Flowers at the Scot-Pep Memorial for Laura Lee last month.March is a month of special occasions that closely resonate with the person that Laura Lee was. Last Sunday (4 March) was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Today (8 March) is International Women’s Day. Coming up (11 March) is Mother’s Day, in the UK. 

Laura died last month, on 7 February 2018. I will remember her as a leading activist who campaigned fearlessly to decriminalise sex work. She was a freedom fighter for sex workers, a feminist, a mother to a daughter and a needed friend to many.  

I know that I spent time with one of the most intelligent, strong and inspiring mentors and mothers in the sex workers' rights movement. Among other things, Laura helped me to deal with my own frustrations at the positions that some women’s groups in Scotland have taken on sex work.

'I know that I spent time with one of the most intelligent, strong and inspiring mentors and mothers in the sex workers' rights movement.'

It was so disappointing that groups that focus on violence against women appeared to be blindly supporting the so-called 'Nordic model,' which criminalises the purchase of sex. Such legislation puts an already marginalised group of workers, sex workers, at further risk of harm by driving the industry underground.

Laura’s mentorship, and her words of wisdom, helped me to be challenging with respect and grace to those who don’t share our convictions and understandings of sex work. Everything she did in her day-to-day life, fighting for sex workers’ rights, aimed to also build the capacities of those around her.

Laura engaged fearlessly in media and public debates, seeking to protect and represent her colleagues in the fight for decriminalisation. She did endless press interviews, including on high-profile and well-known TV and radio shows, and spoke at events around the UK and abroad, from festivals to debates at universities.

At Laura's funeral, one sex worker described her as: “a woman who would walk through the door first to take the bullets.”

“A woman who would walk through the door first to take the bullets.”

The hatred directed at Laura was sometimes scarily atrocious, because she was a publicly self-identifying sex worker who refused ‘approved’ labels of victim, whore, or sexual deviant, and pointed out the detrimental effects that 'protecting' sex workers under criminalisation has had in Ireland.

In 2014, Laura confronted the Northern Irish Assembly on the Human Trafficking Bill brought by DUP Lord Morrow. It effectively imposed the Nordic model on the region, making it illegal to pay for sex. Laura gave evidence against this law at the assembly’s justice committee – and was quizzed on her personal sex life and her relationship with her father.

Laura said she was also accused of targeting vulnerable disabled men and, “in a final act of arrogance,” was told that some of the committee members “don’t need any evidence.” “Ignoring sex workers is bad enough,” she said, but this experience “took that one step further.”

Once, Laura told me that social services even contacted her to question her suitability as a mother to her daughter – who said: “she always put me first.”

Despite attacks from her opponents, intimidation tactics, and a hostile environment, Laura climbed on, challenging harmful legislation. She was not brought down by her opponents, but knowing Laura and remembering her means also identifying the challenges and vulnerabilities she faced to truly understand and appreciate her overwhelming strength.

Balloons released for Laura at her funeral.Strong women like Laura are standing up for themselves and their communities and will not be restricted in their lives by the morality of others. Of course they will terrify the DUP, one of the most socially-backward political groups.

Despite the backlash, Laura continued high-profile campaigning while also, in the background, putting in place as many safety measures for sex workers as possible.

Laura reached out to support other sex workers in distress. She convinced the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to appoint sex work liaison officers in April 2015, to make it easier for sex workers to report crimes.

She also worked with the Northern Ireland justice department, convincing them to form a special sex work liaison group, so that sex workers could be involved in work against trafficking and other exploitation.

Laura showed in her devastatingly short life that individuals in the sex industry deserve to be recognised as workers deserving of rights. She advanced demands for decriminalisation, and felt and shared love with her friends, allies and a massive community which will continue her work – because that’s what we fucking do.

Image: Banksy, Dover (2017). WikiMedia/Creative Commons license.

How do you analyse a moment, which was part of a process that is about everything, but was reduced to a yes – no decision? The EU referendum vote was both a mass participatory and mass exclusionary moment. This vote, and Brexit as a whole, can be described as a polarising conflict of marginalisations. The conflict exposed by the EU referendum constitutes an important point of entry into addressing the unmet needs and enabling the de-marginalisation of people who have been living violent marginalisation for generations. 

Following the vote, there was a 100% rise in racist incidents. One in five BAME people in the UK reported being racially abused. This is in a context of police impunity for over 1,500 deaths in custody since 1990 within which BME people are over-represented, and with black people in the UK three times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts, and 44 times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. Negotiating Brexit cannot be understood as a technical, economic process alone but one of navigating and overcoming the lived experiences of oppression in the UK. 

In my analysis of Labour’s plans for Brexit, I will look primarily at workplace and immigration policy. I will argue that the implications of a “managed migration” policy – including “employer sponsorship, work permits, visa regulations or a tailored mix of all these which works for the many, not the few” – is contradictory and will ultimately work for the few and not the many. 

This policy risks reproducing more complex systems of class subordination and fragmentation. Multi-tiered workforces and the creation of multiple statuses with differentiated access to resources and rights put collective bargaining, on a workplace or social level, at a serious practical and moral disadvantage. 

The consequences of this architecture of multiple marginalisations exists in a context of manufactured resource scarcity. The legacy and perpetuation of these marginalisations in a future climate change context of genuine resource scarcity deserves urgent attention but is outside the scope of this piece. But it should be understood that a Conservative-led Brexit will marginalise the climate crisis – already evident with support for fracking – in the name of a national interest based on a fossil fuel-dependent vision of energy security, endorsed by mainstream trade unions in the name of ‘jobs’. Labour’s vision for Brexit needs to put forward a fundamentally class, community and climate change-based approach that moves away from airport expansion, fracking and fossil fuels. 

Brexit as conflict

The media-backed right wing Brexit camp stoked the marginalisation of a ‘British public’, a singular identity of British-born and majority white Christian citizens – who had been marginalised by the unaccountable bureaucrats of the EU, who had undermined a sovereign population’s ability to make its own decisions. The enemy was Brussels and immigrants, refugees, sliding to general ‘outsiders’ – Muslim and black and brown communities – competing for scarce resources – jobs, housing, health care, and welfare. ‘Taking back control’ would be empowering, the box to tick to shake the establishment, although in reality the establishment was holding both boxes. 

Racism, class, poverty and capitalism were marginalised by this discourse. It was a nationalistic narrative promoted by corporate and establishment interests seeking to maintain a system based on a continuing subordination and marginalisation of working class people wherever they come from. 

The leftist Lexit camp mobilised through the trope of the organised, diverse British working class, with shared interests and history, driving towards a planned, socialist economy. Control ‘over the supply of labour’ was to be a key part of this, and neoliberal trade deals and directives such as the Posted Workers Directive were to be scrapped. The PWD allows companies to employ overseas workers at different rates of pay but not less than the minimum wage in host countries, enabling them to work where wages are higher, but contributing to a divided, multiple-tiered workforce undermining the rights of all workers in the workplace and their capacity to collectively bargain. 

The Lexit camp characterised the EU as a capitalist club designed to enforce wage restraint, undermine trade unions and prevent the British working class from realising the power to win. Controlling the supply of labour would be necessary to do this. The working class in this conception were framed as British citizens. The marginalised left-wing British working class would need to marginalise the migrant working class in order to achieve its aims. 

The mainstream Remain camp narrative matched the political representation of the EU by the EU – a community of nations, co-operation and mutual aid. Advocates by turns invoked inter-state solidarity and the benefits of freedom of movement for all citizens. Immigrants were ‘a benefit’ to the economy, mass net contributors, entrepreneurs. The responsibility of the EU in maintaining a disempowered working class, whose freedoms amounted to choosing which country to be exploited in, went unaddressed. 

The existence of trade deals which sell off public services and assets and the dominant neoliberal economic framework within which ‘development’ would evolve were also unmentioned. The complicity of EU states in permitting the blocking, drowning and incarceration of refugees in camps, rather than allowing them access to the resources and rights that citizens have, helped marginalise migrant, British and non-British working class experiences of exploitation and exclusion. 

The left wing Remain camp, which included Greece’s former Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis, comprised those who saw the choice as a ‘lose-lose’ one. The benefits of being able to move in search of better conditions and work, gaining protection from some of the rulings which have enabled equal pay and a limit to working hours, were seen as a restraint on employer abuses.

This position was a defensive one, against the prospect of being at the mercy of a more nationalist British establishment which could take back even more control over working conditions, borders, trade unions, the public sector and trade. This compromise marginalised the potential for breaking up a powerful neoliberal institution, whose existence is actually a driver of the marginalising processes which are being opposed, leading Lexit critics to label Left Remainers as nonsensical and unambitious. 

These very general descriptions of the way the Brexit debate was framed will in their brevity sideline other positions, but they demonstrate some of the conflicts within attitudes towards Brexit. 

Whose Brexit?

Understanding more about who voted, how and why is critical. Whilst it hasn’t been possible to quantify the motivations of any group of voters fully, the June 2017 British Social Attitudes Survey, based on interviewing 3,000 people, found nearly three-quarters of those who are “worried about immigration” voted Leave, compared with 36% who did not identify this as a concern.

The Leave – Remain divide has been quantified in race, class, age, education and economic income terms, yet the statistics do not cover the experience of those who voted. Leave voters came from areas with the lowest wages in the country and where there was a high proportion of unskilled jobs. Remain areas specialised in jobs with higher pay. According to analysts EMSI, Leave areas have their highest specialisations in industrial jobs, ranging from tool-makers to production line workers; Remain areas have their highest specialisations in creative and professional roles, with arts, advertising and journalism riding high. These are jobs where workers have a high degree of control over their own labour and working day. 

Two-thirds of those describing themselves as Asian voted Remain, as did 73% of black voters, whilst nearly six in ten of those describing themselves as Christian voted Leave; seven in ten voting Muslims voted to Remain. These figures don’t reveal the conditions working class people of colour experience, with Bangladeshi household incomes £8,900 a year (35%) lower than the white British median and typical black households £5,600 less (22%). These income gaps widen after housing costs are accounted for, given that 58% of white British families own their own home, while only one in four Bangladeshi, black and other white (primarily European) families do.

LSE research concluded that a greater pool of migrant labour for employers to exploit does not drive down wages. Pay did fall by 0.7% in some areas, which is not insignificant if you are on a minimal income. It also did not appear to take into account the impact of reduced overtime and hours and intensification of the labour process, or the fact that the floor of wage rights – the minimum wage – is actually a ceiling in many workplaces. This suggests that while a greater pool of workers for managers to choose from may not drive down wages, unorganised workers can be used to keep wages lowhttps://www.labourfreemovement.org/the-posted-workers-directive-a-red-herring/ by undermining collective bargaining in the absence of unionisation drives.

The current legislative and contractual framework in which work is organised is more significant in undermining the rights of migrant workers than their origins or language barriers. A recent cleaners’ strike (1) saw agency workers sourced from Norwich and Scotland undermine striking Serco cleaners, showing that workers need not be sourced from overseas to undermine collective bargaining, given the flexibility of contracts and relative impunity of employers.

Labour is people

Contrary to the Lexit and Labour argument that constricting the supply of labour is the answer to a lack of organisation in the workplace, a massive investment in organising migrant workers and cracking down on modern slavery from a worker-centred perspective is required. Trade union rhetoric and intention is not matched by the funding and focus needed to do this. Funding education, training and organisers who speak the language of workers from countries of high migration is key, not just to union renewal, but to social change in the UK. 

An example: the hospitality industry is the fourth biggest employer in the UK (2). It has one of the highest proportions of migrant and BME workers (70%) and the lowest union density in the country – 3.6% (3) and some of the highest incidences of exploitation and discrimination (4). The biggest trade union in the country – Unite – of which I am a member and for whom I worked since 2005 for seven years, has just two full-time organisers in this sector. The London hotel workers branch runs on a shoestring and uses volunteer translators. The helpline for Unite members does not offer advice in languages other than English. We can’t organise complex workplaces on the cheap. The mainstream trade unions are yet to meet the challenge of organising in the most casualised sectors, even if the smaller, more agile, non-bureaucratic unions such as United Voices of the World and the Industrial Workers of Great Britain can. 

The idea of workplaces with union recognition agreements being the only ones to permit migrant labour – an idea put forward by the Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey and potentially on the table for Labour – should not be confused with union strength and the closed shop. The imposition of these conditions by law risks barring workers from industries and pushing people into undocumented work. To implement union labour only workplaces would need massive enforcement given that workplaces employing migrant labour are not only big agricultural, logistics and processing factories and warehouses, but also small firms, restaurants and hotels. An extension of the minimum wage inspectorate and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority which is currently playing a policing role in enforcing the ‘hostile environment’ directive would be needed. This approach is not a trade union or worker-led led one to organisation, but one of state enforcement, which could actually result in trade unions playing the role of border guard, restricting access to jobs for fellow workers by visa status and nationality. 

Brexit means new borders

Already human resource management analysts and corporate lawyers predict a lobbied-for modification of TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment)) legislation to allow for ‘harmonisation’ of terms and conditions between workers transferring from one employer to another. This is expected to follow a wage suppression trend. Others are arguing that TUPE should not apply to small and medium enterprises. These can easily be created through the current lax agency laws which allow companies to fold and resurface with the same staff, offices and directors but without liabilities for the workers they just decided not to pay, leading to even fewer rights for agency workers. 

UK case law, such as the recent victories by Unison on scrapping tribunal fees and the right for workers in union-recognised workplaces to be consulted over contractual changes, is not expected to be impacted but caps in equality case compensation, and changes to sick pay and holiday rights are being lobbied for.

Labour’s proposed repeal of the dozen or more Conservative legal instruments designed to restrict and criminalise trade union activity also needs to be accompanied by a trade union education programme delivered through schools, colleges, Labour and Momentum media and trade unions to encourage and normalise union organising as common sense. Sanctions against employers who violate workers’ rights need to be substantial enough to act as a deterrent to current practices of victimise first, pay later. Focusing on restricting freedom of movement, rather than employer impunity, marginalises the responsibility of businesses which treat all workers as expendable. 

Taking back control

Capital is attempting to colonise resources for social reproduction by restricting migrants’ access to services before coming for ‘us’. The Immigration Act creates conditions for future privatisation of not only our public services, but public life and rights to a commons.

Landlords are demanding passport checks in order to rent property (5). Property, even temporary, is defined by the Government as a prerequisite for accessing treaty rights (right to residency) – for some time, rough-sleeping EU nationals have been being seized from the streets by Immigration Enforcement Teams (with the help of charities), locked in detention centres and deported. This process was successfully taken to judicial review, thanks to activists and pro-bono lawyers with North East London Migrant Action. The Department for Education’s gathering of nationality and birthplace data in the school census is to be shared with the Home Office in order to target families for deportation, effectively making the right to free education conditional on status. Access to free health care has been axed for migrants – with proof of identity increasingly sought by medics. Now both a private insurance and payment system has been established which can be extended to citizens in future. Racial profiling is an inherent part of this process leading to an escalation of racist othering in schools, clinics, by landlords, the mainstream media and on the streets. 

Papers, visa, union card please

At the last count, the UK had 34 different types of visa in operation (6). Even if you are an ‘exceptional talent’ in science, humanities, etc., and wish to realise your potential in the UK, you need exceptionally large sums of cash. The application will cost you £292, unrefundable if rejected, and a further £293 if accepted. 

‘Barista Visas’ (based on current two-year Youth Mobility Visas), ‘London Visas’ (for Square Mile financial sector employees), ‘Brickie Visas’ (a three-year points-based visa), and seasonal, sectoral, regional (Australia and Canada have them), age and occupational points-based schemes have all been suggested as methods of managing migration by the Government’s Migrant Advisory Committee. Access to any state welfare support will be axed. Replacing migrant workers with machines has also been suggested as an alternative to plugging the skills gap (7).

New visas, statuses and forms of sponsorship will create new markets of labour purchase for employers – possibly jointly brokered by trade unions – and new markets for visa trading, people trafficking and further exploitation of undocumented workers. During the passage of the Modern Slavery Act, the Government slashed the rights of victims to recover unpaid wages to just two years. According to the Anti-Trafficking and Labour Exploitation Unit, if the UK leaves the EU it will be far more difficult to challenge this restriction and if the Human Rights Act is scrapped, it may be impossible.

Germany, and Denmark with the agreement of Danish trade unions, have applied differential status for refugees within the labour market and lower wages – one euro per hour in the case of one German work programme– in workfare-style bonded apprenticeships, tying workers to employer-registered accommodation and sponsorship. Devaluing the price of labour undermines the rights of people seeking refuge and collective strength and bargaining. Labour’s ‘managed migration’ should not follow this divisive route. 

Restricting access to healthcare, education, welfare, work, equal rights, property and representation for millions of people living in the UK signals a new round of marginalisation, and an intensification of the class system, leading to a form of social death for non-citizens. 

Margins burn…

The devaluation of black lives in the UK to the point that they are expendable and the continuing denial of this crisis correspond with an ongoing colonial process by capital of resource extraction and accumulation which deny life and designate entire habitats as sacrifice zones. These can be regions in the global south or they can be in the UK, including in the most unequal and expensive borough in the capital – the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

What has the Grenfell catastrophe to do with Brexit? It represents the consequence of multiple marginalisations – by those with drastically more power and privilege, wealth, whiteness, qualifications, confidence and freedom of movement, possessed by council leaders, decision-makers, developers, landlords, employers, media commentators, the newspaper editors who sanctioned ridicule and smear stories – marginalising the economic and social factors which led to the catastrophe – all pushing millions of people to the margins, which in the case of Grenfell Tower, led to their deaths.

The mainstream media as a marginalisation machine

Researching this piece, I kept noticing how online searches consistently reproduced the voices of those who were already empowered. The representational universe on Brexit is highly mediated. 

Momentum-related activists put on a series of events in split Leave and Remain cities under the banner of ‘Take Back Control’ to bring together Leave and Remain voters and try to process some of the dynamics which informed people’s fears and desires. Whilst they tended to attract mostly politicised left-wing Remain voters, the events, with their conflict-welcoming opening sessions, were still a model for engaging people from across the vote divide. 

Momentum organised dozens of Bernie Sanders’ Get Out the Vote campaign-inspired training sessions in doorstep election canvassing. These enabled a break with mediated communication into mass face-to-face outreach. Hundreds queued on Friday evenings in central London to train and thousands took part in nationwide sessions, basically on how to speak to each other. This helped transform the election campaign in its directness, unpredictability and de-centering of already privileged opinions and voices. 

A similar process should explore some of the drivers of the Brexit vote – Leave or Remain and the changes that are trying to emerge through it. Conversations, not mediated by commentators with massive media platforms, are going to be experienced face-to-face. A deep democratic understanding of the ways we have come to marginalise and be marginalised, within our relationships, our workplaces, our communities and ourselves needs to happen. 

The role of Labour and Momentum activists and leaders should be to develop the Labour manifesto as a guide for a participatory Brexit policy, explored through conflict facilitation across the country, fostering well-facilitated meetings where conflict is not suppressed or ‘resolved’ but processed, and where marginalising power is named and understood. 

Brexit is a conflict of marginalisations, deliberately polarised by the yes-no question and the framing of the idea of ‘taking our country back’ by powerful elites. Negotiations which “seek to unite the country around a Brexit deal that works for every community in Britain” need to involve everyone. Despite its current elite unaccountability, Brexit can be reclaimed at a grassroots level, as an entrance into a new political understanding, process and polity.

Notes:

(1) Morning Star, London strikers unite against trio of bad bosses 

(2) Oxford Economics for the British Hospitality Association, The Economic Contribution of the UK Hospitality Industry, September 2015.

(3) Williams, Steve, Introducing Employment Relations, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2014.

(4) Trades Union Congress, Still just a bit of banter? August 10th 2016

(5) UK Home Office, Residential tenancies provisions of the Immigration Act 2014 (Right to Rent).

(6) UK Home Office, Home Office Immigration and Nationality Charges, April 2017.

(7) UK Home Office, Migration Advisory Committee, EEA Workers in the UK Labour Market – A briefing note to accompany the call for evidence, August 4th 2017.

Honduran feminist activist María Luisa Regalado, photographed by Whitney Godoy. All rights reserved.

I come from a very large and very poor, rural family. We all worked on a big farm without pay, and because of the conditions under which we were forced to live, there were times when I would rebel; I was always quite rebellious.

My dad was a very imposing figure in our lives; a real patriarch. He never hit my mum but he was violent in his words and attitudes and it made me very angry. I recall when I was young hoping that my dad would die first so that she could live her later years in peace. It was not to be.

I grew up resentful of exploitation, always ready to resist. Because I had to work I never went to school, no one in my family did. I was 22 years old when I learned to write my name

My mum died first and was closely followed by my dad. I was left behind with two sisters, aged eight and twelve and my brother who was fifteen. I had to finish bringing them up: a child raising three children.

I grew up resentful of exploitation, always ready to resist. Because I had to work I never went to school, no one in my family did. I was 22 years old when I learned to write my name. I really wanted an education so when my parents died, I joined the church. Out in the countryside it was the only option.

There was a progressive priest there named Father Factomia. He was a very committed man, very critical of militarisation and the regional impact of intervention by the right-wing paramilitary Nicaraguan contras. When I met him, he was openly denouncing the war that in El Salvador and was very supportive of the refugees.  He coordinated voluntary work in the community and the refugee camps. When I wasn’t caring for my siblings, I was helping him.

Father Factomia was the first person to teach me about the social justice work. In 1982, he was forced into exile in Mexico because the military wanted him dead. The new priest only knew how to pray, so I left soon after he did.

A feminist in Honduras

If it had not always been, by now my path was set. I joined the first peasant organisation for women, The Federation of Honduran Women Peasants. They were part of a Christian worker’s federation, which was marred by deep political tensions between progressives and conservatives. The leadership thought we were making too much noise with “leftist issues” – so now it was my turn to be driven out. Along with two other women, I was expelled.

Undeterred, we formed our own peasant organisation to work closely with what was to become Honduras’ Trade Union Congress. I participated in its founding but was soon exhausted by the continuous internal struggles. A part of me wanted to go back to my village and build a life there; but I was too tied up in the fight, too wedded to the idea that justice was possible. So, I stayed in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Together with my compañeras, we founded what CODEMUH is today: a feminist, anti-establishment, anti-imperialist organisation. That was in June, 1989.

