Old school unspooked

It isn’t really a spoiler to talk about the end of The Italian Job, is it? It’s become a classic. The coach teetering on a cliff edge, its back wheels over a sheer drop, its front wheels still on the road. The bullion robbers are at one end, the bullion itself at the other on a wheeled trolley. If they try to move near it, the gold rolls away towards the back of the bus, threatening to plunge the whole coach into the abyss.

“Hang on lads, I've got a great idea,” says Michael Caine.

I've got a great idea

And the film ends. With absolutely no suggestion of what the idea might be. Or whether there is any possible outcome other than the coach going over the cliff, taking the gold and the gang with it, or at the very least, the gold.

Len McCluskey is one of Britain’s most powerful trade union leaders. One of the keys to his grip on power is the ruthless way he protects it. Challenged for re-election to his post as leader of the Unite union by a fellow official, Gerard Coyne, he ensured that his rival was dismissed from his union role the day before the election. McCluskey won by a narrow margin, with his vote less than half what he had obtained the previous time.

Even more appalling was that the turnout for the election was just over 12%. McCluskey won with a 4% margin over his adversary, among fewer than one in eight of the union members, but the power that gave him was immense.

McCluskey: unrepentant, unspooked, unrepresentative

For instance, look at what happened to the defeated candidate. Coyne sued for unfair dismissal, but McCluskey had the financial clout of the union behind him and could bring up legal firepower far in excess of what his rival could afford. Eventually, Coyne dropped his case.

In the US in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, party bosses held sway over city neighbourhoods or even whole cities. They controlled huge funds and used them to offer favours to supporters, whether in the way of jobs or housing or other forms of wealth, to ensure their continued support – or to keep them under control by threatening to withdraw it. They were unprincipled, ruthless and effective.

One of the more famous of the Republican Party bosses was Mark Hanna. He said, “in politics, there are only two things that matter. One is money. I can’t remember the other one.”

McCluskey’s use of his financial clout reveals how true that remains today.

It’s highly ironic. Hanna was a man of the right. McCluskey a man of the left, head of the union which is a huge contributor to the Labour Party. But both men were political bosses, ruthless in their pursuit of power and their crushing of opponents. Both belong to that Old School of politics in which sheer brute power is all that counts, and money provides it.

In particular, McCluskey is ruthless in his support for Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. McCluskey is indeed believed to favour rule changes so that there would always be someone from the same left-wing current in the party, in any future election for leader. In other words, he wants Corbyn kept in his post and, even when he finally goes, he wants to do all in his (considerable) power to ensure he’s succeeded by someone out of the same mould.

This is curious. Because McCluskey’s stated aim is to see a government in office in Britain that will legislate genuine Socialist policies. And yet the man he’s backing to lead the party has taken it to a constant loss of standing in the polls and, only ten days ago, to its worst performance in a national election in nearly 120 years.

So why did I start by talking about The Italian Job? Not because McCluskey is as interesting a character, and certainly not because he’s as entertaining, as that rip-roaring film. No. It was because he told TV presenter Robert Peston, “my message to the Labour Party is don’t be spooked by these euro elections”.

We in Labour have long laughed at the poor third party, the Liberal Democrats, while we contest the position of top dog with the other big player, the Conservatives.

Well, the latest polls have the Conservatives, thoroughly discredited after their lamentable performance over Brexit, on just 19% of the vote – a disastrous level.

And Labour, who should by now have a 20-point at lead at least, are level-pegging with them. Just behind the hard right Brexit Party, itself behind – the Liberal Democrats. For now at least, they are in poll position.

“Don’t be spooked”? Well, no, one shouldn’t be. Spooking means panicking which never serves a useful purpose. But that’s not what McCluskey means. What he’s saying is “stay firm, stay the course”. In other words, just keep going as you are, however clear it may be that you’re on a hiding to destruction.

That’s why I thought of the Italian job. “I’ve got a great idea”. While the whole bunch of us wait to go over the cliff.

Taking all the gold we fought so hard for, down into the depths with us.

Aftermath of a rout: calling time on Corbynism?

Question: what’s worse than a politician who sacrifices political principle to attract a few more votes?

Answer: a politician who sacrifices his principles and doesn’t even get those votes.

Despite being technically leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has spent three years avoiding all leadership on Brexit, the biggest political question of his generation. He has, instead, tried to attract both sides of the debate, explaining that he wants Labour to be the party of both Leavers and Remainers. Apparently, he thinks he has only to express the wish for it to be so.

Unfortunately, and only Corbyn fans will be surprised by this discovery, attempting to please both sides of a bitter debate only puts both off.

Conservative collapse, Labour rout

Those who back Brexit have deserted Labour for the Brexit Party, which came top in last week’s elections to the European Parliament.

Those who oppose Brexit, and there are far more of them among Labour supporters, have abandoned Labour to vote for openly and actively anti-Brexit parties. Encouragingly, for those of us on the Remain side, though none of those parties individually outscored the Brexit Party, taken together they came well ahead of the total anti-EU vote, covering both that party and UKIP.

As for Labour, across the country it came third behind the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, Labour’s was not the worst performance of the night. The Conservative Party came fifth. It notched up the lowest popular vote it has had in its history, since its foundation in 1834. Both the big parties are in desperate trouble, with a mountain to climb to win back voter trust.

But, if Labour did less badly than the Conservatives, it nonetheless had a historically awful result.

