It isn’t Brexit. It’s the austerity, stupid

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

That was the American journalist H. L. Mencken in 1917. His words keep coming to mind whenever I hear some Brexiter explaining that it’s time for the debate to end, and for Britain simply to leave. ‘Out is out’ one told me recently, uninterested in the obvious truth that even to leave a room requires choosing a doorway (or possibly a window), and that it might be best to pick one that led somewhere one actually wanted to go.

An interesting new attitude has also developed on the so-called left. I say ‘so-called’ because the real left has always been internationalist, whereas this strange left, inside Britain’s Labour Party today, is dominated by Little-England thinking. Some even argue that it’s easier to bring in a socialist programme in a small country, like Britain, rather than a large collection of nations, like Europe.

Stalin argued the same for the Soviet Union. And it didn’t work for him either.

These Lexiters (left-wing Brexiters) argue that the argument about the EU is a distraction from the real questions. A recent internet piece points out that these are austerity, the NHS, benefits payments, housing, food banks and homelessness (I’m not sure how homelessness and housing are distinct issues but, hey, I didn’t compose this list).

Lexiter propaganda: they have a little list...

Within that list, the most important issue is austerity. It is at the root of the other problems. It is the policy of reducing government spending in order to stop piling up public debt.

It’s based on thinking appropriate to an ordinary household. If I were to start spending significantly less, I could build up some savings and certainly avoid debt. The same, austerity politicians believe, is true of government.

However, if I changed my spending rather than reducing it, I might do far better. If, for instance, I bought another house and rented it out, I might be out of pocket for a while but, once inflation had boosted the rent above the loan repayments for the house purchase, I would be making money. On top of that, in the long run, I would have not only the rental income, but a fully paid-for asset in the form of the house.

Governments, too, can make investments that yield returns. For instance, to take one of the other examples from the list, it could pay for a lot of new housing. That would help tackle the problem of homelessness. It would also boost employment, reducing dependence on benefits and food banks – other items on the list. It would cost money at first, but in time the tax paid by the building workers might well outstrip the cost of investment, and with rents coming in on top of those taxes (or indeed income from house sales), the public sector is more than likely to end up making money. That means it could invest in the NHS and even, in time, begin to pay down public debt.

This is a special instance of an economic phenomenon known since the eighteenth century: the paradox of thrift. Saving money reduces spending and therefore takes demand out of the economy, leading to its contraction. That means that the revenue of a government pursuing austerity falls and, if its reaction is to reduce spending further, it takes more demand out and accelerates a downward spiral.

But who’s right? Does austerity economics actually work or is it true that there’s a paradox of thrift?

When the Conservatives came to power, leading a coalition in 2010 and on their own since 2015, public debt stood at just over £1.2 trillion. Nine years on, it’s a little over £1.8 trillion.

A centrepiece of the Conservative campaign in 2010 was that it was iniquitous to burden future generations with paying so massive a debt. But, far from reducing the burden, the Tories’ austerity policies have massively increased it.

So it makes sense for Labour to campaign to reverse austerity. Simple.

Simple maybe. But it leaves out a massive element of difficulty, so obvious that it’s hard to believe its proponents have missed it. Reversing austerity would certainly improve our position in Britain, if we could do it from our present level.

But Brexit will increase unemployment and prices. The change would be relatively small if Brexit were soft, far larger following a hard Brexit. That would make the benign cycle, of investment leading to more work, leading to more revenue, far harder to launch.

As the Red Queen told Alice in Through the Looking Glass: 

... here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

The Brexit race:
run as fast as you can and you might just stand still

Brexit will take us into a looking-glass world where we have to run very fast just to get back to where are now. And a lot faster still to improve.

That’s why combatting Brexit isn’t a distraction from the campaign against austerity. It’s an essential component of it.

They order these things better in the US. Or possibly not

It is said that at its foundation, it was hoped that Canada would combine French culture, with the British political system and American knowhow. Unfortunately, the country has managed to bring together American culture, the French political system and British knowhow.

Ah, American knowhow. The country’s celebrated for it. As well as its culture of service. And generally it fully deserves both reputations. But, as I discovered on this trip across the pond, not always. 

