More McCartney

Paul McCartney's just brought out a new solo-career-spanning compilation, called Pure McCartney. It's available in all sorts of formats but the best is the 4-CD, 67-track 'deluxe' edition. (Links to Spotify and Apple Music.) I spent a week dipping in and out of it and then listening to the whole thing through and it's just a wonderful collection. You will know lots of the songs, of course, but there's plenty that you probably won't. It ranges right across the work though it's strongest in periods up to Tug of War and then from Flaming Pie onwards, which is right and proper.

The thing about Macca is that he's in a peculiar position, having probably the most beloved back catalogue of any musician currently living. He could play a four-hour concert and not just fill it with songs you've heard, not just songs you know, or know well, but songs you love, that you could stand up and sing along with the whole way through - and you'd still come out grumbling that he didn't play half a dozen of your favourites.

So inevitably, some of the grumblers got to review the collection and complain about what wasn't on there. And what's wrong with that? I'd like to know. 'Cos here I go again.

This is my Disc 5 of Pure McCartney. A few quite well-known songs that I was surprised not to see on his collection and then a bunch of slightly less well-known songs and a few 'deep cuts'. I've put nothing from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard because actually I think it's worth just buying the whole thing and listening to it on repeat.

I've added YouTube links to the individual songs, but here's everything on single playlist:

• Spotify link:
• Apple Music (missing 'Old Siam, Sir' because Apple don't have it. No idea why.)

1. A Love for You (Jon Kelly Mix) (from Ram [Special Edition])

Recorded (very muddily) during the Ram sessions, it was remixed ready for a Wings out-takes album in 1981, until someone realised that in 1981 no one really wanted a Wings out-takes album. Then it ended up in a movie and finally got released on the expanded special edition of Ram. Catchy as hell - well of course it is, it's a McCartney song - and Paul does his Elvis impression on it, which always makes me happy.

2. Ever Present Past (from Memory Almost Full)

Nearly forty years later, it's a lyric which muses on how hard it is for the 65-year-old McCartney to quite believe he did all those things when he was young. But he muses in an absurdly, effortlessly hook-filled song that twinkles with the energy of a twentysomething. And the video, in which multiple digital supermodels dance in unison with his own sweetly amateurish moves, is particularly lovely.

3. Mamunia (from Band on the Run)

From Band on the Run, the first solo album to really get good reviews (though, in truth, most of them had been pretty good already), this is a lovely melody. Paul is often derided for his relentless optimism, because happiness is something we obviously have in abundance and can afford to mock, and here the verse is another vaguely environmental suggestion that we take the rain and turn it into love. The multipart vocals at 3'20" onwards are totes adorbs.

4. Spirits of Ancient Egypt (from Venus and Mars)

To be as stupidly gifted as Paul McCartney means that he seems unstoppably, throughout his life, to see a new instrument or hear a new type of music and think, I'd like a go at that. It's why I find his embrace of horrible horrible 1980s studio technology (try the song 'Press' on Press to Play) forgivable. He's not trying to make himself sound young; he's just excited by what he can do with sequencers... And here he turns his hand to a kind of psychedelic swamp blues, and finds opportunities in it for exuberant pop.

5. Old Siam Sir (from Back to the Egg)

Back to the Egg kind of killed off Wings. It got dreadful reviews and, no, it's not my favourite record though as ever there are gems. What's weird about the record - and you can hear it on this - is that it is both trying to be Led Zeppelin (this song has shades of 'Kashmir'; and listen to the way the drum sounds too) and the Sex Pistols (by which I mean, more attack, freshness, aggression ; and listen to him do a kind of Jimmy Pursey on the word 'Walthamstow' at around 3'34"). That's not a circle that needed squaring in 1979 and it didn't quite come off but the mist having settled on that particular battlefield, I think this does fine, rocking hard but with enough swagger to pull it off.

6. Looking for Changes (from Off the Ground)

What you don't associate McCartney with is political content. Though in fact there was 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish' and even, in 1968, 'Back to the USSR' was a fairly daring joke. This is off his probably least-loved record (oh no, wait, there's one worse, I'll get to that) and it's his animal rights song. It starts with some violent threats against animal experimenters but, because it's Paul McCartney, on the Oasis-y 'know what I mean' moment it becomes more upbeat and positive and the song drives on through with a kind of 90s clatter which we're now maybe far enough from to not wince at. It's way better than 'Meat is Murder', I reckon.

7. You Want Her Too (from Flowers in the Dirt)

A duet with Elvis Costello, who brings some welcome bitter perversity to a song of male bonding over a shared sexual partner who is clearly no good for either of them. Costello was a great choice in some ways, obviously bringing a kind of Lennon-like caustic savagery and readiness to 'go there' lyrically where Paul might pull back. This one builds something quite epic out of the nastiness and it's fun to hear Paul called 'stupid' in his own song. The Vegas showband ending makes you realise it's a kind of ratpack duet for the 1980s.

8. Daytime Nighttime Suffering (b-side to 'Goodnight Tonight')

Apparently Paul invited the rest of Wings to write the b-side to their next single but then, the next morning, turned up with this and the contest was over. Who wants to be in a songwriting competition with Paul McCartney? This is a plea to a woman in a crap relationship to throw over her terrible boyfriend and come to Paul instead, but somehow he makes it sound generous and loving rather than creepy and manipulative.

9. Take It Away (from Tug of War)

This is the only one I was genuinely surprised not to see on Pure McCartney, one of my very favourites of his solo stuff. George Martin's the producer which helps - when McCartney does solo albums he sometimes plays all the instruments himself and that can lead to a slightly sterile feeling of someone playing along to a tape (there's a slight feel of that in 'Ever Present Past', I think). The arrangement is quite AOR/MOR but with a drive and cheerfulness that overwhelms that. The lyric is effortless and the tune sits so happily in there, just not a thing wrong.

