Matthew Carr's Blog, page 25

The Tony Blair Guide to Fighting Fascism

There is no doubt that the resurgence of far-right populist politics across the world poses a direct threat to the rights and safety of migrants and minorities, to the future of democratic coexistence, and to the future of the nation-state as a  multicultural and multiethnic space.

Now no less an intellectual authority than Tony Blair has lent his money and his wisdom to this issue, and found the explanation for it.

In a forward to ‘The Glue that Binds: Integration in a Time of Populism’ by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Great Man notes that

failures around integration have led to attacks on diversity and are partly responsible for a reaction against migration. On the other hand, the word multiculturalism has been misinterpreted as meaning a justified refusal to integrate, when it should never have meant that…In this report, we make it clear that there is a duty to integrate, to accept the rules, laws and norms of our society that all British people hold in common and share, while at the same time preserving the right to practise diversity, which is fully consistent with such a duty.

Blair goes on to argue that:

…government cannot and should not be neutral on this question. It has to be a passionate advocate and, where necessary, an enforcer of the duty to integrate while protecting the proper space for diversity. Integration is not a choice; it is a necessity.

This is not the first time that Blair has made these arguments.  In a 2006 speech as Prime Minister he warned that Britain’s different communities had a ‘duty to integrate’ and that that ‘basic values’ should take priority over ‘separate beliefs and customs’.

Blair also insisted that ‘Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here.’ These warnings were clearly aimed at Muslims in Britain, and in case anyone had any doubt,  Blair also noted that the July bombings had thrown the question of  ‘multiculturalism’ into ‘sharp relief.’

So it isn’t surprising to find him making similar arguments now as an antidote to far-right populism.  The report is more nuanced and balanced in its conclusions than its media coverage suggested, but its basic line is that the rise of the far-right is primarily due to ‘ Anxiety in host communities ….driven by the rapid pace of change, fears of segregated communities, competition for scarce resources, fears over values and fears of crime.’

There is a lot to unpick about these claims.   Which communities are ‘segregated’ and how did this happen?  Is such ‘segregation’ due to a failure on the part of governments or the ‘host communities’,  or is it due to migrants who have interpreted ‘multiculturalism’ as a ‘justified refusal to integrate?’

Why do ‘fears of crime’ always equate with ‘anxiety’ about migrants and immigration?  What basis do ‘fears over values’ have in reality,  and why are they always raised in regard to migration?

The report does not really answer these questions clearly.  It doesn’t engage at all with the possibility that these anxieties have been deliberately fueled, for example in coverage like this:

 

Though its authors include case studies of integration policies by some governments, the report avoids specific analyses of the rise of Trump, Salvini, Golden Dawn, UKIP etc, and makes no attempt to analyse the common threads that connect these movements.

Instead it concentrates almost exclusively on the absence of integration as a common explanation for the rise of the far-right:

One of the principal fears associated with immigration is that it undermines the norms and values that bind society together. These fears are exacerbated when newcomers are perceived as not adapting to the host country’s language, culture and identity—or, worse, when newcomers are perceived as retaining cultural norms and practices seen as fundamentally in conflict with those of the majority. Communities that live apart from the mainstream, whether religiously, ethnically or linguistically segregated, reinforce these fears and make publics wary of growing diversity.

Once again such observations do not ask why migrants are ‘perceived’ in this way, nor do they address the constant slippage between perception and reality.  Usually these notions of ‘segregation’ refer to Muslim communities, though the report does not spell this out.

It does not address the extent to which questions of culture, religion, values and identity have replaced ‘race’ in the new ‘identity politics’ of the far-right and its populist variants.   It does not consider the possibility that white supremacist, white nationalist and fascist movements have an ideological worldview and political salience of their own that has always used the supposed unwillingness or inability to integrate as a justification for racial Othering.

There was a time, for example, when the supposed unwillingness of Jews to assimilate was constantly used by antisemites as a justification for their exclusion and removal.   Similar arguments are now routinely used in the depiction of Muslim ‘no go areas’ and ‘Londonistans.’

The report’s unwillingness to look at the continuities and differences between the new far-right and its predecessors, or between the fringe movements and their more mainstream populist representatives is not entirely surprising.

After all, Blair himself once declared that we should ‘build bridges’ with Steve Bannon and the far-right – a generosity of spirit that he has never extended to the left.

Tony Blair, who regularly accuses Corbyn's Labour of cultivating antisemitism, thinks we need to build bridges with Steve Bannon. pic.twitter.com/0sQNeeflZv

— saeen (@saeen90_) September 19, 2018

In keeping with his political ecumenism, Blair also a ‘friendly meeting’ last year with the Lega’s Mateo Salvini in Italy, where according to Salvini they discussed ‘immigration, Brexit and energy polices.’

One wonders if this discussion covered the ‘anxieties’ that led Salvini to block boats of refugees and impose a curfew on  ‘ethnic shops‘ because their clientele consists of ‘drunk people and drug dealers’ who ‘ piss and shit everywhere.’

Salvini was clearly not trying to assuage ‘anxieties’ about immigration when he said this, anymore than Trump was when he referred to undocumented migrants as ‘animals’ and criminals.

Whether intentionally or not, the unwillingness of Blair’s foundation to consider that racists might actually be racists because they are racist effectively shifts the blame for such movements on migrants themselves  or on ‘progressive governments’ that have supposedly failed to take the interrelated issues of integration and national identity seriously.

Few people would disagree with the report’s suggestion that ‘ respect for the law, democratic norms, the ability to speak a common language and the desire to contribute positively to society’ are essential elements for integration.

But the report suggests that migrants are not doing this, and that perhaps they are not willing to belong to a model that favours a ‘ single unified story over parallel lives and asks every group to contribute to a common culture.’

Last but not least, the report ignores the obstacles to integration emanating from within the ‘host communities’ – that have resulted, for example, in EU citizens who have lived in the UK for decades being told to ‘go back where they came from’ and physically and verbally abused for speaking their own languages or even speaking with an accent.

The report is not without useful proposals, though many of them are common sense.  As a tool for combating the far-right it is worse than useless.  It does what too many governments – including the ones that Blair once headed – have done again and again.

Instead of challenging the ‘anxieties’ that far-right movements feed on, the report’s framing and use of language only confirms these anxieties.

In framing the problem of the far-right as a problem of integration, it shifts the blame and the onus of responsibility for these movements onto migrants themselves.  Without actually endorsing forced assimilation it flirts with vague authoritarian notions of coercion that are not far removed from it.

