One of the interesting features of post war literature on Nazism and totalitarianism is the broadness of its understanding of democracy and what makes it work. Many of the leading political theorists and philosophers of this period understood democracy not just in terms of formal processes (majority votes, checks and balances of power) but in terms of the wider political and cultural practices of open and free societies. Jürgen Habermas's idea of communicative rationality stressed the importance of discussion and reflection for coming to ethical decisions which consider the value of others. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt located the rise of Nazism in the late 1920s and the radicalisation of policy once in power in a fragmentation of public discussion of politics. Hans Mommsen's idea of cumulative radicalisation can also be thought of in discursive terms, as can Karl Popper's idea of the open society.
Without wanting to get bogged down in the specifics of their arguments, what these all have in common is the idea that things go very wrong indeed when meaningful public discussion breaks down. People are no longer forced to confront the ethical implications of their desires or their impacts on others. There is no longer a mechanism for gathering and processing new information about decisions, attempting to come to some kind of consensus, or falsifying bad propositions about how the world works.
This, it should be noted, is not primarily a question of the formal rules or constitution of a country. A democratic majority can be more or less considerate of the view points of those in a minority, and more or less open to information coming from outside sources. We might consider the following analogy, in want of a better one. Imagine a pub quiz team. They decide that when they disagree on an answer, they take a majority vote. Imagine, now, that a question comes along where there team is split, but one person in the group is quite certain of a particular answer and wants to explain why they know it to be correct. There is nothing about the formal rules of the team which means that person has to be listened to. It is not clear how you could possibly build a mechanism for doing so into the rules. But there is nothing stopping the other members from listening to that single person and changing their viewpoint. To insist that they do not have to and would rather stick with what they know to be a gut reaction would be mad, albeit technically allowed.
Granted, this is a silly analogy. And it's true that the value or reality of considerate public discussion can be overrated. But I think there is a specific danger in the direction of political argument in the UK at the moment. It is increasingly towards the idea of an opinion being widespread as a justification in and of itself, be it because it is held by a majority or because those that hold it are seen as somehow more authentic representatives of the population as a whole. This is not just about Brexit. Discussion of immigration and criminal justice which focussed on 'reasonable concerns' of 'decent, hardworking people' go back at least as far as the Blair years. The media response in 2010 to Gordon Brown's remarks caught on a microphone after speaking to Gillian Duffy are another illustration of this.
The point here is that this is not primarily about majoritarianism or what the rules of a democracy are. Yes, there is a good case for limits on state power and constitutional checks and balances, but beyond this there is a serious question of how discussions about those decisions are held. This is not just about protecting minorities (important though that may be): the majority loses out too when a mere statement of current opinion becomes a justification. This is as this kind of justification does not allow for new information to be considered that that majority itself might want to consider. And contrary to the authoritarian populist line that this kind of argument is patronising or elitist, the opposite is in fact the case. It assumes people are rational, interested in new information and want to participate in the democratic process. It makes no claim on what eventual decision people will come to to. And the opposite view, that people's opinions are fixed, unreflective, and uninterested in information or ethnical considerations of their judgements, is to paint the electorate as monsters. Those keen to defend this idea of open, ongoing discussions, which do not see opinion as fixed or disinterested in others need to win this argument. To do so, they need to turn the authoritarian populist argument on its head: it is they who are being patronising and elitist by presuming that ordinary people are too stupid and dogmatic to want real discussions of the issues.
No More Games
Earlier this week I wrote a post criticising the Labour leadership
for playing election games that risk allowing no deal. I would like to extend
that criticism to the Liberal Democrats.
Jo Swinson has said she would rule out supporting atemporary Unity government headed by Corbyn in the event of a successful voteof no confidence. Such a government would have to be headed by a backbencher
like Yvette Cooper to gain Lib Dem support.
I am no Corbynista, but this is pretty preposterous. So long
as the Labour leadership does not budge on their current position, that any
administration would have to be led by the Labour front bench, the Lib Dems are
effectively throwing away what may be the only means of preventing no deal.
Their argument, that they could not countenance putting someone like Corbyn
into Downing Street does not even make sense on its own terms. The governing
coalition would likely only exist for a few weeks, with the sole purpose of
negotiating an article 50 extension. It would have neither the time nor ability
to pass any other legislation, and any hint of an executive overstep of the
coalition agreement could immediately be met with a withdrawal of support and a
vote of no confidence.
Their real motivation is surely just another electoral game.
