Carswell?

I have a lot of affection and regard for the Slugger O’Toole site, and its Onlie True Begetter, Mick Fealty. Quite frankly, if you want All Northern Irish Life, that’s as good as any.

With all due respect, then, I was somewhat taken aback that the Man Himself took time out to argue  the significance of Douglas Carswell’s defection from the Tories to UKIP.  Let’s be honest: the only real surprise was the “who”. We knew the wind off the German Ocean was blowing chill for the Tories: witness, for just two obvious examples, the standing-down of Mark Simmonds at Boston and Skegness and Laura Sandys in South Thanet.

Mick Fealty’s argument was:

Carswell defection will bolster UKIP’s bid to become a ‘serious’ Westminster player.

Really! Really?

Did the election, in a full General Election, — not defection — of Caroline Lucas in Brighton, Pavilion, against four Party opposition, and against “Leo Atrides” (I still can’t take that one seriously) make the Green Party a ‘serious’ Westminster player?

Even in the specific Northern Irish context, did Naomi Long in East Belfast or Sylvia Hermon in North Down made either of them‘serious’ Westminster players?

This is the politics of froth.

Even were the Kippers to take (at the top end of every prediction) three seats — not half of one percent of Commons membership — at next May’s General Election, what rights of audience, let alone power, does that give them?

No: the issue is first and foremost that the Tory Party is suffering the political equivalent of a tectonic split. This time the widening divide is over the EU.

Such an event hasn’t been hasn’t been seen among Tories since 27th January 1846. That was when Peel announced he intended the repeal of the Corn Laws. The consequence was the amalgamation of the Peelite Tories and the Whigs to form the “Liberal Party”. It also kept that lot out of government for a decade — and even then, under Disraeli (who could turn his coat as soon as anyone), the traditional Tory presumption of land-owner interest was never restored.

And that, Mr Fealty, is far more important than any War of Carswell’s dubious “Loyalty”.

Confused? You could be …

One of the few decent things that came out of the UK’s early experiments with cable tv was an American import, Soap. This originated with ABC and was a parody of the worst of tv serials. It always started with a voice-over:

 In last week’s episode of Soap, Chester’s secretary Claire had arranged for Chester’s mistress Pigeon to find them together at lunch, thus ending Chester’s relationship with Pigeon. But that’s not all, Claire has threatened to repost Chester’s illegal business activities, if Chester doesn’t divorce Jessica. Jessica has tried to end it with Peter but couldn’t, but tells Mary she’ll see him again to see if she can. Jodie has found that his quarterback boyfriend, in order to protect his image, has a girlfriend. Jodie tells him since he’s planning a sex change operation for that very same reason, his boyfriend can get rid of his girlfriend. Danny has tried to follow the Godfather’s order’s to kill Burt but couldn’t. Confused? You won’t be after this week’s episode of … Soap.

Each episode then ended with a series of bizarre hanging questions.

We had a close domestic equivalent, courtesy of today’s LabourList:

Carswell is now UKIP’s second ever MP, after 2008′s Bob Spink. Or it means he’s UKIP’s first ever MP, if you listen to Bob Spink who now claims he never joined the party. Or it means UKIP still have never had an MP, if you consider that Carswell has stood down, presumably with immediate effect.

Then there’s the small triviality of a by-election. By convention, the Whip of the “out-going” party moves the Writ. So that would put it in the gift of the Tories. When, then, will Michael Gove be authorised to rise and move that flaming Writ?

Surely not during the Conference season, in October, which logically would be the earliest moment? Conceive the effect of a defeat, or — at best — a narrow victory on the Tory faithful gathered at Birmingham, for what must be planned as the Great Electoral Send-Off..

Which would move it into the drab, dark evenings of clocks-gone-back November. Only the most convinced happily venture out to knock unwelcoming doors in such circumstances, with the cutting wind off the German Ocean. And, as of now, there are more swivel-eyed, dedicated, weather-proofed Kippers than Tories, especially in coastal Essex,

Confused? You will be after the next episode of … Westminster Soap.

