Four Limericks On The Friday Britain Took Her Leave.

Or Not: David Cameron's future as Britain's Prime Minister looks decidedly shaky in the aftermath of Britain's narrow, 52-48 percent, decision to leave the European Union. Cameron wagered everything on his country voting to remain in the EU - and lost. Anyone for Boris?

 

1.

 

William, with a conqueror’s grin,

Told the English: “It looks like you’re ‘In’!”

But, after one thousand years,

It’s all ending in tears.

Europe’s welcome has worn wafer thin.

 

2. 

Sheffield used to make knives, forks and spoons,

And sang all of the Left’s favourite tunes,

Until Labour’s “Remain!”,

Drove it’s voters insane,

And now UKIP is over the moon!

 

3.

 

Scotland’s voters were all shouting “Boo!”

As the Sassenachs turned England blue.

“If you all lack the brain

To vote for ‘Remain’,

Well then, fuck-it-all – we’re leaving too!” 

4.

 

Nigel Farage cried: “Look what we’ve got,

Without having to fire one shot!”

He’s forgetting the price,

That Jo Cox was shot thrice,

In the name of – come on Nigel – What?

 

These limericks were originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 24 June 2016.

Other People's Secrets: How Important Are The Panama Papers To New Zealand?

Sunny Hideaways For Shady People: Tax Havens are a very big news right now, but how big a deal are they for New Zealand? Much has been made of the 60,000 references to this country in the Panama Papers. That sounds like a lot. But in a dump of 11.5 million documents, 60,000 references is actually a very small number indeed. Assuming there is only one reference to New Zealand per document (which hardly seems likely) our country’s name is to be found in just 0.005 percent of the documents leaked.

 

THE PANAMA PAPERS are a big deal. No sensible person would attempt to argue otherwise. Thanks to the leaking of upwards of 11.5 million electronic documents the world is now in possession of incontrovertible proof of the global elite’s perfidious allergy to paying tax. What had been the stuff of thrillers by John Le Carré and John Grisham, has become the substance of nightly news bulletins.

 

But how big a deal are the Panama Papers in New Zealand? Much has been made of the 60,000 references to this country in the leaked documents. That sounds like a lot. But in a dump of 11.5 million documents, 60,000 references is actually a very small number indeed. Assuming there is only one reference to New Zealand per document (which hardly seems likely) our country’s name is to be found in just 0.5 percent of the documents leaked.

 

I would hazard a fair amount on there being a considerably larger number of references to the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Cook Islands in the Panama Papers than there are to the islands of New Zealand.

 

It is also important to note that the warnings that have been issued to the New Zealand Government by an assortment of both public and private bodies have tended heavily towards the contingent. If the powers-that-be do not act quickly, there is a risk that New Zealand’s reputation as one of the world’s least corrupt and most transparent countries might be damaged. Which suggests we’ve still got quite a way to go before we get to count ourselves among the Caymans, the Virgins and the Turks and Caicosses.

 

Which is not to say that the 12,000 overseas trusts currently availing themselves of this country’s less-than-robust disclosure regime are all squeaky clean. On the contrary, there’s a better than even chance that a newsworthy number of shady characters have been using these instruments to hide a whole lot of even shadier goings-on.

 

As the International Consortium of Investigate Journalists and their colleagues in the global news media pore over the Panama Papers, we are bound to discover a disappointing number of New Zealand individuals, businesses and organisations in the frame.

 

Will our own Prime Minister be among them? Is John Key about to suffer the same fate as the erstwhile Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmunder Gunnlaugsson, or the present, increasingly beleaguered, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron?

 

Well, John Key is a very wealthy man, and if the Panama Papers have shown us anything it is the extraordinary lengths to which very rich people will go to protect their financial affairs from the scrutiny and criticism of those who are not very rich. For years, rumours have circulated that Key is worth considerably more than the $NZ55 million he publicly acknowledges. If the rumours are true, then the rest of his fortune may well have been salted away where the sun shines and the trade-winds blow. But by whom? Mossack Fonseca isn’t the only law firm that specialises in keeping prying eyes away from very rich people’s financial information. And you can bet that the others are working day-and-night to beef-up their security.

 

Personally-speaking, I’d be surprised if our Prime Minister goes the way of Gunnlaugsson or Cameron. Key has spent his whole life working towards the position he now holds, and all along the way he has been extraordinarily careful to avoid doing anything that might come back to bite him when he was Prime Minister. While the other London currency traders were winging their way across the Atlantic for a weekend of drug-fuelled debauchery in Las Vegas, John Key was heading home for a quiet weekend with Bronagh and the kids. Would he put everything he’s worked for so carefully at risk by squirrelling away millions in some Caribbean tax haven? I can’t see it, myself.

