Matthew Carr's Blog, page 22

Comrade Johnson: When Boris Met Sasha

On the eve of Boris Johnson’s coronation as PM, I have a counterfactual for you, readers.

Imagine that we’re in 2015 in the middle of the Labour Party leadership contest.   All polls suggest that Jeremy Corbyn is going to win.  Only days before his inevitable election a Reuters reporter publishes a story alleging that Corbyn is a close friend of a Russian businessman and former arms tycoon – let’s call him Sergei Gorbovsky – with close connections to the Kremlin and the Russian secret service, the FSB.

The well-researched and detailed story also shows that said businessman has donated £1 million to the Labour Party, in addition to a £25,000 donation to Seamus Milne or Jennie Formby, say.

The story goes on to relate Gorbovsky’s contacts with other leading members of Corbyn’s campaign.  It claims that Corbyn and Gorbovsky spent many hours plotting into the early hours for reasons that are not made clear; that Corbyn’s decision to run for the Labour Party leadership was influenced by conversations with a group of unnamed “East European businessmen”, who persuaded him to put his name forward.

As a result of these revelations pictures of Corbyn in his Lenin hat are plastered over every outraged frontpage.   Angry politicians in the House of Commons deliver passionate speeches heavily sprinkled with words like ‘treason’, ‘communism’, ‘national security’ and ‘Russian oligarchs.’

There are calls for investigations into the “malign interference of the Kremlin in British politics.”  Reporters doorstep Corbyn’s house.  A worried-looking Laura Kuenssberg speaks on camera on the six o’clock news about the “troubling questions” these allegations have raised.  Andrew Marr waxes indignant with every interview with a Labour MP.  People want answers and they want them now.

In the real world, of course things are very different.  And now, as we prepare for the worst government in British history to be replaced by the worst government in British history, it’s worth considering how different they really are.

On Friday, Reuters journalist Catherine  Belton reported that Boris Johnson was a friend of a former Russian arms tycoon and resident in the UK named Alexander Temerko.  According to Belton, Temerko made his fortune in the 1990s, like so many Russian oligarchs, and “forged close links with the Russian defence ministry and security services.”

After falling out with the Kremlin and falling foul of the law, Temerko fled to the UK, which is always more receptive to Russian oligarchs fallen on hard times than it is to refugees fallen on hard times who come to the country by boat.

According to Reuters, Temerko has given more than £1 million to the Conservative Party since he became a UK citizen in 2011.  He also gave £25,000 to Boris Johnson’s campaign manager James Wharton – a paid adviser to the UK energy firm Aquind Ltd that Temerko directs – who also happens to be the MP who introduced the bill calling for a referendum on EU membership in 2013.

Temerko appears to be a strong supporter of Brexit, which he described as “a revolution against bureaucracy”.  Temerko doesn’t say what kind of “bureaucracy” he is concerned about, but we can probably take it for granted that he isn’t overly concerned about bendy bananas or kippers on the Isle of Man

Tmerko comes over as rather slippery and elusive in Belton’s piece.  Though he has at other times claimed that he isn’t a supporter of Brexit, he spoke warmly of his “close friend” Boris Johnson.  Back in 2016, he told the BBC that Johnson would make ” a great Prime Minister” in the mould of Winston Churchhill.  More than three years later Reuters describes how ” at the beginning of Johnson’s tenure as Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, they would often ‘plot’ late into the evening over a bottle of wine on the balcony of Johnson’s office at parliament in Westminster”.

So our Foreign Secretary was “plotting” with a former Russian arms tycoon with close connections to the Russian military and state security service – a man  who praises Nikolai Patrushev the “hawkish head of Russia’s Security Council and former long-time head of the FSB security service”?

Quite the page-turner, this one.

Reuters doesn’t say what they were “plotting” about, but it does say that Temerko didn’t like Theresa May, and that he joined “an unsuccessful attempt led by members of a group of hardline Conservative MPs, the European Research Group, to remove Theresa May as leader in December 2018.”

Temerko appears to have switched his allegiance to Jeremy Hunt, and that might be why he told Reuters that ” a group of East European businessmen” had “helped sway Johnson into siding in February 2016 with campaigners for Britain’s departure from the EU after months of sitting on the fence.”

No one will be surprised that the ERG chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg disclaims any links between Temerko and his group.  Or that the Kremlin denies any connection between Temerko and the Kremlin.   Or that neither Johnson nor any of his associates have wanted to talk to Reuters about these connections.

But going back to my initial counterfactual, what is truly jaw-dropping about this story is the reaction of the British media and its political class.   Labour MP Ben Bradshaw has described the Reuters findings as “extremely troubling” and suggested that they may indicate another attempt by the Kremlin “to disrupt, destabilise and influence our democracy”.

Bradshaw has rightly described it as “extraordinary” that an ex Tory MP running Johnson’s leadership campaign is also employed by Temerko.

And that, folks, is about it.  Elsewhere there is nothing.  No questions asked. No urgent questions in the commons.  No six o’clock news.  What did these ” East European businessmen” say to Johnson to make him change his mind about Brexit?  Why do they care so much?  Why did a former Russian arms tycoon give money to Johnson’s campaign manager, who also happens to be his own employee?  Why is Temerko so keen on Brexit?  What were he and Johnson “plotting” about?

As Buffalo Springfield once sang, there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.  There may of course, be perfectly innocent, logical and straightforward answers to all the questions Reuters has raised.

But it really is striking, as we contemplate the man who is about to become our next PM. is how few people even seem to be interested in asking or answering them.

 

The post Comrade Johnson: When Boris Met Sasha appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

“Running Around Like Idiots”: Britain’s Brexit Crisis

“The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” declares Goneril’s husband the Duke of Albany at the end of King Lear, as the body of the old king is taken away.  Given the carnage, corruption, madness, vanity and greed that has preceded this observation, Albany’s attempt to reach a morally uplifting conclusion comes over as a little banal and inadequate.

