I wish I'd been a remainer

Running a blog is not an easy thing to do. This is my third blogspot, and to date the most successful, but only through persistence and a lot of hard work. It doesn't get nearly the sort of hits it should get for the effort that goes into it. I think this is because it is a fairly niche blog. The hardcore rump of the leave "movement" (for want of a better word) have a very particular narrative to which I do not subscribe and in fact I have more common ground with most remainers than I do leavers. For the most part they have a better command of the details.

One such example was Dr Mike Galsworthy's video critique of Brexit the Movie (BTM). BTM was an absolute travesty. I really wanted to tear into Galsworthy because I have a strong dislike of him, his sneering superior attitude and his overall dishonesty, but I had to let that video critique slide because nothing he said about it was anything I wouldn't have.

Similarly InFacts did not make life very easy in that they picked all the soft targets; Hannan, Redwood and the rest. The attacked all the Vote Leave core arguments in such a way that it was impossible to come to the defence of the leave side. My only real critique of InFacts, apart from their selection bias was that they did a pretty dismal job compared to the demolition job I would have done in their place, and if they'd read this blog they would have found new material with which to beat them over the head.

From an entirely selfish point of view I really do wish I'd been a remainer. It would have been so much more rewarding from a publishing perspective and I would have been acknowledged by the official campaign. Had I been for remaining in the EU I expect this blog would have had three times the exposure. Instead this blog, among others aligned with The Leave Alliance, continues to toil in obscurity - and though we made something of an impact, mainstream history will not make mention of us.

It is said that history is written by the victors. In this case history is written by the establishment media. In their book Vote Leave was the voice of the leave campaign and there are no other points of view. But that's because Vote Leave is very much a branch of the establishment too. In no way could it be considered a grassroots campaign and was conducted entirely through the London media using mainstream politicians and Tory party affiliates.

This is really what the establishment is. An overriding orthodoxy whereby it does not matter who you are or what you say. If you do not have prestige, connections and subsequently the acknowledgement of media you don't exist. There is no grey area.

In this there were plenty of nobodies on the remain side who were acknowledged by media simply because they conform to the establishment narrative, and because they only made arguments within the parameters allowed. The media then picks the low hanging fruit to represent the opposition. This dynamic is wonderfully sketched out by a friend of mine on Facebook who is, not for the first time, quoted on this blog...

"And now on BBC Radio 4, to talk to us about the EU, we have Professor Claus van der Reasoning, an expert on the European Union and a jolly good chap. Professor van der Reasoning is the Clegg Professor of Europe at the European Institute of Europe and has absolutely no axe to grind.

Here to give the anti-European perspective is Sir Henry Bigot MP, a foam-flecked lunatic who hates and little else, and was once reported by the Guardian to have felched David Duke while singing Horst Wessel Lied. He may experience technical issues.

Welcome both of you to this balanced programme that represents both sides of the argument."

And this is actually why the likes of Farage are now on our screens and on the front pages. In that regard, Farage and co are tools of the establishment. They never banked on the public finding them less repellent than themselves. Their hubris has backfired.

I suspect this tactic is a good part of the reason why they lost. They were too self-absorbed. Though the best leave arguments were never deployed on TV during the referendum and had few, if any, champions in the public debate, those arguments definitely were made on social media and on the blogs which bypassed the establishment debate entirely. It's entirely possible that bloggers influenced half million people between us.

That though does not change the post-referendum narrative where the remainers maintain their reputation as the informed and reasonable while the leavers are still portrayed as populist oiks driving the country to ruin on the back of fabrications and lies. The vote may have gone against the establishment but the establishment is still very much in control of the debate.

Amusingly this now bites them on the behind because the one course of action they now seek (something akin with the Norway Option) is the one they went to great lengths to demolish during the referendum. The reason being is that it is entirely safe. They have painted themselves into a corner.

We are now seeing them put up a feeble campaign for an EEA settlement but because they have never explored the potential merits of it, or bothered to acknowledge advocates of it, they are forced into using the same old tactics of scaremongering - repeating all the same mistakes. They are, by their own behaviour, actually increasing the support for leaving the single market.

They could, of course, use Flexcit but that would mean doing something they never do; admitting they are wrong. It would mean acknowledging the author and all those leave campaigners who made the case for a progressive Brexit. Remainers would actually rather damage Britain than break the conspiracy of silence.

But then there is method in their madness. Their hope is to keep the debate off balance and deprived of clarity for long enough that the resultant incoherent shambles will erode the support for Brexit. Best of all, being an incoherent mess takes no particular effort on the part of the media.

Once again it falls to the bloggers to bring any clarity to the situation, and once again without any real acknowledgement. Had we been remainers, by now we would have soaring hits and a considerably larger following, and maybe a seat at the table. But that is reserved for remainers like Open Europe. For sure, most leavers aren't capable of making an intellectual contributions but those of us who are, are simply not allowed.

In the end, from a self-interested perspective, it's really rather a pity that the EU is an obsolete, antidemocratic relic standing in the way of progress, otherwise I'd have done quite well out of this. Sadly, or not so sadly, for all the common ground I had with remainers I could never make the final leap that Britain should be subordinate to a supreme European government. Now I just want both extremes of the debate to lose. Sadly though, for all the waffle we have heard about "toppling the establishment", eurosceptics have never had less power or influence than now. Such is the extent of Ukip's failure. 

Mrs May might as well call off her supreme court appeal

Labour MPs have written to the Guardian on the matter of Brexit in which they say.

The ideology driving some Tory MPs to support a hard Brexit would be a disaster for working people. Falling back on World Trade Organisation rules would not be a clean break but the most destructive, harshest of settlements, which would lead to fewer jobs and less business investment, and would leave the British people poorer. This is not what they voted for in June.

This blog is in agreement that the WTO option would indeed be the most destructive of all possible outcomes - but then the WTO option is the particular circumstance whereby Britain does not seek a negotiated exit and instead unilaterally withdraws from the EU without invoking Article 50. That is the true definition of hard Brexit. Mrs May has given zero indication that she wishes to pursue this avenue and has gone to great lengths to deny any suggestion that she might.

The actual letter makes no comment on whether we should or should not be a part of the single market - it deals only with the WTO option. If that is the basis for Labour's opposition then they are already fretting over nothing.

But then Anushka Asthana, political editor at the Guardian writes the lead accompaniment.

Leaving the single market in a hard Brexit would be a disaster for working people, make the weekly food shop more expensive and hit jobs, growth and business, according to 90 Labour MPs. In a blistering attack on Brexit-supporting colleagues, they urged Theresa May to act against any situation in which the country would be forced to follow “World Trade Organisation rules”.

Now it may seem pedantic to hone in on this but leaving the single market is not the WTO option. Departure from the single market with a negotiated means of preferential access is not the same as unilateral Brexit. As most readers will now be aware, neither is especially desirable as the latter would be time consuming and unnecessary but the point is that the Guardian's political editor does not know the difference. Imagine that. After two years of intense debate over these very issues and this is the sum total of their comprehension.

If this is the extent of the opposition understanding of the issues then Theresa May should have no problems whatsoever in utterly demolishing these intellectual pygmies. It's worth letting them have their say so that the public can see just how undeserving of power Labour really is. 

Theresa May yesterday spoke of the need to avoid a "cliff edge" and has spoken of "transitional arrangements". In all likelihood that means we will, for the interim, remain a member of the single market. We are in safe hands. Labour, though, has nothing of use to contribute other than a petulant and crass demand that we remain in the customs union which will rightly be ignored.

One thing voters did vote for in June is the ability to make our own way in the world. If parliament wants to second guess the people then let's hear them out. Let's hear them out - then throw them out. It's nothing less than they deserve. They are incompetent wastrels - and the debate will show that. 

The Brexit debate is lacking vision and direction

If you are a hack working for the FT, Guardian or Independent, each morning you surrender what few critical faculties you have and take every unnamed source from Brussels at face value. You believe everything you read and are unable to extrapolate any nuances from precisely calculated language.

You will possess no working knowledge of what the single market is and even less idea what the customs union is. Consequently you are operating on the absolute certainty that hard Brexit is a looming even though the only things that adds weight to this massive assumption is some rabble rousing rhetoric from the Conservative party conference which in political terms was an age ago.

