Boris Coup: Day 4

Day 4 of BoJo’s coup dawns bright and fair.

We find cracks appearing even in the ruling junta. Sajid Javid, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is unhappy. Javid’s nominally a key figure in Boris Johnson’s administration, but in reality he’s a cypher in a government being run by a special adviser called Dominic Cummings.

Cummings was Campaign Director of the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Referendum. As such, he was a foremost exponent of mendacity in a campaign not unduly marked by truth-telling.

He is credited with having come up with the powerful, because beautifully simple, slogan “take back control”. Now we’re learning just what he meant by that.

Only unofficially is he BoJo’s chief of staff. Only unofficially is he running the whole Downing Street operation. Only unofficially but with great impact.

Sonia Khan, ardent Brexiter but fired by Cummings, who wasn’t her boss.
Her face didn’t fit, apparently. And one wonders why...

For instance, he took it upon himself on Friday to fire Javid’s media adviser, Sonia Khan, without even consulting her boss. It’s not clear what she was accused of, since she’s a committed Brexiter and she denies having done anything disloyal. She may simply have been the wrong gender (Cummings is clearing out women) and perhaps the wrong ethnicity (which suggests Javid is even more vulnerable than it seems).

In any case, Cummings is clear that anyone who doesn’t like his management style can simply go forth and multiply.

I write “go forth and multiply” because I don’t want to write “fuck off” here.

At any rate, if this is how the junta treats BoJo’s allies, it sends a chilling message about the fate that awaits those who oppose him.

Meanwhile, a group of 50 MPs has decided to continue meeting as an alternative Parliament, outside the House of Commons, once the prorogation comes into effect.

That’s just a gesture, but one to be applauded. It’s only a gesture, because what authority would an alternative parliament have? But it’s to be applauded because gestures matter. After all, the prorogation itself is only a gesture. It’s due to last just five weeks. But it matters because it’s BoJo’s way of saying, “if Parliament gets up my nose, I can just sweep it away”.

The alternative parliament is MPs response to that, saying “we won’t go far. And we’ll keep right on getting up your nose”.

A courageous, principled gesture. Led by courageous, principled people. David Lammy from Labour, or instance. Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party. A few Conservatives

Is a name conspicuous for its absence? Why, yes. Jeremy Corbyn, nominally leader of the Labour Party, isn’t with this group.

It seems that when the courageous and principled foregather, Jeremy Corbyn is otherwise engaged.

The Boris coup: day 3

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

Why now particularly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebel poodles

Our smaller toy poodle is a bit of a rebel.

You might call her downright bolshie. Or perhaps not entirely bolshie. Simply a troublemaker. Not so much a full-blown red as inclined that way, which I suppose would make her orange. Appropriately, since that’s her colour.

I always say that we call her Toffee because she’s toffee-coloured. And, of course, her black companion Luci is Luci-coloured.

Luci in front, Toffee behind her
Innocence personified. But they can be mutinous. If not very effectively

Both Toffee and Luci are connoisseurs of the mouldy piece of bread or rotting bit of bone found lying around in a park. Good at sniffing them out. Enthusiastic in making a beeline for them.

That, though, is as far as the similarity goes.

Luci, when called, at least has the decency to look up from the tasty morsel she’s getting ready to enjoy. Keep calling and she’ll take a step or two towards you. Call ‘drop’ and she might even drop the mouldy bread or bone that she’s picked up. And, eventually, with obvious reluctance, she’ll trot – not run, mind, just the least speed more than a walk to give the impression of obedience – back towards you.

With Toffee, things are nothing like that. Sure, she’ll look up from her piece of rotting meat if called. But with her it’s not with any intention of heeding a call. No. With her it’s perfectly obvious what she’s doing. She’s judging the distance between us. If it’s far enough to give her the time, she’ll take a bite or two. Too close for that? She’ll pick up the whole piece ready to make a dash for it.

She’s quick on her pins too. More than once she’s made me look both slow and stupid around a park, as I chase after trying to get her drop a piece of evil-looking pasty, with her darting away every time I got anywhere near close enough to pop a lead on her.

