Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 10.25.19
Succinct Summations for the week ending October 25th, 2019
Positives:
1. Markets within a % of all time highs.
2. New home sales came in at an annual rate of 701k for Sept.
3. PMI Composite rose from 51.0 to 51.2 m/o/m.
4. Same store sales rose 4.3% w/o/w, above the previous increase of 4.1%.
5. Jobless claims fell 6k w/o/w, from 218k to 212k.
6. Consumer sentiment finished at 95.5 for October, meeting expectations.
Negatives:
1. Impeachment strengthening; Ambassadors’ testimony very damning;
2. Trade war resolution on periphery, not core issues;
3. Existing home sales fell 2.2% m/o/m, below prior 1.5%.
4. Durable goods orders fell 1.1% m/o/m, below expected 0.7%.
5. MBA mortgage apps fell 4.0% w/o/w; MBA refinance apps fell 17.0%;
6. FHFA House Price Index rose 0.2% m/o/m, below expected increase of 0.4%.
MariasBigPic: Sun 10-27-19 The White Cliffs of Brexit | The New Republic
The port of Dover is expected
to be paralyzed by Britain's departure from the European Union. So why are its
residents so desperate to leave?
THE WHITE CLIFFS OF BREXIT
By SAMUEL
EARLE -- The New Republic
October 22, 2019
The
small, seaside town of Dover, where little more than 30,000 people live, has an
outsized significance in Great Britain’s national psyche. The sprawling
eleventh-century castle that overlooks the town is the largest in England,
while the White Cliffs of Dover, rising from the sea, are the nation’s
definitive natural landmark. Across centuries, they have stood as a symbol for
the nation’s dream-self: bold, defiant, and eternal, both a window onto the
world and a wall against foreign threats.
1.
The
chalk cliffs are where Britain’s border juts most dramatically from the surface
of the earth—and yet, only 21 miles from the European continent, they are also
where the nation’s island identity feels most fragile. When I was walking along
the cliffs on a late September Sunday, rain was falling sideways and the sea
and the sky formed a giant mass of gray. “This is England,” I thought to
myself, warmly. And then my phone sent me a message welcoming me to France.
With Brexit, these cliffs are taking on a new role,
becoming a blank canvas on which competing narratives are projected. Staunch
“Remainers” have sought to cast the cliffs as “outward-looking,” with former Prime Minister
Gordon Brown calling it a “highway to the rest of the world.”
The “Leavers” say Dover tells a different story. “Dover and out,” The
Sun tabloid declared—a message it then literally
projected onto the cliffs—when former Prime Minister Theresa May officially
started the process of exiting the European Union on March 29, 2017.
Later, The Sun ran a front page featuring a supersized image of
May standing at the cliffs’ edge, two fingers raised in a V, beneath the
headline “UP EURS.”
Like
Britain itself these days, Dover doesn’t seem to make sense. It is home to
Europe’s busiest ferry port, booming with trade to and from the continental
mainland, but it has also been a hotbed for Euroskepticism for at least 20
years. In the 2016 referendum, Dover voted Leave by 62 percent—ten percentage
points higher than the national average. Dover now finds itself at the center
of Britain’s Brexit battle, which very well may end without a deal with the
EU—a so-called no-deal Brexit, the starkest rupture of all. Despite a deluge of
bleak forecasts about what that might mean, support in Dover for this scenario
remains stronger than ever. Dover is where the complex constellation of forces
buried within Brexit—from the toxic fantasies of Brexiteers, to the failures of
the national government—meet on the map.
A
no-deal Brexit is the favorite negotiating boast of May’s successor, Boris
Johnson, even as he makes last-minute overtures towards a compromise. On
October 31, he has said, Britain will leave the EU, deal or no deal, “do or
die.” And while a vote on Johnson’s new Brexit deal is imminent, its chances of
passing Parliament intact are low. On October 20, Michael Gove, the
Conservative minister in charge of no-deal preparations, said the government
was now implementing its contingency planning. “The risk of leaving without a
deal has actually increased,” he said.
Like Britain itself these days, Dover doesn’t seem to
make sense.
No-deal
only has an illusion of immediacy. For such a reckless act, it requires vast
and meticulous planning, already costing £8.3 billion. It also simply signals
the start of another, even longer negotiating process with the EU, because
Britain will need a new formal relationship with its biggest trade partner no
matter what and it has more leverage while still inside. But under the orders
of Johnson, preparations for the fallout are picking up pace. A public advertising
campaign offers consolation: “Beer, wine, spirits, and cigarettes will all be
duty free for people traveling to the EU if we leave without a deal,” one
official promotional video pronounces. “Get Ready for Brexit” is blown up on
billboards across the country. According to Amber Rudd, a former member of
Johnson’s cabinet, about 80-90 percent of government time is taken up with
no-deal planning.
