The title of Niall Ferguson’s article Brexit Happy Morons Don’t Give a Damn About the Costs of Living is so self-explanatory that I’m surprised he felt the need to write any text below it.
Yet write it he did, with every word shattering the American glass house in which Prof. Ferguson lives. The house already reduced to shards, he concludes the article by saying, “Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron. But I do give a damn about this country’s economic future. And when I see the risks of Brexit being glossed over in ways that would disgrace an undergraduate essay, I feel anything but happy.”
While this devotion to the economy of the country in which he hasn’t lived for years may strike some as hypocritical, the ending does elucidate the thought in the title for those with learning difficulties. But the text in between only reinforces my conviction that writers should disclose their political beliefs.
I favour a rating symbol accompanying every piece. For example, mine would be ‘C’, standing for ‘conservative’ and not for the epithet flung by some of my detractors. Other ratings could be ‘LW’ for ‘left wing’, ‘or, say, ‘NF’ for ‘neo-fascist’ (and not ‘Nigel Farage’, although his detractors can’t tell the difference).
Ferguson’s rating should definitely be ‘NC’, for ‘neocon’. He’s one of those annoying Brits who’ve pledged loyalty to probably the most objectionable and definitely the most influential movement in American politics.
The neocons have discovered the knavish trick of combining conservative-sounding phraseology with Trotskyist cravings realised through appropriate policies. (I expand on this in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick.)
The essence of Trotskyism is ‘permanent revolution’, non-stop aggression aimed at spreading a certain ideology around the globe, thereby unifying it under the aegis of a central authority.
In Trotsky’s case, that ideology was communism; in the neocons’ case, it’s democracy, American style. In neither case does the ideology matter.
Even as the real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses, the real purpose of aggressive internationalism is aggressive internationalism. This doesn’t change whatever colour flag the aggressors run up the pole.
The neocons’ innate internationalism makes them natural champions of European federalism. This dovetails with their American jingoism.
Perhaps they feel that the global US domination they crave will be easier to achieve if Europe presented a single target. Or else they think that American trade would benefit from Europe being a single customer.
Either way, this is the context in which Ferguson’s Sunday Times article must be read. Rather than analysing a complex problem, he’s but a dummy to his neocon ventriloquists.
This unenviable role makes Ferguson drop even below his normal intellectual standards, which fall somewhat short of dizzying heights under the best of circumstances.
For example, he first correctly castigates IMF predictions for being notoriously unreliable. Then, with the absence of logic lamentable in an academic, he gives unquestioning credence to their doomsday forecasts for Brexit.
Freguson’s rationale for such childish credulity is that “the IMF’s intrinsic optimism matters because if the organisation is pessimistic about something, it is very likely to be understating the problem.” Yet what matters about both the optimism and the pessimism is that this organisation tends to be wrong and borderline incompetent.
Then he laments that the pound is 12 per cent down on the euro since November. “Could it fall further? You bet,” forecasts Ferguson, taking his cue from the optimistic-pessimistic IMF.
Such concern for the value of our currency in someone whose income is denominated in dollars betokens laudable selflessness. As someone who pays for half his life in euros, not in pounds in which my income is denominated, I grieve with Ferguson.
However, I rejoice in the knowledge that a weaker pound spells good news for our exports. This may just protect them from being totally wiped out by Brexit, which is part of the party line mouthed by Ferguson.
In general, everything he says about economics, and his argument is wholly economic, betrays both his ignorance of the subject and his willingness to march in step with his neocon Parteigenossen.
Then again, Ferguson isn’t an economist. He is an historian, which makes it odd that he’d want to base his rant on a discipline about which he knows next to nothing, rather than on one about which he’s supposed to know next to everything.
While better and more credible organisations than IMF predict mostly trivial economic effects of Brexit, one way or the other, anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows that EU membership puts paid to a millennium of British constitutional tradition.
As Hugh Gaitskell once put it, joining the Common Market would be “the end of a thousand years of history.” What was true then is a thousand times truer now. But Gaitskell wasn’t a professional historian. Ferguson is, and I’d be interested to hear him comment on this line of thought. But he can’t. His party discipline won’t let him.
“Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron,” he says self-effacingly. Relax, Niall, you aren’t, not exactly. You’re just an immoral party hack.