David Warsh: I look forward to ‘The Crown’s’ take on Brexit

Coat of arms of the British Royal Family

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I’ve been been working my way through The Crown, an hour an evening, starting with its first episode. The Netflix series is a remarkably deft telling of British history since 1936, when Edward VIII abdicated in favor of his brother, George VI, placing George’s elder daughter in line to become Queen Elizabeth II, upon her father’s death, in 1952. I haven’t yet arrived at Season Four, in which Gillian Anderson plays Margaret Thatcher.

Another season or two will be required before show-creator Peter Morgan and his team arrive to tell the story of the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. I’m looking forward to the season after that, the one whose story-line begins next week now that Brexit is finally taking place. Another 20 years or more may be required for the nation to regain its equanimity.

Of this much, at least, economicprincipals.com is certain: Given the Arthurian legends, The Canterbury Tales, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Churchill’s speeches, the BBC’s Upstairs, Downstairs and now The Crown, there will, indeed, Always Be an England. For those who have finished the series, comedy, too. Happy holidays!

David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

Llewellyn King: The deluded Trump backers in my old N.E. mill town

In the neighborhood where I live in Rhode Island, Donald Trump is a hero. It is a solid, mostly white, community of working-class people.

They are fiercely patriotic, as the many veterans memorials that dot the landscape testify, as well as the solemnity with which they celebrate Memorial Day.

They are religious. Being mostly of Italian and Portuguese descent, they are practicing Catholics. Plaster Madonnas sit on many lawns.

These people -- these good, hard-working God-fearing Americans --  usually vote Democratic in a state that is more unionized than most. There are deep labor movement roots, and a history of struggle between the mill owners and the workers in the days when New England was home to the textile trade.

But sharing the small, neat lawns with Madonnas are blue Trump campaign signs.

These people are a near mirror-image of the working people in the north of England who voted for Britain to the leave the European Union. They are also working class or, as we have abandoned that term, middle-class people who saw their textile industry implode.

In Rhode Island, these exemplary people clearly are falling for the false music of Pied Piper Donald Trump. His wild, anti-trade siren song appeals here, invoking the time when New England was a manufacturing hub and China was place that you read about in National Geographic.

Their twins in the blighted North of England followed another piper with another myth: the former mayor of London and showman, Boris Johnson. He preached freedom from Europe: a halcyon dream of Britain free of entangling regulation from the European administrative capital, Brussels.

Now Johnson’s bluff has been called, and it is dawning on the good people of the North of England (think of it as England’s Rust Belt) that their well-being -- such as it has been -- has been largely as a result of the European Union. The North, much less prosperous than the South, where London holds hegemony, depends on European Union investments and grants. Now free of Europe, they are free to be poor.

In Rhode Island, after years in the post-industrial doldrums, a zephyr of new hope is just rising, and it has attracted part of General Electric Co.’s digital division. It will sit alongside another global mainstay of the U.S. economy, Textron, based in Rhode Island.

So even as Rhode Island is beginning a new chapter, its citizens are flirting with drinking the Kool-Aid being peddled by Trump.

Johnson and others, mostly Conservatives, peddled the myth that Britain was being hogtied by Europe and was yearning to be free and trade with the world – a sharp contrast to the Fortress America  that Trump is peddling, but appealing to workers who, on both sides of the Atlantic, want a fairer shake.

Johnson says: Europe has hindered us and is undermining our national sovereignty. Trump says: The world is stealing from us. Both are political myths: dangerous, toxic myths. Both share a common lack of coherence, as is now so evident in Britain.

The sin of Johnson against the British people is that the campaign was based on lies, and there was no plan for how to proceed after victory: a well-known political trap (see G. W. Bush and Iraq).

No one I know believes that after Trump presumably gets the Republican nomination in Cleveland he will go on to win. But neither did I know anyone in Britain who thought that the country would fall for the wiles of devious leaders who play on patriotism and frustration for their own ends: glorification and power.

The blue Trump signs outside the modest houses  proudly owned on my street may not get Trump elected, but -- and here is the danger -- they may draw his putative opponent, Hillary Clinton, toward the same trade poison that he is advocating. She already has backpedaled shamelessly on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she helped negotiate, and who knows what anti-trade deals she will strike with the unions?

When politics is informed by myth not policy, democracies are in danger of hurting themselves. We do not need a special relationship with Britain founded on mutual folly. 

Llewellyn King  (llewellynking2@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle on PBS. He is also a longtime publisher, editor and international business consultant.

Jarrod Hazelton: Brexit a triumph of ignorance

Brexit is perhaps most appropriately summed up in the words of Mr. Donald Trump: 

“Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!” 

