The political year we face into next Tuesday is a year of particular significance, full of elections that could well shape the world in which we live over the coming years. I will leave aside the legislative election in Russia, that is not an election that any of us would recognise as a free and fair election. I think it can be said with certainty that the party that supports Putin will win. The votes are already in the boxes.

November will see Americans go to the polls in the mid-terms. Polling suggests that the Democrats will win the House of Representatives, and there is a chance they could also take the Senate. It is always best to be cautious about these matters. But if some political power in Washington is wrested from the Republicans, it will make the last two years of Trump’s presidency a testing time.

Normally, a “lame duck” president just limps along. But Trump will be no ordinary “lame duck”. More a deranged bull on a rampage. He may well decide to see what he can bring crashing down with him. And, of course, what will really be in play is the 2028 presidential election as potential contenders manoeuvre for position. We shall know soon enough how things might play out.

As readers of these Scribblings know, I live in France, and I take a keen interest in French politics. We are already well into the French presidential election season, with voting in April and May 2027. The past week saw presidential hopefuls pitch to the annual assembly organised by MEDEF, the main French employers’ association.

Like much of the rest of Europe, the French are in denial about many things.

In the aftermath of WWII, the countries of Europe, with considerable American help through the Marshall Plan, rebuilt the continent and put in place strong welfare states. The creation of what was to become the European Union helped significantly through the forging of a customs union and an internal single market. Continuing American investment in Europe was also of great importance. Where would Ireland be today without US FDI?

But the good days are coming to an end, even if we are loath to admit it. We all have to learn how to live in a new, harsher world environment.

To stay with France. French national debt runs to about €3.5 trillion. The debt-to-GDP ratio is some 117%, while the annual budget deficit is in excess of 5%. This is not a sustainable long-term position. To correct this requires difficult political and economic decisions. But if you make these decisions, you are not going to get elected or re-elected. Who wants to vote for someone who says they are going to make you worse off?

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader who is currently the presidential front-runner, wants to bring the pension age back down to 60. At the same time, she promises to cut government spending by €125bn by cracking down on immigration and withholding payments to the EU. Economic smoke and mirrors.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le Pen’s mirror image on the far-left, wants a bonfire of the French national debt. Just wish it away. Abracadabra economics. As if the bond markets are going to stand idly by as debts get burned.

In Germany, the far-right AfD grows in strength with its anti-immigration politics of populism and ethno-nationalism. The appeal of such politics is not surprising as German industrial workers despair at losing their jobs in the face of fierce Chinese competition. VW is talking of cutting 100,000 positions and closing plants. At the same time, the sons and daughters of these VW workers who may soon be out of a job are buying cheap clothes from Shein and other ultra-low-cost global outlets based in China.

Globalisation brings benefits. But also costs. And neither the benefits nor the costs are equally distributed. So we get the politics of populism, which proffer simple solutions.

Europeans are also in denial about demographics. Our societies are ageing and declining. Our social welfare safety nets, along with advances in medical technology and developments in nutritional science, allow us all to live longer. But living longer costs money, and this money has to be found somewhere or other. Part of the answer is for us all to work longer, but who is going to vote for that? As I said above, Le Pen wants to reduce the French retirement age to 60.

Many of our European welfare systems are based on what might be termed “money-out, money-in”. We pay pensions out to older people from the money that young people are paying in. A generational contract. Fair enough, when young and old were in balance. But that is no longer the case. Not only are we an increasingly ageing society, but there are and will be fewer and fewer young people.

The “replacement rate”, the number of children per family to keep the population stable, is something like 2.1 children per family. Across Europe, the rate today from country to country is 1.3 to 1.5. Such a population decline has enormous societal implications. For a start, schools will soon run out of pupils, and then universities. Jobs will go unfilled. Who is going to staff hospitals and care homes? AI and robotics may replace industrial jobs, but there are some things robots cannot do and will never be able to do despite the fever dreams of some in Silicon Valley.

The obvious answer to a shortage of people is immigration, but there are two issues with immigration.

First, in the receiving countries, immigration increasingly runs into a wall of ethno-nationalism, often white, Christian, ethno-nationalism. People want to go back to the homogeneous countries they believe they once were. All the more so, when the immigrants come from ethnic and religious cultures that are not white, Christian cultures. Even if the immigrants are white Christians, that may not help matters. Were not all those Polish people who came to the UK after Poland became an EU member white Christians? But populists, whether of the right or the left, know that playing on fear of the “others” can be the road to power.

As I have written before, the policies of Marine Le Pen are little different from those of Maurice Thorez, the post-war leader of the French Communist Party: “French jobs for French people”. There is a deep seam of the same working-class protectionism to be found in the British Labour Party. The working classes across Europe have always been socially conservative and economically protectionist.

The second problem with immigration is, for me, a moral one. Are we rich Europeans entitled to strip other countries of their best and brightest and leave those countries in destitution and poverty? This is not an easy question to answer, especially for a person coming from Ireland, where emigration was endemic from the time of the Great Famine in the 1840s. Unlike today, when someone like me, through the European Union, can freely choose to live in France, emigration from Ireland was forced by economic necessity. As the playwright John B. Keane put it:

Many young men of twenty said goodbye
...
My boy Jimmy went that day
On the big ship, sailed away
Sailed away and left me here to die
Many young men of twenty said goodbye

But I digress; but then these Scribblings are meant to be meanderings, not academic articles and different from the more structured labour relations writing I do during the week.

There will be plenty of other elections in Europe during the coming year. In Italy, Greece, Spain, Sweden, and in some smaller countries as well. The dark shadow of the far right lurks with snake oil offers and the promise of cost-free, easy answers. Brexit demonstrates where snake oil and cost-free easy answers get you.

The results of these elections will shape the future Europe in which we live. There are difficult decisions to be made. The world does not owe us a living; indeed many countries think Europe should pay them back for its bad behaviour over previous centuries. As the German car industry attests, the Chinese are already eating Europe’s lunch.

But we like what we have and what we have we want to hold. Who doesn’t? Even if we can no longer really afford it. Let someone else take the hit.

So, plenty to scribble about during the coming year.

The world in which we live is very much a social construct and social constructs are very much open to contestation.

I think there is a fair degree of consensus that we are living through a period of climate change. Of course, there are those who deny this, but it is difficult to argue with the forest fires in the west of France, or those in Spain near Madrid. In the north of France where I live, we have not had rain for weeks. You can see the dryness of the land all around you. Where once it would have been green, now it is brown. We are unsure when the rain will come again.

Winding down the use of fossil fuels is one of the things we need to do to help bring our climate back into balance. But not everyone agrees with this, especially if your job is dependent on fossil fuels or if you happen to be a trade union that represents workers in the fossil fuels sector.

Unions in the UK that represent North Sea workers want the government of Andy Burnham to sign off on new oil and gas fields, thereby creating and preserving good-paying jobs. That is what trade unions are for. To protect and advance the interests of their members. They are not altruistic organisations.

Now, I see nothing wrong with unions defending the interests of their members. It is why they exist. But to suggest that the interests of union members and the common good always align is to mislead. Often, they run in opposite directions, as is the case with the North Sea fields. The suggestion that oil and gas extracted from the North Sea will cut the energy bills of UK consumers is incorrect. That oil and gas will be sold on the global market at whatever is the going price. That’s the way the industry works.

A similar story is playing out in Ireland in relation to Aughinish Alumina. The company is an alumina refinery situated on the Shannon Estuary in County Limerick. It is the largest alumina refinery in Europe, and is owned by Rusal, a Russian aluminium company headquartered in Moscow. It is reported that the company is ultimately controlled by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Close to 500 people are employed at the plant, decent, well-paying jobs by local standards.

A great deal of the company’s output is exported to Russia. Now there can be little doubt that much of this material ends up going into Russian armaments, rather than making knives and forks, even if this cannot be proved conclusively. Can anyone reasonably argue that Russia is importing a valuable war material and then not using it for that purpose in its aggressive war against Ukraine?

As said above, the jobs at the plant are good, well-paying jobs. Who wants to see them disappear because the plant is supplying Russia with war materials? Not the union involved, not the government, nor the local politicians. Moral certainty goes out the window when jobs are at stake. Close your eyes and pretend it is not happening because you do not want to have to make hard industrial and political decisions.

In defending the jobs of its members, the union is properly doing what it is supposed to do. But the advancement of the “common good” would be to cut off supplies of war material to Russia, but that would come at an industrial price and the loss of jobs.

A complex and difficult trade-off to which there are no easy answers.

My wider point is this. Trade unions are fully entitled to represent the interests of their members. But the interest of trade unions should not be conflated with that of social progress. They are not one and the same thing. Trade unions can often be regressive in their policies. This could become even more the case as unions continue to shrink in numbers and become little more than public sector organisations, with a small private sector membership, mostly located in older industries.

These days, trade union density, the proportion of the workforce in unions, across Europe is about 25%, if even that. Two-thirds of all union members work in the public sector. In other words, about 85% of private sector workers in Europe are not union members.

That is unlikely to change anytime soon, no matter how many laws the EU and the UK may pass to help revive flagging union fortunes.

What constitutes the “common good” will always be a political and ideological construct, something to be argued about in the public arena. It is unlikely that there will ever be agreement on the matter because there are simply too many of us with different points of view and different economic interests. What makes sense for me and what works for me does not necessarily do so for you.

When there is no political north star to guide your actions, then all decisions become difficult. We live in an age of political dispersion.

The days when there were great, overarching ideologies are gone. Communism is practically no more, and democratic socialism, or social democracy, is but a pale shadow of its former self. New-right populism is little more than anti-immigration rhetoric, without any sort of coherent economic program. When we look at Trump in the US or Farage in the UK, it is also clear that right-wing populism is also very much a vehicle for the personal enrichment of the leaders, with the Trump vehicle running on afterburners.

Unions struggle to gain traction with new generations of workers. So, they retreat into themselves. What they have, they want to hold. Nothing wrong with that. Let’s just be clear-eyed about what unions are. Organisations that represent their members. Nothing more.

Union interests and the common good are not the same thing.

Last Monday, Andy Burnham became British prime minister in succession to Keir Starmer. Before Monday, political and media circles were abuzz with speculation over who would be appointed chancellor of the exchequer, the most important post in the UK government after the prime minister. Would the existing chancellor, Rachel Reeves, get to keep the job or would it go to Ed Miliband, the energy secretary or to Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary?

In the end it went to none of them.

Instead, Burnham nominated John Healey, whose resignation as defence secretary some weeks previously was seen as marking the end of Starmer’s days as prime minister.

As an article in the Guardian puts it:

… when John Healey was appointed chancellor on Monday after intense briefing from allies of Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, and Rachel Reeves, it blindsided even those at the top of the Labour party.

“We did not see this coming,” said one Labour MP. “But that is probably a sign that it is a good decision.”

It is impossible to see around corners in crowded political streets.

But if you happen to be on a French, Spanish, German or Belgian motorway, or any other European motorway for that matter, it is quite possible to see a fair distance down the road.

With Burnham as prime minister, what I see when it comes to the UK and the European Union is that nothing much is going to change from the way things are now.

Later in the year, when an EU/UK summit is finally arranged, with some help from the Irish presidency of the EU Council, which is well disposed towards the UK, hopefully we will see the three deals currently under consideration- student exchange, the push to reduce paperwork and certification for food exports, and the linking of emission trading systems- finally signed off. All to the good.

Helpful as these deals will be, let’s be honest, they are hardly going to move the dial on economic growth in the UK. They are just ice-breakers, little more than that. A tentative attempt to take the Brexit deal out of the deep freeze into which Boris Johnson put it.

The only thing that would really push UK economic growth would be a return to the EU’s single market and customs union. Not just one, but both. But we know this is not going to happen anytime soon. Why? Because British politicians have themselves locked in a doom-loop.

The economy is flat-lining. Living standards are stagnant. Public services are creaking. Infrastructure cries out for investment. Defence spending needs to be boosted because of the dangerous times in which we live. You can’t negotiate “peace” with madmen and the world is awash with madmen.

The “doom-loop” has a number of elements that interlock with one another and strangle political decision-making.

To begin with, there is the FPTP – First Past the Post = electoral system that was designed for a two-party system, which guaranteed that one party would generally win a majority, even a small majority. There were always a few stragglers, such as the Liberals and the Ulster Unionists, maybe the odd Irish Nationalist, but it was still a two-party system. Those days are gone. UK politics is now fragmented across the political spectrum. Labour won its current thumping majority on 34% of the vote. With FPTP, could a party win a majority on just 30%? Don’t rule it out.

Second, there is the dominance of the right-wing, largely foreign-owned media, with a deeply ingrained hostility to Europe, constantly dreaming of days of glories past. The mainstream right-wing media now has to compete with an even more rabid social media, especially X, formerly Twitter, whose owner has opened it to every fruit-loop and wing-nut washed up on the wilder shores of the extreme right-wing. They make any rapprochement with the EU close to impossible until someone has the courage to break their stranglehold, not so much on the public as on politicians.

Third, there is a deep strain of what can be best described as “working class protectionism” buried deep in the DNA of the Labour Party, going back to the days of Bevin, Healy, and Gaitskell, among others. You can also add in Benn, Shore, and Corbyn. Not so much “socialism in one country” as “labourism in one country”. It is also to be found in the trade union movement. Former prime minister Gordon Brown once summed it up when he talked about “British Jobs for British People”.

“Working class protectionism” speaks to the very real fears of many ordinary people whose concerns are all too often dismissed as hostility to the realities of the global economy. Well, if you were going to lose your job and possibly be unemployed for the rest of your life, would you not be hostile to the forces that threw you on the scrap heap?

There is a policy melange of social conservatism, traditionalism, patriotism, and state economic intervention in the market to protect jobs that has an appeal to many. It is a cry to bring back yesterday when economies were largely bounded by their own borders. Oh, and add in a deep hostility to all forms of immigration.

The same melange of cultural conservatism, nationalism - often ethno-Christian, anti-immigrant nationalism - and interventionist and protectionist economics underlies many of the populist movements in Europe. Populism is really a politics of nostalgia: “We want things to go back the way they used to be.” The subtext often is: “When men had manufacturing jobs, women mostly stayed at home and looked after the children, and we were all white.”

Is this not also the essence of MAGA in the US, with the emphasis on the “again” in Make America Great Again?

