Matthew Carr's Blog, page 27

Parliament Passes the Bomb

Some of you may remember the family game called Pass the Bomb.   For those haven’t played it, the rules are simple: You pass a ticking bomb back and forth between the group and try to make sure you aren’t the one holding it when it ‘explodes’.

This is what parliament did yesterday, in a monumental dereliction of duty that historians are unlikely to look kindly upon.

For a brief period, following Theresa May’s massive defeat two weeks ago, a tiny chink of light broke through the black political clouds that have hovered over the nation for the last two and a half years, and it seemed that parliament had finally found a way to reassert itself over an arrogant and overweening executive.

These were heady days – or so it seemed –  when even Nicky Morgan seemed to have acquired an unlikely gravitas; when politicians on both sides of the house negotiated frantically with each other in the corridors of Westminster without any apparent direction from the government or the shadow cabinet.    At last, it seemed, our elected representatives – or at least some of them them – seemed to recognise that we faced a genuine national emergency which parliament had a duty to prevent or mitigate.

Last night these hopes were snuffed out, as parliament relinquished the control it had tried to claw back, and voted down five amendments that might have made it possible to delay the withdrawal process, revoke Article 50, call a second referendum, or  even propose alternative withdrawal arrangements in the event that May was unable to come up with any herself.

Even the mild Cooper amendment was voted down – with the disgraceful support of 14 Labour MPs.

Instead parliament voted for a non-binding arrangement that calls for no deal to be avoided, while offering no legislative mechanisms that might prevent it, and which sends May back to Brussels to revise an agreement that she herself agreed to, in an attempt to convince the EU to accept unspecified arrangements to avoid a hard Irish border which have already been rejected.

The Tory newspapers are hailing this debacle as a ‘triumph’ for May, but to many of us it looks like a collective failure of the British political class.  Ever since this horror show unfolded in June 2016,  the two main political parties have been mesmerised by the ‘will of the people’  – an abstraction based on a narrow and deeply-flawed referendum result,  which asked the public only whether it wanted to leave or remain in the EU, and did not go into any detail about how this departure should be effected.

Sensible and responsible politicians would not have embarked on the negotiating process with the EU,  without seeking consensus and ensuring that parliament had considered all the options available.

They would have warned the public of the risks involved in any of these options, and found ways of allowing the electorate to consider them – and even allow for the possibility of revisiting its decision.   Tragically these are not the kind of politicians we have, and the few exceptions have either been isolated within their own parties or else they represent small parties whose influence has been negligible.

As a result we found ourselves trapped in an increasingly dire trajectory, in which a tone-deaf prime minister has tacked to the extreme right of her own party, and sought to bypass parliament altogether while presenting herself as the person who could ‘deliver Brexit.’

Such behaviour is only to be expected from a party that has demonstrated again and again that it only cares about its own political survival.  But throughout this process the Labour Party leadership has vacillated, dithered, ducked and dived,  insisting only on its absolute commitment to ‘respect the referendum result’ and its determination to avoid anything that could be seen as ‘stopping Brexit.’

Labour did this partly through political calculation, partly through the ideological aversion to the EU amongst the Corbyn team, and partly because of the divisions within the Labour Party which made it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with coherent proposals without splitting the party.

In effect, the two main parties have competed with each other to see which of them best represents the ‘will of the people’ – while refusing to admit that Brexit cannot be delivered without inflicting some degree of harm on the country.  Of course the Brexit zealots inside the Tory Party either don’t believe that there will be any negative consequences from escaping the EU ‘prison’, or else they don’t care, but there are Leavers and Remainers on both sides of the house who know better.

Neither the government nor the opposition wanted to be caught with the hissing Brexit bomb in their hands when it finally explodes, and last night parliament made it clear that it doesn’t want that responsibility either.   Instead they have sent May back to Brussels still holding the ticking bomb that she set in motion when Article 50 was triggered.

May clearly doesn’t want to be caught holding it either, and it now seems clear that her strategy, insofar as she still has one, is to let it explode in Brussels, regardless of whether the country falls off the cliff on 29 March.

Parliament might say, and it might even believe, that it’s only upholding ‘democracy’, – as if democracy was nothing more a single referendum result – but its craven inability to hold the government to account is likely to do far more long term damage to the country’s creaking democratic institutions.

We can only hope that one day they will pay a political price for this.  But until then there is little that most of us can do except and watch their antics in horror,  as the country sinks ever deeper into a vortex of its own making.

 

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Fyre Festival: Burning Down the House

I wasn’t aware of the 2017 Fyre Festival till I watched Netflix’s new documentary last night, and it was fairly jawdropping and astonishing viewing.   It would be disingenuous of me to deny that there’s something morbidly satisfying about watching thousands of rich narcissists arrive on a Caribbean island for a non-existent festival, only to find themselves trapped in a mini JG Ballard-meets-William Goldman dystopia.