The Labour Party first presented candidates in a national election in 1900. By 1910, at its fourth election, its share of the vote was struggling towards 10%. In 1920, its fifth campaign, it leaped forward to over 20%. It never fell below that level again until the European Election campaign of 2009. That was the tail end of the government led by Labour’s Gordon Brown. He was a good statesman, notably in the major steps he took towards eliminating child poverty, but he was a lousy politician, finding it hard to build empathy with voters. He achieved 15.2% of the popular vote in 2009 and was roundly, and rightly, criticised for that lamentable performance.

So it’s an extraordinary testimony to the Corbyn era that, in these most recent elections, he managed to reduce Labour’s proportion of the popular vote to an even lower level than Brown did: just 14.6%. The lowest level since 1910. It’s worse even than 1931, when Labour split after its leader, then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives. At the General Election that followed, Labour was reduced to 52 MPs, but it achieved over twice the percentage of the popular vote that Corbyn clocked up last week.

That’s not as impressive as the Conservatives, achieving their worst result in 185 years, but it’s still remarkable: Labour’s weakest performance for 119 years.

What makes this particularly ironic is that Corbyn’s supporters like to point to the increase in the popular vote Labour achieved under Corbyn in the General Election of 2017. It was the biggest increase since the end of the Second World War (though, and they sometimes seem to forget this, he didn’t actually win). His fans attribute that growth in support entirely to him.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the 2017 result. I had expected him to be crushingly defeated. Because I got it so wrong, a sense of shame kept me quiet at the time over what I believed had actually happened. Corbyn was still an unknown quantity that many felt offered them hope. He was also up against one of weakest campaigners I’ve ever seen, Theresa May, our soon to be ex-Prime Minister.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats had done themselves potentially irreparable damage by joining a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, making them complicit in much of the harm inflicted on Britain in the name of austerity. At the time, I thought it might take a generation for them to come back.

Well, last week normal service resumed. Corbyn is no longer an unknown figure. Voters have seen him and they don’t like what they see. Weak and vacillating, he no longer inspires trust or hope. The damage I expected Corbyn to inflict in 2017 he did instead in 2019. Why, he even pulled off the extraordinary feat of making the Liberal Democrats electable again, only four years after the end of their coalition with the Conservatives, not twenty as I’d expected.

After nearly nine years of austerity, with millions dependent on charity to avoid hunger, the NHS withering for lack of investment, and the most vulnerable driven to despair by benefit cuts, Britain has never needed Labour in government more. But Corbynism has almost certainly left it unelectable.

Corbyn could and should go. He’s trying to change position to back a new referendum on Brexit, but after three years of resisting the proposal, will anyone think him sincere?

A leader who has failed as he has enjoys no right to cling on. The problem, however, is that Corbynistas still have a death-grip on the party. It’s not enough to part with Corbyn, if the Corbynistas can simply impose another of their inept favourite sons on Labour. It’s not clear how we do it, but we need to prise their fingers off Labour, or give up on it altogether.

Which would force anyone looking for a progressive alternative to turn to the Liberal Democrats. The Greens might be preferable, but the Lib Dems seem closest to power. On the other hand, they’re tainted by their association with the Conservatives. Can we trust them not to play the same trick on us again?

Well, we may not have much choice. If Corbynism continues to strangle Labour, what else can we do? We might just have to take our chance on Liberal Democracy.

Interesting times ahead.

And not in a good way.

Is research good for your health?

Back in the nineties, I was involved in a study in France into ways of calculating risk factors in maternity services. The first step was to define what we meant by a good or bad outcomes in childbirth, so we could answer the question, “we want to measure risk, but the risk of what?”

What could possibly go wrong?
We were trying to measure the ways it might

One of the bad outcomes we looked at was postpartum haemorrhage – bleeding after childbirth. But that too required definition, because there is some bleeding in any childbirth. The study decided we'd regard any blood loss exceeding 500 millilitres as a haemorrhage.

One of the obstetricians involved in the study decided that she wanted to use graduated pouches to catch and measure any blood lost. The midwives in weren’t happy with this idea, since their professional experience meant they could assess whether a patient was haemorrhaging or not just by observing them, without anything so coldly technical as a pouch. But the obstetrician overrode them.

At the time, fathers weren’t allowed into that hospital’s delivery suites. So as soon as a baby was born, the midwife would nip out into the corridor with it and, in the obstetrician’s words, coo over it with the father. The mother, in the meantime, would be left on the table, possibly bleeding away.

Using the pouches put an end to all that. One of the effects, unsurprising to anyone but the midwives, was that it turned out they were actually missing a great many cases of haemorrhage, professional experience or not. But far more important was the fact that the midwives had to stay behind to fit the pouches, which meant they were looking after the women.

The rate of readmissions to the hospital for postpartum anaemia dropped massively.

The mere fact of looking into the problem had led to an improvement in patient care.

Those memories made it particularly interesting for me to listen to a conference presentation that talked about a classic paper by Sharon K. Inouye and others, ‘A Multicomponent Intervention to Prevent Delirium in Hospitalized Older Patients’. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999.

Seminal study
But its flaw may be as interesting as its conclusions

The study compared the outcomes for elderly patients given specific interventions targeted at a range of problems leading to delirium, compared to two other groups receiving ‘usual care’. It found that some of the interventions genuinely prevented the onset of delirium, though the likelihood of recurrence of delirium and the severity of any delirium suffered, was pretty much the same in both groups.