The same could be said of Nick Robinson’s recommendation, at the end of last night’s Panorama on Britain’s Brexit Crisis, that our politicians should stop talking about “having our cake and eating it” and that ” What our politicians owe us now is honesty, about that, and the challenges ahead.”

The problem with Robinson’s advice is not that it isn’t true.  It’s just that this observation, like Albany’s, does not encapsulate the sheer awfulness of what his own programme has just laid bare.  Because Britain’s Brexit Crisis makes it clear that what has taken place these last three years is a genuine political tragedy – without the poetry – that is in large part due to a collection of politicians who would be more suited for an episode of The Thick of It or a Brian Rix farce than anything remotely Shakespearean.

Robinson is too polite – and perhaps too chummy with some of the Tory politicians involved in this debacle to actually say this – but others have no such reservations.  The former vice-president of the European Commission Franz Timmermans describes his amazement on finding out that early on in the negotiating process that the Brexiters and the British government had no “Harry Potter-like book with all the tricks” to bring to the negotiations, in words that will ring out through the ages:

“And then I saw the first public utterances by David Davis and I saw him not coming, negotiating, grandstanding elsewhere. Oh my God they haven’t got a plan.  They haven’t got a plan. That was really shocking for me actually, because then the damage if you don’t have a plan…It’s like Lance Corporal Jones, you know.  ‘Don’t panic!  Don’t panic!’ Running around like idiots.  Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, but it’s about time we became a bit harsh.”

It is, and few people who watched last night’s programme are likely to disagree with this assessment.   David Davis is first seen walking up to Downing Street to become the new Brexit Secretary, with the kind of smug smile that you might find on a cat presented with a bucketful of Dreamies.

Even in retrospect, Davis is all bluff and bluster, laced with nonsense and jokey bitterness.    At one point he accuses the EU of adopting a “strategy, which is to use time against us”, because Michel Barnier kept insisting that the clock was ticking following the triggering of Article 50 in the spring of 2017.

The fact that it was Davis’ own government, with the support of his party and the Labour opposition, that committed the country to a two-year timeline when it had no consensus on how to leave the European Union or how to do it,  does not even begin to enter into Davis’ assessment of the EU’s dark machinations.

At another point Davis accuses Michel Barnier of a “set-up” because the EU’s chief negotiator turned up to negotiations with a file of papers outlining the EU’s negotiating strategy, whereas Davis turned up without anything at all, which made him look as though he was “winging it”.  Davis is aggrieved that this made him look bad, but too dishonest to admit that the reason he looked bad was because he was in fact, winging it.

Davis and his advisers also appear to have been jealous of Barnier’s polish and expertise, and one of his officials sniggers at how he and his colleagues had Barnier sit in a chair so that he wouldn’t “look good.”   If this sounds childish, it’s because these politicians are shockingly childish, and had nothing much to offer except their childishness, their ambition, their fanaticism, and their complete lack of understanding of what the EU was and what leaving it would mean.

Faced with the yawning discrepancy between what they said would happen and what actually could happen, the more extreme Brexiters, like Davis, Raab and Johnson simply resort to blaming the failure to leave on the EU, or the absence of “confidence” and “belief”.

This is only to be expected.  It’s an unspoken rule of all Brexiters that they never responsible for anything.

But the tragedy/farce that we are trapped in,  is also in part due to politicians who privately recognized that leaving the EU could not be achieved without inflicting serious harm on the country, who knew that there was no plan or strategy, and yet rejected the expertise of officials who might have helped them, and replaced them with clowns like Davis, Johnson and Raab.

Referring to the decision to trigger Article 50, Philip Hammond says ” With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that was wrong” and that Britain should have decided what kind of Brexit it wanted before beginning the process.

Really, you should not need hindsight to realise this, and the fact that Hammond thought otherwise says so much about how we got into this mess.   Britain’s Brexit Crisis is filled with similarly jawdropping revelations, in which the amateurishness, bad faith, lack of preparation and inflated expectations of our politicians contrasted with the expertise and professionalism of EU politicians who understood what Brexit meant better than the Brexiters themselves.

Faced with accusations that the EU set out to “punish” and “humiliate” Britain, Barnier declares that Brexit has “no added value” and describes it as  “negative negotiation” and a “lose lose game for everybody.”

This is what it is, but don’t expect any of those who set us on this path to admit it.  Britain’s Brexit Crisis is a useful reminder of how we got here.  So watch it and weep.

And instead of the Duke of Albany or Nick Robinson, or even Corporal Jones, we might to better to remember the Fool’s words to the mad King Lear who has given away his kingdoms and found himself alone on the heath: “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool!/And yet I would not be thee, nuncle/Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ th’ middle.”

The post “Running Around Like Idiots”: Britain’s Brexit Crisis appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Stand With the Squad

Yesterday, in yet another of the dismal milestones that the Trump administration continues to carve into American political history, the US House of Representatives voted 240-187 to condemn the President of the United States for making racist statements.    This unprecedented rebuke followed Trump’s Twitter attack on the four recently-elected Democrat Congresswomen, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Taib and Ayanna Presley who make up ‘the squad’,  in which he declared:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.  Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.  Then come back and show us how…

As always Trump’s supporters have rushed to his defence.  Some have flat-out denied that these statements are racist.   Others clearly don’t care if they are – these tweets received 169,000 likes within the first couple of days.   A few pedants have tried to split the difference, and argued that Trump’s comments aren’t racist but merely nativist and xenophobic, as if that lifts them into some higher moral category.

We would do better not to be distracted by semantic smokescreens, and listen to what the objects of Trump’s bile are saying:

 

 

In telling these women that they should ‘go back where they came from’ Trump is recycling a long-established white nationalist trope that juxtaposes ‘indigenous’ – meaning white – people, with people of colour who are depicted as permanent outsiders because of where they came from, or where their parents and grandparents came from.   Trump also referenced another familiar trope; that immigrants, especially immigrants of a different colour, come from countries that are culturally defective, and that they bring these defects and inadequacies with them.

