[noemon]

Brexit is a 'nationalist spasm': Lord Adonis resigns as infrastructure tsar

Labour peer urges his party to support second referendum as he steps down as chair of national commission

Heather Stewart, political editor, and Nicola Slawson

Brexit has caused a “nervous breakdown” in Whitehall, the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis has said following his resignation as chair of the government-backed National Infrastructure Commission.

Lord Adonis resigned on Friday in protest at Theresa May’s management of Britain’s departure from the EU, describing the process as “a dangerous populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning: “Almost the entire government machine is spending its time seeking to wrench us out of the key economic and political institutions of the EU. Everything else is going by the board.”

Adonis said there should be a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal and that people like him who are in leadership positions should be “arguing passionately with the British people as to why staying in the EU is the right thing to do”.

He said those who voted to leave were “not stupid” but argued that Brexit was not defined before the referendum and people should be given “a new say” on the choice between May’s deal and staying in the EU.

“I hope we can bring the common sense of the British people to bear when they realise what the consequences are,” he said.

The former transport secretary headed the body that makes recommendations to the government on projects such as the high-speed rail link HS2. Most recently he recommended that 1m new homes be built in the “brain belt” spanning Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes.

Adonis has become increasingly outspoken on a series of policy issues in recent months, including tuition fees and vice-chancellors’ pay.

He told BBC Breakfast earlier on Saturday: “My differences with the government had become too great, not only on Brexit, which I think is being handled very badly … but increasingly Brexit is infecting the whole conduct of Whitehall. We’re seeing that including in infrastructure itself.”

His strongly worded resignation letter accuses the prime minister of becoming the voice of Ukip and pursuing policies that would leave Britain in splendid isolation.

“I am afraid I must now step down because of fundamental differences, on infrastructure and beyond, which simply can’t be bridged,” he wrote.

Adonis said he was duty bound to oppose the government’s flagship EU withdrawal bill, which will reach the House of Lords in the new year. He described the it as “the worst legislation of my lifetime”.

He said Britain could have abided by the result of the 2016 referendum and left the EU “without rupturing our essential European trade and political relations”. Instead, the prime minister had “become the voice of Ukip and the extreme nationalist rightwing” of her party.

Adonis said he would have felt compelled to step down anyway over the transport secretary’s decision to bail out Stagecoach and Virgin on the East Coast rail franchise. “It is increasingly clear that the bailout is a nakedly political manoeuvre by Chris Grayling,” he said. He described the move as extraordinary and indefensible, saying that it would cost taxpayers “hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly billions”.

Grayling announced that a new partnership would take on responsibility for intercity trains and track operations on the route in 2020. Virgin Trains East Coast, involving Stagecoach and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin, had previously agreed to pay the government £3.3bn to run the service until 2023.

Adonis said he had tried to warn the government of the cost to the taxpayer of the bailout, but that a senior official had tried to stop him. He is said to have text messages from a senior official at the Department for Transport, warning it may be more difficult to cooperate with him if he attacked the decision, and that it could be awkward for him to attend its annual party.

He is also said to have sent a direct text message warning to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, which went unanswered.

Adonis’s departure, which was confirmed by commission officials,makes him the second senior Labour figure to resign from a government-backed role, following Alan Milburn’s decision to step down as chair of the social mobility commission, citing May’s failure to make progress on the issue.

It is unclear why Adonis, who was appointed to the role in April, chose now to resign, when May made clear in her conference speech in 2016 that she planned to take Britain out of the single market and the customs union.

Before the official announcement of his resignation, an early version of Adonis’s letter to May was leaked to the media. When asked how this happened, Adonis told Today that “dirty tricks” had been played but that he would be speaking “unmuzzled” from now on.

Nick Timothy, May’s former chief of staff, tweeted that the recent behaviour of Labour appointees was “making it harder to pick people from different party backgrounds”.

Adonis has also been highly critical of his own party’s stance on Brexit, urging the shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer’s team to advocate remaining in the single market, and suggesting Labour would eventually end up backing a second referendum.

A Labour spokesperson said: “Theresa May’s weak and divided government can’t even command the confidence of its own advisers. With each resignation, the stench of decay around the government grows stronger and stronger. The Tories
are in office, but not in power.”

Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, expressed sadness about Adonis’s departure. “Lord Adonis is one of the most thoughtful politicians around. This is why he has so many friends and political admirers beyond the Labour party,” he said.

“It is, then, a great shame that he is no longer leading Britain’s infrastructure programme. Yet he felt there was no other option but to resign because of the way Brexit has been so badly mishandled.

