The ANC has ruled since 1994 largely because of black voters’ sense of racial solidarity, but after nine nightmarish years under the corrupt and institution-destroying rule of Jacob Zuma great faith was also placed in the would-be reforming new president Cyril Ramaphosa. Nonetheless, turnout slumped by nine percentage points to 65 per cent, and the ANC slipped badly by 4.6 percentage points. Even former interim president Kgalema Motlanthe admitted that this was “the ANC’s last chance”. The far-left populists, the Economic Freedom Fighters, whose leader Julius Malema favours the nationalisation of all industry, banks and land and promises that he “will not slaughter the whites, at least not now”, saw their vote almost double to 10.8 per cent while the main opposition, the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), saw its vote fall by 1.5 per cent to 20.8 per cent. Small but significant gains were also scored by Prince Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party and the conservative Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus).

‘South Africa is now in its fifth year of falling real incomes, the chronic power cuts are expected to last at least another five years, the crime rate is horrendous and the police are corrupt and ineffectual’

Whether Ramaphosa can or will really change the country’s direction is unclear. He was, after all, Jacob Zuma’s deputy president for many years and said not a word about the orgy of looting going on all around him. Zuma’s faction remains strong within the ANC and will fight like fury for its right to continue to steal. Two of the most corrupt men in the government are David Mabuza, the deputy-president, and Ace Magashule, the ANC secretary-general. Moreover, Ramaphosa has thus far backed down before every pressure group he has confronted. Half of the electorate already regard him as weak. The least one can say is that if Ramaphosa is to fulfil the reforming hopes placed in him he will have to reveal a backbone of steel of which there has been no sign to date.

I was commissioned by South Africa’s independent TV station ENCA to carry out pre-election research. Never have I seen such pervasive and deep levels of depression and demoralisation among all races as we saw in our focus groups. Some of our black respondents quite spontaneously welcomed the idea of the return of white rule, at least for a period of time, to help sort out the country’s
comprehensive mess. Similarly, since the ANC has now had 25 years in power, we asked voters why they thought that unemployment, corruption, education and health had all got worse under ANC rule. Overwhelmingly voters of all parties, including the ANC, said that the government/the ANC simply does not care about such things. When we probed further, 54 per cent of voters (including 55 per cent of ANC voters) said that “the ANC may care but its policies just don’t work”. Only 21 per cent even of ANC voters disagreed about that.

Given that 20-30 million people now live in complete penury and South Africa under ANC rule has become the world’s most unequal society, we asked (a multiple-choice question) who was to blame. Among ANC voters 55 per cent said “the government” and another 29 per cent said “the ANC”; 16 per cent said “rich whites” and under 1 per cent blamed apartheid. When we asked our focus groups what they thought about the future of the ANC, there was laughter, derision and suggestions that it was all but finished—a strange contrast with the fact that it took 57.5 per cent of the vote.

Theoretically the election should have been tailor-made for the Democratic Alliance, but instead it went backwards, losing eight seats and half a million votes. The fact that this disaster occurred on the watch of its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, has placed the party in a quandary. Maimane’s popularity has steadily declined (he is now less popular than Malema). He is widely seen as indecisive and he has failed to  attract the extra black voters that he hoped for. Shortly before the election the DA’s policy chief, Gwen Ngwenya, resigned, saying that “the party doesn’t take policy seriously”, and indeed its policies were mainly a paler version of the ANC’s offerings. It had no clear economic policy and its failure to defend Afrikaans language and cultural rights cost it dearly among the Coloured and white Afrikaans-speakers who had been some of its strongest supporters. Maimane is young (38) and inexperienced, was previously an ANC supporter who still thinks in ANC terms, and is a pastor in a fundamentalist church which rejects evolution, none of which helps him with the party’s traditional liberal voters.

But the most serious problem is that the DA has gained in every election since 1994, generating a tremendous spirit of momentum and confidence in its ranks from top to bottom. Just as the German Social Democrats happily talked of “Comrade Trend” in the 1960s as the party crept up at each election, so this same phenomenon in the DA generated a happy sense that “the future belongs to us”. This has now been dashed and the damage is very great. There are demands for the whole top leadership to go and fears that unless the party turns itself round quickly it could face further losses in the local elections in 2021. Throughout the campaign the DA claimed that its own (secret) polls showed the party gaining. This now looks like a deliberate lie.

The main gainers of the election were the Economic Freedom Fighters, a ferociously anti-white and anti-Asian grouping. The EEF advocated the doubling of all social grants and pensions and as many other unfundable promises as it could dream up. Its leaders have been involved in various scams (Malema lives in a mansion let to him by a major cigarette smuggler, is a member of Johannesburg’s most expensive country club, and has a child at a private school) but none of this seems to dull the passionate support of many younger blacks (especially young men) for the party.

Interestingly, voters associated the party mainly with anti-corruption—a reflection of the many occasions when the EFF reduced parliament to a shambles by shouting at Zuma, “Pay back the money!” This was clearly a big hit and Malema’s predominantly young followers are excited by his wild rhetoric, his all-red uniforms and military style. This, indeed, is the danger: if the ANC continues to fail as badly as it has to date there is a clear possibility that Malema and the EFF will be the main beneficiaries, in which case the country will be caught in a destructive downward spiral, with Malema frightening investors away or scaring the ANC into aping his populist promises, thus causing further job losses—which in turn creates more fuel for Malema’s fire.

The sight of Ramaphosa appealing to Malema to return to the ANC does little to allay investor anxieties. For the moment the country is waiting with bated breath for Ramaphosa’s announcement of his new cabinet. If he kicks out all the notably corrupt, there will be major ructions within the ANC, but if he fails to do so, hope in the reforming potential of his presidency will collapse.

However, careful analysis of the poll data reveals a more complicated reality. Among ANC voters a majority of 3:1 rejects Zuma’s policy of “radical economic transformation” in favour of more pro-business policies—thought more likely to produce desperately-needed jobs. An even larger number of EFF voters agreed with this and, despite their leader’s policies, they were also the most likely to favour the privatisation of loss-making state-owned industries.

Similarly, while Malema says all land should be nationalised, EFF (and ANC) voters heavily endorsed the idea that the land currently administered by the chiefs should be individually owned by whoever lives on it. Less than 2 per cent thought land reform a burning issue (except for housing land near big cities) and even EFF voters were overwhelmingly willing to ditch the policy of expropriation without compensation if this was more likely to bring foreign investment. EFF and ANC voters were also happy to ditch both black economic empowerment and affirmative action policies if that would help the jobs crisis. And a large majority of EFF voters favoured the idea of South Africa seeking an IMF bail-out.

‘The large majority of black South Africans are in despair. They were promised so much, the ANC has failed them so utterly and they don’t know where to turn’

This reveals three things. First, the EFF is a confused populist movement, a sort of African Poujadisme, and its supporters are by no means disciplined supporters of Malema’s views. In effect the hunger for more jobs easily outweighs any sense of party loyalty. Second, the usual ANC/EFF socialist agenda is actually a reflection of the prejudices of a very small elite of political activists who are wildly unrepresentative of their electorates. Third, the large bulk of black South Africans are absolutely desperate: 237,000 more jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2019 alone. Among the young joblessness is over 50 per cent.

When you speak to ordinary Africans they are bewildered. They were promised so much, the ANC has failed them so utterly and they don’t know where to turn. Some 19 million adults failed either to register or, if registered, failed to vote. It is easy now to find nostalgia for the “good old days” of higher employment and greater order under white rule, and our focus groups even showed that there was nostalgia for the old black homelands.

Indeed, despite the apparent stability of ANC dominance, large shifts are taking place. The electorate is becoming far more fluid and less firmly attached to any party. We found that more than 25 per cent of all our respondents had switched either their party or into abstention during the election campaign. The greatest fluidity was found among African voters, 17.1 per cent of whom had changed parties in that period. Nothing like that existed in the Mandela period. The standard way the ANC has campaigned against the DA is to say that if the DA win they will restore apartheid and cancel all social grants. This canard has worked wonderfully well for years but this time we found that only 38.8 per cent of African voters said they believed it, while 43.3 per cent didn’t. (Among the 18-24s a 2:1 majority disbelieved this central piece of ANC propaganda.) Similarly, less than 40 per cent of black voters believe the government’s promise that it will restore the electricity utility, Eskom, and stop the power cuts. The other 60 per cent expect it to fail and/or say that Eskom should be privatised. ANC credibility is now thin.

Moreover, the ANC vote is increasingly fragile. Among all African voters only one third said they would vote ANC whoever the leader was (in the Mandela period this figure would have been 80-90 per cent), while 27.3 per cent said they would never vote ANC. However, 19.4 per cent said they would vote ANC because they had confidence in Ramaphosa even though there were many crooks on the ANC list. This exactly bears out the claim by the ANC election boss, Fikile Mbalula, that without Ramaphosa the party might have fallen to 40 per cent. This dependence on a single individual is also new: in the past there was fierce loyalty to the ANC as an institution and a historic force. Those who still feel that way are concentrated among the older age groups and are thus literally dying off.

Another 20 per cent of African voters said they might have voted ANC but there were just too many corrupt people on the party’s list—so they wouldn’t. Again, this degree of discrimination is new. The old image of the ideologically committed and unconditional ANC voter is fading fast—and among the young it is close to vanishing. The idea of the ANC as a non-racial party has also largely faded—the top white on its election list, Barbara Creecy, was in 53rd position, and the top Asian, Pravin Gordhan, was 73rd.

Ramaphosa’s popularity, though large, is also fragile. Half of all voters say either that he is weak or that he is just doing whatever he can to stay afloat. Most of the latter—about a quarter of black voters—say he is just another politician, full of empty promises. Until now he has given way to almost every pressure group. Unless he ceases such behaviour he will rapidly fall into disrepute. His popularity is his greatest asset but unless he uses it to bring in major reforms, he will rapidly lose it.

When an experienced old politician like Motlanthe says that this is the ANC’s last chance, what does that mean? Perhaps that they could just be voted out next time—though it is hard to see the DA, in its present dilapidated state, replacing it.

What seems more likely is that the government could just lose control of the country. This is already happening. Hundreds of small towns are in virtual ruins as corrupt ANC councillors steal the money for maintenance, sewage, road repairs and everything else. A major university town like Grahamstown now has sewage running in the streets, broken roads, power cuts and water cut-offs on a regular basis. The railways have largely ceased to work. The country is plunging ever more heavily into debt. The electrical utility Eskom alone owes $35 billion and the government has no means of paying it. Large numbers of professionals are emigrating and the result is that the tax base is shrinking. Two of the three ratings agencies have consigned South Africa to junk status; if the third (Moody’s) follows, there will be a catastrophic outflow of capital.

The government, meanwhile, is living in fairyland: Ramaphosa has announced that he is determined to set up a national health service which will cost at least another 5-6 per cent of GDP. With the national debt already out of control it takes magical thinking to imagine where that might come from.

Perhaps most striking of all, there are currently 84 major infrastructural projects stalled because in each case thugs descend on the works and demand a 30 per cent equity share in the company concerned, while local people demand that all the construction jobs must go to them. If these groups don’t get what they want they destroy the plant and buildings of the companies concerned. Hence the companies pull out—many of them international firms of just the sort Ramaphosa is trying to entice to invest in South Africa.

Julius Malema, leader of the far-left EFF, which gained 19 seats. Voters associate the party with anti-corruption despite various scandals (©GUILLEM SARTORIO/AFP/Getty Images)

How can this happen? Mainly because the police are nowhere to be seen. There is, after all, nothing in it for them. These days when you’re driving and a policeman pulls you over it is often to demand a small cash present (“money for a cool drink”). When we asked voters which institutions they trusted the most the police came rock bottom.

Ramaphosa still enjoys the enthusiastic support of the business and financial world. He will need all the help he can get. But he still clings to many orthodox ANC platitudes: there will be no privatisation; there will be no recourse to the IMF; inflation-plus wage increases have been granted to the civil service and the staff of state-owned enterprises, though no one has any idea how to fund them; he will legislate the expropriation of property without compensation, though in a way which does not frighten investors away; he has legislated a minimum wage policy which is already putting more poor people out of work. And so on. He has also promised complete job security for public sector workers, who often earn 30-40 per cent more than comparable workers in the private sector. It may be, of course, that all this has been done or promised simply because Ramaphosa was desperate to win the election and that he will start backing away from all such promises now that he has been elected. But the worrying possibility exists that he actually means what he says, in which case he has yet to understand properly how dire is the situation that he and the country are in and how large are the challenges that he faces.

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Hence Ribbentrop’s idea of a United States of Europe under German and Italian auspices. Four allies (Italy, Finland, Romania and Hungary) had already joined Germany’s war on Russia, and volunteer units to assist the Wehrmacht had been sent from Croatia, Denmark and Slovakia (later to be joined by units from France, Norway, Albania, Ukraine, Spain, Belgium and Holland). Various neutrals (the Vatican, Ireland, Portugal, Turkey and Bulgaria) had let it be known that they would be pleased to see the USSR defeated. Sweden was not only supplying Germany with iron ore, but even allowed German troops passage through Sweden to fight in the East. It was, Ribbentrop decided, a united European crusade against communism. Hitler was receptive: he had dismissed Himmler’s idea that they should simply “Germanise” all European countries, for he was enough of a realist to see that separate “independent” states must be permitted. On October 25, Hitler explained his idea further to the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano:

Noteworthy in the fighting in the East was the fact that for the first time a feeling of European solidarity had developed. This was of great importance especially for the future. A later generation would have to cope with the problem of Europe-America. It would no longer be a matter of . . . antagonistic systems, but of the common interests of Pan-Europe within the European economic area with its African supplements. The feeling of European solidarity . . . would gradually have to change . . . into a great recognition of the European community . . . even America could do nothing against a Europe thus unified.

“European solidarity”, Ciano reported to Mussolini, was “Hitler’s new pet slogan”. Hitler then added another key consideration:

. . . most people in Europe are already fully agreed on one thing: Britain must be kept out of Europe once and for all. Too long have the British made mischief on the continent, playing off one power against another . . . we now have the uplifting experience of seeing one European nation after another . . . turn away from Britain and towards us, offering their sons to fight the common Bolshevik enemy.

Britain had, in any case, shown how completely it did not belong with Europe, Hitler said. Not only had it turned instead towards America, but, above all, it had sided with Stalin against Europe’s united forces.

Stalingrad traumatised Hitler’s allies. Romania had lost five per cent of its men. Hungary had seen its modern army wiped out. The Italians saved themselves by running away from the Don and now had to endure German accusations of cowardice. Doriot’s fascist French of the Charlemagne division were  wiped out at Borodino. They all turned to Ribbentrop, demanding a peace with the USSR and retreat into a European confederation. Ribbentrop was enthusiastic — he sketched out a confederation which allowed all states internal autonomy, though German dominance was assumed. And, of course, the confederation would have a common currency: the Reichsmark. But Hitler wanted all such plans put aside until Stalin was beaten. Ribbentrop persevered. The confederation would include Germany, Italy, France, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Spain. He even went so far as to draft a treaty of accession to this European bloc. But there it ended.

There is much in these plans that foreshadows the European Union, but really this is all part of a far larger canvas. As Niall Ferguson has argued, if  Germany had won the First World War this would  have produced a united Europe under German dominance that excluded Britain. Since this is what we have ended up with today, it follows — so the argument goes — that Britain was foolish to have got involved in  the First World War. In effect, there was a long-run historical tendency — an ineluctable progression — towards a unified Europe excluding Britain, in which Germany would be the political and economic leader.

To understand that progression, one has to go back to the struggle for German unification. A fundamental role was played by the Zollverein (customs union) which bound together the German states into a single economy from 1834 on. Austria was excluded so as to maximise Prussia’s influence, but otherwise it spread far and wide. The Netherlands and Luxembourg were members, and from 1865 the Zollverein also had a customs treaty with Sweden-Norway, binding those economies in. After the Franco-Prussian war, Alsace-Lorraine joined in 1871.

As the Zollverein developed it had common weights and measures, a common currency, a co-ordinated census, and provision for revenue-sharing — clearly the features of a national economy and a national state. Inevitably, a sense of German national consciousness grew, though there were always ideas of a “restricted Germany” (Kleindeutschland) and a “wider Germany” (Grossdeutschland). When Bismarck finally created a unified German state in 1871, it was a Kleinsdeutschland. But this still left hanging in the air dreams of a Grossdeutschland. Bismarck was keenly aware that any move towards that would be highly provocative. He also knew that integrating what Germany had already swallowed was quite enough for then. Bavarians were quite strange enough to his Prussian taste and he had no appetite to include Austria. “A Bavarian,” he said, “is a cross between an Austrian and a real human being.”

But the dreams of a Grossdeutschland were instinctively picked up by the Nazis. Hitler wanted not only to incorporate Austria and get back Alsace-Lorraine, taken by France in 1919, but also the German minorities in Eastern Europe. You may have wondered why certain key states were missing from Ribbentrop’s plan of 1943 — for example, the Czechs and Austrians. Both, of course, had been incorporated into the Reich already and were no longer separate states. But the same was also true of the Netherlands and Luxembourg. There were to be no Quisling or Vichy regimes there: they were simply declared part of Germany because they had belonged to the Zollverein. If you add all these missing states to Ribbentrop’s list, the similarity with today’s EU becomes a lot clearer.

This left Hitler with several problem cases. He had no doubt that Switzerland also belonged inside the Reich, but he knew the Swiss were very jealous of their independence and would fight like tigers to protect it. He didn’t need such a distraction while he was still dealing with Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. So it was decided that only when Germany had won the war would the Swiss be incorporated. Hitler also wondered about incorporating Belgium and Norway. The Flemings and the Norse were clearly Aryans but, he decided, their incorporation might lead to trouble. And anyway their admixture might weaken the German bloodline (all those Walloons). The Nazi defeat put an end to dreams of a Grossdeutschland for a while, but anyone who still harboured them would feel a degree of satisfaction with today’s EU. The German minorities in the East all fled back to Germany as refugees after 1945, Germany itself is reunited, and the Czech, Benelux, Austrian and Swiss economies are all satellites revolving around Germany’s sun.

