Category Archives: Book Review

The Story of Brexit (3 of 3) – Britain punching its weight

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Book Review ‘Inside the Deal: How the EU got Brexit Done’, Stefaan De Rynck, Agenda, 2023

At one point in the Brexit negotiations Michel Barnier pointed out that in the area of security policy the UK was promising to do more together with the EU than it had done before; as De Rynck puts it, trying ‘briefly to hold on to its lead role on EU military operations.’  It continued to present itself as the bridge between the EU and US, except the EU ‘failed to see any benefit in not liaising directly with the US instead.’  When Johnson won the election in December 2019 this approach for a closer relationship on security and foreign policy was dropped.

What came later, we now know, is acting as an instrument of US policy in the war in Ukraine; scuppering early negotiations by promising western military support to the Ukrainian regime and continuing to ‘punch above its weight’ by promises of weapons deliveries like tanks designed more to pressurise others than to make a critical contribution itself.

De Rynck doesn’t explain the about-face, except that Trump had criticised NATO, implying a reduced priority for Europe ,while he had already promised Britain a trade deal “very quickly”.  His ambassador to the UK supported Brexit – “you have a great future outside the EU”  he said – while US State Department officials warned against no deal and stated their wish that security cooperation be maintained at “current levels”

De Rynck admits that the EU negotiators were initially less confident of maintaining a united front on foreign and security policy than on the economic front, and implies concern that some East European countries might want different outcomes.  He argues however that Brexit has strengthened EU security arrangements and its autonomous decision making in which the UK will no longer be involved.  He argues that weakening the single market would have eroded both and reduced the ‘strategic potential of a more Global Europe’.  On the other hand, its development, including a ‘single market for defence industries’, is a precondition for development of this role.

This assessment is informed by the start of the war in Ukraine and the alliance with the US in opposition to Russia, including sanctions that have substituted cheaper Russian energy for more expensive US sources.  The introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US is now also a threat to EU industry with its subsidies attracting European industry to the US.  When the problem of Ukrainian refugees is added, it is clear that the ‘strategic potential of a more Global Europe’ faces a threat from the US in relation to which Britain has acted as supplicant and surrogate.

De Rynck makes none of these observations in the book but alludes to this role in recording previous US opposition to the EU’s satellite navigation system Galileo, which Britain had at first also opposed.   He reports that the EU Commission came close to abandoning the project, although went ahead when Denmark switched sides, Tony Blair withdrew British reservations and Germany promised to pay.  This then gave the EU its own alternative to the American Global Positioning System.

The British claimed that they had been able to limit Galileo to civil applications, and continued to veto military uses, but by 2015 they announced their intentions to use it for military purposes, including for the guidance of targeted weapons.  ‘Losing access’ to the system was therefore a significant Brexit problem.

De Rynck explains that the EU were willing to allow the UK to use the system’s military grade signal, but Britain also wanted access to the source code for economic and military purposes and complained it could not be the only member of the UN Security Council without full control of its own navigation system.  After a ‘bitter’ debate, and threat and counter-threat, the purpose claimed for Brexit of “taking back control” did indeed mean losing it, and Britain did become the only member of the UN Security Council without full control of its own navigation system.

A core justification of Brexit was the ‘opportunity’ to change its policies, regulations, and product requirements.  Brexit, it seemed to everyone, would be pointless without this.  However, rather than see how EU rules would continue to apply post-Brexit, the EU initially concentrated on what guarantees any alternative arrangements could offer, on effective dispute settlement and on credible unilateral remedies, all of which were agreed three years later.

In between the British complained that the EU approach did not seek to replicate its trade negotiations elsewhere, like those with Japan or New Zealand. Michael Gove said Britain was willing to reintroduce tariffs in exchange for the EU lowering its demands on a level playing field only to be told that there was no time to go line by line through each product, and in any case, it would not buy a lighter version of the level playing field.

Britain made proposals and then withdrew them; it proposed a Canada style trade agreement and then backtracked when what this meant was explained to them. ‘What makes the UK “so unworthy” complained David Frost, as the British declared their sovereignty, only to be told that sovereignty was a two-way street; the EU was itself annoyed that what was on offer to them was less than what the British were offering to Japan, Ukraine and Australia.

It seems almost incredible that, given the course of the negotiations recorded in the book, the British continued to argue that cooperation should rely on trust rather than rules.  The EU was perfectly aware that the negotiations were mainly just to ‘get Brexit done’ without any genuine commitment to any written agreement.

De Rynck states that ‘despite some failed EU demands and compromises, the outcome was largely in line with what the EU set out at the start.’   ‘The UK government played a game of chicken, by itself’ and ‘as a more diverse and bigger economy, the EU had no interest in accommodating the UK . . .’

The majority of the British people now regard Brexit as a mistake.  The sign on the side of the bus promising money to the NHS looks like the con it was as the NHS collapses, highlighted by media reports of incidents of raw sewage pouring out inside crumbling hospitals.  This, and every other Brexit promise, has literally turned to shit and the wonder is that anyone thinks being poorer is part of the solution to anything.

Guardian commentators like Polly Toynbee write articles setting out how awful Brexit has been but with no proposal to reverse it – ‘Most people are now in favour of rejoining the EU, but Labour is right to steer clear of another row over Europe’ she says.   Gideon Rachman writes columns for the ‘Financial Times’ about how it can be reversed but has nothing more to propose than two referendums on the tenth anniversary of the 2016 leave vote.

The British state is in confusion about what to do, evidenced by the meeting of the great and good, leavers and remainers, reported to arise because ‘Brexit is not delivering’.  Its proclaimed purpose however was “about moving on from leave and remain, and what are the issues we now have to face.”  As if the issue is not what brought them together in the first place and the answer obvious.

As one commentator in ‘The Irish Times’ said, ‘it is hard to understand the 40 per cent who still agree with the decision’.  On the left, among the Lexit supporters, there equally appears to be no remorse, just excuses like the assorted Tories, UKIPers, xenophobes and racists who were equally committed to a Britain-alone approach.

The book by the EU insider reveals no secrets but describes the British negotiation process as confused, inept and as full of wishful thinking as the Brexit project itself.  It faithfully records the bluster and threats that no one with any appreciation of the balance of power could take seriously.  It points to the folly of left supporters of Brexit who supported it when all this was obvious.  Did they expect the negotiations would deliver some advance for the British working class?  I suppose that they must, in which case the book is another testament to the stupidity of Brexit, Lexit or whatever its supporters want to call it, now that it’s no longer just an idea and so not what they wanted.

Back to part 2

The story of Brexit (2 of 3) – Britain’s Irish problem

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Steve Bell ‘The Guardian’

Book Review ‘Inside the Deal: How the EU got Brexit Done’, Stefaan De Rynck, Agenda, 2023

In Ireland one of the lessons supposedly to be learned from Britain leaving the EU is the necessity to have a plan for what you want to do when you succeed, with the mess associated with Brexit due to its supporters not having one.  Some leave campaigners did want to put together a plan but apparently Dominic Cummings opposed this on principle.  So now, supporters of a referendum on a united Ireland are keen to get a plan on what it would look like and how it would be implemented.  Of course, the experience of the Brexit referendum and its consequences demonstrate that the problem with it was not the absence of a cunning plan but that it was simply a bad idea. 

Brexit immediately gave rise to the potential for hardening the existing political border, with leaving the customs union and single market raising the prospect of checks to be applied to goods entering and exiting the single market. This was the case even if Theresa May repeatedly said that there would be “no going back to the borders of the past.”

Both the EU and the British negotiators were concerned that whatever solution was proposed to avoid a hard border within the island did not (or did) become leverage for the new border that would exist between Britain and the EU.  That concern continued to exist even after a first agreement was made with Theresa May that a ‘backstop’ would be in place, which would ensure–absent any other agreed solution–that Northern Ireland would remain aligned with EU rules, although this would entail checks between Britain and the North of Ireland.  As a sign of things to come the British government blocked civil servants in the North from engaging with the EU on how this might work.

As noted in the previous post, the British would rapidly disavow at home what they had just agreed, and May renounced her commitment in the House of Commons as something no prime minister could ever accept.  But if this was the case, a ‘soft’ Brexit would have to cover all the UK and this was not acceptable to those for whom Brexit meant Brexit, whatever Brexit actually meant. Jeremy Corbyn once again demonstrated the poverty of his own position by supporting the backstop but wanting domestic guarantees of a soft Brexit.

De Rynck describes British politics as a ‘farce’, noting that ‘May could not claim publicly she had obtained a customs union for fear of upsetting her backbenchers, which suited Corbyn’s fear that he would have to explain his own opposition to a deal his party officially wanted.’

The focus on the North of Ireland that frustrated the Tory Brexiteers so much only existed because it starkly revealed the illusion of Brexit itself, and the phantasy that was the deal that they thought they could get.  Irish nationalists could be forgiven for seeing what was happening as karma – British weakness being exposed by their clinging to one of their last colonies.  However, a survey of Tory MPs revealed that only one third of them thought the border was a serious matter, so it’s doubtful this was the source of much discomfort for them. 

British think tanks sought out a different solution that avoided the necessity for checks and a border where they would have to take place, including ‘Max fac’, which the EU rejected but De Rynck suggested ‘some elements could be useful to soften friction for goods moving from Britain to Northern Ireland’.  In the end, of course, May couldn’t get her deal through, and Boris Johnson turned the backstop into a ‘frontstop’.

De Rynck completes the picture of British political farce by noting the position of the Democratic Unionist Party, which believed that EU support for its Irish member state would collapse in the end.  He recalls that Barnier “pushed Foster and her party to come up with its own solution but there was never a plan from the DUP”, quelle surprise.

