Open letter to the Leader of the Opposition concerning Article 50

Dear Jeremy Corbyn MP,

My name is George Harold Millman; I'm an actor, playwright and political activist. I realise that you will most likely have received numerous messages on this subject, but it is important that I express to you my feelings concerning the triggering of Article 50, with specific regard to your intention to order a three-line whip on your MPs to vote in favour of it. I need to say right at the start that generally, I really admire your work. I have been part of crowds you have addressed on four occasions (I believe), I agree with the vast majority of what you say and I generally find you to be a real breath of fresh air in a largely corrupt political system. That said, I cannot help but feel that on the Article 50 discussion, you are making a fatal error that could have far-reaching consequences.

The reason that seems to define any lack of opposition to Article 50 is the need to respect the result of the referendum and the will of the people. I believe this logic to be flawed, for the following reasons:

1) I stayed up watching the results of the referendum as they came in, and all night it was switching between Remain and Leave being in the lead. Right from the start, it was clear that whichever side eventually came out on top, the country would be almost entirely split. I believe this to be a major constitutional problem; a referendum that reveals an almost entirely split country results in a decision which is opposed by almost half of all citizens. I feel that the way to handle this is not to blindly go down whichever avenue came out in a narrow majority, but to undertake a serious investigation into the reasons why people voted either Remain or Leave and take the course of action that will benefit those people the most, whether that is by remaining or leaving. Forcing through a Brexit led by a Prime Minister without a mandate in these circumstances is not respecting the democratic will of the people; it is playing a political game that individuals suffer from as a result.

2) The Leave campaign is known to have used a lot of lies and mistruths to garner support (as did the Remain campaign, but not to the same extent) so the result could be argued to have occurred on false pretences.

3) The referendum question did not say anything about exactly when Article 50 should be triggered. We have a Government which quite clearly has the interests of big business at heart at the expense of everyone else. Voting down Article 50 would not mean it could not be voted in favour of in the future. I believe that setting ourselves a two-year time limit right now would be an extremely foolish thing to do, and that the triggering of Article 50 should at least be delayed until we have a more compassionate Government, even if it is not avoided altogether.

I recognise that you have tabled a wide range of amendments to the Article 50 Bill, but I feel strongly that at this stage that is not enough. I do not believe that the Conservative Government are likely to accept many of your amendments, particularly as you have come out and said that you will be voting to trigger Article 50 regardless. As you are aware, the Prime Minister's Brexit strategy appears to be to demand a host of completely impossible things from Europe, with the backup of a trade deal from the United States if they decline (and they will almost certainly decline). The fact that Theresa May has spent the last few days trying to flatter Donald Trump is something I find quite repulsive - Trump has said the most appalling things about public services, women's rights, the rights of immigrants and many other things besides. As a country, we should be standing up to Trump's divisive and hateful rhetoric, yet this trade deal throws a spanner in the works. I am also extremely worried about what will happen if this trade deal goes through. The Prime Minister has refused to confirm that she will not be offering parts of the NHS to US firms, that she will not lower food safety standards in order to ease trade with the US, and a lot more besides. Trump is an egomaniac who appears to view other countries doing well as him personally doing badly. Any trade deal between the US and the UK right now is guaranteed to be skewed in favour of America at the UK's expense, and I have seen no evidence that May will not bow to his every whim. Trump even says that he will want the right to nullify any trade deals if he is not happy with them at any point (presumably if he feels that they are benefitting another country more than the US). Will the UK have the same right? I would put money on the fact that we will not. The Leave vote was meant to be about taking back control - there is a very good argument that triggering Article 50 at this point would be quite the opposite.

I do not envy your position at all. I know that you have had a huge amount of negative publicity, and that you would be slated in the press whatever you decided to do. I think that in this country (and indeed the world at large) we have got to a place where very few people see the full story - they see things as more black-and-white than they are, and perhaps that is why there is this notion that going against Article 50 would be 'defying the will of the people'. However, this is so much worse. There is a saying: 'Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest'. I think this applies here; we have the rich and powerful playing political games, and citizens are suffering as a result. My MP Thangam Debbonaire has pledged to vote Article 50 down. I implore you, please stay true to your principles, reverse your decision on the three-line whip and form an alliance with the other opposition parties to vote down Article 50 until we are in a place where we can make this work. Right now, we just are not.


Regards,


George Harold Millman

Brexit and Trump

This week was a tough one for anyone who is remotely progressive. 2016 was notorious for two things: celebrities dying young and the BBC losing the Bake-Off (no, I jest). The referendum result indicating that the UK should leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump. This week, both of these worrying developments in history came closer, as Trump was officially sworn in and Theresa May made a speech to the EU indicating her bargaining position on the terms of Brexit. I'm going to talk a little about both of them in today's blog, because they are associated with each other, I feel that they both stemmed from a similar sort of emotion, and because I believe that both will require the same area of solidarity in order to deal with them.

