Managing Nuance

Some days you can see the Guardian editors at work, working out which stories belong together. On Wednesday they paired two transgender stories, illustrating very different approaches to this frighteningly complex issue.

In the first, the WI reaffirmed its policy of inclusivity. They’ve a proud tradition of taking progessive,tolerant stands on controversial issues, and were clearly not going to be stampeded into a kneejerk reaction. Melissa Green had thoroughly researched members’ attitudes, so she could confidently assert that “We’ve not been afraid to tackle things that cause us or other people discomfort in an effort to inform and educate and move society forward…We’re not always going to agree on everything. I don’t know why anybody would expect us to.”

From the sublime to the ridiculous. the government has been considering what advice to give t single-sex schools who are asked to accept transgender pupils. Education secreary Gilian Keegan is confident that this is really pretty simple - “We have to be sensible and have a big dose of common sense here. We can’t mix up sex and gender. We’ve seen what happened in Scotland when it got that round the wrong way.” So girls’ schools are free to reject applications from pupils who identify as female but whose legal sex is male. Neat and easy for the schools, and the girls for whom Keegan is obviously concerned. For the transgender students, not so much.

Confidence Trick

One of the interesting offshoots of the deeply depressing story of Donald Trump is his relationship with the reporter Maggie Haberman. that’s nothing like as sordid as he might like it to be, since she gets on with her professional work of reporting what he’s doing - and has done for years. He’ fascinated by her, occasionally lurching into outrage and insults, but also regularly coming back for more, in the belief that maybe he can charm her into being on his side.

It hasn’t worked. Her 500-page study of his rise to power, Confidence Man, is a thorough journalistic job, immaculately researched and resourced, and without a glimmer of personal bias. She carefully records whosaid what and whowrote what, and is toughly self-critical of herself on the occasions when she got it wrong. Anything further than Trump’s own style would be hard to imagine.

So the evidence is all there, about how he tricked and lied, deceived and backtracked, powered by his own inexhaustible vanity and constant need for admiration and support. Nobody reading his could imagine that he was fit to be in charge of a company, let alone a country - and yet reports still come in of influential Republicans deciding hat yes, he’s the man to represent them in the next presidential election. It’s the kind of thing to give democracy a bad name.

Labour Pains

It must get them down, being Labour strategists. They keep seeing Tory charlatans picking up votes with ,meaningless slogans - “take back control.” Bogus offers of 40 new hospitals, or 20,000 police officers, no questions asked. But if you’re giving police officers those powers, there’s a whole lot of questions you should be asking.

So it’s not amazing that the Labour boys want to get their own, devising posters branding Sunak as a soft liberal who lets sex offenders and gun owners roam free, whereas Labour promises to lock ‘em up. And maybe that Trump echo wasn’t an accident? And when the Tories complain, there’s some hard young lad ready to quip “they don’t like it up ‘em.”

But we’re talking playground spat here, not actual politics. It’s a tough, uphill grind, but it’s still Labour’s job to point out that this stuff isn’t easy, that quick fixes on a poster will cost you if they become pledges that you have to carry out. And if that isn’t true, if you’re so desperate that anything goes, why not do it properly and promise to keep Suella Braverman in post? We know there are voters out there who’d welcome that, but are those the votes you really want to win?

Minister for Incompetence

So now we know. Today’s Guardian headline reads “DWP report shows benefit sanctions make it harder to find work.” To many working in the field that’s not surprising, but it’s good to have official confirmation. What’s striking is that this report follows analysis insisted on by a select committee, who wanted to see if there was any factual basis to justify Coffey’s hunch about punishing claimants. Reluctantly she carried out the research, but then refused to publish the results, because publication was not “in the public interest.”

Oh yes it is. It’s in the interests of claimants, who no longer need to be bullied. And it’s in the interests of intelligent government, which should be based on information, not prejudice. But it’s not in the personal interests of the minister, who until now has had the power to suppress it.

Ms. Coffey has now moved on to DEFRA, with responsibility for the massive pollution of our water. Nothing to be done about this, she says, because it would mean a massive increase in what consumers have to pay. But she doesn’t even look at a couple of alternative responses - like cutting the massive dividends paid to shareholders, or actually getting serious about the business of regulation. That’s what government is for. They’re not the star striker, claiming glory. They’re the bloody ref, making sure people keep to the rules. But with ministers like her, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

...and then there's the Mail.