The conclusion was that it was important to prevent the initial occurrence of delirium, and the interventions were effective.

What the speaker, Dr Andrew Severn, a senior anaesthetist from University Hospital of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, pointed out was that the apparent division between the groups, intervention and control, was nothing like as rigid as might be expected. The study mentions that overall, across both the target and the control group, rates of delirium were lower than would normally be expected in the population generally. What’s more, there was a drop in the usual-care group – not as substantial as in the intervention group but still significant. The conclusion? There’d been some contamination between the groups: some of the interventions from the target group had somehow spread into the control group. As the study paper explains:

Although efforts were made to avoid contamination, some intervention protocols were disseminated by word of mouth to staff members in usual-care units. Moreover, although the intervention strategies most often involved the nursing staff, the physicians rotated on all hospital floors and carried over some of the intervention protocols to the usual-care group.

This sounds like a flaw in the study. But, in reality, it’s something far more significant: what it’s demonstrating is that the nurses using the new interventions were talking to their colleagues working with the control patients, and the latter were saying, “hey! That’s a good idea. I’m going to do that too.”

The same was happening to the doctors, simply by virtue of the fact that they were treating both groups.

In other words, good ideas were being tested in this study. The care professionals involved were identifying the ideas as good and simply couldn’t wait until the end of the study to apply them. As a consequence, the mere fact of researching enhancements in care was leading to better care.

Like my postpartum haemorrhage project, it’s an excellent example of the Hawthorne effect: work observed is work improved.

Interestingly, Dr Severn spoke right after a patient involved in a clinical trial. She said that her inclusion in the project, on its own, had improved her health. She now knew she was being monitored. She could get attention when she needed it. She realised that she might be in the group receiving the placebo rather than the active drug, but she felt better for being subject to more active care.

Yet further proof that research itself can be good for patient care. Whether or not it leads to a breakthrough…

Seward: three telling tales retold

Picking up where I left off last time, it must have been a terrible blow to William Seward not to win the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860. And even more galling to see the country lawyer Lincoln go on to win the Presidency in his stead. Even so, at a time when candidates did not campaign for themselves but relied on their allies to campaign for them, Seward was by far the most active promoter of Lincoln’s cause, travelling from State to State, apparently tireless in his canvassing on behalf of his rival.

William Seward
In defeat, a loyal friend to his successful rival

It was only reasonable that his reward should be the highest non-elective office in the land, that of Secretary of State. But Seward viewed the role’s responsibilities rather differently from his boss. He must have thought that the relatively untried Lincoln would be out of his depth as President, and needed someone to guide him, or even to run the government in his name.

“Whatever policy we adopt,” Lincoln quotes him as saying in a response he drafted but never sent, “there must be an energetic prosecution of it.” And Seward apparently suggested that “either the President must do it himself… or devolve it on some member of his cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide.”

Seward obviously had a candidate in mind for the Cabinet member to whom such authority might devolve.

What did Lincoln feel about this? He noted: “I remark that if this must be done, I must do it.”

The man elected to the post with the power would exercise it and no one else. That, no doubt, is what Lincoln explained to Seward face-to-face, rather than in a letter. In that quiet tone, without aggression, without raising his voice.

What I like most about this story is that Seward took the point and never again tried to challenged Lincoln’s authority. Indeed, he became Lincoln’s strongest and most loyal supporter. Which didn’t mean that he never stood up to him – on the contrary, he learned to respect Lincoln, though that didn’t stop him offering advice, even if necessary in opposition to the President’s own views..

My second anecdote concerns just such a moment.

The Trent affair was one more crisis in the seemingly uninterrupted sequence of crises of a life-and-death civil war. The British mail ship RMS Trent had been stopped on the high seas by a US warship and two commissioners (diplomatic envoys) from the Confederacy – the self-proclaimed rebel government in the South – removed from it.

That profoundly displeased the British government. Which, in turn, was bad news for the US, one of whose primary war aims was to stop Britain or France intervening on the side of the South. Indeed, that was the very reason the Commissioners had been seized: to stop them appealing for support in Europe.

You can imagine, however, that there was joy in the North over the capture of these two leading rebels. And when objections were raised, a feeling that the US couldn’t possibly back down and hand them over. What a humiliation that would be.

Seward felt that was exactly what they should do, humiliating or not. As a higly effective lawyer he put together a powerful brief: the seizure, because it was carried out on the High Seas and not in US waters, was illegal; it was precisely to stop this kind of attack on neutral shipping by the British that the US had gone to war in 1812; and, in purely pragmatic, political terms, handing the commissioners back would disarm those in Britain who wanted to back the South.

Lincoln listened to the argument but wasn’t convinced. A good lawyer himself, he told Seward he would prepare a counter-argument and present it at the following day’s cabinet meeting.

In fact, at the Cabinet meeting next day, all the discussion was on how the handover of the Commissioners to the British should be undertaken, who should contact whom in the British government to make it happen, how the decision should be communicated to other politicians and the public.

As they emerged from the Cabinet room, Seward asked Lincoln what had happened to the case he had planned to present against him.

“I found,” Lincoln replied, “that I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me that your ground was the good one.”

Is that anecdote about Seward or about Lincoln? I leave it to you to decide. Although I’m not convinced it matters.

My final anecdote comes from several days after Lincoln’s assassination.