Most of the Lib Dems target seats are Tory marginals, and they do not want to be
associated with a government that has Corbyn in Downing Street, even if just
for a few weeks. This is dangerously cynical.
It’s true that the Labour leadership is playing cynical games
too. But that does not negate collective responsibility. Trying to force the Labour leadership to change their position is just irresponsbile at this stage. What's more, it is unlikely to work.
There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, the Labour leadership is intensely (perhaps primarily) worried about losing control of the party. It has woken up to the fact that Brexit poses an existential threat to this, and they believe that a government of national unity headed by a backbencher would provide a locus around which a leadership challenge could be mounted. For many figures around Corbyn, this may be more important than any other considerations.
Secondly, the leadership likely has ambivalent attitudes to the political consequences of no deal. It is quite possible they see themselves as the likely beneficiaries as the consequences of no deal fuel backlash against the government. The main fear that they too would be blamed if they did not form or support a unity government is more or less neutralised if the Liberal Democrats make the same mistake.
Finally, some may even see the economic consequences of no deal as offering an opportunity for Labour to remodel the UK. It is quite possible that large parts of the British economy will effectively have to be operated as a command economy if supply chains break down; nationalisation and the introduction of price controls would be much easier to justify in such an environment.
Firstly, the Labour leadership is intensely (perhaps primarily) worried about losing control of the party. It has woken up to the fact that Brexit poses an existential threat to this, and they believe that a government of national unity headed by a backbencher would provide a locus around which a leadership challenge could be mounted. For many figures around Corbyn, this may be more important than any other considerations.
Secondly, the leadership likely has ambivalent attitudes to the political consequences of no deal. It is quite possible they see themselves as the likely beneficiaries as the consequences of no deal fuel backlash against the government. The main fear that they too would be blamed if they did not form or support a unity government is more or less neutralised if the Liberal Democrats make the same mistake.
Finally, some may even see the economic consequences of no deal as offering an opportunity for Labour to remodel the UK. It is quite possible that large parts of the British economy will effectively have to be operated as a command economy if supply chains break down; nationalisation and the introduction of price controls would be much easier to justify in such an environment.
The main strength of the Lib Dems at the moment is that if
they are willing to support a Corbyn led temporary government, the Labour
leadership is not in a position to refuse. This, in the long term, I think,
would offer actually offer a better electoral strategy for the Lib Dems anyway,
as it would put distance between the party and their role in the Cameron’s
coalition government.
There is a big opening for a Europhile party of the centre
left, particularly one that embraced expansionary fiscal policy. This seems to
offer more of an opportunity than mopping up the relatively small number of disaffected
Cameroons. But there is no room for that strategy if the Liberal Democrats
become yet another appendage to the political culture that brought about a no
deal Brexit. And even if that's wrong, at this stage, who cares. Now is not the time for electoral games.
The party politics of no deal
There was a lot of noise last night about Rebecca Long Bailey's interview on Channel 4 news in which she said that Labour would not support any kind of unity government as a means of preventing no deal Brexit, as this would give Johnson a "get out of jail free card". The most common response has been that it was simply illogical, or suggested a misunderstanding of what a 'unity government' would mean. How could a scenario in which Johnson lost a vote of no confidence and was replaced as Prime Minister be letting him off the hook?
But I don't think this is the most likely explanation. The second part of the sentence was that he could use his get out jail free card to "sail back in, without any problems at all, without a sufficient parliamentary majority". That last part of the sentence admittedly confuses things, but the general sense sounds more like what is being expressed is the fear that Johnson would not have to face the consequences of his actions (i.e bringing the UK to the edge of the no deal cliff). He could then at some later stage "sail back in", though presumably on the back of a general election (and perhaps, if successful, a parliamentary majority). As mentioned, the last part of the sentence doesn't quite gel with this, but you can see why someone wouldn't refer to the prospect of their own party losing an election.
Furthermore, whether or not her remarks were an accidental admission, you can see the strategic rational from the point of view of the Labour leadership of that view. The chaos of a no deal Brexit would, you would hope, make the Conservatives very unpopular. And the alternative scenario, in which Johnson as leader of the Conservative party can go into a general election saying that his plan only failed because he was undermined by remainer MPs, does sound like something that could be an effective strategy for the Conservatives.
This is deeply worrying, because it suggests that the Labour leadership might well come to the conclusion that the best electoral strategy is to make some kind of parliamentary gesture of opposition to no deal, but ultimately fail to take what might be the only viable way of preventing it. Even more worryingly, the Conservative leadership is now dominated by a cult that not only sees no deal favourably, but actually seems to think it will bring political dividends. They point to an opinion poll suggesting a higher vote share for the Conservative party in this eventuality, are primarily focussed on winning back Brexit voters, and like all cults on some level think that what they want must ultimately be popular.