 As a women’s organisation, we soon discovered that feminism was considered an even more dangerous topic than anti-imperialism.

The 1980s were the height of anti-imperialist struggle in the capital. In the villages and barrios though, people still thought it was a dangerous discussion to be having. They were afraid of being associated with us because of the military repression. So, in the early 1990s we renamed ourselves Colectiva de Mujeres Hondureñas: the Collective of Honduran Women (CODEMUH): a feminist name. Back then, we didn’t understand the pillars of feminism but we knew we knew that was our true identity.

As a women’s organisation, we soon discovered that feminism was considered an even more dangerous topic than anti-imperialism, even in the city. We were striving to work with women across society, from peasant women like me to students, trade unionists and civil servants. But we found that women weren’t very interested in speaking about gender, much less feminism. Often, women would ask us what the point was. “Let’s free the country first,” they’d say, referring to the struggle for national independence. “The other transformations will follow, only after the country belongs to the people.”

We knew this wasn’t right, that we needed to understand and confront gender violence in our communities, here and now. An independence movement which does not recognise the voices, perspectives and work of women will never bring us freedom. Likewise, the Honduran movement against economic imperialism - the struggle for true independence - would be fatally weakened by the exclusion of women, who make up half of the population.

 Until 1955 women were not even citizens in Honduras, we had no right to vote, no political or human rights whatsoever. All the gains made since then had come from our own work. 

Until 1955 women were not even citizens in Honduras, we had no right to vote, no political or human rights whatsoever. All the gains made since then had come from women’s own work. We know that to assert our beliefs and have our rights respected, we need to be part of the political struggle.

We also have to educate each other, because we need a women’s movement that thinks critically and sees clearly the root causes of our oppression. Without that vision, the problems facing our society look very different and so do the solutions. I am often offered money for labour rights work by corporate funders. We will sit and talk with them, but we cannot take money from the same corporations that are failing to guarantee the rights of women in the workplace, or paying us fair wages, or supporting better conditions for us.  

They fear us

In the beginning, these commitments cost us dearly. Eomen left and in the end just three of us remained to build what CODEMUH is today: a women-led grassroots organisation that has survived for 20 years to fight for the empowerment and rights of women workers. It is run by feminists seeking change in society that allows women to realise our potential, free from exclusion and discrimination.

Today we have 150 members organising women in factories across the garment factory sector. Our greatest achievement has been to take women out of the world of four walls: the four walls of the kitchen and the four walls of the garment factories - so that their faces our recognised and their voices heard.

Another success has been that women take ownership of their own liberation and find courage to publicly denounce abuse at work, by the state, in the media and around the world. This includes taking legal action through the courts. We also play a vital role in raising awareness to have conditions like occupational musculoskeletal disorders, which are caused by corporate exploitation, recognized as occupational diseases. CODEMUH is an international benchmark for its expertise in labour law.

I am thankful that CODEMUH has grown strong, but time has proven our original perspective right in the worst possible way. Under the past two administrations, the cause of women’s liberation has been pushed backwards into a defensive war.

 Women and their bodies have become the battlefields of the big organised crime gangs.

The coup of 2009 and the global financial crash threw us into a political crisis. The gangs, drug trafficking and organised crime escalated, all with links to the political establishment. Women and their bodies have become the battlefields of the big organised crime gangs.

CODEMUH also lost many sources of funding. We were forced to cut staff and it was a terrible time. We only survived thanks to the resilience of the women organising our outreach groups, who really stepped up and developed as leaders.

Instead of moving to protect the women of Honduras, the state sits back and justifies violence against us by saying that women are involved in the drug trafficking and crime. Women are routinely accused and stigmatised without investigation. The public money spent on security is wasted through corruption. The killers know they can murder with impunity and sleep with their doors open. 97 per cent of the time when a woman is murdered, no one is punished. 

Those in power would have women return to the world of four walls. Many political campaigns that claim to represent women’s interests offer only conciliatory gifts designed to keep us at home. Several government proposals to implement tortilla microenterprises are designed to send women back into the kitchen. When women are injured in street protests, the authorities say: “it’s her fault for being on the street and not where she should be.”

But we want freedom, not four walls. We see a future without violence and impunity. Without impunity, the violence could be investigated; the murderers and abusers would be jailed. Our struggle is against the patriarchal system, which is not only against abuse by men but the system that justifies it and the state that offers no justice for women.

Now we are taking to the streets, demanding our human rights: our rights as women and workers, they fear us. We are pushing back against domestic violence, sexual harassment and killings; against those who see women as things and not as people. This is our fight, beyond the world of four walls, to dismantle the structures of the patriarchy. It is a lifetime’s struggle. But it belongs to us.

___

Click here to read her latest update for International Women’s Day.

From left: Paul Murray, Peta Credlin, David Speers and Kieran Gilbert with their Silver Logie for the Most Outstanding News Coverage during the 2017 Logie Awards at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Sunday, April 23, 2017. Tracey Nearmy/Press Association. All rights reserved.For much of the 1980s, Rupert Murdoch steadily lost money on his Sky TV venture, initially offered as a pan-European service to owners of large satellite dishes. He assumed there was a pan-European advertising market: he was wrong.

When it became technically possible, in 1988, to deliver multiple channels to medium-sized dishes in the UK, Murdoch doubled down on his investment, even though he would now face a government-sponsored rival, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), using an even smaller “squarial” dish. At one point, in 1990, Murdoch’s master company, News Corporation, came close to breaching its banking covenants, as the losses at Sky mounted. It was a career-defining gamble.

As both satellite companies splurged cash in competing for ruinously expensive Hollywood studio deals, they stared bankruptcy in the face; and they eventually collapsed into each other’s arms, with control of the newly-formed BSkyB, although owned equally by the rivals, ceded to Murdoch.  The combined business was losing £10 million a week.

Studio deals were painfully re-negotiated: discussions with Disney were so brutal that all the negotiators abandoned the talks, leaving executives from both sides (I was one of them) trying to manage an output deal that existed as a rough outline on a single sheet of paper. Talks over supply of The Disney Channel were even more fraught, and, in due course, litigious.

BSkyB eventually turned the corner, and was floated on the stock exchange, allowing the original BSB shareholders to exit: a requirement of the flotation, to induce outside investors to buy shares, was for News Corp to reduce its stake to below 40%, even whilst explicitly retaining tight operational control….

Eighteen years later

By 2010, News Corp had taken dominant positions in the leading satellite enterprises in both Italy and Germany/Austria, and it became commercially obvious to consolidate all three businesses, starting with buying back the whole of Sky. So News Corp bid £7 a share for the 61% held independently, valuing the company at over £7 billion (the independent directors rejected the proposal, saying £8 was the minimum they could consider).

That bid was derailed by the phone-hacking scandal: the ensueing Leveson Inquiry and parliamentary hearings humbled (his word) Murdoch and damaged his newspaper empire (the News of the World was forced to close). The scandal also forced Rupert’s son James to resign as chairman of Sky, in order to avoid the company being adjudged by media regulator Ofcom not fit and proper to retain its many broadcast licences (he had been CEO of the newspaper division when News Corp failed to acknowledge, let alone root out, phone hacking and other criminal activities). Legal and closure liabilities, and compensation payments, cost News Corp the best part of a billion pounds…

After the failed bid

Yet the Murdochs bounced back. Ironically, the shameful activities at The Sun and the News of the World finally induced them to adopt a strategy many of their shareholders had long urged: splitting the print business (which inherited the old News Corp title) from the entertainment business (now titled 21st Century Fox – or Fox for short). As the value of Fox surged, the worth of the 39% held by the Murdoch Family Trust (MFT) in the two companies also grew dramatically. And because the consolidation of the three satellite TV businesses still went ahead, but was now financed through Sky, rather than through News Corp (or Fox), the MFT enjoyed a further cash benefit.

By the time the Murdochs (through Fox) returned to the Sky bidding fray, in December 2016, they valued the company they had created back in the 1980s at £17 billion, bidding £10-75 for each of the 61% of Sky shares not owned by Fox. Not long before then, the shares had fallen to below £8, as fears over the cost of football rights (which had soared after BT entered the premium sports market), and rapid expansion by rival subscription offers from Netflix and Amazon, depressed market expectations.

Yet even after the bid was made, the share price languished at barely £9: indeed, in my November 14 article on the prospects of the bid succeeding, I noted that investors were spurning a virtually guaranteed 20% return well within 12 months. Clearly, they had been spooked by the scale and intensity of the opposition the Murdochs faced….

The new opponents

Curiously, this time around most of the opponents of the 2010 bid – commercial rivals of News Corp in the shape of other UK newspaper groups, Channel 4 and even the BBC – had almost nothing to say that was hostile to the transaction. The dangers they had emphasised in 2010 – of the potential threat if the newspapers and television businesses were combined (which the EU competition authorities quickly dismissed as vastly over-stated) – were clearly sidelined by the new company structure: it would be illegal to merge any activities without formal approval from two different sets of shareholders.

But new – and more effective – opponents came to the fore: pressure groups such as Avaaz, 38 Degrees, Hacked Off and the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, along with an array of academics. And the new structure of the Murdoch empire did not eliminate fears that the MFT might deploy the views published in the newspapers within News Corp (where it owned 39%) at Sky News, if Fox (where it also owned 39%) took full control of the broadcaster.

The absence of any prior attempts – across nearly 30 years – to influence Sky News was not sufficient to dissuade, first Ofcom, and then the CMA (the Competition and Markets Authority), from believing that – despite the existence of the Broadcasting Code forbidding the expression of views on Sky News, and despite Sky News and News Corp between them being responsible for only 10% of news consumption – the proposed transaction might reduce media plurality and therefore be against the public interest.

Even so – and especially with both regulators clearing the bid with respect to Fox’s genuine commitment to broadcasting standards – it was hard to see why market sentiment was so negative. After all, it seemed very obvious that Fox would offer undertakings to the CMA that wholly insulated Sky News from any possibility of MFT influence, whilst underwriting its losses for up to a decade: which would surely remove all media plurality concerns.

On Tuesday, February 20, Fox did indeed offer those pledges, and added a further dimension. In December, Murdoch had surprised the media world by agreeing to sell most of Fox (other than news and sports TV channels in the US) to Disney, in a deal valued at over $60 billion. The head of Disney, Bob Iger, described Sky as the jewel in the Fox crown, and it was assumed that, after Fox had completed its purchase of Sky, it would be passed on to Iger at the end of the lengthy regulatory scrutiny of Disney’s offer for Fox. As Disney – owner of ABC News in the US – was an uncontroversial owner of Sky News, many critics of the Fox bid dialled down their opposition. The Fox undertakings to underwrite Sky News’ losses for ten years would be inherited by Disney – a £200 million commitment that would be deducted from the Disney price for Fox….

Enter the “arbs”

The hedge funds, “value” funds and “arbs” (specialists in arbitrage situations) who had speculated in Sky shares now plunged in much more deeply. These funds are overwhelmingly US-owned or US-based, and the prospect of squeezing up the price Fox had offered, to reflect the larger significance of the Disney deal, had been boosted by three other factors.

First, Sky had cut a “mutual carriage” deal with BT, whereby their respective sports offerings would become automatically available on each other’s services. Most observers predicted that this would lead to a reduction in the price paid for renewing TV rights to the Premier League, by easing the competitive heat between the two main bidders. Last month, the auction outcome for the years 2019-22 duly revealed that Sky had actually reduced its commitment by £200 million a year. BT’s expensive venture into sports rights has helped reduce its market capitalisation by two-thirds in less than five years: last week, its enterprise value fell below that of Sky for the first time.

The second new factor – the assumption that Murdoch’s February 20 commitments to Sky News had clearly been pre-approved by Disney – meant that Sky News seemed safe for the foreseeable future, an outcome that was warmly received at an event organised by The Media Society on the question of the future of Sky News, that very evening. The “arbs” assumed that CMA approval of the Fox deal (even if the subsequent Disney bid never completed) was now certain.

The third factor was the continuing sets of positive results from Sky, confirming its resilience in the face of fierce competition. The twentieth consecutive year of revenue growth had delivered profits well above the £1 billion mark, and reflected some actual progress in both Italy and Germany/Austria (who between them only account for a third of Sky’s revenues, but where growth had previously been patchy)….

Enter Comcast

Then, on February 27, the price of Sky shares rocketed as a new player entered the contest: Comcast, the giant US cable operator. Comcast had reportedly tried to break up the Fox/Disney transaction by offering a higher price; but the Murdochs had seemingly calculated that a vertical deal (a cable company buying a content company) might face stiffer regulatory hurdles in the US than a horizontal deal (between two content companies).

This calculation may seem counter-intuitive: after all, horizontal deals can create or enlarge dominant positions, which are seen as anti-competitive (for instance, Disney and Fox combined have a 40% share of cinema box office in some territories). By contrast, a platform company buying content is usually seen as less threatening to consumer welfare.

However, the Trump administration has decided to oppose the bid by AT and T (a major telecoms and cable company) to buy Time Warner (home of HBO, CNN and a vast business producing and distributing content), claiming it will lead to higher prices for consumers (in previous years, Murdoch had also tried to buy Time Warner, and been rejected). That challenge will be decided by Judge Richard Leon, in a case starting March 19 and scheduled to take several weeks to conclude. His judgement is expected in the summer.

Not entirely by coincidence, Judge Leon also presided in anti-trust hearings over Comcast’s own purchase of a major content company, NBC Universal, seven years ago. That ‘vertical’ deal gave Comcast a foothold in the UK, with NBCU’s digital channels – including news – and production entities such as Carnival Films. These are highly unlikely to form a sufficient impediment to the proposed purchase of Sky, as they barely register on the media plurality scale…

A clear run for Comcast? And will they underwrite Sky News?

Not that Comcast can assume a clear regulatory run in the UK: it has had a number of problems with the US regulatory and legal system, as well as with unhappy consumers (“the world’s worst company” as some of them have dubbed it). Understandably, Fox is arguing that Comcast should undergo just as rigorous a scrutiny as it has experienced, should the intention to bid be confirmed.

As it happens, the public record of Comcast’s mis-steps and failings runs in uncanny parallel with the complaints made about Fox: sexual harassment, breaches of undertakings, suppression of journalism, and even an Ofcom sanction – a £40,000 fine, something not on the Fox rap-sheet – for broadcasting material unsuitable for children at the wrong time.

Will the pressure groups who have campaigned against Fox regard it as their public duty to take up cudgels against Comcast, too? Given Comcast’s indifference to the idea of ‘net neutrality’, there may be consumer groups who could choose to object to a Comcast purchase. Absent the involvement of politicians and the likes of Avaaz, it seems unlikely that the scrutiny process could reach the level of a formal intervention. But that absence cannot be assumed, and there is a low threshold for the Secretary of State to order a stage 1 Ofcom inquiry; if not into media plurality, then into broadcasting standards. Presumably, Comcast has factored that in to its calculations.

Just as Disney owns ABC News in the US, Comcast owns NBC News: there is no inherent reason for either to walk away from Sky News if they acquired it, other than the scale of commercial losses. But the Murdoch pledge of February 20 seems to bind Disney. All that Comcast has offered so far is recognition that “Sky News is an invaluable part of the UK media landscape” and an intention to “maintain Sky News’ existing brand and culture”: no mention of open-ended underwriting of losses. That ambiguity may not survive a formal regulatory review of Comcast’s bid, were it to happen: Tom Watson, Labour’s shadow culture minister, has already called for firm undertakings.             

Comcast’s next steps

The Comcast announcement did not commit the company to making a definite bid: yet the extensive detail in their preliminary documentation virtually guarantees that what was – under UK Stock Exchange rules – a non-binding rule 2.4 statement of intent will escalate to a binding rule 2.7 offer, probably next month. This short hiatus will allow Comcast to prepare the EU filings that are a requirement for a deal – with approval to be expected by mid-July.

A formal offer in April would force the independent directors of Sky to reconsider the agreement they entered into with Fox when they provisionally accepted its £10.75 per share bid. Comcast are offering £12.50 in cash, and are willing to leave Fox in place with 39%, provided they secure 50% plus 1 of Sky’s shares.

The initial reaction of the market was to boost the share price to a 10% premium above the Comcast offer, on the assumption that Fox/Disney would come back with a higher bid (the shares have slipped a little since then, but are still well above £13). Curiously, it is the Comcast bid which exposes the case for a much higher take-out price, in that it projects that an acquisition at £12.50 would be earnings positive in the first year (excluding transaction costs), even though there are no cost savings and virtually no synergies to be derived from combining two separate and different businesses. Comcast is quite open: the main benefit it would derive would be a re-balancing of its earnings, from 91% domestic to 75%.

So if £12.50 per share is the non-strategic value of Sky to Comcast – the hedge fund argument goes – the strategic value to Fox or Disney is much higher: anything from £14 to £16 a share is mooted. This is more of a pain to Fox than Disney, as any additional funds assigned to buying out the 61% would presumably be deducted from the deal value of Disney’s offer for Fox itself.

                                           *************

So who will win?

On the face of it, speed of process, no media plurality concerns, a cash bid, and a target of only 50% plus 1 would put Comcast in pole position, absent a matching or higher offer from Fox. Neither Fox nor Disney can buy shares in the market (and so shutting out Comcast by acquiring the 11% needed to block Comcast’s path to 50%), pending the outcome of the current offer process; nor can Disney launch a bid of its own for Sky without the agreement of Fox.

If Fox does not increase its offer, Sky’s independent directors could clearly argue that they should be released from their agreement with Fox, allowing Comcast to see if they can reach the 50% plus 1 target at £12.50. Holders of 1% or more of a company’s shares must declare their position, and that has exposed about 17% of the equity in the hands of “arb” investors, with probably the same amount owned by others of that ilk, though with individual holdings below the 1% level. These funds are entirely cash-oriented: highest bid wins.

With 39% held by Fox, probably 34% in “arb” hands, and perhaps 10% held by non-professional investors, a residue of 15-17% is thought to be controlled by what are called “index funds”, who may sit tight until an unconditional offer is on the table from one party or another. Comcast would have to induce all the non-professionals and most of the index funds to accept its offer to meet its 50% plus 1 target, if Fox declined to sell its 39%.

It is possible that Fox/Disney might just sit tight on their 39%, and see if Comcast can achieve majority control. At that point, a calculation by both sides might involve exchanging stakes in the US on-demand video service Hulu (which will become 60% Disney-owned if the purchase of Fox is completed, with Comcast holding the balance, through NBCU) for stakes in Sky (which presumably would have then also ended up 60:40, this time in Comcast’s favour). There is a long history of stake-swapping between US media companies: another reason why the Comcast offer seems both risk-free and a pain in the neck for Fox/Disney.

Fox can – and probably will – win out in the end, by topping the Comcast offer, and slogging through the last stages of the approval process. But Comcast rarely lose a contested auction, and have plenty of fire-power in reserve.   

Back to the approval process

Meanwhile, the CMA final report on the Fox bid is due in May, with the new Culture Minister, Matt Hancock, scheduled to announce his response to it in June. The working assumption is that the MFT undertakings on Sky News will tip the CMA into approving the Fox purchase, leaving Hancock to choose between an outright endorsement of such a recommendation, or holding yet another consultation. It is hard to see that process going much beyond July.

By then Avaaz will have received the outcome of their application for judicial review of the original Ofcom clearance of the Fox bid. That appeal had been on the grounds that Ofcom’s analysis of evidence of Fox’s lack of commitment to broadcasting standards had been marred by factual error and mistaken methodology.

With all due respect to Avaaz, the chances of this review succeeding are effectively zero. Two Court of Appeal judges would have to conclude that, not only was Ofcom in serious error, but that no reasonable person could have reached the conclusions it arrived at. Indeed, even if they reached such a conclusion, the outcome would simply be a requirement that Ofcom review its process – and the chance of it arriving at a different decision is minimal.

Nor, indeed, could even that have an effect, as Hancock’s predecessor, Karen Bradley, over-rode Ofcom’s clearance of the Fox bid on broadcasting grounds, and invited the CMA to examine the objections all over again. This it did, and came to almost identical conclusions as Ofcom, both in terms of the evidence and the methodology used. Anyone with the patience to do so can follow the entire process on the CMA website, but I have singled out one of Avaaz’s objections as an example of what is involved.

The “foxification” of Sky News Australia

This is what Nick Flynn, legal director of Avaaz, told the CMA on October 27 2017:

“We also have an interesting example in Sky [News] Australia, where the ownership has gone recently from 33% to 100% and we would submit that you begin to see the Foxification of Sky [News] Australia as a direct result of that change of ownership. It is analogous to what is happening in the current merger.”

Ed Miliband, Vince Cable and Ken Clarke (who have formed a joint lobbying group opposed to the Fox bid) also wrote to the CMA, saying that “there has been an increase in right-wing voices [on Sky News Australia] since News Corp gained full control...they were part owners when these trends started, and they have increased since they took control.”

This is what Stewart Purvis told the CMA at its round table on media plurality on November 8, 2017:

“I will give you one example, in Sky News Australia, where they have adopted the Fox model of the primetime commentary programme, as opposed to the news programme, where their version of Mr Hannity, Mr Paul Murray, said of the defence minister, Mr Pyne, on June 26: ‘This is the type of bloke who, to use the Aussie-ism, if you were on fire, he wouldn’t piss on you. This is the bloke who, if he was at a social function, and met you, would be looking over your shoulder for someone more important than you. That is the measure of this wanker.’ He also called Mr Pyne an arsehole.

“If you have got a TV news operation run in that style and you have a broadsheet where you potentially control the editorial space given to political debate and commentary and you have got a tabloid which gives you the power to attack politicians and their policies and potentially over their private lives, you have a powerful line-up. No regulatory regime is going to pick that up as being undue influence. It just happens to be quite a powerful way to run a media empire in a new foreign country.

“I think it is not impossible that...if the [Fox/Sky] transaction were to happen, potentially that model might play out, subject to how the impartiality rules were interpreted...I think there is some evidence based on what happened with Sky News Australia when they moved from a shared ownership model to a complete control model, that that might happen.”