This didn’t work when Blair was in power, and the experience of the last decade makes it clear that it is not going to work now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post The Tony Blair Guide to Fighting Fascism appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Breaking the Irish Peace

Back in the early seventies there used to be a political postcard that depicted Northern Ireland trying to speak to an England that had a cork firmly in one ear.   Ulster – and indeed the whole of the island of Ireland – has often had difficulty in making itself heard in England.  Time and again English politicians have shown themselves indifferent to and disinterested in what takes place in Ireland until it’s too late, and the English public have not been much better.

Given this history, there is nothing at all surprising about the condescension, arrogance and ignorance that so many of our politicians have shown in response to the unexpected return of Irish politics to centre stage as a result of Brexit.

For politicians drunk on imperial nostalgia, it has been infuriating to see their grandiose Brexit dreams stymied by Irish priorities.  Some, like the senior Tory who said that the ‘Irish really should know their place’,  take these priorities as a direct affront.

Others regard them as at best a minor irrelevance, and at worse a deliberate conspiracy between Remainers and the EU to deprive them of their prize through ‘Project Fear’ fantasies about the unraveling of the Irish peace process that they believe have no foundation in reality

These politicians – and the commentators who support them and recycle their narratives – have breezily dismissed the warnings of politicians who were part of the Irish peace process and realise how painfully it was achieved and how easily it could collapse.

Suggest that Brexit has put strains on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and that these strains are likely to increase if a hard border is implemented in Ireland, and Brexiters are likely to respond with the wrongheaded  ignorance that Julia Hartley-Brewer and Darren Grimes recently displayed when they compared the Irish border to the border arrangements that Switzerland has with its neighbors.

It’s not always clear whether such shallow comparisons are due to stupidity, laziness or malice, but whatever the motivations, they grossly mischaracterise and misunderstand the genuine risks that Brexit poses to the Irish Peace Process.

Armed conflicts can end when one side defeats the other, or because the contenders realise that none of them can win.   In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement was the product of more than a decade of secret and public negotiations,  in which the various protagonists gradually accepted that they could not defeat their opponents militarily and agreed to move their conflict back into the terrain of politics.

With the support of the United States, the European Union,  and the British and Irish governments, republicans and unionists came to an agreement which enabled both sides to gain something in the short-term, and which paved the way for a process of consensus and consent that would decide the long-term future of Northern Ireland.

This agreement kicked a lot of cans down the road, and obliged republicans and unionists to accept things that had once been unacceptable to both sides.  Compared with the bloodshed , trauma and suffering that preceded it, its political consequences might seem negligible, but it nevertheless brought the armed conflict to an end and marginalised the more intransigent and extremist forces on either side that wanted it to continue.

This was achieved through the construction of a delicate political arrangement, underpinned by the European Convention of Human Rights, which enabled the European Court of Human Rights to act as an independent guarantor of the rights of all communities in the province.  As fellow members of the European Union, the population of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were able to act as de facto members of a single nation, without abandoning the political identities and loyalties that had driven the conflict.

All this was intended to lay the foundations for political coexistence and cooperation that would make it possible – one day – to resolve the inherent contradictions underlying the agreement through negotiation and consensus.

This was no mean achievement,  and to disregard its significance and even to treat it with contempt, has been one of the greatest follies – and crimes – of the Brexit cult.

And now, with the awful killing of the young journalist and writer Lyra McKee last night, it is worth asking whether we may be witnessing the consequences of such folly.  It is too early to know whether Brexit contributed to what happened in Belfast,  but it would also be stupid and reckless to ignore the possibility of such a connection.  Today the former Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officer Alan McQuillan told Radio 4

the threat from dissident Republicans may grow, but it needs support from the community, which it doesn’t currently have.  They’ve openly said that they regard [Brexit] as a great recruiting sergeant and will exploit it to the hilt.

It’s easy to see how Brexit could provide such a ‘recruiting sergeant’.   For more than two years there has been no government in Northern Ireland, yet the DUP has been propping up a Tory administration intent on leaving the European Union.   If this happens then the European Court of Human Rights will no longer provide the independent guarantee it was intended to, and it will be replacement by a British bill of rights that republicans will regard as politically illegitimate.

If a hard border is implemented and patrolled by British police and customs officers, then it will be regarded by republicans as a giant political step backwards.  Even before 1998, the existence of an open border has made a united Ireland a practical everyday reality, if not a political reality.  If that border is reimposed then some ‘dissident’ groups will undoubtedly use this ‘betrayal’ as a justification to return to physical force, and some may already be doing so.

In two years time, the DUP is planning to have a national holiday to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of partition.  It is not difficult to imagine how such commemorations would be perceived by republicans in a post-Brexit Northern Ireland with a restored hard border as a constant reminder of the reality of partition.

It is impossible to know whether these possibilities are already transforming the situation on the ground in the province.   According to the Northern Ireland police, the searches carried out in the Creggan last night were ‘intelligence-led’ raids aimed at preventing planned republican violence over Easter.  The fact that fifty petrol bombs were thrown at ‘crown forces’  suggests that some republican groups were prepared for them,  and the bullet that killed Lyra McKee was intended to kill a police officer.

There may be more of this to come. History and politics cannot be erased by signatures on a piece of paper.  Even at peace – as Lyra McKee wrote so eloquently – thousands of people in Northern Ireland bear the memory of trauma and violence and share a political space where continued sectarian divisions mean that the possibility of violence is always present.

McKee described herself and her peers as ‘ceasefire babies’ born in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, and she was probably killed by another member of that post-conflict  generation. Most of the rioters in the Creggan last night were young, and could, in theory, form part of a resurgent physical force movement if the political structure that underpins the Good Friday Agreement unravels.

It is the responsibility of all politicians to everything they can to prevent that outcome.  Lyra McKee should have lived, and used her remarkable voice to help Northern Ireland continue its painful and difficult path towards a better future.

And here in England, we should mourn the death of a young woman who had so much to contribute.  And despite the insane recklessness of the Brexiters, we should take note of the warning signs emanating from Ireland and remove the cork from our ears.

 

 

 

 

The post Breaking the Irish Peace appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

The Gangster-in-Chief versus Ilhan Omar

I have to admit I was wrong about Donald Trump.  Before he was elected I recognised that he was a danger to his country and to the world, and that he also posed a direct threat to migrants and minorities in the United States.  It was clear even during his campaign that  Trump was a moral and political degenerate, devoid of any decency or scruple, who represented the American kleptocracy at its basest.  It was obvious that he was consciously summoning the darkest forces in American society onto the historical stage and weaponising hatred to propel himself to power in a way that no previous president had done before him.

You would have to be blind not to notice these things.   Nevertheless I still thought that the American system had enough checks and balances to neutralise his worst excesses, and I so hoped that his own cluelessness, arrogance, greed and impetuous bellicosity would undermine him and even bring him down.

