(This is an incomplete blog I wrote at a time when I was losing stuff on the web, so never posted. I’ve kept it to see whether I was right or wrong or just irrelevant)

On June 23^rd June the UK voters will go to the polls to decide by referendum whether we shall remain a member of the European Union or not.  The calling of the referendum has been prompted mostly by a split in the Conservative Party between those who wish to stay in the EU, and those who want to leave: in this respect, it mirrors the 1974 vote, which was designed to pacify the Labour members who never wanted the UK to join the Common Market.  It is striking that estimates of the way that the Conservative MPs will vote often suggest that they are pretty evenly split.  The other driver is the antipathy to immigration, which has reached substantial levels in the UK, and has led to considerable support for UKIP.  About half of immigrants to the UK come from other EU members, attracted by an economy which can provide jobs and a language that is an international lingua franca.  I think language matters, but it is rarely mentioned.  It’s a factor that is, I believe, rather more powerful than the imagined generosity of the UK welfare system; it is striking that some Iraqi refugees have decided to go home rather than learn Finnish.

This is not going to be a simple decision; there is no right answer.  Least of all should we believe that one camp or the other are brainless idiots – a good point made here by John Harris in the Guardian.  One would hope that the decision will be made by voters who have carefully balanced the issues and weighed them against their preferences and values.  Are the gains from trade outweighed by the weight of EU regulation ?  Is our influence in the world increased by being a leading EU member, or diminished because our Parliament cannot defy EU rules.  I doubt that it will.  I think there will be a lot of instinctive voting, with worries about migration and regulation will probably be outweighed by fears of the economic consequences of leaving.  Whether David Cameron’s concessions will make any difference to their calculus – well, make up your own mind.

However, we are seeing the beginning of a reasonable debate. There are some wonderful graphics of London being stalked by zombies or Godzilla if we leave, but mercifully the ‘Project Fear’ stuff is limited and obvious.  Luckily we have advocates from both sides willing to make decent points (OK, as well as some stupid ones).  I thought it might be useful to put together a compendium for the passing reader.  A really good overall source is the BBC Reality Check, which you can get via Twitter.  I’ll try, however, to keep the list below up to date.

Issue: Has the EU made a positive contribution to the UK and Europe ?

One can ask, Monty Python style, what has the EU ever done for us ?  This is the title of a powerfulletter from Simon Sweeney of the University of York here – you can read it and the rebuttals beneath.  Environmentalists see the EU actions on air and water as positive.  I can certainly remember taking my kids out of a foul sea at Redcar before the EU Blue Flag initiative.  Trade unions value the work that has been done to secure greater rights for workers – as the TUC points out here.  Cynics wonder whether the ‘red tape’ that business wants removed is in fact necessary protection for workers, the environment and consumers.

There’s a particular issue, though, about innovation.  The EU falls behind the USA and Asian nations in its response to innovation, which is a key driver of prosperity in the modern economy.  It is for this reason that Matt Ridley calls leaving the EU a ‘leap in the light’, and his Times article is available here, outside the paywall, to read.

Some commentators have brought in the issue of peace and democracy in Europe, which they claim has been a major benefit of closer working by the states involved.  The original EEC came about from cooperation between France and Germany, after three disastrous wars in 70 years.  The benefits of peace and cooperation outweigh almost any conceivable cost.

Issue: what will be the overall economic effect of leaving the EU ?

Here’s a balanced article from the Financial Times.  The LSE has come out with a well-argued economic case for staying in here.  Woodford, the investment fund, include some telling graphics in their discussion about how investors should vote.

A particular issue comes from a change in the sterling exchange rate, which fell nearly 2% on the day that Boris Johnson said he’d campaign to leave.  A falling exchange rate helps exports by making them cheaper, but raises the price of imports to the UK.  This might help employment and growth, but would hit living standards.  Pantheon Macroeconomics tell us that a 15% fall in sterling adds 1% to inflation, we’re told, though this seems very low to me – surely if 30% of GNP is imported, inflation would go up by .3 of 15%, which is 4.5%.  However, the Bank Of England might choose to hold sterling up with higher interest rates.

Issue: but won’t we benefit from stopping payments to the EU ?

Yes, we will.  Under the formulas worked out over the years, the UK pays in more than it gets out.  The effects vary according to where you are – farmers and depressed areas get more than southern towns and service industries – but overall we pay £23m per day into the EU.  You could see this as a rip-off or a membership fee, according to your preference.

Issue: will we be able to trade with the EU after leaving on something like the current terms ?

The debate here is usually between those who say the EU has a positive current balance with the UK, and so would be foolish to deny a deal on roughly the same grounds after Brexit as before.  There are two arguments against this apparently commonsense view (assuming you start with the idea that politics is motivated by logic, rather than pique and malice).  First, the EU’s market is much more important to the UK than the UK is to the EU – as you will see in this article by a German academic, and here by the NIESR.  Secondly, we make a deficit in manufactures and visible goods, sue, but we make a fat surplus on services (insurance, banking etc); a crafty EU might agree to keep visible trade going on current terms, but undertake long and tedious arguments about the trade in services.

The key issue is the barriers to trade that exist.  In fact, the tariffs (import duties) on manufactures in the industrialized world are relatively low at the moment, as a visit to the World Bank website will tell you.  The industrial goods tariff the EU applies to imports from non-members is 1.3%, which would hardly seem to be a deterrent to buying a car or a radio. When the £ moves by 2% in a day (see above), this seems inconsequential.

Issue: what will be the effect on the UK of leaving ?

Here we face the unfortunate division of the UK into countries that vote differently on different issues.  The Scots and Welsh have had Conservative governments, but never voted for them.  Ditto England, which never produces a Labour majority.  One consequence of the referendum might be a thumping majority to stay by the Scots being outweighed by the English who want to go – and Tony Blair is not the only one who thinks that threatens the existence of a United Kingdom.