But however much time and money is spent, the chaos of a
no-deal exit cannot be planned away. Down in Dover, as many as 16,000 trucks
pass through the port each day—more international trucks than the rest of
Britain’s ports combined—carrying 17 percent of Britain’s total trade and
almost a third of the nation’s food supply. For now, at the port’s Eastern
Docks, trucks transport EU goods and their average clearance time is under two
minutes. At the Western Docks, which handle non-EU trade (and only 2 percent of the
port’s traffic), trucks take a minimum of 20 minutes to reach the open road.
Sometimes, it’s several hours. Other times, several days.
If
such inspections suddenly moved to the Eastern Docks, as will be required if
Britain leaves the EU without a deal, the effects will be immediate and
far-reaching. According to a recent (and reluctantly released) government
report named “Operation Yellowhammer,” billed as a “reasonable worst-case
scenario,” lorries could face waits of up to two and a half days, creating
traffic tailbacks of dozens of miles. Food and medicine supplies will be
jeopardized across the country, and so supermarkets and pharmaceutical
companies are stockpiling in anticipation. At least three sets of government
papers on the no-deal fallout– “Operation Snow Bunting” on police preparations,
“Operation Kingfisher” on business support, and “Operation Black Swan” on the
real worst-case scenario—remain secret.
Whatever happens, roads in and around Dover will be
gridlocked. Residents could find themselves cut off from shops, public
services, schools, and work. The National Health Service has had to block-book
hotel rooms near Dover’s hospitals to ensure doctors and nurses can sleep
within walking distance. The chairman of the county council has called on
police officers to be drafted in from all over the country. The port could lose a £1
billion worth of trade each week. The turmoil—which neatly aligns with Brexit’s
distinct blend of paralysis and pandemonium—is expected to last for at least
several months.
The many economic players girding for a no-deal Brexit
have been anticipating something like this surreal scenario for some time.
“It’s not just me who’s frustrated or the company,” Tim Dixon, general manager
of Motis, which runs the operation at Dover’s port, told me last year, “it’s
the whole Dover community. We’re on the front line down here, and we’ll bear
the brunt of it no doubt.” Now, I’m told, Motis employees—like those of other
companies—are being pressured not to share concerns about a no-deal Brexit with
the press. One head of a major business group told The
Financial Times that the message from on high is: “Don’t expect to
be given good access [to the government] and influence if you’re not prepared
to play the game in public.”
Still,
in Dover, no-deal is disproportionately popular. In May, during the European
Parliament elections, the newly launched Brexit Party, founded by the original
Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage, stood with a single policy—a no-deal
Brexit—and won comfortably nationwide. In Dover and the surrounding region of
Kent, there were places where the Brexit Party won as much as 49 percent of the
vote, almost 20 percentage points higher than the national average. Farage
himself is one of their MEPs.
Three
years after the referendum result, excitement about Brexit has turned into
frustration—but the will to leave is unshaken. When I spoke to people in
Dover—whether a waiter, a butcher, or a Conservative councillor—“just get us
out” was a recurring, sighing refrain. It’s a similar story across the country.
The sentiment seems to stem as much from wanting to exit the endless saga of
Brexit as escape the captivity of the EU. A no-deal Brexit appeals to this
impatience. Since the Brexit Party’s success, Johnson has thus harnessed his
best Farage impression—an act that, along with several others, he has been
perfecting for years. The Conservative slogan of Theresa May was “Building a
country which works for everyone.” Johnson’s is simpler: “Get Brexit Done.”
Dover
is a swing seat. Over the past few decades, it has switched hands between
Conservatives and Labour every two or three elections; it went Conservative in
2010, and stayed that way in the last two elections. “Dover is bellwether, it
goes with the government,” Charlotte Cornell, Labour’s prospective candidate,
told me when we met at a cafe along the local high street. With Dover having
voted Conservative three times in a row now, the moment should be ripe for a
Labour win—all the more so because the town has suffered from nine years of
austerity-driven government cuts. Still, Cornell said, “It won’t be so easy.”
Dover
makes plain the difficulty of Labour’s task. Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s leader
is a hard sell. So is the party’s support for a second referendum—achieved over
Corbyn’s resistance, after continuous pressure from within and outside the
party. Brexit is constantly drawing new battle lines, eclipsing old
distinctions between Labour and Tory: A remarkable 87 percent of the population
identify as either a Remainer or Leaver—more than any other social grouping,
and more even than the 72 percent of the electorate who voted in the referendum
to begin with.