 

Snarf! Snarf!

The whole #Clactongate business has been a delight and an amazement this Thursday afternoon.

The vid of Farridge having to play second fiddle to the Main Attraction, the otherwise publicly-unnoted Carswell, was delicious in itself.

Since when, the entertainment value has got better and better. Hence the snarfing.

And then, at the bijou domain of ane Guido Fawkes, I came across this:

Do read that final Update II with great care. Next try to enunciate it, preferably with a rising volume and tone, especially as one reaches the final sentence.

Then experiment, again, with a theatrical Reichsführer-SS Himmler intonation.

Works, huh?

Ordnung muss sein!

On with the monstering

That Dan Hodges piece (see previous) is about as subcutaneously irritating as it can get. But that is only part of the great flannelling which is how this Rotherham story has become.

• At no time in all this does anyone recognise where the whole story, as currently represented, comes from. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, 1997-2013 was commissioned by and for … Rotherham Council. And presumably paid for by them, too.
• Ever since 2001 Rotherham Council has funded the Risky Business youth project, which:

worked with young people between 11 and 25 years, providing sexual health advice, and help in relation to alcohol and drugs, self-harm, eating disorders, parenting and budgeting. By the late ‘90s, it was beginning to identify vulnerable girls on the streets of the town. Its relationship with any young person was voluntary on both sides. It was part of the Council’s Youth Services, though it derived its funding from various sources in its early years. One of its main functions was the provision of training to voluntary and statutory agencies working in the field, to magistrates, the Police, schools and foster carers.

Risky Business is one of the few good-news stories here.

• The failings were at management level, as Professor Jay calls it:

the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. This came from those working in residential care and from youth workers who knew the young people well.

Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers.

• Surely, the main failing was with the South Yorkshire Police. Again from Professor Jay:

At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.

This becomes even more glaringly obvious when we reach paragraphs 4.1 and 4.2 of the Jay Report:

4.1 Children’s social care introduced CSE as a category for referral in 2001. However, many exploited children were wrongly categorised as being ‘out of control’. Prior to January 2013, the Police did not have a separate category for CSE. Neither agency had compiled reliable data that the Inquiry could use to estimate the scale of the problem over time. There was good information about cases open to the CSE team or co-worked by them, but information about other children being supported by children’s social care was not easily obtained. [My emphasis]

4.2 In the chart above we summarise what we were able to find out about caseloads and contacts received by children’s social care. The data must be treated with caution. The figures were not collected or presented in a systematic way from year to year. Nevertheless, the chart gives a broad indication of the scale of the problem as reflected in children’s social care records.

 I am aware from my own past connection with local authority business that the casework-load for social workers is excessive. Even now, Rotherham’s specialist child sexual exploitation team has 51 active cases, and sixteen looked after children who were identified by children’s social care as being at serious risk of sexual exploitation or having been sexually exploited.

• It would be helpful if we were told what the case-loads are for social workers is in Rotherham. This has been more than a niggling problem for years. Nationally, it is a problem. In areas of severe deprivation it can be overwhelming.
• The starting salary for a full-time, qualified social worker in Rotherham is £22,443 a year.

So, let’s consider spending constraints. In fact, Professor Jay does that for us, too:

The combined effect of changes to local authority funding in England has been a dramatic reduction in resources available to Rotherham and neighbouring Councils. By 2016, Rotherham will have lost 33% of its spending power in real terms compared to 2010/11.

For the current financial year (i.e. after Rotherham’s problem had been identified, and lambasted by the Commons Select Committee) that‘s:

a £23 million programme of cuts – as well as a tax increase – in Rotherham Council’s budget for the [present] year.

The authority has already had to slash £70 million from its spending plans over the last four years, and needs to find another £23m of savings by next April.

A council tax increase of 1.9 per cent – the first rise in the town for four years – has been proposed, but ‘frontline services’ will be affected in the latest round of cuts.

