Transatlantic travel and comparisons

One of the pleasures of my job is that it gets me to the US from time to time. Specifically, to Boston and Massachusetts generally, which is great, not least because they’re pretty much the antithesis of Trumpland.

It was great flying across. The trip was uneventful, as flights generally are these days, out of Russian missile range. Air travel has become routine, with neither much sense of risk (thank God) or of luxury (small price to pay).

We landed half an hour early, which was no benefit at all. Traffic at Boston is so heavy there are never any gates free so arriving early means waiting for the previous plane to leave your designated gate. Half an hour early? You get half an hour wait on the tarmac.

The Americans have massively improved entry into the country. It used to be a painful process. But I’ve managed to get myself on to the Global Entry programme, so I glided through with ease. Besides, the officials at Boston are friendly, which isn’t the case at every US airport, so arriving here’s unusually pleasurable.

Getting through passport control quickly means you get to the baggage hall sooner. I know I should learn to travel with hand luggage only, especially for just three nights like this trip. But I hate having only tiny tubes of toothpaste or micro-bottles of shampoo, and I love getting rid of my case, so I check it in, small though it is.

The airlines have a great system so that if you travel with them often enough, they grant you certain privileges. My bag now gets a ‘priority’ tag when I check it in. This is a huge boon, since it means it’s now hardly ever the last case offloaded.

The great privilege of a 'Priority' label
Which does... pretty well nothing

On this occasion, about three-quarters of the luggage had appeared before my priority case. That unfortunately meant that it didn’t make the cut: it didn’t reach the carousel before the entire luggage belt broke down. This is the land of superfine, superfast technology, so when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

Ah, well. We went from super-early to pretty late, but who cares? At least I had the chance to go for a rest, where rest is what Americans take in a restroom. I loved the symbolism used though, I have to confess, I couldn’t conform since my bag still hadn’t arrived and I couldn’t put a bowtie on.

Tough dress conventions for this 'rest' room

After that, all I had to do was head for the hotel. Which was on the waterfront, so I was able to have a relaxing walk before crashing out. That was quite an experience: I associate Boston with bitter cold, but on my walk just before midnight, it was 30 Celsius rather than 30 Fahrenheit.

A pleasant walk on a balmy night
At 30 C, nearly barmy

Breakfast is one of the better US institutions. I enjoyed it over a copy of the New York Times. That’s the ‘failing New York Times’, according to the President of this fine country. The fact that the hotel provided that paper and no other was in keeping with what happened the previous evening, when I checked in. The clerk gave me instructions for logging on to WiFi. After selecting the service, the suggestion was that I call up CNN.com to get the hotel login page. That’s quite amusing, because I always use BBC.co.uk for the same purpose. Of course, both CNN and the BBC are just the kind of news outlets Trump detests.

Not just Trump. I notice that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters use much the same language as the Trumpists to denounce the media and its supposed unfair hounding of the blessed leader. Interesting how people at the centre of personality cults, whether of Left or Right, always hate anyone who questions them. And as for dissent, that can only come from traitors. I recently read these edifying words:

We know who the conspirators are; who their backers are; where they are and why they want to destroy [our man and our movement].

Was the writer talking about Trump or Corbyn? It’s hard to tell. The threatening tone of ‘we know where they are’ is like Trump whipping up hatred against journalists at a rally. In this case, the words were a Corbynista’s.

Breakfast also reminded me of the meal on the flight over. It included ‘Butler’s Secret’ Cheddar. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Marketing people love the notion of secrecy. Odd, seeing as their work is all about publicity. Somehow, nothing’s so exciting as the notion of secret ingredients.

What turned up was something that looked, felt and, I can testify, tasted like perfectly ordinary Cheddar. And since its wrapping stated what it was, I couldn’t really see anything secret about it.

Butler's Secret. Proclaimed on the packaging.

Which was a relief, to be honest. After all, if I want transparency in anything, it has to be about what I’m eating. Why would I want the producers to keep what they’re putting in my food secret?

Still. At least I don’t suspect them of engaging in collusion. Which is a lot more than I can say for Trump.

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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The Empress, the Wit and the Disappointed

When I first went to university, it was to study Maths and Physics. It didn’t work out. I spent a rather purgatorial time immersed in the politics of the far left – all about ‘having faith in the working class’ which always left me a little uneasy, as I felt the left ought to be about evidence not faith – and even became president of my college students’ union, but at the end of the process I had no degree.

