Matthew Carr's Blog, page 12

House of Cards

Twenty-two years isn’t much time, historically-speaking, and it seems even shorter when you look backwards not forwards. Like most people, I remember very well what I was doing on September 11, 2001. I was in my study working on a novel, when my mother called to tell me that something was happening at the World Trade Centre.

That was after the first plane hit, and over the rest of the day I tried to continue with my novel, while flitting in and out of the rolling news coverage. I felt disgust, despair and sorrow at the atrocity that was unfolding on my tv screen, and I also recognized the fiendish brilliance of it - the ‘creativity’ that must have gone into preparing such a horrific spectacle of destruction and mass murder.

My daughter was five years old then, and my wife and I agreed to tell her what had happened, so that she could hear it from it us first. I remember that I picked her up from school and said something bad had happened in New York. I may have said something about bad people doing bad things, but it was nothing for her to worry about, because how do you explain to a five-year-old that our world contains such possibilities?

Of course there was a great deal to worry about, and what worried me - and many others - was that in the world that we had, with its brutal global divisions of wealth and power, and with the leaders that we had, the wrong choices would be made.

Many of us sensed that it was likely, if not inevitable, that September 11 would unleash a cascade of retributive violence and make a bad situation even worse, even if we didn’t know exactly what form it would take.

As the whole world knows, that is exactly what happened. A wounded - castrated? - superpower used the attacks to launch a global war on ‘terror’ with no coherent enemy or definition of victory, no boundaries to its theatre of operations, and no limits on the means that it was prepared to use.

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Effective military strategy implies clear goals and a realistic assessment of what is possible and what can go wrong, and an understanding of your own resources and reserves of national power and the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy, so that you can avoid fighting the war your enemy wants you to fight.

All that went out the window in the ‘changed world’ of 9/11, as a US administration made up of the most gimlet-eyed Reaganite hawks seized on an opportunity to wage global war against whoever America wanted to fight and whoever it wanted to take out. Riding shotgun with the Bush posse was Tony Blair; part-Jesus, part-Machiavelli, who always seemed to be staring at monsters that only he could see and protect us from.

While Bush did his ‘we’ll smoke ‘em out’ John Wayne impressions, Blair was always more grandiose, telling the Labour Party Conference the ‘kaleidoscope had been shaken’ and that it was time to ‘re-order the world’ while the pieces were ‘in flux.’ Other bit-players joined in the chorus. Berlusconi, the bunga-bunga gangster-mogul, advised the West to remember the ‘superiority of our civilization’ over Islamic culture.

This sense of superiority made anything possible. Regime change became the order of the day. Regional opponents of American power were all lumped together into a common ‘Axis of Evil’ to be picked off one after another, and linked to 9/11 or al-Qaeda, or nuclear weapons, or all of these things.

Bombings, invasions, and military occupations; kidnappings and ‘extraordinary renditions’ that removed counterterrorist procedures from legal scrutiny; Guantanamo; the insanely racist ‘porno-interrogations’ at Abu Ghraib; draconian antiterror laws that stigmatized entire communities; assassination-by-drone - all these measures were presented by conservatives and neo-conservatives as an expression of ‘moral clarity’ against an enemy comparable to Nazism or Communism.

The world, or so the architects of the war on terror believed, could be remade, or at least policed, by the world’s only superpower. America was Rome, and its enemies were barbarians. Dictators would fall - at least the ones we didn’t like - and democracies would sprout up across the world, because terrorists hated democracy and democracy was the best cure for terrorism.

It was all so horrendously overblown, wrong-headed, dishonest and downright devious - and all served up with a mixture of cynicism, wishful thinking and hubris that has rarely been equalled.

9/11 provided the opportunity to escape the mediocrity of late capitalism. It enable countries to be great and their leaders to be great too, and the leaders we had were in no mood to listen to the bleeding hearts, or the little people and ‘appeasers’ who suggested that there might be more effective, targeted and lawful ways of destroying the networks responsible for the attacks, without tearing the Middle East to pieces.

Because America was an ‘empire now’, as Karl Rove supposedly suggested, and the ‘reality-based community’ could only watch in awe as the empire-builders dazzled the world with their feats of imperial derring-do. This was the moment for the little men who wanted to be Churchill; for the desktop warriors and laptop bombardiers and the backroom boys; for Michael Ledeen, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the architects of the ‘American century’.

And so we got Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian civil war and Libya, Islamic State, the bombing of Lebanon, three wars in Gaza, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, and the war in Yemen, and many other ‘battlegrounds’ that the world hardly remembers.

We got death and carnage on an epic scale, some of which we saw and some of which we didn’t. And millions of refugees crossing borders, many of whom we had no interest in helping.

And even though politicians insisted that we were fighting ‘over there to stop them fighting us over here’, we also got a lot of terrorism ‘over here’’ as one country after another experienced ‘its 9/11’ and self-proclaimed holy warriors massacred concert-goers, mowed pedestrians down in trucks, blew up commuters, and shot people down in hotels and beach resorts, and murdered school-children.

Some of these murderers - and in the end they were never anything more than that - were pathetic amateurs plucking half-baked bomb plots from the Internet or former drug dealers seeking to cleanse themselves through virtuous murder of the kuffar. Others were terrorist ‘operatives’ acting under the al-Qaeda franchise or some national organization, or waging politics and warfare other means.

All of them were ‘terrorism’ - a justification for the media spectacle of terror and counter-terror and asymmetric warfare that we gawked at like spectators at a bloody Wimbledon, at least when Western targets were attacked. Still our governments pledged to ‘keep us safe’ even when, as was the case with the British army in Helmand Province, they often had no idea who they were actually fighting.

Historians may one day piece find some sense and meaning out of this mayhem, but for the moment we can say quite clearly that no one ‘won’. The United States was defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars and losing more casualties through suicide than combat - an astonishing 30,177 of the former compared with 7,057 of the latter.

Defenders of these operations can point to Bin Laden’s death - executed in a compound less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad - as some kind of endpoint, but it was certainly not a victory. And the same could be said about Al-Zawahiri or al-Baghdadi.

No one can mourn men like these, but they are executions, not victories. And if the organizations and movements that they led have been weakened or destroyed, then it is also worth pointing that they might not have existed, or grown to the size they reached, had it not been for the strategic lunacy that gave them the wars they wanted.

And these organizations also won nothing. Al-Qaeda got its ‘fields of jihad’, but twenty-two years after 9/11 it controls no territory and its political project, such as it was, has collapsed. Even Islamic State’s hideous utopia, that once spanned two states, has fallen to pieces. The only clear beneficiaries of these wars are the Private Military Companies like Blackwater, the military suppliers and arms companies - and the Taliban.

History is made in the dark, and those who make it have no idea how it will turn out. Nor are they able to prevent unintended consequences of their actions that they may not even have considered - not to mention ‘unknown unknowns’ that are always waiting in the future. But too many of the people who presided over the war on terror were too blinkered by their own ideological convictions and premises to see how shallow they were.

Once, ‘extremism’ was a ill-defined concept that was generally synonymous with ‘Islamic’ terrorism or Islam in general. A range of pundits from Christopher Hitchens to Melanie Phillips depicted Islam or ‘Islamofascism’ as a threat to the West, to liberalism, or to global democracy.

Now the West is under threat primarily from itself, as electorates turn away from democracy towards authoritarians and demagogues. Mismanaged and ill-conceived wars of choice have merged into a succession of institutional failures. Misgovernance and bad governance and an indifference to the basic nuts and bolts that hold society together have fuelled the rise of white supremacists, ethnonationalists and far-right ‘populists’ espousing the wildest conspiratorial politics, who are as contemptuous of liberal democracy as Osama bin Laden was.

In this topsy-turvy world, nothing is as it was. Who could have predicted that Liz Cheney - the paleoconservative whose Keep America Safe group once called the Department of Justice the ‘Department of Jihad’, because seven of its lawyers acted on behalf of alleged terrorists - would now be ejected by her own party and leading - with honour, courage and integrity - a Congressional Inquiry into the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol?

No one can be surprised to find ‘Mamma Grizzly’ Sarah Palin threatening civil war in America in defence of Donald Trump. But Palin was once hailed as the great hope of the Republican right by Bill Kristol, the affable and ever-smiling editor of the Weekly Standard who never saw a country he didn’t want to bomb into democracy.

Kristol once looked to Palin to ‘channel a certain kind of populism into… a healthy conservatism.’ Now he considers her to be a ‘disappointment’. Now America is potentially just one election away from democratic collapse, and Kristol, like Cheney, is opposing Trump and his own party.

And then there is Michael Flynn, the JSOC death squad general in Afghanistan, forced out of Trump’s team for alleged Russian espionage, now spouting a mixture of Christofascism and QAnon insurrectionary politics. And Alistair Campbell, the swaggering former tabloid journalist-turned war propagandist who helped con his country into war, now holding forth as the voice of liberal reason.

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Life, in the twenty-first century, really does come at you fast. And it isn’t always convenient to consider the connections between our ‘post-truth’ world and the lies, fantasies and fabrications that accompanied the era of terrorwars. Or ask why it is that we now reject refugees from the countries we once set out to liberate, even when they fought on our side.

Thirteen years after the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, twenty-thousand Libyans have died because two dams were not maintained by one of the two ‘governments’ that rule the country between them. Libya was another product of the ‘regime change’ agenda that has left a world with many broken eggs and no omelettes, which none of the governments or the politicians responsible, have ever really taken any responsibility for.

Waging the war on terror it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry or even admit that you have done anything wrong. Meanwhile, at the end of this sordid and sorrowful history, 30 terrorist suspects are still in Guantanamo Bay. Some of them have never been charged with anything. Others cannot be tried because they were tortured. No one can know if they are innocent or guilty. And no one wants to ask.

Do I feel sorry for Khalid Sheikh Muhammed? No. But I would like to see him tried. And I would like to know what the others have done - or not done. Instead they are permanently warehoused people, who may well spend the rest of their lives in a jail that is not jail, in a world that has moved on, where too many people have no interest in looking backwards.

We like to believe that we can learn lessons from history. But as far as the mistakes of the war on terror is concerned, there is no evidence of any such inclinations. Today ‘terror’ has slipped into the political background of the world’s political priorities, but if - or should we say when? - it ever comes back, we might want to take another look, and use these anniversaries to remember, not just those who died on September 11, but of what came afterwards.

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The Summer of Tory

There are many signs of a nation in decline. The first clue is the word ‘decline’, as in something once regarded as good that is becoming smaller, fewer, or less. In geopolitical terms, national decline means that your country used to have more power and influence in the world than it does now, and that the rest of the world regarded your country with more respect than it does now.

This is the kind of decline that the succession of maniacal ‘make…great again’ populists of the twenty-first century seek to address, usually by attaching a sense of national victimhood, resentment and rancid nostalgia to some opaque and ill-thought out vision of the future which bears no resemblance to present reality.

You can pick your country here. I’ll just mention the UK and Brexit.

Another symptom of national decline occurs when a country constantly reproduces leaders who keep saying and doing stupid things, or making vainglorious and incoherent promises that bear no resemblance to what their country is capable or its actual position in the world.

Think Global Britain. Think trade deals that are worse than the ones you already had. Think a hard Brexit that hurt the economy when you could have had a softer Brexit that hurt it less. Think Boris Johnson predicting in 2019 that Britain would be ‘prosperous, dynamic and contented’ after completing our exit from the European Union.

Think so many things that were promised in 2016 and turned out to be the opposite, and the bleached bones of so many unicorns that came prancing out of the lie factory and promptly expired at their first breath of air.

That is national decline: not just the gulf between the real and the unreal but the inability even to tell the difference between the two.

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One of the reasons why our leaders keep doing such things is because they are leaders of a very low moral and intellectual calibre, drawn from a very thin stock of human possibilities, whose role in public life isn’t necessarily due to any expertise they have in anything beyond their own advancement and satisfaction and the preservation of power purely for its own sake, or for the perks that come with it.

Think Rishi Sunak, Greg Hands, Grant Shapps, James Cleverly, Braverman, Dorries, Jenrick, or almost any Tory right now, not to mention those who have come and - thank God for small mercies - gone.

These people are arse-coverers, buck-passers, and look-over-there artists, specialists in propaganda, gaslighting and floating hot air balloons. Their metier, insofar as they have one, is deception, evasion, and falsehood. They cannot admit mistakes. They cannot take personal responsibility for anything, because they lack the honour, humility and integrity required, because the truth would have the same impact on them as sunlight on a vampire.

Instead they must lie, pivot and endlessly deflect and distract. And blame the ‘global left’. Or Labour. Or ‘the Blob.’ Or the EU. Or the lawyers who Honest Bob Jenrick is now proposing to put in jail for life.