I didn’t realise how far Trump was willing to go in order to please his political base, while he and his family used the presidential office as a vehicle for enriching themselves still further. I didn’t foresee how relentless, fanatical and devoid of even the semblance of scruple he would be, and how much he would be able to get away with.

I didn’t understand then how much of a grip the radical right had attained over the Republican Party and the American media, and how beholden Trump was to these sectors.

I certainly didn’t imagine that a sitting president would publicly set up a Muslim member of Congress for assassination.  But this is effectively what Trump did yesterday in the case of the Somali-American Democrat representative Ilhan Omar.  To understand the context we need to go back a little.

Many readers will know that Ilhan Omar is of the first two Muslim women to be elected to the US Congress, that she was born in Somalia, that she is leftist, and a strong critic of US foreign policy and of Israel.

All these qualities have made her a natural hate-figure for Trump’s base and for the media networks that feed that hatred.   On 9 March the former judge Jeannine Pirro- one of the most fanatically anti-Muslim presenters on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – questioned Omar’s patriotism and accused her of antisemitism, in a monologue that included the following observation:

Think about this, she’s not getting this anti-Israel sentiment doctrine from the Democratic Party, so if it’s not rooted in the party, where is she getting it from? Think about it. Omar wears a hijab which according to the Quran 33:59 tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution

Many of Fox’s viewers need little encouragement to know what they think about a Muslim-American woman who used to be a refugee with strong (leftist) political views, and  many would have understood the meaning of these words: that Omar was a Muslim who obeys ‘Sharia law’ rather than the laws of her own country.

Omar has already received numerous death threats, including a phone call to her office two weeks ago which asked one of Omar’s aides

Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?  Why are you working for her? She’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.

 

Whether Pirro’s rant had anything to do with this reference to the Muslim Brotherhood is not clear, but even before this incident Fox News had given her a mild slap on them wrist by  taking her off air temporarily.

Pirro loves Trump however, and he loves her.  In a series of tweets he called for her reinstatement and published a thread which declared:

Bring back [Judge Jeanine.] The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against Fox News hosts who are doing too well. must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country.

In any other president this would be an unusual intervention, but in the current dystopia there is nothing outlandish about it.  Since then things have got worse.  At the beginning of this week Representative Omar told a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) meeting

 for far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second class citizen, and frankly I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.  CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose our civil liberties.

 

 

This observation was not entirely correct.  CAIR was not founded in response to 9/11 but in 1994.   Nevertheless Omar’s depiction of the broader consequences of the 9/11 attacks for American Muslims will have resonated with many Muslims both inside and outside the United States, who found themselves under suspicion as a result of the atrocities, and Omar’s words were intended to inspire them to become less apologetic and access the rights that the American constitution grants them.

All of this was obscured in the backlash that followed, which focused almost entirely on the single phrase  ‘some people did something’ [on 9/11],  to indict Omar as a terrorist apologist and an unpatriotic Muslim who minimised American suffering.  Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel both shared the clip, which McDaniel used to call Omar ‘anti-American.’

Omar’s reference to the September 11 attacks was not well-expressed, and a politician subject to persistent hostile scrutiny should certainly have chosen her words more carefully.  But there is nothing in her speech to suggest the meaning given to them by her critics, such as Murdoch’s New York Post:

 

 

On the internet the response was more extreme.    McDaniel’s followers variously called for Omar to be ‘incinerated’, ‘eliminated with extreme prejudice’, sent to Guantanamo, or deported. On Instagram the far-right activist and former reporter for Rebel Media Laura Loomer called Islam a ‘cancer’ and told her followers that Muslims seeking public office should be criminalised.

And yesterday Trump joined this pitchfork mob, by posting this disgraceful tweet with a video showing Omar’s words played repeatedly:

WE WILL NEVER FORGET! pic.twitter.com/VxrGFRFeJM

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 12 April 2019

So here is the president of the United States,  fueling the hate chorus of his favourite news networks, and using 9/11 to designate a Somali-American Muslim woman as unpatriotic and un-American, at a time when white supremacist violence and hate crimes have reached new heights, and when Omar has already become a prime target.

So no, I simply did not see this coming.  I did not believe that even Trump would sink this low.  And now that he has, I hope that American society pushes back hard against what is little more than incitement.

And I hope that Congresswoman Omar stays safe,  and that she receives the protection that she clearly needs.

But if anything does happen to her, the man who calls himself president will bear some of the responsibility for it.

 

The post The Gangster-in-Chief versus Ilhan Omar appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

On the Hate Highway

Yesterday a British Muslim woman I follow on Twitter posted an anonymous message she had received threatening to skin her alive.  This was one of various similar threats that she has received, some of which she had reported to the police – without any response.   These threats were clearly intended to intimidate a politically outspoken woman who also happens to be a Muslim and a woman of colour.

Such viciousness is routine on social media, and Muslim women who speak out in public are often on the receiving end of it.   The Somali-American congresswoman for Minnesota Ilhan Omar has frequently been threatened on the internet and last week she was the object of two death threats by telephone – one to her office and another to a hotel where she was staying.

It’s convenient – and there are a lot of commentators around who like things to be convenient – to attribute such threats to sweaty far-right keyboard warriors operating on the fringes of the internet.   Some dismiss the prevalence of the far-right and white nationalist movement on social media as a marginal phenomenon that is somehow disconnected from the social mainstream and the ‘real’ world.

That would be a serious mistake, because the evidence increasingly suggests that the internet acts both as a megaphone for spreading racist hatred and also as a conduit between digital hatred and real-life hate crimes involving white nationalists.

Robert Bowers, the man who killed eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue last year,  was connected to various far-right social media discussion groups such as Gab.    The Christchurch shooter was radicalised in part by the internet groups that he belonged to, and his livestreaming of the murders he carried out was intended to ‘inspire’ these same circles.  These efforts succeeded.  Within hours of the killings, messages of celebration and support were being posted on the messageboard 8Chan and other internet fora.

So there is a serious problem here, which is only just beginning to receive the recognition it deserves. In the wake of the Christchurch murders, the US House Judiciary committee held livestreamed hearings on Monday on white nationalism and the internet, which quickly demonstrated why such hearings were necessary.  Within thirty minutes, Youtube was forced to shut down the live chat section of its video streaming of the hearings in response to a deluge of racist and antisemitic comments.  According to Buzzfeed, these included ‘derogatory remarks about women on camera, anti-Semitic slurs, far-right memes with references to “white genocide,” and pro-Trump slogans.’

Youtube also disabled the white nationalist platform Red Ice tv, which described the hearings as a ‘ House Judiciary committee on criminalising nationalism for white people’, and which was receiving financial donations even as the hearings were ongoing.   One user donated $100 and described the hearings as ‘nothing but the elites and globalists setting up laws that will be enacted in a single pen stroke against the white race in the future.