10. Keep Under Cover (from Pipes of Peace)

From a pretty patchy record, this has a George Martin string arrangement that propels it gloriously throughout with a great crunchy up-and-down bass line that almost rivals Paul's own bass line on 'All My Loving'. I wince at the 'what use is art if it hurts your head?' line but then remember Paul has always been rather fond of head-hurting art, to the extent of getting The Beatles to record 'Carnival of Light', a 15-minute sound collage to be played at a psychedelic Roundhouse event in 1967 that makes 'Revolution #9' sound like 'From Me To You'. Again the song is actually about feeling abandoned and alone in the absence of a loved one but it turns again into something joyous.

11. Little Lamb Dragonfly (from Red Rose Speedway)

This is an adorable, wistful children's song. Inevitably this means people have scorned it, because what is a Beatle doing writing children's songs? And when I say 'people' I mean 'idiots'. See also the Frog Chorus.

12. Some People Never Know (from Wildlife)

Wildlife is a funny old record. It was recorded at enormous speed, apparently inspired by rumours that Bob Dylan had started going into the studio and recording his songs in one take. The whole record took two weeks to record (though that's 14 times longer than it took the first Beatles album). It got slammed when it came out; not quite 'what is this shit?' but pretty close. So people haven't really listened to it since, assuming it's a disaster. And they are so wrong. It's a beautiful collection and fits into that late-60s/early-70s thing where bands started living on farms and recording rootsy, folky albums. This is a classic McCartney affirmation of love. Without bitterness, he laments hardly believing it that 'some people get sleep at night time / Believing that love is a lie'. This sounds to me like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and in fact if they don't get back together and record it, I shall be livid.

13. Only Love Remains (from Press to Play)

The production does get in the way of this album, but here's a piano ballad which the production doesn't ruin. And god it's lovely; a soaring and heartfelt and beautiful. He's been writing about love for nearly 60 years and to me there's something defiant and serious about that persistent affirmation of love. One thing that fascinates me is the way he doesn't seem quite to know how to deal with having been in The Beatles; half the time he's trying to puncture things a bit ('they were just a good little band') and at other times he's weirdly desperate to ensure people think they were unfailingly good (hence his constant campaign to have the Magical Mystery Tour TV movie revalued). At one point, maybe in that Beatles Anthology, he reflects that one thing he's glad about is that the Beatles pretty much only sung about love and peace. I mean, that isn't true, but over the years, it amounts to a credo for Paul and it's not the worst legacy to leave.

14. Cut Me Some Slack (with Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear) (from Sound City Real to Reel)

In which seventy-year-old McCartney jams with the surviving members of Nirvana and the thing sounds completely convincing, with Paul tearing apart his fantastic voice on a nonsense lyric. It's a kind of twenty-first-century 'Helter Skelter'.

15. Monkberry Moon Delight (from Ram)

Ram was hated when it first came out, mainly, I guess, because it wasn't The Beatles. Strange that, because, from this distance, it's his most Beatles-y record, full of day-glo psychedelia like this one, which sounds like a paean to hard drugs but is apparently about milk, wouldn't have sounded out of place if recorded in 1967. Must have been an odd feeling for McCartney, thinking but when I did this exact sort of stuff before you loved it. It's a pity because it's a stunningly good record with a handful of his greatest stuff (listen to 'Back Seat of My Car', if you haven't already: it's his 'Surf's Up'). I think Linda sounds pretty great on this too.

16. Ballroom Dancing (from Give My Regards to Broad Street)

Yep, this is probably Paul's least loved album. The soundtrack of a frankly rather awful, trite movie about Paul McCartney zooming around London recording various new versions of his old hits for no good reason which then becomes a silly story about stolen mastertapes. It seemed particularly odd that he re-recorded Ballroom Dancing, since it had only been released in its original version two years before. But actually, I think he improves it. McCartney insisted that the music performances in the movie were actually live and that gives this a bit more energy and swing than the studio version (on Tug of War) and after the instrumental break, the way the music comes charging back in with a Dave Edmunds rock 'n' roll riff at 3'10" (in the audio not the video...) is genuinely rather thrilling.

17. Driving Rain (from Driving Rain)

I find Driving Rain quite a tough record to listen to, because for much of it I just hear Paul deep in mourning for Linda. So the songs are beautiful but sometimes there's a hollowed-out just-stopped-crying quality that makes for tough listening. Especially, I guess, because McCartney is so much the person who writes about love, it's a bit heartbreaking hearing his voice cracking at its loss, although something that makes records like this and Chaos and Creation so satisfying is that, with age, that angelic sweet voice of Paul's has got a bit more weathered which becomes a better vehicle for deeper feelings. This one is the more jolly of my two choices; but don't be fooled, it's his 'Fort Da' game, just about facing his love's loss and then fantasising her return ('You come walking through my door / Like the one that I've been waiting for') but I just hear loss in it, for all its exuberance.

18. Soily (from Venus and Mars [special edition])

This is another nonsense-lyric rock jam. This version is from a Wings movie, One Hand Clapping, but that didn't get released officially (though much of it can be found on YouTube). It drives nice and hard and once again Paul is channelling Elvis. If you don't know, I bet you actual money you'll think nothing of it first time you hear it and then later today you'll find it going through your head and you'll need to hear it again.