No, I don’t usually write two posts in a day, but these are interesting times. Less than six hours after I wrote the previous blogpost about the Partygate hearing I saw the front page of the Daily Mail. Sarah Vine, amazingly, didn’t watch the same footage that I did. :

“Harman’s face was thunder. Boris was as agile as a cat.” Really? Was Harman looking grim because she’s just ugly that way, or was she anxious about an abuse of parliamentary procedure?

Vine doesn’t say, but her conclusion is that there’s nothing to see here, just two opposing sides who were never going to agree. “After four nit-picking hours, had a single mind been changed?” Which just happened to be the identical conclusion reached by a BBC reporter yesterday, dismissing Chris Bryant’s comments on the impressive performance of the Privileges Committee. It’s long been an aim of this government to get the BBC and Daily Mail singing from the same hymn sheet, but I can’t share their enthusiasm for the success of this project.

Neutral BBC?

I know the BBC is under attack and I want to support them, but they really do make that difficult. After the Lineker disaster, we have the Partygate hearing, which I thought was fascinating. Straight after three hours of televised interrogation, their reporter asked Chris Bryant for his impressions. When he’d finished, she said “We told you there were two sides whose view of Johnson wouldn’t change, and that proves it.”

Which would have been fine, if Bryant had said “I always said he was a lying shit, and there’s the proof.” But he didn’t. He provided a detailed, lively account of what had just gone on, referring in detail to how Johnson contradicted himself, repeated himself, and disowned any sense of leadership or responsibility. But Bryant also paid tribute to the members of the committee, his committee which he knew well. They’d prepared thoroughly, asked intelligent questions, and refused to allow Johnson to waffle in his own defence. They resisted any attempt to grandstand or be distracted by Johnson supporters’ insinuation that they were a kangaroo court. Bryant argued that they are trying to uphold a traditional view of honest responsible government, which is seriously under attack. Rees-Mogg, on the other hand, dismisses them as “marsupials”, furry little creatures who don’t matter.

That’s a crucial difference, but the BBC says “We don’t take sides. We just sit in the middle.”

A Government Spokesman said...

At first it made me angry, but now it’s just a dreary routine. the government is accused of some failure, so it wheels out an anonymous spokesman. They don’t reply to the charge, but assert constant, positive action - “We’ve done x and y, and next year we’ll be spending z.” Even if the original challenge is startling, like the Government’s abdication of responsibility for the water quality of rivers, the routine remains the same.

But recently it’s got worse. A Home Office spokesperson waved away the Williams report - “it’s not set in stone”- as though it were some Victorian relic past its sell-by date, rather than a damning analysis of the government’s failures over Windrush, and then of its failures to put that right. Then there was Dominic Raab, whose consistent bullying presents a challenge for the smoothest apologist. Nonetheless, there was somebody willing to suggest that these many serious allegations were simply pique on the part of incompetents, who had presumed they’d be able to get away with shoddy work.

But the star entry takes us back to the Home Office, where thousands of Tory supporters were informed that Braverman’s small boats bill was being obstructed by “an activist blob of leftwing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour party.” Nothing to see there. Typical Braverman rhetoric, with which we’ve become familiar. But we’re now asked to believe not only that she didn’t say this, but that the statement was put out without her knowledge or approval. Really? The Braverman Home Office doesn’t strike me as the kind of workplace where officials are encouraged to exercise their creativity, and draft the kind of thing the Home Secretary might say. All the same - “This was a CCHQ email and the wording wasn’t seen by the home secretary. We are now reviewing our internal clearance processes.” Well, of course they are, but there’s little likelihood that the result will lead to greater honesty.

Sunak Schizophrenia

In week 1, Sunak gives a very convincing imitation of a grown-up. He talks to the EU about the settlement of the various messes that Johnson left behind, and guess what? Faced with somebody reasonable and polite, the EU agreed on a deal which was far better for the UK than anything we’d seen before (before the mess bequeathed us by the Brexit vote, that is. There was a better alternative before that, but that’s blood under the bridge).