Those cuts to ‘frontline services’ include:

children and young people’s services will lose £3m.

Rotherham, lest we forget, ranks 310th of the 324 English authorities in the Experian Resilience Index.

Any monstering there should properly start with Eric Pickles at the Department of Communities and Local Government.

There is one other operation that requires a severe monstering: the South Yorkshire Police.

Read this, and weep:

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) concluded that officers in its public protection unit spent “a great deal deal of time trying to disprove” victims’ allegations.

HMIC’s chief inspector, Tom Winsor, ordered South Yorkshire police to end immediately the culture of “investigate-to-record”, where officers do not record incidents as possible crimes until they have been investigated.

Of the violent offences, including rape, that had been written off as “no crime” by the force, just under a fifth were wrongly classified and should have been pursued, inspectors found.HMIC examined 66 recorded crimes of rape, violence and robbery that South Yorkshire police had recorded as no-crime but found that 11 of these – equal to 17% – were incorrectly classified.

The report said: “This culture of dealing with reports of crime shows a disregard for victims and is unacceptable; it hides the true extent of the picture of crime from the force and is particularly concerning when the offences investigated by this unit are often of the most serious nature and victims are often the most vulnerable.” […]

The HMIC also raised concerns about South Yorkshire police’s recording of crimes including child abuse.

Winsor said that inspectors had examined 53 reports to South Yorkshire’s specialist departments. Out of those, 34 crimes should have been recorded – but only 18 were, the report said. Of these 18 crimes, eight fell outside the 72-hour limit allowed to record incidents.

The report found: “This level of under-recorded crime is a significant cause of concern and is a matter of material and urgent importance, particularly as some of these relate to violence and sexual assault against vulnerable children.”

South Yorkshire police currently have 173 “live” investigations into suspected child sexual exploitation, 32 of which are in Rotherham, a spokeswoman for the force said on Thursday. [again, my emphasis]

So there are 141 “live” CSE investigations going on in the other three administrative areas of the South Yorkshire Police Authority. Obviously Rotherham may not be quite the worst cess-pit of depravity.

South Yorkshire Police previously distinguished themselves in the 1984 Miner’s Strike and at the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

In 1984:

After Orgreave, South Yorkshire police claimed they had been attacked by striking miners, and prosecuted 95 people for riot and unlawful assembly, offences that carried potential life sentences. All were acquitted, after defence lawyers argued that police evidence was false, fabricated and that an officer’s signature on a statement was forged.

[Michael] Mansfield [QC], who defended three of the accused miners, describes the prosecutions as “the biggest frame-up ever”. Mansfield argues that South Yorkshire police, under [Chief Constable Peter] Wright, had been “institutionally corrupt” and was still unreformed when the Liverpool supporters came to Sheffield for the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.

In 1989:

Lord Justice Taylor, in his official report into Hillsborough, published in 1990, judged that mismanagement by South Yorkshire police was the prime cause of the disaster, yet the force relentlessly sought to lay the blame on the Liverpool supporters. A unit of senior officers, reporting to Wright, oversaw that case, ordering junior officers to rewrite their statements, to delete criticisms of the police’s own operation and emphasise allegations that supporters were drunk and misbehaving.

In those days, of course, the South Yorkshire Police had a firm friend in 10 Downing Street. The private briefing that Margaret Thatcher was given (to be told only what she and the police wanted her to hear) the day after Hillsborough, and the equally-misleading report of Merseyside Chief Constable Sir Kenneth Oxford only came into the public domain in 2012.

Monstering 2

We are currently spectators at a massive monstering. Today’s Daily Mail is a prime example.

We have the classic formula: a “most wanted’ list, and then the distortions.

Compare the on-line version:

Of course Shaun Wright’s position as Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire is untenable. “Untenable”, not because he has failed in just two years at PCC for South Yorks, but because he had been defenestrated from Rotherham Council, and found a safe nook, over just this whole scandal.