Not everyone realises that the President was not the only planned victim of the murder plot. Assassins were due to target the Vice President Andrew Johnson and the Secretary of State William Seward, too.

Seward had suffered a serious carriage accident and was bedbound already. Fortunately, his would-be assassin was intercepted by his carers and, though Seward suffered severe additional injuries, they were not fatal.

As he began to recover, he saw through his window that the flag on the Defence Department was at half-mast.

“The President is dead,” he announced.

As he’d been instructed, his attendant attempted to contradict Seward, to spare his feelings. But Seward knew better.

“If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me… and there’s the flag at half-mast.”

He lay back on his pillow with the tears flowing freely down his face.

Lincoln and he had been adversaries. But they had become close collaborators and finally friends. Seward mourned the death of his erstwhile rival as sincerely as anyone in the country, if not more so.

It’s not the least of Seward’s outstanding qualities that he was able to walk that road to reconciliation, respect and ultimately grief.

A birthday that reminded me of a strange event

Google – or was it Wikipedia? there are so many of these things these days and it matters so little which is doing the talking – reminded me this week that William Seward’s birthday fell on the 16th of May.

It was his 218th birthday so I don’t imagine he was doing much celebrating. But I raised a glass to his memory. Because he’s one of those figures that I think deserves to be remembered with affection and a twinkle of humour.

Not perhaps the most attractive of men
but a most attractive character

He was born into wealth and into a family which owned a few slaves in the last few years of that shameful institution in the state of New York. Whether or not his family’s experience of slave ownership played any role in the formation of his ideas, he grew up with an abiding and outspoken hatred of that abuse. Inevitably, he was one of the main figures in the launching of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

That party, as well as having a powerful conservative wing, was also the home of many US radicals, including most of those in favour of abolishing slavery. It was, above all and increasingly, the party of liberal Northern, business and financial interests, against a much more strongly agrarian and conservative current in the Democratic Party, in which Southern concerns played a forceful and growing role.

Funny how things have changed, isn’t it? The Liberal wing of Republicanism seems to have sunk without trace. It’s the Democrats today who represent the liberal currents of the wealthy North East, the West and of some central states.

By 1860, Seward had served two terms as Governor of New York and was approaching the end of his second term as a Senator for that State. He was one of the best-known and powerful voices in the Republican Party and his track record of public service was outstanding. No wonder that when his name was submitted to the Republican convention in Chicago that year, for selection as the party’s presidential candidate, he seemed not just the front runner but a shoo in for the nomination.

Back home in New York – candidates in those days didn’t attend the conventions, though it was there that nominations were decided, in a time before primaries – back home, his friends and family had put together a huge celebration to mark his selection including a battery of cannon to mark the great moment.

Unfortunately, however, he’d put off many of the more moderate members of his party. Or maybe it would be more accurate to describe them as prudent or even nervous. Many felt that to oppose slavery too openly would spell doom for the country, splitting it irretrievably and possibly even precipitating Civil War. Many felt it was wiser to adopt a less radical stance, perhaps of allowing slavery to continue where it was already practised but prevent its spread anywhere else.

Sadly for Seward, while he was able to command the biggest single bloc of convention delegates on the first ballot, it didn’t constitute a majority. And through the next three ballots, his vote remained static.

Instead, the less abolitionist majority, originally split among several candidates including Ohio Governor Salmon Chase and former Missouri Representative Edward Bates, began to coalesce around just one.

And who was he?

Well, his name is known around the world today, far beyond the borders of the United States. But you need to imagine yourself back into the atmosphere of the times to realise how extraordinary his nomination was.

He was a local politician of limited education, raised in agonising poverty, who earned his living practising law in a thinly populated state, and had only made any significant amounts of money when he began to take briefs for such enterprises as the railroads. His total experience as a politician at national level was a single two-year terms as a congressman eleven years earlier, when he had signally failed to make anything like a name for himself.

No Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recognisable anywhere today after only a few months in office and so well-known, indeed, that she can simply be referred to as AOC.

A major national party nominated for President of a United States on the brink of Civil War, and at a crisis point over slavery that was as moral as it was political, a man barely known outside his State and with limited previous political experience.

He was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1860 Presidential Election, though without winning a majority of the popular vote. Despite all the prudence of the moderates, the result of that vote precipitated the secession of the Southern states, and the Civil War they had hoped to avoid by selecting Lincoln in the first place.

One of his first acts was to appoint his rivals from Chicago to his Cabinet. Salmon Chase became Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Bates became Attorney General. And Seward, cheated of his coronation, became Secretary of State, the most senior member of the Cabinet, second only to the President himself.

Better, as Lyndon B. Johnson would later colourfully claim, to have them in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

I’m only going to tell three anecdotes about Seward, three of my favourites. But, this post being more than long enough already, I’ll come back to them in my next.

The fallen angel: not an example to follow

“This is the only city in the world,” our Madrid taxi driver told us a few weeks ago, “which has a statue of the Fallen Angel.”

Well. Taxi drivers don’t deliver their sententious statements under oath. And they’re not known for their strict impartiality when talking about their cities. Even so, it does seem true that Madrid is the only major city with a statue to this particular fallen figure, and it is only one of a handful of any such statues around the world.

The Fallen Angel: a beautiful spot on a fine day

Having an hour to spare in Madrid, in glorious weather, I decided not to resist the temptation to wander around the Retiro Park and track down the statue.

And there indeed it was.