If you assume that British elections are essentially a zero sum game with two players, either Labour or the Conservatives must be miscalculating. But that is perfectly possible. It is quite plausible that the Labour and Conservative leadership for different reasons both think that letting no deal happen (or balking at the measures that would actually prevent it) is the best way of positioning themselves for the next general election. To use an old cliché, I very much hope I am wrong. If not, we are in for a very bumpy ride.
But I don't think this is the most likely explanation. The second part of the sentence was that he could use his get out jail free card to "sail back in, without any problems at all, without a sufficient parliamentary majority". That last part of the sentence admittedly confuses things, but the general sense sounds more like what is being expressed is the fear that Johnson would not have to face the consequences of his actions (i.e bringing the UK to the edge of the no deal cliff). He could then at some later stage "sail back in", though presumably on the back of a general election (and perhaps, if successful, a parliamentary majority). As mentioned, the last part of the sentence doesn't quite gel with this, but you can see why someone wouldn't refer to the prospect of their own party losing an election.
Furthermore, whether or not her remarks were an accidental admission, you can see the strategic rational from the point of view of the Labour leadership of that view. The chaos of a no deal Brexit would, you would hope, make the Conservatives very unpopular. And the alternative scenario, in which Johnson as leader of the Conservative party can go into a general election saying that his plan only failed because he was undermined by remainer MPs, does sound like something that could be an effective strategy for the Conservatives.
This is deeply worrying, because it suggests that the Labour leadership might well come to the conclusion that the best electoral strategy is to make some kind of parliamentary gesture of opposition to no deal, but ultimately fail to take what might be the only viable way of preventing it. Even more worryingly, the Conservative leadership is now dominated by a cult that not only sees no deal favourably, but actually seems to think it will bring political dividends. They point to an opinion poll suggesting a higher vote share for the Conservative party in this eventuality, are primarily focussed on winning back Brexit voters, and like all cults on some level think that what they want must ultimately be popular.
If you assume that British elections are essentially a zero sum game with two players, either Labour or the Conservatives must be miscalculating. But that is perfectly possible. It is quite plausible that the Labour and Conservative leadership for different reasons both think that letting no deal happen (or balking at the measures that would actually prevent it) is the best way of positioning themselves for the next general election. To use an old cliché, I very much hope I am wrong. If not, we are in for a very bumpy ride.
Arguing against the absurd
At university, for the better or worse, I was quite involved in competitive debating. One rather surprising thing you learned was it was often a lot easier to argue for an extreme, or even absurd position than a reasonable one. What you said would be more interesting, more entertaining, and if you were good at it, give you more opportunity to use novel arguments. These would be harder for the other side to anticipate and they would have no experience refuting them.
The following example is illustrative, if a little embarrassing. I remember one day having to chairing a show debate about the legalisation of duelling. The proposition had 15 minutes to prepare their case. Their argument was simple. Individual preferences are difficult to discern. We allow people to make strange choices according to priorities which don't always make sense to an outsider. We also allow people to consent to large risks. If people are willing to consent to something with risks that large, they probably do so because it is very important to them. The opposition responded by questioning the ability of individuals to consent to that sort of risk. They talked about family and societal pressure, motivation by jealousy, shame, or rage, and argued that the kind of situation where somebody was likely to be involved in a duel was one where they could not rationally make a decision. But the proposition had a counter. Why could these things not constitute rationally valid motivations? If a sense of shame or lost honour is so important to you that you would be willing to risk your life for it, why could you not rationally make the choice that the risk was worth taking? The opposition had no idea how to respond to this argument.
That's not to say there weren't effective counters for the opposition out there. Or perhaps they should have sidestepped the issue of whether someone can consent to such harms, and framed the debate in terms of whether consent eliminates a harm. Perhaps they should have talked more about the consequences the practice imposed on loved ones, or how it would shift societal expectations of how people respond to shame.