This struck me as annoying, so I immediately signed up to study something completely different. French. That gave my mother a wonderful told-you-so moment: she pointed out that I had always been temperamentally far more suited to the humanities than the sciences. And she was right.

Fortune favours the bold. Sometimes, I find it favours the downright impertinent. At the end of my first year of French studies, I let my professor know that I wanted to do a PhD.

‘Come and see me at the beginning of your fourth year,’ he sagely told me. 

After all, I had a failed degree behind me, and I certainly had something to prove before I could be considered for postgraduate studies. Like graduating, for instance.

Well, I stuck it out. At the beginning of my fourth year, a message trickled through to me that Professor William Barber would like to see me. I made an appointment and dropped in for a chat.

It seemed that he was now open to the idea of my doing a PhD. I was delighted. Why, I’d even chosen the extraordinary man I wanted to study. Denis Diderot, the son of a craftsman, had emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. He was the prime mover of the Encyclopédie: at a time when the belief was that driving knowledge forward was the most important endeavour of mankind, what could be more valuable than to bring all available knowledge together in one easily accessible place – the first Encyclopaedia ever?

Denis Diderot: an extraordinary brain and a delightful wit

But what appealed to me most about Diderot was his extraordinary wit. If you don’t know his Jacques the Fatalist, you should try to find it and read it: it’s rich in lessons about tolerance and decency, and is also one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.

William Barber, my Professor, invited me to sit down.

‘Subject to your getting a sufficiently good degree, I’d be happy to supervise you doing a PhD,’ he told me.

I was delighted.

‘I’d like you to work on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.’

I was disappointed.

Maupertuis was someone I’d heard of, but only because he appeared in two footnotes of a work of Diderot’s. It was a bit of a come down. And yet – William was right. Maupertuis was a scientist as well as a philosopher. My failed studies of science had at least equipped me with enough knowledge to understand his work.

‘Of course,’ William had assured me, ‘you don’t have to choose Maupertuis. But if you want me to supervise you, that’s who I’d like you to work on.’

Since I did want to work with William, I accepted his suggestion. For the next ten years, Maupertuis would dominate my life, as I wrote his Intellectual Biography. He may have been obscure and I may have done little to shine much light on his life, but I enjoyed what I did. There’s also a little pride in having been, however briefly, the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis, which I never would have been on Diderot. That’s big fish in a small pond thinking, I know, but hey, that’s not without its satisfaction.

So, I have no complaints about William’s decision.

On the other hand, I do still sometimes regret not having worked on Diderot. He was so much more attractive a character than Maupertuis. If nothing else, he didn’t take himself half so seriously - Maupertuis had what was no doubt to his mind an accurate estimate, to everyone else a wildly overblown one, of what was due to him.

So it was a pleasure to come across an anecdote about Diderot I was unaware of while reading a biography of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Well, I say reading, but in reality I was listening to it: these days I often find it easier to listen to books than read them. 

Catherine was a great fan of Diderot’s, and even had him come to Russia as a guest for several months.

Diderot did outstanding work but it wasn’t well paid. He was never wealthy. He was devoted to his daughter, the only child he and his wife had after a series of miscarriages. When the daughter reached adulthood, he was anxious to raise a dowry for her. With little material wealth, he decided that all he could do was sell his library. He went looking for 15,000 French pounds (yes, the pound was a French currency too at one time) for it.

Catherine decided to offer him 16,000. But then she attached a condition to the sale. On the grounds that it was wrong to separate a scholar from his books, she insisted that he should keep them for her during his lifetime.

In effect, she had made him a librarian of hers. So she decided to pay him 1000 pounds a year to play that role. That worked fine in the first year, but his pay failed to show up in the second. Catherine, much embarrassed, made up for the oversight, by sending him fifty thousand pounds.

As she told him, that was fifty years’ salary, paid in advance.

Ah, yes. He was a special man, our Diderot. And, to be fair, Catherine was a pretty remarkable woman too.

Catherine the Great
As keen a fan of Diderot as I am. But with the means to prove it

Brexit exit: first step. With a stumble

There’s always one thing that goes wrong, isn’t there? Still, as long as it all works out in the end, it’s hardly worth complaining. And I call an excellent unplanned Chinese meal a good ending.

Some time ago, I mentioned that my wife Danielle and I have brought forward our plans to move to Spain. That’s our exit from Brexit and if we’re reasonably quick, we can probably pull it off before the UK leaves the EU.

The first concrete step was selling Danielle’s car. It was a small car and already second hand when we bought it so we knew it couldn’t be worth much. In fact, a little online searching suggested the best we could hope for would be around £3100.