Anyone will do, as long it’s not them.

So national decline takes place when a country puts itself in the hands of people like this, and not just once but over and over again.

It’s exhausting and demoralising, and not a little disturbing for those of us who didn’t choose this, and it’s also dangerous. Because ‘decline’ isn’t just a mood or a state of mind; it shows itself in tangible, crumbling, material things that weren’t as bad as they are now; in old problems that no one fixes and new problems that crop up because of the ones you haven’t fixed; in the rusting and corroded chains of accountability; in the nuts and bolts of systems worked out over years that that hold a complex society together and make the idea of a society in which we all have a common stake possible.

Think of the 57 triathletes who got sick after swimming off Roker Beach at the World Triathlon Championship last month. We know why this problem exists, because all over the country, water companies are pouring sewage into our rivers and beaches, essentially, because they can, because the government lets them.

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Everyone knows this, but yet here we are, and Michael Gove has just introduced legislation that will make rivers even more polluted than they already area. And there is so much more than this. The dental patients in Leigh who had to queue up at four in the morning to see their local dentist. The 156 schools built from soft RAAC concrete that have to be closed, because they are falling apart and were not repaired because the government didn’t want to pay for new ones.

The flight suspensions. The queues and missed ferries at Dover. The danger to life as a result of delayed ambulances. The GP appointments you can’t get. The councils that are running out of money.

The Country and its Dogs

This has been going on for some time, but now even pipsqueak Tory propagandists like Sarah Vine has begun to wonder if we might be coming ‘a Third World country’ because she missed a British Airways flight, prompting her to wonder how

Once an example of can-do competence, community spirit and common sense, we seem to have turned into a nation where no one cares, no one can be bothered and everyone always has a excuse for why none of it's their responsibility.

A place where the ordinary law-abiding, taxpaying citizen or loyal, fee-paying customer is increasingly powerless in the face of other people's selfishness, incompetence or, in many cases, plain greed. It's all me, me, me and sod the rest of you.

A Tory country going to the dogs isn’t necessarily the one that you or I may be living in, especially when a minister’s ex-wife and a well-paid columnist misses her flight. So no one should be surprised that Vine’s ‘greed’ consists of - drum roll - Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme and cycle lanes. And the rail unions, and the teachers, doctors and civil servants, all of whom have forgotten the ‘sense of duty or vocational calling’ that inspires Vine and people like her.

The art of Tory living consists on blaming others, and no matter how bad things get, or much they fall apart, the Vines of this world will always be ultimately unconcerned and unscathed. They will find a doctor and a dentist. They will live in wealth and comfort for the rest of their lives. They will not be on benefits, but occasionally they will look through the frosted glass at the wreckage that they played a small part in creating, and ask themselves what the country’s coming to.

That too, is national decline. And yet, all is not lost. At the last wheezy gasp of this dreary Tory summer, just as the political class prepared to step back into parliament to perform its zombie rituals, there was hope, albeit from an unlikely source.

Step forward Penny Mordaunt - the seafaring lady with the steely gaze and the upright sword - announcing a new ‘Great British National Service’ scheme in order to harness the ‘goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination’ of the nation’s youth.

If this scheme sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Back in 2010, as the Coalition government prepared to decimate UK society, David Cameron announced the coming of a National Citizenship Scheme that would be part of the ‘Big Society’ project. This was intended to ‘help communities save local facilities and services threatened with closure’ and enable ‘communities the right to bid to take over local state-run services.’

What a cheeky Tory wheeze - to close state-funded services and then allow the communities devastated by such closures to ‘bid’ to take them over as part of a ‘radical devolution of power.’

It’s not the most successful political party in the Western world for nothing.

The National Citizenship Service was also intended to ‘encourage charitable giving and philanthropy’, and ‘encourage volunteering and social action’.

Well, we did get volunteering and social action, in the form of food banks, or ‘community pantries’, as Mordaunt calls them, but these initiatives didn’t come from the government’s citizenship scheme. They were a grassroots response to the hunger produced by Cameron’s ‘radical devolution of power’ and his cruel treatment of ‘shirkers’ on benefits that left tens of thousands unable to feed themselves and their families.

This happened in one of the richest countries in the world, and no Tory ever thought there was anything wrong with it.

And now, thirteen years later, here is Mordaunt, the King’s sword-maiden, with a homily that sounds as though it were written by Alexa, telling the nation’s youth that ‘nothing is more rewarding than serving your community and nation’ and that ‘Service can build the resilience, skills, and pride in their community and country that many need’.

Mordaunt often looks like a hostage on Sunak’s frontbench. Now we know what she’s been wrestling with:

I’ve often thought about what makes someone take personal responsibility. For some, it’s a necessity. For others, it’s personal pride. For me, it’s duty. You can’t grow up in a naval town and not understand this. There is no greater personal responsibility than risking your life for your country. You can’t witness that duty, service, love and dedication without feeling a direct and personal obligation. That’s why the notion of military national service endures.

Coming from a politician who supported Johnson and Liz Truss, this sermon raises the question: Which Tory, in the last eight years if not further back, has ever taken ‘personal responsibility’ for anything at all? Which automatically raises another question: How dare they?

The scheme is the brainchild of the rightwing thinktank Onwards, fronted by Sebastian Payne, the former FT Whitehall correspondent who looks like an extra from The IT Crowd.

According to its report ‘young people are unhappy, unskilled and unmoored’ and national citizenship can ‘develop skills, improve mental wellbeing, and increase a sense of belonging.’

To avoid the low take-up of Cameron’s National Citizens Service, the scheme proposes to automatically enrol 600,000 people unless they opt out, who will commit to a two-week residential programme, six months of social action, and a voluntary addition year of service.

The report contains a lot of discussion of mental health, skills shortages, ‘civic apathy’, depression, and the ‘building blocks of character’ , which will be difficult for many readers to stomach given the quality of the ‘characters’ who have ruled the country for the last two decades, who may partly answer the question of why young people have grown ‘increasingly distrustful’ and prone to ‘civic apathy.’

The report wants to address this ‘decline in national sentiment’ and a ‘decline in national pride…compounded by a larger fracturing of society into siloed communities.’

Nowhere in this screed is there any mention of the fact that government spending on youth services was cut by an incredible 70 percent in real terms in the decade 2010-2020, resulting in the loss of 750 youth centres and more than 4,500 youth workers, or that some areas have completely lost youth funding.

Though the ‘cost of living crisis’ is touched on, it’s quickly skipped over, because solving problems like this is not what this report is about. And ‘taking responsibility’ is not what it’s about either.

It’s a stale, Groundhog Day idea in a GroundHog Day country stuck firmly in the Tory wheel of doom.There’s no app that can turn this on and off. A general election and the annihilation of the Tory Party would be a start, but that’s all it would be. Because the decline runs deeper than a change of personnel. Repairing - let alone reversing - the damage means recognizing the damage that’s been done.

We’re still a long way from that. And we may still have further to fall before we reach it.

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Not in the Same Boat

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

Warsan Shire

In a world that overflows with content, it can be difficult to decide what to watch and read. But millions of people in the UK would benefit from watching Sally El Hosaini’s stirring film The Swimmers, which you can see on Netflix. The film tells the story of the teenage Mardini sisters, who were on their way to becoming Olympic swimmers in Syria, before the civil war broke their country to pieces.

As a result they were forced to become refugees in 2015, and made their way to Germany, where they were able to settle as a result of Angela Merkel’s open-door policy. One of the sisters went on to swim for a specially convened Refugee Team at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

That’s the bare bones of ‘the plot.’ But there is so much more to The Swimmers than plot. Films about refugees don’t have to be uplifting. Those of us who have never been stateless and never had to live outside our national borders without a passport, and whose government is actively seeking to make life worse for those who do, cannot expect a warm glowing feeling as the credits roll on the rare occasions when refugees become the subject of semi-fictionalised dramas.

In depicting the journey of the Mardini sisters, The Swimmers shows with painful clarity the journeys that thousands of refugees made in 2015, the year of ‘Europe’s migrant crisis’. It shows the route from Syria to Turkey, across the sea to Lesvos and then through the Balkans and into Orban’s Hungary and then Germany.

It shows the rip-off merchants and the predators, the would-be rapists, the wire fences with police, guards and dogs all deployed specifically to snag refugees at the border. There is a long and particularly terrifying sequence in which an overloaded dinghy nearly sinks between Turkey and Lesvos - a voyage that will be taking place somewhere in the world even as I write these lines.

The film also captures the hope, resilience, courage and determination of the men and women who made these journeys - and the little acts of humanity performed by some of the people who help them. It shows their dreams, aspirations, and friendships, their ties to each other and their families, and their personal conflicts.

It’s a funny, moving and even joyful film that deepens our understanding of humanity and what it means to be a stateless human being in our century of proliferating walls and fences.

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It chimed very powerfully with my own memories of the migrants and refugees I met during my journeys to Europe’s borders between 2010 and 2012, to research Fortress Europe. Too many Europeans are accustomed to seeing refugees as a faceless mass of desperation and human misery, worthy of pity rather than respect - often without being aware of how easily pity can dehumanise the people it is extended to.

I don’t want to imply that refugees are generically better or worse than any other category of humanity. But I can say that I met many men and women who I regarded as genuinely heroic - if sometimes reckless and naive - in their determination to risk everything to help their families, and their refusal to accept the ‘paper walls’ or the formidable barriers placed in their path by some of the most powerful governments on earth.

Needless to say, the refugees I met, and the refugees who appear in The Swimmers, are not the refugees depicted by the UK government and the rightwing media, or the endless fascistic ‘Stop the Boat’ trolls who pollute Twitter day after day with their sinister depictions of ‘young men of military age’, ‘parasites’, ‘rapists’, and ‘benefit scroungers’ arriving in the UK.

In a powerful piece in the Guardian last week, Aditya Chakraborty reported on the protests taking place at the Stradey Park Hotel in LLanelli, where asylum seekers were expected to be housed while waiting for their applications to be processed. So far this has not happened, but the likes of Katie Hopkins, Richard Tice, Anne-Marie Waters and GB News have all gone to Wales to pour douse more petrol on the bonfire of fear and hatred that one local anti-racist activist called ‘far-right radicalisation in real time.’

In effect, Stradey Park has become one more flashpoint in the ‘Stop the Boats’ nightmare that we can’t wake up from, in part because the UK government doesn’t want us to wake up from it.

A Manufactured Nightmare

In the same week that I watched The Swimmers, it was announced that the UK asylum backlog has reached 175,457 - 44 percent higher than it was last year. This means that 175,457 people are living or partly-living in the UK at the state’s expense - or rather at the expense of the ‘the taxpayer’’ as our saloon bar racists like to put it - with no permission to work, study, or do anything that might enable them to live the semblance of the normal lives that the rest of us live even in these abnormal times.

Instead they are housed in hotels, detention centres, and barges - where they present a constantly visible ‘problem’ that can be picked on week after week. Either they are living in the lap of luxury, according to the ‘we must look after our own people’ lobby, and all the racists who leap onto that bandwagon in an attempt to give themselves a semblance of moral gravitas. Or as Lee Anderson helpfully reminded us, they are ungrateful for not accepting the worst conditions we can give them.

The government knows this is happening, and does nothing to challenge it. Not one tiny dicky bird, or even the ghost of a whisper to suggest that it is not the fault of asylum seekers if they end up in hotels.

Instead it presents deportations to Rwanda as some kind of magical formula that will ‘Stop the Boats’, even though it has yet to produce even a shred of evidence or a convincing argument that the removal of a few hundred migrants to Rwanda would have any impact whatsoever on reducing Channel crossings.

It simply asks the public to believe in Rwanda, like a cargo cult in reverse, in which people will miraculously vanish from the Channel as soon as the first planeload takes off to fulfil Suella Braverman’s ‘dream.’ And then when these flights don’t take off, because the government hasn’t even done basic legal research into what is possible, it whines about ‘activist lawyers’, politicized charities, the ECHR and anyone else it can blame for sabotaging its ability to implement the ‘will of the British people.’

In a way its win-win, even if the ‘illegals’ always lose. But it’s also awful, pernicious clownery.

The previous week, the Home Office took 39 asylum seekers off the Bibby Stockholm barge, only a few days after putting them on it, because Legionnaire’s disease was discovered in the water supply. It was then revealed that the Home Office hadn’t carried out the safety checks it was asked to do, and said it had done.

Now Suella Braverman is proposing to return the asylum seekers to a barge that the Fire Brigades Union has called a ‘floating death trap.’ Asked what she thought of these warnings, Braverman accused the Labour-affiliated FBU pf carrying out a ‘political attack’.

