When people warning about incipient fascism are criticised rather than laughed at is the time to worry about incipient fascism

I’m old enough to remember left wing demonstrations in the UK when ‘fascist!’ was a standard chant. On most occasions back then it was a ridiculous accusation, and as such it was rightly laughed away. But times have unfortunately changed. With authoritarian regimes in some East European countries, Trump’s election and subsequent behaviour, and far right parties gaining ground in other countries, fears of a return of something like fascism are no longer a laughing matter.

When Andrew Marr interviewed David Lammy a week ago, he suggested Lammy talking about appeasement of the ERG in the same terms of Hitler or apartheid was “unacceptable”. Not ludicrous but unacceptable, and by implication something Lammy should apologise for. Quite rightly, and so refreshingly for a Labour MP in the glare of TV lights, Lammy was having none of this. He said his comments were not strong enough. When Marr protested that these were elected MPs he was talking about, Lammy reminded him that the National Socialists had elected MPs. In 1932 they were the largest party in the Reichstag.

Nigel Farage is not an MP, but the BBC seem happy not just to give the launch of his new party considerable airtime, but also to do so in an uncritical manner. After the BBC had chosen the soundbite from his speech about putting the fear of god into MPs for what they had done to us, no one was given airtime to warn about how dangerous that kind of speech was, and that one MP had been murdered by the far right, another plot foiled and about many other serious threats to MPs. I think it is fair to say that the launch of the Brexit party was news and had to be covered, but to provide no kind of critical balance whatsoever was a strange decision.

Discussions of incipient fascism go in the wrong direction when direct comparisons are made to fascism in the 1930s. Equally ticking off check lists of signs of fascism just beg the question of how many ticks mean we should be worried. There is no generally accepted definition of fascism. We need to be more analytical, but also to update the analysis to the circumstances of today.

Much of the academic discussion of this issue takes place under the umbrella of studying populism. I think this is a little unfortunate, because the populism umbrella can be spread very wide to include any political party that challenges an existing party political structure. If you are interested in incipient fascism a better conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The real people quickly becomes those that support the populist leader. The others, especially immigrants or minority religions or races, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. Populists of the Müller type will be strong on nationalism, as well as threats from within and without. Intimidation and violence against opponents is never far away. Populists will talk about the elite that has been leading the country astray, and how they as leader has to constantly battle against this elite, even though they themselves are often part of that elite.

I think a critical aspect of Müller’s account is that populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of pluralist democracy if they believe they are frustrating what the populist leader perceives as the will of the people. Authoritarian populist leaders deny the necessity of democratic pluralism, such as an independent judiciary or an independent media. The people, as expressed through the populist leadership, takes precedence over all other elements of pluralist democracy, and these elements must be made to bow before that will or be replaced by those who embody that will.

A clear example of what Müller is talking about is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He has pledged to create an illiberal state like Russia or China. Perhaps as a result, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a 2015 EU summit dispensed with diplomatic protocol to greet Orbán with a "Hello, dictator." To further this aim he has gone about controlling the media and courts either directly or through placement of allies, with complete success. This together with a lethal combination of extreme nationalism, scaremongering about migrants and antagonism against Muslims and Jews keeps him popular. NGOs have been attacked, which has led to legal proceedings by the European Commission. A host of public bodies like its fiscal council, the central bank, and the national elections commission, have been abolished or their independence limited. An international university in Budapest has been forced to close down.

Yet Hungary is still a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. When occasionally the opposition does win a local election, Orbán unleashes the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the opposition. He won his last election with ease.

I would argue that this is the incipient fascism of today. It is possible that Orbán’s nationalism and control of the media and other parts of the state will allow him to maintain total control for many years. If at some point in the future a unified and effective opposition does arise, we will see if Hungary moves back to democracy or to something worse than the elected dictatorship it now is.

It is also easy to see many of the traits of a Müller populist in Donald Trump. He is impatient with the constraints of the judiciary, and is more than happy to fill vacancies with barely qualified or unqualified individuals who will do what he wants. He plays up threats from within and without. He has a penchant for dictators in other countries. He endlessly criticises the ‘fake news’ that comes from an independent press, and instead favours the Republican/Trump propaganda that comes from Fox News. When asked whether he was concerned about death threats that followed his disgraceful attack on one of only two Muslims in Congress he basically said no. His own Republican party provides no check on his actions.