So she advertised it for £3200.

First step towards the Brexit exit:
a bit of a wrench but we had to part company with Danielle’s Aygo

She also contacted one of those online organisations that buy cars for the trade. Once she’d given all the details, they suggested they might pay £3100. That sounded fair enough, so we agreed they could send someone round to check out the car.

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Danielle said, ‘these guys are well known for always finding reasons to knock a price down after an inspection.’

The character from the company showed up on Saturday. A large cheerful man, all hail-fellow-well-met, with lots of jokes, and an open, friendly countenance. So naturally I decided I couldn’t trust him any further than I could kick him, and given his size, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to kick him far.

He checked out the car and expressed himself satisfied with its state. He liked the fact that the service record was bang up to date. He liked the fact that Danielle had all the documentation ready for him. So he phoned his head office. Then turned to us and cheerfully announced, ‘we can offer you £2300.’

Danielle looked shocked.

‘Down from £3100?’

‘What’s the least you’d accept?’

‘Not less than £3000,’ she said, firmly.

He rang his office again.

‘The best we can do is £2600,’ he told us.

We said goodbye.

Danielle immediately re-advertised the car. Again at £3200.We weren’t best pleased with the trader, so we were delighted that it was the very next day, on Sunday, that someone expressed an interest in it.

It was a family from Milton Keynes, about 40 minutes away from where we live in Luton. They wanted the car for their daughter. All three turned up to see it.

They too were impressed. By the state of the car. By the service record. By the fact that all the documentation was available.

So we reached the key moment.

‘Are you OK with our making an offer?’ said the father.

‘Please do,’ said Danielle.

‘Would you take £3000?’ he said.

Danielle looked at me.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘It’s your car,’ I said, which was a copout, I know. But I’ve cocked up this kind of negotiation more than once in the past.

A silence fell. I’ve learned the power of silence so I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to break it.

‘What about if we split the difference?’ he said. ‘Would you take £3100?’

Since that was exactly the figure she’d first thought of, Danielle didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, that’ll be fine,’ she said.

Given we’d been offered £2600 the day before, that had to represent about the quickest £500 we’d ever made.

Everything had gone smoothly up to then. Now we just had to manage the financial side of things. That, sadly, involved a bank.

‘I’ll send you a pound first,’ said the buyer, ‘to check that the details are right.’

Minutes later a pound showed up in Danielle’s account.

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘now for the £3100.’

‘3099,’ I corrected him.

‘The pound’s on me,’ he said, jovially, as he pressed Submit on his phone.

And then his face fell.

There was another silence. Not a powerful one this time. More distraught, really.

‘Is there a problem?’ asked his wife.

‘They’ve blocked the transfer.’

Well, I’m not going to bore you with the details. Let me just say that twenty minutes later he was still arguing with his bank.

‘I know it’s a security question,’ he said repeatedly, ‘but how can I possibly tell you how much the last payment from my account was for, since I’m not at home and don’t have access to any statements?’

His wife had been able to access the account, and she showed us that the £3100 had already been debited from their account. It just hadn’t reached out ours.

We could hear the bank representative talking to her husband.

‘That’s fine now, sir,’ they were saying, ‘the payment will go through. It shouldn’t take more than two hours.’

‘Two hours? But I’m sitting in someone else’s house. And trying to buy a car we were going to drive home. You expect us to sit here for two hours?’

We suggested that we could take them out for dinner somewhere. They didn’t like that idea, since their dog was at home and no doubt getting sad.

‘No,’ he said, looking defeated, ‘we’ll just have to come back tomorrow.’

We weren’t keen, particularly as it would mean we were looking after someone else’s car overnight. What if some moron scratched it? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

And then an idea dawned on us. The Taipan restaurant in Central Milton Keynes is one of the best Chinese I’ve ever been to. We hadn’t eaten there for ages.

The Taipan in Milton Keynes:
one of my favourite Chinese restaurants. Anywhere

‘We’ll go and have a Chinese in Milton Keynes,’ we told them, ‘and you can pick up the car there when the money comes through.’

Which is how things worked out.

They were pathetically grateful.

‘It’s so good of you to have come up here with the car,’ the father told us.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m indebted to you for a great dinner I wouldn’t otherwise have had.’

‘Oh, yes. I suppose I made that possible.’

‘You and your bank.’

‘Right. I can’t take all the credit.’

So things all worked out fine in the end. Everyone was happy.