Imagine, for instance, an increasingly cashless society. Even the smallest purchases can be made by card. An ice cream, a taxi, a meal. So much more convenient than having to carry cash, which you can do nothing about if it’s stolen, and which supports a whole parallel economy evading tax. Clearly the way to go in the future.

But that’s not the States. That’s Sweden. I made the mistake of drawing out a little Swedish cash on an early trip to the country and two years on it’s still just burning a hole in my wallet.

In the US, on the other hand, I went to one restaurant which refused to take anything but cash. A fine restaurant but just what are they up to? Back in England, that kind of behaviour would excite suspicions of money laundering.

Then there was the Café that claimed it took cards, until it came to paying.

“I’m so sorry, our card machine is down,” they sorrowfully announced. Though I’m not sure the sorrow was authentic. Fortunately, there was an ATM nearby; less fortunately, it was one of those that indulges in the scandalous practice of charging you for access to your own money.

But it wasn’t either of those experiences that provided me the most powerful insight into the occasional technological and service blips in US life.

I had to get from New York to Austin, in Texas. And things weren’t looking good. A major snowstorm had been threatened for the North Eastern states. There were snowploughs travelling up and down the streets. The buses even had snow chains on their back tyres.

Would my plane take off at all? These were anxious moments.

It was with some relief that I discovered that the weather forecast had been less than accurate, at least for New York. A friend suggested that this might be an effect of the partial government shutdown – staff were perhaps not turning up at the meteorological service. I can just imagine juniors who’ve missed a pay cheque getting together in the office and saying, “hey, let’s give the New Yorkers a shock, shall we?”

New York. At the time the worst snow was forecast

I travelled out to the airport feeling superior to my colleagues stuck in Boston. This is a bad frame of mind. I try not to be superstitious but I can’t help a slight queasiness when I get a little too cocksure. That strikes me as a bit of a lightning conductor for bad Karma.

And so it proved.

As we were boarding, the pilot announced that he wanted us in our seats fast as we needed to be moving away from the stand by eight o’clock. And we rose to the occasion. We were all seated in minutes, well before his deadline. 

At which point, he sat on the stand for a further 25 minutes.

Eventually, he began to taxi towards the runway. In, I’d have to say, rather a lackadaisical way. There were frequent stops, as though the plane was running out of breath. The engines frequently whined, as though trying to reach high speed, while in fact moving at what felt more like a walking pace.

In time, however, we reached the runway. Or rather, not in time. The pilot came back on the PA system.

“We tried our best,” he told us, never a statement that encourages listeners to expect a happy continuation, “but we’re one minute too late. We can’t now get to Austin within the maximum flying time permitted. We have to go back and wait for a new crew.”

Which we duly did. Waiting with different degrees of patience in the terminal building for a further four hours. We took off at 2:00 in the morning, six hours late – a delay significantly longer than the flight itself.

For someone who travels by air a lot in Europe, this came as a disagreeable reminder of times gone by. It’s been many years since I experienced such a delay on a flight, except for circumstances well beyond the control of the airlines – terrible weather or someone flying a drone near the airport, for instance.

We tried to get rest on the flight. Which put me in mind of a line from Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day:

Sleeping on planes – you know. Ruins the complexion. From the inside.

Somehow, that sentiment seems to encapsulate things perfectly. Sleeping on a flight just gnaws away at you, and it is indeed from deep inside you. Not a comfortable way to spend time.

And not the most glowing tribute to the levels of service provided by a US airline.

Still, it was only a discomfort. And a useful object lesson in the fact that it isn’t just severe weather that disrupts air travel but human ineptitude – in this case, running services on far too tight a margin for safety – can be just as lamentable. 

And it even happens in the US.

But I’m not complaining. I don’t live in Yemen, or Syria, or Venezuela. I know nothing of real suffering. What I went through was an inconvenience not a tragedy. Besides, it was a pleasantly ironic insight into things transatlantic.