Eliminating these platforms will not be easy.   There is no doubt that governments and tech companies need to become far more proactive in shutting down individuals and organisations that promote white nationalist narratives and overt racial hatred.

This will not be easy.  Recent bans on Facebook and Twitter have clearly damaged the Tommy Robinson and Infowars networks, but even with the best efforts of the tech companies,  individuals and organisations will always be able to set up new platforms and create new discussion groups below the radar.  In addition some individuals and organisations will always be clever enough to stay just within the boundaries of what constitutes racism and hatespeech, without actually breaking any laws, while simultaneously maintaining a polite distance from the more overtly extremist groups that share their world view.

Two years ago Buzzfeed wrote an important exposé on how Steve Bannon set out to use his ‘killing machine’ Breitbart News to promote white nationalist politics through the internet and beyond.   Bannon’s chosen instrument back then was the Breitbart columnists and alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos, who Bannon recruited to take part in what he called ‘a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media…Drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilization.’

Yiannopoulos did his best, using his public profile to raise alt-right talking points under the rubric of free speech,  while engaging in private discussions with prominent white nationalist figures on the kinds of messages that they wanted to see promoted.

Today the most effective mainstream instrument of the white nationalist movement is probably Donald Trump himself.  When the president of the United States can describe undocumented migrants as ‘animals’, issue ‘Muslim bans’, praise Nazis as ‘ very fine people’, and retweet messages from Britain First, it’s clear that white nationalism has found a megaphone that leads petty attention-seekers like Yiannopoulos in the shade.

So when we think about how to combat online hatred, it helps to be aware of the broader spectrum that such hatred is part of.   This is particularly important when we look at anti-Muslim hatred.

One of the witnesses at Monday’s congressional hearings was Doctor Muhammad Abu-Salha, whose two daughters and son-in-law were murdered, execution-style,  at Chapel Hill in Minnesota in 2015.  Abu-Salha moved some members of congress to tears as he described how he first read the autopsy reports on these atrocious murders.

Abu-Salha also told the hearings of some of the messages he had seen on twitter after the killings.  One said ‘three down, 1.6 billion to go’, while another tweet said that his children’s accused murderer ‘should be given the Medal of Honor and released from custody.’

Incredibly, Abu-Salha also found himself subjected to hostile interrogation about his own faith.  One congresswoman offered her sympathies and then asked him ‘Did you teach your children, your daughters, hatred?’

A representative of the World Zionist Organisation named Mort Klein – a man who once referred to ‘filthy Islamist Arabs’ in a tweet – described the Christchurch murderer as a ‘leftist’, and harangued Abu Salha about verses in the Qu’ran that Klein said called for the killing of Jews. Another congressman also asked Abu-Salha ‘Does Islam teach Muslims to hate Jews?’

It’s difficult to believe that a member of any other faith or minority who had suffered such a terrible loss would have been subjected to questioning like this.  But Muslims, it seems, will always be suspect to some, even when they appear at a hearing on the roots of the hatred that killed three members of their family.

So let us by all means look at how to shut down and disrupt hatespeech on the internet, wherever it appears, and no matter how long it takes.   But Monday’s hearings should also remind us that, when it comes to Muslims,  digital threats of violence are only one component of a broader spectrum of hatred, marginalisation and suspicion that reaches far beyond white nationalist message boards and into more mainstream and respectable circles.

 

 

 

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The post On the Hate Highway appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Rootless Cosmopolitans

Readers of this blog will know that I’m not a great fan of the pro-Brexit Left that goes under the portmanteau Lexit.  But there are various kinds of Lexit.  There are those who make compelling and accurate criticisms of the failings of the EU that I actually agree with.  To my mind, such criticisms tend to concentrate too much on the European Union rather than its member states, and they generally ignore or dismiss the negative consequences of the process we are actually embarked upon.

If some Lexiters have effectively tried to attach a socialist trailer to a truck that is driven by the hard (ethno) nationalist right both inside and outside the UK, there is another sector that actively works alongside extreme-right figures and organisations,  and/or uses language and concepts that are often indistinguishable from the far-right.

Take the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) official Paul Embery.  Embery is an outspoken and dogmatic Lexiter.  He is also the national convenor for Trade Unionists Against the EU (TUAEU) – an organisation that received a series of donations from  Arron Banks, whose organisation Leave.EU was responsible for some of the most anti-immigrant ads produced during the referendum campaign.

Embery  has defended Banks in public and he writes for Banks’s Westmonster website.  He has also shared a platform with Nigel Farage, and like Banks and Farage, he frequently rails against  ‘mass immigration’ and ‘globalism’ albeit from a leftwing perspective.

Embery has repeatedly described immigrants and immigration as an economic and cultural threat to the (British) working class, and condemned those who defend migrants as out-of-touch elites and liberal cosmopolitans.

On Sunday Embery’s dogmatic ‘socialist-nativism’ earned him a lot of negative attention on Twitter as the result of comments he made during a debate about Freedom of Movement. The conversation began when Gary Lineker asked why anyone could think that removing FoM was a good thing, to which Embery replied:

Do you share house keys with all the residents on your street? Or do you enter each other’s homes only when invited?

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) April 7, 2019

This gobsmacking analogy was bad enough, and leaves Theresa May’s designation of EU nationals as ‘queue-jumpers’ standing.  To Embery, the men and women who come to the UK to work or study are not just jumping queues: they have taken your house keys and moved into your home.

When the folksinger Mike Harding tried to make the point that a nation is not a ‘home’ that can be broken into in this way, he received the following reply:

‘A nation is not a home.’

I fear this encapsulates the divide in our society – between a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle-class (in this case a bloke who used to sing folk songs on the BBC) and a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class. https://t.co/VjYqQou3Ri

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) 7 April 2019

There is so much wrong with this, it’s difficult to know where to begin.  First of all, notice the way Embery has twisted Harding’s response to his own flawed analogy, to suggest that Harding and people like him don’t regard the UK as their home and perhaps don’t belong to it.   Then there is the use of ‘cosmopolitan’ or more specifically ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ as a derogatory term.

This usage has a pretty unedifying history.   It was used by Nazis as an antisemitic insult, to designate Jews as perpetual outsiders who were inside the nation but not part of it.  In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:

I ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite … at this time of bitter struggle, the streets of Vienna had provided valuable instruction.’