Issue: will we lose sovereignty if we remain in the EU ?

Because the EU can make regulations that over-ride the UK Parliament (and courts), it is argued that the organisation is anti-democratic, and that to be a free, independent nation where the voters can decide what happens in the country of which they are citizens, we will have to leave.  This case was made by the Justice Secretary Michael Gove as he announced his decision to campaign for withdrawal.   His article was initially praised, but then the flaws in his case began to be exposed – as here.  The opposite view on sovereignty – expressed here in The Economist –  is that the world is now so interconnected – globalised – that no country is independent in the sense of doing precisely what it wants about everything.  Outside the EU, we would be bound by regulations that we have no part in making, as Jonathan Freedland points out here.  One article cheekily said that only North Korea is sovereign in the sense that the Out campaign mean.

Issue: can we stop migration if we leave EU ?

Well, we could stop half our migrants right now by excluding non-EU nationals.  We would lose a lot of Filipino nurses and Australian bar-staff, but it is possible. It’s pretty clear, though, that we can’t prevent the entry of EU workers if we stay in the EU, and would probably need to allow them in if we were outside and wanted to have free trade.  The idea that non-EU migrants would swarm from the Calais jungle is not true: this is covered by a non-EU treaty. Anyway, if they did (France is, after all, a sovereign nation in non-EU matters and could give two years notice), we could deal with it: the numbers are less than a Chesterfield home crowd.

The arguments here would be more convincing if the government took powerful steps to meet the costs of migration in the towns where it happens, funding local government for more schools and houses.

Issue: is the EU over-bureaucratic ?

We have all heard stories of EU bureaucracy – straight bananas and all that.  Before delving into this debate, it’s worth making two points.  Firstly, many of the stories are not true.  The joke that compares the economy of expression in the Ten Commandments or the Gettysburg Address with the 27,000 words in the EU directive on trade on cabbages falls when you find out there is no EU directive on trade in cabbages – the whole story is a copy of a US Republican complaint that wasn’t true there either.

The fact is that a common market needs common regulations.  Otherwise an (e.g.) Czech Government could refuse to allow (e.g.) British lawnmowers in on the grounds that they did not meet local electrical safety standards.  Remember the French attitude to British beef as an example.  If it can be pointed out that a good (or service) meets the criteria that has been agreed, then it cannot be excluded from export sales. Similarly, common regulations are needed on transport like lorries that travel across the EU.  Boris Johnson has said that the EU prevents safeguarding cyclists from them: hmm – his views are crushed here.

Lot of kerfuffle at the moment about the US authorities demanding that Apple reveal the codes that conceal the calls made by a convicted terrorist.  Many people argue that this is an invasion of privacy that should be resisted.  This seems to me to make privacy an ultimate right, when there are many times that we know it isn’t.  What the FBI is asking for is a digital search warrant.  One tweeter said “this is a diktat”.  Well, that’s what the law is, mate – an occasion when you have to do as you’re told, because without some ultimate power that end disputes, organised and civilized society would become unmanageable.  Ask yourself this: where would you stand if a murderer refused to let police access his house to recover a blood-stained axe on grounds of privacy ?

In passing, is it not odd that we get an increasing emphasis, almost obsession, with privacy in a society where almost everything is out on the table, where employers can look at applicants Facebook pages, where software endlessly promises to let us ‘share’ information or contacts, where families publish their holiday snaps and students their holiday indiscretions for the world to see.  This contrasts with initiatives like, for example, the ‘right to be forgotten’ which was enacted in Europe in 2014 and allows individuals to insist that references to them – not, I would guess, their Nobel Prize or Olympic gold medal – are deleted from the web.  This is not utterly outrageous – we have had ‘spent convictions’ for many years in the UK that allows criminals to erase their court records after a period going straight – even if it is a right that seems to be being exercised by dodgy businessmen rather than victims of cyber attacks.  But the major human right is the right to stay alive, and I guess that is what the FBI is trying to secure.

So, yup, I’m on the same side as Donald Trump here.

I’ve been getting through my Christmas books, some worthy others less so.  “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells” – Sebastian Faulks tribute to P. G. Wodehouse – made me cry with laughter, embarrassingly as it was in a packed standard class carriage of East Midlands Trains.  Then “Wings On My Sleeve” by Eric Brown made my jaw hit the floor: the country’s greatest test pilot, flying everything from German jets to biplanes, interviewing Goering about the Battle Of Britain, landing a Mosquito on an aircraft carrier, finding out why fatal crashes happen at the speed of sound, extraordinary.

One book I enjoyed more than I thought I might was Linda Ronstadt’s autobiography, “Simple Dreams”.  I’ve always enjoyed her voice: I went straight out and bought her LP after hearing her sing “Tracks of My Tears” on the radio in the 1970s.  The voice is wonderful, and I have always admired the way that she was happy to move between different genres – country, Mexican folk, rock’n’roll, Gilbert and Sullivan, Puccini, and the great American song-book with Nelson Riddle.  She was also a backing singer on many of the iconic records of the last forty years – “Heart of Gold”, “Graceland”, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, Little Feat, the lot.  The danger with reading a book about an admired performer – the word ‘idol’ is silly – is that they might let you down.  This book doesn’t.  There’s confirmation of decent human being status (regretting the closure of the Mexican border, seeing through the nonsense of a Catholic education, rejection of drunken or druggy or simply ill-mannered behaviour).  There are some surprises – didn’t know her grandfather invented the electric toaster – and some good anecdotes – she doesn’t pull her punches about loutish rock stars (Jim Morrison sounds a prize arse) or corrupt agents.  She is loyal to old boyfriends and partners, gracious about other women singers and, above all, enthusiastic about the music.

