Matthew Carr's Blog, page 26

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  Social media and more mainstream political discourse alike are awash with facile historical references and comparisons, between Dunkirk and WTO rules, between the EU and Hitler, Napoleon, or the Soviet Union.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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Cracking Up: Brexit and the Seven Dwarves

Fans of Titanic and other disaster movies will know what to expect from the genre.   In the first part of the movie the characters go about their business oblivious to what is about to happen.  They might be in an office building, a ship, a submarine, an oil rig or any other structure that the audience knows is going to collapse or break up.

The characters usually don’t know the disaster is coming, but we do – that’s why we showed up.  And so we watch out for the inevitable warning signs: the busting rivets, the overheating temperature gauges, the ignored warnings, the buckling metal and all the other telltale signals that tell us things are about to blow, bigtime.

Politically speaking, the seven MPs who left Labour to join the ‘Independent Group’ yesterday belong to the same dramatic trope.  Individually or taken as a whole, these MPs have little political or intellectual clout.  They do not inspire and they are not likely to inspire.   Unlike the Gang of Four back in 1981 they include no big beasts and have no obvious constituency or coherent vision of what they propose to do.

We know that they detest Corbyn and the ‘hard left machine’ that they say has taken over the Labour Party.   We know that they are anti-Brexit.  We also know that they are repelled by a party that they argue is ‘institutionally antisemitic.’

Beyond that, things become hazy.  On Channel 4 News yesterday Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna were deeply unimpressive, waffling vaguely about the ‘values’ that they believe Labour has departed from – regardless of the fact that it would be difficult to find anyone in the Labour Party who would reject the values that Berger listed.

 

Berger also spoke darkly of a drift away from the centre to the fringes and extremes that she insisted her constituents rejected.  That remains to be seen, and since none of the seven are prepared to stand in bye-elections, it may be a while before anyone finds out.

Given this absence of clarity and purpose, it’s not surprising that yesterday’s event wasn’t the epoch-making launch that the seven may have hoped for.  It’s certainly an unusual – and given what goes on these days – a possibly dubious step to register a new political group in Panama, thereby making it impossible to know who its donors are.

For MPs who have made the ‘institutional racism’ of the Labour Party their cause celebre, it was genuinely jaw-dropping to hear Angela Smith refer to BAME people with a ‘funny tinge’ on tv.   You also have to wonder why Katie Hopkins – one of the most notorious racists in the country – would welcome a split like this.   Not to mention the Daily Mail and the entire Tory press.

But less obviously self-interested commentators have also hailed the ‘magnificent seven’ and praised their courage and bravery, and expressed hopes that this split may herald some return to ‘decency’.

Personally, I’m not impressed by any of them, either individually or collectively.  And I can’t help thinking that the real significance of yesterday’s events goes beyond the Labour Party itself to the ongoing political disaster movie that we have been living these last two and a half years.

The creaking and buckling has been going on for some time, but now a rivet has finally burst loose, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Though responsibility lies primarily with the Tories, the British political class has proven itself to be woefully incapable of finding answers to the most serious political crisis in the country’s history since World War 2.

It’s a crisis that has opened up multiple fractures in the political class that the old two-party system cannot absorb or deal with.   It runs across parties and within them.  It is not simply Leave versus Remain, but between left and right Leave and Remain, between May’s deal or no deal, between Corbyn’s customs union and a second referendum, between those who think that Brexit is a serious crisis and those who believe it’s just a distraction.

These divisions do not easily lend themselves to any obvious political alliances.   There may well be Tory MPs who are tempted by the notion of a ‘decent’ centre in order to escape the clutches of the ERG,  but what form will that centre take beyond Brexit or calls for a second vote?

The SDP occupied a very specific political ground and they failed – while weakening the Labour vote in the process.  The seven have no such position, and it’s not at all obvious what kind of position they even seek to occupy.

There are dozens of Labour MPs who loathe Corbyn and will have been thinking of leaving the party, but why would people like John Mann and Graham Stringer join a breakaway faction that calls for a second vote and opposes Brexit?  Why would left-leaning Remainers want to support a group that has previously favoured soft austerity and hard immigration controls, and which opposes freedom of movement?

It’s very difficult to see how any breakaway faction, or even a new ‘centrist’ party can accommodate these differences.   But one thing is certain: it won’t be the last split. Brexit has created pressures that Westminster cannot contain, and unlike your typical disaster movie – this one has been some time coming.  The old coalitions that held Labour and the Tories together in opposition to each other are breaking up.

Whatever happens over the next few months, we may be approaching our own version of Italy’s tangentopoli –  the antiquated, rigid and discredited political system that collapsed when its inadequacies were glaringly revealed in the early 1990s.

What happens next remains to be seen, but nothing happened yesterday to make me think that the Independent Group have the ability to take the country to a better place.