Thinking back to this does make me cringe a little. But I think it helps make sense of popular debates, and why it can be so difficult to argue against absurd positions. Think about someone who wants to argue that natural selection is in fact a myth. An argument frequently used is that something like the eye could not possibly come about through natural selection, as it requires a high degree of complexity to be advantageous. There are so many mutations required for an eye that give no evolutionary advantage before you have something functional (so the argument goes) that an organ like the eye would be highly unlikely to come about. This is not be a good argument against natural selection, but how would you respond to it? As a layman, it would actually quite hard to immediately know why the argument is wrong. Is it because there is already a good evolutionary account of the eye, or is it because the absence of one does not mean we should reject the theory of evolution? As it turns out, there are explanatory accounts of the eye. But unless you happened to be an evolutionary biologist, or spent some time researching the question after the conversation, you would have no idea what these explanatory accounts are. I still do not know how certain or speculative they are. The correct response in such a discussion might therefore be to say that while you can't explain the eye, a single incident of something currently only partially understood does not imply that you should reject a theoretical framework for which there are otherwise overwhelming grounds to accept. But it's easy to imagine a situation in which you fail to make that argument, or, in doing so, you seem to have conceded rather more than you actually did.
The point is that the person arguing against natural selection, however absurd their position, is actually likely to be far more familiar with how these arguments play out than most people who might hear their argument. They will have more experience arguing their position, and assuming they aren't arguing against a specialist, may even have more relevant (albeit partially false) subject knowledge . It is likely to be an obsession, and something they have spent a considerable amount of time arguing about. And precisely because their argument is so absurd, most people will never have spent any time whatsoever thinking about how to defend their own, contrary beliefs. Indeed society would not be working properly if this were not the case: there is simply too much specialist information out there for us all to absorb, some conclusions must simply be taken on trust of those with expertise, and those experts themselves have to spend their time thinking about real scientific questions, not how to justify assumptions or positions in debates overwhelmingly resolved a very long time ago.
This, I think, was one of the initial advantages that the Leave side had in the 2016 Brexit referendum. They had been making their arguments for decades. They knew how audiences responded, they knew their case, and they had a much better idea of what the Remain case might look like than the other way round. Remainers, on the other hand, had almost no experience arguing their case. They had no idea which arguments worked and which didn't. And they had no idea how to respond to a position that they saw as inherently absurd. The Leave position seemed in some basic way to violate how the world worked. Figures like Daniel Hannan could do very well in televised debates by bamboozling opponents who had no idea what the flaws in his argument were. A lot of the time, they relied on specific falsehoods or factoids which took a lot of time and effort to refute.
On Brexit specifically, this may have gradually changed. A lot of people have suddenly found themselves finding a lot more out about the issues involved, and learning the contours of this strange 'debate'. People like Ian Dunt, Chris Grey and David Allen Green have large audiences for their work refuting some of the bad arguments made about Brexit. This is perhaps similar to the response from popular science writers who in the '90s and 2000's very publicly made the case for natural selection. But there is a more general problem here with populist movements for liberals and left liberals like myself. They rely on conspiracy theories that are very difficult to refute. And they attack the norms and practices of liberal democracies that are so established that very few people have thought about how to argue in favour of them, at a time when they are weakest. They make bold claims about how the world could be, or how governments could act, that nobody else has thought through. And what used to be a compelling argument, that such propositions just demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the world worked, now seems to be a much weaker one.
The following example is illustrative, if a little embarrassing. I remember one day having to chairing a show debate about the legalisation of duelling. The proposition had 15 minutes to prepare their case. Their argument was simple. Individual preferences are difficult to discern. We allow people to make strange choices according to priorities which don't always make sense to an outsider. We also allow people to consent to large risks. If people are willing to consent to something with risks that large, they probably do so because it is very important to them. The opposition responded by questioning the ability of individuals to consent to that sort of risk. They talked about family and societal pressure, motivation by jealousy, shame, or rage, and argued that the kind of situation where somebody was likely to be involved in a duel was one where they could not rationally make a decision. But the proposition had a counter. Why could these things not constitute rationally valid motivations? If a sense of shame or lost honour is so important to you that you would be willing to risk your life for it, why could you not rationally make the choice that the risk was worth taking? The opposition had no idea how to respond to this argument.
That's not to say there weren't effective counters for the opposition out there. Or perhaps they should have sidestepped the issue of whether someone can consent to such harms, and framed the debate in terms of whether consent eliminates a harm. Perhaps they should have talked more about the consequences the practice imposed on loved ones, or how it would shift societal expectations of how people respond to shame.
