source told the paper: "This is about delivering the clean Brexit that people voted for. No concessions."

The plan is for the UK to have a Canada-style free trade agreement with the EU. But get this, only if the EU drops its objections to having a border on the island of Ireland. If the EU will not agree to this there will be no deal at tall, and the UK will trade on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms, with the bloc.

Canada and the EU have signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which is essentially a free trade agreement, removing most tariffs on trade in goods between the two trading partners and some more limited access for services. Border controls are still in place for people and goods, so if the UK were to adopt such an agreement, it would not solve the problems of delays with imports at UK and exports at EU ports or the situation with the border in Ireland.

I think the plan is hypothetical anyway, because I can’t see any way that the EU will back down on the Irish border issue. We could have a CETA type deal otherwise, but the ERG have ruled this out for some reason. So, we are basically back to a no deal Brexit, and falling back on WTO trade rules. Hardly much of a plan?

I don’t think any country in the world trades on WTO rules only, but of course in the longer run trade deals can be negotiated, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership which the government has explored joining or bi-lateral trade arrangements with other nations. All of which takes time and skilled trade deal negotiators though, neither of which we have much of.

Under WTO rules, each member must grant the same ‘most favoured nation’ market access, to all other WTO members. This means that exports to the EU would be subject to the same customs checks, tariffs and regulatory barriers that the UK and EU currently charge on trade with countries such as the US. The UK’s exports to the EU and other WTO members would also be subject to the importing countries’ most favoured nation tariffs. But tariffs all the same.

EU tariffs on WTO goods range from zero to 45%, with the average tariff being 4.8%, making British goods under such arrangements, less competitive in the EU marketplace. Of course, costs could be reduced by UK exporters, to cover the difference, but this will almost certainly mean cutting the wages of British workers. Alternately, businesses may relocate to the EU, where it is feasible and advantageous, taking British jobs with them.

The Alt-Brexit plan turns out to be really no plan at all, with even a Canada style deal out of the question if there is no agreement on keeping the Irish border open. It is just a long winded way of crashing out of the EU with no deal whatsoever, with all of the problems that will bring for the UK. And more time wasted on pointless negotiations.

David Cameron and the Rewards of Failure

It is nearly two years since David Cameron resigned as prime minister after losing the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU). This is the man that sowed the seeds of the chaos the country finds itself in today. Cameron resigned, despite calls for him to stay from Remain and Leave supporting ministers in his Cabinet, saying reportedly, “why should I do all the shit work?” The new prime minister, Theresa May has been shovelling it ever since.

Cameron was well known to be lazy, probably the laziest prime minister of modern times, and he appears to have carried this habit through to his post politics career. We still await his memoirs, although without bated breath, for which he bought a garden shed specifically to use as a writing room. It is said that the book will be published later this year, if he gets around to finishing writing it. Reports say he will be paid £1.5 million for his efforts, although other reports say the amount is closer to £800,000.

Cameron also has several other lucrative consultancies and lobbying positions, which amount to very little real work but are rewarded handsomely. According to the BBC he has taken the following roles:

Consultant and chairman of Illumina's international board (announced in February 2018)

Vice-chairman, UK-China Fund (December 2017)

Board member, ONE, a development organisation (December 2017)

Consultant and brand ambassador, First Data Corporation (October 2017)

Member of Global Board of Advisers of the Council in Foreign Relations (May 2017)

Chairman, International Growth Centre's Commission on Growth in Fragile States (March 2017)

President, Alzheimer's Research UK (January 2017)

Chairman, National Citizen Service Patrons (October 2016)

Public speaker, Washington Speakers Bureau (December 2016)

He will be paid £50,000 per hour to make after dinner speeches and is entitled to a £115,000 per year “Public Duties Cost Allowance” to run his private office, from public funds.

Cameron became leader of the Tory party in 2005 and prime minister in 2010, in coalition with the Lib Dems. To impress the Euro-sceptics in the Tory party he promised that Tory MEP’s would leave the European People's Party grouping in the European Parliament. The ploy worked and Cameron won the leadership. He then concluded an agreement to form the Movement for European Reform grouping with Euro-sceptic parties, mainly from eastern Europe.