It’s the stuff of a certain kind of fiction, but it’s also a very 21st century tale which began in December 2016, when a conman/charlatan named William McFarland began to organise a ‘luxury music festival’ on a Bahamian island in order to promote the Fyre music booking app.

The ‘Fyre festival’ event was promoted through Instagram through various ‘social media influencers’ like Kendall Jenner and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who were paid by Fyre to post an image of the Fyre ‘flame’ logo on their Instagram feeds.

Viewers clicked on it to find a video showing bikini-clad models cavorting on a yacht and a Caribbean beach, accompanied by text promising ‘ an immersive music festival…two transformative weekends…on the boundaries of the impossible.’

 

As McFarland puts it in the programme in a rare moment of honesty, the video was a fantasy aimed at ‘the average loser’ and it initially proved to be strikingly successful.

McFarland attracted investors from the fashion industry and beyond, all seeking to make money from a festival on an island supposedly by Pablo Escobar to transport cocaine to the US, because I mean dude, how cool is that, right?

In the end the event was not held on ‘Pablo Escobar’s island’ after all but on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma.

While McFarland roamed back and forth in Maseratis and private jets schmoozing and scooping up investments, thousands of hipsters paid anything from $500 to $1500 for tickets, in addition to extra payments for ‘modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes’, luxury houses and meals by celebrity chefs, jet skis, metal credit cards, cool wristbands and other luxury extras.

Many of these payments were made for things that did not actually exist.  When the punters turned up in April they found no luxury houses, only mosquito-filled geodesic tents lined up like a hedonist concentration camp in a dismal gravel lot covered with imported sand.

There were no luxury meals.  Many punters had no food at all, and others got only processed cheese sandwiches.  Often there was not even toilet paper.  A tropical storm the night before had soaked most of the beds in the tents – for those guests who were lucky enough even to get a tent.

Organisation was so chaotic that there were no charter flights out.  Crucially, there was no music.

Thousands of people watched their dreams of the ultimate party come crashing down, and watching them posing and pouting for their Instagram selfies beforehand you couldn’t help feeling that a lot of them really deserved everything they didn’t get and everything they did get.

As Marx once said, all that is solid melts into the air, and there was absolutely nothing solid about this nonsense.

In effect, McFarland was working a very 21st century scam, with its intersection of hip capitalism, wealth, hedonism, Instagram, social media apps,  tawdry glamour, and the seriously unending quest to make as much money as one can while doing nothing of any tangible benefits to society.

Most of the people in the programme were young, and too hip for their own good.  Many of them seemed to have more money than sense in their inane references to McFarland’s ‘energy’ and ‘positivity’.

McFarland’s attractions were entirely lost on this particular viewer.  And even though you felt for the employees who were told by McFarland that they were not going to be fired but they were not going to be paid either, many of the people in the programme seem as shallow, greedy and self-obsessed as he seems to be.

The documentary does have some genuine laugh-out-loud moments though, such as the gay member of McFarland’s team who plaintively describes how he was instructed to ‘suck dick’ in order to get Bahamian customs officials to release the festival’s supply of bottled water.

In a world where 26 people have more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population combined, the Fyre festival embodies certain aspirations to fame, money and glamour that are part and parcel of  ‘globalisation’.

McFarland is now serving time for fraud, and good riddance.  But the scam he tried to work has wider implications that go beyond a single ‘operational sociopath’, as one of his former employees described him.

In a slightly peripheral and tangential way, the fantasies that he exploited go a long way explain why the world is so dysfunctional.

And the Netflix documentary may not have been intended as a moral tale, but it turns out to be just that.

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Brexit: The Stab-in-the-Back

It’s now becoming increasingly clear, even to its most ardent defenders, that Brexit is not going swimmingly.  Having inflicted the most comprehensive parliamentary defeat ever inflicted on a British prime minister, parliament is in a state of fevered chaos, with MPs frantically trying to prevent the country from sliding towards no deal, yet unable to agree on what the alternative should be.

Day after day brings more evidence that the economy is flaking away.  Yesterday Sony announced that it was moving to Holland, and 250 other companies are now planning to follow suit.    In a less-than-resounding declaration of faith in post-Brexit Britain, arch-Brexiter James Dyson announced that he was moving his head office to Singapore.

Last month P&O ferries announced that their ships would now be flying under a Cypriot flag to preserve their current EU tonnage tax financing arrangements.  This week the chief executive of the Food and Drinks Industry warned of ‘ really bad economic consequences for everyone in this country on a scale not seen since the war’ in the event of no deal.