The interesting thing about the EU is that although many of its original enthusiasts were not Germans, the model adopted was clearly that of the Zollverein. Perhaps it was simply the only one available. The European states would start off by being united in a single trade bloc, but gradually a process of harmonisation and standardisation in every sphere — including a single currency, a single European passport, elections to a single European Parliament, European courts and perhaps even a single army — would bind the continent together into a United States of Europe.

Thus, in effect, immanent historical forces have been pushing for more than a century to unite Europe together under German leadership. It could have happened in 1918 or 1942-3, but in any case it has happened now. In either 1918 or 1942-3 Britain would have been excluded. This was entirely accepted by Britain. When, during the war, Churchill called for the constitution of a democratically organised United States of Europe, he made it clear that Britain would not be party to it. And when moves towards European unification began in the 1940s and ’50s both Labour and Conservative governments in Britain wanted nothing to do with it. The only British political leader to advocate that Britain should join a united Europe was Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party had as its slogan “Europe A Nation”.

After the Second World War, however, the leadership in setting up the European Economic Community came from all the constituent countries, but particularly from France in the persons of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. This French leadership was essential. If such an association were to get off the ground, the French had to overcome their long, historic enmity towards Germany. The leadership could hardly come from the small Benelux countries or from either of the two former Axis powers. Indeed, had West Germany led this process — which, as the EEC’s largest economy, it was bound to dominate — it is unlikely that the British and Americans would have accepted it. The sight of the Germans, for the third time in 40 years, coming up with a plan to unite Europe under their leadership would have been too much for Anglo-American public opinion.

French leadership remained the norm for several decades. In the 1960s, it was de Gaulle who repeatedly vetoed Britain’s application to join. And when this application was finally accepted, it was President Pompidou who had the final word. West Germany’s growing economic weight — registered by recurrent devaluations of the French franc against the deutschmark — meant that its Chancellors, especially Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, were of growing international importance within the Western alliance. However, when 1989 suddenly brought German reunification into view it was, once again, Paris that took the lead. As East Germany collapsed, Kohl had spoken of how there were still lands that belonged to Germany beyond the Oder-Neisse line, to the east of East Germany. This was a major red light throughout a Europe shaken by the thought of a reconstituted and over-mighty Germany. President François Mitterrand of France met with Kohl and then made a speech of historic importance.

“The Entente Cordiale”, by John Bernard Partridge, 1904

In the year when France was celebrating 200 years of the French Revolution, Mitterrand said, it was impossible for Frenchmen to deny the principle of national self-determination. It was clear that Germans as a whole wished to be reunited, so that must be fully accepted. On the other hand, the Germans must accept that “there was such a thing as the Second World War”, and this had three implications. First, there must be no more talk of changing Germany’s eastern borders. Second, Germany must never have nuclear weapons (but France would). Third, there must be a common European currency, the euro, which would bind the French and German economies so closely together that a future war between those two countries would remain forever unimaginable. Kohl implicitly accepted all three conditions. They were Mitterrand’s way of reassuring an anxious French opinion at this crucial juncture. For Kohl the key was simply that France, and thus the rest of Europe, would accept German reunification.

This turned out to be the last hurrah of the French. Once Germany was reunited, it was decisively more populous and economically stronger than any other European power. Kohl quickly became the leading European statesman, as did Gerhard Schroder, who followed him in 1998-2005, and after that, Angela Merkel. The French presidents of that period — Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande — tried their best to act the part of leading men, but it was an increasingly shallow charade. For the euro turned out to be a boon to German industry and exports while for the French, with their decisively higher rate of wage inflation, it turned into a curse, leaving their economy stagnant with an apparently permanent rate of 10 per cent unemployment.

And so German dominance grew proportionately. Despite the fact that Germany had had to absorb the far poorer DDR and pay enormous sums to modernise its infrastructure, by 2018, on a purchasing power parity basis German GDP per capita was $52,896 against France’s $45,474 — which meant that the average German was 16 per cent richer than the average Frenchman — and there were far more Germans. Germany was now exporting one third of its output and by 2016 was running a trade surplus of $310 billion a year, while France ran a trade deficit of $52 billion. France may have led the way into a united Europe, but in the end it had resulted in a German-dominated Europe, just like the united Europe envisaged in 1918 and 1942-3.

It will be seen that the main joker in the pack was Britain’s changing attitude. From firm refusal of any interest in joining the EEC in the postwar period, it suddenly applied to join in 1961, repeated its request in 1966 only to be turned down again, and finally entered the EEC on its third attempt in 1973. Now it is leaving after what one European leader has described as “a divorce following an unhappy marriage of 45 years”. Given that Britain was resolutely against joining a united Europe throughout the century until 1961 and that a popular majority voted to leave the EU in 2016, the real question has to be why British political leaders changed their views in the 1960s and ’70s.

The then Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, had a privileged view of that process. When Harold Macmillan opened negotiations to join the EEC (“the Common Market”) in July 1961 Gaitskell thought that “the arguments of principle were fairly evenly balanced for and against” — this despite the fact that, on a Gaitskell visit to Washington, President Kennedy, whom he much admired, “had mobilised half the Cabinet to tell (Gaitskell) that Britain must plunge into Europe”. In Gaitskell’s view, everything depended on the terms and conditions of entry. Britain had to preserve its Commonwealth ties; he did not like the Common Agricultural Policy, which would mean dearer food and large British payments to subsidise French farmers; and he was sure that Britain could not enter a federation of any kind, for British opinion would not accept such a loss of sovereignty. Which is to say that for Gaitskell, as for British opinion in general, joining the Common Market was all about trade — and only about trade.

The application to negotiate with the EEC came as Macmillan’s position had begun to slip. From summer 1961 on, Gaitskell raced ahead of him as the public’s choice for prime minister and Labour also led the Tories in the polls. There was a general malaise. The EEC countries were all growing much faster than Britain, which was afflicted by chronic trade deficits and stop-go policies. Britain was also still dogged by the problems of decolonisation in East and Central Africa, while its dependence on the US in defence matters was now undisguisable. There seemed no solid ground anywhere. When Macmillan sacked one third of his cabinet early in 1962, insiders claimed he had lost his nerve and was in a state of panic.

In Gaitskell’s eyes, Macmillan’s EEC application was his supposed lifebelt: the only way he could win a fourth victory for the Tories in 1964 would be on a manufactured wave of pro-EEC feeling. Gaitskell, for his part, was resolutely open-minded. He had no patience with European enthusiasts like Monnet who spoke in emotional terms, not in practicalities. But he also disliked the right-wing Little Englanders and the Marxist Left who dominated the anti-EEC camp. He also had no patience with the Liberals who “would have us join right away — like that, without conditions and apparently (without) negotiations. They do not care at all what is to happen to the interests of the Commonwealth . . . or to British agriculture.” The point he insistently made to all-comers was that if Britain were to enter the EEC on the wrong terms, it would only find itself backing out of it later, which would truly be the worst of both worlds. Above all, that had to be avoided.

Nonetheless, by spring 1962 Gaitskell assumed that Britain would enter the EEC, that he would be supporting it and he would have to beat back the anti-EEC Left within his party. But in August, to his amazement, Macmillan simply collapsed and accepted all the EEC’s terms, CAP and all. “I never expected the government to have the gall to propose to go in on such bad terms, which we were bound to oppose,” Gaitskell wrote. He explained in a letter to Kennedy how the decision had left him “bitterly disappointed and, indeed, astonished”. He noted, too, that even many of the European socialist parties favouring the EEC were frankly federalist and “there is no question of Britain entering into a federal Europe now”. The British commitment to national sovereignty was simply too strong. Perhaps future generations might feel differently, but as things stood, British opinion would not agree to surrender their sovereignty to some supranational bureaucracy in Brussels.

In Gaitskell’s view, Macmillan’s collapse betrayed complete desperation. He had agreed to get rid of all of Britain’s existing trading arrangements with the Commonwealth and received only vague assurances in return. Moreover, Britain seemed to be signing up to a frankly federal future: “It means the end of Britain as an independent nation: we become no more than ‘Texas’ or ‘California’ in a United States of Europe. It means the end of a thousand years of history; it means the end of the Commonwealth . . . to become just a province of Europe.”
Gaitskell’s stance was denounced by the Government and even more by most of the quality press as mere populism. The people did not understand the issues, it was argued, so it was only right and proper that they be settled by Government before any election. This elicited a furious response from Gaitskell: “We are now being told that the British people are not capable of judging this issue — the Government knows best, the top people are the only people who can understand it; it is too difficult for the rest . . . what an odious piece of hypocritical, supercilious, arrogant rubbish is this ?”

Gaitskell remained widely popular with the public and everything suggested he would win the 1964 election. At this juncture, however, Gaitskell died and de Gaulle vetoed British entry. The issues of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty have continued to be central to the EU debate.

De Gaulle’s vetoes kept the issue off the agenda until the 1970s, when Edward Heath took Britain into the EEC on much the same terms as had been agreed in 1962. He dodged the issue of popular sovereignty by insisting that his promise to subject the decision to “the full-hearted consent” of the electorate had been fulfilled by the previous election. The issue of national sovereignty was also dodged. It was agreed there might be some small loss of sovereignty but this would be amply compensated for by economic gains. This was not good enough for opponents of EEC entry, particularly Enoch Powell, for whom the national sovereignty issue was paramount. In effect, Powell asserted that he had a privileged insight into the English national character and therefore “knew” that the British (and, even more, the English) would never agree to submerge their identity within a supranational body. Heath and other proponents of EEC entry insisted that the European federalists need not be listened to. Britain was agreeing to a new set of trading relationships, little more.

It is not clear whether the Tory leadership sincerely believed this. There were, after all, many keen European federalists already making it abundantly clear that they wished to create a true supranational state. Heath and his supporters elected to ignore this. Perhaps they did so cynically, simply because they knew they could not persuade the British electorate to surrender national sovereignty. More likely, they persuaded themselves that once Britain had joined the EEC they would be able to halt or minimise the movement towards European federalism. Or perhaps they took the view that British opinion would come round to federalism in time. What was clear was that for many of the really committed pro-Europeans — such as Heath or Roy Jenkins — no matter how far Europe moved in a federalist direction, there would never be a point at which their enthusiasm lessened.

This ambiguity lay at the heart of all the problems to come: some thought they had bought a ticket for a strictly limited ride, whereas others thought they were boarding a bus from which they would never dismount. Certainly, there was a typically British overestimation of their own ability to control the ride. This was never really likely. When Britain joined the EEC it was only one of nine members, and in any case a Franco-German partnership was already well established in the driving seat. In practice, it was impossible to displace it, split it or join it.

British public opinion (as measured by the polls) about “the Common Market” was fairly volatile, but it was hostile for much, perhaps even most, of the time. Inevitably this led the anti-EEC faction to demand a referendum, an idea which the pro-EEC faction strongly resisted. Indeed, when the Labour Party decided to back the referendum idea in April 1972, Roy Jenkins resigned in protest as the party’s deputy leader. Several other pro-EEC frontbenchers resigned in sympathy. This passionate opposition to a referendum by Labour’s pro-Europeans was rooted in the fact that the opinion polls showed a steady majority believing that Britain had been wrong to join the EEC.

The referendum was finally set for June 1975. By January 1974 there was a 2:1 majority wishing to leave the EEC and even by February 1975 there was a 41-33 plurality wishing to leave. However, with all three major party leaders campaigning for a Yes, together with business and almost all the press, and with the Yes campaign outspending the No campaign by nearly ten to one, public opinion was massaged into delivering a 68-32 Yes vote. The irony of this triumph for the pro-Europeans who had so bitterly resisted the idea of a referendum was matched by the speed with which the anti-EEC group, having secured the referendum they demanded, continued to advocate leaving the EEC, in defiance of the referendum result.

Once the referendum campaign was left behind, public opinion returned to its usual anti-EEC stance. By March 1979 MORI found 60 per cent saying it had been a mistake to join, against only 32 per cent who took the opposite view. A year later this had hardened further to a 65-26 per cent majority.

Meanwhile the EEC was changing, admitting Spain, Greece and Portugal, and steadily moving in a more federal direction — creating a European Parliament, transferring many new powers to the European Commission, transforming the EEC into the European Union, and then establishing the euro. All these changes were welcomed by Britain’s pro-Europeans, whose allegiance to their cause was by now unconditional. Thus the Liberal Party and Tony Blair enthusiastically campaigned for Britain to join the euro. Public opinion was adamantly against — in the entire period 1991-2007 MORI never once found more people in favour of the euro than the number against.

By this stage, indeed, British opinion had so clearly begun to change that their politicians began to limit Britain’s commitment to the EU: Britain would not join the euro, or be part of the Schengen zone, and nor would it accept the goal of “ever closer union”. The emergence of UKIP as a major force was accompanied by a growing anti-EU faction within the Conservative Party which effectively looked back to Enoch Powell and accepted his arguments for national sovereignty.

This gradually built up to the referendum of 2016. This time, the demand for a referendum came primarily from the Right whereas in 1975 it had come from the Left. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, was bitterly criticised by the defeated Remain camp for ever having held a referendum at all — though the very same people then demanded a yet further referendum, “a People’s Vote”.

As one looks back, it is difficult not to feel that Britain’s initial decision to apply for EEC membership was taken in a mood of panic. Britain had lost most of its empire, and Suez had shown that the alliance with the US was no longer solid. With American support withdrawn, a disastrous run on the pound had developed and Britain had had to make a humiliating climbdown. Khruschev had rattled his rockets at Britain over Suez and, without American support, the country was completely vulnerable. It had been a horrible revelation of just how weak and unsupported the UK now was. Its economy had still not fully recovered from the terrible damage inflicted by the war and its neighbours within the EEC were all growing much faster and, one by one, they were overtaking Britain. The country seemed stuck amidst its usual social stand-offs and trapped in perpetual stop-go oscillation.

Above all, there is no disguising the fact that Britain’s ruling class made a disastrous mess of its relations with Europe. Its initial refusal to be involved in negotiations for an EEC meant it missed the opportunity to shape the Treaty of Rome more to its liking. Only a few years later, it made a 180-degree turn in a fit of panic. It then entered the EEC on unfavourable terms and deliberately deceived itself about the seriousness of the commitment to “ever closer union”. It thus committed the blunder which Gaitskell had expressly warned against, going in on the wrong terms and thus ultimately having to withdraw again, getting the worst of both worlds. It is difficult to think of other matters of comparable importance which Britain has handled with such incompetence.

Moreover, Britain finally entered the EEC in 1973 just as the party was ending. Within months, a major world recession struck, bringing a halt to “les trente glorieuses” — the golden period of European growth between 1945 and 1973. The European countries were never to recapture their growth rates of that period. Britain’s own economic performance continued to be sub-standard. It limped along with low growth, stagflation and an IMF bail-out. In the end the bracing shock which it had been hoped EEC entry would deliver was administered by Margaret Thatcher, not by the EEC.

For hundreds of years Britain’s foreign policy was motivated by a determination not to allow Europe to be dominated by a single great power — whether Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser or Hitler. In that sense, the Europe which has emerged since 1989 with a dominant and reunited Germany, is a historic defeat for Britain. Indeed, that was apparent right away in 1989, when Mrs Thatcher was forced to drop her initial opposition to German reunification. By voting to leave the EU, Britain has in effect accepted it is unable to reverse that situation — and therefore seeks a new solution.

During the protracted euro crisis of the last decade, it became apparent that in reality Europe was divided between a weaker southern zone, including Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece, who desperately need to devalue against the strong euro, and a northern tier of states which prosper with a strong euro — most particularly Germany but also the surrounding economies which are, to a lesser or larger degree, Germany’s economic satellites — Benelux, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. In effect, President Emmanuel Macron leads the desperate but unavailing attempts of the southern bloc to get the northern tier to indulge in revenue-sharing schemes to bail out their struggling southern neighbours.

In practice, and for the foreseeable future, the EU will be dominated by that northern tier. Indeed, the logic is for a break-up into a strong euro (northern) currency bloc and a weaker (devalued) euro bloc in the south. That may or may not happen, but there is no doubt that Germany sits at the heart of the dominant northern tier. Which is to say that if Britain were to remain part of an increasingly federal Europe, it would find itself taking its directions more and more from Berlin. Given the history of the 20th century, it was always predictable that British public opinion would find that unpalatable.

There is, however, also a strong view that in today’s globalised world the question of which power is dominant in Europe is only of local importance. Indeed, this had been evident back in 1962 in the open and bitter argument between Gaitskell and the Belgian leader Paul-Henri Spaak. As Gaitskell’s biographer Philip Williams points out, “Spaak rightly sensed a deep psychological gulf between the Continentals, for whom their historic reconciliation was the world’s most important political development, and Gaitskell, for whom it was ‘parochial’. (Gaitskell) had no emotional sense of belonging to Europe and told one old friend that on the contrary, ‘I . . . probably feel that I have more in common with North Americans than with Europeans’.”

Many Brexiteers think of a future Britain as wholly untied to any regional bloc, an independent entrepôt state. Geography alone suggests that this is unlikely. Norway and Switzerland may not be EU members but they are, indissolubly, part of a European regional bloc, the European Economic Area, and so will Britain be. To that extent it will be unable to escape from the influence of the dominant northern tier, with Berlin at its centre. But Gaitskell was right when he spoke of European parochialism. Once the country that dominated Europe was, inevitably, the world’s greatest power. Now such a state will come behind the US, China, Japan and, perhaps, Russia and India too.

