Reflections on politics of the week

Slavery reparations, accusations of fascism and a pre-Budget comms cock-up have kept commentators on their toes

Once again, I’ve prepared a concatenation of stories which are worth marking before they disappear (for the moment, anyway) from the spotlight.

Slave 4 U

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa has concluded, and the official communiqué declares that, on the subject of the transatlantic slave trade, “the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity”. This, in the coded and obfuscatory officialese of international summitry, is a reference to the idea of the United Kingdom paying financial reparations for its involvement in chattel slavery and the slave trade. It is being portrayed in the media as a reverse for Sir Keir Starmer and the British government, forcing on to the Commonwealth’s public agenda a policy which the United Kingdom has rejected.

It need not be a reverse. It is hardly my place to leap to the defence of the prime minister, but if he is absolutely clear and immovably firm that the UK will not countenance reparations, whether financial or non-financial, then there is no harm in the matter being on the agenda for next year’s UK-Caribbean Forum. He can wait until the item is reached, and politely but unequivocally say that His Majesty’s Government will not engage in any such process. Neither the UK-Caribbean Forum nor the Commonwealth heads of government has the power to force the prime minister to go further.

It is unhelpful in that regard that the newly elected secretary general of the Commonwealth, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, has said that “financial reparations are good”. The Ghanaian minister for foreign affairs and regional integration will succeed Baroness Scotland of Asthal on 1 April 2025 to become the seventh occupant of the post since it was established in 1965. Despite her personal views, she has also said that “whether or not the Commonwealth has a role to play will depend on the heads of government, who will give the secretary general her marching orders”.

Additionally, it is awkward that the foreign secretary, David Lammy, has repeatedly expressed some kind of support for reparations. In June 2018, while a backbencher, he told the House of Commons:

The Caribbean nations have been united in wanting to put the issue of reparations back on the table at the United Nations… It is important that this country hears and listen to those calls for support, particularly against a backdrop of the Government making it clear that they wish to enter into trade negotiations with those countries once again. Let us consider: what do reparations look like for those Caribbean nations? How do we make that work? What dialogue do we as a country need to have with those people?

In July 2020, after Sir Keir Starmer had appointed him shadow justice secretary, Lammy made the point again in an interview on US radio.

We’re no longer in a society where we say, look, systematised racism doesn’t exist. And then we get to a point where we have to discuss power and reckoning and repairing—and that to some extent is obviously financial and involves endowments.

Has the foreign secretary changed his view? Is he at least willing to accept collective responsibility if the government’s policy is against any sort of reparations?

Reparations for slavery are a practical absurdity. One estimate is that the UK could be liable to pay £18 trillion to the descendants of slaves, which is seven times our annual economic output. That is simply never going to happen, and no British prime minister could consent to such a financial commitment and expect to stay in office. They would also be a rather bizarre exercise in levying impossibly large demands on people who were not responsible for slavery in order to compensate otehrs who had never experienced it. In any event, as the economist Thomas Sowell said,“if you had reparations for slavery, virtually everybody on the planet would have had an ancestor somewhere who was enslaved”.

There is no authority in the world which could both require and compel the government to entertain this fantasy. It is, however, only practical to recognise that the demands for reparations are widespread and passionate. All of the candidates to be the next Commonwealth secretary general supported the idea, and it is perfectly possible that there is a majority of members states in the Commonwealth which endorse the idea. The anti-colonialist stance of the United Nations could see the General Assembly or the Security Council make some pronouncement on the matter. That means maintaining the absolute refusal to entertain reparations could make the United Kingdom unpopular in many international circles, and the prime minister must be prepared for that. The recent agreement with Mauritius over the sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory suggests that the Labour Party has a kind of resignation towards the UK losing either legal or moral cases and is too ready to compromise to maintain good relations with other states.

Let us hope Starmer stands firm, and that Lammy has had second thoughts. There may be a case for a formal apology for Britain’s role in slavery and the slave trade, though I am dubious, but on the matter of financial reparations, the government must keep repeating its simple message and refuse to discuss the issue any further. To react differently would be the start of a journey towards abasing ourselves before the opinion of every quasi-judicial or diplomatic group in the world. The prime minister cannot let that happen.

If it looks like a duck…

The wrangling in American politics continues over whether Donald Trump is or is not a “fascist”. This goes back a long way: in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, J.D. Vance, then the young and acclaimed author of a newly published book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, was savagely critical of Donald Trump, publicly describing him as an “idiot” and “reprehensible”. In private, it is said, he compared the candidate to Hitler. (Senator Vance is now, of course, Trump’s running mate.) In essence, there are two points of view which have muscled their way to the fore. The first, generally on the left, is that Trump has very strong authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts, and that to fight shy of the word “fascist” is euphemistic, indulgent and self-deceiving. The second, generally found on the right, is that calling someone who was elected president of the United States and is again the presidential candidate of one of the two major political parties a “fascist” is inflammatory, exclusionary, dismissive and, in itself, anti-democratic.