So just because Trump doesn’t use the N-word, or because he has shaken hands with black people, doesn’t mean that his comments are ‘not racist’ or that he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, as he has subsequently insisted.    In case anyone needed reminding – and these days, it seems that a lot of people do – race is never simply about ‘race’, skin colour, or biology, or the imagined size of someone’s skull or brain.

Racism is a social construction that invents its own meanings and justifications for the exclusion, domination and persecution of the people it depicts as outsiders, aliens, cultural inferiors or subhumans.

It might take these justifications from the Bible.  Or by grafting classical constructions of the barbarian Other into colonial conquest.   Or from racial pseudo-science that equates cultural ‘primitivism’ with skin colour or degrees of white and black ‘blood’.   And then again it might shift to religion or culture – ‘It’s not racist to hate Islam!’  Or it might fuse ‘race’ with hyper-nationalist, nativist and xenophobic narratives that make it possible to describe immigrants in general as criminals, rapists, or cultural intruders who need to go back where they came from so that ‘we’ can ‘take our country back.’

It’s a moveable feast of dank and disgusting food, and this is the meal Trump is serving up for his base.  He is deliberately and carefully stirring the pot, so that the rank odours will attract and ‘inspire’ more people  to behave as he did this week.

To call this poisonous and destructive does not even begin to describe it.   Yesterday Trump’s ghoul-like counsellor Kellyanne Conway responded to a question from a reporter about whether Trump’s comments were racist with the question ‘what’s your ethnicity?’

On the same day avowed white supremacist and all-round American Nazi Richard Spencer was inexplicably invited by CNN yesterday to  give his opinion on whether Trump’s tweets were racist.  Not surprisingly, Spencer concluded that they were, while adding that racist ‘tweets that are meaningless and cheap and express the kind of sentiments you might hear from your drunk uncle while he’s watching [Sean] Hannity’ were not enough for his movement.

Spencer isn’t entirely wrong.  Trump is not an ideological racist like he is, or like Hitler was.  He uses racism essentially for personal reasons, to keep himself in power and distract attention from the corruption,amorality and criminality at the heart of his sleazy administration.

Nevertheless in doing so he is lowering the bar for white supremacists, Nazis and racists everywhere.   He is actively emboldening and encouraging them, with the assistance and complicity of the news outlets which support him and some of those that supposedly don’t.   His own party voted against yesterday’s resolution, with the exception of 4 congressmen.

The GOP, to its eternal disgrace, is dancing to Trump’s tune, either because its representatives care about nothing but their own careers and don’t have the guts to speak up about what they know is wrong, or because they have actively embraced his message, like Lindsay Graham, who called the squad  ‘a bunch of communists.’

Let no one think this just an American problem.  Last year Steve Bannon told a National Front rally in France,  ‘Let them call you a racist…wear it as a badge of honour.’

This is the world that he would like to see, and Trump’s outbursts are instruments towards achieving that goal.  For this reason it’s enough to call his comments ‘inappropriate’ or even ‘totally unacceptable’ as our retiring Prime Minister just about managed to do.   Neither she nor her potential successors could bring herself to call his comments ‘racist’ and were clearly at pains not to have to use the word.

The rest of us should have no such reservations.  This is a racist president, mobilising and stoking dangerous forces in American society that are already coursing through Europe and through our own country.

He and those who think like him need to be shunned, resisted, and relentlessly opposed.

And the question we should be asking is not whether or not his comments were racist, but whether or not we are going to stand with the squad.

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Epstein’s Monsters

Many people will be familiar with the observation made by John Stuart Mill in 1867 that ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.’   This is true as far as it goes,  but there are also cases when the triumph of evil is not due to the passivity of ‘good men’, but to a wider systemic and societal amorality that enables bad men to get away with pretty much anything they want.

Take the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who has just been indicted on charges of sexual trafficking of minors, thanks to dogged investigative journalism from the Miami Herald.

Many people will have heard by now that Epstein is a financier and hedgefund manager, with a history of sexual abuse of minors stretching back decades.  Epstein was originally indicted in 2008, where he received an astonishingly lenient sentence of 13 months on charges of soliciting a 14-year-old girl for prostitution, even though 40 other girls had come forward to accuse him of rape and sexual assault – some of whom were as young as 13 or 14 when the assaults took place.

Some of these girls were recruited through modelling agencies – allegedly with the assistance of the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.  Others were young girls from poor, dysfunctional families, who recruited each other.  Epstein also had girls flown in from Eastern Europe.  All of them passed through his New York mansion, his house in Palm Beach, his New Mexico ranch and his Caribbean island, where they catered to the perverse whims of Epstein and his high-profile guests.

Epstein’s photos are very Ralph Lauren, with his long rangy look and the self-satisfied and vaguely enigmatic smile.    He cultivated an image as a cultured philantrophist, with interests in evolution, physics and sociobiology.  He became a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Few people understood exactly how he made his money, but he made a lot of it.   His roster of powerful friends included scientists, lawyers, politicians and Hollywood actors.  Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew – the list is long, and men who move in such illustrious circles will always be given a greater latitude then their counterparts in the world below.

In an unctuous hagiography of Epstein in 2002, New York Magazine oohed and aahed over the ‘man of mystery’ who ‘is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women’, who collected both ‘beautiful women’ and ‘beautiful minds.’

One of these minds was Bill Clinton, who described Epstein as ‘both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science.’

Epstein would have liked that article, but he was less keen on a Vanity Fair profile that came out in 2003, whose author spoke to two girls who had been sexually abused by him.  Under pressure from Epstein, the editor of Vanity Fair pulled these references, and Epstein continued as before.  Even when he was indicted in 2007, a battery of expensive lawyers – including Dershowitiz – worked with the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta to have most federal charges against dropped and sealed.