If you are Toryboy, on the other hand, you believe that Mrs May is a secret remainer plotting to keep us in the single market and you foam at the very thought of a managed and sensible Brexit that doesn't immediately sever all ties with the continent.

But then if you're a Labourist you think Mrs May is actually the second incarnation of Mrs T who is bent on hard Brexit. The official Labour line this week is that the UK must stay in the customs union and the single market - and if you know what that actually means in terms of terminology it is an entirely intellectually incoherent point of view. It's Schrodinger's Brexit. The subtext of that is that Labour wants Brexit in name only.

All of this contributes to a cacophony of noise, none of which adds any value to the debate or the sum total of our understanding. Whipping up a panic about the WTO option at this point is to pick the least likely scenario and by so doing Labour is absenting themselves from the debate in such a way they are voluntarily surrendering any influence over it. Given how little value they can add, that is no bad thing.

All we are seeing is games within games between the lazy, the feckless and the stupid. Each have their own pet theories and hobby horses and as far as I can tell virtually nobody in the field has any interest in establishing what is actually happening and how the various mechanisms work. It seems that Brexit has become the vehicle by which each tribe imposes their own alternate reality while the government does its own thing entirely. For all the noise parliament has made over parliamentary sovereignty, they are doing nothing to deserve a place in the discussion.

The problem we have is that the meagre efforts of the middle of the road remainers is actually emboldening the Tory hard Brexiters. In the end Mrs May will ignore them but the fevered panic this creates is not at all helpful. The way to dismantle the Tory right's arguments is to start examining and selling the advantages of the EEA and demonstrate the obvious futility of leaving the single market.

The problem we have here is that Brexiteers have long since stopped doing any thinking. They decided in 1992 that the only way was out and have not updated their arguments ever since. There was a time where we could have left the single market to revert to operating in an unregulated space but since 1992 the rest of the world has caught up and is now operating to the EU standard which in many respects has become the global standard. There simply isn't the scope for sweeping deregulation that the Tory right imagines. Consequently, by leaving the single market we would be terminating all the mechanisms that allow for the freest trade possible for no commercial advantage.

In this Labour can squeal at the insanity of the proposition but theirs is no better. Theirs is to run for cover - to seek a status inside the customs union having no say in EU affairs but having none of the advantages of leaving. It lacks vision or courage and puts us in the worst position imaginable.

But then Mrs May is not daft. She knows full well that the whole point of leaving the EU is to regain the power over our own affairs including trade and that means that we most certainly will be leaving the customs union. To do otherwise would to to unleash all hell. That leaves both extremes of the debate pointlessly shouting into the abyss. Consequently it is left to the government, without a clear vision, to fumble around in the dark.

What we should be looking to do is to succeed where the EU has failed. The EU has sought through TTIP and CETA to expand the single market but with a view to retaining an iron grip over it, controlling the terms of accession and retaining exclusivity. The British mission, therefore, should be to continue working with the EU to enhance the single market, removing the unfair distortions, but also using our soft power and agility to increase participation. In so doing we build up a core of non-EU participants coalescing around the UK to the point where we can break the single market out of EU control, making it a community of equals.

In this, neither Labour's snivelling gutlessness or dinosauric Tory wrongheadedness should be tolerated. We want continued free trade and good relations with the EU but at the same time we wish to take a leading role in the world to bring about a global single market. Labour wants to run to mummy while the Tories want to shut up shop and pretend the last twenty years never happened. Both to me sounds distinctly un-British.

More pointless noise from the BBC

Who said what and when is to me completely irrelevant. The fact is that most Vote Leave politicians did at some point say that we would leave the single market. The official line was that Britain would leave the EU unilaterally. They said so on their website. That content has now been removed.

That though was never really picked up on in the popular narrative because the media decided Vote Leave had no official plan, and Vote Leave were in no hurry to correct them - with both Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart both appearing on the BBC saying that it wasn't their responsibility. Julia Brewer Hartley said much the same.

Then in the treasury select committee meeting when pressed, Dominic Cummings declined to say whether we would or wouldn't leave the single market, instead leaving poor old Rachel Reeves deeply confused by denying we were even in the single market. This line was later repeated by Gove.

Some had their ideological reasons for wanting to leave the single market while others like Kate Hoey merely bleated that we should leave the single market because she was clearly doing no thinking of her own - and to this day I doubt she could give us a satisfactory definition of what it means.

Others like Owen Paterson, for a time, made it quite clear that we should join Efta and remain part of the single market - until such a time he caved into peer pressure on the Tory right. He is a man reputed to agree with the last person he spoke with. As to Ukip, there is footage of Farage repeating the EEA line. Ukip though changed their position the moment it became a media narrative that the EEA meant continued freedom of movement. Leave.EU momentarily flirted with the Norway Option only to back down a day later for the same reasons. As for Daniel Hannan, his opinion changed by the hour and still does to this day.

So, it is a matter of historical fact that the leave campaign was unable to present a coherent position and kept things deliberately vague so that the EEA could be deployed as an argument when convenient, and dropped when inconvenient.

So what are we to make of this mess? Well one thing leavers are all agreed on is that the customs union, which was never even a referendum issue, is something that we must leave in order to make our own trade deals. The question of the single market however remains open ended.

We could if we wanted play games with deduction. After all Vote Leave did say they wanted to spend £350m a week on the NHS, which would require ending all payments to the EU - and thus would be a unilateral exit from the EU and thus not part of the single market, but there is now a broad consensus that we won't be spending that money on the NHS thus everything else is now up for debate. There is a broad mandate to leave the EU but nobody voted with a view to terminating all trade and diplomatic relations with it.

Consequently nobody in Vote Leave has the right to call the shots and since parliament has been so keen to insert itself in the debate it is now a matter for deliberation. The arguments must be heard and assessed on merit.

For that to happen we need to know from hard Brexiteers what why they want to take such a course of action. Ask any hard liner and they will tell you it's because they want to end freedom of movement and to be free of EU regulation and free of the ECJ. They also want to end payments to the EU.

Except of course that Efta states are not under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, Efta court decisions are not binding. Further to this, Liechtenstein has limits on freedom of movement. As to being free of EU regulation, I would like to hear from Mr Gove why it is that New Zealand, India, Canada and the US are presently overhauling their food safety laws. The answer to that question is that all new technical standards and regulations for signatories of the WTO agreement on technical barriers to trade are adopted from global regulators and the EU is now subordinate. It no longer makes the rules.

What that means is that the rules we would adopt as part of the EEA would be exactly the same ones we would have out of the EEA. And the truth is that Norway does not adopt every EU law - and of the ones it does adopt it has a voice in creating them at the level above the EU. The globalisation of regulation is an issue that still escapes most in the media.

So really that just leaves the matter of payments to the EU. If we do leave the single market and erect non tariff barriers then we are adding considerable cost burdens to business and making trade more expensive. That then reduces tax receipts for the UK government. So can any of the hard Brexiteers provide even a scrap of evidence that suggests we will be better off to the tune of £350m a week?

Moreover, part of what we pay to the EU goes to EU decentralised agencies that safeguard trade from counterfeit goods, food fraud and terrorism. Naturally we would need to replace all of these systems. What happens in the interim and who is going to pay for it?

Readers of this blog will be aware by now that I can elaborate on any one of these points in considerable detail. It's all there if you go through the archives. To date no Vote Leave politician has offered a satisfactory case for leaving the single market. Norway as an EEA member gets to make its own trade deals, has a veto on the rules it adopts and could very well use the same safeguard mechanisms on freedom of movement. Britain has a better chance as we have a good deal more clout than Norway.

It is really incumbent on leavers to make the case for leaving the single market. Considering all they have talked about since the referendum is free trade it is really for them to explain why erecting physical barriers to trade makes the UK better off. In this, the likes of Open Britain are doing a feeble job in making the case for the single market. With arguments as thin as the ones put forth by John Redwood, the hardliners should have been routed from the debate by now. But then I suppose that's what you get when you pretend the one organisation that did have a Brexit plan doesn't exist.