Thinking back to this does make me cringe a little. But I think it helps make sense of popular debates, and why it can be so difficult to argue against absurd positions. Think about someone who wants to argue that natural selection is in fact a myth. An argument frequently used is that something like the eye could not possibly come about through natural selection, as it requires a high degree of complexity to be advantageous. There are so many mutations required for an eye that give no evolutionary advantage before you have something functional (so the argument goes) that an organ like the eye would be highly unlikely to come about. This is not be a good argument against natural selection, but how would you respond to it? As a layman, it would actually quite hard to immediately know why the argument is wrong. Is it because there is already a good evolutionary account of the eye, or is it because the absence of one does not mean we should reject the theory of evolution? As it turns out, there are explanatory accounts of the eye. But unless you happened to be an evolutionary biologist, or spent some time researching the question after the conversation, you would have no idea what these explanatory accounts are. I still do not know how certain or speculative they are. The correct response in such a discussion might therefore be to say that while you can't explain the eye, a single incident of something currently only partially understood does not imply that you should reject a theoretical framework for which there are otherwise overwhelming grounds to accept. But it's easy to imagine a situation in which you fail to make that argument, or, in doing so, you seem to have conceded rather more than you actually did.
The point is that the person arguing against natural selection, however absurd their position, is actually likely to be far more familiar with how these arguments play out than most people who might hear their argument. They will have more experience arguing their position, and assuming they aren't arguing against a specialist, may even have more relevant (albeit partially false) subject knowledge . It is likely to be an obsession, and something they have spent a considerable amount of time arguing about. And precisely because their argument is so absurd, most people will never have spent any time whatsoever thinking about how to defend their own, contrary beliefs. Indeed society would not be working properly if this were not the case: there is simply too much specialist information out there for us all to absorb, some conclusions must simply be taken on trust of those with expertise, and those experts themselves have to spend their time thinking about real scientific questions, not how to justify assumptions or positions in debates overwhelmingly resolved a very long time ago.
This, I think, was one of the initial advantages that the Leave side had in the 2016 Brexit referendum. They had been making their arguments for decades. They knew how audiences responded, they knew their case, and they had a much better idea of what the Remain case might look like than the other way round. Remainers, on the other hand, had almost no experience arguing their case. They had no idea which arguments worked and which didn't. And they had no idea how to respond to a position that they saw as inherently absurd. The Leave position seemed in some basic way to violate how the world worked. Figures like Daniel Hannan could do very well in televised debates by bamboozling opponents who had no idea what the flaws in his argument were. A lot of the time, they relied on specific falsehoods or factoids which took a lot of time and effort to refute.
On Brexit specifically, this may have gradually changed. A lot of people have suddenly found themselves finding a lot more out about the issues involved, and learning the contours of this strange 'debate'. People like Ian Dunt, Chris Grey and David Allen Green have large audiences for their work refuting some of the bad arguments made about Brexit. This is perhaps similar to the response from popular science writers who in the '90s and 2000's very publicly made the case for natural selection. But there is a more general problem here with populist movements for liberals and left liberals like myself. They rely on conspiracy theories that are very difficult to refute. And they attack the norms and practices of liberal democracies that are so established that very few people have thought about how to argue in favour of them, at a time when they are weakest. They make bold claims about how the world could be, or how governments could act, that nobody else has thought through. And what used to be a compelling argument, that such propositions just demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the world worked, now seems to be a much weaker one.
Voting for no deal
Most leavers are wrong when they say they voted for no deal. But they aren't necessarily being disingenuous. It is quite possible that many people are being quite sincere when they say that a no deal Brexit was what they always had in mind when they put their cross in the box in 2016.
The first claim, while difficult to prove conclusively, has a decent amount of evidence in its favour. Vote Leave, the official leave campaign, consistently insisted that Brexit would be a relatively smooth process, and that the EU almost certainly agree to arrangements which did not disrupt the flow of trade, having an enormous incentive to do so. While it is difficult to prove the general thrust of a campaign, particularly when many contradictory promises are made, the campaign leaflets are illustrative. They emphasized continuity in trade and cooperation, achieved by an alternative agreement.
The first claim, while difficult to prove conclusively, has a decent amount of evidence in its favour. Vote Leave, the official leave campaign, consistently insisted that Brexit would be a relatively smooth process, and that the EU almost certainly agree to arrangements which did not disrupt the flow of trade, having an enormous incentive to do so. While it is difficult to prove the general thrust of a campaign, particularly when many contradictory promises are made, the campaign leaflets are illustrative. They emphasized continuity in trade and cooperation, achieved by an alternative agreement.