Had it not been for the Miami Herald, he would be en route to rehabilitation.   But now dozens of girls have come forward with accusations of rape and sexual abuse, and some of Epstein’s friends may be getting nervous.  Already Acosta – the man  DonaldTrump made his labor secretary – has resigned.   Which brings us to Trump himself.

Trump is now at pains to distance himself from Epstein, claiming ‘I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I have spoken with him for 15 years. I was not a fan. A long time ago. I’d say maybe 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.’

As always, Trump is lying, and his lies aren’t hard to prove.   In 1992 he and Epstein held a ‘calendar girl’ party at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in which they were the only two guests with 28 girls, for purposes one can only guess at.   The 2002 New York Magazine piece carries the following quote:

‘I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,’ Trump booms from a speakerphone. ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.’

In 2016, a lawsuit brought by ‘Jane Doe’ against Trump and Epstein, described how both men enjoyed their social life together in 1994, by raping and sexually assaulting her on various occasions at Epstein’s house when she was thirteen years old.  Even though her statement was supported by one of Epstein’s ‘party planners’, who witnessed some of these assaults, the lawsuit was dropped after Jane Doe’s attorney cited ‘numerous threats’ against her client.

So contrary to John Stuart Mill’s assertions, this is one man who was able to ‘compass his ends’, not because too many good men did nothing, but because too many men and women knew or suspected what was going on and did nothing.  Some may have been directly involved in what Epstein was doing.  Others may have been too dazzled by the money, wealth, power and celebrity that provides the dank froth on our 21st century plutocracies to give a damn about what was happening to people who did not have wealth or power.

Trump should have been nailed to the wall about that lawsuit.  Instead he is in the White House, and the Republican Party continues to grovel to him and so do British politicians and celebrity-narcissists like Piers Morgan.

Not many people are groveling to Epstein.  As Robert Wyatt once observed in a very different context, they now flee from him who onetime did him seek.  But Epstein is is only back in prison because one newspaper had the courage to do what so many should have done a long time ago.   Some of his friends will be nervous, and with good reason.

We can only hope that this time justice will be served, and well-served, not only to Epstein, but to the Orange Caligula and all the other big men who floated with them on the rancid surface of our new gilded age, basking in the impunity given to them by a star-struck and wealth-struck world that too often preferred not to look, or simply didn’t care about young girls who were considered to have no value at all.

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Our Ex-Man in Washington

One of the most extraordinary revelations during our ongoing descent into the political vortex has been the supine feebleness and incompetence with which the British ruling classes have responded to a direct threat from the right to their most cherished institutions.  Back in the 1970s there were weird rightwing organisations like Moral Rearmament, secret service plots, and coup plans involving top army officers in response to the trade union militancy and the prospect of a leftwing Labour government.

Since the referendum the mighty establishment, with all its pomp and circumstance, its fossilised parliamentary rituals seasoned over the centuries, its independent civil service, its robed judges, and its elected representatives have all come under increasingly vicious attack from the Brexit zealots within and beyond the radicalised Tea Party Conservatives, working in tandem with the Putin-Trump-Bannon axis to weaken and divide the country, and its response has been effectively, nothing, nada, niet, zilch.

Take this week’s ‘soft coup’ that forced the resignation of the UK Ambassador to the UK Sir Kim Darroch.  Last weekend Isabel Choketruth (not her real name), the Brexiter’s go to mouthpiece for stuff like this, published a piece in the Mail (also a go to Brexit platform), containing leaked ‘diptel’ messages from Darroch that were critical of Trump.

Actually they were extremely critical, but this is what ambassadors do, and Darroch’s messages were not meant for public consumption.   Nevertheless Trump responded in the way that he will always do – like a psychotic toddler, tweeting:

….thought of within the U.S. We will no longer deal with him. The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister. While I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent State Visit last month, it was the Queen who I was most impressed with!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2019

What a guy.  What a man.  Having refused to deal with the ambassador of a country with which the US was not at war, Trump effectively laid down a challenge to our new Global Britain: Sack your ambassador and get me another.  Also, though this was not said out loud, Trump’s veto meant that we would not get the great trade deal that Brexiters believe is the only thing that can save them.

So off went Liam ‘Machinegun’ Fox to apologise to Ivanka Nepototski.

Meanwhile what would happen here?  Brexiters from the Tory Party to Nigel Mosley-Farage were scandalised – scandalised I tell you – by Darroch’s observations, and immediately demanded the resignation of a man whose diplomatic career, as Choketruth pointed out,  included ‘top roles dealing with EU bureaucrats in Brussels’ which have ‘ earned him a reputation as a europhile, and he is mistrusted by Brexiteers’.

A disreputable gang of Tories and ‘Brexiteers’ joined in the outrage at Darroch’s ‘trash-talking’ , as Piers Morgan put it, of the Mighty Trump.  But would the brave new Global Britain – the country that has just rejected EU ‘vassalage’ – stand up to this?  Would it support its own diplomats?

Well yes, and no, because one wants to defend one’s diplomats but one doesn’t want to offend the Orangeman any further.  One person who really doesn’t want to offend him is Boris de Waffle Johnson, who once insulted Trump himself back in 2015.  But that was then, and this week, during his debate with Hunt, Johnson refused to say whether he would support Darroch as PM, because that would be ‘presumptuous’.

As a result Darroch handed in his resignation.  If all this reeks of a stitch-up, it should, though naturally Ms Choketruth denies any such intentions:

This is ludicrous. Like I’ve said, sometimes a great story is just that; not some kind of global conspiracy. MASSIVE eye roll. https://t.co/jUrfdQblSM

— Isabel Oakeshott (@IsabelOakeshott) July 10, 2019

This the kind of statement for which the word ‘disingenuous’ was invented. Choketruth once had another ‘great story’, in the form of emails between her ‘Bad Boy of Brexit’ pal Arron Banks, which she sat on for more than a year until another journalist effectively forced to own up to them. The reasons she sat on them are the same reasons she colluded in the unraveling of Darroch – to remove an official in a key position considered to be too close to the EU, who the Brexiters would like to replace with one of their own.