“Notably, he is deeply concerned by how the Conservative leadership has pandered to its right wing over the single market and customs union, leaving which will badly – and needlessly – damage our trade.”

Senior government sources played down the significance of his departure, claiming his position had been under threat over his recent habit of engaging in vehement Twitter spats.

They also cited his criticism of government policy. “He’s been moving closer to the exit door with each new onslaught he makes against Brexit,” they said.

The former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: “Lord Adonis’s departure is long overdue.

“It’s a bit rich for him to pontificate on what he calls populism, but what most would refer to as democracy, when he himself has never been elected by a public vote. He has instead relied on preferment from others.”

Adonis was an adviser to Tony Blair and a key driver of the decision to impose tuition fees on university students, but he has been strongly critical of recent changes to the scheme.

The large-scale infrastructure projects he championed are likely to go ahead without his chairmanship, because his approach is shared by the chancellor, who is keen to boost investment to offset the impact of Brexit on the economy.

Full text of Adonis’s letter

Dear prime minister,

The hardest thing in politics is to bring about lasting change for the better, and I believe in cooperation across parties to achieve it.

In this spirit I was glad to accept reappointment last year as chair of the independent National Infrastructure Commission, when you also reaffirmed your support for HS2, which will help overcome England’s north-south divide when it opens in just eight years’ time. I would like to thank you for your courtesy in our personal dealings.

The commission has done good work in the past 27 months, thanks to dedicated public servants and commissioners. Sir John Armitt, my deputy chair, and Phil Graham, chief executive, have been brilliant throughout. I am particularly proud of our plans for equipping the UK with world-class 4G and 5G mobile systems; for Crossrail 2 in London and HS3 to link the northern cities; and for transformational housing growth in the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge corridor.

I hope these plans are implemented without delay. However, my work at the commission has become increasingly clouded by disagreement with the government, and after much consideration I am writing to resign because of fundamental differences which simply cannot be bridged.

The European Union withdrawal bill is the worst legislation of my lifetime. It arrives soon in the House of Lords and I feel duty bound to oppose it relentlessly from the Labour benches.

Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump. After the narrow referendum vote, a form of associate membership of the EU might have been attempted without rupturing Britain’s key trading and political alliances. Instead, by allying with Ukip and the Tory hard right to wrench Britain out of the key economic and political institutions of modern Europe, you are pursuing a course fraught with danger.

Even within Ireland, there are set to be barriers between people and trade. If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children’s generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction.

A responsible government would be leading the British people to stay in Europe while also tackling, with massive vigour, the social and economic problems within Britain which contributed to the Brexit vote. Unfortunately, your policy is the reverse.

The government is hurtling towards the EU’s emergency exit with no credible plan for the future of British trade and European cooperation, all the while ignoring – beyond soundbites and inadequate programmes – the crises of housing, education, the NHS and social and regional inequality which are undermining the fabric of our nation and feeding a populist surge.

What Britain needs in 2018 is a radically reforming government in the tradition of [Clement] Attlee, working tirelessly to eradicate social problems while strengthening Britain’s international alliances. This is a cause I have long advocated, and acted upon in government, and I intend to pursue it with all the energy I can muster.

Britain must be deeply engaged, responsible and consistent as a European power. When in times past we have isolated ourselves from the continent in the name of “empire” or “sovereignty”, we were soon sucked back in. This will inevitably happen again, given our power, trade, democratic values and sheer geography.

Putin and the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland and Hungary are flashing red lights. As Edmund Burke so wisely wrote, “people will not look forwards to posterity who do not look backwards to their ancestors”.

However, I would have been obliged to resign from the commission at this point anyway because of the transport secretary’s indefensible decision to bail out the Stagecoach/Virgin East Coast rail franchise. The bailout will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly billions if other loss-making rail companies demand equal treatment. It benefits only the billionaire owners of these companies and their shareholders, while pushing rail fares still higher and threatening national infrastructure investment. It is even more inexcusable given the Brexit squeeze on public spending.

The only rationale I can discern for the bailout is as a cynical political manoeuvre by Chris Grayling, a hard-right Brexiteer, to avoid following my 2009 precedent when National Express defaulted on its obligations to the state for the same East Coast franchise because it too had overbid for the contract. I set up a successful public operator to take over East Coast services and banned National Express from bidding for new contracts. The same should have been done in this case. Yet, astonishingly, Stagecoach has not only been bailed out, it remains on the shortlist for the next three rail franchises.

