Pesky driving licences

I count myself lucky that just before I had to switch my British driving license for a Spanish one – which would have necessitated taking another driving test, conducted in Spanish – the British and Spanish authorities reached an agreement in which one licensed could simply be converted from one to the other.

This is the good part.

What is less good is that it has proven absolutely impossible to obtain an appointment at the DGT, the local traffic police.

I have tried and tried and tried. Endlessly.

Most of the time the website says that no appointments are available. Occasionally it will let me through to a form that I dutifully fill in, before the website reports that, once more, there are no appointments available.

It’s very frustrating.

What is actually going on, as the recent arrest of 69 people show, is that an organised criminal gang have written a piece of software to book up all the appointment slots, and then sell this appointments to the woebegone foreigner.

I’m quite baffled as to why the Spanish authorities don’t put a proper anti-bot system in place. I’m sure that it would be quite easy to do.

As for me, time is running out. I have six months from March 16 to convert my license, otherwise I will have to retake my test here.

I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a Python script to automatically book an appointment – it really doesn’t look too hard, and if criminals can do it I’m sure I can too – but in the end opted for phoning the DGT instead, and hitting buttons in response to their automated system.

I now have an appointment tomorrow morning at 8.45. Although it’s far from clear for what I’ve booked the appointment.

Brexit shambles

Brexit is a shambolic disaster – I think few would disagree – but it is exceedingly difficult to see how we get out of this mess.

It is unfair to blame this all on Brexit. It was always going to be a difficult task to pull us out of the European Union – I think few people, myself included, realised quite how difficult – but Theresa May and her bunch of appointed cronies made things all the harder right from the start.

She unnecessarily drew red lines in the sand too early, when she didn’t need to.

She pandered to the British electorate when she already had a mandate, rather than diplomatically coddling up to our EU partners.

She has displayed brazen arrogance and ineptitude, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the EU, right from the start.

No, I am not a fan of Theresa May.

But the question is: just what the hell do we do now?

Having spent the past week looking at the potential impact of Brexit on Asia, I can say one thing: whilst British financial firms didn’t really want to leave the EU in the first place, what they hate more than the idea of leaving is the uncertainty about what leaving means.

I talked to a source from an Asian regulator about this, and she surprised me by saying that they hadn’t actually been hearing much concern from European banks over here – probably, she guessed, that Brexit was such an insurmountable challenge that no one really knew what they should be worrying about first. So they didn’t – and kind of just hope that everything will turn out okay.

The squabbling between the Brexit and the Remain camp is not helping things. This is prolonging the uncertainty. Talk of a second referendum is prolonging the uncertainty. We need to put things together, move beyond party politics and move on.

Whilst I do, as a previous blog entry will show, have reservations about Brexit now, I would, in a second referendum, vote the same way: to leave. I feel that the democratic process has been hijacked by political ineptitude, and Brexit has not had the chance it deserves. I know a few Remainers, too, who feel the same way – and would indeed now vote to leave if another referendum were held, simply because democracy has not properly been applied.

Remainers often assume that a second referendum is the answer to their problems. But it isn’t.

For one thing they incorrectly assume they would win, but that is far from a certainty. They may lose – and what then? We would never rejoin the EU for generations.

And even if they did win, the majority would again be so slim as to prompt calls for a third referendum.

Make it best of three, eh?

And then what about all the pent-up anger spilling on to the streets. Violence has no place in any democracy, but you can’t ignore it. Many Brexiteers would be sorely disenfranchised by the whole process and would vent like nothing before, plunging the UK into a real crisis which would potentially be far more damaging than a crisp and clear Brexit.

We do need to get rid of Theresa May and get our shit together.

Because right now everything that is going on is far, far more damaging than leaving the EU should ever have been.

The case against a second referendum

The past 18 months has seen a governmental balls-up of monumental proportions.

Over this period I have shifted from being a reluctant Brexiteer to being a reluctant Remainer. Full disclosure: I voted with a heavy heart to leave the European Union but now find myself regretting this decision.

All that this has taught me is that the decision of whether to leave the EU was a hugely complex matter best left to well-informed experts and not thrown out to the general public who cannot possibly be expected to comprehend all of what this might mean. Thank you for that Mr Cameron.