This week we said goodbye to Barack Obama, as President Trump was sworn into the White House. The end of Obama's tenure was slightly surreal for me - it seems that he is a suitably beloved President for many, with my Facebook newsfeed showing a swarm of pictures of him and his family accompanied by tributes reflecting on what a wonderful President he has been, and considering sadly the poor substitute making himself comfortable in Washington. I engaged briefly in an interesting conversation earlier about whether this glorifying is appropriate. I have not really agreed with much of Obama's legacy in the White House, his enthusiasm for drone strikes, his vast increase of the surveillance state and his introduction of harmful trade deals such as TTIP, not to mention his lukewarm attitude to his mostly-forgotten commitment to close Guantanamo Bay for good. Is it really a good idea to hold him up as an architect of a golden age? No doubt the immediate response to this is to compare him to what the regime of Trump is likely to hold, which is a reasonable position - it is human nature to look on things comparatively, and whilst Obama may have hardly been a saint, he is at least on the lesser side when it comes to autocratic and ruthless world leaders. I shan't be putting any pictures of him on my Facebook profile; nevertheless I can appreciate that he is a principled man, I am grateful for any social progress that has been achieved under his rule and I genuinely wish him, his wife Michelle and their daughters Malia and Sasha the very best for the future. (I also commend him for doing the right thing and announcing the release of Chelsea Manning, something that I ordinarily would have devoted an entire blog to if there was not so much else going on!)

And so, now we come to a Republican presidency. I say 'Republican' rather than 'Trump' because I'm very much unsure how long Trump will last. Not only is he at age 70 the oldest person in history to assume the Presidency, but his behaviour leads me to believe that he is likely to be impeached  at some point, or to lose his temper and storm out (assuming that no one assassinates him, which could be a realistic possibility in itself). One way or the other, I think it likely that Mike Pence will be the US President before too long - in fact, I have heard a conspiracy theory that this was the Republicans' intention the whole time, and that Trump was only a Trojan horse used to win the election. It concerns me how personal this has become - people aren't talking about parties, they are talking about individuals, and this seems to me to simplify the issue. As much as the thought of a man who boasts about sexually assaulting women and is apparently unable to string a coherent sentence together holding the most powerful position in the world makes me feel rather sick, focussing on that masks a much wider issue. We have a world where career politicians have run things for too long, the world's finances have been conducted by Wall Street and Westminster and people on the ground have realised that they aren't benefitting at all from this catch-22. A change is clearly desired, and yet somehow people firmly lodged into the establishment, such as Donald Trump, have perfected the art of coming across as outsiders. If we ever want a world in which decisions are made for people and not profit, in either this country or the world at large, the media needs to give platforms to people who speak the language of the people - at the moment, they are only doing that with individuals who are going to say the most controversial things, such as Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage, and this has resulted in frustrated individuals making electoral decisions that make no social or economic sense.

This week, Theresa May made a speech outlying for the first time her objectives for the Brexit deal. It has taken six months for the Government to give any sort of explanation of its position on this at all, and the speech itself amounted to something which for various reasons does not amount to a good bargaining position. The blogger Thomas G Clark has quite a few articles on his excellent blog Another Angry Voice explaining exactly why May's speech was so poor, but to clarify concisely, it essentially amounted to a series of completely unreasonable demands, and a thinly-veiled threat to turn the UK into a notorious tax haven if these are not conceded to. The EU is highly unlikely to agree to these requests, both because they would not be beneficial for its place in the world at all and because the UK is in a much weaker position than May seems to believe, but even in the slim chance that it did agree, the beneficiaries would be major industries, not including anyone below the super-lucrative. Either way, we are in a situation which is going to benefit very few people, and certainly not the majority of the 52%, whose will we apparently have to stick to at all costs. The lack of intellectualism throughout this whole charade would be funny if it wasn't so serious. There are some quite legitimate concerns with the conduct of the European Union, but none of them were examined in detail either in the run-up to the referendum or in its aftermath. From the very start, the referendum was a ploy of David Cameron's to ensure his return to power in 2015, and it backfired. There is no serious analysis behind any of this; the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum involved a clear explanation of how Scottish independence would work. There was no such plan for Brexit; clearly British people were not considered intelligent enough to be able to make informed choices, and therefore the powers that be had to rely on trite soundbites. At this stage, most politicians seem to feel that remaining loyal to the uninformed 'will of the people' takes precedence over assessing what the Brexit plan actually entails, and this is something I find incredibly dangerous.