Which was a vindication of intelligent displomacy, and confirmation that David Frost’s belligerent jingoism wasn’t actually the best way to obtain a good result. It had the incidental virtue of seeming to underline the final collapse of any pretensions that Johnson had towards leadership - though with him you never know.

But this reasonable prime minister would never have appointed Suella Braverman, and in week 2 we get Sunak Mark II, the man who will singlehandedly turn back all the boats and make sure no foreigner ever steps on a British shore again. This is, of course, a fantasy, designed solely to pick up votes. Nobody seriously expects it to work. But it has the added disadvantage of infuriating the European allies who the previous week were convinced that the UK was someone with whom they could collaborate. So we’re back in the Brexit doghouse, on our own again, but flying a lot of union jacks.

Matt Hancock

You remember him…During lockdown, he was the one who insisted that his arms were around the care homes, night and day. Canny sceptics like John Crace in The Guardian, were impressed by his announcement at the covid briefings that they’d be honest about it if they got things wrong. At the time I thought he was crazy to trust Hancock’s word. You only got to be in that cabinet if you’d told lies about Brexit, so why should he suddenly assume that they would now be starting to tell the truth?

Nothing Hanock’s done since has raised him in our estimation. No, we didn’t really think he was being a celebrity in the jungle to promote the cause of dyslexia, and donating 3% of his fee to that cause justified our scepticism. But what we have now, courtesy of Isabel Oakeshott, is a detailed running commentary of just how vain, incompetent and deceitful he could be. He was, of course, an idiot to trust her with anything serious, but the important political question is how any Prime Minister could appoint such a fool, and then allow them to stay in office long after they’d demontrated their unfitness for the role.

The case for bullying

“Dom puts the backs up of civil servants because he actually checks the work. He doesn’t just take what they tell him.”

That’s an unnamed government minister, telling The Times why they should ignore evidence that over twenty civil servants across three departments have been bullied by Dominic Raab. It’s less an argument than an image,the portrait of a tough boss who keeps the rabble in line, but gets things done. That might be more convincing if Raab’s career were full of achievements against the odds, but what he’s best known for is putting his own comfort and convenience above the desperate needs of vulnerable allies in Afghanistan.

But the Raab defence is part of a long Tory tradition, like the fairy story they tell about education. “Teachers have wild ideas and want more pay, but government ministers are on to them and are busy raising standards.” This one is also coming apart at the seams, as parents recognise the work done by teachers to support their children during the pandemic. Yes, a teachers’ strike may create short-term problems of supervision, but if you treat hardworking professionals that badly, they’re entitled to come out on strike.

Sorting Windrush

Picking up the pieces of the Windrush scandal was never going to be easy. How do you get a Home Office which has been encouraged to see itself as be hostile to suddenly change direction, and become fair and considerate towards the people it’s been terrorising?

Wendy Williams, the ex-police officer who wrote a 275-page report, had a few ideas. Educate Home Office staff in colonial history. Arrange reconciliation events, so that HO officials could bridge the gap between them and the communities they affected. Have a commissioner to directly represent these communities’ views. Appoint an independent director, to check on the likely impact of immigration policy, before it does serious damage.

The Rishi Sunak who signed up for reasonable government would have endorsed all these, as Priti Patel did. But he’s outsourced immigration policy to Suella Braverman, who prefers to scrap the lot, and leave herself free to concentrate on turning back the boats.

Making Sense of Migration

Migration is a mess. It’s a really complicated topic, confused by angry rhetoric and political arguments which are passionate, confused and hard to disentangle. So what a worried observer with endless leisure needs is a good book, and luckily I’ve just discovered one. “The Fourth Time, We Drowned” is 400 pages about the situation in Europe, mainly in Libya. The EU doesn’t want large numbers of Africans coming to Europe, so they pay Libya huge amounts of money to make sure that doesn’t happen. But “Libya” isn’t a pleasant, rational country, organised to do a humanitarian job. It’s a mixture of competing militias, who make money by locking up migrants, threatening them, blackmailing their relatives, and either taking them off boats or putting them on boats, whichever is the more lucrative. Sally Hayden, in Irish journalist, uncovers all this with enormous patience, relying on social media links with a succession of migrants in horrendous circumstances. For many of them she is their only source of hope, and she pursues the story doggedly, chasing down EU representatives, spokespersons and whistleblowers from UNHCR, and other agencies unable to match their public statements with effective action. It’s depressing but hugely impressive, and on the back cover there are seven seriously good writers of various kinds, each testifying that this is a very special book. I got it from the local library. I’m guessing you could do thesame.