Brexit zealots continue to dismiss all these warnings as ‘Project Fear’ and agitate to bring no deal closer with ever more authoritarian demands.  Yesterday Peter Bone called for Remainers to be removed from the cabinet.

The contemptible reactionary Rees-Mogg – a politician who increasingly resembles a Tim Burton creation and a pro-Nazi aristocrat from Kazuo Ishigiro’s Remains of the Day – called for parliament to be suspended altogether.

Meanwhile many Brexiters ache for no deal with a sadomasochistic fervour that is as inexplicable as it is unseemly.  And it isn’t only the politicians.  Every week vox pop interviewees say ‘ let’s just get on with it’ or actually cheer the prospect of no deal, as a Question Time audience did a week ago.

Despite all this, many Brexiters recognise that things are not going well and some are clearly worried that it might not go at all.  And these fears have been accompanied by a narrative, that we are likely to see a lot more of in the future.

One of the most significant contributing factors to the rise of Nazism was the idea that Germany didn’t actually lose World War 1 militarily, but was betrayed by a cabal of politicians and Jewish financiers.  According to this ‘dolchosslegende’ (stab-in-the-back legend), the machinations of these politicians resulted in the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, which Hitler set out to overturn.

This pseudo-explanation for the German defeat was a lie, but it gained its emotional force from the greatest slaughter in history and the very real losses and sufferings of the German population.

All this seems  a long war from the Brexit ‘war’ with the European Union.  Here there has been no fighting, no losses or sacrifices,  only the inevitable crash that inevitably occurs when a political fantasy tries to break the laws of historical gravity.

That fantasy has not hit the ground yet, but its architects are already preparing their excuses and explanations. Already a Brexit dolchosslegende is beginning to emerge, in which the Brexit dream has been tarnished and undermined and deprived of its rightful victory – not by its own inconsistencies and inflated expectations – but by ‘Remainers’, ‘traitors’ and ‘saboteurs’ working behind the scenes.

The essential components this narrative were already in place as early as November 2016, when British papers condemned High Court judges as ‘saboteurs’ as ‘enemies of the people’ for ruling that Brexit could not be triggered without a Westminster vote.

It has continued to gain traction ever since.  In an article for Breitbart on the ‘looming Brexit betryal’ last december, James Delingpole claimed that the Tory no confidence vote was deliberately sabotaged because May’s Chief-of-Staff Gavin Barwell supposedly released some of the 48 letters intended to provoke a leadership challenge in order to ‘force the issue’.

Delingpole offered no evidence to support this theory.  Instead he suggested that Barwell ‘ in cahoots with fellow Remainer David Lidington’ was conspiring with  Labour MPs to bring about a second referendum.

This is the Brexit stab-in-the-back legend in a nutshell: that the ‘will of the people’ is being actively thwarted by the machinations of a corrupt elite working in tandem with the European enemy.  Last week a ‘senior MP’ claimed that a ‘hardcore group of Remainers’ in May’s cabinet were conspiring to ‘stop Brexit.’

The usefulness of such narratives is that they offer a pseudo-explanation for every eventuality, from May’s rejected ‘vassallage’ deal to the ‘success’ of a no deal exit, or the unlikely prospect of an extension of Article 50 and a second vote.

So if we do crash out and those who wanted to ‘just get on with it’ discover that the warnings of the last few months were not Project Fear after all, don’t expect to hear too many mea culpas.  Instead the architects of this catastrophe will blame the EU for ‘punishing’ and ‘humiliating’ us.

They will also blame the ‘Remoaners’ who failed to ‘get behind the country’; the MPs who ignored the will of the people.

They will blame the ‘elite’, the ‘chattering classes’, Gina Miller, and anyone else who tried to prevent or limit what will surely go down in history as the most gratuitously foolish act of self-harm that any country has ever inflicted on itself.

They will blame them if they get their ‘victory’ and they will blame them if they don’t get it.  And one thing you can count on: they will never blame themselves or examine their own failings.

Because if they were able to do that, we wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place.

 

 

 

 

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Donald Trump’s Lyin’ Eyes

If there’s one thing that has defined Donald Trump’s presidency more than anything else, it’s his startling propensity for lying.

According to the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker database, Trump has made 7, 645 ‘false or misleading claims’ since taking office.  Last October alone, the WP found that he said ‘1,200 things that were false or misleading.’

It isn’t as if American presidents haven’t lied before.  Successive American administrations routinely lied about the Vietnam War.   George Bush, with the support of the British government and many of the same politicians who now attack Trump, lied about WMD in Iraq.  But Trump’s lies are on an entirely different scale and they also have a different purpose.