The stakes have now been dramatically raised. During a CNN town hall meeting, Vice-President Kamala Harris was asked if she regarded Trump as a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she affirmed. Meanwhile, in an interview with The New York Times, John Kelly, the retired US Marine Corps general who served under Trump as secretary for homeland security then White House chief of staff, alleged that the former president had spoken admiringly about Adolf Hitler and that he “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure”.

According to an Ipsos poll for ABC News, half of voters think Trump is a fascist (depending on how the word is defined). Of course, that has to be balanced against the fact that opinion polls also show Trump attracting around 46 per cent of the vote, which at least suggests that “fascism” is a quality about which some of the electorate are relatively relaxed. In 2020, Vox assembled a panel of experts to consider the issue, and the general sense was that it was not the most appropriate or fitting terms and others would be more helpful and illuminating. This week, Philip Bump in The Washington Post concluded that “Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler” but that “he views the constraints of democracy with disdain and embraces an approach to power that checks the boxes of fascism” and his “approach to power much more closely resembles an autocratic, fascist leader than an American, democratic one”.

My view of the forthcoming presidential election has clarified, essentially, like this: Trump and Harris are both terrible candidates and terrible politicians. But Harris is terrible within normal political parameters, in a way politicians are often terrible. Trump is different: he is mendacious, utterly unpredictable, psychologically unstable, possibly cognitively impaired, ill-informed, ignorant, narcissistic, paranoid, vicious, vulgar and cares nothing for any kind of restraint or limitation. That makes him much more terrible and much more dangerous. He gives no indication of accepting even intellectually that the president, or at least he, as president, should be in any way constrained in action or authority.

You might think, then, that I would be inclined to subscribe to the fascism argument on the grounds that commentators should say what they see. I’m not. And I don’t subscribe to it for straightforward and practical reasons. It is ultimately an unproductive process: the number of undecided voters who are shocked into facing “reality” by the description of Trump as a fascist is much smaller than those who are simply encouraged in their existing opposition to the Republican candidate and those who support him anyway and are outraged by this inflammatory rhetoric. It does far more harm than good.

It is also a distraction, because it becomes a philosophical, historical and semantic debate about the nature of fascism and its attributes. Worse, we risk moulding our perception of reality to fit a construct rather than describing, accurately and meaningfully, what is happening. If you want to argue—and there is plenty of evidence to do so—that Donald Trump is bigoted, or xenophobic, or authoritarian, or vindictive, then say so. Observe and describe. Fascism has become too loaded, too controversial, too much of a shibboleth to be a helpful instrument of taxonomy. It becomes not a debate about Trump’s qualities, virtues and vices, but about what each of us means by “fascist”, how justifiable our construct is and to what extent that applies to Trump. That seems a fruitless and strangely indirect way to address politics.

I misspoke…

There was a degree of consternation when it was revealed that one measure the chancellor of the Exchequer would include in her first Budget on Wednesday would be the creation of five new freeports. The idea of special economic zones which are free from various kinds of regulation in order to encourage investment had been very much identified with Conservative economic policy: they had featured in the party’s 1983 general election manifesto The Challenge of Our Times, and the following year six were established, in Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow Prestwick Airport and Southampton. Their impact was, however, modest and their licences were not renewed by the coalition government in 2012.

In November 2016, the Centre for Policy Studies published a paper entitled The Free Ports Opportunity: How Brexit could boost trade, manufacturing and the North by the newly elected Member of Parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire, Rishi Sunak, in which it was claimed that the creation of new freeports could bring 86,000 new jobs and stimulate the Northern Powerhouse. Early in 2020, bids were invited for 10 freeports and in March 2021, Sunak, by then chancellor of the Exchequer, used his second Budget to announce eight new freeports: East Midlands Airport, Felixstowe and Harwich, the Humber region, Liverpool City Region, Plymouth, Solent, Thames and Teesside.

Responding to the Budget, the leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, was lukewarm on the policy of freeports. He criticised Sunak’s “blind faith” in the idea and portrayed them as a minor, ideologically driven measure which failed to address the wider challenge of the country’s post-Brexit economy. It was surprising, then, that the prime minister was quoted on Friday as saying that the new freeports to be established would “have this government’s stamp on them” and represented part of a pragmatic economic policy.