Cosmopolitanism was also used as an antisemitic dogwhistle by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union after World War 2, against a variety of targets that were known or assumed to be Jewish.   Thus in 1949 Pravda declared:

An anti-patriotic group has developed in theatrical criticism. It consists of followers of bourgeois aestheticism. They penetrate our press and operate most freely in the pages of the magazine, Teatr, and the newspaper, Sovetskoe iskusstvo. These critics have lost their sense of responsibility to the people. They represent a rootless cosmopolitanism which is deeply repulsive and inimical to Soviet man. They obstruct the development of Soviet literature; the feeling of national Soviet pride is alien to them

It’s not clear whether Embery was aware of this heritage.  He denies that he was, and he may well be sincere, though ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is such a specific and loaded expression that it’s difficult to believe that it just randomly sprung into his head.   Embery has been heavily criticised for recycling antisemitic tropes, while his defenders have repeated ad infinitum that Embery ‘doesn’t have an antisemitic bone in his body’ etc.

This is probably true.  At least I’ve never seen anything he’s written to suggest otherwise.  But what I find disturbing about his remarks is their binary division between a ‘national’ working class that is supposedly ‘rooted’ and ‘communitarian’ and ‘patriotic’, and a deracinated outsider group that doesn’t feel any sense of community or kinship with the country in which it finds itself.

David Goodhart articulated a similar distinction between ‘people from somewhere’ and ‘people from anywhere’.  And Theresa May also denounced people who regarded themselves as Citizens of the World as Citizens of Nowhere.

In all these cases, the notion that there is something suspect and even corrupt or ‘bohemian’ about those who feel kinship with the world beyond their borders, is juxtaposed with a notion of ‘identity’ fixed in a particular geographical or national space.  Is it not possible to be a citizen of the world and a citizen of your own country?   Can people who feel an attachment to the place they were born or grew up in not also feel affiliations that transcend their community?

Can you not feel part of your country and part of the world at the same time?  Has the ‘communitarian’ working class always been ‘rooted’ in the same place?   Are immigrants and the descendants of immigrants not working class too?  And if so can they belong to the communities and the country they are part of?

These are not questions that Embery has ever shown much interest in asking.  Two weeks ago John Rees from Counterfire disgracefully – and nonsensically – described the Remain march in London as the seedbed of a new fascist movement.

I beg to differ.

And I would suggest that if some kind of fascism does emerge from the political collapse that we are now witnessing, it’s more likely to come from the sectors that Embery represents, where Lexiters work alongside the likes of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks and  espouse reductive, reactionary and xenophobic notions of national identity that proclaim ‘internationalism’ on the one hand and decree certain categories of people to be permanent outsiders and enemies of the nation on the other.

 

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At Eternity’s Gate

A few years ago I visited the artist Ray Atkins at his farmhouse in the French Pyrenees.  For the last few years Ray has painted the forest that surrounds his home, and he had just finished another of his forest paintings on the day we arrived.  I remember he took us into his garden and the canvas was still standing there on its easel, about four foot by three.

At first sight the forest around Ray’s home can seem oppressive and even monotonous.  You look around you and you see nothing but the same dark green.  That wasn’t the forest I saw on Ray’s canvas.  On the contrary, what I saw was an explosive semi-abstract eruption of colour, with all kinds of shades, points and nuances that I hadn’t even noticed – and struggled to see even when I looked at what Ray had been painting.

On the one hand that painting showed me how painters can see parts of the world that our own eyes may have missed.  At the same time Ray’s painting was his own unique creation – and a reminder that no one ever sees the same landscape in the same way.

I thought of that encounter last night when I went to see Julian Schnabel’s astonishing study of Van Gogh At Eternity’s Gate.  I have to admit that I don’t know much about Schnabel as a painter.

I never paid any attention to him until The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  I was attracted to that film because I’d read the book, and I was interested to see how a film might deal with a heroic but tragic tale that consisted, for the most part, of the observations and thoughts of a paralysed man who was unable to communicate except by blinking.

Suffice to say that I was knocked out by it.  Schnabel turned Jean-Dominique Bauby’s horrific illness into a genuinely life-affirming statement.  At the end of the film, as its doomed protagonist finally slips into death, Schnabel concocted a series of stunning dreamlike images that celebrated the world that he was prematurely leaving, and also reminded us how lucky we are to still live in such a world.

So naturally, in these poisonous political times, I was keen to see what he would do with Vincent Van Gogh, and it didn’t disappoint.  In the past Van Gogh’s life has lent itself Hollywood melodrama, in Kurt Douglas’s Lust for Life.  Or the misty-eyed sentimentality of Don MacLean’s saccharine hit Starry Starry Night.

Schnabel’s take could not be more different.  It is first of all an intimate study of a painter by a painter, which explores the relationships between Van Gogh’s art and his disturbed personality.  On a broader level, its a meditation on the importance of art and painting that recalls Victor Erice’s classic The Quince-Tree Sun.

The film is driven by an astonishing performance by Willem Dafoe.  His Van Gogh is part-madman, part-holy innocent, a man with the sensibility and vulnerability of a child, tormented by mental illness that neither he nor anyone else understands, while simultaneously intoxicated by the natural world that he is compelled to paint for reasons that he also barely understands.

There are some wonderful scenes of Van Gogh tramping through a luminous landscape of southern France that we instantly recognize from his paintings, rolling on the ground or swirling round in a state of ecstasy like some medieval hermit or Sufi mystic.

Schnabel’s moving camera tracks Dafoe’s movements from a distance and then also in close-up, from his twisting hands to his pained, expressive eyes, before panning round to the light and landscapes that Van Gogh celebrated in paintings that had to be completed ‘in a single gesture’, as he puts it.

The camerawork also acts like a ‘brush’,  capturing the light and colour that Van Gogh saw, and there are scenes in which you only see Van Gogh’s hand (or Schnabel’s and the other two painters who collaborated in the film) laying on brush strokes in some of his iconic paintings or even copying some of them.  Schnabel wants us to see and feel the world as Van Gogh experienced it, with its sunshine and cold, its poverty and disappointment.   We see the dirt under his fingernails and the holes in his socks, his battered boots, and the tormented expressions of his fellow-patients at the lunatic asylum.

At certain moments the camera becomes deliberately blurred – a technique that captures Van Gogh’s very tenuous mental grip on a world in which he is essentially an alien and a stranger – except when he is painting.  Schnabel also overlays fragments of conversations that have already taken place, as they pass through Van Gogh’s head.

Many of these conversations revolve around painting, particularly in the dialogues between Van Gogh and Gaugin, and address the questions of why Van Gogh painted, why he painted the way he did, and how he responded to the artists of his own time and to the nineteenth century ‘culture industry’.

Some of these reflections were taken verbatim from Van Gogh’s own journals, and they never feel pretentious or extraneous.  Schnabel includes them as part of his exploration of Van Gogh’s art and personality, and also because he believes in the necessity of art and painting. This marvellous film makes us believe it too.