The north of France, where I live, is now a stronghold of Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale, drawing on working-class support. In the years after WWII, the parents of these RN supporters all voted Communist. Look at it closely, and there is not much difference between the policies of Le Pen and those of Maurice Thorez, the longtime post-war leader of the French Communist Party, who was born in the north, near Calais. Once these policies had a left-wing face. Now they face right. Like Thorez, Le Pen thinks kindly of Moscow.

That many working people have been “left behind” by the economic changes of the past few decades is a stark reality that many economists and other analysts were slow to understand, especially the fact that many of the “left behind” were geographically concentrated. Governments need to pay attention to this and do what they can do to bring hope back to these communities. But the totality of policy should not be dictated by the need to rebuild these communities. But in the UK that is the Labour reality. Cue a cut in taxes for pubs to “save working class culture”.

Which brings me back to the UK and the EU. It is a truism that you cannot unscramble an egg. Eggs are pretty fragile things in the first place. When you break them, you cannot unbreak them. Ask Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty back together again.

That is how I see things between the UK and the EU. The relationship was a pretty fragile egg to begin with. It came close to breaking more than once.

But then with Brexit it did break and the UK chef who eventually got his hands on the frying pan, Boris Johnson, made sure the egg was well and truly scrambled. And it was a pretty watery, runny scrambled egg he served up to the British people. No toast, no bacon, no sausages to go with it. In fact, the British find it difficult to sell bacon and sausages to the EU these days. Thank you very much, say the Irish; we can do that instead. In one of my local supermarkets, there is always Celtic lamb on sale. And Irish cheddar.

So when Andy Burnham looks at what he needs to do within the next three years to give Labour a chance of returning to government after the next election, it will not take him long to realise that there are no quick deals on offer from the EU. Just the long slog of year after year of negotiations. Mind-numbing, detailed negotiations,

Any deal worth its salt would have to contain a return to free movement. Go beyond that, and you are talking about going into Schengen, and a commitment to join the euro. He is not going to waste precious political capital on that, not now at any rate. Maybe someday, somewhere over the rainbow, but that day is not today.

Burnham’s first instruction in 10 Downing Street was that he wanted “rough sleeping” in the streets in the UK ended. He won’t waste any time on those part-time British migrants, sorry, “ex-pats”, who complain they can only sleep 90 days in every 180 in their second Spanish homes.

Politics and economics do not always rhyme. It makes economic sense for the UK to rejoin the EU or, at least, the single market and customs union. Burnham knows that. But for now at least, it does not make political sense. Politics is about more than economics and always will be.

Before you decide to scramble an egg, always remember you cannot unscramble it.

“Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life, it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.”

The Opium of the Intellectuals was first published in 1955. I am currently in the midst of rereading it. I first did so many years ago, and it helped shape my thinking about the destructive effects of Marxism and Communism on the cause of social progress. I’ll write about this some other time, but today’s Scribbling is about our inability to predict the future, even the near future.

In The Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron writes as if Soviet Communism, to which he was very much opposed and rightly so, was forever to be a permanent fixture in the world. We know that this was not to be the case. It collapsed in 1989.

What caught my attention was this passage:

“In Europe, up to the 1950s, our diplomacy was to put a brake on the recovery of Western Germany, which was inevitable and foreseeable from the moment Russia undertook the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, instead of taking advantage of the circumstances to bring about a reconciliation. With the Schumann Plan, our diplomacy jumped to the other extreme. There was the grandiose scheme for a West European Federation including Germany, Italy and Benelux. How was it to be accomplished without sacrificing the French Union?”

The “French Union” was the equivalent of the British Commonwealth, a collection of former French colonies, and before anyone corrects me, yes, I know, in the 1950s the British still clung on to their Empire, even if most of Ireland had long gone, and India more recently. Not to mention the US 250 years ago this year. Bloody battles were still to come to dismantle the rest of the Empire. At the time he was writing, France had already lost Vietnam, with the Americans about to be involved in that quagmire, and the Algerian war of independence was soon to erupt with consequences for French politics to this day. The right-wing party of the Le Pens has its roots in the Algerian war and the decision of De Gaulle to let Algeria go its own way. “Betrayal” of Algeria is still a running sore for parts of the French right.

Today, we know the “West European Federation” proposed by Schumann as the European Union, which, for all its faults and they are many, is one of the most successful political and economic projects in European history. But note Aron’s dismissal of the project as “grandiose”.

A man as insightful as Aron failed to see this coming when he wrote in 1955, whatever may have been his subsequent views. The future is never preordained. It sneaks up on us and takes us by surprise. This can be as true in our personal lives as in the wilder world. We lose a partner; we met a partner. We turn up at work one day to find that our job is no more. We hope to find a new job; maybe we will, maybe we won’t.

Of course, the French did not spend too much time worrying about the French Union, but along with West Germany, took the lead in building the European Economic Community. The British fretted about their Empire, then went and lost it, and spent the years from 1960 to 1973 trying to get into the EEC. Then they left after the 2016 Brexit vote, and now the UK does not know what it wants to do when it comes to the European Union. It is wandering in the wilderness of its own indecision.

As we look across the political landscape today, we see the wreckage of futures that did not go according to plan.

As I write this, Andy Burnham, who has already become leader of the UK’s Labour Party, will tomorrow become prime minister. Until recently, he was the mayor of Manchester. Who could have foretold this when Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a thumping majority in a general election just two years ago? Did anyone predict that Starmer would last just two years as prime minister? Not that I remember reading, and I read a lot. Can anyone put their hand on their heart and tell us how well Burham will do? No, they can’t. By tomorrow evening, Monday, he will already have made enemies within the Labour Party when he announces the members of his cabinet. There will not be a place for everyone, and some will be bitterly disappointed with the places they are offered. Others, who were not expecting a place, will be angry that their faction lost out.

In politics, you only have one golden moment, the afterglow of winning an election. Once you start making choices, the sun darkens, and you have no idea how the days and weeks ahead will work out.

Vladimir Putin knows all about the future not going to plan. He thought a quick strike would see Ukraine crumble within a week or so in the face of the great Russian army. Four years later, the war still goes on, and new drone technology has allowed the Ukrainians to strike deep into the heart of Russia, hitting energy infrastructure and other targets. Can anyone say how this war might end? Not with any certainty, they can.

US President Donald Trump also thought he could run a quick war, along with Israel, against Iran. Iran would crumble as the US bombed it from the air, first having taken out its leaders in a targeted strike. It has not happened. Four months later, the war still rages despite various attempts to negotiate some form of settlement. Not only has Iran not crumbled, even if today it is probably an economic basket case, but it has also discovered the leverage of the Strait of Hormuz, which allows it to choke the world’s oil supply, for now at least. Why just for now? Because those hit by Iran’s closing of the Strait will find ways around it, which may take time, such as building new pipelines and as new energy technologies such as wind and solar reduce fossil fuel dependency. Sometimes political or industrial leverage can be fleeting.

Who can predict how the Midterm elections in the US will work out? Could the Democrats take control of the House and the Senate? Could President Trump attempt to undermine the outcome of the elections? There will be opinion polls aplenty predicting this and that, but who knows? If the Democrats were to win both houses, what would that mean for the last two years of Trump’s term of office? What could it mean for the 2028 Presidential election? Unknown unknowns. It was forever so.

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) change the world? Is it all it is made out to be? Or will it end up just being another tool that people can use to help them in their work? Personally, I lean to the latter view while recognising that AI can be a generator of information, but that information still needs human intelligence to give it order, structure and meaning. But I could be wrong. But then again, I could be right. Who knows?

Twenty years ago, who would have predicted that China would be the global superpower it is today? Sure, because of its size, it was always going to be important once it left behind the nonsense that was Maoism. But would it just be a “factory” to which American companies outsourced work and to which Germany sold cars? Who predicted that today it would be at the leading edge of technology developments and on the verge of decimating the German car industry? Certainly not the German car industry or German politicians.

I don’t think we can predict the future. But we can try to shape it. But to shape the future, we need to be clear about our own political and moral values. Raymond Aron was clear about his values. Western civilisation, for all its faults, was preferable to Russian Communism. He was right. Sartre was wrong.

As you know, I have always thought that it was the right of any Englishman who became a member of parliament to get rich. And I have become very rich thanks to the many presents given to me by people who support me in my desire to Make Britain Great Again by making it a country of true-born Englishmen. Too bad for those who are not English.

I woke up one morning to find that a devoted British patriot who had chosen to live in Thailand had deposited £5m in my bank account. What can I say? It was like a Lottery win, even though I had not bought any sort of ticket in a Thai lottery. But the patriot so believes in my work that he gave me the money to do with as I wish. I am so grateful, as a chap can never have enough money when he dines often in Mayfair restaurants, which are bloody expensive, especially if you have a couple of bottles of Primat Château Angélus 2016 at €25,900 a go.

Not that I generally pay myself. Others are on hand to do so. I have many posh friends, even though I am best known as “Nige of the People”.

But the Establishment is determined to get me, and they will stop at nothing. Making money as an MP is no crime. Not that I “make money” from running a business that employs people and boosts general economic wellbeing. No, people just give me money because of who I am, the liberator of the UK from the shackles of the tyranny of Brussels. Britain may be the poorer because of Brexit, but I am so much richer.

So, I decided to confront them head-to-head. I resigned my seat in Clacton and triggered a by-election. It was to be me against the establishment. But they all refused to dance. Except for Count Binface and a few other assorted fruitcakes.

So it is me against Count Binface and some nuts. Me against the establishment. For whom could be more establishment than a Count? A member of royalty? Is Count Binface really Prince Harry in disguise, desperate to make a royal comeback? Why does he cover his face? What does he have to hide?

I have nothing to hide. I am open and transparent about the fact that I accept money from cryptocurrency chancers and people who have done time in a US jail. So my pitch to the electors of Clacton is simple: Make Farage Very Rich: Because I am Worth It. (Please attach £5 to your ballot paper. I also accept crypto.)

But I am not alone in being persecuted as a tribune of the will of the people. Look across the English Channel, that is, if you can see past all the little boats that clog up that precious stretch of water that keeps us safe from a hostile Europe and look at poor Marine. Found guilty by French courts of allegedly misusing EU funds to prop up the Front Nationale, as it was called at the time.

OK, so she and her party used EU parliamentary funds to pay for party workers in France. But what is wrong with that? Did I myself not collect my MEP’s salary and expenses for many years without doing any actual work as an MEP? While all the time campaigning for the UK to leave the EU and become a free and prosperous nation again. OK, for now, scrub the prosperous bit because we have not had a proper Brexit because I have not been in charge. But that day is coming, Binface or no Binface.

Now, poor Marine is being forced by the French Establishment to wear an electronic bracelet as she seeks to become the next French President. Knowing Marine as well as I do, we meet often at patriotic get-togethers across Europe, the bracelet will obviously be by Chanel or Dior. Definitely not something you would pick up in Monoprix.

But I fear for Marine. She is appealing her outrageous sentence to the French Supreme Court. Is there a chance she could be sentenced to spend time on Devil’s Island? Could she be the new Papillion? If so, would Meryl Streep agree to play her in the movie? Probably not. Streep is too woke. OK, I know she played Thatcher in The Iron Lady, but then Thatcher never did jail time as Le Pen is doing.

Could the French really elect a criminal as their next President? If so, there could be hope for a dodgy chancer like me to be the next UK PM, after Andy Burnham has a chance to have a go at it. Andy may be known as the “King of the North”. I’ll be known as the “King of Crypto”. Always partial to a Thai take-away.

But then, I would still only be in the half-penny place compared to The Donald. He may be increasingly senile and prone to falling asleep in meetings – let’s be honest, aren’t we all – but he still knows how to make a dollar. Let’s make that billions of dollars. The Donald is the Michael Corleone of our day. He knows how to make offers business people cannot refuse. And he has a couple of Luca Brasi characters to help him when the going gets rough.

But, back to me. What can I say? The Establishment has sent a bin to fight me in the election because they are too afraid to face a man of the people like myself. But they will quiver in their boots when I return to Westminster triumphant, re-elected on a minuscule turnout.

But late at night, after a few gin and tonics, a frightening thought haunts me. What if the turnout is so low that Binface beats me? What if he surfs to victory on a woke wave? Could this be the end of “Nige of the People”? And the end of the money pipeline.

Instead of dining in Mayfair restaurants, could I be reduced to a fag and a pint in a Wetherspoons?

It is a frightening thought. Do I know what I have done?

While you are away, you tend to fall out of your daily routine, and the actualité can pass you by. Once I picked things up again last Friday, I read a story in the Financial Times which headlined: Brussels rebuffs UK request for ‘decision-shaping’ role in EU.

The opening lines of the story ran:

Brussels has rebuffed a British request to participate in decision-making in the EU, further delaying a deal to reset post-Brexit relations with the bloc. London wants a “decision-shaping” role in the rules and regulations that Britain has agreed to follow as part of its push for closer economic ties with the EU, according to people briefed on the matter.

On reading the FT article, what came to mind were the words from the Bible:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Now, as those who know me will affirm, I am not an avid Bible reader, but I do know the odd quote, and this one seems to me to sum up precisely the history of the UK’s relationship with the European Union. “Please, sir, can we be both in and out at the same time? Can we have all of the bits we like and none of the bits we don’t like? And now that we are out, can we please have a say on decisions that might affect us?”

It was forever like this between the UK and the EU, economic necessity driving UK involvement in the European market, the imperial British heart crying No, we are exceptional, we are special, we are different.

Not surprisingly, the EU said no, you can’t have a role in decision-making. You decided to leave, and that means you can’t be involved in our internal processes. We might consult you about what we are considering and ask for your opinion, but you can’t have a seat at the table.

Those of us who wrote about the “Brexit Wars” as they were happening well remember speeches by Michael Gove, then a government minister, and David Frost, then the UK’s Brexit negotiator, predicting that when Brexit came to pass the EU would break up as other countries saw the golden future that lay ahead of the UK freed of the “shackles” of Brussels and would follow the UK out. The UK would then take the lead in shaping a new European order of free-trading nations. It did not happen. In fact, Eurosceptics saw the train wreck that was Brexit and decided to hang on to the European Union for fear of finding something worse. Today, Gove is the editor of a small, right-wing London magazine, while Frost is an obscure backbencher in the House of Lords. No leadership role in a new Europe for either of them.

