Swiss sense and satisfaction. An example for Britain

My wife Danielle holds just one nationality, French, but by birth, with a wholly Swiss father and a half-Swiss mother, she’s more Swiss than anything else.

No to breaking bridges to Europe...
If only the Brits could learn to be so smart

My stepson David (pure coincidence) is French and British (just like me, as it happens, if the other way around) but he was actually born in Switzerland.

When I first met Danielle, her mother lived in a street that ended at a field. Beyond that field, a few minutes’ walk away, could be seen the first apartment blocks of the Swiss city of Basel. Her aunt lived in the Canton of Geneva, and we often visited her in her house near that great Swiss city.

So one way or another, Switzerland loomed large in my life for a while, and I spent quite a lot of time there. And one of the things that annoyed me most about the place was that it was so damned self-satisfied. I mean, they didn’t even grant women the right to vote until 1971. That was at federal level, and the last canton – state – didn’t extend the suffrage to women until 1990, and on the most extraordinary of pretexts, that voting took place by show of hands on the market square, and it was too small to allow women to join the men.

But then I looked around the place and I realised that, for all its faults, Switzerland actually had a lot to be satisfied about. We met a (French) social worker employed in Basel who had sent a girl in social service care to London to learn English; while there, the girl had, on her own initiative, got herself admitted to the Royal Ballet School; the social services decided to fund her to go back again.

I don’t know any other country which would spend that much for a child in care.

Even more striking was the flood of refugees the country took in. The Rwandan genocide took place during the time that I was visiting the country regularly, and it was striking to see the number of tall, magnificent Tutsi refugees we would see on the streets. We got to know one of them well.

In fact, the number of immigrants is perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of Swiss life. The United Kingdom has a high percentage of immigrants, 12.4% of the entire population, though to listen to the moaning of many of our xenophobes, you might imagine it was far higher than that. It was that xenophobia which gave the Leave side its victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Germany has a lower percentage of immigrants, though not by much: 11.9%. That’s created quite a problem too, with the far-right Alternative for Germany making advances. However, they’ve never broken through, and Angela Merkel, much criticised for having let in 1.7 million refugees, is once more riding high in the polls. As the Guardian recently argued, the country has adapted. Certainly, it continues to be Europe’s most powerful economy.

Switzerland also has a great economy (that’s why they can look after children in care so well). In fact, it’s only the smaller population that keeps its economy smaller, though per head it’s far ahead. And yet Switzerland takes even more immigrants than either Germany or the UK. Astonishingly, almost 29% of the population is made up of immigrants.

That’s led to complaints there as well. The anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party (SVP), though far from a majority, is the biggest single party in the Parliament. 

Switzerland isn’t a member of the EU. But it is a member of the single market, and also of the Schengen system of open borders. Without actually joining the Union, it has built a large number of bilateral agreements with EU members, all of which depend on its membership of the single market and Schengen group.

So when the SVP launched a referendum to pull Switzerland out of the two systems, there was consternation in government, business and quite a lot of the population. The economy, as we’ve seen, is doing well. Everyone benefits from that. Knocking out a key element of the foundation on which the wealth is built would be pretty stupid. “Worse than Brexit,” many said.

Well, they didn’t. Some 62% of the electorate said “no, thanks, we’re staying in”. They sent the SVP off to lick its wounds.

No wonder the Swiss have so much to be satisfied about. They’ve rejected the xenophobia that seems to have so many Brits in its grip. And they can see a good deal when they have one, and their membership of EU organisations is a very good deal for them. Nor do they feel to close their borders to immigrants, as the SVP wanted: as the Germans are learning, immigrants contribute to wealth much more than they take from it.

What a pity Brits couldn’t be as sensible as the Swiss. We might have understood that ‘taking back control’ was just an empty phrase, not worth the cost we’re going to pay. Swiss good sense might have led us to Swiss levels of prosperity and even Swiss levels of satisfaction.

When extermination is more satisfying than mere victory

It’s one thing to defeat your enemies. It’s another to crush them.

That’s an idea forcefully portrayed in the latest film by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, While at War. 

“You will win, but you will not convince”
Karra Elejalde as Miguel de Unamuno in While at War

The key scene is in a lecture hall of the University of Salamanca, on the Spanish national day or ‘Race Day’, as it was called in the time of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, at the time leader of the military insurrection that led to a three-year civil war. 

The room is full of uniformed men, many of them armed, including some in the blue uniform of the Phalange, the Spanish Fascist movement. Facing this hostile and dangerous crowd, the internationally celebrated logician and philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, declares, “you will win, but you will not convince”.

It works better in Spanish, with its play on words: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis”. 

Unamuno got out of the hall unscathed, but died a few months later under house arrest. He never saw how true his words proved. Franco and the Fascists won the war but that wasn’t enough for them. They crushed their enemies with 200,000 executions during the fighting and in the years immediately after it.

That’s the difference between a democratic and a dictatorial system. In a democracy, the losers are beaten at the ballot box, they don’t get bombed to death in the presidential palace by their own nation’s air force, as happened to Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende on the orders Augusto Pinochet, the man for whom Maggie Thatcher later showed such friendship. 

What’s more, the losing side concedes defeat and, perhaps through gritted teeth, congratulates the winners. But it doesn’t expect to be arrested or assassinated on its way home. It isn’t even driven out of politics, but can generally regroup and prepare the ground to try to win again at the next elections. 

Because the victors win by convincing voters, unlike the men Unamuno denounced. The defeated side will be given another chance to convince them back. 

Sadly, that kind of thinking seems increasingly unfashionable today. 

In Britain, political opponents are not yet being arrested, let alone assassinated. They are, however, being politically destroyed. The government headed by Boris Johnson, and directed by his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, despises Parliament although, for centuries, Parliament has been the main way the British system prevents the executive abusing its power.

Actually, they despise it precisely because it’s a brake on their authority.