Unscrupulous politicians lie to hide their misdemeanours or advance their careers.   Democratic governments may deceive the public in order to achieve specific outcomes.  But Trump lies compulsively about big things and small things, and he isn’t the only one.   Only this week the arch-charlatan Boris Johnson claimed that he had never claimed that Turkey was about to enter the EU, even though various videos and interviews record him saying it.

Like Trump, Johnson he is a fraud and a charlatan, who lies for his own advancement, and knows that he can do so with impunity.

Such men aren’t as new as we might think.  In 1712 Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical review of a non-existent book entitled The Art of Political Lying.  In a subsequent essay for The Examiner on ‘Political Lying’, Swift wrote of

a certain great man famous for this talent, to the constant practice of which he owes his twenty years’ reputation of the most skilful head in England, for the management of nice affairs. The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it.

Swift would not have been surprised by Trump or Johnson.  But the problem that we are currently faced with isn’t simply the alarming proliferation of sociopaths and political con-men who routinely lie in order gain power, but the context in which they operate.

Trump’s bare-faced lying certainly hasn’t bothered his base, nor the Republican Party in general.  Some have questioned Trump’s sanity, and they are probably right to do so.  Others, faced with such bare-faced and routine mendacity, have wondered whether we have entered a new era of ‘post-truth’ politics.

That question is also worth asking, because there is no doubt that shameless lying – accompanied by the dismissal of contradictory facts as ‘fake news’ –  has become the standard operating procedure of the new populist politics, on the Internet as well as the ‘real’ world.

 

 

Drawing on the conspiracist ‘truth telling’  of alt-right shock jocks and websites like InfoWars,  Trump has transformed lying into a political modus operandi.  At the same time he has propagated a grand conspiracy narrative in which seemingly incontrovertible facts are breezily dismissed as ‘fake news.’

No one can deny that this isn’t working. We can see the same tendencies over here in the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, or the idiotic cult of Tommy Robinson.   Last year, the Internet seethed with moronic descriptions of Tommy Robinson as ‘our Mahatma Ghandi’ and ‘our Nelson Mandela.’

Lawyers and journalists patiently explained that Robinson had not been arrested as an ‘enemy of the state’, but because he had broken the law.

Tens of thousands of people simply dismissed such explanations out of hand as ‘fake news.’ Insulated in their social media peer groups, Robinson’s supporters believed what they wanted to believe, in much the same way as Brexiters dismiss any facts they don’t like as ‘Project Fear.’

Democracies cannot flourish in a climate like this.   Societies that cannot or will not attempt to distinguish between the authentic and the ersatz; that treat facts only as ‘opinions’;  that no longer care who is lying as long as the lies reflect what certain groups want to  believe; that no longer seek to hold lying politicians to account, are open to manipulation.

This is why so many people believe that Tommy Robinson is a freedom fighter, that the EU is a dictatorship, that white men are victims of ‘feminazis’, that liberal elites and ‘cultural Marxists’ are deliberately bringing migrants into Europe in order to transform it into an Islamic colony.

Believe these things and you can believe anything.   And that’s the point of Trump’s lies.  They aren’t simply a product of his manifold psychological defects.  They are a political strategy, intended to make people believe what he and people like him want them to believe.

As Jonathan Swift once observed.

Few lies carry the inventor’s mark, and the most prostitute enemy to truth may spread a thousand, without being known for the author: besides, as the vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

Today, in the 21st century, the patient is not just truth, but the possibility of democracy.

Neither of them are dead – yet.

But both of them are looking a little frayed and peaky, and no wonder, after the poison that Trump and his cohorts have been pumping into them.

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You Won, Get Over It

There are some historical laws that can’t be avoided, and one of them is this: that if a country aspires towards something that is objectively impossible, sooner or later that impossibility, like gravity,  will impose itself in ways that are impossible to resist or ignore.

You might be able to get away with this for a while, running on thin air like a cartoon character running off a cliff, but sooner or later reality will impose itself.

Ever since Theresa May came to power she has been trying to reconcile a contradictory aspiration: that the UK can leave the European Union without doing some harm to itself.

As shockingly inept, devious and manipulative as she has been, she can’t be entirely blamed for doing this. The same contradictory promise was repeated again and again during the referendum campaign and mixed into the poisoned chalice that May greedily drank from in order to become prime minister.

Throughout her reign of chaos she has insisted again and again that the UK can leave the European Union and have it all.

Not once has she or any member of her cabinet dared to admit that the country cannot leave the European Union without inflicting some degree of harm on itself.  To have gone through these last two and half years without explaining this has been a shameful act of cowardice and a dereliction of duty of which the principal opposition is also guilty.