He notes their June 2017 manifesto, surely being one of very few to have read it, which affirmed Northern Ireland’s “unique history and geography”, its “particular circumstances” and its need for “ease of trade with the Irish Republic and throughout the European Union.” The DUP advocated “Northern-Ireland specific solutions through active executive engagement”.  Its leader, Arlene Foster, was later to highlight the benefits to Northern Ireland of being in both the UK and EU markets; but not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the most extreme elements set the agenda for the rest to follow and it became the overwhelming policy of unionism to condemn these sort of arrangements as a threat to their ‘precious union’. 

While Johnson turned the backstop into immediate application, or at least pretended to, he also wanted a particular voting procedure that would ensure local Northern-Ireland consent to its peculiar arrangements.  The EU agreed that the NI Assembly should have the right to confirm the requirements of the deal over time but thought that its ability to overrule the initial Westminster decision made no sense.  The British negotiators wanted the local Assembly to approve the deal and to require a majority of both nationalists and unionists, which given the latter’s deepest affection for saying ‘No’ would have meant they would have said no and there would have been no deal.

It might appear easy to discern British motivation for asking for this provision because they might have believed that the unionists’ ‘No’ could perhaps be a means of putting pressure on the EU to deliver a better deal.  The approach of the EU however, was that while it was up to the UK to determine its internal political arrangements, these were not determining a deal with the European Union.  Today, the DUP is still opposed to the final deal and is in effect attempting to impose its veto, but it is not a party to the talks and it will not determine their outcome.

The final deal was concluded with the same familiar backdrop as the preceding negotiations.  The Daily Telegraph reported a cabinet minister’s “fury” at the EU’s “demands for more concessions” while at the same time Johnson decided to sign up to it.  He later met representatives of Northern Ireland manufacturing, assuring them that they could throw any customs forms requested in the bin, and they could call him if they had a problem. I would not be surprised if they immediately reflected that there was no problem for which he would be regarded as the solution.  As we have now been assured, Johnson did not know what he was signing up to, writing in the Daily Telegraph that the protocol he agreed to couldn’t have meant introducing trade barriers, because that’s not what he meant, and so it would be vital to now “close that option down.”  

On the EU side, it would appear from De Rynck that the EU was happier with the Johnson deal than with May’s proposed all-UK membership of a common customs territory, with its pursuit of some sort of “max-fac” means of reducing customs checks.  He nevertheless contends that “the EU compromised more on Northern Ireland than on any other withdrawal issue”.   This might be true, because it is also clear that in terms of the other two issues, in respect of Britain’s financial settlement and the rights of citizens, the EU essentially got what it wanted. 

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

The story of Brexit (1 of 3) – How not to negotiate

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Book Review ‘Inside the Deal: How the EU got Brexit Done’, Stefaan De Rynck, Agenda, 2023

This book tells the story of the Brexit negotiations from the point of view of the EU by a senior EU negotiator.  It is a reminder of the tortuous course of the process and the more or less complete failure of the British government to achieve its objectives, not least because it was never too clear about what these were; or perhaps more accurately, if it did have ideas, these were none to clear and not possible to achieve.

Anyone with any interest in Brexit will be aware that Britain appeared to believe that the EU needed Britain more than Britain needed the EU and that certain countries had a particular interest in the British market. These would be keen on a deal that facilitated unrestricted access; for example that German car makers would put pressure on Angela Merkel to make sure no barriers were put up to selling their cars in Britain. In fact German industry (and others, including the Spanish so reliant on British holiday makers) lobbied to ensure protection of the EU’s single market.

This meant British diplomacy believed it could prise individual states away from the EU negotiators and undermine a united EU response.    This was backed up by repeated threats that if Britain didn’t get what it wanted it could walk away with no deal.  This was sometimes accompanied by threats of ending security cooperation, which the author of the book acknowledges the British usually to the lead on.  Ironically it was the EU in the final agreement that rejected an important aspect of military cooperation in which the British were very keen to be involved.

Their negotiating tactics often amounted to not negotiating and dragging their feet, as if the EU would come running, expecting the EU to be in some way desperate to maintain the relationship due to the cost of the divorce.  Merkel recalled at an informal occasion at Davos that ‘May kept asking me to make an offer’, as if the party walking away should be given whatever was required to have it still hanging around. Merkel said “I told her it is the UK that is leaving.  The UK should tell us what it wants.”

British tactics also involved repeatedly deferring Brexit through delaying notification of leaving, extending the period of negotiation, and demanding a transition period while then running down the clock in the face of deadlines that piled on the pressure to get a deal.  This pressure was placed particularly on the British side because Tory leaders were continually under pressure from their Eurosceptic MPs to demonstrate progress in getting Brexit done.  What would be the problem if the EU did indeed need Britain so much?

While this was supposed to be the case, British sources continually leaked stories to the media in London that the EU negotiators had made outrageous demands that Britain had rejected. EU negotiators then began to find that this was the prelude to acceptance of the actual EU proposals, at which point the press in London would claim a great victory!

De Rynck notes that while the British media in Brussels often had a better grasp of what was going on, their counterparts in London regurgitated the same Brexit delusions of Tory MPs for home consumption.  This was the case even where the British made agreements and then talked at home as if they hadn’t, or openly backtracked on them in front of the domestic audience. Threats would be made, and no action ever follow.

While the whole exercise was based on ‘taking back control’ the negotiations revealed how little control Britain had; its parsimony on protecting citizen’s rights in the Withdrawal Agreement revealing the reactionary priorities behind the project.  Taking back control meant taking control of citizens’ rights and trashing them.  Theresa May would tell Italian television she was guaranteeing the rights of their compatriots in the UK at the same time as her negotiating team was arguing to take some away.

And it wasn’t even the rights of foreigners that were to be discarded.  De Rynck writes – that ‘Madrid seemed more concerned about the Brits in Spain than London was an impression activist NGOs often confirmed at that time in conversations with Barnier’s team.’  Some EU states wanted EU nationals to have the same rights in the UK as UK nationals would have, except that this would give UK nationals in the EU more rights and better protection than EU nationals in the UK.

De Rynck appears to view with some wry amusement the visits to Brussels of British political delegations to meet with Michel Barnier, including those tasked with monitoring the Brexit process, with their innocent suggestions for progress but clear incomprehension about what the problem was.

He makes clear that the united response by the EU member states and refusal to be divided was a result of EU membership and its single market being much more important to them than Britain.  The EU was completely conscious that it was the stronger party and British claims that it was going to get ‘a great trade deal’ with the United States, as promised by Donald Trump, failed completely to influence EU negotiators.  None of the US officials met by an EU delegation to Washington supported Britain and audiences were mostly in favour of deepening the single market in order to benefit US investment.  The EU was also aware of British intentions to make agreements and not implement them, which is why unilateral enforcement was included in the texts.

It never struck the British that if they hadn’t got what they wanted by threatening to leave they weren’t going to get it once they had decided to go.  Boris Johnson had claimed that after voting to leave Britain would get a better deal than David Cameron’s attempt before it, while some member states thought Cameron had got too much. 

The British never seemed to ‘smell the coffee’ even after the repeated refusal of members states to enter into bilateral discussions, or to appreciate that British political difficulties and divisions did not mean that the EU would decide they should be helped to overcome them. Rather it was taken as a warning for EU negotiators not to get embroiled.  Repeated resignations by British negotiators, of David Davis, Dominic Raab and David Frost no doubt assisted the Brexiteers in not learning from experience, although perhaps resignation was the best course individuals could take to avoid their fingerprints over failure.

Above all, the EU was determined to protect its single market, which meant that there was to be no cherry-picking and no having cake and eating it, where Britain would be able to have access for some favoured sectors but not for others.  Neither was there to be mutual recognition of each other’s standards, which effectively meant the British could establish the market’s rules.  EU negotiators raised the issue of their own sovereignty when the British proclaimed theirs, while other Eurosceptics such as Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Salvini in Italy and the Sweden Democrats rowed back on their opposition to the EU or the Euro.

De Rynck has negative judgements to make on the British Labour Party, which he accuses of having givien a blank cheque to the Conservative government by voting for withdrawal without knowing the destination the government wanted to go in.  He records that Starmer while accompanying Corbyn, just like Theresa May, wanted full single market access while restricting free movement of EU nationals.  The Labour MP Hilary Benn, who led the House of Commons Committee on Exiting the EU, visited Brussels and asked questions ‘from a different galaxy.’  Benn wondered why divergence from EU rules was a problem as the UK would still be more aligned than any other country. From the point of view of the EU, and apart from dynamic alignment being a problem, there was no point to Brexit if the British did not change their rules, with this change expected to be in the opposite direction. Why would it agree to that?

Forward to part 2

‘The Year the World went Mad’: a review (2)

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In his book Mark Woolhouse provides the story of the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain and his role as an advisor to the British and Scottish Governments.

His restrained story does not cover all aspects of the pandemic and the Governments’ response, but it is nevertheless pretty damning.  He notes that that Scottish Government didn’t set up its own expert advisory committee and have its first meeting until three days after the first lockdown, ‘by which time the course of the epidemic in Scotland and the UK . . . was pretty much set’. He criticises the World Health Organisation (WHO) for only declaring a pandemic until well into March, so undermining early action in the UK, and by which time he deems it also ‘pretty much irrelevant.’ 

In fact, WHO comes in for other scathing criticism, including for its approval of China’s strict lockdown policy – “China’s bold approach . . . has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic’ it said at the end of February 2020, even as Covid-19 had already spread to forty-eight countries.  Nearly three years later China’s strict lockdown policy is falling apart and the call by the Director-General of WHO to follow its policy now looks foolish.

The UK had its own problems right from the start, including the assumption in its pre-existing planning that it was going to be fighting an influenza pandemic.  As Woolhouse puts it, the modelling group he sat on ‘had to contend with one challenge right away; it was set up to tackle the wrong disease.’