The East Coast affair will inevitably come under close scrutiny by the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee, and I need to be free to set out serious public interest concerns. I hope the PAC calls Sir Richard Branson and Sir Brian Souter to give evidence. I am ready to share troubling evidence with the PAC and other parliamentary committees investigating the bailout.

As you know, I raised these concerns with the chancellor and the transport secretary as soon as the bailout became apparent from the small print of an odd policy statement on 29 November majoring on reversing Beeching rail closures of the 1960s. I received no response from either minister beyond inappropriate requests to desist.

Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown across Whitehall and conduct unworthy of Her Majesty’s government. I am told, by those of longer experience, that it resembles Suez and the bitter industrial strife of the 1970s, both of which endangered not only national integrity but the authority of the state itself.

You occupy one of the most powerful offices in the history of the world, the heir of Churchill, Attlee and Gladstone. Whatever our differences, I wish you well in guiding our national destiny at this critical time.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Adonis

The Guardian

[mikema63]

Let us note, somewhere in this world exists a man named lord Adonis.

Anyway, I basically agree with him. And good for him resigning when the government insists on stupid corporatist bullshit.

[foxdemon]

Brexit is an example of where popularism goes. So is Trump’s rise to power. OK, so maybe we need slow down and examine popularism carefully.


I find it interesting to read older articles from before the wave hit. Is it corporatism or popularism that is to blame?

Let’s try for some definitions. Please disagree with these if you see fit.

Corporatism: big business interests override all else in state policy.

Popularism: political doctrine which appeals to majority sentiments by targeting an identified out group, forexample elites. But could be ethnic groups or white heterosexual males, etc.


The following article blames baby boomers for a lack of moral fortitude and is critical of leaders chasing measures of popular opinion. And he blames social media.

Is the author too critical of baby boomers? Isn’t that leaning toward popularism? No mention is made of rising levels of socioeconomic inequality which, though happening from the 1970s on, has reached critical levels today and is, in my opinion, the real driving force behind popular unrest. The social media is just an enabler.

The lack of leadership and the insincerity is a valid explanation. Corporatism violates Adam Smith’s insistence that the state should not side with financiers and merchants any more than with other interest groups. Rather the state is supposed to regulate interest group competition in regard to the health of the overall economy. Much modern democratic leadership has been about explaining to the public why corporate interests should trump everyone else’s interests and thus must necessarily by insincere.

Possibly the stranglehold of corporations on policy makers for the last few decades has resulted in the lack of leadership and the lack of truth? And the result has been a political vacuum that popularism has arisen to fill.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-rise-of-popularism.html

The Rise of Popularism

Thomas L. Friedman JUNE 23, 2012


TRAVELING in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day? There are many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I’d focus on two: one generational, one technological.

Let’s start with the technological. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, posited Moore’s Law, which stipulated that the processing power that could be placed on a single microchip would double every 18 to 24 months. It’s held up quite well since then. Watching European, Arab and U.S. leaders grappling with their respective crises, I’m wondering if there isn’t a political corollary to Moore’s Law: The quality of political leadership declines with every 100 million new users of Facebook and Twitter.

The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?

This sentence jumped out from a Politico piece on Wednesday: “The Obama and Romney campaigns spend all day strafing each other on Twitter, all while decrying the campaign’s lack of serious ideas for a serious time. Yet at most junctures when they’ve had the opportunity to go big, they’ve chosen to go small.”

Indeed, I heard a new word in London last week: “Popularism.” It’s the über-ideology of our day. Read the polls, track the blogs, tally the Twitter feeds and Facebook postings and go precisely where the people are, not where you think they need to go. If everyone is “following,” who is leading?

And then there is the exposure factor. Anyone with a cellphone today is paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube access is a filmmaker. When everyone is a paparazzi, reporter and filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. And, if you’re truly a public figure — a politician — the scrutiny can become so unpleasant that public life becomes something to be avoided at all costs. Alexander Downer, Australia’s former foreign minister, remarked to me recently: “A lot of leaders are coming under massively more scrutiny than ever before. It doesn’t discourage the best of them, but the ridicule and the constant interaction from the public is making it more difficult for them to make sensible, brave decisions.”

As for the generational shift, we’ve gone from a Greatest Generation that believed in save and invest for the future to a Baby Boomer generation that believed in borrow and spend for today. Just contrast George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush. The father volunteered for World War II immediately after Pearl Harbor, was steeled as a leader during the cold war — a serious time, when politicians couldn’t just follow polls — and as president he raised taxes when fiscal prudence called for it. His Baby Boomer son avoided the draft and became the first president in U.S. history to cut taxes in the middle of not just one war, but two.