In the final scene, Van Gogh lies in a coffin, while mourners look at his paintings and take them away like trophies.  It’s a poignant sequence, which you could read it as a bleak comment on the predatory nature of an art world that turns everything into money.

But is also suggested – to me – that Van Gogh’s art transcended the torment and marginalisation that dominated much of his life and reached beyond ‘eternity’s gate’ so that even now in the 21st century, we are still able to feel and see what he saw and felt,  and we can still be moved by it.

 

 

 

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Rightwing Populism: Your Climate Change Non-Solutions

There are many urgent reasons to oppose the rightwing populist movements that are gaining ground across Europe and beyond: their racism and hostility to minorities, their anti-Muslim bigotry, their authoritarianism, their incipient fascism, their hostility to democracy, the antisemitism that so often seeps through their opposition to ‘globalism’.

But there is another reason that tends to get less consideration.   At a time when humanity is facing multiple threats from global warming, catastrophic biodiversity loss, and mass extinctions, the growth of rightwing populism is pretty much the last thing we need.

These movements are dominated by climate change denialists who believe that climate change is a leftist/liberal concoction and another manifestation of ‘fake news’ that deserves only contempt and derision.  As usual the tone has been set by Trump.  Not only has Trump repeatedly mocked climate change science in his tweets and public statements; he has also undermined the attempts by his predecessors to reduce emissions nationally and sought to derail the search for international mitigation and adaptation.

Other rightwing movements have taken a similar position.   In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has appointed a foreign minister who thinks that climate change is merely ‘dogma’ and a ‘cultural Marxist ploy.’  In the UK,  UKIP has described climate change as ‘one of the biggest and stupidest collective misunderstandings in history.’

The Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has described carbon dioxide as ‘not a pollutant, but an indispensable component of all life’ and claims that ‘ the IPCC and  the German government are suppressing the positive effects of CO2 on plant growth and thus on global nutrition.’

The least that can be said about these observations is that they are not helpful.  Their knuckledragging imbecility is partly due to ideology; these movements hate anything that smacks of leftism, and they also despise the ‘global elites’ that are supposedly imposing climate change emissions targets etc over the interests of the nation,  through international institutions such as the EU, the United Nations and the IPCC.

Sometimes there are financial and material reasons for their denialism.   Back in 2009 Trump once accepted that climate change was real, and caused by human activity.   Now he doesn’t, and he has done pretty much everything the oil, gas and coal companies that funded his campaign have asked him to.  In Brasil, Bolsonaro has given a boost to the agribusiness industry that donated heavily to his campaign.

More often than not economics and ideology overlap.   In Poland in 2016  the Law and Justice Party’s former environment minister Jan Szyszko – a former forester – authorised logging in the Bialowieza forest, one of the last of Europe’s primeval forests, and rejected international protests which had transformed the forest into ‘ some kind of a flagship for the left-wing-libertine movement of Western Europe.’  By the time logging was halted last year – following pressure from the EU – 10,000 trees in the forest had been cut down.

Rightwing populist attitudes towards climate change and the environment are not entirely homogeneous.  In Hungary Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has recognised climate change as an international problem and called for countries to reduce emissions.  In Italy  the League manifesto states that ‘man and environment are two sides of the same coin. Whoever fails to respect the environment fails to respect himself. Our task is to support the green economy, enabling research, innovation and the development of ecological work.’

Yet Salvini has also tweeted with Trump-like facetiousness that global warming may be a good thing because it will produce ‘more herbs’.   And last month some prominent Lega  supporters were calling for the assassination of Greta Thunberg.  In France, Marine le Pen’s National Rally has described the UN’s climate body as a ‘communist project’ while also supporting the development of domestic renewables in its 2017 manifesto.

In a study of rightwing populist attitudes to climate change and immigration, the German Adelphi thinktank commented on the prevalence of ‘green patriotism’ in the extreme right which ‘strongly supports environmental conservation, but not climate action.’ This tendency includes organisations like Golden Dawn in Greece, which describes the environment as ‘ the cradle of our race, it mirrors our culture and civilisation, and it is therefore our duty to protect it.’

This is the kind of ‘environmentalism’ that the Christchurch shooter espoused in his manifesto when he described himself as ‘an Ethno-nationalist Eco-fascist.  Ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on the preservation of nature, and the natural order.’

There is a long tradition of this kind of environmentalism in the far-right, whose echoes can still be found in the rustic volkisch imagery of its newer variants, such as the UK’s Rural Conservative Movement:

 

 

 

Whatever their variants and nuances, these movements draw their strength from an insular, selfish, and often racially or ethnically based nationalism, which generally precludes or openly rejects attempts at multinational and multilateral cooperation on climate change  –  and has little interest in national mitigation either.

In Poland the Law and Justice Party has promoted the coal industry at the expense of renewables in order to reduce the country’s dependence on Russian gas and oil, regardless of its impact on the nation’s health.  The yellow jacket movement in France was initially sparked by a tax on diesel – a tax which admittedly did constitute another economic burden on marginalised sectors of French society.

Nevertheless,  the opposition to Macron’s tone-deaf initiative was partly a reflection of the wider philosophy expressed by the Dutch  Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Marcel de Graaff, who said of the 2016 Paris Agreement that ‘ Sovereign states decide what they want to do with regard to climate change…The elite are laughing here while rubbing their hands. They will benefit from these climate action plans. But the hard-working citizens in the Member States will pay for their electricity, their car, their heating.’

This exclusivity is a major obstacle to developing international polices on climate change. Right now we face collective problems as a species that require international solutions and international cooperation.

Such politicians will never deliver such solutions or even recognise that they are required.  On the contrary most of them will do nothing to mitigate climate change or help us prepare for it, and they may well make it worse.

The only thing they will do is put up walls and fences along their borders to keep out the ‘climate change refugees’ who are likely to become part of even larger movements of people as the century unfolds.  Of course some of those who vote for them may believe that all this ok, as long as they themselves are ‘safe’ inside their own borders.

But let’s be clear: these barriers won’t protect you for long. You can put up as many walls as you like.  You can shoot boats out of the water.  But in the end all of us will be affected by a global problem that requires global solutions.

All of us share this planet in which we have become the dominant species.  If it goes down, we all do. And it would be good to remember that the next time you see Trump gloating about the cold weather, or Salvini tweeting about herbs, or some UKIP MEP telling you that global warming is caused by ‘cosmic rays.’

 

 

 

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The Exterminating Brexit

In Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel, a group of bourgeois party-goers go out to dinner and then find out that they can’t leave the house they were invited to.  No one is actually stopping them, it’s just that the guests can’t seem to get out of the house.

Is it a spell?  Is it collective hysteria or herd instinct?  No one knows, and Bunuel doesn’t explain.  Instead he amuses himself – and us – by stripping away the veneer of civilisation and gentility from his aristocratic guests.