The difference this made can be seen in the models created to inform decisions on what action to take against the spread of the disease.  More appropriate for an influenza pandemic, the ‘new, bespoke coronavirus models’ included the impact of schools but not of care homes for the elderly.  Covid-19 was a disease massively disproportionately affecting the elderly, with the average age of death in the UK at 78 and 80 for deaths attributed to coronavirus, but having generally only mild effects on children.  The original influenza models also didn’t include lockdown.

Woolhouse says that ‘We’d done our homework, but we’d prepared for the wrong exam’.  He still claims that they ‘were useful tools’ but also that ‘I wouldn’t want decision-making to be over-reliant on models either’.  Unfortunately, he also says that ‘in March 2020 . . . you could easily get the impression that the UK government’s mantra of ‘following the science’ boiled down to following the models.  That’s how it looked and that’s how the media presented it.’

The models were used to produce an R number every week: the average number of cases generated by a single case. ‘The R monster turned out to be quite dangerous . . . The relentless focus on the R number detracted from the usual public health priorities of saving lives and preventing illness.’  This, for him, was part of a wider problem, accusing many scientists of ignoring elementary principles of epidemiology and abandoning objectivity and common sense.

One example, that was employed as an ignorant term of abuse also on the left, was the damning of ‘herd immunity’, and he criticises the editor of the leading medical journal ‘The Lancet’ for continuing ‘to rail against their straw man version of a herd immunity strategy.’

This criticism of the approach of many scientists is measured and unpolemical, and he presents it from an insider perspective in which models create scenarios and not predictions. He nevertheless finds a particular target in the Imperial College report number 9, which generated a worst-case scenario of half a million deaths in the UK by the end of July.  He admits to generating such a scenario himself.  ‘The problem was that these worst-case scenarios weren’t realistic and weren’t intended to be.’  This one however had the very real consequence of making lockdown ‘accepted as a necessity the first time it was proposed.’

The strategic objectives were presented as saving lives and protecting the NHS.  As Woolhouse notes, if this meant ‘trying to minimise deaths due to novel coronavirus while ignoring deaths from other causes, and if social distancing is the intervention of choice, then we don’t need a complex computer model to tell us what to do.’

Boris Johnson’s ‘flattening the curve’ to ‘protect the NHS’ had two problems according to him.  Firstly, flattening infections and hospitalisation reduced peak demand on NHS services but prolonged it, and the NHS couldn’t cope with either. The NHS therefore required more resources and, while it got new hospital facilities, these remained largely unused because it didn’t get the required staff.  Woolhouse claims the UK got what he predicted – ‘yo-yoing between intolerably severe restrictions and unsustainable pressure.’

In my own posts during the pandemic, I argued that protecting the NHS was attractive to politicians because it would also protect them from accountability for their prior policy of running the service down.  Ritual hand-clapping on the street became the substitute, while we are now invited to condemn NHS workers for striking to recover the fall in living standards incurred over the past number of years.  Perhaps these workers would be in a stronger position today if the failures of government had been exposed during the pandemic instead of demanding more of the same policy.

Woolhouse admits to supporting the introduction of the first lockdown despite concerns, because there was no other option on the table, he was unsure of the effect of earlier measures and he was not prepared to take the risk.  The central message of the book however is that lockdown was wrong and there was an alternative.  He argues that there were already marked shifts in people’s mobility before lockdown and that the latter ‘seems to have come late to the party and had surprisingly little effect.’  Imperial College published a counter-factual analysis ignoring this voluntary activity and exaggerating the effect of lockdown.  

Woolhouse notes some problems with its analysis.  Sweden never went into full lockdown but brought the epidemic under control. Imperial then claimed implausibly that its banning of mass gatherings had had the same effect. Other researchers came up with the quite different conclusion that the UK epidemic was already in decline before lockdown took effect.  He doubts that ‘anyone would claim now that the March 23rd lockdown saved anywhere near half a million lives.’

His alternative was to act earlier, but not to introduce the lockdown that was implemented, while lifting restrictions earlier.  ‘Lockdown was never going to solve the novel coronavirus problem, it just deferred it to another day, and it did so at a great cost.  Epidemiologists and modellers knew that it was going to be the case from the outset. It turned out policy-makers did not . . .’

‘Lockdown was conceived by the World Health Organisation and China as a means of eradicating novel coronavirus once and for all from the face of the earth. With hindsight, this plan was doomed from the outset . . . The world was given an intervention that only made sense in the context of eradication as the preferred means to control a disease that was clearly here to stay.’

Many on the left maintained this position – of zero-Covid – long after this was obvious, while the World Health Organisation eventually backed away from the policy.  In October 2020 it stated that ‘we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method.’

As Woolhouse puts it – ‘tragically, this appeal came seven months too late and by that time a colossal amount of damage had already been done.’

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

‘The Year the World went Mad’: a review (1)

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‘The Year the World went Mad; a scientific memoir’, Mark Woolhouse, Sandstone Press, 2022

The working class in Ireland and Britain face dramatic cost of living crises caused by inflation, and in the UK by austerity justified by claims that the public sector deficit has dramatically increased.  The BBC reports that ‘the cost of living is currently rising at its fastest rate in almost 40 years’ and that ‘the UK faces its biggest drop in living standards on record.’  This is ‘largely due to the war in Ukraine and the fallout of the pandemic’ says the BBC.

In Britain the sudden collapse of the pound following the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng budget was the result of large unfunded tax cuts that the international finance markets would not accept.  One reason they did not accept them was the previous massive expenditure arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.  In Britain and the North of Ireland the cost has been estimated as £376 billion, or 15 per cent of total Government debt and enough to fund over eight and a half years of a deficit that supposedly justifies the current austerity.

The war in Ukraine has resulted in sanctions by the West on Russia, which has in response limited energy supplies to the West.  Sanctions have also disrupted trade and increased many commodity costs, exacerbating the inflationary effect of state expenditure during Covid and the money printed through quantitative easing.  There was always going to be a price to be paid for the money spent as a result of the lockdown policy and sanctions on Russia and it is hardly a surprise that it is being imposed on working people.  What should be a surprise is that the Left should have opposed incurring these costs in the first place but didn’t.

In so far as the war in Ukraine goes, much of the Left has been an echo of Western Governments, which so far have been willing to incur the pain as long as it can be transferred on to rivals and/or dumped on workers.  The voices of the pro-war Left tend to mute when it comes to accepting responsibility for supporting the sanctions policy and consequent assault on working class living standards.

As far as the policy of lockdown during Covid is concerned, the problem would be massively worse had much Left advice to extend and deepen lockdown been accepted.  This book by a member of the British and Scottish Governments’ Covid-19 advisory bodies is a Professor of Epidemiology and a critic of both of their pandemic policies.  He is critical of the lockdown policy of both, of its health, social and economic costs, and insists there was a better way.

If his credentials are supposed to inspire confidence it should of course be remembered that there were many other scientists and medical experts who would disagree with his analysis and conclusions.  Appeals to authority are not going to take you very far.  It is necessary, as always, to think for yourself. His book is worth reviewing because he was an insider in the Governments’ responses and therefore in an advantageous position to recount their decisions and why they were made.  He can also provide background to the pandemic and the response to it but essentially his analysis backs up what was very largely known during lockdown and which led this blog and others to reject the consensus that lockdown was the only correct response.

As to why so much of the Left supported lockdown, this in itself is no pointer to a correct policy; we long ago left the terrain of seeking comfort in majority opinion on this end of the political spectrum.  Stalinism, social democracy and ultra-left sectarians have been making up the majority of it for a long time and even the last grouping almost invariably seeks maximum action by the state as the answer to immediate political and social problems, washed down with a heavy dose of scatological political prognoses based on the supposed radicalisation of the working class through a seemingly permanent capitalist catastrophe.

If capitalism is in permanent crisis then it would seem obviously impossible that the greatest political, social and health disasters are anything other than the immanent outcomes of capitalist economics and the calculated strategies of the representatives of the capitalist class.  This resulted in some on the left demanding even greater lockdowns because the existing ones were either a sham or simply inadequate.  This involved highlighting the potentially worst possible outcomes, repeating the greatest scares and calling for the most drastic actions.

Their recommended policy ignored the level of repression required to enforce their preferred extreme version of lockdown, and ignored the real costs of existing lockdowns and the very impossibility of achieving more restrictive enforcement. It ignored the stupidity of closing down production of goods and services while calling on the state to fund the incomes of workers who produce them so that they could buy the goods and services that they were being paid not to produce.  Anything else was denounced as sacrificing lives for profit, as if under capitalism the goods and services required to produce and reproduce life could be created any other way.

From this perspective the advantage of this book is that it is not in the least concerned with much of the disputation on the left, but may be read as a critique of their proposed approach from which they might at least ask–did we get it wrong?

Forward to part 2

‘From Empire to Europe’, and then where?

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‘From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry since the Second World War, Geoffrey Owen, Harper Collins, 2000.

This is another book I read last year: a history that more than most has contemporary relevance.  It charts the story of British manufacturing from the end of the Second World War to the end of the century.  The majority consists of ten chapters on the experience of separate industries, from textiles and steel to cars and pharmaceuticals.  Not all are stories of failure.

Two early chapters present the historical background and four at the end review differing explanations for Britain’s relative decline.

The book was first published in 1999 and screams ‘BREXIT’ – as a history of the future of Britain outside the EU, or so it might too easily be concluded.  In fact, given the relative starting positions of Britain and the rest of Europe, then and now, the mistake of standing outside of the rest the continent now looks more obviously stupid and will more quickly be seen to be so.  If it isn’t already.