In
this part of England, distrust of Europe runs far deeper than modern-day
trading ties, which even in Dover can still seem remote. The affluent port is
separated from the struggling town—not only by a motorway but also by a Royal
Charter. This document, from 1606, puts the seafront under the control of a
national authority, rather than the local council, with its own private police
force. There is a warranted sense that, like the lorries carrying cargo, the
port’s prosperity is always heading elsewhere.
Here,
memories of the Second World War feel far closer, and fold with worrying ease
into the Brexit narrative drummed up by Johnson, Farage, and Co. As many people
in Dover will tell you, it’s not the first time they find themselves on the
frontline of a battle with mainland Europe—if anything, emboldened by
nostalgia’s siren song, they appear to relish this role.
It
was during the Second World War when the Cliffs of Dover truly affirmed
themselves in national legend, as a shelter that everyone shares. When Germany
invaded France, and Britain “stood alone,” the cliffs became a hive
of hidden tunnels. Underground barracks, built during the Napoleonic era,
housed beds, a hospital, and a command center from where British generals plotted
the Dunkirk escape. A cartoon from February 1941 shows a huge, angry Hitler
launching planes from France, only for them to crash into the cliffs and fall
into the sea below.
In
truth, Germany dropped so many bombs on Dover it became known as “Hellfire
Corner.” Today, the town exhibits its sacrifice with the solemn honor of a
veteran parading his military medals, and it wears its wounds—bomb sites, lists
of the dead—with the same sense of pride. Commemorative statues and plaques are
everywhere. Plastic red poppies—the national symbol for war remembrance—are
permanently pinned to lampposts along the high street. The citizens of Dover
have suffered for the nation’s sovereignty before, the story goes, and they are
ready to do so again.
Even
more than May, Johnson has stoked this force of national feeling. On October 8,
Johnson and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke on the phone. Whereas a
German official said the call was “very friendly” with nothing new agreed,
Johnson’s team briefed the press to the contrary: Merkel apparently, and
implausibly, made clear that a deal is “essentially impossible, not just now
but ever.” The provocation landed. Moments later, the social media account of
Leave.EU—one of two main campaign groups during the referendum—tweeted, “We
didn’t win two world wars to be pushed around by a kraut,” next to an image of
Merkel.
The
narrative of Brexit as a sequel to the Second World War—or rather, as the
continuation of a continental war that never ended—began during the referendum
campaign. As prime minister, Johnson has stepped into his military persona even
more. While playing up comparisons with Churchill and posing with armed forces
for posts on social media, he has made military investment a priority,
announcing an extra £2.2 billion in funding. “I am a prime minister who will
back our Armed Forces all the way,” he says.
With EU negotiations, Johnson is reportedly attempting
to use Britain’s military cooperation as leverage. May tried the same with
intelligence cooperation, prompting The Sun’s bloodthirsty headline: “Your
money or your lives.”
Johnson’s increasingly militaristic rhetoric has drawn
accusations that he is inciting death threats against fellow MPs, who find
themselves accused of “betrayal,” “surrender,” and “collusion” if they oppose
no-deal. (One anonymous minister in Johnson’s cabinet warned The
Times of a “violent, popular uprising” if his Brexit agenda
was thwarted.) Johnson shrugs off these fears with his usual bonhomie. “Am I
fighting a losing battle to use these military metaphors or should I stick to
my guns?” he quipped at the Conservative Party conference.
Besides
letting Johnson act out his own Churchillian fantasy and pander to the
patriotic fever-dreams of Brexiteers, the prime minister’s pantomime pivot into
military general serves another purpose. In the national mold, Corbyn is a
postwar leader—ready to invest and rebuild after decades of damage, delivering
paeans to the virtues of peace. Johnson is a wannabe wartime one: His main
purpose is to rally the troops and expel those he calls “the doomsters and the
gloomsters,” spurring the spirit of the nation. At a time when Britain feels
like a nation at war—if only a war with its own shadow—Corbyn finds himself on
the back foot.
This has long been Corbyn’s abiding weakness. In many
parts of the country, the Labour leader’s original sin is neither his socialism
nor the allegations of anti-Semitism that plague his party, but his pacifism.
The agreed danger of this stance is so ingrained that, when Corbyn was first
elected as Labour leader in 2015, a senior serving military general told The
Sunday Times that there would be “mutiny” if Corbyn became prime
minister. Both press and Parliament—faced with the threat of a military
coup—barely batted an eyelid.