But in what sense can any of this be applied to the single political project called Brexit? The ERG are a disparate group of MPs, whose common cause is to push for the most extreme form of Brexit. There is no single authoritarian leader among them. So can Müller’s concept of populism still apply to this project and some of those who push it?

Let’s begin with what happened shortly after the 2016 vote. That referendum did not specify how we left or under what circumstances Article 50 should be triggered, but May decided that she uniquely understood what the referendum meant and parliament did not need to be involved. The Prime Minister wanted to start the Article 50 process without consulting parliament. The issue went to court, and when three judges decided parliament did have to approve the decision, the Daily Mail described them on its front page as enemies of the people.

The Brexit press and those promoting Brexit frequently talk about the will of the people, thereby excluding the 48% who did not vote for it. Indeed Remainers are often accused of sabotaging Brexit, and being the elite that those carrying out the will of the people have to defeat. EU citizens living here are effectively ignored, and were not even allowed to vote in the referendum. When the costs of Brexit are mentioned, we will often be reminded of how the British stood alone in WWII and came through the hardship of war. This is nationalist imagery at its most potent and dangerous. At one point the Daily Telegraph managed to find common cause with the authoritarian regime in Hungary and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew for his ‘plot’ to stop Brexit.

To sum up, Brexit and those that push it have displayed almost every element of Müller style populism. I have not even needed to refer to links between various Brexit politicians and the German AfD, Steve Bannon and various far right groups. Or about law breaking in order to win the vote, and the lack of enthusiasm shown by the police in investigating this. Brexit displays the same populist characteristics that you see in Victor Orban or Donald Trump. Add the violence that Brexit has inspired and the pro-Brexit right encourage with their talk of treason and we have every reason to warn about incipient fascism, as Michael Heseltine pointed out.

It is also naive to imagine that all this will stop if we end up leaving the EU. Steve Bannon is creating a network of far right parties that will use immigration and islamophobia to undermine existing parties and then pluralist democracy. Islamophobia has already been employed by the Conservatives in trying to stop Sadiq Khan becoming mayor of London. Brexit of the kind proposed by May will undermine living standards for working people that have hardly grown for a decade. This stagnation, coupled by unfettered and growing inequality, is the kindling that Bannon and his network hope to set alight.

In my view this has become so dangerous partly because the political centre fails to see it. The Brexiters are appeased by May rather than isolated as John Major did. Those termed political moderates fret about the leader of the Labour party as much if not more than incipient fascism. I cannot quite decide whether the BBC is just blind to all this or elements within actively promote it. A lesson of history is that the far right is at its most dangerous when it is appeased by a centre that is more concerned about the threat from the left.

How Broadcasters should handle the Prime Minister lying

This post is about the Brexit Dividend and how broadcasters should treat it. However I want to start with an extreme case: Donald Trump. He is the right place to start because he became POTUS in good part because of how the media treated him and his opponent. He gained publicity by saying outrageous things. That increased his poll rating, so he started getting favourable coverage because his poll ratings were going up. (I explain how this works in more detail here.) Once he was the republican candidate, the media’s obsession with balance meant they spent as much time talking about the trivial issue of Clinton’s emails as Trump’s lies, whether he pays any taxes, bribes officials and assaults women.

One of the most remarkable polls during that campaign was that more people trusted Trump than Hillary Clinton. How can someone who lies all the time, almost every time he says anything, be trusted more than Hillary Clinton, who has had countless Republican inspired investigations into her affairs and has never been convicted of anything. For some time cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has pioneered the idea that (among many other things - see for example a Guardian article with Gil Duran) lies that are repeated often enough become associations in people’s minds that they find it hard to combat. So the phrase ‘crooked Hillary’ that Trump repeats all the time has a purpose beyond firing up the base. Equally when Republican’s start investigations into her affairs that alone puts an association of guilt in people’s minds. That is a key reason why before the election they trusted Trump more than Clinton.

In the United States Trump played the media big time, and continues to do so. If the media is not careful the same thing could happen here. The phrase ‘Brexit dividend’ is the equivalent of ‘crooked Hillary’. If it is repeated enough, a sufficient number of people will begin to associate Brexit with a ‘dividend’, whether that dividend is real or not. And in case someone reading this does not know by now, the Brexit dividend is a complete fiction.