At this point though, I don't really care. This is all noise for the entertainment of the media.
As it happens I trust Mrs May and I trust my own analysis. We can, on paper, leave the single market and negotiate the right to deviate from close customs cooperation and regulatory harmonisation, but when it comes to the test we will leave it alone. May will keep us in the single market, probably by stealth because of all the "soft brexit is not brexit" morons. Because of them Brexit is going to be a lot more expensive than it should be.

In the meantime, if Mrs May is keeping her plans quiet is so she does not enrage her own party - not because she has a hard Brexit in mind. Hard Brexit has been off the table for a long time now. Some in the media are beginning to realise this. The kind of pointless bickering we see on The Sunday Politics is politics as entertainment and has little bearing on the actual outcome. Any hopes that Brexit would revitalise our media seem at this point to be well and truly dashed.

Spare us the "post truth" baloney

If you are fairly new to the Brexit debate it cannot have escaped you that all the lead Brexit spokesmen are complete morons. Had I only recently drifted into this arena I probably would have voted to remain. The arguments put forth by all of the Brexiteers is panglossian nonsense and it comes from extremely dubious politicians. The Brexiteers lost the economic argument early on and never really recovered the ground.

In a lot of respects Brexiteers have got lucky so far in that the immediate Brexit fallout has not been that severe. It's only because we have a sane PM who isn't one of the Brexit brigade that confidence in the UK is not collapsing completely.

That is not to say there are not sane Brexiteers it's just that moderate Brexiteers offend the sensibilities of the eurosceptic tribe and remainers won't give us any exposure because that would mean admitting there are good reasons to leave the EU. Consequently we toil in obscurity and are largely excluded from the debate.

This dynamic has prompted a lot of discussion about the concept of "post-truth politics". How can it be that the remain side lost when the leave politicians made such thin arguments and are in the main political lightweights?

Much of this though is a conceit in that if the remainers are honest they told their fair share of porkies and exaggerations and much of their case was dependent on economic projections and doom-mongering hocus pocus. We didn't hear much of a principled defence of the EU, only the drastic consequences of leaving. The best they could muster was "yeah, we know it's a bit shit so we need to stay in and reform it" just after David Cameron had completely failed to secure any meaningful reforms.

Right up to the wire Cameron repeated the mantra of staying in a "reformed EU" when it was perfectly obvious to all that the brake on freedom of movement was a policy rehash and the other measures were so utterly inconsequential that nobody can remember what they even were. After persistently bleating that three million jobs depended on EU membership and that David Cameron was the all conquering hero, the remainers are not in any position to be lecturing us about "post-truth politics".

And when it comes to being post-truth, the narrative to this day still remains that the UK was a loosely aligned member of a trade bloc when in fact the very existence of all these Brexit complications points to the glaring truth that our membership was something much more profound and comprehensive.

This is the one truth that Brexiteers have always known. The EU is not what our politicians pretend it is. In that regard the leave vote is as much a rejection of our political class for lying about it as it is a rejection of the EU.

We must also remember that as bad as Brexiteers are, remainers are also pretty awful. The finger wagging superior lectures from Anna Soubry are enough to put anyone off - so too are the limp wristed millennial whiners who called senior citizens selfish. Apparently senior citizens who have invested in society for the betterment of their children and grand children don't have a valid opinion because they will be dead soon. Real nice attitude. And let's not forget the up front attempts to gerrymander the electorate by giving non UK citizens and children the vote.

In fact, now that I think on it, the petulance and pettiness of remainer really was quite astounding. Jo Cox's corpse was still warm when Polly Toynbee, Alex Massie and James O'Brien were pointing the finger at Brexiteers. Add to that the Geldof moment along with a procession of other sneering members of the celerity class, losing was inevitable.

I think what sticks in the craw for remainers is that if the decision were a rational one based entirely on cold short term economic metrics then they probably would have won. But democracy is a funny old game. Most votes are decided on gut instinct and that is every bit as valid as a cold calculation on something like this. In the end both sides were so dreadful that it was decided on a coin toss at the last minute.

In the final analysis the leave campaigns were irrelevant. They made a lot of pointless noise, wasted a lot of money and spoke only to a hardcore of the already convinced. They campaigns made no real dent in the polling and the public didn't really engage until the last couple of weeks. My website hits reflect that much. By then the government and media had become so shrill and patronising, the final verdict was a two fingered salute to the powers that be.

That is why this cannot be characterised as a populist insurgency. That died with Ukip at the general election. It had no intellectual foundation and no substance with which to capitalise on its exposure. The activities of Vote Leave and Leave.EU were mainly a space race to create the most noise so that they could claim credit for something that was largely out of their sphere of influence. No different to a teenage vandal tagging with a spray can.

There was no sophistication behind it. In the end, Arron Banks was fleeced by publicity men and there was no real strategy at work. The had no idea what they were doing and everybody who had any dealings with Leave.EU all noted how remarkably thick and crass they were.

If the lesson you took from this is that "post-truth politics" as a campaign technique works then you are misreading it badly. The same is true of America and Trump. Just about everybody has noted that the key element in both votes was social media and really it was the private conversations between individuals that swung it. In this I would say the official campaigns were largely useless for both sides.

Voters are not stupid nor are they easily taken in. The marketing slogans used by the leave campaign are necessarily bad because the reasons for leaving are all based on conceptual and philosophical arguments which cannot be condensed into a soundbyte. The remain campaign could paint a picture of peace, unity rainbows and ponies while we were talking about fluid concepts like sovereignty and self-determination.

In fact, though Ukippers tend to be demented obsessives, some of the best expertise on all the nooks and crannies of the EU tend to be of that ilk. They were largely downed out by an increasingly self-confident and boisterous "new Ukip" and became tainted by association. The notion that voters were such gibbering imbeciles that they were swayed by a bogus statistic on the side of a bus is precisely the kind of misguided snobbery that cost remainers the referendum in the first place.

In a free society we will always have a noisy and confusing battlefield of ideas and the battle for the truth is an ongoing one. In this there can be many verifiable facts but when observed from different angles facts take on contexts of their own. The way we sort it out is by having a national conversation on all the platforms and we then have a vote on it. We had a year long national debate, itself an extension of a lingering dispute, and even though remain had every advantage, they lost - and they deserved to. There was a mountain for leavers to climb and we climbed it.

For America, the vote was decided by those who chose to stay at home. For the UK, though, we had a very respectable turnout and by whatever means, for whatever reason, the majority of people voted to leave. There is no populist surge, we are not mindless zombies enslaved to the tabloid media and we do not need our betters to referee public discussion for us. The fact is that remainers couldn't make a winning case for keeping things the way they are. It's really that simple and now we must move on.

March of the Brexit morons

Sixty Tory MPs including seven ex-Cabinet ministers have demanded Theresa May pulls Britain out of the single market and customs union amid fears her Brexit stance could be watered down. Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, John Whittingdale and Theresa Villiers are among the leading Eurosceptics to put their names to the negotiation demand. The politicians have gone public through The Telegraph amid concerns that pro-EU figures in the Cabinet are fighting to soften the Government’s Brexit position.

I haven't seen the full list of names but you can bet it's the usual suspects, half of whom cannot adequately define the single market or the customs union. What has to be said from the outset is that remaining in the customs union is not Brexit and any agreement that sees us remaining in it permanently defeats the purpose of Brexit and puts us in a manifestly worse position than we are in now. Those remainers who think this is the safe option are actually arguing to remain in the EU but with none of the rights associated with membership. The worst of all worlds.

The single market, however, is a different issue where there is no economic advantage to erecting trade barriers yet this is precisely what Tory free traders are advocating. By now there is a quite deliberate refusal to acknowledge non tariff barriers and they are motivated by a desire to leave as quickly as possible with absolutely no regard to the fallout. They are out of touch with reality.

The reason I am not in any great rush to join in the panic though is because Mrs May is in charge and will ignore her sizeable lunatic fringe. For once the official line is a rare example of government telling the absolute truth.

A Government spokesperson said: "We are committed to getting the best possible deal as we leave the EU: one that is unique to Britain, not an ‘off the shelf’ solution. "It's not about binary choices - there is a huge range of possibilities for our future trading relationship with the EU. That's why the Government is painstakingly analysing the challenges and opportunities for all the different sectors of our economy".