After the war ended it was expected that in due course Germany would resume its pre-war role of supplying Europe with manufactures; Britain could concentrate on the rest of the world with which it already traded.  The Labour Government decided against joining the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and ceding sovereignty over its two most important industries, while the left of the Labour Party complained of the economic liberalism on the Continent it said led to social injustice.  Foreign  Secretary, Ernest Bevin, insisted that Britain was ‘not just another European country.’  Some economists at the Board of Trade favoured membership of the ECSC on the grounds of exposure to European competition, but this was a minority view.

The Tory Government from 1951 broadly followed its predecessor, rejecting a second opportunity to join the ECSC or taking part in negotiations to create the Common Market.  European integration was, in the words of another author quoted, ‘at best irrelevant to Britain’s economic self-interest and at worst a political nuisance which had to be tolerated, if only in public, because of the Americans.’

Again and again, Owen records the effect of being outside the European market.  In textiles small and medium-sized firms from Italy and Germany benefited ‘to a far greater extent than the British industry from the expansion of intra-European trade in the 1950s and 1960s . . . where the long-standing bias towards non-European export markets proved to be a serious disadvantage’ (p57)

When eventually Britain did join the Common Market, it found that its European competitors ‘instead of scale and standardisation . . . had put more emphasis on design and technical innovation . . . imports from the Continent rose sharply in the second half of the 1970s, and the British textile industry, having neglected European markets in the 1950s and 1960s, was not well equipped to respond.’ (p77)

In shipbuilding ‘the export trade was regarded as marginal and unpredictable’ and ‘a marketing strategy geared to the requirements of domestic owners was becoming obsolete’. (p97 & 100). In steel, ‘traditionally the most nationalistic of all major industries . . .  European steel-makers needed a market as large and competitive as that of the US’, and ‘while recognising that the smaller domestic market-imposed limits on how far British steel-makers could go in the American direction . . .’ there were barriers to this being achieved within Britain.

On the other hand, while ‘there was a long tradition of price-fixing in French steel, and the industry had bee oriented almost entirely to the domestic market the effect of the European Coal and Steel Community (which was opposed by most French steel makers) was to break down the parochialism of the industry and force it to plan for a wider European market.’ (p 148, 127 & 130).

In the paper industry, joining the Common Market ‘would have exposed it ‘at an earlier stage to competition in a large dynamic market; ‘modernisation and rationalisation which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s might have occurred earlier’ and it would ‘have provided export opportunities’ which might also ‘have started earlier.’ (p170)

In relation to the engineering industry Owen writes that, after the war, ‘when the continental economies were in disarray and the need for hard currency was urgent’, when standing aside might been seen as explicable, ‘the neglect of Continental Europe . . . after its recovery in the 1950s . . . was to prove a serious error.’ Seemingly strongly placed in the early 1960s, low economic growth and lack of involvement in intra-European trade meant that ‘an increasing number of British manufacturers were falling behind their Continental counterparts in the scale of their production.’   The failure to Europeanise in the 10–15 years after the war meant that for many firms it was too late when they did.

A similar experience les behind the decline of the British motor industry: ‘the decline of Leyland has to be seen as an avoidable disaster, largely attributable to the failure to Europeanise the business in the 1950s and 1960s.’ (p249). The ‘low priority’ given by British firms to Continental Europe meant that they did not join ‘homogenous, fast-expanding and highly competitive mass market enabled companies such as Renault, Volkswagen and Fiat to narrow the productivity gap with American manufactures . . .’ (p250)

Owen points out that European industry was itself not always successful and notes its failure in computers and semiconductors.  Of the former he says that ‘European industry might have done better if governments, instead of nurturing and protecting national champions, had concentrated on widening the market for computers . . . As it was, nationalistic, producer-oriented policies, discriminating in favour of chosen domestic suppliers, exacerbated Europe’s most serious weakness vis-à-vis the US, the small size of the market.’ (p270)

Owen makes clear that lack of orientation to a European market was sometimes a mistake not just made by the British, and that failure was not simply a result of lack of access to that market.  Other strategic mistakes were made. Half a century later it would therefore be an identical mistake to see market restrictions only on a continental scale as the problem, when many industries now have global markets and global production.

So, Renault is partnered with Nissan and Mitsubishi; Volkswagen includes Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda plus others and has an alliance with Ford, while Fiat is now part of Stellantis, which includes Chrysler, Jeep, Peugeot, and Citroën.  Britain has a small luxury car market with volume production owned by foreign companies.

Owen tells a similar story about chemicals, noting however that the success of ICI by the end of the period covered was despite the factors that harmed the development of British companies in other industries.

Others were also successful, such as pharmaceuticals, which Owen says was due, among other things, to its ‘openness to foreign investment.’ (p372). This ensured that ‘British-owned firms were forced to compete against the world leaders and learn from them.’ (p387)

In the last chapters he looks at common explanations for the decline of British industry after the war, including the nature and dominance of the financial system; the quality of training, education and culture; poor industrial relations, and Government policy.

On the first, he says that ‘the financial system on its own does not have a decisive influence on which countries succeed in particular industries, although it may play a supporting role.’ (p403).  He does not believe culture or education factors were decisive either, and although he notes that ‘there is no doubt that some British companies were badly managed in the 1950s and 1960s . . . there was significant improvement in the 1980s and 1990s.’ (p 422)

On Government policy ‘the decision to opt out of European integration was the biggest missed opportunity of the 1945–60 period, more important than any mistakes in macro-economic policy.  Indeed, it is hard to argue that Britain suffered from uniquely incompetent macro-economic management during these years.’  (p 450) Britain became a member of the EEC ‘fifteen years too late.’  He concludes on an optimistic note, telling us that ‘by the end of the 1990s Britain had found a role for itself as a medium-sized industrial nation, well integrated into the world market.’  (p 461)

Everyone loves a happy ending so maybe it’s as well the book hasn’t had another edition.  The ‘unique incompetence’ of British Government economic policy that didn’t exist after the war looks as if it has arrived.  But not only the government, the informed commentariat look as if they think this policy should persist, or, more charitably, be persevered with.

In today’s ‘Financial Times’ (6 January) Robert Shrimsley records the view that ‘Tories are wondering what happened to the Brexit they promised’, as if they got ‘the house red’ rather than the ‘vintage claret’.  He recommends that ‘whether one sees Brexit as fabulous or foolhardy, it is absurd not to take the wins that are available.’   

Unfortunately, the wins he seems to champion do not seem to be up to very much and also have downsides. His recommendation, therefore, is to continue better with a failed policy that will do nothing much more than deliver failure.  He, like Kier Starmer – the so-called leader of the opposition – can no more think of going back into the EU than Tory Eurosceptics could previously stop dreaming of leaving it.

The book tells a sorry tale of British failure to appreciate where the world was going and what its place in this changing world was to be.  It has happened again with Brexit.  Deciding to persevere is what’s called déjà vu all over again. 

Some books I read in 2021 (3) – ‘The Illusions of Postmodernism’

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The appearance of widespread support among organisations describing themselves as Marxist for demands that don’t have a material basis – I’m referring to the claims of some trans activists that men can become women simply by declaring it – has come as has surprise to many, although perhaps it should not.

In attempting to explain this, those Marxists who are rooted in a materialist understanding of the world have referred to these organisations’ orientation to students, who are a strong constituency of the broad movement supporting this particular claim.  In effect, it is argued that these organisations that should know better do not want to alienate potential recruits and presumably don’t see the issue as important enough to risk doing so.

They are acutely aware that even to raise any question invites denunciation as a transphobe and calls for what is now called cancelling – ‘trans rights are not a debate’ is not only a slogan.  This censorious approach does not sit well with Marxists, for whom this is simply not an approach we can afford to take even if we wanted to, which we don’t.

It is all very well for trans activists to refuse to debate, or refuse to argue for their views and address challenges; their demands have had access in corporate boardrooms and HR departments, and in the corridors of government departments, judiciary and university administrations.  This is a more than inviting substitute.  For Marxists this is impossible – our politics are based on the self-emancipation of working people and this isn’t going to come from within these locations.

Of course, a more interesting question is how this constituency came to support these views in the first place, although the book reviewed doesn’t really focus on this.  I’ve rather read it with a view as to how these views, that should be so alien, have been so easily embraced by sections of the Left.

Reading Terry Eagleton’s ‘The Illusions of Postmodernism’, published twenty-five years ago, makes a number of observations about its target that help inform this inquiry.

So, in his preface, he defends himself against the anticipated criticism that he is placing himself on the same side as conservatives, which has often been an argument of some on the Left, thus the examples are numerous.  As one example we have Brexit, which supposedly must be supported because the EU is capitalist, and big business supports it, so we can’t be on the same side as it.  Of course, this also requires a certain set of blinkers.

Eagleton agrees that ‘radicals and conservatives, after all, necessarily share some ground in common’, which explains resistance to postmodernism and its progeny, including the type of claim above.  ‘Radicals, for example, are traditionalists., just as conservatives are; it is simply that they adhere to entirely different traditions.’ (page ix) 

The Left has lots of ‘antis’ – anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and anti-austerity.  That none of them necessarily entails socialism gets missed, so much so that some organisations name or define themselves in these terms, forgetting that there are reactionary movements that endorse each.  Ironically, many ‘social justice’ demands today are not even anti-capitalist.

He thus notes that postmodernist ideas (and their offspring) can be subversive but not transformative; positive content is effectively evacuated and the power to change does not arise, even if it were contemplated, from reality but from moral outrage against the oppressive power of language, hence the need to police it.

