Why this Eurosceptic is voting to Remain (and why you should too!)

Introduction

To say that I am not exactly a loyal footsoldier of the EU is a bit of an understatement. If we had had a referendum on the Euro when our government was toying with the idea of throwing us under that particular bus in the early 2000s, I would have voted against it. If we had been given a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (or, before that, the proposed European Constitution) I would have voted against that. I’m a bit too young to remember in any detail the wranglings over Maastricht so I am not sure what I would have done at the time but with hindsight I would probably have voted against that as well. 

In saying this I am not trying to present myself as a Mr Miyagi-esque font of all wisdom when it comes to matters European - in fact in all of these cases I would in all probability have found myself in the majority, which is of course why none of those referenda were ever held. I mention these things merely to illustrate the fact that I have always considered myself a Eurosceptic and therefore it is with no small degree of irritation that I find that when we are finally, for the first time in my lifetime, offered a referendum on something European related, I am forced to side with those ghastly gravy supping bureaucrats who seem so obsessed with the curvature of our bananas. 

I should at this early stage declare a financial interest in the result of the referendum. One of our big household expenses is the repayment of my wife’s student loans in the US, repayable in dollars. Given that every time a poll shows Brexit ahead, the pound falls against the dollar, I shudder to think of how far it will take a plunge if we, the British people, ourselves “take the plunge” on June 23rd. The screams emanating from my wallet will be heard for miles around. But leaving my personal circumstances aside, the markets’ reaction to a possible Brexit should be a significant concern to all of us, as a fairly black and white piece of evidence that the Out camp’s claim that there will be little or no short term economic pain if we leave should be taken with a small pinch of salt (and a hefty dollop of bullshit).

Initial Concerns

Nevertheless, back in February when the referendum date was set, I found myself going into the debate with a genuinely open mind. If I found myself inclining towards the Remain camp from the outset it was primarily for two reasons, neither of them mercenary. 

The first of these was that for the vast majority of my adult life the people peddling the case for leaving the EU had primarily been those politicians with their clown shoes resting comfortably on the “lunatic fringe” of politics, with the likes of Farage and, before him, Robert Kilroy-Silk (remember him? No? Count your blessings!) on the one hand and a few crazy lefties like Tony Benn and that Corbyn fellow on the other. The idea that Brexit is now a mainstream argument is therefore relatively new to me and one I have found difficult to swallow. Picturing the toadlike grin on Farage’s face when, like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, he gets everything he always wanted, made me feel feel faintly nauseous. 

The second was that my Unionism trumps my Euroscepticism and as a huge fan of Scotland and someone who feels a strong sense of kinship with our chums on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall I was extremely worried that our leaving the UK would eventually lead to a second referendum in Scotland and a vote for independence.  

Over the course of the next four months, the Leave campaign admittedly did better than I was expecting in countering my first concern, by getting various mainstream figures into their camp, including a number of extremely impressive independent thinkers across the political spectrum like David Davis, David Owen and Frank Field. They also managed to snare Gove and Boris, of course, although throughout the campaign the latter has never seemed truly convinced of the merits of his own arguments. I suspect that his gamble may backfire (even if Brexit wins I doubt he’s got enough MP support to make it to the top) and that shortly after the referendum he will announce that he is quitting frontbench politics to spend more time with Ian Hislop and Paul Merton (hopefully with a few more fantastic documentaries about Ancient Rome thrown in - one of the few pleasing aspects of this referendum has been the frequent reminders of how great his 2008 documentary “The Dream of Rome” was, although I suspect that I enjoyed those clips being repeated more than he did!)

The second question, however, namely “what happens to Scotland” has mainly been ignored as an inconvenient distraction by the Leave camp. I appreciate that the SNP cannot unilaterally call a second referendum, and that there has been a poll suggesting that there will be no massive increase in support for independence following an Out vote, but if leaving leads to economic turmoil, even if it is only in the short term, in circumstances where the Scots have voted to Remain (which seems highly likely from the polling), we might well find that they have quickly change their mind and the pressure for a second vote becomes overwhelming. I have not heard any convincing argument from the Leave camp as to why this would not (or might not) happen. 

I appreciate that the break-up of the UK may not be as massive a concern for everyone as it is for me, but personally I view it as a “dealbreaker”. However, it is not the only thing that tipped the scales for me.

Peace in Our Time 

In the interests of balance I will say that there are a number of arguments that have been raised by the Remain camp that I have found completely spurious. The first is that the EU has led to peace in Europe since 1945 and that we are jeopardising that peace by leaving. It is true that, internally at least, even with the horrors associated with the break up of Yugoaslavia, Europe has been relatively conflict free over the last 70 years by historical standards and this is indeed something to be celebrated. But there does not appear to be much evidence of this being because of the EU. Which wars exactly is it supposed to have stopped, and what specific steps did it take to stop them? 

A century or so ago Edward VII was nicknamed the peacemaker of Europe. A short term triumph it may have been, given that we definitely got a fairly unpleasant World War shortly afterwards (in fairness to King Edward, who died in 1910, we can’t really attribute that to any failings he may have had, unless dropping dead at inopportune moments counts as a diplomatic faux pas). But at least we can point to the Entente Cordiale as something specific that emerged from his boozing and schmoozing. In the case of the EU, my feeling is that it is one of the by-products of peace in Europe, rather than its cause. 