The short version is that the still have no idea and still no plan but the subtext is that they are looking for a politically acceptable solution. May cannot come out and say we will stay in the single market nor can she detail any of the concessions we will make specifically because it will enrage her own lunatics. The media takes May's silence as proof she intends to push for a hard Brexit (an increasingly meaningless term) but the reality is that May is not in a position to be erecting barriers and will not be able to negotiate exceptions. Moreover, integration runs so deep that we are not in a position to "take back control" until we have rebuilt the administrative institutions.

When you look ta the physical real world constraints it can only be one way. An interim solution that maintains much of what is already there until we have an idea of what we wish to disentangle ourselves from and how to do it. Mrs May has thus far hinted at a bespoke deal but that does not rule out the EEA as a template or temporary mechanism. It may be that the EEA is the only mechanism available. We can park the EU trade issue because the rest of the Brexit process is complex enough.

In this there may well be a genuinely held intention not to use the EEA but when the technical realities make themselves apparent it will inescapably emerge as safe and sane option. To do it any other way would be to add further complexity, risk and delay. I do not yet think the government has realised this but they will eventually. That they haven't tells us they are still clutching at straws and have yet to define a clear path which actually makes the chances of invoking Article 50 next spring increasingly remote.

That means for the time being we will have to tolerate ludicrous fact free assertions from eurosceptic MPs. Steve Baker, Tory MP and chairman of the European Research Group, said in the Telegraph that “A vote to remain in the EEA or the Customs Union is a vote to be powerless over trade and domestic regulation and therefore poorer than we otherwise can be. “The UK is ideally positioned to catalyse a new global trading system which works for everyone by promoting free and fair trade and defending against predatory practices.”

This is interesting rhetoric, probably lifted from The Leave Alliance, because nobody else has really been speaking of a global trading system - but the facts he deliberately ignores is the fact that it is a rules based system which functions on common regulatory frameworks of which the EU is a member. That means we comply with the same regulation in or out of the EU - which means we are not at liberty to slash and burn what he would call red tape. Having left the EU we get our own voice and veto on the many global regulatory bodies and we would have that even as EEA members.

What that means, in case you needed it spelling out, is that there is absolutely no point whatsoever in leaving the single market. Norway only adopts about a quarter of the EU acquis, most of which overlaps with that "global trading system" he speaks of. More to the point, Norway does have a veto and it does have a say in the rules because it has an independent voice in the making of the rules that the EU adopts from the global bodies. This is a point that has yet to be realised in the Westminster bubble chiefly because of gatekeepers like Baker who go out of their way to exclude voices who do not subscribe to his intellectually stunted extremist ideas.

Further to this Baker has very strong links with the Legatum Institute and is very heavily plugging their work with a view to getting them on the payroll. Personally I think he has a commercial interest in it and there is something bent about this arrangement. I think Baker is a man on the make representing vested interests. I don't think it's above board.

Joe Carberry, co-executive director of Open Britain, a British pro-EU campaign group, said: “The inevitable consequence of leaving both the single market and the customs union is erecting barriers to trade with our closest and largest partner. Those calling for us to do so, need to provide evidence rather than bluster that it will actually increase trade, boost growth and create jobs. Expert opinion, which I know has gone out of fashion, suggests otherwise."

In this, Carberry, as far as the single market is concerned, is absolutely correct. Pulling out of the single market requires major effort which can only result in trade becoming less free and more expensive and the stated advantages simply do not exist. There is no bonfire of regulation and tinkering with tariffs is not going to bring about the free trade sunlit uplands the Tory right imagine.

What Britain actually needs is to work with countries around the world to make our trade with them as barrier free as it is with the EU. Presently the EU is an obstacle to that because it dictates the terms of trade and is fixated with failure prone deals like TTIP. That is why trade has stalled. In order for the UK to improve matters we will have to work within the global system to export the regulatory systems which the UK and EU observe and we won't have a carte blanche to regulate as we please.

Effectively, what Britain needs to do outside the EU is to wrest control of the single market away from the EU and expand it globally. This is already happening but Britain can indeed be a catalyst. Remaining part of the single market is central to that and making any moves to substantially differentiate ourselves from the EU single market is to effectively pull out of the global system which Baker himself advocates.

In this there are parts of EU integration that are also part of the EEA which I would happily dispense with, not least the public procurement system which is turning out to be a one way system for France and Germany to fleece the UK public sector while keeping their own markets closed. I understand probably better than most why the single market is an asymmetrical arrangement, not least because Britain plays by the rules, but for the time being, until we have further developed the global system and bedded down the already massive changes that Brexit will bring, we will have to take the rough with the smooth.

What makes the EEA the right choice is the system of annexes whereby we can constantly renegotiate the relationship and there is a system in place to do exactly that. It allows us to revisit our relationship and gradual evolve out of the EU at our own pace rather than rushing it and making a pigs ear of it. It's a the safe and pragmatic choice. In this we absolutely must resist the zealots in the Conservative party. They are dishonestly risking our global standing and flirting with recession on the basis of a delusion. I remain confident that they will not get their way but we should still call them out for what they are: Morons.

We must restore the voluntary ethos to rebuild Britain

For the better part of a decade Facebook has been my lifeline. I moved to Bristol to take up a role at Airbus, not knowing a soul in the South West. To this day I have exchanged more words with the staff of the local Tesco express than anybody in the immediate locality. I have made some very good friends but as a political animal I have learned the best way to keep very good friends is to avoid contacting them.

In fact, as a political animal most of my interests and passions are quite niche and I don't relate to much mainstream culture. I cannot abide reality TV, I don't like pop music, I can't really relate to TV dramas and I reject the BBC in principle. Facebook has allowed me to tailor a niche bubble for myself where I have intimate relationships with people I have never met and will likely never meet.

And though Facebook has served as a proxy social life where I would at one time enjoy nothing more than an evening of Facebook and fine malts, I came to realise that technology has allowed me to indulge my natural aversion to talking to people. We call it social media but in fact it is deeply antisocial. Even a deeply personal and introspective post on Facebook is not really communication.

It seems the curse of our age is to live increasingly insular lives supplemented by technology bizarrely in a world where populations are growing. Not coincidentally the biggest killer of men my age after heart attacks is suicide. We have moved beyond large workplaces, shared cultural experiences, shared religious affiliation, and tight community and now there is only the self - and the increasingly isolated family unit. We have made men redundant in every sense.

It is now even acknowledged by Age Concern UK that loneliness in our elderly is increasingly a problem - but I would venture that it is seen as more acute because it's more visible. I'm willing to bet it affects every strata of society and every age group. This is why in my previous article I draw specific attention to the smoking ban. As much as it wiped out the pubs that used to serve as community centres it also ruined nightclubs where dancefloors emptied as people congregated outside to smoke. I don't think the rave scene ever recovered and the commercial value of property has seen a gradual death of all the best venues.

In a lot of ways I think this goes some way to explaining the deep division in the country where just about every post-industrial region of the UK voted to leave the EU when London didn't. There was a time when communities in and around Newcastle would live their whole lives in the same square mile. The houses behind the shipyards belonged to the ship builder along with the churches. Liverpool, Bradford, Sheffield and all the towns in between could lay claim to poverty and hardship, but never loneliness or lack of community.

But that has changed now. The mines are gone, the shipyards are gone and the mills are gone. There is no going back. There is no longer a need for large semi-skilled workforces - and as much as people want the jobs back, they also miss the sense of community. For this we see the finger pointed at the EU and globalisation (which to an extent was true) but even if we hadn't let go of key industries we would have seen mechanisation and automation having the same effect.

What we have is not a crisis of inequality as the Guardian would have it but a crisis of social inclusion. And that in some way explains the resistance against immigration. Up and down the country we see immigrants forming communities of their own in what were once white working class communities and those of the white working class are excluded from it not least because of the language barrier. The sentiment that "the immigrants are taking over" is to some extent absolutely true on the more local level. As much as the working classes are increasingly excluded economically, they are also culturally excluded.

If you were born before the millennials you grew up with the fairly pedestrian expectation that even if you flunked out you would probably own your own home and probably have a half decent job and you would somehow make ends meet having a degree of job security. That has now been demolished.