And I enjoyed the object lesson as much as the meal: things go well while people of good will are working with each other. But that doesn’t include professional car dealers. And once a bank gets involved – watch out. They don’t make those massive profits for nothing – they’re world-class champions at turning a simple transaction into a major inconvenience.

A mighty will in a tiny body

Ah, poor Toffee. And poor Danielle, for that matter. Poor me too, perhaps, though I had less to put up with – just a brief interruption of sleep.

Why poor Toffee? One of the reasons we wanted a second toy poodle is that we thought it would be fun to breed from her. We found Luci, our first toy poodle, such fun that we thought a second one, and then some puppies, would just multiply the pleasure. It’s certainly turned out that just adding Toffee to the household took the poodle amusement level up several notches.

The thing about Toffee is that she has a personality that completely compensates for her lack of physical size. She knows what she wants. She likes to make sure she gets it. You should see her if she’s found some awful mouldy piece of meat in the park: we can chase her all over the place, but she’ll never drop it or even let us lay a finger on her.

Another example is breakfast. She and Luci like to take their time over it. It’s dog biscuits rather than soft food, so they don’t wolf it down the way they do with food they like better. They leave some of it in their bowls.

But just let Misty, our cat, get anywhere near it. Toffee will be out there like a shot and growling ferociously. I watched her this morning, and saw how Misty, twice her weight, backed away intimidated by her ferocity.

The heart of a lion in a teeny-weeny body.

Because that’s the other thing about Toffee. She really is minuscule. Which rather spoiled the second part of her plan. Breed from her? Would she be able to handle a pregnancy? Where would we find a male small enough for a pregnancy not to cause her harm?

That all came to a head a few weeks ago. We’re beginning to plan for a move to Spain rather sooner than we’d originally planned – Brexit oblige and all that – and another move probably means we don’t need a litter of puppies to complicate things. Given we were already in two minds about it, that really rather killed the plan to breed from Toffee.

So that was it. Toffee went under the knife and came back wombless.

Toffee with her mate, on their couch
She's in her blue post-op coat, poor thing
Though it's much better than those ghastly cones....

Now Toffee is lively, active and carefree. But neutering is a serious operation for a female. When she got back from the vet’s, she was far from herself. She was lying on the couch and clearly in pain, poor thing.

We’d had clear instructions that she wasn’t to run and she wasn’t to jump for a while. And let’s be clear: jumping includes using the stairs, for a little dog who has to leap from step to step.

‘I think I’ll sleep down here,’ Danielle said, ‘on the couch. That way Toffee can sleep next to me and, if she needs a pee during the night, I can take her out in the garden.’

It seemed a little rough on her to have to sleep on the couch but, in the circumstances, it made some sense. So I went up to our bedroom on my own while Danielle settled down on our (quite comfortable) couch, with both dogs next to her.

And so things might have stayed had Toffee not once more exercised her mighty will and her inalienable right to freedom of choice.

At 4:30 in the morning I was awoken by Danielle bursting into our room, distraught and panic-stricken. Though I’m glad to say that her first words suggested things were less bleak than they seemed.

‘Oh, thank God,’ she said.

Danielle was wearing an outdoor coat over her nightdress.

‘I’ve been hunting around the garden, looking behind every bush. I thought the pain had got too bad for Toffee and she’d crawled away to die somewhere quiet.’

‘But she hadn’t?’ I enquired, not yet fully conscious.

‘No. There she is.’

I looked where Danielle was pointing. And there lay Toffee, curled as always into a little ball, lying against my leg. She had doubtless been asleep not long before, but she’d lifted her head to look and Danielle as though asking, ‘what’s all the commotion about?’

The explanation was simple. Toffee views the couch as a fine place to lie on, during the day, or even in the evening when we’re watching TV. It isn’t where we, and in particular Toffee, sleep. That happens two floors up, on a proper bed.

So, doctor’s orders or not, she’d jumped off the couch, made her way to the stairs and quietly but determinedly jumped up from step to step till she reached the top.

Where she’d made the further leap onto the bed and fallen asleep next to me. In what she clearly regarded as the right place for it.

‘Well, if she’s sleeping up here, so am I,’ said Danielle. And climbed into bed.

Onto which Luci also promptly leaped. So we all four slept for the rest of the night on our communal bed. As we usually do.

Order had been restored to the universe. Things were once more the way Toffee likes them. And the way, ill or not, she was going to make sure they remained.

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.

Traditional triumph in the board room

It seems that top executive pay in Britain rose by 11% last year, while on average pay packets rose by only 1.7%. That 1.7% is a pay cut in real terms since it isn’t enough to cover inflation.