So, if anything, I’m grateful…

Another homecoming abroad

One of the things I like about my job is that it gets me to places I like. In particular, it has taken to two cities that I hadn’t seen for decades but which are deeply rooted in my life.

The first was Rome, where I was born. And now it’s New York, where my parents lived from 1969 to 1977. If you add up all my visits to them over that time, it comes to pretty much two years. So, just as when I went to Rome for the first for a couple of decades and felt as though I’d come home, so returning to New York – or rather, Manhattan – was like a homecoming, though I’d not been back for 24 years.

My hotel, the Free Hand, is on Lexington Avenue. I was a little sad to see that the avenue, which used to be full of shops selling exotic spices or clothes of the kaftan variety, was now much more staid and duller. But the hotel itself was almost as surprising for its fidelity to that tradition, with its dimly-lit idiosyncratic decor and its colourful rooms offering Argan-based shower gels and shampoos.

The Free Hand hotel - very Lexington Avenue. In the old sense

Just being in the city was an odd sensation. I knew my way around. I went straight to the Caffe Reggio, haunt of my adolescence, for breakfast with a friend. She wanted to go to the 9/11 museum, so I led the way there too. I spent the day wandering the streets, without ever having the sense of not knowing where I was or how to get where I was going.

It was like slipping a comfortable old glove on and enjoying the sensation.

It was also a pleasure to chat with some of the locals. I’d forgotten how easy it is to get into conversation with strangers in New York. Three young men were having a discussion about whether or not it was legitimate to hit a brother (well, one brother was telling the other, ‘stop hitting your brother’). Having a brother myself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to join in, pointing out there seems little point in having a brother at all if you can’t hit him. However, we established that there had to be limits, and breaking a brother’s nose and leaving him bleeding on the ground was perhaps going just a little too far.

No one confirmed it, but I think the young man who raised this particular issue was the younger brother and had suffered just that fate. Certainly, the other brother was looking defensive, suggesting that his conscience wasn’t entirely clear.

We also came across a woman with a woolly hat to which she’d stuck a label with the single word ‘Impeach’. We had a brief exchange about just who she had in mind for impeachment, in the course of which neither of us felt any need to mention his illustrious name. Illustrious, that is, in the sense of notorious.

In the evening, I visited friends for dinner and went by boat. That was a new and breathtaking experience. The lighted skyline along the riverside provided a spectacular view so, like a child with a packet of sweets (or maybe I should say candy), I stayed up on deck watching it the whole time, so I turned up enchanted but frozen.

Manhattan skyline (with the Empire State Building in the background)
from the East River at night

At dinner, one of my friends pointed out that she felt that the Brexit process – which, apparently, many are following with fascination, and horror, over here – had only one benefit: at least Brits like me could hardly turn up in the US and poke fun at the country for its Trumpisation. It was a question of pots and kettles.

‘You have the advantage over us,’ I said, ‘you could get rid of Trump in 2020. We shall be stuck with Brexit for at least a generation.’

To my surprise, she replied, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen.’

An interesting point of view. It would make some sense: since there’s clearly no majority for any Brexit formula, the logical conclusion would be to drop Brexit altogether. Someone on Twitter told me recently to cut the ‘whataboutery’ (whatever that means) because the ultimate principle is simple: ‘Out is Out’.

One of the most comical aspects of Brexitism is its capacity to reduce complex issues to such simplicity. I did point out to him that if there are several doorways to choose from, and no agreement on which to use, it’s hard to leave even something as simple as a room, however much out may simply mean out.

Still, it makes little difference that cancelling Brexit would be a logical outcome. Experience so far suggests that no presumption of logic can be made about the process. And I’m not quite sure how the cancellation would happen. Neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn wants to be the leader who tells the electorate ‘we’re dropping the policy you voted for back in 2016’.

Still, there are moves towards first blocking a no-deal exit, and then perhaps to a second referendum that might, just might, put an end to the whole sorry business. It’s encouraging to have crossed the wide Atlantic to hear people who believe that it may yet happen.

In the meantime, it’s been a joy to be back in a city that feels as familiar to me as it’s full of surprises.

The vote she lost. The vote he lost. The vote neither wants to give us

Exciting times!

