Matthew Carr's Blog, page 26

Springtime for Fascists

It’s become something of a cliché to look back on Nazi Germany and shake our heads and ask how the country of Goethe and Beethoven could have descended into barbarism.  There are obviously very specific historical reasons why Germany took the path it did, but there is also a more universal lesson that can be applied to other historical contexts.

To put it simply, societies tumble off the abyss and become what the medieval historian RI Moore once called ‘persecuting societies’ because the forces that might have prevented this outcome  either don’t recognise the warning signs in time or they don’t act on these signs when they have the chance to do something about them.

Here in the UK it is becoming increasingly clear that Brexit has acted as a catalyst for a social and political transformation that goes beyond the shenanigans and political convulsions in Westminster, and that will not be resolved by ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexits or arguments about the kind of deal on offer.  Consider the events of the last week.

Last Saturday a Romanian woman in Doncaster was savagely beaten by a group of teenagers who called her a ‘Polish cunt’ and told her to ‘fuck off to your country.’  The following Monday the yellow jacket thug James Goddard and his followers virtually took over a court hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, and forced the judge to flee the court.  Goddard’s followers went on to storm the Attorney General’s office.

Last Thursday the Labour MP for Brighton Kempton Lloyd Russell-Moyle was attacked on the street and called a traitor because he called for a delay to Brexit.  In the same week MPs were advised to take taxis to and from Westminster in case they were attacked, and  Independent Group MP Anna Soubry announced that she no longer goes home because she is afraid of attacks.

Yesterday the monitoring group Tell Mama reported a staggering 593% rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the UK since the Christchurch massacre.    These incidents included attacks on five Birmingham mosques with sledgehammers, another attack on a mosque in Scotland, and the stabbing of a teenager in Surrey.  In Oxford, Southampton and north London, Muslim men and women reported gun gestures or firearms noises being directed at them, and verbal abuse that included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die.’

There was a time when you might have expected people who feel like this to keep their mouths shut – in public at least – in the aftermath of a white supremacist atrocity in which  49 Muslims were savagely murdered.  Yet instead of being chastened by the massacre in Christchurch, the perpetrators of these hate crimes appear to have taken inspiration from it, and they felt confident enough to actually threaten British Muslim men and women with something similar.

Contemptuous disregard for the rule of law; threats against MPs; violent attacks on foreigners; the exultant celebration of mass murder – if these are not warning signs then I don’t know what is.

None of this fell out of the sky.   It’s been clear ever since 2016 that the referendum has actively emboldened and empowered the older far-right and its newer variants, and that Brexit has given these forces a cause celebre and a new constituency that is willing to listen to an ethnonationalist agenda which is profoundly hostile to Muslims, foreigners and immigrants, and also to the Westminster ‘traitors’ and ‘liberal’ elites who supposedly facilitated the foreign (and Muslim) ‘invasion.’

This is why Jo Cox was killed.  Yet even when an MP was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain first’, the significance of this horrific crime tended to be obscured by media narratives that dismissed the killing as the act of an isolated ‘loner’ with mental health issues.

Three and a half years later, we now have a country where the mass murder of Muslims is seen in certain circles as something to be celebrated.  We would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the possibility that actual deeds may one day follow last week’s threats.  And we are to prevent the country sinking any deeper into the toxic political sewer that has made the events of last week possible,  we need to recognise that this transformation is partly due to Brexit.

Neither the Brexit right nor the Lexit left likes to admit that Brexit has contributed to the climate where such acts are now possible.  To do so would tarnish the image of Brexit as a popular rebellion against the ‘elite’,  which both the right and some sectors of the left still adhere to.

Suggest that Brexit is, in part, an ethnonationalist project with racism and xenophobia at its core, and you’re likely to hear the same banal arguments that ‘not all Leavers are racists’ or ‘ it’s not racist to be concerned about immigration’ or ‘a few bad apples don’t define a country’ etc, etc

But we need to join the dots, even if they produce a picture that we would prefer not to see.  We need wide and deep mobilisations across the country to defend our communities and uphold the diverse, open society that an emboldened and empowered extreme right is now looking to ‘take back’.

We also need to take the country back – from them.  And unless we can do this, these forces will get stronger and more vicious,  and we will face the very real possibility of a further descent into our own kind of barbarism.

 

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Lexit: the Disaster Utopia

There is in every society , and at every historical period, a yearning for collapse and calamity – or at least a fascination with these possibilities.  Our fascination with things falling apart is sometimes based on a vague awareness that the prospect of disaster is never as far away as we think.  But there is also a political tradition – to which both right and left are prone – which sees the complete unraveling of the established order as an essential prerequisite for creating the conditions through which something better or merely different can emerge.

Such expectations can build up over years of frustration, boredom, impatience and indignation with things-as-they-are, with the run-of-the-mill compromises that more often than not are part of how society functions.  Rebecca Solnit has written of

the ability of disasters to topple old orders and open new possibilities. This broader effect is what disaster does to society. In the moment of disaster, the old order no longer exists and people improvise rescues, shelters, and communities. Thereafter, a struggle takes place over whether the old order with all its shortcomings and injustices will be reimposed or a new one, perhaps more oppressive or perhaps more just and free, like the disaster utopia, will arise.

There is no doubt that the extraordinary situation in which the UK now finds itself is in part due to such expectations.   Amazingly, we are now just over a week from crashing out of the EU without a deal – even though parliament has just voted against precisely this possibility.  A prime minister without a shred of authority, decency or integrity is now seeking to circumvent and undermine parliamentary democracy by appealing directly to ‘the people’ over the heads of their elected representatives.

Government has effectively collapsed and parliament has shown itself unable to pick up the slack,  and agree on or impose a common response that can mitigate the grotesque act of national self-harm that the country is now about to inflict on itself.

Just to be absolutely clear: this atrocious political car-crash is almost entirely due to the right – both inside and outside the Tory Party.  Brexit is a hard-right political project first and foremost and nothing will ever change that.  But the British left – or at least parts of it – also bears some responsibility for what has happened and what is about to happen.

Where the romantic ‘disaster utopians’ of the right see Brexit as an opportunity to revisit lost episodes of national greatness or wartime resilience – and transform the UK into a deregulated ethnonationalist island fortress, there are those on the left who think that socialism is coming and that Brexit will speed its arrival.  Consider this tweet, which appeared yesterday and will remain anonymous:

The left will have to adopt the tenets of economic nationalism, compromise with the centre-right to defeat ethnic nationalists, and act as the stewards of internationalism. It’s clear the future belongs to the left. And the right will surely fragment.