This was why Bankski was having a jokey tweet about it yesterday.

Thanks for the endorsement, I’ve got a bit on at the moment , I would have thought @LordAshcroft would be ideal given his close relationship with the UK and US government ! @IsabelOakeshott https://t.co/pwz4jMXcY3

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) 10 July 2019

Lord Ashcroft is co-author with Choketruth of a biography of David Cameron, so these are very much in-jokes.

And to put all this in perspective, here is Mosley-Farage on his LBC show, telling a caller every Remainer in the civil service ‘should be removed, or change their ways.’

This was in answer to the question of whether every ‘every civil servant, every ambassador, even the head of the army, the head of the navy’ might have to be replaced ‘if they are Remainers’.

Mosley-Farage has no doubts.  He justifies their removal on the grounds that ‘the job of civil servants is to do what the elected government of the day tells them to do.’  Therefore if a government is attempting to ‘deliver Brexit’ and civil servants are ‘an obstruction to that’, then Nigel thinks they ‘should be removed’.’

Nigel is being a little bit slippery here,  which is only to be expected from him.   Civil servants may be ‘Remainers’ but still do what the government tells them to do.  Having a contrary political position does not mean ‘obstruction.’  Nor is it clear how Darroch ‘obstructed’ Brexit simply by giving his government informed and honest advice about how to deal with an unstable, reckless and erratic president.

Last but not least, it is clear that Darroch was ‘removed’ by a Brexit clique, working hand-in-hand with that same president.  As Mosley-Farage’s sidekick Richard ‘Tricky Dickie’ Tice explained on  Newsnight, Darroch’s resignation is ‘a huge opportunity for the new PM to completely re-set the agenda in a pro-Brexit world’.

Tice would like this person to be a ‘businessman’, rather than a trained diplomat, and clearly wouldn’t be averse to taking the position himself.

So here we have it.  The mighty Global Britain is leaving a trade bloc with which it engages as a partner to link its fortunes to an unstable president linked to the far-right, who clearly regard the UK as a bit of a vassal-state.

In this he is being assisted by Brexit ‘patriots’ intent on gutting the country’s institutions and reconfiguring them entirely according to their own agenda.

The Nazis had a word for what Mosley-Farage is proposing: gleichschaltung – coordination or consolidation, which Merriam-Webster defines as ‘the act, process, or policy of achieving rigid and total coordination and uniformity (as in politics, culture, communication) by forcibly repressing or eliminating independence and freedom of thought, action, or expression : forced reduction to a common level : forced standardization or assimilation.’

With the Nazis, this meant the Nazification of all Germany’s institutions, which began with their takeover of power in 1933.   Mosley-Farage and his gang of spivs are attempting to achieve a similar process of ‘standardisation’ – without the violence and terror or the machinery of the police state.

They don’t need any of that.

They just have to shout, bully, bluster, scheme and plot.  And unless the politicians and civil service – and the public – takes note of what is going on and take action against it, they will set in motion a process that will become very difficult to stop, and which will leave few institutions untouched.

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The Brexit Party: All Men Shall (Not) Be Brothers

In case anyone ever doubts what a sad, petty and downright nasty country we are becoming, the Brexit Party will always be there to remind us.  On Monday, they managed to stage a mighty protest by turning their backs – turning their backs I tell you! – on a young orchestra playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy at the opening of the European Parliament.  Courage like this really does leave Tiananmen Square in the shade doesn’t it?  It’s even more moving when you think that they wouldn’t turn their backs on their salaries.

No wonder two of the female MEPs were holding hands to support each other and give each other strength.  Sisters united in political infantilism might need to do that, but many of us watching this sad stunt will also need strength as we contemplate a future in which this party might even get into government.

But let’s talk about music and poetry.  The Ode to Joy was originally written by Friedrich Schiller in 1795 as a paean to human freedom and brotherhood – a message made clear in its rousing line ‘All men are brothers.’  Beethoven included parts of the poem in his ninth symphony, written when he was completely deaf and premiered for the first time in 1824 at the Royal Opera House Muscat in Vienna.   The premiere took place only nine years after the Congress of Vienna, where the Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich presided over the post-Napoleonic attempts to reimpose the ancien regime on a continent still pulsing with revolutionary ideals.

The Congress  was one of various ‘European Unions’ that have come and gone through history, and its premises were entirely reactionary.   No one was more reactionary than Metternich, who did his best to suppress the political and social forces unleashed by the French revolution through censorship, police surveillance and repression.

Beethoven was working in the Austrian capital as a freelance musician and was himself politically suspect because of his sympathies with the French revolution and his contacts with French emigré intellectuals.  Despite having felt obliged to churn out a 15-minute piece on Wellington’s victory in 1815, he had clearly not abandoned these sentiments.   The symphony was conducted by the theatre kapellmeister Michael Umlauf,  but Beethoven stood next the conductor setting the tempo and ‘waving his arms like a madman’, as one audience member described it.

Metternich and his police chiefs probably did not want to hear the line ‘all men shall be brothers’ proclaimed anywhere near Vienna,  but Beethoven’s audience clearly did.  Even though Beethoven once concluded ‘ as long as the Austrians have brown beer and sausages, they’ll never revolt’, they loved the Ninth.   At the end of the symphony, they threw their hats in the air – in what may have been an attempt to convey their enthusiasm to the deaf composer.