Last autumn, the government attempted to prorogue Parliament, to prevent it having a say over the conditions for Britain’s departure from the European Union. Suspending Parliament is a classic tool of the authoritarian. A great many Members of Parliament fought to prevent that happening, including some leading members of Johnson’s own Conservative Party. So he kicked them out of the Party, meaning they couldn’t stand in the subsequent general election.

All of them lost their seats. They lost their frontline political positions. They weren’t just defeated, they were politically destroyed.

In the US, it has long been clear that Donald Trump has no wish to see his opponents merely beaten. His language is that of hatred and incitement to violence. He has now dropped increasingly sinister hints that even if he is defeated for re-election, he may refuse to leave office, and his supporters have been talking about the use of weapons to achieve their aims.

It looks as though there too the mood is for winning without necessarily convincing. For crushing opposition rather than merely winning against it. For using intimidation and, ultimately, violence to eliminate any possibility of adversaries toppling the ruling group.

The 27th of September is a good day to be thinking of authoritarian government holding onto power by ugly means. Especially here in Spain. That’s because the last executions carried out by the Franco government took place on that day in 1975.

One of a series of paintings by Equipo Cronica for the 1975 executions
Each shows the date, a black band for mourning, 
a face with eyes blanked out representing the mask of the man being shot,
the wall he stood against and the artist's broken palette

There hadn’t been many executions after the first wave of terror, from the time of the overthrow of the Spanish Republic in 1939 until about 1948. Between that year and 1975, only 48 people were executed.

On that day, five more opponents, all convicted by military tribunals of the murder of policemen, were executed by firing squad. There is doubt at least over the guilt of some of those shot. But that’s not what’s most striking about the deaths.

The most appalling aspect is that they were confirmed by the Council of Ministers, chaired by Franco himself, the day before the executions. 36 years after the end of the Civil War and, even more shockingly, less than two months before his own death, Franco was still keen to destroy those who opposed him.

It seems that the instinct to eliminate dies hard.

That’s something worth bearing in mind, given the slide towards authoritarianism in some of our democracies today. 

Diane Abbott, or how I can't help liking someone I feel so sorry for

I’ve always had a soft spot for Diane Abbott, the Member of the British Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

Diane Abbott

That’s not because I agree with her on much. I don’t. In particular, I disagree with her apparently blind and unquestioning support for the previous leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. She clings to it today, even though only last December, he led the Party to its worst defeat since 1935.

If I still like her, in spite of everything, it’s partly because she’s a black woman who’s managed to break into a world dominated by white men. It’s partly because she’s passionately committed to her constituents in a deprived area of London. Above all, it’s because she has a certain vulnerability for which I can only feel sympathy.

This was most shockingly shown in an interview she gave during the campaign for the 2017 general election. She offered the figure of £300,000 for Labour’s proposed extra funding of the police force. She later corrected her estimate to about £80 million. Corbyn gave the final correction, to £300 million, or a thousand times what she’d originally claimed.

It later turned out that her confusion was down to her diabetes, not well controlled at the time of her interview. However one criticises someone’s political stance, one can’t criticise her for being ill. Indeed, a more professional party organisation might have spotted her condition and kept her away from the media, but the Corbyn organisation was never anything like professional.

Instead, it let her blunder through some terrible public appearances, and then removed her from frontline campaigning. So what should have been handled discreetly and with care turned into a public sidelining that looked like a punishment. That’s the kind of incompetence that has done Labour so much harm and which I regret she had to suffer.

It should be said that, if it’s unfair to be too harsh about that interview, she has on other occasions shown herself entirely capable of shooting herself in the foot all on her own. But since that must be an acutely painful thing to do, perhaps that should only be another reason for feeling sorry for her.

She left the leading team in Labour once Keir Starmer took over from Corbyn. That means that she attracts less publicity these days. However, she does attract some, and she’s done it again in just the last few days. Not always in a way that shines the most favourable pssible light on her.

I loved what she told a conference, The World Transformed, organised by the pro-Corbyn faction, Momentum. Asked whether it was perhaps time to give the supporters of the new Labour leader the opportunity to prove their worth, now that Corbyn had failed and gone, she was emphatic in rejecting this soft idea:

Give moderates a chance? Don’t be ridiculous.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that ‘moderate’ has become a word of disparagement in certain circles? I’ve always tried to follow the advice of one of my teachers, “Moderation in everything, David, including moderation”.

Abbott clearly doesn’t want the moderates taking over. Which, I suppose, at least has the admirable quality of displaying consistency: the immoderates haven’t finished ruining the party, so they don’t want the moderates back running it.

Her most wonderful recent statement, however, came in an interview she gave to Zoe Williams at the Guardian. It reveals her enduring commitment to Corbyn, of whom she says:

He did his best to be nice to people, to put his arms around them, and they weren’t nice back.

I don’t know. It may be naïve of me, but I find the playground vocabulary endearing. Or at least truthful. It’s obvious that people who are focused on being nice, can’t really spend much time being effective. That may help explain our lousy performance under Corbyn.

But, in any case, I wasn’t all that aware of this niceness of Corbyn’s. I saw, for instance, his supporters enthusiastically campaigning to deselect MPs (i.e. prevent them running for Parliament again) who happened to think Labour couldn’t win an election under his leadership (it had two goes, and failed both times, the second dramatically). I didn’t notice Corbyn leaping in to stop this kind of thing happening or demanding that people be nice to those they disagreed with.

On the other hand, I did see him being extremely nice to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. 

In the first place, he agreed to the 2019 election being held at a time of Johnson’s choosing, even though it was clear that this could only favour the Tories. And, having made that concession, Corbyn ran an inept political campaign, on a manifesto that was simply a jumble of promises of anything anyone might ever want and a slogan no one can remember. It was – no, heck, I’ve forgotten – but I do remember Johnson’s, which was ‘Get Brexit Done’. It was a crass lie, but it was simple, easy to remember and a rallying call to just the people the Tories needed for victory – and, lo and behold, they emerged with an 80-seat majority.