The great problem is that as things stand, nor can anyone else.

 

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Shamima Begum and the Quality of Mercy

What is mercy?   The Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘ compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.’  This definition highlights the essential component of mercy, which is forbearance and leniency from a position of power and authority.

This concept is well-established in various religious traditions.  The Quran declares: ‘ No one despairs of God’s soothing mercy except those who have no faith.’ (Quran, 12: 87).  ‘Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you,’ insists Ephesians 4: 31 -32.

Such exhortations are partly based on the notion that God is merciful (sometimes) and that therefore human beings should strive to be merciful too.  But societies don’t need religious authority to be merciful.  In The Merchant of Venice, Portia describes mercy as a dispensation of the Almighty, but she also insists that mercy shown by kings is ‘twice blest/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes/ ‘T is mightiest in the mightiest/ It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.’

Needless to say, this is not a notion that Daesh/Islamic State has ever showed any interest in or familiarity with.  On the contrary, Daesh has not shown an iota of pity, mercy or humanity, not to the prisoners it executed, nor to the people who transgressed its savage laws, nor the non-Muslim or non-Sunni minorities it conquered and enslaved during its rampage through Iraq and Syria.

Nor did its motley followers show any mercy to the men and women they slaughtered in Paris, London, Nice and many other places.   More than any of the various jihadist organisations that have sprung up across the world in the last two decades, Daesh has positively reveled in cruelty and killing.

Given this history, it’s logical to ask why the UK and any other state should show any mercy or forgiveness towards the foreign fighters and supporters who once rushed to join the ranks of caliphate, and are now returning to the countries they came from in the aftermath of its collapse.

This phenomenon has become the subject of national publicity since the ‘ISIS schoolgirl’ Shamima Begum was interviewed by Times reporter Anthony Lloyd in a Syrian refugee camp last week.

 

At first sight, the heavily-pregnant Begum is not the most obvious object of mercy and forgiveness, despite her insistence that she wants to return ‘home’.  Though she refers vaguely to the ‘underground oppression’ of Muslims under Daesh, she makes it clear that she did not regret joining the caliphate, and seems to suggest that she would have been comfortable with  such ‘oppression’ had it been limited to non-Muslims.

Begum did herself no favours, and the Home Secretary Sajid Javid responded exactly how you would expect him to, declaring:

My message is clear.  If you have supported terrorist organisations abroad I will not hesitate to prevent your return.  We must remember that those who left Britain to join Daesh were full of hate for our country.  If you do manage to return you should be ready to be questioned, investigated and potentially prosecuted.

Javid knows what gallery he is playing to, and there has never been a time when a Tory government needed so desperately to find a sympathetic audience somewhere.  But Begum’s appeal has been discussed all over the media, and also on social media and below-the-line commentaries,  where it has ignited a stream of vicious hatred that – if acted upon, would take the country very deep into the gutter.

That is exactly the audience Javid is playing to, and even though you can understand why he would want to do this, his suggestion that Begum should be considered persona non grata does not make much sense in the broader scheme of things.

The extent to which Begum is a ‘brainwashed’ victim or an active and conscious participant in Daesh’s crimes remains to be determined.  Nevertheless, with Daesh on the brink of final collapse, the priority of any sensible government should be to provide routes for the reintegration and deradicalisation of the foreign fighters who want to return.

There is of course a risk that some of them might seek to carry out attacks in this country.    However, those fighters who are still intent on carrying out such attacks will plot such things anyway, and stripping them of their citizenship and leaving them with nothing to lose is likely to increase their willingness to do so.

If we are serious about ‘fighting terror’, we need to find ways of closing the cycle of cruelty and vengeance that has unfolded across the world ever since the 9/11 mass killings, and we should seek to limit the appeal that Daesh and similar organisations have to Muslims in this country who might be attracted to them.  We also need to understand what motivated people like Begum.

One step towards achieving these objectives is to create pathways back into UK society for those who are genuinely looking for them.  That doesn’t mean we should welcome Begum and her fellow-jihadists  back into the country with a big hug and a cup of tea.  As Javid suggested, she should be thoroughly vetted and questioned, and where crimes have been committed, she should be punished.

But beyond that, there should be an opportunity for redemption for those who want to be redeemed.   This isn’t about being ‘soft on terrorism’.   It’s not about showing how liberal we are and patting ourselves on the back.

Of course demonstrating that we aren’t like Daesh is an aspiration that every society should aim for, but it’s also common sense.  Because Daesh would not want us to behave like this.  It would prefer that our governments showed the same cruelty and implacability that it showed.

It would prefer us to show no mercy.  It would prefer us to act out of vengeance and hatred.  And there is no better reason why we shouldn’t give in to that temptation.