Even if there have been a number of peace deals negotiated in the past that I am unaware of, that have prevented e.g. Belgium and Luxembourg from ripping each other’s throats out, a vote to abolish the EU altogether is not on the table in this referendum given that we are only one of 28 member states. Nor, given that we are paying significant amounts of money into the EU every week (even if it is more like £150 million than the £350 million being claimed by Boris’ Big Bright Bus of Bollocks and Balderdash) can any historic peace achievements in and of themselves justify our continuing to fork out such humungous membership fees (on a rather different scale from the Christmas tree we get from Norway every year by way of thanks for helping them out during WWII)? 

We need to be looking to the future, and thinking about whether there is any realistic likelihood that the specific act of the UK leaving the EU is going to increase the chances of any armed conflict anywhere in the world at any point in the future? I don’t believe so, and despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, I don’t think he believes so either (first rule of politics - never hold a referendum when you believe that one of the two possible outcomes will trigger a world war!) 

What has the EU ever done for us?

Nor am I particularly convinced by the arguments for Remain that focus on the wonderful pieces of legislation that the EU has been responsible for to date. I won’t replicate the lists here but I have seen plenty floating around, and they are long and impressive. I agree completely that a lot of laws that have emanated from Brussels (perhaps most of them) have been eminently sensible and I am very glad that they are there. This is not unimportant but it is missing the crucial point of my concerns, which are not about the quality of the decisions (after all, if we do Brexit then (a) we don't have to repeal anything in force already and (b) we will still be able to keep an eye on what they're up to and snaffle any of their good ideas of we so choose), but rather about whether the EU has a proper mandate to be making those decisions, or whether it is simply an inappropriate level of delegation by our officials of the duties we thought we were electing them to carry out. 

The question I have is what do I do if there are specific laws I don’t like, to the extent that I want to punish the people responsible for putting them in place. I am not going to call the EU undemocratic, that would be simplistic and false. We elect our MEPs, the Council of Europe consists of ministers from governments elected by the member states, and even the Commissioners are appointed by governments elected by the member states.  

But it is an imperfect democracy - a proper democracy should be about accountability, about “kicking the rascals out” (it’s a tedious cliche, but it’s worth saying anyway because it’s true). How can there be true accountability when no-one knows who the rascals are, no-one understands who really holds the balance of power, less than 5% of the public know who their MEPs are, and even those who do are unlikely to have much of a sense of what measures that MEP voted for and against, and what the impact on the European Parliament would be if that MEP was kicked out and replaced by some other faceless Eurocrat (other than that it would probably be negligible). 

OK, we can vent our anger on the political minnows, the MEPs, but how do we achieve the equivalent of Portillo (or Balls, if you prefer) losing his seat? If we don’t like the European President or the EU Foreign Minister what can we do about it? The answer is absolutely nothing. 

This is why I have continuing concerns about the increasing transfer of powers to the EU. In terms of the decisions that affect our daily lives, the truth is that I would much rather have one of our chaps (or, even better, one of our female lady chaps) making mostly bad decisions, than the EU making mostly good ones. At least in the case of the former I know that (a) the next time I go to the ballot box I can give him or her a kicking, and (b) in the meantime I know there are ways of getting their attention, whether it is writing letters, petitioning, protesting or even engaging in a vigorous debate with them over Twitter. In the case of the latter, the people in charge might be making good decisions now, but even the best of politicians tend to “go off” after a while, and when they do, what’s my remedy?

A Leap into the Unknown

So far, so John Redwood. Wasn’t this supposed to be a pro-EU rant, I hear you ask! Why are you veering all over the place like a shopping trolley being steered by a hyperactive toddler, Crockford? Well, I just wanted to illustrate that although I believe all of the points above to be true, I don’t think they are sufficiently important to justify our leaving the EU. Going back to my original comment, that I would have voted against the Euro, the Lisbon Treaty etc - the difference there is that in all those cases I would have been voting for the status quo. I knew roughly what would have happened if my side had won the referendum. Britain would have kept buggering on in exactly the same way as before. To throw in another tired cliche, again because it’s true, we really are voting for a leap into the unknown if we vote to Leave. 

The choice we are faced with is like being offered the choice between (a) a Second Hand Skoda (a bit pants, but you know what you’re getting) and (b) a large box that may have a slightly newer Skoda in it (you see, I am acknowledging that leaving the EU might have benefits but they certainly aren’t Ferrari level benefits!) but might just as easily contain a gigantic ostrich turd (there’s a Noel Edmonds show waiting to happen!)

The Longer Term View

But the status quo isn’t on the ballot paper, the Brexiteers squeal triumphantly. “The powers that be in Brussels will take a Remain vote as a green light to press ahead with full integration!” Really? Even if it’s as close as it’s currently looking? The Brussels elite may be out of touch but I refuse to believe that they’re quite that stupid. “We’ve had our one chance at reform, now the choice is stay in an unreformed EU or leave!” the Leave camp crow. Really? Given that every government from the Heath government that took us in until the one we elected in 2015 has to a greater or lesser extent gone along with significant transfers of sovereignty (including Mrs Thatcher’s until right at the very end of her tenure when she ran out of other people to beat up)? How hard do you think that the Major, Blair, Brown and Coalition governments were really pushing for a looser EU model? The current Tory government is the first one to take even a vague, languid, grudging stab at it. 