Other than that I’m still at a loss for what the best course of action would be.

I agonised for days about where to put that ‘X’. I have also so far resisted talking much about this decision, or trying to justify it, for the simple reason that the debate has become so heated and antagonistic that I didn’t feel like entering it. Call it cowardice if you will, but I feel that people have become so entrenched in their positions – on both sides of the divide – that they are unlikely to want to look fairly at another point of view if it doesn’t agree with theirs.

But here’s the reason, in brief, that I voted ‘Leave’.

For starters, I want to distance myself from the likes of Nigel Farrage and Boris Johnson. People like these were the populist voice of the eurosceptic movement, but never really represented – or even came close to – the much more sophisticated grassroots movement that I got to know during my Brussels days. In fact, none of the eurosceptics that I am on close terms with actually have much time for these people, believing that they detract from what are some very valid reasons for leaving the EU.

My reason for deciding to vote ‘Leave’ – and for agonising so much over the decision – is simply because it wasn’t a fair question to ask. It wasn’t a question about whether to leave the EU or to stay within it. It was a vote between leaving or supporting ever-closer federalism.

Had we voted to remain, that would not have been the end of the matter. The EU would have used this vote to crush any eurosceptic dissent, not just in the UK but throughout Europe – and, to be fair, eurosceptism in the UK is the only eurosceptisim that has ever really mattered. Eurosceptisim in other countries has either been too weak or too pragmatic; Denmark has a very strong eurosceptic flare but were they ever going to consider leaving? Not really.

So the EU would have used any vote to remain to push through some rather unpalatable reforms, portraying British eurosceptics as fringe nutcases that are significantly out-of-step with mainstream opinion. Westminster, needing to be seen to back the outcome of a successful referendum, would then have had no choice but to acquiesce to Brussels’ demands or to be seen to be destabilising the result of the referendum that it had fought so hard to win. In good conscience, I could not vote towards such an outcome.

That is the first point.

The second reason for voting ‘Leave’ comes from the five years I spent in Brussels seeing how the EU is run. Everyone comes away from the European capital with a different view of their time spent there. A well-known eurosceptic MEP that I was briefly fairly close to had the view that, in order to foster eurosceptism throughout the continent, he simply had to bring as many people to the halls of European power as possible, just to see how things worked. He had a point.

Saying that the EU is an undemocratic institution is an argument easily put down. European citizens elect the MEPs that serve in the European Parliament and, although they don’t have a say about everything, their power has been increasing. European Commissioners – which head of various departments of the EU’s executive body – are appointed by national governments. And then the EU’s Council, which has to sign off on just about every bit of new legislation, is made up of national governments.

So labelling the EU as undemocratic is of course easy to counter. But there is clearly some kind of democratic deficit here, if only because most people don’t really understand how the EU works, what powers it has or exactly what MEPs are responsible for.

What I will say is that the unaccountability of the EU is dangerous – and that is the other chief reason that I was not comfortable supporting our membership of the institution. I have seen from close quarters how corrupt the EU is, and how vested interests have lured the bloc into making unconscionable decisions that hav been bad for the whole of the continent.

If people within a national government make the wrong decision in order to further their own ends – and this comes to light – then the laws of modern democracy hold them to account. Not so with the EU and, though journalists have tried to shine a light on various misdeameanours, little has changed within the cozy little club. This is not good for Europe as a continent.

So those are the reasons, as concisely as I can put them, for why I chose to vote ‘Leave’.

So what of the talk of this second referendum?

Having seen what a mess Theresa May’s government has now made of Brexit – largely because of the sharp divisions within the Conservative Party but also because so many people in power seem to display a fundamental misunderstanding of how Europe works (‘negotiate’ does not mean ‘dictate’ – and, no, I agree, you can’t cherry pick) – I now regret my previous decision and wish I’d voted the other way, or the outcome had been different.

Which might suggest that I’d be in favour of a second referendum. After all, I’m well aware of all those cartoons that point out that, one way or another, once you shoot yourself in the foot and end up with a big hole there, and realise that shooting one’s foot is actually not the wisest course of action, then it actually might not be a bad idea to stop shooting.