19. See Your Sunshine (from Memory Almost Full)

It baffles me why Take That haven't already recorded a version of this; it even sounds like one of Gary Barlow's very best moments. It's light as a feather but moves sinuously through its sections, each one hookier than the last. It's perfect sunny pop of the kind that he pretty much invented fifty years ago.

20. From a Lover to a Friend (from Driving Rain)

Oh god and this one tears me up. Apparently Paul's never quite said definitively what this is about, but it sounds to me like an agonized plea to Linda for permission to love Heather, but at the same time a plea to Heather to understand that he will never stop loving Linda. It's one of his greatest songs, I think, and I'm including the Beatles stuff in that. Worth playing to anyone who thinks he is superficial. And since I seem to have started a thing of commanding bands to cover these songs, I would now like to hear the Jayhawks version of this please.

21. Somebody Who Cares (from Tug of War)

Basically, I want to cheer you up slightly after that last one, without killing the mood. And if I'm being honest, I kind of want to cheer Paul McCartney up too, so this one, which urges us to seek out the ones who love us does the trick. It's is a lovely country-ish ballad from Tug of War. Not all the lyrics feel quite right (if someone took the wheels off my car when I had somewhere to go, in fact even if I didn't have somewhere to go, it would be more than 'annoying'), but Paul's not a poet, he's a songwriter and somehow his clumsy moments seem to add to the feeling.

22. Beware My Love (from Wings at the Speed of Sound)

You remember what music journalists would say of a song that 'From a quiet acoustic opening it builds to a blazing rock finale'? Well this is kind of what they mean. I like how the song (and the title) stays ambiguous throughout: is it 'beware of my love' or 'beware, my love'? There's an alternative version of this with John Bonham drumming, but actually the pounding doesn't really help it; this version is a bit more emotional and needy. The Four Tops of course should record this.

23. Coming Up (Live in Glasgow 1979) (from McCartney II [special edition])

'Coming Up' is on the Pure McCartney collection but in the studio version. And, great though that is, I thought I'd want a live McCartney track; he's released a slightly crazy number of identical live albums but it's clear from this that by the late 70s, Wings were actually a fucking great live band. And this version, loose and groovy, is just such jubilant fun with its funk-pop-disco silliness. The Scissor Sisters actually did a good song called 'Paul McCartney' but they should cover this.

24. Tomorrow (from Wildlife)

From the underrated Wildlife, this song is again about love, about wanting the perfect loving moment never to end. I think this is a stunning song, but never see it talked about and it never ends up on the compilations or best-of lists. I would love to hear the Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris version of this, though I am now prepared to concede this is unlikely.

25. Check My Machine (b-side to 'Waterfalls')

Consider this a bonus track. A 'Her Majesty' or something. I want to end on this because there's always been this utterly weird side to McCartney. Sometimes it's wilfulness that heads him off into rather sentimental areas, but sometimes he just pursues fascinating strange ideas, which are in their way as odd as mainstream pop ever gets. This is both a peculiar experiment with studio technology and a fascinatingly catchy earworm.

If you're thinking of voting Leave...

So we're about to make a huge decision about the future of the country. Why are we making it? Not because it's democratic to ask the British people. We get asked every few years at a General Election where we balance our attitudes on Europe with our concern for health, education, economic and foreign policy, etc. That's how our democracy works and generally it works okay. We don't cherry pick our policies because that is the route to complete confusion - we know that if we had referendums on taxation and on welfare, we'd get votes for American tax rates and Swedish welfare, but you can't have both. That's why we have the party system and general elections.

No, we're in this horrible campaign because David Cameron faced the twin attack of a UKIP threat at the polls and grumbling discontent from his Eurosceptic backbenchers. So he kicked the can down the road by promising a referendum in the next parliament, probably assuming he'd be in coalition with the Lib Dems again and wouldn't have to do it. But here we are.

You may be thinking of voting Leave. Please don't. Here's some - I hope - reasoned, evidence-based argument why you should vote Remain. I've picked three areas that seem to be flashpoints; there are other important issues where I think the argument for remain is also strong (the environment, security, peace, worker rights), but this blogpost is long enough as it is. I'm talking about immigration, the economy, and sovereignty - with then a comment on the people in charge of the campaign.

Immigration

It’s certainly true that immigration from EU countries has increased substantially over the last decade. There have been around two million EU migrants to Britain since 2004. But then quite a few UK citizens migrate to other EU countries: in 2015, while 270,000 EU migrants entered the UK, 85,000 UK citizens moved away.

But anyway, what’s wrong with migration? Migrants help the economy. A study by the UCL Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration shows that the net contribution of EU migrants to public finances is over £20bn, that they contribute more in taxes that they claim in benefits (migrants from the ‘original’ 15 countries contribute 64% more in taxes than they claim in benefits and migrants from the new accession countries, who are typically younger, contribute 12% more). In fact EU migrants are less dependent on benefits and tax credits that native UK citizens – 43% less so.

But, you might say, that’s because they have pushed UK natives into unemployment by undercutting wages. In fact, The Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE found no evidence to say that migration created unemployment, drove down wages, or pushed up the benefits bill. In fact they found that EU migrants were on average significantly better educated than UK natives – 43% for EU immigrants against 23% for UK natives. And notice: they were educated abroad, thus saving the UK significant amounts of money (UCL calculated that saving as £6.8bn).