He still has his wings, although the myth has God tearing them from him. But he’s falling fast, and far from happy about it. Especially as a snake is about to haul him downwards into the nether regions where he is to spend eternity. A sad fate for the greatest of the angels.

Detail of the Angel: not having a good day

For he was the bearer of light, or Lucifer to give the name in Latin. 

The story isn’t entirely logical. I mean, it claims he led a rebellion against the Almighty. It’s not quite clear to me why anyone would. How do you delude yourself sufficiently to believe that such a rebellion might succeed? Surely the clue is in the word. Almighty. All mighty. Not much point trying your luck against that, is there?

Besides which, how do you even get the conspiracy going? You’re talking about an all-knowing being. You could hardly chat to a fellow disgruntled member of the entourage without the principal knowing. All knowing. Again, the clue’s in the words. Why, you couldn’t even think about it yourself without his being entirely informed of your intentions.

Before you’d even formed them.

No, I reckon Lucifer should have just said to himself, “I’m the greatest of the angels, the bearer of light. That’s pretty impressive gig, quite honestly. And I want for nothing. What would I jeopardise all that for?”

Naturally, one could come up with all sorts of down-to-earth explanations of the myth. That the story is designed to demonstrate that greed for power is a passion that drives us all, maybe. And that there’s no greater sin than to rise up against the ruler. You can imagine how those might be messages that it suited powerful elites to communicate to their subjects, above all their over-mighty ones.

But that’s all psycho-babble, or socio-babble, and I had no intention of getting into that kind of thing on a fine morning in a lovely park.

In any case, we owe Lucifer thanks on at least one count. He did provide the Madrid sculptor Ricardo Bellver with the theme for a pretty good statue. Not too big, delicately carved, full of movement and emotion. On a sunny day, well worth seeing.

And maybe more people should. Because today too far too many people seem to be inclined to delude themselves that powerful forces can be overcome just by wishing it were so. And maybe we need a few more statues of the Lord of the Underworld, only to warn us not to elect too many of his followers into powerful positions. A lesson we need to think about in the US, Russia, Brexitland and other places.

Remember. Their role model may have been an angel, but he fell. It’s a long way down and not a comfortable ride to get there.

As the statue shows.

Distrust the man who talks of freedom

It always seems wise to distrust anyone who claims to be striving to set you free.

“Setting me free? You’re really interested in my freedom, are you?” strikes me as the good question to ask.

For example, the US likes to celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims, the refugees from religious persecution in England who created the first successful European settlement in Massachusetts. Their admirers tell us the pilgrims struck a blow for freedom of worship. Which in a sense they did – a blow for their own freedom of worship. But they were members of a particularly harsh Protestant sect, and they weren’t interested in establishing freedom of worship for Muslims, Jews or – still worse – self-styled fellow Christians such as Anglicans or, even more abominable, Catholics.

Indeed, these fine apostles of liberty were far from above doing a bit of energetic persecuting of their own. They regarded it as a duty to God, even. Extirpating heresy and all that. Within a lifetime of their arrival, some of the descendants of the Pilgrims were conducting witch trials in Salem and other local towns, that led to the hanging of nineteen people for the perfectly fictional offence of witchcraft. In some instances, the cases turned on ‘spectral’ evidence, testimony provided by spirits in apparitions to some of the witnesses.

Contemporary denunciation of the use of
‘spectral’ evidence in the Salem trials

Or take the example of Hungary. 

It was part of the Austrian Empire into the nineteenth century. A movement for equality with the German speakers led to revolution in 1848. For a brief spell, power fell to Lajos Kossuth, outspoken and internationally celebrated liberation leader. Counter-revolution eventual crushed the uprising. He had to flee his country and spent the rest of his life in exile, where he was lionised and feted in many nations. Why, he even has a bust in the US capitol building.

Bust of Kossuth in the US Capitol building

And yet. While in power he showed little sympathy for the national aspirations of non-Hungarians, including the minorities inside Hungary. He did nothing for the Slovaks, for instance, though his own father was one. Indeed, Kossuth lost some support in the US when he showed himself unable to back either Catholics or the anti-slavery movement.

His keenness to liberate downtrodden communities clearly didn’t extend to all such minorities. Just to his own.

This all came to mind for me when I saw a piece of graffiti in Valencia. “Valencia is not Catalonia,” it pointed out, in English, “Valencian language is not Catalan”.

Will Catalonia work for freedom for Valencians too?

It’s certainly true that the Valencian language, although similar to Catalan, is a different language. More generally, there is little appetite in Valencia, either the city or the region, for independence from Spain. Let alone for absorption into Catalonia.

A few months ago, I heard the story of a public servant in the Balearic island of Menorca. As well as what most of us call Spanish – Castlilian – he’s a native speaker of the local language, Menorquí, which like Valencian is closely related to Catalan, but different from it. So imagine his annoyance when, in pursuit of promotion, he had to sit an examination that was written in Catalan and required answers in the same language.

The leaders of the fight for the independence of Catalonia are outspoken in their advocacy of Catalan rights. They have less to say about the rights of other, smaller minorities. Indeed, they’re happy to treat those minorities with exactly the same insensitivity, or even arrogance, that they claim they suffer at the hands of the national Spanish authorities.

Just like the Massachusetts Puritans, or the Hungarian nationalists, they’re long on their own freedom, much less concerned about anyone else’s.

Which is why I tend to distrust anyone who proclaims his commitment to liberty from oppression. I think a few follow-up questions are always in order. Like, “yes, but would you stand up for my rights against oppression by you?”