Of course, the messages of the campaign itself does not necessarily imply beliefs on the part of the target audience. But polling taken in July 2016 about expectations of Brexit suggest that beliefs were indeed congruent with the campaign message. In this comres poll, 70% of respondents expected some sort of continued single market membership, either unmodified or with some changes on Freedom of Movement. More surprisingly, these expectations were not hugely divided by how people had voted. 61% of leave voters expected the same, with the bulk (54%) expecting single market membership with new rules on Freedom of Movement. \
But this does not in and of itself mean that leavers are being disingenuous if they say that 'no deal' Brexit was in fact what they had in mind when they voted to leave. Research on the psychology of attitude formation suggests that people's memory of past behavior and beliefs is affected by current attitudes. One example of this is an experiment carried out by Michael Ross in 1981. Half the participants were presented with information on dental hygeine, the other were not. They were then then asked how often they had brushed their teeth in the past two weeks. Those who had been given information on dental hygiene were significantly more likely to say they had brushed their teeth more often. While there are problems with this specific experimental set up, similar results have been found in numerous other experiments, particularly when memories relate to attitudes that are value laden.
Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that this extends to memory of attitudes and attitudes about the past, when these are in tension with current, more salient attitudes. Think about going for a meal and discovering that your favorite dessert had run out. It wouldn't be too strange to decide that you had never really wanted it in the first place. It's particularly easy to imagine this occurring when what is at stake is your own sense of self, and whether you were duped into false expectations. In the case of Brexit, current attitudes can be a strong part of people’s sense of self.
Finally, the contradictory and impossible nature of the Leave campaign’s promises, and absence of any specific conditional commitments as to the relative importance of leaving or what would be done in what circumstances allows for the selection of certain real past memories which are more consistent with the present reality. You could remember the campaign promise that the mechanisms for maintaining the regulatory framework of the single market would not apply after Brexit, but fail to recall how important you thought this was, relative to other, contradictory promises (continued market access).
This is important when thinking about how to argue the case against no deal. Arguments which start from the premise that leavers are being disingenuous if they say they voted for no deal are not necessarily true (though some prominent politicians and journalists almost certainly are being disingenuous). In any case, that is unlikely to work well as a persuasion strategy. Prominent political actors who are dishonest should be called out for it. But when addressing the broader base of leave voters, assuming sincerity is the better strategy.
Selective mercantilism
As Johnson’s government turns up the heat on no deal rhetoric, an old trope has returned to temper fears: don’t worry, once they know we are serious about walking away, German car manufacturers will come to the rescue. More broadly, so the argument goes, the UK’s trade deficit with the rest of the EU gives the British government a substantial advantage in any negotiation, because European exporters stand to lose more than British exporters from any uniform reduction in the volume of trade.
There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that the argument confuses absolute values with proportions. Yes, the U.K. exports less to the rest of the EU than vice versa, but the EU represents a substantially larger proportion of the U.K.’s export market than the other way round. 46% of U.K. exports go to the EU, whereas only 8% of rEU exports go to the U.K. Once you factor in U.K. exports that go to countries which the U.K. has trade arrangements agreements with by virtue of EU membership, the figure for the U.K. is even larger.
But the second problem is perhaps more fundamental. Why do exports matter more than imports? ‘They sell more to us than we sell to them’ could easily be rephrased as ‘we get more of our stuff from them than the other way round’. If a good is being is being imported, it must represent some kind of a gain for the consumer: either in price, quality, choice or simply availability of a particular commodity. If this were not the case, why would anyone buy the good? Replacement, where possible, would come at a cost. And the sudden shock of a disruption to trade could lead to shortages. What’s more, long supply chains dependent on imported goods would mean disruption would hit export industries too.
Brexiteers seem to have fallen for the old mercantilist fallacy: that national wealth, like that of an individual firm, comes from accumulating profits (in this case from exports) rather than efficient resource allocation. But this mercantilism is in fact rather selective. The very same Brexiteers explicitly reject this argument when arguing in favour of the so called WTO option.
Their argument relies heavily on modelling done by Patrick Minford, which assumes the U.K. will embark on unilateral free trade. The idea here is that while the U.K. could not force other countries to eliminate barriers to U.K. exports, the U.K. could unilaterally eliminate barriers to imports. The argument does not take into account non tariff barriers (particularly in the form of regulatory alignment) which do require agreement, but let’s leave that one aside. The point is that for unilateral free trade to represent a gain, you have to assume that reducing import costs is beneficial. So much so that it might be worth giving up the leverage of being able to reduce barriers in order to get a trade agreement. This is what Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees Mogg, John Redwood and others have argued.