‘Some, one might predict, would assume that the dominant system was entirely negative – that nothing within this seamlessly non-contradictory whole could by definition be of value – and turn from it in dismay to ideologise some numinous Other.’ (page 7)

Many on the Left have long thought of capitalism as in terminal decline, in continual crisis with workers equally as long being exhorted to be angry and outraged.  Capitalism has no contradictions, otherwise it would not simply be utterly reactionary and, faced with a simple negative, the positive becomes a socialism that is not grounded in capitalism but has its own foundations.  Since these are uncontaminated by capitalism they are uncontaminated by reality and must rest on purely ethical claims – as do the claims of trans activists that men can become women and that they must be supported because they are oppressed: ‘only the oppressed know their oppression’ so no need to be ‘labouring away in the British museum’, as Eagleton explains, in order to understand it. (page 5)

In responding to postmodernist claims that it is opposed to dogma – and Marxism is always characterised by opponents as such – Eagleton notes that ‘one of the commonest forms of postmodernist dogma is an intuitive appeal to ‘experience’, which is absolute because it cannot be gainsaid.’ (page 67)  This, of course, also means that anyone else’s experience, of postmodernists for example, cannot be challenged either.

The low level of class struggle facilitates the alternative arising out of capitalism being judged on purely moral grounds because a real mass struggle will contain lots of impurities (which of course Marxists will want to combat) so will not therefore withstand any test based on a perfectly moral yardstick.

We know this from the experience Marxist organisations continually hark back to – the Russian revolution.  The issue here is not to excuse or condemn its failings but to recognise it is not a great example for today and that these failings were not moral but material and political.  It wasn’t ripe for socialism, particularly if left on its own – and it was left on its own – and given this it was inevitable that something other than working class self-emancipation would rise to take over.

This is what has happened with opposition to racism and sexual oppression etc.  Without a working class movement which can embrace them and offer a totally different system, within which their needs can be expressed, their demands are enveloped by politics compatible with capitalism.  All the rhetoric and ‘Theory’ is mainly camouflage.

So, the autonomous and rational individual subject that is the basis of liberalism is taken to another level when such an individual can determine the sexual nature of their own body.  It is claimed by some transgender activists that their gender identity is innate and not an internal processing of external culture, but this is similar to ‘any brand of epistemological anti-realism, it consistently denies the possibility of describing the way the world is, and just as consistently finds itself doing so.’ (page 28)

Hence, some trans activists deny the world has caused their gender dysphoria but just as consistently demand that this world can and must ameliorate it.

As Eagleton notes ‘at a certain point in the 1970s, all concern with biology became ‘biologistic’ overnight . . . Properly afraid of a vulgar reductionism, some strands of postmodernism responded to this danger by the rather more violent tactic of erasing the biological, and occasionally the economic, altogether.   In speaking materially about culture, it began to speak culturally about the material.’ (page 48)

‘What culture you inhabit is not definitive of your humanity, in the sense that beings of different cultures are not creatures of different species.  To be some kind of cultural being is indeed essential to our humanity, but not to be any particular kind.  There are no non-cultural human beings, not because culture is all there is to human beings, but because culture belongs to their nature.’ (page 101)

Eagleton takes up the sibling of race and gender as these are perceived by some postmodernists, which is class.  But ‘classism’ is not something Marxists have ever complained about, unlike racism and sexism.

‘’Classism, on this analogy, would seem to be the sin of stereotyping people in terms of social class, which taken literally would mean that it was politically incorrect to describe Donald Trump as a capitalist. Socialists, however, churlishly refuse to subscribe to the orthodoxy that social class is a bad thing, even though they are out to abolish it.  For socialism, the working class is an excellent thing, since without it one could never usurp the power of capital.’

‘On the surface, the class–race–gender triplet appears convincing enough.  Some people are oppressed because of their gender, some on account of their race, and others by virtue of their class.  But this is a deeply misleading formulation.  For it is not as though some individuals display certain characteristics known as ‘class’, which then result in their oppression.  On the contrary, Marxists have considered that to belong to a social class just is to be oppressed, or to be an oppressor.  Class is in this sense a wholly social category, as being female or having a certain skin pigmentation is not.’ (page 57)

‘The oppression of women is a matter of gender, which is wholly a social construct; but women are oppressed as women, which involves the kind of body one happens to have.  Being bourgeois or proletarian, by contrast, is not biological at all.’ (page 58)

Some of these ideas are obvious for Marxists, which points not to explaining how easily some Marxist organisations have adopted idealist constructs of woman, but how difficult it should be.  Any explanation should therefore entail how this departure is not really unique and surely a result of some general malaise.

So, to come back to what I have called the moral basis of much of the politics practiced by some on the Left; Eagleton asks a question that returns us to social reality – ‘Is the capitalist system progressive?’

He responds – ‘The only reasonable answer is a firm yes and no.  On the one hand, Marx’s praise for capitalism is surely well justified.  Capitalism, as he never tires of arguing, is the most dynamic, revolutionary, transgressive social system known to history, one which melts barriers, deconstructs oppositions, pitches diverse life-forms promiscuously together and unleashes an infinity of desire . . . As the greatest accumulation of productive forces which history has ever witnessed, it is capitalism which for the first time makes feasible the dream of a social order free of want and toil.’

‘All of this, of course, is bought at the most terrible cost.  This dynamic, exuberant release of potential is also one long unspeakable human tragedy, in which powers are crippled and squandered, lives crushed and blighted, and the great majority of men and women condemned to fruitless labour for the profit of a few.  Capitalism is most certainly a progressive system, and is just as certainly nothing of the kind.’ (page 61)

For a long time, many on the Left have sought to overcome their marginality by relying on capitalist crises to radicalise workers, but through a moral critique unhinged from how that capitalism works.  The key question for them was creation of a revolutionary party, but neither capitalist crises or moral indignation will create it, so it becomes as idealistic a construct as postmodern ideas of social justice that look to other agencies, if they look at all.  When they do they especially look to the state.

Today some of the Left endorses claims that are utterly unrelated to reality, doing so because these appear as demands of the oppressed, forgetting that the working class is not the agent of change because it is particularly oppressed; others have been much more oppressed and much more numerous.   Unfortunately, an ungrounded moralistic alternative is very unlikely to be accepted by the working class and especially its more irrational claims.  This Left will make another mistake, and if we have learnt anything, it is that it always pays for them.

Some books I read in 2021 (2) – ‘Market Maoists’

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The rapid economic growth of China to one of the world’s leading powers has prompted debate on how this was achieved, from its extreme poverty to the prodigious development associated with its insertion into the world capitalist system.  This book traces the evolution of the earlier relations between China under Mao and the capitalist world, before the explicit economic reorientation and while still proclaiming adherence to the revolutionary transformation to socialism.

The fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still proclaims socialism, and that before the Deng Xiaoping era China had relations with the capitalist world, means that the story is not a simple one, hence the debate on whether China today is capitalist or imperialist.  This book doesn’t directly address these issues but seeks to provide the story of the early Maoist relations with the capitalist world, starting with the semi-underground trading arrangements set up by the CCP in British ruled Hong Kong in 1938, years before the conquest of political power nationally in 1949.

In the first full year of Maoist rule roughly 74 per cent of trade was with capitalist countries; two years later this had fallen to 21 per cent, with the share taken by the Soviet Union etc. dramatically increasing.  Like the experience of the USSR surveyed in the previous post, China sought to trade its farm goods for advanced technology and equipment, plus chemicals and fuels, in order to build its industry.

As is well known, the 1949 revolution did not initially involve state takeover of all private capitalist enterprises and the Maoists were acutely conscious of their lack of economic experience, which had been limited to relatively remote rural regions.  CCP policy involved repeatedly contacting foreign capitalists to explore trading opportunities, and the book records their meeting in Tianjin with the American Chamber of Commerce to discuss cooperation, although with no success.

This policy was very much encouraged by Stalin, with the Maoist leadership supporting trade with Japan despite the very recent and brutal war against their occupation.  This and later engagements were far from smooth.  For Stalin, geopolitical considerations of defending the Soviet Union were paramount while the Chinese sought to expose latent contradictions between Japan and the US; something which was to become a recurring theme as the US attempted to isolate the new regime and China attempted to wriggle free. Other capitalist states showed themselves to be more open to acceptance of it by way of developing trading opportunities.

The eruption of the Korean war set back Mao’s plans; when meeting with Stalin for the first and only time he told him that “China needs a period of 3–5 years of peace”.  Their negotiations yielded a new Sino-Soviet Treaty in 1950 but relationships were not particularly warm as Stalin kept Mao hanging about Moscow for a second meeting in order to show him who was boss.

Most welcome was a loan from the Soviet Union, its need apparent from the government budget in the first three months of the new year being nearly balanced, having been in deficit by nearly two-thirds in the previous year.

The importance given to trade was made clear through the decision to break the unwritten rule – that commercial work should remain in the hand of trusted CCP members – and employ technical experts from the old Nationalist regime.  The new Korean war-time conditions meant a return to clandestine trading activities, with the CIA estimating that “China was smuggling between two hundred and three hundred tons of strategic materials from Hong Kong to mainland China every night.” (page 82)

The launch of the “three Anti Campaign” targeting corruption, waste and obstructionism in 1951 was followed in 1952 by the “Five Anti Campaign” which mobilised the population against China’s corrupt bourgeoisie.  Native private capitalists would no longer be protected as the CCP consolidated its control of the economy.

These campaigns also involved targeting the type of individuals that the Party wanted to recruit to agencies set up to assist its development of trade with capitalist countries, a problem that was to recur again, requiring the support of leading sections of the bureaucracy for the state bodies involved and their work. Zhou Enlai told the Chinese delegation to an international conference in Moscow that “You must make friends widely, don’t just make friends with progressives; make reactionary friends, too.” (page 89). The US opposed the conference but the Chinese delegation were able to sign its first contract with the British, while the CIA lamented that “our side can be expected to sustain loss after loss.” (page 91)

The CCP showed its elastic use of Marxist categories, developing “a new narrative for China’s place in global markets, one that centred on the theme of trading with capitalists as an anti-imperialist struggle.” (page 99).

