From the French Revolution onwards, politics has been defined by the distinction between left and right. In the UK and elsewhere, conservatives and socialists did battle along socio-economic lines. Class was the best predictor of voting behaviour. However, the division inaugurated by 1789 appears increasingly obsolete. The politics of left v right is being superseded by the politics of open v closed. In the UK, the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU split both the Conservatives and Labour into Remainers and Leavers. For the rest of this decade and beyond, British politics will be defined by Brexit, and attitudes towards immigration will be more important than those towards capitalism.
In the US, Donald Trump’s election similarly reshaped historical loyalties. His political programme of closed borders, higher government spending, trade tariffs and tax cuts borrowed from left and right. Like the Brexiteers, he managed to mobilise formerly inactive sections of the electorate.
Across Europe, nationalists are thriving by the same means. In France, the leader of the Front National, Marine Le Pen, has attracted former Socialists and Communists by vowing to end “multiculturalism” and by promising a referendum on EU membership. In Germany, the xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland rejects Angela Merkel’s policy on refugees. In the Netherlands, the nationalist Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) continues to lead in opinion polls as this year’s general election draws near. Poland and Hungary are already governed by parties of the far right. Faced with this revolt, social democrats are struggling to maintain relevancy.
Though open v closed is the most salient new schism, it is not the only one. In this issue, we detail five others reshaping politics: graduates v non-graduates, old v young, owners v renters, white Britain v ethnic minorities and metropolitan v provincial. For the Conservatives and Labour alike, the challenge is to bridge these divides. Theresa May rightly recognised that the Brexit vote was not merely a rejection of the EU but a symptom of much deeper unrest. For many in the north of England and the Midlands, the referendum was a chance to protest against decades of neglect. Others voted Leave to reduce immigration – even knowing that economic growth could be harmed.
The lesson here is that the UK must address long-standing defects: our poor productivity, our regional imbalances, our lack of affordable housing and our weak vocational sector. Mrs May has already made progress in some of these areas. In housing, the government has abandoned its predecessor’s obsession with subsidising demand in favour of expanding supply. An additional £1.4bn has been announced for affordable homes, including those for rent. After making no mention of private tenants in their 2015 manifesto, the Conservatives have banned letting agent fees.
The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, has rightly abandoned the goal of a budget surplus by 2020 in order to increase infrastructure investment and to soften planned welfare cuts. He has signalled that the triple lock (which ensures that the state pension rises by inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest) could be abolished after the next general election. All of these measures will help to address the increasing gulf between the young (who endured the largest post-crash fall in standards of living) and the old (whose real incomes rose).
Yet even more than this, the government must unite Remainers and Leavers in a shared project of national renewal. In the postwar era, the National Health Service, the welfare state, the Open University and a Keynesian economic strategy helped ameliorate the class divide. The crises in living standards, social care and housing demand no less ambition today. Mrs May’s challenge is not merely to deliver Brexit. It is to make divided Britain united once more.
Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy…
Daniel Hannan, as I’ve noted in the past, has an awkward habit of deleting his tweets. Often, by a strange coincidence, it’s the more embarrassing proclamations that vanish into the ether – no explanation, no, “Apologies, friends, I buggered that up didn’t I?” The tweet simply vanishes as if it had never been tweeted.
I’ve taken, then, to screenshot-ing some of the best morsels, just in case they’re not there the next time I look. Here’s one now:
Funny thing about that tweet is that Danny Boy has not, at time of writing, deleted it. Despite the fact he was tricked into embarrassing himself by a mean-spirited Remoaner, it’s still sitting there on the internet looking for all the world like its author is not crippled with embarrassment at the fact he could have been such a dunderhead as to write it. Two things are wrong with it, one relatively small, the other so huge as to be all encompassing.
The small one lies in the choice of monarchs. Not all of them are unreasonable: Henry VIII famously broke with the Catholic Church in his search for a divorce, an heir, and a quick bonk with Anne Boleyn. Since that meant an end to the period in which the English crown was answerable to a higher authority in the form of the Pope, we’ve already been treated to umpteen “Britain’s first Brexit” articles, and they’re not soon likely to stop – all this, despite the fact the big man liked to go around telling people he was also the King of France.