There are probably three causes of the misconception:

1. The Lump of Labour Fallacy: this is a common-sense but false idea that there is a finite pool of jobs, therefore if more people come in and compete, they must drive down wages or drive up unemployment. In fact immigrants earn money and then spend money, creating new jobs elsewhere in the job chain and thus enlarging GDP and the pool of jobs.
2. The global financial crisis. The bulk of EU immigration has happened over the last 10 years and at the same time unemployment has risen and wages for a long time stagnated or went down. It may seem obvious that there's a connection but no, there isn't. Employment and wages collapsed because we went in to recession. And if A&E or class sizes have been hit, it's because of government cuts, not because of migration. There are undoubtedly some very specific industries in a few very specific areas where migrants have undercut UK workers. But the answer to this is to unionise and raise the minimum wage, not to keep migrants out. On the whole, migrants (a) do jobs that UK natives don’t want to do (b) do jobs that British people can’t do (they are better – and differently – educated).
3. Press hostility. The press has been unremittingly hostile to migrants and tell us constantly things that, as we’ve seen, are untrue. Of course, we’re not so gullible are we? But look at these maps.

Image: Laurence Dodds, Raziye Akkoc, Matthew Goodwin & Rob Ford (c) Telegraph 2015

On the left it shows where immigrants are most populous in England and Wales. On the right is shows where people are planning to vote UKIP (and UKIP voters are the group that put immigration highest on their list of political priorities). You’ll notice that generally where migration is high, UKIP voters are low, and vice versa. In North Norfolk, where there are very few immigrants, if any, they’re mad for UKIP. In London and the South East where the vast majority of immigrants live, UKIP are nowhere. What this tells us, surely, is that people who have no direct experience of immigration believe that it’s a problem because they have heard it’s a problem – and those lurid headlines are the most prominent source of this misinformation.

The last thing to say is that if we do leave the EU, what do you think is going to happen? First, unless we literally become a fascist state, we’re not going to deport those EU citizens (unless you fancy seeing the reciprocal uprooting of pensioners from their Spanish and French retirement homes). Second, if we Brexit and then try to get access to the European Economic Area (EEA), that will certainly come with strings attached – and one of those will be free movement for EU citizens. Third, we want immigration anyway; it sustains some of our key industries (the NHS and so on). To block immigration would be an act of terrible self-harm.

Economy

It;s not disputed by the Brexit camp that we do a lot of business with Europe. In fact according to the Government's Pink Book, we do about 45% of our trade with the EU. The question is what would happen if we leave?

We currently have no tariff barriers on trade with Europe on goods or services and we benefit from the free movement of people across the continent. If we left, would we be able to negotiate the same deal?

No - and here's why.

1. About 44% of our exports go the EU. About 3% of the EU's exports go to us. That puts us as a huge disadvantage in any negotiation. We need them much more than they need us.
2. We would just have pissed off the EU. Not a good starting point to try to get mates' rates.
3. Even if we managed to charm them, it's not in the EU's interests to give us a great deal. If we can get just the same access to the EEA outside the EU, won't every other country ask for the same deal? Right-wingers like Marine Le Pen of France's far-right Front National hope Brexit will lead to a cascade of countries trying to break up the EU.
4. There are precedents - but they're not much good for us. Canada has a trade deal with the EU, but, as the BBC Reality Check points out, it mainly covers goods, not services - and 80% of Britain's business is in services. Norway is outside the EU and negotiated access to the single market but, as the former Norwegian foreign minister says, they have to contribute to the EU, accept all its regulations, and freedom of movement (they are, in other words, within the Schengen agreement, which currently, Britain is not) - and yet they don't have a seat at the table, no vote on any of these matters.

We would face tariff barriers to our biggest trading partner - who are on our doorstep. That would put the cost of business up by, who knows, 3%? 5%? On the Today Programme this morning a Brexit economist suggested that this would be fine because the pound would probably drop a bit on Brexit. Um, yes, that would be fine for exporters if the pound dropped exactly the same as the new tariff barriers. But it would be doubly terrible for importers and people who go on European holidays and anyone caught up in the recession that pretty much every single reputable economic body says would be the result.

If you are concerned for the vitality of the British economy, vote Remain.

Sovereignty

It is true that the EU is a fairly cumbersome organisation, although this is easy to overstate. There is a lot of talk about unelected bureaucrats, running the EU. We have 393,000 civil servants in the UK. To run the whole of the EU, there are 55,000 (less than 1/7th the number).

But probably the Brexiteers are talking about the European Commission, which is the body that proposes legislation. The EU Commissioners are not elected, it's true. But they are proposed by elected governments of all member states. Every EU Commissioner is there because an elected government proposed her or him.

And then the European Commission only proposes legislation. That legislation is then voted on by the European Parliament whose 751 members are elected by the populations of member states (and 73 of those MEPs are British). Elections to the European Parliament are proportional - so actually much more democratically representative than the UK parliament. This is why there is only 1 UKIP MP in Britain (i.e. 0.2% of the MPS, despite gaining 12.7% of the national vote), while in the European parliament election UKIP got a little over 26% of the vote and has just under a third of the UK's MEPs. Of course, it's true that British people tend not to turn out to vote in these elections (hence UKIP's disproportionately large showing), but that's us not stepping up to the democratic plate, not the EU being undemocratic.

And then the major legislation that comes out of the European Parliament has to be ratified by all the national parliaments. It's laborious, yes; but undemocratic? No.

(And let's not talk about the House of Lords.)

More broadly though, what does sovereignty mean to the Brexiteers? What power do they think we can get back by leaving? We have pooled some of our sovereignty in the EU. And that's surely a good thing. It makes sense to make legislation at the lowest, most local level - and no lower. Is it really a good idea for every European nation to separately waste time coming up with their own regulations to make sure that electrical goods are safe or that fruit is free of dangerous pesticides? Particularly when we trade these goods with each other? It's much better to do these things at an intergovernmental, supranational level. Pooling sovereignty saves time.