Now this week, that fantasy was finally shot down in parliament.  It is now clear even to those who wanted this outcome, that leaving the European Union is going to hurt.  Some might may argue that it’s still worth it and crave no deal like some quasi-religious apotheosis.

Others debate how long and how much it’s going to hurt, and some still don’t believe it will.  But the triumphal glow of 2016 has long since faded in a sour, confused, and rudderless country swirling in  a political maelstrom entirely of its own making.

This shouldn’t be entirely surprising.   If you seek things that unobtainable sooner or later you will find that that you can’t get them.

As Fintan O’Toole – one of the sharpest observers of our collective nervous breakdown – has observed, leaving the EU was   ‘ sold in the referendum as a fantasy of national liberation. It simply could not survive contact with reality. It died the moment it became real. You cannot free yourself from imaginary oppression.’

Why did we do this to ourselves?   In a brutal piece in the New York Times last week, Pankaj Mishra excoriated the ‘malign incompetence of the British ruling class’ in India, Palestine, Ireland and other countries.

Mishra saw the referendum as another example of the ‘egotistic and destructive behaviour’ of the British ‘chummocracy’, which has now brought catastrophe to their own country.  He’s right, but Brexit isn’t simply a failure of the British ruling classes.

For too long now, Britian, and particularly England, has been accustomed to looking down on other countries from a great height, as if the map of the world still consisted of the imperial ‘pink bits.’

After centuries of telling others what to do, sometimes at the point of a gunboat, we dislike having to conform to rules made by foreigners and seeing our greatness hidden in the European bushel – not to mention sharing our national territory with foreigners who have had the temerity to come and live here.

Riding shotgun with the United States was one thing.  That was ‘punching above our weight’ and playing ‘Greece to Rome.’

But for a country whose rulers still believe we have some special destiny to be the ‘light of the world’, as Tony Blair once put it, membership of a continent that we – according to Brexit history- singlehandedly ‘saved’ was an unbearable national humiliation.

Some of this sense of exceptionalism has percolated downwards, embracing even sectors of the population that never benefited from our greatness.

All this has made us complacent and blind to our own failings, arrogant and lazy in our thinking about the wider world and our place in it, still hankering after what we believed we lost.

In these circumstances it was entirely natural to see membership of a multinational organisation as a form of tyranny; to portray ourselves as victims; to regard foreigners as usurpers and intruders, to see demagogues and political grifters as liberators; to believe that we can still behave in the twenty-first century as we once did in the nineteenth.

This is what the ‘chummocracy’ told us, and too many of us believed them.

And now, as we contemplate the political chaos that is engulfing us, let’s by all means blame the recklessness, dishonesty and incompetence of our rulers and the fake anti-elitist ‘bad boys’ who brought us to national self-destruction.

But let’s also remember that millions of people voted for this outcome.

They did this because they, like our rulers, have spent too much time looking down at the rest of the world from a great height.   And now, like Roadrunner, we are going to hit the ground hard.

And if we are ever to move out of this debacle to a better place, we really ought to remember another useful historical rule, which the Danish Foreign Minister Kristian Jensen observed in 2017:

‘There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Small Island: A Brief History of British Immigration ‘Concerns’

Politicians tend to defer almost as a matter of course to popular ‘concerns’ about immigration, as though they were a novel reaction to the unprecedented 21st century phenomenon of ‘mass immigration’.

But these ‘concerns’ are actually part of a longer historical tradition, in which racist and xenophobic prejudices have been attached to different groups of people, in ways that are sometimes surprisingly similar to what we are seeing today.

In the late nineteenth century, Jews first began to arrive in the UK in large numbers.  Most of them were what we would know call ‘economic migrants’, fleeing poverty and antisemitism in the Tsarist empire, and they weren’t always welcomed.

In 1887, the Conservative MP for Tower Hamlets, Captain J.C.R. Colomb, asked ‘what great states of the world other than Great Britain permit the immigration of destitute aliens without restriction.’

These ‘destitute aliens’ were always understood to be Jews.  This was made clear by William Evans-Gordon, another Tory MP in the East End and one of the founders of the pre-fascist British Brothers League.

 

 

Where Nigel Farage, Melanie Phillips and others talk of ‘Muslim no go areas’, Evans-Gordon observed that ‘East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town,’ where the Englishman lived ‘ under the constant danger of being driven from his home, pushed out into the streets, not by the natural increase of our own population but by the off-scum of Europe’.

 

 

As you might expect, the Daily Mail was already doing what it has done so often in different contexts.  In 1900 the Mail was at Southampton to report on the arrival of Jewish refugees from the Boer War.   Its reporter noted that ‘There were all kinds of Jews, all manner of Jews. They had breakfasted on board  but they rushed as though starving at the food… These were the penniless refugees and when the relief committee passed by they hid their gold, and fawned and whined, and in broken English asked for money for their train fare.’