I’ve come across commentary like this again and again since the referendum campaign, and it sounds particularly hollow and grating this week.    Usually the same people who make predictions like this are also the ones who used to say that parliament was a bourgeois smokescreen; that ‘real’ power was in the streets and the workplace; that if voting could change anything it would be illegal.  Yet since 2016 we have found them hailing the imminent triumph of the left and proclaiming a flawed referendum result as the ultimate expression of democracy which cannot be revisited.

These are the ones who argue that the EU has neoliberalism ‘baked into it’, that state aid rules make ‘socialism’ or even nationalisation impossible; that hail Jeremy Corbyn’s strategic brilliance at every turn and dismiss any criticisms of his leadership as an anti-socialist plot.

None of this would matter that much, were it not for the fact that this is the left that appears to have been directing the Labour Party’s position on Brexit for the last two and a half years.   It is foolish to claim, as some of Corbyn’s detractors have done, that he could have ‘stopped Brexit.’  The Labour Party has never had that power, either inside or outside parliament.

Brexit should not be ‘stopped’ by parliamentary fiat, but it could and should have been revisited in another public consultation.  What we have needed for the last two and a half years is an opposition with the ability to separate what is desirable from what is realistically possible, and with the courage to explain to the public why the expectations that led to the referendum cannot be realised – without seriously damaging the country.

The Labour leadership has done none of these things.   Again and again it has looked at Brexit only in terms of what it could get out of it for itself politically

Behind these manoeuvres, it is impossible to shake off the suspicion that Corbyn is surrounded by a clique that appears to believe – no less fervently than the right – that Brexit is a kind of liberation and an opportunity.

Unlike the right, Corbyn won’t say this openly, and this is one reason why Labour has adopted the ‘strategic ambivalence’ which long ago passed its sell-by date.  The result is a real stench of bad faith that will last a long time.  If Brexit is a disaster for the country, it will also, I fear, turn out to be a disaster for the left.

In May extreme-right and populist parties from all over Europe are looking to take over the European Parliament, and turn the EU into a ‘Europe of nations.’ The left should be in that fight, campaigning for a very different outcome.

Instead it will be isolated in an embittered, failing and dangerously divided country that shows no sign of turning to ‘socialism’ and which is already becoming a freakish irrelevance and a political cautionary tale to the rest of the world.

Not for the first time, the left has overplayed its hand, and when the Brexit backlash begins, those who effectively colluded with the right to make this ‘disaster utopia’ happen are unlikely to find that they – or the rest of us – have benefited from it.

 

 

 

 

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The ‘Great Replacement’: a Recipe for Murder

Historically speaking, few things are entirely new under the sun, and the paranoid fantasies of the ‘great replacement’ and ‘white genocide’ that have gained new publicity as a result of the Christchurch murders are no exception.   On Friday Newsnight interviewed Benjamin Jones, the UK leader of the alt-group Generation Identity about the murders.  GI is one of various organisations which upholds the idea that ‘low birth rates of German and European people and simultaneous massive Muslim immigration will turn us into minorities in our own countries in a few decades.’

While insisting that he condemned the Christchurch murders, Jones insisted that violence was an ‘inevitable’ consequence of ‘bringing people from parts of the world who have a radically different perspective on how to conduct their lives as human beings to the typical Westerner.’

Jones insisted that this ‘inevitable’ violence could only be avoided by defending and upholding a ‘homogenous’ society.  Jones did not say what this homogeneity consisted of, and the gormless BBC reporter did not probe him further.

The rest of us should not be so circumspect.   Because these fears of racial and cultural engulfment have been a recurring theme in the white supremacist imagination for a long time, and have frequently resulted in horrific consequences, from eugenics programs and wars, to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The origins of ‘white genocide’ can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when racist writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and the British-German political philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain propagated the idea that the white or ‘aryan’ race was under threat from various factors that included racial ‘miscegenation’, Jewish immigration, and the unrestricted global growth of non-white populations.

In his essay on ‘The Inequality of the Races’ the racist writer de Gobineau argued that

peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various admixtures of blood which they undergo; that their degeneration corresponds exactly to the quantity and quality of the new blood, and that the rudest possible shock to the vitality of a civilization is given when the ruling elements in a society and those developed by racial change have become so numerous that they are clearly moving away from the homogeneity necessary to their life.’

In July 1900, Houston Stewart Chamberlain saw the Boer War as a sign of imminent racial degeneration, and argued that ‘it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men and threatens destruction.’

Such ideas were not limited to cranks and marginal figures.  In the years leading up to World War 1, the prospect of racial and national decline and collapse was a recurring obsession in Europe and the United States.  On both sides of the Atlantic such fears were reflected in the popularity of eugenics, in restrictions on racially undesirable migrants, in the promotion of sports and physical exercise to ensure the quality of the national ‘stock’.

The massive bloodletting of World War I reinforced these fears.   In The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World Supremacy, (1920) the American journalist and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore Lothrop Stoddard warned that the ‘subjugation of white lands by colored armies’ was ‘less to be dreaded than more enduring conquests like migrations which would swamp whole populations and turn countries now white into colored man’s lands irretrievably lost to the white world.’

Then, as now, the dread of racial dissolution was based on an imagined racial hierarchy, in which the white, ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ race was seen as the epitome of culture and civilization and a prerequisite for the existence of both.  For the American eugenicist and anthropologist Madison Grant argued in The Passing of the Great Race (1916),  the highest rung of the racial ladder was occupied by, the ‘Nordic’ or ‘purely European type’, which he defined as  ‘Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence.’

In a Germany radicalised by war and economic collapse, these ideas took an explicitly genocidal turn, in which the Nazi state set out to enforce ‘homogeneity’ inside and beyond Germany through eugenics programs involving the mass killing of ‘useless mouths’; the exclusion, persecution and finally the extermination and subjugation of ‘alien’ races that had no place within its new racialised borders.

Nazi genocide was explicitly intended to enforce racial homogeneity,  and its architects justified their actions as a form of ‘self-defence’ in an existential struggle against a ‘Jewish/Bolshevik’ world order intent on defiling the ‘reservoir of blood’ that defined the German nation-state.

Then, as now, such narratives invariably found ‘cosmopolitian’ aliens beyond their borders and also inside them who had to driven out or physically eliminated in order to guarantee the ‘living space’ of the German people.

The memory of Nazi genocide is one reason why today’s ‘replacement’ theories no longer use words like ‘mongrelisation’ or ‘miscegenation’,  and generally prefer not to talk about ‘race’ at all – not on Newsnight anyway.