The clear implication from Stewart’s evidence is that the raucous style and right-wing tilt of Sky News Australia is a consequence of a deliberate act by the Murdoch Family Trust. Professor Steve Barnett made an almost identical case at the February 20 Media Society event.

“Sky News Australia is definitely not Sky News UK, not has ever been”

John O’Loan (the Australian founding editor of Sky News in the UK) and fellow-Australian David Butorac (who spent 14 years at Sky UK before taking senior appointments at other pay-TV ventures) were puzzled to hear this claim at the Media Society event. According to Butorac, Sky News Australia (he was a director representing Sky News for many years) has had the same Managing Editor (Angelos Frangopoulos) for 20 years (Butorac was on the panel that appointed him).

“Angelos is one of the most respected and garlanded news executives in Australia,” says Butorac. “Sky News Australia is definitely not Sky News UK, nor has ever been. Its style has always been more populist than Sky News UK, but that’s more about the style of Australian TV news than down to influence from Rupert Murdoch or anyone else. The channel’s outspokenly political commentators (at various times, Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Mark Latham, Paul Murray, Graham Richardson, Peta Credlin etc) have been in situ for many years (Latham was recently fired for making untoward comments). Nothing has materially changed since the change of ownership from Sky/Seven/Nine in equal parts to 100% News Australia at the end of 2016. Interestingly, the Australian equivalent of the BBC – the ABC – recently tried (and failed) to poach the political editor of Sky News: scarcely an indication that the service is politically skewed.”

O’Loan adds: “Paul Murray has been on the channel since 2010. Peta Credlin joined as a co-presenter, with veteran radio host Alan Jones, of a show that launched in 2014. Credlin is a former chief of staff for Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott [in Australia, the Liberals are the right-of-centre party]. A previous co-host of the show was former Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham, the former leader of the opposition in the federal parliament. The only significant change in presenter personnel since the shift to 100% NewsCorp ownership was the return of Graham Richardson, a senior Australian Labor Party figure and cabinet minister in several Labor governments, to co-hosting an evening show.”

The story of “foxification” of Sky News Australia that the opponents of the Fox bid seem to rely upon was written by the London-based Mark di Stefano in July 2017, quoting the view of Paul Barry, a presenter at the ABC, a fierce rival of Sky News. According to Buzzfeed, the opening monologues of Paul Murray’s 2-hour show are “littered with crude taunts and attacks against perceived ‘lefties’”. Unfortunately, the only tirade cited by Stewart Purvis was aimed at Christopher Pyne – a Liberal minister, who had recently himself been a co-host of a Sky News Australia talk show, partnered by a Labor shadow minister, Richard Marles.

Another senior Labor politician who served as a Sky News Commentator from 2014 to 2017 was Kristina Keneally, former Labor prime minister of New South Wales: it was an attack on her as “a Yankee sheila” by her fellow Labor veteran, Mark Latham, that led to his ousting (he had also handed out tongue-lashings to various other female targets, including a 15-year-old schoolgirl). What Buzzfeed did not seem to understand is that intra-party abuse is as much a feature of the raucousness in Australian media as cross-party insults.

The Buzzfeed article made much of the role of Peta Credlin. Yet her most revelatory material on Sky News Australia has related to the Liberal government she used to serve. Her sharp insights on Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (she dubbed the prodigiously wealthy former lawyer “Mr Harbourside Mansion”) helped Sky News Australia win Logie and Walkley awards for its 2016 election coverage.

That Sky News Australia’s most popular host (Paul Murray) is also a loud-mouthed right-winger has not stopped him winning industry recognition (such as “outstanding male presenter” in the 2015 Logie awards, and “outstanding news programme” in the 2015 Astra awards). And the claim that Sky News Australia was aping Fox News (with Murray and Andrew Bolt likened to Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly) dates back to at least 2010.

Some months before the Buzzfeed article – but after the change of ownership – senior Australian media commentator and academic, Denis Muller, explicitly differentiated between Fox News and Sky News Australia: “Someone who only watched Fox News would get a very distorted view of the world. This is not true of Sky. Its news service and its more sophisticated panels include a range of perspectives, even on major stories with an ideological bent. Such catholicity is not to be found on Fox News, and that is a significant difference between the two.”

The CMA report – upholding Fox’s genuine commitment to broadcasting standards – exhaustively pursued this line of inquiry. It cited the Muller article as rebuttal of the “foxification” claim. It politely failed to point out that the Miliband/Cable/Clarke evidence had mistakenly attributed to News Corp the 33% shareholding in Sky News Australia held by Sky News prior to the 2016 transaction.

News Corp actually had no interest, direct or indirect: even the Sky News stake represented just 33%, in which Fox (not News Corp) had a 39% interest, in which – in turn – the MFT had a 39% interest. The notion that an indirect 5% interest in Sky News Australia might allow the Murdochs to override their fierce commercial rivals – Channels 7 and 9, with 66.6% ownership – in controlling the editorial content of the service is the kind of stretch that has given some of the Fox bid’s opponents a bad name (Miliband and Cable were also responsible for the false claim that Sky News was responsible for 45% of UK radio news consumption: correct figure 2%).

What the CMA did establish (though it could not differentiate between repeats and original hours of broadcast) was a modest rise in the amount of commentary programming (mostly right of centre) since 2016. Frangopoulos would have explained this had they asked: his star sports presenter was poached by Channel 9, and the easiest way to fill the resultant gap in the schedule was to extend the Paul Murray show (the highest rating programme on the satellite service which carries Sky News Australia): nothing to do with the change in ownership, but nonetheless grist to the “foxification” mill.

The endgame?

Even for the most avid observers of the Sky saga, it must be a relief that a conclusion is in sight. Although there is an element of uncertainty as to the final CMA verdict, the response from the Secretary of State, the degree of scrutiny to which Comcast will be subjected and the Avaaz judicial review, it is reasonable to reach two conclusions: that Sky News will emerge safe and secure, and that the final ownership of Sky itself will come down to price. If Comcast presses on with its bid, Fox may have to top the £14 per share mark to prevail. If so, the independent directors who recommended the opening £10.75 offer will look foolish: but the “arbs” will have their day.

Chelsey and Bailey Glassco in front of their new home in Childersburg, Alabama, where they’re raising a foster son. Photo by the author.

This article was first published in Scalawag.

Childersburg is a typical river town in Alabama: tackle shops, Waffle House, a Piggly Wiggly. Near the Glassco house, a Cajun restaurant called Bigman’s serves grilled gator and BBQ.

But the Glasscos aren’t exactly the typical Childersburg family, because, as they’d say, of the whole lesbian thing.

When I meet Chelsey and Bailey Glassco on a Wednesday afternoon in their new home in a neighborhood called Pleasant Valley, they’re a few weeks into the semester at the private Christian Academy where they’re both teachers, and their foster son, Jay (that’s not his real name), is in first grade. Bailey teaches high school English. Chelsey teaches music and Spanish to the younger grades. They welcome me inside still buttoned-up from the day, preppy: slacks, loafers, dress shirts.

The house is buzzing with new home-owner energy: Jay is bouncing between his two dogs and us, asking if I’d like to see his room, if I’d like to play, if I’d like to eat ice cream with him. Chelsey is apologizing for the move-in mess and shuffling the dogs back into the yard. Bailey, who grew up, as she says, “in the wilderness” near Sand Mountain, Alabama, is on the phone giving directions to a social worker from their adoption agency, Ashley Douthard, by offering local, posted road names instead of state-issued monikers on maps. I get the feeling Bailey can rebuild engines while quoting Eudora Welty. (On the way to their house, when I got lost, too, and called for help, she told me, “Turn back and hang a right at the little pew-jumping church.” When I laughed, she added, “That’s not a judgment. Just a description.”)

They’re only the second owners of the property, a midcentury fixer-upper on 3.7 acres. Signs of the couple who built the house half a century ago are everywhere: a wheelchair ramp off the back deck, a glass collection carefully stacked in the butler pantry. Everything is a little worn-in from age but full of potential.

When I ask to go to the bathroom, Chelsey takes me down the hall, following me to point out the ‘50s-era ceramic work. We’ve known one another two minutes, and we’re admiring tiling around a toilet together. A dentist’s daughter from Bonifay, Florida, who grew up singing in an Assembly of God church, Chelsey speaks like the talky tracks of Loretta Lynn records, sweetly Southern, bitingly witty. Back in the living room, Jay dashes outside and we stand amid empty boxes, watching their boy through a bank of west-facing windows.

Jay trots up the grassy slope of his new backyard in boots and a yellow T-shirt, waving a stick toward the sky, two dogs trailing behind. The whole scene is downright Norman Rockwell-ish.

The irony of being in a neighborhood called Pleasant Valley hits me when Chelsey cuts the chitchat to tell me Jay has had a hard week, and I remember why I’m here.

In May, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed HB24 into law, protecting adoption agencies when they deem parents unfit on the basis of religious beliefs. I’m here because the law means religious-affiliated private adoption agencies can now legally discriminate against same-sex couples like the Glasscos.

Bailey Glassco and her dogs in the back plot of her 3.7-acre home. Glassco is trying to legally adopt her foster son with her wife, Chelsey. Photo by the author.

Jay has a condition called Reactive Attachment Disorder.

When the Glasscos met Jay, his family had been in the system for two years, and he’d cycled through multiple placements. He was underweight. He was balding. His skin itched nonstop from stress-induced psoriasis and eczema. “He’s constantly telling us he’s afraid he’s not going to be fed,” Bailey says.

Common in children raised in orphanages or environments of neglect, Bailey describes RAD as a wiring malfunction that happens when a young child is forced to self-soothe in moments when they need to be cuddled or fed. The result can be a lifelong struggle with relationships.

The Glasscos work with Jay each day on understanding boundaries and establishing appropriate trust. He sees a therapist. He takes medicine. They receive weekly support from Douthard, the social worker. They’re waiting on a special, weighted vest to arrive in the mail, a garment that’s supposed to help comfort Jay when they physically can’t hold and calm him.

Today, Douthard is coming for an emergency visit. As a therapeutic social worker for the foster and adoption agency working with the Glasscos (they asked we not name the agency to protect Jay’s privacy), Douthard offers weekly check-in sessions to families fostering children like Jay who are undergoing medical treatment for psychological or behavioral disorders.

Going to school has been challenging for Jay, navigating the social landscape, and to cope, he’s been hitting himself and his classmates. Violence is common in RAD kids. As they begin to make attachments, something in their brain fires off a warning, and they lash out. Without treatment, this behavior can continue into adulthood with potentially horrific results. To give a point of reference for the difference between a child who does or doesn’t receive help, Chelsey names two famous examples of people with RAD, “You could be Helen Keller or Ted Bundy.”

The frustrating part to Chelsey is that RAD is 100 percent preventable, but once kids have the disorder, they have it for life. She says Jay’s biological family struggled to meet his basic needs. “It’s a really sad situation,” Chelsey says. “Everybody and their mama, no pun intended, had been abused in [Jay’s] family.” Because the Glasscos will be in court soon, they can’t offer details publicly of Jay’s history.

I spoke to other foster parents for this story who were also in the middle of court proceedings and didn’t want their names to be public. Many of those foster kids came from families where no one has a job or a car to get to a job, where multiple generations suffer from drug addiction, and where state intervention is common. Finding family members to offer these children safer homes can be difficult.

Jay has lived with the Glasscos for six months. It’s the longest he’s lived anywhere. “When we hit the three-month mark,” Bailey says, “he started to ask if he was staying with us. His internal clock knew it was time to be moved to another foster home.”

Outside, Jay is running, hollering down to us that he’s “supah fast.” His white athletic socks are poking out of the tops of his boots, and it’s the sight of those socks that kills me. My own son is 16 months old. I think about all the socks he’s tossed off in the car, the grocery store, wherever. Hundreds of times a day he needs me or my husband to hold him, to help him. I can’t even think about Jay when he was a baby.

When I ask if this is how the Glasscos envisioned parenthood, Chelsey says they think about having a baby—“Bailey has always wanted to be pregnant. I’d love to plan four hospital routes and be the one going ‘you can do this!’”—but every time they’ve seriously considered it, another kid has needed them. They met their first foster kid when she was in high school and living in a group home. “[She] was going to have to be housed back with her mother who was a drug dealer. And she didn’t have another option,” Chelsey says. “So we got certified.”

But the Glasscos say they were denied by a dozen adoption agencies before finding one willing to work with a same-sex couple—all prior to the passing of HB24. Chelsey drops into a snooty voice, joking, “We were like, ‘We don’t want to work with you guys anyways.’” Bailey says they didn’t worry about the other agencies, and never considered legal action, focusing instead on helping their foster teen transition to adulthood, figure out how to get job, a car, an apartment. She lived with them until she turned 18 and got her own apartment.

“We have a soft spot for that age, because we were so vulnerable during that time,” Chelsey says. When Chelsey and Bailey themselves were entering adulthood, they were homeless.

They met at a small all-women’s Baptist College, where Bailey was a star on the volleyball team and Chelsey sang in Sunday services. (Even though Chelsey came out at 15, she wanted a challenging academic environment where she could better explore religion. Her folks wanted her to be a Christian singer. “Like Amy Grant?” I ask, half-kidding. “Exactly. Actually, she was my first crush,” she says.)

When they made their relationship public, their families launched campaigns to pray them straight. The congregation of Chelsey’s church back in Bonifay began calling and sending letters. Bailey’s family contacted teachers and administrators at their school. Certain administrators at the university contacted ministers at churches where Chelsey sang, worried she might have spread propaganda like rainbow flags.

“We’re some potent gay,” Bailey jokes.

By the time they graduated, they didn’t have anywhere to go. They lost contact with nearly everyone, from youth group buddies to their own brothers.

“Our families were basically like goodbye and good luck,” Chelsey says. A handful of people they met—through churches—helped them get on their feet but things still weren’t easy. They lost teaching jobs when a board member at a school didn’t want lesbians on staff, so they moved to a new town and took jobs at Olive Garden and Firehouse Subs until finding the school where they now teach.

Jay pops in to ask for water. He pants like the dog at his hip to show us how hard he’s been playing.

I realize I haven’t asked how old they are (Bailey’s 28, Chesley’s 27) or how long they’ve been married (seven years). “That’s our numerical age,” Bailey says, “but we say it’s about the mileage.”

Now, Chelsey says they’re visiting an LGBT-affirming church in Birmingham, where they’ve found a preacher willing to be a male mentor for Jay, and where he can grow up in “a village” like they did. Even though her old congregation no longer serves as her support system, Chelsey says, growing up, there were “16 people I could have called if I needed something. Foster kids don’t have that. That’s the reason they’re in foster care.”

When Douthard arrives, I wander around a bit, tagging along for a tour of the house before heading to the backyard to pet the dogs and stay out of the way. Jay is telling the social worker about mowing the lawn, how his moms are going to let him do it someday but first he has to master picking up sticks, and I see Chelsey and Bailey reach for one another’s hand. I know that reach, that moment you need to connect with your partner to say, “Maybe we’re doing something right.”

I wonder how things would be different for the Glasscos if they’d been embraced instead of excommunicated from their families. Would they still have Jay? If not, where would he be?

Here’s the thing: Chelsey and Bailey didn’t choose Jay. They signed up to be foster parents to any child in need. When things get too difficult, as foster parents, the Glasscos have the option to ask for respite or terminate their time with him. It happens. Families don’t click. A child presents too great of challenges, or as with Jay, a foster child changes the family’s option to have other children.

But next week, the Glasscos will have their first meeting to begin the arduous legal process determining what is best for Jay’s future, either reunification with a family member or adoption into the Glassco home.

The cicadas start their nightly hum as the Glasscos tell the social worker about their renovation plans, where the vegetable garden will go next spring, how they’d met most of the neighbors already. I wonder how people could see this—the Glassco home—as dangerous.

It’s not like people are fighting over foster children. We have more children seeking homes in Alabama than families seeking children. The latest report from Alabama Department of Human Resources showed 6,028 children were in custody of the department at the end of June 2017. One lawyer I interviewed said 1,000 of those children are in need of new homes.

 So, what’s our hope, or responsibility, for kids like Jay?

A portrait of the Glasscos by their son, Jay, gifted to the author. Photo by the author.

There’s a narrative we’re asked to believe in the discussion surrounding same-sex adoption: A great battle exists between Christians and queers. If you are of the opinion that exposure to an LGBT lifestyle might turn children queer and therefore land them in eternal damnation then I’m not sure harm on earth has much argumentative power. But everyone I spoke to for this story, most of whom identify as queer, made a point to tell me they identify as Christian, too. Beyond a battle over the role of religion as it pertains to government, in Alabama, a law like HB24 is a battle over interpretations of Christianity.

As Reverend Jennifer Sanders put it, “The role of the government is to prevent harm. Now, it’s all about how you define harm. I think that’s what we’re arguing over.”

Sanders is one of 70 faith leaders who opposed HB24. The week before I came to Childersburg, I met Sanders at a café next door to Beloved Community Church in Birmingham, where she said she leads a congregation as active in social justice efforts as they are in Sunday worship. Sanders is a Christian liberation theologian, a lesbian, and a mom. She says she’s less interested in the outcome of this particular law than she is the liberation of the world from mankind’s harm. To her, the LGBT adoption battle matters only if lost. If won, it’s just a step toward equality in an inherently unjust system.

When I asked her how she entered conversations with conservative Christian ministers and policymakers, she said conversation doesn’t go far. “There tends to be a fair amount of smug disregard because people will treat you politely but that’s because they know they have the power, and your own power is curtailed by the structure.”

I tell Sanders about a moment in Alabama Bound, a film that follows lesbians in the state as they advocate for marriage equality prior to Obergefell v. Hodges, when the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal across the country. I’d seen the film’s premiere a few weekends before at the Lyric Theatre in Birmingham. There’s a scene where openly gay Representative Patricia Todd is preparing for a pro-LGBT vote on the Montgomery Capitol floor, and GOP Representative Barry Moore walks up to her, gives her an awkward back-patting, side-hug and says something like: “You know I love you, girl, got all the respect in the world for you, but this ain’t gonna happen.”

 The scene sums up the dynamic when it comes to marginalized groups gaining rights: Love ya. Ain’t happening.

Rev. Jennifer Sanders believes the fight for LGBT adoption only matters if it’s lost. Photo by the author.

In Alabama, White, evangelical, Republican men hold the power.

Alabama lawmakers pushed hard for HB24, placing duplicates in the House and Senate, sponsored by Representative Rich Wingo and State Senator Bill Hightower, respectively. Neither agreed to an interview for this story. Even though both have told the press the law isn’t about denying LGBT couples the right to adopt, Wingo told NPRthat other states have seen religious organizations close their doors instead of working with same-sex couples. The burden on the state, he said, would be overwhelming if Alabama’s private, religious agencies shuttered. But no Alabama agency has publicly announced it would shutter. I attempted to contact Wingo multiple times over several months for this story, and didn’t hear back from his office.

Even though Wingo is credited for the law’s success, the reality is this law is one of many in a recent batch of so-called “religious freedom” bills strategically popping up all over the country, backed by well-funded right wing groups. By passing HB24, Alabama joined Michigan, Virginia, and the Dakotas, where Republicans have approved related religious freedom bills. Even the name of the law—the Alabama Child Placing Agency Inclusion Act—is strategic. (Still, Conservative news outlets celebrated the law as a victory in efforts to discriminate against LGBT couples.)

The law is particularly problematic, according to Eva Kendrick, the Human Rights Campaign Alabama State Director, when you consider LGBT minors are more likely to be in the foster system than their hetero or cisgendered peers, and LGBT couples are four times more likely to raise adopted kids and six times more likely to raise foster children than hetero couples, according to nonpartisan studies, like the 2014 report released by the Williams Institute.

Kendrick, who fosters a baby with her wife, says only two adoption agencies supported the bill while nearly 70 faith leaders signed a letter in opposition. Because you have to be legally married for one year before you can adopt in Alabama, and adoption only recently became legal for gay and lesbian couples in the state, she says the law is mostly just causing confusion over who will or won’t work with them.

I tried to contact religious adoption agencies all over the state to ask about their policies on same-sex adoption. No one has returned my calls or emails. But Kendrick works with agencies statewide, and she said the attention the law is receiving has actually been a boon for same-sex adoption training. HRC has seen a spike in collaborative requests, and Kendrick said she’s trained more than 250 social workers in LGBT adoption courses. So the law may be having the opposite effect of Wingo’s intentions.

But even though same-sex couples have agencies to choose from when adopting, problems with the law still arise during family reunification for foster kids, according to Kendrick. Here’s an example: I spoke to Tony Christon-Walker, the Director of Prevention and Community Partnerships at AIDS Alabama, who worried he’d be denied parental rights when his half-sister lost custody of her son, Maurice. His sister asked Christon-Walker to adopt the boy. Christon-Walker, 50, is gay and HIV positive. A judge in Birmingham granted him parental rights, but if Maurice had been under the care of a private religious organization in Alabama instead, then under this new law, Christon-Walker could have been denied and would have no legal action to keep Maurice in the family.

The reality is, right now, no one really knows how this law will or won’t play out in court. I read the bill and its amendments a dozen times until I began to feel the way you do when you repeat a word aloud until it loses meaning.

Tony Christon-Walker with his husband and their adopted son, Maurice. Under new Alabama law, same-sex couples like the Christon-Walkers might not be able to adopt children from their own families. Photo courtesy of the author.

As written, HB24 protects privately-funded adoption agencies in Alabama when they turn away parents based on “closely held religious beliefs.” That vernacular vagueness is confusing even to practitioners in the legal system; several lawyers told me they weren’t comfortable offering a definitive explication of the law’s application for this story. One lawyer, Shane T. Smith, cut to the core of what’s so confusing: “While I respect everyone’s closely held religious beliefs,” he said, “I know a lot of Christians who are fine with people who are divorced. I know some Christians who won’t associate with people who are divorced. It’s not just a lesbian or gay thing; it’s whatever they deem to be sinful or wrong in their doctrine.”