 

Then again, who among the very rich could have foreseen the acute danger into which this age of digitalised information storage, retrieval and communication was leading them? John Key? Many New Zealanders have wondered at their Prime Minister’s interest (some would say obsession) with cyber-security, and noted his extreme hostility towards individuals and groups accused of abusing and/or violating the supposedly secure zones of cyber-space. Exactly what was driving Key’s inflated disquiet about the security of secret information has never been very clear.

 

As the tens-of-thousands of secrets contained in the Panama Papers are revealed to the world, however, there will be more than a few Kiwis who will insist on ending the above paragraph with the words – until now.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 April 2016.

Putin's "Plan B"

Plan B: Did the thousands of Ukrainian revolutionaries who cheered her at the Maidan realise that Yulia Tymoshenko, no less than her great political rival, Victor Yanukovych, is a person the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, can "do business with". If Tymoshenko cannot be leveraged into a regime acceptable to both the EU and the Russian Federation, then the territorial integrity of Ukraine will become a live issue.

WHEN THE RIOT POLICE abandoned their posts and the protesters entered the hurriedly vacated offices of President Victor Yanukovych, Ukraine passed from mass protest to revolution. When the Ukrainian armed forces declared their unwillingness to defend its deposed government, revolution took a further critical step towards consolidation and success.

 

What happens next will depend on how Ukraine’s neighbours respond to the fast-moving situation the revolution has unleashed. The Russian Federation, which describes Ukraine as a “brother state” and “strategic partner” will be asking itself whether a virulently anti-Russian government in Kiev is tolerable. If the answer is “No”, then Moscow may have to swallow its pride and swing in behind a new Ukrainian leader – one both sides can live with.

 

The European Union, has a different problem. While achieving most of its short-term goals vis-à-vis removing the government of President Yanukovych, it must consider the long-term ramifications of being seen to endorse the violent overthrow of a democratically-elected government. (Ukraine was scheduled to go to the polls in March 2015.)

 

The EU also needs to consider the implications of its loud condemnation of President Yanukovych’s use of deadly force to defend his government from armed extremist groups intent upon its overthrow.

 

Confronted with anything like the same challenges, what would the leaders of Sweden, Poland and the United Kingdom, President Yanukovych’s harshest critics, have done?

 

Would the right-wing Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, have denied himself the resources of the Swedish armed forces if far-Left extremists demanding his resignation had broken into regional Police armouries, seized firearms and started ferrying them to demonstrators attacking and killing police officers in the heart of Stockholm?

 

Would the spirit of the 1980s protest movement Solidarity have been strong enough to keep the Polish army in its barracks in the face of a violent attack upon the democratically-elected government of Donald Tusk?

 

Would the same David Cameron who, in 2011, demanded the ruthless repression of the youthful urban rioters in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and other British cities, have urged the Metropolitan Police to “pull back” in the face of shotgun-wielding demonstrators in Trafalgar Square? With the smoke of burning barricades wafting over the Houses of Parliament, would the same political system that gave us “Bloody Sunday” and Blair Peach have unilaterally foresworn all recourse to deadly force?

 

Certainly, Messrs Bildt, Tusk and Cameron seem unlikely converts to the revolutionary ideas of the Founding Fathers of the United States who, on 4 July 1776, put their signatures to Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated Declaration of Independence.

 

“[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations,” wrote Jefferson, “pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

 

Well, there’s no disputing the fact that Ukraine has provided herself with “new guards”, but whether her “future security” can safely be left to the young, hard-core nationalists of the far-right “Pravy Sektor” only time will tell.

 

The triumph of Pravy Sektor is perplexing. In just about any other jurisdiction the appearance on the barricades of such a heavily armed group would have been the signal for the declaration of a State of Emergency or, more likely, Martial Law. Why this didn’t happen in Ukraine, especially after the exhausted Riot Police started losing men to small arms fire, is baffling.

 

In the famous Sherlock Holmes case “Silver Blaze”, Inspector Gregory from Scotland Yard asks: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes replies: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The puzzled Gregory retorts: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Says Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

 

In danger of becoming lost in the kaleidoscopic tumble of events of the past few days was President Yanukovych’s dismissal of the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Col. General Zamana, and his replacement by the Naval Commander, Admiral Yuriy Ilyin. With hindsight this can be seen as the Ukrainian President’s last throw of the dice. That it failed is almost certainly due to the intervention of both the USA and the Russian Federation.

 

The Obama Administration had warned repeatedly that the use of the army against the protesters would escalate the crisis to a new and dangerous level. Vladimir Putin, clearly unwilling to raise the stakes that high, appears to have abandoned President Yanukovych in favour of a “Plan B”.

 

How brave and fragile she looked, wheelchair-bound and bundled against the cold, speaking tearfully of a New Ukraine born of the blood spilled in the “Maidan” – Kiev’s Independence Square.