To see how May’s claim that there is a Brexit dividend should be handled, read this in the FT and this from Sky News. (HT Femi) The FT article does not have ‘Brexit dividend’ in its title, and this is important. As Lakoff argues, the more often people see those two words together the more likely they are to associate them, so do not put it in a headline as many people just read headlines. (Putting it in inverted commas does nothing.) He suggests what he calls the ‘truth sandwich’ approach: begin with a truthful statement, then report the dishonest spin, and then fact check the spin. Leaving out that first stage plays into the hands of whoever promoted the spin.

Who are the heroes and villains in this example of barefaced lying (see my definition of barefaced below). For villains we have to start with Theresa May herself: if this is a sop to the Brexiters in exchange for a soft Brexit that is no mitigation. Boris Johnson of course for suggesting the idea: the court might like to take a large number of previous offences into account. The right wing Brexit press for whom lying is just part of their game.

Heroes include Paul Johnson, who toured the broadcasters on Sunday to emphatically say there was no dividend, and Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston for saying it was complete nonsense, as well as the two references already given in the FT and from Sky News. I hope there were other examples that I did not happen to notice.

What about the BBC? It did have Paul Johnson on, and Laura Kuenssberg did at least ask the existential question, although she felt unable to answer it. (There are not ‘economic’ and ‘political’ truths: arithmetic is arithmetic, lies are lies.) But there are unfortunately other occasions when the Brexit dividend was treated as if it was real and put into headlines (e.g. here), missing out the first layer of the truth sandwich. And of course the Marr interview on Sunday, where he did not even question the concept. All too often (e.g. here) any questioning of the dividend was left to the end of the article and was presented in the standard ‘he said,she said’ format.

Why does this all matter? In terms of Brexit, it is obvious. Another barefaced lie in the Brexit campaign was £350 per week for the NHS. Most Brexiters continue to believe that they will be better off after Brexit, and I suspect most are not aware why this is unlikely to be true. Talk of the Brexit dividend is designed to keep them in their ignorance.

But I think its importance goes well beyond Brexit. Why don’t politicians lie more often to enhance their cause? Some have integrity, but for the others the deterrent is being found out. But being found out depends critically on the media calling out lies when they happen. And when a large section of the media are very selective about how they treat lies depending on who said them or why they were said, or indeed are often the source of these lies, society has a serious problem.

That is the situation in the US with Fox and Trump and in the UK with the right wing press and Brexit or the Conservatives more generally. How the print media in the US and the broadcast media in the UK treats lies has therefore become critical. With lies ‘she said, he said’ type reporting is just not sufficient to defend democracy. Now often it is quite difficult to prove someone is lying, but if I could delineate a barefaced lie as one where it is very easy to establish the truth, then the Brexit dividend is a barefaced lie. OBR documents, accepted by the government as the basis for their tax and spend decisions, show quite clearly that the money has already been spent. You cannot spend the same money twice.

The right wing Brexit press have already supported this lie. As most of their readers also watch broadcasters, it is imperative that these broadcasters inflict some political damage on those who tell the lie. If they do not, the lesson certain politicians will draw is that they too can get away with barefaced lies, encouraging the kind of behaviour we see with Trump. For that reason broadcasters have to speak truth to power, otherwise the non-partisan media becomes complicit in propaganda or just a mouthpiece for politicians.

Brexit is fantastic project

Leavers often say they do not understand why Remainers cannot just accept that we are leaving. There are many good reasons, but the one that I keep coming back to is this. Brexit is fantastical. There is nothing about the case for Brexit that is based in reality. This is why everything Brexiters say is either nonsense or untrue.

Take, for example, the leaked government estimates of how much poorer we will be on average as a result of Brexit. There is no surprise here for economists, because the estimates are in line with the wide range of large negative long term impacts made by various groups or organisations before the referendum, including the UK Treasury. But these new official estimates are made by the department for exiting the EU, and if any massaging went on in producing them it will surely have been to promote Brexit. These new estimates include, for example, the impact of yet to be discussed trade deals with the US and others. The fact that they still come out with numbers that are not very different from those produced before the referendum is, in effect, an official acknowledgment that these earlier estimates were reality based, and not the Project Fear of Brexit spin.

So what do we get in response from the government? Just different varieties of nonsense. They say the bespoke deal the UK is hoping to get is not included. As Jonathan Portes notes, this bespoke deal is somewhere between Norway (2% GDP loss) and Canada (5% GDP loss). You have to be totally innumerate not to realise that this would mean a GDP loss between 2% and 5%.