Gaitskell’s comment that he found he had more in common with North Americans than with Europeans, though it might be shared by most Britons, provides no basis either for a nation’s trading relations or its security partners. Geography ensures that Europe is likely to provide at least the former and quite possibly the latter as well. When de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry to the EEC, he incurred the undying enmity of Edward Heath and many other Britons as well. This rather precluded any fair-minded consideration of the reasons for de Gaulle’s decision, but there is much to be said for them.

De Gaulle believed that Britain was irresistibly drawn towards the huge Anglophone world across the Atlantic and would therefore never be willing to make a wholehearted commitment to Europe. For de Gaulle, the most important political fact in the modern world was that “America speaks English”. As one watches the easy way that British and American popular culture washes into each other’s country, one realises there is much truth in this. But it is also the case that Britain is America’s biggest foreign investor and America is Britain’s biggest foreign investor — a degree of economic interpenetration unmatched elsewhere in Europe. Perhaps most important of all, when the going has been really hard, when the chips were right down — in 1917 and 1940 — Britain looked to America for help.

It is a deeply-held belief in Britain that when the going gets tough it is impossible to feel confident that its European allies will stand by it. Even in minor engagements far away such as the Falklands War, the Americans provided essential help while the French sold weapons and spares to the Argentines. The Germans are now so pacifist that no one would wish to rely on their military assistance. A European army remains a chimera and nobody at all believes in a European nuclear deterrent.

The contrast with America is sharp. In both wars, some Americans volunteered to fight for Britain even before the US joined the war. Roosevelt strained American neutrality as far as he could in an effort to help Britain in 1940, ultimately saving the day with Lend Lease — “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation”, as Churchill called it. After the war Marshall Aid confirmed this impression of America’s willingness to help.

“America speaks English”: US Secretary of State Alexander Haig in Downing Street for talks on the Falklands crisis, April 1982 ( © PA/PA Archive/PA Images)

However, British dreams of relying on “the special relationship” are just that — dreams. As a world power, the US will inevitably give priority to its relations with the strongest European state, which is Germany. Britain may be more important in military terms, but the US can access that through Nato. Most striking is the UK-USA intelligence-sharing agreement, now encompassing Canada, Australia and New Zealand in a network known as Five Eyes. But this brings in perhaps the more important factor of the Anglosphere — the fact that all these English-speaking countries have close political ties and exist as a cultural bloc. The Anglosphere is the world in which Britain most truly belongs. It is, moreover, of increasing importance — the fast growth rates of Canada and Australia have made them the world’s tenth- and 13th-largest economies. Some 30 per cent of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English (and all business and governance there is conducted in English), which means that India has quietly overtaken the US as the largest English-speaking country. It is also the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Indeed, the Anglosphere is expanding all the time. Ironically, the presence of Britain and Ireland in the EU made English one of its three official languages and it is clear that it will remain so after Britain has left. Around 700 million Africans speak English, a number which is set to double over the course of the next generation. A maximal strategy for Britain would be to invest as heavily as possible in the sectors which feed that Anglosphere — the knowledge industries, education, publishing, film and TV, radio, entertainment, internet content and  high-level research in the sciences and social sciences. Everything, in other words, which amplifies Britain’s voice and position within the Anglosphere, which is enormously larger than any other sphere in which Britain is involved.

But the Anglosphere is not even an association, let alone an alliance or trading bloc — and nor is it ever likely to be. It is, though, the strongest single example of soft power in the world. That power does not belong to any one nation, though Britain inevitably plays a key role within it. There is no tidy answer as to where Britain belongs — it is partly Atlantic, partly European, partly Commonwealth. If the Anglosphere is where it feels it most belongs, it is because that unites the Atlantic and Commonwealth associations and then adds a large slice of the global English as a Second Language world. There is no point in trying to answer Dean Acheson’s famous quip by determining on a tidy definition of Britain’s role in the world. That role, like the Anglosphere, is diffuse and likely to remain so.

The post The way forward for Europe’s great outsider appeared first on Standpoint.

It has often been argued that the reason for the barbarian invasions which ended the Roman Empire lay in climatic changes in Central Asia producing famine conditions which propelled vast population movements westward. Today’s crisis lies in similarly profound events far from Europe which one could sum up as the failure of Third World nationalisms. These arose several generations ago under leaders such as Nasser and Nkrumah, with a promise to modernise and democratise the Middle East and Africa. This promise failed, for it is notoriously difficult to leapfrog the long historical development which has produced democratic modernity in Europe. The result in the Middle East was that although the Arab nationalists swept away the last kings — Farouk of Egypt in 1952, Muhammad VIII of Tunisia in 1957, Faisal II of Iraq in 1958 and Idris of Libya in 1969 — their successors turned out to be even more tyrannical and just as incapable of modernising their countries. One after another these regimes foundered in social unrest or civil war.

The story of African nationalism has been somewhat similar though the complication here is the huge demographic surge which will over the next generation add an extra billion Africans. There is simply no way that Africa’s shaky economies and polities can produce the housing, education and jobs required to meet that surge. The result will be large movements of population towards Europe — and these will be opportunistically joined by Afghans, Pakistanis and others. In other words, what we have seen to date is merely the first trickle of a developing flood. Without doubt all these migrants will claim to be refugees.

It is already clear that Europe is wholly unwilling to accept this flood. At the moment the presentation of this problem in the media is always accompanied by woeful statements from well-meaning NGOs and churchmen, arguing for an unlimited duty to accept refugees and criticising as racists or chauvinists those who disagree. But this is mere chaff in the wind. The polls show that large majorities in every European country feel very differently. Throughout Europe anti-immigrant parties are on the rise. Already there are troops in the Brenner Pass to stop any further illegal immigration into Austria, Hungary has high border fences with armed guards to ensure the same, Italy is refusing to allow migrant boats to land, the AfD is still on an upward trajectory in Germany on the same issue and Horst Seehofer of the CSU is clearly determined to erect German border fences too. Even in Sweden the anti-immigration Right is poised to make gains. It is idle to imagine that any amount of argument is going to change these facts or the general drift of events.

So strong is this push for the reimposition of border controls (though in the EU outside Britain some of this work is already done by the identity card system) that the choice now seems mainly to be one between a formal EU policy of Fortress Europe and a series of nationally imposed controls amounting to the same thing. Already the migrant flow to the EU has fallen markedly this year, for this is a market-sensitive phenomenon. There are no migrant flows into Saudi Arabia, Japan or China, despite their wealth, for it is well known that they will be denied entry. For similar reasons the flow of illegal migrants into the US is also well down.

It is true, of course, that world population growth has seen Third World migrants testing the borders of the developed world in many places — on America’s southern border, Palestinians trying to push from Gaza into Israel, Africans pouring into South Africa, Indonesian boat people trying to get into Australia and even migrants trying to get into French overseas territories like Mayotte. In every case such pressures have led to even stronger counter-pressures. So Europe is merely an example of a more general problem. But what makes the European case special is the long historical dimension of the problem.

This is apparent in several ways. The furiously resistant response that the migrant crisis has met in Eastern and central Europe can only be understood with reference to the fact that for generations these were the borderlands where the Turks and Islam were prevented from pouring into Europe. The scars left by those clashes also explain the ferocity of such conflicts in the Balkans. The great mistake that Angela Merkel made in 2015 was to assume that things were different in Western Europe. In that year over a million migrants were allowed to enter Germany — all told there were 1.38 million applicants to stay. Although they were billed as Syrian refugees, Syrians made up only a third of the flood. But
the vast majority were Muslims.

Three-quarters were under 30 and 60 per cent were men. Inevitably, these young men began importing their wives and having children so it quickly dawned on German consciousness that very soon they would have not one million but several million newcomers.

Merkel’s act — importing more than a million Muslims and settling them down into the heart of old Christian Europe — was like throwing a large stone into a stagnant pond, creating large waves which washed up on every shore. Almost certainly it was responsible for the Brexit vote — it dramatised the notion of huge foreign hordes pouring in (remember the posters?). And for Marine Le Pen’s 31 per cent vote in the French presidential election (her father had managed only 18 per cent). And, of course, for the rise of the AfD in Germany and the swing to the right in Austria, Sweden and Italy. The irony is that Ms Merkel acted in the generous spirit she did in the belief that she was standing up for liberal values — yet her act may have dynamited the old EU, to which she and liberal opinion looked.

Indeed, in retrospect it is clear that if in the run-up to the Brexit referendum David Cameron had simply reimposed national control over immigration, effectively daring the EU to expel him (a dare he would have won), he would have won the vote easily, for this would have taken the emotive immigration issue off the table. And in no time at all Britain would have been just one more EU country with its own set of immigration controls. For whether one likes it or not, this is something coming soon to a cinema near you.

To her credit Ms Merkel is still fighting for her cause but it is difficult to see how she can win now. The lukewarm proposal for immigrant detention centres which emanated from the recent EU summit seems unlikely to anaethetise the fire-and-blood issue of immigration. The number of migrants may be down but as long as leaky boats full of migrants are attempting to cross the Mediterranean it is difficult to imagine it receding from the headlines. More likely, the CSU, under strong pressure from the AfD, will insist on a halt to further migration outside the normal legal channels. In any case, the Austrians and Italians will clearly press on: when Matteo Salvini, the Italian Interior Minister, prevented immigrant boats from docking his party’s standing soared. Indeed, the polls showed that 72 per cent of Italians supported Salvini’s hardline stance.

So what will Fortress Europe look like? The claim made at present that a tough line on immigration will sabotage the “free movement of labour” within the EU need not be true. Provided the proper legal processes are respected, immigration can go on at a measured pace and EU countries can allow other EU citizens to move around freely. But there is the rub. For example, France has taken a hard line against allowing in illegal migrants from Italy — the last thing it needs is yet more angry, unemployed young Muslim men. But would that attitude change if Italy simply gave them all citizenship? Of course not. And quite certainly Hungary and Poland would not want them at any price. That is to say, Europe already contains millions of citizens to whom free movement does not really apply. Imagine that the German economy continues to outpace France, ultimately producing a flow of several million unemployed French Muslims into Germany. Any German Chancellor who allowed such a thing would undoubtedly get thrown out. In other words, the objection that Britain was different in wanting immigration controls on the movement of EU citizens as well as foreign migrants doesn’t really hold: potentially this applies to all.

Which brings up several other issues. First, of course, a move to Fortress Europe would leave the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) in a commanding position, for it would mean that the rest of Europe had  flocked to their banner. Visegrad is notable as the most cohesive bloc within the EU. On its own it would be the world’s 12th largest economy with an annual GDP of $2 trillion. Secondly, such a situation would bring to the fore the fact that the issue causing all the agitation is not just migrants, but Islam. Put baldly, the Visegrad countries would be unlikely to welcome an influx of Muslims whatever the passports they carried.

It must be admitted at this point that most European countries, whatever their neo-liberal principles, have an undeclared policy of minimising Muslim immigration. To many, France stands as a warning. With a Muslim population of five million it has an endemic problem of terrorism. Many of the Muslims don’t integrate. Many French Jews flee: indeed, Israel treats French Jews as refugees. Trump talks about the country as one that has already “gone”, “given up”. Others quietly take notice. British Home Secretaries make it clear that they want the (mainly Muslim) Asian community to look for their brides at home and the government sets a low target for the acceptance of Syrian refugees. Throughout Europe there is anti-Islamic feeling and agitation, discomfort at the higher Muslim birth rate and the sight of Muslim mosques on the skyline. Already many Jews say that it is not safe for them to go to synagogue wearing the kippah in any country with a large Muslim population. In France all synagogues and Jewish schools have to be under permanent military guard. After every terrorist incident the public waits to hear the identity of the terrorists, expecting Muslim names. And anti-Muslim incidents proliferate.

Everyone knows that this flies in the face of liberal principles about treating everyone equally irrespective of factors such as race or religion — but what to do? As Europe’s Muslim population grows, many countries are now having to deal with the fact that in some of their larger cities there are no-go areas for some religious groups and even for women. Sometimes it is Muslim women who complain of right-wing thugs tearing off their scarves or niqabs, sometimes non-Muslim women who complain of harassment by Muslim men. Moreover, social democratic parties across Europe have lost much of their traditional working-class base and compensate by appealing to immigrant groups. This, in practice soon turns them into spokesmen for the Muslim interest: they cultivate a fierce anti-Israel rhetoric and fairly soon there are accusations of anti-Semitism. This is toxic stuff. By comparison, class politics was a lot more civilised.

A good example of the politically correct reaction to this situation is to be found in Jim Wolfreys’s Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (Hurst). Early on Wolfreys denounces what he calls “a clash of civilisations narrative”. The book consists of a step-by-step account of anti-Muslim attitudes in a wide range of French parties and institutions including even the orthodox Left, for Wolfreys believes that the traditional republican laicité has been turned into an anti-Muslim instrument. At the end of the book all that Wolfreys has established is that there are frictions between Muslims and non-Muslims at every level of French society. Wolfreys has merely taken one side in that conflict. As so often happens, anti-Islamic feeling is then denounced as racism but that is only true in the same sense that, say, English anti-popery was often conflated with hostility to the Irish or Spanish. The more important point is that a clash of civilisations really is happening and, as we surely all sense, the present rather silly debates about hijabs, niqabs and burkas are merely the opening skirmishes.

Islam is thus an independent factor when considering Fortress Europe, although it’s hardly bon ton to admit it. The migrant crisis has merely crystallised a situation that already existed. It was always quite clear that the prospect of millions of Turkish Muslims fanning out all over the EU was a major reason that Turkish entry to the EU never got anywhere.  Muslim EU citizens may well complain — correctly — that this situation makes them second-class citizens. But if we’re dealing with realities, this is where we come to. Already, it should be clear, the half-a-million illegal immigrants in Italy (who are mainly Muslims) are a ticking time bomb. Many Europeans will disapprove of Signor Salvini’s intention to boot them out. But imagine the furore if Italy attempts to push them into France or Austria.

It is now obvious that the migrant problem is a major threat to the integrity of the EU, not only because it threatens the free movement of labour doctrine or because European leaders find it impossible to agree on how to deal with the problem. The real challenge is much more fundamental. It is that the prospect of large-scale immigration by Third World people, most of them Muslims, everywhere creates a strong nativist reaction. This quickly takes nationalist form, an implicit challenge to the supranational values of the EU. The key reason why this happens is that, threatened by the ingress of a large number of unwanted Others, people turn to the nation state as their natural recourse. Surely, they ask, every nation has the right to decide its own immigration policy? As we know, such feelings were fundamental to the Brexit vote, but they are also now to be found in almost every European country and they are pulling Europe apart.

It is difficult to see how Europe can avoid this crisis, for it is born out of something as fundamental as the world population explosion. This will not go away. Indeed, the world population is set to peak around 2055 at around 11 billion, a huge increase from the 7 billion now, which will test every nerve and sinew we’ve got. To feed that extra four billion every single scrap of vacant land will have to be cultivated. In much of the Third World this pressure will produce huge wars, so more and more refugees. After 2055 the world population will decline to perhaps 3.5 billion by 2150. But 2055 is a long way away and the decline from that peak will initially be slow, so ahead of us over the next 40-70 years we have the most difficult period in the planet’s history. Lord knows how many species will disappear under the weight of that dreadful human increase. In that whole period Europe will be under siege.

The situation is compounded by the fact that most would-be migrants are unskilled and the highly-developed economies of Europe have less and less need for the unskilled. At present Ms Merkel supports her case by pointing to the declining German birth rate and thus the need for replacement workers. But this rationale will soon cease to hold water as the robotics revolution takes hold. And in any case, all developed countries will soon have to adjust to the reality of declining populations.

So what to do? Fortress Europe seems inevitable. At present there is much reliance on reaching accords with border states like Turkey or Libya to stem the flow there and, of course, there is a lot of earnest lip service to the idea of helping African and Middle Eastern societies to develop so that their people will not wish to quit them in such numbers. It seems unlikely that these border arrangements will last, and while European aid to Africa is praiseworthy, it is idle to imagine that it will make a decisive difference unless the problem of Africa’s poor governance is solved. And perhaps not, even then.

Meanwhile what is important is that whereas a generation or two ago few Africans were at all conscious of what life was like in Europe, now everyone can see on their mobile phones how much better life in Europe is than what they face in an increasingly turbulent and chaotic Africa. This alone will guarantee a large and steady flow of would-be economic migrants. If Europe doesn’t want these people it is going to have to be extremely determined, efficient and even ruthless in turning them away. After all, the Romans didn’t manage it.

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 I nodded — I’d heard about the Mitchell’s Plain trouble but these days civil strife is so common in South Africa that it often doesn’t make the papers at all, only the traffic news, and nobody bothers any more to say what the cause of the trouble is. Instead, it is all put under the general rubric of “service delivery protests”.

What seemed to be the problem, I asked. “Oh, you know how it is,” says the delivery man, who is Coloured. “Some of them say their housing conditions are bad, others are demanding houses or land to build shacks on. That’s what it’s like in the new South Africa, hey? Some people think they will be given property if they just make enough trouble.” A black workman, overhearing this, tells me more bleakly: “What’s happening at Mitchell’s Plain is that the Coloured people and the blacks are fighting one another.”

On April 21 the Kaiser Chiefs soccer team played at the World Cup stadium in Durban — and lost. Their angry fans went on the rampage, burning and looting vehicles and committing some Rand 2.6 million (£150,000) of damage to the stadium itself. On April 1 on the main N3 motorway at Mooi River, more than 100 miles out of Durban, protesters had attacked and burnt 35 large trucks and looted and destroyed a considerable number of other vehicles. This was only a small item in the news and no reason was given for the violence. However, a friend phoned me from the scene, describing a situation of utter chaos. The protest had been against the employment of Zimbabweans as truck-drivers — there is usually a xenophobic element to such troubles — but once the vehicles had been successfully stormed an army of looters joined in. My friend said that the police were just standing watching. When he asked them why they made no move to stop the looting, they had explained that it wouldn’t be safe — some of the looters had guns. This complete passivity on the part of the police is also part of the new normal — it had been just the same at the soccer riot.