Hypotheticals run rampant: Could Catholics deny an adoptive parent who was previously divorced? Could Baptists deny the unbaptized? Could Wiccans deny worshippers of Sun Ra? If these religious groups meet the criteria for protection—owning and operating a privately-funded, state-licensed adoption agency in Alabama—then, in theory, they sure could.

But in all the confusion over what HB24 means for gay families, who can and cannot adopt and from which agencies, it can feel like the kids themselves get lost in the mix. And what are the consequences if kids like Jay spend more time, possibly their entire childhoods, in group homes or transitional housing?

For a lot of kids, that life leads to higher instances of traumatic childhood events, which psychological studies show can affect everything from earning power to emotional well-being. Christon-Walker and his son serve as an example here, too. He said Maurice was believed to have an IQ of 69 while in foster care. He’s thankful the judge in Birmingham “believes in family,” because today, Maurice is a well-adjusted kid thriving at a Birmingham private school. He likes to joke with other kids by asking them where their second daddies are.

When I asked Christon-Walker where Maurice would be if he hadn’t been able to adopt him, he started to cry. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

At the Glasscos, we’re all out back with Jay now, the sun setting over the hills.

The social worker has wrapped up her visit, and I finally ask them about the law.

“This law is a protection for the majority, for a group who doesn’t need protection,” Bailey says. I tell her about what I’d heard from people in Birmingham, about progressive change, open-minded judges, and welcoming adoption agencies. I tell them what Eva Kendrick of HRC (who introduced me to the Glasscos) said about the increase in training for LGBT adoption.

“It’s easy to say the law is not going to change anything for the worse. But how can you predict that?” Bailey wonders. “This month, they’re feeling gay friendly. Let’s say Mr. So and So, who usually puts foster care in the homes of gay couples, goes home and his wife just read an article about some pedophile and how he had boyfriends or whatever, and he says we’re not dealing with gay people anymore. Things won’t change immediately, but it just takes one person.”

They’re worried groups that have been quietly working with LGBT couples will suddenly have board members wondering what their same-sex policies are. Chelsey does an imitation of an evangelical adoption director: “Hey, y’all! Welcome! Thanks for coming to the back door!”

“Now they might close the back door,” Bailey says.

Chelsey says right now, they’re more interested in making inroads with their families than lawmakers. A few years back, they reconciled with Bailey’s brother’s family. Since Jay came into their lives, Chelsey says her parents are more receptive to a relationship with Chelsey and Bailey (before they were only comfortable seeing their daughter without her wife).

Jay is on the deck below, out of earshot, playing with the dog who licks him chin to forehead.

“Ugh. He’s so stinking cute,” Chelsey says. “It makes me want to shake his parents. We see all the potential.”

“Sometimes we think he’s a baby, then he’ll sweep the floor,” Bailey says. “I mean, where the heck did that come from? You can’t button your daggum britches, son.”

The Glasscos are hopeful they will be able to adopt Jay. “The guardian ad litem, social workers, psychiatrist are working tirelessly to assure he ends up in a safe and healthy home,” Chelsey says.

“There’s always a chance the parents wake up, have an epiphany, go out and get a job and start making good choices.” If that does happen, and his parents are able to offer Jay a healthy environment, the Glasscos say they’ll be heartbroken but also unburdened. Chelsey says they have to trust the doctors who tell them long-term care will bring Jay healing. “We keep thinking… about when he’s 18, and he’s an amazing young man going to be a teacher or a doctor or joining the military,” Chelsey says.

“Or going to be a plumber! Or an electrician or anything that contributes to society,” Bailey says. “Or a football player, a third string kicker who rides the bench and sets us up for life!” They laugh. Jay offers a not-so-subtle hint it’s time we wrap up our conversation and his moms get dinner going: “I smell pizza!”

As I’m leaving, Jay pulls a drawing from his pocket and offers it to me as a gift. I ask him to describe the scene, and he tells me it’s him and his moms cleaning up the yard while the dogs play.

One side of the house in bathed in light. The other in darkness. Jay says he’s afraid to go in the dark, but his moms are brave.

They aren’t afraid, he says, and someday, he won’t be either.

Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader, at Central Election Commission's session which is about to deny his right to be in the ballot on the upcoming presidential elections. Photo CC BY-SA 4.0: Evgeny Feldman / Wiki Commons. Some rights reserved.Presidential elections in today’s Russia are often talked about as mere formalities, as procedures essential to maintaining a democratic façade. The outcome of the process is known to everyone in advance. In public, the only person who can doubt the outcome is the one who is actually responsible for it – Vladimir Putin, who delayed announcing his re-election bid for long enough to generate rumours about potential successors. This “modesty” is an integral part of the game: the acting and future president has to hesitate (playfully) in order for the elections to gain symbolic weight – only then to announce his candidacy over rapturous applause during a visit to Gorky Automobile Plant.

But here’s what makes the 2018 election unique: doubt over the election results, which had been privatised by a key political figure, has now been expressed by unofficial leader of the Russian opposition Alexey Navalny. More accurately, Navalny’s large-scale grassroots presidential campaign turned out to be the form of that doubt. Eighty campaign offices across Russia, thousands of activists on the ground – this sits in clear contrast to the Presidential Administration’s traditional script. To say it more simply: Navalny has proposed a new, democratised interpretation of the elections – and, as expected, the Central Electoral Commission refused to register him as a presidential candidate, citing a corruption conviction (which, according to Navalny himself, was politically motivated). Once Navalny was barred, the campaign organically morphed into what he has dubbed the “voters’ strike”.

Navalny proposed a new, democratised interpretation of the elections – and, as expected, the Central Electoral Commission refused to register him as a presidential candidate

Navalny made it clear after submitting his candidate registration papers in late December that he could potentially switch his strategy from campaigning in the elections to advocating a boycott of them (his chances of being registered were obviously negligible). “To go to the polls,” he said in a pre-prepared video statement, “is to vote for lies and corruption.”

This change in strategic direction precipitated the widespread boycott protests on 28 January. Held in cities all over the country, these protests resulted in 371 arrests, including that of Navalny himself. It has also sparked a broader debate on the point of staging a boycott – and, by extension, the meaning of the 2018 presidential elections themselves.

The mathematics of the boycott

This isn’t the first time Navalny has deployed protest tactics in an election context: in 2011, for example, he called on voters to cast their ballots for any party other than United Russia. The “party of power” ended up with under 50% of the vote (although calculating the effectiveness of Navalny’s tactics that year is next to impossible). Yet attempts to grab a piece of the pie during a presidential election whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, with a known-beforehand winner taking all, yield less conspicuous results. On the other hand, low turnout cannot be catastrophic for the simple reason that the minimum turnout threshold was abolished in 2006.

As expected, the idea of ​​a boycott wasn’t received with mass enthusiasm by the liberal opposition

As expected, the idea of ​​a boycott wasn’t received with mass enthusiasm by the liberal opposition, which, given how fragmented it is, is by no means certain to get on board with Navalny’s initiatives. “It’s a delusional, meaningless protest. A great many political scientists have already said as much. What’s the point of holding a boycott? In all of history, if statistics are anything to go by, doing so made sense about twice,” claimed Ksenia Sobchak in an interview with Radio Liberty in late December (with Navalany barred from running, Sobchak is one of only two remaining candidates from the liberal-democratic camp, the other being Grigory Yavlinsky).

Among the political scientists and experts alluded to by Sobchak, there’s a clear preference for a mathematical approach. Simply put, if we want to evaluate the boycott, we must first of all consider its impact on the final results. The logic is simple and clear: if fewer potential anti-Putin voters turn out to the polls, then, in purely mathematical terms, this is going to play right into the latter’s hands –while Putin’s share of the vote will increase, a high turnout will still be guaranteed by fair means or foul. This is the stance of Yabloko deputy Boris Vishnevsky. Writing in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Vishnevsky stresses that “as far as the winner is concerned, electoral success is determined primarily by vote share rather than turnout” – and argues for the theoretical possibility of a second round. Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin deploys the same kind of arithmetic in this January column, underscoring that the boycott will only amplify the significance of the elections in regions such as Chechnya and Dagestan, where both turnout and Putin’s vote share are traditionally at their highest. Oreshkin’s calculations also imply that the probability of a second round would automatically decrease in the event of an active boycott.

Rally at the Academician Sakharov Avenue, Moscow, 24 December 2011. Photo CC BY-SA 3.0: Wiki. Some rights reserved.Generally speaking, this mathematical angle on the elections is subject to the following prerequisites: the elections are just that (elections) and the election commission’s refusal to register Navalny doesn’t render them a sham by default. This means that the opposition’s prospects cannot be reduced to those of Navalny, and Putin’s vote share must be reduced by every possible means, which, in the liberal paradigm, implies a vote for Yavlinsky or Sobchak. Turnout, meanwhile, isn’t treated as the most important piece of the electoral puzzle.

And yet, categorically dismissing the notion of a boycott as an appropriate tactic on the basis of numbers alone may be a step too far. As political analyst Grigory Golosov told me: “2011 taught us not to invest too much belief in mathematical forecasts because of their conservatism: they are made on the basis of observed electoral dynamics and are extrapolations of what has already happened. We cannot regard such large-scale social processes as mere manifestations of social mechanics, and a lot depends on the degree to which people are actively involved.”

This is how it really works

In a sense, Navalny himself is for this mathematical perspective, albeit with an emphasis on turnout: thus, he openly declares a decreased turnout to be the boycott’s primary objective while maintaining that his primary battle force is a network of observers tasked with calculating that turnout on election day. It’s unsurprising, then, that physicist Sergei Shpilkin, an active researcher of the electoral calculus in Russia, put in an appearance on the Navalny.Live YouTube channel. In one of his calculations, Shpilkin stressed that the boycott would prove ineffective in terms of the final result if all campaigning were geared exclusively towards opposition-minded voters. Pro-boycott campaigning, Shpilkin argues, should therefore be geared towards potential and actual supporters of Putin – precisely what Navalny is calling for.

That turnout does indeed represent a crucial element of the elections in the eyes of the regime is evidenced by specific examples: local referendum initiatives, door-to-door visits by polling station commission members, and the notorious use of “administrative resources”, including appeals to state-financed sector workers to turn out and vote. As sociologist Denis Volkov told me: “turnout is a genuine issue, but it’s quite possible that the government will ensure that it remains high by mobilising the state-dependent electorate. In addition, the eve of the elections witnessed increases in pensions and salaries, and a withdrawal of Russia troops from Syria was announced as well, which, of course, represents a pivot towards Putin’s traditional electorate. And although there’s no utilitarian need for a high turnout, 70% is the regime’s benchmark – they’ve more peace of mind that way.”

As Ilya Budraitskis, a left-wing commentator, told me: “A high turnout is important [for the regime] as regards the legitimacy of the elections; in the eyes of local authorities, on the other hand, it constitutes an indicator of loyalty.”

In this way, the boycott seeks to emphasise on a symbolic level the illegitimacy of the interpretation of the elections put forward by the Kremlin

The electoral mathematics around the turnout question sheds light on the key refrain of this new phase in the Navalny campaign, which concerns the illegitimacy of the elections as such – that is, a phenomenon of a primarily symbolic order. Attention to the final turnout figures stems from a general refusal to play by the rules in view of what is believed to be a politically motivated registration refusal. Even Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has pointed out the connection between refusal and legitimacy, stating that “if a would-be presidential candidate is prevented from participating in accordance with the law, this can in no way affect the legitimacy of the election.”

Ilya Budraitskis. Source: Youtube.Paying exclusive attention to the turnout issue, and that of that final results, can, in this case, give greater prominence to the significance of the boycott, which denies the Russian political system as such. According to Ilya Budraitskis, “a high turnout will be achieved, and Putin will secure a high vote share, so on one hand all the mathematically-inclined arguments are correct, but, on the other, they give rise to no political conclusions other than submission and passivity. The boycott issue is specifically propagandistic, facilitating the initiation of a discussion that isn’t about programmes and superficial differences within the existing system but about the system as such. So as far as propaganda efforts are concerned, calling for a boycott is very much the right tactic.”

In this way, the boycott seeks to emphasise on a symbolic level the illegitimacy of the interpretation of the elections put forward by the Kremlin, and, ipso facto, that of the entire institution of presidential power – the keystone of political reality in Russia.

Street style

In January, the popular Hobbes Channel on Telegram, whose primary focus is political analysis, drew attention to a scientific study of boycott strategies in authoritarian regimes. The results of this study were less than reassuring: a minor boycott that fails to attract the involvement of major political forces is not capable of exerting any influence on the electoral process and simply constitutes an additional mode of protest. As for large-scale systemic boycotts, the chances of subsequent democratisation aren’t really that great either.

The strike announced by Navalny, meanwhile, represents a situational transformation of a more general grassroots street protest. In the words of Budraitskis, “Navalny is constructing his campaign not in the form of an electoral campaign but as a campaign of non-system street politics. From this point of view, the boycott is an element in the construction of a movement centralised around a single persona– a persona for whom every step is tactical in the sense of exerting progressive pressure on the regime and bringing the movement into the [mainstream] political area, with the key goal of abolishing the existing political model.”

Despite the fact that the “voters’ strike” that took place on January 28 wasn’t particularly well attended, it marked a natural transition from preparing for the elections to disavowing them for the movement’s activists. As Golosov notes, “these protests are necessary in order to unite the activist collective. In the absence of a massive upturn in political engagement, they can perform no other function. A massive upturn in political engagement can only achieved on the basis of certain results. I believe that Navalny himself is very much aware that whatever the results of the election, the effect of the boycott will depend on the results.”

Targeted repressions against opposition activists aren’t the only threat to the boycott: there’s also the ill-concealed leaderism of Navalny himself

The authorities’ response has been telling: having decided to eschew mass arrests in Moscow on the eve of the elections and even to give the go-ahead to a small procession with flares, they still unleashed targeted repressions (for instance, the St Petersburg campaign office coordinator and an activist detained in Moscow together with Navalny were both sentenced to 30 days arrest).

But targeted repressions against opposition activists aren’t the only threat to the boycott: there’s also the ill-concealed leaderism of Navalny himself, who periodically stands in marked contrast with the active and ideologically diverse grassroots movement and potentially repulses possible supporters. The arguments of those in favour of participation in the elections often emphasise precisely the fact that calls for a boycott are, as it were, the flip side of Navalny’s striving towards one-man leadership of the opposition.

The “voters’ strike”, January 28, 2018, Moscow. Source: Youtube.That said, it remains impossible to affirm with any certainty that the boycott is reducible exclusively to the figure of Navalny. As Golosov recalls, “when the tactic of voting for any party other than United Russia was implemented in 2011 – and with great success to boot, I think – the reason this happened wasn’t because the adopters of this tactic were all supporters of Navalny, who was little known back then.”

According to Budraitskis, “a great many people refuse to conflate Navalny and the boycott and take to the streets simply to voice their discontent. There was a demand for a movement and a persona of this ilk, and that demand was seized on and instrumentalised by Navalny. If the movement keeps growing, it will inevitably outgrow him.”

Elections without choice

The effectiveness of the boycott, however, will not be so easy to assess. According to Golosov, “we will not be able to quantify its effect in numbers, even if we look at public opinion polls. We’ll be able to gauge the effect of the campaign from public sentiment, from the tone struck on both official and unofficial media outlets, and from whatever happens on social media.”

Changes in the mould of the cosmetic measures introduced after 2011, such as the installation of video monitoring systems at polling stations (to combat falsification), could serve as a possible indicator of the boycott’s successfulness. But measures of this kind, purely technical as they are, clearly do not meet the symbolic and pragmatic objectives of a strike demanding real elections without the removal of representatives of the non-systemic opposition. As Denis Volkov points out, Russian society does not as yet “understand that fair elections mean more than just fair vote counts – that they also presuppose equal access to the media and a level playing field as a matter of principle.” The boycott is the sole remaining means for Navalny and his grassroots movement to articulate this.

Thus, the voters’ strike should be understood as an extension of the general protest movement in Russia – one that throws into question not so much the formal institution of elections per se, but that institution’s specific, system-imposed meanings. As a protest against the stage-managed nature of the elections and the politically motivated barring of would-be candidates, the boycott actually only serves to emphasise how essential it is that this and other democratic institutions function appropriately. On the other hand, Navalny has repeatedly stated that the elections will not usher in a change of regime in Russia. This means that the main result of his campaign, which has gone from collecting signatures to the boycott itself, will remain a revitalisation of street politics – otherwise marginalised under Putin’s managed democracy.

englishbulterriersare great/Flickr. CC (by-sa)

The numbers are in

For the past year, studies have piled up showing large proportions of EU citizens in the UK – from doctors and tech workers to academics– were considering leaving the country. In the meantime, the issue of EU citizens’ rights in the UK has become a politically charged topic and consequently remained unresolved since the referendum in June 2016. This has taken its toll.

New data released on 22 February by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that net EU migration decreased to 90,000 over the last year. This is 75,000 lower than the previous year. In fact, it is a five year low. It also shows that 130,000 EU citizens left the UK – the most since 2008.

The fact that life rafts are being prepared should concern the UK government.

Despite stalled progress in divorce talks with Brussels, Whitehall has made unwitting headway towards a trademark Brexit goal. EU migration is decreasing. The figures clearly show that current and potential EU migrants are re-evaluating living in the UK. This seems to be the case across profiles; students, the low and high skilled. It is also the case for western and eastern Europeans alike. For example, Poles and Spaniards were especially likely to leave, and data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) shows national insurance number (NIN) registrations decreased 34% and 25% for those nationalities respectively.

Meanwhile, recent data show 17,000 Brits sought citizenship of another EU country in the year following the referendum. Ireland was the most popular, as applications from the UK increased by 1025% in this period. Over the same year, Italy saw an eightfold increase. British passport applications have also risen markedly for Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark, both from UK residents and British citizens in those countries. For now more Brits are just getting other passports; how many living in the UK will actually leave is a separate question. In any case, the fact that life rafts are being prepared should concern the UK government, and for Brexiteers this will not be a story to advertise.

What does this show?

The UK has clearly become less attractive for many EU citizens. Unable to vote on Brexit, many EU citizens are now voting with their feet. May’s insistence that she prioritised EU citizens’ rights has rung hollow and in the harsh rhetoric characterising UK-Brussels negotiations, they have become negotiating collateral. Meanwhile, many applying for UK residence permits and citizenship have muddled through Home Office processes from Kafkaesque to unjust – some were mistakenly sent letters ordering them to leave the country. This has only served to erode confidence in the system. Interestingly, EU citizens have been deciding to leave the UK despite an actual change in status, highlighting the power of uncertainty. For many, over 18 months without visibility of their future has overridden other considerations.

The new data also reflect a recognition by EU and British citizens alike that a theft of rights is taking place without too much background noise. Whatever Brexit ends up looking like, both groups will still lose some rights to free movement, to work or settle in any EU member state or the UK, and to equal treatment in any member state or the UK on the same terms as citizens there. One ongoing case in Holland may set an important precedent here. Triggered by five UK nationals, it argues that EU citizenship rights held by Brits are a matter of legal fact rather than a ‘political gift’. Therefore, as Brexit would strip these rights away, this should be disputed.

What does this show for the UK?

Economically and culturally, Brexodus represents a small stampede of ‘grey rhinos’ for the UK. The effects of EU workers leaving have already been negative to date. Between the referendum and the end of 2017 over 10,000 EU citizens working for the NHS left their jobs, and the number of EU nurses applying for UK jobs decreased by 96%. Departures have had negative effects including critical staff shortages. Academia has also been hard hit already; over 2,300 EU academics resigned from UK universities between 2016 and 2017. Beyond this, there are growing problems for areas from fruit-picking to banking.

Over 10,000 EU citizens working for the NHS have left their jobs.

These trends are already starting to strain the system. The fall in EU net migration has prompted higher demand for skilled workers from outside the EU. As a consequence, the Home Office quota for skilled workers’ visas has been maxed out in three consecutive months for the first time, meaning migrants with medical, software and other specialist skills are being turned away despite vacancies for them. This has made it harder for employers, including the NHS, to hire workers they need. There are now calls for NHS employees to be excluded from these caps.

Issues such as these will only increase after Brexit. The ONS figures show overall net migration to the UK remained quite similar at 244,000 (down by 29,000 from the year before). To reduce this to its arbitrary ‘tens of thousands’ target, the UK government would need to take drastic steps which would give it an immigration system starkly out of step with the country’s economic and social dynamics.

Meanwhile, for the EU and Europe in general, regional migration dynamics are likely to change. Some European cities may receive more arrivals as they become attractive alternatives to London and other cities in the UK. Paris, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam flourishing post-Brexit is planned for, as it is expected some employers may relocate there. Now, it seems employees may actually be moving there before them. If new migration patterns are sustained over time, these could affect labour markets and industries across Europe. This could become a key opportunity for several countries.

What happens next?

The end effects depend on what actually happens once a deal for EU citizens is struck. Discussions are locked on the transition period, and whether EU citizens arriving after March 2019 will have the same rights as those previously residing in the UK. Worryingly, the rights of EU citizens – both those already in the country prior to Brexit and those coming afterward – in the event of a no-deal does not seem to be a big talking point.

What happens next also depends on wider questions about Brexit, including perhaps most crucially the UK-EU trade relationship, which looks to be limited to a free trade agreement, and whether the UK can successfully negotiate for financial services to be included in this. Meanwhile, it is continuously difficult to predict how far political infighting will shape outcomes, particularly as Theresa May’s Brexit statements increasingly seem targeted at factions of her own party.

In any case, it is now clear that for many EU citizens, whatever deal is reached will be too little, too late. More EU citizens in the UK are leaving and less are coming in. Governments on both sides of the channel should pay attention to this now-verified trend, which will likely accelerate as Brexit nears.

The views expressed here are the author’s own.

A demonstration by West Papuans in The Hague, against the Indonesian government. Wikipedia. Public domain.

In guidebooks it is referred to as the country’s final frontier. It is a vast territory consisting of mostly unspoiled wilderness and a relatively sparse population. There are immense forests and soaring, glacier-capped mountains.

When traveling to the region from the country’s populated core, it is common to see settlers and contractors who work for mining and logging companies. One cannot help but notice the presence of soldiers that are there to offer protection from the natives.