With this track record, her behaviour the other day failed to surprise me, but certainly left me amused.

In the morning, the dogs get Kibble. Biscuits. They’re not that fond of them, far preferring the wet food – actual meat – they get in the evening. That’s hoovered up in seconds. The Kibble, well, sometimes it hangs around several hours, with them eating a mouthful or two now, another mouthful or two then.

But the other day Toffee tried a novel approach. She simply ate none of it. I realised that she’d graduated, from mere bolshie troublemaker to full-blown trade unionist. Not just any trade unionist, but a shop steward, a convenor even, organising and leading the workforce.

Of course, the workforce was pretty limited, consisting entirely of Luci. Who, I noticed, in any case had a surreptitious mouthful or two, on the QT, whenever Toffee wasn’t looking.

What made me really laugh, though, was the lousy choice of tactics. It may have been a strike but, for pity’s sake, it was a hunger strike. And it was they who were going to be hungry.

So I’m afraid I behaved like the callous employer responding with a lockout to his employees’ strike. I simply gave them nothing else to eat.

Boy, did the strike collapse fast. Dogs cope even less well than men with hunger. Faced with not being fed at all, our two quickly developed a new appetite for Kibble.

By the evening, their bowls were nearly empty. And I gave them a rather smaller portion of meat, mixing the remaining Kibble in with it. Lo and behold, both meat and Kibble were hoovered up in no time.

The rebellion was over. Order had been established once more. The seat of power was not shaken.

Orange she certainly is. But a red? Toffee certainly isn’t an effective one.

The Boris coup: day 2

It’s day 2 of the Boris coup.

Boris Johnson now rules without parliamentary limits or even oversight on his power. And why? Because the British constitution, unwritten and dependent on politicians following convention, allows him too. A lesson for us all, if and when BoJo’s autocracy ends, that we have to stop regarding the unwritten constitution as a charming tradition, but at as a constant threat to democracy which we have to replace with something enforceable in law.

So where do we stand on day 2?

“Parliament will consider this” petition against its prorogation 
While it’s prorogued?  

As of this morning, the petition against the proroguing of parliament has passed the 1.2 million signature mark, one of them my own. I signed because it seemed important, though I signed with little hope of its doing any good. After all, if BoJo can ignore the elected representatives of the people, why should he pay any attention to the people themselves?

Besides, the petition is to parliament. I’m not wholly clear how parliament can react to it while it’s prorogued. Aren’t we asking parliament to reverse a prorogation which it can’t until that prorogation ends?

In any case, BoJo won’t give a damn about the opposition he’s getting. He has plenty of support. Naturally, the right-wing press, the Telegraph, the Sun and the Mail prominent among them. Interestingly, they back the prorogation as a way to ensure that the will of the people is respected. In other words, that the Brexit referendum decision is carried out, even though no one voted for a hard Brexit and very few voters back one.

The usual suspects support BoJo's assault on parliamentary democracy
In the name of respecting a democratic decision, of course

But isn’t the right wing’s position gloriously ironic? They see the proroguing of parliament as a necessary step to enforce a democratic decision.

We suspend the central institution of our democracy in order to protect democratic rule? Only an autocrat and his supporters could come up with a paradox that bizarre.

Or that ugly.

BoJo's British coup

Let’s be absolutely clear: the decision to prorogue parliament was taken by Boris Johnson, but it was issued in the name of the Queen. Why? Because Johnson was exercising a royal prerogative.

You thought the British monarchy was just a matter of pageantry and ceremonial? Think again. It is no longer the monarch who rules, but many of the powers of monarchs persist and are exercised by the government. That allows ministers, in particular the Prime Minister, to rule almost arbitrarily at times, and to dismiss any kind of scrutiny by elected representatives.

In a fuller democracy, such behaviour by the executive would not be tolerated. It would be thwarted by a powerful judiciary. By the equivalent of Parliament, in fact. But in monarchical Britain, Parliament can still be overruled, and that’s what Johnson has done. He’s issued a diktat – well, strictly, got the queen to issue a diktat for him – and anyone we actually voted for is out of the picture, apart from those, handpicked by him, who are in his government.