A Tweet heard (naturally) ‘round the world, whose expression of ignorance wa signored by his supporters  even as it was rightfully lampooned by everybody else.   Scotland and Northern Ireland voted strongly for the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union; England and Wales voted to leave.

Support for Brexit worldwide is a veritable Who’s Who of international Nuevo-fascism: Trump, Zhirinovsky, Putin, Marine le Pen. It is also the direct result of unabashed ignorance.  Take, for example, the recent remarks by U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.

One of the central tenets of the Leave campaign was that £350 million per week in payments to the European Union would be diverted to the British National Health Service after Brexit. This incredible incentive is certainly something to consider, but for the fact that it was a total fabrication. Rather than admit this, Farage has instead made the preposterous assertion that he never said such a thing, regardless of the Leave campaign tour bus being emblazoned with the £350 million figure as it traversed the English countryside. Perhaps one of his handlers forgot to mention the design change. Additionally,  a Tory member of the European Parliament,  David Hannan, back-pedaled on immigration, claiming less than 24 hours after the Brexit vote that immigration levels  from the E.U. into Britain might remain unchanged after Brexit goes into full effect. Who knew that the UK had just voted in favor of a group of BRINOs (Brexitors In Name Only)?

Lying in politics is certainly not new but the  size of such preposterous claims in recent history is impressive. Trump is a virtual cacophony of spewing, festering untruths, and yet his followers  go along with his claims regardless of veracity. Instead, he maintains a stronghold on their collective frustration at  being excluded from a system that has long since left them behind.

What Brexitors and Trump supporters have in common may be less xenophobia, bigotry, racism and a longing to take back “again” whatever it is they feel is no longer theirs than ignorance. In America, Trumpists, are nostalgic for a country that once afforded them labor protections, defined-benefit pensions, generous employer-subsidized healthcare, affordable education and other things that have been stripped from them, albeit with scraps still trickling down to them from the rich interests so powerful in Washington, D.C. 

Ironically, market forces that have assaulted Brexitors and Trump and Sanders supporters who will refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton may ultimately solve their problems for them. Sovereign wealth funds lost over 30 percent of their interests in the U.K. overnight as  the pound crashed with the Brexit news, and won’t stand for  this to go on. Businesses in Britain will realize the vast expense of hiring and retraining based on citizenry regulations to be too egregious. And Brexit Remorse may lead to a second referendum, and/or negotiations to leave the E.U may result in a realm of clauses and capitulations that would truly make a Brexit In Name Only.

The prevailing ignorance, xenophobia, bigotry and socio-economic factors behind market forces may solve themselves for a time, but in so doing no lessons will be learned.

Jarrod Hazelton, who holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, is a financial analyst.

Llewellyn King: Blame stupid English nativism for E.U. vote debacle

The English appear to have laid down the burden of sanity. They have voted to leave the European Union.

It was never about Great Britain; it was always at its kernel about England. There was always a primal, nativist, historically seated English antipathy to Europe and by extension to the European project.

I should know. You could say I was there in the beginning.

Way back in the early 1960s, as a young journalist, I worked for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born newspaper publisher who led the early fight against the European Economic Community, also called the Common Market. There were then, in 1962 and 1963, just six members and the rival outfit, the European Free Trade Area had seven.

I believed that when Britain finally joined what is now the European Union in 1973 that a decade earlier we had been wrong. And I believe that leaving the European Union today is terribly wrong, a ghastly self-inflicted wound that will hasten the end of the United Kingdom, encourage a surge in right-wing bigotry in Europe, and leave no one -- not one individual in any country of Europe -- better off, particularly the residents of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In the wreckage that now has to be sorted out across the Atlantic, two lessons stand out: first, referendums have no place in a representative democracy and second, today's political parties, across the world, no longer represent the feelings of their electorates. In Britain, as in America, and most recently in Italy, it is now apparent that the old left-right divide does not address a smoldering anger that affects the democracies of the world.

Give angry people something to smash and they will smash it. The angry English have just smashed up the place where they live. It is ineffably sad for those who have followed Europe’s attempt to come together, to boost trade, and to end war in on the continent.

During the long and campaign leading to Thursday’s vote, every shibboleth about sovereignty, faceless bureaucrats, money transfers and European skullduggery was trotted out.

When the facts do not fit, harken back to another time: That is easy enough to do in England with its storied history. They never said it, but the triumphant Leave campaign implied every day in every way: We’ll make England great again. Donald Trump could have ghosted the Leave campaign.

When Britain joined the Common Market in 1973, the country was often referred to as the sick man of Europe. Today, Britain is the world’s fifth-largest economy and it has been the strongest advocate for free markets and free trade in Europe. Not only will Britain be setting a new course, but so will the European Union.

