Made me proud to call myself a Canadian. I have had dwindling faith in all politicians for many many years. This restored some faith. If we compare it with the speech of the other North American leader who was present I am happy he was representing the country where I have made my home.
Ok it can and probably will all go wrong, but someone in a senior leadership role has some integrity it would seem
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350
It was a timely and necessary speech. Hopefully others will take note and understand that you can’t appease bullies. Strength lies in unity. Elbows up!
Anthony Scaramuchi on the Rest is Politics US podcast knows him well and likes him a lot. He said “he’s very intelligent, knows the detail, has liberal views and is hard as nails – he can’t be bullied”. Top man then.
He has Obama levels of class and leadership. It was a genuinely brilliant speech. At a time when someone clearly and erruditely needed to say something. I am very impressed with him.
At least we’ve bowed out of the grotesque “Board of Peace’ debacle, that;s something I suppose. The idea that the likes of Netanyahu. Putin, MBS etc hobnobbing with Blair and Trump under the pretence of promoting “peace” is a grisly charade indeed
If only a “Love, Actually” polite but on-point bollocking of a vile American President really knocked them down. I think every espirite d’escalier directed at Trump (and I’ve contributed plenty myself, too) is wasted. The skidmark needed to be lumped a few times when he was still in a critical learning stage to have acquired the capacity to only open his mouth when he had decided what he was going to say, and to know there are consequences for saying stupid things. Too late now. he’s got away with it for a lifetime, and thrived on it. Amazing what people actually want.
Not massively interested in speeches (good or bad). I think we’re now well into the “ignore what they say, watch what they do” stage of proceedings.
Maybe give it a go. Carney is doing what he says
I’ve heard the speech and it’s lovely. I just don’t think political speeches are all that important. They give everyone a little sugar rush of “saying what needs to be said”, but too often they’re a placebo for actual action.
That’s not a criticism of Mark Carney btw – he seems great.
I think politics is really about saying what you’re going to do and then doing it. Otherwise it’s pretty difficult to elect them. That’s not to decry that delivery is always the important bit, because it is.
That certainly used to be true. I’m not convinced it is anymore.
I think we put too much focus on the saying, and not enough on the doing. Until we reverse that formulation we’re going to keep losing, and by god are we losing.
Agree with that. Doing is essential.
The shift in the saying seems to be that you can make up any old shit, have it exposed that you are a big, fat liar and still people will vote for you. And many seem unbothered by the fact thyou didn’t even attempt to do it.
And by god we are losing.
As a German politician put it, politicians know full what must be done, they just don’t know how to do it and get re-elected. The current UK government has an even greater dilemma. It knows it has to prioritise growth in order to afford even current levels of spending in the future, let alone any increases. But it doesn’t know how to achieve it without revolt within its own ranks, let alone the wider electorate.
Technofeudalism suggests growth is not currently possible.
Presumably Carney either hasn’t read it or thinks it’s nonsense., otherwise he wouldn’t be bothering with all the things he mentioned in his speech ( and others he didn’t). If, on the other hand, Carney is wrong and Varoufakis is correct, Rachel Reeves had better scrap the triple lock, pull up the drawbridge on PIP etc pronto
If we are paying heed to Varoufakis then we are really screwed.
I suspect that Zach Polanski certainly is, or at least the bits that likes the sound of. Which tends to be the problem with most of our politicians, albeit for understandable reasons.
In any event, should Polanski ever get anywhere near government, e.g. in coalition, I suspect we woukd be hearing a lot more of Varoufakis. After all, he, like the Greens, is a fan of Modern Monetary Theory ( MMT). Varoufakis has said it can’t work in most of Europe because they don’t have a sovereign currency. The UK,of course, does. What the Greens seemingly fail to recognise is that MMT , even if you accept the theory, is in trouble if you start with a huge national debt. It also requires governments to cut back on spending / printing money when inflation inevitably comes calling. The notion that a populist Green Party would be capable of that stretches credulity.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I haven’t read the Varoufakis book. The technofeudalism tag seemed like a convenient shorthand for the monopolistic stranglehold tech bros have over flows of capital, impoverishing the rest of society in the way Gary Stevenson seems to describe. ‘Growth’ seems to be a very amorphous target for government policy, putting the cart before the horse. Surely it should be just one measure towards the actual goal you entry to achieve, not the goal itself? Similarly, isn’t there a difference between inflation caused by increased consumption and that from long term infrastructure investment?