In this vein, the end of the Korean war in 1953 was received by China as an opportunity to undermine the US blockade and use the Geneva Conference, organised to settle the peace at the end of hostilities, to enhance the new line of “peace in economics”.  In that year the country’s volume of trade reached its highest level since 1930; exchange with the capitalist countries growing by 29 per cent on the previous year. China however was still not important globally, so this didn’t prevent its share of capitalist countries’ trade falling relatively as world exchange soared.

On the back of this the CCP elaborated the concept of the “five principles of peaceful coexistence”, which entailed containing American imperialism and hastening the demise of capitalism.  Meanwhile relations with other capitalist countries such as Britain and France could be improved.

In 1958 China opened its first significant trade exhibition in Canton from April 25 to May 25 hosting 1,200 people from nineteen countries.  Later in the year Britain decided unilaterally to eliminate the differential (greater restrictions compared to the Soviet Union) in controls on exports to China, followed within weeks by a host of other countries including France, West Germany, Italy and Holland.

Not long after this Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, by which he hoped to mobilise the population to overcome existing material constraints and rapidly accelerate the industrialisation and modernisation of the country.  It was a project that seemed directly to contradict the foundations of the Marxist doctrine he claimed to hold, which recognised that the underdevelopment of the forces of production could not be overcome by sheer will.  In the event, they couldn’t, and the initiative failed in its objective, including that of catching up with Britain in fifteen years.

Part of it was meant to involve a key role for trade with foreign capitalism.  Like the Soviet Union, taxation of agriculture – in effect the peasant – was to provide the resources to feed the growth of the working class which would also allow for increased trade with foreign capitalism.  Unfortunately, this period saw political considerations lead to a major spat with Japan and a fall in trade until the early 1960s.

This, however, was only one aspect of the harmful effects of the Great Leap Forward on the conduct of trade policy.  Decentralisation of decision making led to import orders from capitalist markets in the first six months exceeding by twice the ministry budget for the whole year.  Targets were missed, foreign currency reserves fell and the risk arose of defaulting on contracts.  The central state struggled to regain control while “chaos” reigned in Chinese ports causing “crippling” delays. (page 145)

Japanese business and others started to complain about Chinese price “dumping”, pirating of designs and copying of Western patents.  Other South-East Asian countries complained of special financial inducements, while China encouraged ethnic Chinese in these countries to boycott Japanese goods, although British diplomats in a number of them reported scant evidence of this happening.

At the same time relations with the Soviet Union started to fall apart and China launched an artillery attack on the Nationalist Kuomintang-occupied Island of Jinmen.  For Mao this was part of the effort to rally the people to the demands of the Great Leap Forward.

Zhou Enlai again intervened to support the organisation of the work of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, including to ensure contracts with foreign capitalist were honoured.  At a meeting of staff he told them that “[we would] rather ourselves not eat or eat less, not use or use less, and fulfil the contracts already signed.” (page 149). The Ministry had for years been aware of the need to defend China’s credit rating and Zhou was concerned that dumping was affecting relations with capitalist countries, including India, which was concerned about “dumping” of cotton on the market.

Zhou acknowledged that international trade with capitalists was a form of class struggle, ‘but China could not afford to struggle blindly.’  The Ministry had to differentiate between different capitalists in order to serve China’s diplomatic objectives and avoid behaviour that would undercut relationships. (page 150).

Zhou emphasised the political purpose of trade but the Ministry was caught between the demands of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and commercial requirements.  He repeated the mantras of zili gengsheng (revival through one’s own efforts) and repudiated the concept of shangzhan (“commercial war”), emphasising heping jingji (“peaceful economics”. (Page 152) ‘“The Great Leap Forward must also accord with objective realties”, he said. “Foreign trade cannot jump 40–50 percent all at once,” he told ministry officials.’ (page 152).

Unfortunately, ‘Zhou’s call for a more moderate trade policy in late 1958 proved too nuanced for the brute force of the GLF’.  New, more modest, targets for exports and imports were set but ‘still exceeded the actual 1958 values by 19 percent and 3 percent respectively.’

Inevitably contracts were not fulfilled.  Like the other aspects of the GLF, ‘the situation became absurd.  Regions without a single walnut tree had been ordered to harvest the nuts for export.’ (page 153). The demands of the GLF for “more, faster, better, more economical” continued into the new decade.

The state failed to meet its grain target but exceeded its export targets as the last-ditch efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Trade to do so were successful.  Food stocks declined precipitously in 1959 and early 1960 and a crisis was imminent: ‘people were already starving in some places.  The bottom was falling out of the Great Leap Forward.’ (page 158)

Relations with the Soviet Union finally collapsed and the Ministry of Trade had nowhere to turn except the capitalist world for the imports necessary for modernisation and the grain necessary to save lives in the famine.  The Maoist regime was led to discover that Soviet “revisionism” was worse than US imperialism.  One task considered an immediate priority was consequently taken to be wiping out the debt to the ‘socialist countries’, necessary in order to defend China’s “international reputation” (guoji shang de shengyu).

The Chinese state struggled to procure the grain necessary to avoid greater catastrophe, especially while trying to keep the famine a secret. Billed as a great step forward to socialism, and while denouncing “revisionism”, the Great Leap Forward precipitated the requirement for grain imports from the capitalist world throughout the first half of the 1960s. (Although the degree to which other factors were responsible is controversial).  It compelled compromising on the principle of avoiding capitalist debt, which up to then had had the effect of limiting China’s fuller entry into the world capitalist market.

The necessity to regularly import grain from the capitalist world, and maximise exports to it in order to earn the foreign currency to pay for the grain, while husbanding its reserves, meant that foreign trade could no longer be ‘tightly scripted, discrete transactions conducted at arm’s length’. Jason Kelly states that ‘It presaged a much more consequential shift in China’s relationship to the global economy that would occur during Reform and Opening.’(page 176)

Trade then increased, first with Japan, then with Western Europe, so that trade with the capitalist world that had been 18 per cent of the total in 1955 reached 70 per cent by volume in 1964. The CCP also moved away from the Great Leap Forward, Zhou Enlai telling the National People’s Congress in 1962 that ‘“blindness” (mangmuxing) to objective laws had marred China’s socialist construction.’ (page 184)

China was, however, about to go through another tumultuous upheaval before learning the same lesson again. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), of which the late socialist Neil Davidson said ‘every word was a lie’, launched an antibureaucratic campaign against potential capitalist restoration that included familiar target such as ‘bourgeois specialists’ and ‘venerable masters’.

Launched by a section of the CCP bureaucracy it was ended by same, although in-between it witnessed mass assaults on the state apparatus, so that its origin eventually allowed for the manner of its ending.  The Cultural Revolution hit China’s trade but the “figures seem mild in relation to the chaos . . . These were significant declines, but not catastrophic” and “were not caused solely by the Cultural Revolution.” (page 189)

These developments, including skirmishes with the Soviet Union from 1967 but more seriously in 1969, led to rapprochement with the United States.  The logic of socialism in one country, the unity of the Communist – more accurately Stalinist – World, took a giant step towards its ultimate conclusion. China’s planners thus forecast a significant increase in trade with the capitalist world in the fourth Five-Year Plan (1971–1975), including import of whole plant equipment, and later for thousands of foreign workers to come to work in the country.

Many of these developments to closer ties with the capitalist world, and without all the talk about it undermining that world, preceded the changes introduced by Deng Xiaoping, who until 1973 was repairing tractor parts in Jiangxi Province following his purge.  The following years saw the post-Mao leadership of Hua Guofeng launch an even larger, too large as it turned out, import programme, while other CCP leaders worried that China was embracing capitalist markets ‘too enthusiastically.’ (page 208)

Deng Xiaoping, speaking to Party officials in 1978, sums up the history presented in the book: “when Comrade Mao Zedong was alive, we also wanted to expand economic and technological exchanges between China and the outside world, including developing economic and trade relations with some capitalist nations, and even the introduction [into China] of foreign capital, joint ventures, etc.” (page 209).

The book chronicles the early history of one aspect of China’s relationship with capitalism and illustrates incidentally the Marxist understanding of the necessary preconditions for the achievement of socialism and the inevitable failure of trying to leap over them or seeking to achieve this goal in a single country.  The book is, of course, not written from a Marxist perspective and given the size and importance of China, and its rich history over the last 70 or so years, it can be no more than a partial history. It is nevertheless very interesting for its exploration of one aspect of China’s less recent economic development.

Some books I read in 2021 (1) – ‘Red Globalisation’

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‘Red Globalisation: The political economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Krushchev’, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Despite the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc the politics of Stalinism lives on, infecting even those who declare their politics to be its historic left opposition.  This politics is summed up in the idea of the possibility of establishing socialism in one country.  

For example, there is no basis for left support for Brexit other than the possibility of taking otherwise prohibitive steps towards socialism on a purely national basis.  Such a view of this left case is supported by its argument that the EU prevents the implementation of state ownership, which, when combined with nationalism, is termed nationalisation and is considered more or less synonymous with socialism.

Since neither state ownership or nationalism expresses specifically working class interests or its powers to assert them, they do not at all define socialism.  Despite its demise the example of the Soviet Union continues to be been held up as embodying socialism, based on its definition as state ownership, and moreover this achievement in one country, so justifying nationalism.

The book ‘Red Globalisation’ argues that the Soviet Union, far from being an economic construct separate from the world capitalist economy, was intrinsically enmeshed within it as a middle-income country, very much subject to the forces shaping that world economy.  This can be seen not only in its autarky in the 1930s but also in its own particular globalisation after the Second World War.