And pooled sovereignty is still sovereignty. The UK has a lot of pooled sovereignty within it. We are four separate nations who have pooled sovereignty. But in fact we are multiple regions who have pooled sovereignty too. It's not an attack on the sovereignty of Peterborough that it has the same number of votes in parliament as Chorley. Nor is it a failure of sovereignty if Peterborough is sometimes on the losing side of a parliamentary vote, something that Leave don't seem to understand. We do some things better in bigger units.

More broadly, sovereignty doesn't mean what it meant when the sovereign made us, um, sovereign. One of the results of globalization has been that there are huge global corporations - utterly undemocratic, entirely unelected - whose internal economies dwarf those of most countries. In 2014, of the top 100 economies in the world 63 were corporations and only 37 were nation-states. These corporations want things that are not necessarily in our best interests: they want to drive down wages, reduce regulation, health and safety standards, workers rights, the length of your holiday, your maternity pay and so on. They have the clout to do this. We will not be better at resisting that pressure if we step away from the EU; we will more prey to these rapacious corporations, not less.

It's corporate power that is more damaging to our sovereignty than a bunch of EU regulations. If you want to preserve sovereignty, vote remain.

The Brexiteers

I'm not someone who believes that you should be swayed by personalities in this debate. If I were convinced of the argument for Brexit, it wouldn't give me a moment's pause to learn that David Beckham or J. K. Rowling or Stephen Hawking are on the Remain side. But it's not just a matter of personality to note that Brexit has attracted the support of Donald Trump and Geert Wilders andVladimir Putin. These are not people, I would suggest, who have your or my interests at heart.

But still, bad people can coincidentally have good ideas, so that's not a decisive argument. What is more serious and disheartening has been the nature of the debate. It's been the most depressing political debate I can remember, and that's even before the murder of Jo Cox by an ultra-right-wing activist.

I'm not blaming the Leave side for this, not wholly. The most prominent Remainers have exaggerated the reliability of their predictions, for example George Osborne's ridiculous claim that he can know the state of a post-Brexit economy in 2030, when each of his predictions for the following quarter have proved wrong. We can be pretty sure there would be a very serious recession if we vote to leave, but how the economy would respond after that is almost impossible to say. Cameron has unfortunately often employed the relentless negativity of Project Fear rather than promoting any positive vision of the EU. I said this four months ago and the tone hasn't changed. (It's almost like they don't read my blog.) I've been disappointed at how reluctant and half-hearted Jeremy Corbyn has been on the Labour side (at least until recently); he's not an instinctive European and it shows. The case for migration, for harmonization, for pooling sovereignty, for the cultural and intellectual benefits that flow from our EU membership, these cases have not been made. The top Remainers have focused narrowly on the economy, making it sound like a matter of selfish national calculation rather than a vision of unity and cooperation.

But, Christ alive, the Brexiteers. The Remainers have exaggerated, played on our fears, and basically been a bit hopeless. The Brexiteers have lied and lied and lied again. The tabloids have whipped up visceral hatreds against immigrants, supported by Nigel Farage, a man, who, let's not forget, was described by one of his own schoolteachers as a 'racist' and a 'fascist' and who used to sing 'Hitler-Youth songs'; who referred only a few years ago to black people as 'niggers' and 'nig-nogs'; who said he would be concerned if a group of Romanians moved in next door; who complained about hearing people speak foreign languages on the train; who argued that HIV+ foreigners should be denied NHS treatment; who declared that migration put British women at greater risk of rape; and who, a week ago, unveiled a poster of dark-skinned people warning of immigration that even his fellow Brexiteers described as being like 1930s Nazi propaganda; and when Jo Cox was murdered on the same day, he called it 'unfortunate timing' and sought to portray himself as the 'victim'. He is a disgusting man.

But his fellow Brexit campaigners, even as they distance themselves from him, still whip up fears about immigration - fears that they don't remotely believe. I don't think Michael Gove is worried about immigration but he thinks the only way Leave can win is jumping on the racist bandwagon, and so this intelligent, educated man pokes the fire.

And does Boris Johnson believe that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU? No, he doesn't. He knows better than that. He knows that - once you subtract the rebate and the money that comes straight back to us in the form of agricultural support, regional aid, and more - the figure is less than half of that. The point has been made time and time again (for instance here, here, here, here, here, and here), but Boris refuses to back down, will not change the slogan on his bus (left) continues to make this claim, and why? Because the lie is working.

Does the Leave campaign really think Turkey is joining the EU? Their poster (right) says so, but it's not true. Does Boris Johnson really believe Brexit will help LGBT rights? Probably not, since it wouldn't. Does the Daily Express really believe the EU has banned curved cucumbers or says bottled water can't be advertised as helping hydration? It seems unlikely, since these things aren't the case. Does Nigel Farage really think that 5000 Islamist terrorists, disguised as migrants, have entered Europe via the Greek Islands in the last 18 months? Surely not, since he made it up.

And so it goes on.

The worst of it is that the Leave camp seem often unswayed by argument or evidence. A poll for YouGov found that, for example, the views of academics were trusted by 68% of Remain voters but only 26% of Leave voters. The Bank of England was trusted by 61% of Remain, but 19% of Leave. Heads of reputable charities had the trust of 58% of Remain and 21% of Leave. This is why, less than a week away from the Referendum, after months of campaigning, the UK public is massively misinformed about the EU.

What this means is that quite likely I shouldn't have bothered write any of this. Why give evidence when people think common sense is better, even over matters of fact?