During the Brexit negotiations, a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg commented that once upon a time, the UK was in with lots of opt-outs; now it wanted to be out with lots of opt-ins. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I am reminded of Einstein’s comment: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Since the Brexit saga began, the UK has kept seeking EU benefits without obligations, and the EU has repeatedly said no. Why would the UK think the EU was going to change its answer because it is Labour that is asking and not the Tories? “We’re nicer people” does not get you a different answer.

Would the EU want members of a possible future Farage UK government involved in its decision-making?

If Brexit did not lead to the break-up of the EU, which today is stronger than previously with a queue of countries looking to join, then the same cannot be said of the UK. Let me come back to potential developments in the UK.

First, something that really annoys me. Journalists and commentators who constantly complain that the EU is not doing this, that or the other, and is moving too slowly.

The EU was founded in 1958. That, in historical terms, is the blink of an eye. Of course, the EU isn’t perfect. No political system is. But what we have is better than a continent of individual national states constantly at one another's throats that has been the way of things for centuries. Like all political systems, the EU is built on shabby compromises, dirty deals, and political intrigue. If you want perfection, go and join a monastery and take a vow of silence. You will find peace there. Otherwise, accept the fact that the political world is deeply compromised and always will be. Politics has more sinners than saints.

Back to the UK.

The genie of English nationalism is out of the bottle and won’t be going back in again anytime soon, if indeed ever. Brexit has let loose breakup forces in the UK, and hardcore English nationalists would probably be more than happy to see the back of Scotland and Northern Ireland, whatever about Wales.

I’ll leave Scotland for now, but the more nationalism grows in England, the more Scotland will want to cut itself free and become an independent nation within the EU.

Northern Ireland is more complex. It lives on a separate island from the rest of the UK. In its last regional election, a party, Sinn Féin, that wants to lead Northern Ireland away from the UK and unite with Ireland, came out top. Demographic trends would seem to push in the same direction.

Northern Ireland depends for its existence on UK subsidies, at a minimum of £6bn a year, maybe stretching to as much as £20bn. For a Farageist government, cutting Northern Ireland loose might look like a juicy cost-saving. If that were to happen, what options would the unionists in Northern Ireland have? They would have neither the support nor the wherewithal to run a little, independent statelet. They are no longer the majority. Their yesterday is dead and gone.

Were the Farage English nationalists to form a government and cut Northern Ireland loose for economic reasons, then the only realistic option for Northern Ireland would be to turn south to the Republic. And it would not be in a strong bargaining position as it would have nowhere else to go. Better to start thinking about the unthinkable now than when it slaps you in the face.

We can never know the future. But we can identify potential pathways and options. Best to map them out when you have time to do so. Because when the future creeps up on you, time vanishes. And then it is too late. The future of Northern Ireland may be decided in London and not in Northern Ireland, or Ireland, if a Farage government decides it no longer wants the troublesome child that is Northern Ireland. Never say never when it comes to politics.

Were Farage to become Prime Minister, he may get his wish. A little England cut loose from Europe. Maybe a border between England and Scotland, maybe a border between England and Wales, if both are back in the European Union. Definitely a border with Ireland.

But England will have its sovereignty.

And from early on, it quickly became clear that, other than leaving the hated EU, Brexiters had no idea how to manage the consequences of what was about to happen. During the campaign, they had deliberately failed to spell out what Brexit would mean to keep together a coalition of those who, on the one hand, saw quitting the EU as a turn to working-class protectionism and closed borders, and, on the other, those who dreamt of an ultra-free-market Singapore-upon-Thames. Not to mention out-and-out racists who just hated foreigners of any sort.

I had not followed the Brexit debate with much attention. Like many, I had assumed that the decent people of the UK would not do something so stupid as to walk out of their biggest export market, that they would not erect barriers to trade and the movement of people where none existed while they were inside the EU. But they were told by the Brexiters that they could leave and there would be no downside consequences, just upside benefits because if they voted to leave, the UK would hold all the cards and the EU would cut a deal with them on beneficial terms.

The empire mentality of the public school ruling elite continued to believe that the world revolved around the UK and who, even to this day, cannot accept that the UK is just a minor power off the Eurasian landmass. Its navy once ruled the world. Now much of what remains of it cannot even put out to sea but is in dock for maintenance. As the former Europe minister in the Blair government, Denis McShane, once caustically put it, the British navy has more admirals than ships.

Very quickly, Brexit turned from being a simple political decision taken by a narrow majority into a new religion. Brexit became the sacred “will of the people”, never to be questioned. A cadre of Brexit high priests soon emerged and what might be described as a Brexit theology began to develop. These high priests claimed they would lead the people into the promised land that would see them being able to come and go and live in Europe as they saw fit, while cutting great trade deals with the rest of the world, especially with the US.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, the British would just be the first out of the EU, with other countries soon following. The EU would implode, and a Europe of sovereign free-trading nations would take its place, wisely led by a newly invigorated UK.

These fantasies would soon collide with the rock of reality. The European Union was not about to bend to the will of the Brexiters. Nor was it about to break up. If anything, Brexit made the EU stronger as the 27 remaining members determined that they would not be dictated to by an ex-member. (See this from the Guardian here)

There would be no soft Brexit landing. No cake and eat it. Just the brutality of isolationism. If the UK wanted to be alone, well, it could be alone.

There was a blite assumption on the part of Brexiters that Ireland would soon follow the UK out of the EU as it had once followed the UK into the old European Economic Community. But the Ireland of 2016 was no longer the impoverished, agricultural-based economy that it was in 1972. It was the European home of many major US tech and pharma multinationals, and Ireland was never going to give that up to again become dependent on a shrivelling UK market. What has happened during the past ten years has borne out the wisdom of that choice. While the UK economy has spluttered, Ireland has continued to grow. The island of Ireland was to loom very large in the Brexit saga, but a detailed comment on that is for another day.

Brexit prime ministers, first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, twisted and turned and believed six impossible things before breakfast every day as they sought to negotiate an exit arrangement with the EU that would be cost-free and give the UK all the benefits of the EU single market with none of the obligations.

Such a deal was never going to be on offer. No one country was bigger or more important than the European Union and certainly not one that was leaving and behaving badly as it did. It is a fundamental truism of any negotiation: never reward bad behaviour because rewarding it just encourages it. And the UK behaved badly on the way out, to say the least.

So, the UK eventually left the EU with a miserable thing of a deal and has paid the economic price ever since. There were no sunny Brexit uplands, just the soggy bogland of a low-growth economy and long queues at airports and seaports as non-EU Brits waited to get their passports stamped or their biometric details recorded.

How much has Brexit cost the UK economy? No one can ever know for sure, but anywhere between 4% and 8% would not be a bad guess. Not to mention what I once called the “Brexit of small things” like queues at borders, the extra cost and paperwork to take your dog on holidays with you, the limit on the time you can spend in the EU, 90 days in 180, and the rest. If you happen to be a rock ‘n roll band, trying to do gigs in Europe has become a nightmare. No chance of getting “Lost in France”.

Now, ten years on, there can only be one verdict. Brexit was a bust, a dystopian economic nightmare. But, worse than that, it has become a well of poison in British politics. It has let the evil genie of ethno-nationalism out of the bottle. Hatred of the “other” as represented by immigrants has moved into the right-of-centre mainstream, and some on the left are not immune to the virus. Labour “red-wallism” is just racism by another, proletarian name.

The English ruling elite never wanted to be part of an “ever closer” Europe. They kicked against the idea from the start, refused to consider membership of the coal and steel community in the early 1950s. Churchill saw the UK at the centre of three overlapping circles: the colonial empire; the English-speaking Anglo-sphere (which included the US); and continental Europe. Affiliated with all three, but beholden to none. In other words, a global power. Suez showed that it was no such thing.

Slowly, after Suez, the long journey to joining with the rest of Western Europe began, but always grudgingly, rooted in economic calculation, never with any idealism in the heart. The UK and Europe were never anything other than an arranged marriage, two people who lived in the same house but with little in common. It was always going to end badly.

Today, most people in the UK know that Brexit was a mistake and that it has cost them dearly. Opinion polls show that a majority would now vote to join the EU again.

In my own view, it is not going to happen now, or anytime soon. Maybe it will in a universe far, far away. As an Irish person, would I like to see the UK again join the EU? Yes, definitely I would. Would I support the UK joining again? Yes, definitely.

So, why do I say it is not going to happen?

First, UK politics will not allow it. UK politics was once dominated by two great parties, the Tories and Labour. The Liberals, as they then were, had a small walk-on role. Today, even if it is “out of Europe” UK politics are European, fragmented across multiple parties, with a new one appearing almost every day. all jammed into an archaic FPTP first past the post electoral system. It is conceivable that a party with just 25% of the vote could form a government. The current Labour government got just 34% of the vote at the last election, and things have split even further since then. How could the EU do a deal with such an unstable entity? How long would it take to do a deal and what guarantee would there be that it would last? A waste of time and effort.

Second, relations with the UK are not an EU priority. The UK is just not that important, no matter what UK commentators might think. Russian military aggression, Chinese commercial aggression, American “firstism”, demographic challenges, including immigration, and candidates for enlargement. Who wants to spend time talking to a UK that does not know its own mind?

Third, as Jean-Claude Juncker said in a recent interview with the Financial Times, “The first cut is the deepest, baby I know. The first cut is the deepest”. OK, he did not use those words, but that is what he meant. Like in any relationship, you cannot end it, walk out berating the other party, bad-mouthing them as you leave, and then, when you realise you have made a mistake, expect them to graciously take you back. Life and politics do not work that way. (Also, see this from the Financial Times here.)

So, ten years on. The UK is off the European train which continues to pull away into the distance. Will the train stop to allow the UK to catch up and get on board again? Not anytime soon. The UK made its existential Brexit decision. Now, it is condemned to live with the consequences of that decision.

As every schoolchild knows, you cannot put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Coda

I am not persuaded that the change of PM from Starmer to Burnham will make much difference. Burnham might not be as rigid as Starmer was about the “red lines”. The most I think he could do would be to announce that he will drop the “red lines” at the next election and in the meantime seek preparatory talks with the EU. But would the EU be prepared to invest any time in such talks for the reasons stated above?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

James D. Boys is a senior research fellow at the Centre on Politics at University College, London. I finished reading his book US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory: From Nixon to Trump last Sunday just as word was breaking that the US and Iran had signed a deal to at least temporarily bring the war between them to an end.

It is not often that you read a book on a theory of negotiations at the same time as you have an example of that theory playing out in real time. Did the Iran deal deliver on the madman theory?

By the way, the book is a fascinating read, though I do think it over-rationalises Trump’s approach to policy. My own view is that Trump has genius political instincts but is nonetheless a fruitcake for all that who has destroyed the US’s reputation in the world. Would you buy a second-hand casino from this man? One that he had bankrupted in the first place?

I first became aware of the “madman theory” during the “Brexit Wars” when Boris Johnson was quoted as saying:

(He thought) … that President Trump … would do a better job negotiating Brexit than Mrs. May.

I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump … I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.

Imagine Trump doing Brexit … There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.” (here)

According to Boys, the “madman” theory of negotiations has its origins in the work of three American academics, who were also influential in Washington policy circles, one of whom was to become extremely influential and globally well-known.

The three were Thomas Schelling, Daniel Ellsberg, and Henry Kissinger. From the 1950s onwards, their work focused on strategic options for the US during the Cold War when both the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Out of their work emerged the concept of the “madman theory”.

At the same time, Richard Nixon, Vice-President to Eisenhower during the 1950s, was coming to similar conclusions as a result of observing the tactics employed by Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, during the Korean War and other international incidents. He was to use these insights when he finally became President himself after the 1968 elections.

In essence, the madman theory does not require the practitioner of the strategy to be mad. It simply requires that counterparties believe they are mad, irrational, and out of control. “Madmen” negotiators want to keep the other side off-guard, unable to predict how the “madman” might act or react in any given situation. For example, would they be prepared to use tactical, nuclear weapons? Or, at least, give the impression that they might.

Let me say at this point that for most of us involved in everyday negotiations, whether it is industrial relations negotiations, commercial negotiations, or the small negotiations that fill our personal lives, the “madman” theory has limited relevance. It may work if you are a major power with nuclear weapons. Even then, maybe not, as we will see. In ordinary business and personal life, if you tried to give the impression that you are mad and started to behave irrationally, you would probably quickly find yourself out of a job and living on your own. Maybe even in care somewhere.

The “madman theory” is premised on the notion that a great power with nuclear weapons should convey the impression that it is prepared to use them in certain circumstances to force its opponent to the negotiating table and to do a deal on the “madman’s” terms.

Has this ever happened? Has it worked out when it was tried? Not that I know of.

Go back to Nixon. He campaigned in 1968 saying that he would quickly bring the Vietnam War to an end and that US troops would soon be coming home. Once elected President, he recruited Kissinger as his National Security Advisor, one of the three academics who have authored the madman theory. A chance for Kissinger to apply the theory in practice.

But there was no quick end to the Vietnam War, and Nixon even extended it with the illegal bombing of Cambodia.

It took until 1975 for the US to extricate itself from Vietnam, and it was hardly out of the country before the North Vietnamese overran the South and the reunited Vietnam became a Communist state, which it remains to this day. The use of the madman approach to grand strategy and great power diplomacy clearly did not work and failed to deliver in the case of Vietnam.

Had it delivered in Korea, where Boys says that Eisenhower and Dulles had threatened a nuclear attack to bring the fighting to an end? Maybe they did, and maybe it did work, but Korea remains divided, and North Korea is now a nuclear power.

Boys well makes the point that whatever about the use of madman tactics by Eisenhower and Nixon, neither of them was mad in any clinical sense. Neither did they shout their madman tactics from the rooftops. They let their thinking be quietly known through backchannels, which also has the benefit of plausible deniability if things go wrong. “Did you ever hear me say that …?”

Which brings us to Trump and his Iran “deal”. There is no rooftop too high from which Trump will not shout, though in his case it is social media, Truth Social, that he uses. Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far”. Trump likes to talk loudly, but when push comes to shove, he never appears to have much of a stick. There is some truth in “TACO” – Trump Always Chickens Out.