Glimmers of light

My New Year resolution is to accentuate the positive. One of the best things I did in December was to attend a zoom teach-in featuring Greta Thunberg and Naomi Klein. That was inspiring, but also a reminder that my succumbing to despair would be a huge encouragement to people I really don’t want to support, so…look on the bright side.

Already, I see a glimmer of hope. This year’s honours list rewards intelligent, independent people who’ve made a massive contribution - but have also been critical of government: Sir Michael Marmot, Chris Bryant. As Marmot says, that decision says “something very good about Britain”, in that we value stuff that’s good for us as a whole, whether or no it suits the interests of the governing party.

Which is not surprising at all, until you look at the track record of Johnson and Truss, whose only concern was to reward their own cronies and further their control of the House of Lords. That Sunak is prepared to reverse that trend, and go back to a wider, more objective view of awarding honours, is progress of a kind, however small.

Selective News

We all heard the outline story. Rishi Sunak is helping out at a hostel for the homeless, and he asks this man if he wants to get into finance. How stupid can you get? Insensitive, out of touch Tory, thinking everybody’s just like him. Until you actually get to read the conversation. Dean asks Rishi if he’s sorting the economy out. He says he’s trying to. Dean says that “best for business.” Rishi asks if he works in business, and offers him some fruit. No, Dean says, he’s homeless. “But I am interested in business.” Dean says he likes finance, that if finance does well, so does the rest of London. So it’s not entirely silly that Rishi asks if that’s something he’d like to get into.

No, it’s nothing like as simple as the outline version, and that’s the trouble. What we’re often fed is the most dramatic story, the one with the simplest moral, but to get that often means touching it up a little, and missing out important details. Yet another reason - not that I was struggling to find one - why the effort and expense of going through my paper copy of The Guardian feels like a worthwhile investment.

World Cup Final

Whatever else was going on, in football terms the Qatar World Cup went out with a bang. Despite the French barely turning up for the first seventy minutes, this ended up as totally gripping roller coaster ride, with Messi and Mbappe living up to the billing by managing five goals between them. But there was subtler stuff going on as well. Remember Jude Bellingham, how he was dominant against Senegal, then struggled against the French? And here was Griezemann, many viewers’ player of the tournament, majestic against England but hardly visible here. Was that because of the virus, or did the Argentinians take Karen Carney’s advice to physically bully him out the game?

We may never know, but we certainly didn’t get any answers from Guy Mowbray, who for someone at the BBC is the person best placed to provide comentary on the most important game of the year. Before the game, he talked about compiling a dossier of information, so he has handy little snippets to hand out when nothing’s going on. But he insists he doesn’t polish special lines in advance - he has to be free to respond to the situation, to read what’s on the pitch. And what do we get as a result? One of the best team goals of the tournament is characterised as “engineered by a bloke from Brighton” (Argentina’s Alexis MacAllister). A camera shot of Argentinian veterans weeping with joy gets “Do cry for me, Argentina.” It’s the poetry of tabloid headlines. Is this really the best we can do?

New new Labour

As the Tories sink into further division and incompetence, so it seems more likely that we might get some form of Labour government - but given our ludicrous electoral system, I certainly wouldn’t bank on it. And right now, I don’t look forward o it with unalloyed enthusiasm. Yes, there’s some decent, competent people there, and I’m sure they’d make a better fist of actually running things than the Tories (not a high bar) but there’s things about them that worry me. Partly, the sense of solidarity and unity they convey has been at the price of edging out of the party those who are most radical - most angry about inequality, racism, sexism, capitalism. I’m worried that potential candidates have been disqualified because on social media they’ve supported comments by people in other parties - the Greens, the SNP. The idea seems to be that only Labour have the answers, only Starmer can decide, and all that has to happen is for him to be in charge and all will be well. That sounds a lot like Peter Mandelson to me, and last time it didn’t end well. Can they really achieve the majority they want without the unexpected commitment and energy that boosted Labour in 2017? I doubt it. I don’t fear those party workers defecting to the Tories. But I do fear large numbers of voters across the country getting disillusioned with the whole business, and deciding not to vote.