Look, here's the thing. I'm not naive. I know we take decisions and form our opinions in a network of other prior beliefs, and attitudes, and social practices. As a metropolitan, left-wing, university professor and arts professional I am pretty likely to vote Remain. (The Times Higher found that 88.5% of university staff backed Remain; the Creative Industries Federation found that 96% of its members backed Remain; Londoners are polling 51% to Remain against 34% to Leave). But in fact, my view has shifted. Last year, when the EU was punishing Greece and bypassing its own referendum, I seriously contemplated voting Leave.

Because we have to change our minds. Yes we make decisions based on other opinions we have; we don't like holding opinions that contradict each other. But sometimes the decision is so important, it's the other views that must change, if the arguments are compelling enough. This is one of those decisions.

I also think this is the far-right's attempt at a grab for power. It's an unholy alliance of extremist neoliberals who want to unravel worker rights, dismantle the welfare state, further liberate business and complete the Thatcherite revolution with the far-right racists who believe they can turn Britain back into the whites-only paradise it never was and never should be, let by the lounge-bar nudge-nudge racist Nigel Farage.

If you've read this far, I'll be very surprised but very grateful. For all the reasons I've given above, please consider seriously voting Remain on Thursday.

Buying Votes

You’ve probably seen the growing story that the Tories seem to have consistently under-reported their election expenses. It’s a serious story because there are strict limits to election spending, designed to stop rich people buying an election. The amounts reported to the Electoral Commission were within those limits, but it seems that often when the Tories sent central resources into a seat to campaign, they didn’t take those into account. So the cost of election battle bus, hired for several thousand pounds a week and the accommodation costs of those driving it, were allegedly not declared as candidate spending in each constituency they visited.

Channel 4 have been reporting this story doggedly for a few weeks now and various police forces are now properly investigating these claims. Indeed, 51 constituencies (representing around 8% of the House of Commons) are under investigation. Details at the bottom of the page.

That figure looks very dramatic and it is. But two words of caution:

First, it doesn’t mean the Tories bought 51 seats. It’s obviously a bit more complicated than that. For instance, in nine of the 51, they didn’t actually win. If they overspent at the election, that’s still a very serious offence, but it’s not a matter of a sitting Tory MP being there fraudulently.

Another issue is that many of the seats that the Tories won in 2015 were already held by the Conservatives before the election. In other words, they might have won the seat anyway – though, let’s be cautious about that: why send in a battlebus if you don’t think there’s a battle? (Five of the seats under investigation that they held onto are among the 12 narrowest Tory majorities.) But still, in only 14 of those seats did the Tories unseat another party’s MP and install their own candidate. And then there was also Thanet South, where Nigel Farage fought a very strong campaign to become UKIP’s MP.

I should also say, of course, that these claims are being investigated. We can’t say yet whether serious fraud has been perpetrated. It may be that this is genuine error and oversight; it may be more sinister. It may be that the police conclude that only minor misdemeanours have been committed and the Tories get a slap on the wrist and that’s it; it may be that they are fined punitively. Who knows? Some people may go to prison. It may be that those elections are annulled and 51 by-elections have to be called.

Mind you, if the elections are annulled and re-run, there are various injustices that follow from that. Can everyone afford to run again? Campaigning costs time and energy and money. Will the original candidates be reimbursed and compensated for their costs?

And then there’s this. The last election was very close. The polls suggests that opinion is still pretty close but Jeremy Corbyn has faced a constant onslaught since he took over as Labour leader last September. Is it possible that if some of these seats were re-run, the Tories might actually gain seats that they didn’t win in 2015? That can’t be right can it? If so, an unscrupulous party could deliberately overspend at an election where the polls weren’t in their favour, hoping that they will have recovered in the polls by the time the fraud triggers a by-election. Would it not be more appropriate to have a red card system, whereby a party that commits fraud in a seat is banned from standing in that constituency for a couple of general elections?

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Seats under investigation

The colour indicates who currently holds the seat. The seats in bold changed hands to the Tories at the last election. Note that Thanet South really looked like it would go to UKIP (Nigel Farage was the candidate).

Screaming Blue Murder

A quick one. The Brexiteers are forever talking about the cost of Brussels regulations, the burden of EU red tape.

It's always misleading, exaggeration or outright lies. Boris Johnson went on the Today programme last week to claim that Brussels is responsible for £600m in regulation. That is, £600m of economic activity that it's preventing through wasteful unnecessary regulation. So leaving Europe will cut regulation and the economy will grow.

What's the truth? That's an estimate derived from the right-wing Open Europe think tank. They in fact state that the cost of regulation is £33.3bn each year or £640m a week. But even they also admit there are benefits from being part of the EU system and they come to £58.6bn a year or £1.1bn a week. In other words the net 'cost' of EU regulation is a return to the UK of £487m a week. (And that's just the business benefits and says nothing about the benefits to us as EU citizens, to our culture, etc.) Leaving the EU will, on this measure, harm the economy.

And then various Brexiteers have claimed that half or more of all UK legislation is made in Brussels. So if we leave the EU we regain control of our economy.

Where to start? First, it all depends what you mean by legislation. Does one regulation equal a whole new piece of primary legislation? Probably not. It's true that our membership of the EU means that when there is a new regulation it is usually incorporated immediately in UK law without need for a vote. And there are lots of regulations coming from the EU. But two things:

(a) a lot of this regulation simply doesn't affect us, like the ones concerning the Mediterranean or how to grow tobacco and

(b) a lot of this regulation, if we left the EU, we'd want to incorporate into UK law anyway. Do we not want our beaches to be clean? Do we not want the electrical products we buy here to be as safe as they are on the continent?