Since then the Ode to Joy has undergone an extraordinary evolution into a genuine piece of ‘world music’ – signifying a desire for peace, brotherhood and freedom that many different peoples have aspired to.  Chilean prisoners under Pinochet sang it to each other in prisons and detention centres.  Every year orchestras across Japan play it in order to welcome in the New Year – a tradition that began when German prisoners of war performed in Japan for the first time in 1918.   In Osaka 10,000 singers perform the ode nicknamed ‘Daiku’ (‘Number 9’) in reference to Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution’s ‘Peace Clause’ outlawing war as a means of resolving conflicts.

The Ode to Joy was played at Christmas 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.  That same year student protesters at Tiananmen Square played it over loudspeakers even as tanks were coming to destroy their movement.   In 1972 the Council of Europe made the Ode its official anthem, and in 1985 it was adopted as the anthem of the European Union

Beethoven might have been been puzzled to  find the Ode to Joy in A Clockwork Orange or Die Hard, but he would surely have taken some satisfaction on seeing his music carried back and forth across the world by orchestras, choirs and flashmobs, all of whom have found solace and inspiration in one of the most stirring passages of music ever written, whose  essential message still stands as a message for our times

Joy, bright spark of divinity

Daughter of Elysium

Fire-inspired we tread within thy sanctuary

Thy magic power re-unites all that custom has divided

All men shall be brothers

Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

Needless to say, this is not a message that Nigel Farage and his merry men and women like to hear, especially coming from the European Union.  They are dancing to a very different tune,  insofar as you can dance to the shrieking air raid siren which accompanied Nigel’s entry at last week’s Brexit Party rally in Birmingham to remind the party that the nation is at war and that we need a Strong Leader to lead us.

 

If this sounds familiar, and if Nigel’s glowstick rally/rave sounded a little bit…Nuremberg, that may not be entirely surprising, because these are Nigel’s roots.  After all this is a man whose former English teacher at Dulwich remembers him swaggering round a Sussex village singing ‘Hitler youth songs’.  An a former teenage pal wrote an open letter reminding him of when he once sang  a song with the words ‘gas them all, gas ‘em all, gas them all’.

Let no one say that Nigel doesn’t like music then.  And it’s safe to say that whatever those ‘Hitler youth songs’ were, they probably didn’t include words by Schiller and music by Beethoven.  Nevertheless the Great Man didn’t like some of the  mockery and criticisms that were directed against his party on Monday, and he felt the need to respond to them in the way that only he knows how:

Heard some say that Brexit MEPs were “disrespectful” today.

I’ll tell

you what is disrespectful — taking the ancient nation states of Europe and turning it into one country with its own anthem and flag, without ever

asking for permission! pic.twitter.com/AthIAzVDgN

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 2, 2019

Where to start with this?  How about that word ‘ancient’?  When applied to trees ‘ancient’ is a lovely, resonant word.  Who doesn’t like to think of an ancient oak tree or redwood that has been standing there for centuries?  When applied to the ‘nation states of Europe’ however, it is a entirely meaningless ethnonationalist buzzphrase that serves the same kind of political function as  concepts such as ‘Christian Europe’, ‘Judeo-Christian Europe’ or ‘indigenous peoples of Europe’ that Nigel and people like him are prone to using.

Such concepts are sometimes deliberately ahistorical and sometimes just plain ignorant.  In Nigel’s case you can never tell which it is.  But let’s just consider some simple facts:

No nation state is ‘ancient’.  All the member-states of the European Union are relatively modern, and some have only been created in the last few decades.  The European Union is not a country, and Antonio Tajani clearly used the word in his admonition of the Brexit MEPs to emphasise their lack of respect rather than suggest that the EU is a country with its ‘own anthem and flag.’

Contrary to Nigel’s assertions, the European Union was not created ‘without permission.’   All of its member states joined voluntarily and remain in it voluntarily.

We, as the world knows too well, are leaving, but we haven’t been able to leave because our politicians have not been able to transform  the false promises and expectations that drove the Leave vote into a political reality that does not harm the country, and because Brexiters have refused to accept any compromise and are now in headlong pursuit of a no deal hard Brexit regardless of the consequences.

That’s why the Brexit Party turned its back on Schiller and Beethoven on Monday.   And one thing you can be sure of: these are not people with any desire whatsoever for universal brotherhood.

Let no one believe that a country like this can ever be ‘open’, ‘welcoming’ or ‘Global Britain’ – apart from our possible appeal to fascists, ethnonationalists, carpetbaggers, asset strippers and dodgy millionaires looking for a new offshore tax haven.

On Monday Nigel and his pals showed the world how ‘open’ and how ‘global’ we are, even as they pretended to ‘represent’ a country they are intent on wrecking.

In doing so, they did not demonstrate our ‘greatness’, but provided further proof of our decline and our deranged national hubris.  And the fact that we have allowed this to happen will be a source of shame to millions of us for many years to come.

 

 

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The Resistible Rise of Boris the Clown

Yesterday morning I watched Boris Johnson give two absolute car crash interviews on LBC and Talk Radio.  It was hard to know which of them was the worst: the one in which he refused to answer Nick Ferrari’s question regarding the date of his ‘Boris and Carrie’ photo, or the one in which he mumbled hallucinatory gibberish to his astounded interviewer about painting buses for a hobby.

 

 

In both interviews Johnson was clearly lying and dissembling, as he usually does whenever he’s exposed to anything approaching serious scrutiny.  But what was disturbing about these performances was the absence of any pretense that he was doing anything else.

There was no evidence of any preparation, no attempt to come up with answers to difficult questions, or even pay lip service to the suggestion that he should look ‘prime ministerial’ or dispel the question marks surrounding his character and competence.

Johnson knows the Tory membership will vote for him no matter what he says or does.  All he has to do to maintain that following is go to garden parties in Surrey and bloviate about ‘optimism’ and ‘determination’ and not paying the £39 million and the Tory Brexit cultists will go ga ga and weak at the knees.   When it comes to the country he claims to want to ‘unite’ however,  he doesn’t even bother to turn up to explain himself.  And when he does he feels able to  say or do anything he likes because, hey what? it was  good enough for Eton and the JCR, and good enough for the Tory Party,  and that means it’s good enough for the rest of us, and if not, yah boo, sucks.