So even then refugees were not ‘genuine’ refugees.

Such antisemitic caricatures were not always expressed so overtly.  The Manchester Evening Chronicle celebrated the 1905 Aliens Act – legislation specifically aimed at Jews and designed to meet ‘concerns’ about immigration at the time. on the grounds that ‘ the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous, and criminal foreigner, who dumps himself on our soil and rates [breeds] simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land.’

No need to say ‘Jew’ here.  People knew what was being referred to.

These racialised fears of the ‘criminal foreigner’ tended to increase in response to outbreaks of criminality/terrorism involving Jews, such as the 1909 Tottenham Outrage and the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street:

 

 

But then, as now, sometimes anti-immigrant hostility was just a question of ‘numbers’:

 

 

The fear and loathing of foreigners also shaped opposition to the construction of the Channel Tunnel from the late nineteenth century onwards.

 

 

In 1882, General Garnet Wolseley, future commander-in-chief of the British army,  opposed the tunnel project, arguing ‘Surely John Bull will not endanger his birth-right, his liberty, his property…simply in order that men and women may cross to and fro between Britain and France without running the risk of sea-sickness?’

And in 1919, a former intelligence officer named Colonel Charles Repington opposed a new plan to build the Channel Tunnel on the grounds that it would lead to the ‘loss of our insularity and the easy access of shoals of aliens upon our shores’.

Repington was concerned about its security implications as an invasion route – and also as an entry route for foreign anarchists and Russian ‘Nihilists’.

 

 

Repington, like other commentators also worried about the potential influx of Frenchwomen who might bring their lax sexual mores into the nation and lower its moral standards. And who could blame them?

 

 

Repington also regarded foreign men as a threat, and worried that they might come to the country in such large numbers to breed with our women, thereby ‘Latinizing’ the national ‘stock’ and diluting our Anglo-Saxon essence.

Such ‘psychological factors’, as one British civil servant called them,  were one of the reasons why the Channel was not built until the end of the last century.

Even when it was finally opened in 1994, it did not take long before the Dover Express was railing at the ‘illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, bootleggers and the scum of the earth drug smugglers [that] have targeted our beloved coastline, leaving Dover with ‘the backdraft of a nation’s human sewage and no cash to wash it down the drain.’ This racist rant was aimed primarily at Slovak Roma, but Evans-Gordon would have understood it well.

And so we come to present day, when immigrants can casually be dismissed as ‘bloodsuckers’ who don’t ‘enhance’ our country and threaten our livelihood and our identity.

 

It’s the day of the #BrexitVote.
The day EU citizens like me, your neighbours, colleagues, friends and family, are 935 days in limbo.
And here we are: it’s now also the day we were described as #bloodsuckers live on @SkyNews. #TheRealFaceOfBrexit pic.twitter.com/82RgYLnqfN

— Prof Tanja Bueltmann (@cliodiaspora) January 15, 2019

To point out these continuities doesn’t mean that we have always been racists and xenophobes.   It means that there have always been racists and xenophobes among us.  And those who stir up hatred and division to further their political aims:

 

 

And at the moment, these people are winning, and telling us that we need to keep new groups of people out in order to preserve what we have always been.

Even though history tells us that, like ‘cheddar man’ we have always been something else:

 

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The Savage Frontier: Page 99 Test

Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American Reader blog has a fun exercise called ‘ the Page 99 test.’  Following Ford Madox Ford’s dictum ‘ Open the book at page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you,’ it invites writers to talk about page 99 in one of their books and see whether it bears out Madox Ford’s thesis.   This is my contribution, about The Savage Frontier: the Pyrenees in History and the Imagination: 

‘The Savage Frontier is a history of the Pyrenees, which challenges the stereotypical image of the mountains as a remote border region, isolated from the main currents of European and world history. I also examined the cultural depictions of the Pyrenees and the different ways in which the Pyrenean landscape has become a “landscape of the imagination.” It’s a very personal history, which combines various genres. In writing it, I was determined to see as many places and landscapes as I could with my own eyes, and I tried to imagine them from the perspective of the people I wrote about.

The chapter in which page 99 appears is entitled “The Zone of War”. As the title suggests, it looks at the military history of the Pyrenees as a battleground and strategic frontier, for invading armies and soldiers fighting in Spain’s various civil wars…’

You can read the rest here. 

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‘Foreigners Like You Have No Right to Interfere’

Just after the referendum in 2016,  I got a message on this site from an anonymous fascist,  which I wish I’d kept.  The gist of it was that the people like me had lost, and that people like the writer were now going to take their country back.