Instead they focus on Muslims and Islam; on ‘grooming gangs’ and ‘rape jihadists’; on refugees and migrants encouraged by ‘cultural Marxists’; on ‘identitarian’ ethno-nationalism and the defence of ‘indigenous’ cultures against ‘multiculturalism’; on conspiracy theories that depict a subjugated Europe overwhelmed by Muslim ‘colonisation’ and transformed into ‘Eurabia’.

Occasionally older narratives show through, such as the Charlottesville Nazis who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us.’  But for the most part Muslims have replaced Jews as the current existential threat to national identity or racial and cultural integrity.

Today, as in the past, these  narratives of ‘replacement’ overlap with reactionary gender politics and toxic masculinity; with paranoid and ahistorical concepts of national and racial identity; with anxieties about the proximity of the non-white world and the population growth of minorities perceived to be culturally powerful and culturally alien.

These are the fears and anxieties that underpin Generation Identity’s calls for ‘homogeneity’, and they are increasingly seeping through from the fringes into the mainstream.

If we are going to fight them, we need to remember where they can lead.  In Jean Raspail’s racist novel The Camp of the Saints (1973),  an ‘invasion’ of Europe by impoverished migrants is repelled by genocidal violence.

We have not reached the point where such ‘solutions’ have become politically acceptable, but the Christchurch murders should remind us that there are those who would like to adopt them.

And faced with these crimes – and the prospect of more to come – we should remember that the mass murder of Muslim worshippers by a a white supremacist fanatic is not an ‘inevitable’ consequence of immigration or multiculturalism, but of a racist tradition that has never been fully extinguished from our politics, and which cannot be allowed to regain any legitimacy and contaminate them any further.

The post The ‘Great Replacement’: a Recipe for Murder appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

From Christchurch to the White House

The disgusting murders of 49 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch  are further evidence of a growing threat of far-right extremism that has rarely received the same level of media and political attention as its jihadist counterpart.

It’s become a cliché in far-right and conservative circles to claim that ‘Islam is not a race’, that Islamophobia is a ‘fiction’, and that hostility towards Muslims may even have some kind  of spurious legitimacy.   At best these arguments are a product of confusion and ignorance, and at worst a deliberate obfuscation intended to avoid accusations of racism and provide a Trojan horse for its new manifestations.

Either way they are extremely useful to the  ‘new’ far-right and ‘’hard conservatives’ who have placed Islam and Muslims at the centre of their 21st century ‘clash of civilisations.’

The idea that ‘Islam is not a race’ enables the right to say all the things it used to say about people of colour while all the time maintaining that it isn’t their ‘race’ they’re concerned about, it’s just their ‘religion’ or their ‘culture’.  Such arguments make it possible to depict Muslims as terrorists or terrorist supporters, barbarians, rapists, and invaders without ever having to mention race or racism overtly.

It’s possible to make these arguments if you assume that racism is only racism when it’s based on  biology or skin colour or the size of one’s skull.  But the usefulness of Islamophobia is the way it fuses religion, culture and race while seeming to erase race altogether.

The focus on Islam and Muslims has a powerful political salience, echoing  older confrontations between Islam and Christendom in which Islam was identified as the antithesis of Christian/European civilisation.  It becomes possible for barely-educated psychopathic killers and Oxford graduates alike to trace grand historical trajectories that supposedly connect the Battle of Tours/Poitiers and Charles Martel to the Siege of Vienna in 1688 all the way to the  21st century ‘Muslim invasion of Europe’ by immigrants and refugees.

In this way mainstream pundits like Douglas Murray and knuckledragging nazis and white supremacists have been able to propagate paranoid narratives about the Islamicisation of Europe and the ‘end of Europe’ that reach from the pages of the Spectator to the fringes of social media, where violent dreams of murderous ‘resistance’ are gaining traction.

The manifesto produced by the murderer who calls himself ‘Brenton  Tarrant’ makes it clear that he was an out-and-out racist, bigot and ethnonationalist.  No one will be surprised that he cited ‘Justiciar Knight Brievik’ as an inspiration for the massacres he perpetrated today, and said that he had ‘received a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.’

Tarrant also listed a number of white supremacist murderers including Dylan Roof and the Finsbury Park Mosque killer Darren Osbourne.

Like his hero Breivik, Tarrant’s manifesto was steeped in paranoid and explicitly racist narratives of ‘white genocide’ and ‘the ‘great replacement’, which identify migrants, refugees and Muslims as a common threat to Europe, and he made it clear that his murders were intended  ‘ to directly reduce immigration rates to Europe by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.’

In killing Muslims in Christchurch in order to ‘save Europe’, Tarrant’s savage atrocities demonstrate how the white supremacist movement that he belongs to has become ‘borderless’ in the age of social media, in much the same way that the transnational terrorist jihad has become borderless.

It’s tempting – and convenient – to depict Tarrant as just another lone psychopath who has been nurtured in the danker corners of the Internet, but the attitudes that led him to kill yesterday belong to a wider spectrum that reaches above and below the media radar.   In his manifesto Tarrant praised the pro-Trump conservative Candace Owens, who only recently launched the Turning Point UK chapter with the observation that Hitler was ‘ok’ until ‘ he became too ‘globalist.’  Tarrant also hailed Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of white identity and common purpose.’

It is clear that the election of Donald Trump has coincided with an increase in far-right extremism.    According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre 2018 report,at least 40 people in the U.S. and Canada were killed last year by individuals ‘motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies,  embracing ideas and philosophies that are cornerstones of the alt-right.’ The SLPC linked the growth of alt-right groups and ‘fight clubs’ to the election of Trump, which  ‘ has opened the White House doors to extremism, not only consulting with hate groups on policies that erode our country’s civil rights protections, but also enabling the infiltration of extremist ideas into the administration’s rhetoric and agenda.

Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House.’

This ‘toehold’ is reflected, among other things,  in Trump’s policies at the border, in his ‘Muslim ban’ and his depictions of Muslims and migrants in general, in his tacit support for white supremacists such as the demonstrators at Charlottesville, in the incitement to violence that characterised his election campaign.  Only two days ago Trump  told Breitbart News ‘ I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’

Today the Christchurch murderer ‘went bad.’   And there will almost certainly be others like him, who will take encouragement from a US president who has legitmised their obsessions and explicitly threatened his political opponents with violence.

They will take inspiration from the fear and loathing of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular that have become the cornerstones of the far-right resurgence.