First there was the vote she lost. Theresa May denied MPs a vote on her Brexit deal in December for fear she’d lose by upward of 100 votes. Then in January she held it and lost by upward of 200.

Then there was the no confidence vote in the government. Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t propose it in December for fear he’d lose. Then he put it down in January and duly lost it.

Now there’s the vote neither of them wants us to have. Another referendum to ask the people whether they still want to go ahead with Brexit, after all this mess it’s landed us in. And May and Corbyn don’t want that, for fear they might lose it too.

They both denounce a new referendum as an affront to democracy. An interesting position. I mean, if it confirmed the result of the previous one, in favour of Brexit, I think us remainers would just have to bite our tongues. We might think the decision wrongheaded, boneheaded even, but with two popular votes going that way, we’d just have to put up with it.

Fun following the debates from Italy
A cartoon by Giannelli in the Corrriere de la Sera
Theresa May is asking 'Redo-rendum?'

But May and Corbyn still don’t want another vote. And why not? Because there’s a chance it might reverse the previous decision. And though both made a bit of a show of campaigning against Brexit last time, deep down they both want Britain to leave the EU. 

Actually, not that deep down. May keeps talking about her goal being to deliver Brexit. As for Corbyn, he told the Guardian on 21 December that Brexit would go ahead if he were elected. So they offer different flavours of Brexit, but no relief from Brexit in either case.

So, they don’t want a referendum for fear they’d be denied their Brexit.

In other words, in declaring it anti-democratic they’re using a special but not unusual definition of democracy. To them, democracy is obeying the will of the people when it gives them what they want in the first place.

You may feel that’s not terribly honest. And you’d be right. But spare a thought for Corbyn. His own dishonesty is particularly difficult.

See, his fans point out that his is a fresh take on politics since he wants, insists even, on policy being made by members. Unfortunately, he heads a party in which three out of four members want a new referendum, and four out of five want to stay in the EU.

How do you handle that situation if you’re a Brexiter and the party leader?

A conundrum. But Corbyn, such a traditional politician however much his zealots say he’s an innovator, has simply adopted the ‘listen and ignore’ stance.

In line with party policy, he wants a general election and only if he can’t get one will he consider other possibilities. At that point, all options including a second referendum, would still be on the table.

That’s listening.

Here’s where the ignore bit comes in.

His reaction to defeat in the no confidence motion, his only route to forcing an early general election, wasn’t to say, ‘ah, well, we’d better consider another approach’. It was to say ‘we’ll keep bringing in no-confidence votes’.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Of course, it makes you wonder why he bottled proposing a no-confidence vote in December, given he’s happy to keep bringing them in. And you might think it odd that he’s OK with holding repeated no-confidence votes until he gets the result he wants, but won’t countenance repeating a referendum.

That, though, is to miss the cunning of his stance. While he keeps proposing no confidence motions, he doesn’t have to consider any alternative. A second referendum is an option on the table, but that’s just where he chooses to leave it: on a table he won’t go near.

Again, not necessarily all that honest a way of following party policy, you might feel. A bit Jesuitical. Like crossing your fingers when you make a promise. But it allows him to say he’s doing what he’s been told, while being able to keep his Brexit.

Trouble is, it may not be that safe. For the rest of us, of course. But even for him

Because, as the saying has it, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Call my Agent. And enjoy

France has been slow in building itself an international reputation for producing TV series. In fact, it wasn’t until … that it released the first series to win a major following outside France, was Engrenages, translated into English as Spiral, a gripping and entertaining thriller series, though one that sometimes pushed credibility rather beyond the limits of plausibility.

Since then, they’ve made several, including under the Netflix name, of greater or lesser quality. None, however, had come close to rivalling Spiral until Call my Agent or, to give its original title, Dix pour cent, from the Netflix stable. The French title is for the fee a theatrical agent will charge a client for finding him or her roles in theatre or films.

The agency is a great setting for all the tensions and poisonous relationships that we’ve come to expect from office-based soaps. This series, though, handles them particularly well: the clever plots and manipulations often blow up in their perpetrators’ faces, and the games that the powerful play sometimes succeed but sometimes fail against a smart counter-move – or simply bad luck.