Boris Johnson: author of a very British coup

There’s nothing unusual about this, historically. A man – it almost always is a man – who wants power untrammelled by constitutional niceties, starts on his road to autocracy by a coup d’état against a parliamentary body he finds vexatious.

Julius Caesar took on the Roman Senate. He came unstuck personally, murdered by a group of aristocratic senators, but in the civil war that followed, his successors won the imperial power in Rome that had eluded him.

In Britain, Charles I was no more successful than Caesar in breaking the power of parliament, and he too paid with his life, but again at the cost of a civil war.

Napoleon came to power in a France drained by tyranny, misgovernment and war, and secured his own rule by emasculating parliamentary authority. That meant he could exercise arbitrary and unconstrained power. The consequence was even more deaths in war leading to ultimate crushing defeat.

When Hitler managed to get MPs elected to the Germany parliament, they infamously showed their contempt for the institution of which they were members by turning their backs on the speaker. In short order, the Nazis had reduced parliament to a speaking shop only, wholly docile to Hitler’s rule.

Why do they get support when these would-be autocrats go down that road? After all, the people suffered terribly in every one of the cases I’ve mentioned and, as a general rule, things ended pretty badly, above all for them.

There is a naïve belief among many citizens, even in a democracy, that elected representatives are all lying, corrupt, power-hungry and ineffective. They look instead to a strong man who will sweep all these timeservers and timewasters out of the way and get things done. The things that everyone – by which they mean everyone who thinks like them – know to be necessary and which are being held up by the corrupt opportunists who occupy parliamentary seats.

That, after all, is exactly what has happened with Boris Johnson. Parliament has been unable to legislate Brexit. It hasn’t been able to do so because it is divided within itself, but that is a true reflection of the state of the nation. However, for some voters, the failure of parliament to reach a decision is a simply a failure of parliaments, and it’s time to move on, to find the man free of the corruption and personal ambition which parliamentarians serve, and have him deliver the Brexit the people voted for.

The irony is that the strong man in this particular instance is the most corrupt and lying of them all. But so were Hitler or Caesar. What BoJo’s supporters are looking for is strength, and none of the rest really matters. BoJo provides the strong smack of authority they crave.

The other irony is that in reality, no one voted for a hard Brexit. It wasn’t an option on the ballot paper. And the people who are clamouring most loudly for it will be among the hardest hit by it. But again, none of this concerns them. They see stalemate now, they see action from the strong man, and that’s what they admire.

People will tell me that BoJo’s nothing like the historical characters I mentioned. Certainly, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, he’s not making a bid for indefinite and unlimited power. But make no mistake about it, what he has done today is a coup d’état. He has seized personal power, monarchical power, for himself by eliminating the possibility of parliamentary scrutiny of his actions or opposition to them.

The coup d’état is temporary. It’s due to end on 14 October when parliament will be allowed, by grace of Boris, to convene again. And should take immediate action to cut back on the royal prerogative powers the executive exercises.

Or will it reconvene? Another lesson of history is that once autocrats have tasted such power, they find it hard to give up. And Brexit is going to lead to difficult times ahead, in which a strong man is going to be seen as still more necessary.

Will normal service resume on 14 October? I hope so. But do I think it’s guaranteed? I most certainly don’t.

Commemorations and mythologies

National myths matter. They define, or perhaps more accurately they express, national character.

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a Mexican friend explaining to me how important, to a Mexican, was the story of the ‘Malinche’. She was the native woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Cortés. She is the mother of the nation, formed as it is from the mixture of Spanish and native bloods; she is also the woman who betrayed her people to become the mistress of the man who led a bloody and deadly conquest of her land.

By the same token, Cortés is the father of that people. And yet he was also the murderer of thousands of its ancestors. That erotic but treacherous, intimate but murderous relationship is at the root of Mexican mythological history. And it’s as complex and fluid as Mexican life itself.

The United States has its mythical past too. And like most mythologies, what it owes to historical fact is pretty limited.