And there is the good old ‘all forecasts are wrong’ line. I am tired of inventing new ways to distinguish between conditional and unconditional forecasts, but I guess I will have to continue to do so as long as some political journalists fail to understand the point, and economic journalists fail to make the point. Here is an example for Brexiters. Mr. Fox thinks making trade deals with pretty well anyone he can is good for the economy. That is a forecast. It is a forecast using many of the same elements as those behind the latest official estimates of the cost of Brexit. The reason that deals with all and sundry cannot replace being in the EU is down to gravity, which as Chris notes is one of the most successful and robust ideas in economics.

And then there is the even more tiresome “according to economic forecasters the economy was going to collapse” type of argument. I got wise to this kind of thing with austerity. A few allowed themselves to over-egg the impact of the government cuts and that allowed others to declare 2013 growth as a vindication of austerity, just as I predicted they would. In reality austerity caused years of stagnation and the slowest economic recovery in living memory. The reality of Brexit is that we have already lost about 1% of output, as the rest of the world including the EU leaves the UK behind.

Source: Jonathan Portes in the New Statesman here

So the economic arguments of the Brexiters are nonsense: describing them as fantasy gives fantasy a bad name. But why don’t Remainers like me accept that this is really a culture thing, and that Leave voters are willing to pay for their independence from the EU. One reason is that there is clear evidence that most Leave voters believed they would at least be no worse off after Brexit, which is of course why Brexiters continue to try and rubbish estimates of how bad the hit will be. I’m pretty sure those arguing that this is only about culture are not worrying each week about how to make ends meet.

But the ‘taking back control’ idea is itself a fantasy. Trade deals today, and the Single Market in particular, are about harmonisation and cooperation. Why is this such a terrible loss of independence when the cooperation is with the EU, but no problem when it is with the US? There is a real debate to be had about the extent to which globalisation erodes national democracy. But this is not the debate the Brexiters are having. Their dislike is with the EU in particular. I have yet to hear a single voter complain about the specific directives that come from Brussels: indeed the UK government often pretend ownership because they tend to be popular. The idea that Leave voters are objecting to a “remote Brussels bureaucracy” imposing standards to keep our beaches and air clean and to prevent workers being forced to work long hours is a myth. Voters would like to take back control, but not from Brussels or the EU.

There is even a large fantasy element when it comes to immigration. Yes, there are a few Leavers who would pay a large amount to avoid hearing a foreign language spoken in their town, but they do not represent most Leave voters. Instead there is the belief, carefully cultivated by the Conservative party, that immigration has reduced real wages and our access to public services. Large numbers voted Leave because they thought less EU immigrants would mitigate the NHS crisis. Now those EU immigrants who also happened to be doctors or nurses are leaving, and the NHS cannot fill vacancies. And, of course, those lower growth numbers mean less money to spend on the NHS: the Brexit dividend is negative.

To see how much of a fantasy it all was, why not take an article by Andrew Marr, who as the presenter as the BBC’s flagship Sunday current affairs programme should know what he is talking about, written just over a year ago. He writes

“some things are already becoming clearer. We will be out of the single market and will be out of a customs union – because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to negotiate our own trade agreements around the world. Theresa May would hardly have created a new Department for International Trade if she intended it to have no purpose.”

All this, of course, was based around the fantasy of invisible customs posts on the Irish border. The UK committed to staying in the Customs Union when it signed the first stage agreement, but yet still clings to the fantasy that it has not. And then

“The logical conclusion is that we will see sector-by-sector agreements to allow in X thousand electricians, or Y thousand careworkers, with industry bodies given coupons by the government and allowed to issue the work visas they require.”

which fails on the simple logic that the EU could never allow such a thing. And then

“Some of the measures the left would like to take to support and protect the steel industry, or engineering, or to enhance our growing advantage in robotics, are made impossible not by British Conservatives, but by EU regulations on competitiveness and state funding. Make no mistake: an awful lot is back in play. Rail renationalisation, for one …”

Again, a fantasy, this time from the left. He then goes on to list lots of exciting things we can do, most of which we can do more easily inside the EU.

For all those who will tell me that the British people knew what they were doing (or rather the 52% who voted Leave), I ask did they really know more than Mr. Marr writing six months later? I suspect you could still find far greater flights of fancy among Leave voters. This is not because people are stupid, but because they soak up the propaganda in their newspapers, propaganda which the BBC is too timid to contradict. 