Well, that was certainly nice. Not to our side, sadly. Not to Diane Abbott, even, who lost her chance to move from Home Affairs spokesperson to Home Secretary. But terribly nice to the other side. And she’s right: Johnson has never been nice back.

Being nice to the wrong people? Yes, that’s what the immoderates’ regime was all about. Poor Diane, wrong as usual, can’t see why that leaves us moderates deeply disinclined to give them another go.

Reluctant canines

One of the best things about having dogs is that they get you out of doors.

Wet or dry, cold or warm, calm or windy, the dogs have to go out. Like the US Postal Service, at least before Trump got hold of it, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, stays” this dog walker from his appointed task.

There are a number of advantages to fulfilling this obligation. It gets me off the couch. It forces me to take some exercise. But, above all, it provides me with sights it would be a pity to miss and which are only available outside built-up areas.

The kind of sight reserved for dog walkers in all weathers

All in all, it’s no bad thing to have the obligation that dogs impose to get out of doors two or three times a day. In fact, it would be awkward if they stopped imposing it. That would be rather as though a pretext had been withdrawn from me.

Which, funnily enough, is rather what’s happened.

To be fair, the dogs – Luci in black, Toffee in toffee – are pretty small. Toy poodles, you know. Not big dogs.

Toffee and Luci in their place of choice

Well, not big dogs physically. Huge personalities. I’m always amused to see Toffee, approximately rabbit-sized (or is that squirrel? No, that’s not fair. She’s bigger than a squirrel) chasing after an Alsatian, approximately wolf-sized. She chases them with great gusto, running at full tilt, and barking loudly, at least at the yap level.

Until, that is, the Alsatian stops running away. Then you see Toffee applying the brakes with great firmness. A hard stop, you might say. She stands all aquiver, watching the larger dog intently and with, how shall I put this, a certain visible wariness. And, though I’m sure she’s barking massively internally, nothing comes to the surface any more.

Eventually, the large dog loses interest. “That little tyke,” she seems to say, “all bark and no bite. Time it got a life. Now, where did I leave my owners?”

When the Alsatian disappears, Toffee trots back to us, tail in the air, full of obvious self-satisfaction. “See how I saw her off?” she’s clearly saying. And, of course, we tell her what a good girl she is.

Luci, on the other hand, will have withdrawn discreetly into the undergrowth, keeping the whole scene under close scrutiny, but only reappearing when it’s clear the threat has receded. “Discretion,” she’s telling us, “as the bard so neatly puts it, is the better part of valour.”

Big personalities, as I said. But small legs. So walks represent an awful lot of steps for them. Recently, they seem to have developed a sense of not being particularly keen on going out. The couch, they appear to be saying, is much the preferable environment for them. 

Luci demonstrates that preference unambiguously to me, by growling every time I put her collar out. That’s all, I hasten to add – she never bites or even snaps. But she does express her dissatisfaction in completely unmistakeable terms.

And once they get out, Toffee has developed a neat new technique. “Carry me,” she says, completely unambiguously. Not in words, of course. She starts by rubbing her nose against the back of our legs. Generally, we – or at least I, the more soft-hearted of the two of us – give in and pick her up. But if we don’t, she just pulls on her lead. And if that doesn’t work, she just stops dead. Then, if we try to pull her, she splays her forepaws in front of her on the ground, with her head between them, generating all the resistance to forward motion that a toy poodle is capable of.

“Enough walking, already,  Pick me up now”

That’s all very well and fine when we’re actually out on the walk. But lately she’s pushed things rather further. She adopts the head-on-the-ground tactic right in front of our gate. It’s as though she were telling us that if we want her to go out at all, we can carry her from the outset.

That’s our gate in the background
“This is your walk, not mine. You want me on it?
Then pick me up.”

All very well and fine, I say. But just how far do I have to go to accommodate our dogs? And, frankly, it leaves me just a tad uneasy to discover that I’m keener on going for a walk than they are.

Ah, the dogs of today. None of the enthusiasm I remember from my youth. How things have gone downhill.

Bye, Bye, Blighty

It’s rather a strange one, but 20 September’s a bit of an anniversary to me.

On 20 September 2019, I returned from England, my home until a few months earlier, to Spain, my new and future home. I was on the way back from what I didn’t yet know would be my last business trip. I had held what I knew was one of my best customer presentations, though I didn’t yet know it would be my last. 

Misty setting an example

I wasn’t alone. I was travelling with Misty, our cat. We’d left him behind when we moved to Spain, because the first home we had here was a flat. From birth, he’d always lived in places that allowed him to go out whenever he chose. It would have been a cruelty to lock him up in a flat where, even if he could go out, he would have found himself only in a street, with no grass to satisfy his needs and plenty of traffic to threaten his wellbeing.

So we’d left him with the friends who’d bought our house and were kind enough to look after him for us. We hadn’t expected so long a separation, but it took six months before we’d moved to a house with a bit of a garden where a cat of his habits, and his by now advancing years, could build a way of life that appealed to his demanding tastes.

Neither of us particularly enjoyed the journey. I arrived at Heathrow airport with a bit of a squelchy shoe, because Misty played a trick that wasn’t at all uncharacteristic of him, on being loaded into his cat carrier: he peed and, while the lining protected the taxi from most of the product, it was my shoe that caught the rest. 

That required a quick change in a Heathrow toilet, before checking in my case.

We didn’t like the flight much either. I’d spent a couple of years flying three or four times a week, without much pleasure. The number of trips had significantly lessened of late, one my first indications that things were turning ominous within my company. That meant that the return flight to London in September had represented a return to a routine I’d been happy to break for a while.

While in England, I had dinner with a new colleague, whose training we’d completed only a few weeks earlier, and her husband-to-be. It was a pleasant evening and her advice, in fact, had been one of the key elements in making my final presentation such a success. That was, however, another experience which I didn’t realise would prove to be the last of its kind – not just the last meeting with her, but the last meeting with any of the seven members of the team I then led.