The more I read about the agreement with the Iranians, the more I conclude that it is an “entrée deal” and not the “plat principal”. Of course, I use entrée in the French sense of a starter and not the main meal, which is how Americans use the word. In other words, it appears to be an agreement to negotiate an agreement. Nothing wrong with that. Except it does not deliver what Trump claimed through social media were his war objectives when he and Israel started bombing Iran on February 28.

He wanted regime change in Iran and the complete destruction of its capacity to produce nuclear weapons, as well as putting an end to its ballistic missile resources. He also wanted to stop its ability to threaten Israel, either directly or through its proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. In a word, he wanted to break Iran. He wanted unconditional surrender. “Unconditional surrender” were the exact words he used.

As I write, the fundamentalist, theocratic regime in Iran is still in place, with, it would appear, hardliners even more in control than before. Little hope of democracy for the people of Iran anytime soon. Iran still seems to have most of its attack arsenal in place, able to launch missiles and drones against its Gulf neighbours, not to mention Israel. As for its nuclear material, that will be a matter for discussions over the next sixty days. The nuclear can has been kicked down the road.

The last time I looked, the Strait of Hormuz was freely open to shipping before the bombing started on February 28. Then the Iranians closed it and discovered that they had global economic leverage in their hands. Will it remain freely open in the future, or will fees be charged for the passage of ships through it, given Iran an enormous financial bonus? Trump says no; the Iranians say they will be charging a “fee for services”.

How much in dollars has Trump’s team offered Iran? Much more, it seems, than Obama gave them back in 2015.

Are all stakeholders on both sides on board with the deal? Israel appears unhappy, as do many in the US MAGA movement in the US. Will Israel do what Trump orders it to do? Commentators in Israel have said that the deal is a “sell-out” and a “surrender” with Israel “being thrown under the bus”. here.

The madman theory might work if you are a nuclear power. But it probably doesn’t unless you are really prepared to use nuclear weapons, and few are willing to do so. The price you pay is just too high for dropping atomic bombs.

But there are still some lessons those of us involved in mundane, everyday negotiations can take from the Iran debacle.

One: Be clear and precise about your objectives before you start a negotiation. If you do not know where you want to end up, you will not know how to get there.

Two: Never overpromise and create unreal expectations.

Three: Always be moderate in your language. Words can hurt, they can sting, they can wound, and they are not easily forgotten.

Four: Always agree what you have agreed before the negotiation ends. If the two parties walk out of the room with different interpretations of what the text means, they are heading for trouble.

Five: Beware of “dealitis”. “We have been at this so long, we cannot finish without a deal. Otherwise, we will be seen as failures”. I dislike the phrase, but there is a truth to it: “No deal is better than a bad deal” and “dealitis” often leads to bad deals. Walking away when you have to is a sign of strength, not failure.

Six: Always, but always, keep your own stakeholders with you. Communicate, communicate, communicate. The phrase “We will not give a running commentary on our negotiations” is nonsense. You need to do so to bring your people with you and to pick up early warning signs of potential trouble.

I learnt much from Boys’s book, and he makes a strong case for a certain degree of cogency in Trump’s thinking, stretching back to his obsessions with certain policy themes going back many years.

But, as I said earlier, I am still convinced that Trump is a fruitcake, and a fruitcake short of a few raisins at that.

Look at the numbers from the OECD here. Overall union density has halved since 1985, falling from 30% to 15% in 2023/24. On average across 28 OECD countries, 14.3% of women in employment were unionised in 2024 vs. 15% of men. In contrast, unionisation was much stronger in the public sector, with 41.3% of employees unionised in 2024 compared to 10.1% in the private sector. Put this another way. In OECD countries, 9 out of 10 workers in the private sector are not union members. Dig into the numbers, and you will find that private sector membership is concentrated in what can be called “old industries”: food and drink; auto manufacturing; the docks, transport; some retail. But in the newer sectors, membership is almost non-existent.

Which is not to say that there are not a few activists here and there in the newer industries. But increasingly these activists are not concerned with economic issues, the original raison d’etre of trade unions. They are agitated by sexual politics or what they see as moral causes, such as who the company they work for does business with.

The problem is that not everyone believes in the same moral crusades. Go back a bit. There were some unions in the US which opposed the Vietnam War. But there were construction union hardhats who backed Nixon. A recent UK poll showed that about 50% of union members plan to vote for Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party.

Two people in a workplace may agree that they need a wage increase. Money always talks. Beyond that, they may not agree on anything else. Any attempt to try and rebuild unions on the basis of a moral/political strategy is going to go nowhere. Unions work best when they are narrowly focused economic actors. Unfortunately, most union leaders want to be political players. This may have worked in the old days of a predominantly blue-collar working class, most of whom lived in close-knit cohesive communities. But today’s working class, by whom I mean those who live on a weekly or monthly pay cheque, small or big, and who would find themselves in difficulty if the cheques stopped coming, are more scattered and diverse and not easy to organise.

The words from the Springsteen song The River come to mind:

And for my 19^th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat.

You got the union card, and you held it for life, whatever about the marriage. Because you probably stayed in the one job for life. Lived in the same house, drank in the same bar, supported the local sports team, were part of a community.

Those days are gone. And they are not coming back. Even if manufacturing industries are “reshored” to ensure economic and defence resilience, they will be “jobs light”, run by AI-controlled robots, with a minimum of human intervention.

So unions in the private sector find themselves in difficulties. Public sector unions are a different matter, but public sector unions are not what this piece is about. Private sector unions can no longer depend on a “job for life” cadre but are constantly having to think about recruiting and organising. Which is not easy. Especially when employers are not receptive. And why would they be?

A union representative knocks on an employer’s door. I’d like to come in and talk to your workers about the benefits of joining a union and collective bargaining. What would that mean, asks the employer. Well, we would be pushing to increase the workers’ wages and better their conditions of employment, and we would like to ensure that they had a say in management decision-making.

Let me get this straight, says the employer. You want to come in, organise my workers, increase my costs, dent my profit margins, and curtail my decision-making powers? Do I have that right? That’s about it, says the union organiser. There’s the door, say the employer. Close it on your way out.

In other words, trying to organise workers into a union in today’s world is a tough sell. But then it was never easy. Ask Jim Larkin, Ernie Bevin, or Walter Reuther, just to mention three union leaders from Ireland, the UK, and the US. They all fought difficult and bloody battles. Fights over economic rewards in a capitalist, market economy are never going to be a Sunday picnic. As my friend Rick Warters puts, that's because “everyone wants more”. And if you get more, I may get less. Win/win solutions tend to be hard to come by despite what some of the academic texts on negotiations suggest. There is no win/win when you close a plant and make 1,200 workers redundant, no matter what the “social plan” may provide.

If the industrial leverage that was delivered to the unions by a mass membership is a thing of the past, then they need to find other forms of leverage if they are to continue in business.

Ten or fifteen years back they thought that International Framework Agreements (IFAs) with multinational companies might be a way forward. They saw these agreements as enabling them to recruit on a global scale. At the last count, there are around 300 IFAs, but most of these are with French or German companies. There are no fully-formed IFAs with US companies. In recent months, IndustriAll tore up its IFA with Mercedes because it was of little value to it as the United Auto Workers (UAW) tried to organise the Mercedes plant in Alabama. IFAs turned out to be a false dawn. They appeared to shine brightly but soon faded.

Now, the unions are increasingly turning to the law as a source of leverage. During 2024 and 2025, unions pushed hard for European Works Councils to be able to go to court and ask for injunctions to block management decisions. Member state governments, acting through the Council of Ministers, refused to accede to the demand.

Unions believe that Article 4 of the EU’s Adequate Minimum Wage Directive, which calls for national action plans where collective bargaining coverage falls below 80% of the workforce, will force the hand of governments. But as France shows, you can have near universal bargaining coverage through legal extension mechanisms while still leaving the unions with very few members. Bargaining coverage in France is 98%. Union density in the private sector is around 5-6%. To date, EU governments have shown scant interest in pushing the boundaries of Article 4. See here. More disappointment looms, it would seem.

Unions have also invested heavily in due diligence laws such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), but these have been pared back to the bone through the Omnibus process and are now weak things that, in reality, offer little.

But maybe there are a couple of bright spots.

In the UK, unions are hoping that the Employment Relations Act 2025, with its loosened rules on a legal route to union recognition, will help them rebuild their depleted membership. It remains to be seen if it will.

Unions in the US have managed to get the House of Representatives to pass the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The law would require employers to open negotiations with a union within ten days of the union gaining recognition, most likely through a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election. The parties would then have 90 days to reach an agreement. If no agreement is reached, Federal mediators get involved, with a further 30 days to see if an agreement can be found. Absence an agreement, the matter goes to binding arbitration by a three-person panel, with the resulting imposed contract valid for two years here.

As things stand, it can take 450 days to negotiate a first contract, if indeed one is ever negotiated. The FLCA is designed to dramatically cut that timescale.

Whether the Act makes it through the Senate remains to be seen, and then it would have to be signed by President Trump. Neither seems likely.

You also have to ask if government-imposed terms and conditions through arbitration can be considered collective bargaining as defined by the International Labour Organisation in Convention 98? It seems unlikely that it would be. I presume the union response is that they do not care what it is called if it delivers improved pay and working conditions for their members. But what happens at the end of the two years? Can the employer simply tear up the agreement and walk away from it?

The most significant thing about the Act is that it was backed by 20 Republicans in the House, and the push on it is being led in the Senate by a Republican, Josh Hawley. What happens if the Democrats take the House and Senate in the midterms? Could the US be on the cusp of the biggest change in labour law since the 1930s? Expect significant employer pushback in the weeks and months ahead.

While the unions in the US see “first contract arbitration” as an answer to their problems, the unions north of the border in Canada don’t seem to like arbitration, preferring the right to strike here. Which raises the question: If unions start calling for arbitration in contract negotiations, why not arbitration in all industrial disputes?

Will any of these initiatives turn around the fortunes of the trade unions? I am not persuaded that they will. But if the light of the trade unions is dying, they will not go quietly into that good night. There may be some fight left in them yet.

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But it is not just another June 7, especially for those who take an interest in European labour and employment law, as I do. Taking an interest in these matters is pretty much my day job.

Today is the day by which all 27 member states of the European Union, along with the three member states of the European Economic Area (EEA), should have transposed the European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive (PTD) into national law. The Directive is designed to help eliminate the 12% pay gap that exists between men and women in Europe by making employers’ decisions on pay transparent, by, for example, putting pay ranges in advertisements for jobs.

As of today, just three EU member states have transposed the Directive: Italy, Lithuania, and Slovakia. It is questionable if Italy has properly done so, saying, in effect, that the matter has been dealt with by a series of national sectoral collective agreements. A doubtful proposition at best.

Germany has also pushed the idea that undertakings covered by collective bargaining agreements should be considered to be compliant, a difficult argument to sustain, as it assumes that, by definition, collective bargaining agreements cannot be discriminatory. History suggests otherwise.

Three out of thirty. Within the past week, Belgium has asked the EU Commission for permission to delay implementation by six months. Sweden has gone further and asked that the implementation of the Directive be suspended and that it be renegotiated to simplify it and reduce its complexity. The Swedes have a point.

I have been writing about EU labour and employment law since the late 1980s, when the dead hand of the UK veto was lifted, and the EU Commission under Jacques Delors began to produce a stream of new Directives, covering working time, health and safety, maternity leave, and the one that turned out to be something I would specialise in thereafter, the European Works Council Directive.

There have been other labour and employment law Directives since then. I am not going to list them all here.

With all of these Directives, of course there were some laggards when it came to transposing them into national law, but in most cases the majority of member states did so by the due date, there or thereabouts.

But over all those years, I can never remember a case of 27 out of 30 missing the deadline, while making it clear at the same time that they are going to miss it by a lot. Is the EU Commission now going to start taking infringement proceedings against all of them? Or would it be better off asking why governments are struggling to transpose the legislation? Maybe because it is just a badly written and constructed piece of law. Well-intentioned, hoping to do the right thing, but creating more problems than it offers solutions.

I can’t say I am surprised. The PTD is a complex piece of legislation which seeks to eliminate the estimated 12% pay gap between men and women that exists within the EU. It does this by focusing on pay differentials that may exist within grades and categories of workers. If the data shows gaps of more than 5%, which cannot be justified on objective, non-gender grounds, or which cannot be eliminated within six months of having been identified, then employers have to engage with employee representatives to identify the reason for the gap and to look at ways of eliminating it. The data analysis involved puts a considerable strain on companies and stretches resources.

I have never been convinced that the approach set out in the Directive will go any distance to eliminate the 12% gap because the gap does not exist at what might be called the “micro level” of individual jobs and categories, though undoubtedly, some such gaps will be thrown up. It exists mostly because of “macro level” factors such as women taking more time out of work than men because of childcare and other family responsibilities, which increasingly involves aged care as more of us live longer because of improved standards of living and advances in medical science.

It also exists because of “occupational choice”, with, for instance, more women in nursing and teaching than in finance and engineering, the latter dominated by men and paid more than teaching and nursing. Because of their absence from the workforce, women may not be present when promotional opportunities arise, meaning the upper and better-paid levels in many organisations have more men than women in top positions. The PTD is not going to do much about these issues but will involve businesses in a considerable amount of work with little to show for it at the end of the day.

Let me set out a personal position here. I have never believed that there is some scientific and objective way of determining what jobs should be paid. Schemes of job evaluation have always left me cold. They are little more than pseudo-science.

Pay is determined by value judgements and relations of power in the workplace, and these flow from our wider judgements about what we consider important economically and socially. Are bankers really more important than nurses? Are accountants more important than teachers? Who gets to decide these things? On what basis? Why are women who stack shelves in supermarket shops paid less than men who stack shelves in supermarket warehouses?

No amount of made-up evaluation spreadsheets or hocus-pocus “toolkits” will ever resolve these questions because, at the end of it all, the answer does not come down to “factors” or “weightings”, themselves subject to bias, but to value judgements. The economics of pay in the workplace will always be an area of contestation that cannot be “scientifically” resolved.

I often wonder how many of those in the Council, the Commission, and the Parliament have any first-hand experience of the way things actually work within businesses when they are writing laws. Do they have any insight into the mechanics of the way decisions get made, the complexities involved in trying to determine which jobs fit into which category, what are appropriate pay scales? What attention do they give to the role that collective bargaining, if it exists, which it increasingly does not, plays in all of this?