I couldn’t believe it when Big Dave suggested that he would have sorted out a “Reformed EU” by 2016/17 after a single round of negotiations and I don’t believe he’s managed it now (although the concessions he got were not as worthless as some have been suggesting), but we’re a big beast in this jungle and this is not the end of the story (Philip Hammond is on the record as saying that the process of pushing for reform is ongoing - no-one listened to him because he’s Philip Hammond, but he is the Foreign Secretary so he probably knows a thing or two about it!) The truth is that we’ve barely started. This is just Round 1. It may take decades to get to the looser, a la carte Europe that would really work for a country like Britain, but the current model of more and more centralisation for all is fundamentally unsound and the senior politicians in the other EU member states are going to take a lot longer to reach that conclusion if we’re not sitting in those meetings banging that drum. It’s going to be slow, tedious and damned difficult, but when has that ever deterred us Brits? Are we fighters or are we quitters? 

Ahem, sorry about that, I was just having a Peter Mandelson moment there. Where was I?

But...but why is no-one talking about IMMIGRATION?

As the husband of an American who has now become a dual citizen, and as a solicitor specialising in construction, an industry heavily reliant on easy access to labour from within the EU, I am unashamedly pro-immigration. And as it happens, I think it is talked about rather too much, and thought about rather too little. I accept that there seems to be no logical reason why it should be more difficult (or indeed any easier) for a Canadian or an Australian to come here to work than it is for a Romanian or Bulgarian, and that an even playing field would be more equitable, but my fear is that given the level of (misguided) public antipathy towards immigration, the response post-Brexit would be to make things more difficult for everyone in the interests of short term headline chasing. That is assuming that we are also outside the Single Market, which is not an absolute certainty - it is perhaps not surprising that the Brexit camp were only able to clarify that they wanted out of the Single Market halfway through the campaign when they decided that being tough on immigration would win them votes. It is also assuming that the deal we reach with the rest of the EU includes significant restrictions on free movement, which is again, not a given. 

If a future UK government does manage to pull up the ladder, the construction industry is one of a number of important sectors of the economy for which the consequences will be disastrous. The fact is that from an economic perspective, based on where we are at the moment, the benefits of the current system, arbitrary though it is, outweigh the disadvantages. However, if new members keep joining there will probably at some point be a tipping point where this is no longer true. Although the prospect of 80 million Turks suddenly deciding to set up camp in Basingstoke is obviously a complete red herring, I do appreciate that the EU cannot keep growing ad infinitum with the free movement principle remaining sacrosanct, and that that the principle will almost certainly have to be watered down in the long term. That is where our veto over any new member states comes in (and we shouldn’t hesitate to use it - you see, we do have leverage and we can use it to push for reform!)

How bad will it be?

For the record, I think that (apart from the very real prospect of losing Scotland, which I have already covered) in the long run Britain will still be a great nation after this referendum no matter what the result. I completely and utterly refute the suggestion by Sir Richard Branson that leaving the EU will lead to Great Britain becoming Little England very quickly indeed. Our political, economic and cultural impact on the world will not be so easily erased. The Washington Post recently claimed that Brexit would be an act of national suicide. Sorry, chaps, but we’re not that easy to kill. 

In the short term, however, leaving will be a diplomatic disaster. Remember  the incident when George Bush Senior threw up in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap? Imagine if he’d gone around and deliberately and systematically done the same thing to all of the Great Heads of Europe and you’ll have a sense of how well this will go down internationally. In the long term, however, I am sure things will settle down. Perhaps we will be less able to punch above our weight at International Summits outside the EU, but I suspect that in the long term the decline in our influence will be less marked than some are suggesting. Britain will be OK. But there will be a lot of individual British people who won’t be. Of course the suggestion that 3 million jobs will be lost if we leave is nonsense - even the economist from whose work this figure was extrapolated, Dr Martin Weale, has strongly disavowed it. But even if the real figure is only 1% of that number, that is still a personal tragedy for a huge number of people.  

Project Fear, or Project Caution?

This is why I am getting extremely weary of the constant bleating about Project Fear from so many in the Brexit camp. It is especially egregious in my mind when it comes from senior Conservatives. Dictionary.com’s definition of “conservatism” is “a general preference for the existing order of society and an opposition to efforts to bring about sharp change” (the tendency of some commentators, especially in the US, to describe hardliners as “more conservative” than moderates, is in reality rather misleading). Most Brexiteers won’t like this, but in rejecting Project Fear (or Project Caution as it should really be called), what they are rejecting is conservatism in its purest sense (and it may be the first ever issue on which Jeremy Corbyn, half hearted Remainain though he is, is more conservative than Iain Duncan Smith). 

Whilst some of the more dire warnings coming from the likes of Cameron and Osborne have indeed been obviously overblown, there is absolutely nothing wrong with warning the public of the risks associated with a particular course of action - in fact it’s kind of their job! A cautious approach to a momentous decision like this is surely the right one. 