Short of an overall majority in Parliament in 2010 he formed a coalition government with the Lib Dems and set about introducing austerity policies which cut public spending deeply, with the resultant misery for many of the country’s most vulnerable people. In an effort to keep the Tory party united over the issue of Europe, he promised a referendum on EU membership, which he thought he would never have to hold, because of opposition from coalition partners, the Lib Dems. But Cameron won a surprise majority for the Tories at the 2015 general election, and had to hold the plebiscite in 2016.

This was not a good time to hold such a vote, six years on from the financial crisis and with his austerity policies biting and wages falling or stagnating for most people. Cameron negotiated some minor concessions from the EU, which was meant to be the basis for the UK remaining in the bloc, but were hardly even mentioned during the referendum campaign. The British public voted to leave, and here we are today, in the shit.

Cameron was a complete chancer. Asked about why he had wanted to be prime minister, Cameron replied “because I thought I’d be rather good at it.” Well, he wasn’t, but this reply reveals much about Cameron. He had a sense of entitlement and arrogance commensurate with his upper middle class background. No vision for the country in general, just a public relations exercise of re-branding the Tories, into looking a more modern party.

After screwing the least wealthy, and leaving the country in Brexit chaos, Cameron has scarpered, and is being well rewarded for incompetence when in office. What mugs we are.

Theresa May’s Response to Outing Gay People is Cynical and Irresponsible

Defending her political secretary, Stephen Parkinson, in Parliament on Monday, the prime minister, when asked about the Brexit whistle-blower Shahmir Sanni, being outed as gay, by Parkinson, trotted out the most trite of replies.

Sanni, who is of Pakistani origin told the Guardian he had the “most awful weekends” after revealing details of the Vote Leave campaign getting around spending limits at the 2016 EU referendum. Money was channelled through a separate campaigning group BeLeave, who have links to Cambridge Analytica, the company accused of misusing personal data gathered by Facebook, for the referendum campaign. Sanni was forced to admit to his family still living in Pakistan that he is gay.

Being gay in Pakistan is a much bigger deal than in Britain, and this news could well endanger Sanni’s family. Why Parkinson decided to make public the fact he and Sanni had had an eighteen month relationship, is not entirely clear, but it certainly looks like an attempt to smear Sanni’s revelations in some way as unreliable.

In response to a question from Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, who highlighted the danger posed to Sanni and his family and concluded by saying:

“It’s a disgrace, prime minister, you need to do something about it.”

The prime minister intends to do nothing about it, it appears:

May said: “I of course recognise the importance of ensuring that we do recognise that for some being outed as gay is difficult because of their family circumstances. What I want to see is a world where everybody is able to be confident in their sexuality and doesn’t have to worry about such things.”

Well we all want to see that, but how is this going to be achieved? Not by mere wishful thinking that is for sure, or outing gay people with family connections outside the UK. Surely May bears some responsibility for what her political secretary puts into the public domain, especially on such a sensitive and potentially life threatening issue like this?

May seems completely incapable of thinking on her feet, and has become infamous for her robotic standard line responses to questions in Parliament and from journalists alike. I can’t ever really remember her giving a straight answer to a straight question, preferring instead to say something which is vacuous, often baffling and seemingly designed to put her audience to sleep.

I expect May’s defence of Parkinson, who worked at the Vote Leave campaign, where he met Sanni, like everything else May does, is designed to appease the hard Brexiters in her Cabinet and Parliamentary party. To sack Parkinson would likely stir unrest, amongst an increasingly worried Eurosceptic faction in the Tory party.

The accusations of breaking electoral law by Vote Leave and its association with the dubious behaviour, to say the least, of Cambridge Analytica threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the referendum result, and so to make it less likely that we will leave the EU. It does seem that almost everyday some news comes out that is unsupportive at best, and often quite damning about Brexit itself.

The wheels appear to be falling off the Brexit wagon, one by one, and there aren’t too many left now. Maybe, the momentum is with remaining in the EU now, or to take the softest of Brexits, anyway. Time will tell.