President Cyril Ramaphosa had to cut short his attendance at the Commonwealth conference in London to rush back to deal with a huge wave of civil violence in Mahikeng (the old Mafeking) and throughout the North West province, all aimed at trying to get rid of the province’s hated Premier, Supra Mahumapelo. Ramaphosa held meeting after meeting, failed to push Mahumapelo out, and immediately faced a further wave of rioting and arson as a result. Again, it was notable that shops owned by Pakistanis, Somalis and other foreigners were particularly targeted.

Elsewhere land invasions are common and often end in violence with the police using rubber bullets and stun grenades against groups loosely labelled as “protesters”. Land is, indeed, often the heart of the matter — not white-owned agricultural land, despite all the rhetoric about it, but urban land wanted for residential purposes. For many years people have been patient as they hoped for houses. They are patient no more.
How to understand such strife? The sources are complex. Everywhere in independent Africa a small successor elite grabbed all the key political and bureaucratic positions and used them as a source of personal enrichment. There was no parallel in the pre-colonial situation for the gross inequalities that this produced: Leopold Senghor, the President of Senegal, owning a French chateau, Krobo Edusei, one of Nkrumah’s ministers in Ghana, owning a solid gold bed, the Congolese dictator Mobutu becoming one of the world’s richest men. This was achieved, moreover, in bone-poor countries. But when the ANC elite came to power in South Africa they were taking over the richest country on the African continent. The result has been a feeding frenzy which no Senegalese, Ghanaian or Congolese could ever have dreamt of. In a nutshell, the South African black elite has been involved in a vast, continuous party for the last 24 years.

Take, as a very small example, Gengezi Mgidlana, the Secretary to Parliament (i.e. to the Speaker) who, it is now revealed, used his position to acquire a large cash bonus, a study bursary for which he was not qualified, expensive clothes for his wife and himself, and business-class travel for himself and his wife. These he used on a number of foreign trips, most of which seem to have been nothing more than luxury holidays and shopping expeditions, in which he, his wife and friends stayed in top hotels and, at home, enjoyed chauffeured travel in luxury cars, often with blue lights flashing and outriders to emphasise his elite status.

Mgidlana was just a minor functionary, nothing more, but in effect he stole many millions of Rand — such were the resources available that even a minor functionary could steal for years without detection. And every cent of it has gone on conspicuous consumption, thus proving what a Big Man Mgidlana is or was. This is a perfect microcosm of what has happened with the South African black elite. Among the many billions thus peculated perhaps the most shocking thing is how few assets have been acquired.

The corruption took off under Nelson Mandela, accelerated under Thabo Mbeki and reached its current apogee under Jacob Zuma. What was different about Zuma was that the President himself set out quite openly to enrich himself and his family, that in return for kickbacks he allowed the state to be captured by an Indian immigrant family, the Guptas, and that corruption became systemic. Every town, every city, every province, every nationalised industry and every government department became a patchwork of interlocking rackets and patronage networks, often criminally enforced. Those brave enough to blow the whistle on what was going on were, quite normally, assassinated. But the fruits of office were universally known so that not infrequently even figures as lowly as town councillors were murdered by rivals eager to get their hands on contracts and tenders. Even the teachers’ union regularly sold teaching jobs, and the whistleblowers there too were sometimes murdered, for a thriving hit-man racket has sprung up and “contracts” to terminate witnesses are relatively cheap.
Zuma’s South Africa resembled a feudal kingdom with the monarch at its head. Beneath Zuma served the great bosses of the cabinet and the nationalised industries, each of whom controlled lucrative patronage networks. Political control was assured by what was known as “the Premier league”, the Premiers of KwaZulu-Natal, the North West, Mpumalanga and the Free State. Exactly like a feudal monarch, Zuma would maintain each of them in office in return for tribute and their solid support at party conferences. The Premiers would then be free to loot their province and to exercise patronage networks of their own, running down to the mayors of all their province’s towns, who in turn would be free to loot their towns provided they repaid the Premier with tribute and solid political support. Naturally, the Premier league was in bed with the Guptas as well.

One could see the results of this system not only in large cities like Johannesburg or Pretoria, where hundreds of ANC activists would be on the municipal payrolls but never came in to work and where contracts, tenders, pension funds and appointments would all lie within the patronage system, but even in the smallest country towns and districts. In the bone-poor towns of the Eastern Cape, for example, one finds over and over again that almost the whole of the municipal budget is spent on the salaries and perks of the mayor and councillors, comfortable men driving around in Mercedes, while nothing is left for capital expenditure or even for maintenance. The result is that these towns are visibly falling to pieces.

This blight now affects large parts of rural and small town South Africa: one finds potholed roads, water and electricity shortages as infrastructure is allowed to decay, and polluted rivers and lagoons because corrective measures are no longer applied. Everywhere the money for infrastructure and maintenance has simply been stolen.

A friend who owns a hotel business on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast told me how he had approached his bank to secure a loan to expand his thriving business. The bank refused, quoting their own confidential intelligence that the entire infrastructure of the lower south coast would collapse in around five years. My friend responded by tarring his own road, installing huge generators and building his own fresh water reservoir — just in time, as power cuts, water cut-offs and potholed roads have since become endemic in the area. Rival hotels in the area have been badly hit, but he continues to thrive only because he has become almost completely self-sufficient. The same situation now applies in much of rural South Africa, but few can afford such self-sufficiency.

The black bourgeoisie has been so caught up in this frenzy of enrichissez-vous that for all its notional ideological commitment to the ideas of the Left, the interests of the mass of the population have simply been ignored. In large areas of life things have gone backwards. Even former anti-apartheid activists agree that the state schools were better under apartheid, as were the hospitals, that law and order was much better maintained and there was a lot less corruption. Perhaps most striking of all, when the ANC came to power in 1994, their posters proclaiming “Jobs, jobs, jobs”, there were 3.7 million unemployed. Today there are 9.4 million.

Inevitably, the always very unequal society of the apartheid era has become a whole lot more unequal as the black elite claims more and more resources for itself. Nobody regrets the demise of apartheid and certainly no one wants it back again. But the sad truth is that its successor regime has not just failed to govern well: it has failed to preserve its own sense of national purpose from dissolving into a vast myriad of contending local and personal interests.

On the ground the result is that after 24 years of empty promises the black and Coloured rank and file have simply had enough. For the last five years per capita incomes have been dropping while poverty, inequality and unemployment grow. People feel enraged at the sight of elite corruption and they have also inherited the struggle tradition: if you feel angry, march, stone vehicles, burn tyres, burn buses — it’s the one certain way to get people’s attention. But such activity is now almost invariably accompanied by looting. Any large-scale protest march by strikers, by the trade union or by Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters now resembles a medieval army, with a following host of scroungers eager to pillage the battlefield once the fighting is over. In the modern South African case large demonstrations will inevitably have a tail of street people who loot and vandalise as they clean up behind.

It’s hard to interpret this situation. It feels as if the country is beginning to unravel, that it is slipping towards ungovernability. Perhaps it can still be pulled back together but nothing is certain. One should not forget that the different territories which make up this country were only forged into one by dint of the British force of arms: South Africa was not, so to speak, a natural country. Its future national unity cannot be taken for granted.

Enter Cyril Ramaphosa, stage right. He is in a weak position, coming from a small minority tribe, and without a significant base. He was elected by only the slimmest of margins because David Mabuza, alleged to be one of the most corrupt bosses of the Premier League, came over to his side at the last moment — and was rewarded with the deputy presidency. Ace Magashule, the equally controversial Premier of the Free State, became the ANC’s secretary-general. So Ramaphosa is hedged in on both sides by some of the worst elements of the old Zuma regime.

Under that regime, Premiers were like feudal barons, free to loot their fiefdoms. Only if they went too far and caused a peasant insurrection against them, would the king step in. And that is pretty much what has indeed happened in the North West province where the corrupt and oppressive Premier, Supra Mahumapelo, is clearly about to be forced out. Ramaphosa would doubtless have liked to see him gone some time ago but the leadership group around him are worried that this might start a chain reaction in other provinces. Magashule has deliberately hindered the investigation into Mahumapelo (the consultative meetings with local officials were often held in remote and sometimes lion-ridden places, gatekeepers kept many relevant people out, etc) and also openly opposed the VAT increase just decreed by the government. Ramaphosa seems powerless to discipline him.
For the reality is that the ANC is still honeycombed with corrupt placemen entirely willing to fight their corner to keep their rackets going and Ramaphosa is far too weak to carry out the general purge that many would like to see. Indeed, in the ANC’s biggest province, KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma has dug in and is playing the Zulu card for all it is worth, with his supporters angrily protesting against the fact that their leader will soon be brought to trial for corruption. They blame Ramaphosa for having forced Zuma’s resignation and angrily insist that they will force Ramaphosa out too before long. Some are even suggesting secession from the centre by the KwaZulu-Natal ANC.

Faced with this sea of troubles Ramaphosa’s main initiative has been to launch a campaign to attract $100 billion in foreign investment. He is certainly right to see economic growth as the essential means to get out of the current mess, the other necessary elements being a thorough purge of corrupt elements and a large programme of infrastructural investment.

The trouble is that foreign investors are hardly clamouring to pour their money into a country that is in such a mess and which, according to the US State Department, is among the world’s top ten most anti-American countries, judged by UN votes. Most businessmen would like to see evidence of some tough-minded market-friendly reforms before risking their cash. But Ramaphosa is too weak to carry out such reforms even if he wanted to.

At present he is trying to talk up the economy — which, as Larry Summers argued some time ago, is the very cheapest form of economic stimulus. Most predict that this will only produce growth of 2 per cent or less, in which case the country will drag along much as now. The sad irony is that Ramaphosa is probably the best President that the ANC has yet produced. But he has taken power at a juncture when the cumulative mistakes and squandered opportunities of ANC rule have not only become a crushing burden but have largely worn out the patience and public support on which the party has depended until now.

The post Is South Africa about to fall apart? appeared first on Standpoint.

Relief at the end of the corrupt and illiberal regime of Jacob Zuma has quickly given place here in South Africa to swooning adulation for the new President, Cyril Ramaphosa. South African political culture is very much leader-focused and the recent experience of democracy means that it is also naive. One realises that electorates get more sophisticated with time and even understand a bit of comparative history. That is how you get an electorate smart enough to reject the massively popular Churchill for the rather anonymous Attlee because the latter was better suited to the work of postwar reconstruction. No such scepticism exists in this case. Ramaphosa has known how to press all the right buttons and has led an extended charm offensive, piling on the rhetoric of consultation and conciliation with a trowel. The idea — clearly successful — has been to position himself as the man who negotiated the country’s first democratic constitution, who will bring the same skills to dealing with the country’s problems now, and fulfilling the promise of Nelson Mandela. This is heady stuff and were an election to be held today he would clearly win by a mile.

In large part this is due to sheer relief at the end of Zuma’s blundering and stealing and the way in which he allowed the state’s capture by a gangster elite. But this is a good moment to look at South Africa’s leadership under the ANC since democracy was won in 1994. Mandela was a dear old man, greatly loved, and his message of racial conciliation and forgiveness was just what the country needed. In every other way he was a hopeless president. He never understood or did the job, instead spending all his time with pop stars, sportsmen and the mega-rich. He neither presided over the cabinet nor even bothered to stay right through its meetings. There was simply a hole in the middle of government where there needed to be hands-on executive leadership. Corruption began to flower under his administration, particularly in the infamous arms deal of 1999.

Next came Thabo Mbeki, in many respects more capable but given to stealthy behind-the-arras elimination of possible rivals and to grandiose visions of himself as the leader not just of Africa but of the entire Third World. He also used nakedly racist rhetoric against whites. His combination of paranoia and grandiosity led him to believe that the anti-retroviral drugs used to treat the HIV-positive were just a scheme by Big Pharma and that he knew better than medical science. Accordingly, he deprived the HIV-positive  of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). A later Harvard study showed he had caused 300,000-365,000 unnecessary deaths, almost all Africans — a true genocide and at least 20 times more than had died for political reasons under apartheid. Under him corruption became structural as part of the vast ANC patronage network. Even when cadres were found stealing, no one was punished. Finally, there was Zuma, under whom a corrupt mafia took over the entire state. The president, a semi-literate, warned people against witches, told them the ancestors would be angry if they didn’t vote for him and also said that God supported the ANC. He made up policy without the least regard for legality or affordability and seemed quite ignorant of the constitution.

The net result is that after 24 years of ANC rule there has not yet been one good executive president and the country has suffered enormous damage. In addition, very few cabinet ministers are competent and many of them get rich with suspicious speed. The ANC is, moreover, still working towards the old Soviet slogan of the National Democratic Revolution, which is supposed to see the transition to socialism. Even the most corrupt claim to be revolutionaries and call one another “comrade”. The party has just vowed to proceed with expropriation of land (and, by implication, other property) without compensation. The whole emphasis is on redistribution rather than growth, on consumption rather than investment. The result is that under ANC rule unemployment has grown from 3.7 million to 9.4 million. Unsurprisingly there has been an investment strike and the last few years have seen a massive outflow of capital as panicking South African firms and individuals rush to buy foreign assets.

There is indeed, a curious symmetry with Venezuela, whose President Maduro is much admired by the ANC: it has the largest oil reserves in the world and is now plunged into hopeless poverty and debt. South Africa has the largest mineral deposits of any country on earth and it also has record (40 per cent) unemployment, increasing inequality, slow growth and falling per capita income.

To further spice things up we have also had the spectacle of the three Guptas — Ajay, Atul and Tony — once the most powerful family in the country, able to sack and appoint ministers, now becoming fugitives from justice. The deal was simple. Working through crooked ministers (whom they had effectively appointed) they secured the appointment of Gupta creatures on the boards of all the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) who then diverted a stream of contracts to Gupta companies. Zuma would report to them after every cabinet meeting, driving with the presidential cavalcade to their luxurious home, and in return they would divert great wealth the way of the Zuma family. Now we have the inglorious spectacle of the ministers who collaborated in this daylight robbery suffering amnesia, denying things they are forced to admit on the next day and generally trying to evade responsibility. The Guptas, meanwhile, have fled the country and are invisible though the law enforcement agencies of several countries are keen to know their whereabouts. They may have stolen as much as $5 billion or even more. Their Cape Town house, bought from Mark Thatcher, stands vacant. Zuma’s son, Duduzane, a  major Gupta associate and beneficiary, has also fled.

South Africa is now in a parlous position. Two of the three big ratings agencies have downgraded its credit to junk status, the government has run out of cash, the civil service is far bigger and far better-paid than in any comparable country and the big state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been looted and mismanaged into bankruptcy. So much has gone wrong that it is difficult to know where Ramaphosa should start. His first state of the nation address was full of commitments to hold jobs summits, set up commissions, advisory councils, task teams and working committees, all premised on the assumption that if you can get business and labour round the table with government all problems can be solved. The Communist Party and their allied trade unions, Cosatu, immediately demanded that Ramaphosa, whose election within the ANC they had supported, must consult them first. They have branded his first budget “a betrayal”.

Ramaphosa’s commitment to corporatist consultation sounds very democratic. But it is a mistake. For almost ten years now the World Bank, IMF, OECD and the ratings agencies have all said that South Africa needs serious structural reform. It must radically reform its education system — the weakest in all Africa. It must liberalise its labour market, which currently works only to the advantage of a tiny labour aristocracy; it must slash its public service both by personnel and wage cuts and it must clean up its SOEs, which have all been bankrupted by their venal and incompetent management. The problem is that in each case this would involve confrontations with the trade unions which are a key part of the ANC’s alliance, so the government has always backed away and instead promised to bring down the budget deficit.

However, the failure to enact structural reform has undermined all efforts at fiscal consolidation. The public service unions (the main component of Cosatu) continually insist on and get wage settlements way beyond inflation. In their last three-year deal, concluded when the economy was actually shrinking, they got 26 per cent plus an increase in benefits worth another 3 per cent. The shortage of well-qualified personnel — due to the weak education system — pushes up salaries for the elite. And the SOEs need continual large bail-outs to save them from bankruptcy. There is simply no hope of Ramaphosa getting out of this mess if every policy has to be carefully brokered between government, business and the trade unions.

Take the SOEs. The state arms-manufacturer, Denel, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation both ran out of money to pay salaries a few months ago and only desperate temporary expedients are keeping them from closing. South African Airways has been bankrupt for many years now and exists only on continual state bail-outs. But by far the most important, Eskom — the electricity company — now owes more than $35 billion, has seen its staff double in the past five years even as its output fell, pays the highest average salaries in the country and has run out of money to pay salaries.

The government’s answer was to illegally raid the civil service pension fund to keep things going and to ask the local banks to lend Eskom $1.72bn. to tide it over for a few months. All foreign banks have backed out, the local banks are “considering” and even so Eskom’s bankruptcy will be only months away. This was, under apartheid, the world’s eighth biggest utility, legendarily profitable and producing the cheapest electricity in the world. Yet the government can’t afford Eskom to go bankrupt because all its debts are government-guaranteed and because cross-default clauses mean that any SOE that goes bankrupt automatically results in a calling in of loans to all the rest.

It is obvious that any solution to the Eskom mess has to include large staff redundancies, a pay freeze, and the large-scale sale of assets — and something similar applies to all the other SOEs. There is no hope of getting such solutions agreed by Cosatu or the Communists. The same is true of the crises in education, the rigidity of the labour market, and public service pay. There is simply no road to structural reform through consensus-seeking corporatism. Yet to agree to structural reform is to admit that the whole trajectory of ANC government since 1994 has been wrong — and it also means a fight to the death with the South African Comunist Party, the unions and the ANC Left.