Of course that relies on making a careful, informed decision based on the opinion of experts. Ooh, don’t ask the experts, says Michael Gove, what do they know? Well, Michael, they probably know a little more about their field of expertise than the people who aren’t experts - that is what being an expert is! 

Yes of course experts can be wrong. Margaret Thatcher was once asked in the Commons to name two economists who agreed with a particular policy she had at the time - she got away with it but later admitted she’d have been totally stuffed if she’d been asked to name three (albeit she may not have phrased it in exactly those terms). And the balance of expert opinion was indeed at one point in favour of joining the Euro, although the constant refrain that “these are the same people” who are now pushing for Remain is just not accurate. Bill Cash and John Redwood will be sorry to hear this, but the fact that we are still outside the Euro has absolutely nothing at all to do with them. The three politicians most responsible for keeping us out were Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and William Hague, all of whom are firmly on the Remain side (I think Hague has been underused in this campaign - although his record of electoral success is not exactly unblemished, I think his approach of “yes, the EU is a bit rubbish, but it’s better than the alternative” is realistically likely to play better with waverers than the arguments from those who actually want to generate some positive enthusiasm for the EU. Perhaps if he can tear himself away from Angelina for a few minutes there is still time for a last minute intervention).

The Establishment

So yes, to repeat, experts can be wrong, but they are less likely to be wrong than ignorant know-nothings. And let’s look at the opinions of people who have had to make the high level decisions in the UK since we joined the EU, the people who should know better than anyone whether making those decisions would be easier or harder outside the EU. These are the statistics:

Living Prime Ministers (current and former) - 4 for Remain, 0 for Leave

Living Chancellors of the Exchequer (current and former) - 5 for Remain, 2 for Leave

Living Foreign Secretaries (current and former) - 9 for Remain, 1 for Leave

I appreciate that these people are the very establishment that Brexiteers like, er, the Lord Chancellor and the Leader of the House of Commons, have been railing against for months. But they are also the people who do run or have run the country, and given what a horrendously difficult task that is, and how easy it is to make a complete horlicks of it, if those people think Brexit would make their job more difficult I want to know about it!

Two questions, not one

Ultimately, there are for me two important questions that everyone voting in this referendum should be thinking about:

1) What sort of relationship do we ultimately want with Europe?

2) What is the smartest way to go about getting it?

Subsidiarity

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be starting from here. The "one size fits all" model, which some leading European politicians (although by no means all of them) seem still to be clinging to like limpets fighting the rising tides of reality and common sense, is quite obviously not for us (and I'm not convinced the other Member States should be going along with it either). I understand that deeper fiscal integration between the Euro states is probably now the only way to prevent the whole Euro project from lurching from one catastrophe to another, and I think that is a tragedy. The UK is very lucky to be in a position not to have to go along with that. 

Very few people in the UK when asked how they would identify themselves, would say "European". That's not because we don't have respect for the concept - I personally feel that we are extremely lucky to be geographically located where we are. It was of course Shakespeare who referred to is as a "Fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war" but he might have added as a side note that it's also a good spot from which to hop on an Easyjet flight and find yourself in some very interesting places in no time at all. I have a huge affection for Europe and its delightful cultures, but it is "cultures", plural. We don't necessarily do things the way they do, and they don't all do things the same way as each other either. 

That's diversity, and it's part of what makes the world so interesting - it should be cherished, and as this is the 21st century I think we can do this as grown ups. This is a British solution, we can say. We're not saying it's better than yours, it's just different, but we like it and we're going to stick to it. If you like it too, please feel free to pinch it, and we'll probably pinch some of yours. It's all a matter of choice. Let's inject a bit of freedom, flexibility and pragmatism into the whole process.  There's a difference between co-operating with our neighbours and a situation where all 28 member states have to abide by every single rule devised by Europe's overzealous bureaucrats. My starting point is, for all the reasons I have given (both in terms of the imperfect nature of the EU's democratic set up and the lack of a pan-European identity), that laws should be set at a national level, and I want to see an EU that looks a lot harder at whether there is a burning need for it to be involved at all before it jumps into the fray. 

If this sounds a bit Brexity, it shouldn’t - in fact my approach outlined above is closer to the principles of the European Treaties than the meddling approach currently adopted by some in the higher echelons of the European institutions themsevles. The principle of subsidiarity has been enshrined in EU legislation from the word go (currently Article 5(3) of the Lisbon Treaty states that “In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall only act if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional or lower level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level”).

We haven’t heard a sausage about subsidiarity during this debate, presumably because it would be too easy for the Brexiteers to argue that it is honoured more in the breach than the observance. And OK, I’m not massively happy about the “in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence” bit, and shrinking the ambit of those areas of exclusive competence is going to take a lot of pushing, but if on the other hand the EU tries to push the other way by expanding its ambit, or reducing areas where unanimous voting is required, then this will trigger another referendum under the European Union Act 2011 (not a prospect to fill one with joy right now, but an important protection nonetheless). 