Misty and I met Danielle, my wife, at Barajas airport in Madrid. Misty had taken the flight well, despite his annoyance and having to undergo it. The final stage of the trip, four or five hours by car through thunderstorms on the way to our home near Valencia, was pretty hellish, and Misty did begin, at that point, to make his displeasure known to us. Loudly and repeatedly.

Still, in time it came to an end. I was, as always, delighted to be home, and all the more so for seeing how pleased Misty was too. He spent a while wandering around the whole place, checking out each room in turn, and then the back and front gardens. It was clear he deemed the place satisfactory and was ready even to consider forgiving us for abandoning him so long.

It was only the next week that I discovered that six of the seven members of my team and I were all being made redundant. We’d been doing great work, as we were regularly told by senior managers in the company, but they decided that what we provided was a luxury service they couldn’t really keep offering their clients. I have to admit that I’d never really understood how our role could be justified in purely financial terms, though I loved working for a company which felt it could offer it anyway. Clearly, at last, hard finance had caught up with soft quality of service.

At my time of life, and on my fourth redundancy, I felt that it was perhaps time to call a halt. No, Danielle and I decided, I wouldn’t go looking for another job. Instead, I’d take my pension and we would learn to enjoy our retirement here.

So we have been, ever since. To my slight astonishment, in the year up to 20 September, I haven’t caught a single flight. When I see planes flying overhead, my only thought is, “thank God I’m not on board”. I haven’t been back to the UK, but frankly I don’t miss it: I find the atmosphere in the Johnsonian Brexitland increasingly meanspirited, inward looking, ungenerous. I haven’t even been out of Spain, but there’s more than enough to discover here, and Covid doesn’t encourage travel in any case.

Besides, I just look at Misty. He clearly loves this place. I only have to see him stretched out in the sun to know he’s saying, “you guys have moved me around a lot more than I’d have wanted. But at least you’ve found the right place for a deserving cat to retire to. For that, at least, you have my thanks.”

Time to relax, pal, time to relax

He’s right, I reckon. And since he seems to have no objection, I’ve decided to join him in his retirement. After all, a cat as discerning as Misty isn’t going to get that wrong, is he?

So 20 September saw me say "bye, bye" to London, shake the dust of England off my shoes, and head into the retirement I’m enjoying now. 

Even if I didn’t know it yet.

Postscript I realise that my native country, Italy, also celebrates 20 September as a bit of an important day. It’s the anniversary of the day in 1870 that the Italian army, led by the gallant Bersaglieri regiment, broke into Rome, which it had been besieging, to end the Papal states and incorporate them into the national territory.

The Bersaglieri lead the charge through the breach at Porta Pia
150 years ago on 20 September

I naturally wish them well on that important anniversary.  But for purely personal reasons, I prefer to mark my own events on that date. Personal, as Terry Pratchett wrote in Men At Arms, isn’t the same as important.

 

A distant mirror: conspiracy theories

Imagine a nightmare scenario.

An underground network, run by a hostile organisation abroad, is conspiring to undermine your institutions, bring down your government and replace it with foreign, authoritarian rule that tramples on your most precious rights. 

The conspirators aim to start with an assassination, at the very top of government. In fact, they’ve already tried, with gun or poison, and failed so far – gun misfires, that sort of thing.

The agents of the plot are everywhere, throughout society. That neighbour who seems so friendly, he could be one. He may be working hard to hand you over to a foreign dictatorship that hates everything you care about.

Sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? 

Or maybe not. You may well feel it’s just another conspiracy theory, to set alongside the notion that the Moon landings were faked, that 9/11 was a CIA plot, or that Covid-19 isn’t real, just part of a sinister ‘plandemic’. All fake news, you might say, fictions built on at most a grain of truth. 

You’d be right. Except that I’m not talking about the ‘plandemic’ or the Moon landings. I’m talking about a far older incident, underlining the hoary truth that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Titus Oates was a strange man. Kicked out of schools, lying about being a Cambridge graduate to get into the priesthood, perjuring himself to take the job of a schoolmaster by falsely accusing him of sexually abusing a boy, kicked out of the Royal Navy as a chaplain for gay sex at a time when that kind of behaviour could have got him executed. 

He lived in England at a time, the reign of Charles II in the late seventeenth century, when hatred of Catholicism was a constant background theme, that could burst out from time to time into something far more virulent. Which is what he engineered.

The conspiracy against our rights and values I was talking about wasn’t Communist, it wasn’t headed by George Soros or Bill Gates, it was claimed by Oates to be directed by the Catholic Church against England.  He had managed to get enrolled in two Jesuit Schools, in Spain and in France, both of which he was kicked out of, and made out that he’d only gone there to spy for England on a Jesuit-led ‘Popish plot’.

He maintained that Catholic agents were planning on killing the King to precipitate a crisis in which the Pope could achieve his aim of bring England back under his control, wiping out Protestantism and installing a Catholic tyranny. Despite his unsavoury track record, Oates was able to persuade people to believe in him. Partly he was helped by his remarkable memory, enabling him to repeat the same entirely fictitious allegations, with perfect recall of the details, each time he was interrogated.

He also had excellent knowledge of intercepted documents giving information about the plot, though that was less extraordinary, seeing as he’d written them all himself.

Conspiracy plots, fake news
Perpetrators and victims

He had plausibility, and his allegations emerged at a time when people were unusually ready to accept them. James, brother to King Charles and his heir, had converted to Catholicism. Charles himself was close to the Catholics, making him a dubious figures in the fight for Protestant values. That was especially true as he’d taken money from Catholic France in turn for extending more rights to English Catholics and, more significantly, joining a French war against Protestant Holland. When that war started to go badly wrong, the atmosphere was exactly right for the kind of bandwagon Oates got going.

The scandal lasted three years. It led to the execution of up to a couple of dozen innocent people before the allegations were all shown to be false. Then as now, fake news could gain widespread acceptance, as long as it was based on evidence that was plausible, even though it was false.