Then there are at least three gross distortions there already:

1. Ged Fitzgerald is clearly identified as “Councillor”. #Fail. He was Chief Executive of South Yorkshire for just two years (2001-2003) of the decade-and-a-half in question. A simple fact check would have established that. Or even — perish the thought — a reading, let alone an understanding, of Professor Jay’s report.

2. The headline is perverse. It wasn’t “1,400 Young girls”. Professor Alexis Jay is clear:

Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

Note: “children”, not just “girls”. But that lacks the sexualising of young girls that is a consistent Mail trade-mark. More on that here and here.

3. What about the assertion that child rapists are mainly of Asian origin?

What’s a bit of racism between consenting adults?

That has been another chronic #Fail throughout the whole of this horrible saga. It began, and continued from Andrew Norfolk’s original piece for The Times. Not to put too fine a point on it, Norfolk’s stories for The Times seem obsessed with proving the malignity and rapaciousness of Asians. Try it and see.

The whole focus, not just by Norfolk, has been on “gangs”, with the clear insinuation that the problem involves Pakistani men preying on vulnerable white girls. We may trace that one back to Jack Straw in January 2011:

Jack Straw has said that the “fundamental failure” in the Rochdale case, in which dozens of girls were groomed for sex by a group of men of Pakistani origin, lay with the police and social workers who failed to take action to protect them.

But, the former Home Secretary added, there was an added “issue here about colour,” in cases in which Asian men took advantage of white girls.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, he said: “There is an issue of ethnicity here which can’t be ignored.

“It is true that if you go into the sex offenders wings of prisons there are proportionally more white men than Asian men. But there’s also the separate issue of group grooming in the Asian community.

“In terms of group grooming, there is an ethnic dimension to this which is Asian men and white girls, and that has to be faced by the Asian community.

What Straw said, even as there reported by the Daily Telegraph, was almost balanced. What others read into it was definitely not. As with Sky News:

Former home secretary Jack Straw has sparked a row after claiming there is a problem with young Pakistani men grooming and sexually abusing vulnerable white girls.

The Blackburn MP talked of a “specific problem” involving Pakistani men who were “fizzing and popping with testosterone”.

He added that a minority of these young men considered vulnerable white girls as “easy meat”.

Same story; less nuanced.

Suzanne Moore made the case against this simplistic, even casual racism:

… when young myself and working as a residential care worker… [i]t was my duty to report a child missing if he or she did not come back to the home at night. For some girls, that was most nights. The police and my co-workers cheerily referred to these girls as “being on the game”.

If you want to know about ethnicity – as everyone appears to think this is key – these girls were of Caribbean descent, as were their pimps. The men who paid to rape these children, they said, were mostly white.

That was London in the 80s, so the whole “child protection is in tatters” number is not news.

Again, any nuance is unacceptable. Things must be seen as they are, in strict racial terms. So Dan Hodges, again for the Telegraph, channels his inner bigot:

The final attempt at exculpation is being constructed around the straw man of power. Suzanne Moore again leads on this today. “The bigger picture is not, as the right claim, about ethnicity but systematic abuse of girls and boys by powerful men”, expounds the subheading above her piece. “Our untouchables turn out to be little girls raped by powerful men,” she claims.

But they weren’t. Our little girls were raped by Kashmiri cab drivers. Yes, powerful men were involved in the Rotherham abuses. But they weren’t the ones doing the raping. They were the ones turning a blind eye to the rape. And why were they turning a blind eye? Because of the ethnicity of the rapists.

I had to read that twice to get the full splenetic spittle: Our little girls, forsooth. For Hodges (a reformed Lefty himself, but naturally) and his like, all detestable power has to be of the Left. The Guardian has to be monstered as part of the deal. If a bit of male-chauvinist monstering of a female columnist comes along, Steely Dan is up for it.

And that bit of nonsense is where I go to next.