All this is clearly a jape and a bit of a lark for Johnson – and to those who enjoy watching their country being flushed down the toilet, but to those who don’t, the prospect that such a man should become PM is a grim testament to our ongoing political implosion, and just because Johnson is a clown does not mean that he isn’t dangerous.

Steve Bannon didn’t boast about writing his speeches for nothing, and his followers aren’t supporting him for nothing.   Today Team Boris has been playing up the possibility that he will ignore parliament,  in the event that parliament votes against no deal.  First up on the Today programme was Dominic Raab, announcing that any motion from MPs against no deal would have ‘zero effect’, because Johnson would simply ignore it.

And here is Arron Banks’ sidekick Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who gives journalists a bad name, nodding approvingly at a similar suggestion elsewhere:

This is what his aides have been saying for a while: that @BorisJohnson would ignore a Parliamentary vote against no deal. Which -possible or otherwise – is music to the ears of millions of voters https://t.co/3RXVagV9T6

— Isabel Oakeshott (@IsabelOakeshott) 25 June 2019

Johnson and his followers – and the Brexit Party which supports the same deal even if it doesn’t support no deal – are playing an old game here.  In effect they are using a manufactured political conflict between the ‘will of the people’ – a ‘will’ defined by them –  and the ‘Westminster elite’ in order to degrade and bypass the institutions of representative democracy, while all the time claiming that they are acting in the name of ‘democracy’.

I thought of Johnson last night, while watching the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa’s superb documentary The Edge of Democracy, about the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the arrest of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on corruption charges.  It’s a terrific piece of work, part-personal memoir and part-political indictment, which traces the events of the last three years that led millions of Brazilians to vote for a fascist-politician who openly praises the country’s 21-year dictatorship and would clearly have no compunctions about bringing in another one.

Clearly there is a very specific Brazilian context behind this outcome, but there are also certain things that we can recognize over here: the brazen dishonesty of the congressmen who manipulated democratic procedures in order to bring down Rousseff while simultaneously avoiding legal scrutiny for their own crimes and misdemeanours; the  ability of the ‘populist’ right to use social media and ‘hot button’ issues about gender equality, white victimhood, and elite corruption to generate rage and hostility towards democratic institutions, to the point when millions of Brazilians were prepared to elect a politician previously regarded as a clown, who actually celebrated the man who once tortured Rousseff when she was a member of the revolutionary underground.

The Brexit circus is a long way from dictatorship and Johnson is not Bolsonaro, but the direction of travel is clear.  For the radical right, Brexit is a battering ram in the ongoing ‘war’ against ‘globalism’, multiculturalism and liberal democracy,  and now a rightwing movement that includes the Tory Party and also reaches beyond it, is seeking to reconfigure British politics on Bannonite lines.

It remains to be seen whether the bus-building clown who lied so brazenly yesterday has the competence or the ability to lead the kind of ‘coup’ that people like Oakeshott and Raab are proposing.  But the danger that Johnson poses is due as much to the hopes placed upon him and the constituency that he is trying to reach as it is to his own capabilities.

He may fail, but if he does then Farage and others will seek to take his place.

We need to wake up to this, and whatever the failings and imperfections of our antiquated democracy, we need to resist the Poundland putschists who would like to destroy it if it doesn’t give them what they want.

 

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The Tory Party Has Gone Missing

Some readers may have heard of the mass hallucinations that took place at the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.   As John Grant Fuller describes it in The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, on 15 August that year the entire village of 250 inhabitants woke up and began seeing visions.  One man sat down  to eat a medieval banquet that did not exist.  Another chewed his way through a leather strap that was holding him down, jumped out the window, and continued running even after breaking both his legs.  Another was chased by a tiger, while yet another was followed by snakes.

By the end of this episode, five people had died and others were seriously ill.   Most theories attribute this outbreak to a surfeit of ergot – a component of LSD – in the wheat harvest, which found its way into the local bread.  Another school of thought argues that the villagers actually took LSD as a result of a CIA experiment that went wrong.

I mention this, in view of what is happening to the Conservative Party.   Police are advising anyone who encounters the Tory Party to stay away from it for their own safety.   Because if its members are not wall-slamming female climate change protesters, they can be found wandering the streets of Twitter like drunken town criers proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Messiah, here:

.@BorisJohnson is smashing it again in that latest round of voting. He is the only candidate with momentum and the only candidate bringing our MPs together from every side and part of the country.

Boris can deliver Brexit, unite the party and unite the country @BackBoris

Hollow Man: Boris Johnson’s Delusions of Grandeur

“It can safely be said that the last three years have not been fruitful ones in the history of the United Kingdom. Politically speaking, the 2016 referendum has opened a political hellmouth straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which a seemingly endless procession of charlatans, mediocrities and outright monstrosities haunts the polis with messages that are alternatively idiotic, jingoistic, dishonest, preposterous, or downright sinister. Mark Francois, Andrea Leadsom, Esther McVey, Dominic Raab, Andrea Jenkins, Jacob Rees-Mogg — all these demons parade through our TV screens, proposing deals that cannot be implemented, promising futures that cannot be delivered in the way they say they can, ignoring evidence to the contrary and denouncing their opponents as ‘traitors’ or ‘Remoaners’, sabotaging plans that have already been well and truly sabotaged by the gulf between expectation and reality.

Stuck in this little shop of horrors, it would be comforting to find some consolation in the ongoing implosion of the Tory Party, which has been inflicting this nightmare — and so many others — on the nation in the first place. Punished in the recent local and European elections, the Tory Party, once one of the most formidable election-winning machines in Europe, has been shattered by its obsession with Europe, an obsession it has chosen to inflict on the whole country.  Its zombie government staggers on, visionless and ineffectual, crushed by its own incompetence and a Brexit process that has revealed it to be fatally out of its depth…”

My latest piece for Ceasefire Magazine.  You can read the rest here: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/hollo...

