If this is disloyalty, we need more of it, not less

It had to happen, I suppose. Eventually a different narrative had to emerge. And, since the original one wasn’t particularly believable, the alternative was likely to be a lot more plausible.

Corbyn: cheated of victory by disloyal critics?
Or saved as long as possible from himself by those critics?

His supporters’ account of what happened in the two elections for which Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, runs something like this.

In 2017, he came tantalisingly close to winning the election, gaining the biggest single increase in popular vote of any Labour leader since the war. He was cheated of victory by the deliberate and treacherous behaviour of a number of Labour Party staff and members, led in particular by thoroughly disloyal Members of Parliament.

Just another 2500 votes would have given Labour the victory.

Then, in 2019, those same disloyal staff, MPs and members, conspired to undermine him further, willing to lose the election to Boris Johnson, as the price for driving Corbyn from the leadership.

It was a never particularly convincing story.

That’s first of all for a question of principle. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that occupying the leadership isn’t simply a matter of honour or even authority, it’s also a matter of responsibility. The first responsibility for a defeat is the leader’s. Any attempt to attribute blame to someone else is scapegoating to avoid personal accountability.

Secondly, the Corbynist explanation also fits the facts badly.

While Labour surged in the popular vote, that was less to do with Corbyn’s success, and much more to do with the continuing collapse of the Liberal Democrats as a rival party of the centre-Left.

Surge or not, Labour was still nearly 2.5 points behind the Tories in the popular vote, and ended up with 55 fewer Parliamentary seats. To set Labour’s achievement in 2017 in context, it lost then with 40.0% of the popular vote. Back in 1970, it also lost, but with 43.1%. In a first-past-the-post, constituency-based system, winning the popular vote only wins an election if it’s spread geographically the right way.

That’s where the tale of the 2500 for victory votes fails. The votes would have had to be in exactly the right constituencies, and that’s not something any campaign can engineer. Indeed, a smaller switch to the Tories, of exactly the right votes in the right places, would have given them a Parliamentary majority. The reasoning is meaningless.

As for the effect of the disloyal staff and members in 2019, with an extra two and a half years in charge, the Corbynists had greatly reinforced their control of the party machine. Internal opposition to Corbyn was far less powerful in 2019 than in 2017, and yet the defeat was far greater.

Patrick Heneghan.
Disloyal or working to stop Corbyn making things worse?

Which is what makes the new narrative more plausible. It comes from Patrick Heneghan, previously Labour’s executive director for elections and campaigns. He’s one of the former Labour staff accused of disloyalty by Corbyn supporters. By his own admission in the Huffington Post, he did indeed engage in action in direct opposition to the leader’s instructions.

He was part of a group that defied Corbynist instructions to defund a number of constituency campaigns in 2017. And which campaigns were listed for defunding? Why, they were all constituencies held by Labour MPs who had been critical of Corbyn.

In other words, the leader was deliberately jeopardising attempts to beat the Tories, because that mattered less to him than eliminating internal opposition to his rule.

Now, it’s true that some of those MPs were sitting on large majorities. But, since many of those seats were indeed lost in 2019, it’s clear they were by no means as safe as they might have appeared. Besides, the leader was trying to redirect the funds into campaigns for seats occupied by his loyalists, with majorities just as large.

So Heneghan and his group surreptitiously set up a separate fund, away from the leadership’s control, to funnel finance to the MPs Corbyn wanted defunded. And indeed the seats were held.

This is quite a statement, because it suggests that Corbyn’s relative success of 2017 – losing less badly than expected – was at least in part down to ‘disloyal’ staff disobeying his instructions and properly funding certain campaigns against his wishes.

With this in mind, it’s pretty obvious what happened in 2019. People like Heneghan could no longer influence events. A lot of the MPs opposed to Corbyn had been muzzled or had left. Indeed, the Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, had decided to leave Parliament altogether. So suddenly the bridle that had prevented him doing far more damage in 2017 was gone. And, unsurprisingly, the damage was far greater.

Why, we even lost Tom Watson’s former seat.

In this account, it wasn’t the supposed disloyalty of the staff that caused the disaster of 2019. It was because that supposedly disloyal group could no longer prevent it. It was they, and not Corbyn, who had limited the defeat of 2017; with their influence weakened in 2019, the defeat became a rout.

While the ‘disloyal’ group was able to influence things, losses were contained. When its influence waned, losses soared.

I don’t know about you, but that suggests to me that ‘disloyalty’ of this kind, to the Corbyn faction, was all that saved Labour in 2017. The disaster of 2019 was because ‘disloyalty’ of that kind was no longer in a position to save the party from Corbyn.

Or, putting it more positively, maybe loyalty to the party as a whole required disloyalty to Corbyn while he was leader. 

Corbynists won’t agree, but I can’t help finding that explanation of the facts far more convincing than theirs.

