Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

Boris Coup: Day 11

Day 11 of the Boris coup and Brexiters are in a terrible flap. 

They’re shocked. Appalled. Flabbergasted.

It seems that before voting to block a hard Brexit, the cross-party group of MPs opposing no-deal – the people I like to think of as the resistance – spoke to EU officials to check whether a request for a further delay would be granted if Britain requested one. The Brexiters are horrified. David Jones, a Tory MP, and one of BoJo’s accomplices – apologies, supporters – said that this:

... confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.

I changed the word ‘accomplices’ back there because I’ve been warned about the importance of words. But more of that later.

It’s interesting that British MPs approaching EU officials amounts to unwarranted interference by the EU in our internal affairs. Does that mean that when Boris chatted to Trump at the Biarritz G7 meeting, that was similar interference by the US? Is it now a political sin to talk to our foreign partners before deciding how we should approach our partnership with them? Or is it simply that David Jones wants us only to consult and be guided by Boris?

Meanwhile, the bill to force BoJo to ask for a Brexit delay is due to receive royal assent on Monday. All eyes are on what Boris does next. Will he refuse to send the bill for assent? Will he refuse to abide by it when it becomes law? Is someone who suspended Parliament because he couldn’t get his way prepared to respect the law?

That we have to ask the question at all shows just how far we have sunk in this febrile coup atmosphere in which we live.

Tom Watson.
So annoying that his political antennae are better than his leader’s

It’s an atmosphere that affects Labour as well as the Tories. Mark Serwotka, President of the Trades Union Congress, was insisting on Thursday – or, as I like to think of it, on day 9 of the coup – that “the actions of some of the parliamentary Labour party such as Tom Watson and others have been really unacceptable”. 

Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, should it seems now get in line and stop acting against the will of his leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Whose will, according to Corbynists like Serwotka, should be religiously followed in all circumstances. Just like Boris feels all Conservatives should jump to his every whim.

Tom Watson is annoying to people like Serwotka because he has political instincts. Right at the start of the coup, Corbyn rushed off to Glasgow to do some election campaigning. Business as usual, for him. Tom Watson, on the other hand, got stuck in with the resistance, working immediately with the ‘Stop the Coup’ campaign in London. Corbyn only woke up to the importance of what was happening at the end of the week, when he also belatedly joined the movement.

No wonder Serwotka wants Watson silenced. Who’d want a deputy leader who so eloquently demonstrates how far off the pace his leader is? Especially when he shows it in practice and not just words.

Which takes me back to the subject of words.

I’ve had complaints about my use of the word ‘coup’. What Boris has done, my critics claim, is not a coup. It’s true that if a coup means tanks on the streets, military occupation of the TV stations and political opponents arrested, then it wasn’t a coup.

But there are far more insidious ways of seizing power illegitimately. What Boris did was even legal, as several judges have confirmed, but that only makes it more difficult to obstruct his power grab. The only defence we have in Britain to abusive executive power is Parliamentary oversight, an annoyance to would-be autocrats anywhere, so Boris decided to do away with it.

He would have established a precedent, and precedent is everything in a system governed by an unwritten constitution. It would have allowed the executive illicitly to take whatever power it wished, if it couldn’t bend Parliament to its will.

That is a coup.

It has to be resisted, as any coup should be resisted. Parliament deserves congratulations, and thanks, for having so resisted BoJo, so far with success.

While we’re on the subject of words, let’s look at this one too: conservative.

Generally, it means someone who wants to conserve things. In particular, that would include our conventions and political processes. It’s clear that BoJo has no intention of doing so. That makes him a radical, seeking to change Britain radically, though from the right rather than the left. A radical, not a conservative, with a small c, even though he leads the Conservative Party, with a capital C.

David Gauke
Expelled for opposing his leader’s attack on democratic values

That’s why David Gauke, former Justice Minister but one of the 21 Conservative rebels BoJo expelled from his Party for voting against him, says that Boris, to placate Brexiters, has “had to rebadge the Conservative party as the Brexit party”.

That’s the party of Nigel Farage. BoJo’s behaviour is turning him, in Gauke’s words, into “Farage-lite”.

Powerful words. As words can be when you deploy them to maximise their impact. Gauke did it, and I apologise to no one for attempting to do the same.

Boris coup: Day 7

Day 7 of the Boris coup already. Time flies when you’re dismantling democracy.

Boris keeps using democratic language to mask his authoritarian intentions. He keeps piling it on. First, he threatened any fellow Conservative who opposed him in parliament with expulsion, meaning they wouldn’t be able to stand as Conservative candidates in any future election, ensuring their careers end ignominiously.