And, then as now, it could be extremely dangerous.

Why did I include the words ‘a distant mirror’ in the title of this post? It’s a reference to the historian Barbara Tuchman’s book, which used the terrible fourteenth century as a mirror to our own times. I’m not as ambitious as she was, but it did occur to me that we could do with one or two new mirrors from the past to view our own experiences more clearly.

Today, in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, conspiracy theories are emerging again, as they did in the time of Titus Oates. And as then, they’re based on allegations which seem plausible but are generally false. They do, however, provide much the same benefits as Oates with his wild allegations.

They offer certainty, and cheaply, without any need for research or even detailed thought. A theory might suggest the pandemic was caused by Bill Gates, or George Soros, or the Chinese. It’s wonderful to have a pat explanation like that, rather than have to admit ignorance and keep looking. As H L Mencken pointed out, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”. Conspiracy theorists want a shortcut to knowledge, and are just a little too lazy to check for themselves whether it’s true or not.

Secondly the conspiracy theorists, like Oates, offer us a scapegoat, and aren’t they wonderful? We’re not to blame for anything. It’s all down to Bill Gates, or George Soros or the Chinese. Just like in the 1670s, it was all down to the Catholics. Or in the 1950s, it was all down to the Communists.

An alternative explanation of what’s going on would require investigation, debate, careful thought. All hard work. And who wants to have to do any of that?

 

How did Britain get here? It's as simple as ABC

It doesn’t require much insight to work out why Britain is in the parlous state it is today. Even Boris Johnson could cope with the challenge, if he could find the energy to rise to it. So could anyone who can master an ABC.

An ABC we can quickly run through here.

Austerity, Brexit, Covid. And Boris Johnson caught, in the middle,
making it all far worse

A is Austerity. Britain’s had ten years of constant cuts in public services. Back then, both the Conservatives and their supporters claimed that such austerity was almost a moral obligation, in order not to leave a massive debt to our children. Curiously, those people have gone completely silent on the subject today, since despite all that austerity, the national debt is now double what it was back then.

Meanwhile, key services have been strangled. More money has gone into the NHS, as Conservatives keep assuring us, but nothing like enough to keep up with the impact of an ageing population and the increasing costs of treatment, as new therapies emerge for conditions we were previously unable to cure.

What’s more, a succession of Tory or Tory-dominated governments has maintained pressure on NHS staff income and numbers, so that healthcare professionals are being paid less for doing far more.

The result is that Britain has ended up with 254 hospital beds for every 100,000 people, compared to Germany’s 800. The picture in intensive care is still worse, with the United Kingdom having just under 7 ICU beds per 100,000, against Germany with nearly 39.

So when a serious epidemic hit both countries, Germany had the resources to cope, and Britain didn’t.

Since we’ve already mentioned the pandemic, let’s skip to C for Covid. The same Conservatives who gave us all-pain, no-gain austerity, gave us an epidemic out of control. At first, the government denied the seriousness of the problem, losing precious time as a result. It then made a series of promises it couldn’t keep, on testing, on the provision of Personal Protective Equipment for care workers, on combating the disease in Care Homes.

The result was a performance that may have been the worst in Europe, and was certainly amongst the worst. Not just in the immediate effects of the disease, in numbers of infections and deaths, but in the economic impact it has had, which may have been the worst of any advanced economy.

Which takes us finally to B for Brexit. The very same Conservatives of Austerity and poorly controlled Covid have been giving us reckless Brexit. They, and their friends in the right-wing press, have been trying desperately to blame the slowness of negotiations, and the increasingly probable outcome of a no-deal Brexit, on the European Union. But we’ve now had the government openly admitting that it intends to break international law over Brexit, by unilaterally flouting the terms of an agreement, although it had made it and signed it itself.

It had triumphantly presented that agreement to the electorate as evidence that it was the right team to ‘get Brexit done’. That helped it to its present maority in Parliament. It’s now clear that, although it had been told what the implications of the agreement were at the time – an internal trade border within the United Kingdom, between Northern Ireland and Britain – it had either deluded itself into believing it could duck those implications, or it had never had any intention honouring its commitments in the first place.

Either way, having shown itself to be an untrustworthy partner, one who can’t be relied on to stick to any agreement it makes, it can hardly expect to be taken seriously in its ongoing negotiations with the EU. Blame the EU for the breakdown of negotiations? You might as well blame it for Johnson’s handling of Covid.

Covid has plunged Britain into recession. Any Brexit will make things harder still. As for a no-deal Brexit, that would be even worse than the epidemic.

Still, some may argue that Brexit isn’t on us yet. It’s a pleasure still to come. Its effects we have still to suffer (or enjoy, if you’re a Tory and that way inclined) in the early part of next year.

In which case, let’s have a different B, if you prefer. B for Boris. After all, he’s so closely involved in the continuing disaster of Covid, or the disaster of Brexit to come, that he deserves to figure in our ABC. 

Austerity-Boris-Covid will do for now. When Johnson takes us into Austerity-Brexit-Covid next year, it’ll almost certainly be him inflicting that new ABC on us. A new triumph for him to add to his others.

Either way, its cause will remain as simple to understand as any ABC.

 

15 September: a day for good memories

There comes a time when, however young someone dies, it starts to become far-fetched to keep asking, “what if he’d lived till today?”

Leonard, my father,  in his forties

My father died when he was 61. It meant that he only met one of his four grandchildren, my son Michael, and even him only briefly. My last vivid memory of him was of his giving Michael, then aged around three months, his finger to suck  in the back seat of our car. Each seemed delighted with the other.

That ease with kids was one of the characteristics I most admired about him. So naturally I regret that he wasn’t around to watch his grandchildren growing up. As they went to school, as they achieved their successes or needed comfort for their failures, as they launched themselves into university or work, as they met their partners. He could have seen many of those things within the scope of a normal lifetime, and all of them without having to grow exceptionally old.