According to a 2018 Europol report ‘The violent right-wing extremist spectrum is expanding, partly fuelled by fears of a perceived Islamisation of society and anxiety over migration.’

These ‘fears’ produced the murderous hatred that we saw yesterday.   It’s time to call out those who propagate them – some of whom are now shedding crocodile tears over Christchurch.

It’s time for politicians to show some real courage and stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism.  It’s time for the security services to treat the far-right threat with the seriousness it deserves.

It’s time to recognise that Islamophobia is real – and it can be deadly.  And even as we mourn the dead of Christchurch, we should reject the rampant racist ethnonationalism that was unleashed today, and stand up for the diverse, open societies that Brenton Tarrant and his cohorts would like to destroy.

 

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One Nation Under a Gove

Whenever I hear politicians invoke ‘ the national interest’ I tend to reach for the metaphorical salt cellar.  It’s not that I don’t believer there is such a thing, but ‘the national interest’ is one of those empty box phrases, like ‘national security’ or ‘the public interest’ that politicians can fill with whatever they want, and all these terms can be used to cover a multitude of sins.

Whereas ‘national security’ tends to evoke state secrets that are too hush hush to speak about, the ‘national interest’ suggests a sum of the parts that is higher than the parts themselves.  As Merriam-Webster defines it, the national interest as ‘the interest of a nation as a whole held to be an independent entity separate from the interests of subordinate areas or groups and also of other nations or supranational groups.’

Historically,  the concept of an overriding national interest has been linked to foreign policy and the ‘realist’ school of international relations, which prioritises the security and national interests of states over over ‘moral’ or ‘idealistic’ notions of multilateral collaboration and intervention.

The same concept can also be used in the context of domestic politics.  Disraeli famously called for ‘One Nation Conservatism’ in which the Tory Party would act as a unifying arbiter between a country divided into ‘two nations’ whose classes had mutual obligations to each other.

When a government claims to act in the national interest, it claims to be acting selflessly and wisely, carefully weighing up all the arguments for and against a particular policy, seeking the necessary consensus and the compromises that can best benefit the country as a whole and knit competing interests or points of view together.

It’s generally considered an admirable and even noble aspiration.    This was why Theresa May told parliament on Monday that she had lost her voice but understood ‘the voice of the country.’  It was why Michael Gove asked the House of Commons to pay tribute to May yesterday, declaring ‘ even though she may temporarily have lost her voice, but what she has not and will never lose is a focus on the national interest.’

 

 

Gove was at his most oleaginously sincere, positively oozing fake gravitas in his transparent attempt to show the country that, even in the howling storm of stupidity and folly that he and his cohorts have inflicted on us,  he is a statesmanlike ‘unifying’ politician with his eye on the higher interests of the nation.

If I were Theresa May I would be as wary of such praise as Othello should have been about Honest Iago, because – to broaden the Shakespearean net a little – Gove and his pantomime Lady MacBeth wife are two people you need to keep your eyes on even when the lights are on if you choose to spend the night at their castle.  And when Gove praises you, you better watch out, because he could so easily turn out to be Brutus.

May probably knows this, but her martyrd long-suffering expression yesterday made it clear that she agreed with his perception of her, and this is how she would like to be seen by everyone else: the brave battler whose only interest has ever been to serve her people and her country.

The rest of us should not be fooled by these antics.  Gove is absolutely not the person to define the national interest.   Like the partner-in-crime he stabbed in the back in 2016, his single overriding interest has been his own advancement or the advancement of his party.    In July 2017 he said that bribing the DUP with £1 billion was in the national interest because it  was the only way to have a ‘secure government.’

As Gove well knew, this bribe was intended to keep a Tory government in power – thereby keeping him in power – and prevent the Tory Party from falling apart.

If the ‘national interest’ means anything when applied to government, it means a willingness to act in the wider interest of the society that elected you, and to consider the potential risks and negative consequences of the decisions that you are about to take.  It implies or should imply a willingness to explain these consequences to the electorate – not conceal them beneath platitudes and false promises.

At no time has the voiceless Prime Minister who thought that destiny had come knocking on her door back in 2016 ever shown these qualities.

Had May thought of the national interest she would not have tacked towards the hard right of her party as soon as she got her job and pursued a policy that was essentially designed to please them.   She would not have described people who voted Remain as rootless ‘people from anywhere’.  She would have tried to remove the Brexit negotiaitons from parliamentary scrutiny – even trying to block parliament in the courts.  She would not have tried to blackmail parliament into accepting her deal by running down the clock.  Throughout this process she has thought of one thing only – her own survival and the survival of her party.

Her colleagues are no better.   If her predecessor thought of the national interest he would not have turned the country into a nation of foodbanks.   He would not have called a referendum with dangerous consequences that he clearly did not anticipate or prepare for.  If Gove had thought of the national interest he would not have thrown his weight behind a dishonest Leave campaign that never had any intention of fulfilling the promises it made and clearly did not even know what the consequences of leaving would be.  If Philip Hammond thought of the national interest he would not offered to end austerity yesterday – but only on condition that parliament accepts the PM’s Brexit deal.

This is not the tradition  of Disraeli and Macmillan.   These are politicians who belong to no nation except their own.  They shysters and chancers, careerists, fanatics and mediocrities.  They have exposed their country to a level of peril and risk unprecedented in peacetime and reduced it to an international laughing stock.  They have left a legacy of bitterness and division that has not even begun to run its course.

Let no one believe that they did this out of some misguided pursuit of the national interest or in the wider interests of society.

On the contrary, they have demonstrated, through their selfish ambition, zealotry and incompetence, that the Tory Party is the enemy of society and a direct threat to the national interest,  and the sooner it is confined to the dustbin of history, the better for all of us.

 

 

 

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England Kaputt

As I write it’s now exactly 20 days, 8 hours and 32 minutes until the UK leaves the European Union.   At 11 pm GMT on 29 March, unless parliament somehow finds a unity of purpose next week that it has not shown for nearly three years,  all EU rules and regulations will instantly cease to apply to the UK.  There will be no agreements between Britain and the EU on customs, trade, travel or citizens rights.  We face the very real possibilities of a collapsing pound, food and medicine shortages, a breakdown in supply chains, traffic jams at the border, businesses going under, and millions of people effectively stranded in the UK and Europe in a legal limbo.

None of this was forced upon us.  Everything that has happened since the June 2016 referendum is a consequence of our own decisions;  of a referendum campaign soaked in dodgy money, lies and false premises;  of politicians and an electorate that did not understand what they were doing; of an inept and dishonourable government that has proven itself to be painfully out-of-depth on every single level except maintaining itself in power.