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Hormuz: Iran in the Gunsights

If US and British intelligence services are to be believed, Iran has just attacked two tankers at the crucial Strait of Hormuz choke point.  So far the only evidence to support this allegation is a video that apparently shows Iranian naval commandos removing a limpet mine from the hull of the Kokuka Courageous tanker.

It’s not clear whether the patrol boat is simply removing a limpet mine that it found there – or what Iran would gain from attacking a Japanese tanker at precisely the moment when the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was visiting Tehran.

To some extent we’ve been here before.   Some of you may remember the ‘tanker war’ of the 1980s when the US effectively took Iraq’s side in the Iraq-Iran war in order to protect Kuwaiti tankers. Others may remember the refrain ‘real men go to Tehran’ that circulated through neocon circles shortly after the Iraq War in 2003.

At that time, Iran was on the Bush administration’s ‘axis of evil’ and there were those who wanted the US to extend the regime change program to Iran.   This didn’t happen, partly because of the Iraq insurgency and the failure of the United States to achieve its political objectives in Iraq.   In effect, the Iraq invasion actually empowered Iran, by extending the Shia sphere of geopolitical influence into Iraq, and producing governments that had more in common with Iran than they did with the United States.

The strategic failure of the US in Iraq was also a setback for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf autocracies, which was subsequently compounded by the failure to topple Assad in Syria.  Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – with their arsenals flush with American, British and French weapons, then attempted to defeat the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

Once again they failed – though not without reducing much of Yemen to ruins.

Against this background of failure, powerful forces both inside and outside the United States have consistently tried to provoke the US into a fullscale war with Iran.  Supporters of this option generally do not admit to the geostrategic motives behind this policy.

Instead, we have heard repeatedly that Iran is a ‘mad’ state that promotes terrorism and wants nuclear weapons in order to annihilate Israel.  Back in 2006 the historian Niall Ferguson suggested that the Iranian government and its people wanted nuclear weapons because Iran actually wanted to be destroyed with nuclear weapons.

Why?  Because Iran is Shi’ite and the Shia are crazy people who all want martyrdom, according to Ferguson – in slightly more intellectual terms.  In 2012, Ferguson was at it again, urging Obama to join Israel and carry out missile strikes against Iran – something he described as ‘creative destruction’.

That same year Melanie Phillips similarly argued that ‘the Iranian regime is impervious to reason. Educated, intelligent and cunning they may be but they are religious fanatics driven by an entirely different set of considerations. ‘ In August 2006 the esteemed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis told the Wall Street Journal that Iranian president Mahmood Amadinejad was preparing for the return of the twelfth Imam that month and intended Iran to begin producing nuclear weapons on that date.

In this context, Lewis insisted, Mutual Assured Destruction would have no impact since Iran was only interested in ‘ the final destination of the dead as hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers’.

If Iranians were fanatics intent on mass suicide, they were also inveterate terrorists.  In October 2011 Saudi Arabia even suggested that Iran had tried to murder its ambassador in the United States through an improbable plot involving Hizbullah, the Mexican Zetas, and an Iranian car salesman – all of which proved, according to the former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, ‘official Iranian responsibility for this. Somebody in Iran will have to pay the price.’

In the end Iran didn’t pay the price, because the plot was blatant nonsense.

In 2012, Benyamin Netanyahu attempted to blame Iran for botched attacks on Israeli diplomats and officials in India, Georgia and Thailand, which he claimed were carried out by ‘ Iran and its protege, Hezbollah’ proved that Tehran was ‘the largest terror exporter in the world.’

In 2015 a US establishment chastened by its reversals in Iraq and Afghanistan finally backed away from war and came up with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), which proposed a series of measures to restrict Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for ending sanctions.  So – who would have thought? – Iran was not lusting after martyrdom after all, and many people breathed a sigh of relief that diplomacy had prevailed, because it is not necessary to endorse the Iranian regime to point out that many of the regimes wanting to topple it are no better – not to mention the horrific consequences of military action for the Iranian people and the region.

But that was then, and now we have a very different set of parameters.  First of all we have a tempestuous and erratic US president who knows nothing and understands nothing, and is incapable of thinking beyond his last tweet or the last person he spoke to.  Last year Trump pulled out of the JCPA, effectively wrecking all the diplomatic work of his predecessor and ushering in a new era of confrontation.

His national security advisor John Bolton, is a longterm proponent of regime change in Iran, who has spoken at MEK events in support of this policy.  Trump’s head of the CIA Mike Pompeo is cut from the same cloth, and opposed the Iran nuclear agreement in 2015.   In 2017 the Trump administration signed one of the largest arms deal in history with Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis are not winning their Sunni-Shia confrontation, and no one will be surprised that Saudi Arabia agrees with the US that Iran is responsible for the tanker attacks and wants a ‘swift and decisive’ response to them.  Saudi Arabia may not be able to win in Yemen, and they may be prone to carving up political dissidents in their own embassies,  but they will be clearly hoping that US weaponry and support will make up the difference in Iran.  In Israel, Netanyahu cannot form a government and faces the prospect of prison time for fraud and bribery charges.

In the UK we have a broken government and a Tory Party in meltdown, desperate to gain credibility and distract attention from its monumental failings.  In addition, the UK will be desperate for a trade deal if Brexit goes ahead, so if the US and Saudi Arabia say they want a war with Iran there will not be a millisecond of hesitation.

So this is a dangerous situation, which could very easily turn into another war and a regional conflagration.    There are those who actually want this, and there is no reason to believe that they did not set this up.

We shouldn’t let them get away with it.   Because even now, when so much is falling apart, the world does not need a war with Iran, after Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and we should do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.

 

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