This is a level of debate that makes the average primary school playground conversation look like high diplomacy. The most charitable explanation for these failings would be to assume that those responsible are merely epically incompetent. But the longer the crisis goes on, the more difficult it is not to conclude that the government is deliberately allowing it to continue, in the hope of extracting political benefits from it.

If that means dehumanizing asylum seekers, and setting them up to a resentful public as objects of fear, hatred, and resentment, then so be it.

Braverman - one of the most atrociously dishonest and inept politicians this country has ever produced - has openly pandered to such dehumanization by calling asylum seekers ‘criminals’ and describing Channel crossings as an ‘invasion’, which is exactly what every common or garden racist says it is.

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This isn’t just incompetence. It’s so much worse than that. For the first time in British history, there is now an open - as opposed to covert or surreptitious - alignment between the UK government and the far-right on the issue of migration and asylum.

All this is being done entirely to protect the political interests of the Tory Party. The government clearly hopes that it can use Channel boat crossings to present Labour as ‘soft on migration’ and scrape some more votes from the bottom of the barrel that might enable it to keep its grubby fingers on the nation’s throat. And the Head Boy and his team are desperate to distract from the ‘cost of living crisis’ by turning popular anger and resentment towards anyone but them.

It’s all so brazen and transparent, as well as unbelievably cynical and downright dangerous. Because once these lines are crossed, anything becomes possible. And if you can convince the public to see performative cruelty as an antidote to the problem you helped create, then you can also crank up the cruelty.

The UK isn’t entirely unique in this regard. Most European countries, and the EU have been playing the same game for many years now. Long gone are the years when Vietnamese ‘boat people’ were grudgingly accepted as worthy refugees because they came from a communist country.

We are far from that now, in a world where national borders have progressively hardened in response to international problems, in an attempt to halt or at slow down the movements of people seeking to escape their own countries. This is a world where migrants and asylum seekers can be shot down by Saudi or Spanish border guards, abandoned to drown in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ‘pushed back’ across the Evros river or the Río Grande, or ‘offshored’ to Naura Island.

Until migrants began crossing the Channel post-Brexit, the UK hadn’t seen such movements actually unfolding on its borders, because many of the refugees and migrants who wanted to enter the country were trapped long before they got here, by the EU’s ‘external’ borders and de-territorialised border controls that reached even further outwards.

The present ‘crisis’ is unfolding at a particularly dangerous moment in the country’s history, when all kinds of political possibilities are emerging that didn’t seem possible before. There is a lot of anger and resentment that, like our overflowing sewage system, seeks an outlet, and an empowered and virulent ethnonationalism has taken control of the Tory Party which feeds politically on foreign threats.

The government knows all this, but can’t or won’t do anything about it. Instead it has treated the crisis as a problem but also as an opportunity, and a populist metric.

It’s no use Braverman, Jenrick, Sunak, Tugendhat & co churning out the tired ‘evil criminal gangs’ rhetoric to disguise the fundamental cruelty at the heart of the government’s refugee policy. Because it is so obviously targeting asylum-seekers, not criminal gangs. And in doing so, it is giving the public a license to fear and hate the former.

You can’t sink much lower on the scale of political depravity than that. But there is another side to this nightmare. And other paths that we might take. The Swimmer shows us what they are. And so does the open letter which the 39 asylum seekers sent to the Home Office last week:

We are writing to explain that we were running from persecution, imprisonment and harsh tortures, with hearts full of fears and hope from the countries we were born in, to find safety and freedom in your country and our new refuge.

It is hard to Imagine that we, who used to live under harsh tortures and danger of persecution in our country, have been forced to leave our homes, our jobs and our families, and some of us haven't seen our families for months.

This abandonment and separation from our family has been bitter and painful, and has been accompanied day by day with anxiety and nervous stresses and only a combination of hope and fear remains within us.

We shouldn’t need to be told this. We should be able to hear these voices and take them seriously. We should not have the temerity to even suggest that such people have risked so much simply in order to live on a barge on £36 a week. We should have enough imagination and enough humanity to be able to imagine the humanity of the people who come here seeking refuge and a chance to rebuild their lives.

We should be able to give them a chance to do this and make it possible for them to play a positive role in our society. We should listen to the 39 asylum seekers who told us ‘respectfully and hopefully’:

Now, we seek refuge in you and hope to walk alongside you on this path with your support and unity. We believe that with our joint effort, we can overcome these unfavourable conditions and achieve the peaceful and secure life that we aspire to.

We need to accept that invitation. We need an asylum system that works effectively. We need safe routes. We need cooperation with other countries that is not centred on hardening borders, building ‘deterrents’, trapping people and exposing them to hardship and death.

To achieve any of this, we need to recognize that all of us are in the countries we are in out of luck and the quirks of fate and the vagaries of politics, and not because of our individual brilliance.

Our good fortune doesn’t give us the right to dismiss stateless people as ‘illegals’ and invaders if they come to our shores looking for help or simply a chance to stand on their own feet.

We shouldn’t allow the difficult times that many of us are going through to turn us against people who have also been in difficulty, in many cases much worse than ours.

So watch The Swimmer, because in this world of trouble, it tells a story that we haven’t been hearing, that deserves to be heard, and which too many of those who claim to want to ‘put our own people first’ don’t want us to hear.

And if we start listening to them, we might just be able to imagine a different kind of future to the dystopia we are currently constructing.

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Suffer the Little Children

If there’s one thing the new conservative/hard right populists care about, it’s children. We know this, because they never stop trying to warn us that children are in danger from drag queens, woke teachers, abortionists, Muslim ‘grooming gangs’, migrants, the Clintons, and paedophiles. Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, ‘Tommy Robinson’, Katie Hopkins, Suella Braverman - they are only trying to protect children from the forces of evil that the media/elite/left/woke establishment dares not confront and may even be colluding with.

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According to the QAnon cultists, Trump became president specifically to save children from deep state paedophile rings, and would have saved them, had he not been cheated out of his rightful electoral victory.

That’s the kind of guy he is. And the kind of people his supporters are. The kind of people who, in the summer of 2020, used the #Savethe Children and #stophumantrafficking hashtags to promote an entirely baseless conspiracy theory in which a satanic/child-murdering network was supposedly trafficking 300,000 children every year.

And that’s only the start. Because the QAnonists would also have you believe that liberal Hollywood stars and Democrat politicians are torturing children in order to ‘harvest’ the adrenaline-related adrenochrome from their brains that would keep them forever young. Adrenochrome is the psychedelic chemical that Hunter Thompson gets high on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he insists can only be extracted from ‘a living human body.’

Thompson was just having fun. The QAnon circus barkers are absolutely serious. Hilary Clinton. Bill Gates. Tom Hanks. Oprah. Celine Dion, George Soros (of course) - they’re all businly sucking eternal youth from children’s brains. Even the Wayfair furniture company was involved in the trafficking business, apparently because it once sold a pillow with the same name as a missing child.

Bear that in mind next time you send off for a bedside table.

It’s easy - and necessary - to mock such howling drivel. But we shouldn’t laugh too much, because nonsense like this does have a purpose. History has shown again and again that if you want to make people hate and fear, one of the best ways you can do it is by accusing your enemies of harming or wanting to harm your children.

This is why fantasies of the Jewish ritual murder of children so often feature in outbreaks of medieval antisemitism, and in the twentieth century in the pages of the Nazi newspaper Die Sturmer:

The QAnoners have no problem reaching into these sordid anti-semitic tropes, because these are the toxic waters they swim in, and would have us all swimming in. The people who propagate and subscribe to such ‘theories’ inhabit a political space in which simply having ‘political opponents’ who you disagree with or don’t like is no longer enough - you have to hate them and everything they stand for. They need their target audience to remain in a permanent state of fear, horror, and outrage at the absolutely depraved evil being perpetrated by absolutely depraved conspiracies against children.

If this means convincing them that Hilary Clinton and Bill Gates are drinking the blood of children at sex orgies, then so be it. And if you can make people believe that a furniture company names its products after kidnapped children, then you can convince them of pretty much anything. It’s not for nothing that QAnon supporters segue so easily into ‘scamdemic’/anti-vax/anti-mask/5G-n-your-veins’ hysteria, and depict the pandemic and everything related to it as another Diabolical Evil Conspiracy Product.

And whatever the scam, you can guarantee that children will be part of it. Why were children forced to wear masks? To make it impossible to identify their faces so that the abductors and human traffickers can get hold of them more easily. Why did Bill and Melinda Gates vaccinate children against polio in Sierra Leone? To give them polio.

And so on and so on. And as mad and hateful as these stories are, they are also useful to people who don’t necessarily believe them

One of those people is Donald Trump, who last month held a special screening of the ‘QAnon film’ Sound of Freedom at his golf club in New Jersey, with the likes of Kari Lake and Steve Bannon in the audience, in addition to the film’s lead actor Jim Caviesel. The film is ostensibly a thriller, about a US government agent who rescues Honduran kids from Columbian sex traffickers, who just happen to be members of the FARC.

Though its director has denied any connection between his movie and the QAnon movement, Caviesel has embraced ‘adrenochrome’ stories and QAnon has embraced the fim. Sound of Freedom has been widely-criticized by anti-trafficking organizations for portraying child sex trafficking as primarily a cross-border/inter-state activity.

Not that Trump and his cronies care. One of Caviesel’s line ‘God’s children are not for sale’ has become as well-known as the film itself. ‘Wow.Wow. Wow. GO SEE #SoundofFreedom’, tweeted a clearly-distressed Ted Cruz, while Senator Tim Scott praised a ‘powerful film that reveals the horrifying reality that is human trafficking.’

I haven’t seen it, but I am pretty certain that Cruz, Bannon and Trump don’t give a damn about Honduran children or any other children who can’t be useful to them politically. Because these are people whose concern for children is very selective. It doesn’t extend to ‘children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, including foster care,’ ‘runaway and homeless youth’ and ‘unaccompanied foreign national children without lawful immigration status’, listed in the 2020 U.S Department of Justice report on ‘Trafficking in Persons.’

It doesn’t extend to the migrant children who were locked up in cages and taken from their parents and given to other families during Trump’s administration. Or the migrant children who are being denied water at the Texas border. Or the children who die week after week in American schools because of the country’s insane gun laws.

So the question is, why was Trump showing it and associating himself with it? The answer, and it isn’t rocket science, is that Trump is playing to the QAnon narrative of the child saviour in order to keep his base foaming at the mouth. Immediately after the screening, the Great Man promised to ‘end the child trafficking crisis by returning all trafficked children to their families in their home countries, without delay’.

No surprises there, but Trump also made a promise to introduce the death penalty to ‘anyone caught trafficking children across our border.’

This is where the love of children invariably takes these crusaders - to the gallows, the electric chair and the lethal injection. Because there’s nothing like a little capital punishment to make a certain kind of politician seem tough and caring. Both Trump and his would-be challenger Ron DeSantis have put the death penalty back on the political agenda, using child sex traffickers and child rapists as a pretext.

Because they too want to #Savethechildren and exploit whatever political capital they can get from the blood lust that inevitably accompanies both real and imagined crimes against children.

Let no one think there is anything uniquely American about this tawdry demagogic cynicism. In a country like the UK, punch-drunk from rightwing populism and its failed promises, and clammy with incipient fascism, it was inevitable that the monstrous crimes of Lucy Letby would be exploited by exactly the same people who have exploited so much else these last few years.

In little more than twenty-four hours after the verdict, GB News had called for at least twice for ‘debates’ on whether the death penalty should be brought back. Elsewhere, fascistoid numbskulls like Brendan Clarke-Smith and Lee Anderson were also tightening their knuckles round an imaginary noose, and Peter Hitchens could be found boasting about the two executions he has already witnessed.

On GMB, the shrivelled husk-like visage of the sadly ubiquitous reptilian sado-pundit Andrew Pierce could barely contain a grin at the prospect of dragging prisoners out for sentencing in chains and a gag.

In the Telegraph, the insipid altar boy Tim Stanley called for a ‘proper debate’ on the death penalty. Even though he opposes it himself, Stanley still thinks we should ‘remain sympathetic towards the instincts surrounding calls for the death penalty, and wary of attempts to dismiss or suppress them.’

Why should we be sympathetic to anyone but the people directly affected by this awful crimes? And why should not dismiss people who get some vicarious satisfaction at the prospect of someone hanging from a rope? Because, according to Stanley, ‘the murder of a child, so innocent and vulnerable, sparks rage in normal people.’ And also, ‘the modern world, rejecting the doctrine of original sin, often operates in ignorance of people’s capacity for wickedness.’