But no.

And here’s why, in three words.

Maastricht. Nice. Lisbon.

The Treaty of Maastricht, which set up the European single currency, was rejected in 1992 by the Danish. Ireland rejected both the treaties of Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2008). In all cases, the electorate, who were clearly ill-informed and thick as pig shit, were told they got things wrong and to vote again.

I do not want that for my country.

Okay, there were some superficial tweaks before the second votes took place, but they were nothing substantial and in no way justified going to the polls again. In the rerun of the Nice vote – which is the one I reported on and therefore know most about – the Irish government managed to secure a ‘Yes’ by disingenuously and somewhat bizarrely lumping the vote in with three other issues, one of which was a move to strike the death penalty – widely regarded in Europe as a bad thing – from the statute books. How can an electorate, unfamiliar with the machinations of Brussels, really reach any sensible conclusion amid such dishonesty?

Basically, do not hold a referendum if it is not going to be binding.

Now I’m not saying that I would never support a second referendum, but I am saying that for me to support a second referendum it has to be demonstrably different from the referendum held last one.

So Theresa May has a difficult task ahead of her.

Either she has to lay out a clear course of action for leaving the EU that can be acceptable to our European partners – and since she loves to have her cherries, right now she seems as far away from ever from being able to do that.

Or she needs to come to the British electorate with promises that extend way beyond what the conditions of the first referendum. And of course she can’t do that because, it order to make the terms of the second referendum sufficiently different from those of the first, she would have to promise things that she doesn’t have the power to promise.

Rock.

Hard place.

May.

It’s not just the politicians that should rethink things

First Brexit. Now Trump. It seems fairly clear who holds the responsibility for this: those smarmy world leaders that are at the heart of the political establishment, which now has been very much shaken and could even be crumbling. They didn’t take Greece’s pain seriously. They chose to bail out the banks rather than let them gracefully unwind. They trounced all over Keynes’ legacy and dogmatically welded themselves to the idea behind austerity and then, when people pointed out that actually curtailing spending might not be the best way to stimulate growth, growled and snarled.

But this initial analysis is simple and unfair. It is certainly true that the politicians have for too many years acted with contempt for a large portion of society, but it seems that they are not alone.

Where are all these Trump supporters? Where are all the Brexit voters? Hidden? Ashamed? Frightened of being seen to rock this cozy establishment?

On social media, the only comments I seem to be reading is that the world is in some sort of crisis and a kind of incredulity that people could actually consider voting for Brexit or electing Trump. I.e, are people really this stupid?

But this misses the fundamental point of what has driven people in this direction, and until people start reflecting on that society is going to have a hard time stitching itself back together. Yes, politicians have acted with arrogance and contempt that beggars belief, but they appear not to be alone.

Suddenly, those who for years have lent their support to the political establishment find themselves in the minority, and that is an uncomfortable feeling.

With Brexit, I was strongly divided. I saw the benefits that staying could bring, but I also see the EU as an undemocratic supranational entity that does things its own way with little regard for due legal process upon which our societies have been built.

Had I been able to vote in the US election, though, there is not a snowball’s chance in Hell that I would have chosen Trump. There was nothing in his rhetoric that endeared me to him and, although Clinton had her baggage, she was the least bad choice of the two.

But recoiling in horror from the outcome and despairing at the stupidity of the supporters of Trump – or for that manner the voters for Brexit, who I do feel some affinity towards – just misses the point.

Something is changing with our societies and people are rocking the boat.

Politicians must start to understand why. We must, too.

Duped

The Leave camp are going to have a serious problem. Or maybe they’ve always had one.

One thing that seems to be coming increasingly clear – at least, observing events from afar – is that not only have a lot of Remainers failed to understand the reasons behind the Leave vote, but many of those that voted Leave don’t seem to have fully understood what they were voting for either.

This could be a huge problem for the Leave camp.

You are never going to convince those die-hard Eurosceptics, who have spent all their life campaigning against the EU, that actually being part of this European project might not be that bad of an idea.

But you might just convince those that thought the world would be different when they ticked that Leave box that they made the wrong decision.

I have seen a number of people wavering on this and this is a reflection of the poor work that the Leave campaign did in preparing an exit strategy.