Now, he’s followed up on that threat by warning MPs that if Parliament votes to block a no-deal Brexit, he’ll call an election for 14 October. That would make the end of their careers much more imminent than they imagined. He feels it would focus their minds more clearly on the need to bow to his will.

You see? There’s nothing more democratic than an election. But in his hands, it becomes a blackmail threat to cow anyone with the guts to stand up to him.

Johson (l) and Corbyn may soon face off in an election
They both think they’re election winners but only one’s a truly redoubtable campaigner

It’s not entirely up to BoJo to call an election. He needs a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons. But the Labour leader Corbyn has been calling for an election for so long that he could hardly have his party vote against one now. He should, though: no opposition party has won an election from as low a poll standing as Labour currently enjoys (if ‘enjoy’ is the right word).

Corbynists try to comfort themselves with the thought that their man performed so much better than expected last time, in 2017. They forget that then he was up against Theresa May, who surprised most of us by turning out to be not just a mediocre campaigner but an absolutely lamentable one. Wooden, uncharismatic, constantly repeating the same phrase, “strong and stable”, long after voters had lost all enthusiasm for it.

As the coup experience has shown, Boris Johnson is a campaigner in a different league. He’s building a solid base in the electorate. It seems a near-certainty that he would win an election held in the next few weeks.

In fact, his greatest threat was from his right, from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. But Farage has said he would stand down candidates if Johnson sticks firmly to pursuing a no-deal Brexit. And Johnson certainly will.

Not that he says as much. He still claims that he’s pursuing a new deal. But he has repeatedly made clear that such a deal would have to drop the so-called backstop to keep the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic open. However, even the people he’s commissioned to find alternative solutions have told him they can’t.

As always with BoJo, most of what he says is simply smoke screen. Get through the smoke and you find more smoke. If you get right through all the layers, what you’ll find at the end is the one solid goal he has: Britain will leave the EU on 31 October, and will do so without a deal.

It’s his ability to deploy duplicity so effectively and capture support, even among people who know he’s lying, that makes him so redoubtable an adversary. I think some in Corbynist ranks are beginning to realise that. But, sadly, too few. 

And far too late.

The Boris coup: day 3

Boris has announced that he’s now going flat out to get a deal with the EU.

Why now particularly?

Because now he’s doing away with the interference of those pesky members of parliament. Of whom he happens to be one. And by no means the least pesky (ask Theresa May).

If anyone was in any doubt of the plans of the Downing Street junta, a source from inside the bunker cleared them up on Thursday, as Heather Stewart tells us in the Guardian:

We’ve been very clear before that we will deliver Brexit by any means necessary and that remains the case.

Any means that they deem necessary. If that means trampling mere constitutional niceties, say by removing the only means of democratic oversight of government that Britain has, well, you can’t make brain soup without breaking heads.

Citizens out in the streets to resist the coup
And where was the Leader of the Opposition? Nowhere to be seen

Boris Johnson, we have come to learn down the years, may not always be entirely truthful in his public pronouncements. Few can have been naïve enough to believe him when he announced he was proroguing parliament to give himself time to refine his domestic agenda. If they were that innocent, there was a lovely hot-mike moment, also on Thursday, when, as Heather Stewart also points out, the defence secretary Ben Wallace was caught saying:

”Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want. It has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality. So eventually any leader has to, you know, try.”

He continued: “Our system is a winner-takes-all system. If you win a parliamentary majority, you control everything, you control the timetable. There’s no written separation, so … you pretty much are in command of the whole thing. And we’ve suddenly found ourselves with no majority and a coalition and that’s not easy for our system.”

Ah, yes. He belongs to the lazy right that believes things should be easy. 

In a democracy, when parliament can’t decide what it wants, you wait until at last a majority emerges for one solution or another. A system where one man decides he can do without a majority, and does away with parliament to impose the decision himself, is called an autocracy.

But Boris can dress up what he’s doing as democratic because there is widespread voter support for him. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone either: whenever an autocrat takes power, he does so with a large minority, or even a majority, backing him among the people. Right now, the Tories enjoy a lead over Labour in the low double figures, small but enough to encourage him down the road he’s taken. Indeed, add in the Brexit Party vote, which he would get if Farage’s party chose not to stand candidates against Tories, and he’d be sitting on 45%, a dream level of support for an autocrat.

Also enough to win him a sizeable majority in parliament if he decided to go back to ruling through it. Which, as Ben Wallace indicated, he would probably do if he had the majority that gave him the control he wants.