 

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The TaxPayers’ Alliance: Your Toxic Solutions

It’s been known for some time, for those who want to look, that the lobbying organisation the Taxpayers’ Alliance is not what it says it is.  On its website the TPA presents itself as a ‘non-partisan, grassroots campaign for lower taxes, government transparency and an end to wasteful government spending.

Founded in 2003  by Matthew Elliott – the future  chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign during the referendum – the TPA is one of various astroturf lobbying organisations based in Elliott’s 55 Tufton Street stable.  Its influence has grown in the last few years, thanks to donations from some wealthy Conservative Party supporters, in addition to undisclosed donations from American donors.

For all its ‘grassroots’ pretensions, the TPA is a strictly top-down outfit.  And if you want to know what kind of organisation it is, consider its attempts to stop Southampton City Council from enforcing a low-emissions Clean Air Zone (CAZ), in Southampton city centre.  Some context here.  The CAZ is an attempt to address the fact that  Southampton is one of the WHO’s top 11 most-polluted urban areas in the UK and Ireland, where Public Health England figures in 2011 attributed 6.3 per cent of adult deaths in the city to air pollution.

Last year the government’s  Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) estimated that between 28,000 and 36,000 people die as a result of air pollution every year in the UK, and the UK was one of five countries referred to the European Court of Justice for breaching legal limits on air pollution levels and failing to introduce ‘credible, effective and timely measures to reduce pollution as soon as possible, as required under EU law.’

Southampton is one of the cities that breaches EU legal limits.  In 2011 Public Health England attributed 6.3 percent of adult deaths in Southampton to air pollution.   As part of its Clean Air Zone project therefore, Southampton announced last autumn that it would charge some diesel vehicles to drive in the city centre.

In October the TPA began to protest these proposals, which it described as a ‘stealth tax’.  Nothing surprising about this.  The TPA also opposes proposals to tax sugar and processed meat, regardless of the consequences for public health.

The TPA reached deep into its grassroots support base and dispatched…four activists to Southampton Football Club, where they wore Saints shirts and held up mock £100 cheques made out by ‘ A. Taxpayer’ – to support their claim that the charge would prevent Southampton fans from entering the city centre.

 

The scheme was also opposed by local Tory MP for Southampton Itchen Royston Smith as a threat to ‘jobs and livelihoods.’  Last month, the City Council announced that it was removing plans to impose £100 charges from its CAZ.

And today, the TPA has been bragging about its victory as part of an ongoing attempt to raise its profile further, with messages like this:

That feeling when a new tax is defeated

Guest Post: Catalonia, the Trials of Shame

This week the first trials of Catalan government officials, politicians, parliamentarians, police officials and civic activists for charges relating to the 1 October 2017 independence referendum begin in Madrid.  This is a guest post from my good friend Andreu Jené, giving a Catalan perspective on these events, with my translation.

Cartoon credit:  Paco Santero 

 

Tomorrow the first trials will begin in connection with the events that took place during the Catalonia independence referendum on 1 October 2017.  The trials will cover a range of offences related to the advance preparation and organisation of the referendum in the months beforehand, and the actual realisation of the ballot that was so brutally repressed by the police and civil guard on the morning of 1 October.

Most of the accused will be tried at the Supreme Court in Madrid, and a few defendants will be tried in Catalonia.  In total 16 people will go on trial: the vice-president of the Generalitat (government of Catalonia); the speaker of the Catalan parliament; half the Catalan government; members of the parliamentary bureau; one female MP and two leaders of civic activist organizations ( the so-called Jordis).

In addition,  the Catalan Minister of the Interior and the chief of the Catalan police will also be tried for failing to suppress the referendum, even though the Catalan police confiscated more ballot boxes on the morning of the referendum than the Spanish Civil Guard and police, without any violence whatsoever.   Nine of the accused have already spent months in preventive custody – four of them for more than a year.  The charges leveled against them include rebellion, sedition, disobedience and the misuse of public funds. The offence of rebellion carries with it the accusation of violence, though none of the defendants engaged in or promoted any form of violence.

Prosecutors are demanding a total of 214 years imprisonment for these charges. The vice-president of the Generalitat faces a potential sentence of 25 years. The other defendants face the prospect of 17, 16 and 7 years in prison, in addition to fines and bans on holding public office.  These extraordinarily harsh demands are intended to make the court seem magnanimous if – as has been suggested – these sentences are eventually reduced to 4 or 5 years.

 

It should be clear than nothing is acceptable except complete absolution.

These charges have ignored judicial decisions in Belgium, German and Scotland, all of which have rejected the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) sent by the Spanish judge for the arrest of the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and other members of the Catalan government who went into exile. These countries only accepted the possible misuse of public funds as a justification for the EAW, but because the Spanish investigating judge was reluctant to bring charges only for this offence, the arrest warrant was withdrawn.