It’s true that he might have had to be exceedingly old to pick up the one-year old granddaughter of ours, his great granddaughter, Matilda, who came to visit us just a few weeks ago. And yet I couldn’t help thinking what a pity it was he couldn’t be there. He would have loved her as she would have loved him. 

Strangely, Matilda’s father, my son, has the same warmth of intimacy with his daughter that I’m sure my father would have had. It rather skipped me. I’m not a lot of good with very young children. That, to tell the truth, made it both surprising and a delight to find myself getting on so well with her while she was here. Somehow she and I hit it off, for all my clumsiness with small kids. Another thing I’m sure my father would have loved to see.

Denied the pleasure of seeing him with his grandkids, let alone his great grandchildren (there are four now), I’m left remembering only, but with pleasure, how he was with his own children.

He was an extraordinary father. He wasn’t the intellectual. That was my mother, a woman who I think could have been an excellent academic, but never got the chance – the relative poverty of her background, her gender, and the Second World War, all got in the way. What he had though, in bagsful, and far more than she did, was empathy. He knew what was on a child’s mind and what would make him happy. And he took as much pleasure providing it as the child receiving it.

For fifteen years, he worked in a job which gave him a great deal of bitter frustration. His bosses didn’t appreciate his qualities and he simply never had a promotion for over a decade. But he put up with that for the sake of the family, biting his tongue and accepting the treatment he was handed.

That’s not to say he was forever bored. Working for a United Nations agency meant he got to see a lot of the world, and that fascinated him, as well as giving him the pleasure of knowing it was in his power to do some good. In 1960, when fighting broke out in the recently independent former Belgian Congo, and the UN declared an emergency, he was just one of three volunteers to go and serve there for nine months, out of the 5000 in the offices where he worked.

With a new-found friend in the Congo

And finally, in the mid 1960s, he decided he’d had enough. He applied for and got a more senior position in another UN agency, at which point the bosses who’d treated him with such contempt for so long, came rushing at him with offers of significant promotion to try to persuade him to stay after all.

His first posting was, ironically, back in the Congo. My brother and I were sent to boarding school in England, which looking back I think was a pity. But up to then, and in holidays when he returned to the family, he was always a wonderful Dad it was a joy to be with.

A great pity my sons, my nephew and my niece were deprived of the joy of knowing him. And, of course, it would have been astonishing had he lived long enough to meet Matilda. It may, indeed, be time to stop saying “what if he’d lived till today?”

After all, on 15 September, he would have turned 99.

Doesn’t stop me wishing he were still around. As it won’t stop me raising a glass to his memory. A very good memory. 

Governments breaking the law? Not good for democracy

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use,” according to the philosopher Kierkegaard.

There certainly is a lot of talk (which I suppose is appropriate) about freedom of speech, whether from anti-vaxxers or the latest crop of conspiracy theorists. There is, as Kierkegaard suggests, far less inclination to make use of the freedom of thought. But lack of thought is becoming an increasingly serious threat to all rights.

The first matter to think about is just what is fundamental to a democracy.

Most people seem to think it’s voting. And certainly, as nations where it doesn’t exist demonstrate, being able to cast a vote freely and have it fairly counted, is vital. How poignant it was to see black voters in South Africa queueing in 1994 for hours under a blazing the sun, to vote for the first time ever in a Presidential election.

A moving sight: black South African voters in 1994
queuing to vote for the first time in presidential elections

A counterexample is Trump’s attempts to restrict access to voting in the US this year, to make it hard for opponents to register a vote against him.

But, moving though those images from South Africa are, and impossible as it is to imagine American or any other democracy without free elections, the right to vote is still not the foundation stone of democratic rule.

Is it individual rights, such as freedom of speech or thought?

Again, it’s hard to conceive of a democracy without them. If you can’t speak out against government, the opposition can never set out its case. So the right to vote, if it exists at all, is hardly free. Russia’s a case in point.

Still, even that may be vital but isn’t fundamental. After all, freedom of speech can never be absolute. Even democracies ban the abuse of free speech: libel, incitement and conspiracy, are generally and rightly illegal. To give the old, iconic example, surely no one would defend the right to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre.

Well, unless there actually is a fire, of course.

I particularly value the protection of minorities in democracies. It’s obviously right that the majority should select the government, and through its majority, make law, but I’d like to see that happen with proper respect of the minority and its rights too.

That’s particularly true when it comes to minorities defined by permanent characteristics. Gays. People of colour. Anyone subject to persecution only for what they are rather than for anything they do. The Black Lives Matter movement is a legitimate answer to the continued denial to black people of basic rights enjoyed by others.

But even this key concept isn’t the foundation on which democracy depends.

That foundation is the rule of law.

This is the notion that the law applies to everyone. That’s whether it concerns actions it allows or actions it forbids. If I’m not allowed to travel from London to the North of England during a pandemic lockdown, then nor is anyone else, however rich or powerful he is.

Similarly, if I am doing something entirely legal, such as sleeping in my bed in the small hours of the morning, I should be safe from being shot by the authorities. Police who turn up at my house and fire their guns recklessly into it, shooting me in the process, have committed a crime and should be punished for it.  

Breonna Taylor: innocent victim, asleep in her bed, 
shot dead by police firing from outside her home in Louisville, Kentucky

What’s more, no government authority may arrest me simply because it doesn’t like my ideas, because my face doesn’t fit, or my face is the wrong colour. Legal action may not be taken against individuals, without good grounds to suspect them of genuine breaches of the law.

No one can be made the target of action by the arbitrary decision of the authorities. In other words, we don’t want law being made, or applied, only on the basis of the will of the authorities. On the contrary, the will of the authorities has to be subject to the law itself.

Why is the rule of law so much more vital than any of the others?

Because all the others are guaranteed by law. The right to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the protection of minorities are all ensured only by legislation. If government can start to break the law with impunity, then none of the other rights are safe.

That’s why it’s serious that Boris Johnson was so casual about his chief adviser Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown regulations to travel to Durham. The offence itself may not have been serious. What is central is the implicit claim by Johnson that he can decide, without reference to anyone, to tolerate illegal behaviour, simply because he has a personal relationship with the perpetrator.