But like I said at the top, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I know when I’m out of my depth.
I keep on trying to swim, though!
Frazer Nelson has written an interesting article in today’s Times. His cover a lot of ground,but one of his key points is that European leaders in particular are inclined to say one thing and do another.
A star was born in Davos last week. Everyone knew Donald Trump was coming to denounce the global elite and their liberal order. But no one expected Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, to emerge as the anti-Trump with a speech that stole the conference.
He invoked a famous essay by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-president, about living under the lies of communism and compared this to the US rules-based order. It’s time to admit those days are gone, he said. Stop living the lie. Instead, “middle powers” can get together and build something new.
Carney was as eloquent as Trump was rambling; as considered as his counterpart is reckless. The Havel reference was perfectly pitched to my generation, who saw communism collapse and the liberal order emerge.
My wife’s parents fled the regime that Havel so beautifully lampooned in The Power of the Powerless, but my reading of that essay is very different. We certainly live in times of denial and self-deceit. But if you apply Havel’s lens to those gathered in Davos, we see Europe, not America, living the lie.
He was writing in 1978 about a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his window saying “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But everyone goes along with the pretence, for an easy life.
This creates a “bridge of excuses”, letting both the greengrocer and the regime pretend something nobler is happening than mere submission. The result? A “world of appearances”. Ritualistic language, detached from reality. But sooner or later, he says, people stop living the lie, take the sign down — and the illusion shatters.
Does Carney’s analogy hold? Havel’s target was communism, a lie that killed millions and immiserated hundreds of millions. The US-led liberal order led to the greatest explosion of wealth and the fastest fall in global poverty in human history. Are we so sure this era is over? Do we really see, in Donald Trump, a president unleashed in the “unhindered pursuit of power and influence”, as Carney says? Or a president who has hit the limits of his authority and was last week forced to row back?
Annexing Greenland, for example, would be illegal under US law. Congress would not have authorised funds for such a venture; generals would have refused or resigned. Americans were appalled that Trump was even talking about it; polls showed it went down worse than even the Epstein scandal.
So it’s dangerous to talk about the “middle powers” being squeezed between two bullying great powers. There is no moral equivalence between American democracy and Chinese autocracy — and no doubt about who we should stay closer to. It was certainly dismaying to see Trump threaten tariffs to undermine the territorial integrity of a Nato ally. But his suggestion was also illegal and, ergo, unworkable. Safe to say the death of the US rules-based order has been rather exaggerated.
Much of what Mark Carney said did make sense: to grow economies you need to cut taxes and red tape. Strike more trade deals, find new allies. But this was not a popular theme among the European leaders, who preferred what he said about an alliance of middle powers. Emmanuel Macron has been talking for a while about the need to end the “era” of relying on America.
Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s president, informed Davos that “Europe must speed up its push for independence” and promised an “unflinching, united and proportional” response to American bullying. Donald Tusk, who as Polish prime minister holds the EU presidency, declared Europe to be “equal to the greatest powers in the world”.
This is why even hinting at a rupture with America is preposterous for a Europe that relies entirely on the US nuclear deterrent for defence against Russia and China. To pontificate about freedom without being willing to defend it is to build up the very “world of appearances” that Havel held up to ridicule.
It fell to Volodymyr Zelensky to call out the hypocrisy. Going to Davos is like Groundhog Day, he said: always the same grandstanding before leaders scarper back to the shelter of the fictions they built. “Europe loves to discuss the future,” he said, “but avoids taking action today that defines what kind of future we will have.” Look at the massacred Iranian protesters, he said: what did Europe offer them?
When just 40 European soldiers were sent to Greenland, what did that tell Xi and Putin? He might have quoted Havel’s 1990 speech to the US Congress suggesting that a new, free Europe could pay for its own defence. “American soldiers shouldn’t have to be separated from their mothers,” he said, “just because Europe is incapable of being a guarantor of world peace.”
