Matthew Carr's Blog, page 28

Our Man in Budapest

As a general rule, whenever politicians tell you that they want to protect your culture or your civilisation with walls and fences, it’s a good idea to pat your wallet and check that it’s still there.

One minute you’re staring into their eyes and nodding approvingly as they tell you that your heritage and your identity are in grave danger from immigrants and ‘aliens’, and then you realise that you and your country have got poorer while your would-be saviours have mysteriously got a lot richer.

Take Hungary’s Victor Orbán. In the panoply of sleazy demagogues, charlatans, populists, white supremacists and outright fascists who have become paladins of the people these last few years, Orbán has acquired a special place in the far-right imagination.

Orbán’s Fidesz party has been in power since 2010, but he first established his international reputation as a defender of ‘Christian Europe’ in 2015, when Hungary began trapping migrants within its borders even though most of them didn’t even want to stay there, and were trying to get to Germany.

After allowing his police to attack migrants with tear gas and water cannons, Orbán went on to build a border fence along Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia.

When the EU asked Hungary to accept quotas of refugees, Orbán refused, declaring that Muslim immigrants were incompatible with Hungary’s Christian culture. Such defiance led Marine le Pen to describe him gushingly as ‘the only one protecting the external borders.’

This was how Orbán appeared to his foreign admirers and perhaps to himself: a modern incarnation of the Magyar soldiers who once patroll the perimeter of the Hapsburg-Ottoman militargrenze (military frontier), now defending Hungary and ‘Christian Europe’ from the refugee hordes.

In the face of the ‘globalists’ and ‘liberal elites’ intent on promoting Muslim immigration, Orbán proudly proclaimed Hungary to be an ‘illiberal democracy’ and a ‘Christian democracy’. He identified the far-right’s bete noir George Soros as the enemy of Christian Hungary and Europe, passing a ‘Stop Soros’ law enabling the government to fine and imprison NGOs who helped refugees.

Orbán also closed down the Soros-funded Central European University, in order to defend Hungary against political enemies he described as ‘ not national, but international. They do not believe in work, but speculate with money. They have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.’

No prizes for guessing who those enemies might be. But Orbán’s many fans, from Nigel Farage to Steve Bannon, didn’t ask. Orbán also acquired a fan in Vladimir Putin, giving Russia a 12 million euro contract to build Hungary’s only nuclear plant.

All this has transformed Orbán into a key player for the European far-right; the mitteleuropean strong man who is now supporting the Salvini-Polish proposal to remodel the European Union on far-right, anti-immigrant lines in the forthcoming EU parliamentary elections.

Until recently Orbán was rarely questioned inside Hungary itself, even when his party gerrymandered electoral boundaries to keep itself in power, and set out to control the media and judiciary. Orbán also cultivated an oligarchical political network based on gross levels of corruption and nepotism, handing out jobs and contracts to his friends and family, and enriching himself in the process.

Most Hungarians didn’t know about this, because Fidesz controls ninety percent of Hungary’s newspapers, television and radio stations. That’s what ‘illiberal democracy’ means. It’s a new kind of fascism that doesn’t need to speak its name, that acquires power not through streetfighting and military coups, but through a veneer of legality and a reconfiguration of democracy.

Not for the first time in history, Orbán appears to have let this go to his head.

This month he installed himself in Budapest’s Buda Palace complex – the former seat of the Hungarian government more than four centuries ago – which Orbán is having expensively refurbished. No one knows how much this restoration has cost, but estimates reach as high as $92m. He has even got a luxury restaurant to provide the food for its canteen.

But then last December Orbán’s government passed a law raising the overtime cap from 250 hours 400 hours, and giving companies three years to pay workers for it instead of one. 400 hours is a lot of unpaid overtime, in a country where forty-two percent of the population earn the minimum wage and have no choice but to work extra hours.

The government justified this measure because of Hungary’s labour shortage – a shortage caused partly by high rates of Hungarian emigration – some 350,000 people, and also – who would have thought it? – a lack of immigration.

For the first time since coming to power, Orbán found himself under serious pressure, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets and rejected the government’s ‘slave law.’ These demonstrations are still ongoing. Hungarian trade unions are now threatening a general strike on January 19, unless Orbán concedes a series of demands including the abrogation of the ‘slave law’ and a public sector pay rise.

Suddenly, it seems, the saviour of Christian Europe may no longer be impregnable. And that is good news, not only for Hungary but in the other ‘illiberal democracies’ that have sprung up in Eastern Europe in Slovakia, Serbia and Poland, where civil society has begun to mobilise against their own authoritarian governments

But Orbán is one leader who needs to be weakened. And better still he needs to go. Because Hungary doesn’t need politicians like this. And Europe doesn’t need them either.

And instead of looking to men like this to save us, we would do better to look more closely at how we can save ourselves from them.

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Published on January 12, 2019 02:57

Ceasefire: Goddard’s ‘Westminster mob’ are a threat to our common future

Few people who pay any attention to British politics will be unaware of the small but vocal group of far-right demonstrators who have been gathering outside Westminster for the last month. Led by Tommy Robinson fanboy James Goddard and inspired by the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement in France, these protesters have heckled and abused MPs, journalists and activists including the Sky News journalist Faisal Islam, Owen Jones, anti-Brexit campaigner Femi Oluyole, Sky News presenter Kay Burley, and – most famously – the Tory MP and anti-Brexit campaigner Anna Soubry.