“Simple Dreams” is a reminder of the utter wonderfulness that was around, and it is fascinating to learn how she came across (e.g.) the McGarrigle Sisters, or Ann Savoy, or John David Souther, or Peter Asher.  It was a small world, but filled with extraordinary talent.  There’s a legend that the music of the mid 70s was tired and boring, panting in exhaustion after the excitement of the sixties, waiting to be rescued by punk and the New Romantics.  The idea that Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison or Jackson Browne or James Taylor needed to be rescued by Spandau Ballet or Johnny Rotten … this is such crap, and I was glad to hear the great Danny Baker say so when he was on Desert Island Discs.

Why am I so defensive/aggressive about the mid 70s ? Part of the answer is that during the mid 1970s I was a part-time disc jockey on local radio – Radio Tees, in Teesside where I was working as a college lecturer at the time.  I won’t tell the convoluted tale of how I became the most local of local personalities (I actually got to the stage of being asked for my autograph), but it was the job I most enjoyed of almost any I have ever done.  What did Noel Coward say – “work is more fun than fun”: yes indeedy.  Then I was offered a new lecturing job in Manchester, and accepted, just as the radio station was about to offer me a job.  Rats !  It would have been a career disaster, but what fun.  As it was, I left and my last show was filling in for a Christmas absentee on the graveyard slot, 11 pm till 1.00 a.m. on 27/28^th December 1976.  I discovered a dusty tape of it under my desk (Memorex, if you want to know what lasts 38 years and still does the job), and this was the playlist:

When will I see you again – 3 Degrees (as it was my last show – geddit ?)

Diamonds and Rust – Joan Baez

Nights are Forever without You – England Dan and John Ford Coley

Everything that touches me – Bonnie Raitt

Everything I Own – Ken Boothe

Coyote – Joni Mitchell

Nothing Heavy – Bellamy Brothers

Lover’s Cross – Jim Croce

Fire in the Hole – Steely Dan

Weekend in New England – Barry Manilow

Fair Play – Van Morrison

Every Time We Say Good bye – Ella Fitzgerald

Late for the Sky – Jackson Browne

In The Winter – Janis Ian

Winter Melody – Donna Summer

I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer – Stevie Wonder

What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye

My Man – Barbara Dixon (Yes, it’s an Eagles song, but this version is wonderful)

That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be – Carly Simon

Girl – The Beatles

Secret Drinker – Pete Atkin

One of Them Is Me – Andrew Gold

Gypsy – Jake Thackray

Heart Like Wheel – Kate and Anna McGarrigle (who wrote it, even if Linda Ronstadt made it famous)

I Won’t Be Hanging Round – Linda Ronstadt

Tongue-tied – Pete Atkin

Hey, Mister, That’s Me Up On The Juke-Box – James Taylor

I doubt you could find anything anywhere as good nowadays.  Remember, this was a late night show on a small local station in a little known area of England.  Criticism ?  Too full of my faves – Atkin, Browne, Raitt, the Dan.  Maybe a little light on the Great American Songbook, Sinatra, Riddle etc; lacking anything European, Piaf, Brassens, Trenet, (suppose I could’ve slipped Autumn Leaves in the seasonal mix), but hang on, we’re talking about two hours as the drunks pitch out of the pubs in Stockton-upon-Tees.  The fact that YouTube has preserved nearly all of these songs on screen tells you something.  I could release it under the label of “Now That’s What I Call Music”, but I think that’s been done, actually it’s been done 89 times, so you’ll have to rely on some click-throughs from which I make not a penny.  Enjoy, as the modern cant has it.

I have been trying to think why I feel less committed to political debate at the moment, at the very time when it is more important than ever to find answers to our problems, and when we are suffering from a government that, despite the warm words of Cameron at the Conservative conference, is one of the most reactionary that we have suffered.  I think it is because we have a very confused political discourse, and it is one that the election of Corbyn has done a little to clarify.

Here goes. I think there are four distinct socio-economic areas of debate, which are:

1. Fiscal policy and austerity. Should we place as much emphasis on repairing the public finances as the current government – and its mates in the European Central Bank and IMF – is (apparently) doing ? Or should we take a more relaxed view of the deficit, feeling that the priority is to restore economic growth and protect welfare and health provision ? Perhaps we can call this the Krugman hypothesis.
2. Managing our public services. It is extraordinary to consider how quickly we have moved from privatizing airlines (a project I thought was OK) to railways, electricity, water, and soon prisons and probation services.  Air traffic control, for heaven’s sake.  And it isn’t just about ownership.  Even in what remains of the public sector, there is discussion as to whether there we should introduce more private sector management into the running of our hospitals (or whether there is just a simple need for increasing the spending of existing organisations), whether independence for schools in the form of academies and free schools is a good idea, whether too much is being paid to finance institutions for partnership capital funding.
3. The problem of greed – the increase in inequality over the past thirty years, which has led us back to the levels of inequality last seen in the 1920s; the extraordinary rise in managerial salaries; the use of hedge funds to squeeze money out of existing transactions, not create more wealth; the almost criminal evasion of tax by large companies. I read A. B. Atkinson’s “Inequality” recently (it’s the sort of thing boors like me do on holiday, I’m afraid), and will try to post a summary on this blog soon.  After the academic analysis, there’s a welcome emphasis on ‘so what do we do’ in the book, but I think it unlikely that the Professor’s policy recommendations will be actioned anytime soon.
4. Change in the global economy – such as how the digital world of information is transforming out economies and companies. I’m off to listen to Paul Mason this afternoon, whose book on Post-Capitalism I’ve just started.  He is on the side of the angels in topics (1) and (3) above, but feels (topic 4) that we are in the beginning of a transformation that will provide new answers to our discontents.  The environment is, of course, a major issue that is out of the normal left/right spectrum – though the Green Party is pretty Corbynist,  the Tory nominee for Mayor of London, Zak Goldsmith, has some pretty green views.