Of course we do. It's like the ridiculous ongoing shambles of the British Bill of Rights which the Tories believe they can draw up to replace the European Convention of Human Rights which is currently incorporated into UK law. What they've discovered - obviously - is that there is no such thing as a meaningful set of British rights that are more fitting to us that the European set. So they're hoping, I imagine, that we'll all forget about it and they don't have to waste everyone's time with this nonsense. The same is true of Brexit; if we leave the EU we'll spend the next few years finding UK equivalents for most of the regulations we've supposedly left the EU to avoid.

And even then, if we want to do business with them, you think they'll trade with a country that doesn't abide by the same workplace standards as they do? Not if we want anything like the kind of deal we have at the moment (which the Brexiteers are convinced we can get just by demanding it). So we'll have to keep those regulations one way or another. At least in the EU we have a chance to change the regulations we don't like.

But still, is it true? Is 50% of our legislation made in Brussels? The House of Commons studied this and they said, given all the variables, it's simply not a claim you can make unambiguously. They reckoned the EU is responsible for anything between 15% and 50% of new legislation. The Brexiteers typically go for the upper figure. (Except Boris Johnson, who likes to claim it's 60%.)

And here's the thing. I know it's an article of faith among free-marketeers that regulation is a bad thing because it stops business doing what business does best, but take a minute to think about it and it's just obviously nonsense. 

Murders cost the economy money but they also generate economic activity. A murder requires the work of police officers and pathologists and detectives and coroners and lab technicians and journalists and printers and manufacturers of crime scene tape and evidence tents and, I don't know, magnifying glasses and deerstalkers and so on. They make work for hospitals and mortuaries and undertakers and crematoriums. They drive investment in alarms and pepper sprays and guard dogs and street lighting and window bars. They shake up lazy businesses by forcing a sudden need to replace staff. They make us reflect on our society and its values in a way that can't fail to stimulate new business concepts. By creating sudden gaps in the employment market they give opportunities to the private sector which likes nothing more than spotting a gap and filling it with a brilliant new entrepreneurial idea. In fact, come on, now we're really cooking, what if murder were legal; that whole dormant homicide business would be liberated. Think how lucrative a free-market in murder would be! The innovations, the employment, it would open up a whole new thriving area of business. The economic dividends would be extraordinary. Yes, of course, there would be a cost- economic and emotional - but nothing that a healthy private sector can't fill and even fill better, because as Schumpeter says, capitalism thrives on creative destruction and why should murder be any different?

The laws against murder are a form of anti-business regulation!
Free the murderers!
Free the economy!

On second thoughts, let's not.

And let's stay in the EU.

Brexit and the Poor

The Brexiteers have had a bad few weeks. Their trade arguments were trashed with enormous dignity by Barack Obama while their economic arguments were steamrollered by a lengthy Treasury document. Their responses to these have been blatant racism (Boris Johnson accusing Obama of being 'part-Kenyan' and having an 'ancestral dislike of the British Empire', as if Obama is basically a secret member of Mau Mau) and self-destructive economic relativism (the Treasury is making impossible predictions about economic performance - which might be true but also covers the Brexiteers own arguments).

One thing that strikes me about the right-wing Brexiteers' argument sis the odd way that they are so often using left-wing arguments to support Brexit. They talk about democracy, and accountability, and they wring their hands about the poor. The poor will be liberated if we leave the EU, they say.

Here's a simple bit of history that will tell you what you need to know about these claims.

In the 1970s, broadly, it was the economic right-wing that favoured the EU (Thatcher campaigned to stay in the European Economic Community, for instance) and the left-wing that opposed it (Tony Benn campaigned against). Now it's the left-wing that favours the EU and the right-wing that want out. I simplify but not that much.

This switcharound happened in the late 1980s and it happened because of the 'social chapter'. Its proper name is the 'Protocol on Social Policy and the Agreement on Social Policy' which is part of the Treaty on European Union, also known as the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. But why did this make a big difference?

The EU began its life in the 1950s as the 'European Coal and Steel Community', a small-scale customs union, designed to eliminate tariffs on coal and steel between the member countries (and, as a hefty side project, reduce the chance of war between them). It was signed by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. This customs union added some administrative bodies to oversee its operation and evolved into a fuller European Economic Community, with the aim of integrating their economies. Various countries joined over the next couple of decades: Denmark, the Republic of Ireland and the UK in 1973, Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986. But at this point, in the mid-eighties, it is still, overwhelmingly, a customs union with a little bit of regulatory harmonisation attached; it is fundamentally about creating a free-trade bloc for those countries. And the Tories are - with a bit of flag-waving xenophobia attached, are still enthusiasts for EU membership while Labour campaigned in 1983 on a manifesto, parts of which argued for pulling out of the EU altogether.

But in 1985, Jacques Delors became President of the European Commission (the institution concerned with European legislation). In the Treaty of Rome there were broader aspirations than simply being a free trade zone; it also enshrined freedom of movement for workers (Articles 48ff), to establish basic standards across Europe for working conditions, union recognition, social security, gender equality in pay and conditions, and more (Article 117ff), and a Social Fund to raise living standards and working conditions (Articles 123ff). He noted that while the customs union had been a priority, little progress had been made on these social aspirations and Delors was determined to bring the social aims of the Union up to speed with its economic ambitions. To this end he and his team drew up the Social Charter (or, to give it its full title, 'Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers'), setting out a series of protections and support for working people across the Union. And it was signed up to by all member states in 1989.

All? No not all. One member did not sign up to it and I bet you'll never guess who that was. Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Delors were never going to be friends. She a standard-bearer for the neoliberal right, he a fighter for the European left; she an individualistic Methodist, he a communitarian Catholic; she a monetarist, he a socialist, etc. He accepted an invitation to address the Trade Union Congress in 1988, which became the signal for the Tory press to vilify him. And they didn't get on. Thatcher resisted the social charter all the way down the line, culminating in refusing to vote for it in 1989. Why? After all, most of the social charter was there in the founding documents of the EU for which she campaigned in 1973.  Because she believed, dogmatically but sincerely, that regulation kills jobs and is bad for business. She liked the idea of a free trade zone but did not want the social side of the EEC.