First Birthday

How a year can whip by. Or last an age…

When it’s just one sixty-seventh of your life, as in my case, it seems little more than the blink of an eye. But when it’s the whole of your existence, it’s everything. Nothing could be longer.

That probably makes it a real mercy to be pretty unaware of the passage of time in your first year. Otherwise it might seem painfully long. But it’s fine if you just enjoy each day as it comes, testing your increasing powers and resources as you go, as most of us do at that age. It’s only a shame that you’re unlikely to remember any of it later, since when else are you going to be that carefree?

First Birthday party
The cake was such fun. Especially when I could pick the fruit off it

At any rate, it was a great pleasure, and a privilege, to be able to attend the first birthday celebration of my granddaughter Matilda. And to wish her well on the second year that she’s just starting. There’ll be a lot of fun for her. Though there might also be a little pressure.

That’s the problem with life. It’s full of expectations. At first, it’s mostly other people who have them. Later on, you have them yourself, which is even more painful.

In Matilda’s case, for now, it’ll be mostly other people’s.

Poor thing. We were all so pleased when she mastered the art of crawling. She does it now with what can only be called aplomb. Great skill. To say nothing of speed.

But, I’m sorry to say, Matilda, adults are fickle. We’ll soon be expecting you to do that thing called walking instead. And once you’ve mastered that, it’ll be running that we’ll demand. Just be thankful that, for the moment, you’re not being asked to do it the other way around. Once you start work, you’ll meet plenty of people who’ll claim that nothing could be further from their minds but, in fact, demand that you run long before you walk.

And then there’ll be language too. For the moment, it’s pretty clear that you understand English well. We ask you to do things, and you do them promptly. If they’re things you want to do. We’re not fooled, you know: when you fail to do things, it isn’t down to your not understanding us, but to your deciding we can wait. Until you’re good and ready. Or even longer.

Why, you’ve even started to produce some words yourself. I keep hearing ‘yes’, at least at the ‘ya’ level. You don’t bother with ‘no’ because you have gestures for that and, boy, are they unambiguous.

We’ve heard something that sounds like ‘Mummy’ and a series of sounds that could be taken for ‘papa’ too, at least in the form ‘baba’, but that’ll do just fine.

Your grandmother and I are also certain that we heard you say ‘granddad’ a couple of times but, hey, we’re hardly impartial observers. Every else denies it. They may be right, but I like to think they aren’t.

You should, of course, keep on making the great progress you’ve already shown in language. The bad news, though, is that you’re about to face a challenge in this already difficult area.

You live in Spain, you see. You’ve probably noticed that lots of the people you meet make sounds that aren’t like those your parents and grandparents produce. By your reaction, you know very well that they mean well, and it wouldn’t surprise me that you understand them too already, since you’re bright enough. But here’s the thing: you’re going to have to start mastering those sounds yourself, as well as English ones.

Are you ready for that? Learning Spanish too? Everyone will tell you what a great advantage that’ll be for you, and they’re right. But it’s another task you have to take on, another challenge that you have to face.

And that’s the thing about life generally. It’s always that way. You get a challenge, you rise to it. And what’s your reward? You get to face another challenge, usually harder than the last one.

You don’t know about climbing mountains yet, but you will, since there are plenty near where you live. And the thing about climbing them is that you see a slope ahead of you leading to a crest, and you expend so much energy to get to the top of it that you feel you can’t go another step. And what do you find? That far from being at the top of the mountain, you’ve just got another slope with another crest ahead of you.

Still, if you press on you do get to the top in the end. And that’s a great feeling. In fact, so good a feeling that you can end up looking for more mountains to climb just to enjoy that feeling again.

You don’t yet about metaphors, or a metáforas, but that was one of them.

A year is long in the short time you’ve had so far. You’ve started another one now, and it won’t feel quite as long. But, boy, it’s going to contain a lot to learn, a lot of mountains to climb, and a lot of achievements you can take satisfaction from.

Enjoy all of it. It’ll be fun to join you at your second birthday party, where we can celebrate all your new accomplishments. And I’m looking forward to helping you enjoy quite a few more birthdays after that.

Just a year ago. But it feels like an age

Disappearing Toffee

 It was all misunderstanding, it turns out, in the end.

Toffee, our toffee-coloured toy poodle, doesn’t just like to walk around the woods with me. In fact, she would probably prefer not to have to walk around the woods anything like as much as I make her. But when she does have to, she wants to be able to check interesting things out.

Toffee walking in the woods

You know, get underneath that bush from which a curious smell is emerging.

Or stop to investigate carefully another dog’s pee from a large rock on the path, because there are a lot of questions to answer about that kind of thing: I mean, was it a big dog? A fierce dog? A male dog or a female like Toffee herself?

As well as all those interesting considerations, there’s the more urgent matter of whether it was there quite a while ago or just recently. Because that can make quite a difference to how we behave going forward: advancing breezily with never a worry in the world, or much more cautiously and with apprehension.