Celebration of the myth:
Mayflower pilgrims bring godliness and love of freedom to North America

American mythology starts with a bunch of pilgrims landing at what is now Plymouth rock in Massachusetts, seeking religious freedom. It then picks up the current of representative government, of the notion that the people are the true sovereign power in a state. It culminates in the emergence of democratic rule, at a time when in old Europe democracy was still a dirty word, though it would ultimately become the aspiration of so many countries.

Much of this is true. In the nineteenth century, the torch of democracy was held almost exclusively by the Americans. When Abraham Lincoln talked about the American Civil War as a conflict fought to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth, he was voicing an important truth. And yet, the United States was no democracy when he spoke it: no blacks and no women enjoyed the rights of white men. Even Catholics were far from enjoying the same rights as Protestants.

Those contradictions can be traced right back to the historical roots of the myth.

The Mayflower pilgrims weren’t concerned with religious freedom in general, only with their own religious freedom. As their descendants would show, most dramatically in the Salem witch trials, they were fully capable of being as vicious in their persecution of others as those they fled back in England.

In addition, they weren’t even the first to land in North America. They got there in 1620. A full twelve years earlier, the first permanent European settlement had been set up in Virginia. And a year before the pilgrims landed, two events occurred in Virginia whose fourth centennials have been celebrated in the last few weeks.

Back in July, it was the launching of representative government. Trump attended that commemoration. And this weekend, it was the arrival of the first slaves from West Africa. Trump stayed well away.

At the weekend, today's African Americans commemorated
the first arrival of African slaves in North America
A year before the Mayflower Pilgrims

Back in August 1619, the British privateer White Lion arrived near what is now the town of Hampton in Virgina and landed “20 and odd Negroes” whom he traded for food. The principle that humans could be bought and sold had been established. Slavery had begun its grisly existence on the North American continent and would not end for nearly two and a half centuries. Only in 1865, with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, would slavery finally and for all time be abolished in the US.

Its consequences would not die so soon, however. When Trump tells black Congresswomen to go back where they came from, he is expressing an attitude that underlay slavery and still hasn’t been driven out of US culture: that people of African ancestry are not fully members of American society.

That the attitude still persists is not a truth with which all Americans are at ease. Which is why the foundation myth of the country is much more concerned with the Mayflower pilgrims, misrepresented as champions of religious liberty. And with the birth of representative government, an event in which it’s easier to take pride than in the first arrival of slaves.

Which is why Trump went to the first commemoration. About representative government. Not to the other one. The one about slavery.

But it’s much more important that the second one happened.

Slavery and Trump: the poison lingers

We’re about to commemorate, because celebrate really isn’t the right word, the fourth centenary of the introduction of slavery on the North American continent, in 1619.

The first permanent European settlement in Virginia was established in 1608. So it took just eleven years before they were importing slaves from Africa. 

Anyone in Britain who feels any sense of superiority over their American cousins over this should think again. Those settlers in Virginia were decidedly and entirely British.

By a curious coincidence, as a Brit myself, I’m reminded of this dismal past regularly in my new home in the suburbs of the Spanish city of Valencia. Not far from where we live, in a wheat field, stand the ruins of a farm building. On the intact wall, an artist has painted a black man raising his fist as he looks at a field in which he has, no doubt, been working and will soon be working again.

Even today, even in Spain, still yearning to be free

It’s a curious sight not only because it reminds me of the Africans taken to America, but also because Africans come to Spain each year for the kind of work the man in the painting does. They’re paid, of course, and they go home afterwards, so they’re not slaves. But free? I’m not sure men driven by economic necessity so far from where they live can really be said to be free.

The institution of slavery marked American culture profoundly. If you believe that a group of people is so debased, so inferior that it is perfectly possible to buy and sell individuals from it, and you treat them as cattle for the best part of two and a half centuries, how long will it take you to understand that they are no different from you and certainly no less valuable?

There is something shocking in the fact that a movement has to be called ‘Black Lives Matter’, as though that were some kind of surprising new discovery. The United States was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. How is it a shock to discover that it really applies to all women as much as all men, and all blacks as well as all whites?

However, it seems that this truth is still a shock. The L A Times recently reported that one in a thousand black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of police violence. That’s two and half times more than their white equivalents.