Here is an interesting fact. The EU Parliament publishes all sorts of analysis about its membership - men/women, political parties, countries of origin, and so on. One thing it does not publish is the occupational backgrounds of MEPs. So we have no way of knowing what workplace experience they bring to the table when employment laws are being considered. When writing something into legislation, they never seem to ask the question: how exactly is this going to work in practice, not in theory, but in practice?

I suspect that the reason many governments are struggling with transposing the PSD into national law is that they are having difficulty in trying to figure out just how things are supposed to work in practice. For example, some EU countries, mostly the older Western ones, have well-established systems of workplace representation. Many member states do not. In those member states without workplace representation systems, who counts as an employee representative for pay transparency purposes? What systems need to be put in place to provide for such representation if joint pay assessments are to be conducted?

With the exception of California, which is a law unto itself, those US states that have pay transparency laws limit these laws to ensuring transparency in job advertising. Put what the job pays out there for all to see. They do not require the bureaucratic burrowing that the PTD does of European employers. The US states have kept it simple. Maybe if the EU had also kept it simple, member states would have transposed the Directive by today.

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that the PTD is the answer to the 12% gender pay gap in the EU. It is well-intentioned, but it is looking in the wrong place. The issue is not pay discrimination within categories and grades, or between two individuals. It is social and cultural and requires answers that are not to be found in the PTD.

Made the Swedes do have a point. Stop the clock and think afresh about the issue. Put a deadline on it of a year. What’s to lose? Many member states probably won’t have transposed it within the year anyway. Why not pull them together to discuss the problems they are running up against in the transposition process?

As for employers, it is difficult to be getting on with things when you do not know what is required of you. You can’t implement a law that does not exist.

Coda

I am not one of those who believes that the answer to every labour market problem is deregulation. Like the rules of the road, I believe we need strong and robust labour market regulations to ensure the wellbeing of all labour market participants. But not every regulation should be sacrosanct because not everything that comes out of the Brussels legislative process is always fit for purpose. My argument above is that the PSD is not fit for purpose and it should be revisited before it imposes burdens on employers that yield little in the way of results. Maybe even the unions might want to revisit it to build in some collective bargaining safeguards. Maybe some genuine social dialogue around the issue is what is needed. Negotiations in the “shadow” of a bad law might be no bad thing.

Let’s run a check:

1. Is Iran any less of a theocratic regime run by ideological hardliners than it was on February 27? No, it is not.

2. Has Iran’s nuclear program been degraded? Not so far, at any rate.

3. Does Iran still have the capacity to launch attacks against its neighbours around the Gulf? Yes, it does, and it regularly launches such attacks.

4. Iran has realised the leverage it has over the world’s economy through its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Not only can it determine which ships pass through the Strait, but it now plans to make them pay to do so. This will bring it in billions a year. The Strait was open and cost-free before Trump began his ill-advised attack.

If you go into any negotiation, or a war in this case, with the objective of reducing the ongoing power of the other party and the other party emerges stronger and richer after the event, then it has to be said that you have failed and failed spectacularly. You can dress a pig up in Hermes and say it is a fashion icon, but it will still be a pig, even if it has a Birkin bag.

As I write this, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defence, though he likes to call himself the Secretary for War, is quoted in the Financial Times as saying:

“He (Trump) wanted me to reiterate how patient he is in ensuring that with America undertaking this kind of historic endeavour [the Iran war], any deal will be a good one. A great one.”

I somehow doubt it. For one, Trump has little leverage over Iran. Certainly, he can resume bombing, but the Iranian regime has shown it can absorb such attacks and keep functioning. The Iranian regime is a totalitarian regime that is not subject to political pressures from its citizens. In fact, it has no compulsion in killing them in their thousands if they step out of line, as it showed in the early part of this year when people took to the streets over record-high inflation, food prices, and currency depreciation. Religious totalitarians have little fear of death, believing as they do that if they are killed for defending their beliefs, they will be amply rewarded in the next life.

On the other hand, and despite his dictatorial impulses, Trump is subject to democratic political pressures. His popularity ratings have tanked in the US, as his tariffs and war have resulted in a spike in inflation, with gas at the pumps now above $4 a gallon. Most of the promises he made during the election campaign, such as slashing energy costs and bringing down food prices, have not been delivered on. There is every chance he could lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, hobbling the last two years of his presidency to a significant extent.

In a war, as in a negotiation, it is difficult to push forward if you do not have your own side on board. There is an inelegant term for it in labour negotiations theory: intra-organisational bargaining, which means getting your own side behind you before you even start talking to the other side. It means you have to have clear objectives and be able to show how you plan to deliver those objectives.

This is never as easy as it sounds. Your own side is made up of multiple stakeholders. Even if they are all sailing in roughly the same direction, they are not all on one ship. It is more like a convey, and it can be tough keeping them sailing together.

When it came to his attack on Iran on February 28, Trump had made no effort beforehand to get US allies on board with what he planned to do. The attacks came as a surprise to many of them. And then he demanded their support for something they were never consulted about. Most of them demurred, resulting in rage on his part. Trump demands unquestionable loyalty. He may get it in MAGA world, but not outside MAGA world in the US and certainly not in the rest of the world. In Europe, we know where blindly following leaders can end up.

To borrow from the Police song, with every move he makes, with every breath he takes, Trump diminishes the US. But then, he’s so vain, he probably thinks that song is about him.

As I said above, if you want to get your allies/stakeholders working with you, you need to have clear objectives and a realistic delivery plan.

It seems to me that with Iran, Trump had neither. I am convinced that he thought he could rerun the Venezuela playbook, where he had special forces go in and grab Maduro, having already probably cut a deal with Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, to take over from him and work with Washington. You have to suspect that the snatch of Maduro was made possible by access to a great deal of inside information. Ambition for the top job has led to many a betrayal in the course of history. Et Tu Brutè, and all that.

On the other side of the table, Iran is not necessarily unified in its approach to the negotiations with the US. This article in the New York Times quotes one Iranian political hardliner as saying:

“Trump must know that Iran, as the victor and conqueror of the field, sets the terms.”

Now, even though I cannot see the US coming well out of Trump’s “little adventure” in the Middle East, I also cannot see it bowing the knee to hardliners in Iran. The idea that Iran can dictate the terms of a settlement is nonsense, but then, that’s where religious fundamentalism gets you. Trying to do a deal to end a war is not easy if one side thinks that God is on their side. Hardline Iranians clearly do. But it is even more difficult when both sides think God is with them. Pete Hegseth sees the attack on Iran as a sort of modern crusade, driven by Christian values. When two religions collide, finding a solution can be intractable. Over the centuries, how long did wars of religion run for in Europe? How many died because people believed that their God was a better God than your God?

No wonder God does not appear on earth all that often. He does not want to have to pick sides. I can’t say I blame him.

If a deal is done to end the Iran war, it will be on terms that Iran can live with, not what Trump would have wanted at the outset. Trump will cry victory, but the cry will ring hollow.

Trump is also pushing for the establishment of a $1.8bn fund to compensate people he claims were victims of “lawfare” by the Biden presidency. Critics see it as a slush fund to enable him to award political supporters.

Trump came to public attention with his book The Art of the Deal. Maybe he should now write a follow-up: The Grift of the Giveaway.

Coda

I am currently reading James D. Boy’s US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory: From Nixon to Trump. I get how the Madman Theory was intellectually constructed by the academics Schelling, Ellsberg, and Kissinger and then shaped by Nixon, drawing on his own political experiences in the Eisenhower administration. But I am convinced that Trump is not making use of the Madman Theory in any sort of coherent fashion. He is what he is. A T-Bone short of a full BBQ. I will come back to the Madman Theory when I have finished the book.

… AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.

I think Armstrong’s comment applies to all market economy companies which are intent on profit maximisation. Call it capitalism, if you will. Outside of China and Russia, and a few other countries such as North Korea, it is the system in which we live.

Compared to previous generations stretching over the centuries, most of us have better lives than our ancestors because of the market economy. Which is not to say that it is not riddled with flaws and inequities, but it is better than any of the other economic models that were or are on offer.

For most market economy companies, labour is a cost that they constantly try to minimise. To be blunt about it, companies are in the business of making profits. They are not in the business of creating jobs.

Nowhere is this truer than in the US where employment is “at will”, which I understand to mean that the employer gives you the job as long as you are of benefit to him or her. Once the work you do is no longer seen as adding value, then it is a very quick goodbye. Clear your desk by the end of the day, as they say in the movies.

Europe is different. Once you have the job, the job is yours, and the employer can only take it away from you by going through legally defined procedures. If the US makes it easy to dismiss workers, Europe makes it hard.

Market economy companies are in the business of business, which means producing products or offering services that customers or clients are willing to pay for. Despite what “mission statements” may say, they are not in the business of social justice, unless there is a business logic to being in the social justice business.

This often disappoints those idealists who join companies which say they have a mission beyond just making money and who are then gutted when they find that, in reality, the companies they joined don’t have a mission beyond making money. As Armstrong says, profits will always come first.

Gushing statements about “bringing your whole self to work” quickly disappear when the presence of your whole self stands in the way of business. At the end of the day, it is the Corleone maxim that prevails: Nothing personal, just business.

These thoughts about “real existing capitalism”, as Marxists might put it, occurred to me as I read Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.

Scheiber writes on labour issues for the New York Times, and I think it would be fair to say, is sympathetic to the labour movement.

Scheiber’s book covers much the same territory as Dave Kamper’s book Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions, which I wrote about on LinkedIn recently. My answer to Kamper’s question was, well, it is not the unions if you look at the numbers. Union membership in the US is below 10%, and hovers around 6% in the private sector, and most of that membership is in old industries where the unions have been long established.

Scheiber covers the unionisation drives in Starbucks, Apple and at some video games companies, and the strikes in Hollywood of scriptwriters, and the new militancy of the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Shawn Fain. But he does so through telling the stories of individual workers who were involved in these initiatives over several years.

As someone who is steeped in labour relations literature, I found it a compelling read. It has a lightness of touch about it which draws you in and makes you want to continue to read on. It is the work of a top-class journalist, written in clear, simple English, devoid of any sort of academic theorising and empty of jargon. Not that I dislike academic theorising, but this is a book that is better for leaving such theorising to one side.

Scheiber deftly describes the pain and hurt of broken expectations and shattered dreams as the new “college-educated working class” finds that the world is not delivering the jobs and living standards they were led to expect.

Instead of enjoying a pay premium because of their education, they find themselves working in Starbucks coffee shops or Apple stores or waiting around for the next writing gig in Hollywood, which often never comes.

Close your eyes, clap your hands and believe, and it will happen does not happen for them. They do not live in a Peter Pan world. They juggle hours and multiple jobs and still struggle to make rent. Welcome to the college-educated precariat.

Cards on the table. I am an employer-side negotiator dealing with European-level labour relations issues. I have no problem with workers joining unions or with collective bargaining. I have spent much of my life involved in such negotiations, often dealing with union representatives late into the night. It is the nature of the business.

What struck me when reading the book was the naivety of those pushing unions in Starbucks, Apple, and Amazon. At the time of writing this article, the three campaigns have achieved little, though one Apple store did manage to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, but it did not trigger a tsunami of organising in other Apple stores. There are no union contracts in Starbucks or Amazon in the US.

Collective bargaining is not about whether you have a strong moral case for better pay and conditions. Maybe you do, but it is not going to get you very far. The old manual working class learned that lesson many years ago.

Now, maybe, you can win statutory recognition through procedures provided for in the law, but all that does is to get you in the door and across the table from the employer.

You want a deal? You need leverage, the power to force the employer to offer you terms you can accept. In collective bargaining, that power generally comes down to the ability to call an effective strike, though other “corporate campaign” tactics are available, but these are often dependent on third parties taking action on your behalf.

I know Starbucks workers have called “red cup day” strikes, but when the strike only hits a few hundred shops out of around 16,000, you can hardly say it is effective. The Amazon win at the Staten Island centre died on the vine as those who organised the unionisation drive had no idea how to follow through in bargaining. They thought winning recognition was what it was all about when it was just the first step in a “journey of a thousand miles”.

By way of contrast, the Hollywood strike, even if it went on for months, and the UAW strike against the Detroit auto makers, brought leverage to the table. They hurt the employers’ bottom lines. There was solid organisation on the workers’ side. But that organisation was many years in the making, often forged through past bloody battles. Google “UAW Ford River Rouge” if you want to know more, by way of an example.

The market system is a cruel and unforgiving system. It is profit-oriented. It feels no moral obligation to offer full-time jobs with stable hours and decent hourly pay rates. It will constantly seek to minimise costs and maximise productivity in whatever way it can. There is no point in being blind to that.

It would be socially better if it were otherwise, but this is the reality of the world of the gig economy, and when, to borrow from Yeats, the “rough beast” of AI, its hour come around at last, “slouches” across the land. The Hollywood writers’ strike was about combating the rough beast. The strike may have slowed it, but has it stopped it?

The “social contract” of full-time, well-paid employment, with continually increasing pay packets leading to ever-improving standards of living, defined the thirty to forty years after WWII. We thought it was a forever paradigm. It turns out it was not. It came about because of a unique set of historical circumstances. But even in those unique circumstances, it still took workers to organise to make sure they had a seat at the table.

If, as Scheiber says, the US college-educated are a new working class - the old working class has not gone away, you know - then this new working class will need to figure out for itself how to get organised to defend its interests. I suspect trying to organise Apple store by Apple store, or Starbucks coffee shop by coffee shop will not do it. Even if Scheiber’s book was written to suggest that a new dawn in the US labour movement was breaking, what it really documents is microscopic gains, difficult for the naked eye to see.

Now, before my friends in the US labor movement (I have dropped the “u” from labour for this) say to me, but what about the teachers in Arizona, or gamers at Microsoft, or doctors in some hospital system, or university graduate teachers, yes, I know all about these things. The labour movement has always won some new members here and there as it lost members elsewhere. But the direction of travel is clear. Union membership is in long-term decline.

Maybe, when we reflect on things, unions as we have traditionally known them, will turn out to have been organisations of their time, and that time has passed. But employer-side negotiator and all that I am, I think workers will always want an independent, collective voice in their workplace, a say over their working lives. Who knows what shape that collective voice will take?

Schriber’s book finished abruptly. You turn to the next page, and there is no next page. I suspect that he would have liked to write a next page, but he had no idea what to say on that next page about the future of the US labor movement. His is a book in search of an optimistic ending. But there is no such ending on offer, at least for now.