The absurdity of the charge of violent rebellion is particularly glaring in the case of the Jordis, Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez, the first of the defendants to be sent to prison.  On  20 September 2017, the Civil Guard entered various Catalan ministries and arrested 14 civil servants during a frenetic search for papers, ballot boxes and evidence of preparation of the referendum, which were never found.

In response to these arrests, a spontaneous demonstration was quickly organised through social media networks outside the Ministry of the Economy in the centre of Barcelona.  In a few hours 20,000 people occupied the street in front of the ministry in protest.  Soon afterwards Sánchez and Cuixart, as leaders of the pro-independence Assemblea Nacional Catalana (Catalan National Assembly) and Òmnium Cultural respectively,  took control of the demonstration.

As evening fell Sánchez and Cuixart called on the protesters to disperse peacefully.   In order to do this, they climbed onto a Civil Guard car, with the permission of the Civil Guard officers themselves, and addressed the crowd through a megaphone.  Oddly, the Civil Guard car was left open,  with weapons visibly displayed inside.  Naturally,  none of the protesters laid a hand on them, ignoring what was clearly a deliberate provocation intended to incite violence.

Following the declaration of Catalan independence on 27 October, the president of the Catalan parliament and various members of the government were immediately imprisoned, even though that declaration had no practical consequences.  The rest of the Catalan government chose to go into exile. Ever since the trial process began, it has been marked by irregularities and illegalities, which have been denounced by various jurists, including ex-members of the Supreme Court itself.

Every attempt has been made to impede the defence lawyers in their work.  Instead of being granted bail in order to prepare their defence with their lawyers, the accused will be taken from prisons in Catalonia to a prison near Madrid.  From there they will be taken daily to and from the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court is contaminated by judges who have been members of the conservative Partido Popular.  The high judiciary in Spain is still steeped in the Francoist past, and its ability to ensure the separation of powers and the rule of law is doubtful, to say the least.

The presence of such officials makes it difficult to believe that these trials will not be politicized.   Incredibly, the fascist party Vox has been allowed to take out law suits against some of the defendants, thereby giving it a role in the trials which Vox officials intend to use to their party’s political advantage.  All this is being done because the Spanish ‘deep state’ knows that sooner or later Catalonia will be independent, but it is trying to gain time by using police and judicial repression to wear down, divide and terrorize the independence movement.

Some 200 international journalists have asked to be present at the trial, which will be televised. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said that they will be monitoring the trial to ensure that due process is observed.  It’s clear that when the inevitable appeals against these sentences are brought before the European Court of Human Rights they will be declared void, and the prisoners will be freed, because there is no legal basis for these invented offences. Until that day, the prisoners will remain unjustly imprisoned.

All this matters, not just for Catalonia, but for a European Union already facing serious challenges, including populism, the rise of the extreme right, refugees, the crisis in the Mediterranean, and Brexit.  Ever since the referendum, the EU has turned a blind eye to the crisis in Catalonia on the grounds that it constitutes a Spanish ‘internal matter.’

It cannot continue do this for much longer – in the interests of democracy and in its own interest as well.

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All the Devils Are Here

It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it?   It’s fine for us to compare the EU to Hitler, the Soviet Union, the mafia, and a dictatorship.  It’s ok to accuse the EU of torturing us by ‘administering punishment beatings’, as the sixth form yob who bizarrely became our last foreign secretary once declared.

It was absolutely fine for Farage – in his full Alan Partridge-meets-Oswald Mosley posturing mode – to tell the former president of the European Union Herman van Rompuy back in 2011 that he had the ‘charisma of a dirty dishcloth,’ a ‘funny name’, and that he came from a ‘non-country’ – Belgium.

But it’s another matter when these foreigners start getting theological with us and telling Brexiters that there might be a ‘special place in hell’ for them.

So Farage was up in arms – up in arms I tell you – describing Tusk as an ‘arrogant bully’ and promising that a post-Brexit Britain ‘sounds like heaven.’   Next up was is the DUP’s Sammy Wilson – a politician who always looks as though he’s just staggered out of a bar after a very long lunch – reaching for his inner Paisley and describing Tusk as a ‘devilish euromaniac’ whose ‘trident wielding cabal’ has ‘fanned the flames of fear’ in an attempt to prevent the UK from reaching ‘the paradise of a free and prosperous Kingdom.’

Devils, tridents, flames, heaven and paradise – it’s all getting a little crazeee here, isn’t it folks?  And topping off the zaniness was Jacob Rees-Mogg.  On Thursday Rees-Mogg penned a piece for the Sun, in which he declared that

Mr Tusk’s arrogant and high-handed approach assumes the public did not make an informed decision to Leave.  He is saying that 17.4million people are stupid and got it wrong primarily because they are objecting to the system that he benefits from.