Until this week, these protests aroused little concern from politicians or the media. On Monday however, Soubry was jostled by ‘yellow jacket’ protesters who called her a ‘Nazi’, a ‘traitor’ and compared her to Adolf Hitler.

In a television interview delivered against a background of taunts and abuse, a visibly-shaken Soubry declared that it was unacceptable to be called a Nazi and lamented the fact that ‘this is what is happening to our country.’ That same day Owen Jones was also jostled while trying to enter Westminster by Goddard and his cohorts, who called him a ‘traitor’ and a ‘lying little snake’ for supporting Jeremy Corbyn.

It was the Soubry incident that finally burst the bubble. The Commons speaker John Bercow condemned the abuse directed against her and described the protesters as a ‘type of fascism’. Fifty MPs have now written to Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick to complain about the ‘deteriorating public order and security situation in and around the exterior of the parliamentary estate.’

My piece for Ceasefire Magazine on James Goddard, Anna Soubry and the ‘Westminster mob’. You can read the rest here

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Published on January 11, 2019 00:53

El Cid Meets Donald Trump: Fascism Returns to Spain

Until recently Spain was something of an anomaly in the ‘new’ populist/far-right European politics. Despite – or perhaps because of – the recent memory of the Civil War and the decades of dictatorship, it had no explicitly far-right party of any influence.

Even the Partido Popular (PP), which swept up much of the post-Franco right, was essentially a mainstream conservative party rather than a far-right formation.

As we now know, the mainstream is no longer what it was, and last December Spain joined the European trend when the extreme-right party Vox unexpectedly won 12 seats in the Andalusian regional elections. Founded only four years ago, Vox is now entering into coalition in the Andalusian regional government with the PP and the new ‘anti-corruption’ centre-right party Ciudadanos (Cs).

Where the PP contained elements of Francoism, in its personnel and its political behaviour, Vox is the full package, combining ‘old’ Spanish fascism with its newer Trumpian variants.

Until yesterday, when it agreed to drop some of its proposals in order to co-govern Andalusia with the PP and Ciudadanos, Vox proposed to deport 52, 000 undocumented migrants. It wants to eradicate Spain’s autonomous regions completely and devolve the powers of all regional governments back to the central government. Like its counterparts elsewhere, it loathes ‘feminazis’ and ‘feminist supremacists’.

It wants to change domestic violence laws to prevent ‘false cases’ against men, remove all state grants for ‘radical feminist’ organisations, and uphold the ‘natural family’ based on male and female parents rather than same-sex marriage. It also wants to rescind the Law of Historical Memory, which has enabled excavations of mass graves containing victims of Francoism both during and after the Civil War.

In true Trumpian fashion Vox also wants to cut income and corporate taxes and build ‘walls’ in the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. Anyone who has been to both exclaves will know that the giant security fences erected around them already are difficult enough to cross, but Vox, like Trump, is fond of political symbols.

All this is steeped in the very particular iconography and historical traditions of the Spanish far-right.

Vox wants to ban the construction of ‘fundamentalist’ mosques and – somewhat laughably considering its own position on gender rights – mosques that ‘disparage women’. It wants to change Andalusia’s regional day to celebrate the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

During its electoral campaign various Facebook ads showed Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal riding through Andalusia with a group of other riders, accompanied by stirring music and the slogan ‘The Reconquest will begin in Andalusian lands.’

Franco also depicted his 1936 coup as a ‘reconquest’ and presented himself as a new El Cid waging war against the Marxist hordes, so Vox knew what it was doing here.

What explains Vox’s breakthrough? The answer lies partly in the politics and economy of Andalusia itself. For years Andalusia has the poorest region in Spain, with 37.3 percent of the population ( approx 3 million people) living in poverty and an average monthly salary of 327 euros.

The region has been ruled for nearly forty years by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and until recently the Socialists regarded Andalusia as their political fiefdom.

Both the PSOE and the PP have drained votes seats in the last two regional elections, which explains why the PP has been willing to enter into coalition with them. Vox did well on a low-turn out, winning 400,000 votes. It came second in eight Andalusia districts, and first in El Ejido, in Almeria.

No one who has been to El Ejido will be surprised that Vox did so well there. A soulless gold rush town situated in the heart of Almeria’s ‘plasticultura’ greenhouse industry, El Ejido owes its existence and its new-found wealth largely to its floating population of underpaid migrant workers from African and Morocco. For years El Ejido was run by the corrupt racist mayor Juan Enciso, who once declared ‘ at eight in the morning there are never enough immigrants, at eight in the evening there are too many of them.’

Andalusia has also been the first port of call for undocumented migrants trying to enter Europe through Spain. In the last two years the numbers of undocumented arrivals have increased, following the tightened policing of the ‘Libya route’ to Malta and Italy.

In this context Vox’s anti-immigrant politics have clearly gained new traction, and public disenchantment with the two main political parties in Andalusia has enabled it to present itself as an alternative to a moribund and atrophied system.

It would be a mistake to identity Vox as a purely Andalusian ‘protest’ party, however. The military coup that overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1936 was in part intended to suppress Catalan and Basque national aspirations. Vox belongs to the same extreme centralist tradition, and its appearance is clearly linked to the Catalan independence movement.