Maybe some “old heads” from both sides, management and labor, those no longer active in the business, could come together and start a dialogue and explore possibilities. What’s to lose? I’m sure there is some foundation out there that would fund such an effort.

Having entered these caveats, would I recommend Noam Scheiber’s book? Definitely.

In 2024, 6.67 million employees were members of a trade union. As a proportion of all employees, this is a fall from 28.8% in 1995 to 19.9% today. In the 1960s, it was close to 50%. No wonder the unions pushed Labour hard for this law.

The ERA is designed to reverse this shrinkage and to help unions rebuild sagging membership. Whether it succeeds, only time will tell, but there can be little doubt that it is a pro-trade union law from a Labour government. This should come as no surprise, as the Labour Party was founded to represent in Parliament the interests of working people and their trade unions.

I have always followed British politics closely, and there was no better week to be in the UK if you are interested in such matters than last week. Now, of course, in these days of the internet, 24/7 TV news, and social media, you do not have to be in the UK to know the ins and outs of UK politics. But what you miss when you are following things virtually is the conversation in the workplace or, in my case, in the pub. Not just the back-and-forth with your colleagues after the work of the day is done, but the chat with the stranger who sits down beside you. You can learn a lot in a pub if you are willing to listen.

Of course, the big political story of the week was the imminent decline and fall of the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The writing was on the wall since the disastrous local election results the previous week. Starmer tried to rescue matters with what was billed as a major speech last Monday, but the speech had neither substance nor eloquence. The bland delivering the bland.

I will come back to Labour. The other big UK political story of the week was the revelation that the leader of the far-right Reform party, Nigel Farage, he of Brexit fame, had been given £5m by a Thai-based British crypto billionaire just before he was elected to Parliament. It appears he may have used a £1.4 chunk of that money to buy himself a house for cash, a house he previously stated had been bought with money from his partner’s family.

When pressed, Farage gave various reasons for why he was given the money. It was to allow him to beef up his personal protection. It was a gift for his Brexit work, though why a Thai-based billionaire would bung him £5m for that is a bit of a head scratcher. But that is the way with crypto kings. Not for us ordinary mortals to understand the ways of crypto. By the by, I would be grateful if someone could explain crypto to me and how it can be used to buy stuff in a shop.

Maybe the £5m bung will badly damage Farage. Then again, maybe not. As Trump once said, he could shoot someone on 5^th Avenue in New York, and his MAGA base would still vote for him. Maybe it is the same in the UK with Farage. Trump in the US, Farage in the UK, Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands and the rest of the far right give bigots everywhere a licence to openly express their bigotry, racism, and sexual phobias. They are prepared to overlook the ethical and financial transgressions of their heroes in return for this licence.

But back to Labour. As we Irish would say, Starmer is a “goner”, meaning he will be ousted as prime minister sometime soon. I have seen it suggested that he could serve as a future Foreign Secretary, but I am not aware of any British Prime Minister since WWII who subsequently served in the cabinet of the person who ousted him or her. When you were once top dog, it is almost impossible to return to just being another member of the pack.

I know Willian Hague, a former leader of the Conservative Party, served as David Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, but then Hague never was Prime Minister.

As I have previously written in these Scribblings, I do not comment on UK politics other than when it comes to labour relations laws, my day job, and the UK's relationship with the EU.

We know that Brexit has been a complete economic failure, knocking as much as 8% of UK GDP. When you have done something stupid, the obvious answer is to undo it. Accept that you made a mistake and get on with correcting it. The sooner the better. But even though in recent speeches, including in last Monday’s speech, Starmer admitted that Brexit had badly damaged the UK economy, he could not bring himself to drop his red lines of no to the customs union, no to the single market, no to free movement, and no to rejoining the EU. But he still thought he could put the UK at the “heart of Europe”. Now, I don’t know that you call that, but I call it delusional.

“No, no, no” was bad enough from the UK when it was actually a member of the EU, and the other members had to grin and bear it. But they do not have to do so when the UK is outside the tent. During the “Brexit Wars”, David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, was often referred to as “Frosty the No Man”. Starmer is the new Frosty.

It seems to me that whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister has an opportunity to revitalise the Labour Party by committing to rejoining the EU. I know that cannot happen today or tomorrow, and it may need an electoral mandate to do so, but it would galvanise the membership of the party and put the water of the English Channel, or Le Manche as we call it in France, between Labour on the one side, and Farage and the Tories on the other. Let them explain why they want to keep the UK poorer by staying out of the EU. So Farage can help make crypto kings richer?

Politics and economics are like a horse and carriage. You cannot have one without the other. Much of the political discontent in the UK is rooted in the absence of economic growth and stagnant incomes.

As Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of government at King’s College London, notes in a piece in the Financial Times:

In the years following the financial crisis, incomes have been stagnant. Real wages were below the 2008 level in 212 out of 340 local authorities, according to an April 2024 analysis by the TUC. The Resolution Foundation think-tank has claimed that, had growth since 2008 matched growth before 2008, the average worker would have been around £11,000 a year better off.

When you are no better off than you were 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago, of course you are going to be bitter. Life chances get postponed. How do you start a family? Buying a house is out of reach. Graduates are burdened with crippling student loans. AI is now threatening multiple entry-level jobs. Optimism is in short supply. When the old political structures fail to deliver a better life, you are minded to take a chance on the new and the untested. Jump to the right with Farage, jump to the left with the Greens. Pick your poison.

Rafael Behr had a column in the Guardian which opened with the words: “Removing Starmer solves the problem of an unpopular leader, but without a coherent alternative agenda his successor won’t fare much better.” A return to the EU should be at the heart of that alternative agenda. What’s to lose, and economic growth is there to win.

Oh, and throw in electoral reform as well, to be implemented before the next election. After all, Parliament is sovereign. Is that not what the Brexiters campaigned for?

I’ll be back in London in September, again discussing the Employment Rights Act. And talking politics with who knows who in a pub somewhere.

On May 9, 1950, the then French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, made a speech which laid the foundations for what we know today as the European Union. It first took shape in the Coal and Steel Community. The UK was invited to join the talks in 1951 to establish the Community alongside France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. When the invitation to join the talks arrived, Herbert Morrisson, then standing in as foreign secretary for the terminally ill Ernie Bevin, turned it down, saying, “It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners will never wear it.” Call it the first British opt-out. It was to take until 1973 when the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, joined what was then the European Community to reverse Morrison’s opt-out.

According to the Financial Times, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, “will on Monday give a speech calling for closer UK links with the EU, more defence spending, help for young jobseekers and support for households, ahead of a new legislative package in the King’s Speech on May 13.”

It is the “closer links with the EU” that interest me. As an Irish citizen, I would very much like to see the UK back in the EU where it belongs. Not just “closer links”. Properly back as a full EU member state on the same terms and conditions as the rest of us. No opt-outs and no exceptionalism.

But I doubt if it is going to happen anytime soon, and certainly not this side of a general election unless Starmer, while he is still prime minister, is going to tear up his red lines of no to EU membership, no to the customs union, no to the single market, and not to free movement. I can’t see it happening, can you? To Starmer, these red lines are what the Durham miners were to Morrison, except that what is left of the Durham miners are now all voting Reform.

All too often, those in the UK who are enthusiastic about the UK again joining the EU look at things solely through a UK lens. As the business commentator Simon Nixon has recently pointed out (here), the economic case for the UK rejoining the EU is persuasive. He is right. There was never an economic case for the UK leaving the EU, and those who still argue the Brexit case after ten years of failure do so on the grounds that “Brexit was never properly implemented” without explaining what “properly implemented” means. All their economic fantasies dissolve when confronted by the reality that the UK is but a medium-sized country off the northwest coast of the Eurasian landmass. It is not a world power, even if it once was. According to the former Labour European Minister, Denis McShane, the UK navy has more admirals than it has ships.

In any negotiation, if you wish to be successful, you have to ask yourself the question: How does the other side see things? If I were in their shoes, what would I be thinking?

So, here I am in Brussels, by which I mean the EU institutions of the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament, and the questions that cross my mind are these.

I think the first thing I would notice is that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give it its full and proper title, is unsure of itself and that its politics are fractured. This week’s local election results hammer this point home.

Labour has lost over 1,000 seats, less than expected, but a terrible result, nonetheless. After years of dominance, it has been reduced to a rump in Wales. It languishes in Scotland. Both Wales and Scotland will now be governed by parties that have independence from the UK in their DNA, as does Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland. To borrow from the US, Labour’s performance this week can only be described as operation epic disaster.

Can the UK hold together as a country? I would ask myself. And, if so, on what basis? The SNP in Scotland is not going to give up the quest for independence, nor is Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, and, along with the other nationalist/republican parties, will continue to push for a roadmap to a United Ireland. Plaid Cymru may be less bullish about independence than the SNP in Scotland, but that is also its direction of travel. The independence genie is out of the bottle and loose in the land.

The SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the republican/nationalist bloc in Northern Ireland all see their future firmly within the European Union. Rightly so, because for smaller countries, as the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has pointed out, it makes sense to be in an organised bloc.

Then I would notice that Reform, the current political vehicle of the arch-Brexiter, Nigel Farage, picked up over 1,200 seats in this week’s election. If anything, Reform is a right-wing English nationalist party, whatever about its advances in Scotland and Wales. And it hates Europe with a passion.

But we need to keep things in perspective. The Reform vote is only around 25/26% of the electorate. Would that see it win a national election under the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system when tactical voting to block Farage could play a part? To put this another way. 75% of those who voted on Thursday did not vote for Farage or his party.

But then, the FPTP system, designed for a two-party contest, could well throw up bizarre results in a seven-party contest. Labour currently has a dominating majority in the House of Commons on just 34% of the vote.

Reform, and the Tories, much reduced as the Tories are, both say that if they are in government after the next election, they will tear up any deal Labour does with the EU in the name of “national sovereignty”. How that would benefit British exporters to its biggest market, they don’t say.

So, back to Brussels. What questions are EU leaders going to be asking themselves about the relationship with the UK, and with the Labour government?

First, do we have the bandwidth to enter into negotiations with a UK government, which appears to be deeply unpopular, over a new EU/UK deal that falls far short of membership, only to see that deal tossed aside by a new government after the next election? We need to think long and hard about this, especially given the many other priorities we have on our plate.

Second, as long as the UK has its FPTP electoral system, now that the party system has fragmented, is it likely that we will ever see a consensus for EU membership in the UK that can outlast changes of government? Or will we be dealing with a “Hokey Cokey” European policy of in, out, shake it all about?

Third, we would note that opinion polls suggest that there is a majority among the electorate for the UK to again join the EU. But we would not be 100% convinced, despite what the opinion polls suggest. Why the doubt? Because we think that many people think joining the EU means rejoining the EU on the old terms and conditions, with Euro and Schengen opt-outs and the budget rebate. When the terms of joining are put on the table, would the consensus to join again still hold?

So, if I were a Brussels negotiator, I would be wary of investing too much time in negotiating with the UK as things stand.

Regrettable, but that is the way things are.

Now I have always made it clear in writing these Scribblings that I am of the European social democratic political family and have a very deep affinity with the British Labour Party. So, here is my unsolicited advice. Cast caution to the wind and announce now that at the next election you will be proposing that the UK apply to again join the EU. Put clear European water between you and Reform and the Tories. Build a pro-European alliance with other pro-European parties. It will be a bloody battle, but better a battle than no battle at all. Something to fight for, and something to win. Fight on your ground, not theirs.

The mines are gone, and so are the Durham miners.

On, and by the way, I would also think about planning for electoral reform. The FPTP system is no longer fit for purpose.

Should the business of business be strictly business, or should it be swayed by considerations of political values? I use the term “political values” rather than morals or ethics because this is what is in play when businesses need to make decisions that are deeply political. And, as we know, there is little social consensus on political values. Canons to the right of you, canons to the left. Into the valley of death, as the poem puts it.

These questions are prompted by media reports of some disquiet in Google over a contract it signed earlier this week with the Pentagon. It inked a deal for its technology to be used by the US military for classified work for “any lawful government purpose”, joining OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI in doing so, according to newspaper reports. Other companies signed similar deals later in the week, according to the Financial Times.

Those who are interested in these things will remember back to 2018, when employee objections led to Google deciding not to renew a contract for work with the Department of Defence (now called the Department of War by Pete Hegseth), known as Project Maven, on a system designed to analyse satellite and other imagery to assist special forces operations.

Before Google signed the deal this week, just over 500 employees out of a workforce of over 180,000 sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, calling on him to refuse to let the US government use its artificial intelligence technology for classified military operations.

“We are Google employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the US Department of Defence,” the letter read. “As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralise power and that they do make mistakes.”

They added: “We want to see AI benefit humanity, not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, but extends beyond.”

Now, as it happens, I tend to agree with the sentiments expressed by the letter writers. We still live in a human world, and I want the decisions that impact my life to be made by humans, and not by some machine that knows what it knows because it has scraped every last bit of knowledge off the internet. I want decision makers to be guided by moral considerations.

But that is not the point at issue here. The point at issue is who gets to decide what companies do and who they do business with. Management or micro groups of activists? For me, the answer has to be management.

500 or so Googlers may have signed a letter protesting the Pentagon contract, but how many of the other 180,000 employees approved of it? Google has about 100,000 employees in the US out of the 180,000 it employs globally.

In the last presidential election, the US electorate split almost 50/50 between Trump and Harris. So you have to figure that even if Googlers lean progressive, many thousands of them must have voted for Trump. The 500 letter signers only speak for themselves. They have no mandate to speak for anyone else.

There may have been a moment back in 2018 when what Alan Wild and myself termed “activist capture” controlled events. By this, we meant that small, highly motivated groups could capture worker representative institutions or frame the narrative because of the indifference of the majority. In the climate of the times, management retreated in the face of such activism.

That time has passed. The logic of corporate capitalism is slowly reasserting itself.

As Robert Armstrong notes in the Financial Times:

… AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.

Of course, Armstrong is right. With a putative Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027, what corporation is going to want to pass on a share of that because a handful of employees have moral scruples?

US corporations have been engaged in defence work since the US first had an army and a navy. Companies such as RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin have been manufacturing defence materiel forever, and employ hundreds of thousands of workers in good-paying jobs. Are these workers morally compromised because they work for defence contractors? I very much doubt they think they are. In fact, they probably see themselves as patriotic Americans working to make their country safe.