This description sounds, to the American ear, like the development of the western frontier. It has an old world ring to it, and is resonant with the frontier stories of Australia, Canada, Russia, and numerous settings around the globe. But the subject of the description is West Papua, a contemporary frontier region in Indonesia.

West Papua, roughly the size of California, is the colloquial name given to the western half of the island of New Guinea (the eastern half of the island is the sovereign state of Papua New Guinea). It is an extraordinarily diverse place with hundreds of languages and cultural groups.

The very concept of West Papua is in many ways the product of colonialism. It was once known as Dutch New Guinea, a region within the Dutch East Indies. Between 1949 and 1963 it was a stand-alone Dutch colony. It was later called Irian Jaya after it came under Indonesian control in the 1960s. Since that time it has been the scene of an independence struggle against the Indonesian government.

The independence effort, or Free Papua Movement, is now 60 years old. It is thought that 100.000 people have died in the resulting conflict, although estimates vary widely. Reports of torture, extrajudicial killing, and human rights abuses are common.

The strategy of the secessionists (never really a unified group) has oscillated between outright insurgency – at times pitting rebels with bows and arrows against soldiers with modern weaponry – to forms of nonviolent civil resistance and protest to diplomatic outreach.

The independence effort, or Free Papua Movement, is now 60 years old. It is thought that 100.000 people have died in the resulting conflict.

Like other historical cultures on the frontier of a large expansive state, the West Papuans feel that they are becoming increasingly marginalized on their own land.

A chief driver of this sentiment is the Indonesian transmigration program, an attempt by the State to relocate people from the core islands of Java, Bali, and Madura to the less populated and less developed outer islands. 

This has dramatically altered the population balance in West Papua. Whereas non-West Papuans accounted for approximately 4% of the population in 1971 and 32% in 2000, they are now becoming a majority.

Whether or not this represents an attempt by the State to transform the ethnic composition of the region, instead of simply transferring citizens to less populated provinces, the native reaction is not hard to anticipate: they see this as a form of imperialism that alienates them from their land. Some observers of the state of affairs in West Papua have called it “slow motion genocide.”

In addition to the demographic trends, the West Papuans feel marginalized from the economy and relative prosperity that non-West Papuans enjoy.

West Papuans are disproportionately poorer and have higher rates of incarceration and alcoholism. The ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences combine with stereotypes of West Papuan backwardness to perpetuate forms of racism. Not unlike the marginalized indigenous groups of Australia and the United States, there is a seeming intractability to the divide that gives rise to despair. Many West Papuans fear that they will disappear as a people.

Whereas non-West Papuans accounted for approximately 4% of the population in 1971 and 32% in 2000, they are now becoming a majority. 

Independence movements are shaped by their settings. The Northern Cypriots and the Abkhazians possess their own independent, albeit unrecognized, state and for them life is not so different from state-possessing nations elsewhere.

The Scots and the Catalans have democratized movements and their resulting political efforts bear a likeness to other forms of formalized political contestation.

But the conditions in West Papua are different. It is illegal to fly the independence flag (The Morning Star), demonstrations are routinely broken up, and independence-related meetings are often raided by the police or military.

In addition, media access to the region is limited. This type of state suppression transforms an independence movement in a specific way: it makes it into a resistance struggle.

I recently traveled to West Papua to participate in a workshop focusing on unity building and the advancement of nonviolent methods for seeking self-determination. The workshop was clandestine and I was told to travel without any physical or electronic documents about secession should I be detained.

It is illegal to fly the independence flag (The Morning Star), demonstrations are routinely broken up, and independence-related meetings are often raided by the police or military. 

The participants were brought in from all over West Papua and Indonesia, and included students, former insurgents and political prisoners, and members of the clergy. More than half of the participants had been beaten by the police, several had been tortured, and they all knew people who had been killed by the State security forces.

At close range, I have found all independence movements to be inspirational. There is always a sense of hope, enthusiasm for the mission, and a poignant celebration of national identity and culture.

But independence movements in the form of a resistance struggle are truly stirring, and I was unprepared for the level of camaraderie and devotion I found when attending the workshop.

The participants would begin each session by joining hands and singing spirituals. They engaged in highly emotional unity-building exercises and forms of ritual. In one exercise they formed a circle, joined hands, closed their eyes, and took turns calling the names of those who have inspired them, alive or dead.

With each calling the group would murmur “present” (in Indonesian). I was told that this was a way to invite the larger community (the living and the dead) to bear witness to their struggle, and that the practice was borrowed from past Latin American resistance groups.

A visitor to Barcelona will quickly notice the ubiquity of the Catalan independence flag. But in West Papua I saw the Morning Star flag only once, painted on the side of a handbag for sale at a local market.

I asked a friend if the vendor would be arrested, and they replied that the West Papuans push the envelope in small, subtle ways such as this – after all, it was a bag not a flag – and that such acts constitute everyday forms of resistance.

The deck is stacked against the West Papuans. Indonesia is quite keen to hold on to the province, and it is a strong state with powerful allies including the United States, Australia, and transnational mining corporations, who all have an interest in looking the other way.

The military and police are involved in local business and the growing non-West Papuan population is loyal to the State. Secessionist-related activity is punishable by imprisonment or worse. And the West Papuans are becoming increasingly marginalized.

Indonesia is quite keen to hold on to the province, and it is a strong state with powerful allies including the United States, Australia, and transnational mining corporations.

This is a form of frontier imperialism that goes largely overlooked outside of West Papua. Yet this is a moment that took place generations ago on other frontiers. Given the current trajectory, the West Papuans are destined to become a small minority in their own land. 

Like the Native Americans or Australian aboriginals, their languages might endure in pockets and in the names of geographic features and terms that will be appropriated by the settler population. One day, after a period of semi-assimilation, forced or otherwise, there may even be sincere society-wide attempts at reconciliation that many will see as too late.

There are two sides to every independence struggle. The Indonesian government has gotten some things right and it would be wrong to fault the non-West Papuan migrants who are just seeking a better life.

But there is always space for dialogue, the right to free speech, and the opening of democratic channels. The solution is to empower the West Papuans now, to recognize and bear witness to their struggle, and to give them greater autonomy, before it is too late.

"We are all in this together" was the familiar refrain used by former Chancellor George Osborne. If we want to pay down the public debt, we must all bear some of the burden for tax rises and spending cuts."We are all in this together" was the familiar refrain used by former Chancellor George Osborne. If we want to pay down the public debt, we must all bear some of the burden for tax rises and spending cuts. After it was announced this week that the target for reducing the deficit had been reached, Mr Osborne announced triumphantly that "we got there in the end". It is, however, not at all clear who Osborne is referring to when he says "we". The enlarged deficit in 2009-10 was created by the slump in output that followed the global financial crisis, and the spending required to get us out of it. It was the decision to bail out the banks which added £1.5 trillion to the national debt -- not overgenerous public spending by the previous Labour Government. And yet, those people who rely most heavily on our public services have been the ones to bear most of the cost. Our schools have seen almost £3 billion worth of cuts since 2015. Local councils will see their funding fall by 77 per cent by 2020 versus 2015. The NHS funding gap stands to reach a staggering £30 billion by 2020. Meanwhile, successive Conservative governments have reduced the rate of corporation tax from 30% in 2005/06 to just 19% today. This is the lowest rate in the G7, and one of the lowest rates among the 35 countries of the OECD. Astonishingly, a further reduction to 17% is still planned before the end of this Parliament. These changes have seen revenues from corporation tax fall from 3.5% GDP in 2005/06, to just 2.6% today. At the same time, it has become increasingly easy for multinational companies to shift their profits to low-tax jurisdictions in order to avoid paying tax in the UK altogether. Today, nearly half of all children in London, Birmingham, and Manchester live in poverty, whilst UK-based corporations enjoy some of the lowest tax rates in the developed world. So much for "we’re all in it together". It is in this context that the IPPR has released a new report calling for a fundamental rethink of the system of corporate taxation in the UK. First, we are proposing an increase in corporation tax from 19% to 24%. We argue that the revenues from this should be used to reduce taxes on workers by reducing employers’ national insurance contributions from 13.8% to 11.8%. Taxes on profits are more likely to be borne by the people who own a company, whilst taxes on payrolls are more likely to be borne by workers themselves. So reductions in corporation tax have benefited shareholders at the expense of workers, who have yet to see their wages recover to pre-crisis levels. This imbalance has also had important distributive effects between companies, raising the tax burden of less profitable, higher-employment companies, and reducing that of more profitable ones. Second, we propose the introduction of a new tax designed to prevent multinational tax avoidance. Our ‘Alternative Minimum Corporation Tax’ (AMCT) would link a company’s tax liability to its sales or turnover in the UK, to ensure that firms were not able to avoid taxes by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions. While we do not currently have any reliable data on the extent of multinational profit shifting, the exchequer is estimated to lose somewhere between £3 billion and £12 billion each year as a result of these practices. Our AMCT would capture a significant portion of these lost revenues, which would go some way to closing the gap in the NHS budget. After eight years of austerity borne primarily by the most vulnerable in our society, it’s time that all businesses started paying their fair share.

Labour's leave voters might be less certain than some think. Wikicommons/Ilovetheeu. Some rights reserved. Prevailing wisdom dictates that to avoid harm being done to you by politicians, you must not trust them. There are good and valid reasons for this, but the logic leaves us vulnerable to one key risk : that we doubt politicians when they are in fact telling the truth. As a result we are left exposed to the threat we anticipate rather than a security we refuse to believe in.

In recent times there have been no political soap operas with so ready a supply of bad faith actors as Brexit and the saga of Corbyn and Labour. Shadowy think tanks (Legatum), misrepresented wills of people (Farage et al), billionaire media (Murdoch, Barclay Brothers, Rothermere) the machinations of Labour’s Blairite rump, still spurned and licking its wounds. As so many of these quarters bemoan a supposed loss of truth, new research from the British Election Study (very neatly summarised here) details attitudes that reveal much about Labour’s crucial Leave voters, and in so doing offer useful, and corrective, advice to those still hoping to clinch remain from the jaws of leave. The research points strongly towards the idea that leaving the EU was a means and not an end.

The research, first of all, shows that Labour’s leave voters still care more about housing and public services than about the leaving of the EU, with 26 per cent of respondents citing it as their number 1 concern (24 per cent cite Brexit). The proportion citing foreigners or immigration is lower again, at 17 per cent. It goes almost without saying, but nevertheless still should be said, that the same does not go for Tory voters - just 15 per cent of leave-voting Tories prioritise housing and public services (interestingly, in what it says of the assumed progressivism of remain voters, a higher rate of concern than the 10 per cent of remain-voting Tories), while 24 per cent of leave-voting Tories have a primary concern of immigration and foreigners.

Labour’s Remain voters – its ridiculed and supposedly out of touch urbanites – meanwhile, share priorities every bit as ‘left’ as Labour’s traditional base, with 20 per cent of them citing public services and housing as an issue bigger than the EU. Between these two groups, you find a party that either wants the EU and the fairer society project of Corbynism, or wanted to leave the EU in 2016 but nevertheless care more about the fairer society than about doing so. You find a party that either wants the EU and the fairer society project of Corbynism, or wanted to leave the EU in 2016 but nevertheless care more about the fairer society than about doing so.

On other relevant themes, Labour’s leave camp also stack up as 44 per cent in favour of a ratification referendum on the final deal (compared to just 18 per cent of Tories), and also self-identify as paying less attention to politics, so that their 2016 vote might more readily be regarded as an accurate mood of the times, rather than a firm commitment. For this group, and unlike their Tory equivalents, the research points strongly towards the idea that leaving the EU was a means and not an end.

Much of that which has been written on Corbyn and the apocryphal “Lexit” has felt more like the obsession of a voiceless political centre getting a taste of the disenfranchisement already familiar to most. Against that, a thought experiment: 

Imagine that Jeremy Corbyn gave the EU “seven and a half out of ten” because he felt the EU warranted, if pressed to give one, a rating of seven and a half out of ten. Contrary to the outsized ‘Lexit’ narrative, imagine that Labour voters back and backed remain, voting for it to the tune of 63 per cent, favourably comparable to the 64 per cent of the remain-backing SNP and the 70 per cent of the avowedly Europhile Lib Dems. 

Whether it was accurate or deceitful (it was deceitful), imagine that voters did simply want £350million a week for the NHS, as promised on the side of the bus. Imagine that to leave the EU really was no more than the  project of a Tory fringe that eventually lucked-in on post-financial crisis timing and the rise of a referendum thanks to a political chancer such as David Cameron.

Stripped of the certainty that Labour are engaging in deceit, or that a section of the electorate (half of it) is a homogenous out-group determined to leave the EU for nefarious reasons, there is a clear constituency – present in the recent data – for Labour under Corbyn to deliver the fair society without the EU departure, or at least with further public consultation on it.

The proviso, also evident in the data, is that it must be a joint-project that does not jettison one for the other, a trade that would anyway ensure both failed together.

This is, admittedly, a far cry from Labour’s first response to Brexit, encapsulated on June 24, 2016, by Corbyn’s ill-thought through and snap call for an immediate Article 50 notification to be delivered. The moment, understandably enough, is something critics will long hold onto as evidence of his Eurosceptic bent, where a more forgiving reading is that it was rather a sign of the poorly-drilled outfit from which Labour have since drastically upped their game.

This accidentally full-blooded beginning in the brave new world of Brexit nevertheless set the Labour Party’s tone for the following year. Not yet strong enough to contend a general election as a party against the ‘will of the people’, Labour overhauled the Tory majority on the backs of dissatisfaction with a naked Tory haughtiness, and fuming, energised remain voters. With that result of June 8 , 2017, a confidence has emerged, and with it the potential to differentiate the Labour EU offer from that of the Tory Party. The new direction is typified by a Labour now comfortable enough to assert that there will be a customs union with the EU, and industrious enough to make the announcement together with the CBI. The party is, without doubt, the UK political centre.

Screenshot: British Election Study tweet.

Tory Remainer votes?

That process will be done no harm at all by the information on offer in this latest research, suggesting that Labour leave are ready to compromise in return for the fair society promised by project Corbyn. The data, however, does present a few important questions still to be asked. While the Labour leave vote has been scrutinised almost exhaustively, its equivalent, the Tory Remain vote, has not – this despite the latter having more votes in it.

If Labour’s leavers seem to dislike the Tories more than the EU, and value fair society above an EU exit anyway, might Tory remainers be brought on-side at no political cost to Labour’s own base? The question then will be the inverse – do Cameroon Tories like the EU more than they dislike Labour? The key test, as it always has been, will be if George Osborne will vote Jeremy Corbyn. While there is often the refrain from remainers that Corbyn should back remain to win an election, more seldom comes the assertion that centrist remainers must back Corbyn to win a remain.

If this is the current mood of the electorate, then it will need to be matched by changes in the thinking of the Corbyn team. Where Labour seemed once to operate with an assumption that they must cede Brexit to get socialism, a bargain many in the Corbyn team would have been happy to strike, the contrary logic now becomes more valuable: Labour get socialism by giving remainers their EU, or at least a stab at a ratification referendum. While there is often the refrain from remainers that Corbyn should back remain to win an election, more seldom comes the assertion that centrist remainers must back Corbyn to win a remain. True, politicians are our servants – let them come to you – but Corbyn is also servant to 17 million leave voters, some hard, most lukewarm, but disregarding the nature of that duty is not only the attitude that brought us to Brexit, but will also be sure to lose the day.

As the political centre and momentum moves, as it was inevitably always going to, towards customs union and reason – Labour’s interrogation will now also shift from domestic priorities (what degree of Leave to accommodate in getting Corbynism) to European ones (what degree of Corbynism will the EU accommodate). These sort of questions become possible with a sense that hard Brexit can be taken from the table, and that what John Major once called "the Bastards” of the Tory Party would break their own government sooner than concede to common sense over the EU. At that point, Labour becomes ever more the government in waiting that they already take efforts to present themselves as.

Evidence of this process can be seen in the opening up of space for serious discussion of particulars in the Corbyn project. George Peretz QC, of Monckton Chambers, recently provided an open-minded but neat rebuttal of how that sacred cow of some left-wing leavers, EU state aid law, actually does little harm and even much good to the aims of Corbyn. The tone is instructive, however, in that it assumes Labour's position on the EU to be misunderstood, not malicious. 

First by accident and then by design, Labour have for two years given the Tories enough rope for them to be strung up in the knots of their own Brexit. As the electorate becomes more amenable to, and even hungry for, rationality on the matter, now comes the time to question, seriously, if the EU is at-odds with the Labour Manifesto, and if not, to mend for good the rift that once existed between Corbyn’s Labour and remain voters. The external variable to this, beyond our control and with a clock ticking, is whether or not – come that time – Brussels can still be made to care.

Photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved.Russian elections used to be all about dramaturgiya, meaning an artificial and carefully-scripted drama. Elections may not have had the normal interest, like an uncertain outcome, but they buzzed with all the drama of artificial conflict. In fact, one of the tricks of local “political technology” was to deliver emotive narratives to marginalise subjects that the Kremlin didn’t want to see discussed.

The 2018 presidential election, however, isn’t just boring. It’s devoid of any politics at all. If it is about anything, it’s about the politics of nothingness. It may therefore apparently not be worth paying too much attention, but dramaturgiya has been a functional part of the Russian political system for over 20 years, and it’s not clear how things will work without it.

Switching the tracks

Dramaturgiya has changed its function several times. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was part of a weak state’s box of magic tricks. Russia’s leaders were presented as either a lesser evil against exaggerated threats (Yeltsin against the “red-brown” coalition in 1993 or against the Communists in 1996), or as a crusader against soft targets or threats that the state didn’t have the capacity or desire to properly confront (the oligarchs in 2003, the Chechens in 1999 were arguably both). Dramaturgiya’s main function was thus distraction, changing the dominant narrative away from the authorities’ corruption or incompetence.

Under “mature Putinism”, dramaturgiya became the key means of maintaining Putin’s mega-rating, at 70% or more

Under “mature Putinism”, dramaturgiya became the key means of maintaining Putin’s mega-rating, at 70% or more. This wasn’t about popularity in a bipartisan system like the USA, where the leader hovers either side of 50%. It was about creating and maintaining what the political technologist Gleb Pavlovsky and others used to call the“Putin majority”. Seventy percent or 80% was the level of loyalty that was expected in the system; a degree of opposition in discredited 1990s circles or amongst the intelligentsia mattered little, so long as the “majority” was intact.

The majority marginalised other voices, but most importantly it aligned political elites via a loyalty test to the script of the dramaturgiya. Political debate was replaced by a virtual chorus. The majority functioned as a post-modern equivalent of Václav Havel’s greengrocer in his well-known 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Back in the era of Leonid Brezhnev and Gustav Husák, it didn’t matter whether Havel’s conformist really believed in the slogan he was supposed to put in his window (“Workers of the world unite”) – what mattered was his display of loyalty to the official party line. The modern-day Kremlin script functions in the same way. It’s pointless to ask whether the Russian elite actually believes all the tropes, myths, propaganda and downright lies. The point is their loyalty to the overall narrative, and maintaining the closed circle of its reproduction.

A further change under late Putinism is that the dramaturgiya acquired a harder edge. Russian political technologists had always read too much Carl Schmitt for their own good. They now revelled in his “Theory of the Partisan”, creating a “state of exception” to justify constant, even escalating conflict between “Fortress Russia” and its enemies. And far from dramaturgiya somehow fading away, the authorities needed constantly to create new episodes to renew fading impact effects. Or, most worryingly of all, ever higher doses to maintain the effect.

One final change is that the record got stuck. In the 1990s, political technologists never really played the same trick twice. Since 2012, the refrain has constantly been foreign enemies, orchestrated by the USA, and channelled by the domestic fifth column. And in so far as the script didn’t change too much, its intensity changed instead.

The empty election

This all meant that dramaturgiya was increasingly permanent. It wasn’t just deployed to win elections. The majority became the means by which the mythical “power vertical” actually worked – not by the orders given, but by the need for the administrative machine to join in the virtual chorus. But there were dangers of too much drama. If Gleb Pavlovsky was one of the original architects of the system, one reason why he fell out of favour in 2011 was that he began to warn of the dangers of over-mobilisation, and of creating too many enemies. When I interviewed him in 2007, he said, “we have to prepare tranquilisation, not mobilisation”. And by 2011, Pavlovskii was in the Dmitry Medvedev camp. He thought he had saved Russia, job done.

“2017 is the year when the Kremlin’s domination over the ‘scenario’ ends, although it’s far from being the end of the Kremlin’s hegemony over politics”

But the Medvedev project was beset by internal tensions. Medvedev was designed to be a virtual liberal, but protesters wanted him to act like a real one. He was supposed to de-mobilise protest potential, but the spark for the Bolotnaya protests was the desire for a first term of rhetoric to be succeeded by a second term of action.

What the protesters got instead was reaction. Putin overdosed on dramaturgiya with his conservative values project in 2012, and we have been living with the consequences ever since. The Kremlin was grappling with the need for internal-external enemies after Putin’s re-election, even before the crisis in Ukraine. Who now remembers the row about American foster parents? Then confrontation with Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, sanctions and constant rows with the west took things to a whole new level. Ukraine segued into Syria. And America was always the Great Satan.

But now we have nothing. In Pavlovsky’s words:

“2017 is the year when the Kremlin’s domination over the ‘scenario’ ends, although it’s far from being the end of the Kremlin’s hegemony over politics. All year Putin’s scenarios have been late, catching up with issues emerging inside the public domain. But in the minds of TV viewers, even Kremlin critics, the inertia of his former power reigns… The views of observers, their language and vocabulary, are aimed at ‘Putin’s campaign’. But there is no campaign.”

Unlike 2012, there is no overriding theme. There is no manifesto. There are no Putin articles in the press. The mythology of “Fortress Russia” is still there in part, but ritualised, with the option of taking it to a higher level excluded for now. The Kremlin toyed with the idea of a victory campaign, declaring an end to Syria operations many times over, and even toying with peace proposals for Ukraine. Putin would run on accumulated dramaturgiya, banking his fake victories abroad. But this proved hard to deliver – or more exactly, to stage convincingly.