One can picture Stanley kneeling by his bedside in a monk’s robe with his hands clasped and a beatific smile as he came up with those lines. And yesterday the Telegraph returned to the same subject with a piece explaining how ‘the debate around reinstating the death penalty has re-emerged’ and headlined with a reader quote that ‘ The death penalty is the ultimate act of justice and it should be applied to child killers.’

This ‘debate’ has only ‘re-emerged’ because the likes of the Telegraph see Letby’s atrocious crimes as an opportunity to engage in some reactionary back-to-the-future posturing. No one is calling for a debate about original sin or the death penalty beyond the scrapings of our political class, the rightwing press and the dregs of Twitter and the rightwing comments pages.

Once again, it would be easy to conclude that the only fault with people like this is that they love too much, but vengeance is the goal here, not justice. And the death penalty has always had a morbid ability to stir unhealthy emotions in a certain kind of right-wing voter who thinks that ‘prison is a holiday camp’ and we need a ‘deterrent’, even though, like flights to Rwanda, there is no evidence that hanging has ever provided any such thing, or that it would have stopped someone like Letby from carrying out her atrocious crimes.

The US-imported astroturf ‘student’ movement Turning Point UK knows this very well, and has tried to turn the death penalty into a genuinely rabble-rousing cause célèbre, with advertisements like this:

And these are the reasons that it gives:

-The death penalty gets justice for victims & their families.

- A rope is eco-friendly as can be reused.

- Execution is cheaper than housing the most evil criminals for life.

-The death penalty has 100% guarantee of stopping reoffending.

- The death penalty deters future crime.

Nice. And the vicious vulgarity of that second ‘reason’ really gives an insight into the new age of barbarity that these people would like to take us towards. In their world, forwards is always backwards. If they have to use the murders of children to get there, let no one think they will hesitate for a second.

But we don’t need to have a ‘debate’ about the death penalty. We know the reasons for and against it. That debate was won in 1965, when capital punishment was suspended, and confirmed when it was made permanent in 1965, and again when it was finally abolished for all crimes in 1998. Had that not been the case, the Birmingham Six would all have been hung, and so would Barry George, Stefan Stiszko, Judith Ward, and Sally Clark, and let no one think that Lee Rigby’s killers would have been deterred from doing anything.

We don’t need to revisit a debate that already took into account murders that were no less atrocious than Lucy Letby’s crimes.

The only thing that has changed is that the country has become crueller and nastier, and the right would like to make it nastier still. Because capital punishment is part of its emotional comfort zone, and it is intended to appeal to the same kind of people who want to use gunboats against migrants, put soldiers in classrooms, and all the other ‘tough’ things that they think make us better.

In this country, a flailing hard-right movement desperate for anything that can serve its interests has even more reason to go down this reactionary path when so many of its promises have gone up in smoke, and when it no longer has any limits regarding the type of voter it is prepared to appeal to.

Bringing back the rope is just one more ‘victory’ its more extreme fringes would like to win. At the moment, these demands are mostly clickbait. But don’t be surprised if the death penalty becomes another rightwing ‘culture war’ issue - perhaps linked to withdrawal from the ECHR.

It’s even possible to imagine a Conservative Party election promise to hold - ahem - a referendum on capital punishment, regardless of the fact that Margaret Thatcher - who believed in capital punishment, refused to this.

Nothing is really off the table in these deranged times. But when we see these hard-faced tough guys on our tvs and mobile phones calling for executions, gags and chains in response to crimes against children, we should remember who they are, and what they want, and feel the same disgust at their shameless exploitation of these crimes as we do towards the crimes themselves.

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Suella Braverman's Diary

Phew!

Sorry I’m a bit late to this, but protecting our borders and disrupting the business model of the evil criminal gangs that thrive on human misery is a full-time job. I mean really. And our national Stop the Boats week was even busier than most weeks!

Honestly, I was rushed off my feet! Literally, I hardly had time to catch a breath. But hey, I’m not complaining! Because the British people gave me a job to do, and I can tell Miss Yvette Cooper and Monsieur Macron and Frau Von der Leyen and the lefty lawyers and closet Remainers and woke do gooders that it’s a job I take very seriously!

But Stop the Boats week. I mean, gosh! What a week! Honestly, it was just Off.The.Scale! Busy, busy, busy, every hour God sent. Even on Sunday - the day of rest (I wish!) - we were ready to go with Bob’s edgy column in the Sun, spilling the beans on that dodgy so-called anti-racist lawyer helping Labour stop our Rwanda policy ( A great policy btw, which will totally stop the boats, and don’t let any woke civil servant tell you otherwise!).

The next day Bob was interviewed by lefty Remoaner woke radio presenter Andrew Castle and asked for the name of the lawyer. And of course Bob wasn’t going to fall for that ‘facts’ nonsense. I mean, come on. This is 2023!

Castle kept on nagging (what is it with these people?) but Bob’s lips were sealed.

So off to a flying start with a BIG win for us. Go us!

And that same day, we put the first so-called asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge, ( Total cost to the hardworking taxpayer, ONLY £1.6 billion over the next two years. Go us!). That was despite the lefty Fire Brigades Union and other do gooders whittering on about safety and fire risk and ‘floating Grenfells’ and inhumanity and blah, blah, blah.

Fingers in the ears. Altogether now. La, la,la, la,la.

Because I’ll tell you what’s inhumane. Putting Albanians up in luxury hotels with gyms, swimming pools, and smorgasbords while the hardworking British taxpayer can’t even pay his bills and has to go to a community pantry to make ends meet, that’s what.

Care4Calais? About time we had a Care4Britain! But we did it anyway! We got 15 so-called asylum seekers on board! Fifteen! Go us!

And if they don’t like it, they can eff off back to France.

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Not that I would personally use that kind of fruity language. Mummy and Daddy didn’t raise me to do that. But our Deputy Chairman is a simple son of the soil who speaks honest home truths from his simple working man’s heart. And even if the tofu-loving wokerati might not deem it ‘politically correct’ to put it in quite those terms, Lee expressed the genuine hurt and frustration that the British people rightly feel at the illegals who have abused our warm-hearted generosity for so long.

Because we are a welcoming people. With a proud tradition of welcoming. But honestly, there is a limit. And now the people have said ‘Enough!’ And I understand their righteous anger at the do gooders and the bleeding hearts and the RNLI and the lefty woke lawyers who STILL managed to stop twenty illegals from boarding the barge by launching vexatious and politically-motivated appeals to ‘the law.’

I’m sorry, but as a former Attorney-General, I won’t take lectures on ‘the law’ from a bunch of lawyers. And as Alex Chalk said, we WILL be coming for them. But later, because there really is so much to tell!

On Tuesday, we got the headlines we wanted: ‘Tory fury as lawyers block migrants on barges’ (Express) and me (Go me!) ‘Suella: “I’ll wage war on crooked migrant lawyers” (Mail).

What I said.

And yes, we WILL be seeking a whole life tariff for any rogue firm found guilty of helping illegals perpetrate immigration fraud. Go us!

On Wednesday Bob was off in Turkey doing a fabulous deal with Erdogan’s border force to stop the evil criminal gangs that thrive on human misery long before they reach the Channel!

All this at NO extra cost to the taxpayer. Just a few million diverted from overseas development assistance funds, because let me tell you that stopping illegals and so-called asylum seekers from coming to stay in luxury hotels in our country IS development, and don’t let any do gooder tell you otherwise.

So go Bob! Go us! And especially, yay me!

And on Thursday, to show how well our Stop the Boats policy was working, 756 people crossed the channel in a single day - a record for the year so far! All of which goes to show that our strategy for tackling the evil criminal gangs that thrive on human misery is working really, really well.

Because imagine how many there would have been if we’d done nothing?

But I can promise you that these number WILL fall, once the illegals find out they’ll be staying in barges and not at Centreparcs or Radisson Blu. And when we can FINALLY start sending people to Rwanda. Or Ascension Island. Or Barren Island. Or the Okavango swamps.

Or really, wherever.

When that happens you’ll see how many of them want to come here! That’s my dream. It’s just like Martin Luther King’s dream, sort of. He wanted people eating round some table of brotherhood thingy in sweltering Mississippi or wherevs: I want to see thousands of so-called refugees locked up in a detention centre in a distant land no one cares about, thousands of miles away from our white cliffs, our bowling greens and cricket pitches, our village fetes, and our community pantries.

Because the hardworking British grafter has said ENOUGH. And we need to put OUR people first. And as for those 173,000 so-called refugees waiting for an initial decision on their asylum claim, we’ll get to them once we stop the queue jumpers.

But of course the do gooders are all crying ‘incompetent!’ and ‘not fair! And of course they’d like to put them all in luxury hotels instead of the barges that were perfectly ok for our oil workers and rough sleepers and other simple sons of the British soil.

Why? For the same reason they tried to stop Brexit. Because they hate our country. Because they are the enemy within.

Well I can tell the Remoaners carping on the sidelines ( Yes it’s sooo easy to criticize when you’re not doing anything yourself!) that I will NOT let this happen.

Fingers in the ear. La, la, la, la, la. Do I look like I’m listening? That’s because I’m not!

And then Friday. Of all the things! Some busybody goody two shoes discovers Legionnaire’s Disease in the water, and so we have to take the same asylum seekers off the barge who we put on it on Monday.

Can you imagine?

Well, who could have predicted that, without doing safety checks? Which we didn’t have time to do, because, come on! These are illegals.

And I am busy! Busy, busy, busy.

And it’s not as if any of them actually caught Legionella, (a minor ailment, compared with Ebola, fyi). So really, a lot of fuss about nothing. Health and safety gone mad. And how did that Legionnaires Disease get in the water supply, that’s what I’d like to know?

Bit too much of a coincidence, if you ask me.

Because let’s face it, if you’re going to come here without permission you need to know that you’re not going to be living the life of riley on a bed of roses, whatever the Labour Party and Miss Yvette Cooper and all the virtue-signalling humanitarians will tell you.

And we WILL sort out the barge and put the illegals back on it, and those who don’t like it will just have to suck it up.

Anyway. Despite these little blips, the week was going really, really well, all things considered. And then on Saturday, what happens? Six so-called Afghan refugees go and drown in the channel! Just like that!

Well awful. Just awful. And of course my thoughts and prayers go out to them, and this is why we have to fight the evil criminal gangs that thrive on human misery.

But let’s not lose a sense of proportion! It’s not as if anyone made these people cross the Channel. It’s not as if they weren’t already in a safe country.

Perhaps if the French had done their job properly, instead of punishing us for leaving the EU and shipping their unwanted so-called refugees over here, these unfortunate people might not have taken such a risk and paid all that money to the evil criminal gangs who thrive on human misery.

So thoughts and prayers. Should go without saying. But just in case, I’m saying it.

There. Done.

Not that it makes a blind bit of difference! Because people will moan, won’t they? And now the do gooders and the bleeding hearts are bleating on again about ‘alternate safe routes’ and ‘blood on our hands’.

Well let me tell you, there is NO blood on MY hands. And I won’t take lectures on human decency from a bunch of humanitarian charity workers who do nothing but try to help vulnerable people. I sleep soundly, in the little shuteye that I’m able to snatch, because delivering for the British people is a full time job! 27/7!

And I can tell you that I will not reward people who seek to enter our country illegally by allowing them to enter it legally. Because really, what do they want us to do? Fly every so-called victim of Taliban oppression in from Kabul so they can stay at the Hilton?

Why not roll out the red carpet? What do they want? Golden elevators? Jacuzzis? Pampering days?

I say, NO.

I say, what’s wrong with France?

And I will fight these invaders. In the mountains and on the beaches. I will never surrender.

Read my lips: I. Will. Stop. The. Boats. And if the do gooders and the traitors try to stop me, I will work to ensure that we have a Tory government that can send these people back to where they came from, and THAT is the issue we will fight the next election on.

No ifs. No buts.

And I don’t care if we have to leave the ECHR and the United Nations and the Geneva Convention and all the other ‘laws’ and multilateral conventions that the global elite drew up after World War 2 or whenever, and thinks we have to obey now.

I’m sorry, but we didn’t leave the European Union for that. We didn’t win back our sovereignty and independence for that. We didn’t defend it against the Remoaner traitors for that. And I say to all the do gooders, the bleeding hearts, the lefty lawyers and the charity hustlers.

We ARE coming for you.

We WILL put illegals back on that barge.

We WILL stop the boats.

We WILL disrupt the business model of the evil criminal gangs that thrive on human misery. And if we have to surround the country with a sea wall and barbed wire like that lovely Greg Abbott did in Texas, fine. And we WILL make France and the EU pay for it, and they will just have to suck it up.

Because we ARE a GREAT NATION.