Had those words been heeded, things might be different now. America might see Europe as a partner rather than a nagging dependent. Things are changing but nowhere near fast enough. Keir Starmer says he’ll raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But the sign goes in the window anyway. France is doing the same. Germany has pledged the money but struggles to find enough people to raise the army to its proposed strength. Only Poland and the Baltics have a credible plan to tool up.
Sticking with America is not just the best hope of protecting Europe’s security, it’s the only hope. And the greatest threat to this alliance is European denial and parsimony, not Trumpian outrage. As Zelensky said, there is worryingly little sign of this changing, which may be an issue if Ukraine ends up partitioned and a million Russian soldiers are sent back home as the Kremlin works out what to do with them.
“Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens,” Havel wrote, “there can be no free and independent nations.” Europe’s leaders might start by becoming such citizens themselves. Not by quoting dissidents but by doing what dissidents actually did: facing uncomfortable truths, accepting responsibility — and then, acting accordingly.
Thanks for posting this.
While Trump was giving his speech I was sat in a meeting in Italy, watching senior heads from my sector try to figure out a way to convince the European Commission not to regulate the ever loving shit out of them at a cost of billions of euros in lost revenue and massively decreased EU competitiveness, to relatively minimal consumer benefit.
As with any brush with the political organism in Brussels, it was a sobering experience. Whatever one feels about the EU and the importance of European solidarity, I have yet to meet anyone who deals regularly with these institutions who fails to recognise that this is a gravy train, operated from within a hermetically sealed bubble.
I agree with Nelson about the grandstanding. We love a speech, we love noble words. The idea that we’re on the right side/ahead of history, so we can just benignly go with the drift, finding ever more beautiful ways to auto-fellate as we do so. Well, I think that period is probably ending now.
In 2008 the GDP of the EU was at virtual parity with that of the US. In the intervening 15 years, the US has developed a 50% advantage. What technological innovation we generate, we quickly sell to others, because there simply is not the investment capital in Europe to grow and compete. We are militarily dependent and politically divided. And that’s why we got spoken to like dickheads this week. That’s what we now need to fix.
I don’t think there was ever a serious prospect of Trump invading Greenland this year, for all the reasons listed above. It would quite obviously be political suicide, and very possibly the end of his administration. I told a concerned friend a week ago how this would inevitably end – with Trump backing down and claiming victory as he did so, having fucked with the markets, tickled his base and distracted us all from whatever the hell it is we’re not meant to be looking at this week (Epstein? Iran?).
What I took from the event was not Greenland. It was our inertia. We’ll celebrate this as a victory – “we stood up to him! He backed down” – but stepping back from Greenland was priced in from the start. It’s a shadow victory. The reality is that the most powerful man in the world came to town and insulted all of Europe to its face, endlessly and directly, because in his calculation Europe is weak and dependent. It wasn’t the threats that mattered, it was the rhetoric and the body language.
What we need to do now seems fairly evident, if it didn’t long before this debacle. Prepare to stand on our own two feet. Assure our own defence. Be ready to properly compete economically, culturally and politically. The age of comfort and the easy life is coming to an end, after several decades. What we need now isn’t honeyed words, but honest ones – politicians who will tell us the painful truth of what needs to be done, that it’s going to hurt and where we should expect the pain. But we won’t get those politicians, not in Europe at least, because the alliance is too fractured, because the electorate is already roiled. Because our governments are not on solid ground. Because the fantasy is ingrained too deeply.
So instead we’ll keep on making speeches, and hope the danger passes. We’ll continue to do the easy things because they’re there, and because the hard things feel beyond us. We’ll continue to look inward, to regulate more than we innovate, and to trust that history will be gentle with us simply by virtue of who we are and what we represent. And eventually, somewhere down the line, that trust will be betrayed, if it hasn’t been already. And – who knows – we may even be too busy making speeches to notice.
If only we had our own dictatorship. Much more effective at getting things done.
A couple of years back, Joe Biden reported having the following conversation with Xi Jinping:
“He [Xi] said democracies cannot be sustained in the 21st century, autocracies will run the world. Why? Things are changing so rapidly. Democracies require consensus, and it takes time, and you don’t have the time”.