Similarly England spent much of the reign of his daughter trying to avoid being swallowed by the Spanish Empire, so it’s probably fair to suggest that Elizabeth I wasn’t a big fan of European integration either. George V, though, was closely related to – indeed, shared a face with – half the other head of states in Europe during his time on the planet, so what he’s doing there is anybody’s guess.
The truly vexing inclusion, though, is Edward V. Is Daniel Hannan really saying that a boy king who reigned for 79 days and was murdered by a wicked uncle at the age of 12 had serious concerns about the European project? Was it the damage that the Combined Agricultural Policy wrought on developing world farmers that Edward was brooding about in his tower? The money wasted on repeatedly moving the European Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg? What?
@JonnElledge To be fair, if you’d ask the Princes in the Tower if they wanted to leave or remain, I’d bet they’d vote leave.
— Chris Cook (@xtophercook) December 29, 2016
Okay let’s be charitable and assume it’s a typo, presumably for another of Henry’s kids Edward VI. (It certainly wasn’t Edward III who spent much of his reign trying to get into Europe, by kicking off an endless war with France.) But the bigger problem here lies not in the specifics of Daniel’s answer, but in the fact he bothered to answer at all. The entire exercise is entirely ludicrous. It’s like asking for Theresa May’s position on the dissolution of the monasteries, or Jeremy Hunt’s proposals for tackling the Black Death.
The question is an ahistorical nonsense – not just because the European Union was invented in the late 20th century to deal with problems specific to a particular time, but because it misunderstands how England’s role in Europe has evolved over the centuries.
For the first five hundred years or so after the Conquest, the nations of the British Isles were a key part of a western European political system that included France and the Low countries. Until it lost Calais in 1558, indeed, the English Crown generally held territory in France.
The idea that the United Kingdom, as the state became, was with Europe but not of it – that its destiny lay on the high seas, not the continent – is a notion that’s core to Eurosceptic mythology, but one which didn’t emerge until the imperial era. Exactly when I’m not sure (unlike certain Conservative MEPs I’m not afraid to admit my ignorance, which is what makes us better than the animals and egg avatars). However you count it, though, the period between then and 1973 must make up a minority of England’s history as a nation. For most of its history, the idea that the England was somehow not properly “European” would have seemed crazy.
Actually, there was one major European project which a king of both England and Scotland kept us out of, a policy decision confirmed by his successors. That project was a key plank of French foreign policy, grew to encompass more far flung countries like Sweden, and was launched largely to prevent the Germans from getting above themselves. It was the Thirty Years War.
But is James I & VI on Hannan’s list? Is he b*llocks.
© Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/01/leader-new-divides
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A statue of a girl representing the Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military was unveiled in front of the Japanese Consulate in Busan, South Korea, last week. Japan recalled its envoy to South Korea on Friday to protest the statue. “The Japanese government finds this situation extremely regrettable,” Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said during a news conference in Tokyo. 
Thousands of North Koreans have rallied in Pyongyang, chanting communist slogans and vowing support for leader Kim Jong-Un, who in his New Year’s message announced plans to test-fire a ballistic missile capable of reaching the US mainland. 
The U. S. tech giant announced plans on Friday to open its first retail outlet in South Korea. The store will be located in Seoul, which is also Samsung’s headquarters. 
A senior North Korean delegation left Pyongyang on Friday to attend the inauguration of Nicaragua’s newly elected President Daniel Ortega. 
A fast emerging trend from this year’s tech extravaganza is the use by carmakers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a way of accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles. If a car can learn from its errors and from its owner, it will be able to navigate spaces and terrains without mapping and will be able to make the right decision if a familiar route suddenly changes.
President-elect Donald Trump ‘s disapproval of Ford Motor and General Motors may be too harsh, considering the sizable presence of foreign automakers in Mexico, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on Friday. 
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to be briefed Friday on a report prepared by the U. S. intelligence community on Russian hacking activities in the presidential election — after he spent this week still questioning the veracity of their previous assessments . 
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The provincial governor of Afghanistan’s Baghlan province has said that an unknown gunman has killed 12 coal miners. 
The Latest on the federal sentencing trial of convicted Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof (all times local): 