And we WILL win the next election by drawing a line in the sand between those who LOVE our beautiful country and those who HATE.

That’s all for now. Must rush.

Busy. Busy. Busy.

Yay me.

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Woke Up This Morning

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It’s always a good idea to recognise the strengths of your political opponents, and there are two things that the new populist right does very well, which go a long way to explain its political successes in the last few years. The first is lying. Unencumbered by any moral scruples or concern with even the most elementary notions of truth that make it possible for a democracy to function, its representatives feel able to say anything, regardless of whether it bears any connection to reality.

The second - closely related to the first - is the right’s ability to make its intended constituencies feel like victims, to the point when they believe that they are being subjected to vast conspiracies that threaten their very existence.

Both these talents converge seamlessly in the right’s ongoing obsession with ‘woke’, ‘wokeism’ and ‘wokeness.’ Nowadays, in the English-speaking world at least, you would have to go into a cave with a blindfold and ear plugs on to avoid coming across one of these terms at least once a week.

Where there used to be reds under beds, there is now rampant wokey pokery operating in every sphere of society, trashing our history and identity, dismantling our institutions and most cherished beliefs, insinuating itself into the minds of the unwary like the alien seed pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Woke lefty lawyers; woke civil servants; woke schools and teachers; woke weathermen; the woke National Trust; the woke Labour Party; woke Costa Coffee shops - it’s everywhere.

Even the elite royal bank Coutts is now woke. And so is the US women’s football team, according to Donald Trump, which is why it lost. And the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park Authority is also woke because it changed the name of the park to Welsh. Last week, the Daily Mail - an authority on all things wokeist - published its ‘Woke List 2023’ of the ‘Britons who are most high-profile in their awakedness to perceived injustices in society.’

That ‘perceived’ is the crucial word here, and the list was not intended as a badge of honour. Its luminaries include the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gary Lineker, the Director-General of the National Trust, the Chief Librarian of the British Library, the ‘ungrateful, woke brat’ Emma Watson, Michael Sheen, the ex-Chief Executive of NatWest Group, and the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Traitors, bastards, and useful idiots, the lot of them. And the Comintern can eat its Stalinist heart out, because this is what it really means to take over a society by stealth.

Political Correctness

At first sight, all this wokeus pocus recalls the concept of ‘political correctness’ which first emerged in the seventies and eighties as an in-joke amongst the left, and went on to become an insult used by the right to ridicule the left and the causes and issues associated with it.

To say that such and such a person or institution was ‘politically correct’ automatically suggested inauthenticity, a lack of seriousness, and an obsession with marginal issues. To be ‘politically correct’ meant that you didn’t really believe in any of the causes you espoused; you were merely trying to live up to some fatuous leftist nostrums in order to make yourself feel good and look good.

Even worse, you were trying to make other people look bad, by imposing limits on free speech on the everyday good folk who just wanted to watch the Black and White Minstrel Show and exclaim ‘what a pair of knockers!’ without having to feel guilty about it.

Accusations of political correctness invariably tended to crop up in the context of discussions about racism, sexism, the discrimination of minorities, and so on, and were often used in tabloidspeak in reference to ‘loony left’ city councils and the ‘political correctness gone mad’ stories that abounded in the era of municipal socialism.

These were the days when the Murdoch papers gleefully churned out stories about bans on black bin liners, about primary school kids forced to sing baa baa green sheep, and everybody had a larf at the Citizen Smiths and the do good zealots with their wacky lefty schemes. The term also became a standard element of mainstream discourse, always with the same nudge-wink, shake-your-head pitying irony, and often accompanied by attempts to praise those few free thinkers, like Alan Clark or Jim Davidson, who were supposedly brave enough to break the ‘rules’.

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Of course, there is no reason why the left can’t be mocked. Leftists aren’t immune to intolerance, holier-than-thou pomposity, hyper-orthodoxies, dogma, and authoritarianism. But these accusations of ‘political correctness’ were not seeking to make the left behave better, but to discredit the causes that it stood for.

As a delegitimizing strategy, it was quite effective. It encouraged the kind of cynicism that the right thrives on, and it also encouraged the mockery of very real social injustices and forms of discrimination, which still persist today. Traces of this past can still be found in the contemporary right’s obsession with ‘woke’, but whereas political correctness was depicted as a ridiculously overzealous response to ‘perceived’ social injustices, ‘wokeism’ is imagined as something far more sinister and dangerous.

Consider some of the books that have been written about it in the last few years:

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance, and Reason; Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America; Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews; Woke Culture: Working to Destory Our Nation; We Speak for Outselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress.

You get the idea. In 2021 the Sun published a piece on how ‘“political correctness on steroids” and woke-weaning betrays and brainwashes children’.’ One of its interviewees was a History professor who compared student policy on ‘microaggressions’ to the Inquisition. Another retired headteacher insisted that ‘every area of school life is determined by wokeism. There is no dissent. It’s like religious, totalitarian fanaticism.’

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Reading such pieces, you can’t help wanting to send some of these interviewees to a country where there really is ‘religious, totalitarian fanaticism’ in order to re-acquaint themselves with reality, but reality is not the point here.

In May this year, wokeness appeared in many of the speeches at the London ‘National Conservative’ conference. For flat-out idiocy, it was hard to beat the Tory backbencher Danny Kruger’s shrill warning about ‘The weird medley of transgressive ideas that is now threatening the basis of civilisation in the West.’

This medley doesn’t come much weirder than Kruger’s evocation of ‘a new ideology, a new religion – a mix of Marxisim and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship all wrapped up in revolution.’ Nevertheless, he insisted,

they are wrong and they are a lethal threat. Because to build their new Jerusalem – their pagan city on a hill – first the old one must be destroyed. Everything must be undermined. Dismantled. Swept away.

Everything must conform at last to the imagining of John Lennon: No countries. No families. No religions (except this one). Nothing to live or die for. No history, just a bland progressive present.

So… Jerusalem is pagan now? And never mind that Lennon sang ‘Nothing to kill or die for’ - a very different message - because this is the heady brew that makes new conservatives heads swim, and whatever they’re snorting in the HoC these days must be stronger than we realize.

This was one of the first occasions anyone has heard anything from Kruger, which on the evidence, can only be a good thing. But talking like this can get you invitations to some very rightwing places you wouldn’t otherwise get to. This is why perennial Tory mediocrity Oliver Dowden took off to Washington in February last year to lecture the palaeoconservative Heritage Foundation on the ‘painful woke psychodrama sweeping the West.’

The Heritage Foundation doesn’t need much convincing. After all, this is a thinktank that has always been adept at pushing very hard right messages into the American mainstream, and its website teems with articles on wokeus pocus and wokery, such as the following explanation of its origins:

The term does come from black slang, and according to Vox (the authority on all things woke), it meant “the notion that staying ‘woke’ and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic.”

Then white leftists, feeling guilty about crimes they never committed, borrowed the term (or “culturally appropriated” it, if you believe the woke nonsense) to denote a consciousness of the supposed social injustice that is part of the very tapestry of the oppressive nature of American society.

Or some such. The initiates into the woke cult are intravenously fed this propaganda about a systemically racist and oppressive America to provoke them into dismantling society and the entire system.

At a time when the left can barely win an election anywhere in the world, it may be comforting to imagine that the ‘woke cult’ is capable of achieving such momentous outcomes. One of the recurring threads in anti-wokeism, is the idea that the left - a word which pretty well refers to anyone across the broadest of leftist-liberal spectrums - has abandoned its efforts to take formal political power in favour of ‘cultural activism’ and the ‘long march through the institutions’ strategy advocated by Gramsci, Rudi Dutschke and Hans Magnus Enzenberger.

According to the Australian conservative Dr Kevin Donnelly, ‘Woke identity politics is a radical attempt by the cultural left to remake Western society in their image.’ Like many anti-woke ideologues, Donnelly builds this sinister ideology/conspiracy from a disparate array of sources, from the Frankfurt School, to Gramsci, Marcuse, the 1968 Paris riots, and the ‘hippy, counter-culture movement.’

Such claims are difficult to take seriously, because there is really no coherent evidence than any such unity exists, or ever really has existed between all the elements included here, even if the right likes to believe otherwise.

Why is this happening? On the one hand, anti-wokeism is a new variant on an old rightwing technique: the evocation of a fantasy conspiracy in order to discredit your opponents or anyone with a different worldview. At the same time it’s a very specific response to the rise of ‘identity politics’ and cultural politics, to ‘cancel culture’, the Black Lives Matter movement, Me Too feminism and the ongoing and often toxic debate about gender and trans rights.

There are certainly legitimate criticisms that can be made, and reservations that one can have about the way some of these ‘new’ movements conduct themselves, and whether or not some of them represent a regression from ‘universalist’ principles that define the left at its best.

But these aren’t the criticisms that the right is making. Once again, its aim is not to create a better left, but to destroy the left, through the construction of a fantasy ideology-cum-conspiracy that is not nearly as powerful or as unified as the right proclaims.

A Culture of Cruelty

All this is extremely dangerous, because antiwokeism dismisses, delegitimizes and often demonizes very real injustices and problems, in an attempt to prevent any solution to them. In doing so, it shores up the most reactionary, conservative, and often downright fascistic sections of society, to the point when even the climate emergency and clean air policies can be dismissed as just another expression of wokeness.

It’s amazing how readily anti-wokeists will pivot to Great Replacement theories and antisemitic ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theories; how the likes of Miriam Cates will be warning of ‘woke teachers’ who ‘destroy our children’s souls’ one minute and then depicting falling birth rates as a cultural threat to the UK. One minute anti-wokers will be telling you ‘women don’t have penises’, the next we’re heading towards Lebensborn.

In effect, anti-wokeism has become a weapon in a different kind of majoritarian ‘identity politics’, which is attempting to roll back liberal social gains, postpone any discussion about structural racism and sexism, and shut down debate about how to create a more just, equal and diverse society.

It’s actually a good idea - in fact an essential idea - for any society that wants to be better than it is, that its members should be aware of the injustice and oppression that society may be perpetrating, and show solidarity with those who have been victims of such injustice.

The alternative to that is grim indeed. Ron DeSantis has made it a hallmark of his sordidly opportunistic career to define Florida as a place where ‘woke comes to die.’ His anti-woke regime has reportedly lost his state billions of dollars, not because ‘the left’ has taken it over, but because corporations and investors see no future for their brands in associating themselves with reactionary bigotry.

None of this bothers the ex-Guantanamo guard. Fresh from promising to start ‘slitting throats' if he becomes president, DeSantis has now supported the use of ‘deadly force’ by special forces and border officials against drug traffickers crossing the Mexican border

Asked how these operations could distinguish between traffickers and migrants, anti-wokeism’s answer to Steve Seagal said that they should use US military operations in Iraq as an example.

In Texas, fellow anti-wokeist Governor Greg Abbott shared a fake article about country singer Garth Brooks being booed off the stage in a purported display of patriotism in response to the singer’s perceived wokeness in a non-existent town called ‘Hambriston’. In July Texas troopers employed by Abbott’s border control initiative reported that they had been instructed to deny water to migrants crossing the Rio Grande and push women and children back into the river.

These connections aren’t accidental. Because this is where anti-wokeism leads: to performative demonstrations of cruelty. To denying water to migrant children. To putting migrants on barges or sending them to Rwanda. To politicians telling asylum seekers to ‘fuck off back to France.’

In short, it makes society crueller and meaner. So best not to give into it. Better to stay woke and call out injustice when you see it. Better to lend your back, and your voice to the idea that the world is not as bad as the likes of DeSantis, Abbott, and Anderson would like it to be.

Better to feel not shame, but pride, when they call you woke, and think that you are probably doing something right.

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Trump's Last Battle

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

On the surface, it’s not been the greatest of weeks for Donald J. Trump. It isn’t every day that a former president of the United States finds himself indicted on four separate federal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruct the electoral count during the 2020 presidential election, with another indictment likely to follow pertaining to Trump’s machinations in Georgia.

This follows 37 charges in June relating to Trump’s handling of classified docs, and a $250 million law suit from New York attorney general Letitia James against Trump and three of his children. This is enough criminality to make Watergate look like a minor traffic infraction in comparison.

It’s all looking a bit grim for the Emperor of Mar-a-Lago, or at least it should be. This really ought to be the moment - belated to be sure - when the scales finally fall from the eyes of all but the most corrupt , the most depraved, and the most manipulated of Trump’s supporters; when the politicians who finally jump off his bandwagon scattering mea culpas for the monster they created.