Vox refers to separatism obsessively in its 100 point program. It wants to reimpose the Spanish language in Catalonia and the Basque Country, ban all parties, associations and NGOs that seek ‘the destruction of the territorial destruction of the Nation and its sovereignty’, including regional tv stations and weather forecasts, and penalise ‘ offenses and outrages against the national anthem, the flag and the crown.’

It also proposes to promote and protect a Spanish national identity which celebrates ‘Spain’s contribution to civilisation and universal history, with special attention to the heroic acts and great deeds of our national heroes.’

Though Vox wants to remain in the EU, it doesn’t want to be part of the Schengen Area, partly because it believes that Schengen encourages ‘immigration mafias’, and also because the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and his fellow ‘golpistas’ – coup plotters – sought political asylum in Schengen member-states.

Where the PP clung rigidly and clumsily to Spain’s democratic constitution in its attempts to prevent Catalonia’s independence referendum in 2017, Vox proposes to change the constitution completely, and re-impose a Francoist model that would eradicate the constitutional basis of Spain’s democratic transition.

That ‘reconquest’ is a long way off, but a recent poll in the rightwing newspaper El Mundo suggested that Vox could win as many as 45 deputies in the Spanish parliament if national elections were held this year, giving it a national balance of power to match what it already has in Andalusia.

If the PP and Ciudadanos translate their Andalusian coalition into a national arrangement, then that would be very bad news for Spain and Europe.

We can only hope that the Spanish left can get its act together, and that Spanish society can mobilise itself against a movement that poses a direct threat to everything that Spanish democracy has achieved since the death of the dictator.

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Published on January 10, 2019 00:12

Telling Lies About Immigration: the Far-Right and the UN Migration Pact

When it comes to migration, far-right movements and populist governments are a lot clearer about what they want than many of their political opponents.

In Europe and America, liberal, conservative and left-of-centre governments have responded to the global ‘migration crisis’ with bureaucratic and physical obstacles that have exposed undocumented migrants to death and danger in a predatory and often pitiless world.

Even while tacitly accepting such barriers as a form of ‘deterrence’, most of these same governments have signed up to international treaties that – at least in theory – oblige them to take in refugees and ensure that the human rights of migrants are guaranteed.

The far-right movements and its more recent populist manifestations have no such dilemmas. To them migrants are invaders and intruders who threaten the cultural and racial integrity of the nation-state. Some of them see migration is a product of ‘globalism’.

Others regard migration as a deliberate conspiracy, promoted by the likes of George Soros, the United Nations and ‘cultural Marxists, who are paving the way for ‘reverse colonisation’ and the transformation of Europe into a Muslim-dominated colony.

These principles are shared by a broad spectrum that runs from Nazis and white supremacists to mainstream conservatives. In the era of Trump and fake news, these movements have become increasingly effective in mobilizing their international constituencies through the Internet, and in spreading conspiracy theories and fantasies to audiences that are already predisposed to believe them.

Anyone who doubts this should consider the response to the UN’s intergovernmental conference on migration which took place on 10-11 December in Marrakech last year. The conference was intended to sign off on the UN’s ‘Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration’, whose text was agreed last July.

On the face of it, the pact’s proposals were relatively modest and uncontroversial. On the one hand, the text stated that ‘Refugees and migrants are entitled to the same universal human rights and fundamental freedoms’ and called for a’ comprehensive approach…to optimize the overall benefits of migration, while addressing risks and challenges for individuals and communities in countries of origin, transit and destination. ‘

At the same time the pact reaffirmed ‘the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law.’

Most of these recommendations were broad aspirations and statements of principle, rather than concrete proposals, and the agreement was non-binding.

It was nevertheless the most wide-ranging effort so far to develop a cooperative global approach to migration that reconciles the rights of migrants and the rights of states.

Even before the conference began however, it was the object of an intense social media campaign involving far-right, anti-Muslim and ‘identitarian’ activists in Europe and America, and Canadian conservatives, which accused the pact of ‘promoting’ migration and attempting to bring about ‘the demise of the European people’.

Some activists interpreted the pact’s commitment ‘to ensure that all migrants, regardless of their migration status, can exercise their human rights through safe access to basic services’ as a license to usurp Western social security benefits.

Others presented its aspiration to ‘counter expressions, acts and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, violence, xenophobia and related intolerance against all migrants in conformity with international human rights law’ as an attempt to ‘ban criticism of migration.’

These assertions were as paranoid, delusional and dishonest as we have come to expect, but they were also very effective.

In Belgium the New Flemish Alliance withdrew from the government in protest against the pact. In September, Trump declared that the US would not be participating in the Marrakech conference, on the grounds that ‘migration should be governed by an international body that is unaccountable to our own citizens.’

The pact proposed no such thing, but Trump, as usual, spoke with the same voice as the far-right trolls, and he wasn’t the only one. In October the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz – whose government is in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party – announced that his government would withdraw from the pact.

By the time the pact was finally voted on on 19 December, five countries voted against: the United States, Hungary, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic. Another twelve abstained, including Belgium, Australia and Austria.

In effect, the far-right used social media to undermine the first significant attempt to develop a coordinated international response to migration that takes the rights of migrants into consideration. Its activists were able to disseminate false information through channels that now reach from the dankest corners of the Internet to the White House.

