Category Archives: Politics

Britain, Economic, European Union, Government, Politics, Society, Terrorism, United States

2017 will be a year of major challenges

CHALLENGES, RISKS & CHANGE

Intro: There is a sense that the unglamorous hard grind will start to bear down on the detailed practicalities of change during 2017

Following the shocks and political reverberations of 2016 it should come as no surprise that relatively few have jumped forth with confident predictions for the year ahead. Yet apprehension over the future is high as the effects of the past 12 months crystallise in the weeks and months ahead.

Identifying the reasons as to why many are fearful will not be difficult. Nonetheless, buoyant financial markets in both America and the UK over the last few days have seen record highs. Businesses are sensing opportunities under a Trump administration that is pledging a boost to federal government spending on infrastructure as well as a major overhaul to the tax code in the United States. This is likely to lead to tax cuts for households and firms alike. Here in the UK, estimates for third-quarter growth have been revised up to 0.6 per cent on quarter, while household and consumer spending has been boosted by high employment and a relatively modest growth in real incomes. Hitherto, while a notable slowdown is expected over 2017, the dire predictions of economic recession in the wake of the EU referendum vote have proved overly pessimistic and we are starting the New Year from a much firmer base than many had predicted.

But major uncertainty persists over Brexit. The calls by the Scottish Government for Scotland to remain in the Single Market, and the issue as to whether beneficial trading relationships can be established with other EU countries, are clear examples of the muddle and disarray. Whilst lack of detail is frustrating, there is a notable mood across the business world to make the best of our situation and by getting on with the job. The depreciation and fall in the value of sterling offers opportunities for UK firms to boost exports and for many firms in the food and drink sector to build a presence in overseas markets. In Scotland, our tourism and events sector, spanning hotels, hospitality and conference catering, stands to benefit.

There is a sense that the unglamorous hard grind will start to bear down on the detailed practicalities of change during 2017. The focus is likely to be upon legislative changes. However, we also face an elevated degree of geo-political risk. Recent terrorist attacks across Europe and elsewhere are indicative of the challenges facing government and the intelligence agencies.

Barbaric attacks such as those in Istanbul cannot but heighten tensions across Europe. Adding further to security precautions in many European capitals, the woes and fears that governments have across Europe for their people is becoming distinctly palpable.

Fear of further such attacks, including the use by Islamic State of chemical weapons, will undoubtedly increase public anxiety and growing voter mood of unease across Europe. The British Government has already warned that ISIS could unleash such devastating weapons on our streets. Voter discontent is also threatening to bring major election upsets in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, the ever-belligerent North Korea has taken another step towards long-range nuclear strike capability. The country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has claimed that the country is now close to testing long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

A febrile 2017 seems likely to pose challenges as big as anything we have faced before.

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Britain, Economic, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

Britain’s exit from the EU. Getting down to it.

BRITAIN & THE EUROPEAN UNION

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On June 23, 2016, Britons voted to leave the European Union. The two-year process for negotiating Britain’s departure will soon begin.

Intro: It has been six months since the referendum vote on Brexit. Thus far, the debate has been more about process and procedure than substance. In 2017, as negotiating talks get underway, the going will get much tougher. As we edge closer to Article 50 being triggered, where does Britain stand?

SOME THINGS have already changed since Britons decided to withdraw from the European Union following the Brexit vote on June 23rd. The country has a new government led by Theresa May. Two new government departments have been set up For Exiting The EU (under David Davis) and for International Trade (under Liam Fox). After several years of austerity cuts, the civil service is beginning to grow again. It is being geared up in tackling the numerous challenges of disentangling Britain from the bureaucracy of Brussels. In the Government’s most recent Autumn Statement, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, softened previous plans to cut the budget deficit by 2020.