Or, to put in other words, “are we talking about freedom for me, or should I be more concerned about freedom from you?”

Going Nordic in the South

Before we left England, Danielle and I had taken to the sport of Nordic walking. You do it with sticks and, in principle, at speed. The idea is that the sticks keep your posture better than walking without them, and mean that the exercise affects 90% of your muscles, including arms, shoulders, back and abdominals, as opposed to only your legs.

It’s also quite fun.

We thought we’d try it here in Valencia too. A long way south of the Nordics, but hey, latitude doesn’t count, does it? We went out several times on our own, in the park the city has made where the river Turia used to run before it got directed outside the city. But it seemed a good idea to join a group, so we went for an initiation session this weekend.

It was in a lovely location, outside the town of Riba Roja, on that same river Turia, but where it actually still runs today.

One of the people going offered us a lift and suggested we meet at 4:00. We were there bang on time, even a little before, as was she – it keeps surprising me that the Spanish people we meet completely belie the reputation of the nation for lateness, summed up in the word ‘mañana’. That’s become an internationally recognised synonym for delay, procrastination and downright tardiness.

By meeting at 4:00, we turned up the rendezvous point a good half-hour early. Not everyone else was as punctual, so the actual session didn’t get started until a while after 5:00. And it didn’t start with the walk. Instead, a representative of the municipal council gave us a brief talk about the castle where we’d met, which was worth hearing, since the place had been built as a fortress by the Moors during Arab rule in Spain, before becoming a noble’s home and then falling into disrepair until the council restored what it could and added new – and rather spending – modern building elsewhere.

The castle explained to the group: a striking venue

That interesting talk was followed by another that was was far less so. It was given by the Nordic walking instructor, who spent an inordinate time getting his PowerPoint slides to project and, even worse, a video (have you noticed how often presentations with video in them seem to fail?) I learned that I’d been holding the sticks wrong, which was a useful lesson, but frankly could have been communicated in five minutes rather than the hour it took.

Finally, we got on the walk at rather after 6:00. Well, I say ‘walk’ but it was more of a Nordic stroll, frankly. Though those of us who complained (not in words but by getting out in front and moving a little faster) were soon given a taste of our own medicine (proving you should be careful what you wish for): the instructor’s friend got out in front and he had that capacity of tall men to walk in a leisurely manner but, with colossal steps, set a punishing pace we struggled to keep up with.

In the end it took an hour and a quarter to do four and a half kilometres, which is pretty dire. But, with the pace so much quicker in the stretches between pauses to allow others to catch up, by the end I was exhausted.

Pack of Nordic walkers in the southern sunshine

That made it great that the organisers chose to finish with a snack in a local bar. We were given beers and (rather good) sandwiches. Danielle and I sat with people we’d never met and enjoyed a conversation with them, though conversing is something of a challenge – a double challenge, indeed, since in our broken Spanish, we have to work to find the words to express what we want to say, and then they have to work to mentally translate what we’ve just said into the words we would have used if we’d said what we meant correctly. But we still got on swimmingly, despite the difficulties.

And then we headed home, having taken rather over five hours for what, left to our own devices and staying local, would have taken under one. Still, we saw some wonderful places. The walk was along the river, where it flows strongly in its old course (it was to guard that precious water that the Arabs built their fortress in Riba Roja). The sights were wonderful, as we walked between vegetable plots and wild flowers, with glimpses of the river every couple of minutes.

Then to finish with beer, sandwiches and good company – what more could we want?

A glimpse of the Turia on our walk

Brief contacts

There’s something invaluable about those occasional moments of contact we have with strangers, however brief. When they go well, they leave precious memories.

Some weeks ago, Danielle and I went for dinner in a small restaurant in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. We ordered too much food, including ‘patatas’ which we thought would be a side dish of potatoes. It turned out to be a near tray-sized plate of chips. Fortunately, a bunch of students came in and we gave them the dish, virtually untouched by us, and they devoured its contents with great joy. And speed.

Not just a side dish of chips
Food for a whole bunch of students

To my amazement, we discovered that despite the excellent Spanish of the student who talked to us, they were in fact Americans. And, what’s more, from the deep South – Alabama.

I was so astonished by their apparent mastery of Spanish that I wondered whether they’d perhaps spent time in Latin America. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong way to frame my question.

“Do you know Mexico?” I asked.

“Mex… Mex… Mexico?” answered the principal wag amongst them. “Do you know, the name rings a bell.”

I decided to reply in kind.

“Yes. You know the place. Long wall along its border.”

“Not yet!” they all chorused immediately and together.

I thought if young people, even from the deep South, could be so keen to establish their opposition to Trump, there was hope for the US yet. And for us all. It was a good moment. An encouraging moment.

A couple of weeks later I was in Milan on business and decided to have lunch in a small restaurant which looked fun. It wasn’t upmarket – in fact, it was surprisingly cheap – but it seemed cheerful and attractive.

In the more expensive places, once you’re at a table, even alone at a table for four, no one else joins you. Not so at this place. Only a few minutes after I’d arrived, the waiter brought a young couple over towards me.

“Do you mind if these people have lunch with you?” the waiter answered, but in a way and a tone that made it clear that the answer “no” wasn’t an option.

