Donald Trump – Democracy & the Importance of Accepting Defeat

With anti-Trump protests sweeping several US cities, activists vowing to fight a Donald Trump presidency in the courts and Katy Perry calling for outright revolution, you could be forgiven for believing we are in the final death throes of liberal democracy. In a fit of unforgivable bigotry and stupidity, American voters had snuffed out the shining beacon of liberal democracy.

This reading of events is not only wrong, it is dangerous.

Democracy is founded on the fundamental principle that the voter is always right. Should you be on the losing side, either your message was wrong or you failed to communicate it effectively. The electorate is never to blame and both sides must accept the result.

A rejection of this basic principle is a rejection of the very core of our democratic system, undermining the very concept of liberal democracy that it purports to represent.

When conceding the election, Hillary Clinton made clear that she fully bought into this principle: “I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future.” This follows a long history of the losing presidential candidate publicly conceding the result and stands in marked contrast to Trump’s pre-election refusal to commit to doing so should he have lost the election.

Barack Obama echoed these words when he stressed that this was the nature of democracy, that “the path this country has taken has never been a straight line, we zig and zag. Sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back and that’s OK. [...] That’s the way politics works sometimes.”

Many parallels have been drawn to the recent EU Referendum which resulted in Britain voting to leave the European Union. Perhaps just as enlightening, however, is the comparison provided by the 1997 UK General Election. In that election, the ruling Conservative Party faced the end of 18 years in government with the loss of 178 MPs and the prospect of electoral oblivion. John Major, the defeated Prime Minister, accepted that “we have suffered a very bad defeat, let us not pretend to ourselves that it was anything other than what it was.” Politics, he noted, “is a rough old trade. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. But when you don’t, you just speak back, ask yourself why you didn’t, and put yourself in a position to make sure that next time you get it right, and you do win.” 13 years later the Conservatives were back in government and now command a majority in the House of Commons.

Opponents of Trump must ask what went wrong for them during this election and seek to learn what lessons they can from the experience. There is already much opinion on the subject but it will be up to them to face these lessons head on and to resist the temptation to return to their political comfort zones.

Very few things in politics are permanent and, as the experience of the Conservative Party shows, political fortunes have been known to change radically within a relatively short period of time.  

In 1997 Major praised his colleagues for losing “with a dignity which made me proud of this party.” Clinton showed similar poise when she congratulated Trump on his victory and hoped “he will be a successful President for all Americans.” Once emotions have calmed down, hopefully we will all able to do the same.

French arrogance: Britain should 'get out of Europe before you wreck it'

On Thursday 5 June former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard called for Britain to 'get out of Europe before you wreck it'. (The original French version can be found here).  

What he said was extraordinarily arrogant. 

In his view Britain has blocked every move to make the EU a functional and democratic body capable of tackling the problems of the modern world. Our opposition to a European superstate has been no more than a cynical attempt 'to capitalise on the disorder that [we] have helped to create'.  We should simply 'go before [we] wreck everything'. 

His argument shows a complete disregard for the views of his own people. In last May's EU elections 25% of the French people chose to vote for the anti-Semitic and Islamophobic Front National rather than back one of the euro-federalist parties of the political establishment. They couldn't have given a clearer rejection of 'more of the same' when it comes to the EU. 

It also reflects a belief held by many in the French political class that the rest of Europe is a mere extension of France, with French interests and those of the European continent being the same. The idea that any other European country should stand up for its own national interest is unthinkable - it's anti-European.

This belief becomes all the more perverse in light of of France's decision to push ahead with its sale of two warships to Russia. This is despite blatant Russian military aggression in eastern Europe in its attempts to destabilise Ukraine and annex Crimea. France chose French jobs over European solidarity and the shared ideals of freedom and democracy. 

France is the new sick man of Europe. Described by the Economist as 'the time-bomb at the heart of Europe', its inability to tackle record unemployment and a floundering economy must make finding a scapegoat tempting. Yet Britain is not to blame for France's troubles. The fault lies solely with France and its inability to face the painful economic reforms that Britain tackled head on. 

Britain is now the fastest growing economy in the G7 and unemployment is at a five year low. The head of the IMF even apologised for underestimating the UK's growth forecasts. Rather than bashing the UK, perhaps France should be looking to see what Britain did right.

Syria & Chemical Weapons: Britain's shameful retreat

Since March 2011 the Syrian government, led by Bashar al-Assad, has brutally put down a popular uprising in which more than 100,000 people have died. 

Last night, on 29 August 2013, Parliament voted against a motion that Britain should in principle support military intervention in Syria. (You can find the full motion here).