His strong position isn’t only down to Boris. It equally depends on the sad weakness of the official opposition to him. It’s interesting watching all these developments from abroad, in Spain. One of the better Spanish papers, El País, had this to say about developments in Britain:

A triple offensive, with appeals to the courts to overturn the prorogation, calls to citizens to block the streets and a final attempt in Parliament to prohibit by law a disorderly exit from the EU, are laying the groundwork for a decisive week in the history of the country.

Well, the appeals to the courts have started badly, with a Scottish judge refusing an interim order reversing the prorogation. Still, the efforts proceed, under the leadership among others of the doughty, impressive Gina Miller.

Citizens have been taking to the streets to try to block BoJo’s coup. Now here’s where one might expect a radical left-winger to prove his credentials. A man from that political tendency would, one might imagine, be a strong proponent of direct extra-parliamentary action by the population, to reinforce any action in parliament.

In other words, the protest action called ‘stop the coup’ gave Jeremy Corbyn, the official Leader of the Opposition, the opportunity to prove his worth. Sadly, it has proved exactly that. His is a business-as-usual approach, and instead of joining the protestors, he preferred to go campaigning in a Scottish constituency.

Most of us already knew this about him, but his failure to pick up the baton offered him by ‘stop the coup’ proves it: he’s a Leader of the Opposition who can’t lead, and who doesn’t even oppose much.

No wonder BoJo is opening up a commanding lead in the polls.

That leaves Corbyn with only the legislative route open. To push a bill – or help push someone else’s bill, since there are real leaders in the House of Commons – through Parliament, in the brief time it’s allowed to meet before it’s prorogued.

Then hope for the best against the odds, since BoJo has already shown his readiness to ignore Parliament.

Oh, well. As El País says, it’s a historic moment for Britain. And, given the quality of the leadership on display, a pretty dire one.

Fake news and 'The Truth'

Terry Pratchett was one of the finest English writers of recent years. That’s not as widely understood as it might be, perhaps because he wrote fantasy novels and too few people realise that they are, in reality, not concerned with his invented ‘Discworld’ but with our own life here on Earth, to which he held up a revealing mirror. Or a searchlight.

Terry Pratchett: excellent writer whose insight we sadly miss

The Guardian recently published an article on the Pratchett biography due to be released next year by Marc Burrows. He discovered that Pratchett, who started his professional career as a journalist, conducted an interview in 1995 with Bill Gates of Microsoft. Pratchett correctly foresaw the arrival of fake news; Gates mistakenly countered that there would be an authority on the net which would classify material and allow readers quickly to establish that certain items were simply untrue. How wrong that was…

Pratchett had said:

Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

Lisa Forbes, newly-elected MP for Peterborough
Confused about the anti-Semitism of posts she decided to like

It’s ironic that he chose an instance of anti-Semitism to illustrate his point. Today, we see a great deal of anti-Semitic material on the internet, masquerading as anti-Zionism, and plenty of people are empty-headed enough to endorse it unthinkingly. That’s what Lisa Forbes did, before becoming the new Labour MP for Peterborough in its recent by-election. But there’s Islamophobic material out there, and anti-vax material, as well as stuff about conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, the moon landing or pretty much anything else you care to mention, so that the right can fall for it just as readily as the left or the simply naïve.

Pratchett also wrote a novel to explore these problems, aptly entitled The Truth. It focuses on William de Worde who launches the Discworld’s first daily newspaper, the Ankh-Morpork Times. As William comes to grips with his new profession of journalism, he begins to discover some of its more curious aspects.

In the Palace of Ankh Morpork, William attempts to collect information about an offence alleged to have been committed there. But the Commander of the Watch (the Chief of Police), Sam Vimes, refuses to tell him anything useful. However, when William needs something from the kitchens, Vimes is at least good enough to point him in the direction. William decides to poke around there, until he’s challenged.

‘… who are you, askin’ me questions?’

‘Commander Vimes sent me down here,’ said William. He was appalled at the ease with which the truth turned into something that was almost a lie just by being positioned correctly.

He’s absolutely right. Nothing helps a lie gather momentum so much as having it transmitted through a statement that is strictly true. Vimes did indeed send him that way. But Vimes gave him no permission to interview anyone or, indeed, continue his investigation of a crime on which the police were working. And yet, isn’t that exactly the impression William’s words give?

The problem, in William’s view, is summed by an old saying about lies and the truth: ‘…lies could run round the world before the truth could get its boots on.’ But what gives that statement its power is the thought with which he follows it up:

And it was amazing how people wanted to believe them.

Here’s a lovely example of both these notions: that a dash of truth makes fake news more palatable, and that it will be more quickly accepted and spread by people who want it to be true.

