Sunak premiership provides grounds for hope

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers. 

It’s Christmas. I’m not going to bang on for ages about the geopolitical situation, or the collapse of the global rules-based order, although there is a little of that further down this newsletter. You’ve got Christmas shopping to do, unless you’re one of those people who did it all weeks ago, in which case you can relax and watch Elf again or start drinking decent dry sherry, one of the best value great wines that is mystifyingly out of fashion. Either way, no one needs a long essay from me and Reaction about the state of the world, which is very interesting but will still be very interesting when the Reaction team returns on 3 January. I’m off for two weeks, and this newsletter returns in mid-January.

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British politics will always be part of our mix in terms subjects, of course. And what a year it’s been, he said, looking for something mild to say that doesn’t involve swearing.

To cover the full spectrum of the Westminster madness the plan had been for me to, as usual, hand out my annual Reaction awards. I started writing my awards newsletter – Prime Minister of the year, Chancellor of the year, ministerial resignation of the year, Prime Ministerial resignation of the year, that sort of thing. But not only were there so many contenders, making it too difficult to whittle down to longlists, let alone shortlists. Worse, none of it seemed remotely amusing when written down.

This year simply hasn’t been funny. This turmoil must be great for you, all this chaos in politics, people trying to be nice or encouraging say at drinks parties. In many a previous year I would have said something along the lines that it was all a bit of a mess at Westminster but “good for trade”, or some other glib, polite Fleet Street-style observation designed to change the subject.

Not this year.

I can present a case for the Westminster farce of the last year being evidence of the system working, moving on Prime Ministers who had fallen short, and so on, but who would I be kidding? This has been a year of national humiliation. What a gulf between the dignity and example of the late Queen and the chicanery of the Conservative party.

And yet, in British political terms something hopeful emerges from the farce. Britain behaved admirably on Ukraine. Compare the UK’s conduct with that of Germany and the complete collapse of Merkelism, German policy. Europe’s largest economy became way too reliant on Russia and complacent about the risks. Germany is “a proper country,” one of my favourite Europhile friends likes to say, though he says that less now after events since February.

The premiership of Rishi Sunak offers some hope. I hear you – those Reaction subscribers countering that nothing works, that immigration policy is a shambles and productivity is going nowhere.

Hear me out. By being well-organised, hard-working and generally reasonable, Sunak has begun the painstaking process of national rebuilding after the division and destruction of the post-2016 period.

It may not save his party. Perhaps this is one of those junctures where sufficient voters have decided this has to stop, that it is time for a change, and the Tories are swept away.

One of the main upsides of Sunak’s professionalism post-Johnson is that it compels Labour to avoid complacency, to up its game. This competition is good for the country. A better government forces the opposition to think and operate as though it’s not guaranteed to win. Sir Keir Starmer (always telling his team to avoid complacency) cannot know whether Sunak’s low-key regeneration will work or not. He has to work on the basis Sunak might do it.

The Prime Minister may be swept away in the election or before by the cost of living crisis and NHS strikes. If he gets through it and the economy surprises on the upside (possible) then Starmer will not have it easy. If not, Starmer will at least have been tested.

Life without Twitter could be fine

What would happen if Twitter just stopped? Regular users, or addicts like me, have been forced to contemplate this possibility in recent weeks because of the increasingly eccentric behaviour of global wally Elon Musk. Wally is a word that needs saving and Musk, for all his undoubted achievements in space, is a wally.

One day, perhaps soon, the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, and his biggest fans, will be fired in a rocket headed for Mars on a one way ticket. Large crowds will wave him off.

If Musk does kill Twitter, it would only mean going back in terms of human experience to about 2007. Not long really. It wasn’t so bad then. Before Twitter. Life was fine, actually, much better even, without tweeting. If you wanted instant news and analysis there was TV, radio, even the internet, newspapers, and conversation with other humans. Could the last of those catch on again?

What seems more likely than all out closure is that Twitter will end up being owned by the banks and institutions who lent Musk some of the money to buy it. They will regularise its activities to attract back advertisers. Until Musk it had revenue from ads and a few other bits and pieces of around $5.5bn. The problem was its costs were higher than that. Keep the costs lower, get the advertisers back and Twitter could – my goodness – make some money and be a slightly calmer place.

Where’s Britain?

Okay, one short year end item on the collapse of the global rules-based order that underpins trade between nations. Sorry, it’s going to be a central global theme of next year.

The trading order is disintegrating. As Politico reported this week, the hope that the Biden administration would be nicer to the World Trade Organisation (the FIFA of trade) have turned out to be in vain. American officials are again saying, in effect, the WTO can get stuffed when it criticises American protectionism. The US will do largely as it likes.

And the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA, used to mean something else) is highly protectionist, subsidising US green technology, the supposed industries of the future. The EU is deeply concerned and will counter or match such protectionism with its own subsidies and rules.