In passing, those figures are bad enough entirely independent of race. Something like three people are killed by police each day in the US. So far in 2019, two have been killed in the UK, 1 in 2018. US police kill as many people in a day as the UK police killed in each of the last two years.

But above all, it is the contrast between black and white deaths that is particularly striking. It underlines why a movement called ‘Black Lives Matter’ had to be set up. There is still an indifference to the value of black life permeating US society, and in particular its power structures such as the police. I’ve quoted these words before but they’re worth quoting again, since they reflect how that indifference came from the very top of US society. This is Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1857, talking about slaves and their descendants, whether free or not, who, at the time of the Declaration of Independence:

…had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…

Why is all this of any particular interest now? Well, it isn’t just because of the commemoration of the introduction of slavery. It’s also because, by an ironic coincidence, this is the week in which Donald Trump made his offer to buy Greenland from Denmark.

The Danes, sensible in their adoption of twenty-first century standards, and sensitive to the needs of the Greenlanders, dismissed this proposal as absurd. And Trump, far from admitting his error – and when will he ever? – responded by cancelling his planned visit to Denmark.

To him, what he was proposing was “essentially a large real estate deal”. That’s a far more telling statement than he and even most of his critics realised. Because he wanted to buy an entire country, including its 50,000 inhabitants. And that to him is just “real estate”.

Trump: buying and selling a nation and its people
is just a real estate deal

People who look or sound different from the ruling Anglos in the US just don’t matter to a certain section of those Anglos. They can be bought and sold like real estate, or indeed like cattle. They can no longer be enslaved as they once were, but it seems they’re still viewed as inferior can still be shot with casual frequency.

The poison that entered the US soul four centuries ago hasn’t yet been worked out of the system. It’s interesting that it still drives Trump’s attitudes. And isn’t it appropriate that this should be revealed in the week we commemorate its four hundredth anniversary?

Policing as it should be done

It was great, for the young foreign couple in Valencia, to see an ad on a local website for a second-hand kitchen island. It was exactly what they’d been looking for. All they had to do was pay the money and collect the piece of furniture.

Alas, that turned out to be less easy than they’d imagined. The thing had been firmly glued together. There was no way to take it apart without breaking it. So they couldn’t carry down the five flights of stairs in disassembled pieces. It would have to be carried down bodily, as a whole

They tried the lift. But it didn’t matter which way they turned the piece of furniture. It was two centimetres too big. The lift doors wouldn’t close.

So they started on the massive job of manhandling it down the stairs.

Unfortunately, their progress wasn’t unobserved. A neighbour decided they must be burglars, stealing the prized possessions of the family on the fifth floor. No sooner had he had the thought than he acted on it. The police were summoned.

They arrived as the couple had finally reached the second floor. She was done in. She couldn’t have carried the colossal piece of furniture down another floor if her life had depended on it. When the police arrived, she made no attempt at all to resist what was coming next.

What was coming, however, surprised her. The police took a look at her, exhausted on the landing, and her husband, drenched in sweat and gasping to get his breath back, and decided no one less like a pair of burglars could possibly be imagined.

“Wait here,” they said, an injunction which, in their weary state, they had no trouble at all obeying.

The police climbed up the stairs to the apartment of the man who’d phoned them.

“What on earth do you mean by wasting police time in this way?” they asked him when he opened the door.

With a few neatly constructed sentences they expressed to him the extent of their displeasure at being summoned to deal with people who were clearly not engaged in any kind of criminal endeavour, but carrying out an entirely legal and understandable task. Then they returned to the second floor.

There they metaphorically rolled up their sleeves and helped the couple get the kitchen island down to the ground floor and loaded into their car.

Local police in Valencia
They can be tough but they can also be helpful

Our own experience in Madrid a few weeks ago was similar. Danielle had her purse filched from the backpack. We flagged down a police car to report the theft and, not only did they take a note of the event, they offered us a lift to a police station where the city has someone on duty to help tourists make their statements about crimes they’d suffered.

This contrasted to an experience I had as a student when I was stopped while heading home from a film-showing in college. I was carrying the three canisters of film for, if I remember, The Battleship Potemkin.