If anyone has any doubt how useless this government is, consider what happened last week.  First Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt blamed the EU for any breakdown in the negotiations, because the EU would not change the backstop agreement that the government itself had originally asked for, but now wants to opt out of in order to please the zealots in the Tory party.

Then the Attorney-General, with a breathtaking cheek, suggested that the backstop might pose a risk to the human rights of the people of Northern Ireland.   While this was going on, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that he was ready to deploy the army to deal with knife crime.  Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley told parliament that killings carried out by the security forces during the Troubles were ‘not crimes’ and Andrea Leadsom suggested that Islamophobia was a matter for the Foreign Office.

In short, this is a government-of-the-damned, a government that cannot and should not be allowed to govern.  And yet that same government is nine points clear in the polls.  And it isn’t hard to see why.  On the other side of the house Labour announced that it wouldn’t be pushing for a second referendum after all, even though it seemed to say the week before that it would be.

It is difficult to know what Labour wants on this issue, as its different factions jostle for position and the party continues to fragment.  Last week Tom Watson formed a new left-of-centre caucus within the party.  And Channel 4 News revealed that the Labour Leave campaign, most prominently represented by Kate Hoey, was funded in part by Arron Banks.  Meanwhile the independent group flits around ineffectually, and Brexit-supporting Labour MPs seem poised to vote for May’s deal if they can get big enough bungs for their constituencies.

In short, this is not the parliament you look to in order to avert disaster – not if you want to sleep at night.

A responsible government and a responsible opposition would never have allowed us to end up in the situation in which we now found ourselves.   Even if you accept that parliament was obliged to implement the referendum result,  the government and opposition should have approached Brexit with extreme caution, given what was at stake and the risks involved.

The government bears primary responsibility for not having done this.  It was the government that dictated the process and moved from blustering arrogance to capitulation in its negotiations before defaulting to blustering arrogance once again.   It was the government that triggered Article 50 and committed the country to a time-limited negotiation process without any coherent plan or consensus on what kind of withdrawal was desirable or possible.

But Corbyn also waved Article 50 through for party political reasons.    Again and again Corbyn has talked of ‘respecting the referendum’ as if that was the beginning and end of the debate.   Serious politicians would have worked on a common plan – however long it took – and they would have welcomed the opportunity to present such a plan to the public, with an option to reject it.

There is clearly a world of difference between a snapshot referendum that narrowly voted to leave the European Union as an abstract principle, and the practicalities and consequences of such a monumental decision.

To have acted only on the former without allowing the public to vote on these practicalities is not just an error – it is actually a dereliction of democratic duty.

Terrified of standing up to the populist tide and risk being accused of ‘stopping Brexit’ – and losing votes as a result –  both the Tories and Labour fetishised a flawed referendum as the ultimate expression of democracy, essentially because each of them hoped to gain party political advantage from it.

The result is that a divided and fractious parliament dominated by two parties that are visibly falling apart and fatally divided, is unable to reach a consensus, and at the same unwilling to go back to the public and halt the disastrous process.

So we are looking at political failure on an epic scale, whose consequences will resonate for decades to come.   It’s really very difficult to see a positive outcome in all this.  The UK is unlikely to survive this process, which may be good news for Scotland, and Ireland too – if independence can be achieved without a return to civil war.

Wales may be forced to go where England goes.   And that is not looking like a good place.  Because in the end this failure is primarily a failure of English politics.  Brexit was and is driven by English arrogance and English nationalist delusions.

These delusions have been our downfall, and unless something truly astounding happens next week,  I fear that our fall will be much steeper than we think.

 

 

 

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Are You or Have You Ever Been an Antisemite?

I’m not a Labour party member, but it’s impossible to ignore the ‘antisemitism crisis’ that has ground its dismal way through British politics for the last three and a half years.

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015,  this crisis has grown and grown, acquiring new dimensions and components along the way.  Where Corbyn was once accused of failing to deal with antisemitism, he is now accused of being the cause of it.  Where the Labour party once had a problem with antisemitism, it’s has become ‘institutionally antisemitic.’

Journalists now traul through Corbyn’s facebook posts,  meetings and appearances to discover that – hey presto! – a politician with an antiracist record that few British politicians can equal turns out to have been an antisemite all along.

Other leftwing activists have been similarly indicted, and those who know them or associate with them have been indicted by association.   We have now reached the point when leftwing activists like Michael Rosen can be dismissed by Dan Hodges as ‘Corbyn’s useful Jewish idiot’; when Nick Cohen can write in the Spectator that ‘ the far left has completed the project of Oswald Mosley and the National Front and made anti-Semitism mainstream’ – within the Labour party.

On Monday  the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh told Radio 4’s John Humphries that ‘some people in the Labour party’ are incapable of taking antisemitism seriously, because ‘  it’s very much part of their politics, of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital.’

Such claims are not only historically inane; they are also extraordinarily destructive and irresponsible.   There’s no doubt that there is an ugly streak of antisemitism on the left which at times has found its way into support for the Palestinian cause.

This is not to suggest that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic, despite the suggestions of some of Corbyn’s critics to the contrary.  But leftwing criticism of the Israeli state has sometimes been infused with hostility towards Jews per se.  At its most extreme, leftwing antisemitism may take the form of the vicious hatespeak and death threats directed at Jewish MPs such as Luciana Berger – though such abuse was not uniquely ‘leftwing’, nor was it supported by any organisation of the left.

Such tendencies may also take the form of antisemitic ‘tropes’, about ‘zionazis’, Rothchilds, international banking conspiracies, undue Jewish influence over domestic politics etc, which may reflect unconscious bias or something more sinister and unpleasant.

Both ‘tropes’ and overt expressions of antisemitism have rightly disgusted and offended many British Jews.   At the same time it’s striking that such attitudes have acquired their political salience only insofar as they are identified as a Labour party problem, or more particularly as a Corbyn problem.

There is no doubt that this problem has  been wilfully exaggerated  by opponents of  the left and the Corbyn project, both inside and outside the party, who include leading  Jewish organisations – almost all of which are strongly supportive of Israel, the Tory government, rightwing Labour MPs, the Daily Mail, Guido Fawkes, left hating journalists like Nick Cohen and the likes of Katie Hopkins.

There is also evidence that the Israeli government has contributed to this process, though even  to make such an observation in the current climate runs the risk of being depicted as antisemitic oneself.  Many of those who now attack ‘Labour antisemitism’  have never raised their voices about any other kind of racism.  Some, like Katie Hopkins,  actively promote racist hatred towards every other racial or ethnic group except Jews.