Dover
feels the fears of invasion intimately. It is one of the reasons why opposition
to Corbyn, in one of the poorest towns in the country, runs so high. Cornell
spoke very warmly of him, and showed me a photo from the recent party
conference of the Labour leader holding her baby. “He’s not a magic grandpa,
he’s a friendly grandpa,” she joked, referring to one of his nicknames. “He’s a
lot warmer than the media ever makes him seem.” But she admitted that having
him as leader is “tough.” “A lot of people I meet say they would vote Labour if
he wasn’t leader,” she said. “I don’t know if they just use it as an excuse for
not wanting to vote Labour.”
On
September 23, vandals sprayed CORBYN RESIGN in large, red letters outside the
local Labour party headquarters. I asked Cornell what explained such strength
of feeling against Corbyn in Dover. Her response was immediate: “It’s a
military town.”
Dover
and the surrounding region of Kent are also reminders that, while Leave vs
Remain is often painted as a story of North against South, this picture
deceives. In England, Leave won a majority in almost every constituency outside
major cities and university enclaves like Oxford and York. More than 100 of
England’s 120 or so coastal constituencies voted in favor of Brexit, and the
southeast is where Farage first rose to prominence with his old party, UKIP.
Dover,
like much of Britain, tells itself a story of being permanently under siege. At
the time of my visit, the local museum had an exhibition dedicated to “invaders
and settlers”—a revealing conflation that pools together people fleeing war
with those fighting it. The timeline begins with Viking Raiders in 835 AD,
moves through the Norman Conquest in 1066, the World Wars, the arrival of
Jewish refugees, and the late 1990s (when refugees arrived in Western Europe
during the Balkan Wars), and ends in 2004, when the EU’s freedom of movement
was extended to new members like Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia.
There’s a feeling that, in Dover, people are always
either leaving or, if they arrive, arriving in the wrong way. There’s a
transience to the town today that sits uneasily alongside its ancient
castle-crown and its timeless white cliffs. People are always passing through:
Truck-drivers with their trade, ferries with their tourists, and now
journalists like me, writing dispatches on Dover and Brexit. Television crews
have become a common feature along the high street. Even those visitors who
come for the cliffs and the castle often circle the town—aided by the same road
that sections off Dovorians from the port. “Everything that’s great about Dover
bypasses Dover,” lamented Gareth Doodes, the headmaster of the local private
school, Dover College.
The
ones who really want to reach Dover are the ones who are most resented. Over
the past few months, French authorities have raided refugee camps across the
Channel and many people—from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Eritrea—have sought to find a
way to Britain by sea, leading to hundreds of crossings and at least two
deaths. “We cannot have the Channel becoming the new Mediterranean Sea with
dead bodies lying on beaches both sides of the Channel,” said Pierre-Henri
Dumont, the MP for Calais.
If
Britain’s Border Force doesn’t stop them, then the neo-fascist group Britain
First might. In September, members of Britain First began patrolling Dover’s
coastline with binoculars and torches, ready to intervene if they see any
crossing. They’re calling it “Operation White Cliffs.”
Perhaps the great irony underlying the names of
Britain’s two new tribes—Leavers and Remainers—is that, as metonyms, they are
the wrong way around. The archetypal Leaver really wants nothing more than
to remain: to pull up Britain’s drawbridge, deepen roots, and
make others outside remain where they are, too. The archetypal Remainers, by
contrast, love leaving—they are more cosmopolitan and liberal, with dreams of
either one day departing toward a European elsewhere or at least living
alongside those who have.
At
times, these caricatures can be unhelpful, pitting thoughtless patriots against
rootless cosmopolitans. “Leave” and “Remain” are complex coalitions, which is
one of the reasons why neither side can settle on a single strategy. But these
caricatures still capture something true: Leave and Remain draw almost all
their emotional force from these opposing visions, fixed borders and flight.
Leavers long for stricter border controls, hoping this will make people remain
where they are. Remainers rally around a right to leave, channelled through the
EU’s freedom of movement.
Dover,
with its unmovable cliffs, might seem a fitting symbol for the wish to remain.
Yet even the cliffs are leaving. A study in 2016 found that they’re losing
about 22-32 centimeters of ground a year. Over the past 150 years, the rate of
erosion has been 10 times faster than the previous 7,000 years, and this is
only expected to accelerate further with climate change.
Brexit
hopes to shore up Britain’s borders by other means. A no-deal is often
described as a cliff edge. For many Dovorians, and for many in the nation who
find security and shelter in the nation’s towering, white walls, there is no
place they would rather be.
Samuel Earle is a freelance journalist based in London.
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