The logical corollary of this is that increasing such costs represents a harm. This is surely hard to reconcile with the first, previously mentioned plank of no deal rhetoric: that the UK’s trade deficit is a negotiating advantage, because all that really matters is exports. You could perhaps try and make an exotic argument about both being important, but one mattering more than the other, but at that stage the arguments become increasingly arbitrary. The only realistic way of reconciling these two views is to say that yes, exports aren’t really the source of wealth, but perhaps the rest of the EU is stupid enough to think that that is the case. But perhaps this is just taking bad arguments a bit too seriously.
There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that the argument confuses absolute values with proportions. Yes, the U.K. exports less to the rest of the EU than vice versa, but the EU represents a substantially larger proportion of the U.K.’s export market than the other way round. 46% of U.K. exports go to the EU, whereas only 8% of rEU exports go to the U.K. Once you factor in U.K. exports that go to countries which the U.K. has trade arrangements agreements with by virtue of EU membership, the figure for the U.K. is even larger.
But the second problem is perhaps more fundamental. Why do exports matter more than imports? ‘They sell more to us than we sell to them’ could easily be rephrased as ‘we get more of our stuff from them than the other way round’. If a good is being is being imported, it must represent some kind of a gain for the consumer: either in price, quality, choice or simply availability of a particular commodity. If this were not the case, why would anyone buy the good? Replacement, where possible, would come at a cost. And the sudden shock of a disruption to trade could lead to shortages. What’s more, long supply chains dependent on imported goods would mean disruption would hit export industries too.
Brexiteers seem to have fallen for the old mercantilist fallacy: that national wealth, like that of an individual firm, comes from accumulating profits (in this case from exports) rather than efficient resource allocation. But this mercantilism is in fact rather selective. The very same Brexiteers explicitly reject this argument when arguing in favour of the so called WTO option.
Their argument relies heavily on modelling done by Patrick Minford, which assumes the U.K. will embark on unilateral free trade. The idea here is that while the U.K. could not force other countries to eliminate barriers to U.K. exports, the U.K. could unilaterally eliminate barriers to imports. The argument does not take into account non tariff barriers (particularly in the form of regulatory alignment) which do require agreement, but let’s leave that one aside. The point is that for unilateral free trade to represent a gain, you have to assume that reducing import costs is beneficial. So much so that it might be worth giving up the leverage of being able to reduce barriers in order to get a trade agreement. This is what Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees Mogg, John Redwood and others have argued.
The logical corollary of this is that increasing such costs represents a harm. This is surely hard to reconcile with the first, previously mentioned plank of no deal rhetoric: that the UK’s trade deficit is a negotiating advantage, because all that really matters is exports. You could perhaps try and make an exotic argument about both being important, but one mattering more than the other, but at that stage the arguments become increasingly arbitrary. The only realistic way of reconciling these two views is to say that yes, exports aren’t really the source of wealth, but perhaps the rest of the EU is stupid enough to think that that is the case. But perhaps this is just taking bad arguments a bit too seriously.
The Legitimacy Zugzwang
A close friend of mine remarked earlier today that he is increasingly worried about the effect Brexit will have on social cohesion. If it goes ahead, the economic shock will likely lead to a significant amount of dislocation, and if it doesn't, the existing betrayal narrative amongst leavers is likely to get worse. They may blame not just politicians, but liberally minded people in the country at large. Increasingly I think there is no outcome that a large portion of the population won't see as fundamentally illegitimate. Any move on Brexit is likely to make social cohesion and belief in the legitimacy of government worse.
Amongst Conservative Brexiteers and the leave supporting press, there has been a decisive move towards describing anything other than the most extreme rupture with the European Union as an act of betrayal. In their minds, nothing else will fulfill the mandate of the referendum.But the corollary of this is that any 'legitimate' Brexit for leavers will so egregiously exceed general expectations of the referendum mandate that it will almost certainly be seen as illegitimate by most remainers. This is not the same as saying they won't like it: they will see it as an extreme development achieved without proper democratic consent.
Add to this the increasing awareness of electoral misconduct by Vote Leave and the memory of the way in which the campaign was run and it's easy to see why the legitimacy of the vote might be called into question. And any residual sense of legitimacy of the process will then be tested by the severe shock of an abrupt departure from the EU.
This was not always the case. When May first came into power in 2016, it may well have been possible to put together a compromise position in favour of EEA membership (the so called Norway option). Sure, lots of people wouldn't particularly have liked it. Remainers like myself might well have thought the process was pointlessly damaging: a large amount of effort, and a very unpleasant campaign would have occurred, all to keep things more or less as they are, albeit with less influence than as a full member state.
