Sunday 17 March 2024

The US is sinking into chaos

We are living in very strange times, stranger and perhaps more dangerous than any I can remember in my lifetime. The planet seems to be spiraling into chaos. It’s becoming ever more difficult to be shocked, but yesterday I was. Several tweets popped up on my Twitter timeline. The first was a report on the US cable channel CNN about the Republican nominee for what is effectively the education minister for North Carolina. She is Michelle Morrow and is clearly a committed Trump supporter.

Have a listen to this report. It’s three terrifying minutes long:

She wants to see Democrats executed and believes all this stupid QAnon stuff about a global conspiracy of satanic child molesters. Every country has its own nut jobs but they don’t usually get very far in political parties and certainly don’t get nominated for important public offices.

America, at the very highest political levels, is now packed with these sorts of people. It looks like the last days of the Roman Empire when they were all driven half-crazy by lead poisoning from the water pipes.

As if that wasn't enough, a few hours later, the orange baboon himself, the Republican nominee for President of the United States of America gave a speech in Dayton, Ohio where he speculated on what would happen if he didn't win. Listen to it:

The years of drug abuse in America seems to be reaching its inevitable conclusion with a descent into madness affecting half the population who apparently not only believe he should be on the ballot but are prepared to vote for him and think he should win whatever the actual result is.

UPDATE: I now see that Trump was actually talking about a bloodbath in the US car industry if he isn't elected in November. The Twitter post has been cleverly cut to make it seem he is talking about some sort of civil war. I should make it clear that this is NOT the case. Apologies.

They are taking Kango hammers to the very foundations of democracy and don't seem to realise that when democratic institutions fail they're very difficult to restore and only anarchy and chaos will be the result. I have to say Trump is totally responsible, or rather irresponsible, with his refusal even now to accept he lost the 2020 election fair and square. More than 60 legal challenges in several different states, many with Republican administrations, have all shown there was no conspiracy to deprive him of the presidency yet he continues to whip up resentment among his supporters.

It is all completely insane, and extremely worrying for the future of the West. 

Against this backdrop, Brexit begins to look even more stupid than it was. By next year, Europe and the EU could be the last redoubt against Putin, Xi, and the forces of authoritarianism with Britain adrift in a world of heavily armed but unstable superpowers, and having little influence with any of them.

And speaking of Brexit, Kemi Badenoch is slowly sinking under the weight of contradictions that leaving the EU entails. A report recently from UK in a Changing Europe suggested ministers had "underestimated" the problems that Brexit would bring. Nowhere is this more true than in the business and trade department, headed at the moment by Ms Badenoch.  She hasn't got a clue.

We first learned that the UK-India trade talks had been 'put on ice' and nothing is going to happen before the election - and probably not much afterward either.

Then Badenoch appeared in front of Bill Cash's European Scrutiny Committee where she came under pressure about the lack of progress in scrapping all those EU laws known as REUL. She was asked if there was “a reluctance to dispose of the law in various departments by officials”.  This a reference to the famous 'blob' as we know: 

She told MPs on the committee:

“I haven’t personally seen any obstruction from the Brexit opportunities team or smarter regulation teams that are under me in terms of making sure that we carry out this programme at the highest priority. 

“I think that if there is anything that is slowing things down, it is the attention of ministers to crises – and MPs as well as we’re in election year – on to things which are more retail electorally.

“If I bring out a technical regulation, which I think is going to do something to the media industry, for example, it is not sort of thing that catches fire, but in terms of the work that we are doing identifying – yes that is still going at pace.”

What this actually means in practice can be seen in the 10th edition of UKICE's Divergence Tracker. There is work certainly going on but it's hard to see much substance. The report notes some changes but says (my emphasis):

"Yet the day-to-day impacts of these reforms are likely to be limited, as many of the changes are largely technical in nature or effectively update the law to reflect existing practices. That said, the reforms to GDPR, while not radical, do reduce some personal data protections - and could prompt the EU to drop, or not renew, its data adequacy decision for the UK (which is up for review in 2025)."

"There are, however, a couple of areas where the UK is seemingly trying to introduce lighter-touch regimes than the EU. The government has issued a ‘strategic steer’ to the Competition and Markets Authority to focus on boosting economic growth - which could be seen either as a deregulatory push or, more prosaically, as an admonishment for some notably interventionist decisions post-Brexit. 

"The UK is also introducing an ‘alternative’ process for registering chemicals under its UK REACH regime, requiring less data to be submitted than under the EU system. This stems from the inhibitive cost to business of replicating EU registrations, but the plan has raised serious concerns about the impact on chemicals safety.

In other areas, the recent trend of the UK seeking to minimise divergence continues. In some cases, this amounts to replicating or restating EU law. The government has intervened to retain EU principles on VAT and excise duty law - which would otherwise have lapsed at the end of 2023 under the Retained EU Law Act - because their removal risked opening government up to re-litigation from major companies; and the working time reforms restate EU case law principles around carrying over leave. Elsewhere, the UK is replicating a landmark EU policy by outlining plans for a UK Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which it was in effect forced into to avoid high-carbon goods being dumped in the UK once the EU CBAM takes full effect."

In other words, it is all very complicated with much of the work focusing not on new opportunities but on limiting divergence to avoid further damage to the UK economy. We are going to be following EU rules - or UK rules that are so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, with minor cost savings easily exceeded by the extra bureaucracy involved when trading with Europe.

And finally, if you want to see where the slow puncture of Brexit is taking us this report in The Guardian is a good starting point: ‘Desperate neglect’: teachers washing clothes and finding beds as poverty grips England’s schools.

I grew up on a council estate in the Midlands. We were quite poor, six of us in a three-bedroom house. Hand-me-down clothes, darned socks, a tin bath on Sundays, RAF great coats as duvets in winter, never cold but sometimes hungry, yet here we are seventy years later and things look even worse.

Our teachers never washed our clothes for us or allowed us to sleep in class because we were exhausted.

For Heaven's sake.

Posted by at