There was a time when you would look at the houses on the council estates and pray that you never ended up in one. Thirty years later, thanks to right to buy, what were once ghastly pebble-dashed huts and identikit red brick terraces are now homes in their own right with each having their own distinctive character. The relative affluence of the last few years has certainly improved the lot of the working classes in a material sense.

Now though, if you go to the local authority for housing you can expect to be given what is available and you won't be expected to like it and if you missed the boat of the mortgage bubble then you are pretty much excluded from the housing market permanently. The banks are risk averse and the credit rating system is broken. Being poor is now an expensive experience.

The result of this is a society where young people are floating around merely satiating their own short term desires in the knowledge that they have no real stake in society and are consequently restless, reckless and rootless. It is why modern culture is so lamentably shallow.

There have been various interim measures to address this problem such as help-to-buy but one of the big problems in the UK is financial illiteracy so the people who have benefited from such schemes are the money savvy middle classes rather than the working class. There is still the impression that these schemes are there to help anyone but you. There are reserve support mechanisms but they are limited in order to avoid the race to the bottom that existed under New Labour.

Over the last two decades what was once regarded as a birthright has become the preserve of the already well to do in a culture that rewards conformity and punishes any deviation. Worse still is the influence of big government.

During the Blair era we saw a drift toward the corporatisation of government and we saw the quangofication of social enterprises and charities. If I wind the clock back to about 1998, I remember working as a database developer in a disability charity. In a short time I saw it close its high street charity shop (formerly a major source of funding). I saw it close its doors to community activity to become primarily a fundraising and grant chasing organisation.

Any actual community work directly for disabled people went on the back burner. And by taking over some of the statistics gathering functions of social services it become a quasi-corporate enterprise with full time staff, most of whom performed administrative functions. I have watched the same happen to dozens of charities ever since.

And then there's things like childcare. It used to happen on a community basis. Playgroups and cubs groups were commonplace. But then everybody suddenly become a criminal or suspected paedophile and everybody had to go on a database at their own expense. We saw the professionalisation of childminding which then meant registration, certification and real world adult wages. Soon after childcare become an industry and it ruled young mums out of taking part time work. If you work, you need expensive childcare. The response to this was another bureaucratic voucher system consuming vastly more money.

This gradual appropriation and regulation of just about every facet of life has destroyed the voluntary ethos and in so doing has destroyed communities and made people entirely dependent on mechanisms of the state. Our welfare policy is an extension of this. The nationalisation of poor people. The product of which is illustrated above. Little Britain is very much Blair's creation.

There are visible cosmetic consequences to this too. The park where I grew up now has expensive reinforced fences around the disused tennis courts, the park furniture is dilapidated, the pond is now a green swamp, and the local primary school has a fourteen foot high fence around it with razor wire round the gutters. They all have multimillion pound service contracts which employ thousands of people - but the jobs don't get done.

Just recently I took a drive out with dad to our favourite walking spot. We have been going there since I was very young. Spurn Point at the mouth of the Humber. The land is owned by an EU funded quango. It has executives on handsome salaries but as yet there is no funding to repair the road washed away by a tidal surge. Incidentally, it's the road that connects the one full time RNLI station to the mainland.

If policy makers want to mend the divides in the country then we need to restore our sense of purpose and sense of community. In this Cameron was on to something with his "big society" but it was an idea that never fully took form and was labelled by the malevolent left as "tory austerity". The short of it is that government does too much and does more than it should. It replaces the community with the state.

What we need is a new programme of housing with community facilities but they must be decent sized homes with protections against landlords breaking up decent sized homes and turning them into cash cow flats. And in the planning of these homes we need green spaces and community facilities. The last decade saw a gradual removal of sports facilities and playing fields and North Bristol where I live has virtually no green spaces at all.

But if we are to build new communities they must be stable and that means we can't have massive and sudden influxes of people and if we want to rebuild communities then we must restore all those things that bring about a shared sense of identity. One of the most depressing acts of the Labour era was to abolish school uniforms where instead a slovenly sweatshirt become the only requirement which basically allowed lazy parents to slack off. A school uniform was integral to a community and an important part of identity. This offended Labours shallow egalitarianism thus was removed.

In just about every aspect of life Labour stuck its nose in, replacing voluntarism with officialdom and nannying, virtually eradicating social enterprise and individual initiative and reduced the working classes to supplicants. This wasn't so much with the intent of improving the chances of the working classes, rather it was a chance for Labours nannying fussbuckets to insert themselves in the lives of ordinary people and dictate their choices.

From this grew a comfortable and cosseted middle class of public servants all of whom had pension options most can only dream of - none of whom would ever consider voting Conservative on the basis that turkeys do not vote for Christmas. At peak a third of the workforce was in some way working for the state.

During the Labour era we saw a massive transfer of power from local authorities to London and the EU where powers to run our own affairs were removed and local government became central administration. Councils are not local government. They are regional development agencies where councillors have next to no power and overpaid council executives have more power than the council combined.

It seems to me that we have not seen any meaningful austerity. For sure councils have closed down all the public services that are inconvenient to their efficiency statistics but the roughly the same mouth of money is still swilling around being syphoned off. That's what happens when you centralise power over procurement from districts and place it in the hands of mega authorities.

What we need to do is take a wrecking ball to "local" councils. We need to break them up and give them real powers including the right to tell Whitehall where to go if so instructed by local people. People are not the plaything of government social policy and our communities are not petri-dishes for bureaucrats. All they need is a decent home and they can take care of the rest.

By creating social entitlements Labour created a scenario where people became ever more dependent on the state rather than organising for themselves. That lead to this state where councils gradually stop doing those things they are supposed to do like gritting the roads and emptying bins and instead providing services people could either buy with their own money or organise voluntarily.

The very essence of community is voluntarism and that is how people include themselves. Any time we get a recognition from the left that this is so their immediate response is to create a central authority to register volunteers and assign them tasks. It is engrained in the left wing mindset that everything has to be stamped, sanctioned, numbered and approved by our superiors before anything can go ahead and the natural result of that is that nothing gets done at all. This is why we should oppose authoritarians like Bridget Phillipson who want to reinforce New Labour centralism and tell people how to live.

Now that we are leaving the EU and the structure and nature of government is up for question we need to start asking how we can make real and lasting reforms to ensure that never again can the sociopathic left take the power away from people. We are not hapless serfs in need of the care of the well to do fussbuckets. We are real people with pretty simple needs. The only thing standing in the way is government which continues to impoverish us and take away those things that make us human.

This year we learned that resistance is not futile.

I don't know if this is English literature 101 but I had a very good English teacher in my upper school years. His first lesson was that at the very heart of good literature is conflict. Conflict of characters, ideas, concepts and metaphors. It's all about juxtaposition and contrast. Much in life and politics is the same. Without conflict and without struggle there is no intrigue and that is at the very heart of our creativity. Without epic struggles and the kind of political engagement that inspires us to do great things we atrophy. Revolution and renewal define us.

This explains why Fareed Zakaria, writing in the Washington Post, has such a hard time working out why this new movement on the right wants to tear down the global order.

What is this globalism to which these people are so opposed? he asks. "After 1945, after the Great Depression and two world wars, Western nations established an international system characterized by rules that honored national sovereignty, allowed for the flourishing of global commerce, and encouraged respect for human rights and liberties. This order resulted in the longest period of peace among the world’s major powers, marked by broad-based economic growth that created large middle classes in the West, the revival of Europe, growth in poor countries that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and the spread of freedom across the globe".

Of course, it's a conceit to say that these systems honour national sovereignty and they are in fact the very antithesis of it. What these systems have done is pretty much abolished politics to the point where Western societies are run by remote technocratic institutions where democracy is largely a decorative ritual. Effectively what we have build is a number of global supply chains that actually work better without the involvement of politics and politicians. 

The problem with that is that the regulation of these systems fall to an elite band of globalists who are increasingly making seismic decisions over the products we consume, homogenising everything and eradicating those things upon which we build our identity. In this, national sovereignty and identity are viewed as quaint throwback ideas that stand in the way of the greater good and so through deception and coercion those things are eroded. 