But on another level, and on Brexit itself, however, Mrs May has done little beyond repeating her mantra that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘We’re going to make a success of it’. The prime minister has promised a Great Repeal Bill to enshrine most exiting EU rules into UK law for continuity. And she has said she will invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the legal clause that sets a two-year time limit for Brexit, by the end of March (2017).

Indeed, most public discussion and debate on Brexit has been procedural, not substantive. Discourse in Parliament has revolved around how much information MPs will be given. The courts have become involved: this month the Supreme Court will decide whether triggering Article 50 requires prior authority through an act of Parliament, as the High Court has already ruled. There have been disputes over just how much Mrs May should reveal over her negotiating objectives. Yet, all of this has taken place even before there is an internal agreement within the government over what form of Brexit to aim for when negotiations begin.

For some MPs, such as Neil Carmichael and Mr Davis himself, there is hope that a government white paper on Brexit will be published before Article 50 is triggered. Mr Davis has recently said, though, that the government would not publish anything until February. Protagonists say that would still leave time for a white paper and a short parliamentary act before Article 50 is sanctioned.

The substance of Brexit is likely to prove far more difficult than the procedure. One reason is that it will involve trade-offs the government has so far avoided debating. The most obvious is that in which maximising barrier-free access to the EU’s single market will make it hard to take back full control of migration and laws relating to freedom of movement. That’s because it is invariably and directly linked to the free movement of capital and services. There is also the issue of ceasing contributions to the EU’s budget.  Several more difficult dilemmas await: for instance, the desire to maintain security and intelligence cooperation with the EU may be almost impossible to achieve if Mrs May continues to insist on escaping completely from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

The substance of a Brexit deal will also be more difficult than procedure because Britain’s 27 EU partners are likely to put a premium on unity. It is possible Britain will need to pay an exit fee of some $63bn, as well as negotiating separately any future trade relations which would not run in parallel with the strict terms of exit. Other EU leaders face political pressure at home: France, Germany, the Netherlands, and possibly even Italy, will all have elections in 2017.

The ominous and gloomy signs are that a harder version of Brexit will prevail, but there are some flickers of hope that also point in the other direction. Mr Davis and Mr Hammond appear to be working as one in minimising the shock of departure. Mr Davis has not completely ruled out making payments into the EU budget after Brexit. Several other government ministers have floated the possibility of continuing partial membership of the single market, the customs union or both. The Scottish government, too, has said it wants to stay in the single market regardless of what happens elsewhere in Britain. Negotiating a final deal for Brexit with so many added complexities will become more divisive and problematic as the clock starts ticking.

Of late, a growing recognition has emerged of the economic risks of Brexit. Leave campaigners have long claimed that economic forecasts and predictions by Mr Hammond’s predecessor, George Osborne, were too pessimistic and overly cautious. But the Autumn Statement made clear that Brexit has a cost. Public and private consumption has held up reasonably well but investment continues to be cut. Banks and others in financial services are talking of major job losses as institutions restructure and positions are transferred to continental Europe.

Prodding ministers towards a softer Brexit must be on the table because the economy matters. A recent poll for Open Britain, a pro-EU lobby group, found that half of Leave voters are not ready to be made worse off as a result of Brexit.

More realism over immigration should also be a factor. To date, this has only been presented in terms of the relationship between the single market and the four freedoms of movement of capital, goods, services and people. The implication has been that to keep the first may require concessions on the second. Several companies, however, in industries ranging from financial services to agriculture, have made clear that migration is crucial in its own right. Indeed, some are more concerned about migration controls than they are about barrier-free access to the EU’s single market because of the effect such controls will have on the availability of labour for their industries.

A view is also emerging among politicians who see the need for a transitional deal with the EU – to avert a hard landing in March 2019. Transition is being talked up, as a string of recent reports from the House of Lords EU committee highlight. They say this is particularly important for financial services. The fact that transition was ever controversial is, in the words of Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, “symptomatic of a strategy-less approach to Brexit”. That it is now widely accepted as a sign of common sense.

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

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