Hopefully this is Osborne digging himself out of his hotel room before the interview.
George Osborne was a Davos devotee in his time as chancellor, never passing up a chance to get snow on his shoes. And he returned again this year in his new capacity as a newspaper editor, giving a television interview, framed by those white peaks, in which he described MPs flirting with no-deal Brexit as like players of Russian roulette.
Never mind the argument, the reaction to Osborne’s comments focused on where he was saying it from. This was widely seen as an own goal for the soft Brexit cause. Didn’t we have here an out-of-touch “globalist”, a “citizen of nowhere”, trying to thwart Brexit on behalf of his rich friends?
A Davos radio interview with Roland Rudd, the wealthy business PR man and chair of the People’s Vote campaign (not to mention brother of Amber), was similarly received. So was Tony Blair’s sermon from the Alps on the need for a new referendum. “Are Blair, Osborne and Rudd secret agents of the Leave campaign?” goaded the Guido Fawkes website.
The toxic Davos meme wasn’t just a British phenomenon. Canada’s Trudeau stayed away this year after getting criticised at home for the £400,000 cost of his appearance last year.
No_way_out
“inclusive globalisation must work for all” but it doesn’t. The new period of globalisation (it of course has happened before but came to an end with world war in 1914) has been marked once again by spectacular growth in inequality just as last time around. The idea of globalisation leading to a new Jerusalem is as laughably naive and romantic as the post 1914 dreams of the Leninists. Those who currently have their hands on an unfair share of the cake are not going to let go without a fight any more than did the Nomenklatura of the Soviet system. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid Mimir.
ukgovernmentwatch 