Over-mobilisation has recently become more of a concern. The 2016 Duma campaign was almost deliberately boring

There are mini-dramas. Ksenia Sobchak seems to be running both to create a new pseudo-opposition and to discredit a certain type of caricatured liberalism. Pavel Grudinin seems to have passed his screen test to join the ranks of Kremlin outriders, a fake populist to ride the global wave of populism rather than letting it crash against the Kremlin unchecked. But there is nothing to make sense of the whole. (Though Grudinin, at least, does hint at one possible future direction.)

The changing nature of the Kremlin’s dramaturgiya is illustrated by the shift from Vladislav Surkov to Vyacheslav Volodin to Sergey Kiriyenko as information overlord. According to one Ukrainian expert on information war I interviewed recently: “Surkov was a creator, Volodin a brutish builder, but Kiriyenko is only a manager. He’s not developing the system, just controlling it. This shows that Putin thinks propaganda works well, it doesn’t need further development. But it’s probably a short-term appointment, just for the elections.”

A pause or a re-calculation?

But because the election is a great big blank, we don’t know whether this is because of short-term or long-term factors. Whether this is just a pause or a strategic re-calculation.

Over-mobilisation has recently become more of a concern. The 2016 Duma campaign was almost deliberately boring. The obvious price to be paid was the fall in official turnout to 47.8%, although independent estimates calculated it as low as 36.5%. In part, this revived a point made by Ivan Krastev in 2011; one of the paradoxical strengths of Putin’s regime before 2012 was its lack of ideology, without which there was little for protesters to mobilise against. The Kremlin is clearly afraid of the opposite scenario to 2012 (protesters after rather than before the election) because the election will not actually decide anything. So turnout, or more exactly real turnout, will undoubtedly be low this time (65.2% was claimed in 2012). Hence all the methods used to make it look higher, with a virtual civil society campaign fronted by ersatz NGOs like “Volunteers of victory” collecting signatures for Putin.

The Kremlin is unlikely to risk further disengagement; it will not want to leave the old Putin majority strategically adrift

Russia’s “conservative turn” after 2012 seemed for the longer term. But there were reasons to pause for breath in 2018. There were too many tigers to ride. There was the danger of what Mark Galeotti called“fantasy fatigue”. There was the real world, and the real-world consequences of too much virtual conflict, blowing back to Russia from Ukraine, Syria and the USA. And there was the accumulation of real world demands. Putin’s annual address in March 2018 didn’t solve the problem of defining what the election was actually about; but it made some nods in the direction of development rather than drama, without of course addressing the reasons why so many practical issues had been neglected. And Putin’s nuclear machismo pointed in the opposite direction.

In part, the Kremlin was relying on the momentum of existing dramaturgiya, on the script remaining the same. Everyone should know it by now. But the system looks old. Putin is tired. According to Pavlovsky again, everyone can see “the wear and tear of the outdated scenario-planning machine in the Russian Federation”. The whole show is empty. “Putin has become a pilgrim in his own country. Puzzled, he wanders around in the fogs of politicisation, visiting cities and ministries, like a pensioner, moving from dacha to dacha. The “theatre of depoliticization has exhausted itself”.

Life without drama

I won’t attempt to predict what will happen to Russia over the next six years. But logically, we can say what will happen without dramaturgiya, at least at election time.

First, the population is less mobilised. It is more of a spectator for whatever Putin decides to do next. Inevitable low turnout for the election, whatever the official statistics may claim, will be a damp start to the new term. The Kremlin is unlikely to risk further disengagement; it will not want to leave the old Putin majority strategically adrift.

Elites may also gain a certain destructive freedom. In ideal type democracies, competitive elections confer a mandate. The losers acquiesce in the winners’ right to rule. But if Russia no longer has a propaganda chorus to align elites, then they may go off-script. Clan politics will be more prominent; though individual clans will likely claim their own mini-dramarturgiyas, posing as “nationalists” or “reformers”. Ramzan Kadyrov is already trying out his narrative, as leader of a more radical version of Russian Islam. There may be a new Time of Troubles, but with competition between false narratives rather than false Dmitrys. And if a hypothetical succession struggle hots up, it will not be for the keys to the Kremlin, but the keys to NTV.

Russia may also be buffeted from abroad, or by the simple force of events. The whole world now faces narrative volatility, and Russia has played its far from small part in encouraging that trend. It would be deeply paradoxical, and unlikely, if Russia now took a back seat. As the election has been so devoid of debate and meaning, there is nothing to stop Putin ramping up the rhetoric again if he wants.

An alternative explanation for the current, possibly temporary, lack of drama might be the 2018 World Cup. The most prosaic answer of all might be that Putin just wants a free hand in a very uncertain next term. But he is unlikely to get it, having failed to define the script in advance.

Image: Liam Fox, International Trade Secretary, speaking last week. Jonathan Brady/PA Images, all rights reserved.

The last twenty years of my professional career have been spent working to support UK business in European and global markets, most recently at the Department of International Trade. We now face the challenge of how public policy can best help UK firms to compete effectively as we leave the European Union. My focus here is on the practical realities, not the politics, of Brexit.

I want first to set out the economic implications of the choices the UK faces in 2018; and then put forward some policies to support the competitiveness of UK firms trading in global markets.

Trade requires both effective access to markets, and competitive firms producing quality products. It is firms not governments that determine how much is exported.

Governments influence market access through agreements on how markets are regulated, acceptable product standards, competition policy and, less importantly, tariff levels; as well as through exchange rates.

Public policy also helps in the longer term to shape the available skills, research base, infrastructure and access to capital which determine longer term productivity, and support the competitiveness of firms.

“an immediate, significant and lasting negative impact”

Against that background it is important to bear in mind that today’s UK economy is very much service based – around 80% of value added comes from services.

UK exports account for around 21% of UK GDP (on a value-added basis) with services representing more than half of that total. Business services, finance and insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors provide as much UK export value as the top twelve industrial sectors.

The EU takes 46% of UK service exports; nearly four times what we export in services to the US, which in turn is roughly twice our total service exports to India and China combined. No other overseas services market is significant.

The UK’s exports of goods to the EU are around 49% of our total sales abroad; just over four times our exports to the US and twelve times current exports to China.

The distinction between what the statisticians define as services or goods is no longer as robust as it used to be. Recent estimates from the CER and Trade Policy Observatory find that services valued added directly linked to manufacturing exports, design, software etc., is worth more than £50bn annually, about the same magnitude as UK financial service exports.

The income gained by manufacturers and their supply chains in servicing advanced products from aircraft to medical diagnostic machinery is often half or more of the total value of a contract.

So economic activity is more like a bowl of entangled spaghetti than separate dishes neatly labelled as goods or services; and this is particularly true of trade inside the EU.

The European single market in services is still less developed than in goods. But it is the only functioning cross-border services market in the global economy, because the EU is the only organisation combining mutual recognition of qualifications, technical standards, and free movement of workers with shared regulatory structures and a legal dispute resolution system able to provide certainty to suppliers and consumers.

Losing guaranteed access to service markets currently open across the EU will therefore have an immediate, significant and lasting negative impact. The UK is predominantly a service economy; around half of our service exports go the EU; and there are no plausible alternative markets for these services which combine the scale and depth of current service exports to Europe.

Impact goes way beyond ‘financial services’

Examples of this impact which do not involve financial services include UK legal services, where net exports amounted to over £3bn in 2015. Outside the single market UK law firms would no longer be able to represent clients in European court hearings, nor engage directly with the Commission on competition investigations. Similarly, international arbitration work depends on being able to plead before the European Court of Justice; and intellectual property disputes require representation rights before the EU IPO tribunals.

The creative services sector exports over £4bn to the EU, with more than half of fashion, graphic design, film and video exports going to EU countries. The UK could no longer be the hub for pan-European broadcasting it has become since the audio-visual market was opened up, as broadcasters are required to base themselves in an EU member state; and current EU free trade deals do not cover broadcasting and programme production rights.

Our manufacturing economy is, as the logic of the single market implies, now deeply integrated with the rest of the EU. Just under half of UK exports, and over half of UK imports, come from within the European Union single market. For the last 25 years there have been no customs checks or border tax adjustments on these transactions. The ability to move workers, with mutually recognised qualifications, freely between member states also makes firms more cost effective.

Much single market trade is within closely managed supply chains which require certainty of rapid delivery, clarity of technical standards, the lowest possible transport costs, and the ability to provide unified support services, for example in data analytics, design and maintenance. Larger companies make investment decisions within the EU by comparing the cost of different plants within these integrated cross-border supply chains.

Components, particularly in the automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors, often cross-national boundaries several times. VAT formalities continue to be streamlined and the EU’s digital single market ensures free data movement within a shared legal framework. So both services and goods trade are becoming ever more interdependent within the EU.

No plausible economic analysis concludes that the extra customs, tax, security and regulatory barriers necessarily required by a trading border, and the inevitable delays, expense and bureaucracy that go with them, could somehow increase UK firms’ competitive advantage. Losing level playing field access to the EU’s internal market, and to the customs union that goes with it, would immediately put UK based producers at a lasting disadvantage to their competitors within that market.

What options are available to manage this challenge?

A bilateral free trade deal between London and Brussels is an obvious candidate.

The additional costs to business of such a deal compared with the status quo would be significant. The annual administrative burden of moving out of the customs union to a free trade agreement with the EU has been officially estimated at over £5 billion, a 350% increase. Up to 5,000 new permanent Customs staff would be needed, a deadweight cost to the taxpayer, as well as additional physical infrastructure to process well over 10,000 containers a day in channel ports.

More than half of the UK’s 300,000+ traders trade only with the EU. At least 130,000 of those have no current dealings with Customs authorities. The number of customs declarations is projected to increase fivefold, from 50 million to 250 million.

Any free trade deal requires rules of origin certificates for cross border trade to ensure that there is sufficient domestic content to justify tariff free status. One UK car company estimated that it would need some 15,000 rules of origin certificates, at a minimum cost estimated at £15 each. UK supermarkets relying on just-in-time food imports could need 80,000 separate import declarations annually, costing large businesses £25 each and smaller ones without economies of scale around twice as much. Similar challenges apply to food exports. Around 70% of UK food and drink trade takes place within the EU.

Technology cannot offer frictionless solutions - and our own tech business are threatened

Technology cannot offer a frictionless solution to border controls. The need for formal product standard approvals, hygiene checks, advance security declarations, VAT calculations and payment, and the inevitable delays at the border, cannot be wished away. Together these complexities threaten just-in-time supply lines and make companies manufacturing for the European market see further investment in the UK as higher risk than in other EU economies without these added costs and delays.

The UK’s stock of inward investment is also at risk as investors seek to maintain that wider market access. Over 1000 Japanese companies in the UK employing some 140,000 people are here because of free access to the wider EU market, not simply the smaller UK home market. The 2000 German companies employing 370,000 people with 110bn Euro of direct investment are part of seamless pan-EU supply chains. In the chemical sector for example 60% of UK exports go to the EU, and 75% of imports come from the EU.

Two thirds of UK exports to the EU are estimated by the IFS to be intermediate inputs to wider supply chains; as are 55% of imports here from the EU. Investment to build these supply chains will be at risk if UK based firms can no longer access the single market on equal terms. Half of the £1 trillion stock of UK foreign direct investment comes from other EU based investors so the potential impact is large.

An important factor in the UK originally joining the European Community in 1973, in the abolition of exchange controls by Mrs Thatcher’s first administration in 1979, and in the UK’s leadership of the single market programme from the mid-1980s was to ensure a more competitive home market, as the basis for success in the global economy. For the last 25 years the EU single market has achieved that goal with a rigorous control of state aids, active pro-competition policy and open public procurement markets worth over 2000bn euros, five times that of the UK alone.

The competitive spur of the single market has provided cheaper imports for business as well as consumers, and pressured UK firms to improve their productivity or go out of business. By restricting firms’ access to the largest and most prosperous single market in the world, taking the UK out of the EU negotiated preferential trade deals which cover another 12% of UK exports, and increasing investor uncertainty about guaranteed cross-border access to skilled labour, Brexit risks undermining the global competitiveness of the UK economy.

The Brexit implications for entrepreneurship and innovation in the UK are also problematic. The welcome growth in tech start-ups, in London and more widely across the UK, has been fuelled by the ease of movement of young professionals into Britain from the rest of the EU and the freedom to transact data and digital services across the single market. £7bn was invested in the UK’s digital tech sector in 2016, 50% more than in any other European country.

The growth of available start-up and scaleup capital, incentivised by the Enterprise Investment Scheme and Seed EIS tax breaks, has been a further UK advantage. The research sector has benefitted from the UK government’s decision in 2012 to develop an industrial strategy with increased research and innovation funding; while universities have benefitted from EU Horizon 2020 funding for research programmes and their ability to recruit talent freely across the EU.

After Brexit there will be more constraints on European entrepreneurs seeking to settle and open businesses in the UK. The EIF which provided one third of the funding for UK based venture capital funds in the four years to 2015 -some £2.3bn – is now winding down its operations here. The £400 million new UK funding to be provided through the British Business bank, while welcome, will still leave a significant gap in public funding for venture capital.

For start-ups the UK risks moving from being the most open major European country to being the most bureaucratic, with no guarantee that new firms can import staff freely from within the EU, the loss of significant EU funding in the research and innovation sectors, and uncertainty over the alignment of UK and EU data protection rules. Universities already report the loss of EU staff amid worries that the UK will no longer be able to lead cross-European research teams funded by the EU, and wider concerns about the status of family members under more restrictive migration rules.

Bilateral trade deals, evidence, and wishful thinking

Can these disadvantages be remedied through new bilateral trade deals with the rest of the world?

It is right to look seriously at the alternative markets which may open to the UK outside the EU, some fast growing. But as David Hume reminded us, a wise person proportions belief to the evidence.

There is a marked lack of evidence that leaving the EU customs union and single market will lead to greater UK trade with third countries.

It is for example unclear why third countries such as China, India or the United States should agree to negotiate bilateral trade deals with the UK which favour Britain’s comparative advantage in the service sector. They will instead seek acceptance by the UK of their own national regulatory, environmental and technical standards as part of even a limited trade deal.

Given the reciprocity which runs through trade negotiations, third countries will also be aware that any concessions made to the UK will be expected by other trading partners; and the degree of their interest in the UK market will be strongly influenced by how far UK based firms continue to enjoy competitive access to the much larger European market.

In trade negotiations size does matter. Even implausibly favourable market access deals with some third countries are arithmetically unable to make up for the loss of unrestricted access to more local EU markets in which so many UK producers are currently integrated.

On current trade flows, a tripling of total services trade with China would not equal a fifth of the UK’s current services exports to the single market. Germany already does more than four times as much trade with China as the UK. The major barrier to additional UK trade with China or other markets is our lack of relative competitiveness.

Moreover for most products outside the agriculture, textiles, food and automotive sector, tariffs are an administrative burden rather than a significant cost. Few high value products are so price sensitive that a reduction in bilateral tariff levels will massively shift trade. Market access in advanced service economies is largely about regulatory standards, access to data, and effective dispute resolution. Investors require reassurance that market access will not be threatened by political disagreements or arbitrary anti-dumping decisions.

It is of course helpful to achieve more market access through negotiation. The EU as a trade negotiator has the economic weight to deal with China and the US as trade equals. The UK does not. The European Commission has negotiated trade deals with over fifty countries, most recently with Canada, Korea and Japan, and continues to engage with the US. Some £55bn of UK exports, 12% of UK trade, benefit from these third country agreements.

So for the UK to give up existing access both to the EU single market and to the preferential trade agreements which the EU has in place with over 50 countries in exchange for its own bilateral trade deals at some future date, is rather like rejecting a three-course meal now in favour of the promise of a packet of crisps later.

There is no evidence of untapped global markets waiting to welcome UK companies. The key trade deal for the UK is therefore the one with our largest market, the European Union. Here the choice is clear. We can remain connected to the EU customs union and single market if we follow the same rules as everyone else. Or we can leave.

Of cake, cherry picking and fairy godmothers

Having our cake and eating it is not an option in the real world; ‘frictionless trade’ is a phrase without legal content. The EU opposition to sectoral cherry picking in market access is grounded in a defence of the four freedoms which make up the single market. To provide UK business with guarantees of full and equal access to the single market without equal acceptance of EU regulatory structures would require not so much a skilled negotiating team as a fairy godmother specialised in trade law.

The UK could choose to unilaterally remove all tariffs and quotas, which would reduce prices of agricultural produce, textiles and steel. This would undermine the viability of many UK producers, particularly in farming. In the unlikely event that the UK took this step other countries would maintain their own restrictions in both goods and services markets. UK suppliers to Europe would therefore still face barriers.

Three priorities for damage limitation

If Parliament does vote to leave the single market and customs union after a brief transition period, what damage limitation measures could be taken to support UK competitiveness and trade in this less favourable environment? I suggest three priority areas.

First, increased supporting for entrepreneurs and innovation across the economy. This is best achieved by focussing on their need for skills, research support, access to data and a supportive tax environment. Specifically:

• -        Delivering visa decisions on staff for small businesses rapidly and easily online, with minimal restrictions so that researchers, entrepreneurs and growing companies can access the skills they need rapidly and at low cost. A user-friendly visa system becomes a key test of UK attractiveness for innovative investment. This would be best organised separately from the current visa system, with separate targets and incentives for staff in a new Business Visa Agency.
• -        Within the UK’s industrial strategy, delivering the needed doubling of public sector spending on innovation and scale ups, to compensate for the loss of European funding and to ensure that universities continue to engage locally with tech and digital start-ups;
• -        Guaranteeing that, whatever the wider relationship with the EU, the UK will continue to remain within the EU data protection regime, a vital requirement for the tech sector, and increasingly for manufacturing too. This will require continued acceptance of a role for the ECJ as legal arbiter.
• -        Committing to maintain the current favourable tax breaks for entrepreneurs and venture capital for at least the next ten years.

Second, avoiding additional UK regulatory bureaucracy. There are currently over thirty EU regulatory agencies which if duplicated in the UK would add massively to the administrative burden on firms based here and seeking to export. Where the current EU regime is satisfactory, in medicines, chemicals, intellectual property, telecoms, energy and other sectors, we should commit to staying formally aligned with it rather than diverging and thereby adding unnecessary costs and uncertainty to business faced with double regulatory standards, domestic and European.

Third, provide more active support for smaller firms seeking to export. They will face extra costs, delays, complexity of regulatory rules and uncertainty about supply chain access. Together these risk reducing UK exports significantly and increasing costs in the domestic market. UK companies are already significantly less open to exporting than their continental competitors and leaving the EU will only exacerbate this trend.

There can be no export subsidy schemes. These are illegal under WTO rules and would lead to immediate retaliation by our larger trade partners, as would market-distorting state aids. The government should however ensure its trade support bodies provide transitional funding to cover the initial cost of the extra administrative burden to smaller exporters; and use digital channels to provide targeted training to those 130,000 companies currently exporting to the EU who will be dealing with customs formalities for the first time.

Continued trade missions to developing markets are worthwhile at the margin to highlight new opportunities, but do not move the dial. Growth from a low base even in a fast-growing developing economy is not a substitute for sales to larger richer markets. Ministerial visits can have a limited role in less open markets, but it is not one that substitutes for underlying competitive advantage.

“a chilling effect on sales”

The reality is that most companies start exporting to neighbouring markets with similar rules, which for the UK usually means European Union members, then look further afield. Making exports to Belgium or Germany more expensive and complex will have a chilling effect on sales to more distant and challenging markets. Changing specific third country rules which hold back exports, for example intellectual property theft of branded goods, is something the EU with its massive trading footprint can do more effectively than the UK.

An urgent negotiation priority for 2018 must be to confirm that UK firms will continue to benefit from guaranteed market access to EU negotiated third country trade deals after the end of March next year. Otherwise Range Rovers exported to Korea will face higher tariffs; Canadian public procurement markets will be less open to UK firms; UK value added will no longer count towards EU value added in free trade deals; and UK exporters will lose a level playing field in Switzerland, Norway and other EEA members.

Similarly, the transition period must be flexible enough to dovetail smoothly with any new UK-EU trade deal – which is likely to require at least five years to agree, sector by sector. The EU has a complex set of national interests to consider when determining its negotiating position, and this takes time.

Significant damage to businesses, competitiveness and employment

To summarise, trade requires a competitive economy. Competition thrives on openness and a large domestic market with shared rules, particularly in the service sector. Leaving the customs union and creating barriers within the single market which takes around half of our trade must by definition move the UK economy away from openness and thereby reduce the ability of UK firms to attract investment, compete and export globally. Measures to maintain open labour markets, focus on entrepreneurs and innovation, and support exporters can mitigate but not remove this competitive handicap. That is what the facts tell us.

In today’s globalised economy policy choices reducing competitiveness can have long lasting effects on living standards, innovation and investment. The question is therefore how far the undoubted economic harm to UK jobs, growth, tax revenues and public services caused by moving away from full EU market access can be justified on wider grounds.

The international commitments made to ensure regulatory alignment on the island of Ireland in the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Treaty are also relevant. It is significant that, in paras 49 and 50 of the 8 December 2017 joint report with the European Union, the UK Government committed itself to maintaining full alignment if no alternative solution were to be agreed; and also stated that no new regulatory barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK would be introduced. This may lead to the UK remaining within the internal market as the only practical way to achieve both objectives.

Given the negative consequences of leaving, and the lack of any significant offsetting advantages, I believe it is likely that UK will seek to return to full membership of the EU single market in due course. But significant damage to employment, the structure of the economy and the competitiveness of UK firms can be expected in the meantime.

Image: Mark E Smith of the Fall at Camp Bestival, Lulworth Castle. David Jensen/EMPICS/PA Images

1988: Men on the street smoking weed, drinking and talking. Crazy guys.

2018: Men on the street smoking spice, drinking and talking. Men with mental health problems.

Mark E. Smith died recently. His legend was partly built on his drink and drug use. Experimenting with hallucinogenics, magic mushrooms and LSD, he then moved to speed and booze as punk arrived. Shaun Ryder moved through everything, heroin, crack. All of this has been celebrated as part of the Manchester mythscape.

Note how different it sounds to simply say that Mark E. Smith was an alcoholic and Shaun Ryder was a drug addict.