Whilst we're about it, I need to talk a little about my reaction to Labour's position on this whole thing. Earlier this week, the Guardian deliberately published a misleading headline suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn intended to whip his MPs to vote for the final Brexit plan irrespective of what is in it. In fact, Corbyn did not say anything of the kind - no decision on this has been made, nor can be until the plan is published, and quite rightly so. Having said that, I am really not impressed with Corbyn's overall attitude towards the triggering of Article 50, which he discussed during an interview on The Andrew Marr Show. It pains me to criticise Corbyn because I generally find him to be a real breath of fresh air in British politics and I may well vote Labour at the next general election assuming he is still heading it then, but I think he has this wrong (though he's not the only one). I think that right now what is more important than the vote on the final Brexit plan is the vote to trigger Article 50, which Theresa May intends to do at the end of March. What the majority of MPs and political leaders seem not to understand is that voting against the triggering of Article 50 does not equate to betraying the will of the electorate, because it could still be done at a later time. Someone who was sceptical about the Tories' ability to negotiate a good deal for the United Kingdom would be quite within their rights to be, and if they voted against Article 50 as a result this would reflect the fact that at the moment we are not in a strong place to strike a bargain. It is not the same as voting against ever leaving the EU; but if we ever do (and it is still an 'if') we need to be confident in the people leading the negotiations. Theresa May has backed down on her initial intention to bar Parliament from voting on the final Brexit deal (not that she has had any choice) but everyone seems very reluctant to speculate on what will happen if it is voted down. Setting ourselves a time limit of two years whilst we have people whose approach is to demand utterly unreasonable things under ridiculous threats seems to me to be a very foolish thing to do. I won't deny that there is a very large part of me that hopes Brexit never happens; but at the moment, this is eclipsed by concern about the negotiating tactics are using. I'd be open to leaving if we were going into this sensibly - in the meantime, I feel strongly that we should put off triggering Article 50. I will be writing to my MP (Labour's Thangam Debbonaire) and possibly to Corbyn to express this. It's another example of a black-and-white viewpoint clouding what is more important, and we should not take any chances on this.

The progressions of the Brexit plans and the inauguration of Trump are both things that have people the whole world over incredibly concerned, and with good reason. I feel that it is important right now that as activists, we devote our time to epitomising a regime of mundialization - 'an ideology based on the solidarity and diversity of global citizens and the creation of supranational laws, intended as a response to dehumanizing aspects of globalisation'. This is not normally a term used in reference to a community without a leader, but in this case I think it is quite clear the world over that no one is going to lead us in a progressive mindset, so the progressive community has no choice but to do this ourselves. Everyone can do this in different ways - writing blogs like mine, going on demonstrations, even just having conversations with people - but if anyone needs some support, let me link you to a great video I came across recently by commentator Myles Dyer. 2016 was a horrible, horrible year, and 2017 promises to be difficult as the impact of decisions made last year begin to affect us all. I'd like to invite anyone who is remotely motivated to make a difference in the world to join me in realising and taking all opportunities to create social change within our society. I hope that together, we can be the progressive force the world needs.

Write to your MP about the NHS

Greetings, everyone!

The NHS is in crisis. I'm not going to spend several paragraphs writing about how it is in crisis, because no doubt you already know, and if not there are lots of news websites you can read this on. However, what the mainstream media might not make clear is the fact that it is in crisis not because of too many patients, or doctors not working hard enough, but because of ideological cuts to services by a Government intent on privatisation.

However, perhaps you do not yet know what you can do to help this. No MP, even one under pressure to toe the party line, wants to see their local health service close down. Every single person who writes to their MP about this is putting them under pressure to demand more funds for the NHS. You can write to your local MP by clicking here and entering your postcode. Below is the example that I have sent to my local MP, Thangam Debbonaire (Labour):



Dear Thangam Debbonaire MP,


I am writing to you to express my extreme concern with the current state of the NHS in Bristol West, and across the west of the country. I read recently that hospitals in this area have been placed on a 'black alert', meaning that they are now so overcrowded that patient safety can no longer be guaranteed. Across the country, cancer operations are being postponed, birthing units are being shut down, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.


The Health Secretary seems to be holding everyone to blame but his own regime for the current crisis. There have been indications that the incredibly hard-working staff are to blame. He has suggested scrapping the waiting times to be assessed for 'non-urgent' cases - overlooking, of course, the fact that it is impossible to tell before such assessments whether or not a case is urgent. He tells people that they shouldn't visit A&E unless it's an emergency - this is patently obvious, but when GP appointments are so hard to come by it is really not good enough to advise people of that, not to mention utterly hypocritical on his part (in 2014, he admitted taking his own children to A&E for a non-emergency situation). The media is not helpful, suggesting that patient numbers have been 'unprecedented' this winter. They are described as 'unprecedented' every year, which makes no sense as the word means a unique situation that could not be prepared for. Patients are in danger now, not even taking into account the extra £22 billion of cuts that health services are expected to produce.


I believe that the NHS is being driven into the ground on purpose to justify further privatisation. I am aware that the current Labour leader has promised to renationalise the entire NHS if Labour are elected into Government at the next General Election, but we cannot wait to see if that happens. The NHS needs more funding right now, and as your constituent, I feel that this is something that must be not requested, but demanded.


Yours sincerely,

George Harold Millman

The Matriarchy