For this slide in public perception on Brexit to be used as a motive for possibly putting lives in danger is truly outrageous and disgraceful. What was the purpose of Parkinson outing Sanni? I can see no other motivation, other than to try and muddy the waters around the actions of the Vote Leave campaign. The fact we haven’t been offered a suitable explanation, from the prime minister or anyone else does lead people to draw their own conclusions.

Will you give us a straight answer to the question of why Sanni was outed for being gay, Mrs May? I won’t hold my breath, I don’t think May is likely to change the habit of a political lifetime, so you will have to make your own minds up.  

Boris Johnson is a National and International Embarrassment

Has Britain ever had a foreign secretary anything like Boris Johnson? Foreign secretaries are normally very guarded about what they say in public, because first and foremost, the job is the most senior UK diplomat handling international issues. That is the way diplomacy works, and to do anything else is likely to be counterproductive. The art of diplomacy is to get agreements where everyone can claim some sort of victory.

As reported in the Guardian, the latest embarrassing remarks to emanate from the lips of Johnson are his almost casual comparison of the current Russian government as similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany of the 1930s. This was the exchange:

Johnson made the Hitler comparison while speaking before the all-party foreign affairs select committee and responding to remarks from the Labour MP Ian Austin, who called for England to pull out of the World Cup altogether. “Putin is going to use it in the way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics,” Austin said.

Johnson replied: “I think that your characterisation of what is going to happen in Moscow, the World Cup, in all the venues – yes, I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right. It is an emetic prospect of Putin glorying in this sporting event.”

The rule of thumb when debating issues is that the first one to mention Hitler has lost the argument, thank you foreign secretary! Whatever you think of Putin and the Russian government, it is crass to compare it to the Nazis. Even more so, given the history of the loss of millions of Russian lives sacrificed fighting Hitler’s army.

This though is just the latest example of Johnson’s complete unsuitability for his job. Of course, he is only in the job because the Tories need to keep a pro and anti Brexit balance in the Cabinet, but foreign secretary is definitely not the role for Boris. Come to think of it, I can’t imagine what Cabinet job he would do well at? Transport maybe? Although he did nothing for transport in London when he was Mayor, except inheriting those bikes and hiking the fares on tube and buses.

This is the man who has failed so spectacularly to get British national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe released from an Iranian prison on a highly dubious espionage conviction. Going so far as to risk getting her a longer sentence, by using loose, flippant language about the case in public. He told a Parliamentary committee that Ratcliffe had been training journalists in the region, and she was promptly hauled in front of an Iranian court and told her sentence may be doubled to ten years.

At the Tory party conference last year, Johnson said that he knew businessmen who “have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte (in worn torn Libya) into the next Dubai. The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away.” The remark was rightly, roundly condemned, and certainly not anywhere near diplomatic language.

Johnson also got into a row with the Italian economic minister Carlo Calenda, when Johnson claimed  it was “bollocks” that free movement of people is one of the European Union’s founding principles. Calenda is quoted as saying “he basically said: ‘I don’t want free movement of people but I want the single market,’” Mr Calenda told Bloomberg. “I said: ‘No way.’ He said: ‘You’ll sell less prosecco.’ I said: ‘OK, you’ll sell less fish and chips, but I’ll sell less prosecco to one country and you’ll sell less to 27 countries.’ Putting things on this level is a bit insulting.”

And so to Johnson’s part in the EU referendum. He had a reputation for being from the liberal wing of the Tory party, and despite some opportunistic journalism for the Telegraph and Spectator, was never really that animated by the EU. Indeed, his father and sister have gone on record as saying that Johnson had never shown any interest in leaving the EU, prior to the referendum being called.

Naked ambition got the better of him, as he calculated that whichever way the referendum went, there would soon be a vacancy for Tory leader (and prime minister), with party members being given final say between two MPs selected by their peers. The membership of the Tory party, aging, white, middle to upper class, are overwhelmingly anti-EU. Hey presto!