Where is Britain on this? Nowhere much, as yet. The subject, great power bloc competition on trade rules, has hardly been mentioned in Britain. It is as though this seismic clash has yet to be noticed. Perhaps everyone in power or wanting power is distracted and exhausted by  turmoil of the last year.

Trade rules are one of those arcane yet important subjects from the Brexit era that make the head hurt. Takes you back to 2019. What’s the difference between a customs union and a single market? Does anyone in the ERG know? Are there any diagrams? What does the acronym ERG stand for anyway?

It matters, though. There is a chance, as trade expert and Brexit critic David Henig of the European Centre for International Economy wrote last week, for Britain to find a way through the turmoil. If the Northern Ireland protocol is fudged and resolved, improving relations with the EU; if the UK negotiates membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, the Asia Pacific free trade club; and if it makes progress on a deal with India, then the story could from a post-Brexit British perspective look quite different soon. Difficult though.

Whatever the outcome, trade competition will be a major theme next year and British policymakers need to wake up. The global system is collapsing, and Britain is one of those states in the middle. What does the British government think about this? No one seems to know.

Scottish devolution has turned into a political disaster and a moral catastrophe

When the Scottish parliament was founded, in 1999, some of us on the Unionist side were a tad grumpy about it. Wouldn’t it let the Nationalists in eventually, creating an endless grievance-manufacturing machine the Nats would use to undermine the integrity of the United Kingdom?

For all my negativity back then I always assumed, wrongly it turns out, that Scottish devolution would improve with age. There would be a logic of improvement. Isn’t that how history works, if you’re lucky? Legislative mistakes would be learnt from. A new generation of leaders would presumably emerge and public administration would improve.

Nope. It’s much worse now than it was twenty years ago and getting worse by the month. More of the gender recognition reforms in a moment.

Holyrood’s deliberations are increasingly idiotic, simplistic and depressing to watch. It’s not just that it’s unicameral with no revising chamber. The claim was the expert committees would do the revising work better than the UK House of Lords. Instead, the committees at Holyrood are depressingly low grade. Try watching any of it as a Scottish patriot, or as a non-Scot who likes Scotland. It is jaw-droppingly mediocre. 

The whole Scottish devolution project under the SNP has come to be defined by a creeping, chippy, downward dimness, a parochial smallness of the imagination that makes contemporary, discredited Westminster look Athenian. While Holyrood attracts a minority of talented individuals, the poor souls are surrounded by people who should simply not be there. This is Scotland? No, it’s a place with so much potential, the country of Adam Smith and David Hume, run into the ground by Holyrood.

Face it. The Scottish Parliament has been a disaster. It has not improved education, health, the economy or social policy in Scotland.

Now, the parliament has passed a law meaning 16 year-olds can change sex (a biological impossibility) without a rigorous medical procedure, or any surgery or prospect of it, it seems. Women’s rights are being trashed. Sex offenders, rapists and paedophiles will be able to declare themselves to be women and demand to serve their sentences in women’s prisons. An amendment requires a “risk assessment”. What could possibly go wrong?

It is all so inherently stupid, gender “woo woo” as Alex Massie calls it, and blindly parochial. Outside Scotland the last year or so has involved significant and worrying developments. The debate has shifted. The controversial Tavistock gender clinic in England has closed. The trans activist Mermaids charity is under investigation by the Charity Commission.

There’s a central deceit at work, a delusional conceit, that colours much of the journalism and commentary, though not all, about the downright weird goings on in Scotland. Don’t point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes, really no clothes, because, well, even devo-sceptics are supposed to say they, we, are dedicated to making it work.

There is no way back. I accept that. The Scottish Parliament is not going to be closed down. What needs to happen is massive improvement. That won’t happen until the truth is faced and more sensible Scots rise up and year on year take control of the country’s parties and institutions.

What I’m listening to

Wynton Marsalis. After a chance encounter, and a life-affirming lengthy conversation a few weeks ago, I’ve revised my longstanding view that it is better never to meet your heroes. Meeting Marsalis made my year.

He stands as one of the most important American cultural figures of the last 50 years, the key jazz musician since his hero Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. Famously, he clashed with modernist Miles but respected him for his intelligence and artistry. The Marsalis credo is as follows, I think. It is about the greatness of the greats, be it Bach, Beethoven or Ellington, the importance of true artistic endeavour, of form, relentless study, tradition and continuity as a framework for genuine innovation, the importance of universal humanist love, curiosity, empathy and manners, and a rejection of the 1960s European avant garde in all its mad, destructive futility.

His worldview is wonderfully culturally counterintuitive. In an era of YouTube and TikTok idiocy, of accelerating stupidity, of inattention to detail and contempt for real learning, he says there is another, older, better way. He’s right. Decade after decade the music of Marsalis is the swinging, energising sound of hope.

In that spirit, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2023.

Thank you for reading.

Iain Martin,
Publisher and CEO,
Reaction