When you have technologies that promote quick short-term responses and judgments, and when you have a generation that has grown used to short-term gratification — but you have problems whose solutions require long, hard journeys, like today’s global credit crisis or jobs shortage or the need to rebuild Arab countries from the ground up — you have a real mismatch and leadership challenge. Virtually all leaders today have to ask their people to share burdens, not just benefits, and to both study harder and work smarter just to keep up. That requires extraordinary leadership that has to start with telling people the truth.

Dov Seidman, the author of the book “How” whose company LRN advises C.E.O.’s on leadership, has long argued that “nothing inspires people more than the truth.” Most leaders think that telling people the truth makes that leader vulnerable — either to the public or their opponents. They are wrong.

“The most important part of telling the truth is that it actually binds you to people,” explains Seidman, “because when you trust people with the truth, they trust you back.” Obfuscation from leaders just gives citizens another problem — more haze — to sort through. “Trusting people with the truth is like giving them a solid floor,” adds Seidman. “It compels action. When you are anchored in shared truth, you start to solve problems together. It’s the beginning of coming up with a better path.”

That is not what we’re seeing from leaders in America, the Arab world or Europe today. You’d think one of them, just one, would seize the opportunity to enlist their people in the truth: about where they are, what they are capable of, what plan they need to get there and what they each need to contribute to get on that better path. Whichever leader does that will have real “followers” and “friends” — not virtual ones.

[foxdemon]

I have some more thoughts on popularism. Instead of talking about the West, let’s look at popularism in the Umma.

Traditionally, order in the Islamic World was based on the authority of the Natal Ulama, the ones who know. Yet Islamic scholars have little say in things today. The Umma is dominated by popularism.

Radical Islamism is popularism. Even the non violent expressions of Islamic politics are popularist in nature. They are built on popular sentiment and an opponent of the people’s will is identified as the enemy. This might be Muslim dictators or even democratic governments, or foreign influences such as Russia, the West, etc. Muslim scholars are occasionally invoked for legitimacy but can hardly be regarded as in control.

Why? Maybe Attaturk was to quick in rejecting traditional values in his efforts to modernise? Possibly reforming the scholars rather than replacing their authority might have been more sensible. Today few smart Muslims aspire to a life of Islamic scholarship and instead pursue careers with material rewards, such as business and technology. So the Ulama is essentially irrelevant in modern Islamic politics. Thus there is no stablising authority to shape Islamic political discourse.

The result is disorder. Informed authority builds order while popularism breeds disorder. Or is it that disorder breeds popularism? Which is the chicken and which is the egg. Anyway, I assert it is the dominance of popularism that is preventing the Umma from adjusting effectively to change in the modern world.


Of interest is Xi Jinping’s use of popularism in China to sure up his power against his rivals. It seems to be working for him now but what happens when he is no longer Leader? We also see his authoritarian style crushing courage and independent thought. It is likely China will end up overwhelmed and destabilised by an angry popularism once the big Xi cashes in his chips.

[Beren]

Let us note, somewhere in this world exists a man named lord Adonis.

Very godly name indeed, maybe he speaks in gods' name.

[Rugoz]

Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown across Whitehall and conduct unworthy of Her Majesty’s government.

As far as I can tell Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown in Brussels as well as in noemen.

Very godly name indeed, maybe he speaks in gods' name.

As a Greek god he obviously has a preference for failed states.

[Atlantis]

What the good Lord has to say about the Brexit government isn't in the least bit surprising. But what's really interesting in the story is that Labour is back and fighting. His resignation seems to be part of a Labour initiative to weaken the Tory government. By showing how the Tories spend tax payer's money to bail out the big cats, he could even convince free-marketeers that Corbyn's plans of re-nationalizing the railways might not be such as bad idea. Very smart, the Lord Adonis!

[Beren]

[ThirdTerm]

Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump. After the narrow referendum vote, a form of associate membership of the EU might have been attempted without rupturing Britain’s key trading and political alliances. Instead, by allying with Ukip and the Tory hard right to wrench Britain out of the key economic and political institutions of modern Europe, you are pursuing a course fraught with danger.