What Johnson was calling for was the right to arbitrary power.

Now he’s decided to breach an agreement he himself made and signed with the European Union. He knows, as one of his own Ministers has admitted to Parliament, that this action breaks international law. But he intends to go ahead anyway.

Once more, he’s exercising arbitrary power.

We know that Trump is actively trying to undermine democracy in the United States. But Brits, shocked observers of Trump’s shameful behaviour, need to look closer to home too. Because what Johnson is doing is knocking out the very basic piece of the Jenga tower of all our rights.

If you want to protect our democracy, then Johnson’s flouting of the law has to be stopped and stopped fast.

Remembering 9/11, anniversary of two terrorist atrocities

On 11 September, my first instinct is, of course, to offer sympathy to my US friends for the terrible and bloodthirsty terror attack on their country in 2001. It was an act that was cruel and senseless. It has led to nearly two decades of war from which there have been no winners, but huge numbers of losers.

Today, however, I’m going to focus on my second instinct. That’s to remind us all that it wasn’t only in 2001 that a terror campaign was launched on 11 September. The previous time, as I pointed out once before, far from being a victim, the United States was backing the perpetrators.

Terror twice over: the first 9/11 and the second

Partly my reason for focusing on that occasion is that I’ve recently finished Isabel Allende’s latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea. It’s outstanding. With a cast of characters as engaging as in all her works, she builds a compelling tale of two harrowing experiences of defeat, terror and exile.

The first is at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when half a million people trekked across the Pyrenees, seeking refuge in France from the brutal retaliation the Franco forces handed out to its defeated enemies at home. Chillingly, she tells how even surrender couldn’t save you: men or women who laid down their arms were still liable to be tortured and shot.

And what the refugees found in France was concentration camps.

The second experience follows the coup d’état in Allende’s native Chile. And, just as chillingly, there too surrender was no safe option, as she also described in her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Men and women who give themselves up, unarmed ad hands raised, are killed or tortured all the same, by a brutalised army that’s just seized power.

In both books, she describes the bombing of the presidential palace, in which the left-wing President, her cousin Salvador Allende, and his entourage were killed. And she doesn’t mince her words. That military uprising, as illegal as Franco’s, unleashed on Chile a campaign of terror. Both Pinochet and Franco were convinced that the only way to overcome their opponents conclusively was to terrorise them into silence. It was never enough to defeat their enemies. They wanted to exterminate them.

That’s the nature of terror. It isn’t about convincing people. It’s about crushing them. Franco did it in Spain. Pinochet did it in Chile. And the 9/11 terrorists tried to do it in the US, though they fortunately failed. Franco and Pinochet were far more successful. They remained in power for nearly forty and nearly twenty years respectively.

Eleven September 1973. That was the date of the Army coup that unleashed its terror on Chile. Twenty-eight years to the day before the attack on the twin towers in New York. The 1973 event is the other 9/11, and it deserves to be remembered with the same respect, though it sadly isn’t.

Why the difference? Because far from being targeted, the US, or at least Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, actively and with great energy supported the destabilisation of the Allende government, and backed the military leaders when they seized power.

It denounces terrorism, but the US backed the terrorists of that 9/11.

That’s not that unusual, incidentally. One of the aspects I most resented of the terror campaign I lived through in 1980s London was the knowledge that it had only been made possible by support from the US. Money flowed in, and the American judicial system tended to back the IRA when the British government tried to take action against its members in America. The US seemed not to oppose terrorism in general, only the terrorism that attacked its interests.

The Chilean tragedy lasted well beyond that first bleak day, of course. In the end, maybe as many as 3200 were killed, while 80,000 were detained, with a high proportion being tortured (including a future President, Michelle Bachelet, whose father died of his torture).

Years later, after the reintroduction of democracy, Pinochet was indicted for his crimes by a Spanish examining magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. That it should be a Spaniard is interesting, since it was the first time anyone had applied the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’, allowing prosecution anywhere for crimes of heads of state, even if amnesty has been granted in the country in which they were committed (as had happened in this case).

Pinochet was in Britain at the time. He was arrested and spent a year and a half under house arrest while his case was being heard. Maggie Thatcher, who’d been out of office for eight years, many of whose continued admirers see her as something of a saint, and who had regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, sent Pinochet a bottle of whisky with the charming message, “Scotch is one British institution that will never let you down”.

Who’s a terrorist and what constitutes terrorism is clearly not the same thing for everybody. Which is worth bearing in mind when we remember two terrible attacks on 9/11. And offer our sorrow to the victims of both.

Entitled and above the law

Any Brits not yet sure they want Donald Trump beaten in this November’s presidential election, need only look at their own Prime Minister.

Trump has been positioning himself as the law ’n’ order President. That, though, hasn’t stopped him backing people who use or threaten violence against others, just as long as the perpetrators support him and the victims don’t. In other words, he upholds the law insofar as it suits him.

The British government is now proposing to break the agreement it made with the EU less than a year ago, covering arrangements for trade within Ireland. To preserve an entirely open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the agreement allows that there may be tariff differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Oddly enough, Johnson was warned when he reached the agreement that this was what it implied. Perhaps it took him seven months to work out that this really, really was the case, and now he’s flailing around looking for a way out. As I’ve pointed out before, Johnson isn’t anything like as bright as his admirers like to claim he is.

But he can’t just blame his relative dumbness for this latest action. There’s also something far more serious. Johnson simply does not see himself as governed by the same rules as anyone else. Questioned about the government’s willingness to breach its own agreement, the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis explained to the House of Commons.

Yes, this does break international law in a specific and limited way.

Trump and Johnson share more than bad hair

“Your honour, I only burgled one house at a time, so my crime was specific and limited and therefore not to be regarded as really bad,” sounds like a highly original approach to a criminal defence. I’m not sure it would really fly, though.