That they were able to do this without serious challenge should ring a lot of alarm bells. And one can only wish that the governments that supported this initiative had shown the same energy and commitment in promoting and defending it as the right did in trying to destroy it.

But most people outside the far-right’s orbit did not even know it was taking place.

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Published on January 08, 2019 07:29

Gavin Williamson: Brexitland Rules the Waves

In the final pages of the Beagle diaries, Charles Darwin celebrated the incorporation of Australia and other British colonies into ‘ a grand centre of civilization’ and declared approvingly:

It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a certain consequence wealth, prosperity and civilisation.

Darwin made these observations at a time when the British navy was seen by many Victorian Englishmen as the guarantor of civilization as well as British commercial interests. Long after our slow ‘retreat from Empire’ this association between global military power and ‘greatness’ has been crucial to the way that Britain imagines itself.

More than any other European country we have consistently sought to project military power abroad even after our ‘retreat from empire’, usually by riding shotgun with the United States, and we have never ceased to look back on the global reach that Darwin described without a certain nostalgia.

This nostalgia has re-emerged with a vengeance as a result of the ‘Empire Redux’ fantasies that have followed the referendum. Last week our fireplace salesman-turned-defence secretary Gavin Williamson told the Sunday Telegraph that leaving the EU offered Britain the chance to become a ‘global player’ by establishing a chain of military bases around the world.

Interviewed in his office with a picture of Churchill on the wall behind him, Williamson delivered these stirring words that were guaranteed to warm the hearts of many Torygraph readers:

We have got to be so much more optimistic about our future as we exit the European Union. This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way, we can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play.

Williamson made these observations in the same week that Jeremy Hunt was touting for a new post-Brexit role by summoning the ghost of George Canning in Singapore. The Defence Secretary promised to end the 1968 ‘East of Suez’ policy and ‘ get as much of our resources forward-based, actually creating a deterrent, but also taking a British presence’ in the Commonwealth and countries ‘right across Africa’.

All these regions, according to Williamson, apparently ‘look to us for the moral leadership, the military leadership, and the global leadership.’ Williamson didn’t say exactly where these bases will be established, but the Telegraph suggested potential locations in the Singapore, Montserrat, and Guyana.

What will these military bases deter, in Montserrat or Guyana, say? For Williamson, the presence of these bases is more important than their actual purpose. The important thing is to be out there and show the world that we are ‘global’ and therefore ‘great’ again. That’s what being optimistic is all about.

Never mind that recruitment to the British army has fallen to the point when the armed forces are now appealing directly to ‘snowflakes’ in a bizarre attempt to attract millennials into the army.

Williamson cited recent research carried out by Lord Ashcroft which supposedly showed that while ‘the rest of the world saw Britain standing 10 feet tall – when actually we stood six feet tall – Britons saw us standing five feet tall, not the six, and certainly not the 10.’

I’m not quite sure what this means, and I doubt if Williamson is either. Even by the dismal standards of this-government-of-the-damned, the man who once told Russia to ‘go away’ has been promoted way above his station. Williamson is essentially promoting a schoolboy Airfix toy version of British power driven by imperial nostalgia and imperial amnesia.

Many countries have done associated military power with ‘greatness’ in the past, and most of them have ultimately come to grief in the end – not to mention the grief that such countries have often inflicted on others. For Williamson, like so many Brexiters, ‘optimism’ and fantasies of global reach have now taken the place of any realistic assessment of who we are and what we might become.

Unlike Darwin’s time, we no longer inhabit a world in which British gunboats uphold the international world order and enforce free trade for the benefit of British manufacturing. We are a medium-sized power and something of a minnow.

Williamson’s pronouncements notwithstanding, there is little evidence to suggest that the world is crying out for our ‘leadership’ – especially after the tormented farce of the last 2.5 years. Our inability to recognize this transformation is a problem, and so too is our unwillingness to honestly come to terms with our imperial past.

Not only will Williamson’s ‘forward resources’ cost a great deal of money that could be better spent on repairing the torn social fabric of a country where many homeless people are veterans from our recent attempts to show the world how great we are. These fantasies of ‘Global Britain’ and ‘ Empire 2.0’ are part of the reason we have ended up in this horrific political mess in the first place.

And the great irony, which I’m sure the historians of the future will not miss, is that these foolish attempts to become ‘great’ again are likely to lead to our national ruin and the breakup of the UK.

No military bases in Montserrat, Guyana or the South China Seas will make up for that, and the politicians who waved this process through are likely to look even dumber and more out of their depth than they do already.

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Published on January 06, 2019 02:28

Jeremy Hunt’s Chain of Fools

As a schoolboy studying for my History O’Level, I once memorized the British Foreign Secretary George Canning’s famous 1826 dictum: ‘I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’

At the time I was never exactly sure what it meant, but I understood that it had something to do with the ‘informal empire’ that Britain established in Latin America after the Napoleonic Wars. I was nevertheless impressed by the grandiosity of a statesman who could ‘call’ new worlds into existence, and I sensed that our history teacher expected us to be impressed too.

In October last year our current foreign secretary referenced Canning in a speech on the UK’s role in a post-Brexit world. Brexiters like history, even though they tend to look back on it through a very narrow lens, and Jeremy Hunt’s speech was one of the silliest speeches I have ever heard since this dismal process began.