Europe, including Britain, has a massive migration problem that fed the anxieties of the English, particularly in the depressed north of the country. But Europe has yet another problem that will not go away: The euro has failed. Britain wisely never adopted it, but the 19 countries of the Eurozone are paying a high price. Weak economies on the southern flank of Europe, most notably Greece, cannot devalue to make their goods and services more salable and the strong economies, most importantly Germany, are the beneficiaries of a weak euro in their exports.

The British vote will spur reforms in Europe and if they are not fast enough and far enough-reaching, the European Union itself will break apart. Italy is an early candidate to bolt, but so are its southern neighbors.

It is not Europe as a free-trade area they should be trying to escape, but rather its benighted currency. Consider: If the euro was fazed out and the old currencies were to reappear, Germany would have an increasingly hard currency, the mark, and Italy and Greece, with the lira and the drachma, would produce goods and services that were very affordable to their customers.

But that is not Britain’s problem. It has to find new markets and a way of living with the strictures of European trade without a voice in the writing of those strictures.

Political folly has led Britain to be lesser. “Little England” and Little Englanders always have been pejoratives in British political invective. Today the Little Englanders are triumphant, having chosen insignificance and poverty over importance and wealth. Shame.

The British (read English) electorate has signed on to a dream. The nightmare begins now. 

Llewellyn King, host and executive producer of White House Chronicle on PBS, is a longtime publisher, columnist and international business consultant. This piece first ran on Inside Sources.

Llewellyn King: In U.K.: Sex, booze, rock and Jihadism

  It is a simple question, but there are only fragments of an answer. The question is: Why do so many Muslims, born in Britain, turn to Jihadism?

The best numbers available show that more than 500 young, British-born Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. By comparison, an estimated 100 Americans have taken up arms for the Islamic State. As the population of the United States is 313 million, compared to 63 million for the whole of Britain, the disparity is huge.

The “the enemy within,” as the British media call these young people, has deeply disturbed the British public, as it looks to its political leaders to take action. One writer, in The Daily Telegraph, says that the government has been soft when it should have been tough, and tough when it should have been soft.

The truth is that successive British administrations have been silent on the consequences of immigration since the second Churchill government, in 1951-55. Everyone is to blame and no one is to blame.

Britain never saw a large influx of immigrants after the Norman Conquest, in 1066. In fact, it had become quite proud of its tolerance for émigrés; Karl Marx was the exemplar. The Jews were tolerated after the 1650s, but excluded from many occupations and social circles.

Past and present Britain is made up of enclaves remarkably uninterested in each other. Hence, a small island nation can support 53 distinct, regional accents and dialects.

Idealists believed that post-World War II immigration would change Britain for the better, sweeping away its imperial trappings. Actually if anything eroded the class structure, it was the great wave of pop music and fashion in the 1960s.

Surveys show that of the immigrants from the  Indian Subcontinent, the Indians, mostly Hindu, assimilated best and took to business -- and the class system -- with alacrity, many becoming millionaires. The Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, have fared the worst. They assimilated least and imported practices that are a savage affront to British values: forced and under-age marriages, honor killings, and halal butchers, opposed by many British animal-rights groups.

These same values have made life rough for young men of Pakistani descent. For working-class British youth, sex, booze, music and soccer are their safety valves. Sexual frustration is endemic all over the Muslim world; it is at work among devout, young Muslim men in Britain, where sex is celebrated in the culture.

British business had a role in the mix of immigrants in the 1960s. Businesses wanted workers for the textile mills and factories in northern England, who would do the dirty, poorly paid work nobody else wanted. The proprietor of large tire-retreading company boasted to me in 1961 how he had solved the labor problem by recruiting rural Pakistanis, who worked hard and cheaply and kept to themselves. His words have echoed with me down through the years.

This alone does not explain why, for example, a preponderance of the Jihadists are from London, or why some of them seem to be university types from the London School of Economics, King's College London, the School for Oriental and African Studies, and others. If you are young, male and Muslim, and even somewhat religious, it is easy to be convinced that you live among the infidels with their alcohol and preoccupation with coitus.

But, again, it is not explanation enough; not an explanation of why a generation of British-born young men are attracted to the life and values of their distant ancestors, or why they have shown such savagery.

Britain has comforted itself by dealing with self-identified “community leaders” in the Muslim community. Unfortunately the real leaders have been fiery, foreign-born imams who proselytize hatred in the mosques that serve Britain’s 2 million Muslims. The Muslim communities have been hidden in plain sight from the British mainstream.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle," on PBS, and a long time international journalist, publisher and business consultant.