Monstering 1

We need a definition here, so let’s hear it from one who was there:

A monstering from Murdoch’s droogs is a terrible experience. If the damage they did were physical — visible — courts could jail them for years. As it is, they inflict grievous emotional harm, the kind of injury from which some victims simply never recover. Indeed, there are some who have been left suicidal by the experience. It can come out of nowhere, picking on some off-the-cuff statement or some tiny detail which has caught nobody else’s eye, least of all the victim’s, and suddenly the violence begins. It can be completely arbitrary in its choice of target. If Miss Muffet abandons her tuffet because of the approaching spider, the droogs can choose to attack her for cowardice; or to attack the spider for indecency and threatening behaviour.

Once it starts, the monstering cannot be stopped by the victim. If the spider says he meant no harm, he was simply looking for somewhere to sit, then ‘an unrepentant spider last night threatened to spread his regime of fear’. Apologising will not work — ‘a humiliating climbdown’. Nor will refusing to apologise — ‘an increasingly isolated spider’. There is no end to the potential angles. The droogs will call everybody who ever sat next to the spider until they find somebody else who didn’t like him. They will comb through arachnophobes everywhere, in search of alarmist quotes and calls for action. They can keep it going for days. A little distortion here, some fabrication there. The fact of the focus is itself a distortion: the relentless return to the same victim, the desire to destroy that corrupts normal editorial judgement. Often, other newspapers and broadcast bulletins will join in, so that simple commercial competition encourages the hunt for a new angle. The spider is helpless — if he speaks out, he fuels the story; if he stays quiet, the story tramples him.

Eventually, the monstering stops, usually because some new target has arrived; or because the target has been destroyed. Sometimes, even destruction is not enough. In his diary, Alastair Campbell recalls the ferocious monstering which was given to the then Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, in the spring of 2002, which continued even after he had resigned: ‘It’s like they get a corpse but then are disappointed there is nothing left to try and kill, so they kill the dead body too.’

And the fear of this monstering generates power far beyond the relatively small number of victims who are attacked. All those in the power elite are prone to fear Murdoch because none can be sure that they will not be next to be kicked by the tabloid boot. They all saw what happened to the former Labour minister Clare Short. Several times she criticised the Sun‘s use of topless women to sell the paper and found herself denounced to millions as ‘killjoy Clare. . . fat .. . jealous .. . ugly … Short on looks … Short on brains’. At various points, the paper offered readers  free car stickers (‘Stop Crazy Clare’); sent half-naked women to her home; and ran a beauty contest to ask their readers whether they would prefer to see her face or the back of a bus. Separately, the News of the World ran two bogus stories suggesting she was involved with pornography; tried to buy old photographs of her as a twenty-year-old in a nightdress; and published a smear story which attempted to link her to a West Indian gangster.

Pages 172-173 of Nick Davies’ Hack Attack, which has been my bedside, and gruesome, reading these last couple of evenings.

On to Monstering 2

The homosexual flag came out of the closet…

Ever since Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board GCE English Language A made us explain “what is wrong in the following sentences?”,  I’m a fan of weird misplaced modifiers.

• There’s a man at the door with a wooden leg called Phil. [What’s his other leg called?]
• The antique dealer put her large chest at the front of the shop.
• The statue’s erection completed the town’s square. [Those two guaranteed to raise a laugh in any classroom.]

Not to mention the “half-Shropshire chicken” on a local pub’s lunch menu. [What’s the other half of its ancestry?]

An all-time favourite, from an actual examination script:

• Henry VIII wanted a divorce because his wife wouldn’t give him a son. So he asked the Pope, who wouldn’t give him one either.

But this one had me totally pole-axed, for more reasons than one:

Anniversary!

I nearly missed this one:

Sometime between lunch and tea-time, two thousand and seventy years ago today, Caius Iulius Caesar arrived in Britain. He had intended to make landfall at Dover, but the Brits were waiting for him. Once he saw the welcoming party on the cliff tops, he headed north along the shore, and made land-fall, probably somewhere near where the town of Walmer in Kent stands today.