The motion was put forward after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons to kill over 350 people on 21 August . This has to be wrong. It is a crime against humanity. Britain, the US and France have the capability to stop this and as a result we have a moral duty to do so.

Some have argued that military intervention would be illegal. This is not so. Following advice from the Attorney General (the legal adviser to the UK Government) the Government released a statement affirming that limited military strikes to deter future chemical weapons attacks would be legal under international law, even without the backing of the United Nations.

With the motion's failure ended any real prospect of Britain fulfilling this moral duty. In the words of the Prime Minister: 'It is clear to me that the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the Government will act accordingly.'

Why did the motion fail? The blame surely lies with Ed Miliband who refused to call his party (Labour) to back the motion. His argument was that there must be 'compelling evidence' before any British involvement.

How much evidence does Miliband need? According to the Joint Intelligence Committee it is 'highly likely that the Syrian regime was responsible' for the use chemical weapons (CW) on 21 August and that '[t]here is no credible evidence that any opposition group has used CW'. The US has even gone so far as to call the regime's use of chemical weapons 'undeniable'.

There is further evidence to suggest that Assad's regime has used CW on a smaller scale at least 14 times since 2012. If we don't send Assad a clear message now he will continue in the knowledge he can use chemical weapons with impunity. 

Last year I argued that Britain has a moral duty to intervene in Syria to protect the lives of innocent civilians. Those views haven't changed.

Today our country turned its back on the slaughter of innocent men, women and children. We should be ashamed.

The Credit Crunch: What are interest rates and why do they matter?

Debt is a good thing. It might seem counterintuitive but debt allows people to own their own homes, businesses to grow and for all of us to live more happy, prosperous lives. Just as an example, a button maker who borrows £1,000 and uses it to buy a new machine which produces three times as many buttons will be able to pay back the £1,000 and make a healthy profit to boot. That's the theory anyway. 

Why would you ever lend someone money? Not only are you depriving yourself the opportunity to spend that money but there's the risk you might never get it back. Interest rates are the way people who lend money get something back for the trouble. If A lends B £100 at a rate of 1% then he can expect to be paid back £101. That is he receives the £100 he originally lent plus £1 as his reward for having done so.

Banks operate by borrowing money from people at one interest rate and then lending that money to other people at a higher rate. In other words, if I put £200 in the bank then they might pay me a 1% interest rate but then lend that money to you at 2%. I receive a £2 reward for having deposited my money with the bank whilst the bank receives £4 from you in return for lending the money on to you. 

If things were left like this the system would constantly seize up. Each time someone went to a bank to ask for a loan the bank would have to wait till someone else deposited an equal or greater amount in the bank with which it could make the loan. To stop this happening governments make continual short-term loans to banks to provide them with ready money to lend on to other people. They do so through central banks. In Britain this is the Bank of England, in America it's the Federal Reserve, whilst in the eurozone (those countries using the euro) it is the European Central Bank. 

The interest rate at which governments make these loans is the most important interest rate there is. This is because the interest rates banks charge people borrowing money from them will always be higher than the rate at which banks borrow from the central bank. If the central bank's rate is low then banks will charge borrowers lower interest rates and vice versa. At the moment the Bank of England's rate is 0.5%.

Why do we have such a low interest rate? At the moment banks simply aren't lending anyone any money. The idea is that if banks can borrow money more cheaply from the Bank of England then they will be able to lend that money on to everyone else at an affordable rate. The fact that this still isn't happening shows the limits of what interest rates can do. Low interests rates alone won't get us out of the economic mess we're in now. They will help though.

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Most of the ideas here were stolen from those far more intelligent than myself, chiefly John Lanchester's "Whoops!"

Syria: A moral duty to intervene

Since the Syrian uprising began in March 2011 President Bashar al-Assad's autocratic regime has killed over 20,000 people.

Protests first erupted in the southern city of Daraa after Syrian security services arrested and tortured a group of youths. Their crime: spray painting anti-regime slogans on a school wall calling for Assad to step down. Since then the county has descended into a civil war in which up to 25,000 people have died.

How did Syria get here? Assad himself came to power in the year 2000 on the death of his father, Hafiz al-Assad. The regime he inherited, however, has a much longer history. Syria's Ba'ath Party, sister organisation to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party in Iraq, arose out of the mid-twentieth century movement to unite the Arab people under a single pan-Arabian state. Following the failure of that movement, epitomised by the catastrophic 1948 Arab-Israeli  War, it degenerated into a vehicle of repression through which the minority Alawite clan, of which Assad's family is a part, could dominate the majority Sunni population in Syria. 