I think Brexit was an accident that the Establishment could not foresee. All pollsters predicted that the pro-EU camp would prevail and Britain would stay in the EU. But the situation changed drastically in the last week of campaigning and the Leave camp eventually won by a wider margin than expected. In the American case, the Hillary camp was undermined by the e-mail scandal, losing her double-digit lead over it. Otherwise, Hillary could have been the duly elected president.

A new poll has found that support for keeping EU membership is now ten points ahead of support for Brexit. The BMG poll of 1,400 people for The Independent found that 51% of British people would now stay in the EU, while 41% wanted to go ahead with leaving. It was published on the newspaper’s website on Saturday, showing the biggest lead for ‘remain’ over ‘leave’ in any poll so far since the vote in June 2016.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/12/16/new-brexi ... to=cbshare

[B0ycey]

I think Brexit was an accident that the Establishment could not foresee. All pollsters predicted that the pro-EU camp would prevail and Britain would stay in the EU. But the situation changed drastically in the last week of campaigning and the Leave camp eventually won by a wider margin than expected. In the American case, the Hillary camp was undermined by the e-mail scandal, losing her double-digit lead over it. Otherwise, Hillary could have been the duly elected president.

The problem with Brexit - and the poison chalice that it is, is nobody can make out what it is. Everyone has different opinions on the outcome. You cannot win. There was no manifesto to follow. So naturally there is going to be in-fighting. Adonis is only stating the bloody obvious.

As for Brexit being an accident, it was, but only due to timing. Cameron decided to pick the worse time during the height of the refugee crisis to hold a referendum and the Leavers wasted no time leeching onto that fact. If the referendum was held today, I suspect at least 60% (maybe higher) would vote remain. The reality of the fearmongering at play has finally hit home here. I think people are just fed up with Brexit now. The quicker an outcome is reached (whatever that is) the better.

As for Trump, same principles are in play compared to Brexit. Trump has hoodwinked his supporters by fearmongering. He has passed the worse bill in US history by cloaking it with patriotism against Muslims. I doubt Hillary was hindered by her emails actually. No more than by Trumps Pussy grab video. Trump has too much Roger Stone in him. He knows the art of denial, social media, bullshitting, fearmongering and spin to a gullible audience. Honesty doesn't work in politics. It never has. That's why you cannot get a politician to answer a straight forward question. Trump has taken it to a new level though. And that has divided America today. I only hope America can wake up from this nightmare in three years time. The world really does need them to.

[Atlantis]

I think Brexit was an accident that the Establishment could not foresee.

Brexit is the just punishment for an opportunistic political elite that sees politics as a cynical game.

[The Immortal Goon]

Lord Adonis is not wrong. It is the same social movement that started Brexit that continued to Trump. It is in Hungary, Greece, Poland, and virtually everywhere else in the West. Even Ireland, which currently has a gay Indian as Taoiseach, only masks Varadkar's actual position as a rightwinger.

I suspect that this is all a somewhat controlled reaction, a flailing, as the World Wars and Cold War wears off and capitalism gently sits back down to a more comfortable position. The motivations have always been obvious enough, you make as much money as possible. To do that, you spend as little on labour and taxes as possible. This is elementary, and without the threat of someone coming in there and smashing up the shop, there is increasingly no reason to spend money on providing an alternative vision.

So with the leftwing thoroughly demoralized and as defeated as possible, really only anarchists and academics left after a successful Cold War for the right, it's time for them to sit down into a Gilded Age.

Where I normally am, in the Western US, this tracks especially well. The Gilded Age is a phase from Mark Twain, who wrote about the sheer corruption in capitalizing unimproved land and the suffering and waste that it caused. The Progressive Era, among other things, made a lot of this kind of land public to get around the issue. Now, of course, the big push is for rich people to get this land from the public and begin the suffering and waste again. Yee-ha!

Regardless, this is capitalism. Get used to it for a while until the ghost haunting it materializes well enough to take action.

[Baff]

Brexit was assured when they signed the country up for the EU in clear opposition to the countries wishes.
The polling may have ended at 51% against, but it began at about 79% against.

It's been massively unpopular here since day one. Never ever been able to win a referendum.
It wasn't anything sudden. It was along drawn out 30 year denial of democracy. Almost half the population of this country have died of old age before even seeing it.

Lord Adonis? Who cares? Goodbye.
No one will miss him. Not the Tories and not his own party.


Corporatism verses populism seen through the prism of Britain's EU membership,
Corporatism got us in, populism got us out.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Lords like this are a threat to the House of Lords as an unelected institution.

[Decky]

Lords like this are a threat to the House of Lords as an unelected institution.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Fuck the lords.