With my unexpected lunch companions in Milan
Much more entertaining than a Kindle

They weren’t from Milan but had moved there recently, for work. But they enjoyed the city. However, they also knew Rome, the city where I was born. We had fun comparing the two. Rome is known for its corruption and its inefficiency, to the point that anger is beginning seriously to boil these days: there are too many potholes in the streets, too much rubbish uncollected, and there are even three stations on the underground system closed for repairs with no sign of them reopening.

Milan, by contrast, is brisk, efficient, wealthy, well-kept. But, to those of us who know and love the capital, just a tad soulless. I always regard it as a city of Austria’s deep south, rather than of Italy’s north.

How much corruption, how many potholes, how much ineptitude is it worth putting up with for the greater warmth and relaxed attitudes of Rome? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I think it’s worth pondering, because I don’t think the answer is “none at all”.

As I write this, I’m in a plane on my way back from Wiesbaden in Germany, a city I didn’t know and which astonished me by its beauty. No wonder the Americans chose it as a major centre for their occupation forces.

I’d been warned that there wasn’t much accommodation available, so when I logged onto a hotel booking site I was ready to take whatever came up. A message flashed up on screen to say that an apartment had just become available near the park in the city centre; I jumped at the chance and booked it at once.

I landed at Frankfurt airport and rang the number I’d been given.

“Welcome to Germany!” said by soon-to-be landlord. “How do you plan to get to Wiesbaden? Don’t take a taxi!”

“You suggest I travel by train?”

“Surely. The station is right underneath the airport. Ring me when you get to Wiesbaden and I’ll come and fetch you.”

“Are you sure? Isn’t that too much to ask of you?”

It turns out that he regarded it as a pleasure. And, as it happened, he was already at the end of the platform when my train pulled in.

The flat was fine and I told him so, which seemed to please him. Then I asked what I should do with the key when I left.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “there’s no tenant after you so you can leave your things in the apartment until the afternoon, and I’ll come and meet you and run you to the station.”

I was astonished, but he seemed keen so I accepted the offer with pleasure.

There was only one minor hitch in the arrangement. I told him I would meet him at “half-two” on the day of my departure, forgetting that in German that means half-past-one. They call 2:30 half-three. But he was unfazed by the problem.

“No problem,” he said when he rang to ask where I was, “I’ll come back.”

He was as good as his word. But he had an announcement to make.

“Before I take you to the station, I will make a detour so you can see something special. Our Russian Orthodox cathedral with its golden-roofed spires. Built by a prince in mourning for his Russian princess wife, who died in childbirth.”

When we got there, he suggested I get out and wander around, even taking a look inside. I was a bit worried about missing my plane and said so.

Russian Orthodox cathedral in Wiesbaden
Quite a tribute from a widower to his lost wife

“Oh, no. You must see the place.” He thought a moment. “It’ll be no problem. I’ll take you to the airport.”

Which he did. So I got to see the cathedral. And make it to the airport on time.

My host in Wiesbaden, Karl
“Charlie. No one calls me Karl.”

Which explains how it happens that I’m writing this on the plane. And also why. Because there’s something special about these brief moments of friendly contact with a stranger.

My cockup, their conspiracy

It’s not easy being relatively chaotic if you’re trying to live an organised life.

That was confirmed on a recent trip to Germany. I couldn’t find a direct flight from Valencia, where I now live, to Frankfurt. That isn’t quite the same thing as saying that there is no such flight, only that if there is, I haven’t found it yet. So instead I decided to take the train to Madrid and fly from there.

The train service is remarkable. An hour and forty minutes for a trip that takes three to three-and-a-half hours by car. Far, far beyond anything being achieved in Britain, the nation that pioneered railway travel in Europe.

The other great thing about travelling via Madrid was that I could go up the evening before and have dinner with my sons, who live there, and my daughter-in-law and my daughter-out-law. Who live there too.

The plan was to travel at 4:15, to have drinks and dinner in the evening.

I bought the ticket on line. Sadly, I must have been thinking too hard about the flight because when I came to travel, I discovered that I’d booked myself onto a train for the same day as the flight – which would have meant missing the plane – and not for the evening before.

“Thinking too hard about the flight?” my son Nicky interjects. “You mean not thinking at all.”

Ah, well. His judgement is harsher but perhaps more accurate than mine. Which is a little kinder.

In any case, I decided there wasn’t really a problem. I’d taken a flexible ticket, perhaps unconsciously aware that I was screwing up, so I had only to go to the station early and change the reservation.

It wasn’t that simple. There wasn’t a 4:15 that day, so the first train I could get on was the 5:10. But then the ticket agent corrected himself.

“Sorry – no. That train’s fully booked. And – oh, dear – so’s the 7:15. The first I can get you on is the 8:15. The last seat.”

“OK,” I said, “but every train I’ve ever caught in Spain has no-shows. Could I wait by an earlier train and if, just before it’s due to leave, there’s a spare seat, grab it?”

He shrugged.

“If they let you onto the platform, you can try.”

That wasn’t going to happen. Renfe, the national railway operator in Spain, posts staff at the entrance to platforms to check tickets, and there was no way they were going to let me near a train I wasn’t booked on. I’m not sure how to say “more than my job’s worth” in Spanish, or whether there is any such expression in the language, but that was absolutely the attitude they were taking.

It seems that against me all fate had conspired. Or at least, all Renfe.

In the end I had to take the 8:15.