Through gradual brainwashing the narrative has been twisted so that nationalism and identity are viewed as akin with fascism and racism and an international groupthink has emerged which as it that us primitives who cling to "outdated" concepts like sovereignty are holding back the progress of mankind. Our global elites even call themselves progressives. This is why language and political correctness have been at the centre of a culture war which the globalists have until very recently been winning hands down. 

In this they have sterilised the food we eat, the political discourse and political processes, making us passengers in our own lives with no real influence over the laws and diktats we must live by. Right now decisions are being taken in the WHO that will eventually be issued by executive order or statutory instruments that will have a profound effect on our social habits. One such example is the smoking ban which nobody ever asked for but was uniformly implemented without our consent. It changed our social lives, our night-life and in the space of a few short years changed our culture. It ruined nightclubs and removed one of the few reasons we had to congregate and meet people.  

In every sense the global order has been the transfer of power ever upwards to those who believe they know what is best for us. These are people who hold some profoundly Malthusian ideas and see people as a problem to be managed rather than a species endowed with free will. 

And without the politics and the liberty to do those things that are untidy and unhealthy and not necessarily efficient we create a cage for ourselves where yes we are notionally peaceful and more prosperous but socially and spiritually bereft. Throw into the mix the idea that the freedoms we have are impacting the climate to such an extent that we must live austere and restricted lives. It goes against the very idea of being human. 

Meanwhile as these systems have grown ever more restrictive and ossified we have stagnated and our culture is in a repeat cycle with each new generation having nothing of its own. Everything is served up to kids as a rehash of what came before in corporate wrapping. The corporations own all the intellectual property and they exist to outlive us so that they are our providers for all things from entertainment, culture and consumer goods. 

This system though is one that has yet to spread its tentacles into the developing world which has its own ideas and is developing at a pace that our western systems cannot keep up with and so if the west is to remain relevant and able to compete in a globalised world then we must throw off the restraints that enslave our minds, our language and our economies. 

In this we must reclaim our identities and our sovereignty and our politics and shape our lives according to our own needs and desires rather than the designs of experts and central planners. And though the idea that people living their own lives in their own way horrifies the globalists who have their own vision and the power to impose it, they cannot withstand the tidal wave as we wake up and reject their rule. The incomprehension of Fareed Zakaria is all too telling. It is a matter of mystery to them that we plebs might prefer the messy and disorganised organic life than the one wrapped up in cellophane and given to us on a plate. 

Humans need conflict of ideas and disorders that they may bring meaning to their lives. A planned existence within predefined parameters is to make battery chickens of people. If we are to be dissuaded from participating in our own governance and resign ourselves to being mere cattle then we suffer from a spiritual and cultural ennui that gives way to self destructive habits like drugs and alcohol. For all the wealth and prosperity of globalisation, the west has an appalling relationship with prescription medication and alcohol. Anything to numb the tedium and loneliness of our lives as post-social animals. 

What we are seeing across the West is a rejection of managerialism by the few. They may have shown that they can make us materially wealthier but the society they have built cannot fulfil mankind's desire for freedom, conflict and disorder. We are a complex species and the criteria for happiness is an ever evolving one that is not centred around the material. The globalists are distinctly shallow technocrats who believe that world peace can be achieved if only we are fed and watered by the machines. They believe they are building a future paradise when in fact they are building a sophisticated cage for our minds where privacy and liberty is something you don't even dream of. 

It may be that this revolution we have started with Brexit makes us materially poorer. It may mean that GDP goes into decline. But GDP is just a number on a screen and a big number does not necessarily translate into wealth for the many. What it seems to mean for most is that we become serfs conditioned to accept smaller aspirations where we wait for our providers to provide rather than to build for ourselves. 

Countering that may well mean tearing down the rotten establishment and it may not be in our material interests but it is a spiritual need that compels us that will never show up on any spreadsheet. Humanity is a magnificent species, noble in reason, infinite in faculty. In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! We can never be forced to live to a design and humanity's greatness will always rebel against the systematic perfection that our rulers have in mind. This year we learned that resistance is not futile. 

Breitbart: the voice of hate

I note that Breitbart has been in the news today after a Beeboid suggested that the vessel is in some way antisemitic. I wouldn't venture an opinion on that. It should however be noted that Breitbart weaves a deeply unpleasant narrative with the express intent of riling up their own constituency of single-minded bigots for whom ending freedom of movement really is the primary reason for leaving the EU.

The writing style of Breitbart is virtually identical to that of most actual far-right vessels and its UK constituency has more than a coincidental overlap. The appointment of Raheem Kassam is entirely a smokescreen. The man is basically a chancer with a lizard-like brain, who will be the person that circumstance demands if it advances his own personal cause - which is Raheem Kassam, and not a lot else.

In pursuit of his own self-gratification he has shown himself to be a shrewd operator and skilled social climber which is why he and Farage are peas in a pod - and rumour has it that they are both equally unpleasant. This social intelligence though does not stop him from basically being thick as pigshit, much like Farage.

Breitbart London is pretty much the mouthpiece of Ukip's mouthfoamers, popularised as hate HQ for the morons who frequented the Disqus comments on Telegraph blogs before they were shut down.

The thinly veiled concern for women's rights and gay rights is mainly a smokescreen which excuses naked anti-Islamic sentiment - which immediately becomes obvious when they express an admiration for Putin who is not known for upholding minority rights.

Like most revolutionary rags they tend to keep a strict discipline in only reporting that which they can verify so they can lay claim to being factual, but are skilled propagandists in the way they present information, always with a view to radicalising bigots. That is not to say that Breitbart readers are necessarily stupid. The far-right is not without its intellects. Much of this hate-bait is willingly consumed by those wilfully engaged in self-radicalisation.

Breitbart pretty much occupies the place in the spectrum where the legacy media would not ordinarily tread simply because they are guided by a certain code of decency - and while the bar is set pretty low, it does not sink as low as Breitbart. In most respects Breitbart is a bigotry enabler and the whole point of it is to embolden racists and bullies while maintaining plausible deniability. It may not actually cross the line of being a white supremacist nativist shitrag but that is more through editorial intent than actual values.

Breitbart is essentially a dustbin for the Kiptards and the losers. It isn't a conservative vessel. It is a reincarnation of the BNP website when they last put any serious effort into it. It may lack the blood and soil nationalism but it is most certainly read by all those who subscribe to such toxic politics.

I had my fill of Breitbarters during the general election and during the referendum campaign - people who to this day insist Leave would have won by a larger margin if only they have been allowed to be even more toxic than they already are and grunt about Mulsims more.

In this, the BBC have missed a trick in assuming Breitbart is anti-semitic in that the Breitbart constituency is to a large extent rabidly pro-Israel and will make just about any excuse for them. This is a strand of Israel advocacy that crosses over into worship by way of having a common enemy. Muslims.

They can use whatever pretence or sophistry they like in order to break free of the racist label, but Breitbart is a shitty hate rag. They know it, we know it. The only people who don't are the gullible readers they ensnare.

Whether they've got round to calling themselves alt-right yet I don't know but its the same band of misanthropic miscreants for whom the Conservative Party will never be right wing enough. People who believe in pretty much zero non-white immigration, people who want low taxes and small government, except for a massive and illiberal border force for which they will pay any price because swarthy foreigners are coming to rape their women. Morons basically.

More than anything it is a support group for losers who can find no community or company elsewhere. Hating everyone and everything is full time job. Consequently it has cult status and anyone who is not a devotee is either a "cuckservative" or a "leftard". You might not actually be dealing with jackbooted skinheads but still they are obsessed with hating anyone with a different opinion.

Now I like to be robustly right wing as much as the next guy but these people are true obsessives who live for their hate and have little else going for them. It's a state of mind and it's deeply unhealthy. It depends on a constant flow of scare stories and confirmation of narrative. Breitbart is what sustains it and they in turn sustain Breitbart. Call it what you like but it's ugly, corrosive and deeply toxic. It is not a website for healthy people. You don't have to be a racist to read Breitbart, but it does seem to help.

It is time for a different approach with Russia

It would hardly be original to point out that everyone who has demanded the departure of Assad has departed. Even now, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch is calling for his removal. He remarks that over 85% of civilian casualties are on Assad's hands and crushing ISIS while retaining Assad's brutal repression will only ensure another ISIS in some new form.