Well no he didn’t.  His frustration was entirely aimed at people like…Rees-Mogg – an MP who still looks more like Tim Burton’s idea of what a certain kind of British politician should look like than a real person.  Tusk’s actual words were: ‘ I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.’

It goes without saying that the people who did that will never admit to it, so Rees-Mogg did what Brexiters always do – he tried to whip up some nationalist victimhood by completely misrepresenting Tusk’s words.  So far so normal. But then the Moggster, as is his wont, tried to dazzle Sun readers with a little Etonian erudition, so we get this:

Sadly, Mr Tusk’s theology is not very good either – circles of hell are not reserved for people we disagree with. They should go back to their Bible studies for another look – or perhaps  I should send them the catechism to remind them of the teaching of Holy Mother Church.

So we’re bringing the Holy Mother Church into this now?  Yes we are.  And yesterday, Rees Mogg, still wearing that ill-fitting man of the people suit, could be found singing the old World War 1 song  ‘ the bells of hell go ting a ling a ling for you but not for me.’

I wouldn’t be so sure myself, but if Rees-Mogg did end up in hell, you can be sure he’d make sure his money was suitably reinvested elsewhere beforehand.

But it’s all jokes, right?   Well it is for them.  For millions of us, watching this go on day after day, we can only feel, like Mephistopheles ‘ Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’

But if Brexit is hell, let’s never forget that this is a Tory hell.  A hell that was brought to us by the Cameron government, whose successors have fanned the flames.  If you had any doubt, consider the astounding interview that Sayeeda Warsi gave to C4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy last week.

 

 

 

I saw Sayeeda Warsi speak on a panel about Islam and young Muslims at the Bradford Literary Festival last year,  and I was quite impressed by her.   She was so honest, intelligent, outspoken and thoughtful  that I kept asking myself ‘what are you doing  in the Tory Party?’

Anyway at around 41 minutes into the interview, Guru-Murthy turns the subject to the Cameron government and the referendum and asks whether ‘this was done essentially to keep the Tory party together, wasn’t it?’

The following exchange occurs:.

Warsi: Of course, and I think even if you speak to  David [Cameron] about this, he will say that I’m not sure that anybody in the Conservative Party expected that we were going to win that election, and therefore there was a bit of placating of our own side in the run up to that election, in the hope that, thereafter, would we or would we not deliver that referendum? I’m not sure.

Guru-Murthy:  Because you thought there’d be another coalition, and the Lib Dems would deny you a referendum?

Warsi: Absolutely.

Guru-Murthy:  So it was a promise you would never have to deliver on?

Warsi: Absolutely.  That was the sense that I got, yeah.

Guru-Murthy: Isn’t that just the most reckless awful politics, to have done that? To have gambled the country’s future like that?

Warsi:  Yep, it is.

Guru-Murthy: Shouldn’t someone say sorry?

Warsi: I’m not sure sorry is enough.  I think that the best way we can deal with it is to make sure that we deliver a Brexit now which, one, keeps the country together, but in the long term, make sure that we remain a vibrant successful nation.”

So here we have a former Tory cabinet minister admitting that her party gambled the future of the country by promising a referendum that it did not believe in, in the hope that it would not have to deliver it, simply in order to gain power.

This isn’t what ‘David’ has been saying himself.  Cameron still insists that he has ‘no regrets’ about the referendum and presents it as a high-handed ‘promise to the British people.’

Many of us have thought differently for some time.  Warsi’s frankness made it clear that we were right.  Yet even then, having fessed up to her party’s shocking cynicism and fecklessness, she goes on to praise Theresa May,  and insists that she is the one to ensure that we remain a ‘vibrant successful nation.’

Which explains why she is in the Tory party.

And in a way it also explains why we are all in political hell right now, and why all the devils are here.  And if we ever manage to drive them away, we should never forget who brought them forth.

 

 

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Drill Baby Drill: Donald Trump’s Sociopathic Gaze

There are many reasons why the rise of populist ethnonationalism and authoritarianism is bad news.   But one reason which tends to receive little attention is the impact of this phenomenon on the environment.

For some time now, we have become accustomed – too accustomed – to a relentless stream of alarming reports on the future of the planet.   Sometimes it comes in little snapshots.   It might be melting glaciers or rises in Carbon Dioxide emissions, such as the 2.7 percent rise in 2018.  It might be fires in Australia or polar vortexes in the US.

In June last year a Royal Academician photographed the Alpine glaciers photographed by John Ruskin more than 160 years ago and found ‘ a dark moraine-covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice.’

In the same year scientists found that the Gulf Stream current was at its weakest point in the past 1,600 years – a development which many scientists believe has been instrumental in causing the ‘severe weather events’ that we have been experiencing in recent years

At other times the predictions are so devastating that they are difficult to take in.  This week a report by the Hindu Kush Himalayan Assessment predicted that a third of Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2100, thereby threatening the water security of 240 million people – repeat 240 million people.  In 2017, German researchers found an incredible 76 percent decline in flying insects in German nature reserves between 1989 and 2016.