But 2023 is not 1972, and the baseline threshold of acceptable political behaviour in the United States long ago collapsed like so much rotten wood under the weight of monstrosities who make the Nixon era look like a golden age. And even though Trump has been indicted for grievous crimes against American democracy, millions of Americans with eyes are not willing to use them, or will only see what they want to see.

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No one can be surprised to find Trump boasting of the indictments as a ‘badge of honour’ or describing himself as a victim of political persecution comparable to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This is what he will always do, but he isn’t the only one.

Polls show that Trump’s support within the Republican Party actually increased following Jack Smith’s indictments. As a presidential nominee, Trump is miles ahead of his nearest challenger, the absurd coward Ron DeSantis. Some polls for the 2024 election have him tied with Biden on 43 percent, while others give Biden a 44 percent lead.

Don’t these voters have a moral compass? The answer to that would be a resounding no, at least not when it comes to Trump. After all, these voters include people who believe that the rapacious pussy-grabbing sociopath is Jesus Christ, or at least that he has Jesus’s ear, like the supporter on the Gab social media platform who responded to Trump’s arrest this Easter with the observation ‘Seems there was someone else who was tortured and crucified.’

As another supporter on Telegram put it that same month: ‘Good vs. Evil. Biblical times. Divine timing.’

The least that can be said about such comments is that they lack empirical rigour. But then so do the QAnoners who believe that Trump is fighting a cosmic battle to save children from being raped and eaten by Hilary Clinton and Celine Dion in order to drain adrenochrome from their brains. And the Twitter trolls who posted pictures of Jack Smith as the ‘face of evil’ over the last week. Or the politicians like Sarah Palin and Marjorie Taylor Greene who believe that the Democrats are ‘communists.’

You’re not going to get much sense or honesty from these quarters, and certainly no repentance. Politically-speaking, this is the twilight zone, where a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Republicans believe law enforcement officials are engaged in ‘politically motivated investigations’ against the former president, and another poll in March found that 58 percent of Republican voters still believe the 2020 election was ‘rigged’.

In effect, the entire Republican Party is infected with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome'), and this is why the likes of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - a man who would pimp his own mother for political advantage - are working themselves up into a lather of fake-indignation, echoing Trump lawyer talking points that the former president was merely exercising his right to ‘free speech’ by challenging the 2020 election results.

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In fact, the indictment goes to some lengths to point out that this was not the case, and that Trump is not being charged for expressing his opinion, but for actively colluding and conspiring to undermine the election, thereby denying American voters their democratic rights.

McCarthy et al are too co-opted, too craven or too self-interested to care less. As long as the base sticks with Trump, they will stick with the base. And DeSantis is no better, simultaneously trying to distance himself from the ‘rigged’ 2020 election narrative while also describing the indictments as politically-motivated.

Some more hopeful polls this week suggest that 52 percent of Republicans wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was in prison on election day, and that nearly half of Republicans wouldn’t vote for him if he was convicted. This is hardly the stuff of political happy endings.

‘If’ is the key word here. Should Trump’s lawyers succeed in delaying his trials, he could win the election and then pardon himself. And even if he is convicted and ends up in jail before the election, it’s entirely possible that some Trump-surrogate like DeSantis could run on a ‘pardon Trump’ ticket and do just that.

From Trump’s point of view, he has to become president to stand a chance of staying out of jail, and if he achieves these aims, he has made it clear that he intends to inflict ‘retribution’ on those responsible, in messages like this deranged post on his Truth Social platform:

A Trump spokesperson has since issued a statement defending the former president’s post, as ‘ the definition of political speech, and was in response to the Rino [Republicans in Name Only], China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and Super Pac’s.’

Few people are likely to be fooled, except those who want to be. And in order to understand what Trump might do in order to win, and what he might do if he does win, it’s worth taking a closer look at the way he has depicted his enemies.

The Deep State

Long ago, back in the late sixties and early seventies, the concept of the ‘deep state’ was used by the left to refer to the ‘strategy of tension’ pursued by elements elements within the Italian state, who appeared to be colluding with both left and right week terrorism in order to push Italy towards an authoritarian democracy.

Today, this imagery of puppet-masters working in the shadows has become a recurring theme in the right’s neo-gnostic view of the world, to describe any opposition to anything the right wants to do, whether legal or political, and any attempts to indict or discredit Donald Trump. In July 2018, Kevin McCarthy - of course - described an anonymous op-ed critical of Trump published in the New York Times as evidence of a ‘permanent political class in Washington that believes that it has a divine right to rule the American people. You could even call it a Deep State.’

You could, though if you had even a smidgeon of honesty and integrity, you probably wouldn’t. No surprise then to find Lindsey Graham in November 2019, responded to revelations that Trump extorted the Ukrainian government for political gain with the observation ‘When you find out who is the whistleblower is, I’m confident, you’re gonna find out it’s somebody from the deep state.’

Such discourse will not be unfamiliar on this side of the pond. In February 2018, a number of Brexiters accused the Treasury of having ‘fiddled the figures’ to make post-Brexit economic assessments seem worse, such as the the ex-Brexit Minister David Jones, who warned that ‘ the last of the Remain tendency are deep within the bowels of the Treasury.’ The Treasury’s negative assessments also moved Jacob Rees-Mogg to wonder ‘if there isn’t a pattern in that, whether there is some orchestration of the stars.’

If the Deep State can orchestrate the stars, it can also bring down prime ministers, according to the indefatigable truth-teller, Dan Wootton at GB News, who described the Privileges Committee investigation into Boris Johnson’s rule breaking as an ‘anti-democratic campaign…that threatens to undermine British democracy itself…The deep state stitch up of Boris Johnson could have ramifications for our political system…the stakes could not be higher.

Blessed is the nation that has such democrats to defend its institutions. In the UK the sinister references to the Blob’ and the ‘Deep State’ have been used to justify attacks on the civil service, and Donald Trump has a surprisingly similar agenda. One of his last acts before the 2020 election was an executive order moving federal workers in ‘confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating’ civil service jobs into a new job classification, which would make it possible for the government to remove and appoint government employees at will.

As Trump described it in a rally that year, these were ‘ critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,’ in order to ensure - wait for it, that ‘The deep state must and will be brought to heel.’

This order was rescinded by Biden, but Trump has never abandoned these aspirations. In March this year he told a rally that if re-elected he would remove parts of the federal government in order to ‘totally obliterate the deep state.’ This, he insisted, was ‘the final battle…Either they win or we win.’

It’s clear why Trump must win this ‘battle’. But many of his supporters are so afflicted with TDS that they see the world in exactly the same terms as he does. They believe that Trump is the victim of a ‘deep state’ plot, and even if they don’t believe it, they will pretend to, as Ron DeSantis did this week, when he promised to transform the federal bureaucracy through mass firings, in which he would ‘start slitting throats on Day One.’

DeSantis has been widely condemned for using violent language. But violence is a very real possibility, whether Trump wins or loses. And if he wins, and attempts to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own appointees, this will not be an attack on the Deep State or a ‘critical reform’ of government.

It will be an act of vengeance, and an authoritarian power grab by a criminal and would-be tyrant that would spell the end of American democracy, and send a dark message across the world.

And the great problem that America - and the world - now has, is that millions of people know this, and don’t care.

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Boil, Baby, Boil

Fictional dystopias are often intended as warnings to the present. In imagining the worst possible future, they tend to extrapolate the most dire possibilities from present trends, acc-ent-u-at-ing the negative to show what we could become if we don’t watch out. The twenty-first century has been a golden age for fictional ‘black mirrors’, and it’s difficult to separate this seemingly endless appetite for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic end-of-world scenarios from the very real dystopian turn of 21st century politics and society.

Shadow wars against an omnipresent terrorist enemy; Islamic State’s murderous utopias; the insane corruption of the Trump presidency; QAnon and the January 6 insurrection; the Covid pandemic; the weekly massacres of refugees in the Mediterranean; the denial of water to pregnant migrants at the Mexico-Texas border - these are only some of the routine ‘already existing dystopias’ of our era that would fit comfortably into any fictional realisation of the worst possible future.

But the most alarming manifestation of our current dystopian turn is the calamitous degradation of the natural world as a result of human activity, whose consequences are increasingly impossible for all but the wilfully blind to ignore.

Take the events of last week. On 24 July CBS News reported that preliminary experiments were taking place in the Florida Keys to assess whether sharks may be becoming addicted to cocaine, because of the amount of cocaine that has ended up in the ocean. I wasn’t aware of this before. Nor did I know that brown trout and other fish had become addicted to methamphetamine.

Call me humourless, but I’m not laughing at these wired ‘cocaine sharks’. Because human beings might ‘choose’ to be become addicts , but sharks and fish shouldn’t have late capitalism’s throwaway toxins foist upon them, and the fact that this is happening is another indication of the seemingly limitless and increasingly grotesque human alteration of the natural world.

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In the same week the wildfires in Rhodes and Corfu provided another reminder of that transformation. Media coverage of the fires focused mostly on the novelty of tourists-turned-climate refugees fleeing from ‘nightmare holidays’ , producing a stream of images that would not have been out of place in a JG Ballard novel.

Women in swimming costumes, summer dresses and glamorous sunglasses speaking into mobile phones; lines of tourists in shorts and sandals dragging pullalong bags away from the red Brueghelian sky; evacuees clustered round beach huts beneath billowing clouds of black smoke; gyms and schools turned into makeshift shelters for stranded tourists - these were some of the pictures that made the front pages over the last seven days.

The Greek government claims that most of these fires were man-made, which may be true. But the reason they have spread is because we are now living through the hottest summer on record - hotter than the previous record last year - in which everything is drier than it should be and ready to burn.

So far wildfires have broken out in Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain. In Sicily wild fires forced the closure of Palermo airport and temperatures in Catania reached 47.6 C - making the air so hot and polluted that even breathing has become difficult. In Milan a heatwave turned into a freak hailstorm across Lombardy that sent slabs of ice flowing through a nearby city.

These storms took place after what had already been the hottest July in recorded European history, in which sea temperatures have also reached new records. The World Meteorological Organization has had no hesitation in attributing these developments to human activity. Nor has UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who announced this week that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.’

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the journal Nature Communications published the results of a study from the University of Copenhagen suggesting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) which carries warmer water from the tropics to western Europe may slow or ‘shut down’ within the next decade as a result of climate change - a transformation that would make Europe colder and much of the rest of the world considerably hotter.

‘He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news’, Bertolt Brecht once wrote, but that is a lot of bad news for one week, and it ought to be a wake up call, except that so many dire wake up calls have already come and gone, without producing anything like the commensurate response.

You sometimes hear the sinking of the Titanic as an analogy for our current predicament, but unlike the Titanic, we can clearly see the multiple catastrophes coming towards us. We’ve been warned again and again, decade after decade, about the damaging impact of fossil extractivism, about the human impact on animals, about the threats to our survival as a society and even as a species.

Scaremongers and ‘Climate Scams’

We know what a climate change dystopia looks like, and what ecological collapse could look like, because so many people have spelt in out in great detail, and because so many of the things that were predicted many years ago have already started to happen. We also know the potential solutions, policies, and mitigating steps that we could implement to try and prevent these outcomes.

Yet here we are, in July 2023, staring into the ‘age of boiling’, and it’s not even August. Of course if you believe some people - and I highly recommend that you don’t believe them - none of this is really happening. For the last week now the hashtag #ClimateScam has coursed through Twitter, boosted by armies of bots and amplified by the usual suspects. In Sicily, the holidaying Julia Hartley-Brewer, could be found tweeting with her characteristic joyless gleeful malice:

Elsewhere, David Frost (again…sigh) informed the House of Lords that rising temperatures were likely to be ‘beneficial to the UK’ because more people die from cold than hot weather. At GB News, Neil Oliver accused the BBC and other ‘woke’ weather presenters of ‘scaremongering’ and generating ‘fear of the summer’ by using satellite images of ground temperatures to make it appear that the regions described were hotter than they were.

This was not true - weather maps are not designed on that basis, and Oliver’s claims were immediately and comprehensively debunked, but not before at least two million people had seen his video on social media. Why are ‘they’ frightening people? Because, according to the gimlet-eyed Thane of Mordor, ‘they’ want ‘to get control of people again’ just as they did with Covid. This is why images like this have been circulating on social media, parodying media ‘scaremongering’:

It would be easy to ignore such stupidity, and certainly better for anyone’s blood pressure, were it not for the damage these ‘climate change denialists’ do, and the amount of people they reach and try to reach - often with considerable financial support from fossil fuel companies and billionaires with far more to gain from the propagation of such views than the ‘woke’ BBC has to gain from instilling ‘fear of summer.’

