Ostriches not unicorns

The trick is to pick your myth and then follow it unswervingly

It’s often said that if you want to solve a particularly challenging problem, such as alcoholism or drug addiction, the crucial step is to admit that you have a problem at all in the first place.

Surprisingly, I’ve now discovered that this simply isn’t the case. The far more effective way of dealing with such difficulties is to deny them. You decide that they don’t exist and, lo and behold, they go away.

To illustrate the point, here is a statement on anti-Semitism from the Labour majority, the Corbynist faction that now dominates the Party.

Our attitude, from the outset has been, “there simply isn’t a problem. Labour is anti-racist, so we can’t be anti-Semitic. Which means that if there were ever a trace of anti-Semitism anywhere in our ranks, we would ruthlessly drive it out. Which is why there is no anti-Semitism anywhere in the Party.”

All we have to do is look around to see how well our approach is working. Barely anyone talks about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party any more, do they? Why, we were even able to readmit the MP Chris Williamson to full membership of the Party, after a brief suspension, with hardly anyone noticing. That’s why objections to the readmission were so muted.

You may have forgotten about Williamson’s case, since it generated so little discussion, let alone controversy. He’d originally been suspended for suggesting that, though we were doing little enough about anti-Semitism, even that much was excessive. He, like so many others in the current majority faction, had identified measures against anti-Semitism as entirely superfluous.

We have declared ourselves anti-racists, so we must be.

We deny the existence of and anti-Semitism in our ranks, so there can be none.

Some have been so churlish as to point out that we were forced to suspend Williamson again within two days of his readmission. But that’s OK. We’re simply going to ignore that too.

What comrades need to understand is that denial is one of the most powerful weapons available to a political party. See how well it’s working for us on Brexit: we have refused to take any position for or against the EU. Who can doubt that it is this subtle and masterly stance that accounts for our soaring position in the opinion polls and our outstanding performance in the recent European elections?

Some have accused us of chasing unicorns. This is a vile slander. There is no such thing as a unicorn. But there is such a thing as an ostrich. It, we are told, hides its head in the sand on the basis that any danger it can’t see must be non-existent.

A noble beast. A fine response. An excellent role model we intend to keep following.

After all, look how well it’s worked for us so far.

I have always depended on the cordiality of strangers

Often it works out well. On Sunday, we took both dogs to Ashridge Forest, one of the more magical places in the three counties Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Making up for quite a lot of places of the other kind.

For Toffee, not yet seven months old, it was a matter of sheer delight. I think she had never previously encountered such a medley of smells. She ran through mile after mile of forest with her nose trailing along the ground for most of the way, as she revelled in the experience.

Sharing the joys of Ashridge in the spring

After giving the dogs their treat, we headed to the National Trust café which does an excellent line in homemade meals and cakes (not of course that we indulge in the cakes). The place was full – it took me twenty minutes even to get to the front of the queue, making me more grateful than ever the existence of a Kindle app on my phone – so we ended up sharing a table with other people.

By good fortune, we found ourselves opposite to women of Indian extraction, with whom we got into a pleasant conversation. We agreed about how awful racist objections to Muslim dress are, how desperate a state the Labour Party is in under its present non-leadership and how appalling it is that Britain is planning to leave the European Union.

It really is depressing watching someone self-inflicting a major injury. Especially when it’s your country.

I was amused that one of the women complained that she was constantly losing credit cards.

“How irresponsible is that?” she asked, I assume rhetorically, “what’s more irresponsible than losing credit cards?”

“Using them?” I asked.

“That’s what husbands are for,” she patiently explained, “to make sure you always have credit on the card.”

Her husband was clearly a different kind from my wife’s. With us, I was always the one running up the credit card bills. It was my wife who spent twenty-five years trying to train me to understand that my life would be a lot less stressful and a great deal more comfortable if I stopped treating “credit” as though it were “funds”.

These days I’m convinced that losing my credit cards would be a lot less irresponsible than using them. But it was fun meeting someone who took the opposite view. Especially in as glorious a setting as Ashridge.