As many as ten thousand Roman legionaries arrived in the same flotilla. The natives Brits turned up in chariots and gave them a bit of aggro, before a truce was arranged.

Roman reinforcements, including cavalry, tried the same crossing four days later, but were beaten by the weather.The same storm damaged some of Caesar’s landing boats, so repairs had to be undertaken, under the constant threat of British attack.

Foraging parties were sent out, and reported good crops of grain — most likely oats. They also found they were kept under close observation by those British charioteers.

Wisely, once boat repairs were complete, the Roman expeditionary force returned to Boulogne.

They would be back.

The Europa thing

My starter for ten:

In the 1975 European Referendum campaign I started out as a convinced anti. I had read the arguments by the Labour opponents and found them solid. I spoke from platforms on that basis. As the date of the poll, 5th June, came closer, so my convictions weakened to the point when — for the first and only time in my enfranchised adult life — I couldn’t bring myself even to visit the polling station. Since when I have accepted that — at least for those of us who live and work in the southern UK — the European link goes with the climate. London, after all, as close to Brussels as it is to this fine city of (old) York). And now less than a couple of hours journey from the Euston Road.

Yesterday, with morning coffee and sponge cake …

It was grey and wet, and I spent over an hour watching passing trade from the windows of Belfast’s Europa Hotel. In that time I dissected the Guardian, the Times and the Irish Times. Two opinion pieces stood out:

• Matt Ridley, in The Times, on Government is the acceptable face of violence;

and

• Dennis Kennedy, in the Irish Times, on Is debate on UK policy on Europe a dangerous bluff?

Both attempted to put their topic in an historical context — Ridley, who was essentially plucking books from his guilt-pile, opened with:

In almost every nation, if you go back far enough, government began as a group of thugs who, as Pope Gregory VII put it in 1081, “raised themselves up above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder — in short by every kind of crime”.

Was Canute, or William the Conqueror, or Oliver Cromwell really much different from the Islamic State? They got to the top by violence and then violently dealt with anybody who rebelled. The American writer Albert Jay Nock in 1939 observed: “The idea that the state originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation — that is to say, in crime . . . No state known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose.”

By the way, that quotation (which may be via R.W.Dyson) from Pope Gregory comes from a letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz, in March 1081, at the time when the Papacy was “having issues” over lay investiture with Heinrich IV — which may amount to control of the “single market” of its day.

Government as “violent gangs”?

Ridley’s sub-heading is pertinent:

The threat of force is implicit in law and order but a modern state should recoil at the armour on show in Missouri.

Where that leads to is the edge of terror:

The Republican senator Rand Paul commented in Time magazine that the federal government had incentivised the militarisation of local police, funding municipal governments to “build what are essentially small armies”. Evan Bernick, of the Heritage Foundation, warned last year that “the Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armoured vehicles, guns, armour, aircraft”. The Pentagon actually donates military equipment to the police, including tanks.

We have not yet gone so far in this country. Ofsted and the Met Office — as far as I know — do not yet arm their inspectors and forecasters. But the days when the state’s monopoly on violence was merely hinted at by a policeman’s uniform are long gone. You see police with sub-machineguns everywhere, and the Met is about to purchase water cannon to keep us in order. I hope that in combating violent gangs, our governments do not themselves turn back into violent gangs.

“A swift and minor change”

Ah, yes! Boris Johnson’s illegal (because Theresa May — bless her cotton socks and leopard kitten-heels — has made clear their use is not “authorised”) water-cannon. Appropriate that Ridley drops that into a Monday when Boris Johnson was arguing for English law to adopt presumption of guilt:

At present the police are finding it very difficult to stop people from simply flying out via Germany, crossing the border, doing their ghastly jihadi tourism, and coming back. The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a “rebuttable presumption” that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.

A different perspective

Yet it is Kennedy’s account of things European that grabbed me.

His thesis depends from the 1957 Treaty of Rome, in which the original six nations:

Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe

He emphasises that was explicitly accepted by Britain:

not just since 1973, but effectively since Macmillan’s Conservative government first applied for membership in 1961.