This is why Ramaphosa is committed to his corporatist path. It may even get him through the 2019 elections. But it is bound to fail. The real question is what happens then. One way of answering that question is to realise that in the situation Ramaphosa now faces the logical thing to do would be to call in tbe IMF, apply for an emergency loan and then take the tough medicine imposed by IMF conditionalities. This is, however, anathema to the ANC not only because of the loss of economic sovereignty it entails but because of the public admission that ANC government has failed. But one senses that sooner or later this is where we shall end up. What it boils down to is that the political system, sunk in its parochial fixations, its past historical resentments, and its outdated ideology is incapable of carrying out indispensable reforms itself and that they will happen only when they are externally imposed. Much as the end of apartheid — another outdated ideology — was brought about to a large extent by sanctions, boycotts and international pressure.

South Africa became a democracy in 1994, fully 30 years after the rest of Africa and many of its problems now are simply a re-enactment of where most of Africa went wrong. Everywhere the continent is governed by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie which is almost wholly unproductive and parasitic. Someone had to pay for the salaries and privileges of this new bourgeoisie — since it produced nothing itself — and inevitably that had to be the 80 or 90 per cent of the population that were still peasants. This meant a perverse redistribution from the poor to the rich, with a consequent increase in inequality. This siphoning-off of resources from the peasantry saw one African country after another plunge into dependency on food imports.

Exactly the same process has occurred in South Africa, with the difference that in this case the transfer of resources to the new bourgeoisie is mainly from the tiny white tax base and the immiserated urban poor. The consequent increase in inequality has made South Africa into one of the two most unequal societies in the world. Here, of course, white farmers still produce almost all the food in the shops — the farms redistributed by land reform to Africans have had a 90 per cent failure rate — but the trend is the same. The number of white commercial farmers has decreased dramatically and the large agricultural surpluses of the pre-liberation period have fallen back into a situation where exports merely balance imports.

Most African states chose either “African socialism” or “scientific socialism”: both were uniformly disastrous. They not only achieved little economic growth but the extension of public ownership that this involved invariably ended up with large, loss-making, overstaffed entities which were — and still are — a byword for nepotism and corruption. Indeed, it is hard to see how public ownership can work in countries where the extended family system makes it obligatory to help family members get jobs, where political elites insist on pushing their cadres into key management positions and where the general urge for primary accumulation is so strong that corruption is ubiquitous. Public ownership even in Europe and North America is a difficult business but there are sociological reasons why this can’t work in Africa now. Inevitably, the tentacles of patronage and corruption lead into the private sector as well.

Despite that, the ANC seems determined to copy all the mistakes of Nkrumah, Kaunda and Nyerere. The current water crisis in the Western Cape, for example, is directly traceable to the nationalisation of water in 1998. Water — which is precious, scarce and costs a lot to extract, store and recycle — was declared a national resource which would be freely available to all as a human right. But little effort was made to increase water resources or even to maintain the existing system. Inevitably, disaster has followed and water currently sells for high prices on the black market in Cape Town.

Ramaphosa is doubtless a great improvement on Zuma but he seems committed to much the same failed ANC policies. He talks of the need to stop corruption and stealing in the state-owned enterprises but assumes they will remain state-owned, which is a bit like saying he will stop mice from eating cheese. Under ANC rule the public hospitals have collapsed which has led the government to insist that the solution lies in abolishing the highly functional private medical sector. Ramaphosa is continuing with this crazy policy. And he has embraced the policy of expropriation without compensation. He seems to think he can invite foreign investors to a big conference and there persuade them to invest in South Africa but it is difficult to see how they will get beyond item one, the question of expropriation without compensation.

There is a post-apartheid consensus which is effectively endorsed both by the parliamentary opposition and internationally. This is best summed up as transformation plus black empowerment. Transformation is a process which is supposed to happen to every area of life from company boards to sports teams where as many black people as possible must be appointed or selected at least until demographic representivity is achieved — though no one will mind if you go beyond that to 100 per cent black. There is a particular concentration on the topmost positions in leading sectors (e.g., the directors of the 50  biggest companies) because, of course, such positions are of particular interest to the new elite.

Transformation can only be achieved by massive affirmative action, often with disastrous results, such as an Eskom board with no member with engineering or business experience. But South Africa is a middle-income country in competition with many other countries in which appointments are made on merit. And while a minority of affirmative action appointments work well, most don’t, a potent cause of South Africa’s slide in all major international rankings and its almost zero economic growth. Ironically, affirmative action, though hugely popular with the black elite (its main beneficiaries), is, according to opinion polls, unpopular with most blacks — after all a black miner or farmworker or domestic servant cannot benefit from it but will suffer from the inferior delivery of services which it results in.
Where are they now? Ajay and Atul Gupta in 2011 with Duduzane (son of Jacob) Zuma, then director of one of their companies  (©Gallo Images/City Press/Muntu Vilakazi)
 Black empowerment is not just about schemes to help black businessmen and black farmers. Most of all, it is about rules requiring all businesses to have at least 25 per cent black ownership (preferably 51 per cent ) and as many black directors, managers and suppliers as possible. Inevitably, this means businesses having to hand over large chunks of their equity for low prices. But the policy also requires a careful counting of every category by race — yet racial classification is supposed to have been abolished. Moreover, many black shareholders, having received their shares at sub-par prices, quickly cash them in for a quick profit. This leads to government demands that the companies now “empower” another set of black shareholders to bring them back up to the 25 per cent level, while the companies indignantly reply that they cannot keep giving away their equity.

Black empowerment is so politically correct that few want to stick their heads above the parapet. Yet business universally sees black empowerment as a tax on investment and it is a powerful disincentive for foreign investors. Additionally, of course, most of the black empowerment bonanza has gone to a few politically well-connected members of the elite, the most successful of them all being Cyril Ramaphosa who has amassed a fortune of $425 million from a standing start 20 years ago. Yet no new product or services or even any particular company is associated with him, and nor does he possess any special entrepreneurial skills. Instead, he has had multiple directorships and has benefited from many favourable share deals in other people’s companies.

The post-apartheid dispensation works well for the new black elite but offers no advantages to most blacks and is directly harmful to South African society as a whole. What it means is that South Africa, like most other African countries, is really run for the benefit of the small black bourgeoisie — perhaps a quarter of a million people in a population of 57 million. This perspective informs almost everything about the country. For example, South Africa gains high marks from UN agencies for equality of women because it has many women MPs (mainly just voting fodder on the ANC list), yet this tiny elite is absurdly unrepresentative. South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of rape and violence against women, three-quarters of black families are headed by a single woman and they seldom receive any support from their ex-husbands. In real terms the plight of black women is abysmal. They are the true heroines of modern South Africa, holding together whatever is left of the black family.

For the whites South Africa remains a beautiful, sunny and exciting country in which to live — and the country still depends heavily upon them. Their numbers may be down by 20 per cent in the last 20 years but they still pay an overwhelming share of taxes, grow virtually all the food, manage almost all the big companies and run the country’s top schools and universities. They are, in African terms, South Africa’s great competitive advantage — yet they are also reviled, endlessly reminded of their past sins and have learnt to keep their heads down. Instead of confronting their accusers most of them busy themselves with private life, making money, sport, philanthropy and, often, a passionate concern with the country’s environment and threatened wildlife.

This last is a great drama, for African nationalism seems incompatible with wildlife. Already African wildlife has been exterminated throughout north and west Africa and most of what remains is in the formerly white-ruled states — Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia. Yet everywhere those remaining animals are under threat from poaching and explosive demographic growth. Although black politicians recognise in principle that wildlife preservation is vital to the tourist industry, it is noticeable that all the passionate wildlife activists — like the former South African cricketer, Mark Boucher — are white. For many whites the richness of Africa’s flora and fauna constitutes a principal reason for continuing to live there, though one cannot but suspect that some of this activism is a displacement activity.

It has, though, its larger significance. As Asia and Latin America (and some parts of the Middle East) climb out of poverty, Africa will soon no longer be able to console itself that it is part of the Third World: it will be the Third World. This is not just about being poor but about the persistence of pre-modern political structures and behaviour, with countries ravaged by war and tribalism, by terrorism and ruthless elites, often still imbued with antique ideologies as well as relentless cynicism. This is a continent where for every dollar of aid received, 63 cents finds its way back into (private) foreign bank accounts, and which holds the all-time record for the number of UN peace-keeping missions, all of which have to be funded from outside Africa. The great hope of Mandela’s South Africa was that it would be able to provide the continent with a model of humane politics and successful development. This promise has been almost completely squandered. The rest of the world could be forgiven if it simply walked away — as witness Barclays’ decision to exit Africa to concentrate better on the US.

But there is a sense in which the world can’t walk away. For a start, Africa is just so big — its area could encompass Western Europe, Britain, the US, China, Japan and New Zealand. This is also the continent which gave birth to the human race and where the world’s oldest people, the San, still live. All our DNA is traceable to here. This is, too, where all human language began. It is also the fastest-growing continent. Much of Europe, Russia and Japan are in steep demographic decline but Africa will add another billion people to its population by 2050 — making it the world’s fastest-growing market. Africa contains most of the world’s uncultivated arable land — which will all have to be cultivated by the time the world population peaks in 2055 at around 11 billion. It also contains a large proportion of all the Earth’s key raw materials. And, finally, it is Earth’s last remaining repository of some of the largest, most important and utterly magnificent life-forms: lions and a large number of other wild cats, elephants, rhinos, hippos, large gorillas and apes, giraffes, zebra, enormous numbers of buck and a huge variety of insect and reptile life. Humans everywhere tend to see these life-forms as connecting us back to a far earlier age when men lived as simple hunter-gatherers.

So, despite all the frustrations and false starts, the world’s engagement with Africa will continue. And while it does, South Africa will, inescapably, continue to play a key role as the continent’s most developed state. And it is this, finally, which gives Ramaphosa’s election its significance. South Africa’s early promise has certainly failed — but the worst has been avoided.

The post Cyril Ramaphosa’s poisoned chalice appeared first on Standpoint.

It might be best to begin by saying how I came to be interested in the 1986 visit to South Africa of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the great Irish statesman, diplomat, writer and public intellectual. I was born on Merseyside but my father was later transferred to Durban by his employers, so I finished my schooling there and then attended the University of Natal, where I was heavily involved in anti-apartheid activities. A Rhodes Scholarship took me to Oxford just before the Security Police came to detain me. I was to stay in Oxford for many years as student and teacher, well aware that it would be unsafe to return to South Africa. I finally did so in 1978 and thereafter returned frequently to teach and to write about the evolving situation for The Times and Sunday Times. Ultimately I left Oxford in 1995 to return to South Africa where I ran the Helen Suzman Foundation. I have ended up living in Cape Town. Throughout these many years I have heard countless friends and colleagues discuss “the Conor Cruise O’Brien affair”, which was quite a landmark in South Africa, particularly for liberals. This always intrigued me, for I had got to know Conor a little through his son, Donal. The account which follows depends heavily on the oral testimonies of eye-witnesses.

Conor visited South Africa on a number of occasions and was considerably interested in its politics which he, among many others, compared with both Israel and Northern Ireland. During several of these visits he gave lectures at the University of Cape Town (UCT) — generally regarded as the country’s premier university — and these were sufficiently well received for him to be invited by Dr David Welsh to return as a Visiting Professor to the university’s political science department in 1986.

This was, however, the era of the academic boycott of South Africa called by the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The boycott was continuously controversial with those (like Conor) who felt there should never be any impediment to the free movement of people and ideas. Over time the AAM, which was always controlled by the African National Congress (ANC) and often by the South African Communist Party, had succeeded in getting apartheid branded by the UN General Assembly as a “crime against humanity”, a fact which served to heighten the AAM’s sense of self-righteousness. In turn, of course, the political atmosphere both within South Africa and outside was charged by the increasing tide of revolutionary protest led by the United Democratic Front (UDF), which acted as a surrogate for the banned ANC. On the English-speaking university campuses, student feeling had become increasingly shrill, a development much strengthened by the decision to open these universities to students of all races.

One of the key pillars of the apartheid regime had been the Separate Universities Act of 1959, which forbade racial integration at tertiary education level. This was a tremendous blow to the liberal English-speaking universities — Witswatersrand (Wits), Natal, Rhodes and UCT, which all fought and protested strongly against the new Act. Thereafter black students were consigned to (inferior) “tribal colleges” within the so-called “black homelands”. Inevitably, political dissent spread from the black campuses into black schools, finally resulting in the explosion of the Soweto riots of 1976 which then spread right round the country. This in turn created a climate of continuous unrest in the nation’s black schools. The exiled ANC naturally seized on this new opportunity and extensive political mobilisation took place within these schools under the (educationally disastrous) slogan of “Liberation now, education later”. In practice this meant continuous school boycotts, stay-aways and protests and the enrolment of many schoolchildren as full-time political activists. The result was a steep decline in the standard of these “Bantu Education” schools, leading to a so-called “lost generation” of schoolchildren whose school lives were punctuated by continual and often violent clashes with authority.

Thus when the apartheid system began to crack in the mid-1980s and the English-speaking universities were again allowed to admit first a trickle and then a flood of black students, the situation quickly became very difficult. (I was teaching at the University of Natal in my Oxford vacations in those years and experienced the resultant problems at first hand.) Inevitably, the black students now pouring into these universities were hugely disadvantaged — many not even all that literate. The universities hurriedly devised remedial courses for them but this often only deepened the resentment such students felt at finding themselves at such a disadvantage compared to their white, Indian and Coloured peers. They were also in a high state of political turmoil and were continuously ready for protest action of one sort or another. Some were engaged in guerrilla activities for the ANC and carried weapons.

More and more this made these campuses a cauldron which it took considerable political agility to negotiate. I write advisedly for I was a regular visitor to these universities in those years, something I managed unscathed only because I had grown up in South Africa, was thus returning home and anyway knew the ropes. Even so, I was often greatly taken aback as, for example, when I was interrogated by student leaders in Durban as to my attitude to freedom of speech. When I said I favoured it they furiously denounced me: the official “line” was now that that would mean giving Chief Buthelezi an equal right to that of the United Democratic Front leaders to speak on campus. Similarly, I could hardly be unaware that one of my faculty colleagues clanked when he walked because of a large amount of concealed weaponry and that he was meeting at night with black students to plan armed raids (“in self-defence”) against their Inkatha enemies.

This, then, was the world that Conor was to step into when he arrived in Cape Town in 1986. His only preparation for what lay ahead derived from his disagreements within the AAM over the academic boycott of South Africa which the ANC had called for. Conor’s disagreement with the moral absolutism of the AAM over the academic boycott and related questions had brought him into conflict with Kader Asmal, a South African émigré lawyer based at Trinity College, Dublin, who was the founder and head of the Irish Anti Apartheid Movement. Asmal was a somewhat self-important man who took it as almost a personal affront that Conor felt free to disregard the AAM “line” whenever he disagreed with it. Conor, with typical self-confidence, felt that his anti-racist credentials were well known, that his record in the Congo and Ghana was internationally respected and that he was therefore immune to the charges of reactionary and racist attitudes which the angry Asmal flung at him. Similarly, when Asmal claimed he had helped find IRA volunteers to help the ANC, Conor denounced any links with the IRA. But, of course, although these disagreements were often fierce they were essentially academic and contained within the usual law-abiding limits of public debate.

Word of Conor’s invitation to the University of Cape Town quickly reached the ears of Asmal, who was, of course, incensed that Conor was going to practise what he preached and would thus disregard the academic boycott. Telephone messages flowed in rapid succession to the ANC high command and the AAM in London and to the Student Representative Council at UCT where, according to contemporary witnesses, the UDF activists were instructed to “make it hot for O’Brien” and to “kill him”. The result was that news of Conor’s impending visit spread across the campus, as did a wave of student protests demanding cancellation of his visit. Conor was aware of this effervescence but decided that it was a matter of principle for him to go ahead and insist on free speech. Conor’s adopted son, Patrick, himself of African descent, decided to accompany his father.

Conor was greeted in Cape Town by a lunch party in his honour given by the university’s Vice Chancellor, Dr Stuart Saunders, in the fine setting of the UCT medical school. But by this time student protest against Conor’s visit had become fairly noisy so when Conor got down to business with his first public lecture before an audience of some 200 in the main lecture hall in the Leslie Building (the Social Science block) the doors were locked shut once the hall was full — a most unusual precaution, for such lectures were open affairs. No sooner had Conor begun speaking than an angry crowd of around 200 mainly black demonstrators began hammering on the doors, eventually breaking them down, and invaded the room, disrupting the lecture. Conor was unable to proceed and instead faced a series of angry comments and questions about his defiance of the boycott.

At this point Conor, lacking local knowledge, made two critical mistakes. First, he pointed out that he could hardly be accused of racism. His record was clear enough and, after all, he had come to Cape Town accompanied by his own black son. This seemed only to madden the demonstrators, who claimed that Patrick was a mere token black. In any case, it was in their eyes a mere diversion from their central ideological cause. The real question was: how could Conor dare to ignore a boycott policy which had the backing of the liberation movement itself (then conceived as an almost god-like entity)? Conor replied that he had never believed in the academic boycott which was “a Mickey Mouse affair”. This was seen as tantamount to mockery of the anti-apartheid cause and enraged the students further. It was clear the lecture could not continue and Conor was hurriedly smuggled out through a side door to avoid matters getting further out of hand.

The demonstrators, now thoroughly aroused, marched on the political science department, demanding to see “Conor” — they never really grasped his whole name. However, the news of what had happened at Conor’s first lecture had thoroughly alarmed members of the department. (Dr Welsh was so alarmed that he retreated to his house where he hired two armed guards — for by this time the protesters were threatening arson. He vanished for several days.) Other members of the department also decided that the absence of body was preferable to the presence of mind.