The immediate problem here is that Assad is very much Putin's boy and since we have no influence in Syria right now, it really is out of our hands unless we wish to further step up tensions with Russia or do something constructive like attempt diplomacy with Russia. Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, has warned that a total military victory for Bashar al-Assad rather than a negotiated peace deal will leave Syria and Europe exposed to resurgent Sunni terrorism, as in Iraq. I imagine we do not want this.

In this it would appear that Mr Putin holds all of the cards and has done for some time. The West squandered much of its political capital there and at home and though we should have acted, politically that would not have been possible. We must now focus on what leverage we have when the conflict is brought to a decisive end. Presumably this would be an international agreement on rebuilding Syria.

In the meantime the main source of outrage is the conduct of Mr Putin's war. Deliberate targeting of civilians to a sadistic degree. This the left are incredibly squeamish about and that makes Putin the popular bogeyman. What we forget though is that every day this drags on we see millions of displaced people and thousands downing every single week in the sea. That is entirely our doing.

And if we are getting into the realms of whataboutery, then what about Turkey jailing journalists and academics and dismantling democracy and shelling Sirnak into dust? From the illustration above there is very little left to destroy. This, for reasons that escape me, has our very own Boris Johnson warning against pushing Turkey into a corner.

Clearly Turkeys human rights abuses are to be tolerated just so long as Erdogan is on behalf of the EU holding back a tidal wave of refugees. Meanwhile everybody is clamouring for a trade deal with China whose recent territorial aggression is considerably more alarming than Russia's, cyber threats are increasing and Chinese human rights abuses are about as bad as ever they were. Meanwhile, British built Typhoons are bombing Yemen. You know, the Saudis. Those bastions of human rights.

So please excuse me if I am being a bit thick here, but why does it trigger revulsion in polite society at the suggestion that an expensive and pointless cold war with Russia is something that we should on the whole seek to avoid and instead seek diplomatic alternatives? Trump is reputed to be the stupid one yet it's the Western establishment going along with this bovine ramping up of hostility.

The West for a very long time now has been systematically alienating Russia, expecting Russia not to react. Now that it has we see that not only is the West not prepared to take responsibility for its actions it has the nerve to play innocent. Now it is we who need Russian cooperation in this and many other things.

In this we have two choices. We can either play infantile games around the fringes in Syria, increasing the potential for an accident of history or we can recognise our own hypocrisy and start some kind of constructive conversation with Russia. It's all very well to be parading our virtues but risking a wider conflict when we're turning a blind eye to massive crimes against liberty in Turkey seems beyond all comprehension.

The notion that Russia is the greatest threat to the west right now seems to me to be an article of faith and the product of a left wing groupthink that has infected the centre-right. It elicits name-calling and accusations of being a Putin sympathiser - which is to be expected when populist parties like Ukip express their open admiration for Putin, but one thing I am not seeing is any consistent and reasoned arguments as to why a new cold war is worth it and how it can be justified in the face of such rank hypocrisy.

Britain and the USA may not have engaged in the kind of savagery that Russia is presently engaged in in Syria, but Russia is getting the job done in ending hostilities. The West on the other hand have managed to wreck half of the middle east to no effective resolution. If we wanted Assad gone then the window was several years ago. Now it seems to me that the most urgent business is to bring an end to this destruction, if not for Syria then for Europe's collective defence.

Whether it is an article of propaganda or not, Putin appears to be finishing what we couldn't. If we want a voice in what happens next, then it is the West that needs to come to the table. Ramping up to a new cold war on the back of the childish sentiment that "war is howwid" strikes me as the sort of infantile policy that has driven many of our interventions in recent years. After two decades of it, it is time to try something else. Rather a lot depends on it.

Populism is not on the rise in Britain

I voted for nobody in 2010. I voted for nobody. I wasn't about to vote for spivvy shitehawk like David Cameron and since by then Ukip had become a clan of inbred mouthbreathers there wasn't much point in voting. But by that same token I can't really blame others who think as I do about the EU for voting UKIP.

Cameron decided that the core right wing vote was expendable. He was wrong. It cost him an outright win in 2010. Were it not for the promise of a referendum he would once again be teaming up with the Lib Dems in 2015. Even then the Tories got lucky.

While there was a lot of white noise coming from the left about Ukip being essentially the new BNP - which by that time wasn't really that far off the truth, there was sufficient momentum behind Ukip to make major gains if they played their cards right. That was a big if though. They had neither the organisational competence nor the intellectual foundation. They were thin on policy and incredibly gaffe prone. They robbed themselves of a number of seats.

At the height of Ukip the party was a personality cult with a very weak foundation. That is why it has imploded so fast. All it took was a few of the right noises from Mrs May while they were in disarray and the drift back to the Tories began. Since then every local poll shows major decline for Ukip while local branches fold.

Consequently these is only really a rump of Ukip left. The UKs own variant of the alt-right which is mainly an internet constituency which Arron Banks hopes to turn into some kind of movement. There is no reason to believe it will go anywhere. Arron Banks is to political competence what I am to tact. He thinks the referendum was won by grunting about foreigners and that without Leave.EU we would have lost the referendum.

Logically there is no truth to this. At the general election when Ukip did nothing but grunt about foreigners they scored 14%. They might have scraped another four or five percent had there not been the offer of a referendum on the table - but the basic fact is that all the immigration obsessives were already planning on voting to leave and were already voting Ukip. Anyone trying to put a rational and measured case for Brexit to win over normal people who aren't seething with rage found Leave.EU more of a liability than a help.

The truth is that populism in the classic sense is not actually that popular. It gains support as a protest vote but that's only when there is no alternative. Well now there is. We have a church and shires PM who for the moment has my full support. I really like Theresa May. For sure, she is a bit on the authoritarian side but if you are of the view that we have let things slide a bit she is a timely dose of medicine. Of all the people in the commons I trust to deliver a sane and measured Brexit it is she, and keeps her extremists at both ends on a tight leash. I can vote conservative without hesitation now.

The short of it is there is no reason for a populist movement to exist. The right are getting much of what they want. Out of the EU,  immigration control and a few less wind turbines. They actually very easily pleased. It's only the die-hards who won't rest until we have bricked up the channel tunnel who will remain in the political fringes - assuming they show the same devotion to Banks as they did Farage. At best there's a couple of million of them but most will still be asking "who the hell is Arron Banks?".

Worse still, as much as Cameron kept the Ukip flame burning, the other major culprit is the EU. Without the money rolling in from having MEPs and a paid staff, Ukip is totally screwed. The only man who can bankroll it is Arron Banks and the British public are usual suspicious of political movements bankrolled by millionaires. For all Jimmy Goldsmith's cash the Referendum Party didn't score a single win. And it wasn't for a lack of campaigning.

There is the suggestion that the UK no longer needs a Ukip because the Tories have become Ukip but that's a pretty shallow analysis. We saw some robust rhetoric at the Tory conference, but that's really all it is. What hasn't already been quietly dropped will be savaged by Sir Humphrey and the rest will be beaten up in the house of commons.

The Three Brexiteers are placemen only. None of them have any real power and it would appear that Andrea Loathsome has been prevented from making any radical moves. Under the veneer we pretty much have a continuity government whose only real commonality with Ukip is that they are both committed to leaving the EU. Albeit reluctantly for the Tories.

Only after Brexit will we really see how strong the "far right" is in the UK. Chance are Mrs May won't be able to make drastic cuts to freedom of movement and that will outrage many but my bet is that most leavers really won't care. Out is out, and so long as out really is out then all this insurgency nonsense will lose its momentum. I think it already has. The boil has been lanced.

There are still those who believe that Mrs May is hell bent on hard Brexit even though there is zero tangible evidence to suggest we are heading for any such thing. Too much depends on trade continuity and if you filter out the noisemakers, all the signals are there that the first day of Brexit will differ little from today. The hyper-ventilators are going to look ridiculous.

I take the view that the 2015 general election was really the window of opportunity for any insurgent movement and Ukip blew it. Anything now associated with Ukip will be tarred with the brush of failure. Anything attempting to rise from the ashes will likely struggle shake off the ghost of Ukip past.

