Could the end of the world really now be nigh?

The consequences of the Trump presidency make what could happen if the UK leaves the EU pale into insignificance, One will mainly have severe consequences on the British people, the other could lead to unthinkable disaster. Donald Trump is a dangerous, dangerous man. He is clearly more than psychologically disturbed and has surrounded himself with some very nasty people. While the quality of today's politician is generally low, certainly in this country, none so scrapes the bottom of the barrel as much as Donald J. Trump. He glories in doing the wrong thing. George W. Bush was not an intelligent or educated man but he looks like Einstein compared to the current holder of the office. Of course there are some leaders worthy of the name - Angela Merkel, obviously, and Emmanuel Macron is already shaping up well as the French President. His statement after the Trump climate-denying announcement that we should "Make the planet great again" was a brilliant twist of the knife in the moronic Trump narrative. Sadly, Trump and his people don't only not care, it pumps them up in their war against the rest of the world. One White House insider is supposed to have said, when told that the decision would upset Europe, "That's another bonus." Not even the greatest Cold War warrior would have said that about the Soviet Union. Doing all you can to spit in the face of your opponents and revelling in your successes in doing that is a sign of pathetic immaturity. The big question is where this goes now. Not particularly on climate change but for the future of peace in the world. It may be that Trump's greatest legacy will be to unite the rest of the planet. Yet if that makes the president even more paranoid, the possible consequences really are unthinkable.

The skilled art of negotiation (and it isn't Corbyn who hasn't got it)

When I was a trade union official, many years ago, I worked out that there were two ways to negotiate. One was to thump the table, shout, bluster, threaten to walk out and, indeed, sometimes walk out. The other was to try to find some common ground, behave with civility, never lose your temper and treat the other side with respect. It should be no surprise that I adopted the latter tactic, having taken over from a Father of the Chapel who had done the opposite. And I won the biggest pay rises for journalists that there had ever been on Fleet Street. So naturally it amuses and horrifies me to see Theresa May in effect taking the attitude towards the European Union negotiations that you would expect from the most rabid, hardline trade unionist. If Bob Crow were still alive, he would surely approve (he was very anti-EU anyway). The idea that the leaders of the 27 other countries will politely listen to her demands and then nod approvingly as she lectures them while playing to the image of being a bloody difficult woman is laughable. For a start, anyone who has ever been involved in negotiations and isn't completely stupid knows that the side which has the power has an advantage. And thinking that in a contest of 27 against 1, the 1 has the advantage is, frankly, breathtakingly moronic. That doesn't mean I think Jeremy Corbyn would be a great negotiator. I don't think he has done any since he was a junior public-service union official in the 1970s and the European team will be a lot different from management in a cottage hospital. That is irrelevant, though, as despite the interesting - yet clearly meaningless - latest poll, Theresa May will be the one leading the UK's negotiators. It is her who will be wandering naked into the negotiating chamber.

This time it was May who missed the open goals

The sole way in what is left of the Lobby continues to operate is that political journalists agree on “the line”. A process which seems at times to work through osmosis but is nowadays helped by social media. Which is undoubtedly how the general view of last night’s non-debate between May and Corbyn came to be widely described as “a score draw”. This is utter nonsense. Even though they weren’t in a face-to-face scrap, Corbyn clearly did well and the prime minister did not, as any neutral person would have appreciated. And not just neutrals – people like me who abhor Corbyn were won over. Even Douglas Carswell and Nigel Farage thought he was impressive. By contrast, Theresa May was exposed as the posturing cliché-ridden zombie some of us had already realised she is. Her performance on the Channel 4/Sky News programme couldn’t have been a score draw as she patently failed to score. Even her parroting of “Brexit means Brexit” only got applause because the people who applauded her would have cheered whatever she said about getting out of the EU. The Tory campaign will now spend the next nine days simply saying “Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit” and “Jeremy Corbyn is a terrorist lover”. The former will continue to reverberate with a large number of the voters who were duped into backing Leave and don’t yet realise how it is going to hurt them. The Corbyn slogan won’t resonate, though, as it says more about the Tories than it does about him. It is Lynton Crosby at his worst. He is one immigrant I would be happy to see put on the next slow boat back to where he came from It’s a pity that the Australian Points System so beloved of Ukip doesn’t mean one Australian in particular could be kept out of British life.

The lemmings dash blindly to May's cliff-edge

Why is no one saying what this country will be like in 2022 when the next general election is held after five years under Theresa May? Partly because the opposition is bloody hopeless and partly because all seem incapable of looking beyond June 8. The Tory manifesto sets out a series of policies which are going to hit millions - not just the elderly but their relatives. The effects of leaving the European Union will by 2022 be growing obvious, with lower living standards and reduced public services as the tax-take falls. And public services are already on a downward spiral. Anyone who thinks the NHS can survive if it continues to be treated as it is at the moment is really living in a fool's paradise. The government won't listen to the people who know how serious things are - those who work in the health service. Just as they won't listen to the teachers and police who know what is happening to schools and law and order. At least Michael Fallow was honest when he admitted on Newsnight that curbing immigration would have a cost to this country and that the government hadn't a clue how great that cost would be. But that doesn't stop the Tories and the Ukip idiots lunging recklessly down the path of keeping out immigrants. The one thing all parties agree on is that this is the most important election of modern times. But none of them seem to understand why it is so important. It genuinely is about the future of the United Kingdom yet there is no real debate about the real issues and the real consequences of where we are heading. The cliff-edge lies ahead and the lemmings are blindly, madly rushing towards it.