It is worth mentioning at this point that what these Department members knew all too well was that the great bulk of black students were very poorly educated, had only the most parochial conception of events and had only heard of Conor a week or two before. In addition, they came from township backgrounds where violence was always a ready and immediate response. Anyone who taught such youngsters was soon aware that they were a somewhat explosive quantity, especially since they were inflamed by millennarian expectations and (an altogether reasonable) sense of grievance.

So when the protestors reached the department they found only Professor Hermann Giliomee, a liberal Afrikaner recently hired from Stellenbosch University, taking a cup of tea in the departmental tea-room. Addressing Giliomee as “the Comrade Professor”, the protesters’ leader, one Comrade Ziko, demanded to know where “Conor” was and which was his study. Giliomee, unperturbed, said Dr O’Brien was not there and nor would he tell them which was Dr O’Brien’s study for he did not feel confident that they would not molest it. On this he would not budge and eventually the protesters dispersed. They seem to have been a little flummoxed to meet a calm and benign Afrikaner rather than the heretical Irishman they had sought.

By this stage the protesters were threatening to burn down university buildings unless the O’Brien lectures were cancelled. Conor, for his part, refused to be intimidated and persisted in his attempt to give his course of lectures. On each occasion he was interrupted and harassed but, being Conor, he took some pleasure in stating very plainly the essential principles of free speech which they were violating. This was regarded as further provocation. In the then fashionable vocabulary of the United Democratic Front, students demanded to know if Conor had “consulted his community” before deciding to disregard the academic boycott — shorthand for consulting “progressives” such as Kader Asmal. Conor’s reply — that he had hardly required the consent of such folk when he had served in the Congo or in Ghana or on previous visits to South Africa — was regarded as “arrogant”, though to be fair by this stage nothing that Conor might have said would have placated his opponents.

Towards the end of the second week of term, with Conor still attempting to plough on with his lectures, the university’s Vice Chancellor, Stuart Saunders, called a meeting of the Academic Staff Association and asked whether Conor’s lecture course should be cancelled. It was an anguishing choice: on the one hand the university was proud of its liberal traditions and of the way it had upheld free speech under apartheid; on the other hand, all present were extremely concerned by the threat of arson and also realised that any person voting “in favour of O’Brien” would quickly become known to the protesters who would doubtless target them. For by this stage the threat of student violence was exercising an intimidatory pressure on faculty members at large. In the end it was decided to cancel the lectures — an obvious slap in the face to Conor. Those who felt shamefaced about this consoled themselves with the thought that it had effectively become impossible for Conor to continue his lectures anyway.

The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg had also invited Conor to give some lectures there. These were now hurriedly cancelled too. True to its liberal tradition, the South African Institute of Race Relations quickly stepped in and invited Conor in its place. This event took place without disturbance. Conor then returned to Cape Town to pack up amidst the wreckage of his visit. Like many faculty members, he had been shocked by this complete victory of mob rule. It was well-known that the United Democratic Front activists among the students had imported many non-students onto the campus to reinforce their numbers (a common UDF and later ANC tactic) and their victory had been won by physical force and the threat of violence, not by voting or using any of the established procedures or institutions.

Wryly considering this scene Conor expressed to Hermann Giliomee the concern that South African universities might soon find themselves under the thumb of Red Guards, as had happened in China. Conor never visited South Africa again.

The affair had cast the University of Cape Town in a bad light internationally and was also bitterly controversial on the campus itself where Dr Welsh expressed outrage at the way his distinguished guest had been treated. Accordingly, Dr Saunders — in consultation with the Student Representative Council — decided to set up a Commission of Inquiry into the affair. This was to consist of three men: Professor D.J. Du Plessis, a former Vice Chancellor of Wits, and two prominent lawyers, Ismael Mohamed and Arthur Chaskalson. Both men were known to have strong ANC sympathies (indeed, Chaskalson had only been dissuaded from joining the Communist Party by the party’s chairman, Jack Simons, who felt Chaskalson was more useful to the party as a nominal independent). Undoubtedly the choice of these two men pre-determined the commission’s findings, for it was inconceivable that they would reach a finding not acceptable to the ANC. But choosing such men was inevitable once Saunders decided that the selection of the commissioners had to be made in conjunction with the Student Representative Council, for the UDF activists there were bound to insist on such a choice. They were, after all, in continuous communication with the UDF leadership and the underground ANC.

The commission’s report was a foregone conclusion: it emerged that the student demonstrators had to be exculpated for their use of violence because Conor was a “controversial” figure who had behaved “provocatively”. Indeed, Dr Welsh was criticised for having invited him in the first place. (The report mis-spelt Conor’s name throughout.) Even among those who had supported the cancellation of Conor’s lectures there was embarrassment at this finding. In effect the commission had decided that although the principle of freedom of speech (and every other notion of academic freedom) had been grossly violated, it turned out that the person to blame was . . . Conor himself.

A meeting of the UCT Senate was then called to consider the report. A record turnout crammed into the Baxter Hall but it was, for all concerned, a very sad occasion. Even those who felt the report had to be approved were extremely unhappy at the precedent thus set and realised that their approval of the report would further tarnish the reputation of the university. Against that, Saunders was popular and to vote against the report would now be to disavow him. Worse, the threat of arson and of violence against those who defied the academic boycott was still very much in the air and the assembled professors knew they would be closely questioned by angry students if they voted in an “incorrect” fashion and that reprisals against such “incorrect” voters were likely. In the end the report was overwhelmingly approved, though only against the passionate opposition of Dr Welsh and his supporters.

As an authoritarian Afrikaner nationalism gave way to an equally authoritarian African nationalism and the years slipped by, the Conor Cruise O’Brien affair remained a key point of reference for South African liberals who saw it as beginning of a slide away from civil rights under ANC governance. Chaskalson was appointed the first head of the country’s Constitutional Court, while Ismael Mohamed was made head of the Supreme Court of Appeal. Kader Asmal returned in triumph from Ireland to become a minister in the ANC government. Dr Welsh continued his distinguished career at UCT through to retirement but expressed complete alienation from the institution in the wake of the O’Brien affair. His magisterial work, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, signals his honorary attachment to Stellenbosch University and makes no mention of UCT.

A generation later in 2015-2016 the Rhodes Must Fall movement began at UCT when a student threw a bucket of faeces over Rhodes’s statue in an event carefully planned with the ANC-supporting Cape Times, who helpfully had a photographer on hand at that exact moment. Gradually the Rhodes Must Fall movement morphed into a demand for free university education and for the “decolonisation” of higher education.

Rhodes Must Fall was a wholly unelected movement (which often included township activists brought onto the campus to swell its ranks) and it used violent means to gain its ends. Hundreds of paintings belonging to the university were hauled out and burnt, the Vice-Chancellor’s office was burnt down and on other campuses copycat action followed in which all manner of student residences, libraries and lecture halls were torched. Other students and faculty were intimidated, rapes occurred, syllabi were changed under threat and all manner of university norms violated. Faculty morale plummeted, with many academics seeking to leave UCT or take early retirement. UCT fell sharply in the international university rankings and applications from foreign graduate students fell too, as did alumni donations.

The Vice-Chancellor, Dr Max Price, again followed a strategy of accommodation, exculpating the Rhodes Must Fall activists, even those found guilty of violence, agreeing to “decolonise” the university and to do it in conjunction with the activists. The university agreed to set up its own version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to inquire into the guilt of the university and its faculty under apartheid. In effect the authorities’ decision to take the path of all-out concession meant that faculty felt completely unprotected from the intimidation that was now rife. But every new concession was denounced as insufficient by the activists who had demanded it, causing the authorities to make yet further concessions. The era of the Red Guards had indeed arrived. It was not clear what would be left of South African higher education at the end of this tumult. Older faculty members looked back to the O’Brien affair, sighed, and wondered if it might have been different.

Looking back, it is easy to see that Conor considerably misjudged the situation. He had been to UCT often before and given lectures in much the same setting that would have applied in an English or Irish university of the time, with a polite, well-educated audience, well aware of who he was and what he had done and interested in what he had to say. What he stepped into in 1986 was a Third World pre-revolutionary ferment in which he was wholly unprotected by any sense of his eminence or prestige or, indeed, by any conception of academic freedom. Not only did township youths know nothing of this but they often enrolled township schoolchildren into their cause — who knew even less. In the situation of 1986 this generation, sensing the demise of apartheid, were full of anger and excitement, caring only for “the line” the liberation movement preached.

In that sense it is difficult to see that any other outcome was possible. Yet, 30 years later, the verdict of 1986 has been wholly reversed. The ANC government, when pressed on its attitude to the denial of human rights in Zimbabwe, Iran or North Korea loudly says that it has never believed in sanctions or boycotts. It is as if the academic boycott had never existed (except, of course, in the case of Israel.) Most of the promises of liberation are now mere ashes in the mouth. The commission which denounced Conor is now remembered with shame and embarrassment. Conor’s own reputation was undamaged; indeed, he is remembered for the courage and determination with which he stood up for what he believed in an impossible environment.

The story has an unmistakeable resonance today in the era of “no-platforming” and so-called “safe spaces”. One can imagine without difficulty what Conor would have to say about that. But the story also has something to tell us about the politics of free speech. It is tempting sometimes to believe that free speech was one of the very earliest civil rights achieved en route to democracy and thus requires little defending today. On the contrary: it is a right which has to be fought for and regained time after time.

Second, it is sometimes tempting to believe that there may be crisis situations (or even, on some contemporary campuses, quite routine situations) in which it might be politic and prudent to limit or even suspend free speech. In fact, of course, it is precisely in such situations that we need free speech more than ever. As Conor’s example shows, the path of those brave enough to insist on exercising free speech may be not at all easy. But with the passage of time, it is that courage which is admired and commemorated, while with those who, under whatever banner, sought to curb and prevent free speech, the very best we can do is to try to find excuses for them.

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Above all, the collapse of Labour Scotland means that the party has to completely reorient itself if it is ever to achieve majority status again. Labour has only won a majority of English seats in 1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005 but that is exactly what it needs, routinely, to aim at from now on. Even its traditional predominance in Wales is no longer safe: a poll at the beginning of the campaign showed the Tories winning over half of all Welsh seats. In fact, Labour held on comfortably but there is no doubt that broader social forces (and the M4) are slowly incorporating much of Wales into Southern England, with predictable political results.

The proposed boundary changes, involving the loss of 50 parliamentary seats, would tighten all these screws. Wales would lose 11 of its 40 seats and Scotland six of its 59, while in England many small inner-city seats would be lost. All told, 35 of the 50 seats threatened with the axe are currently Labour held. Labour’s net loss would be around 30 seats and many safe Labour seats would become marginal as rural and suburban areas are added to urban seats.

So Labour’s problem starts with the fact that its current leadership is dominated by old-fashioned class warriors of the Corbyn-Seumas Milne variety, and yet it must move at speed to refashion itself as a broad social democratic alliance able to appeal to the lower 75 per cent of the English populace. This means embracing not just the barely managing but a large slice of middle-class England. This is by no means a wishful project: there is widespread resentment of growing inequalities and the capture of almost all the gains of economic growth by the top few per cent. Indeed, while Theresa May tried to make this the Brexit election, Labour’s surge was far more about the natural pressures caused by a lengthy period of Tory austerity and its effect on incomes and public services (the NHS, police, social care, tuition fees and schools). This made George Osborne’s gloating at May’s discomfort all the more tasteless, for Osborne was the man most responsible for that austerity.

Labour did launch itself towards capturing Middle England once before. That is what Tony Blair and New Labour was all about: hence those three consecutive elections (1997, 2001 and 2005) with a Labour majority in England. Yet Labour’s current leadership abhors Blair and has no wish to learn lessons from him. But that is, of course, exactly what it needs to do. The truth is that Labour has never really faced up to the task of working out where New Labour went right and where it went wrong: typically Blair is written off because of Iraq, and Brown because of the banking crisis.

Despite the current euphoria in Labour circles and the belief by the likes of Diane Abbott and John McDonnell that they have been “vindicated” and must “prepare for government”, such fantasies need to be batted away. One has to start from the fact that the old industrial working class is now a fraction of what it once was and that the class cleavage has been steadily weakening for 50 years. (A straw in the wind: the Sunday Times breakdown of the election result gave tables by gender, age, and other variables — but not by class.) The SNP’s ascent showed that this was true even in Scotland, where the Labour movement began; and even now the SNP has fallen back, the new cleavage revealed is not class but attitudes to the United Kingdom, with the Tories prospering as the main pro-Union party.

This was the reason why Blair wanted to shift Labour towards embracing “aspirational” values: accepting that most people wanted to own their own homes, upward social mobility and higher education for their children, and also accepting Tony Crosland’s point — made some 40 years before — that nationalisation was only a means to an end and by no means always the most effective. Secondly, Blair laid enormous emphasis on improving education, not only because many of Britain’s schools work poorly (why should one accept that South Korea or Singapore should be so much our superior in this regard?), but because we need a better and better educated populace to remain competitive in a knowledge-driven economy. These central aims met large and repeated public acceptance.

Where New Labour went wrong was that, dazzled by their own success, Blair and other New Labour leaders too much enjoyed their new acceptability to economic and international elites. They liked having rich friends, holidaying on their yachts and being popular with American opinion in a way that no previous Labour leaders had been. Meanwhile a long boom was mainly enriching the already rich while New Labour failed to redistribute economic gains to the majority.

In the end it all ended up very much as it did with the Clintons in America: Clinton and Blair had won power by making promises to poorer people in, say, Pittsburgh or Newcastle. On the completion of the whole experiment, the poor of those cities were as badly off as ever, while the Clintons and Blairs were multi-millionaires. It was as if they had merely surfed off the misfortunes of others and turned that into a way for becoming rich far beyond the dreams of any previous leaders of the Left. It is hardly surprising that this has produced anger and cynicism, although neither Blair nor Hillary seem to understand quite why they are so deeply unpopular.

Yet the fact is that ultimately, if it is to remain competitive, Labour will need to revisit Blair’s strategy, as well as learn from his mistakes. But nothing remotely as constructive as that is likely while Labour remains as badly split as at present. Indeed, the election has, if anything, set back Labour’s longer term hopes by entrenching in power a far-left team at the top of a parliamentary party which strongly disagrees with it. Worse still, the calibre of the Labour front bench is poorer than at any time since Labour became the official Opposition in the 1920s. The disastrous — and quite evident — failure of both Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry to master their briefs is eclipsed by, on the one hand, Abbott’s immediate and laughable attacks on the media for reporting her blunders, and by Thornberry’s almost theatrical impersonation of the Hectoring Labour Woman. Even Bessie Braddock was a lot more practical and focused than that. One only has to look back to the days of the Wilson front benches — Healey, Castle, Crosland, Jenkins, Crossman, Gordon-Walker, Lever, Soskice — to see what a huge falling-off there has been.

In 2017 none of this mattered much because Labour attracted support simply as the main alternative to an austerity Tory government that had already been in power for seven years. In effect Labour merely offered to end austerity with a lot more public spending and a promise of higher growth. The Shadow Chancellor making this offer, John McDonnell, is a man who has told one public meeting that he would have liked to assassinate Thatcher and who was foolish enough to read from Mao’s Little Red Book in a parliamentary debate. For now, nobody cared. But if Labour is to be taken seriously as an alternative government, then matter it does.

The Left, like the Right, will also have to face up to three demographic problems. The first is the growing number of old people, the higher dependency ratio and the consequent financial problems (considerably exacerbated by the effects of low interest rates on pension funds) which society as a whole must face. Theresa May was hounded for her own maladroit stab at this problem — the so-called dementia tax — but at least she was thinking, as a real government must, about this mounting problem.

Second, there is the simple fact that Britain is an overcrowded country. We already have one of the highest population densities in the world and the population continues to mount. At root this fact lies behind the issues of immigration, access to schools and hospitals, transport, the housing shortage (and thus exorbitant house prices) and even the endless difficulty over situating a third London airport. Reducing or at least stabilising our population should be a top priority.

Third, there is generational inequality, now at an extreme level due to house prices and the decision to load students with massive debts. To be sure, it is hard to see why the children of upper and middle class parents should be subsidised to gain an education likely to improve their earning power. But Britons should realise that simply to load students with debt is to follow a failed and dangerous American model. There student debt is now $1.4 trillion (more than double the total of all credit card debt). This figure frightens Wall Street, where it is understood that many ex-students will fail to repay that debt. The same is doubtless true here. Corbyn’s offer to abolish all tuition fees would add at least £11 billion to the annual education bill — a lot of it going to already privileged young people — when he was only offering the NHS an extra £3 billion. That is not the answer either. Across Europe the lesson of free universities is that they soon become shabby and down-at-heel, and fall in the academic rankings. There needs, in other words, to be some really serious thinking about this problem, not just crowd-pleasing promises.

Over and over again one keeps bumping into the intractable problem of high house prices. Cambridge University is currently developing subsidised housing on a large scale as the only way that it can hope to attract the young academics and researchers on which its future relies. If such schemes are in Cambridge’s corporate interest, why are they not, many times multiplied, also in our national interest?

These are the themes around which a modern Left could be organised. But will it be? At present the Labour leadership offers only a vague populism, brewed in the 1960s, if not long before. The party is divided and its leadership is, in the main, incompetent. The only ray of light derives from the large infusion of younger voters in 2017, including many of the best-educated among them. This at least creates the possibility of a much-needed transformation.