Above all, whatever our investigations lead to, there’s one vital task which we’re certainly going to carry out: Toffee must leave her own calling card on top of the stranger’s. That’s the quickest bit: crouch down, quick spray, move on. Job done.

The thing about all that is that it takes time. And if I don’t stop and wait until she gets to the end, there’s a terrible chance that I’ll be out of sight by the time she’s finished. And then what is she to do?

I reckon she ought to be able to smell the way that I’ve gone. Especially since Luci’s there too. But it seems it’s not that simple. Toffee likes to work by line of sight. If she can see us, she can follow us. If she can’t see us, well, she can’t work out where we’ve gone.

Talking about Luci, who’s the other toy poodle, she couldn’t be less like Toffee in this regard. I mean, they both show entirely justified care of other dogs around and about. Especially big ones. They have that much in common at least.

Toffee and Luci together
So similar and yet so different

Luci always has been afraid of other dogs, but then she’s always been more timid. In fact, when she first joined us, she came from a family who’d never taken her out on a walk. She was scared even of going outside. A place with no ceiling? With no walls around her to keep her safe? And we expected her to like it? She would regularly make a dash for home.

Eventually, though, she adapted and now she enjoys her walks at least as much as Toffee does.

Toffee was much bolder right from the start. She used to go right up to other dogs and see if they’d like to be friends. To be fair, none of them ever bit her, but a few of the bigger ones trampled her a couple of times. Not always deliberately, mind you. When there’s such a lot of you, sometimes you can lose control over where every single bit of you is, and when you’re as small as Toffee, that bit might right on top of you.

So she’s learned to be as wary of other dogs as Luci. But not, unfortunately, in the same way. Luci always knows where we are. Even if a large dog shows up, and Luci disappears into the undergrowth, she’s always keeping an eye on us so that, once the hazard has passed, she can reappear next to us, even if we’ve kept moving down the path.

That’s a useful skill that Toffee sadly doesn’t have. As I said, if she gets a bit too far from us, whether avoiding another dog or simply because she’s stopped to investigate something interesting, she forgets to keep an eye on where we are, so she can’t automatically find us afterwards.

I reckon that’s what happened the other day. Once she’d finished with her business, she looked up for Luci and me and couldn’t see us. So she did a sensible thing: she took the path I usually take to get home from that place.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the path I’d taken that time.

The result? A missing dog situation.

Stupidly I didn't follow my instinct and look for her on my usual path, where Toffee had actually gone. Instead, I walked up and down and around the place I’d last seen her, calling her and whistling, in increasing trepidation.

It took half an hour before I finally decided to try out that other path.

I met a couple coming the other way, with two large dogs (you understand that ‘large’ is a relative term, and I’m applying a toy-poodle scale). I asked them if they’d seen a little orange poodle, but they hadn’t.

Disappointed, I turned back the way I’d come. But then the man called out: “is this your dog?”

“No,” I replied, thinking he’d seen Luci, who had as usual decamped into the undergrowth when she’d seen the large dogs, but about whom I wasn’t worried, “that’s the black one. I’m looking for the orange one.”

“But this one is orange,” he said.

I went back to take a look. And, joy unconfined, it was indeed Toffee!

Well, the joy was rather one-sided. Toffee wasn’t ready to forgive me for what she clearly regarded as an abandonment. She has a way, when she’s fed up with being overwalked, of lying down in the path and refusing to move, until I pick her up. She did that several times on the way home, but each time I took her in my arms, she wriggled to be put back down again.

You want me to keep going?
Then you can pick me up and carry me

The message was clear.

“No, I don’t want you carrying me. You’re the one who walked off and left me all alone in the woods. Where anything could happen to me. I don’t like you any more.”

Fortunately, it didn’t last. It took a while, but by the afternoon she’d relaxed enough to be friends again. And, as usual, took her siesta lying next to me on the couch.

Friends again

All’s well as ends well, I suppose. But I’m going to be taking things a lot more carefully on our future walks…

The Hitler lesson that doesn't breach Godwin's Law

 Godwin’s law states that any online discussion, if it goes on long enough, will eventually include a statement comparing someone to Hitler or his actions. So you’re talking about some particularly unpleasant political leader, for instance, and he’s known to have used excessive force against his opponents, maybe the army against protestors, and someone points out that this is an act worthy of Hitler.

The effect is to end any useful conversation in the thread.

This is because generally what people are comparing others to is the most infamous and obscene of Hitler’s deeds, the Holocaust. That’s the deliberate, planned extermination of all the 12 million Jews of Europe, together with homosexuals, Romanies and other minority groups.

The emphasis is on ‘deliberate’. There wasn’t even a pretence at ethnic cleansing by physically displacing people. It was, from the time of the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 when the ‘final solution’ (i.e. the mass murder of the Jews) was adopted as official policy of the Nazi state, a clear intent to wipe out a people by mass murder.