The loss of biodiversity, and the ongoing loss of birds, mammals and insects that make up the ‘sixth extinction’, has until recently been obscured by global warming as a threat to our common survival, but it’s no less serious.

If this extraordinary decline in bug biomass continues it means that we will not be able to pollinate plants, aerate the soil or create top soil.   As one American scientist notes ‘ The whole fabric of our planet is built on plants and insects and the relationship between the two.’

Though research into ‘Insectageddon’ is still ongoing, the scientific consensus is that, like global warming, it is largely caused by human activity.  In short, we have a problem, or rather a whole series of massive looming problems that place the future of our civilization, and our own survival as a species, in jeopardy.

These problems ought to be the fundamental concern of governments right now.  They require urgent short-term and long-term international solutions on a whole host of issues including emissions reductions, climate change action and mitigation, protection of natural habitats and other related matters.

They require intergovernmental and inter-agency cooperation and sharing of resources and good practice; a root and branch transformation in energy and transportation systems, in farming methods, the use of land and food production.

What they do not need is a retreat behind armed ethnonationalist borders governed by selfish plutocrats and oligarchies whose sole interest is maintaining and increasing their wealth and power.  In a politically healthy world, in which the concept of the common good or even common sense had any meaning, this would be obvious.

But right now this is not the world we have.  Instead we have a world in which rumours of calamity, catastrophe and the collapse of civilization merely take their place in a 24-hour news cycle alongside gossip about the Kardashians – and the latter often get more attention.

It’s a world in which the urgency and scientific rigour required to stave off the worst-case scenarios that now haunt the 21st century are muted or neutralised by paid-up ‘climate change sceptics’  like James Delingpole and Brendan O’Neill, who dismiss such scenarios as some kind of anti-capitalist plot or an  irrational rejection of ‘modernity.

We really don’t have time for such nonsense, and we really don’t need Donald Trump to be president of the most powerful democracy on earth.

Trump, as everyone knows, but not enough people seem to care, is not just a ‘climate change sceptic’ but an outright denier, who has consistently brought his own unique brand of wisdom to the subject. Trump has also put his garbled thoughts into practice.  He has rolled out the red carpet to the energy industry.  He has pulled out of the Paris climate accord.

No sooner was he inaugurated than he released an ‘America First Energy Plan’ based almost entirely on fossil fuels.

In January last year, the US Ministry of the Interior announced plans to massively increase drilling in US waters in what Scientific American called ‘ the single largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever proposed by the federal government.’

These include plans to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – a home to grizzly bears, wolves, musk oxen and the Porcupine Caribou herd, and many other species that was declared a protected area by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.

All this is intended to bring about what Trump calls ‘energy dominance.’  Trump has also refused to ratify the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, whose signatories pledged to at least half the loss of natural habitats, ensure sustainable fishing and expand nature reserves from 10 % to 17 % of the earth  by 2020.

In his state of the union address this week, Trump bragged ‘ We have unleashed a revolution in American Energy – the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.’

In short, this is a president who is looking down at the world through a distinctly sociopathic lens.

And we need to see the back of him – and also of the politics that he represents, with its selfish national insularity, its reckless and insane greed, its glorification of trashy, insubstantial leaders, and its shameful refusal to face up to the threats to our common home.

Because if we can’t achieve this, we are going to be going down a very dark road and we won’t be leaving much of a world for those who inherit it.  Many people in rich countries, or people who happen to be rich in poorer countries, may follow the lead of the most powerful man in the world and turn a blind eye, and insulate themselves in their Mar-a-Lagos of the mind.

The rest of us really shouldn’t.

 

 

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Turning Point: All the Young (Alt-Right) Dudes

As we sleepwalk towards the Brexit iceberg on 29 March, we should remember that the hardright ‘populists’  who have been dreaming of this outcome for so long don’t see it as an end, but as part of an ongoing process.

For some of them it’s a famous victory in a wider ethnonationalist assault on the international institutions that underpin ‘globalism.’

Others see it has an opportunity to reconfigure British society.   But what kind of society do they want to build?

Some of the answers can be found in the campus-based organisation Turning Point USA, which launched its British version this weekend with a ghoulish cast of ‘young people’, most of whom are connected to the Tufton Road/Matthew Elliot stable.

TP is chaired by ex-Bullington Club yob and millionaire son George Farmer, who has given more than £60, 000 to the Tory Party and received an invitation dinner with Theresa May as a sign of her appreciation.

All of these dismal luminaries appeared in a clunkingly dim video that went out on social media over the weekend.