Knockout Competition

Who’d have thunk it? Right now we’re not hearing so much about migrant workers or human rights, simply because the World Cup football is rivetting. And it’s particularly rivetting at this stage - the final games in the qualifying groups. Regardless of how well any time is playing, the format cooks up instant drama, where in some cases any two of the four might qualify, and a goal scored elsewhere might suddenly boot you out of the competition. FIFA, predictably, are thinking of ditching this format, because a longer, more boring pattern would bring in more teams, create more games and suck in more revenue. Let’s hope they’ll see sense, though the track record doesn’t encourage optimism.

None of this compulsive quality is actually down to Qatar, although to be fair the overall management seems to have been efficient, and money has done the things that money will do. In one key respect they’ve managed to exacltly mirror how we do things in the West - their version of VAR is quite as cockeyed and intrusive as ours. So embarrassing, watching a ref view the same footage over and over again, because he doesn’t think it shows that he was wrong, but he hasn’t got the nerve to be summoned to the magic screen, and then announce his conviction that he was right in the first place. Huge anticlimax, massive undermining of his authority - who is it, exactly, that gains from this charade? Certainly not the players, or the fans.

Playing Away

It’s good to be reminded - though we shouldn’t have forgotten - that Gareth Southgate is really good at cultivating a team spirit, a shared atmosphere of aspiration in which more than twenty talented footballers recognise that only eleven can be on the pitch at the same time. Pretty basic, you’d have thought, but looking around - Germany? Belgium? - by no means standard.

What’s interesting is that they actually seem to enjoy being away from the UK. Take two Manchester United players, for example. Partly because of the change of manager at home, Rashford is unrecognisable - in other words, back to his young, promising best. No, he hasn’r been diverted from playing football by getting involved in food poverty; but he does benefit from supportive management, skilful teammates, and being further away from the poisonous drip of social media. Harry Maguire the same. He hasn’t had that resurgence of form for his home club, but playing for England in Qatar he doesn’t automatically get booed every time he touches the ball, and with the acknowledgement and support of other England players he’s starting to show the reason why he was picked originally. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem ludicrous that he’s wearing an England shirt.

Here...and there

During March and April I followed developments in Ukraine closely, listened to Ukrainecast every day. As the war has dragged on, and it’s slipped down the popularity ratings, I’ve continued to keep in touch - though very reasonably they know produce three episodes a week rather than seven. The resilience of the Ukranians remains almost incredible, and while it’s clear that the war’s doing horrific damage to Russia in so many ways, it’s also clear that nobody can present that fact to Putin in any form to which he might reasonably respond.

But I’m also stunned by the determined realism and intelligence of the Ukrainian leadership. Whether it’s Zelensky, local mayors or the guy raining the rail system, they seem to share a commitment to honesty, hard work and planning for the future which should make us weep. How would we fare in a similar situation? We know that already, from covid. There might be pockets of occasional success, like the vaccine, but the overall performance of our political leaders would be characterised by short-term solutions, dishonesty and self-interest. Would Labour make a difference, if they won the next election? I really want to think so, but that prospect currently feels distant and remote.

Democracy Wins

And breathe…The US election system takes its time - why can Brazil do it so much faster? Eventually we got the final results, with two surprises - the Republican majority in the House would be thin, and the Democrats would hold on to the Senate. And I realised what a huge relief that was.

No, of course it won’t be easy. There’ll be lots of negative stuff, and blocking of bills which ought to be passed, but it isn’t the Republican stranglehold that it might have been, and that the polls predicted. And although I work really hard not to see despair as an option, with Trump’s people in power it’s very hard to see any kind of positive future for Ukraine, or for climate change. Having those two avenues blocked off from any kind of hope really would make a difference to the world.

So we breathe again, and struggle on - strengthened by the certainty that it might very well have been worse. And it’s great to see Trump’s complacency burst, as it slowly dawns on Republicans that maybe he isn’t the electoral asset that he thinks he is. Conveniently, he encapsulates this in his assertion that if they win it’s down to him, but if they lose it’s not his fault. Might that strike a chord somewhere, that what we have here is not the thinking of a rational adult? We can only hope, but at least we can now do that.