The dominant, structuring myth that obscures such a stark reading is that of Romanticism, from the Death of Chatterton - appropriately decorating the cover of editions of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater - to The Joy Division and Ian Curtis as the ultimate trope of doomed young genius. Keats and others are here, hovering above, patron saints, signs of death in life and life in death, pale, beautiful, talented, much too much so for this profane earth…

If leisure is the distorted afterimage of work, in the gym, in DIY, in consumer culture, then the current situation of the homeless on Manchester's streets is a distorted afterimage of Manchester hedonism in the 1990s. Seen one way, 'Madchester' is nothing but a premonition of the city after the crash of 2008, the big economic comedown, after which public funding is sliced and mental health services close. The rock'n'roll rollercoaster mirrors the adrenal release and crash of capitalist processes.

This is not to say that the homeless are victims of their own actions, not at all, they are the victims of a system wired to punitively push them out, Universal Credit sanctions for instance, and an utterly failed attempt to put in place a post-industrial economy. 

The waster, the scally, the loveable rogue?

Sadly, the everyday clichéd myths of working class life often contain exactly that reading, that the homeless have ‘only themselves to blame’. In Manchester, we have the cartoonish trope of the 'cheeky chappie', the cute, loveable rogue, two fingers up in defiance on one hand, can of lager in the other, hedonism as resistance. We have Ian Brown, perhaps the more considered prototype, then Liam and Noel.

This figure folds into the renegade scally, daytime leisurewear signifying an 'always off' philosophy. It may not exactly be the Situationist ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’, ('Never Work'), but it is not far off. In many ways, these people are the last truly resistant class in Britain. But they are the victims of mass derision, officially scripted into benefits porn television and typecast as stupid. They are the scapegoats of an entire nation. The endless needling of the working class is felt like a psychic stab.

Yet the blurring boundary between the celebrated rebel and the loathed waster persists in Manchester. The reality is that the mythologized scally is a mile away from the scally of the street or the estate. Mancunians have long joined forces with troublemakers and anti-intellectual scrappers. Tony Wilson, Morrissey, John Cooper Clarke, Vinnie Riley, Ian Brown, Steve Coogan, even Noel Gallagher, were all too clever, too pretentious for the self-proclaimed 'real Mancunian', but too regional and snarky for the establishment proper.

These men were often suspicious and antagonistic of each other, but also sometimes protective of the other. Mark E. Smith, ever the curmudgeon, was a Jekyll and Hyde nightmare, both sides fighting for supremacy, the worse half gradually taking centre stage over the decades.

Students came to Manchester in their thousands because they loved Joy Division, The Smiths, The Fall, The Roses, the footy, whichever infamy was currently doing the rounds. Mancunians represent first hand, home grown exoticism, the epitome of unadulterated 'authentic man' in his wild and natural state. A latter day native, l'enfant sauvage, a little dangerous close up, but tameable with the right handling.

See the junky dance

In the end, all Mancunians seem doomed to become performing monkeys, playing for laughs.

They make hilarious and lucrative court jesters for those set on clubs or recording empires. It's commodification in action. For every maverick or dead idol that couldn't be saved from themselves, there's a handler, a stringpuller, a profiteer. It rarely ends well in Manchester for the actual hellraiser. Only the biographer, record label, publishers and more to the point property owners win.

But of course it isn't just in Manchester. All over the country, from the 1960s to now, you can see the junky dance. The public fascination with The Libertines was as ill and dysfunctional as Pete Doherty. Oh how we applaud Keith Richards exactly as much as we love to hate estate junkies robbing laptops from suburban front rooms. We love these dysfunctional lads - Amy Winehouse being the female exception who proves the rule.

The face of “evil”, as Burroughs said, is the face of total need, but if that face is pretty and entertains us with tales of vicarious hedonism we can stomach it. If it's wrapped in cool clothes and captured by great photography then all the better.

Last month Liam Gallagher popped up in the Guardian. He recalled the notorious fight in Germany, during which 80 police were called to stop a brawl that reduced a hotel ground floor to 'matchwood'. Liam also has a theory that his front teeth were pulled out by the German police. There's an exceptionalism detectable in this journalism, that what is cool for Liam Gallagher would be unacceptable if it had been carried out by football fans. This exceptionalism goes right down to the assertion that Liam has is ‘sporting the kind of feather-cut hairstyle that would – and indeed does – look ridiculous on anyone who isn’t Liam Gallagher.’

The Northern boy’s club

This Manchester is defiantly laddish, brutalised and therefore brutal, a legacy of the notorious scuttlers, the prototype street gangs whose violence haunted Victorian Manchester and had to be frequently subdued by the police. 

This tension was present right at the start of the Manchester renaissance. A frequently misinterpreted fact is that Bernard Manning compered the opening night of The Hacienda. He harangued and ridiculed the audience. A notoriously foul mouthed, racist, sexist and determined public enemy of the new alternative.

This was postmodern irony engineered by the ever-subversive Tony Wilson, but a little too early for the earnest raincoat brigade. Only Wilson and a few fellow-travellers were in on the joke. It was a rude reminder to bookish outsiders that for every Burroughs reading, for every Nico sighting, there was still a blokish riposte. This might be a fresh new club, but it was still a boy's club, and a northern boy's club at that.

But the spectre of Bernard Manning serves us well in the post-Northern Powerhouse era. Whenever the braying middle classes get too much, charging £3.50 for a coffee, waxing lyrical about how much opportunity there is to make Manchester a more 'world-class' city than 'the indigenous' could ever manage, we can think of Bernard. He was the return of the repressed. The layer of the city its gentrification tries to entomb with new Farrow & Ball surfaces.  

But Manning was vile, unrecuperable. So was Mark E. Smith in his worst moments, a monster under the stairs, a terrifying story told to middle class children as a warning. 

This situation must be turned inside-out. An attempt must be made, however futile, to place the real on the outside of representation, and Frank from 'Shameless' on the inside of creative fiction. This is not to say that there is no veracity to representations such as Frank - you can walk into Manchester right now and find him - but his being writ large whitewashes - literally - a fuller, more nuanced picture. White male Manchester is still the default myth, again with exceptions that prove the rule such as Maxine Peake.

The Manchester Musical Map of artists 'born, raised or formed in Greater Manchester, UK' was unveiled recently and then largely scorned across social media. It is a whitened history. It includes the 'globalism' of the Bee Gees and Davy Jones of the Monkees, but not the global-local of the Children of Zeus in the present, or the Suns of Arqa in the past. There is no mention of the Ruthless Rap Assassins, MC Buzz B or Barry Adamson, and a list of others as long as your arm. It is also very male, the critically acclaimed LoneLady, IAMDBB and Layfullstop are conspicuous by absence.

Freedom vs laissez faire

These working-class cultures have much longer roots. E.P. Thompson explained in The Making of the English Working Class how, during the 1770s, Oldham's population at least doubled. The economy changed, the early power looms drew agricultural labourers and skilled migrant workers into the large weaving workshops of the area, the early factories:

'In consequence, the wages of the best men steadily rose until by the 1830s and 1840s they belonged to a privileged elite. In 1845, at Messrs. Hibbert and Platt's (Oldham), the premier textile machinery works in Britain, employing close on 2,000 workers, wages of 30s. and upwards were paid to good men. The engineers (a Methodist workman complained) spent freely, gambled on horses and dogs, trained whippets, and had flesh meat "twice or thrice a day"'.

Machine culture created money, and then swagger and culture: Remember this when you next watch a Hacienda video clip of people out of it dancing to Detroit techno. Yet after this point, an increase in the numbers of skilled workers began to cause wage repression, and the rapid changes stirred up political dissent. Here are the origins of all the swagger and sorrow in the shock city, the meme of the triumphant little man and the meme of the Chaplin poor.

But the politics behind it all is telling. Thompson explained that Oldham check-weavers tried to secure legal restrictions to apprenticeships, yet the Assize Judge over-ruled the attempt, saying that if apprenticeships were to be enforced, the 'liberty of trade' which gave Manchester its wealth would be threatened. These battles would flare up periodically over the next century, a bitter lock-out in 1851 centred around Hibbert and Platt's in Oldham. (303-4)

This is an example of protectionism versus laissez faire, free market capitalism. These questions, albeit in radically different forms, have recently been forced to the surface of western politics again. It is encoded in the Corbynist desire for a strong regulatory state and the Tory dream of laissez faire.

The model of capitalism and production founded in and around Manchester has moved to the new industrial cities of the Pearl River Delta in China, among other places. After the 1770s, there would be no going back, despite the romantic yearning which followed the changes around like a mournful ghost, whimpering for a lost rural idyll, which probably never existed.

We can see this in excessively cosy views of the industrial past today. In 1981, Charlie Meecham explored and photographed the Oldham Road, one of Manchester’s arteries, for an exhibition and book. He returned to the area sporadically afterwards, and then presented a body of work made during a more intensive revisit in 2011.

It is interesting to note that one of Charlie's rural images ended up on the sleeve of 'Atmosphere' by the Joy Division, who were often hailed as the authentic voice of post-industrial alienation, during the period when Charlie was first exploring the Oldham Road.

Fantasy and sacrificial lambs

Yet we can also see a kind of romanticism in the massive psychological and cultural over-investment in lead singer Ian Curtis's death, which sometimes borders on necrophilia. There is a similarity here I think, to the way that residents of the late 18th and early 19th century invested in religious practices to survive a harsh and ultimately precarious present.

But here, in Manchester now, there are the straight up fantasists too. What we might call the ‘northern bullshitter’. The character from Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, opening his tent to find Robert De Niro pitched across from him. But they are not fictions. A guy I went to school with claimed he played football with the Happy Mondays and Red Hot Chilli Peppers outside the Apollo in Ardwick. Another was a Britart fantasist, who claimed he climbed into a factory with Damien Hirst, where he saw the boxes of pharmaceuticals he would later copy. This is a northern phenomenon, not just a Manchester one. In Bradford recently as I caught up with a friend in a pub, a man stuck his head round the door and claimed that his father invented the television on Buttershaw Estate, in 1974.

Abject = bullshit. It’s an equation. Constricted lives mean recourse to fantasy, to a psychological escape where an escape from the abject economic and geographical conditions of class are not possible. Consequently there’s what we might call the brotherly love former pill-head fantasist. The seething well of aggression operating through a rhetoric of MDMA inspired togetherness.

We know Frank from Shameless is a character, audiences are clever enough to retain distance. Similarly, we don't assume that a tradition of rock stars who take heroin instantly means that whole swathes of youth will become hopeless addicts overnight. They are replacement Jesus figures. The Stone Roses song ‘I Am The Resurrection’ really wasn’t far-fetched.

This is not a moral or moralizing argument, but it is an argument that cultural clichés be dropped – they are blinkers – so that we can see all the different Manchesters that were there all along.

Manchester Evening News reporter Jennifer Williams’s latest news roundup is titled ‘from heroin to heroines’, the latter a reference to the suffragette anniversary.

Sadly, in Manchester we are not quite there yet.

Image: Andrew Milligan/PA Images

Across the world, democracy is facing a crisis in trust and participation. With this crisis comes calls to revolutionise and modernise some of the practices underpinning democracy. Electronic voting in national elections is always one of the first proposals in that discussion for reform.

The argument, blind to the realities of e-voting’s affect and its vulnerabilities, goes: “The way we vote hasn’t changed in years, while everything else about our society has, so why not introduce electronic voting to reflect these modern times? You’ll reinvigorate democratic participation and attract new voters!!”

The Scottish Government is having this conversation right now. There is a public consultation on electoral reform which includes proposals to trial electronic voting, open until 12 March 2018 (Editors note - this has now been extended to 29th March).

Open Rights Group have been following the development of electronic voting for a number of years. We acted as technical observers of e-voting trials in England in 2007. We were also involved in independent technical observation of the Estonian online voting system during the 2014 general election.

We are not convinced that introducing electronic voting has any positive effect on democratic participation. Where it has been trialled, electronic voting has failed to introduce a new generation to voting. Instead, e-voting introduces security and political vulnerabilities that risks undermining trust in the democratic process.

That is why Open Rights Group are urging individuals to respond to the consultation calling for trials of electronic voting to be abandoned, and encouraging everyone to get in touch with their MSPs to attend the Member’s Debate and say no to electronic voting. Scotland’s democracy deserves better than this technological non-fix.

E-voting - false logic on turnout

One of the core arguments in support of electronic voting, and the focus of the consultation from the Scottish Government, is to increase democratic participation. This is a noble pursuit and an aim that should be encouraged, but when e-voting has been trialled, it has not delivered that outcome.

Norway ran electronic voting trials in 2011. Research was conducted looking at the hard numbers of voter turnout in the trials areas, and also the experience of voters in those trials. Internet voting did not have a significant impact on turnout. The vast majority of those who voted online would have voted anyway. Analysis of Estonia’s eight elections since 2005 where electronic voting has been available show that electronic voting has not attracted a new demographic to vote.

Interestingly, the experience of individual’s voting in Norway, particularly younger voters, was recorded in interviews. While younger people had no problem with internet voting, they felt it was important to walk to the polling station, that it represented a symbolic and ceremonial act that indicated maturity. The question that really concerned the young interviewees was why young people should vote, not how they will vote.

Norway eventually dropped its electronic voting in 2014, after similar results in trials in 2013. The Norwegian Government cited both a failure to improve turnout and security concerns as reasons - more on security later.

The distinction - why people vote not how people vote - is what makes all the difference. It should be remembered that Scotland’s independence referendum had the highest turnout of any UK election or referendum since universal suffrage was reached. That wasn’t because there was a new kind of method to vote, it was everything else: the significance of the vote, the closeness of the vote, and the nature of the debate having a relevance to people across Scotland.

Electronic Voting - unsolvable problems

Elections have to satisfy three conditions, they must be:

• Secure: Your vote has to be secure, steps must be taken to make sure that it can’t be tampered with; but also
• Anonymous: Your vote can’t be traced back to you, protecting you against coercion; but also
• Verifiable: It has to be shown that one person cast this one vote, and didn’t cast another to be counted, but also continue to be secure and anonymous.

All voting systems should be subjected to this test, whether pencil and paper, electronic kiosk or online voting. Balancing these three conditions is an incredibly difficult task.

What makes it even more difficult is the additional requirement that the methods used to achieve these conditions need to be reasonably understandable to the population.

Open Rights Group’s research in this area has shown how difficult it is for electronic voting to achieve this.

In 2007, Open Rights Group were technical observers for electronic voting trials in England. E-voting systems in some constituencies were found to be running software known to be vulnerable, risking the security and anonymity of the vote. What’s more, votes were downloaded and counted by the suppliers of e-voting systems, without any candidate, agent or observer able to examine the process, undermining verifiability of the process.

In 2014 Open Rights Group participated in a peer-reviewed independent report on the security of e-voting in Estonia. The research discovered two fundamental vulnerabilities, targeting individual’s machines and the servers used to count the votes, that would allow for votes to be changed at scale potentially affecting the outcome of the election.

Some may argue that these points on the secure systems are moot, that the opportunities provided by blockchain and advanced cryptographic solutions have set all of that aside. But those arguments fail to take into account the other necessary condition for a vote: the process must be reasonably understandable for the public.

Democratic processes need to be understood by more than a handful of advanced cryptographic experts. It must be trusted by all of us, and most important of all it needs to be indisputable in an understandable way for the most sceptical of us. If a solution can’t do this, it leaves us in a very precarious position.

The key to democracy is not in the winning and taking power, it is in the counting, the losing and the acceptance of that result.

The only solution for securing electronic voting against the conditions of security, anonymity, and verifiability appears to be through using advanced security and cryptographic tools. But the problem with that is by using advanced security and cryptographic tools, most people can’t understand the process.

That lack of understanding can be exploited leading voters to distrust the outcome of an election. And there it is: the unsolvable problem with electronic voting.

Democracy is difficult. Relying purely on technology is not going to make it any easier or, as we’ve seen, more attractive to new generations. For the Scottish Government to run a consultation asking for the public’s views on electoral reform is welcome and a great way to leverage technology to support engagement. But it doesn’t replace the hard stuff.

Electronic voting isn’t a solution to the problems in the consultation. In fact, it is likely to bring more profound problems.

Denis Mikhailov. Source: Navalny Team in St Petersburg. A version of this text originally appeared on OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors politically-motivated detentions and freedom of assembly in Russia.

The well-known Moscow activist Mark Galperin has been given a two-year suspended sentence for two videos. The videos, in which Galperin discusses the possibility of revolution, were considered to contain an incitement to extremism. According to the court ruling, for the next three months Galperin is banned from taking part in the activities of civil society groups.

In Crimea, the home of left-wing activist Alexey Shestakovich was searched, after which he was taken away with a plastic bag on his head. During the search, Shestakovich was kept on the floor of the apartment in his underwear and in handcuffs. He was subsequently jailed for ten days. Along with him, trade union activist Ivan Markov was also arrested and then jailed for ten days. However, Markov was released early when an appeal court quashed the ruling to jail him.

Two jail terms in a row for one and the same thing. The coordinator of the St Petersburg headquarters of Alexey Navalny’s campaign for an election boycott, Denis Mikhailov, had not been able to leave the detention centre where he had been serving a 30-day jail sentence for organising the “Voters’ Strike” of 28 January before he was again arrested, taken to a court and once again jailed— this time for 25 days. And again for the Voters’ Strike. Only this time for being a participant in the protest.

Ekaterinburg activist Sergey Tyunov has been jailed for 15 days. He was arrested carrying a placard critical of Putin. On the placard was written: “If you want six more years of lies and thieving, then vote for Putin.” Tyunov was charged with a repeat violation of the regulations governing public assemblies. He has declared a hunger strike.

Following the preliminary investigation, the case against court secretary Alexander Eivazov has now reached the prosecutor’s office. Eivazov has been charged with hindering the course of justice and defaming a judge. The formal reason for the initiation of the case against him was that Eivazov had refused to sign an official record of a court hearing. Eivazov said that he did not sign the document because it had been drawn up by another officer of the court. The real reason for his criminal prosecution, human rights defenders believe, is the numerous complaints about violations in court proceedings that Eivazov had made to various authorities.

Twelve days in solitary confinement for bread found in a bedside table. Тhis is the punishment meted out to Alexey Mironov, a volunteer at Navalny’s Cheboksary campaign headquarters sentenced to two and a half years in prison for social media posts. Mironov asserts that he had not kept any bread in the bedside table. Meanwhile, the authorities are preparing to prosecute Egor Chernyuk, coordinator of Navalny’s headquarters in Kaliningrad, on charges of avoiding military service..

The Commission for Children’s Affairs is taking an interest in the son of an Open Russia activist. Coordinator of the Krasnodar branch of Open Russia, Yana Antonova, has been fined in connection with the public event commemorating the death of Boris Nemtsov — an event with which, she has stated, she had no connection. After the event, she was told that staff of the Commission for Children’s Affairs were seeking to establish the actual address at which her ten-year-old son lives.

Politically-motivated prosecutions are nothing new. Recent convictions of participants in protests bring to mind a case of 50 years ago. We have published the final words of Vladimir Bukovsky at his trial when he was sentenced to three years in a prison camp for taking part in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on 22 January 1967.

Thank you

As the elections draw closer there is ever more work to do. You can help us continue our work now and in the difficult coming months before and after the 2018 elections here. You can volunteer to work with us here.

Prabowo Subianto on horseback, Senayan City, Jakarta , Indonesia, 2014. Suffragio,org. Some rights reserved.

This article is seventh in the series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.

As Indonesia prepares for regional elections in 2018 and national elections in 2019, political operators try to curry favour with both the military right and radical religious groups, in the scramble for votes.

Recent months have seen an escalation of fake news, penetration of extremist views into everyday discourse and violent attacks on the imagined evils of (supposedly) resurgent leftists, religious minorities and the LBGT community. Recent months have seen an escalation of fake news, penetration of extremist views into everyday discourse and violent attacks on the imagined evils of (supposedly) resurgent leftists, religious minorities and the LBGT community. 

Symbols of the ‘New Order’ regime of President Soeharto, who was in power between 1966 and 1998, are being deployed by two new political parties, each sponsored by one of Soeharto’s children. The main rival of the current president, Joko Widodo, is Prabowo Subianto, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and military strongman. He appears at party rallies on horseback dressed like Mussolini, and once told a foreign journalist that he favoured a “benign authoritarian regime …Do I have the guts? Am I ready to be called a fascist dictator?”

What are the roots of Indonesian fascism? Why has it re-emerged on the political stage and accommodated Islamic populism? How does it shape and constrain emancipatory peasant politics?

Seeds of fascism

The seed of fascism has always been a kernel in Indonesian identity rhetoric. In the colonial time, nationalism took its first steps through an elitist movement of western-educated Javanese and aristocrats who gathered youth groups from many parts of the country and declared the existence of ‘one territory, one nation, and one language’. Inspired by the history of glorious kingdoms and sultanates, and the flourishing of fascist governments in Italy, Germany and Japan, Indonesian nationalism started to take fascism as its core idea.

The Indonesian Fascist Party founded in 1930 was chaired by a Javanese aristocrat. The group most impressed by fascism was the Parindra or Greater Indonesia Party, whose leaders expressed admiration for Hitler’s firmness, the German people’s love for their leaders, party and homeland and the strength of their organization, and encouraged the use of the German–Italian fascist salute at meetings.

The military gained a formal role in politics when the first President, Soekarno, announced martial law in 1957. Army officers were placed in the management of nationalized former Dutch enterprises, and for decades continued to be involved in state-owned plantations, mining, banking and trading corporations. The land reform law of 1960 was labeled as a leftist agenda, and all peasant struggles were suspected as communist acts. 

Military power became pervasive, especially after the 1965-66 massacres and persecution of leftists. Peasants were depoliticized through one-party domination. The land reform law of 1960 was labeled as a leftist agenda, and all peasant struggles were suspected as communist acts. State oligarchs, Chinese business conglomerates and military personnel controlled the logging, mining, plantation and financial companies. Such economic domination marginalized Islamic politics and narrowed chances for Moslems to become part of the Indonesian bourgeoisie. 