 

The Left believes they have a monopoly over young people. It's time us young people fought back. We are so excited to announce the social media launch of Turning Point UK, which will be launching across UK campuses soon. #TPUK #TimeforaTurningPoint pic.twitter.com/xb62JN539Z

— Turning Point UK (@TPointUK) February 1, 2019

As the accompanying tweet suggests, Turning Point wants to convince ‘young people’ that they have been brainwashed by the left since, like, forever, and promote a new cultural revolution against this ideological tyranny.

It’s fair to say that the British video is not much of a call to arms, with its half-baked, barely-articulate messaging, and a succession of pampered buffoons asking questions such as ‘Why does the left hate everything good?’ that are so devoid of even a semblance of meaning that they begin to make you feel like the guy in Munch’s The Scream just for having heard such idiocy.

But TP’s aspiration to turn British youth on to ‘conservative values’  has attracted support from from the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Steve Baker.   So it’s worth taking a bit of a closer look into this dank well and see what’s lying at the bottom of it.

Turning Point USA was established in 2012 by a young Republican activist named Charlie Kirk (on the right of the featured picture).  Its website describes itself as a ‘conservative grassroots movement’ whose mission is to ‘identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.’

These goals are accompanied by ‘innovative social messaging’ like this.

 

 

Much of this would be laughable, but TPUSA is only unintentionally funny.   It now has more than 1000 college chapters in the US.  Its annual budget has gone up from $78, 890 in 2012 to $8, 248,059 in 2016.

As a registered charity, many of its donors are not known, but an International Business Times investigation found that most known financial contributions came from big Republican donors, many of whom, like Kirk himself, are avid Trumpites.    According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, many  TPUSA donors are connected to the energy industry and what Kirk calls the ‘fossil-fuel space.’

TPUSA also published a booklet for college students with a forward by Kirk, on ’10 Ways in which fossil fuels improve our lives.’

In addition to being anti-climate change TPUSA is anti-feminist and anti-LGBT, and some of its college chapters are steeped in serious political slime.  The national organisation has compiled a McCarthyite black list of ‘biased’ professors deemed to be too leftist or liberal or too willing to promote ‘myths’ about fossil fuels and climate change.

Charlie Kirk is a contributor to Steve Bannon’s alt-right propaganda site Breitbart.  A number of TPUSA campus events have been supported and attended by white supremacist and white national organisations, which is not entirely surprising given that TPUSA’s National Field Director Crystal Clanton once texted ‘ I hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.’

None of this stopped Kirk from claiming that ‘Turning Point needs more Crystals; so does America.’

And why not?  Because racism is like, just a label that intolerant libtards and cucks use to brainwash you, right?

Despite claims to the contrary, TPUSA also has connections to far-right organisations such as the ‘western chauvinist’ Proud Boys and American Renaissance.  In February,  Kaitlin Bennett, president of the TPUSA Kent State University resigned from the organisation because TPUSA’s field director Frankie O’Laughlin was ‘liking tweets from notorious Charlottesville attendee and white nationalist icon, James Allsup.’

One former Afro-American employee later left the organisation after attending a TPUSA national student summit, where speakers ‘ spoke badly about all these black women having babies out of wedlock.  It was really offensive.’

TPUSA events have also had a notable anti-Muslim tinge.   Last month Sophia Witt, director of Israel outreach for TPUSA told its annual student summit to ‘expose Islam’ for the ‘ugly thing’ that it is at a session on ‘ Addressing Terrorism on Campuses.

In a slideshow Witt accused Muslim students and professors or promoting terrorism and claimed ‘ I don’t even want to call it “radical Islam” – it’s just Islam.’

In addition to this TPUSA is anti-feminist, anti-Black Lives Matter, and anti-LGBT.

In effect, therefore the initiative that Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel praised yesterday is part of a ideological and financial pathway in which radicalised mainstream conservatism merges with the far-right – supported by astroturf lobbying groups.  Its a pathway that connects Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Farage, Anne-Marie Waters, Aaron Banks’s Westmonster site, Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, and the extreme right of the Tory Party.

That is bad enough, but TP’s arrival in the UK is also an indication of how Brexiters on both sides of the Atlanic see the future of the country: an asset-stripped libertarian theme park with government stripped to the bone, purged of ‘leftist brainwashing’ about feminism, climate change, racism etc – all dressed up as a cultural ‘free speech’ insurrection and financed by corporations and millionaires.

And you wonder why so many of us oppose Brexit?

Because it was obvious, all the way back in 2016 that something like was being planned.  The arrival of Turning Point is just one small step towards its realisation.

 

 

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Immigration: Stop Pandering

If there is one thing British politicians always seem able to agree on, it’s that they must respond to public concerns about immigration.

Rarely, if ever, do the politicians who seek to placate these concerns consider their validity.  Is it true that Romanians and Bulgarians are all poor and therefore likely to be criminals – an argument frequently made before restrictions on the A2 countries were lifted in 2014?