Few members of this consensus  have raised their voices to condemn  Theresa May’s hostile environment, anti-Muslim bigotry or the ‘take our country back’ hate crimes that have been unfolding on a weekly or even daily basis since the referendum.  To point this out is not ‘whataboutery’, but  it does raise the question of why one form of racism has acquired such unprecedented prominence when so many others are ignored or minimised.

This prominence is clearly not related to the actual scale of the problem. According to Labour’s own figures,  reported complaints of antisemitism amount to 0.1 percent of Labour party members.  Whatever the outcome of these investigations, these figures clearly suggest that  a problem exists,  and Labour’s response to it has at times been tone-deaf and extraordinarily inept.

The appointment of Laura Murray, the daughter of one of Corbyn’s leading aides, general secretary Jennie Formby’s complaints unit, is such a politically-stupid decision that it smacks of contempt and outright trolling.

But Corbyn’s team cannot take all the blame for a crisis that was exaggerated from the start.  It was perfectly legitimate for Labour to question the IHRA’s  antisemitism guidelines, and it also seems entirely fair that accusations of antisemitism should be investigated and subject to different penalties, depending on the offence.

It would be difficult for any political party  to respond effectively to a McCarthyite consensus that is clearly willing to destroy the reputations of veteran Labour party members and anti-racists on the basis of the wording of a FB post or a ‘trope’, and which seems intent on taking Corbyn’s political head, even if it takes the destruction of the Labour party to achieve this.

For some this outcome is the whole point.  But the repercussions of this crisis are not  limited to the Labour party itself.    For more than a decade now, Gaza has been locked up in an Israeli-imposed cage because its population had the temerity to vote for a government that Israel and the ‘international community’ did not like.  Last spring, Israeli soldiers shot dead nearly two hundred demonstrators and wounded hundreds more, with barely a breath of protest from those who are now accusing Corbyn and the left of antisemitism.  As is so often the case, these victims were too often reduced to ‘Hamas’ or ‘terrorist.’

It is increasingly clear that Israel thinks it has a carte blanche, and that this largesse is  exacerbating its worst tendencies.   Until a few years ago BDS was gaining ground and there was a real possibility of putting international pressure on Israel.  Now that momentum has been lost, and the Palestinians are once again slipping into invisibility.

Israel and its supporters will undoubtedly relish this outcome.   But there are other factors at play here.  Across the western world the far-right and its newer populist variants are gaining ground.  Even though most far-right formations in Europe and America now support Israel – or claim to – Jew-hatred remains a leitmotif for fascists, Nazis, white supremacists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Antisemitism attacks are increasing, but so are attacks on other minority groups.   It is incumbent on all of us to prevent this slide into barbarism.   There is absolutely nothing to suggest that the moral panic about Labour’s antisemitism crisis is intended to contribute to this process.

On the contrary, by prioritising one form of racism over another and exaggerating and manipulating it in order to defame their political opponents, Corybyn’s accusers are more likely to undermine the unity and clarity required to hold back the far-right forces that threaten all of us – and which in this country are growing in strength and confidence as a result of the Brexit debacle.

We should call out racists and bigots wherever we find them, but it is depressingly clear that some of those who are now seeking to destroy the Labour left are only interested in  calling out the ones that suit them

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Nigel’s March for Freedom

As an instrument of protest and civil disobedience, the protest march has a long and illustrious historical pedigree.  Think of Gandhi’s 24-day ‘Salt March’ in 1930.  Or the 1936 Jarrow march.   Or the 1963 Long March for Jobs and Freedom in the US, where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘ I have a dream speech’ in front of the Lincoln Memorial.  Or the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march in 1965.

There is something powerful and moving about large crowds marching from one place to another to protest against injustice or demonstrate their support for a political cause.   It’s not just the numbers – only 200 ‘crusaders’ marched from Jarrow to the House of Commons in 1936.   The impact of such marches can also be intensified by distance, creating a snowball effect as the marchers engage with the towns and communities that they pass through.

The longer the march the better.  Such marches demonstrate that endurance, passion, and commitment.  They show that their participants – whether famous or not – are willing to step outside their everyday lives and do something difficult for a higher cause.  Regardless of their secular motivations, such marches invariably carry echoes of religious pilgrimage.  Last but not least, they act as galvanising events, generating publicity for their cause and for the people who lead them.

Next month the unlikely figure of Nigel Farage intends to join that tradition – sort of.   Beginning in Sunderland on March 16 the ‘March to Leave’ campaign proposes to march 277 miles to London to protest the ‘betrayal of Brexit.’  Farage, you may not be surprised to hear, will not be participating in the whole march, but merely dropping in from time to time – presumably with the tv cameras nearby.

Instead ‘core marchers’ will supposedly be marching for 15 miles a day, paying pay £50 pounds for food and accommodation and a ‘March to Leave kit’ that includes a beanie, a coat, water bottle, and blue high visibility jacket.  You can also become ‘cheerleader’ or ‘sponsor a core marcher’ instead of marching yourself.  The salt march this ain’t

That beanie almost makes me want to sign up, but not quite.  It might seem only a small point to observe that blue high viz jackets are not actually much use from a safety point of view.   As the Hivis company, one of the leading suppliers of high visibility clothing, notes‘Generally, blue is not a very effective colour for fluorescent products and accessories, as its wavelength is not so good at emitting light.’

The same could be said of Farage’s march.  The March to Leave launch has been accompanied by some stunningly amateurish and vapid presentational material, such as this ear-jarring video on how to become a ‘core marcher’, from a female presenter who positively oozes insincerity and fake passion.

 

 

I’m not sure what she’s on, but whatever it is it looks like dangerous stuff, because if there is any evidence of cerebral activity in these pronouncements I cannot find it.   So why is this weird parody of protest being inflicted upon us?  In a tv interview the insufferable fraud Isabel Oakeshott explains that ‘ there is a real feeling, I think, amongst Brexit voters, of a looming betrayal.  They sense that even if this deal goes through it’s a bad deal.’

 

 

So what deal is Oakeshott proposing instead?  Naturally she doesn’t say.  But a clue comes from the organisers of the march, the pro-Brexit pressure group Leave Means Leave, which describes itself as the ‘leading cross-party campaign for a clean, swift exit from the European Union.’

According to its chairman John Longworth: “The Westminster elite has had over two years to implement Brexit and instead has done everything in its power to prevent it…An extension of Article 50, thereby kicking the can further down the road, is completely unacceptable.’