In the recent Peterborough by-election I mentioned before, Labour surprised most commentators by holding the seat. Many had expected it to be won by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. For Labour to hold it after the previous MP, also Labour, had been forced out following criminal action, was remarkable. And many remarked on it. One such remark I saw on social media, claimed that it was a great success, especially as Labour not only held the seat but increased its majority.

Clearly, the writer really wanted to believe in a Labour triumph in the seat. And since the candidate had indeed increased the majority, the justification for this belief might seem solid. Until we look at more evidence. A little more truth, in fact.

The Labour majority at the previous election had been 607 votes. At the by-election the majority had climbed to 683. So it’s perfectly true that it had increased. But it had increased from a wafer-thin majority, by a wafer-thin amount, to another wafer-thin majority.

And what triumphalism over the election result doesn’t take into account is that Labour’s share of the vote fell, and by a far from wafer-thin amount: from 48.1% to 30.9%, a drop of 17.2%.

Indeed, taken together, the vote of the right-wing parties – Conservatives and the new Brexit party – took 50.3% of the votes, an absolute majority. Labour only won because the right-wing vote was split.

Labour had something to celebrate in holding a difficult seat. But triumphalism? That was hardly called for.

Unless you’re ready to believe a distortion made possible by, as Pratchett shows, positioning the truth in a particular way. Which you’ll be all the happier to do if you just want to believe the lie in the first place.

Just as Pratchett warned.

Bregretfully yours

It would be wise to be deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to speak for the will of the people.

It’s curious how many Bregretters I’m meeting these days. That’s people who voted for Britain to leave the EU but are regretting their choice these days.

‘We were duped by Farage,’ one told me. ‘All that rubbish about extra money for the NHS – it was all lies.’

Well, yes. Farage, then leader of UKIP, and leading Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and even a few Labourites, went to the country with a false prospectus about Brexit. And sadly a wafer thin majority fell for their snake oil. Today, they’re beginning to realise that no outcome to the Brexit process can possibly leave Britain anything but worse off, and probably a lot worse off. And when I say Britain, I mean the British people, especially those outside the wealthiest elite.

‘Another referendum,’ my friend went on, ‘would give a landslide against Brexit.’

Well, I’m not that confident. But it does seem likely Brexit would be defeated in a new referendum. The arithmetic just suggests as much: I know of no Remainers who have switched to Brexit, but quite a few Brexiters who’ve switched to Remain. I would expect the Remain vote to win by a margin at least as good as it lost by in 2016, and probably a few points better.

Which makes it ironic that the people who are most opposed to a second referendum claim they’re respecting the will of the people. The people spoke, they assure us, on 23 June 2016 and voted to leave the EU. That decision has to be carried through.

In other words, they’re not concerned with the will of the people. Only with the will of the people as it was then. Not as it’s struggling to make itself known now.

Sadly, since one of the main opponents of another referendum is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, I can only conclude that they’re arguing from a position of dishonesty. They know as well as I do, as well as any commentator of the state of opinions in the UK, that today views have swung decidedly against Brexit. And yet they refuse to allow expression to those views.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both Theresa May, Tory leader and current Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn actually favour a Brexit though they won’t come out openly to say so. Their talk of respecting the people’s decision is just cover for the position they won’t avow. The last thing they want is the people’s voice to be heard, as it would mean changing attitude and abandoning their secret wish.

Just at a time when the electorate is moving decisively against Brexit, it is faced with a miserable pair of alternatives. Both main parties are led by people who refuse to be guided by a democratic choice of the people they claim to represent, whose voice they insist they respect. Or even to offer the people the right to make such a choice.

A dire alternative: two deeply unpopular, rightly distrusted leaders
Neither Corbyn nor May will admit their position on Brexit
or speak out for the people  who will pay the price

It’s no surprise that both leaders are in the pits of public approval. Corbyn is currently just behind May, on a minus 24 approval rating to May’s minus 21, but that could switch around in a matter of days. The point is that both are overwhelmingly disliked and distrusted.

Given their position on the central question of the day, they deserve to be.

It means that at the next general election, whenever it is, voters will have to pick between two candidates without courage or honesty and inseparable on the biggest question that faces Britain today. With clothes pegs on our noses, we shall have to choose the lesser of two evils. We shall elect a Prime Minister in whom no one other than a small band of true believers has any confidence.

Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. I suppose we shall be spared that grim fate. Though it’s hardly a healthy state for our democracy. Especially if our leaders’ ambiguities have left Britain out in the cold after a hard Brexit, without even a trading agreement with the EU, as seems likely at the moment. A tough world and an untrusted leader – that’s probably not the outcome most Brexiters were hoping for.