That was a crime so heinous as to be without precedent and, indeed, unique to this day (let’s hope it stays so). So comparing any other act to it is obviously nonsensical, and almost certainly a ludicrous exaggeration.

However, though the Holocaust is obviously Hitler’s most shameful crime, it was by no means his only toxic act. Others were less sickening but deeply threatening all the same. And there’s no reason why we can’t compare the behaviour of other politicians to them.

Trump and Hitler 
A comparison to the worst crime is inappropriate or at least premature
But stealing power with a minority? That works. And it’s frightening

The Guardian journalist David Smith recently quoted a US politician, talking about Trump:

The Democratic Congressman Jim Clyburn, whose endorsement of Biden was critical to his nomination, told the Axios website in March: “I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist. But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how. And that’s why I’m trying to sound the alarm.”

He’s absolutely right to do so.

One of the terrifying actions Hitler took prior to the Holocaust, and an action that would ultimately make the Holocaust possible, was his seizure of power.

He never won a majority of the German electorate. He peaked in the election of July 1932, when the Nazis took just over 37% of the vote, making them the biggest party in Parliament, though without a majority. When elections were held again in the same year, in November, the last free multi-party elections before the Nazis fell from power, their share fell to just over 33%.

But that didn’t stop him from being called on to form a government. Once in power, of course, he had the means to ensure that no free elections would be called again. When elections were held in March 1933, after months of terror directed against the left, the Nazis still only managed just under 44% and still had no Parliamentary majority. But then, in November 1933, the Nazis were the only legal party and took 92% and, surprise, surprise, 100% of the seats.

So Clyburn is right to point to the dangers now facing the US. Just like in Germany in 1932, a vocal and apparently solid – one’s inclined to say solid from the neck up – minority of voters persist in supporting a dangerous autocrat, despite his proven incompetence, mendacity and corruption.

It’s extraordinary that anyone can support Trump despite those proven charges against him. We’ve seen his inept handling of the pandemic. We’ve seen his use of a pardon to protect a convicted criminal who stayed loyal to him. We’ve seen him lying about the extent of his support. But despite all that, there is a large minority that continues to back him.

That’s all it took to get Hitler into power too.

Once he’d got there, Hitler immediately set about dismantling the apparatus of democratic accountability that might have prevented him retaining power.

And isn’t that exactly what Trump is attempting to do now? He’s even trying to demolish one of the oldest institutions in the US, the postal service, to prevent people being able to cast votes by mail.

Now that is a valid parallel with the behaviour of Hitler. You don’t have to pretend that Trump is a man who wants to launch a new Holocaust – that’s not the similarity. What makes him like Hitler is his utter conviction, against all the evidence, that he’s the man to lead the US. And the unscrupulous means he’s prepared to use to cheat his way into holding onto power.

What happens later it’s hard to say. Except that, Holocaust or not, it didn’t work out well for Germany, did it? And the rest of the world had to pay a huge price too.

US voters have a serious responsibility in November. Jim Clyburn is right to underline the fact.

And that’s no breach of Godwin’s Law.

Holidays: the poodle-eye view

There are times when I worry about how well Luci and Toffee, our toy poodles, are enjoying their lives with us. Obviously, the only way to establish the level of satisfaction others are experiencing, is to consult them about it. That requires a relaxed and unthreatening environment.

So I had a quiet chat with them the other day, after they’d had lunch and were enjoying a bit of a siesta on our bed. With our holiday ending, I wanted to establish what they’d thought of it. The results were illuminating.

Luci, bold in black, and Toffee, joyful in ginger
taking their siesta after a good lunch

Me: So, girls, how has this holiday been for you?

Toffee: Holiday? What’s a holiday?

Me: Well, when you take a break from your ordinary routine and go and do something different.

Luci: Why would you want to do that?

Me: Well, for a change, I suppose. A change is as good as a rest [I thought that was quite clever].

Luci: What wasn’t restful about staying at home?

I couldn’t think of an answer to that. And while I was trying to, Luci pressed home the attack.

Luci: Home’s a place where there’s plenty to eat…

Toffee wasn’t having that

Toffee: Nearly plenty to eat…

Luci: Nearly plenty to eat, our bed…

Me: Our bed, actually

Luci: Our bed, where we let you sleep too. And there’s our couch [I resisted making any other intervention] and various places we know well, feel comfortable in, where we can go and relax when we feel like it.

Toffee: Which is most of the time.

Luci: Most of the time. Right. So what’s not restful about that?

Toffee: And there’s Misty, our cat.

Luci: You’re right. I was forgetting him. Yep, Misty the cat. Good to have around and smell from time to time. Or irritate like hell if you’re Toffee.

Toffee: Irritate like hell? What do you mean? Misty thinks I’m the nicest dog imaginable.

There was a bit of a pause, finally broken by Luci.

Luci: Well, I’m glad you think that.

I’ve got to admit, I wasn’ t enjoying their feedback so far.

Me: Didn’t you like the place up in the mountains?