The truth is, and recent reports suggest that the Commission has come to accept this, is that Ever Closer Union is dead in the water, at least as far as we are concerned, and the prospect of a multi speed Europe is something that we can and should be fighting for. We have already secured opt outs from, amongst other things, the Euro, Schengen, justice and home affairs legislation (except the bits we opted back into). All of this is chipping away at the current German-led European model - if we keep chipping, who’s to say that eventually we won’t be able to resculpt Europe into an image we’re a bit more comfortable with?

War Games

All this will require careful handling, but not nearly as much careful handling as post Brexit negotiations will involve. As it happens I’m still a fan of Boris (in spite of his worsening allergy to accuracy) but he’s not exactly what I'd describe as a Modern Day Metternich. This almost certainly won’t be our last referendum if we stay in (we still have the protection of Article 50 if things go wrong down the line), but once we vote to leave, there’s no going back. 

Anyone still wavering should watch “War Games”, a simulation run by Open Europe back in January, in which senior ex-politicians simulated (a) negotiation of a deal pre-referendum (with Sir Malcolm Rifkind cast against type as David Cameron) and (b) negotiation of a post-Brexit deal (with Sir Norman Lamont, looking more badger-like than ever, playing the new Prime Minister). Witness the level of hostility displayed by the other Member States in the latter session. Watching this made one thing very clear to me - the people of Europe may be our friends, but some of the people in charge of those nations definitely aren’t, especially when we're challenging their world view. 

If we vote to Remain, their default position about anything Britain suggests going forward will be “we will be a bit sniffy but we will consider it”. Sniffy we can work with. If we vote to Leave, the default position for anything that benefits us will be “no”. To turn it into a yes, it would have to have big benefits for them as well. Will they act against their own interests to spite us? Up to a point, I think that yes, their commitment to the European project should not be underestimated and they will be willing to take a bit of short term pain themselves in order to ensure an uncomfortable exit for us, thereby maximising the chances of the rest of the Union staying together. 

Particularly aggressive in the War Games Brexit negotiation was the former Irish Taoiseach John Bruton who indicated that he would regard Brexit as a “hostile act”. It was not so much that which attracted my attention though, as the statistic (which came from Open Europe itself, which has adopted a position of neutrality in the referendum) that the estimated effect on Irish GDP by 2030 ranges from -1% (realistic best case scenario) to -3% (realistic worst case scenario). When you look at it like that, it does seem a bit hostile. As a big fan of Ireland and all things Irish (I’m not sure what the technical term for it is, I only know it isn’t “Paddyophile”) and someone with a tribe of relatives over there, such a severe impact on one of our closest friends and neighbours would have tipped me into the Remain camp even if I had not been persuaded by the arguments above. It’s important to remember that this isn’t just about us. 

Conclusion: Henry Fonda, Bruce Willis and Angela Merkel’s Clothes

So yes, I agree with the more nuanced Brexiteers that argue that this is not a choice between “Europe” and “no Europe”, it’s a question about what type of relationship we want with our largest trading partner. I agree with them that the current inflexible “one size fits all” model is only one of a number of possible ways of taking this relationship forward, and that it is not the best one. But I disagree with them that Brexit is the only way of achieving any of the other models. 

I think Brexit would involve us moving from one bad relationship to a worse one, but that Remaining gives us the opportunity of working for a better one, whilst denying the other member states their perfect excuse not to listen to us. If you want a positive argument for the EU despite not being a fan of how the EU works, it’s this. Let’s stay in the room. Let’s go on being infuriatingly awkward in that charming British way of ours. Let’s be like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. We may be the only person in the room challenging the prevailing narrative now, but in time we can talk them round. Or, if using a film that came out when my dad was four years old as an illustrative example is a little too much for the “young” voters who we are told will make all the difference in this referendum, how about we compromise with a quote from a film that came out when I was four years old instead, Die Hard. Let’s be “the fly in the ointment. The monkey in the wrench. The pain in the ass.”

We’re one of the big three players in Europe. I love Germany, but in a generation the OECD says that in a generation our population, and our economy, will be bigger than theirs, so, as Maurice Saatchi recently argued so eloquently in the Telegraph, let’s take its place as the natural leader of Europe. I’m voting Remain on June 23rd! And so should you! And on June 24th I’m going to write to David Cameron and tell him it’s high time he stole Angela Merkel’s clothes! And so should you!

(If it’s just me, he might think it’s a bit weird....) 

Sherlock, Christie, Dickens, Star Wars and stuff

Happy New Year to y’all! From my greeting you will have gathered that our recent holiday in New Orleans has rubbed off on me a bit - great place to visit but not just before Christmas if you’re trying to lose weight! Tom Cruise was in town while we were there filming the second Jack Reacher movie - had I but known I would have offered up Junior as a possible stunt double (yes, that’s right, you thought it was really Tiny Tom climbing all those buildings and jumping off planes in the Mission Impossible movies, but it is really all clever trickery and toddlers!) 

I have decided to do a new post because for the first time in several years I have actually found myself vaguely interested in some of the TV that was on over Christmas. There is a common theme between the main productions I will be reviewing here (Sherlock, And Then There Were None, and indeed my cinema jaunt to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I will throw in for good measure), as it feels as if I had been waiting for all of them for a very long time indeed (the exception being Dickensian, which just sort of turned up but now seems to be lingering). Warning - THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! LOTS OF SPOILERS! 