I fear that Bregret is set to get a lot worse yet.

Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

Poor old Jezza - he just doesn't get it

Poor Jeremy Corbyn. He really is completely out of his depth, a man promoted far beyond his level of competence. He flounders and flails and sadly sinks.

Greeted like a pop star at the Glastonbury Festival, he went with his advisers’ instincts and organised his own festival in London, Labour Live. In the end, by dint of slashing ticket prices, they were able to attract a turnout of 13,000, way below expectations.

At ‘Labour Live’: a voice Corbyn should be listening to

Why was the turnout so poor? For the same reasons as he is still trailing the Tories in the opinion polls, even though Theresa May’s government is divided, unpopular and distrusted. He simply doesn’t know how to build a majority.

What threw many of his critics, including myself, at the general election of 2017 is that he won a huge surge of support from young voters. That fooled opinion pollsters who expected that the 18-24 age group would be the one with the lowest turnout, as in most previous elections. But, inspired and mobilised by Corbyn, they confounded that expectation and gave him a far more healthy score than we’d predicted for him.

His supporters presented this as some kind of victory, even though he did in fact all the same come second, and there are still no silver medals in elections. Fail to come top and you’ve lost. What he achieved was a more honourable defeat than had been forecast, but it was still a defeat.

However, there’s something else about that 18-24 age group. It is massively pro-European: 71% voted to stay in the EU. Indeed, even the next age group up, 24-49, voted 54%-46% to remain.

In other words, to hold on to the youth vote, Corbyn needed to adopt a Remain stance. That shouldn’t have been hard since it is, after all, the official policy of the Labour Party he leads. But he has two problems that have led him to make no unequivocal statement on the issue: the first, is that a large proportion of Labour MPs represent constituencies with a Brexit majority and they’re frightened of alienating them; the second, that he has traditionally belonged to the anti-EU group on the left of the Labour Party.

All I can say about the fear of Brexit supporters is that leadership does sometimes involve challenging the views of voters. The greatest fear of working class Brexiters is immigration. Labour will truly sell its soul if it tries to accommodate that kind of xenophobia for electoral considerations.

But when it comes to the Brexit left, I have to say that I’m bemused. The central tenet espoused by these people is that the EU is a neo-liberal institution forcing casualisation of the labour market and poor wages on the working class. This vision seems to suggest that Britain is a nation thirsting for radical change, held back only by the vicious free-market ideology of the EU. The reality is that Britain usually leads the charge towards deregulation. You have only to compare worker rights and labour regulation in France or Germany with Britain to see how much further Britain goes in this direction.

Indeed, many of the rights enjoyed by British workers are protected by the EU against serious objections from entrenched interests in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it is the very people who want to tear up regulation and rights that most strongly back Brexit. The Brexiter left has therefore found itself in bed with some strange people, perhaps most strongly symbolised by veteran left-winger Kate Hoey campaigning in a boat on the Thames alongside the hard-right Nigel Farage.

A shameful moment: left-winger Kate Hoey (right)
with ultra-right winger Nigel Farage (left) campaigning for Brexit

In this context, it’s interesting to see that some of the small band of young people who attended Labour Live hoisted a banner calling on Corbyn to ‘stop backing Brexit’. The truth is that he dodges and evades rather than openly backing Brexit, but I share the suspicion of the banner-holders that he does, indeed, secretly back leaving the EU, lacking only the courage and honesty to say so.

It was interesting to discover from the Guardian’s Tim Adams, that a group who wanted to raise a pro-Remain banner during Corby’s speech were bundled away and prevented from protesting. So it seems that the Corbyn regime is not only as ready as Blair’s to evade and fudge, it’s also happy to block the freedom to oppose its views. I know I’m in a minority in this view, but it has often struck me how much more Blair and Corbyn have in common than is generally admitted, at least in the way they operate.

Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit voice was gagged at Labour Live (suggesting that ‘Live’ is a bit of a misnomer). But even more striking than the young people who were silenced is the number of young people who stayed away. It seems to me that they too suspect Corbyn of favouring Brexit, and therefore diametrically opposing them on the biggest question of the day.

He doesn’t get it yet, but maybe it’s time Corbyn worked out this was why he couldn’t get young people to a festival, or to back him again in the polls.

Symbolising nothing

Every evening at 8:00, buglers assemble under Menin Gate in the Belgian town of Ypres to blow the Last Post.