The rise of Islamic populism

Twenty years after the downfall of Soeharto, the authoritarian and paternalistic practices of his “New Order” regime have not completely vanished.

With the conservative turn of Islam and rising inequality, anti-Chinese and anti-communist sentiments were used by the military to create imaginary threats. Riding the same wave, Moslem middle class entrepreneurs launched a campaign of ‘economic jihad’, and formed a ‘212 Moslem-cooperative’.

In combination with military power and the “dull compulsion of the market”, Islamic populism exercises powerful constraints on genuinely emancipatory rural movements, despite its mainly urban and middle-class roots. The bloody 1960s genocide against the left and continuing rural depoliticization have suppressed the formation of a critical progressive rural mass.

The return of authoritarian populism and heightened agrarian conflict

Despite populist challengers, such as Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi won the presidential election in 2014, propelled by a majority in the rural areas. But, three years into his presidency, after many campaign pledges of social reforms and resolution of human rights violation cases, Jokowi seems to have turned his back on any plans for structural change. His new paradigm is pragmatic, growth-oriented, and conservative in its approach to problems of transparency, governance, human rights and justice.

There are uncanny echoes of the past in this new developmentalism, which has heightened agrarian conflicts in Indonesia. At village level the expanded presence of the military is felt directly by the assignment of military ‘Village Guidance Non-Combat Officers’ (Babinsa) to all villages and urban slums. A MoU between the Ministers of Defence and Agriculture includes 50,000 Babinsa personnel to provide security support in food production.

The implementation of these top-down measures has been challenged by various forms of peasant resistance. For example, West Sumatran rice farmers who refused to practise continuous year-round rice cropping, despite the Governor’s threat of military confiscation of their land. While in the million-hectare rice project in Merauke, Papua, military personnel took over land clearing and tilling for rice field expansion from local farmers.   

The return of authoritarian populism is also marked by the armed forces’ ‘proxy war’ rhetoric, claiming that foreign powers are trying to seize control in Indonesia through support to LGBT communities, NGOs, distribution of narcotics, foreign control of natural resources and ‘the return of communism as a latent danger’. The proxy war doctrine justifies the military’s programme of ‘Country Defence’ or Bela Negara, which supposedly is to be implemented in all campuses, Islamic education institutions (pesantren), and mass organizations.

In both the 2014 Presidential election and the 2017 Jakarta Governor elections, right-wing Islamist-supported candidates came from either a military or Islamist background. The rural poor are lured by the charisma of popular ulama, with their rhetoric of ‘defending Islam’ and ‘economic jihad’. The political strategies that have depoliticized rural peasants for the last 40 years have successfully contained rural resistance and protests.

The political strategies that have depoliticized rural peasants for the last 40 years have successfully contained rural resistance and protests. Grievances have been limited to demands by peasants to be incorporated into commodity production on more profitable terms. While such depoliticization is now hardened through a military invasion into rural life and politicization of Islam, rural resistance is limited to indigenous people’s movements and a quasi-class politics of farmers’ cooperatives. None of these situations provide a way for emancipatory peasant politics to flourish.

The crushing of emancipatory initiatives

The combination of right-wing militarism, conservative Islamic populism and the prevailing neoliberal market conditions has resulted in the co-optation and/or destruction of genuine emancipatory rural initiatives.

Three local-level studies, prepared for the ERPI conference, illustrate this. Two cases trace the trajectories of former colonial plantation workers who occupied plantation lands after the collapse of Dutch rule in the 1940s, with an initial vision to set up egalitarian agrarian communities inspired by socialist ideals.  In one case, the peasant organization was brutally dismantled by the New Order regime and its members killed, imprisoned or re-proletarianized under harsh conditions resembling a labour camp.

Following the collapse of the New Order, the next generation again struggled to re-assert their rights to land, finally achieving land redistribution and forming an independent co-operative in 2012. However, they did not find the political commitment necessary to achieve genuine emancipatory agrarian reform, and reverted to the prevailing neoliberal forms of farm management, strengthening tendencies to differentiation and land concentration. 

In the second case, the cooperative survived the New Order period thanks to links with senior (ex)-military figures, but at the cost of its original egalitarian and emancipatory ideals. It became locked in the combined traps of incorporation into the state- (and military-) dominated cooperative structure, formalization of land titles and business expansion, leading to increasing internal inequalities. In both these cases, the internal organization of the cooperative is now marked by the patriarchal and authoritarian structures found in the wider society.

The third study shows how, in the space of a few years, an emancipatory religious-agrarian movement, aiming to establish a self-sufficient agrarian settler community, was destroyed by the moral panic generated by the alignment of mainstream media, orthodox Islam and the state (military and police) apparatus. With their leaders charged with both blasphemy and treachery/secession, the 8,000 settlers were forcibly dispersed and returned to their places of origin for re-education in religion and national philosophy, and their fields and houses destroyed.

Containing resistance

The conjuncture of historical currents: the marginalization and subsequent resurgence of Islam, and growing militarism in everyday life, has produced a condition whereby right-wing populism now arises as a new style of fascism. The conjuncture of historical currents: the marginalization and subsequent resurgence of Islam, and growing militarism in everyday life, has produced a condition whereby right-wing populism now arises as a new style of fascism.

Neoliberal developmentalism has worsened inequalities and heightened rural resistance and agrarian conflicts. However, these grievances do not transform into an emancipatory peasant politics. Resistance is largely contained within the identity politics of indigenous peoples’ movements and a quasi-class politics in the farmers’ cooperative movement. The death of class-based rural movements in Indonesia has entrapped rural resistance in the clutches of market power. 

HMS Illustrious in Portsmouth Harbour Aircraft Carrier, April 2009. Wikicommons/Peter Trimming. Some rights reserved.An earlier column in this series looked at the unknown or neglected history of accidents involving nuclear weapons. Much of the secrecy that shrouds nuclear issues, above all their actual targeting, is the result of deliberate supprerssion by governments with the collusion of the media. Accidents, though, seem to occasion their added element of secrecy, probably because of the particular embarrassment arising when a supposedly ultra-safe and reliable system comes unstuck (see "North Korea: a catastrophe foretold", 29 September 2017). 

The excellent Chatham House study Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy (April 2014)  examines incidents where nuclear weapons came uncomfortably close to actual use. Among many examples, one of the most remarkable is a collision between two ballistic-missile submarines during the night of 3-4 February 2009.

"[The] United Kingdom’s HMS Vanguard and France’s FNS Le Triomphant, two nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs), collided in the Atlantic Ocean”, says the study. It acknowledges that there was very little risk of an accidental nuclear detonation, but finds it difficult to say why the collision took place. A few details emerged through freedom-of-information requests, but these raised even more questions than were answered.

This incident may have been more at the level of accident than risk of detonation. But that still raises the issue of the supposed invulnerability of nuclear systems to mistakes, including potentially catastrophic ones (see "A quick guide to nuclear weapons", 8 February 2018).

The dangers are explored in another report, Playing with Fire: Nuclear Weapons Incidents and Accidents in the United Kingdom(September 2017), published by Nuclear Information Service. The meticulous research of this small UK-based NGO uncovers worrying aspects of the British nuclear system. Indeed, much of the information about these and other aspects of the nuclear world only seeps into the public domain because such dedicated independent observers are ploughing away in the background.

Playing with Fire reveals the alarming incidence of accidents, far more than is normally realised. It lists 110 accidents, near misses, and dangerous occurrences that have occurred over the sixty-five-year history of the UK’s nuclear-weapons programme. These consist of:

* fourteen serious accidents related to the production and manufacturing of nuclear weapons, including fires, fatal explosions, and floods

* twenty-two incidents that have taken place during the road transport of nuclear weapons, including vehicles overturning, road-traffic accidents and breakdowns

* eight incidents which occurred during the storage and handling of nuclear weapons

* twenty-one security-related incidents, including cases of unauthorised access to secure areas and unauthorised release of sensitive information

* seventeen incidents that involved United States forces and nuclear weapons, in the UK and its coastal waters.

The report also finds that forty-five accidents have happened "to nuclear capable submarines, ships and aircraft, including collisions, fires at sea and lightning strikes", of which twenty-four "involved nuclear armed submarines”.

Reducing the risk

To understand the background to this report, the fundamental nuclear-weapons structure in the UK is a good place to start.

These weapons are developed at the atomic-weapons establishment at Aldermaston, west of Reading; manufactured  at nearby Burghfield; deployed on ballistic-missile submarines based at Faslane, near Glasgow; the warheads stored at the Royal Navy armaments depot at Coulport.

The weapons are transported between the sites by road. Because these use public highways and are frequently tracked by anti-nuclear activists, much of what is known about accidents relates to those occurring in transit.

Playing with Fire finds that one of the worst accidents happened on a cold day in January 1987, when two large warhead-carrying trucks – part of a larger convoy transporting six tactical nuclear bombs from Portsmouth to the naval armaments depot at Dean Hill – were involved in a collision. In the course of the accident one of the trucks tipped over into a field when the road verge collapsed, landing on its side.

The overturned truck was carrying two WE177A warheads, each rated at about the power of the Hiroshima bomb. They had probably been unloaded from HMS Illustrious, an aircraft-carrier berthed at Portsmouth. A full-scale emergency was declared. Additional armed personnel and specialist troops were deployed, and logistics specialists worked through the night in sub-zero temperatures in a recovery operation that lasted eighteen hours.

There have been many other accidents affecting the UK nuclear weapons industry, the worst being the fire at one of the plutonium production reactors at what was then known as Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957. One of the great values of Playing with Fire is that it brings into the open an element in Britain’s nuclear posture which is almost entirely ignored in the establishment press and broadcast media.

At the very least this is a report that is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It ends up with a series of recommendations, three of which summarise its overall perspective:

* introduce procedures for publicly reporting accidents involving nuclear weapons

* place ministry of defence nuclear programmes under external regulation

* support an international ban on nuclear weapons.

Not everyone will support the last proposal, but the first two should really not be controversial. Indeed, wider dissemination of this report may well help cement that view.

Screen shot. Title-page of 'Playing With Fire'.

Illustration: Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.I still remember the illustrations that captivated me as a child; they are part of me, and they are part of my imagination. They inspired me, and maybe I even draw and paint today because of them. I often feel that I breathe and I exist because I paint.

Meanwhile, what strikes me during exhibitions is that people often find something beyond what I had intended to communicate in my artwork. A small detail, such as the expression on a character’s face, can spark a memory, inspire a feeling, or open an imagination.

"A small detail, such as the expression on a character’s face, can spark a memory, inspire a feeling, or open an imagination."

Art can support us, send us messages, or give us hope. What you see and remember in an image can stay with you, impact you, and affect the decisions you take in your life. This is the potential power of illustration for a feminist future, too – which must be imagined before it can be created.

In this piece, women are gathered around a crystal ball. They are from different cultures and backgrounds. But they are physically and emotionally close to each other, united and focused on their task of imagining a better world.

Detail; Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.I also wanted to subvert the ancient and malicious trope of women being witches and enchantresses. Individually, the women in this illustration, as in our world, may be strong or weak – but together they can be stronger. This is magical, and a truth that we must remember.

In ancient Greece, people travelled from far away looking for their futures in the prophecies and visions of the Pythia oracles. During the middle ages, women who used herbs and created potions to help people were persecuted and murdered.

Throughout history, women have held power that has been accepted (or not); heard (or not); cast as good (or evil), but felt and lived nonetheless. These women are our past, present and future.

Detail; Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.The history of art is also male-dominated. The illustrations that captivated me as a child were in books like the Jungle Book, or those of Jules Verne. What about women illustrators?

At art schools, we learn about few women artists. One exception is the famous Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, who was persecuted and even put on trial for having been sexually assaulted. It is difficult to be a woman in Italy today, but it was even harder before.

There are more well-known women artists now, but it is an ongoing challenge to be accepted and heard. Despite this, we continue to express ourselves, our visions, our intimacy, and our perceptions of the world through art. And sometimes, what we create inspires others.

I think illustration can be particularly impactful for young people. But I want to inspire others not because I am a painter or because I am a woman. I want to speak to the hearts of all human beings, with my own heart, as another human being. This is my feminist future.

President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, Jan. 30, 2018. Yin Bogu/Press Associaition. All rights reserved.The future of USA foreign policy has been recently outlined in the ‘National Security Strategy’ (18 December 2017) and, if very briefly, in President Trump’s ‘State of the Union’ speech (30 January). Those who expect a lot of ‘fire and fury’ might and will be disappointed. The US will dedicate less time, energy, and money to the rest of the world and concentrate on domestic affairs, regardless of ‘The Donald’s blunders and whims.

The key objectives are clear: on the one hand, the Trump administration aims at strengthening the US economy and armed forces; on the other, it intends to turn its back on the rest of the world, unless vital American interests are at stake. Now America really comes first.

The Trump administration’s doctrine can be understood as protectionist and nationalist. Protectionist ideas have raised a lot of controversies but they are far from new in US history and aim at rebuilding a strong industrial base, especially at a time of competition from emerging economies and on the verge of a ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.

Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is a champion of protectionism, particularly in relation to China and Europe. While such positions remain economically and politically questionable, they have a clear goal: help America re-industrialise by changing trade deals with its competitors (China, Russia, but also Germany). Trump and his clique imagine a world of more-or-less hostile blocs in which the USA wants to sit on top. Sadly, rising nationalisms in countries like China, Russia, India, Turkey (but also Japan and Germany – ‘Alternative for Germany’ has 94 seats in the Bundestag) seem to vindicate Trump’s realism and confrontational posture. Let us hope this will not be the case.

Both economic and strategic reasons suggest that Trump’s main foreign policy focus will be East Asia, and in particular China. For a long time the latter has been the target of Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on issues such as intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, export subsidies, and in general unfair trade practices.

China is catching up also in strategic sectors like Artificial Intelligence and has vastly invested in the US economy in recent years ($ 117 billion in the past five years, according to some estimates). But who would win a possible trade war? After all, China holds a large share of US public debt and lots of American companies that do business there would oppose restrictions in trade and investments. Moreover, the USA is not innocent with regard to export subsidies: for years there have been complaints about support to farmers and aircraft producers (e.g. in the Boeing vs Airbus dispute) – a support which has given the US advantages over both developed and developing countries.   

In strategic terms, the Trump administration has made efforts to revive the Quadrilateral Alliance (USA - India - Australia - Japan) to contain Beijing’s ambitions, but little has been achieved so far. Australia is a leading Chinese trade partner and India co-operates with Beijing on initiatives such as the BRICS group or the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). Why would they choose to confront China?

Even Duterte’s Philippines, a traditional Washington ally, has opened a door to more co-operation with Beijing. Sending an aircraft carrier to neighboring Vietnam, as the USA has pledged to do in the near future, looks more like a performance or a (relative) show of strength than a sign of bellicose intentions. China is a ‘rival’, as Trump called it in the ‘State of the Union’ speech, but a confrontation, if there will be one, might take place only on trade-related issues.  Even at the WTO level, where it is possible to raise complaints and start procedures against unfair trade practices, there have been 39 disputes against China – not really much in comparison with the 84 against the EU or 135 against the USA…

East Asia will be a difficult terrain, but US diplomacy won’t have an easier life in the Middle East. Here Washington has to deal with another ‘out of area’ power, Russia, which under Putin has surprisingly punched above its weight in the region. It’s no coincidence Russia is another ‘rival’, if we trust the language used by Trump himself. After all, Moscow has managed to avoid Assad’s fall in Syria, keep traditionally good relations with Iran, accommodate Erdogan’s erratic Turkey, and strongly improve ties with oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

The USA, for its part, has re-affirmed a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, which should be approached in far more critical terms (let us not forget the issue of Wahhabism), alienated a part of the Arab world after Trump’s declarations on Jerusalem, and been unable to control an ever more unpredictable Turkey, which should probably consider whether it wants to remain under the NATO umbrella or go its own way. The problems between Washington and Ankara have been recognised by the usually cautious Secretary of State Tillerson in his recent and rather inconclusive visit to Turkey.

What will happen to US relations with Europe? The National Security Strategy makes it clear that EU countries will have to spend more on defence. On the whole the EU will be less and less important, unless Europeans truly attempt to take responsibility for their lives and politics. Institutional cosmetics in Brussels won’t be enough. States like Britain, France, or even Germany will be less and less influential and in a highly competitive world will have to struggle to defend what survives of their ‘social models’, with dire consequences in their domestic affairs.

Left to their own national devices, some EU countries might degenerate into semi-authoritarianism, confusion, or anti-European policies; the elections in Italy and Hungary constitute a potential watershed moment.

After all, the USA still has the primacy in technology, finance, and the military. This administration feels the pressure of ‘rival’ powers and intends to concentrate on strengthening US leadership without facing them head-on. There won’t be any generosity towards the rest of the democratic world. If we believe in our value as citizens we have to be aware that the world will increasingly be squeezed in a ‘battle’ among rivals, and act accordingly, starting by showing commitment to democratic institutions and casting our vote in all forthcoming elections.

Former Prime Minister and leader of the Democratic Party Matteo Renzi resigned as party leader after a major defeat, when the centre-left coalition picked up just 22.85 percent of the vote. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.The post-election map of Italy has two main traits: fear and poverty. Northern and Central regions have gone into a centre-right-wing coalition where the leader is not any more Forza Italia’s Silvio Berlusconi but the League’s Matteo Salvini, who dropped its previous ‘Lega Nord’ emphasis to turn it into a nationwide Le Pen-style National Front. Matteo Renzi is the clear loser of the election, with his Democratic Party getting 19% of the vote.

In the Northern counties of Lombardy and Veneto the centre-right is over 50%, with the League reaching 33 to 38% in its heartlands. In Piedmont outside the Turin area the centre-right is close to 50%, with a weaker League. In the rest of the North the centre-right is almost everywhere over 40%; in Emilia, Tuscany and Umbria the percentage is over 35%; in Lazio excluding Rome it is at 40%.

In Southern regions (including Marche) the Five Star movement (Cinque stelle) won heavily, reaching almost 50% of votes in Sicily and northern Campania, over 40% in Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Molise and Sardinia.

More complex is the picture of large cities. The centre-right wins some first-past-the-post seats in Turin, Milan, Venice, Palermo. The Five Stars conquer seats in Turin, Genoa, Palermo, Rome and Naples. Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome have some Democratic Party winners.

The 37-38% (respectively in the House and the Senate) won by the centre-right comes from the success of the League, gone from 4% in the 2013 general elections, to 6% in the European elections of 2014, to 18% today, while Forza Italia falls from 22% in 2013 to 17% in 2014 and to the current 14%. The 32-33% (respectively in the Senate and the House, with a younger electorate) for Five Stars should be compared with the 26% of the general elections of 2013 and with the 21% of the European elections of 2014. Matteo Renzi is the clear loser of the election, with his Democratic Party getting 19% of the vote – it had 25% five years ago and peaked at 41% in the 2014 European elections – his coalition reaching a total of 23%, including the 2.6% of the ‘More Europe’ party of  Emma Bonino. On the Left ‘Liberi e Uguali’ obtained just above 3% of votes, failing to build a significant left-wing opposition. Voters’ participation was similar to five years ago, around 75%, while in the European elections it had fallen to 57%.

Shared discontents

Those gains of the centre-right and Five Stars are parallel successes, fueled by common ingredients: protest vote, populist rhetoric, criticism of Europe, anti-immigrant feelings. In the centre-right coalition such drivers coexist with very distant other interests – those of the rich and powerful around Berlusconi; the balance of internal power relations in the coalition will be difficult to sort out, in terms of political hegemony even before the formation of a government. In the Five Stars those ingredients coexist with the attempt to achieve a transformation from protest movement to government party, with an evolution – in terms of identity and the political agenda – that is yet to be charted. Fear is now the ideology of the League; poverty is the condition breeding Five Star success.

These same drivers, however, have taken different directions in the North and South. The League’s roots in Northern regions have been expressed in demands for lower taxes, for protecting falling incomes, local and national identities. The South – which has been ‘left behind’ by political and economic developments, abandoned by a new emigration, marked by social degradation and criminal powers – has expressed a protest that demands new political power. The main limit of Salvini’s attempt to build an Italian ‘National Front’ has been his inability to overcome this regional division.

Ten years of severe economic and social crisis are the background to all these developments. Italy’s per capita income is now back to the levels of twenty years ago; behind this average there is a collapse – of about 30% – of the income of the 25% poorest Italians, living in the South or in the declining peripheries of the centre-north. Twenty years of stagnation and decline mean a generation with ever-lower expectations in terms of income, work and life. Impoverishment has become a reality for a very large swathe of Italians. The Five Star vote reflects the poverty of the South – their call for a general minimum income has been attractive in this regard. The vote for the League expresses the fear of impoverishment in the North. Only in the centres of major cities – where the richest and the highly educated live, and the economy is better – has the vote taken different directions, going to Forza Italia and the Democratic Party.

The migrant factor

Poverty is coupled with fear. The fear of worsening economic conditions and social status; the fear of having immigrants next door, other poor people competing for fewer low-skilled jobs and scarcer public services. In the elections the most prevalent fear was that of immigrants – the landings in Lampedusa, the inability to integrate them, the killing and shootings in Macerata. Salvini turned anti-immigration attitudes into his most effective political tool; Five Star expressed the same hostility – calling NGOs saving immigrants in the Mediterranean ‘water taxis’ for illegal aliens and refusing to vote for a bill granting citizenship to second generation Italians with migrant origins.

Fear and poverty, in a strange twist, have become the main forces shaping Italian politics. Fear is now the ideology of the League; poverty is the condition breeding Five Star success. Replacing the old left and right, we have now the politics of fear and the lament of the impoverished, the ones excluded from the ‘caste’ of the powerful. Replacing the old left and right, we have now the politics of fear and the lament of the impoverished, the ones excluded from the ‘caste’ of the powerful.

The tragedy of the Left is that for over for two hundred years equality, social security and solidarity have been its banners. They have been gradually lost in the loss of collective identities, in ever less participatory political practices, in government policies that were increasingly in contrast with those values. In this political degradation it must be emphasized that dangerous impulses like fear and poverty are expressed with the tools of democracy: 75% voter turnout at polling stations is the only good news of March 4, 2018.

This article was originally published on Social Europe on March 6, 2018.