Sherlock 

Let’s get Sherlock out of the way first, shall we? From the reviews I have seen it looks like more than half of viewers thought it was utterly fantastic, but a significant minority found themselves rather mystified and muddled. I fall somewhere in between, in that I did at least understand what was going on (it’s basically Sherlock does Inception via Suffragette) but found myself frustrated that it was not what I was hoping for or expecting. 

From the trailers it appeared that what Messrs Gatiss and Moffatt were going to offer us was a genuine “stand alone”, Victorian-set Sherlockian chiller. I was VERY much in favour of that idea. Ever since Cumberbatch and Freeman took on the mantles of Holmes and Watson, my one tinge of regret was that I always assumed that it effectively precluded them from ever playing the roles in a Victorian setting, which I always thought that they would do very well. 

When I heard that in the next episode of Sherlock they were proposing to do just that, I therefore got rather excited. For a Christmas episode, no less! One of my favourite Sherlockian dramatisations of all time is the hammily delicious Jeremy Brett version of the Blue Carbuncle. But this was going to be different - it had a supernatural element to it! So much the better - Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. I wanted to be scared. I wanted them to create a mysterious, gaslit, frightening atmosphere. I was expecting goosepimples! What we got instead was Sherlock hallucinating about dressing up in a silly costume for an hour and a half whilst pepper-spraying the viewers with twenty “in-jokes” a minute, then waking up, getting off a plane and into a car! That was it. 

Unfortunately it is next to impossible for a production to be both atmospheric and “knowing”, and this was a “nudge nudge wink wink” production down to its fingertips. By the end my ribs were bruised from all the nudging and Gatiss and Moffatt have been winking at their audience for so long now that unfortunately it appears to have developed into a nervous tic that they can’t quite shake off. The first two seasons of Sherlock were great because they kept all the “stuff going on in Sherlock’s mind” to a minimum - every once in a while we would have him going to the scene of the crime in his mind and moving stuff around, and that was fine because the filmmakers were using the technique sparingly. But then they started overdoing it in season 3 and they really went into overdrive here to the extent that at times it’s getting close to unwatchable.

So there we were, jumping back and forth between present day Sherlock, Victorian era Sherlock, and a few weird scenes that combined the two (featuring everyone’s favourite twinkly Irish supervillain Moriarty, who isn’t going to let a little thing like being dead stop him from yammering on about how clever he is), and by the end I was getting more than a little fed up with it and got close to yelling “Just pick an era and sodding well STICK to it!” at my TV screen.

Of course it all turned out to be drug induced. What a surprise! Perhaps it is just me being puritanical, but what really frustrates me is the way that virtually every Sherlock Holmes film or TV film since the Brett era seems to have latched on like overexcited limpets to Sherlock’s drug habit, as if that was the most interesting thing about him (especially the 2002 Hound of the Baskervilles and that weird one with Rupert Everett - ironically the Robert Downey Jr version wasn’t too bad on this front!) It is IN NO WAY the most interesting thing about him! It is something that Conan Doyle made a passing reference to in two or three of the sixty original stories but it was never something that he spent pages and pages banging on about, for the obvious reason that he was busy telling gripping stories. Until now Gatiss and Moffatt had resisted the temptation to “make it all about the drugs” but unfortunately they couldn’t resist it this time. 

A plot did manage to winkle its way in there somewhere, and it was all about a gang of feminists teaming up to “right society’s wrongs” by, er, killing that guy who played Percy in Blackadder. Whilst supportive of the concept, I make no claim to be an expert on feminism, but it was hard to miss that this was a bizarrely misogynistic way of coming out in support of the feminist movement! This point was not lost on Buzzfeed either (there was much talk of “mansplaining”), but luckily most of the great unwashed viewing masses were probably too confused by this stage of the show to get offended. 

Similarly, I did feel that Amanda Abbington as Mary is getting slightly short shrift - I get that Gatiss and Moffatt are working their little cotton socks off to try to remedy the lack of strong female characters in the books and I applaud them for doing so (the character of Mary in the original novel “The Sign of Four” is particularly insipid and spends most of the time crying on people’s shoulders - clearly the writer of the play Crucifer of Blood, later turned into a turgid film with Charlton Heston, thought the same, although he went for the simpler approach of just turning her into a serial killer). The trouble with the Gatiss/Moffatt version of Mary is that when every line she is given seems to be a variant of “I am stronger/cleverer than you”, rather than having the scriptwriters actually working to create a fully rounded three dimensional character that the audience can make its own mind up about (“show, don’t tell - more on this later in the context of Star Wars), it starts to get rather tiresome. Having said that, the show does boast some genuinely strong female characters, Molly Hooper foremost amongst them, and there are many shows still being made that don’t even manage that, so let’s not beat them up too much!

All these negatives aside, the film did pass Mark Kermode’s famous “six laughs” test comfortably (I was chuckling throughout) and there were some great moments. Particular highlights for me were Mrs Hudson lamenting her lack of lines in Watson’s stories and consequently refusing to speak to anyone (Una Stubbs may just be the best thing in the show); Martin Freeman managing to turn in a fine authentic performance as “Victorian Watson” in spite of all the gimmicks (is it me, or is he starting to age into Ian Holm for real now?); moustachioed Molly; and of course fat Mycroft (just a wafer thin plum pudding or two away from Mr Creosote). I will undoubtedly watch it again (along with all the others) and will probably enjoy it more the second time round as I won’t be expecting something M R James could have written.