 

How many of those cheering thousands understood that Yulia Tymoshenko is someone Vladimir Putin can do business with?

 

Pawns take Knight. Check. Queen takes pawns. Checkmate.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, February 25, 2014.

Bidding for Number Ten

Prime Political Objective: The door to No. 10 Downing Street, official residence of the UK Prime Minister.

SPARE A THOUGHT for poor Nick Clegg, the Liberal-Democrat party leader standing in the eye of the UK’s political hurricane. Only he commands the numbers necessary to resolve the parliamentary impasse served up by a frustrated and anxious UK electorate. Only he has the power to keep Labour’s Gordon Brown in office or hand over the keys to No.10 Downing Street to the Conservative Party’s David Cameron.

What will he do?

The smart money will be on Clegg deciding to throw in his lot with the Tories. This is certainly the decision the UK Establishment is hoping for.

A Tory-Lib-Dem accommodation is the only option which guarantees a clear parliamentary majority – something which the City of London, beset with deepening fears of financial collapse across the whole of the Eurozone, is desperate to secure in the shortest possible time.

In this they can count upon the wholesale support of the right-wing press, which will, no doubt, bombard the Liberal-Democrat leader with screaming headlines and trenchant editorials urging him to "do the right thing" by putting country ahead of party.

Away from all the cameras and tape-recorders, the UK’s "permanent government" of senior civil servants will be doing some bombarding of their own.

Clegg will be given confidential briefings on the looming financial crisis. He will be told how exposed the UK economy is to financial speculation and capital flight. He will be warned in no uncertain terms how extremely "destabilising" a ramshackle, cobbled-together, electorally battered Labour-Lib-Dem Government – supported by a motley collection of nationalist parties from the "Celtic fringe" – would be to the UK’s fragile economy.

Deploying their time-tested strategies of fawning flattery, high-minded exhortation and Machiavellian manoeuvring (all so brilliantly illustrated in the Yes Minister TV series) the "Men from Whitehall" will bend all their powers to trussing-up Clegg in the sticky webs of the UK state apparatus.

There will, of course, be all manner of threats and promises mixed in with the flattery and exhortation. The Good and the Great will subtly let him know how very generous the State can be to those who put "the wider interests of the country" before "petty, personal ambitions" at a time of "national crisis". He will also learn what long arms and sharp teeth the State possesses when it comes to settling scores with its enemies.

And, waiting in reserve, behind all the tinted glass and drawn curtains; the closed doors and smoke-free rooms; stands the ultimate appeal to duty and fealty – Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

Few Englishmen possess the political fortitude to withstand a direct appeal from the Crown. And make no mistake, if the UK Establishment senses that Clegg is seriously considering throwing in his lot with the Centre-Left, then somehow it will find a way of bringing "the Palace" into the equation.

Men like Lord Ashcroft, who has poured millions into the far-Right’s quest for a Tory government, has a very substantial stake in the outcome of the horse-trading which the voters have forced upon his party and its allies. He knows that, by any dispassionate reckoning, the Liberal-Democrats have only one plausible bargaining strategy. They must secure the immediate introduction of proportional representation.

Without PR Clegg is doomed to repeat the experiences of his predecessors Jeremy Thorpe and Paddy Ashdown, and his party will be forced to wait for the best part of another generation before it again gets the chance to reform fundamentally the UK’s manifestly inadequate and anti-democratic electoral system.

But Ashcroft and his allies also know that if such a deal is done, then the UK Right will find it next-to-impossible to ever again win power. Between them Labour and the Lib-Dems represent a clear majority of the UK electorate. An electoral system that allocated parliamentary seats on the basis of the popular vote would condemn the Right to almost permanent opposition.

This, after all, was the fate to which FPP condemned the UK Centre-Left for the best part of a century. The splitting of the anti-Conservative vote between Labour and the Liberals kept the Tories in government for 56 of the 75 years between 1922 and 1997 – and this in spite of the fact that, in all that time, the Conservative Party only once (1931) succeeded in winning more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

The Conservative Party and its right-wing allies will do everything within their power to dissuade Clegg from doing the one and only thing likely to secure his own and his party’s political survival. Sadly, he does not come across as the sort of politician to withstand the pressures that will be applied to him. The odds are, therefore, very high that he will succumb to the blandishments of the UK Establishment.

To Murdoch headlines screaming "We agree with Nick", Clegg will hand the keys of No.10 to Cameron and become indelibly stained by the brutal retrenchment the Tories he has helped into power are bound to unleash. Very much sooner than he might wish, he will find himself enjoying a comfortable and well-remunerated retirement – and his party will be reduced to a smouldering political ruin.

But if Clegg doesn’t buckle, if he stands firm? Well, that'll be the moment UK politics gets really interesting!

Oh Canada!