I think the above topics are getting hopelessly confused at the moment.   They do inter-relate, of course. Taxing the rich properly (3) would help the deficit (1): I am one of many who suspects that the sob-story about reducing government spending to help our children’s future hides a desire to spend less helping the poor.  Similarly, trade unions are keen to loosen the purse strings on (1) so their members can get a better deal on (2).  But in principle a right winger could disagree with the nonsense about the deficit, and feel the economy and his colleague capitalists would benefit from a policy of reflation.  Keynes, after all, was no socialist.  Likewise, a left winger may want to take radical action on inequality (3) whilst balancing the budget books (1): few governments were more fiscally conservative than the Chinese Communist Party.  My point is that, whatever your views, it would help to be clear about what we are arguing about.

My daughter and her family visited Whitby on their holidays.  They’re football mad, so they went to the pre-season friendly between Whitby Town FC and FC Manchester.  The commemorative mug is attached, and set me thinking about team nicknames.

Now, my dad used to take me and my brothers to see Charlton Athletic as kids.  Yes, I was there in December 1957 for the most exciting match in the history of the Football League, when we came back from 1-5 down to win 7-6.  Charlton were then called the Addicks, which is pretty obviously a version of Athletic despite the various fanciful explanations about winning teams getting a haddock fish supper (though some fans did turn up with plywood haddocks on a pole to wave around).  The team played in red shirts – still do – so they ran onto the pitch to the tune of “When The Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along”.  But some marketing fool decided later to hold a competition for a better nickname, and “Valiants” was chosen.  They play at the Valley, so there is a second-rate pun there, but not much else. Oh, in passing, the Addicks won the FA Cup in 1947 in what was apparently the most tedious match played at the old Wembley: so they enter the record books for the most and least boring matches in English soccer.  And if you’re not yet asleep, Charlton were the first club in England to use a substitute.

Back to the topic in hand – sporting nicknames.  I like nicknames that tell a story – the Saddlers, the Blades, the Potters, the Quakers.  I love names that seem to have no connection at all to current events – like “The Irons” for West Ham United.  What I don’t like are names that are invented simply to match American Football, in the hope that changing the name will unleash massive gate or sponsorship receipts.  Take Wakefield Trinity, a historic rugby league team that was used for the site of “This Sporting Life”, possibly the greatest British sport-based film.  For a few years, some MBA educated idiot decreed that they should be Wakefield Trinity Wildcats.  Now, the wildcat is a ferocious predator, but it is small and nowadays found only in Scotland.  At least that is within 170 miles of Belle Vue, Trinity’s home ground.  The same cannot be said about Leeds and Rhinos, Warrington and Wolves, or London and Broncos, or for that matter Middlesex cricket team and Panthers.  Then there’s Sale Sharks: yes, Britain’s furthest-from-the-sea premier rugby club is named after a fish.  At least sharks exist, which is more than can be said of Huddersfield’s Giants.  Warwickshire County Cricket Club morphs into Birmingham Bears for the short form of the game, based on the bear that appears on the county shield (going back to Earls of Warwick). Leicester Foxes have a similar history, and that’s fine.  Well, fine-ish.  But, come on, Gloucester Gladiators ?  Is that about Spartacus (maybe his mother really came from Chipping Sodbury), or the last RAF biplane fighter ?  Talking of which, Kent Spitfires ?  I know there were plenty of Battle of Britain airfields in Kent, but many flew Hurricanes and Spitfires were made in Hampshire. And Birmingham. Anywhere but Kent, actually.  Does anyone use these modern marketing names without a shudder ? Has a single one of them actually stuck ? Which Yorkshireman will ever be heard to say he’s off to support the Vikings ?

And them there is the affection that there is for criminals.  Nottinghamshire Outlaws, I guess, nod in the direction of Robin Hood. But then you get Pirates, Raiders, Buccaneers, Vikings, Renegades, and Brigands. Hey, guys, what’s wrong with a bit of legal compliance here ?

Back to Whitby.  Whitby Town FC could have enjoyed some wonderful nicknames.  Whitby Vampires, for example, commemorating the arrival of Dracula in the UK.  Or Whitby Jets, to refer to the local semi-precious stone.  How about The Whalers, to let the world know that this is the town that taught Captain Cook his trade, and which ranged over the oceans to bring back oil for lamps and soaps ?  But no, nothing so bold.  What we get is : the Seasiders. Doh !

Friends ask why I shall not vote for Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour leader.  Some of his economic policies are attractive. It is welcome to find a politician who doesn’t think the industrial north of England can be rebuilt without decisive new investment in plant, infrastructure and training.   Questioning Trident is surely, too, something that needs to be part of public debate.  The truth is, though, that much of the economics is wishful thinking.  There’s a good dissection here and here, and the idea that there is a hidden treasure of tax evasion to be easily accessed is queried here.  Some of it is plain contradictory: you can either use tax receipts frm evaders and the rich to plug the fiscal gap, or expand the economy, but, er, not both.  However, at least he is asking the right questions even if giving the wrong answers.  The problem comes in his views on foreign policy.  Leaving NATO and the EU seem comparatively mild stuff beside these features:

• He seems intensely relaxed about the anti-semitic Raed Salah, who spreads the blood libel about Jews making bread from the blood of Christian children, and claims all the Jews who worked in the Twin Towers were told to stay home on 9/11, proof that it’s all a put-up Islamophobic plot.
• He congratulates the repulsive George Galloway on his by-election win. Let’s just remember Galloway’s conduct towards his (Asian female opponent) in the General Election.
• He believes that the Ukraine crisis was encouraged by NATO and western interests. To which one can only say, with Homer Simpson, “Doh”.
• Tabled a Commons motion defending Slobodan Milosevic.
• Makes a speech praising the achievements of Gaddafi and pretty much any other loathsome tyrant who claims to be anti-West.
• He gave a minutes silence for IRA members killed in a shoot out with British security forces in 1987 and still refuses to condemn the IRA’s actions. Readers will remember that during the Gaza fighting last year, much was made of the difference between Israelis killed and Palestinians killed.  The IRA killed six times as many people as the army.