It should be remembered that after losing power in 1979 Labour went through a long series of nightmares: the years of Foot and Kinnock, of Derek Hatton, Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. These were locust years of false prophets and pied pipers, while all the time the real initiative lay solely with the Right. If Labour repeats that script, it will be out of power until 2028. This perspective needs to be kept firmly in mind now that Corbyn is being hailed as if he had won the election. In fact we are only in the early stages of the prolonged contortions that the Labour Party always goes through in the wake of losing power. There is much more to come. Essentially what happens after a Labour defeat is a prolonged convulsion which splits the party (Bevanism in the 1950s, Bennism in the 1980s) before it gradually comes back to the reality that only a moderate form of social democracy will make an effective Labour government both electable and workable. At the moment the Labour leadership is till playing with extra-parliamentary fantasies and the party is badly split, which is to say that we may still be some years (and many leadership changes) away from Labour’s re-emergence from its traumas, routine for each generation.

In assessing Corbyn’s achievement one must remember what sort of man he is. Having done very poorly at school and failed to complete any higher education, he seems to have imbibed at an early age the full agenda of the Guardian-reading London lefty: sympathy for a wide gamut of Third World causes, instinctive solidarity with all the enemies of bourgeois Britain (the IRA, Hamas, radical Islamists, etc), and a passionate opposition to Toryism. He has spent his life banging on about such causes to small audiences as a Labour activist and perennial rebel. With his beard, his vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, his failed marriages, his love of cycling and almost Dickensian passion for faraway causes of little relevance to the lives of those he represents, he is a type of idiosyncratic Englishman that Orwell liked to dwell upon, along with the figure of the middle-aged Catholic spinster cycling earnestly to church.

If one thinks about the sort of life that Corbyn lived for many years — ignored, even despised as a hopelessly eccentric and too-left backbencher, talking all the time of mass popular struggles elsewhere but doing so to tiny audiences in draughty halls, occasionally donning a scruffy duffle-coat to march with other CNDers on stirring but hopeless demonstrations — one realises that it has been a somewhat odd existence, led almost entirely among a small band of kindred spirits who keep up one another’s spirits by constant reaffirmations of how much they are against this, that or the other. For it is in the nature of such folk to be mainly against things and to be somewhat vague and wishful about what they are actually for.

Imagine then such a person suddenly and magically transformed into the Labour leader, faced with the need to rally the Labour vote in an election from an apparently hopeless starting point. The masterstroke — the decision to hold big meetings in safe Labour seats — happened quite by accident. The idea was at least to hang on to these bastions amidst a Tory landslide. In fact what it allowed was a series of TV images of Corbyn greeted by large, enthusiastic crowds, mixing genially with lots of ordinary people who sometimes chanted his name and always applauded him to the echo. For Corbyn it must have been an apotheosis. All his life he had spoken of the masses and wanted to be with them: now it had all come to pass. And not with guerrillas in Palestine, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or crowds of other bearded vegetarians on Easter marches, but with hordes of ordinary folk in England’s green and pleasant land.

This experience not only confirmed Corbyn, McDonnell and Milne in their belief that they had been right all along but, buoyed by the rapidly-improving polls, encouraged a sense of wild euphoria — hence such extraordinary phenomena as McDonnell’s call for a million-strong march on London in order to “force” another election which, it is assumed, Labour would win. This is pure Chavismo.

For Corbyn personally the experience hugely increased his self-confidence. Everything was coming right and, Pied Piper-like, he was leading his movement to triumph. This too helped him for he was so evidently cheerful and at ease, a man happy in his own skin, that this could not but impress interviewers and TV audiences — especially contrasted with Theresa May’s rigidly-controlled performances, in which she would keep a tight smile on her face even when being bludgeoned by harsh questioners. But here too, the effect was euphoria — hence, for example, Corbyn’s “revolutionary” demand to requisition nearby luxury flats in Kensington to house refugees from the appalling Grenfell Tower fire.

Corbyn may as well enjoy his moment of triumph, but the realities of his situation will soon press in on him again. As will be seen, the party needs to make a very cool and hard-headed appraisal both of its own past and its current situation. It then needs to remodel itself to win a majority in England, taking lessons from Blair where necessary. This may seem a tall order — and it is certainly beyond the likes of Corbyn, McDonnell and Milne. But the price of failure, despite the election result, will be to leave the political initiative securely in the hands of the Right.

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In addition, there are literally thousands of unfilled jobs in the administration. Of the 553 senior appointments that Trump needed to get through the Senate by the end of March he got only 21 through and he nominated only another 40. For the other 492 he hadn’t even made nominations. Even the White House — where Trump needs no Senate assent — is badly under-staffed. Part of the problem lies in the fact that Trump likes to micro-manage even junior appointments, with each nominee then being fought over by the contending White House factions. This is an unusual and dysfunctional process.

But these are not normal times. From the word go this administration has operated in an atmosphere of unprecedented polarisation. It was quite abnormal for the inauguration to trigger nationwide hostile demonstrations and, afterwards, for Democrat activists to organise a “resistance” movement to the new president. As many town hall meetings showed, there is a level of popular disquiet and partisan feeling never normally seen in what is usually the honeymoon period of a new presidency. The media have picked up on this excitement and every day has seen breathless reports about every new blunder by the administration.

The White House itself is gripped by this excitement and a sort of threat of violence at one remove. It is not abnormal for presidents to quarrel with the media, but from the very outset Trump and his advisers have said that the media are “the opposition”, that they ought to “shut up” and even that they were “the enemy of the people”. Trump himself denounces the media repeatedly, referring to all the mainstream newspapers and TV channels as “fake news”, “the lying media” and so on, and he has fulminated that various press practices (such as relying on anonymous sources) should “not be allowed”. We have even seen his spokesman Sean Spicer deliberately exclude the New York Times, CNN, the BBC and various other key outlets from a press conference. Trump also refused to attend the usual White House Correspondents’ Dinner — the first time in 36 years that a president has failed to attend.

This has had two results. First, it has facilitated the rise of all manner of right-wing news sources — not just Fox News but Breitbart, Newsmax, Dick Morris.com, Michael Reagan.com and a host of others, plus of course a whole gallery of right-wing radio commentators (“shock jocks”). This enables conservative Republicans to live within their own separate right-wing media universe, another powerful encouragement to polarisation. Second, this universe generates a violent antipathy against its opponents, and the mainline media in turn is gunning for Trump in a way it has for no other president since Nixon.

In many countries war talk of this kind would be the prelude to an actual crackdown on the media. And there seems little doubt that the Trump administration would like to punish the critical media in any way it can. White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Conservative Political Action Committe (CPAC) that “It’s going to get worse [for President Trump] as he continues to press his agenda.” Inveighing against liberals and the media, Bannon warned, “As things get better, they’re going to fight. If you think they’re going to give the country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.” This is dangerous talk: Trump loyalists are being steeled for nothing less than a fight to “get their country back” — at the same time that many Democrats are talking of “resistance”.

A key moment seems to have been the blog post by Dick Morris (a former top Bill Clinton aide and now a major Trump supporter) on March 2 where he argued that the media and the Democrats were aiming at “a coup d’etat” against Trump. This, he suggested, would proceed via leaks from intelligence and other sources inculpating first General Flynn, then Attorney-General Jeff Sessions and then others, with the aim of setting up a special prosecutor to inquire not only into contacts with the Russians but into anything else required in order to drive Trump from office. Morris, in his widely-read blog, specifically suggested that wiretaps and other surveillance would be used to this end.

The right-wing media feeds off itself all the time, so any wild rumour is quickly circulated and soon quoted as fact — “because I saw it on the net/Fox/Breitbart”.  Morris’s “coup d’etat” talk was soon recycled (by Steve Bannon, notably) into talk of a “deep state” and Obama administration holdovers who were actively intriguing against Trump. This in turn rapidly led to suggestions that Obama himself was organising a campaign to destabilise and destroy the Trump administration. No evidence was provided and Obama was actually holidaying thousands of miles away. But by now such rumours had a life of their own and quickly metastasised into the suggestion (initially by a right-wing radio host, Mark Levin) that Trump had been bugged by the CIA or FBI. Although Levin was just speculating aloud — he had no evidence — this was immediately picked up by other right-wing news sources, and in no time Trump himself was parroting the story. Despite the flat denials of the intelligence community, Trump, with hideous unwisdom, asked for a Congressional inquiry into the story.

Two figures feature with particular prominence in this peculiar nether world: the right-wing radio host Michael Savage — who is credited with having developed the Trump programme in the first place — and the author David Horowitz. Savage — the author of such epics as Stop the Coming Civil War and Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country after Obama — was banned from entering the UK for his perceived Islamophobia by Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in 2009, a ban that was confirmed by the incoming Conservative-led government in 2010. His latest book is Trump’s War: His Battle for America. Horowitz, once a man of the New Left, is now treated as the major prophet of the Trump revolution and his book, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, is pushed as a virtual revelation of the future. Horowitz forecast that the Democrats would try to subvert a Trump administration and is now loud in his declarations that this is happening:

Under the guise of “resistance” — as though Trump was the head of an occupying army rather than an elected president — they have set out to destroy his administration. They are not “sore losers” as many had surmised when their hysterical attacks on Trump as an American Hitler began. They are an army of saboteurs bent on destroying the government the voters preferred. Their general, Barack Obama, is an unrepentant radical who abused the office of the presidency when he was in power, and as ex-president is now leading a war to overthrow his successor.

Horowitz’s book is advertised, moreover, with the claim that “It’s time to beat the Democrats once and for all”. This sort of talk — of destroying the opposition party, perhaps even installing one-party rule — is quite new in American politics. Obama’s gentlemanly help for Trump during the transition is forgotten. Indeed, Horowitz leads off with the headline “Trump in TOTAL WAR with Media, Democrats” and tells us (April 3) that “The war against President Donald J. Trump is burning white hot” and “The saboteurs have managed to drive our president’s approval numbers down to 35 per cent”. Hillary is described as “the wicked witch” and there are occasional “revelations’ of how she intended to cheat her way to power.

As one might expect, there is a great deal more war talk in Big Agenda, although the book looks as if might easily have been written in a week and certainly not more than two. Its 162 pages of text are about everything: the “progressive” movement, Obama, the environment, the “myth of systemic racism”, the Islamic threat, the Democrats’ “wars on men and women”, leftist indoctrination in schools and universities, the evils of public-sector unions, healthcare, sanctuary cities and much more besides. Relentlessly pushed by the right-wing media, the book has been a number one bestseller both on Amazon and the New York Times list. As you read it you feel, yes, there is plenty to criticise about politically correct liberal America, but does the critique have to be so trashy?

It’s a good question, for everything about Trump is trashy. To go from Obama’s rhetoric to his is to fall off a cliff: even his favourite insults (“crooked Hillary”) have no wit or even alliteration. Let’s leave aside the woman-grabbing, the endless schoolboy fascination with beauty contests and his campaign lapses into misogyny: when he was asked whether he’d still love his wife if an accident deprived her of her looks he replied that it would depend on what happened to her breasts. This is real trailer-trash stuff. During his campaign for the GOP nomination I asked someone who knew him well who Trump was relying on as policy advisers. Nobody at all, he told me: in the phrase the French used to use in the days of Giscard d’Estaing, he “consulted his own genius”. 

The worrying part of this is not just that Trump is clearly very ignorant (it was a revelation to him that healthcare was an extremely complicated field) but that he didn’t know that he didn’t know and nor did he understand the need for expert advice. Trump makes no secret out of the fact that he doesn’t read books (“much too busy — and since I became president, even more so”.) Indeed, his attention span is too short even for long articles, let alone for complicated pieces of legislation. This was a major complaint of Republican Congressmen whom he lobbied to pass his healthcare legislation. When asked why the bill was so important he would simply say that his administration needed “a big quick win”. When they wanted to discuss particular provisions of the bill he quickly retreated to saying they needed “to look at the big picture”. They quickly realised that he hadn’t even read the bill and knew nothing of its details.

The president’s happy toleration of — indeed, liking for — trash has political consequences. Although he has privileged access to authoritative daily intelligence briefings, he prefers, nonetheless, to rely on Breitbart, Newsmax, Fox and the Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh radio shows. The problem is not just that this suggests a determined triviality of mind. The Obama White House had its lowbrow side too: many people, including Michelle Obama, found the frequent presence there of Oprah Winfrey something of a trial. The point is that the president believes and happily recycles the fake news from the right-wing media, such as his allegation that Obama had been wiretapping him. And it is precisely in these right-wing media outlets that the war talk reaches a crescendo.

It is worth stressing this point. By contrast, most of the war talk by the Democrats — the “resistance”,  Californian secession and sanctuary cities — has been defensive and even that has mainly been venting. The early talk of impeaching Trump cheers up Democratic activists but is wholly unrealistic. Similarly, some anti-Trump activists obsess that the Trump forces are bent on a coup d’etat and produce alarming scenarios in which a major terrorist strike leads Trump to lay the blame on the judges (for blocking the immigrant bans), suspend habeas corpus, reinstate torture, create a Muslim register, introduce new restrictions on immigration and take arbitrary powers. None of that is impossible but it belongs purely in the realm of imagination. Even so, most such talk is badly misjudged. American voters will not take kindly to the idea of a Resistance to a duly-elected president, and polls show 80 per cent majorities believing that city officials should co-operate with the federal authorities and not defy them. What is required is dull, slogging work to help swing the key target bloc — socially conservative, white working-class voters — back towards the Democrats.

That said, there is nonetheless no doubting the antipathy of Democrat voters towards Trump. Democratic senators fought every inch of the way against Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court even though his record was blameless and his judgments have almost never been overruled — because such was the hostility of the party’s base to Trump and all his works that voting for any of his nominees was seen as a sort of treason.

The result is an atmosphere quite different from anything normal. Usually, if one has a new president in power already enjoying excellent jobs numbers and a heady stock market boom, one would expect a honeymoon atmosphere and sky-high presidential approval ratings. Instead, the atmosphere is surly, even angry, and Trump’s approval ratings have fallen from the 43-46 per cent range to a spread between 35 and 40 per cent. On the one hand this is very low; on the other hand he has kept most of the Republican bloc. This is what matters to most Republican congressmen, whose first worry has to be that any resistance to Trump’s agenda could bring them a primary challenger from the Right.

But it is extraordinary and unprecedented that Trump enjoys none of the give-him-a-chance tolerance from the centre ground that an American president can usually rely upon. Ordinarily American political culture prompts an initial respect, even reverence, for the president — he is the head of state, after all, not just the head of government — and many Americans feel that after any election they lost they should reach out towards their fellow Americans who have voted differently. Now, all this is absent and the damage to the legitimacy of the institutions could be long-lasting. Hence the ever deeper polarisation of American politics. This is not just a matter of partisan attachment. For a generation and more the Democrats have been consolidating in the large cities and megacities while the Republicans have been winning more and more of the rural areas and small towns. Thus, more and more people live in politically segregated communities. Moreover, especially in the South, the Republicans have gleefully embraced polarisation, using their majorities to gerrymander congressional seats so that (say) ten marginal seats become three Democrat and seven Republican safe seats. The way to do that is to group all black voters into a few districts. This in turn guarantees that the Democratic party in the South is represented mainly by blacks and is thus viewed by most whites as “the black party”. The result, at the end of the day, is a strong pro-GOP bias and little chance that a swing can make much difference. Instead, black and white congressmen appeal to their own racially segregated constituencies against one another and polarisation grows. Previous American presidents have lamented this polarisation and many have appointed at least one cabinet member from the opposite party. Trump has scorned that. His thumping defeat over healthcare seems to have given him some second thoughts, but it is a bit late for that.

The danger now is that the administration could be facing a series of legislative defeats. Trump has naively embraced the cause of tax reform without realising what a minefield it is: every clause of the tax code has its own special interest group and lobbying will be intense. Above all, Trump risks being undone by the same contradictions which killed his healthcare bill: a reactionary congressional majority and a cabinet full of billionaires, all wanting regressive tax changes at the expense of the poor in general, including just the sort of working-class voters who swung the midwest to Trump. The result could well be the sort of awkward compromise which could again produce revolts both by GOP moderates and the Tea Party Right. If this should happen, the frustration and anger of the right-wing media will know no bounds and the war talk will escalate.

As one surveys this dismal scene one is reminded of two separate before-the-deluge scenes. Some of the excited CEOs corralled by Trump (as a businessman, Trump believes in CEOs, not economists) have talked of this being “the most pro-business administration since the Founding Fathers”. More accurately, we are back in 1928, the era of Hoover, Jay Gatsby and the stock market boom — that is to say, in a pre-New Deal world, an era marked by savage xenophobia and the suspension of civil liberties to deal with “extremists”. But even Coolidge, Harding and Hoover never dared to present a cabinet made up almost exclusively of billionaires and generals.

The other era of which we should be mindful is the 1850s with its growing polarisation, its vilification of individuals (the abolitionist Sumner being physically beaten up in the Senate) and the increasing talk of war and secession. Over and over again men of goodwill sought to halt this slide into civil war, but we know how that ended. In the last decade I have sometimes heard the liberal Democrats who tend to be my ex-students and friends say that perhaps the South should have been allowed to secede, for then the country would have been rid of its most reactionary elements who have held it back on every issue — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, gun control, and so on. I had never hitherto expected to hear Americans — of any political hue — suggest that the Civil War had been a mistake and the break-up of the union should have been allowed.

If one relied on the right-wing websites and the talk of Democratic Resistance activists, one would indeed conclude that the country was slipping again towards internecine conflict. But in the 1850s the nation was torn by the single great issue of slavery and its extension into the Western territories. Compromises were attempted but they soon fell apart: one way or another that issue had to be settled. There is nothing like that now.

What is predictable, however, is that the increasing inequalities in American life that lie at the heart of the populist Trump rebellion are only going to be exacerbated by Trump. This is not just do do with the usual reasons why a Republican administration allows inequalities to increase: it is more dramatic than that. Just look at the speed with which Trump happily cancelled his campaign promises to protect Medicaid, boost spending for opioid abuse treatment and ensure that everyone has health insurance cover. After less than a month in office he announced “100 per cent support” for a health bill providing for sweeping cuts in Medicaid and for health coverage being reduced by 24 million people over the next decade. These cuts would have enabled tax reductions of $165,090 a year for families earning $3.75 million a year, but no tax cut at all for those earning $208,500 a year or less. In other words, Trump was happily backing a huge transfer of wealth away from those deprived of coverage (the poor) towards the wealthiest 0.1 per cent.