Hunt’s basic premise was that the UK finds itself, as it once did after the Napoleonic Wars, at a similarly ‘pivotal, historic moment’ in which ‘ the global balance of power is shifting once more and Post-Brexit, our place within it as well.’ In response to these developments, Hunt suggested that a post-Brexit UK ‘ can use our influence, our reach and power to defend our values by becoming an invisible chain that links the world’s democracies’.

Hunt referred vaguely to ongoing threats to global democracy, free trade and multilateralism, and argued that the UK and its ‘friends’ should unite behind their common ‘values’ and promote the ‘separation of powers, respect for individual civil and political rights, a belief in free trade’ through a combination of hard and soft power.

The new world that Hunt proposed to ‘call into existence’ was somewhat less ambitious than the Latin American markets that Canning once set out to prise open for Britain’s burgeoning manufacturing industries. Hunt announced his intention to establish 12 new diplomatic posts. The first six were to be established in Lesotho, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), the Bahamas, Tonga, Samoa, and Vanuatu.

He also proposed to upgrade the British Office in Chad, set up new embassies will be founded in Djibouti and Niger, and boasted that he now had added Germany, France and Japan to the Foreign Office’s secure phone lines.

Canning, eat your heart out.

On Wednesday, Hunt returned to the same theme in another speech on Britain’s ‘post-Brexit role’ delivered in the Brexiter Shangri-La of Singapore. After extolling the virtues of Singapore, he once again warned of threats to ‘the rules-based international system’ from a variety of sources that included Syria, Russia, and Iran in Yemen (no mention of Saudi Arabia in Yemen – it’s all Iran’s fault).

Apparently unaware that he was in an authoritarian democracy ruled by the same party for more than half a century, Hunt warned of a global retreat from democratic governance, in a world ‘ where it is rarely possible for one country to achieve its ambitions alone’ .

Hunt insisted that the UK was uniquely posed to negotiate these challenges , through a network of connections that included ‘the Commonwealth, our alliance with the United States or our friendship with our neighbours in Europe.’

And those connections are why Britain’s post-Brexit role should be to act as an invisible chain linking together the democracies of the world, those countries which share our values and support our belief in free trade, the rule of law and open societies.

That doesn’t mean being dogmatic or forcing our values on others. And of course we recognise that every country is different.

But it does mean speaking out for those fundamental principles to our friends, as well as those who set themselves up in opposition to them.

It means being active where we have special responsibilities, such as securing peace in Yemen.

There is a lot of nonsense here, not least of which is the Hunt’s suggestion that the UK is ‘securing peace’ in the Yemen war. Perhaps you can’t expect much more from a politician who has shown a keen eye for self-advancement and deference to the powerful in every position he has ever held, but Hunt’s glib meditations on the British future are an expression of official government thinking.

That should be worrying, not only for what Hunt said, but for the facts and contradictions that were not included in his speech. For example:

The UK is leaving the largest and most successful coalition of liberal democracies in history.

The governments that support Brexit are precisely the ones that are most hostile to the ‘values’ that Hunt wants to defend, whether in the United States, Poland, Hungary, Russia or Brazil.

Brexit is regarded by far-right ‘populists’ and ethnonationalist formations across the world as a key step towards destroying the multilateral ‘globalist’ order and ‘rule-based’ system that Hunt believes the UK can somehow link together.

Under Donald Trump, the US is reimposing MAGA protectionist barriers and turning away from the international treaties and organisations that it helped set up. The UK is powerless to change this.

The ‘soft power’ that Hunt praises has been badly tarnished by the astonishing incompetence and arrogance that his government has shown during the last 2.5 years, and the willingness of so many British politicians to treat its partners like enemies.

British diplomacy has been similarly diminished, partly because of the idiocy of politicians like Hunt, who recently compared the EU to the Soviet Union, not to mention the contemptuous act of placing the narcissistic buffoon Boris Johnson as Hunt’s predecessor, who managed to offend almost every country he visited or spoke about.

The UK is no longer at the head of a global Empire. It is a medium-sized power with nuclear weapons, and an economy based largely on finance and services Within a few years it is very unlikely that it will even exist in its present form

Whatever else holds the UK and Saudi Arabia together, it has nothing to do with ‘values’ or a commitment to democracy.

Hunt seems unaware of any of this, or he simply doesn’t care. Like so many Brexiters, he looks at history only through the prism of vanished British greatness, when a more realistic appraisal of our post-Brexit prospects really ought to take note of our current weakness and vulnerability.

So I very doubt whether the history students of the future will think of Jeremy Hunt’s the way we were once taught to regard George Canning, and I suspect that his ‘invisible chain’ will be regarded as one more delusion in the British descent into political delirium.

And if this is the best the British government can come up with, we really are going to hit the buffers quite hard.

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Published on January 04, 2019 01:21

Jair Bolsonaro: Robocop in the Tropics

Not many people outside Brazil will be familiar with the name Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. As commander at the Brazilian army’s Department of Information Operations, known as DOI-CODI, in São Paulo, from 1970 to 1974, the man known as ‘Colonel Ustra’ was one of the most notorious torturers under Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1964 to 1985.