Would well-paid VW workers in Germany object if the factory in which they work switches from making cars to making tanks or other military vehicles, needed to stave off Russian aggression, because, when it comes to cars, VW can no longer compete with smarter Chinese competitors? I somehow doubt it, if the alternative is the closure of their factory and the loss of their jobs. I cannot see IG Metall taking the position that it would rather see workers on the dole than making drones.

Indeed, the future of manufacturing in Germany may hinge on what has been called in the past “Defence Keynesianism”, governments pumping money into the economy through defence spending. It is often overlooked that it was the splurge of WWII spending that as much ended the Great Depression as Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What is sometimes referred to as the “ordinary working class” has always been fiercely patriotic and finds no problem working in defence industries, whether it be shipbuilding or aircraft manufacture, or producing guns and bullets. They have never questioned what the company they work for does, or who it should be doing business with.

When they are recruiting, companies should make clear: “This is who we are, and this is what we do”. And they should ask: “Are you good with that?” A prospective employee can decide if this is a company they want to work for. If not, they can walk away.

Of course, companies change course and pivot to new areas of work as markets evolve, and what was once in demand is no longer in demand as new “stuff” emerges to make the old redundant. If you want to stay in business, you need to forget the old and get with the new.

Employees may be uncomfortable with where the company they work for is now going. We are not all on the same ethical or political page. In circumstances where your own values clash with the new corporate direction, exit should be facilitated on appropriate terms. Call it the “ethical exit package”. Let them leave on decent terms.

But it is management that is answerable to the shareholders for what the company does. Management cannot be dictated to by a small minority of activist employees. That’s the system in which we live and work.

It is management which gets to decide whether to make guns or butter.

The movie gave rise to the notion of a “terminator”, a force that is almost impossible to stop and eliminates everyone and everything in its path. I know that at the end of the series, the Terminator is finally destroyed, but it leaves a trail of destruction in its path. And the war between humans, led by the son of Sarah Connor, and Skynet goes on.

The Terminator image came to mind this week as the Financial Times reported:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

It also reported that “Microsoft on Thursday told staff it was offering voluntary redundancy to about 7 per cent of its US workforce.”

A little earlier in the month, a piece in the Guardian stated:

As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they have slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. The financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi .

I am not sure I necessarily want to see any of the “Tech Bros” suddenly appearing naked in an alley, too many dollars in therapy would be needed to get the image out of my head. But whether they appear naked or not, the relentlessness of the “AI Terminator” has now been let loose upon the world of work by the Bros.

I make no judgment about these decisions by these companies. They are what they are. When shareholder value is the guiding principle, companies will always do what they believe to be in their own best interest. I know there are readers of these Scribblings who believe that matters should be organised differently. If that is what you want, go and get the votes in political elections to allow you to implement your vision of how business decision-making should be governed. Otherwise, as they say, it is what it is.

Up until the materialisation of the “AI Terminator” when people in the US tech industry were laid off, they could usually fairly quickly find another position, even if that meant moving across the country. Maybe not this time. What the “China Shock” did to manufacturing, maybe the “AI Terminator” will do to tech cities. Cut the heart and soul out of them and leave workers stranded.

A recent comment from the CHRO Association, with whom I am involved, notes:

The average worker said they had less than a 50% chance of finding a job in today’s economy, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. With high unemployment (4.3%), “3 million employees say they hesitate to quit when job searches can drag on for months” noted a Fortune article.

Studies by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson show that increased free trade with China cost Americans around one million manufacturing workers between 1991 and 2007. They also found that offsetting job gains in other industries never materialised. Closed companies no longer order goods and services from local non-manufacturing firms, and former industrial workers have been unemployed for years or permanently. Other work by this team of economists estimates that competition from Chinese imports cost the U.S. as many as 2.4 million jobs in total between 1999 and 2011.

More than that, the manufacturing jobs that disappeared were often location-specific. The economist, Paul Krugman, uses the furniture industry as an example, an industry that lost about 400,000 jobs from the China Shock. Krugman writes:

That’s a relatively small number in a nation where total employment is more than 150 million. But the U.S. furniture industry was highly concentrated in the North Carolina Piedmont region, and the entire region suffered severe distress as a result of Chinese furniture imports. The region became hollowed out, as some workers left to find better paying work, but many were left behind and saw their incomes fall dramatically.

The creation of these “black employment holes” had political consequences. Manufacturing states which had once voted Democratic swung to populism and handed Trump his win in 2016, even though he polled 3 million votes less than Hillary Clinton.

In response to the “China Shock”, and for other business reasons, US industry moved jobs offshore, often to Mexico, where labour costs were considerably lower. For example, on February 10, 2016, Carrier Corporation, a division of United Technologies, announced that it was moving a manufacturing operation from Indiana to Mexico.

The announcement was made to a general meeting of 1,400 employees, one of whom shot it on her cell phone and posted it online. It went viral. Donald Trump made the proposed closure a centrepiece of his campaign speeches which attacked free trade as undermining American greatness.

After he became president, Trump did a deal with UTC. Some of the jobs remained in Indiana, but most still went to Mexico.

In his current term, Trump has said he is using tariffs to force manufacturing jobs back to the US. So far, there is little sign of this strategy working, and the Supreme Court has recently declared some of his tariffs illegal and ordered that the money be repaid. Even if manufacturing businesses were to come back to the US, they would be “job light” because manufacturing these days relies more on robotics and automation than on people.

It is hard to push against the job logic of technological change. Of course, it is cruel and devastating for the individuals involved, especially if they find themselves in a “black employment hole” with no apparent way out.

Which bring me back to the “AI Terminator” and what it may do to jobs in the tech industry. In a piece in the Financial Times, Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School points to work recently conducted at Digital Planet, a research centre at Tufts, which looked at vulnerabilities across 784 occupations.

The economics are striking: 9.3mn jobs and $757bn in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5mn jobs and $1.5tn if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable.

19.5 million jobs. That is some potential hit. And the people who will be hit are tech-savvy; they know how to communicate, they know how to TikTok, and they will not be voiceless.

What will be the political consequences when a new class of the “digitally disposed” emerges? As it inevitably will. They will come for the “Tech-Bros” who did this to them. It is written in the stars. They will not go quietly into that good night, to borrow from the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

Europe will be hit by this as well. As I was writing this, a comment popped up on the left-of-centre website Social Europe. It quotes a stark statistic:

A month ago, the EU’s career office published statistics on applications for its prestigious civil service exam. Two data points stand out. First, a total of 174,922 applications have been filed for 1,500 positions — almost three times the expected number. Second, 45 per cent of them (79,450) came from Italy.

But who knows how all this will play out? As John Burn-Murdoch argues in a Financial Times column, history shows that while developments in technology always destroy old jobs, it also creates new ones. How many jobs, for instance, has internet streaming created for writers and actors?

But here is the thing. There is always a disconnect between those who lose the old jobs and those who pick up the new ones. How many of those who lost their jobs in Carrier in Indiana, are now starring in a Netflix series?

And the shift from the old to the new also takes time. In the meantime, the losers can be very politically sore while the Terminator is in town.

First, on Friday/Saturday, I was travelling and am now in Sitges, Barcelona, my home from home. Trying to write “on the run” was once possible, but now impossible as age slows the reflexes.

Second, the rest of this piece is about the US/Iran negotiations, and I was waiting to see what happened as a result of the meeting between Vance and the Iranians.

Third, I was also awaiting the outcome of the election yesterday in Hungary, an event of significant importance for the European Union, and indeed, for the wider world. Orban is out, losing in a crushing defeat to the opposition. Putin’s biggest European asset is no longer in power. The size of the opposition’s win gives it the power to undo most of Orban’s work over the past 16 years to embed “illiberal democracy” in the country.

More importantly, Orban’s defeat shows that the rise of the populist far-right can be halted and reversed. Orban has been funding the far-right across Europe for years. That funding should now come to an end. So yesterday was a good day for us democrats and social liberals who want a flourishing pluralist society, rich in diversity, as opposed to the narrowness of so-called “Christian nationalism”.

So to the Iran talks

Quoted in the Financial Times (here), Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think-tank in Washington, said:

“It’s one thing to declare a ceasefire on social media and it’s another thing to actually have an agreement where people have a shared understanding of the terms.”

Clearly, there was no such shared understanding because, as I write this, Iran is still blocking shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz and Israel is still attacking Lebanon.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I was taught when I was a young trade union official back in the mists of time, that you should always finish a negotiation by making sure that the two sides agreed on what they had agreed. “Let me go over it one more time: Here is what we have agreed. Are we both agreed on that?”

Not as easy as it sounds. In the hothouse atmosphere of a negotiation, when outside realities can often get shut out, the parties can easily take opposite or divergent interpretations from what was discussed and agreed upon. We hear what we want to hear, and we seek confirmation for what we bring to the table beforehand. Such is the way of things.

Unless we leave a negotiation with an agreement on what has been agreed, there is every chance that the “deal” will unravel when it comes to implementation and reality bites. How often have you heard the words “But that is not what we agreed” thrown at you during follow-up discussions?

Ambiguity and imprecision may appear to leave “wriggle room” to play about with later, but, in the end, it just results in never-ending negotiations that sap energy and run up costs.

Best to be clear about what has been agreed on the day, even if that means there is not going to be an agreement because the two sides differ on what has been agreed. If you leave the meeting with different interpretations of what has been agreed, then accusations of bad faith take root, and mistrust grows. Getting a clear and agreed agreement is hard work and takes time.

Well then, what did you expect from the talks in Pakistan, arranged as they were on the basis of two widely different interpretations of the ceasefire agreement? The US sent a VP who has never negotiated an international agreement before in his life, along with two estate agents, as its negotiating team, and expected to get a deal to end a bitter war in less than 24 hours. Hostilities that have lasted for over 40 years, one way or the other. Good luck with that.

As I have written before in these Scribblings, the US has lost every war it has engaged in since WWII. Can you call a divided Korea a success? Vietnam is now a Communist state. And the US basically just walked away from Afghanistan and Iraq. So much winning. Kidnapping a South American dictator is small potatoes.

I see Donald Trump quoted a saying that he did not care if VP Vance and his team did a deal with Iran during the talks in Pakistan because the US “had already won”. Well, if that is winning, I’d hate to see what losing looked like.

Just to take stock. It is now pretty clear that the US was sold a “bill of goods” by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (here), promising that once decapitated, the theocratic regime in Iran would crumble, with the “streets” rising up to oust the mullahs. A few bombing raids would do it. Some were sceptical, such as Vance and Rubio, but Trump bought it, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

What was to be easy turned out to be no such thing. After a multi-billion-dollar attack, Iran is still standing. A theocratic leadership is still in place, a leadership that marches to the sound of a different drum than the commercial transactionalism of Trump. Did Trump really believe that it would be a “beautiful thing” for Iran to levy a $2m tariff on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, provided it split the money with the US, or did he mean, split the money with him? JP Morgan estimates that such a levy could pull Iran in close on $90bn a year. Not a bad outcome from a war that you apparently lost. A $90bn income stream that you did not have before the war began. Such is the cost of losing. Who knows what it would have been if Iran had won!

I have just finished reading a book about Henry Kissinger. Kissinger comes with very mixed reviews, and I would not be one of his biggest fans. But Kissinger was steeped in history and the lore of statecraft and knew what he was doing. Yet it still took him about six years to get the US out of the Vietnam War, and, in the end, the US just gave up and walked away. Today, Vietnam is a Communist state run from Hanoi.

From press reports, it would seem that there are unbridgeable distances in the negotiating position of the US and Iran. Iran seems to have found strength in adversity. The US appears to be trying to return to the status quo ante, the status quo that existed before the war on Iran was unleashed. So, who knows how this thing ends, if it ever does.

But at least this morning it looks like we can welcome a new Hungary back into the European family. Be thankful for that.

Remember, the EU only came into existence in 1958. In the wider sweep of history, what it has managed to achieve in the past sixty years should not be underestimated. Europe is a continent that, over the centuries, has had “forever wars”, some of which lasted more than 100 years. And we killed millions of our fellow Europeans over religious differences. Those who want to bring religion back into politics should remember this.

One country stands apart from the rest of the continent. No, not Switzerland, which is as closely integrated with the EU as you can get without being a member. Switzerland allows for the free movement of people and is in the Schengen regime.

Of course, it is Brexit Britain, a country that decided ten years ago to leave the European Union and go its own way.

Go back and read some of the things that were said by Brexiters at the time. The UK’s leaving would be the trigger that would lead to the collapse of the Union as other countries followed it out. They wanted this to happen, for the EU to fall apart. The UK would then take the lead in building a new arrangement of free trading countries, shorn of all the stuff the UK never liked about the EU, such as its suite of labour and employment laws, not to mention the single currency. The UK would soon be cutting trade deals across the world, not least a mega deal with the US. Sunlit uplands beckoned.

There were no sunlit uplands. Just grey and dismal lowlands, forever enveloped in a fog of lies and uncertainty. Now perhaps, Brexit Britain was unlucky in its choice of leaders, after the man who had called the referendum, David Cameron, cut and run. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and then Rishi Sunak. Hardly a parade of political titans, blessed with the political skills needed to guide the UK through turbulent times.

After the chaos of the Tories’ time at the helm, Labour was returned to office in 2024 with an artificial landslide. I say artificial, because you cannot in your heart believe that 34% of the vote is a landslide, even if it gave Labour an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. But Labour immediately proceeded to squander the power of its majority with a series of ill-judged decisions.

I am Irish and not British, so I have generally tried to avoid commenting on UK government policies, with two exceptions. First, as my day job is working with large US multinationals on labour and employment issues, I take a keen interest in what is happening in this legislative area. For example, the Employment Rights Act is just now of particular interest, especially those provisions which touch on collective bargaining and trade union recognition. I take the same interest in similar laws in EU countries.

As anyone who reads these Scribblings and my previous Brexit Blogs knows, over the past ten years I have written frequently about the relationship between the UK and the European Union.

The world today is a very different place from the world in which the UK narrowly voted for Brexit. The Russian attack on Ukraine has brought the scourge of war back to the European mainland. China has become a major economic and technological power, already dominating many of the industries of the future such as solar, wind power, and EVs. At the same time, its intentions towards Taiwan are uncertain.