The stock market boom has been predicated on the assumption that Trump will turn out much like Reagan, who came to power saying he wanted to cut the debt and balance the budget, but also promising tax cuts and increases in defence spending. In practice, this meant that under him the debt could only grow. The director of the Office of Management and the Budget, David Stockman, had the difficult job of drawing up a balanced budget every year. To do this he was asked to make absurdly high assumptions about economic growth and thus the level of tax receipts in each upcoming year. Stockman knew this was pure fantasy but had no option but to comply. His conclusion was that “in Washington at budget time you realise afresh every year that the most popular girl in town is Rosie Scenario”. The overall result was a huge Keynesian boom. Reagan increased the national debt by 186 per cent in eight years but nobody really minded because the result was a long economic boom, a soaring stock market and a general feelgood factor.

The assumption is that under Trump it will be much the same: sweeping tax cuts, hugely higher expenditure on defence, homeland security and veterans, tax cuts for the rich, and a huge public works programme for the decaying infrastructure. Ryan feels the same need to present balanced budgets but the market is already betting on a debt-led boom. There is, though, a major problem with that. Under George W. Bush the debt increased by 101 per cent in eight years. Under Obama the debt rose by another 68 per cent in his eight years. But the key difference is that thanks to the magical workings of compound interest, whereas Reagan inherited a debt of $998 billion, Trump inherits a debt of $19.574 trillion. That figure is enough, quite reasonably, to scare not only Paul Ryan but many others and it sharply limits the possibilities of another debt-led boom. If these realities puncture the Wall Street boom there will be anger and burnt fingers in many quarters.

It is difficult to see how America’s current trajectory can end well. The generation-long process of political polarisation has been deeply damaging but it seems only likely to continue. It has become almost a conventional truism to say that the US political system is “broken”. Indeed it is. Trump himself is a sign of that. America has always had a good supply of crude, ignorant rednecks but they seldom got higher than governor (George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus). Now we have one as president. Whatever isn’t already broken, he will surely break.  But there seems no appetite for another constitutional convention to sort things out. The only alternative is continued polarisation until that produces a crisis that nobody can ignore.

The post Donald Trump And The Dividing Of America appeared first on Standpoint.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.

As the local elections approached, propaganda from the ANC and the South African Communist Party (the parties are allies and all but indistinguishable) became increasingly frenzied. Opinion polls showing the ANC behind were denounced as having “a regime change agenda” and the SACP demanded that their publication be stopped. There were furious demands to “defend the capital”, and posters went up widely enjoining us all to “defend the revolution”. Zuma, for his part, threatened his audiences that if the opposition won cities like Port Elizabeth “the ancestors will never forgive you”. This led to considerable doubts as to whether the ANC would actually accept an adverse result. In Port Elizabeth the (theoretically) Independent Electoral Commission displayed great reluctance to declare an opposition victory but in the end the verdict of the polls was respected.

However, this was quickly followed by the ANC threatening to make the cities they had lost “ungovernable” and by initial council meetings where the ANC caucus tried to prevent the new administration from being sworn in. In Pretoria this was followed by a series of ANC-led illegal land invasions in which squatters grabbed public land and put up shacks, forcing the municipality to evict them and thus incur the ignominy of being portrayed as apartheid lookalikes. But this is all part of the rather muscular style of South African politics. The really important thing is that the ANC seems habituated to the rules of electoral democracy and this gives one some — not complete, but some — confidence that it may one day accept the loss of national power in good part.

The second issue — the possible downrating of South Africa to junk bond status — is still moot though most market sentiment is that it will happen, causing a stockmarket and currency downgrade of some severity. The result will, of course, be higher interest rates on all forms of government debt, increasingly tight constraints on government spending and, ultimately, an increased possibility that the country will be forced towards an IMF bail-out. All this is some way off and the ANC still lives in a dreamworld where the Brics banks will lend them lots of money at no interest and without conditions. Reality is likely to be a lot less comfortable and the crunch will be felt first in South Africa’s host of loss-making state-owned industries. South African Airways, for example, is run by one of Zuma’s girlfriends, Dudu Myeni, who is therefore unsackable despite her complete lack of business or aviation experience and the huge losses SAA has incurred under her care. It is doubtful if any commercial airline would employ Ms Myeni even as a receptionist.

The conflict between Zuma and Gordhan is a conflict between what is known in South Africa as “tenderpreneurs” (those who have become rich on the back of favoured access to government contracts) and the Treasury, which is attempting to conduct economic policy on rational grounds rather than favouring this or that tenderpreneur. Zuma and his extended family are deeply indebted to the immigrant Gupta family, who accordingly tend to get the lion’s share of contracts. Indeed, if managers in state corporations do not give tenders to the Guptas they will get threatened, bullied and, if necessary, sacked. Other ANC politicians report that the Guptas have promised them cabinet jobs, that the family knows cabinet decisions before ministers do and that they can get any minister fired. This has led to an increasing row over “state capture” in which even the SACP has roused itself to protest.

Zuma is universally regarded as a venal, bought man. What is remarkable is that the Guptas have behaved so provocatively and thus far got away with it. There is no doubt that African nationalists of all shades would like to treat them in the same way that Idi Amin treated his Asians. The Guptas have announced that they are selling all their South African assets and getting out, but currently they are only one step ahead of the lynch mob and they had better be quick. Zuma, for his part, seems to have decided that if he can no longer depend on Gupta favours, he had better do a sunset deal with Putin. But no one believes the South African Treasury can afford one trillion rand for new nuclear power stations. If Gordhan will not sign off on this, it will be the compelling reason for Zuma to sack him and appoint a more pliant finance minister.

Finally, who will succeed Zuma? His clients — the premiers of KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Free State and the North West; the so-called “Premier League” — cannot imagine anything nicer than being allowed to fill their pockets for another five years, so they would like him to stay on. But the constitution forbids that and anyway, Zuma was only able to depose Thabo Mbeki because he was attempting a similar manoeuvre. So for Zuma the next best thing would be for his ex-wife Nkosazana, now head of the African Union, to take on the presidency. She would make sure Zuma did not go to jail on the nearly 800 counts against him; she is tough, authoritarian, very left-wing and otherwise suitable, though she is 70 and no one much likes her.

The greatest barrier to a Dlamini- Zuma presidency is that it is universally seen as a continuation of Zuma by other means. Until now it has had the air of inevitability because the Premier League and other beneficiaries of the Zuma patronage network could not imagine a better way to allow them to keep plundering their satrapies. But the local elections have given the party pause for thought. No one doubts that Zuma’s leadership and all the scandals associated with it cost the ANC votes. As a result thousands of councillors and placemen in the cities will now have lost their jobs. Already the DA is bringing charges of corruption against some of the old regime and more of this will doubtless follow. That is to say, until now Zuma has ruled through the plentiful patronage he provided, but now it is Zuma and what he stands for that will have cost the ANC a vast loss of patronage. This could well change the equation. If the Premier League and the other patronage bosses under Zuma sense that there is a better way to keep their power and spoils, they will bolt towards it. And if all that Dlamini-Zuma promises is another five year years of Zumaism, that may be enough to sink her.

The popular alternative to Zuma is Cyril Ramaphosa, his deputy president. But Ramaphosa comes from the minority Venda tribe and has little grass-roots support. A far more substantial figure is the party treasurer, Dr Zweli Mkhize, formerly premier of the Zulu heartland KwaZulu-Natal. He and Ramaphosa appear to have made an informal alliance but if they are to challenge Dlamini- Zuma they will at some point have to come into the open and confront Zuma directly. Understandably, they are showing a great deal of discretion, not to say hesitation, about doing this. But the biggest effect of the local elections is that Zuma’s power to control the succession may have been much diminished.

Finally, the elections have left the ANC more reliant than ever on the Zulu bloc vote. Only in KwaZulu-Natal did the ANC vote hold up — in Msundizi (Pietermaritzburg) its vote even went up. And of the six big metros only eThekwini (Durban) remains a secure ANC stronghold. In effect the country has been ruled from Durban for some years now and eThekwini’s 41.6 billion rand (£2 billion) per year budget is now more than ever the ANC’s greatest honeypot. But Gauteng — which includes Pretoria and Johannesburg — is the country’s economic hub and now that the DA has won power there a new dynamic will ensue.

Hanging over all this is the virtual dissolution of the ANC leadership and its descent into squabbling factionalism. The party’s heroic period is well and truly over. The myths and slogans of the liberation struggle are less and less able to hold the party together. Everyone is familiar with the life cycle of African nationalist parties. They enjoy mushrooming growth amid the euphoria of the successful anti-colonial struggle. In office they quickly become corrupt and their incompetence becomes increasingly visible. The party begins to atrophy and depends more and more on its control of patronage and the media. Electorally, it falls back into reliance on the chiefs in the countryside as urban dwellers become increasingly oppositional. Then if (as has so often occurred) a coup takes place the soldiers are welcomed by cheering crowds in the streets and the ruling party simply evaporates like a bad dream. Its life cycle is thus often quite short. 

It is clear that the ANC is well along this cycle. It is losing in the cities, is ever more reliant on the chiefs, indeed on the Bantustans, and it is irredeemably corrupt. The leftish Mail & Guardian talks hopefully of the next ANC generation taking over and instances the young ministers Fikile Mbalula and Malusi Gigaba. Yet Mbalula is merely a figure of fun,  and Gigaba is the man who ordered a halt to all maintenance by the Eskom electricity utility during the World Cup (causing terrible power cuts thereafter) and then brought in the visa restrictions which crippled the tourist industry. If they are the ANC’s best young Turks, the party is in terrible trouble.

There will be no coup in South Africa: the civic culture is too strong and the army, like most other state institutions, exists only in shreds and patches. Under apartheid it was ranked the world’s 10th strongest, just ahead of Israel. Now it probably doesn’t make the top 100.

But the notion of the ANC as a party able to hold the country together is just about gone. We have reached a point where simple continuity from what has gone before is no longer possible.

The post The Dying Days Of Zuma’s South Africa appeared first on Standpoint.

The fact that well over a million asylum-seekers entered Europe last year, with even more poised to follow this year, has given Europeans an idea of the size of potential immigrant inflows that the continent now faces. But thus far most of the migrants have come from the Middle East and central Asia. Europe’s much bigger problem lies in the far greater numbers of Africans who are likely to attempt the same journey: David Cameron has given cognisance to this danger in his recent statement about a fresh wave of migrants seeking to enter Europe from Libya.

Already, of course, large numbers of North Africans, Eritreans and Somalis have been mixed among the Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan tide flowing through Turkey. This, however, is but a foretaste. The overwhelming majority of these Africans on the move are economic migrants, and the spread of modern media, bringing with it images of the immensely higher standard of living available in Europe, is propelling ever larger numbers into motion.

This is partly just a matter of size. Africa — whose size is artificially minimised on maps by the Mercator projection — is so huge that one could fit Eastern and Western Europe, China, Japan, India, New Zealand and the USA into its enormous land mass. But it is also because, at a time when population growth has slowed or gone negative in most of the developed world, Africa is still experiencing a demographic explosion.

Historically, disease kept Africa’s population low and life expectancy down to 25 or less. The huge mortality rate meant that in the interests of societal survival girls had to have children at puberty and as many as possible thereafter. The economic historian Patrick Manning estimates that there were 99.9 million Africans in 1790 and only 96.9 million in 1900. But the coming of Western medicine had a dramatic effect: Africa’s population is now more than 1 billion. Moreover, between 1961 and 2011 life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 40.5 years to 54.7. One result is more older men having children with younger wives — South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma is a perfect example: he has more than 20 children with multiple women and is still taking new wives in his seventies.

When the world’s population passed 7 billion on March 12, 2012 (according to the US Census Bureau) Africans made up 14.3 per cent of the total, but by 2040, when the world’s population will have reached 8.1 billion, Africans will make up 1.87 billion (23.1 per cent) of the total. The drama lies in the 870 million more Africans the continent will add by then.

African family size is shrinking everywhere but from such high levels that even the reducing figure produces explosive growth. Thus the Africa Survey 2015-16 produced by Good Governance Africa shows that between 1975 and 2013 the fertility rate — live births per woman — had fallen from 7.1 to 5.9 in Uganda; from 6.7 to 6.0 in Nigeria; from 6.8 to 5.2 in Tanzania; from 6.4 to 5.9 in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and from 7.8 to 4.4 in Kenya. As can be seen, when women on average have four or five children, a population doubles in a generation or less. Only in Algeria and South Africa — the two African countries which had the largest white settlements — has family size reduced to close to replacement level. But South Africa’s population is growing quite quickly because it too is a magnet for African migrants — a fact which has triggered repeated and bloody xenophobic riots.

By 2040 the results will be dramatic. The higher birth rate in East Africa and Nigeria will see these countries loom much larger on the continent. Thus whereas in 2010 South Africa’s population was a third of the size of Nigeria’s, by 2040 it will only be one sixth. One result will be the rise of mega-cities with more than 20 million people each — Lagos, Kinshasa and Cairo, with Khartoum and Luanda both around 10 million. Most of these cities will be made up of shacks. Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that by then Africa will have more than 1.1 billion people of working age, the single biggest group in the world’s working-age population. This group of workers will not only be far bigger than India’s or China’s, but three times the size of Europe’s working-age population, and five times the size of North America’s.

The big question is whether Africa’s already fragile states can cope with this huge population bulge. Can they provide the schools, the hospitals and, above all, the necessary jobs? More basic still is food. According to the World Soil Resources Report produced by the Food and Agricultural Organization, more than 60 per cent of the world’s potential arable land which remains to be brought into productive use lies in Africa. For it to feed all these extra people it will need to be turned over to commercial farming instead of today’s subsistence.

That is highly problematic. The only two African countries where commercial farms produced a healthy food surplus were, until recently, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe’s commercial farms and South Africa has been taking much farmland out of commercial use and turning it over to subsistence. If Africa is not to face continual famines, such policies need to be reversed everywhere. Such a change is bound to meet strong social and political resistance.

According to the UN’s Department of Social and Economic Affairs Population Division, the world’s total population is expected to peak around 2100 at 11 billion, so the world as a whole will need a lot more food by then. Today Africa’s famines are provisioned with surplus food from elsewhere but that surplus may not exist then. It is little comfort to know that the UN expects the world’s population then to shrink rapidly so that by 2150 the world will have only half the number of people that it does now. What matters is getting through the huge bulge before that.

The greatest challenge will lie in unemployment — already high throughout Africa. Most of Africa’s recent growth has come through the exploitation of natural resources. Not only is there no intensive agriculture but there is also very little manufacturing industry anywhere on the continent. As things stand the hundreds of millions of new would-be workers will face a desperate future. Not only is this likely to produce a huge migratory movement to greener pastures but it is also likely to create civil disorder. The German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn argues that most wars and genocides have been generated by a youth bulge in which there are simply too many young men with too much testosterone and no real place for them.  It is, he says, “the problem of the third and fourth sons”. This challenge could easily overwhelm Africa’s fragile states and create chaotic or violent scenarios in which emigration will seem the only alternative.

The result will be a challenge that Europe will not wish to meet. It is simply impractical to imagine that scores or even hundreds of millions of young Africans can be decanted into Europe. Partly this is for cultural reasons: most of the would-be migrants will be unskilled, out of place in Europe’s increasingly high-tech societies, and many of them will be Muslims. However politically incorrect it may be to say so, there is no doubting the European resistance to “Islamisation”. But most of all it is just a question of numbers. Even last year’s inflow has left many Europeans protesting that they cannot accept so many newcomers. Yet despite the fuss made over the present migrant flow, it is merely a trickle compared to the coming tsunami.

What this means is that the present debates about how to maintain Europe’s (relatively) open borders really belong to the past. There is simply no doubt that we are looking at a “Fortress Europe” future of high fences, walls and stringent admission controls. And, as can already be seen from David Cameron’s response to the inflow from Libya, it is likely to imply a scenario in which migrant boats are simply turned back, in the same way that Australia prevents illegal (Muslim) immigration from Indonesia. Meanwhile, because Muslim family size is consistently higher than among other groups, we are looking at a world in which 30 per cent of the entire population will soon be Muslims, concentrated among the planet’s poorer populations. One can descry a possible future in which large numbers of these poorer Muslims will beat against the closed gates allowing entry to the richer and predominantly non-Muslim developed world. The result could be a true “clash of civilisations”. The pressures exerted by demographic growth and the increasing availability of information and pictures of the much higher living standards in the developed world (where populations are not increasing) will unleash a huge migratory potential. And nowhere will that potential be greater than in Africa.

If such a scenario is to be avoided African countries need to experience rapid economic growth and markedly better governance. Bad governance is clearly the limiting factor. In well- governed states like Botswana and Mauritius living standards are rising rapidly and wealth is reasonably spread. In the poorly governed states — the vast majority — growth is weaker and all the benefits go to a tiny elite. It is thus purely a matter of self-interest, and not just philanthropy, that Europe should do all it can to foster higher growth and better governance in Africa.

If nothing is done the worst-case scenario is that one African state after another will collapse under the weight of demographic pressures, mass unemployment, climate change and civil strife, creating a human tragedy on an enormous scale. Even under the best-case scenario, the migratory wave towards Europe is likely to dwarf anything seen from the Middle East. African and Arab nationalism have failed to produce a better life for their supporters, but in an increasingly globalised world people can easily see the better life available elsewhere and are far more likely to move in order to get it. For most of recorded history Europe was able to regard what happened in Africa with some detachment. That detachment, already under strain, will soon vanish altogether.

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