The idea that someone with these views could be electable is fanciful. More fanciful, however, is the idea that someone with these views  occupies the high ground of moral principle in the leadership campaign.  The defence that ‘we have to talk to people we disagree with if we are to achieve peace’ is valid, until we remember that Corbyn refers to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’.  And, truth be told, it’s not his job to broker Middle East peace; that’s what governments and diplomats do, and it is tricky stuff.  That’s why the rejoinder that Tony Blair also met nasty people is so fatuous: that was his job as Prime Minister. Corbyn did it out of his own free will.   Let’s hope he is naïve rather than nasty, remembering all the time the judgement of Henry Adams on Robert E. Lee: “it is always the good men who do the most harm in the world”.

The campaign itself is a pretty devastating disproof of the idea that ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’.  One can only hope that whoever wins grow into the job.  Andy Burnham seems like the deputy marketing manager of a photocopy company; he was Health shadow for five years, and never laid a glove on the most ideological and shambolic Ministerial record of that period.  Fish in a barrel would be safe with Andy at the trigger.  Liz Kendall seems pleasant and clever, but in the wrong party.  I’ll vote for Yvette Cooper, who is experienced and carries no baggage (apart from marriage to Ed Balls), and might at least give the Tories something to worry about.

(This is one of several posts on this topic – see also Quotable Quotes Feb 14)

There are number of well-known logical fallacies.  You can buy a wonderful poster with the most common ones here.  You’ll recognise some old favourites.  “Ad hominem” – attacking the person who says something rather than what they say: only send a tweet attacking Jeremy Corbyn and you’ll quickly see what I mean.   “Slippery slope” – we can’t do a sensible thing like A because it would all end up with Z – remember the Americans who said that same sex marriage was all very well, but we shouldn’t do it because it would end up with humans marrying animals.   I had a recent run on with the anecdotal fallacy – “my wife was a working class kid who made it from a grammar school, so all grammar schools must be great for working class kids”.  This is a version of “smoking doesn’t cause cancer because my grandpa smoked a pipe till he was 96”. Then there’s  “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” – “after that, therefore because of that” – which refers to the belief that because one thing happened after another, it caused it.  This has led many astray, particularly those who claim that vaccines made their child autistic. They had the injection, then the child became unwell – makes sense, doesn’t it.  The bandwagon effect – 30 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong – is a cracker, too.  The Corbyn campaign has been full of the ‘tu quoque’ – ‘you too’ – fallacy.  “You think Arab extremists are bad – just look at what Israel did in Gaza !”.

A popular fallacy on the internet is the ‘appeal to authority’.  This defends a proposition because someone authoritative, or famous, says so.  Which is understandable.  If someone pointed out that my heroes – George Orwell, Maynard Keynes, Bruce Springsteen – said something, I would give it rather more consideration than if Kingsley Amis, George Osborne or Mick Jagger did. But the fact that someone supports something doesn’t make it true.  Least of all is something true if you have made up the support of authoritative figures.  Which happens a lot.

Here are some I’ve noticed recently, and they’re all quotations from famous people. Well, they’re not, actually, but we’ll find that out in passing.

1. A correspondent to the Sunday Times published a quotation from Cicero, the great Roman statesman. The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. Coincidentally, this quotation supports the agenda of the Conservatives in the UK, and the Republicans in the USA. Which is no surprise, as it was written by a right wing novelist and first quoted in the House of Representatives by a Republican Congressman in the 1950s.  I think the clue is in the idea that the Roman Empire gave generous assistance to ‘foreign lands’.  Maybe a short check of what happened to Boudicca, Vercingetorix or the tribes of Brittany (or a hundred other conquered places) might suggest the Roman Empire was not quite a worldwide welfare state.
2. A Twitterer I used to follow became addicted to quotations from Machiavelli. Well, I say quotations from Machiavelli, but … er … they aren’t.  One says “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo – I want to overthrow it”, which rather gives the game away as the great man spent his time working out how “The Prince” could retain power and beat off rivals. Anyone more vigilant to preserve the status quo, or get back in its good books, would be difficult to find. Certainly not Newt Gingrich, whose quotation this actually is. The disseminator of the bogus Machiavelli got very upset when I politely told him they were made up, pausing for a few obscenities before demanding to know if I had read everything Machiavelli wrote.
3. Then there’s poor old Charles Darwin, who is brought to testify ideas very convenient to the new right. He’s alleged to have said It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”. This is, of course, not Darwinism at all: he believed that those who had inherent assets that favoured survival became successful in breeding the next generation.  The idea that individual organisms could themselves change to adapt to their environment comes from Lamarck – or later, Lysenko – and … er … isn’t the same thing at all.  However, it was such a convenient quotation for the political and managerial numbskulls who tell us that we must accept any change, no matter how stupid, that it ended up on the wall of a Californian college.  Poor buggers had to take it down when they found out it was made up by a business studies lecturer in Louisiana in 1963.
4. Last week, we had a stern portrait of Thomas Jefferson circulated by a screenwriters’ organisation. Superimposed on it was a quotation saying “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”  You may feel this sounds more like a station bookstall self-improvement book than the wisdom of a founding father, and you would be right.  No-one ever found this quotation before 1988.