The tone was  quietly triumphant and determined, and it was clear that the writer saw the referendum as the beginning of something much bigger.   I thought of that letter yesterday, when Professor Tanja Bueltmann posted the following screenshot on Twitter, listing the abuse that has been directed against her on Twitter, email and in person:

Most people who read this will be disgusted by the savage misogyny, violence, bigotry and racism and racism on display here, and it’s worth bearing in mind this is just abuse that has been directed against Bueltmann  for the last two weeks.

There are three main reasons why Dr Bueltmann was singled out like this.  Firstly, she is a courageous and extremely effective campaigner for EU citizens rights.  Secondly, she is German national, who has been living in the UK for many years.  And lastly she is a woman.

Anyone who has spent much time on Twitter knows that women who speak out against Brexit or happen to be on the left/liberal spectrum and speak about anything at all are frequently targeted with rape threats and comments about their physical appearance.

It’s tempting to attribute this litany of abuse to a few ‘few bad apples’ hiding behind their avatars, but just because it’s convenient doesn’t mean we should fall into that temptation.

Because insults like ‘traitor’, ‘EU traitor’, ‘foreign bitch’ and ‘Go to the EU if you love it so much’ have a political salience that goes way beyond a few sweaty keyboard warriors squatting in their dank basements.  Consider headlines like this:

 

Or this:

 

In a country where government ministers compare the EU to the Soviet Union and the Third Reich we can’t be entirely surprised if self-professed ‘patriots’ accuse their political opponents of treason and threaten them with death.

And if such opponents happen to be foreign and have the temerity to actually live here, they are clearly fair game in some people’s eyes.  After all, as a vox pop pointed out to Sky News yesterday, many immigrants don’t ‘enhance’ our country and are actually ‘bloodsuckers.’

 

It’s the day of the #BrexitVote.
The day EU citizens like me, your neighbours, colleagues, friends and family, are 935 days in limbo.
And here we are: it’s now also the day we were described as #bloodsuckers live on @SkyNews. #TheRealFaceOfBrexit pic.twitter.com/82RgYLnqfN

— Prof Tanja Bueltmann (@cliodiaspora) January 15, 2019

The interviewee apologised for being ‘blunt’, but the Sky interviewer mollified him that it was ok.  And why not?  We are accustomed to describing immigrants as intruders and parasites who do nothing but freeload at our expense, and we have been doing it for some years now.

Back in 2015, the UN Special Envoy for Human Rights accused the British tabloid press of perpetrating  ‘ a vicious cycle of vilification, intolerance and politicization of migrants’, and it’s not only our newspapers.   There is a reason why Tory politicians accuse EU nationals of ‘jumping queues’ or describe them as ‘bargaining chips’, why Theresa May hailed the end of free movement as the greatest achievement of her withdrawal agreement.

The politicians who play this game know what they’re doing.  Sometimes it’s a calculated political strategy.  At other times it exudes from the same sense of British (English) superiority that led a ‘senior Tory’ recently to wonder why the Irish don’t ‘know their place.’

Many other people think foreigners in general should ‘know their place’,  and after Brexit they now feel able to express thoughts and ideas that were previously kept private.  You can see this sense of empowerment in the attacks on foreigners for speaking their own languages in public, in the increase in hate crime  since the referendum.

Once again, we can tell ourselves that it’s just a few extremists and lunatics.  We can hide behind meaningless and elusive statements like ‘not all Leavers are racists’ or ‘it’s not racist to be concerned about immigration.’

Look more closely at these attacks and you find the same refrains repeated over and over again ‘We voted for you to leave’,  ‘You need to speak in English, you’re in f***ing England’,  ‘ Why are you still here?’

To the right, the suggestion that Brexit has emboldened and legitimised xenophobes and racists is just another underhand Remain strategy.   To Lexiters, the idea that such behaviour is a product of  a reactionary ethnonationalist political project fuelled by imperial nostalgia and English exceptionalism doesn’t fit well with the image of Brexit passed on by John Pilger and so many others as a courageous anti-establishment rebellion.

Even when organisations like Stand Up to Racism and Stop Trump acknowledge the dangerous rise of the far-right, they tend to overlook the role of Brexit in facilitating it, or the centrality of Brexit to far-right/populist movements both here and abroad.

That needs to change, because we are in a real emergency here and it’s likely to get worse.   Already, post-Brexit economic stagnation, a powerless and disintegrating political class, a polarised and rudderless country, have created a breeding ground for fascism, as the popularity of the hatemongering grifter Tommy Robinson and the James Goddard ‘Westminster mob’ attest.