Gradually they become more and more desperate.  One elderly guest dies of a heart attack.  A couple commits suicide. The other guests fight as they get hungrier and thirstier.  Cannibalism becomes an option.

A Jewish mystic reads from the Kabbalah in an attempt to get them out by magic.  The guests consider sacrificing the person who invited them.

Finally one of the guests notices that they are all sitting or standing in the positions they arrived in.  She talks them back to the events that followed their arrival at the party, until they realise that all they have to do is walk out through the door they all entered.

Does any of this sound familiar?  You know it does.  Because for the best part of three years 67 million people have been trapped in a political nightmare called Brexit, and last night’s antics have proved that we are no closer to getting out of it than Buñuel’s guests.

No one should be at all surprised that parliament once again failed to agree on the various options that it proposed; that a government which long ago lost any credibility is now trying to present a plan to parliament that has already been voted down three times;  that the Labour opposition yesterday appeared to oppose Nick Boles’s Common Market 2.0 plan in the morning and then whipped to support it in the afternoon.

We are all trapped in this party that began in June 2016, when the electorate narrowly voted to leave the European Union in a fit of pique, without any idea what it was leaving or what the consequences would be or what leaving actually meant.

But parliament’s own particular wild party has its origins in January 2017, when MPs voted by a massive majority to trigger Article 50, thereby committing the government to a two-year ticking clock timetable without any consensus about what was desirable or achievable.

This was political crack – mixed with nitrous oxide – for Brexiters, as one delighted Tory MP told the Telegraph before voting ‘ I am about to have the best moment in my life since my wedding night’.

God help his wife, because that vote was a disastrous failure of governance that we are all paying for.  The Tories bear primary responsibility of course, as they do for this entire horrorshow.  Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieves, Nick Boles and all the other ‘moderate’ rebels who have since opposed the government all voted with the government.

And so did the majority of Labour MPs, after Corbyn imposed a three-line whip.  Only 114 MPs voted against it – including the totality of the SNP and 52 Labour rebels.

Afterwards leading Brexiters, including Johnson and Davis crowed about the ‘historic moment’ and the glorious prospects now unfolding etc, etc.

Corbyn was also at pains to point out that ‘Labour MPs voted more than three to one in favour of triggering Article 50. Now the battle of the week ahead is to shape Brexit negotiations to put jobs, living standards and accountability centre stage.’

This was in fact the reverse of what parliament should have done.  Even if you believe that parliament was obliged to ‘respect the referendum’, to have committed the country to a time-limited negotiating process without a coherent plan was at best flippant and shallow, and at worse a gross dereliction of duty.

An arrogant, tone-deaf government stacked with mediocrities and Brexit zealots never even attempted to do this.  It sought from the beginning to wrest the Brexit process from parliamentary scrutiny and parliament, for the most part, was happy to oblige.  114 MPs voted against triggering Article 50, warning that it risked rushing the country into a Hard Brexit.   One MP shouted ‘suicide’ when the vote was passed in the government’s favour.

The events of the last few weeks have made it clear that these MPs were right.  Cross-party consultations and discussions; indicative votes; debates about what what compromises are desirable and which ones are achievable – all of this should have taken place before the clock started ticking.

Instead both the government and the opposition looked at Brexit entirely from the narrow perspective of their own party interests, and did what suited them.  The result is the barely-believable spectacle of a government begging the EU for extensions, while parliament struggles to make up policy in the corridors of Westminster or writes out options on the back of a fag packet, and all the time a bloc of 27 countries has managed to agree on exactly what it wants with barely any disagreement between them.

Meanwhile the country drifts towards the calamity of a no deal Brexit, while politicians talk of an election that is unlikely to solve anything, and fascists, demagogues and chancers stalk the streets waving union jacks and ranting about coups and revolutions.

Inside parliament, our elected ‘guests’ are still trying to work out how to get out of the building and go home. But unlike Buñuel’s partygoers they don’t need to read from the Kabbalah or sacrifice their host.

They too can go back out the way they came in.  They could revoke Article 50 or ask for a long extension.

The door is open.  They could have the guts and the common sense to walk out of it.  Because somewhere out there is a country that desperately needs so many things fixing, and this nightmare is not doing a single thing to help with any of them, and in a way, all of us need to leave this party, go home, and start again.

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A Plague of Bastards

If it’s true that people get the kind of politicians they deserve, then the British public must have sinned a great deal.  Just take a look at the events of the last few days.  On Monday, as readers of this blog may remember, Boris Johnson began the week on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, comparing the EU to Pharoah from the Bible and suggesting that May’s deal was perpetuating a form of comparable slavery.

These were bold statements, albeit completely idiotic, and the Telegraph quaffed them down like one of Thackeray’s boozy squires.   So Johnson was given a huge spread, staring into the distance with a soulful principled expression – insofar as a man without a soul or principles can do that – as he pleaded with May to ‘let my people go.’

But then, what’s this?  Yesterday, Theresa May told Tory MPs that if they supported her deal she would resign, thus becoming the first British Prime Minister to offer her resignation to her own party as a reward, rather than a threat.

I have to admit I wasn’t entirely surprised by this.  It was only last week that Michael Gove could be found calling on the HOC to praise May’s courage and selflessness.   When Gove behaves like this, you need to watch your back when you go to bed at night, and from the look on May’s face that day, she probably knew what was coming even then.

In any case Johnson leapt on May’s promise with an alacrity that the word unseemly barely begins to encapsulate.

Without batting an eyelid, the man who once resigned because of May’s deal (according to him), who once condemned the deal as a form of slavery, came grinning out of that meeting to tell an astounded country that – ha ha ha! – he had decided to vote for it after all!

Isn’t that amazing?  Don’t think it wasn’t.

And he wasn’t the only one.   Yes none other than  Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lord No Deal himself,  the man for whom May’s deal was the worst form of vassalage since King John, or somesuch claptrap, suddenly revealed that nunquam concederet did not mean nunquam after all, and that he would also vote for the deal.

Even as the sound of millions of clacking jaws hitting the floor  echoed across the country, the man who has systematically conspired against May and tried to undermine her at every turn could now be found wandering through Westminister, praising May’s ‘dignity’ and ‘sacrifice’ to any news outlet that would listen,  in those sonorous polished tones stepped in centuries of aristocratic breeding that too many people have mistaken for gravitas.

Meanwhile, over in Brussels, Nigel Farage the Frog-King could be found in the EU parliament denouncing May’s deal as the Versailles Treaty – one of the endless idiotic historical analogies that Brexiters are so fond of – while a handful of his hapless followers plodded doggedly southwards towards their appointment with destiny on a walk that Farage had participated in for barely a couple of miles.