Recently, the idea that George Orwell said “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” has been tweeted to death. I’ve even got a tea towel that says it, alongside the great man’s portrait.  Problem – no-one can say if or when he said it. And you’ll have heard that Einstein said it was a sign of insanity to do the same thing and expect a different result.  Same problem – no record of him saying it.

There are a couple of points about these alleged quotations.  The first is that, though I’m no scholar when it comes to Cicero, Jefferson, Darwin or Machiavelli, even what I gleaned from a halting grammar school and polytechnic education tells me straight away that they are bogus.  So, what’s the conclusion, apart from finding that the internet is full of people who can’t check fake quotations on the internet ?  I think it goes back to my whine about confirmation bias, about the human trait to find evidence that supports your preformed views more compelling than evidence that challenges them.  People want them to be true, and so don’t expend the energy to check whether they are lies.

27/8/15

Footnote from August 2019.  I should know better than correct a Trumpist using misquotes on Twitter, but I did it last week.  But the alleged quotations were from Winston Churchill and George Orwell, and were obviously bogus: it would in any case be difficult to think of two people who would be more disgusted by the current stance of the Republican Party.  You may, I think, guess the response, and you’d be right to think it was not “thanks for that – I’ll correct my tweet”.  No, it was “You can’t handle the truth !”.  This has the benefit of being a correct quotation, but is a curious defence of falsehood.

Footnote from November 2021: Lord, it’s spreading to sensible, progressive people.  A C Grayling today tweeted that “It’s a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest” and claimed it was by Abraham Lincoln. Which quote checking websites deny.

Footnote from July 2022: And now it’s spreading to me.  Seeing a tweet that suggested Keir Starmer was boring, I quoted Churchill’s dismissal of Attlee as ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.  It turns out he didn’t say that at all – if anything it was a left wing critic who thought the 1945 Labour Government wasn’t being radical enough (hah !).  In line with my advice to others, I apologized and changed the tweet.

One of the reasons I guess I have been blogging less (apart from running out of things about which to be grumpy) is that I’m tweeting more.  Twitter is a wonderful medium, and is particularly useful when it passes you on to influential articles and thoughtful blogs.  The odd witticism can lighten the day, too.  However, I worry that it might lead to people thinking that the subtleties of political and social discourse can be covered in 140 characters.  Some recent examples:

Tax evasion and avoidance.  The Corbynites apparently believe that there is £120bn of tax being evaded, avoided or just left uncollected: if this were diligently collected, then any hole in government finances could easily be filled.  This is a vast amount of money (total government spending on everything is just over £700bn). I suspect what we have here is genuinely avoided tax (illegal, but not, I suspect, very much – the largest estimate I’ve seen comes from HMRC who think there may be £34bn out there in total); genuinely evaded tax (legal, and so not collectible  but we could change the law – and close overseas bolt-holes – to make Amazon & Starbucks pay their whack) and administrative losses (some of which are scandalous – a former head of HM Customs and Excise was given to cutting sweetheart deals over executive lunches).  Three things, each controversial and arguable, and none explicable in 140 characters.

Another tweet-fest of Corbynism comes when his association with racists and tyrants from around the world is defended – see my earlier blog.  The defence mounted here is that in the search for peace, one must talk to people we disagree with, an opinion normally associated with a photo of the anti-Christ Tony Blair talking to Mubarak or Ghadaffi.  He obvious point – that Blair’s job required him to meet heads of unpleasant governments, but Corbyn was under no such obligation – is probably too subtle for the wisdom of the smart phone.

Then there’s welfare reform, with the public’s estimate of welfare fraud being 27% of the total as against the government’s view that it is less than 1%.  I think the problem here is that there are people who might be able to get out and find a job who can legitimately claim benefit.  Stephen Hawking and David Blunkett could, after all, and they would not be ‘welfare cheats’.  This creates a difference between ‘welfare fraud’ – people defrauding and lying – and George Osborne’s idea of ‘skivers’ – those who could work harder, but don’t as they can legitimately claim benefits.  This idea becomes more powerful when associated with the common idea that there are families with three generations who have not worked due to a culture of worklessness. This is believed not just by the right (Iain Duncan Smith – though the claim has disappeared from his web-site) but also by the left (I remember community workers telling me a similar tale in Sheffield in the 1990s – “there’s no-one in this street who has a job” they would say, ignoring the white vans and rep-mobiles that littered the verge).  Only problem is that it’s not true.  Three problems, each separate, each responsive to different measures, none doable in 140 characters.

Or look at the refugee/migrant issue.  We’re told that many voters are against immigration, or the current volumes of immigration.  But again, it’s a number of issues.  There are EU workers, who have the legal right to come here.  If you want to stop this, we’ll have to leave the EU; and even if we do, the negotiations might allow free movement, or at least allow those already here to stay.  The idea that they’ll be put off by tinkering with social security entitlements is fanciful.  Then there are skilled workers from abroad, keeping the wheels of industry, finance and agriculture turning.  Then we have genuine refugees, fleeing tyrannies, and who do have, in the fullest and most immediate understanding of the word, “a well-founded fear of persecution”.   These people should be settled here quickly and compassionately.  Then there are a larger group who simply want to come to a better life – a country with social peace, uncorrupt police, decent social services, efficient transport and so on.   The way forward here – and I know this is an almost undoable job – is to ensure that their home countries provide the basics of a decent life.   Sometimes the various categories mix together, certainly in UKIP rhetoric, and sometimes in reality, as in the ‘problem’ of those in the ‘jungle’ outside Calais.  You may agree with me that about 5,000 people – a small football crowd – should be able to be dealt with swiftly by the government, either granting asylum or repatriation.  But again, we have a complex issue being represented as either a ‘swarm’ of humanity coming to swamp our economy and social services, or a heartless government resisting a humanitarian crisis.   You’re either for or against migration, it seems, and all of it in 140 characters.