By the time that the social charter was due to be enshrined in European law - in the Maastricht Treaty, which would replace the Treaty of Rome - Thatcher was gone but her successor, John Major, was just as opposed to the social charter. Under Major, Britain negotiated that the clauses on social policy would not be part of the main document, but form a separate protocol from which Britain would be able to 'opt out'. Put another way, the Tories ensured that workers in Britain would be uniquely unprotected from inequality, unemployment, unsafe work environments and more. Even so, the right-wing Conservatives back home saw Maastricht as a document that enshrined a new liberal-left consensus in Europe and gave John Major's government a horribly rough ride in ratifying Maastricht and went on to undermine him right the way through the 1990s.

At the same time, the left in Britain, bruised by the brutal treatment of workers and unions by Thatcher's governments in the 1980s, saw the EU's social dimension as being a welcome support for the principle of raised working standards. Having seen the EEC as a 'capitalists' club' for twenty years, the unions and Labour moved towards greater enthusiasm for the Union, just as the Conservatives were backing away in horror.

And that is where we still are. Mostly. The EU's treatment of Greece sent, I think, shockwaves through some on the left. The neoliberals with their lust for austerity have seized the European Central Bank with the support of Angela Merkel and it has been shocking to see the naked bullying of a democratically-elected left-wing party in the name of a right-wing ideology for which few people voted. There is, indeed, a horrible democratic deficit in the EU which must be addressed.

But the positions still seem to be holding. The right tend to be against the EU, the left are broadly in favour. I still simplify but still not that much.

This is what you need to remember when people like Iain Duncan Smith wring their hands and say that they are campaigning for Britain to leave the EU because they are thinking of the poor. Yes, they genuinely believe that regulations to protect the poor actually damage the poor, despite the disgusting record of successive conservative administrations since 1979 in consigning people including millions of children) to poverty and having to rely on soup kitchens and charity. The idea that austerity helps the poor is rubbish and they either believe it, in which case they are stupid, or they don't in which case they are liars.*

But you know what? It's even worse than that. The right-wing Brexiteers are not just advocating departure because they don't like a bit of regulation. No, they've seen an opportunity. If we leave the EU, the EU will survive - and it will be on our doorstep. Forget all the rubbish about us negotiating to stay in the free-trade zone; why would the EU let us do that? It would cause a domino effect of other right-wing countries (fuelled by scare stories about immigrants) asking to leave on the same terms. No, the EU obviously won't give us access to their markets on the same terms.

They may give us access but at a price. There might be some negotiated lower tarrif compared to some other non-European countries, but that will still add to the costs of business. So how will we compete? By making ourselves attractive to overseas investment - and that will mean savagely lowering corporation taxes, wage costs, health and safety protection, anti-discrimination legislation. What choice would we have? As Iain Duncan Smith said on TV this morning 'We have to run our economy in such a way that [foreign investors] have confidence in it’. In some ways this is always true - the power of foreign investors and the exchange markets constrains the power of individual states - but this is why states need to work together to ensure they can't be picked off one by one and forced into a spiral of competitive austerity. But IDS and his gang actively want us to picked off like this.

You know that bit in the horror movie when the heroine locks the door and thinks she's safe but the cop on the phone says, The killer's inside the house with you? If we vote Brexit and lock ourselves out of Europe, the killer will be inside the house with us and we'll be on our own.

Because this is the right-wing Brexiteers’ ultimate aim, isn't it? We had an opt-out from the social chapter (though New Labour - quite fucking rightly - signed us up to it, because British workers deserve the same protection as workers in Germany and Italy and France) but they don't just want to pull us out of that; they want to force us into a completely radical and unprecedented demolition of all our social provisions. They want you and me to be completely exposed to the depradations of global corporate capitalism. They want to roll back the frontiers of the state in a way that Thatcher could only dream about. Do they really think the poor will do better under such conditions? Of course not and they don't care.

We must vote REMAIN. Europe is our future and our hope.

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* And here’s another thing. At the very best – the very very best – some market mechanisms might improve things for some people. But they never do this deliberately; market mechanisms make things socially better for people only at best as a side-effect of the search for profit. (I’m saying absolutely nothing controversial here by the way; this is completely mainstream neoclassical theory.) But if the social good comes into conflict with the quest for profit, the social good is always abandoned. Not because capitalists are nasty people but because that’s how the system works. Do we want a system where we have to hope that profit will protect our fundamental rights? IDS and his gang do want that, because they are radical right-wing revolutionaries: they think a fully marketised society will revolutionise our sense of what our fundamental rights are. In fact, they think we have none and faced with the ineluctable law of the market we will realise that we must become entrepreneurial or die. Literally, die. They think all of our liberal bla bla about fundamental human rights will wither away like obsolete ideas from past centuries like the Four Humours or a geocentric universe. All that is apparently solid, they think, will melt into air. But that assumes market mechanisms are a god-like principle for revealing the truth and they are not: they are just an immensely powerful mechanism to turn everything into an analogue of themselves, a ghost of economic exchanges, zombie-entities in which every value is removed and replaced by money value. And right at the heart of this is that basic structure at the start of this note: protecting fundamental rights must not be left as the hopeful side effect of something else; human freedom is more important than economic liberty and when they come into conflict, it is economic liberty that must buckle, not our humanity.