To forestall any presumption that the book can be employed to make the case that the Soviet Union was some sort of capitalism, it simply confirms that socialism can be international or not at all.  The book argues that ‘as is usual in large countries, trade did not play much of a role in the Soviet Union’s economic growth at this time; in this almost purely domestic achievement, coercion and surveillance were everything, and these only started to be undermined by Krushchev’s reforms late in the 1950s.’ (page 122). It should also be noted that this reviewer would not agree to the assessment that the domestic achievements of the Soviet Union could be put down solely to repression.

After the early years of the revolution, far from disengaging from the capitalist world, Sanchez-Sibony argues that from the industrialisation debate in the 1920s onwards there was widespread agreement on the necessity of links with the foreign capitalist market, and all the steps considered necessary to ensure that this would succeed, including following ‘the liberal prescription of gold standard orthodoxy, namely austerity.’ (page 36-7).

The pressure experienced on new regime’s currency and gold reserves ‘threatened the credibility of the state’s commitment to monetary stability both domestically and abroad . . .  possible exclusion from international capital markets . . . was not countenanced until it became inevitable . . .‘ (page 37).  Sanchez-Sibony notes that the ‘NEP had been designed precisely to take advantage of the coming global expansion; what the Bolsheviks got instead was the full measure of the world economy’s 1920s fluctuations.’ (page 45)

While one response to these was monetary expansion, this only resulted in inflation and a plummeting value of the currency, leading to increased exertion and coercion.  Remaining creditworthy became ‘a bit of an obsession, particularly for Stalin, who would prove quite willing to implement whatever policies were needed to achieve this purpose, both in the 1930s and after World War II, even if it compounded times of starvation.’ (page 47).

So, while the first five-year plan envisaged foreign trade as one of the most rapidly growing sectors, the Great Depression led to a reduction in credit and then of trade, with internal crises leading to a turn to what was called ‘import substitution’ but was in fact import deprivation – reduced imports did not lead to increased domestic production.

It therefore became a case of attempting to make a virtue out of necessity rather than any ‘discourse on the desirability of economic independence.’ (page 52). Cuts to imports to one-third of their 1931 value kept the Soviet Union solvent in 1933 while austerity allowed it to pay off its debt by 1935 – ‘the surprise was that the Soviet Union, unlike many economically emerging countries during those years, did not default on its debt, preferring to starve the Soviet population instead . . .’ (page 53) This included, by the way, paying Adolf Hitler the debt accrued to Germany in gold ingots in the mid-1930s.

All this did not result in any particularly autarkic economy by world standards; while exports by value fell by half between 1931 and 1934, by volume they fell by 28 percent, still 18 percent above the 1929 level, while world trade had reduced by 20 percent.

Sanchez-Sibony acknowledges that ‘trade did not revive much thereafter’, explaining this by the preparations for war making import dependence ‘a foolhardy proposition’ or ‘perhaps’ Soviet leaders coming to believe their ‘own propaganda on the virtues of economic independence’, which seems rather unlikely given their prior and later history.  He argues that imports of equipment became less critical than they had been at the beginning of industrialisation while the requirement  for industrial materials increased and the import of military technology became a priority. (page 55)

He states that during this period ‘the soviets continued to be dictated terms by the world economy against their plans and best interests’ and speculates whether both the role of Stalin and the course of Soviet history might have been different ‘had the Soviet state developed in a globalising, inflationary world economy more akin to the triumph of the 1950s rather than the disaster of the interwar period?’ (page 56)

Following the war, the settlement in Eastern Europe ‘presented the Soviets with their first opportunity ever to trade with other countries without overwhelming economic or political complications.  It was telling that they seized the opportunity; it heralded the explosion to come.’ (page 70) See graph below:

Foreign Trade turnover by Region (millions 1961 rubles) [from ‘Red Globalisation’]

This however did not entail a decoupling from the world capitalist system.  Referencing the new Bretton Woods system in the West, Sanchez-Sibony writes that ‘the Soviet Union, along with its CMEA [Council for Mutual Economic Assistance] partners, remained appendages to the much larger and dominant liberal construct.’ (page 73)

He recalls one ‘small episode’ that ‘best captures the nature of power relations in the new liberal order the Soviets encountered against their best predictions.’  This involved Soviet fears for the security of their ‘meagre’ reserves, more than two-thirds of which lay in American banks and almost half of which was already committed to importing rubber, that they thought might be safer if they were deposited in European banks. (page 73)

The Soviet Union remained committed to engagement with world capitalism, in what they called the “international division of labour”, resisting defaulting on their war debts in order to defend their credit within ‘the liberal financial architecture of the postwar period.’ (page 74). 

The shortage of dollars was a problem for the Soviets as it was for everyone else and they often employed barter arrangements to avoid currency requirements. They could, however, ‘only watch from the sidelines and rage about the subversive American influence’ as the latter led the reconstruction of a functioning capitalist system in Europe through Marshall Plan funding and the European Payments Union, which facilitated commercial and financial transactions among the West European countries.

The Americans became a real barrier to economic relations with other capitalist powers, which only loosened as these reduced their dependence on the US.  Even so, the Soviet economy began to grow quickly during the 1950s with foreign trade expanding at an even faster rate, the vast proportion with the other Stalinist states.  The weight of trade with developing countries also grew along with the process of decolonisation although it soon reached a  plateau, while trade with the West continued to grow ‘unrelentingly’, with the Soviet Union especially keen for access to Western technology, which was exchanged for raw materials such as oil and timber. 

Ironically Sanchez-Sibony argues that ‘the Soviet Union’s inherently weak position in international politics’ was exploited by both its East European allies, whose provision of low quality goods was subsidised, and other ‘alleged allies in the developing world.’ (page 95)  

In 1958 the Soviet Union was declaring that “in the future we will not relax our efforts to normalise and expand trade and economic relations with capitalist countries,” which year was also the beginning of large net imports of machinery from the West. (pages 107-8). About the same time Soviet leaders started to become preoccupied with repeated complaints by customers about the quality of Soviet exports.  These even included issues with their exports of raw materials, such as unseasoned timber, and coal and chromium ‘riddled with too many impurities.’ (p 116) 

Nevertheless, statistics for foreign trade showed that it increased from 12 percent of national income in 1960, to 21 per cent in 1975 and to 27 per cent in 1980; levels comparable to that of Japan.  In fact, Sanchez-Sibony claims that ‘the Soviet Union throughout the postwar era was more sensitive to changes in the world economy than other large countries such as the United States, Brazil, India, and by the late 1970s, even Japan.’ (page 5).

Far from it advancing beyond capitalism however its trade with Western Europe spoke of the reverse – ‘whereas in 1955, manufactured goods made up 28 percent of Soviet exports to Western Europe, in 1983 the figure was 6 percent.  In the mid 1980s, some three-fourths of their exports to the developed countries consisted of oil, gas, and gold.’ (page 19)

He records the fate of eight Ilyushin IL-18 airplanes sold to Ghana in the early 1960s.  Only four worked regularly, only clocking up fifteen hours each month on average, while a single British Bristol Britannia was flying 113 hours a month and required less repairs.

The Soviet Union’s trade with newly independent nations involved ‘no great Communist crusade’, and a good part of ‘Red Globalisation‘ details the commercial considerations on both sides and the absence of ideological considerations, whatever pretence was sometimes made.  For the Soviet Union ‘the main motivations . . . were political goodwill and the alleviation of western pressure on both the Soviet Union and its economic partners.’ (page 251)

He records the visit of Indian businessmen to the Soviet Union in 1954 to what were presented as the country’s most modern ‘flagship’ factories, such as Moscow’s “Stalin” car factory, and the “Red Proletariat” machine-building factory.

The report back by the businessmen to its government noted that they thought the factories ‘rather dilapidated’, housed in ‘neglected buildings’ and with ‘machinery suffering from widespread disrepair’.  They were unimpressed by the quality of output and productivity and the factory manager’s lack of concern for quality.  The ‘airplanes were chronically late’, the trams were ‘too full’, and the hotels outside Moscow and Leningrad ‘were badly made and unsanitary’, although the ‘people seemed content and children in particular looked healthy and well taken care of.’

They concluded that ‘there was little in the way of technology and industrial equipment in the Soviet Union that could not be bought somewhere else, and moreover have it be of better quality.’ (pages 162-3)

More trade with the West was thus not going to be the answer to the question of economic development while exports were uncompetitive.  In any case, as we have seen, trade with the West did increase and the Soviet Union still collapsed.  Even without autarky or the constraints on trade imposed, especially by the United States, the Soviet Union could not constitute a society with greater productivity than Western capitalism.

’Opening-up’ was not in itself an answer.  Trade with the West did not negate the problems imposed by the Stalinist policy of ‘socialism in one country’, which could not survive even with the benefit of massive oil price increases in the 1970s, of which the Soviet Union was a great beneficiary.

‘Red Globalisation’ is not a particularly long book so it could not be comprehensive. It has also been criticised by some academics for relying on a rather narrow range of archival material that avoids the documentation that would reveal the (supposedly aggressively anti-capitalist) ideological and political motives of the Soviet Union, as opposed to the portrayal by Sanchez-Sibony that it was overwhelmingly economic considerations that drove trade and economic policy.

They advance this argument by noting the original Bolshevik repudiation of the Tsarist debt and particularly the state monopoly of trade.  These, they say, demonstrate the mainly ideological character of Soviet policy.  This however misses the point, or rather several.

As Sanchez-Sibony himself argues, the choice of economic policy was itself ideological, which for Marxists derived from Stalinism’s commitment to a policy of socialism in one country.  The commitment to a state monopoly of trade was simply a reflection of the non-capitalist character of the Soviet Union, while the early Bolshevik repudiation of Tsarist debt reflects, among other things, the revolutionary character of the Soviet regime at that early point of the revolution. 