Last Post at the Menin Gate. You can listen to it too, if you want

That’s the call sounded to mark the end of the day in the British Army. It’s also used at military funeral. Ypres, or Ieper in Dutch, is known as Wipers in English. The Menin Road was taken by tens of thousands of men marching out to the killing fields of the Ypres Salient in the First World War. The Menin Gate is covered by the names of some 54,000 who vanished but have no known grave.

The Last Post is a moving tribute to the memory of all those who died at that time. Symbols are like that: they move us because they conjure up sentiments we associate with significant moments, whether tragic or triumphant. Sometimes, though, the symbolism is all there is – there simply is no substance behind it.

In December of last year, the British government, which has achieved precious little in the Brexit negotiations so far, announced that the country would be reverting to blue passports. This was greeted by Nigel Farage, former leader of the ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’, UKIP, as a ‘happy Brexmas’ present. Because, of course, it would be a reversion to the former colour of the passport before we joined the European Union.

The old British passport.
A tradition denied by the EU. Or was it?

That sounds like an assertion of tradition, and a proud tradition, of Britain as an independent nation. Except that it quickly emerged that there had never been any obligation from the EU for Britain to switch passport colour to the present colour – there are other EU nations with blue passports. Even in Britain, the ‘iconic’ blue passport dates only from 1921.

In other words, as a tradition, it’s a pretty shallow one.

However, it mattered to Brexiters. Possibly because they’re struggling, as the reality approaches, to find anything much else positive to say about our departure from the Union. The symbolism seemed important.

But now we’ve discovered that the contract to produce the new passports has been won, in an open tender, by a Franco-Dutch company, Gemalto. It beat a British competitor, De La Rue. It did so because it could guarantee the same quality for £120 million less over the five years the contract is due to last.

Five years: that’s well into Brexit.

Now that's potent symbolism. What that’s saying is that the British taxpayer – and indeed consumer – can at times (I’d say often) get a better deal by shopping abroad. And that’s what Brexit’s really about: putting up protective walls around uncompetitive industries.

De La Rue is appealing the decision to award the contract against them. If it wins, that will say something powerful about what we’re trying to achieve with Brexit: it will mean that we are telling British citizens to pay more to protect inefficiency. Which is very much in line with what Brexit is promising generally: higher food prices, higher prices on a wide range of goods we currently import, higher prices to find workers in key industries for which the British apparently have no taste.

You may say, at least by taking such a step we protect British workers.

Well, no. Because workers are taxpayers too. As Brexit Britain finds itself financing more and more inefficiency of this kind, it will find that more and more workers are being forced more and more often to dip into their own pockets to protect such jobs. Inevitably, that can’t be sustained indefinitely.

The protection that was supposed to preserve jobs will be impossible to fund in the long run and unemployment will grow – as will poverty.

So what can one say about the precious blue passport? Adapting Shakespeare, I’d have to say it was a tale, told by an idiot, and symbolising nothing.

He wrote ‘signifying’. And he was talking about life. But, hey, this way it seems to work just as well for blue passports and Brexit generally.

Labour and Brexit: time to lead

If you watch a friend signing a document committing a large sum to an organisation that is scamming him, you do him no service by offering a better pen. Instead, if you want to help him, you'll try to talk him out of the mistake he's making. He may not like you for shattering his illusions but it is still the best favour you can do for him.

The British government has spent a long time trying to hide the results of its own analysis of the potential economic outcomes of the different options for Brexit: leaving the EU but staying in the Single Market and Customs Union, leaving but with a good trade deal in place, or leaving with no deal and having to revert to World Trade Organisation terms ("hard Brexit). However, the government has been forced to release the reports to Parliament. The broad lines have begun to leak.

Those of us who voted to remain within the EU will not be at all surprised to discover that there is no option that is economically beneficial to the UK. The harder the Brexit, the worse the impact. And the regions most affected will be the North of England and to a somewhat lesser extent, the West Midlands.

Brexit damage to the UK economy by region
From the Guardian

These, coincidentally, are the regions that voted most solidly for Brexit. They are also, the North of England above all and the West Midlands to a somewhat lesser extent, the heartlands of the Labour Party - my party.

It's easy to sympathise with Labour MPs, and indeed Labour Party members in those regions, who feel that opposing the Brexit views of so many constituents will undermine the party's position. It's particularly tough for the MPs, whose very jobs are at stake. So it's comprehensible that there should be calls to show understanding, even sympathy, for the anxiety about the EU expressed by so many in those regions.

This is often dressed up as an economic concern. EU immigrants are taking local jobs or putting excessive pressure on health, housing or education services. However, there is no evidence that any of this is happening and now there is evidence that Brexit would be no solution anyway - the government analysis shows that Brexit would wreak far worse damage on services and employment than immigrants ever could - if they did cause damage. 