Dickensian

Luckily we were not left at a loss for something more typically festive, and I’m not talking about Phil Mitchell’s annual tradition of smashing up the Vic with a baseball bat with an ironically jaunty Christmas tune playing in the background (“leave it aaaht”). Succour came in the form of Dickensian, a multi part mystery set seven years before A Christmas Carol and dealing with the murder of Jacob Marley, featuring what can only be described as an eccentric smorgasbord of suspects from various Dickens novels, from Scrooge (Ned Dennehy apparently doing an impression of Prince Philip doing an impression of Alistair Sim), to Fagin (Anton Lesser proving that Ron Moody may be no longer with us but his twinkly pickpocketing spirit lives on). Heck, even “Little Nell” is a suspect. 

This one’s rumbling on for a few weeks so I still don’t know whodunnit (my money’s on Tiny Tim), nor, in truth, do I particularly care, but it is an undemanding and vaguely diverting way of passing the time even though (or perhaps because) it involves a lot of familiar looking thesps doing their best “Christmas pudding” acting (often overcooked, extremely fruity and not quite as delightful as it thinks it is). I suspect that they have been urged to overact as much as possible in order to distract from the ludicrously fake backdrops. 

And Then There Were None

This, a 3 part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s darkest novel, is a mystery of an altogether more sombre nature. I became a fan of this novel at the age of 14 when I spotted a very dog eared copy of an old edition being sold off by my secondary school library for 50p. When I say “old edition” it really must have been, as it still bore the original, highly racist title it was published under in 1939, or “before racism was bad” as David Brent would put it (which perhaps explains why Sevenoaks School, with its almost militantly “internationalist” approach, was so desperate to get it out of its library as quickly as possible!) 

It was later republished as Ten Little Indians (as each of the murders that is committed in the novel is based on a line of the nursery rhyme) but “Indians”, although an improvement on the word it replaced, was also judged to be inappropriate for a 21st century adaptation,, so we have the slight but probably unavoidable incongruity of ten people from the 1930s, some of whom, it is clear from the script, are horribly anti-semitic, homophobic or just generally intolerant, nonetheless being sufficiently enlightened to refer to the “Ten Little Soldier Boys” nursery rhyme. 

In truth, Christie should have known better even in 1939 than to scatter the pages of her novel so liberally (or “illiberally”) with so much casual racism, but what is equally true is that in spite of this uncomfortable and grubby drawback, the book is a classic and has undoubtedly inspired hundreds if not thousands of imitators (including the Alien franchise). A detective story with no detective, it soon becomes clear that no-one is safe from the mysterious “Mr U N Owen” (think about it - it’s a tricky one) who has lured ten strangers, each of whom may or may not have committed a murder or two themselves in the past, to a remote, inaccessible island, to punish them for their crimes by one by killing them off in increasingly elaborate ways, only for it to turn out that he (or she) is in fact one of them. But which?

This is actually the sixth film adaptation of the novel, with the classic version remaining Rene Clair’s 1945 adaptation featuring a veteran cast of scene stealers including Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, C Aubrey Smith and Judith Anderson, all of whom find themselves upstaged (and outlived) by the resident cat (who wasn’t in the book and rather disappointingly does not turn out to be the murderer). 

I have also seen the 1960s version (with the action moved from the island in the novel to a remote Swiss chalet - it isn’t bad, but the Shining it ain’t) and the 1970s version (set in the desert - this was the one where the murderer inexplicably makes an early mistake of allowing Charles Aznavour to get through a whole song BEFORE poisoning him). I haven’t seen the Russian version or the 1989 version, which is reportedly rather terrible and starred Sylvester Stallone's brother Frank (remember him? Me neither!) As far as I am aware though, up to this point all of the adaptations have shunned the “dark” original ending (spoiler: absolutely everyone dies) in favour of the alternative ending which Christie herself used in her own stage adaptation of the novel, where MOST people still die but two of the guests turn out to (a) be innocent and (b) survive. So it was clear to me that there was room for at least one more version, this time faithful to the original ending. Clearly the BBC had the same idea. Don’t go looking for happy endings.

Does it work? More or less - the problem is that all of the characters are now so unsympathetic that at times I found myself actually rooting for the killer. This was also true up to a point in some of the previous adaptations, but at least in those versions the characters were fun to be around (and not only the two innocent ones, the other victims/suspects were also generally portrayed with eccentric charm that I couldn’t help liking them in spite of their “crimes”, at least in the 1945 and 1965 versions). Here, the original ending is retained but several of the characters’ backstories are changed to make their crimes even more heinous than they were in the book, which I think was an unnecessary step as it only served to repel the audience more. 