In 2016 it would have taken a worker on the median wage 157 years to earn as much as a top executive would pick up in a year. There has been progress since those dark days, however. In 2017 the figure had risen to 163 years.

It’s not for me to suggest that a top director isn’t worth 163 times any ordinary person. So I’ll leave it to someone much closer to all these matters. The Guardian quoted Andrew Ninian from the Investment Association, a body representing Fund Managers, not generally amongst the lowest paid themselves:

Investors have repeatedly highlighted their concerns with excessive CEO pay, so it is frustrating that the message does not appear to be getting through to some FTSE 100 boardrooms. This year we have seen more FTSE 100 companies get significant votes against their remuneration reports than in previous years.

So even though shareholders have been voting against these colossal increases, they go through anyway.

If shareholders can’t stop them and executives, who benefit from them, won’t, then who could? 

Government maybe.

Sadly, though Theresa May spoke out loudly for executive pay moderation while she was campaigning for election, she’s been back-pedalling hard ever since becoming PM again. She has, for instance, dropped the proposal to put worker representatives on boards.

So there’s no prospect of any slowing in the drive for ever-higher boardroom pay any time soon. Something that people who backed Brexit ought to think about. You wanted control brought back home? Just look who you’re handing it to.

Not that there’s anything new about any of this. Following my mother’s recent death, I have a huge quantity of photos and correspondence to go through, and even a few books (we gave most away but I kept some). One was a collection of cartoons by the American Peter Arno from the 1940s. I happened to be glancing through it today and came across this one.

‘The motion has been made and seconded that we give
ourselves a raise in salary. All those in favour say “Aye”.’

It seems that the triumph of the board room is by no means unique to our times or indeed to Britain. A tradition honoured by time, you might say.

After all, there’s very little else to honour it, is there?

Is Medicine really a Science?

“If your physician does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts and forms.”

So wrote Michel de Montaigne over four centuries ago.

Well, things have changed. Today, a growing body of information is attracting a consensus within the medical profession. However, the information is by no means stable. A journal of the Mayo Clinic in the US (its Proceedings) published a study in August 2013 of all the original research articles from the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine over a decade. It found that:

• 1344 articles examined a new or existing medical practice
• Over half of them (56.3%) suggested a new practice superior to an existing practice. This is known as ‘replacement’, where a new treatment is to be preferred to an old one
• Far more worrying, nearly one in nine (10.9%) found that a treatment in common use was inferior to what had preceded it and should be stopped. This is known as a ‘reversal’, where a new treatment is found to be inadequate and practice reverts to an older approach

That’s just one decade and just one journal, even if it is one of the publications with the most impact in medicine.

Maybe that means that Montaigne, if he were living today, would have to change his advice slightly: if you don’t like the advice your doctor’s giving you, you don’t so much have to find another doctor, just wait a bit – before long there’ll be some new advice coming along.

Of course, you do have to survive for as long as it takes to get that new advice.

Bloodletting: once one of the most common of medical practices
Now regarded as not generally beneficial...

What prompted me to think about all this? Why, the new advice from the Lancet, another of the most prestigious medical journals, that salt, against which we’ve been warned for so long and so loudly, for the harm it does to the heart, might actually be beneficial for cardiovascular disease if consumed in moderation.

Doesn’t this remind you of attitudes towards, say, aspirin? It was perceived as a panacea, a cure for practically any disease, when it was first discovered. Then the profession turned sharply against it, above all for its effect on the digestive system. But now the pendulum has swung back and aspirin, in moderation, is recommended for many conditions, and in particular as a preventative for certain heart problems.

As for red wine, I’ve lost track of where we stand now. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Maybe I should just take a leaf out of Montaigne’s book and just do what I like and, since I like red wine, keep drinking it.

In moderation, of course.

Naturally, all this progress is based on scientific work. Highly effective, intelligent research is slowly moving us forward. It’s causing us to question old remedies, and sometimes – maybe as often as one time in nine – even new remedies. Which means that medicine is becoming more scientific.

Gone are the days of bleeding patients, as in the eighteenth century, just because that’s what a physician does. After all a scientist might well come along and question the practice. But it seems that could also happen for many of the practices we still use, unlike bleeding. With so much of medicine subject to questioning, I’m not convinced that it’s reasonable to call it a science.

Perhaps it’s just a practice on the way to becoming more scientific…

There’s a great quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, though he probably never said it. Asked by a journalist what he thought of Western Civilisation, the story says Gandhi replied that he thought ‘it would be a good idea’.