There is no valid economic argument for Brexit.

Which leads to the darker, uncomfortable truth about a lot of these Leave voters. A truth we don't like to voice inside Labour. Their concern about immigrants may not be about economics at all but simply about immigration. 

What drives it is fear of the other, the foreigner - which is a translation of the original Greek that gives us the word xenophobia. It is the attitude summed up by Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party at the time of the Brexit referendum, when he spoke of his discomfort at finding himself in a railway carriage in which everyone around him was speaking a foreign language.

If "understanding" or "sympathy" means accommodating xenophobia, then Labour would be crossing a red line which lose it its soul.

Our supporters in the Brexit camp have swallowed a snake oil salesman's patter. They believed the now-discredited claims of the Brexiters that there would be a huge Brexit dividend that could be used to fund the NHS. They believed that many of their woes were caused by immigrants and leaving the EU would solve the problem. They believed it, and the latest leaks demonstrate again how mistaken they were.

Labour is the friend of these voters who are going to bear the brunt of the harm Brexit will do to Britain. It has a duty to speak truth to the Brexiters among them, explaining clearly how mistaken they were, not in a superior way, but just as one would attempt to prevent a friend signing away his money. We should be winning them round to what the evidence demonstrates: Brexit will solve none of their problems. And they need the chance to change their mind and exit from Brexit. Or at any rate, the chance to stay in the Customs Union, the least bad option of those on offer.

Instead the Labour leadership continues to sit on a fence. We're told the Brexit vote must be respected and no opportunity to revise that vote must be given. We hear claims, demonstrated to be entirely false by the example of Norway, that it isn't even possible to stay in the Single Market after leaving the EU. And we're told we have to go along with Leave sentiments, without interrogating ourselves as to whether those sentiments are simply based on economic misapprehension or on something far more toxic: downright xenophobia.

That doesn't feel like leadership. It feels like followership. And it's time Labour learned to lead once more.

Especially on the Brexit issue, the most urgent of our times, the one on which our friends most need our help.

Brexit: hope born in an unexpected place

It feels as though a sea change may be under way in Britain. Just may be. And if it is, it’s not a moment too soon.

Nigel Farage:
not the obvious source of encouragement for the pro-EU side

Even Nigel Farage, former leader of the bizarrely named United Kingdom Independence Party – he’s a fan of Donald Trump and apparently keen on making the United Kingdom even more dependent on US whim than it already is – has now suggested that it may be necessary to hold a second Brexit referendum. Why, he’s gone so far as to suggest that Brexit might be defeated in a re-run vote:

I think the Leave side is in danger of not even making the argument. The Leave groups need to regather and regroup, because Remain is making all the arguments. After we won the referendum, we closed the doors and stopped making the argument.

What he hasn’t yet conceded is that, if the Leave side isn’t making much of an argument, it may be because it doesn’t have much of an argument to make. During the referendum campaign in 2016, both sides advanced wildly overstated claims, but Leave’s distortions (£350m a week released for the NHS, a world anxious to beat a path to Britain’s door to sign trade agreements…) won more votes than Remain’s.

Since then we’ve watched a hapless government, faced by an opposition still sitting on the fence, attempting to negotiate a good Brexit deal with the EU. That process quickly revealed that far from saving any money, Brexit was going to cost Britain a great deal. Equally, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is no great appetite around the world to hurry up with trade deals favourable to Britain. The United States has specified that a trade deal would require Britain to drop its food standards and other regulations. In any case, deteriorating relations with Trump now make it look as though no trade deal of any kind. is likely to be finalised soon

Though the inept leaders of the Remain campaign overstated their case, the picture that is emerging looks a great deal closer to what they were forecasting than to the rose-tinted optimism of the Brexit side. That may lead to swinging enough voters away from Brexit to reverse the results of the June 2016 referendum. So one can understand Farage’s concerns.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of this will happen. Nobody in government is ready to call for a second referendum (actually, the third: the first referendum took place in 1975 and confirmed our membership of the EU; another would allow the electorate to reverse the sad effect of the second in 2016). The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has again stated that there is no call on his side for a further referendum either, and it is not Labour Party policy.

Even if there were another referendum, there is no guarantee that Remain would win this time. There is a core supporting departure from the EU which is fiercely attached to its views, and unresponsive to any argument. Remainers can only hope that the necessary 2% or more of voters may have switched to their side of the debate, in the light of real evidence. Given the chance, they might just block Brexit at the eleventh hour.

At most what we have are some straws in the wind. Some cause for hope that we might be able to prevent this toxic step. No guarantees of success, but maybe the beginnings of a change in the climate.