It was midnight. The cops had seen a young man with a heavy rucksack. There had been a lot of breakins recently. They were clearly just doing their job when they stopped me and I didn’t resent it at all.

What I did resent, on the other hand, is that once they’d established my bona fides, including my address – another ten minutes’ walk up the street where they’d stopped me and were interrogating me in the back of their van – they asked me to get out and drove off – straight past my front door.

To this day, I’ve never understood why they didn’t at least run me up the road in the van. What skin would it have been off their noses? And they knew how heavy my bag was.

Two styles of policing. And I know which I prefer.

When the little kid tries to play in the big boys’ playground

Early in August, the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the Spanish Ambassador to protest at the seizing of the oil tanker Grace 1 in Spanish waters. The embarrassed Spanish diplomat had to explain that while he, and his government, agreed that the incident had occurred in their waters, Britain claimed them for itself and when it sent Marines to take control of the vessel, it did so without consulting Spain.

Britain seizes the Grace 1.
The act of a might imperial power

It was an action worthy of an Imperial power. Britain, after all, only claims jurisdiction over those waters through its possession of Gibraltar. That’s a rock the size of a (very) small mountain, attached to the Spanish mainland and nearly 2500 kilometres from London. Britain took possession of it in the early days of its imperial expansion and only by right of war, since it was handed over by the Treaty of Utrecht which concluded the War of Spanish Succession.

Why on Earth was Britain involved in a war about the Spanish succession? You may well ask. Especially as most of the fighting took place in Germany anyway. Please don’t expect logic in any of this.

So the anomalous possession of a piece of obviously Spanish territory gave Britain the right, or so it felt, to seize an Iranian oil tanker. It did so on the grounds that the tanker was breaching sanctions against Syria, contrary to decisions of the European Union. That’s ironic since Britain is hell-bent on leaving the European Union, but that clearly didn’t stop certain people thinking that EU law provided useful cover for doing what they wanted to do in the first place.

In passing, it’s actually questionable whether EU law really did. Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister and an expert on these questions, told the Guardian:

The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me. One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU. And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others. That’s what the US does.

Spain claimed that, in reality, Britain was merely reacting to a demand from the US. Since the Americans have since made an attempt to seize the ship through the Gibraltar courts, it’s hard not to believe that this might, indeed, have been the case. It was US policy, rather than British, that led to the ship’s seizure.

So we have the curious spectacle of high-handed, possibly illegal, imperial action being taken by Britain. And yet it did so as no more than the poodle of the United States, a true imperial power where Britain, once a great power, is today a bit player in the game of global politics.

We didn’t have to wait long to have that proved to us. On 19 July, the Iranians seized the British tanker Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. Britain was powerless – literally – to act. It had a warship in the region, but far too far away to intervene. And in its much reduced state, it could only choose to send one more ship. Britannia once ruled the waves, but no more. Today it can’t provide military protection for its merchant navy.

Iran seizes the Stena Impero
Tit for tat, calling the bluff on British powerlessness

It no longer has the force to play the stooge for Trump’s US, let alone play with the big boys in its own right.

It might be wiser, you might think, for it learn the lesson and stop throwing its limited weight around. Indeed, it might be wiser if it stopped pretending that it was big enough to play on the world stage with the real powers of the world. The US is up there in the top tier, but even Iran is a major regional power. Britain? A minor power on the edge of Europe.

Which is why leaving our union with 27 nations in Europe is such a self-destructive move. We’ve demonstrated we can’t stand alone. But some old-Empire nostalgists are going to force us to try anyway.

The postscript to the Grace 1 story shows the only piece of wisdom in this whole sorry tale.

Gibraltar may be a quirk of history, at least insofar as belonging to Britain is concerned. But Gibraltarians have their heads screwed on properly. They voted massively against Brexit. And now the courts, followed by the territory’s first Minister Fabian Picardo, have shown the guts to stand up to the Americans. The court would not support the US claim to impound the ship. And the First Minister has released it.

Now that really is taking back control, the slogan of the Brexiters. However, it happened in opposition to US demands. Which we’ll certainly be far less able to resist once we leave the protection of the EU.

What Brexiters wish for and what they get may be entirely different things.