So I’ll keep tweeting, and reading tweets, but I won’t think I’ve found the answers.

It seems that the second most common use of the internet – behind pornography, of course – is family research.  I find it hard to believe that internet commerce isn’t the biggest user, or even pictures of cute cats, but that’s what we’re told.  And I have recently had a glimpse of why that should be.

To start at the beginning. I was in London at a family birthday party, and stayed at my brother’s house.  He gave me a photograph which he had found in our mother’s effects, of a nervous but determined young man in military uniform.  On the back, in my mother’s unmistakable primary school-teacher handwriting, was a message:

“Ernest Babb, son of William Tregeare Babb of Exeter and nephew of Clara Bishop, wearing uniform of Australian Expeditionary Force as he emigrated to Brisbane, Queensland before the First World War”

Clara Bishop was my grandmother, that I knew, but apart from that, nothing.  Then I spent a few minutes on the internet, and it all comes out. I recognise that it is helpful to have an odd surname – Babb rather than Smith or Brown – and that the military are better at keeping records than most, but the ease with which you can find out stuff is astonishing.

The first page of a Google search told me that Ernest enlisted at Capella, Queensland in the 5^th Light Horse (service number 1232), and embarked at Brisbane for the front on 17 September 1915 on the HMAT Hymettus, a ship which this web page tells us was able to transport 500 horses.  Another government record revealed he was a 22 year old station hand, born in Exeter, and worked as a station hand. He was unmarried, so did not sign the declaration about giving his wife a portion of his 5 shillings a day (£25.76 in today’s money) wages.

Whether he got to Gallipoli, I can’t say. The 5^th Light Horse were certainly there, but maybe not their later reinforcements.   Seems unlikely, as the Australians were withdrawing by the time he would have arrived in Egypt (5thLH left 17 December 1915).  The Discovering Anzac website, however, has all his records.  He was engaged in the Palestine campaigns (remember Lawrence of Arabia).  He started with the Light Horse, and was then transferred to the 2^nd Machine Gun Squadron.  Ernest was wounded on 16^th November 1917, it seems, at Dueidar, which is a small oasis in the Sinai Desert, though the record simply says “EEF” which stands for Egyptian Expeditionary Force. The casualty record speaks of GSW Foot (gunshot wound).  He was invalided back to an army hospital at Abbassia, then on to Australia on the transport ship ‘Ulysses’ (nothing to do with Alistair Maclean’s novel) on 15 February 1918, arriving 20^th March 1918.  He was awarded the 1914/15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal – standard fare, I guess.

That’s it, the product of maybe 90 minutes of bashing a keyboard. There are bits I found but haven’t investigated – such as the Light Horse website, and the history of the 5^th Light Horse Regiment.  The enthusiasm for militaria, the passion of Australians for their Anzac history and the excellence of military records is not matched by civilian life.  The trail goes dead when Ernest gets back to Australia – I hope his right foot healed enough for him to have a good life.

There’s another relative story from the Great War, less happy.  One of my great uncles – Frederick William Daly, from my father’s side of the family – emigrated to Canada, and also enlisted in the forces to come to the Empire’s aid, signing up for the 28^th Canadian Battalion which was authorized on 7 November 1914, embarked for Britain on 29 May 1915 and arrived in France on 18 September 1915.  Recruited in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the 28th Battalion fought as part of the 6th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division in France and Flanders until the end of the war.

Fred was killed on 18^th July 1918.  Family stories said that he was a horseman who died when he went out to calm the horses during an artillery bombardment.  However, when we visited his grave with my Grandma, there were 18 others killed at the same time, which makes the story unlikely.  With the wonders of the internet, which has each day’s battalion records, you can find out the truth, which is that he was killed by a bomb whilst sleeping in the night of 18^th/19^th July.  If you’re going to be killed in WW1, not a bad choice.  He is buried in Wanquetin Communal Cemetery extension, an addition to a village cemetery near Arras.

One of the reasons for having a blog is to work out for yourself what you think about the issues.  One good place to start is to look at the arguments that people make for their own, pre-determined, views.  The problem there is that you can be swayed, not by the strong logic and impeccable evidence of the partisans, but by the idiocy of their views.  Take the euro.  There is a strong economic case against the UK joining the euro, based on the need for a country to be able to control its own interest and exchange rates. But in fact the argument seemed to be about whether the Queen’s head would appear in the currency (doh – the euro has the head of reigning monarchs on its coinage).  The danger was that you could have jumped into the pro-euro camp, just because the arguments of the anti-euro camp were so stupid.

So, migration.  I am aware that you can lose a lot of friends by discussing this issue.  It is too easy to say that any discussion of controlling the admission of workers or, any proposal to prevent foreigners entering the country and working here, is racist.   This is odd, when the world is organised on the idea that nation states look after their own patch of the globe (OK, OK, I know that this is not true for the rich, who seem able to live and pay tax anywhere they like – and it is only the poor who are herded back to their home country).  The argument about migration is full of similarly invalid or weak arguments, it seems to me:

The first one is that the anti argument that migrants ‘take our jobs’.  This is part of what is known as the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy – the idea that there is a limited number of jobs, and if one person fills a vacancy, there are fewer left for other people.  In fact, we can increase the number of jobs by expanding the economy – by ending the absurdity of ‘austerity’, for example.  The fact that researchers argue that migrants do not replace UK nationals when the economy is at full employment supports this view.  The same is true about the gripes that migrants are taking housing, when we can build houses (and indeed, many building workers are from Irish or West Indian stock, or recent European migrants).  The fact that the government has a weak record in job creation and a worse one in construction doesn’t alter the case.