Do immigrants really ‘undercut’ British workers, lowering their wages or taking away ‘our’ jobs?  How widespread is this?   Is immigration ‘out of control’?

Are we really being flooded by ‘mass immigration?’ Is it true that immigrants deliberately come over here in order to take our benefits or use the NHS?  Are EU citizens ‘jumping the queue?’ Is it true that  immigrants ‘won’t integrate’?

Don’t expect our politicians to ask such questions – at least not in public.  For many of them, even to begin to do this would be to run the risk of appearing ‘soft on immigration’ – an unpardonable political folly and a possible vote loser.

If the public is concerned about immigration, our politicians seem to assume that it’s up to them to placate these concerns rather than assess whether they are a matter of perception or reality.

This response tends to take similar forms: punitive restrictions and tightened borders; ‘toughness’ on immigration;  renewed attempts to demonstrate ‘control’ or at least to be seen to do so; aggressively assimilationist rhetoric that demands that immigrants integrate or leave; detention centres; azure cards; removals and deportations on any pretext; ‘hostile environments’ that end up depriving immigrants of cancer treatment.   

This is what our politicians do, and it seems they just can’t stop.

Tory governments have always done this – it’s a badge of honour for them.  But New Labour did the same, bragging about its toughness while it presided over high levels of immigration from the Accession 8 countries.  Ed Miliband did it with his pathetic ‘immigration control’ mugs.

None of it ever worked.  No matter what governments did, those ‘concerns’ kept coming – fed by a viciously xenophobic pro-Tory press that even the United Nations condemned for its ‘hate speech’ and ‘anti-foreigner abuse’.

Without these concerns it’s difficult to believe that Brexit would ever have happened.

I know people – on the left and right – like to believe that Brexit was some cry of the dispossessed, a kick in the face against the ‘elite’, which it was in part.

But take away immigration and the Brexit anti-establishment soup is pretty thin gruel.  Even ‘sovereignty’ tends to come down to the desire for ‘strong borders’ and the ability to kick people out

Why did May herald the end of freedom of movement as the great achievement of her miserable deal?  Because she knew her audience – or at least the audience she wanted to play to.

Last week we saw again that she isn’t the only one who is willing to play to this audience.

Take Labour’s shambling response to the vote on the government’s Immigration and Social Security Bill (EU Withdrawal) Bill, which lays out UK immigration policy post-Brexit.

Among other things, the bill ended freedom of movement, and laid the basis for placing EU nationals under UK immigration law post-Brexit – with reduced rights under the ‘settled status’ provision that they can apply for through an Android phone app.

What does that mean in practice?  Well it often means things like this:

 

And this:

 

This is not just a technical issue.  As we know from Windrush and much else, it’s what the Home Office does, because politicians tell it to behave like this in order to stop the public from feeling so ‘concerned.’

So how did Labour respond to the bill on Monday?  First it announced it was going to abstain – thereby granting the bill a walk through.  In the morning Home Secretary Diane Abbott told the House of Commons:

The Labour party is clear that when Britain leaves the single market, freedom of movement ends, and we set this out in our 2017 manifesto. I am a slavish devotee of that magnificent document: so on that basis, the frontbench of the Labour party will not be opposing this bill this evening,

Faced with criticism on social media from MPs and members of its own party, the Corbyn team then announced in the early evening that the opposition would be voting against the bill after all, but only on a one-line whip.

By the time the vote came up, only 178 our of 256 Labour MPs were present, and – who would have thought? – the bill passed by 297 to 234 votes.

All of which is a shameful embarrassment.  In effect the ‘new’ Labour Party is behaving pretty much like its predecessors – failing to challenge unwarranted ‘concerns and abandoning the people who are the victims of these concerns.

And they aren’t the only ones.  This week Gina Miller launched her new ‘Lead not Leave’ campaign, in tandem with Helena Kennedy and ahem, Charles Saatchi.

Among other things Miller claimed that her initiative ‘will honour the demand for change that the 2016 vote represented, and give us back control of issues such as immigration.’

The suggestion that Remain is a better way to address the loss of control over immigration than Leave does not even question whether we had really ‘lost control’ – or the assumptions of flooding and invasion by parasitical foreigners that are part of that narrative.

It’s just as dishonourable as Labour’s refusal to defend freedom of movement – even though it comes from a different political position.

Politicians can never win these arguments.  Every time they concede ground to concerns that are often based on misinformation, xenophobia and outright racism – they lose ground.

Decades of this have got us into the mess we’re in.  What we need now is something new: politicians with the courage and vision to stand with migrants and stand up for the UK as a country of migration.

And until we find them, we are going be trapped by those concerns for a very long time – if they don’t destroy us first.

 

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