Medical science? I don’t know what Gandhi would have thought. But to me it seems like it would be another good idea.

Do Jews matter? Or Muslims?

Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis

Denmark, once a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness, has banned the Muslim full-face veil. It also now operates a system of officially designated ghettos, mostly inhabited by immigrants.

The Danish example has animated the far right in Britain, with Boris Johnson, contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, claiming that, while he doesn’t back a ban, he feels the niqab makes women look like letterboxes or even bank robbers.

Many, even Tories, have denounced the ‘morally empty’ Johnson for encouraging Islamophobia in this way. But he has received outspoken support from Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the hard-right, hard-Brexit wing of the Conservatives. That link between Brexit and Islamophobia is no accident: whatever people may say about ‘taking back control’ or Britain assuming its rightful place in the world, the main motive behind Brexit was xenophobia, and the first target of British xenophobia is Muslims.

The rise of xenophobia is creating a toxic atmosphere in which fundamental values of human rights are rapidly receding. We badly need a force capable of resisting that trend, which is why it’s a tragedy that the British Labour Party, far from fighting this crucial battle, has undermined its own position by failing to refute the charges of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Now, I agree with his fans that the scandal is being sustained by right-wing propaganda against Corbyn and Labour. Where I disagree with them is in seeing this as in any way unprecedented or even unusual. Why, in 1924 the first ever Labour government faced a scurrilous campaign of vilification, including the publication (by the Daily Mail, a sewer then as it’s a sewer now) of a forgery, the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, which suggested that the Communist International was working for a Labour victory.

Attacks on Labour come with the leader’s territory. The hallmark of the leadership is its reaction to them. Sadly, the reaction of today’s leadership has been lamentable.

It could have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples, immediately and in full. It didn’t. It decided that four of those examples would have limited its freedom to criticise the state of Israel. It’s hard to see how: nothing in those examples means that one can’t say, for instance, that the Israeli government’s attitude towards Palestinians is racist and abhorrent.

Corbynistas, however, objected to the four examples as a matter of principle. It had to be principle, since pragmatically it was a senseless decision. Ask most British voters about the Israel-Palestine conflict and it’s likely you’ll be met with ignorance. Those who do have an opinion are likely to come up with a ‘faults on both sides’ kind of argument. They might even say ‘well, Israel has to be able to defend itself against terrorists’. Persuading them that Israeli action goes way beyond legitimate action against terrorism would require a long process of education, and I’m not convinced many voters would be prepared to submit to it.

Oddly, though, the rejection of four examples was not, it turns out, a matter of principle after all. Corbyn has now decided that actually he can accept three of the four examples, so clearly they weren’t that problematic to start with. The suspicion has to be that in time he’ll accept the last one too.

Had he done that at the beginning, the attacks would not have stopped, but at least with swing voters he might have been given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Look, he’s accepted the international definition of antisemitism,’ they might have said, ‘and done it immediately. What more can you ask?’

By doing it late and reluctantly, he just looks truculent and unprincipled. He forfeits the credit he might have won otherwise.

Lousy politics.

The implications are more serious than that, however. After all, it isn’t antisemitism that is the most virulent form of racism in Britain today. It is far less widespread or intense than the Islamophobia which permeates society, as exemplified by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what needs to be resisted before we follow Denmark down the ugly road it has taken.

But how does one resist racism by others when one’s own track record isn’t spotless? Until we’ve cleared ourselves of the charge of antisemitism, Labour can’t claim to lead the fight against racism. Boris may be morally empty, but a counter attack would be far more effective if we’d first secured the moral high ground ourselves.

The toxins run deep. A minority of Labour favours Brexit. Sadly, with his talk of the benefits of a ‘Labour Brexit’, the suspicion is that Corbyn is with that group. That gives it disproportionate power. So it’s unsurprising that the leadership is resisting, despite powerful pressure from the membership, attempts to have the forthcoming Labour Conference debate backing for a second referendum on the EU.

The French equivalent of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is ‘tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Labour Brexiters are rubbing shoulders with the xenophobes they should be opposing. If they help reinforce racists’ views, they shouldn’t be surprised when they become tarred with that brush themselves. Backing Brexit lands them in the xenophobe camp.

Sadly, while it may only be Jews who are upset with Labour now, it’s Muslims who are facing general hostility. We should be strong in our defence of their rights. And not just for their sake: allow discrimination against the Jews or Muslims today and, who knows, in the long run you too could be the victim of your short-sightedness.

Niemöller adapted to our times