Certainly many leavers would have disliked it, but it's quite plausible that it would have been seen by a broad enough chunk of the population as acceptable enough that politics could move on to other things. Indeed polling immediately after the referendum suggests this is exactly what many leavers expected to happen, and many prominent leavers had at one stage or other advocated something along these lines. Even the withdrawal agreement, something that in all likelihood would mean a final settlement with the EU which was hugely damaging to the UK in terms of trade, influence, rights and opportunities could potentially have been regarded as an unfortunate compromise.
Now, it is not only difficult to imagine such a compromise: even if one were reached in Commons, amongst the wider population, it would be viewed as illegitimate by either remainers, leavers or both. Arguably, a second referendum could shift this. But I wouldn't be so sure. The margin of victory in a second referendum would likely be small, and there is every reason to think the campaign would be equally dishonest. Leavers could easily dismiss a narrow remain victory as an illegitimate result,either by questioning whether a second vote should have taken place, or by quasi conspiratorial appeal to an establishment set up (conspiratorial ideas about 'the establishment'/the elites form an important part of Brexiteer rhetoric, regardless of their resemblance of actual power relations). Remainers in the event of another leave victory are likely to accept leaving as a politcal reality, but still see the likely tactics of the leave campaign as anti-democratic.
This is not to say that legitimacy questions can simply be tossed out the window. Perhaps the consequences of one group seeing the process as illegitimate are more severe than those of another. And a second referendum may deliver a less bad outcome in terms of percieved legitimacy of government policy. But all arguments to this effect must now be comparative. And in absence of a compelling comparative argument, it increasingly seems to make sense to just push for the best outcome in practical terms, which means remaining a member of the European Union.
Amongst Conservative Brexiteers and the leave supporting press, there has been a decisive move towards describing anything other than the most extreme rupture with the European Union as an act of betrayal. In their minds, nothing else will fulfill the mandate of the referendum.But the corollary of this is that any 'legitimate' Brexit for leavers will so egregiously exceed general expectations of the referendum mandate that it will almost certainly be seen as illegitimate by most remainers. This is not the same as saying they won't like it: they will see it as an extreme development achieved without proper democratic consent.
Add to this the increasing awareness of electoral misconduct by Vote Leave and the memory of the way in which the campaign was run and it's easy to see why the legitimacy of the vote might be called into question. And any residual sense of legitimacy of the process will then be tested by the severe shock of an abrupt departure from the EU.
This was not always the case. When May first came into power in 2016, it may well have been possible to put together a compromise position in favour of EEA membership (the so called Norway option). Sure, lots of people wouldn't particularly have liked it. Remainers like myself might well have thought the process was pointlessly damaging: a large amount of effort, and a very unpleasant campaign would have occurred, all to keep things more or less as they are, albeit with less influence than as a full member state.
Certainly many leavers would have disliked it, but it's quite plausible that it would have been seen by a broad enough chunk of the population as acceptable enough that politics could move on to other things. Indeed polling immediately after the referendum suggests this is exactly what many leavers expected to happen, and many prominent leavers had at one stage or other advocated something along these lines. Even the withdrawal agreement, something that in all likelihood would mean a final settlement with the EU which was hugely damaging to the UK in terms of trade, influence, rights and opportunities could potentially have been regarded as an unfortunate compromise.
Now, it is not only difficult to imagine such a compromise: even if one were reached in Commons, amongst the wider population, it would be viewed as illegitimate by either remainers, leavers or both. Arguably, a second referendum could shift this. But I wouldn't be so sure. The margin of victory in a second referendum would likely be small, and there is every reason to think the campaign would be equally dishonest. Leavers could easily dismiss a narrow remain victory as an illegitimate result,either by questioning whether a second vote should have taken place, or by quasi conspiratorial appeal to an establishment set up (conspiratorial ideas about 'the establishment'/the elites form an important part of Brexiteer rhetoric, regardless of their resemblance of actual power relations). Remainers in the event of another leave victory are likely to accept leaving as a politcal reality, but still see the likely tactics of the leave campaign as anti-democratic.
This is not to say that legitimacy questions can simply be tossed out the window. Perhaps the consequences of one group seeing the process as illegitimate are more severe than those of another. And a second referendum may deliver a less bad outcome in terms of percieved legitimacy of government policy. But all arguments to this effect must now be comparative. And in absence of a compelling comparative argument, it increasingly seems to make sense to just push for the best outcome in practical terms, which means remaining a member of the European Union.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)