The utter unpredictability of the US president, Donald Trump, makes for a nervous world. When it comes to Trump, I am reminded of the conversation between Alice and the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass:

Alice: “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

The Queen: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Which is what Trump does and then changes his mind before dinner in the evening. Call it Trump Through the Looking Glass: 10 Impossible Things in One Day.

It is no secret that the overwhelming majority of Labour Party members want the UK to again join the EU. However, before the 2024 general election, the leadership committed to three red lines in an attempt to appeal to Brexity working-class voters: no to the customs union; not to the single market; and no to free movement. The leadership will not move off these red lines, even as the economic evidence stacks up about the damage that Brexit has done to the UK economy, estimated by a team of US researchers to amount to as much as 8% of GDP. See also these comments from the former chief economist at Goldman Sachs: here.

The leadership position defies logic. If you were aware of something that was wrecking your economy by as much as 8% in lost GDP, would you not move to put an end to it and reap the financial rewards in extra taxes flowing into the public coffers? As John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said: “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?” Stick with the red lines, it seems.

UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seems to think that the UK will be able to gain access on a sector-by-sector basis to the EU Single Market.

“It is increasingly clear, as the world continues down this volatile path, our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the EU,” he said. (here) and (here)

But, as the Financial Times (here) notes:

As Reeves and Starmer have both made clear, improving ties with the EU is also an increasingly important pillar of the government’s growth plan. But the party’s strategy to seemingly cherry-pick arrangements with the bloc will make substantive progress on negotiations difficult.

Since the days of the Coal and Steel Community in the early 1950s, through the years of the Common Market, and then the European Union, the UK has always wanted to be in and out at the same time. In for the things it liked and out for the rest. It finally got to the point when it could not stomach staying in, even for the things it liked and left.

From the perspective of the members of the EU, once bitten, twice shy. Does a leopard ever really change its spots?, they will ask. Rightly so.

Sometimes, you get the impression that the UK government thinks it can negotiate a deal with the EU Commission to “slip in the back, Jack”, to borrow from Paul Simon. But when it comes to the really big decisions, it is the member states that decide, not the Commission.

Why would member states agree to give the UK, which walked out of the EU in a huff, access to the Single Market on a sector-by-sector basis on the cheap? Or any other basis for that matter. You only have to ask the question to know that they won’t. They are not going to give the UK a competitive advantage over their own businesses. Especially when the UK wants to keep sectors where it thinks it is ahead out of the Single Market. The phrase “cherry picking” may be a little hackneyed by now, but it remains true, nonetheless.

Further, with all else it has on its plate, is the EU going to spend time and resources negotiating with the UK when people in Brussels can read UK newspapers and UK polls and know that Starmer is politically tanking?

I wouldn’t. Would you?

Three final points. First, despite all of the above, the change in tone from UK leaders towards the EU is welcome if, for the moment, that is all it is, a change in tone.

Second, if you are going to open a negotiation with another party, then you need to know exactly what it is you want and be prepared to spell that out when the discussions start. And it is not helpful if, from the get-go, you lay down red lines which you will not cross, but then you expect the other party to cross their red lines to give you the deal you want.

Finally, the UK’s approach to the EU, as set out by Starmer in last Wednesday’s speech, is the same as it always was; membership is just an economic and financial transaction to be decided by the balance of pounds and pence, preferably in the UK’s favour. No hint of any buy-in to the ideals of the wider European project.

But then, as Napoleon is reputed to have said, the UK is little more than a nation of shopkeepers, open all hours.

We talk about the need to have clear objectives, do thorough preparation and planning, get a mandate approved by stakeholders, and have a detailed plan of execution. And focus on the follow-up. You need to have identified your options if the negotiations fail. You should also try to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and work out in advance how they will react to your proposals and what they will do if the negotiations breakdown. You should not be surprised by anything that happens. If you are surprised, then you haven’t planned.

I think if you turned that paragraph into a checklist, there is not one of the items on the list that could be ticked off.

It is clear that Trump thought he could pull off “Venezuela 2.0,” decapitate the regime, install a compliant thug as the new leader - because Trump only likes dealing with thugs - and all would be well. And while the US and the Israelis did manage to decapitate the regime, the rest of the Iranian governing apparatus clearly had not read the script and declined to play the subservient roles Trump has in mind for them. They fought back and started hitting targets throughout the Gulf. Trump expressed surprise that they did so.

The Iranians are waging a guerrilla war against the Americans and the Israelis. Not the same sort of guerrilla war the Viet Cong fought against the Americans in Vietnam, but a twenty-first-century guerrilla war using drones, mines at sea, and small boats capable of attacking large resource-carrying ships. And who knows what else they might have available.

It has long been a truism among historians and military strategists that in the long run, superior force will always win out, and there is no more superior force than the US. But is this necessarily true? Russia is not winning against Ukraine. What was to have been a “smash and grab” campaign has turned into a long war. Neither the Russians nor the US prevailed against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The French had to quit Algeria. Even earlier, the British had to leave Ireland.

Size matters, but so also does the ability to take the political pain of a long conflict. There is no question but that the bulk of the populations of the US and Western Europe backed the Allies in WWII. And during the Cold War. But look at the civil and political turmoil in the US during the years of the Vietnam War. Or the demonstrations in the UK during the Iraqi War.

How long can Republican politicians in the US who support Trump and his “little adventure” against Iran take the political heat, especially with the mid-term elections coming up and the price of oil and oil-derived products such as fertiliser ratcheting up? This week, the Democrats flipped a Florida House seat from the Republicans, a seat that includes Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s country club and the unofficial “Winter White House”. In the words of the song, if the Democrats “can make it there, they can make it anywhere”, it is just up to them to do so.

The politics of democracies are different from those of dictatorships, like Russia, or medieval theocracies like Iran, whose ruling cliques are not under daily pressure from disgruntled citizens or 24/7 media. There is a limit to the political pain that the leadership in democracies can take. There is no limit for the likes of Russia or Iran when citizens and soldiers are ruthlessly sacrificed in the cause of ideology or theology.

The attack on Iran may have flattened and degraded a great deal of its conventional military resources. It no longer appears to have an air force or a navy. But, as I said above, it is still capable of waging a drone guerrilla war and inflicting serious damage on those it attacks. As I write this, the Financial Times is reporting:

Drone and missile attacks continued after 12 US troops were hurt in an Iranian strike on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, one of the most significant attacks on US forces of the conflict.

More importantly, the attack on Iran has highlighted the critical importance of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s supply of oil has to pass. It was always recognised as a chokepoint, but the attack has underscored just how critical a chokepoint it is. The Iranians now know this and in future are likely to put a “tollbooth” across it. Pay to pass. Before the attack, ships sailed through freely. But the fact that the Iranians might make use of the leverage that the Strait gives them never seems to have occurred to those who planned the attack. They never put themselves in Iranian shoes and asked the question: What would we do if we were them? Well, now they know.

In response to Trump’s 15-point peace plan, as the Observer puts it:

Tehran has countered with its own demands: reparations for war damages, an end to attacks not just against Iran but its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and recognition of its “exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz”. This last point indicates Iran’s desire to formalise its biggest point of leverage – its ability to choke Gulf energy supplies and hold the world economy to ransom.

I have long had a rule-of-thumb in labour negotiations: If I can think of something, then so can someone on the other side. Best to work out in advance how you are going to respond when they do think of it. Because they will, even if it takes time. It did not take the Iranians long to figure out the leverage now and in the future that the Strait gives them. That leverage was always there. But Trump’s “little adventure” brought home to them just how important it could be.

Trump is now demanding that allies whom he failed to consult before he launched his “little adventure” come to his aid and help him safeguard the passage of ships through the Strait. He berates and insults them when they decline to help dig him out of the hole he has dug for himself. A sure way to get them to help him.

In any war or negotiation, you should have a clearly defined, measurable objective before you start. A precise, well-planned campaign to achieve that objective, stakeholders on board from the get-go, and contingency plans in place if the plan is knocked off course. Who was it who said that you can have a well-defined fight plan until you get hit with the first punch to the face? Mike Tyson, I think it was.

No matter how well you plan, you will always miss something. It is just the way things are. But if you have planned properly, you will have the resilience to cope with the unexpected, the unknown or unknowable.

It is just that Trump and his “warrior” Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, could not plan their way out of a paper bag. But Trump, who infamously dodged the Vietnam draft five times, now has a guerrilla war all of his own making to deal with.

But he will never put himself on the front line. To borrow from the title of an Irish book, Trump will always fight his wars “on another man’s wounds”.

I am Irish, from Dublin, and I would be quite happy to see a “merger”, as Trump puts it, of the two parts of the island. The sum would be greater than the parts, I believe. Nonetheless, while I was raised in a staunch Irish republican household, I came to realise a long time ago that “simplism” when it comes to nationalism is a dead end. I am under no illusions about how difficult a “merger” would be. I lost those illusions many years ago.

For the question is this. What constitutes a nation? Who determines that some particular piece of land should be one country? History, geography, language, religion, culture, tradition, or some mix of all of these. Are nations simply “imagined communities”, as Benedict Anderson puts it?

Is it not the case that practically every nation on this earth was born, or shaped, out of violence, whether war or revolution? Perhaps the “velvet divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia might count as two countries being created peacefully, but it is the exception and not the rule. Maybe you could also include Switzerland.

There is no question that Ireland had a violent birth, as did the USA. France had the Revolution of 1798, Russia in 1918, and China had the civil war after WWII. That war is still unfinished. German and Italian reunifications in the 19^th century were not exactly bloodless. I could go on, but you get the picture. Polite moral codes rarely apply in these matters. When these nations were created, democratic means of looking to change things were generally not available.

Whatever about the past, surely today it might be argued, we are more civilised, and we have international conventions about the right to self-determination. For example, the UN Charter (1945), Article 1(2) sets the foundation, listing self-determination as a core UN purpose.

But who gets to “self-determine”? That is the critical question. In many countries, this is not a settled matter. I’ll come back to Ireland, where the issue is slightly more complicated than elsewhere.

Within the countries that make up the European Union, is the question of nationhood settled? No, it is not. In Spain, is every region happy to be ruled from Madrid? Don’t many in Catalonia or the Basque Country want their own independent nations? Is this regional desire for independence not a source of continuing tension in Spanish politics, with Castellans asserting that Spain is one, indivisible country and others disputing this?

I live in the north-east of France, a few kilometres from Belgium. I have lived in this part of the world for about twenty-five years. For as long as I have lived in Belgium and France, the question of the continued existence of Belgium as one country has been hotly debated. Between the Flemish in the north and the Wallonians in the south, there is constant rivalry, indeed bitterness. Not surprisingly, in Belgium, one of the homes of surrealism, the current prime minister, Bart De Wever, a Flemish nationalist, does not believe in the existence of Belgium as one nation. He wants to see it broken up. Only in Belgium could you have a prime minister who does not want his own job to exist.

The UK is no longer a member of the European Union. By a narrow majority, ten years ago in 2016, it voted to leave. It thought it would be better off on its own. As is by now well documented, that has not turned out to be the case, with one US study suggesting that GDP is some 8% lower than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. Many UK politicians know and accept this, but they lack the courage to try to lead the UK back into the EU. They are held hostage by English nationalism, a minority of the population, but a well-funded, vociferous minority.

The UK is a country, but it is not one nation. There are four parts to the UK: England, the dominant part, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There is a strong movement in Scotland to see it go its own way, cut loose from the UK, and join the EU. We will see this coming May just how strong this movement is when the Scots vote for their regional parliament.

Could we also see a significant independence vote in Wales? Ever since anyone can remember, Wales has been a Labour stronghold, where they weighted the Labour votes rather than counted them. Out of Wales came Nye Bevan, who built the National Health Service while serving in the post-war Attlee government. Now, it seems the Labour vote in Wales is going to collapse. According to polls, Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, may be on course to lead the next Welsh regional government. Like the Scottish nationalists, they want to break away from England and lead Wales back into the EU as an independent, sovereign nation.

Political earthquakes could be coming in the UK. The now evident political limitations of the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, make this all the more likely.

Which brings me to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has two distinct political/religious groupings, which can roughly be categorised as Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist. I know things are not as neat as that, but it will suffice for this Scribbling. These are rambling thoughts on a Sunday morning, not a profound and researched policy paper.

If within the UK, Scotland and Wales just want to go their own way, separate from England, this is not true of Northern Ireland. The statelet was created to deliver a “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People”, a land in which Catholic/Nationalists would always be in a minority. Except history plays cruel tricks, and it is now the Protestant/Unionists who are in the minority.

The Catholic/Nationalists want Northern Ireland to quit the UK and join with Ireland, merge, in Donald Trump’s words. The Protestant/Unionists want the province to stay with the UK. At some point, a referendum on the matter will be held, but who can say when? A democratic way of determining the future, though whatever the outcome, one side or the other will be bitterly disappointed. Will losers’ consent be forthcoming?

This is what makes Northern Ireland different from Scotland and maybe Wales, and Catalonia and Flanders. They all want to be independent, sovereign states. The two sides in Northern Ireland want to be part of another country, Ireland or the UK. There is no push for an independent Northern Ireland. For good reason. Northern Ireland is economically dependent on the UK. Northern Ireland, as an independent state, could not pay its own way.

Whether the calculus will change on the Protestant/Unionist side if Scotland and Wales break from England remains to be seen. The population of NI is close to 2 million. Let’s say that it is roughly 50/50 between Nationalists and Unionists. The population of England is now somewhere around 58 million. The population of Ireland is 5.3 million. Maybe it might be better to be citizens of a country, Ireland, where you can have a real say in deciding matters than to be a small minority in a country, the UK, where polls consistently show that a significant majority do not care for you and would wish you gone, and an increasing majority of your fellow citizens in Northern Ireland want to go anyway.

But who can know the future and the hold of political traditions on the mind?

One thing is certain, however. The future of both parts of the island of Ireland will be decided in a democratic manner. The days of violence are, hopefully, behind us, never to return. The violence of the IRA failed to deliver on its prime objective, to “liberate” Northern Ireland from the UK. For now, at least, it is still part of the UK, even if the power of the “Unionist Ascendancy” has forever been broken.

Where democratic means are available, even if they can be frustrating and take time, violence can never be acceptable.

Nationalist tensions across Europe are not going to go away anytime soon.