I have always said I will look at whatever will deliver for working people, with no ideological lens. So yes, freeports were a scheme we inherited, but when combined with Labour’s laser focus on growth generated from the ground up, we will maximise their potential.

It was briefed, however, that there would be some changes, increasingly the oversight of local authorities and aligning freeports more closely with the government’s industrial strategy.

There was only one problem, as The Financial Times revealed on Sunday: the announcement is entirely inaccurate. There will be no new freeports in the Budget, but rather “next steps” for five of the existing areas including permission for customs sites within their boundaries. In addition, the East Midlands Investment Zone, proposed last year under the previous government, will be formally approved. This explains the confusion among port executives, civil servants and local authorities when the announcement was unveiled. They had not been advised of the plan because there was no plan.

Whitehall’s explanation was frank: “It just was a total cock-up with the comms”. There may have been a lack of coordination, as the prime minister was attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa (see above). But it is a mishap concerning a particularly unfortunate issue, given that official Labour policy was lukewarm, there is substantial ideological and economic opposition to freeports on many parts of the left, the evidential argument is very far from solidly established and it was, of course, a policy enthusiastically championed by the previous government. So for the new administration to have been accepting and expanding the scheme of freeports gave the Conservatives the opportunity to say that Labour was irresolute and lacking in judgement. The official comment from the Opposition was that the chancellor’s embrace of freeports was a “humiliating u-turn that will once again damage the already shrinking business confidence in this country”.

Mistakes happen. Everyone knows that and everyone accepts it, however tacitly. There are also different kinds of mistakes, some which could happen to almost anyone and some for which there is obvious culpability. One factor in this particular debacle seems to have been confusion between new powers and facilities in the existing freeports and the idea of inaugurating entirely new freeports: it is a vaguely understandable confusion but suggests an alarmingly cavalier and superficial grasp of policy by those working on the communications aspect of government. A Whitehall source attempted to staunch the self-inflicted wound by saying:

It's really important for the partners involved in the freeports and the businesses who are investing to know that this Government remains committed to ensuring the customs benefits remain on offer and are available in the new sites.

This is another embarrassing misstep that will be forgotten in short order. It is, however, telling that I instinctively used the word “another”. But there are two observations which spring from him. The first is a question of hierarchies, authority and attention to detail. We shouldn’t underestimate the scale of this embarrassment, an announcement of a measure to be included in the government’s first Budget, complete with an explanatory endorsement in the words of the prime minister. I don’t imagine for a moment that Sir Keir Starmer himself sat down to compose the sentences which were released, and it is perfectly standard practice that they will have been drafted on his behalf in an attempt to capture whatever his particular genius is. But it is fair to wonder at what level this announcement was signed off before being released to the media. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that either someone too senior did not grasp the inherent inaccuracy of it, or someone too junior was allowed to give the green light without at least nominal approval from a more senior or more experienced figure.

This is part of a wider problem, which is an ongoing degree of dysfunction in the administrative operation of government, not just at the centre in 10 Downing Street but across Whitehall. This was a major reason adduced for the downfall and departure of Sue Gray as Downing Street chief of staff and plays into a narrative which also includes the controversy over seemingly political appointments to civil service positions, a tardiness in filling key roles like principal private secretary to the prime minister and in resolving the timetable for the departure and replacement of the cabinet secretary, Simon Case. On a basic level, as I argued in City AM last month, there is a feeling that those at the top of government are not very good at what they are doing in terms of process.

All criticism of the government should be tempered by the recollection that it is still less than four months since the general election, the next election is probably four or five years away and the Labour Party has a titanic majority in the House of Commons of more than 170. The government is not on the verge of falling. But this messy confusion over freeports was an unforced error, and the longer he is in Downing Street, the more Sir Keir Starmer will realise that government is punctuated by enough external and uncontrollable factors to leave room for problems which could otherwise have been avoided. Labour has to get a grip.

Coda

A few items of shameless self-publicity (if I don’t do it, who will etc). I have recently penned two pieces for CulturAll, the digital arts journal I co-founded and run with Alex Matchett and Mariana Holguín:

• “The government’s challenge for Britain’s creative economy”

• “From achievement to excuse—he self portraiture of prime ministers’ memoirs”

I wrote in The Critic last week about the flaws and malign effects of unconscious bias training, championed by Baroness Royall of Blaisdon who is a candidate to be chancellor of the University of Oxford:

• “The grim quasi-religious doctrine of ‘unconscious bias training’”

A couple of weeks ago I appeared on Ian Collins’s Talk TV show to talk about British values, national pride and our sense of identity.