Some of these people will be the kind of voters who rejected Labour in protest at Sadiq Khan’s (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) ULEZ policy, and the kind of voters who Sunak’s Conservatives and - to a lesser extent - Labour itself are now courting as they row back from the policy they once supported, and retreat from climate change mitigation in general.

While there may well be valid criticisms that can be made of this policy in terms of its impact on low-income travellers, it’s only through policies like these that we will have a chance of making our cities healthier places to live in, and stave off the catastrophes that may otherwise become uncontrollable and unstoppable.

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We need to understand that we are not separate from nature, but an integral fleshy part of it, and that we are now the custodians of the planet on which our survival depends. ‘Numberless are the world’s wonders and none is more awe-inspiring than humanity,” wrote Sophocles in Antigone many centuries ago. ‘This thing that crosses the sea as it whorls under a stormy wind/finding a path on enveloping waves/It wears down imperishable Earth, too.’

The earth may be imperishable, but it can be made unfit for human life and for many other forms of life, and humanity will not be so awe-inspiring if we allow our common home to become an overheated desert, and cannot find the collective will to do something to prevent it when we still had had the chance to.

To call this a tall order would be something of an understatement, and we need to recognise the possibility that we may fail to pull it off. It is possible that the stupid, the dishonest, and the selfish streak that runs through humanity - supported by social and political structures that have no interest in humanity becoming anything else - may prove to be more powerful than the proactive development of collective responsibility for the damage we have already done and may yet do.

Because if we walk - not even sleepwalking but with eyes wide open - into the ‘age of boiling’, then it won’t matter that humanity once produced the likes of Bach, Hendrix, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Picasso, Buddha or Rosa Parks, because all the great men and women, and all the geniuses, and all the expressions of ordinary humanity that distinguish our species at its best will not have been enough to save us from humanity at its worst.

If we fail, then it won’t matter who we loved or what we cared about, and what kind of world we wanted our children and grandchildren to live in. It will mean that we have succumbed to the worst of us, and listened to the worst of us, and voted for leaders who could not be bothered to save us. It will mean that the history that nineteenth century bourgeois scientists once believed was based on progress and the pursuit of perfection was in fact the tragic story of a species that was smart enough to dominate the planet but not smart enough to save it.

Last year William Shatner - the original Captain Kirk in Star Trek - wrote movingly of his first trip to real rather than fictional space at the age of 90. Shatner described the contrast between the ‘feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration’ that he expected to feel, and his ‘deepest grief’ ‘contemplating our planet from above’:

What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

We don’t need to go to space to understand that ‘welcoming warmth.’ We witness it every morning when we wake up and draw back the curtains; when we turn out the lights at the end of the day and close our eyes to sleep. We can see it when we go for a walk in our local park, when we go to the beach or the mountains, when we feel the rain and cold; when we watch the delight with which children respond to the world in which they find themselves.

We need to save all this - for ourselves and for others, and for those who come afterwards. We need leaders who can help us save it. We can’t accept any other kind. No ifs. No buts. No postponements or adjournments. No more fetishization of ‘growth’.

No one can say this will be easy. There are powerful vested interests that will do everything to prevent such action, or simply seek to sow enough seeds of doubt to encourage inaction. No species has ever been required to take collective action like this, because no species has ever been in the position in which we find ourselves - masters of the planet and yet still dependent on it even as we contribute to its ongoing ecological collapse.

Yet during the Covid pandemic we showed - up to a point - that we can act collectively to save ourselves, that we can cooperate and make sacrifices for the common good.

The climate emergency requires the same urgency, and the same levels of planning, foresight, and cooperation.

It’s so much easier to do nothing, and tell ourselves that nothing needs to be done, or that nothing can be done. But if we succumb to inertia or self-interest, or despair, we will find that the ‘already-existing dystopias’ of the present are just the beginning.

And at the risk of sounding ‘scaremongering’ or inducing ‘fear of summer’, it’s worth pointing out that dystopian dramas may make for riveting Netflix series, but we will not want to be spectators of the real eco-dystopias that may be just around the corner.

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Waiting for the Foxarians

I’ve always had a soft spot for the BBC. It probably started with Hector’s House, Z Cars, and The Magic Roundabout. Or the Play for Today and the Wednesday Play, which hosted some of the most original and cutting edge drama that has ever appeared on television.

Or it might have been John Arlott’s soft Hampshire burr on long summer days when the cricket was always on all day. Or the years when I lived in Spain in the 1990s, and did freelance radio work for the World Service. Occasionally I would visit Broadcasting House to record a longer programme I was presenting.

These were the days of tape, and I used to watch awestruck as BBC producers expertly sliced and spliced spools to isolate quotes and remove non sequiturs. I also appreciated the streak of creativity running through the World Service, which meant that you could pitch ideas for any kind of content - particularly anything to do with art and culture - and you would at least get a hearing.

In 1999 I attended a BBC writing workshop, where a producer played us an old clip from the fifties, in which a very posh presenter introduced a piece of music by intoning ‘This. Is. A. Symphony’ before explaining what a symphony was, in the cut glass accent of coronation-era Britain. This was long before Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies opened up the notion of what culture was and could be.

The BBC’s presentation was condescending, paternalistic, and earnestly Reithian, in its determination to educate a public that the speaker clearly assumed to be seriously ignorant and in need of education from its betters.

We all laughed, but we laughed affectionately. Because we knew the BBC was a mass of contradictions. Though it comes second only to the Royal Family as an iconic British institution and an expression of post-imperial ‘soft power’, it has found space over the years for genuinely subversive and iconoclastic writers like Ken Loach, Alan Clarke, David Hare, Stephen Poliakov, Mike Leigh, Buchi Emecheta, Shane Meadows, Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Though it can be pompous, po-faced, pedestrian, middle-of-the-road, and drearily conservative, it can also be brilliant, creative, challenging, and trail-blazing. Some of that affection has vanished - on my part at least - on realising the extent of managerial collusion in the crimes of Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris.

But I don’t damn the entire institution because of its management, and the BBC was hardly unique in this respect. In these dystopian ‘post-truth’ times, I’ve often despaired of the BBC’s willingness to find ‘balance’ by bringing in the most dubious rightwing contrarians and thinktank operatives. To my mind the BBC played a major role in the rise of UKIP, Nigel Farage, and Brexit - though fat lot of thanks they got for it.

I don’t even watch BBC News any more. I find it too superficial and too politically timid, and too beholden to government talking points. This might be due to the endless Tory bullying, or the presence of Tory placemen such as Robbie Gibb and the utterly shameless Richard Sharp in the upper echelons of the organisation.

Whatever the reasons, I look for news and commentary elsewhere. But I still watch stunning documentaries such as David Olusoga’s Black and British, Once Upon a Time in Iraq and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, or the harrowing Inside the Iranian Uprising. And I can’t help noticing that the Tory Party and the far-right - a gap that is currently narrower than a piece of cigarette paper - seem to absolutely loathe the BBC, and looks for any reason to undermine and discredit it.

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The Huw Edwards scandal is the latest example of this. I have no political loyalty whatsoever to Edwards. I’m sympathetic to his predicament - up to a point. But even though the sordid details that have become public reveal no evidence of criminality, they certainly exude a distinct odour of exploitation that must surely be sackable.

And yet from the moment the Sun broke this story, the Tory/hard right nexus has been all over it, defending the Sun’s reporting, attacking the BBC management, and generally behaving as if a sinkhole had just swallowed London. Priti Patel felt the need to comment on it. Even Sunak - the same man who hasn’t even the guts to appear in parliament to defend the Privileges Committee - took time out of a NATO summit to make his insipid voice heard.

Day after day, rightwing Twitterati raged at the ‘hypocrisy’ of the BBC in not investigating Edwards, even though the organization was in fact investigating him. Or else they accused the ‘left’ - in other words everyone who is not them - of double standards because they weren’t as outraged at the Edwards story as the right thought they should be.

Literally every rightwing commentator, presenter, and troll from the Daily Mail to GB News was at it. ‘If Huw Edwards was a GB News presenter, the liberal left would be screaming for his head,’ howled Toby Young. ‘ But because he’s a pillar of the BBC…’ you get the drift.

Brendan O’Neill, naturellement, was also working his usual arid contrarian seam with a piece on ‘Huw Edwards and the hypocrisy of the elites.’ Paul Embery was in on the act. Dan Wootton - well there’s a story isn’t there? - also put his few cents in, now deleted from Twitter.

On and on it went, like a thousand screeching crows descending on the sleep of reason. But there is method in this madness. We know that the Murdoch outlets want to damage the BBC because it interferes with Murdoch’s business model.

The politicians and pundits who flocked to the Sun’s story like flies to a dungheap have other motives. One of them is fairly straightforward: they resent and also envy the power and influence of a national broadcasting service that is not sufficiently in thrall to their cultural and political agenda.

The Resistible Rise of GB News

Despite the regular flow of Tory placemen at the top, they believe the BBC is infected with the ‘woke’ virus. They want something like Fox News. More specifically, they want GB News.

There was a time when many of us laughed at GB News, as a succession of mad-looking presenters in murky 70s-era studios read aloud letters from Hugh Janus and Ivor Bigcock. Even Andrew Neill bailed from the horrorshow, though he probably regrets it now, and the rest of us looked forward to its prompt demise.

In these times, happy political endings are few and far between, and we had not foreseen how fervently a collapsing Conservative Party would embrace GB News as its own propaganda channel. Or that four serving Tory MPs would present their own programmes on GB News- the first time this has ever happened in the history of British broadcasting.

Who, in their wildest dystopian nightmares, could have imagined that Lee Anderson would shoot a promotional video for his £100,000-per-year show on the rooftop terrace of parliament itself?

Only this week the Tory MP Caroline Dinenage hosted a parliamentary drinks party for the channel, which included guests like this:

Bear in mind that GB news has breached broadcasting rules on two occasions; that Hope not Hate has accused the channel of providing a platform for ‘the far right, conspiracy theorists, and racists’; that its presenters traffic in messages like this:

And this:

None of this seems to have bothered the MPs who present on the channel, or the two home secretaries who attended the party, or Dinenage. Earlier this year, Dinenage was a guest on GB News, where she told Esther McVey and her husband that ‘The BBC has become the emblem, the token of the battle in the culture wars. It is really in an existential crisis at the moment about its future.’

This interview was given before Dinenage was elected chair of the House of Commons culture select committee, which is currently looking at the government’s proposed media legislation, including changes to impartiality requirements. Whatever Dinenage’s take on ‘partiality’ is, the fact that someone in her position would invite a fringe rightwing tv channel for a private party in parliament is an indication of how far GB News has come since the days of Ivor BigCock.

This is a channel with seemingly endless amounts of money - so much that it has even lured some of the mischievous little scamps at Novara Media to grace its studios with their august Gramscian intellects. It’s a channel that is clearly seeking to become the British Fox News, and it’s doing this with the full-throated support of the mainstream and not-so-mainstream right.

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To say this is not very Reithian would be understating it considerably. In order to achieve this kind of dominance, and for the politicians concerned to achieve the access to their would-be voters that GB News gives them, the BBC must go, or at least be weakened, hollowed out, and gutted of its liberal-wokeist tendencies.

This week none other than David Frost or ‘Lord’ Frost as we are now obliged to call him, entered the fray. Having spent too much time on Twitter, I’m used to hearing Frosty the Nomark enter pretty much every fray, and none of what he ever has to say is particularly interesting.

Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised to hear the Great Man paraphrasing Matthew Arnold, because Frost is just not the kind of guy I can imagine poring over Culture and Anarchy or Dover Beach. He did this in an article in the Telegraph, (paywalled) in which he accused the BBC of a ‘colossal sense of self-absorption and self-regard’ (Pot. Kettle. Black), because it had spent too much time covering ‘the woes of Huw Edwards.’

One can only imagine what Frost and the Telegraph would have said if the BBC had spent no time covering the Edwards story. Baron Blowhard then accused the BBC of not fulfilling its ‘public interest’ remit, and singled out Marianna Spring’s ‘absurd, but dangerous “disinformation” team’ as an attack on free speech.

Without pausing to consider that reporting on disinformation is not the same as banning it, His Lordship moved on:

That can’t be sustained. Instead, it [the BBC] should stand for genuine excellence: high-quality, impartial, factual news; presenting and funding the Western canon of serious music, art, theatre and drama, literature; serious history and science; and, yes, serious politics

Serious politics. From Frost. In the Telegraph. And then we get this:

The BBC once created the best that had been made, written, or thought. Now it seems ashamed of it. It doesn’t even make available for viewing Lord Clark’s great series Civilisation (though it is on YouTube), though it made an embarrassing, ideologically loaded substitute a few years back, and has left it to organisations such as the New Culture Forum, with its superb new series The West, to fill the gap.