Renfe's high-speed AVE trains
Fast, efficient, comfortable. With flexible service? Not so much

Now I know that the cockup was entirely my fault. But I find there’s something attractive about company employees trying to help out even someone who’s created his problems himself. You know, the “let’s see if we can find a solution” attitude as opposed to the jobsworth mentality.

After all, what does it cost them?

They could have helped had they wanted to. You’ll remember that I’d been assigned the last available seat on the 8:15. And yet, when I got on, I found a dozen seats, just in my carriage and the next, which stayed empty for the whole trip. I’m sure there were empty seats on the 5:10 and the 7:15 too.

It’s funny. A French high-speed train once stopped at a station it wasn’t due to call at, just to help my wife Danielle by allowing her to leave it there. A friend of mine who got on the wrong high-speed train in Germany was allowed off at an abandoned station, and was picked up there by the next high-speed train – the one he should have been on – although the station had been out of use for years.

Ah, well. Not everyone has the same view of customer service.

At least the sons and the partners stood by me. They turned out to meet me, not at 6:00 as intended, but at 10:00, which in Spain is the traditional time for dinner anyway. So we ate well in a restaurant near the station. Their warmth and sympathy made me feel a lot less foolish and a lot less annoyed. In any case, hanging around at the station in Valencia for four hours had been less painful than might be imagined – Danielle stayed with me until she had to go and walk the dogs, and I did some work afterwards. A longer wait in the station than I’d planned, but not a waste of time.

Still. I’ve got to learn to overcome my chaotic inclinations and live the organised existence I crave. Especially in Spain, where Renfe conspires so majestically against such sad little cockup merchants as me.

Spain and England, a leader and a ditherer, a victory and a defeat

It’s been an interesting few days, watching a general election in my new home country, and local elections in my old one.

In the former, Spain, the right was routed. It’s true that the hard nationalist party Vox won 24 seats in the new parliament. This was presented as a lurch to the right by some in the foreign press, but the reality is that where the two main parties of the right had 167 seats in the previous parliament, now all three together – including Vox – have only 147.

Essentially, therefore, the election redistributed the votes of the right and then cut them back. It’s as though the hard wing and the more liberal wing of British conservatism broke off to form their own parties, and all three parties were returned with a total of fewer MPs than the Conservatives previously held on their own.

So it was a conclusive victory for the left. In particular, it was a major success for the incumbent Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who gets to form a new government. Under the Spanish proportional system, he won’t be able to do so alone – he doesn’t have an overall majority – so he’ll have to come up with accommodations and agreements with other groupings. But he should be able to do some good.

Sánchez: the leader who won

My prediction? That’s exactly what he’ll do – some good. It won’t be enough for those on the left who believe all we need to achieve a Socialist utopia, is to elect a Socialist and have him wave a magic wand. That Sánchez won’t do, any more than Tony Blair did in Britain. I only hope that the result won’t be that Spain in turn has to suffer another ten years of conservative rule, and learn the hard way that demanding too much of your allies can let in your opponents, who give nothing at all and, indeed, take a great deal.

What about the elections in England?

Brexit continues to poison the atmosphere there. And the first victim has been the Conservative Party. Theresa May promised to deliver Brexit and has spectacularly failed to do so. The party was punished in the local elections, losing 1334 seats, over a third of those contested that it held before the election.

It’s normal for a party in power for nine years to lose local council seats. But on this scale? That’s a rout.

And yet it wasn’t quite the rout it should have been. The Labour Party, the official Opposition, should have been romping home. The seats lost by the Conservatives should have fallen to them. But they didn’t. Instead, Labour too lost 83 councillors – far fewer but a massive loss when it should be winning big against a government party in such disarray.

Corbyn: the ditherer who lost

Labour’s led by a man entirely after the heart of those who hanker for a magic wand. His supporters view him as a socialist and a man of principle. Neither claim seems particularly supported by the facts.

Those supporters like to claim that Labour, by not taking a position either for or against Brexit, has become the party of both those who believe in remaining in the European Union and those who want to leave. In other words, Corbynism refuses to back the EU and, instead, takes a non-committal line. As it admits itself, it does so in the hope of not putting off Leave supporters.

It’s not clear to me that sitting on the fence in this way is a principled position. On the contrary, it strikes me as the rankest opportunism, of just the kind that Corbynists like to allege against Tony Blair.

Nor does it seem to me to be particularly socialist. Opposition to the EU is a key view of the right, and especially the far right, anti-internationalist, xenophobic and insular as it is. What on earth is a socialist doing in that company?

In any case, this opportunist, electoral calculation isn’t paying off. As was predictable and predicted. By trying to please both sides of a deep divide, you end up pleasing neither.

The local election results make the point. Brexiters see Corbyn taking a lukewarm stance so they don’t vote Labour; they see May failing to deliver and don’t vote Conservative; so they stay home and vote for no one. Meanwhile, Remainers see Corbyn refusing to back the EU, so they too either don’t vote or vote for a party that explicitly endorses their stance – the Liberal Democrats, the biggest winners in this election, with a gain of 703 council seats, and the Greens, the second biggest, gaining 194 seats.

Corbyn’s paying the price for his lack of integrity.

The contrast between my two homelands is powerful. A real leader, with clear positions, won the Spanish general election. A fence-sitter, dithering on the great question of his time, lost the English local elections.

Oh, for a British Sánchez to lead Labour. Oh, for the chance to win a victory like his. And oh, for the chance to watch the wishful would-be wand wavers leave the scene.