In the end, the economics is key to how the Brexit fantasy will end. No sane government or parliament will allow an outcome that makes people on average 8% worse off. That is why we have to make a deal with the EU, and the only deal the EU will allow is one that prevents a hard Irish border. That means staying in the Customs Union and much, possibly all, of the Single Market. Brexit will end with the UK becoming what Rees-Mogg describes as a vassal state. It will not be the fantasy people voted for, nor the fantasy the Brexiters had in mind. 

When reality bites, almost no one who voted Leave will be happy with the result. So should Remainers stay quiet and just wait for this disappointment to sink in, just for the sake of a particularly partial concept of democracy? To allow peoples lives to be impoverished and their opportunities to be diminished because of a referendum based on lies? There are democratic ways out of this fantasy turned nightmare, and we should take them.

Postscript (1/02/18)

Rees-Mogg suggested today to minister Steve Baker that the forecasts produced by government economists made Brexit look costly because civil servants had deliberately designed them to do just that, and Baker made no attempt to defend his civil servants. While this attack on the integrity of the civil service has gone unremarked by No.10, when minister Philip Lee said that the Brexit process needed to take account of "evidence not dogma", he was reprimanded. It is almost as if the government had decided that it needed to show that Brexit was indeed a fantasy project in which evidence, alongside 'saboteur' MPs, 'enemies of the people' judges, 'in the pay of the EU' economists and now 'conspiratorial' civil servants, are not welcome.     

Austerity will only end when our leaders start being honest

Austerity was the underlying motivation for starting this blog. Sometimes I think everything that I, Paul Krugman and many others have written over the last six or more years has fallen on deaf ears. Take two recent pieces of evidence: this FT article by Nicholas Macpherson, ex permanent secretary at the Treasury, and this interview of the Chancellor by Andrew Marr.

In talking about Osborne’s fiscal consolidation that began in 2010, Macpherson says: “With hindsight, there was a case for going further faster.” His rationale is that the public like a dose of austerity, but tire after a time. At no point does he mention the economy (a recovery that stalled from 2010 to 2013, and then only started growing at trend thereafter), or monetary policy (interest rates were stuck at their lower bound). His desire for a shorter, sharper fiscal shock would have almost certainly produced a second recession.

I calculated that the fiscal consolidation that did take place cost the average household at least £4,000 in lost resources. This is based on OBR numbers, and assumes (as the OBR does) that the economy recovers quickly from any fiscal consolidation. This latter assumption looks very shaky indeed. Once you stop making it, the costs of austerity become horribly large. Not a word about this from Macpherson, which allows him to make the ridiculous argument that we should have had a shorter sharper consolidation.

One of the other ridiculous things Macpherson says is that, from 2010 to 2016, the UK did not even experience austerity. He justifies this because the debt to GDP ratio over this period rose. I’ve heard similar things in comments on my blog, presumably because of what Conservative politicians or their apologists say in the press. The statement confuses levels with rates of change, whether you are talking about the impact on the economy or on individuals. This is first year undergraduate stuff.

Philip Hammond said in his interview that a deficit of 2.5% is not sustainable. The normal definition of sustainability is a deficit that keeps the debt to GDP ratio constant. The current debt to GDP ratio is 86.5%. To work out roughly what the sustainable deficit is, divide the debt level by 100 and multiply that by the expected growth rate of nominal GDP. That means that today a deficit of 2.5% of GDP would be sustainable as long as nominal GDP grew at about 3%. So his statement that a deficit of 2.5% is not sustainable simply looks wrong.

You could rationalise this by saying that he believes our current debt to GDP level is not sustainable, and that therefore he wants to reduce it, but if that is what he means he should say so. Instead it seems that he wants to pretend that the government is like a household, and so therefore there is some reason why a deficit of zero is desirable. Of course Hammond does not mention interest rates either. And he knows that, in an interview like this, he can get away with anything involving economics or numbers.

Austerity has been supposedly dying since after the Brexit vote, but that just reflects misleading or dishonest reporting. As Torsten Bell says, for most people austerity means cuts to public spending, and for public sector workers and those on low incomes there is more austerity to come. Hammond also said Labour’s proposed fiscal policy would be “catastrophic for the country”. I suspect this kind of nonsense hyperbole, frequently invoked by the right wing press, has now become counter-productive. In reality at the heart of Labour’s fiscal policy is a fiscal rule which takes the government’s role in the economy seriously, rather than reduce it to the budget of a Swabian housewife. I cannot wait for the day that becomes the UK government’s fiscal rule, and we can move discussion of UK fiscal policy away from numbers 'not adding up' and back into the 21st century.