The cast of Call My Agent: ready to entertain us a lot.
And even surprise us a little
l to r: Liliane Rovère, Stéfi Celma, Grégory Montel, Camille Cottin,
Nicolas Maury, Laure Calamy, Thibault de Montalembert,
Fanny Sidney,  Assaad Bouab

That, indeed, is the great charm of the series: every single episode has an obvious ending that one can predict from the beginning, and hardly any actually ends that way. That makes even the ones that do end the way you’d expect surprising, since it’s so unusual for any of them to do so.

The acting, too, is superb, to the highest level of comedy. We have the female assistant (Laure Calamy) who will occasionally fly into a rage or a panic attack with superb contortions of her body – almost clinical seizures – or the gay male assistant (Nicolas Maury) who makes no secret of his wounded and hurtful feelings, while also proving frequently the smartest person present, with clever suggestions expressed in a gloriously camp voice.

We have the adulterous agent (Thibault de Montalembert), we have the agent who can’t keep a girlfriend (Grégory Montel), we have the old agent who had her glory years decades ago, out of which at least one old flame will appear for our amusement (Liliane Rovère), we have the driven Lesbian who falls in love but can’t help straying, not always with a woman (Camille Cottin), and we have the young ingénue who gives us our protagonist and our benchmark of normality while remaining charming and likeable (Fanny Sidney). And even she has a secret that will dog her for many episodes…

All this is excellent enough but then there’s the structure adopted by the series. These agents have clients and those clients are actors. Some, indeed, are stars, and the producers decided not to use ordinary actors playing stars, but real stars playing ‘themselves’. The quotation marks around ‘themselves’ are there because these are fictional versions of themselves – I don’t think, for instance, that Monica Bellucci would have to spend long in an enforced singleton existence in Paris, unless she truly wanted to.

Juliette Binoche getting ready to open the Cannes Festival

Bellucci is far from the only star we meet. There’s at least one in every episode, and many of them are of the same calibre: Isabelle Adjani, Fabrice Lucchini, Guy Marchand, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few of the major figures of the last few decades of French cinema who appear in the series.

For the moment, there are just three seasons of six 45-minute episodes each. Perfect binge watching. And much to be enjoyed…

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

A little humour, a little much-needed bloody-mindedness

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching the French film Ridicule, which focuses on how the court of Louis XVI – yes, the one who ended up losing his head on the guillotine – had made a cult of wit, deemed to be fiendishly clever though it was often also fiendishly cruel. 

The film contrasted such wit with a more British quality, which it called  ‘humour’, and clearly viewed as greatly superior.

At one point, the protagonist, a celebrated wit, meets the King who asks him to say something funny, there, immediately, on the spur of the moment.

“Be witty this minute!”

But on what subject could he be spontaneously witty? The King has a suggestion.

“Use me, for example.”

The wit has the perfect answer.

“Sire, the king is not a subject.”

I thought that was brilliant, but I suppose you could argue that it is perhaps spoiled by a deferential quality verging on the obsequious.

The contrast is emphasised at the end of the film by a French aristocrat, by then in exile in England while the revolution is running wild in his country, walking along a cliff path above a breath-taking seascape. A gust of wind takes his hat. He cries out.

“My hat! I’ve lost it.”

“Better than your head,” his English companion replies.

“Humour!” replies the Frenchman, “it’s marvellous!”

Ridicule: A hat is lost, but a head is spared

To me, that is as witty as the first rejoinder. But there is indeed a difference: it doesn’t establish any kind of hierarchy between the speakers, it shows neither deference to the other person or superiority over him, but merely shares a smile between equals. If that’s humour rather than wit then, yes, I too prefer it.

Sadly, in the last two or three years that famous British sense of humour has been a little scarce in public discourse. The leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties take themselves far too seriously to allow of any smiles. So it was good to see something of the spirit reappear a little, even though it was  on the Tory side at the expense of Labour, and it felt more like wit than humour: the comments were designed to belittle opponents.