Ustra introduced and oversaw a range of procedures against leftwing militants that included inserting rats in women’s vaginas and forcing young children to watch their parents being tortured. One of the thousands of people tortured by the regime was the future president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, then a member of an obscure urban guerrilla organization known as the National Liberation Command.

In 2015 Ustra died of cancer. The following year Jair Bolsonaro, then a congressman, voted in favour of Rousseff’s impeachment, declaring ‘In memory of Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff … I vote YES.’

Such crass viciousness is characteristic of a former army officer who has consistently praised the dictatorship, who revels in talk of blood and violence, and who once declared ‘I am in favor of torture — you know that. And the people are in favor of it, too.’

Bolsonaro is not just in favour of torture. In a 1999 interview he claimed that elections were incapable of solving Brazil’s problems and that it was necessary for a future government to

do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing 30,000. If some innocent people die, that’s fine. In every war, innocent people die. I will even be happy if I die as long as 30,000 others go with me.

There was a time when such views confined Bolsonaro to the political margins in a democratizing continent that seemed to be shifting leftwards, and turning away from the murderous dictatorships that dominated Latin America during the Cold War.

As we have all learned to our cost these last few years, such shifts are not necessarily permanent, and the margins have now become mainstream.

Yesterday Bolsonaro was inaugurated president of the fourth largest democracy in the world, becoming yet another of the new breed of authoritarian ‘populist’ leaders who have come to power across the world in Europe, Turkey, the Philippines and the United States.

All these leaders share certain things in common, but each of them have emerged in a very specific national context. Though Bolsonaro prattled on about Brazil’s ‘Judeo-Christian’ identity yesterday, it is clear that Brazilians voted for him out of more pressing concerns over corruption, economic stagnation and rampant criminality and insecurity, with 63,880 homicides in 2017 alone.

Bolsonaro’s solutions to these problems include the use of torture, allowing cops to kill with impunity, reinstating the death penalty and establishing vigilante groups. This quasi-military response to Brazil’s drug problem places him closer to Rodrigo Duterte than Victor Orbán, but it also has grim precedents in the history of Brazil and Latin America.

It was in 1964 – the same year that the Brazilian military, with political support from the US, overthrew the left-leaning government of Joao Goulart – the first Latin American ‘death squads’ emerged in Sao Paulo, when the city’s militarized police began killing criminals who they believed had escaped justice.

By the time these groups became the ‘rogue cop’ model for Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force in 1973, some of their leading members, such as the Sao Paulo policeman Sergio Fleury, had already begun to export their methods to neighbouring countries, providing expertise in extra-judicial killings and torture to military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and other countries.

Bolsonaro was correct that the Brazilian dictatorship tortured more people than it killed, but Brazil was the seedbed for far more murderous regimes on the continent. Even following Brazil’s democratic transition, Brazil’s police have tended to act like a paramilitary force in their confrontations with the country’s powerful drug gangs.

The Brazilian police already kill an incredible six people per day, most of whom are young black males from the favelas. As the Brookings Foundation notes:

Brazil’s police are already notorious for being one of the world’s deadliest in the use of force. In many favelas, Brazil’s retired and current police officers operate illegal militias that extort and control local communities, murdering those who oppose them and engaging in warfare with Brazil’s highly-violent gangs and in social cleansing. Bolsonaro is simply threatening to turn the rest of the police into state-sanctioned thugs.

In effect Bolsonaro is embracing the methods celebrated in José Padilha’s film Elite Squad, whose fascistic glorification of the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE) or Special Police, made it the biggest earner in Brazilian cinema.

Now, it seems, the Brazilian electorate, has endorsed these methods. If Bolsonaro stays true to his word, an-already violent police force will be given carte blanche to ‘solve’ Brazil’s problems by intensifying a drugs war that has already failed in country after country.

As in the Philippines, many people will die. In Brazil most of them will be poor and black.

Brazilian society may draw some comfort from that for a while. But problems rooted in structural inequalities, racism, and political and economic dysfunction cannot usually be solved with bullets and the torture chamber.

Societies that bring embrace such methods often find themselves suffocated and contaminated by them, as Brazil was in the 1960s, and many Brazilians may find that it was easier to bring Robocop into power than it is to get rid of him.

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Published on January 02, 2019 05:09

2018: What I Read and What I Watched

In dark times, books and films bring more than consolation or escape. In a world gone stale and out of kilter they can provide oxygen that helps you to breathe. They help you understand what is going on and remind you of what could be going on.

I read a lot of great books last year. My stand out novel is Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing – an epic and mournful depiction of the apocalyptic collapse of East Prussia at the end of World War 2 seen through the eyes of a landed Prussian family. This was closely followed by Paul French’s sizzling portrait of the Shanghai criminal underbelly between the wars City of Devils.

I also enjoyed Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom Terror – an eye-opening and extraordinarily well-researched portrait of the doomed attempts by Metternich and the reactionary Holy Alliance to push the European political calendar back to 1788 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

Zamoyski shows how Metternich and his absolutist cohorts sought an explanation for the revolutionary movements percolating through Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, in a non-existent revolutionary conspiracy supposedly directed by the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jacobins and a pan-European comité directeur – a paranoid projection that authoritarian governments have often engaged in since.

Few people write about landscape and nature more poetically or eloquently than Barry Lopez, and I read his magisterial Arctic Dreams as preparation for a potential book project on the Arctic.