Toffee: Listen, pal, it took two days in that damn car to get there. How’s that restful?

Luci: Besides, haven’t you noticed how mountains are things that go up and up? And you lot always seem to want to go up them? Beats me why you bother. It’s exhausting.

Me: But coming back down is pretty easy, isn’t it?

Luci: Sure, but doesn’t just show how pointless the whole thing is? I mean, you go to all that effort to get to the top. And then you come back to where you started from in the first place. Why do you do that?

Me [a little offended]: I thought you liked walks

Luci [defusing the tension]: Look, and please understand that I really don’t mean any offence, there’s a walk and there’s a forced march. There’s a big difference.

Me: Still. You must have liked that pool where you went bathing, didn’t you?

Luci cooling her weary paws

Luci: Sure. It was great. But only to cool down my paws after you made me walk all the way there. And my paws wouldn’t have needed cooling if I hadn’t had to walk there in the first place. Besides, I still had to walk back.

Me: OK, but you must be enjoying yourselves now, what with having little Matilda around.

Toffee [who was jumping up and down by now, a sure sign of her excitement]: Oh, yeah, we love Matilda. She’s great. We love it that she eats in a highchair. And all we have to do is stand underneath and wait for her to throw great pieces of highly desirable food down to us. Which she always does because she likes doing it far more than eating the stuff herself.

Luci: Oh, yeah, that’s really great.

Toffee: It means that we really get pretty much enough food. Which is pretty much the only time that happens.

Luci: But see, we don’t need to leave home for that to happen. I mean, she was in our place not that long ago, wasn’t she? Highchair and all? Why can’t we have that happen again?

Me: Well, it’s going to, actually. Pretty soon after we get back.

Dogs don’t clap their hands, because they don’t have any. But I could see that was what they would be doing if they did.

Toffee: Now that’s good news.

Luci: That’s the kind of holiday we like. A change we can actually enjoy. Without even having to leave home. Let’s have more holidays like that.

That’s the trouble with focus-group studies. Damn good at giving you information about how your clients think about what you’re providing. But it isn’t always the response you wanted.

Ah, well. This feels like a consultation exercise to forget about. So we can keep taking them on holiday anyway. Listen and ignore. It’s what politicians do when they don’t get the feedback they want.

Why should I be any different?

Prerogative of the Harlot

 “Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”

The words come from a speech by a Conservative Party leader and British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His attack was on two press barons, powerful men, subject to no means to hold them to account.

The problem remains as acute today, with Media groups exercising massive influence, without being answerable for anything they say or write.

Indeed, in many ways it’s worse today, because some of the worst distortions of truth are put out on social media platforms which refuse to accept even the responsibility of publishers. Fake news from obscure individuals or malevolent websites gain currency from millions of others passing them on. Look at the scurrilous untruths circulating about Bill Gates or George Soros, for example.

Power without responsibility, as Baldwin said.

Ironically, it is also in government itself that such harlotry is being exercised, and by Baldwin’s own successors, the leaders of the British Conservative Party. Nesrine Malik has provided an excellent analysis of how the UK government, “led by a shallow prime minister, populated by careerists and directed by a grandiose and sophomoric special adviser” (Dominic Cummings), sets out to dodge responsibility by blaming scapegoats for its failures.

It blames its hopeless mishandling of the Covid pandemic on poor management of care homes, failure to observe proper standards by black and minority ethnic communities, misleading advice from scientists or, quite simply, the bad behaviour of individual members of the public.

We see the same behaviour in the US. Trump blames anyone but himself for things going wrong, and boy have they gone wrong. Covid deaths are now approaching fifty percent higher than the total losses from the Vietnam war, though that murderous conflict lasted nearly twenty years.

Listening to Trump, though, the responsibility is to be laid firmly at the doors of inept scientists, of Democratic State governors, or the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Like Cummings and Johnson in Britain, he is blameless in all this, and is being let down by treacherous individuals who are out to get him.

Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump
Chasing power, less keen on responsibility

It’s not a phenomenon limited to the right. In Britain, supporters of the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seem intent on undermining the party to ensure that it does not achieve the success under new leadership that eluded it under his. He, it seems, was let down by foul play and treachery.

Corbynists are convinced that, unlike other defeated leaders of the past, from any party, Corbyn is to be assigned no share of the blame for the debacle to which he led Labour in December’s general election. Instead, they vent their venom on the splitters, traitors and general scum among members and party staff, Blairites and Red Tories all of them, who actively conspired to cheat Corbyn of victory.

It’s the same kind of conspiracy theory as informs claims of Covid being deliberately spread to inflict a dangerous vaccine on us all. These are merely allegations with no serious evidence for them, whose only effect is to divert attention from the real problem. Which is the incompetence of would-be leaders who failed to lead.