It seems that Environment Minister Michael Gove, even though he’s generally someone to laugh at rather than with, showed some elegance when he described MPs who hope Theresa May can get a better Brexit deal than she has so far, as swingers in their fifties hoping that Scarlett Johansson would show up at one of their parties. Quite amusing though I was glad to read that Amber Rudd, speaking up for the female side, suggested “or Pierce Brosnan”.

The Justice Secretary, David Gauke, went one further and described the official Labour Brexit position as hoping for Johansson to show up on a unicorn. Cruel but hardly unfair: Jeremy Corbyn keeps suggesting that if elected, he will somehow bring home a hugely preferable deal to May’s, with absolutely no evidence to suggest that he could do any such thing.

At least the comments were worth a smile, not something that marks British politics much these days.

But there’s another quality my compatriots regard as quintessentially British. It’s a certain cussedness, if not downright bloody-mindedness, which refuses to allow power to do just what it likes. “Over my dead body,” it seems to say, or even “over your dead body” – after all, we cut off our King’s head nearly a century and a half before the French more famously did the same to theirs.

It’s particularly welcome to see that spirit stirring again.

Twice in 24 hours, the May government has been defeated in the House of Commons by MPs across parties working to prevent a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. It is heartening, in this parliamentary democracy, to see parliamentarians asserting their right to resist the government.

What’s more, the initiatives came from the backbenches, not the party leaderships. Yvette Cooper, leadership candidate defeated by Corbyn led one attack. Dominic Grieve, ex-Tory Minister, guided the other. The leaders merely opposed, in the case of May who was defending her deal, or followed, in the case of Corbyn who is, well, Jeremy Corbyn.

The government was particularly angry over the second defeat, with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who allowed the vote to take place. Precedent was against him, and it was a decision that seriously threatened the government’s usual prerogative to decide what gets discussed and what gets voted on. But what it showed was a Speaker intent on seeing all parliamentarians able to decide national policy, and not just the minority of them that form the government.

A refreshing notion.

The Speaker, though originally a Conservative himself,
getting right up Tory noses by asserting the authority of Parliament

And there’s a delicious irony to it, too. Brexiters keep saying that the aim of leaving the EU was to ‘take back control’. I don’t think this is what they had in mind, but I’m revelling in the spectacle of Parliament reasserting its authority over the Executive, which had been allowed to erode away far too far.

Now, that’s the kind of control I’m only too glad to see us taking back.

Especially as it’s so cussed. And gives us a lot to smile about.

Visiting the Infant Jesus

As you can imagine, I’m sensitive to the privilege I’ve just enjoyed. I’ve been visiting the Infant Jesus. Or, as they say in Rome where I’m writing these words, il Bambino Gesù. English or Italian, it’s an honour.

The colleague who met me there drove into town. That’s never easy. First, there are the dreadful traffic conditions (I saw two small accidents in just an hour – it made me almost nostalgic: clearly, Roman driving hasn’t improving since I was a child in the eternal city). And there’s the parking: as in most major cities, spaces are scarce.

My colleague solved the first problem by leaving home far earlier than one might have thought necessary. And she solved the second by leaving the car in the Infant Jesus’s own car park. That seemed fine to me, since why would a child need a car park? After all, children aren’t even allowed driving licences.

It felt particularly appropriate to be making the visit the day after Twelfth Night. That’s the feast of the arrival of the three kings to worship the Infant Jesus, in the manger where he lay. I wouldn’t have wanted to get there before the kings – that would have been disrespectful – so the day after felt about right.

Adoration of the Magi by Gerard David
Nothing like my visit

Still, there was no ox or ass, no manger with a baby, no Mary or Joseph. I didn’t even see any gold, frankincense or myrrh, however hard I looked. Not that I’d have a lot of use for frankincense or myrrh, but a little gold never goes amiss. But, given the financial pressure on hospital budgets, I wouldn’t expect gold to last long in any of them – it would be immediately invested in more care, or for paying down debt (certainly the latter, in the UK).