I also read Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings – a haunting meditation on the racist ‘extinction discourse’ that accompanied the genocide or disappearance of indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. I’m a great admirer of Roberto Saviano, and his Zero Zero Zero is a powerful and almost hallucinatory journey into the international cocaine market, which could almost be subtitled ‘cocaine as metaphor.’

How Democracies Die: What History Tells us About Our Future was filled with insightful observations on historical precedents for the collapse of democratic governance with an obvious focus on the United States. Julia Boyd’s Travellers in the Third Reich was a telling and eye-opening reminder that the descent into the political abyss can seem entirely normal and unproblematic to those who are living through it – no matter how freakish and incomprehensible such periods may seem afterwards.

I spoke alongside Brian Catlos at the Bradford Literary Festival, and his Kingdoms of Faith is the best overall account of the rise and fall of Moorish Spain that I have read.

In terms of films 2018 was a year in which you were spoiled for choice, and constantly reminded of the power and beauty of cinema. Standout for me must be Pawel Pawlikowski’s epic meditation on love, music, exile and history Cold War. But then there was the equally epic The Guardians – a beautifully-filmed study of female resilience during World War 1 which told a story that has rarely been told or told so well.

I loved Spike Lee’s passionate and angry exploration of American racism Black Klansman, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Chloé Zhao’s audacious and intimate portrait of wounded masculinity The Rider. I closed the year with Leave No Trace – a beautifully understated portrait of mental illness, obsession and damaged America from Debra Granik, the director of Winter’s Bone.

On television, my standouts were mostly digital. I tried The Bodyguard, but found it slick and gimmicky and gave it up. Netflix’s study of the rise and fall of the Bhagwan Rajneesh movement Wild Wild Country was a startling, funny and constantly jawdropping documentary with a cast of characters that any novelist would struggle to emulate.

Though I have reservations about Ken Burns, I was impressed by the range and depth of his Vietnam War history and moved by the many stories it told.

Italian crime series continue to knock most of their British counterparts into the sea. I binge-watched the second and third series of Gomorrah and also took in Suburra Blood on Rome and Mafia Detective – a revisiting of pre-Falcone Sicily that deserves a second outing. Montelbano, this definitely ain’t. Channel 4’s Farang is pretty tense and gripping stuff – Scandi-noir in Thailand from Walter Presents.

For fun, I loved Upstart Crow.

Satire was more or less pointless. Why bother, when all you had to do was switch on the news pretty much any day of the week, all through the year?

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Published on January 01, 2019 03:44

2019: The Reckoning

Politically speaking 2018 was a dismal year, but I can’t help feeling that 2019 is going to be a lot worse. In the UK we are now faced with a situation that was unprecedented – and until the 2016 referendum – unimaginable. A minority Tory government, propped up by a heavily-bribed DUP, is using the threat of a no deal crash out in an attempt to blackmail parliament into supporting May’s Brexit deal – a deal that virtually everyone agrees is worse than staying in the EU.

Most economists agree that even the ‘softer’ version of Brexit will have negative economic consequences – not to mention more specifically damaging repercussions on the NHS , social care, food production and other sectors.

At present 3.4 million EU citizens who have just invited by the Home Office to ‘apply’ to obtain reduced rights than the ones they had when they came here. The government now boasts of having stopped freedom of movement as its great achievement – even though it is actually reducing the rights of its own citizens in the process.

It is difficult to think of any British government that has behaved so badly towards its partners and neighbors, and which has willfully agreed to make its own citizens poorer, simply in order to keep itself in power. But this is what May is doing, with the cackhanded cynicism that has characterises everything she does. Millions of pounds are being spent on fridges to store medicines – something you would expect to find in a war. The government has just contracted a company that has no ships, no experience of ferry transportation, to transport thousands of lorries into a port – Ramsgate – that does not have sufficient space to manage the numbers predicted.

Much of the world now gapes in horror and incomprehension at the startling downfall of a country with hundreds of years of diplomatic experience, with a civil service that prided itself on its professionalism & non-partisan expertise. Neither the political class nor the public seems able to prevent one of the most gratuitous acts of national self-harm that any country has ever inflicted on itself. Mesmerised by the principle of ‘respecting the referendum’ the two main political parties are approaching the end of the process to which they foolishly committed the country when they triggered Article 50, at a time when neither party had a plan or even knew what options were available.

It is no longer clear whether there is any good outcome that can be extracted from this astonishing debacle, or whether our political class has the will or the ability to avoid the worst possible outcome. Labour continues to believe that it can unite the country through an election, though there is nothing to suggest that it has any such ability. Brexit zealots yearn for no deal with a fervor that would be more fitting in religious martyrs – fine for them but what about the rest of us?

Even government ministers tell us that we can now be like Singapore or build military bases all around the world, or else they rush back from safari holidays to Dover to strike Churchillian poses in the face of our migrant ‘invasion.’

As Bob Dylan once sang, there must be some way out of here, but it’s difficult to see what it is. A second referendum might be a solution, and there are good arguments for having one. It is quite clear 2.5 years after the referendum that many people on both sides did not understand what the consequences of leaving would be. Both the government and the opposition continue to ignore the role of dark money in tilting the referendum result – even if the result cannot be attributed solely to this kind of manipulation.