So Farage and his cohorts are worried, and their march is intended to rally the troops.  Never mind that this ‘betrayal’ is a whopping lie wrapped in a coating of mindnumbing delusion.  For starters there is no ‘Westminster elite’ opposing Brexit en masse.  On the contrary, parliament has demonstrated time and time again to the frustration of almost everybody, that it is hopelessly divided and out of its depth about Brexit and about the different deals that have been proposed.

The difficulties that the government and parliament have had are more to do with the essential contradiction of Brexit that its proponents have rarely acknowledged: namely that the UK cannot leave the European Union without inflicting serious economic and political damage on itself and/or without reneging on crucial international agreements that it voluntarily signed up to.

Farage and his cohorts have no answer to this, beyond advocating for a no deal withdrawal that most serious analysts, British farmers, trade unions, economists, and the bulk of British business agree would be catastrophic both economically and politically, and would plunge millions of EU nationals and British citizens abroad into a legal vacuum.

Neither Farage, nor Oakeshott, nor any of the Brexit zombies involved with March to Leave ever shown the slightest concern about the consequences of the ‘clean. swift exit’ they are advocating for.

Devoid of any serious or coherent plan, they can only rail against the ‘Westminster elite’ and beat their chests about ‘betrayal’ like the fake men and women of the people they are.  They claim to  represent ‘the British people’ when they don’t even represent all the people who voted Leave.

This is the reality of next month’s ‘crusade’ as one tv channel had the very poor taste to describe it.  Where the Jarrow marchers marched for jobs and industrial investment, these fanatical clowns are effectively proposing to march in support of a no deal withdrawal that is likely to bring about more unemployment and deindustrialisation.  Metaphorically speaking, they are closer to the processions of medieval flagellants who wandered around Europe during the Black Death – if you can imagine flagellants wearing beanies and blue high viz jackets.

No one should be surprised that Oakeshott should have the gall to use the language of the civil rights marchers in describing this hollow freakshow as a ‘march for freedom’ –  this is a ‘commentator’ who lies as she breathes.   But make no mistake about it, this march has nothing to do with ‘freedom’ or Martin Luther King and there is nothing noble or admirable about it.

The March to Leave website shows a photograph of a couple walking through green remembered hills towards the gleaming sea with their three sheepdogs.

Maybe that ocean symbolises ‘freedom’ or ‘independence’, or maybe not.  But one can only hope that they keep walking right into it, and that Nigel’s marchers do the same, because that is where the Pied Piper of Brexitland would like to take us.

And his zombie march has no other purpose except to make that outcome more likely, even as it adds one more note of travesty and farce to our collective humiliation.

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We Could Be Heroes: from Brexit to the Blitz

History has played a big part in the national torment that we’ve been going through for the last two and half years.  Social media and more mainstream political discourse alike are awash with facile historical references and comparisons, between Dunkirk and WTO rules, between the EU and Hitler, Napoleon, or the Soviet Union.

At times it feels we’re living in a looped mash up of Blackadder and Horrible Histories mixed with Pathé News clips.

Many of these references return invariably to World War 2, usually from Brexiters, who like to remind us that we survived the war and can therefore survive a no-deal Brexit, that we liberated the same foreigners who are now telling us what to do, that they should be grateful etc, etc

Such snippets generally come stripped of the complexities, nuances and context that are or should be part of any serious study of the past.  They tend to consist of what Norman Mailer called ‘factoids’, invoked to satisfy a nationalist imagination that feeds on the nostalgic invocation of lost grandeur, that generally prefers myths to facts,  and ignores inconvenient facts that contradict the myths it refers to.

It’s easy – and entirely correct – to point out the fraudulent and selective use of the past by men like Rees-Mogg and Johnson.  But this selectivity is essential to our post-referendum fascination with the past.

Last night Channel 4 News devoted a thoughtful segment to the post-referendum obsession with the war.  Fatima Manji interviewed the former ‘wartime child’ Ruth Baden; a former RAF fighter pilot; the British historian Neil MacGregor, who now advises the Humboldt Forum museum project in Berlin, and the German historian Helena von Bismarck.

 

 

 

Many Remainers will relate to Ruth Baden’s heartfelt response, when asked about the constant references to wartime rationing, that ‘ I feel like weeping, because it’s so utterly stupid.’  But then there is the 94-year-old former RAF pilot Brian Neeley, who  remembers Dunkirk as a time when ‘ we had nothing, we had absolutely nothing.  And it’s the same with Brexit.  We’ve stood up alone before.  And what makes us think that we can’t stand up alone again?’

Neeley, like many people who make such comparisons, seems entirely oblivious to the fact that we are not at war and the negative consequences of Brexit are a consequence of a political choice that our politicians have made .  Nor does he mention the fact that Britain did not ‘stand up alone’ during the war, and would have lost the war if it had.

I’ve often thought, listening to this kind of ‘Blitz spirit’ nostalgia, of the nineteenth century American writers who longed for civil war, not because they cared one way or another about slavery, but because they saw peace as an inherently corrupt and corrupting state in itself.   These were writers who believed that nations were tempered by war, and that war made nations heroic.

Something similar can be found in the writings of Padraig Pearse about Ireland; in the neoconservative writers after 9/11 who saw the ‘war on terror’ as a bracing moral struggle that would redeem a decadent American society through heroic righteous war against an utterly evil enemy.

Some of these expectations underpin the wartime nostalgia that has converged around Brexit, as the negative consequences become clearer.

In terms of how ‘Britain’ imagines itself as a nation, WW2 – and particularly 1940 – has always constituted  a unique historical reference point of national heroism.   Such nostalgia obscures a great deal.  Land Lease, the Soviet Union, the carpet bombing of German cities, the European partisans, the use of colonial troops, and many other factors contributed to a victory that too many people seem to imagine was won by ‘Blitz spirit’ and a stiff upper lip.

Such nostalgia tends to be accompanied by a sense of indignation and incomprehension that ‘Great’ Britain should now be having to ‘take orders’ from foreigners who ‘we’ liberated from Nazism.

In last night’s programme, Neil MacGregor compared the British obsession with the war to Germans ‘who live constantly with the failures of their own history.’   In McGregor’s estimation,  the British use the past as a form of ‘self-affirmation.  It’s a way of telling ourselves that we’ve on the whole been the good guys.  And when we come to the difficult bits, we just speed up.’