In fact, we saw no child at all. The place was full of them but none, to my knowledge, made any pretence to possess messianic qualities. Those are only claimed by the present occupants of the White House or Kremlin. Or, I suppose, the holder of the post of leader in the British Labour Party, though in his case the claim is only made by his worshippers, Corbynism having done away with the milksop notion of mere supporters.

No, Bambino Gesù is a world-class paediatric hospital. For very ill children. Which means the staff frequently have to deal with distraught parents too. So it was still a privilege to be there. As it was invaluable to meet some of the people who have to deal with those harrowing difficulties.

We weren’t there to sell them anything. They weren’t buying. We were listening and learning. About how they’re trying to involve patients in decisions concerning their care, though often that means the parents rather than the patients themselves. It means informing them of the options before them, the risks of each and the possible benefits, to help them reach a choice. Sometimes it means making every effort to disabuse them of certain alternative-medicine notions: no, for instance, cancer really can’t be fought by using the patient’s own energy.

It was a good meeting. Though I was amused by the name of the hospital. In England, we tend to be less inclined to wear a religion on our sleeves. Yes, there’s St George’s in London but the Pope doesn’t even regard George as a saint any more. Even in England he’s more of a figure in exciting tales for kids, riding around and fighting dragons.

And no one calls St Bartholomew’s that any more – it’s plain Barts. Like St James’s in Leeds, fondly known as Jimmy’s. More secular, you see. Perhaps more detached.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the visit. And, in any case, I was pleased to be in Rome again. What a great city, what a joy to have an hour to wander around it in the winter sunshine…

Rome: always a delight to visit

Nancy and Bobby: what leadership looks like

On 11 December 2018, Donald Trump tried to ambush the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, by turning a photo opp at the White House into a political debate in front of the cameras.

Pelosi was having none of it. In a few well chosen sentences she demolished the President, even mentioning the need to avoid a ‘a Trump shutdown’ of government. That riled the president who rose to the bait. If he didn’t get the funding for his precious border wall, he knew just what he was going to do.

I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.

She had entirely wrong-footed him.

Trump meeting his match

He has, as usual, changed his tune since. Far from taking ‘the mantle’, he now denies all responsibility for the shutdown, blaming the Democrats instead. But today Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and she can keep the pressure on him. The first step has been to pass a finance bill with no money for Trump’s wall, putting the onus back on the Republicans to keep the shutdown going.

It’s wonderful to see such gutsy and principled leadership in a world that is sadly short of it. Let’s hope Pelosi stays as firm as she promises to. It’s time that Trump had a lesson in the kind of treatment he can expect from a real leader.

I felt for Pelosi and Schumer in that White House meeting. At my own far less exalted level, I’ve also had the experience of talking to a hostile audience. Funnily enough, I find those sessions the most exciting and the most memorable. Generally, I present to customers, and if one of them attacks me, there’s no question of responding in kind. I have to be strictly polite, even deferential. It’s a fascinating challenge to stay that way while giving absolutely no ground.

The best outcome from such a confrontation is to see the critic, or critics, change their position and end up supportive or at least neutral towards us. That isn’t always possible, in which case the aim has to be to win the support of the rest of the audience that is watching the debate. If they leave concerned – even apologetic – for their colleague’s behaviour, and open to my arguments, then I’ve done as much as I could in the circumstances.

Now, Pelosi wasn’t going to win Trump around. Or even the Trump cult followers watching on TV. But she could hope that her performance would consolidate the backing of her base and win the support of some neutrals. That is the way to beat Trump and at the moment she seems to be handling the campaign superbly.

Sometimes, though, as I’ve suggested, one can actually change minds in an audience. And thinking about that reminded of one of the most remarkable instances of leadership I’ve seen in my lifetime, which indeed changed the minds of many of those listening.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. That evening, Robert Kennedy, brother of the murdered President, who had not long previously announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination himself, was due to speak to a rally in Indianapolis. It was being held in a strongly African-American neighbourhood. Kennedy’s advisers and relatives, even the police, told him he should not go, such was the anger in particular amongst the black population. The police had even had reports of young black men with weapons seen near the venue for the speech.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, Kennedy went anyway. He spoke from rough notes he made in his car. And he made what is arguably the best speech of his career. He started, unhesitatingly, by going straight to the news he was breaking.