There are exceptions, such as Sam Neill as the general (Sam Neill can never be truly dislikeable), Toby Stephens as the doctor (who is keeps getting so amusingly hysterical that one can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him), and Charles Dance as the judge. I always used to think that Charles Dance was essentially Ian Richardson without the twinkle in his eye, but I wonder whether Richardson bequeathed Dance his “twinkle” in his will, as recently the latter appears to have developed an oddly sympathetic streak, which strangely seems to come to the fore mostly when portraying characters who in the novels are singularly “untwinkly” (this was the case here and also in Game of Thrones).

The other acting is also fine, although Anna Maxwell Martin is not given enough to do (it feels as though she is only given a few brief moments to develop her character, which she does excellently, before being ignominiously bumped off). Noah Taylor as the butler is shifty and sinister, Burn Gorman as the bent copper seems to be channeling Billy Mitchell from Eastenders, and Miranda Richardson is truly venomous (or rather her character is - I won’t hear a word said against Queenie!) Oh, and, somewhat unusually, Aidan Turner finds an opportunity to get his top off (I think may have been treating his role as a callous mercenary as a 007 audition - good actor, but not sure he has the presence).

The action is spread over 3 hours, which is quite a lot for a slender novel, but this actually works pretty well as it serves to prolong and heighten the tension (although there may have been one or two flashbacks we could have lived without - I guess we’re just lucky that Peter Jackson didn’t get his mitts on it). All in all I would put this one down as a success (albeit a bit dark for Christmas), although it lacks the charm of the 1945 version, which in my book remains as close to definitive as we are likely to get.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I won’t go on too long about this one as I suspect that most readers might have heard a bit about the film already (and some of you might even have seen it!) I must admit that after the prequels I was working very hard not to get my hopes up, especially as I haven’t been a particular fan of JJ Abrams’ previous work (I got lost during Lost, probably because I made the foolish decision to try to dip into it in the middle of the run, and while the Star Trek remake was OK, I thought that Leonard Nimoy was by far the best thing in it, and when the best thing in your reboot is the character from the original, you know you’re in trouble). 

Actually, my view is that the prequels are not quite as bad as everyone says they are and they do have their moments (Christopher Lee vs Yoda, anyone), BUT they don’t hold a candle to the originals. One of the most telling comments about the prequels came from the “fan” who challenged anyone to describe any of the characters without using a physical description or describing “what they do”. With the original trilogy this exercise is fairly easy, but with the prequels it is nigh on impossible (which is a particular shame when one considers that the main characters are just younger versions of the iconic characters brilliantly fleshed out by James Earl Jones and Alec Guinness in the originals, people who we just “knew” from their performances had intriguing backstories - we didn’t NEED to see those backstories and perhaps it would have been better if we hadn’t). Guinness in particular was a master of the “show, don’t tell” technique - he was able to tell the story of the prequels infinitely better in a few seconds with a pained pause and a raised eyebrow than Lucas did in three films, despite all the filmmaking magic at his disposal. 

Luckily JJ Abrams remembered to create real characters this time, meaning that the new characters of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), new baddie Kylo Ren (Adam Driver making Darth Vader look positively cuddly by comparison and giving the performance that Hayden Christensen SHOULD have given as Anakin in the prequels) and intrepid pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, having to contend with more limited screen time than the other three as well as the fact that his character was named after a Teletubby), are all on course to become iconic characters in their own right in the same way that Luke, Han and Leia did back in the day. If anything, I found some of the “cameos” from the original cast a little distracting (I love R2D2 and C3PO to bits but they didn’t really add much here, especially given that the new droid BB8 is so charming). Having said that, Han and Chewbacca are given quite a lot to do (the latter even gets to engage in a bit of growly flirtation with Dame Harriet Walter, and both are a joy to watch (even if Harrison Ford does spend most of the film looking as if he’s just woken up from a nap). 

Ultimately I did find it all very exciting and entertaining despite certain feelings of deja-vu (discussed below) - my only other real criticisms were that (a) the happy ending from Return of the Jedi (otherwise known as Star Wars Episode VI: The All Powerful Intergalactic Empire Gets Itself Thoroughly Spanked by a Small Band of Ewoks With Sticks) is now completely ruined (I’m sorry but Han and Leia would NEVER split up so I’m going to pretend I just misheard those lines of dialogue) and (b) Abrams obviously doesn’t understand how fast light speed actually is (i.e. too fast to approach a planet or a Death Star if you don’t want to end up as flat as a pancake) any better than Lucas did, but if you can’t suspend your disbelief in a Star Wars film then when can you? 

What did surprise me is just how closely it mirrors the plot of the original film, with Han taking on the Obi Wan role this time round (always a strategic error and sadly this proves to be no exception) and Luke Skywalker looking set to be the new Yoda! Not that it really matters this time round - it’s a good formula so why not stick to it? Disney may run into trouble however if they make a habit of it - if they are planning to release a new Star Wars film every year they are going to have to work exceptionally hard to keep the franchise feeling fresh and original. It’s easy to get excited about this one given that its was the first film for 10 years (or 32 years if you really hate the prequels, or 35 years if you hate the prequels AND the Ewoks!) but the filmmakers won’t have that advantage next time. My own view is that a film a year is going to be serious overkill and it would have made more sense to stagger them (and if they start recasting characters I think they’ll really run into problems). Nevertheless, if they are all as good as this one (or even almost as good), I shall probably keep watching them anyway.