How Rhodri Morgan beat the Blair machine (eventually)

The death of Rhodri Morgan brings back to me my shameful involvement in the Blair machine's attempts to prevent him becoming the first First Secretary of the Welsh Assembly. When in the early years of the 1997 New Labour government the assembly was established, the contest to become its first leader was between Rhodri and Ron Davies, who as a member of the cabinet had been responsible for steering the Bill through Parliament. My view was that although Davies was described as the architect of the assembly, he was much more focussed on being part of the Westminster team whereas Morgan was a proper Welsh-focussed politician. But the Campbell-Mandelson axis got in touch with Piers Morgan and told him the Mirror should be supporting Ron Davies, which Piers readily agreed to (he always did in those days). So the Mirror backed Ron Davies (in other words, I wrote the leader saying he should be First Secretary). And he won. He never took up the post, though. I well remember the moment when I heard he had been caught in a "moment of madness" on Clapham Common. I was waiting to get on a ferry back to the mainland from the Isle of Wight. I wrote a leader when on the ferry but had to change it a bit when we landed as by then Davies had resigned. It seemed like fate had intervened and the right man was going to get the job after all. But no, that wasn't acceptable to the Blairites. They insisted on putting up Alun Michael, another of their acceptable ministers, against Rhodri when, of course he should just have got the job unchallenged. But he wasn't a politician No. 10 could control. I think I managed to keep the Mirror out of this election but, even so, once again Rhodri lost out. And once again the machinating Blair operation showed it was too clever, and too controlling, by half. Michael didn't last and finally Rhodri Morgan got the job he really wanted (his predecessors didn't seem too interested - it was just a career move for them) and to which he was perfectly suited. Rhodri Morgan never forgave the Mirror and rightly so. But at least he did lead the Welsh Assembly and proved how right he was for the role. It also proved what I had always believed, that if you were going to devolve power, you had to let the people of the devolved regions get on and make their own decisions, not continue to try to control things from London.

It really is a mad, mad, mad, mad world

I can never remember how many "mads" there are in the title of the film It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but, whatever the number, it is not enough for the world we currently inhabit. All the old certainties have been turned on their heads in the topsy-turvy lunacy in which we live. In the United Kingdom the Conservative Party, which had always been non-ideological and blindly supportive of all branches of the Establishment, is now fervently ideological, whatever the cost to the country. The party of capital and the bosses throws its weight behind the workers (at least, it says it will). The young, who were supposed to be frivolous and not care about the future, now adopt an air of concern about housing, jobs and debt. While the elderly, whose experience of life used to make them masters (and mistresses) of good sense, throw caution and everything else to the wind, blow their money on frivolous living and don't give a fig for what happens to the country they profess to love. Then there is America. For the whole of my life, the Russians (or Soviets or Russkies as they were variously called) were The Enemy, with China not far behind in the hatred stakes. What the Americans could rely on was being defended by the branches of their security services, especially the legendary FBI, and their magnificent tradition of judicial independence and strength. But in today's mad, mad, etc. etc. the president and administration of the United States cling to the Russians as their best friends, with China hugged to the bosom, too. While the FBI and CIA are vilified, their leaders undermined and kicked out, and judges treated like simpletons and minions. The lessons which were assumed to have been learnt from the first half of the 20th century and implemented through the second half are casually jettisoned. The USA and UK were believed to have the strongest political systems and constitutions in the world. They were monuments to civilisation. Who can seriously still believe that in the age of Trump and Brexit?

Things can only get worse

On May 2, 1997, I was among the hordes at the South Bank who heard Tony Blair declare: "A new dawn has broken, has it not?" Of course it hadn't, though in the immediate aftermath of his landslide election victory, with the strains of D-reams Things Can Only Get Better pounding in our ears, it seemed like it. Over the course of the next decade there certainly were changes but the idea that there would be instantly a New Britain thanks to New Labour was a mirage. Yet it is a natural and consistent human trait to believe that things do change instantly, as if by the waving of a wand. Politicians and journalists play to this, pretending that something can happen immediately. Though even dawn doesn't break in a micro-second. One of the most fatuous parts of the Remain campaign during the referendum was George Osborne's claim that if the country voted to leave the EU, the economy would fall off a cliff, there would need to be an emergency Budget and every family would be £4,300 a year worse off. It was total nonsense designed to panic voters - as it had done in the Scottish referendum - but was so ridiculous it wasn't going to fool anyone. At least ten years earlier, when I spoke at various schools putting the case for Europe, I used to say that if we left the EU, there wasn't a plug somewhere in the middle of the UK, possibly around West Bromwich, which would be pulled up and Britain would slowly sink under the waves. There would certainly be a serious decline but it would take place over years, not days. And so it is proving. Yet there are still Leavers - not only among the masses - who believe that we should just get out of the EU NOW and that the lack of an impact on our economy since the referendum shows that nothing is going to happen. Even the drastic fall in the value of sterling hasn't immediately hit living standards. But it is coming, as the Governor of the Bank of England warned yesterday. Theresa May is worried that it will hit in the next two years, which is why she has called this snap election. It may not even occur in that time scale. It may be closer to the following election in 2022. It could be even after that, with decline gradual as investment falls, firms move out, jobs are lost and tax revenues slip away leading to even worse public services. And who will the voters blame then?