Sanchez-Sibony’s book is mainly concerned to show that the Soviet Union was not an autonomous autarky but that ‘the world economy quickly slotted the country within its economic and technological hierarchy.’ (page 247). This failure has been registered by much of the Left but not assimilated.  The majority of workers consider its experiment a failure, while the determination of much of the left not to learn from it also signals its determination to continue to own that failure.

Three books on Transgender Politics (4 of 4) – Trans – When Ideology Meets Reality

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The third book – Trans – was bought in an Oxfam bookshop in England and I wonder would I be able to buy it there again?

It is, like the first, a critique of gender identity theory, which claims that if someone identifies as a woman, they are a woman, regardless of any contrary biological facts.  It is justified because it is claimed that no one can know more or better about a person than the person themselves.  This is plausible to many, and compassion and sympathy for those minorities facing discrimination lead many to accept these claims without considering the full consequences.

The author Helen Joyce argues early in the book that this is not what gender self-identification is about – “it is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim.”

Not to do so is to invite denunciation as transphobic, including sometimes the hyperbolic claim that that to do so makes trans people feel unsafe.  The subjectivism of ‘I am who I say I am’ is replaced by ‘you must agree with what I say and agree to the demands that I make’.  Changing objective reality is what it is about, while seeking to redefine it through declaration.

Joyce says that this leads to an Orwellian world, an accusation she notes that is “often made too lightly”, but in this case is applicable because it robs language of the words to frame opposition to gender self-identification (gender ID).  ‘Male’ and ‘female’ becomes both biology and identity; for example, it is your sex when you are born and also your identity some time before and then after you transition. But if they are the same why does any transition matter if your sex is defined by your gender identity?  What does it mean to identify as female if your biological sex is unimportant to your gender identity and thus your sex?

A potential response is that medical intervention and or outward presentation is how I would like to express my identity (and therefore my sex) and this does involve a transition.  The real problem is therefore not lack of words, although this causes multiple confusion and makes any discussion a terminological nightmare, but the closed world of pure subjectivism that demands objective validation and over-rides every negative effect of this validation.

At the end of the previous review, I argued that the differences of view demonstrate that the demands of some trans activists are not the same as, and sometimes in opposition to, those of others, especially women.

But not only that, Joyce states of these activists that “this powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for.  And it serves their interests very poorly.”  One of the purposes of the book is to substantiate these claims and to show that “its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance.”

Joyce gives a brief history of transsexuality and why some men want to be women.  Contrary to the claim that ‘I am who I say I am’ must be automatically accepted, Joyce states that “in no field of medicine are patients’ reports the last word.”  

Certainly, if I were to go to a doctor and say that I have ‘X’ condition and she either says ‘no you don’t’, or ‘I would like to investigate first’, it would usually be a very good idea to accept this, even if only provisionally.  People routinely discount other’s claims about themselves, including about their behaviour, character, temperament and other proclaimed physical traits.  The claim that gender identity is some other physical and mental attribute immune to questioning and sacrosanct requires other’s faith in what they are being told, in other words acceptance without justification.

Joyce refers to studies in the 1970s and 1980s of people’s views of their sex as children and later as adults which showed that “in every one the majority outgrew their dysphoria, and the majority of those ‘desisters’ turned-out gay in adulthood.”  She reports that it is not possible to determine who among those expressing gender dysphoria will persist and seek assignment as the opposite sex, and who will desist, and cites ongoing research that whether highly feminine boys desist and identify as gay men, or persist as transwomen, or something else “is largely determined by their culture.”

Except when children are put on puberty blockers, which one study reported seemed to lead to every child in the study persisting and progressing to take cross-sex hormones.  This particular finding would thus appear to confirm the claims of some trans activists that transitioning treatment for gender dysphoria should be given without questioning or delay.  However, for Joyce, this result is likely only because such treatment itself “blocked the developmental process whereby gender dysphoria often resolves.”

The existence and reporting of such research reinforces Kathleen Stock’s appeal for “robust, accurate data.”  Joyce also comments, as did Stock, on what she sees as misleading clams.  So, she states, some of the statements made by activists to support medical intervention is misleading, citing the claims that forty-eight per cent of young trans people have attempted suicide.  This, she says, comes from responses “of twenty-seven British trans people in a larger survey promoted on LGBT websites.”  The number of respondents is both “tiny” and other explanations for elevated risk are more likely.  

Joyce notes that on the American left “activists had started to judge people and ideas, not according to the evidence . . . but according to a very particular notion of social justice.” And as we have seen, such an approach can mean accepting a three-year-old boy’s claim to be a girl.  Seeking simply to explore what might lie behind such a claim, and not immediately confirming it, is damned as transphobic and thus hazardous for therapists who might be faced with the choice.

Where Shon Faye records the stories of trans people transitioning Joyce records some of the stories of those who went through irreversible medical and surgical procedures that damaged their future health as well as life prospects, for example their future fertility, and who now bitterly regret what was done.

For Joyce, particular gender types that are today in many places considered perfectly ordinary – because the person is gay or does not, for example, fit some stereotypical masculinity – is now argued as evidence that the person is actually a different sex.  And this has the effect of only confirming the old stereotypical view of what it means to be a man or woman.

That gender ID is actually regressive is concealed by it being “defined as an inner knowing” and supposedly revealed by stereotyped appearances and action. “You long to hear that girls (or boys) are people with female (or male) bodies who behave however they damn well please; instead you hear that girls (or boys) are people who behave in feminine (or masculine) ways.”

Another way in which she states that the demands of this ideology have been regressive is that, despite complaining about the objectivisation of trans people by repeated prurient inquiry into their bodies, their demand for inclusivity has led to the objectification of women.  So, women become ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, or ‘people who bleed’, or as the Lancet recently put it ­– ‘bodies with vaginas’.  Trans women become women and women become menstruators etc.

Feminists note the absence of terms such as ‘people with sperm’ or ‘people with penises’ to refer to men.  The supposed requirement for inclusion of transmen does not seem to require the same erasure of the name for biological males. Joyce notes that while gender self-identification is a cardinal requirement of social justice for some, racial self-identification is taboo.  Lesbians who are defined by sexual orientation have this rendered meaningless by there being no meaningful definition of sex, with gender being paramount.  This leads to absurdities that they should really consider transwomen with penises as sexual partners.

The effect on women is further taken up in the argument for single-sex spaces for women on the grounds of “risk reduction, comfort and an opportunity for women to be somewhere that their needs are centred.”  So, while not all males are violent, almost all assaults on women are by men and “it is impossible for women to tell which males pose a risk”.  In some circumstances, such as prisons, self-identification is particularly dangerous as transferring to a women’s prison is especially attractive to the most dangerous men.

She notes therefore that the demands of some trans activists have a direct effect on women, including lesbians, that they do not have on men, including gay men.  It isn’t obvious to her why gay people have not reacted more than they have and gives the example of the fight to add sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the US Civil Rights Act, to which trans activists tried to tag on gender identity.  When the latter was dropped some “furious trans activists not only withdrew support for the slimmed-down bill, but campaigned against it’, an example with relevance to Shon Faye’s assertion that the demands of trans liberation are “synonymous” with the goals of the gay rights and feminist movements.

She notes, as have others, that although trans’ campaign groups “talk is about the world’s downtrodden . . . the money comes in large part from the world’s most powerful people . . .”  Faye similarly speaks of the oppressed but also notes that the cause she supports is corrupted by corporate interests for whom a gesture to trans rights is good PR.

Joyce argues that trans activists’ influence is exercised through providing training to judges, through the charity Stonewall’s ‘diversity champions’ scheme covering 850 organisations, employing a quarter of the workforce, and guidance to the press, who then report on female paedophiles, homicidal sex-offending teenage girls, and an axe-welding woman, all of whom are male.

That the trans movement is a top-down movement and not a mass, popular one is demonstrated by Joyce’s recounting of how the Irish State brought in gender self-identification under the cover of same-sex marriage.

As Joyce notes: “there was no public consultation or information campaign about gender self-ID.  Even now, hardly anyone I talk to in Ireland knows they can change their sex more cheaply and easily than they could get a passport.  And that, it turns out, was deliberate.”

She then points out that a large international law firm working for a network of LGBT youth organisations noted that the right to change one’s legal sex without parental consent would be unpopular.  However, the firm pointed out that other unpopular trans-rights policies had become law, citing Ireland.  It therefore “recommended linking such proposals with unrelated ones that commanded broad support” as in Ireland, advising clients to stay out of the news, and informing them that “Irish transactivists had ‘directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum.’”

Yet this is held up as an example to follow by Shon Faye in her book.  She endorses a letter by trans rights activists who opposed British feminists coming to Dublin to debate the issue.  This was, for these activists, an example of the arrogance of imperialism and colonialism.  Faye states that “the whiteness and unexamined colonialism of mainstream UK feminism correlate(s) directly with its tendencies towards transphobia.”

The conflation of British feminists coming to Dublin for a debate, and British colonialism/imperialism in Ireland, would be a serious minimising of the crimes of the latter, if one could take the argument at all seriously.  The misdirection seriously mistook its Irish audience, misreading a very large room.  As a letter to ‘The Irish Times’ noted, such an attitude assumed Irish women could not, after a debate, be able to make up their own minds.

Joyce argues that:

“The idea that what makes someone a man or woman is performance of, or identification with, gender is incompatible with the foundational feminist belief that women, like men, are fully human and should not be restricted by stereotypes.  Same-sex orientation cannot be defended if people are self-defined identities, rather than fleshy mortals whose sex can easily be perceived by others.  Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality.”

Back to part 3