Then there is the pro argument that ‘migrants contribute to the economy’ by increasing the GNP.  Well, of course they bloody do.  Adding workers to any enterprise or region or economy increases output.  The issue is whether they raise the standard of living, the GNP per head.  This depends on an idea called ‘optimum population’, which asks whether we have the right number of workers in relation to our stock raw materials and capital investment.  I think it would be a bold economist who said that the UK at the moment has too few workers in relation to our capital or natural resources.  Any increase would be more likely, it seems to me, to take us beyond the optimum population level: but again, we could use the extra labour to produce more investment goods – more machine tools, better roads – and it is government policy that is influential in depressing the current investment level (particularly in the public sector).

An associated argument is that migrants contribute more to the national budget than they take out.  I welcome any argument that pooh-poohs the idea of benefit tourism, which I suspect to be a minor problem.  Most migrants I meet seem keen to get established with a decent job, or indeed any job.  But the calculus of tax and benefits will depend on the age of the people you’re looking at.  It would be very odd if an immigrant cohort made up of able bodied people between the ages of 25 and 40 did not have a positive effect on the national books: the costly part of your life as far as public spending is concerned is before 18 and after 65.  But do we think that Polish people do not grow old, or Romanians will have no children ?  An example.  We now have in Britain a mature Afro-Caribbean community, with spruce old guys off to the barber and well-dressed lady pensioners off to church.  I suspect the balance of government spending v receipts has levelled up from the days when all our West Indian migrants were young and in jobs.  That will happen to the East European and West African communities, won’t it ?  This seems to me to be relevant to the claim that we need immigration to compensate for our ageing demographic – we have so many pensioners, we need bright and busy foreigners to pay our taxes and care for us.  How long does that benefit last ?

Then there is the debate as to whether immigrants depress wages for native workers.  There has been some denial here, but it would (again) be truly strange if they did not.  The laws of economics see the labour market as just another market, and an increase in supply drives down price.  Some papers have suggested that the effect is sectoral, but the consensus is that wages at the lower end of the market have fallen.  Maybe not a lot, but a bit.  For me, this links in with argument 1 above.  It is dishonest to say that without Bulgarians and Lithuanians we would not get our crops harvested, until we have tried to find workers locally by offering higher wages.

Now, all these arguments seem to be economic.  That’s not the only thing to think of.  There is a respectable cultural case to be made – that English society, literature and science has contributed enormously to the world’s culture, and needs to maintain a distinct identity.  Not sure I agree with this – the list of authors, athletes, politicians, surgeons etc from migrant backgrounds would be too long to print here.  And, to be blunt, there wouldn’t be much of British identity to preserve without the contribution of Polish and Czech fighter pilots in 1940.  But there must be a sense of ‘how much is enough’.  I went recently to my old stamping ground at Woolwich, and was taken aback to find an area that was totally changed from the white working class suburb where I grew up and went to college.  Am I wrong to think that ?  I don’t know, to be frank.  But there must be a case for discussing the effects of a twenty year year doubling of the number of foreign born people in the country – from 2.9m in 1993 to 6 million in 2013.

Does this link with the increasing attacks on social security – now known, American style, as ‘welfare’ ?  Some argue that you cannot have open borders and a welfare state – not because of ‘benefit tourism’, but because a welfare state requires fellow-feeling – that someone like me has got into difficulty and it’s only decent to help them out.  It’s what the French call “fraternity”, and I’ve written elsewhere that we don’t have enough of it.  If the people in difficulty are not felt to be ‘like me’, then the idea of contributing to their income becomes less easy to maintain.  Yes, I know that the biggest element of welfare state benefits are to the old, but that is not how it is sold to the public (or what they believe).

An additional confusion comes from the way that ‘migration’ is a term that covers many different issues.  The refugees in the Mediterranean, fleeing the awfulness of African tyrannies and conflicts, are not the same group as Filipino nurses, and neither of them are the same as Latvian fruit pickers or Polish carpenters.  And then there are the high skill people in finance and technology: here’s a survey of most in-demand skills.  On top of it all are the students coming to universities and colleges in the UK, most of who will want to leave when they are qualified.  Separate policies are needed to respond to the issues raised by each of these groups.  And this is difficult when the motives of migrants are mixed: the distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ is not always clear.  A BBC discussion with Mediterranean migrants (and what a delight to find someone talking to those concerned) found both those fleeing oppression, and those seeking a decently paid job to enable them to remit money home.

Take the Mediterranean problem for a moment, which shows the complexity of the issue.  One side says we must not let people drown.  Another says if we mount a rescue operation we will just encourage the people smuggling trade.  Both sides are, of course, right.  The philosophical issue is therefore not easy.  What is needed is fundamental change and reform in the countries of origin of the fleeing masses, but that’s not going to happen (in the cliché) any time soon.  In the meantime, we need to find civilized and humane arrangements for looking after those we rescue, making it clear that the Royal Navy is not a ferry service to the UK.

Ok. Enough for tonight.  I think it is important to look at the issue with calmness:  just one in six Britons think immigration has benefited the country, and the response to this is surely not to give the rest of them lectures about bigotry.  There is a democratic point: who thinks that the proposition “half the new jobs in the country should be filled by foreigners” – which has happened in recent memory – would have gained support if put to a referendum ?  For all that, people’s ideas about migration are mixed and complex: on that, I agree with Lord Ashcroft (cut that phrase out and keep it for posterity).  Will get back to this when my mind is clearer, which may be a while.