That’s the problem of the Cummings/Johnson gang. They love being in power. But they have no will to do the actual tedious work of government. Just as Trump has ducked every challenge that has come his way, preferring to attack others and retreat to a golf course. Or Corbyn who wanted the leadership but didn’t want to get off the fence on the key question of his time, Brexit, leaving his party rudderless when his hand should have been steering it.

Power without effort. And certainly without being held responsible. Boris Johnson did all in his power to eliminate from Parliament anyone who might call him to account, including senior Conservative MPs expelled from the Party to prevent them even being candidates. Just like Trump refuses responsibility. And Corbyn is anxious to foist it on someone else.

Exponents of the prerogative of the harlot down the ages. Surely we deserve better. The US has the opportunity to improve its position in November. In Britain, Labour at last has a leader worthy of the name. He has an uphill battle, given where Corbyn left Labour, to unseat the unprincipled men now in power, but if we pull together, we can help him do it.

Wouldn’t it be fine if we could say goodbye to all that harlotry, at last?

120 today

She’d have been 120 years old today, my grandmother.

I’ve lived too long in Catholic countries – Italy, France and now Spain – to forget my grandmother’s birthday. The 15^th of August, the feast of the Assumption of Mary. Today, I forgot that the shops would be closed, until I’d walked down to the supermarket to find it shut. But I didn’t forget that it was my grandmother's birthday.

Which is ironic. Remembering my grandmother’s birthday thanks to a Christian festival, though she was someone who never practised but was always profoundly moulded by being Jewish.

This was my maternal grandmother, Yetta. If you read this blog regularly, you may remember her in ‘The Girl on the Dockside’, waiting for the ship that would take her to distant Britain, as she clutched her mother’s hand with one of hers, while in the other she held her little brother’s potty. The brother was in her mother’s other arm.

Her family had escaped the city they called Vilna, today Vilnius, then part of the Russian Empire. Russia was a land of pogroms, anything but kind to Jews. Yetta had little love for the Tsars.

In Britain, she followed the same political trajectory as many other Jews. She started on the far left, glorying in the revolution that had brought down the Tsar and opened a perspective towards a more glorious future for Russia, as the Soviet Union, just a year before the First World War ended.

She joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

It was while she was chairing a public meeting of the party that she was spotted by Nat, a man ten years her senior, only recently released from Dartmoor prison, to which he’d been condemned as a conscientious objector. He was never a Communist, but like Yetta he was part of that general wave of radical thinking that had swept British Jewry and, indeed, Jews in many other countries.

Yetta had previously been engaged to a young man who had served in the war and somehow survived, only to die in the flu pandemic that followed it (I suspect Yetta would have reacted to today’s Coronavirus pandemic with gloomy familiarity). It took her a while to come back from that, but eventually, after a stormy courtship, Yetta and Nat got married.

They lived through the upheavals of the twenties. They saw the first Labour governments, and they saw the long period of Conservative power that followed the Great Crash of 1929. And they watched with horror the rise to power of anti-Semitic totalitarians in Germany in the thirties.

My favourite image of Yetta
Sketch by a friend in 1930, when she was 30

They were still of the Left. Even my mother had to attend Young Communist League classes on Marxist philosophy in the late thirties, until she could stand the boredom no longer. My mother joined the Labour Party, by then a much more appropriate home for Yetta and Nat too.

Then came the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yetta knew of ninety relatives who had stayed behind in Vilna. After the war, she could find no trace of any of them, even with the help of the Red Cross. That they’d been killed was fairly certain, but we never knew where, when or how.

Then in 1948, the state of Israel was founded. The event was supported by the Labour Party, then in power in Britain. Indeed, Israel itself was ruled for many of its early years by its sister Party, Labor.

Why did Israel matter to British Jews, who had no intention of moving there? Because it was a living symbol of the refusal of Jews ever to be passive victims again. Now they would have a nation of their own, capable of defending itself, and that would be a safe haven for any Jew who could get there, when facing renewed persecution in their country of origin.

Throughout my childhood, on my many visits to my grandparents’ house, I was struck by the collecting tin for Israel on the mantelpiece. It mattered to them deeply. It said, “what happened to our relatives in Vilna must never happen again”.

The kind of collecting box my grandparents always had

But Yetta’s political evolution was continuing. There came a time when the centre-left, Liberal newspaper that she read (and I still do), the Guardian, became too critical of Israel for her liking. She, and Nat with her, switched instead to the Conservative Daily Telegraph.

As I became more politically aware, I had long and usually fruitless debates with them. How could Israel justify building itself a country in a place that already had inhabitants? How could it bring itself to drive so many of them off their land? How could Jews subject Palestinians to the very same indignities and deprivations that they had previously suffered themselves?

I realise now that my arguments could not possibly sway them. Whatever Israel did wrong, to Jews it was the only rock to which they could cling. And their experience of the Holocaust had been the most brutal object lesson in how badly they needed that rock.

There were 12 million Jews in Europe before the Nazis set about destroying them. Afterwards there were just 6 million. A massive genocide had been at least 50% successful.