It’s also painfully obvious that the political class cannot find a solution that will even live up to the basic expectations of Brexit – that we would be better off out than in. Given the magnitude and the complexity of the changes that are now looming, it is perfectly democratic – and indeed it should be common sense – to allow the public to revisit that original decision in the light of what we now know and what is actually on offer.

Opponents of a second vote argue that it would divide the country still further, that it would be brutal and vicious. They may be right, but it will be brutal and vicious if we continue as we are, and the viciousness is likely to last for decades, as Brexiters and disaster capitalists asset strip a diminished, weakened and divided country, and millions of people discover that the EU was not the cause of their problems, and that leaving it has made them worse.

The Brexit zealots won’t take a second referendum well. If there is one, they will use the same dark tricks that they used last time. A referendum may not produce the result that Remainers want. Some polls suggest that the momentum has shifted towards Remain, but others suggest that both sides remain largely entrenched in the same positions.

So Remain could lose a second vote. It may even be, as Der Speigel has just suggested, that we aren’t ready to be part of a transnational network like the European Union. Yet despite all these reservations, it seems to me legitimate and essential to test the public mood once again.

However, time is running out, and there are politicians who know this perfectly well. If we can’t find a way to turn this round, in 90 days time we are going to see what happens when paranoia and puffed-up delusions of national grandeur collide with the real world. And I can’t help feeling that it will be painful and ugly, and that many many people – including some of those who now want this outcome – will come to regret that it ever happened.

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Published on December 31, 2018 13:53

2018: The Year of the Missing Unicorn

In her study of the ‘pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest’ from Troy to Vietnam The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman once noted that ‘Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.’

This willingness to rely on ‘fixed notions’ has been a persistent thread in the Brexit process that has unfolded so dismally before us for the last 2.5 years. It was already present during the Referendum campaign itself, in the hysterical representations of a transnational organisation that we joined voluntarily as a ‘dictatorship of Brussels’ that kept the UK ‘shackled’ and prevented from achieving its true greatness.

From 2016 these ‘fixed notions’ about the EU have been accompanied by bright visions of what we could be and what was achievable once we had slipped its chains and emerged blinking into independence and freedom. First and foremost amongst them was the idea that we could leave a club that we had joined without losing any of the privileges or the responsibilities that were associated with membership. We heard that the EU needed us more than we needed them; that the German car industry would come to us with a begging bowl. We heard from our own PM that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal.’

Throughout 2017 politicians delighted us with visions of our forthcoming transformation into ‘Global Britain’ – a buccaneering Empire Redux sailing across the world to sign swashbuckling trade deals with a world that loved and admired us as much as we admired ourselves.

All through 2017 a parade of unicorns passed before our eyes in a beautiful and glorious procession: Global Britain unicorns; Single Market unicorns that came without any strings attached; trade deal unicorns; customs union unicorns without lorry queues or a hard Irish border. Behind them the Labour Party and sections of the left offered less ostentatious, but no less magical unicorns: ‘jobs-first Brexit’; ‘Lexit’; ‘socialist transformation.’

All these unicorns shared certain things in common. They offered us a vision of our national future in which we would lose nothing by leaving the EU and might become even better. Few politicians dared to tell us the future might be worse. When civil servants like Ivan Rogers pointed out ‘contrary signs’ they were forced to resign and their concerns were ignored or dismissed. Our politicians believed that the public wanted unicorns, and that’s what they gave us.

2018 has been a very different year. This was a year in which the ‘contrary signs’ proved impossible to ignore; when the clumsy arrogance of our government in its dealings with the EU was slowly but inexorably unraveled; when the foolishness of triggering Article 50 without any idea of what we really wanted or any realistic assessment of what was feasible or how to get there was painfully revealed.

Now, 90 days from ‘Brexit day’, we have a government that has conceded most of the red lines that it once established, and come up with a deal whose primary achievement has been stopping the free movement of European citizens – and that of its own citizens – with the European political space.

To achieve this deal, the government is effectively blackmailing parliament with the threat of crashing out with no deal, while preparing with the same ineffectiveness that has characterised everything it has done for what is essentially a national emergency. Even the zealots who now to escape the EU’s ‘vassalage’ don’t seem to talk about the unicorns anymore. Some of them, like Rees-Mogg have already made financial arrangements to protect themselves from what is about to unfold. For others the spectacle of national self-destruction and humiliation has become something to look forward to and celebrate.

Meanwhile the rest of the world looks on, as stunned and appalled as so many of us are by what may well go down as one of the most gratuitous and idiotic examples of ‘wooden-headedness’ in history.

A few unicorns still roam through the ultra-nationalist imaginations of Brexiter zealots, who have ignored political reality from the outset. Even in the Labour Party, the ‘Jobs-first Brexit’ unicorn continues to limp on, in Labour’s belief that it can find a better deal – even in the next 90 days – if it gets an election. Socialist transformation has made a surprising comeback in some Labour circles.

But even these unicorns seem shrunken and a little unhealthy – like the UK itself.

You look at them with pity now, and wish they had something better to feed on. But it would be better for them – and us – if they could go back where they came from. Because the world is a harsh and unforgiving place and national self-delusion has very real costs, and unless we can focus our attention back on the real world and find a way out of this mess, I fear we are going to learn that lesson in ways that once upon a time, we never could have imagined.

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Published on December 30, 2018 04:14