Odd that the glimmer of hope has been given some impetus by Nigel Farage. In general, I’d feel no more inclined to turn to him for encouragement than I would to Trump. But in the rather bleak and deeply confused conditions of today, I’ll take whatever comfort there is, wherever it comes from.

Might it be a soft Brexit after all?

So Theresa May surprised me after all. At the eleventh hour. As all seemed set to fall apart around her ears, burying her under the ruins.

Theresa May and the EU negotiator Michel Barnier

She’d claimed at the beginning of the week that she had a solution. Specifically, a means of keeping the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – the only land border between the EU and the UK – open. In other words, a way of allowing trade between the two parts of the island to continue unimpeded, without duties to pay or customs posts at which to wait.

But then it emerged she’d only achieved that by offering to maintain parity in regulations between Northern Ireland and the Republic. In effect creating a border in the Irish Sea, between the whole of Ireland and the UK, instead of within the island. To her astonishment – apparently – the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, on whose votes at Westminster she depends to keep her government in office, went ballistic. Arlene Foster, its leader, made it clear that her party’s continued support would be jeopardised by any such arrangement.

I say “apparently” because it’s actually hard to believe that anyone could have been surprised. The Democratic Unionists emerged in opposition to the mainstream Ulster Unionists because they felt the latter weren’t unionist enough. In other words, the DUP was first, last and forever a party committed to the union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Nothing, but nothing, mattered more.

It’s practically unimaginable that Theresa May has read so little Irish history but, hey, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer extent of her ineptitude, so maybe she really doesn’t know what tradition the DUP embodies.

On Monday of this week, therefore, the whole deal looked set to unravel. And, since agreement on Ireland, was an absolute condition of allowing the Brexit negotiations to move on to discuss trade, it looked as though May was facing a sticky future indeed. Defy the DUP: how could she let her government fall? Allow the talks to collapse and make a hard Brexit certain: how could she allow the economy to suffer that level of damage?

That’s where she surprised me. She came up with a different option. She made a full, unqualified and binding commitment to enter into a full, unqualified and binding commitment at some time in the future, and on terms yet to be agreed.

It was splendid! And so EU. Fudge has always been the preferred mode of operation of the Union, as is hardly surprising when you’re trying to maintain consensus between 28 nations each intent on defending its own interest. May even came up with this agreement to agree as we entered the final 72 hours to the deadline, and the only difference from previous EU negotiations is that they generally end after a final night of intense arguing just before the decision is formalised.

Perhaps May knew well that the fudge was inevitable and felt she could do with a weekend. Why not agree on Friday rather than wait for Sunday? She’s had a torrid few months since losing her majority in an election she called injudiciously and fought incompetently. I expect she could do with a kip.

Meanwhile, on the far right, its most outspoken figure, Nigel Farage, is furious. Although the final terms haven’t been defined, the fudge makes it clear that Britain will have to accept the need to keep its regulatory standards aligned with Europe’s, at least on any matter that might affect the Good Friday peace agreement in Ireland. In other words, Britain after leaving the EU will still have to obey many of its regulations – it will merely have given up having any say on them.

The most encouraging aspect of this concession is that it might lead to something far more like a soft Brexit, where Britain remains closely aligned with the EU, in spite of the Brexiters. It will be a pity to have no say in making the rules, but even without that say, Britain will be far stronger for maintaining such a close relationship with its major trading partners.

On the other two substantive points of the deal, Britain has agreed to pay a lot more money than Brexiters throught we’d ever have to, and has even had to accept that the European Court of Justice would have some jurisdiction in Britain, over the way we treat EU citizens living here. That was enough to make Farage apoplectic, which in itself is enough to make me like the terms. On the other hand, I can see his point.

On all these terms, May has had to abandon her “red lines” and compromise with the EU. The EU has negotiated effectively and forced Britain to move further towards its positions than it has moved towards Britain’s. If these commitments to commit turn into real commitments the impact could be massive.

First of all, the US has made it clear that the trade deal that Brexiters have been relying on as their get-out-of-Brexit-free card will require Britain to align its regulations with American ones. Well, that wouldn’t happen.

Secondly, Britain has had to accept, explicitly at last, that it isn’t a lion roaring on the global stage, harkened to by everyone. If it’s a lion at all, it’s a much reduced one, its teeth and claws gone, having to supplicate rather than dictate. Britain has had to bow to EU demands, not the other way around.

That’s an invaluable lesson for Britons to learn, and long overdue.

In any case, anything that wipes the self-satisfied smile from Nigel Farage’s face, however temporarily, has to be deeply satisfying.

A fine way to start the weekend.