Moreover:

Some argue the “ever closer union” was merely a vague aspiration, committing the member states to nothing more than increased co-operation. But there was little vague about the objectives set at the Paris summit of October 1972 by the six founding members and the three new members – the UK, Ireland and Denmark.

All nine endorsed a transition from a common market to full economic and monetary union by the end of 1980, including, possibly, a single currency. The heads of government also committed to transforming, before the end of 1980, “the whole complex of the relations of member states into a European Union”.

Even the Iron Lady, despite her later apostasy, accepted the notion:

Global economic crises and differences among the member states meant the 1980 deadline was missed, but it was replaced in the mid-1980s by the 1992 deadline for the completion of the single (or internal) market, based on a detailed schedule of European legislation to guarantee free movement of goods, services, capital and people within the EU – a project warmly endorsed by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. [My emphasis]

“It’s for real.”

Allow me to go beyond Kennedy’s account, to recall just how Thatcher — as late as 1988 — gushed with enthusiasm for the Single Market:

We must get this right. Too often in the past Britain has missed opportunities.

How we meet the challenge of the Single Market will be a major factor, possibly the major factor, in our competitive position in European and world markets into the twenty-first century. Getting it right needs a partnership between government and business.

The task of government is two-fold: — to negotiate in Brussels so as to get the possible results for Britain; —and then to make you, the business community, aware of the opportunities, so that you can make the most of them.

It’s your job, the job of business, to gear yourselves up to take the opportunities which a single market of nearly 320 million people will offer.

Just think for a moment what a prospect that is. A single market without barriers—visible or invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of over 300 million of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous people.

Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. And with the Channel Tunnel to give you direct access to it.

It’s not a dream. It’s not a vision. It’s not some bureaucrat’s plan. It’s for real. And it’s only five years away.

Quite what she meant by Action to get rid of the barriers if not a pragmatic ever closer union defeats me.

Yet this is what the contemporary, revanchist Tories want to reverse. And, now, Cameron — who has been playing footsie for so long — finally concedes to his frothing Eurosceptics:

I do not oppose further integration within the eurozone: I think it is inevitable. Eurozone members must make those decisions. But I know the British people want no part of it, want to avoid deeper integration, and want our country properly protected from the impacts on the single market of any further integration that the eurozone undertakes.

This is not the speech of a “thinker”: it is subjective (note the proliferation of first-person singulars here, as in all Cameron speeches) and visceral. But it is not visceral conviction: it is the gut-wrenching fear of being outflanked by the UKIPpers and eurosceptics of his own party. And, as Kennedy suggests, it is dangerous nonsense:

… is the UK debate … a domestic squabble fuelled by fear of Ukip and the reluctance of the major parties to challenge Euroscepticism? Is it a dangerous bluff to frighten EU partners into concessions? If so, it could be a serious miscalculation.

“Miscalculation”?

This could be Cameron’s political epitaph.

• After five years of spatchcocked coalition,
• with austerity,
• over the Scottish referendum,
• with growing social division exacerbated by gross mishandling of welfare,
• over indecisive foreign policy,
• with repressive tendencies and cleavages growing in his own party, and now
• with Europe —

“The great miscalculator”.

“We can govern ourselves better than anyone else”

Thus Alex Salmond’s closing statement.

Well, perhaps. Let’s … well, yes, let’s hope so.

The precedent is none too promising, however.

For all the corruption that went with the closing down of “independent” Scotland in 1707, a couple of crucial facts remain.

Thirty guid poonds Scots exchanged for just one pound sterling.

The “Crown in Scotland” (i.e. the Scottish national debt) needed the English Exchequer to cough £398,085 and 10 shillings to clear the accounts. That’s covered by section XXV of the Act of Union.

That was for a total Scottish population of fewer than one million people, and at a time when eighteen [English] pence a day (that’s less than 5p) was the top daily wage for a labouring man.