There is an important rule in legal practice in Britain, as I’m sure in many other jurisdictions. If a lawyer advises a client that the action they plan to take is illegal, and the client goes ahead with it anyway, the lawyer is obliged to stop acting for the client. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that the most senior lawyer in the British Civil Service, Jonathan Jones, Head of the Government Legal Service, resigned after advising the government that its plans were illegal, a view that had been confirmed by external legal advice too.

Interestingly, it isn’t only civil servants who advise government on the law. There are two politicians who act as law officers, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General, both of them government ministers. It was, indeed, Suella Braverman who overrode Jones’s advice.

Why’s that so interesting? Well, she and the Solicitor General are bound by the same rules as Jones. They too should have advised Johnson that what he was proposing was illegal, and then resigned if went ahead anyway. Instead, Bravernman has made herself complicit in the law-breaking.

The issue of whether a breach is specific and limited is a distraction, of course. That isn’t what this behaviour is about. What matters isn’t the nature of the action, it’s who’s behind it. Trump-like, Johnson believes that any illegal behaviour is just fine, so long as it’s he and his friends who are behind it.

That’s hardly new, as it happens.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson (middle of front row)
in their Bullingdon Club days

When he was a student at Oxford, Boris Johnson, like David Cameron who was Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015, was a member of the Bullingdon Club. Its members were wealthy and entitled and behaved with contempt for others and for normal standards. They would engage in vandalism which, in any ordinary person, would have been regarded as criminal. According to an article in the Guardian from not long before Johnson became Prime Minister:

Boris was one of the big beasts of the club. He was up for anything. They treated certain types of people with absolute disdain, and referred to them as ‘plebs’ or ‘grockles’, and the police were always called ‘plod’. Their attitude was that women were there for their entertainment.

Student days, you might say. He’s moved on. Well, maybe that’s true for some people. Others, though, develop lifelong character traits at that time. The Bullingdon Club reinforces a sense of entitlement and impunity, and that does seem to have stayed with Johnson ever since.

Earlier this year, while the UK was in Covid lockdown ordered by the government itself, one of its most senior members, Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings, repeatedly breached the rules he helped craft for others. Johnson’s reaction? He defended Cummings and kept him in post.

Cummings is Johnson’s friend. He seems to be Johnson’s puppet master. Special considerations apply to him.

Johnson still sees the world as when he was a student. Law is for other people. Obeying it, or having friends obey it, is entirely optional.

It’s a central tenet of Trumpism. It’s alive and thriving in Johnson. If Trump goes, Johnson may find the atmosphere turns just a tad chillier towards illegal action in political office.

Abusive, corrupt power exercised by entitled individuals is at stake on 3 November. The election held that day is in the US. But its repercussions will extend far further.

A-hunting we will go

Santi, short for Santiago, is a neighbour of ours. And he’s introduced me to the delights of hunting.

The quarry of our quest

No, no. Not that kind of hunting. No animals were harmed in the making of this blog post. Santi doesn’t hunt living creatures, far less convert them into creatures whose living has abruptly ceased. He hunts graffiti, which continue to adorn the streets even after he’s been by.

It will come as no surprise that he does his hunting with a camera.

Santi on the hunt

He sets out on his quests on Sunday mornings. Sadly, the hunt isn’t usually over in time for him to make it to mass, but I have to confess that he seems not to be undergoing any great spiritual suffering as a result. Indeed, he seems satisfied enough with his photos to be easily reconciled to missing the words of his priest. How things will work out in the next world, of course, is anybody’s guess. 

Literally.

We’d spoken several times about my joining him on one of his excursions. Last week, while we had a son, a daughter-in-law and our second charming granddaughter with us, we went around to Santi’s for a drink or two. I’m using ‘or two’ in a euphemistic sense. Fortunately, I avoided the fate of Dorothy Parker in such circumstances:

I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I'm under the table,

After four I'm under my host.

It may have helped that we weren’t drinking martinis. But what we were drinking lubricated me just enough to agree, at last, to hitting the road with Santi at 8:00 last Sunday.

That’s 8:00 in the morning, in case you were in any doubt about it. On the day of rest. I’ve got a commandment to prove that status.

The people we’ve come to know in and around Valencia provide powerful contradictory evidence to the suggestion that Spaniards tend to be unpunctual. Bang on time, more like. I stepped out of my door at 8:00, and Santi had already driven the few doors up the road from his gate to mine and was waiting for me to join him on the adventure.

The early hour is partly to avoid the worst of the heat, still a problem even in September. What’s more, that hour on that day of the week allows Santi to visit the graffiti while there are too few people around to keep walking in front of them and spoiling the photos.

Three things struck me more than anything else about the works we saw.

Firstly, that they really are a form of art. Some of the pieces we saw were extraordinarily powerful.

A blank wall overlooking wasteland:
just another canvas

The second is that it’s creativity for its own sake. We started at a place where the artists’ canvas was a blank factory wall looking out over wasteland. It’s hard to imagine more than a handful of people going there. Not all graffiti is so out of the way, but for the painting that are, I’m left wondering who sees the result of so much work? In such a place, probably only other graffiti artists and aficionados like Santi (and now me).

A blank wall overlooking wasteland
and already being prepared for over-painting

Finally, it’s truly ephemeral art. That factory wall in its wasteland was already being painted over in white at one end, ready for new images.

It’s wonderful. Art for its own sake. Lasting only as long as it lasts. Those who are enchanted need to get out and see it now, or they may miss it.

Only someone like Santi gives this creativity an existence beyond the shortest of times, as he preserves the paintings in his photos. He’s a true hunter. Not collecting trophies but building a record.

It was exhilarating. I’m going to have to go again, as it’s worth the price of an early start, even on a Sunday.

But perhaps not this Sunday. A week or two’s recovery is called for, I feel, to overcome the trauma of a start so early on the day of rest. But then – happy to go out hunting again.

Sunset, or possibly sunrise, over the Albufera lagoon
Cheering up a housing estate