This is where Matthew Arnold comes in. The actual quote comes from Culture and Anarchy, where Arnold defines his belief in culture as

the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically …

The idea that the ‘best’ culture makes a society better is quite Reithian in a way. But Frost’s idea of the ‘best’ notably doesn’t include ‘the world.’ For him, the best is only the West, and any attempt to look beyond that is ‘embarrassing’ and ‘ideologically loaded.’

Having seen and admired the BBC’s superb revisiting of Clark’s landmark programmes, in the series Civilisations (note the plural here) presented by Simon Schama, Mary Beard, David Olusoga and others, I have to say - and I’m not at all surprised to find myself saying it - that Baron Blowhard is talking out of his arse.

Rather than consider how this series might widen our understanding of culture and civilization, or consider the existence of other civilizations, or listen to what some of the finest historians and cultural commentators of our era have to say about these matters, Frost recommends watching reruns of Civilisation, and if you can’t do that - because the woke BBC ‘doesn’t make it available’ then you can watch The West - a series produced by the New Culture Forum.

The NCF is an old culture war thinktank formed by Peter Whittle, UKIP’s former cultural spokesman. It has a Youtube channel, on which Whittle has interviewed the likes of Lionel Shriver, Claire Fox, James Delingpole and Charles Moore.

The West was made by Marc Sidwell, director of research at the Henry Jackson Society, and it explains its intention to explore ‘the history, achievements and genius of Western civilisation. Inspired by legendary TV programmes such as Civilisation, Kenneth Clark's 1969 masterpiece, The West is a bold reminder of who we are - and why our culture is worth defending.’

‘Who we are…Our culture…defending.’ If this sounds like culture war, it’s because it probably is. Matthew Arnold once argued that

all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it—motives eminently such as are called social—come in as part of the grounds of culture.

We can question whether or not that is true, and whether ‘culture’, in the sense that Arnold understood it, really is the essential ingredient that makes these things possible. But it is an admirable and even noble objective that has nothing to with culture as Baron Frost and his culture warrior pals understand it.

They don’t want us to be better or happier, or more knowledgeable or more thoughtful, or prevent human error, let alone diminish the sum of human misery. They just want us to feel proud and British, in the sense of ‘Great’ British, and also ‘Western’.

Anything else is political correctness gone mad, or as Sidwell puts it ‘the long march of the left’ through our institutions. And that is one more reason why they want the BBC gone, or stripped of its ideological excesses.

If that happens, then the barbarians really will have triumphed, and, as Arnold might have put it, we will be truly ‘Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

Which is one more reason why I will always defend the BBC, with all its flaws, over all the puerile and self-interested attempts these people make to destroy it. Because I know that if I want to seek out ‘the best that has been thought or said in the world’, I will always have a better chance of finding it at the BBC than I ever will at GB News, or the reactionary wasteland that Baron Frost and his pals inhabit.

And if I have to choose between Dan Wootton and Reith, I’ll take Reith.

Every time.

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Dear Bob

Image courtesy of cahttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Us......

Dear Bob

Hi. You don’t know me, but unfortunately I know you. I first heard the name ‘Robert Jenrick’ back in 2020. You were Housing Secretary then, and like most of the British public, I hadn’t really paid much attention to you until January that year, when it was revealed that you helped Richard Desmond avoid a £30m-£50m community levy to Tower Hamlets council. You did this by approving Desmond’s £1 billion Westferry housing development on the Isle of Dogs, the day before the council increased its community charges on new developments.

We learned that you had sat next to Desmond at a Conservative party fundraising event on 18 November the previous year, where Desmond showed you a video of the project on his mobile phone; that the government’s own planning inspector advised against the development, on the grounds that more affordable housing was needed in London’s poorest borough, and also because the development harmed the character of the area.

But you didn’t care about any of that, because Desmond was a rich man, and like most Tory MPs, you listen to rich men before you listen to anyone else, especially when they donate to your party. And Desmond knew what kind of man you were, and tickled you like a salmon, when he sent you a message in December 2019 saying:

Good news finally the inspectors reports have gone to you today, we appreciate the speed as we don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing! We all want to go with the scheme and the social housing we have proposed and spent a month at the Marxist town hall debating, thanks again, all my best, Richard.

Billionaire pornographer versus ‘Marxists’ at the town hall. It’s a no brainer, really. And so you ensured that the deal got through on 14 January - just in time to avoid the levy. And then two weeks later Desmond popped £12,000 into the Tory party coffers. Good job!

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In any normal country, this would count as corruption, and you would be gone for good, but we haven’t been normal for a long time. Johnson had just become PM, and so you kept your job. You were repentant, sort of. You said how much you ‘regretted’ sitting next to Desmond. I bet you did. I would have regretted it too, in your position.

And you published your text messages in order to show how you kept your distance from him after that November meeting, even though these messages merely make it perfectly clear that both you and Dezza knew the game you were playing and the roles you were expected to play.

You conceded that your decision was technically unlawful, while also insisting - oddly - that there was ‘no actual bias’ towards Desmond. You even claimed that your decision was an expression of ‘natural justice’, despite being unlawful. How was that possible? No one knew, and I bet you didn’t know either.

Then the pandemic kicked in, and all that sleaze was forgotten. Even in the midst of the apocalypse, Tory life continued on as normal. You continued to prosper. You claimed expenses on a house you hardly used. You broke lockdown rules. You got a new job as Communities Secretary where -quelle surprise - it turned out that you were channelling most of the money from the government’s £725 million regeneration fund to Tory constituencies.

The least that can be said this, is that you are a loyal servant of your party or yourself - the difference is always hard to tell these days. Beyond Torylandia however, your brazenness and dodginess earned you a nickname: ‘Honest Bob Jenrick.’

It sounded almost Shakespearian, and it wasn’t a compliment.

You didn’t care, or if you did you never showed it. But even Johnson must have seen you as a liability, otherwise he wouldn’t have sacked you in September 2021 - nearly two years late, but never mind. And then Truss brought you back, because by then the barrel was being well and truly scraped. And when Truss went, Sunak was so short on loyalty - never mind talent - that he gave you the job of Minister for Immigration.

This is a job that tends to bring out the worst in politicians, especially nowadays, and in your case the worst was easy to find. Because it was at this point that you stopped being the smarmy, baby-faced Tory with the weird hooded eyes who appeared on the tv from time to time spouting scripted nonsense with your butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth sincerity.

The Stop-the-Boats Man

No. You were now the stop-the-boats man, riding backseat on the tandem to Rwanda with Suella de Vil’s hair streaming in the wind as she let out a crazed yell. You took to this role as if you’d been waiting for it your life. And who could blame you. Instead of grubbing around for millionaires and chucking money at the Tory shires, you could now appeal to the worst people in the country.

How you took to it.

In a speech last April, you put your cards on the table. You spoke of potentially ‘astronomical’ invasions of the UK by millions of migrants. You condemned ‘unprecedented amounts of illegal migration which have placed our infrastructure and public services under strain, weakened community cohesion and set back integration efforts’, even though successive Tory governments have placed more strain on these services than the migrants who have arrived here.

You said the ‘UK’s adversaries are weaponising the flow of people in Europe’s near abroad’ without providing a shred of evidence for this. You warned that ‘excessive, uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion of the British public’, even though the UK hosts less than 1 percent of the global total of refugees.

Naturally, you supported the Rwanda policy - the foundation stone on which your government’s crumbling authority rests - on the grounds that ‘Deterrence must be restored’, even though there is no evidence that the policy would have a deterrent effect.

You argued in favour of the policy again and again in parliament, without ever once explaining how it could work on its own terms or whether it could work at all. You claimed that sending refugees to Rwanda was ‘humanitarian’, even though it was a deterrent, twisting the meaning out of words in order to justify your descent into the legal and moral void.

You did this in the same way the EU, and almost every country in Europe does, by claiming that you are saving refugees from ‘criminal gangs’, when the evidence of the last thirty-odd years makes it clear that refugees use these gangs in order to circumvent the ‘paper walls’ that keep them out.

You know this, just as you are perfectly aware of the cruelty at the heart of the Rwanda policy. But your government, for some time now, has sought to turn the channel boat crossings to its political advantage, and you accepted this challenge with all the amorality that you have already demonstrated in your other activities.

To witness this grubby hypocrisy and fake humanitarian posturing week after week was depressing enough. And then, you did something truly astounding: you ordered officials at the Kent Intake Unit - which takes in unaccompanied child asylum seekers - to paint over murals of Mickey Mouse.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Mickey Mouse. Even as a kid I found him unappealing and charmless. But lots of kids like him, and you knew that.

According to the staff at the centre, you thought the mural was ‘too welcoming’ and sent the ‘wrong message.’ And you wanted to send a different message, that would hurt and demoralise the children who would be sitting in that waiting room.

Perhaps this was part of your ‘deterrence’ planning. Perhaps you thought that if kids see cartoons on the wall they will send a message on their luxury mobile phones to their friends, and then there will millions of children on boats, queuing up to see Mickey Mouse.

If you really believe that, you must be an idiot. And if you don’t believe it, then you simply engaging in an act of petty, malicious vindictiveness that shames your government, and the country that has allowed itself to fall into your hands.

Of course you denied this, and claimed that the mural was only removed because most of the people who passed through the centre last year were teenagers, and therefore the mural was not ‘age appropriate.’ And yet you also ordered murals to be painted over at the nearby Manston detention camp near Ramsgate, which also takes in children and families. Last month His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) praised the family marquee at the centre for its ‘bright, cheerful colours.’

Too cheerful for you, it seems. And given the smirk that never seems to be far from your lips, I suspect that you are lying about the murals, and that you actually enjoy your notoriety, and your popularity in certain circles. Once you shilled for billionaires, now you’re the people’s tribune - defending our borders, our identity and our cohesion with an exemplary and unsentimental demonstration of ‘toughness’ aimed at…children.

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All this has precedents. You studied History at university. You’re married to the child of Holocaust survivors. Maybe you remember that most states in the 1930s stopped taking accepting Jewish refugees. You may be aware of the 1938 Evian conference, where 32 countries met to coordinate an international response to the Jewish refugee problem, and refused - with the exception of the Dominican Republic - to take in refugees themselves.

In those years Jews were also seen as a potential economic burden and a threat to ‘community cohesion’, associated with ‘alien’ lifestyles and Communism. And because countries refused to take them ‘legally’, the only way most Jews could get out of Germany was to use what we now call ‘illegal’ routes, which sometimes involved paying ‘people smugglers’ to get a visa or cross a border.

You may also remember that the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t occur instantaneously. It was an incremental process, in which the Nazis simultaneously prepared the German public to become a ‘persecuting society’ and tested its responses, with a constant flow of laws and decrees that banned Jews from the right to drive a car; from holding government jobs; from attending plays and concerts; from owning farms; from having health insurance, to use the same playgrounds and locker rooms as German children.

Every law and prohibition was intended to cut another of the ties that bound Jews to German society, and in normalising this stripping away of rights and freedoms, the Nazis were able to pave the way for even stronger measures.

And this, in a way, is what your government are doing to the ‘illegal’ immigrants you persist in demonising. I’m not suggesting that you are contemplating murder or genocide - let’s put that straw man back in the barn. But it isn’t always necessary to be a Nazi, to drink from the toxic waters that the Nazis once fished from.

Sometimes being a corrupt rightwing populist government playing on fear and prejudice can take a country in a similar direction. And this, in my opinion, is what you are doing.

Your Rwanda policy is an invitation to the British public to fear and hate the people who are trying to come here, and the fake-humanitarian rhetoric that you and your fellow-ministers have used to justify this policy cannot disguise its essential cruelty. The policy may be unworkable in itself, but it provides your flailing party with a political weapon that you can use to shore up your collapsing political fortunes.

All you have to do is shout ‘Rwanda!’ or ‘lefty lawyers!’ or ‘stop the boats!’ and you will find an audience in this increasingly bitter, disorientated, and frightened country, in which too many people are too willing to blame foreigners for our collective political and social failures.

You didn’t start all this, of course. Many people have brought us to this pass. But the fact that you have embraced it all so eagerly, to the point when you are now removing children’s cartoons, does make you something of a monster.

Not the kind with horns and a tail. Nothing so grandiose. But the petty functionary-monster, the everyday banality of evil kind of monster, who does what people more powerful than you tell you to do, whatever that may be, and always kicks down in order to lift himself up. You may have taken down Mickey Mouse, but make no mistake about it: you are the rodent here.

And the fact that you are able to do this, without repercussions, is another demonstration of how far your party has pulled us all down, and how much, if we are to stop ourselves from falling even further, we need you gone.

Sincerely,

Matt

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