Many in Labour point out that they must be allowed to criticise the state of Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. They’re right. But what they often do isn’t criticism, proposing ways to improve. It drifts into demonisation, which views Israel as not merely mistaken, but frankly evil. A demon state can’t be reformed, it has to be destroyed.

To many Jews, that would feel like the loss of their one bulwark against renewed persecution. Besides, it would certainly lead to a new Holocaust amongst the Jews living there now. 

It’s hard to see that as anything but anti-Semitic.

That, I think, is why Yetta, like many Jews, moved over decades in her life from the radical Left to the centre-Right. Because escaping from the Russian Empire hadn’t been enough. It had taken building their own State to make the Jews feel safe. Or at least safer.

Anyone denying them that right represented nothing less than a threat to their existence. And they – she – would have nothing to do with them. Something Labour critics of Israel need to remember today.

It’s funny the things my grandmother’s birthday brings to mind.

Corona: not just the problems we knew about

Corona just means crown. We use the word for things that have, or seem to have, a crown. There’s a corona around the sun. There’s a corona around the particularly nasty virus we talk about so much these days. And, of course, there’s a corona on every crowned head, by very definition.

So spare a thought for poor Spain. Like England, it’s struggling with both the health and the financial impact of the virus. Its strict lockdown to protect public health worked a lot better than the weaker measures in Britain, but the damage to the economy has been painful. Though, oddly, England has damaged its economy even more seriously, while controlling the pandemic less well. But then, England has Cummings and Johnson.

Today, however, cases in Spain are increasing once more at a depressing rate, and lockdown measures are having to be reintroduced. Just as they are in England. Although in England they seem to be targeting the Midlands and the North first of all, as though the Conservatives want to punish traditional Labour areas for having the audacity to vote for them instead.

Spain has an additional element of suffering. It’s also having to cope with Corona problems of the other, more ancient variety. The ones associated with the Crown. Especially since its previous occupant, Juan Carlos I, erstwhile King and now King emeritus, decided to do a bunk, fleeing abroad to some destination that has yet to be made public.

Juan Carlos I: ex-King who did a flit, and who knows to where?

His flight was precipitated by the ongoing investigation of his financial affairs. In particular, the judicial authorities find that his bank accounts in Switzerland raise a number of questions they’d like answered (yes, the understatement is deliberate).

This is sad, because Juan Carlos was the designated successor to the dictator Franco but, instead of maintaining the dictatorship, he oversaw an orderly transition to democracy. A referendum adopted the new constitution, still in force today, less than three years after the dictator’s death.

What’s more, not three years after that, when a coup against the new regime was launched by disaffected members of the paramilitary police and the army, Juan Carlos spoke out powerfully against it, rallying the nation to the cause of legitimate government. That ensured the coup’s failure.

Guardia Civil Colonel Antonio Tejero invading Parliament

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic and I share the misgivings of many over the length of time it took the King to come out with that statement. The initial attack against the Parliament took place just before 6:30 in the evening and the King’s broadcast went out at 1:14 in the morning. He recorded it around an hour earlier, but even that was six hours after the coup was launched.

There are those who say he knew in advance that it was going to happen, and only came out firmly in opposition once it became clear not enough of the army supported it. I don’t know how true or false that is. It is interesting, however, that there are those doubts, and that even as long ago as 1981 there were therefore some suspicions clouding the admiration felt towards the King by the Spanish people.

Which may have been a harbinger of what has happened now.

Even so, there are over 600 streets and squares called after Juan Carlos I across Spain. I am, indeed, in one of them now, as I write this piece from the flat near Madrid my one-year-old granddaughter inhabits and kindly shares with her parents (and, right now, us).

Today, a number of councils are facing motions from the Left suggesting it may be time to change the names of those streets and squares.

The government, too, led by Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist but on the Right of his party, is having to fight off moves from his coalition partner, from parties on whose parliamentary support he relies, and even from Socialist colleagues, to review the legal position of the Crown in Spanish politics. It is an offence, for instance, to insult the King, though that could be changed simply by new legislation. More problematic, the King can’t be held accountable for his acts either, and to change that would require a constitutional amendment.

Not the moment, Sánchez argues.

Ah, yes. He has a lot on his plate. Spain is closing down discos and bars again as the scourge of the virus builds again. The country has a shattered economy to rebuild. And now it has the distraction of a monarchy with a former King who’s beginning to look as toxic as the virus.

It amazes me that in today’s world we still have regimes led by men entitled to deference by right of birth. That strikes me as something to fix, so I’d like to see all three questions addressed at once. And perhaps in Britain as well as Spain.

But I can see how it makes the uphill struggle that Spain already faces even steeper and longer than it already was.

So spare my adopted nation a little sympathy…

Postscript: when the military knows how to respond to a coup

On the night of the coup, 23 February 1981 (so the event is referred to as 23F), the only city that was taken over by the military was the one where we live now. Let me quickly say that the two things aren’t causally connected. It’s just that the military region of Valencia was commanded by the general who supported the coup most actively.