I think about that statement all the time. It’s bone chilling, frankly. And a challenge I would hope we can maybe still rise to meet.
I think Carney did say how it is (plus Zelenski) but I have little optimism that anyone will do anything much to support it. This government is much happier fighting amongst themselves than making bold steps. It’s a depressing thought but I doubt anything will change.
Minor correction
(for @leedsboy)
I’m not sure my lack of apostrophe discipline should be crossing threads…
I couldn’t resist the greengrocer reference. Mea culpa.
Pea Cuculpa surely?
The word ‘appease’ has had a bad rap since 1938.
What else do you do with a toddler?
‘Trump you f****** son of a f****** (oh yes, his father was actually the theme of a Woody Guthrie song about racism… Trump Sr. providing slum housing in the cavalier air style that Rachman did in post-war London, ho hum, and don’t be gay or female or poor) you’re a c***’.
Completely reasonable stance. Indeed, wholly accurate.
No Prime Minister of the last 100 years would have done it.
I’ll do it, but then I’m not the Prime Minister.
I hope you’ll fill in the asterisks before you do.
Erm, think I understand… I do something before I do it? OK!
First two rhyme with what you do in a rugger scrum (if yer lucky!), last one doesn’t rhyme with anything, it’s what Nigel Fromage is.
Blunt?
I stick by my fundamental belief that he says crazy things to yoyo the markets. If you know what’s about to happen, you can make gazillions from that volatility.
Yes. He invested half a million dollars each in Netflix and Warners before publicly insisting they merge and he had to be involved.
For what it’s worth, he didn’t insist the companies merge; Netflix had already agreed to acquire WBD following a lengthy auction process and the share prices of both companies are fractionally down since his investment.
It is still a massive conflict of interest though, given his inevitable involvement in regulatory clearance, and I completely agree with Black Celebration that Trump deliberately manipulates the markets by announcing mad shit and then cancelling it.
It will be his private and internal rebuttal to the TACO label and ultimate justification for his actions. If he is x billions richer at the end of this “that makes me smart” – which was his response to Hilary Clinton’s accusation of tax evasion.
I’m not sure what his grand strategy was in suggesting that NATO allies didn’t fight on the frontline in Afghanistan. They “stayed a little back” according to him. Fucking wanker.
That wasn’t Carney
Of course. I moved on to the orange one.
Right. I am glad that Starmer has sternly picked him up on that, not that he cares
I do wonder if we might have reached something of a tipping point based on the last few days. Even his rabid fan base must have doubts. Probably not, but JD Vance as president? Hmmm
I am sure many of us have been “trapped” in small talk with tedious old men in pubs. The kind of men that sit alone at the bar for hours, waiting for their next victim.
When you’re young, you’re too polite to just walk away so you feel you have to listen to the barely coherent ramblings. Terrifyingly, they will sometimes pull up
a chair and join your group to carry on waffling about God knows what. Then you buy them a drink and it’s mission accomplished and off they pop. Both parties happy with that outcome.
Trump’s speeches are very similar. He’s never touched alcohol so his blatherings are all the more astonishing because he can’t say to reporters “sorry- I was pissed yesterday, what did I say again?”
He’s on the Special K, and when he isn’t he’s even less coherent.
As MC Escher said on another thread:
Don’t feed the trolls
Especially coming from a draft dodger. Bone spurs my arse.
I’m sure Carney is distraught that Trump has withdrawn his invitation to join the Board Of Peace, thus denying him the opportunity of sitting down at a table with Putin.
As an Evertonian, I’m proud that Carney is one of us.
I guess nobody’s perfect 😉
I saw a thing in fb today saying he is the new leader of the free world based on this speech
So Trump now threatening Canada with 100% tariffs if we “make a deal with China”. He’s like a toddler who is having a tantrum because of something he doesn’t like.
I think the response here now will be, er ok fine. He will either back down (again), or we find new trading partners. A lot of trade between the 2 countries is anyway exempt from tariffs because of earlier trade agreements.
He’ll TACO. He’s got enough affordability problems at it is. In a Trump v Carney face off I know who will have thought through the options and implications and it’s not the orange guy.