It should be clear, if it wasn’t before, that these are not great men, and they are not good men.  It should be clear that they are liars, charlatans and fanatics, with no ability to reflect on their actions, no sense of guilt and no thought whatsoever for the consequences of their actions.

They care about nothing but their own advancement and no one except themselves,  and because they are rich white men who move through the world unimpeded by anything that resembles a conscience, a moral compass or a sense of social responsibility, they can get away with a lot of things that ordinary folk cannot.

Check out Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 clinical definitions of a psychopath and sociopath and it’s genuinely alarming how many of these criteria apply to Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage, Mark Francois, Raab, Leadsom, May and so many of their cohorts.

What is striking about all of them is not just their malice, but their essential mediocrity.  They are Shakespearean villains reworked by Benny Hill.  They are closer to Pere Ubu than King Lear.  They are tragic villains without the tragic grandeur or the tragic flaw – because even to possess such a flaw would suggest that they had a potential for goodness or greatness.

It’s easy to condemn politicians like this, and we should – till the end of time.  But we shouldn’t restrict our critique to their personal quirks and idiosyncracies.   Because the fact that such charlatans have been able to exercise such a malign influence over our politics is symptomatic of a wider political and social failure that we are also partly responsible for.

To paraphrase the Bard, these politicians  stole the impression of our fantasies, and we let them do it.

We treated politics as if it were another version of Strictly Come Dancing or a reality tv show  We liked the ‘cheeky chappies’ and the eccentric ‘characters’ who stood out from the rest and we didn’t bother to look at what lay behind them.

And so we shouldn’t be surprised that to find that we were not lions led by donkeys after all, but donkeys led by snakes.   We might shake our heads in exasperation at the fact that parliament, having supposedly wrested back control of the Brexit process from the government, revealed that it either did not know what to do with the Brexit process or did not have the courage to embrace the options that passed before it.

But we should also remember that millions of us didn’t know either, and didn’t even care.   We wanted complex political issues served up to us like Haribos – sweet-tasting, easily to suck on, and not too much to think about afterwards.

We wanted our politicians to ‘get on with it’ without knowing what we were getting out of or getting into.  A succession of demagogues, chancers and liars held out the sweeties and we took them.

And now, when it turns out that most of them never cared about the things they claimed to care about, and it becomes clearer with every passing day that these people have poisoned, divided and humiliated their own country for their own self-advancement, we should condemn them.

But we should also take a good look in the mirror, and find a way to build a country where predators like this will never have such influence again.

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Go Down Brexit

‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,’ wrote Charles Mackay in his  classic nineteenth century compendium of human folly Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 

Despite the two-week postponement of our formal withdrawal from the European Union, there is very little indication that those who inspired the greatest folly in our national history have begun to recover their senses, either collectively or individually.

In the last three days a petition calling for the revocation of Article 50 reached five million signatures, and more than one million people marched in London to call for a second referendum.   In the same weekend a gaggle of Tory millionaires fetched up at Checquers in limousines and open-topped sports cars to consider the debacle they have inflicted on the nation – and some of them, as always, were looking to see how they might personally benefit from it.

That time has long gone.   And today one of those attendees – the most self-seeking and sociopathic of our current crop of gotterdamerung politicians – could be found on the pages of the Daily Telegraph.

Yes, it is of Boris Johnson that I speak.   Many of us will know that Johnson has had his hair cut and lost weight in recent weeks, apparently because he has a new girlfriend.  That’s good news for her, and one can only hope that he brings her the happiness, security and the prospect of a better future that he has so coolly helped to strip from so many EU nationals and his fellow-citizens in his obscene and utterly amoral pursuit of the BIG JOB.

But no matter how much the beast is shorn or how many pounds of blubber he loses, Johnson will never be anything more than a grifter, a liar, a demagogue, and one of the principal architects of our ongoing national collapse.  If anyone doubted this, just consider the latest example of rhetorical flatulence that the Telegraph chose to proclaim in banner headlines today:

 

 

That front page is as succinct an explanation for our current predicament as anything you are likely to find anywhere.  I have no problem about politicians using metaphors.  On the contrary, metaphors can illuminate what they refer to and make stale ideas seem fresh and new.  Nor do I object to Biblical comparisons per se.  Paul Robeson didn’t sing the old spiritual Go Down Moses (Let My People Go) for nothing.

In his hands, that song drew real emotional power from a real history of suffering and real oppression.  Coming from Johnson however, Moses’s words from Exodus amount to nothing more than an offensive Etonian brainfart blowing in the wind.

The only thing it illuminates is his genuinely diseased ambition – and the collective madness that has kept this bloviating oaf hovering in the political stratosphere for far longer than decency allows.

To accept its metaphorical implications, we must first see the European Union as Pharoah.  The same Pharoah who once enslaved the Israelites; who taxed them to death and forced them to build cities and erect monuments in his honour; who made them build bricks without straw; who threw their eldest sons into the Nile because he was that kind of tyrant.

To compare all this to our voluntary membership of a trade bloc with pooled sovereignty is to drain language of any meaning whatsoever.  That is bad enough, but Johnson also appears to want us to believe that he is Moses.  And the Telegraph – a newspaper that has long ago lost any claim to be a serious newspaper – appears to accept this claim, by superimposing Johnson’s latest attempts to undermine Cruella de May over a photograph of the Great Man sitting behind the wheel with a serious expression that some may see as statesmanlike but to others will seem merely psychopathic.

All this would be laughable, were it not for the fact that even at this late hour, this preposterous self-aggrandising fraud is still talking gibberish and his gibberish still being taken seriously by a newspaper with a circulation of nearly 400,000.

Because thoughts matter, and bad thoughts will have consequences politically, when they are elevated to collective dogma, and when those who think or express them lose any willingness to hold them up to scrutiny.   For the last three years – and longer in fact – there were men and women in this country who actually know how the European Union functions, who could have explained our relationship to it, and also told us what the consequences of leaving might be.

For the most part we completely ignored them, because we didn’t like what they said, because they were too sober and boring, because we regarded their knowledge and expertise as some kind of ‘elite’ condescension.

Instead we embraced chancers, buffoons, fanatics, mountebanks and outright liars.

And now five days before we are all due to fall off a cliff, one of the worst of them is telling us that the European Pharoah is refusing to let us go, when the only thing stopping us has been the inability of people like him to come up with a plan that did not harm the country and break international agreements that we signed up to.

Rather than admit any of this, Johnson would have us believe that are a subjugated and enslaved people like the Israelites, that falling off a cliff will actually be just like the parting of the Red Sea, that he will be Moses, and that we are all about to enter the Promised Land.

And the fact that such things can still happen goes a long way to explaining how we ended up in this mess.

 

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