Things went reasonably smoothly for him, until he sent tanks out to the airport at Manises, to get the air force unit there to join in. He got a dusty reply from the colonel in charge, according to the story a minister of the time later told:

“I have a Mirage on the runway with its engines running and armed with air to ground missiles. If the tanks heading for the base don’t turn around and pull back I’ll order it to take off and attack them. And I have another Mirage fighter ready on the runway just in case.”

The tanks retreated.

Peaks among the mountains

It’s odd going on holiday in retirement. I mean, a break’s always a good thing to have. But being retired is like a continuous break anyway. A break from a break? Seems odd.

But odd isn’t bad. And this break was great.

How should I begin to describe the greatness?

I suppose a good starting point is the place itself. We travelled to Cantabria and Asturias, on Spain’s northern coast. Once there, we spent most of our time in the mountains.

Forests in the mountains of Cantabria

The same mountains, under conditions more English
Except that the temperature remained pleasantly mild

This was only my second visit to northern Spain, and the first proper one. Back in about 1967, my parents didn’t like the idea of visiting the country while the dictator Franco was still in power. But, having got down to Hendaye, in South-West France and right on the border, they decided we should at least pop across and take a quick look. We had a day-long visit to San Sebastián before beetling back to the (politically) safer territory of France. De Gaulle, still President back then, had at least had the decency to be elected to that office, rather than seize power militarily like Franco.

My mother with her sons on that day trip, way back then

In 2020, we could take a little time and let ourselves be enchanted.

We discovered a restaurant we enjoyed enormously. So much, in fact, that we visited it three times rather than try anywhere else. It’s the Mirador Peña Colsa in Cabuérniga if ever you want to try it, and I recommend you do. The local specialty of Cocido Montañes is worth a visit for its own sake, the mountain setting is superb, and we particularly liked the proprietor, with whom we struck up such a relationship that she gave us a bottle of wine as a leaving present after our last visit.

Her attitude was exactly right. Brimming over with friendliness, as so many are in Spain, where rudeness or hostility seem limited to a tiny minority. On our second visit, she announced, “Ah. All my tables are reserved,” and then added, looking around, “now, where can I put you?”

She was a specialist at squeezing people in. We even saw one couple lunching at a table in the car park.

A couple enjoying their at a table on the edge of the car park

Then there were the remarkable landscapes. Occasionally one comes across places one can only think of as magical. On this visit, that was a series of waterfalls – well, at the cascade level – in woodland at the top of a long valley. ‘At the top’ meant a long and weary walk, but the water, without being freezing, was cooling enough to provide all the relief we needed.

Woodland cascade in Cantabria

Even the poodles enjoyed it, with Luci going so far to take a swim to cool herself down.

Luci enjoying the woodland pool

Equally memorable, but for qualities more dramatic than magical, was our visit to the Picos de Europa. These are not the peaks of Europe – the high Alps are far higher – but they are the first sight sailors would see on returning to Spain from the West. The ‘Peaks of Europe’ told seamen tired of the long Atlantic crossing that they were nearing home.

That’s where we had an experience that illustrates one of the other qualities we’ve come to know and, in a rather special sense, love in Spanish authorities. About twenty or thirty kilometres out from where we planned to start our walk, we came across a ‘No Entry’ sign alongside another announcing that the road had been closed for work.

What? After driving so far? They wouldn’t let us get to the start point of our hike?

Now this is something that keeps happening in, say, Madrid. A road will suddenly be closed, with no apparent good reason, no notice and no attempt to set up a diversion. “Sorry, mate,” someone in the local administration seems to be saying, “you’re just going to have to find another way. And if there isn’t one, find something else to do.”

There certainly wasn’t any other way to get where we wanted to go. And, indeed, while we sat and pondered, we saw more than one car turn back. But then we chatted with another driver and we collectively decided that, since they hadn’t actually put a cordon across the road, we might just have a go.

Which was just as well. The road wasn’t closed. There were roadworks happening, at three places – bulldozers hacking great chunks out of the cliffs, in fact – but as long as you accepted that you might be caught by a temporary closure, and have to wait to be waved through, you could still get to the top.

I suspect the men doing the work simply didn’t have any warning signs about possible delays. “Oh, heck,” they probably said to each other, “we’ll declare the road closed. And for good measure, put up a ‘no entry’ sign. The bold and the rebels will come through anyway. If the others go home, well, at least there’ll be fewer cars for us to deal with.”

We enjoyed the hike in the mountains. It was exhausting, and we had to turn back before we reached the top of the pass we were aiming for, but we saw eagles and we saw chamois, as well as spectacular. What more could we want?

A chamois herd enjoying its lunch

And the whole experience was given additional spice by knowing we’d braved a no entry sign to undertake it. All contributing to a great break-from-a-break.