They probably didn’t think they had to.

As Sarah Vine has been repeatedly quoted as saying over the past few days – no doubt because it is such an awesome quote – “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”.

No one expected the Leave campaign to actually work, let alone those that were behind the campaign. Every eurosceptic that I spoke to before the referendum were focusing on getting as close to the Remain vote as possible. Certainly they never thought they’d beat them.

But they should have thought harder.

Because it now appears that we are a country without a plan. And since we do actually live in a parliamentary democracy, folk, in case anyone has forgotten, leaving the EU isn’t simply a question of laying a hand on the Magna Cart and saying, “I solemnly swear to invoke Article 50”. As some that voted Leave thought it would be.

And now Nigel Farrage is gone, having tendered his resignation as UKIP leader today. One might have hoped that he’d stick around to try to… you know… formulate a plan. Or perhaps dust off the one that he’d had all along at the bottom of his sock drawer, but with all the excitement of everything had clean forgotten about.

All of this means that many people are feeling duped.

You might be able to win a battle with false rhetoric, grandiose promises and over-simplification.

But you can’t seal that victory.

Why the Leave camp will fail

The other week, during my time in London, I had the privilege to listen to MP and shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn make the case for staying in the EU. Rarely have I heard such a masterful orator and, whilst I might not have agreed with everything he said, it was actually quite thrilling to listen to him make his case. Like hearing a well-read bit of poetry.

By comparison, the Eurosceptics on the panel often sounded shrill and desperate and occasionally a little bit crazy. At one point, one of the panellists – Gerald McGregor, a Chiswick town councillor – brandished a piece of paper in his hand, and suggested that David Cameron’s return from Europe before the referendum was a little like Neville Chamberlain returning from Nazi Germany before World War II broke out. Comparing the European project to Nazism isn’t really what folk want to hear.

And that is why the Leave camp will fail.

Not just because their standard-bearers seem to constantly be making obscure references to fascism or tyranny or to a world that now no longer exists (although that probably doesn’t help). But because arguing about leaving the European Union is a lot harder than arguing about remaining. And the Leave camp just don’t seem to have put in the effort to make this case clearly, passionately and rationally enough.

Of course, this isn’t all their fault. Rational Eurosceptics do have the very real problem of having to make their voices heard above those of charismatic and politically-ambitious spokespeople of the Eurosceptic cause, such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. Both likeable enough fellows, but they have managed to boil the arguments of why we might want to leave the EU into such crass shades of grey that they are easily put down by any Remainer with half a brain.

Maybe that is what people want to hear – the simplistic – because it is just too difficult to understand all the nuances behind what it would mean to leave a community that we have been wedded to for longer than I have been alive.

It is extremely difficult to make a rational argument for why we might want to leave the EU without sounding a little crazy, which is why I never try to enter this mine field. But I have some very good Eurosceptic friends who do make such a case very convincingly. The problem is that such convincing arguments never seem to enter the mainstream.

It is precisely because the Eurosceptic case is so much harder to put than the pro-European one that those in the Leave camp should have worked harder at making it. They should have made an effort to understand and explain the more complex areas of the debate, not simply glassed over this and repeated ad-nauseam the rather right-wing snub to immigrants or the subdued left-wing doff to the NHS.

Like what benefit does leaving the EU actually bring to people living in the UK? As with the Scottish referendum, people will be voting with their wallet in mind.

Like exactly why there is such a democratic deficit in the EU, and whether that really matters? Because many people don’t seem to quite get this.

Like exactly what comes afterwards? Okay, perhaps this is a difficult one to answer, since this is a great unknown, but at least they could have tried. At least they could have given us some plan as to what comes once we have taken this leap in the dark.

None of this to say that we shouldn’t leave the EU; I am still split 50-50 on this. Rather, the point of this blog entry is to reassure those committed Remainers out there that they don’t have anything to fear. The Brexiters had a far harder task of persuading people why they should hand back their membership card. And because their job was so much more daunting they should have tried twice as hard to do so.

At least.

And then, even without Hilary Benn in their arsenal, they might just have succeeded in winning enough of the electorate round to make a difference.