We have seen a lot of ‘speeding up’ over the last few years, but our historical amnesia wasn’t caused by Brexit.   We have yet to experience what Germans call ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’  –‘ the process of coming to terms with the [negative] past.’

Germany, as MacGregor points out, uses its Nazi – and communist – past to guide its politics, in ways that the UK has not begun to do.

To point this out is not to suggest that the British Empire was ‘like the Nazis’.  ‘Coming to terms’ with the past should not mean moral self-flagellation, but it should be based on the honest acknowledgment of less heroic episodes such as the Bengal famine, Boer War concentration camps, Cecil Rhodes or the bombing of civilians.

And we should incorporate that knowledge into our understanding of who we are and how we came to be who we are.  Because countries that don’t – or can’t – do this, will inevitably fall victim to precisely the kind of self-destructive nationalist frenzy that has unfolded since the referendum.   They will always be vulnerable to charlatans and demagogues, and what the 86-year-old Ruth Baden calls ‘ false pride.’

As Baden plaintively observed ‘ We’re just a small island off the mainland of Europe.  I think we have a great deal to offer.  But we shouldn’t get above ourselves.’

Quite. But we’ve been ‘above ourselves’ for a long time now, and if we are ever going to wake up from the political nightmare we have inflicted on ourselves, we would do well to take off the rose-tinted glasses that the nationalists want us to wear, stop waving the Union Jack, and remember that we were not always good, heroic, or great – and that our ‘greatness’ was not always what we now think it was.

 

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Our Man in Slovenia

If the behaviour of British diplomats these last two and a half years is anything to go by, the UK may not be taking the giant strides across the world stage that Brexit visionaries seem to think it should.   Take foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt’s visit to Slovenia last week.  Showing all the intellectual gravitas of Peter Sellers’s Chance in Being There, Hunt attempted to ingratiate himself with his hosts by describing Slovenia as:

A really remarkable transformation from a Soviet vassal state to a modern European democracy, a member of the EU, a member of Nato, a country with a flourishing economy, growing its tourism year in, year out, and this is really an example of Europe at its best.

Where to start with this?   Well firstly, with the indisputable fact that Slovenia was never a ‘Soviet vassal state’.  It was, until 1992, a member of the former Yugoslavia, which was not a Soviet vassal state either.

As many people are aware, and have been aware for some time, Yugoslavia famously broke with Stalin in 1948, and held on to its own version of ‘workers self-management’ socialism and international neutrality  throughout the Cold War.

For most of that period, as a Pathé news clip once described it, Yugoslavia occupied the position of an ‘in-between, precariously balanced between East and West’ which meant that Slovenia did too.  Had Hunt had the slightest interest in Slovenia, Yugoslavia or anywhere else, he could have read the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas’s Conversations With Stalin, in which the then-partisan communist leader describes in painful and telling detail his disillusionment with the Soviet Union – including the atrocious behaviour of Red Army soldiers during the liberation of Yugoslavia –  which anticipated the historic break in 1948.

Hunt or his speechwriter might have come across the name Dragica Srzentic, the Yugoslav communist and partisan leader who delivered Tito’s letter to Stalin breaking relations – and later spent 10 years in a female labour camp because she disagreed with Tito’s criticisms of Russia.  Hunt might have remembered the famous letter than Tito sent to Stalin in 1949:

 

 

All this passed Hunt by, even though by his own admission this was not his first visit to Slovenia.  You can’t blame Milan Brglez, former president of the Slovenian parliament, for observing that ‘The British foreign minister comes to Slovenia asking us for a favour [discussing the rights of British and Slovenian nationals] while arrogantly insulting us.’

It would be charitable to think that Hunt confused Slovenia with Ruritania – a mistake that Western Europeans have often made when thinking about any part of Eastern Europe.

 

 

But the most probable explanation is that Hunt simply had no idea what he was talking about, and no interest in finding out what he should be talking about. This is, after all, a man who mistook the nationality of his own wife, who also compared the European Union to the Soviet Union, and nearly collapsed British-Japanese trade negotiations because he told Japan to hurry up.

Hunt is clearly a man who wears his knowledge lightly, perhaps because there is so little of it to carry, but his ‘gaffes’ belong  to a wider tendency that transcends his personal limitations. His clunking appearance in Slovenia followed Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson’s blustering airfix toy threat to send an aircraft carrier to the Pacific – a threat that China responded to by cancelling trade negotiations with the UK.

Williamson, like Hunt, might have done well to have learned a bit of Chinese history, such as the Opium Wars or the humiliation of the interwar Shanghai ‘settlement’ – episodes which have generally led to a certain reluctance from an economic superpower to respond to puerile fist waving from former fireplace salesmen.

And few people will forget that Hunt took over from the idiot king Boris Johnson, whose all-round oafishness, ignorance and outright racism alienated almost every country he set foot in.

Some commentators have suggested – rightly – that the ignorance and arrogance on display at the highest levels of government is symptomatic of the Brexit era, in which the misreading or misremembering of history has become part of our ongoing attempts to relaunch Empire 2: 0.

Men like Hunt, Williamson and Johnson clearly appear to believe they can say what they like about anything foreign, without any negative consequences – domestically at least.  This is why Johnson could compare the Irish border with traffic congestion charges in London, and why a senior Tory recently asked why the Irish refused to ‘know their place.’

Brexit has certainly provided an ideal climate for such ignorance to flourish, but Brexit didn’t cause this by itself.

It’s only necessary to remember Tony Blair, when he was visited by three Iraq experts on the eve of the Iraq War, who tried to explain the complexities of Iraqi politics to him.   At the end of these presentations Blair said of Saddam ‘ but the man’s evil, isn’t he?’

Blair knew nothing about Iraq and he didn’t care to know anything that contradicted his quasi-religious messianism,  until reality exploded in his face.  Cameron was no better, bombing Libya without any thought as to to what would happen next.

For years now, our politicians have had no compunction whatsoever in ‘intervening’ to save countries they knew nothing about, and little interest in finding out about them – and without any serious assessment of the consequences.

Now Venezuela is joining the list, and if the US intervenes and the bombs do fall, you can bet that our man in Slovenia and the fireplace salesman will be sending in troops, weapons or planes to help.

And as for what comes next, that’s not something that will really concern us.  It’s been like this for a long time, and for a long time it worked – for us.

But now, for the first time in our history,  this same level of ignorance, arrogance and shallowness has brought the UK itself to the brink of disintegration.  Reality is exploding in our faces, in ways that we once would never have thought possible, and the endless ‘gaffes’ of our politicians are just one more indication of the deeper political morbidity that has brought us to the brink.

 

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