It sought to rely on the fears of Shias, Christians and other minorities as to what the Sunni majority would do if they seized power. Those fears, however legitimate, are now far outweighed by the threat Assad poses to the Syrian people as a whole.  At first greeted as a less autocratic, modernising face to the regime, his murderous actions over the past year have put to death any notion that this could be the case. When a regime resorts to the systematic slaughter of its own people it can in no way claim to represent their best hopes of safety. Sunni majority rule has to be worth a try.

The UK is the World's sixth largest economy and has a permanent spot on the UN Security Council. The World has treated us well. Despite being a nation of just 60 million we still hold a disproportionate share of the World's wealth and exert a degree of power far above what a small rainy island in the north of Europe could expect. As such we have a duty to act as responsible actors on the World stage.

A worrying complacency appears to have taken hold amongst the British people. People seem to think that since this conflict is thousands of miles away it doesn't matter. It does. A blood-thirsty tyrant is waging war against his own people. As fellow human beings we must do what we can to help. In 1940 the Blitz rained destruction down upon the British Isles and a Nazi invasion seemed imminent. We asked the World for help and it obliged. The World is now asking us to return the favour.

Britain has to show willing to help overthrow this barbaric regime. Seemingly intractable Russian opposition should not detract from efforts to obtain a UN Security Council resolution authorising international intervention to protect the Syrian people. At the very least we must continue to push for stronger action by the Arab League and regional powers to provide a united front against the Assad regime. 

Assad's regime is a foul stain on this Earth representing everything that is wrong with humanity. If we can play the smallest part in its eradication, we have a duty to do so.

The UKIP Threat: the Tories risk drifting to the unelectable right

Recently there has been a spate of articles identifying what they see as the growing threat UKIP poses to the Conservative Party. The Party, they argue, is haemorrhaging voters as traditional right wing voters, alienated by a Coalition Government more willing to please the Lib Dems than implement proper right-wing policies, jump ship to UKIP. Such views aren’t new. A vociferous minority have long claimed that we apparently lost the elections in 1997, 2001 and 2005 because we were somehow not right-wing enough.

This is a delusion. Elections are won on the centre-ground, not the die-hard fringes. In a country that has repeatedly elected centre-left governments it seems ridiculous to claim that what the people of Britain really want is hard-core conservatism. Tony Blair won three elections precisely because he seized the centre-ground, crowding the Tories out. Policies such as ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ outflanked the Tories from the right, forcing them to move to the unelectable fringes in a vain effort to provide a real alternative to Labour’s policy on law and order.

To allow UKIP to draw us to the right would do to the Conservative Party what the Tea Party movement did to the Republicans in America. The witch hunt that brought down so many moderates for being ‘un-conservative’ left the GOP so divorced from reality that its pig-headed refusal to compromise led to the world’s largest economy losing its triple-A credit rating. That was ludicrous: conservatism is meant to be about sound economic management.

Britain is still suffering from 13 years of dire economic management. The British people deserve better. We have a duty to present them with palatable centre-right policies they can trust to get the economy back on track. Don’t let UKIP distract us from that.

Ending the educational apartheid

Earlier this week four universities joined the Russell Group, a group of universities which attracts the vast majority of research funding in the UK. In doing so they illustrated the continuing inequality in the provision of higher education in Britain.

Though we often hear politicians talk about the need to tackle inequality in our nation's schooling, very little focus is given to addressing it in higher education. When inequality is raised at all, it concerns quantity rather than quality. Pledges like Tony Blair's target of sending 50% of school leavers to university show an admirable desire to increase the number of people who benefit from a university education but do little to ensure that education is of an adequate standard.

This is a real problem. In an increasingly globalised world, the only hope for industrialised economies like Britain to remain competitive is to develop their skills base. For that to be achieved a decent higher education system is essential. A system that excludes the majority of people from top-tier jobs clearly fails on that count.

Surely everyone should have access to the best education that resources allow. Of course it would be wrong to attack the quality of the best institutions, but how is it wrong to want to raise the standard of the average? In an age when grammar schools have been all but abolished it seems ridiculous to retain such a system for higher education.

A complete change in the way people perceive higher education is needed. Snobbish attitudes that a degree is a waste of time for some people have to go. It is true, there are some Mickey Mouse degrees out there. But that's the fault of an unequal education system, not young people aspiring for a better future.

The current system is an anachronism, not fit for the twenty-first century. If we're ever going to tackle inequality in this country, politicians need to acknowledge this.