I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Bobby Kennedy breaking the bad news

It’s worth listening to the speech, if only to hear for the visceral moan from the crowd when he spoke those words.

Kennedy had made a point of not speaking about his brother’s death in public before. But that night he made an exception.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Abie Washington, a young man in the crowd, then only 26, told the Washington Post fifty years later:

I was upset, to put it mildly. I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.

But as he listened his feelings changed.

My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?

That night, there were race riots in 100 cities across the United States. In Washington DC alone, a dozen people were killed. But in Indianapolis, there was nothing. The crowd went home after Kennedy’s speech.

That’s the leadership we need today. I hope Pelosi can provide it. And others too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, or indeed Beto O’Rourke who ran a barnstorming campaign for the Senate in Texas, coming closer than anybody might have expected to unseating Ted Cruz.

In Britain, we need it in the Labour Party, but that’s going to need a major change at the top.

Still, at least we can admire Pelosi. Or that extraordinary speech in Indianapolis. And hold up as a model the leadership offered by Bobby Kennedy.

Who was dead, himself the victim of an assassin, only 63 days later.

People are people

It’s an odd paradox, but not at all unusual, that people with completely opposite views can end up taking strangely similar positions on certain questions.

One such question is what it is to be a Jew. On that, anti-Semites will give the same answer as many Jews: they are a race. Being a Jew is something that is inherited by children from their parents, summed up in the expression Jewish blood. That’s why Jews feel it’s enough to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew. While it only needed a single Jewish grandparent to make someone a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis.

For others, however, being a Jew merely meant professing a particular religion. After all, you can convert to Judaism, and that makes you a Jew. But since you can’t convert your DNA, that rather suggests that being a Jew is nothing to do with physical inheritance, and instead, ultimately, a matter of choice.

Did I say DNA? Because that’s the central theme of an article from Time that Danielle pointed out to me.

It seems that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania decided, more or less on a whim, to send off for DNA tests. She, Dani Shapiro, felt there was little need for a test, since she knew exactly who she was and where she came from. She was Ashkenazi Jew whose parents had emigrated from Central Europe.

And then the results came back.

It turned out that she was at least half wrong. It seems her parents had been having trouble conceiving. So they’d called on the services of a fertility clinic, which used a curious technique of mixing semen from different donors with that of their client. That meant, of course, that it was a bit of a lottery who the biological father of any successful embryo might be.

Dani Shapiro: perhaps not everyone’s idea of Jewish looks

In her case, it turned out it hadn’t been the man who she’d always regarded as her father. Who was, in fact, her father. Just not biologically.

Now her mother was certainly Jewish, so to the Jews she would certainly have been one of theirs. But the blood of a gentile also ran in her veins – as she established when she tracked down her biological father and discovered how much they strangely had in common.

“When I met him,” she writes, “I understood, for the first time, where aspects of my very personhood had come from.”

Well, since she had been certain that Ashkenazy Judaism was a fundamental part of her personhood, that was quite some discovery.

The reality, of course, is that being an Ashkenazy Jew really is part of her personhood. As it’s part of mine, even though like her, my father was no Jew. As it isn’t part of my sons’, though to Hitler they would have been Jews too.

The reality is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who your parents are. Being a Jew or not being a Jew is neither a religious choice nor a genetic destiny. It is a cultural state that one enters or doesn’t, as one chooses.

But then the same is true for other ethnicities too. There may be a number of personal characteristics that are genetically determined, skin colour being the most obvious. But just as with Jews, most of what makes an ethnic group is a matter of culture: a series of shared notions and traditions which go far beyond genetics or faith (though faith can strengthen them).

Which makes the differences between groups interesting but superficial. A lesson both Jews and anti-Semites ought to learn. Jews aren’t better than anyone else simply by virtue of being Jews. Just as they aren’t any worse.

A race? A faith? Jews are just people. Which is the most important thing they, or anyone else, ever inherits from their parents.

As a DNA test easily proved. Though none ought to be necessary.