Some have it that Farage's connections to Trump make him newly influential. I'm not buying it for a moment. Trump for the moment is still only the president elect. He has yet to be fed into the White House machine and introduced to all the systems and advisers and protocols. Trump being a man of little intellect and short attention span will delegate. His inner circle will be similarly buffoonish but similarly dependent on the competence of their underlings; all of whom will be taking advice from White House staffers.

Soon enough Farage, a man with no actual power base, no mandate, no support from the UK government, will rapidly find he doesn't have a hotline to the president. The main channel is via Breitbart and I'm sceptical as to how long that obviously grubby relationship will last being under such intense scrutiny. The notion that Breitbart is running the White House is comical.

Ultimately positions of power are only as good as your understanding of power. That's what made Clinton the scarier candidate in my view. Mrs Clinton knows the ropes. She knows every nook and cranny of the establishment and she knows how to get things done. Trump will be played like a fool.

There is quote from House of Cards that rather chimes with me. "He chose money over power - in this town, a mistake nearly everyone makes. Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who does not see the difference".

Trump doesn't know the difference. Clinton does. And this is why I scoff at the suggestion that Trump or Arron Banks are "the establishment" by way of having money. The truth is that Neither Trump nor Banks are rich by way of having any particular skill. You only have to look at Banks's performance in select committee to know that this is a man who knows dick. For every Arron Banks who accidentally makes a fortune there are a million others who don't. It's a giant casino and every now and then a moron gets lucky.

In this game you can have money which may buy you loyalty and may even buy you influence but it doesn't buy you power and even when you occupy a powerful office, unless you know what power is and how to wield it, it's largely pearls before swine. Trump isn't establishment anymore than Farage is for having been a commodities broker. They will never be invited into the power gang - and since they will never really understand the anatomy of the establishment they will never topple it.

Ultimately the establishment is the consensus orthodoxy of the institutions of government. You can purge a few judges and officials and even chuck out the politicians - but in the end the system has outlasted demagogues before. It's designed to do exactly that.

The truth is, if you want to beat the system you have to do it with with ideas. And Banks, Trump and Farage couldn't summon an idea between them. In five years time we will wonder what all the fuss was about. If anyone could change the world right now, it's Marine Le Pen and the French people. Whether the EU lives or dies is on their say so. If you're looking for revolution, I would be looking over the Channel, not the Atlantic.

Revolution may prove more elusive than we thought

Donald Trump has much in common with Obama. Both were elected on a hope ticket. The sentiment behind the votes are very different but both were elected with a mandate for radical change. That has not happened under Obama. Obama has been a weak president who has struggled to push through a legislative agenda. The best we can say of him is that he and his family on a very superficial level have been good ambassadors for the USA. The veneer of a learned black man in the White House with a beautiful family is the sort of image the US needed to project after a pretty dismal showing from George Bush.

History, though, will be unkind to Obama. Though he never had the promise of being another JFK, may expected that he would be the change black America needed. In the end the same stagnant economic policies have remained in place and the social divisions in the USA are as deep run as ever they were, if not worse. It really depends which prism you look through. The Baltimore Murder Rate has become a grim economic metric of its own which is the culmination of multiple policy failings, and last year the BMR was the bloodiest on record.

Year after year we see democrat controlled cities plunging into deeper poverty, deeper divides and suburban America increasingly resembles Soweto. The incarceration rate continues to climb and disproportionately affects blacks, depriving children of fathers and households of income. Too many vested interests are dependent on keeping the status quo. The education system is rotten, the policing is broken and the job situation is not improving.

In this I doubt that Obama had the first idea where to start. So many projected hopes - so little delivery. And in four or eight years we will likely be saying the same of Trump. He simply won't be practicably be able to deliver all that's been projected on him. As tweeter Trent101 observes, "the interesting question is, what happens then? When the people twig they *really* can't get anything done; even when they win a POTUS".

It seems that Obama's legacy will be some marginal tinkering with healthcare. It could easily be undone by Trump. The supposed saviour, the great hope of the poor and the left behind last time has little to claim as an accomplishment. Trump has it even worse. There were high expectations of Obama but Trump is expected to be revolutionary. He is expected to take on the entire global warming cabal, revitalise the US economy and, as per his campaign slogan, make America great again. 

As much as any president is tied by the constitution and the unique make-up of the US power structure he does not have absolute sovereignty in the exact same way the UK does not reclaim it by leaving the EU. He could by executive decree pull out of a number of international agreements and very well could bin TTIP but there are consequences and costs and very little wiggle room. That will be the test of Trump.

It seems to me that in the modern era we have created such an intricate and elaborate system of governance that there is no longer scope for big and sweeping reforms and nobody is in a position to do very much without massively overstepping their authority. Worse still, in order to improve anything, some things will necessarily have to get worse. If you want the gain you must go through the pain. Any big change is going to require radical moves with seismic consequences. There is a lot to tear down before you can build.

The first test is whether Trump has the mettle to take on the many vested interests and whether he has the guts to endure the many negative consequences of picking such fights. With a good deal of foreign debt, America is not its own boss and with a two term limit, Trump will not be around long enough to finish what he starts. And this is all on the assumption that he isn't just a massive bullshit artist who will in fact do little more than play golf. This is a distinct possibility. 

So we are back to that question of what does happen when the people realise that the system is immune to change? The answer is staring us in the face. Revolution. A country as broken as the USA, so completely stocked with firearms of every possible configuration, we will see independence movements popping up all over. I think Trump is probably America's last hope for better or worse. Clinton wasn't going to solve anything. 

In this I think America is over. Too much power is in Washington. Unless there is a significant shift of power back to individual states we could well see the end of the USA whereby states become countries in their own right. I actually think that is the natural evolution of the world in this internet age. More and smaller countries emerging, reaching common agreements on regulations but exerting far more sovereignty on a far more local basis. I think federalism is dead both here and across the pond. With each state increasingly asserting its own identity according to the communities within I think there is sufficient diversity to warrant more nation states.

The USA has been agitating for major change for quite a long time now, as has the UK. And if Trump is America's last chance saloon then the same can be said of Brexit. When the final Brexit settlement delivers only marginal changes and Brexiteers realise those sunlit uplands of sovereignty, control and free trade were a mirage, they, like everyone else will be seeking more radical solutions. 

The binding agreements that prevent any real change will not be tolerated for every. The constitutional restrictions may end up being as tyrannical as any dictator. For us, such a radical move would be a hard Brexit - and for the time being I don't see any need for that. A gradual and measured approach is at least worth a try, but I get the sense that the decay in the US is far deeper set with too many suffering for too long. If Trump cannot deliver then the people will conclude that the system doesn't work. When that happens the USA as we know it is living on borrowed time. 

But by that same token, I think we all are. Human activity is now so rapid and so vast that we may well be reaching the limits of government and we will have to rethink the model entirely. We have far too many expectations of what government can deliver and human development has turned a corner. 

We are already seeing massive leaps in agricultural technology and probably in my lifetime we will see the end of labour intensive agriculture in the West and in a hundred years time almost all food production will be fully automated. White collar jobs are also threatened. It used to be that a small or medium sized enterprise would have their own servers, their own IT and their own systems. Now with the advent of cloud computing and software tools being easily configurable, much of the technical work is being erased entirely.  

We are looking at a future where the remaining jobs will either be the very lowest jobs which cannot be automated or much fewer highly skilled jobs with masses of competition. Eventually we will be forced to devise a basic citizens income system simply because we will have made work as we know it redundant. We are already halfway there. 

The reason the government is spending heavily on defence and nuclear and infrastructure at the moment is because if they weren't spending in this way they would have millions of unemployed people, a collapse of secondary industries and absolutely zero idea how to employ people. The libertarian notion that if we leave money in the economy it will of its own accord find ways to employ people is not so certain. Presently half the UK economy is a house of cards almost entirely dependent on government spending. 

We are not quite there yet but we are increasingly developing into a state where we are post scarcity where the normal rules of economics simply do not apply. Humanity is on the verge of a technological age where the basics are free and abundant. The question is whether we are ready for it or even when humanity can adapt to system where we can basically sit on our behinds and do nothing at all if we want to. I do not think we are there yet. I think we need another revolutionary cycle to get there. World war three. Sometimes the only way to change a system is to destroy it entirely. We appear to be running out of ideas as to how we change this one.