TRY this little thought experiment for me. Imagine that somewhere out there in the big wide world there’s a country a whole lot like ours. It’s ruled by the same Queen, most of its people speak the our language, it’s democratic traditions are of roughly the same vintage, and, along with New Zealand, it has recently come through a general election.

Okay.

Now imagine that this country is in the grip of a constitutional crisis. Imagine that the government of the day, having lost the confidence of the legislature, is seeking to have Parliament prorogued by the Governor-General in order to avoid a Confidence Motion it knows it’s bound to lose. Imagine, too, that the Governor-General has hurried back from an overseas trip to be present in the capital as the crisis unfolds. Imagine the governing party of that country launching radio attack ads against its parliamentary rivals; calling upon its supporters to flood the Governor-General’s office with letters and e-mails; and even proposing a mass pro-Government demonstration outside her official residence. Imagine the country’s trade union leaders responding by calling protest rallies of their own to condemn the Government’s "unconstitutional" intentions.

Okay.

Now answer me this question: "Don’t you think these events warrant a reasonable amount of space in our newspapers? And a reasonable amount of time on our radio and television news broadcasts?"

After all, we are talking about Canada.

I first learned of the crisis engulfing Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party Government here, at the World Socialist Web Site. But, for a more balanced view of the unfolding crisis, I would also recommend this link to the Globe & Mail – Canada’s leading daily newspaper.

Stephen Harper, along with the UK Conservative leader, David Cameron, and our very own, newly-elected National Party Prime Minister, John Key, belongs to the "new" generation of English-speaking conservative leaders. Young, telegenic, and studiously non-threatening, this group already controls two out of the four old "White" Commonwealth countries – Canada and New Zealand – and Cameron seems poised to make it three out of four the moment UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, gives him the opportunity. (Cynics might say that if you count Australia’s small "c" conservative Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, it will soon be four out of four!)

What’s interesting about Harper’s reaction to the coming together of his parliamentary enemies, and his potential ouster from power, is its extraordinary and reckless aggression. For the Canadian voter it has been a real shock to see the hitherto mild-mannered, non-threatening Harper suddenly transformed into someone hell-bent on clinging to power at almost any cost – up to and including undermining the constitutional integrity of the Queen’s representative.

It makes me wonder what sort of John Key might have emerged in the days following our own General Election if the numbers had turned out even slightly more favourably for Labour and NZ First. If a Labour, Progressive, Green and NZ First combination had ended up controlling three or four more seats than National, ACT and the Maori Party, what would his reaction have been?

I pose this question because there is an unnerving similarity in the constitutional misrepresentation that went on here in New Zealand over the issue of whether the party winning the largest number of seats had a "moral mandate" to govern, and Harper’s insistence that there is something constitutionally suspect about the Liberal, NDP and Le Bloc Quebecois decision to support a No-Confidence Motion against his government in the Canadian House of Commons.

In both cases, the Right has wilfully misconstrued the essence of the Westminster System prevailing in both countries: that general elections are held to elect parliaments – not governments.

A government is what is formed when a political party, or group of parties, enjoys the "confidence" (i.e. the support of more than half the members) of the legislature. In neither Canada nor New Zealand do the electors choose a prime minister, they choose a member of Parliament and/or a political party to represent their locality and/or themselves. It is these representatives who ultimately decide who the PM will be.

Fortunately, the NZ electorate, by voting in a decisive fashion, was able to avoid the potential constitutional confrontation inherent in the "moral mandate" position. The Canadians have not been so fortunate.

It is frankly scandalous that the New Zealand public has not been permitted to learn about the situation in Canada. The dilemma in which the relatively new and inexperienced Governor General, Michaelle Jean, has been placed is one which could easily be replicated in New Zealand. What is unfolding in Ottawa should be the subject of lively debate among all those New Zealanders with a interest in both understanding and defending their country’s democratic traditions.

The almost total media blackout on this story reflects the entrenched notion in practically all our newsrooms that the English-speaking nations of the world constitute the bench-mark of political normality and stability, and that it is, therefore, quite impossible for them to experience anything as abnormal and destabilising as a constitutional crisis. Our news editors simply ignore (or are ignorant of) the many historical precedents – from the dismissal of Lang and Whitlam in Australia, to the judicial theft of the 2000 US presidential election.

Apparently, constitutional crises only happen in hot countries – like Thailand – and are newsworthy only to the extent that they seriously inconvenience the travelling public.

Worried Canadians on the snow-covered streets of Ottawa might beg to differ.

UPDATE: Dateline Friday, 5th December 2008.

The Canadian Governor-General, Michaelle Jean, yesterday (our time) acceeded to Prime Minister, Stephen Harper's, request that Canada's Parliament be prorogued until January 26th 2009. This link will take you to the Globe & Mail's coverage of the unfolding crisis.