The treatment of Tanja Bueltmann is just one more example of an ongoing dynamic, in which the populist rebellion against the ‘dictatorship of Brussels’ and the ‘traitors’ who supposedly collude with it, overlaps with loathing of ‘immigrants’ who are already here.

I have the feeling that all this is pretty much what my anonymous correspondent had in mind when he wrote to me two and half years ago.  It was certainly not the ‘anti-racist Brexit’ that Socialist Worker called for today.

And now the beast is out of its corral, and we need to see it for what it is and find a way to put it back.

The post ‘Foreigners Like You Have No Right to Interfere’ appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

What I’m Reading: Blog Piece

When I’m writing non-fiction, my reading tends be dominated by the subject in hand. I try to read obsessively on whatever project i’m writing about so that I’m completely filled up by it. When I’m in between books, as I am now, I try to read more freely, either catching up on books I’ve been looking forward to, or following possibilities that interest me. I’m currently looking into the possibility of a book on the Arctic, so I read Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. Few people write more eloquently or gracefully about landscape and nature than Lopez. Every time I read him…

My piece for Marshall Zeringue’s excellent Campaign for the American Reader blog.   You can read the rest here

 

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Savage Frontier: The Pyrenees in History

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Brexit: Clowntime is Over

‘In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do,’ wrote Charles Mackay in his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852).  ‘ We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.’

For 2.5 wretched years we have watched the UK go mad in pursuit of something that is objectively impossible: leaving the European Union without losing the rights and privileges of membership.

This fantasy was a central component of the Leave campaign, repeated again and again by some of the same people who accused anyone who said anything to the contrary of promoting ‘Project Fear.’

For most of the last two years the most incompetent government in British history has accepted and promoted the idea that nothing would change for the worse and that everything would change for the better, because it was politically convenient to demonstrate to Brexiters in and out of her own party that she was delivering on the referendum result, and because even to suggest that leaving the EU might leave the country worse off was regarded as a violation of democracy and the ‘will of the people’.

The Labour opposition more or less followed the same trajectory, repeating the same mantra that ‘the referendum result must be respected’ while insisting that it could extract a withdrawal agreement from the EU that was better than May’s.

Throughout this tormented process neither the government nor the Labour leadership dared to suggest that the country might be carrying out an unprecedented act of national self-harm.

Instead ‘Global Britain’ and ‘Empire 2.0’ unicorns have mingled with leftwing unicorns in a Disneyland of the national imagination.  Now, after more than two years attempting to sideline parliament, the government is effectively trying to blackmail parliament into accepting a  flawed agreement opposed by Brexiters and Remainers alike, by running down the clock and forcing MPs to vote in its favour or risk crashing out of the EU without a deal – an outcome that all except the most fanatical proponents of Brexit regard as a national calamity.

Mackay once noted episodes in history in which ‘Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.’

This is exactly what Cameron did when he gambled the country’s future to win an argument within the Tory Party, and this is what May has been doing for the last few weeks with her own ‘piece of paper’.

Tomorrow parliament is poised to translate the 2016 referendum into a political reality that almost no one wants.  Or it has to reject May’s gambit, in which case parliament or the government will  have to have to come up with a new political reality that neither parliament nor the government can agree on.

This political and constitutional car crash is likely to get worse before – if – anything like normal traffic begins to move again.   As Mackay once observed ‘ Men…think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’

There is nothing to suggest that the UK is on the road to recovery.    Last week the government demonstrated that it could not even organize a traffic jam.  Today it emerged that the Minister of Defence threatened to attack the Spanish navy with paintballs in order to ‘humiliate Spain.’

As John McEnroe might have said, ‘ You cannot be serious.’  But the terrifying reality is that the government thinks it is.

Meanwhile the political atmosphere in the country oscillates between boredom, indifference and febrile anger, with fascist thugs ranting about ‘traitors’ outside parliament and threatening civil war, and supposedly respectable newspapers describing parliament’s attempts to oppose executive fiats as a ‘coup’.

Rudderless and directionless, we are swirling in a whirlpool of our own making, unable or unwilling to resolve the contradiction between what the referendum supposedly demanded and what is actually obtainable.

This isn’t something that parliament can resolve by itself, and contrary to what Labour have been suggesting, I don’t believe a general election can resolve it either.

A referendum brought all this about, and given everything that has happened, and everything that we now know, a second referendum may be our only way forward.

A second campaign could be brutal, and may not produce the result that its proponents want, but it still seems to me to a better alternative than continuing with this destructive folly simply in order to ‘respect’ a flawed referendum result.

And I hope that MPs will show the courage and backbone, not only to demonstrate the primacy of parliament, but also admit to parliament’s limitations – and find a way to ask the British public once again, if this is, after all, what it really really wanted.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds

Price: £9.99

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