When David Cameron resigned as prime minister after the referendum, Johnson was quickly out of the blocks submitting his candidacy, only to later withdraw after being stabbed in the back by his colleague, Michael Gove. It did earn him his present job as foreign secretary though, and there may well be vacancy at the top again soon.

Johnson’s comment about the EU can “go whistle” for a divorce payment when we leave the organisation, has in fact turned out to be “bollocks” as UK has now agreed to pay around £40 billion. His claim that we can make Brexit a “Titanic success” betrays his schooling in the classics, and that he is completely out of touch with common parlance. Most people associate any reference to Titanic to mean the ship that sank after hitting an iceberg. Not what Johnson was trying to express at all.

We are enough of a laughing stock globally at the moment, why make matters infinitely much worse by having a national representative to the world who is such self seeking prat?     

Carry On Kipper – New Civil War Breaks Out in UKIP

The UKIP leader, Henry Bolton, has vowed to carry on as leader of the party, despite losing a unanimous vote of confidence from the party’s National Executive Committee, the ruling body of UKIP. They argued that events in Bolton’s personal life had led to him losing credibility. It means that an Emergency General Meeting of the party will be called, in 28 days time, where the membership of UKIP will decide Bolton’s fate.

Given that Bolton won a leadership election only four months ago, and he has the semi-backing of ex-leader Nigel Farage, it can’t be entirely discounted that he will lose the vote. But things do look ominous for him. On Monday a succession of senior party figures tendered their resignations as spokespersons for the party on various matters, 16 of them at time of writing, two thirds of UKIPs front bench.

To recap, the furore began when Bolton’s girlfriend, Jo Marney tweeted racist comments, in particular about the unsuitability of Meghan Markle marrying Prince Harry, later this year. Bolton said that he had ended the relationship, but has been spotted still going out with Marney, with the inference being that it was a fake break up.

UKIP has got form on changing leaders quickly, ever since Farage stood down after the EU referendum, getting through as many as Chelsea football club do managers. Former UKIP leader Diane James, who succeeded Farage as leader but has now left the party, notoriously lasted for only 18 days, citing that she couldn’t work with other senior members of the party.

Paul Nuttall, lasted a little longer, but clearly didn’t like the job and resigned after the 2017 general election disaster, where UKIP bombed, falling from 12% of the vote two years earlier to just 2%. Of course UKIP’s big issue, leaving the European Union (EU), has now been superseded by the vote to leave the EU and many of their members have left to join the Tories.

Infighting (quite literally on occasions) in UKIP is apparently the normal state of play. Robert Kilroy-Silk flounced out of the party to form a new party, Veritas, which lasted for about eighteen months, before folding. The MEPs Steven Woolfe and Mike Hookem were involved in a fracas in their offices in Brussels, which ended with Woolfe being taken to hospital. 

UKIPs membership figures of 39,000 were last declared before the EU referendum, and it’s a racing certainty to be less, probably a lot less now, if polling and election results are anything to go by. There have been high profile resignations as well, like James and Woolfe. Most people now view the Tories as the anti-EU party, so it is hard to see where UKIP goes from here.

They have also lost the status of main protest party, vacated by the Lib Dems when they went into coalition with the Tories. The party’s finances are said not to be good either, and of course when we do leave the EU, they will lose that stream of funding.

Bolton appears to be taking a leaf out Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn’s book, with his refusal to be ousted by people at the top of the party, and appealing to the rank and file of the party, although on a much smaller scale, in terms of membership.

It is at least entertaining, unlike the civil war in the Tory party, which has made the party so shambolic that it is ruining the country. UKIP doesn’t matter, they are nowhere near power, so we can sit back and enjoy the Carry On. Ironic really, given UKIPs nostalgia for the Britain of yesteryear. Sid James would have been perfect playing Bolton and Barbara Windsor, Marney. The Carry On films series lasted for about as long as UKIP has now.

All things come to an end, and it looks like UKIP is in terminal decline, which could turn rapidly into complete collapse. As we know, there is a small constituency vote for a far right, anti immigrant, anti Muslim party in this country, which the BNP have exploited in the past, to some extent. UKIP could carry on courting these voters, but this would leave them very much on the margins of British politics.

Good riddance, I say.