Giving way takes courage

‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. That’s a Shakespeare line that always amazes me by how many situations it applies to. Today, I’d say of Joe Biden that nothing in his career became him like his withdrawal from it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president – he had some notable achievements – but he was no longer a good candidate, at a time when his defeat would return to the White House a man determined to undermine the most fundamental values of the US constitution.

It’s obvious that standing down was immensely painful to him. That makes his action particularly courageous and admirable. It puts him into the tradition of a man like George Washington. He received a commission from the Continental Congress, the body that headed the thirteen colonies that rose against Britain, to head its armies. When he emerged victorious from the war, many feared that he would use his popularity to make himself dictator or king of the newly independent nation. Instead, he went to Congress and handed back his Commission.

Biden has shown himself a worthy heir of Washington

As I’ve said before, what he didn’t do (he didn’t seize power) is right up there in importance with what he did (he won the war). What Biden hasn't done (he’s not clinging on to the nomination) is a fine way of crowning a career including some pretty great things he did do (like post-Covid measures and initiatives to aid economic recovery).

But what happens next? 

A friend commented to me recently that Biden clinging on to the nomination would leave the Democrats with no chance of beating Trump. Replacing Biden would certainly not guarantee them victory. But it would at least give them a chance.

It was quite clear, and I got that message powerfully even from individual Americans that I know here in Spain, that many of those who dreaded the return to power of Trump couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, once his state of health showed him to be unfit to hold the office of President for another term. 

The frontrunner to replace him is the present Vice President, Kamala Harris. If she wins the White House, it’ll be historic: the first woman to hold the post and the second person of colour, after Barrack Obama.

However, front runner or not, she’s not even sure of the Democratic nomination yet. There are other possible candidates. They all have one advantage over Biden, which is their age. Had Biden stayed in the race, he would have been the oldest candidate ever for the presidency. Now that mantle falls on Trump’s shoulders. I hope the Democrats will be as ruthless against him as he was in using age as a weapon against Biden. That would be especially appropriate as Trump too is suffering from the effects of his advancing age, shown in speeches that are frequently incoherent and confused.

If it is Kamala Harris that faces off to him, it’s likely that he’ll attack her for being allegedly soft on drug offenders during her time as Attorney General of California. I hope he does. But I only hope that because it’ll give her the opportunity to respond by asking just how tough a sentence the law should impose on a felon convicted of fraudulently using company funds to cover up, for his own electoral purposes, an affair with a porn star.

Harris has also built herself a good reputation as a defender of abortion rights. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-abortion characters, like his running mate JD Vance. I’d love to see her suggesting that it’s not at all surprising that he refuses women rights over their own bodies, seeing how little respect he’s shown for those bodies in his behaviour and, indeed, his boasts about what he likes to do to them.

I’d love to watch Trump squirming under that kind of pressure.

A century on

One hundred years ago today, what a different place Britain was.

Only a few months earlier, in September 1923, when Britain officially took up a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, the British Empire reached its greatest ever extent. Which was odd, because Britain was already decidedly on the downward slope. It had been the banker to the world up to the First World War ten years earlier, but had emerged from that conflict a debtor nation, indebted above all to the United States. 

One of Britain’s allies, that had provided limited but valuable assistance in the war, had been Japan. But the US, worried about Japanese competition in the Pacific, put pressure on Britain to end the alliance. There had been a time when Britain would have firmly but politely – or perhaps not politely – rejected such interference in its affairs, but those days were gone, and it complied with the American demand.

So it was never truer than in the middle 1920s that the sun never set on the British Empire, but it was also true that the Empire’s sun was already setting.

Into that world, on the 11th of July 1924, a little girl her parents decided to call Leatrice was born into the Bannister family. Anyone who knows a little about British Jewish life knows that ‘Bannister’ was one of those give-away names: most people who held it had been called ‘Bernstein’ before they showed up in England.

Nat Bannister, Leatrice’s father, had been raised in back-breaking poverty in London’s East End. He’d left school at fourteen and taken work in the lithographic printing industry. He spent the First World War avoiding military service in what he saw as an indefensible conflict, and ended up spending two years in the harsh conditions of Dartmoor prison for his pacifist pains.

His wife, Yetta, came from a more comfortable family, of more recent refugees than Nat’s, who got out of the Russian Empire not long before Russia went to war with Japan. Her father had already spent seven years in the Tsarist army and could imagine what fate awaited him in the Far East if war broke out with Japan, as he was sure it would. He was a skilled craftsman, making the uppers of shoes for people with feet deformed from birth or as a result of accident, and could provide a better childhood for his Yetta than Nat enjoyed.

Yetta was a radical and an early member of the British Communist Party, though her flirtation with Communism didn’t last long. It was at a public meeting which she addressed that Nat, never a member himself, first saw her. She was recovering from the death of a fiancé who’d made it through the war but then succumbed to the so-called Spanish flu, and she resisted Nat’s courtship for quite a time. She apparently once lost her temper with him, broke off the engagement she’d finally agreed to and flung the ring at him before storming off into the night. Instead of going after her, he got down on his hands and knees hunting for the ring, which he eventually found and presented to her again when she was calmer.

Leatrice grew up in a North London suburb, in an atmosphere she described as stiff with anti-Semitism. She escaped from that when she took a job as secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament and Secretary of the reformist Fabian Society. That meant she spent the latter part of the Second World War close to the circles of power, a remarkable apprenticeship for someone in her late teens to early twenties.

What she didn’t get was a higher education, to her great regret. 

Leatrice in London’s Hyde Park in 1947

After the war, when travel became possible again, she made a beeline for Paris to a typist’s job at UNESCO. There she met Leonard Beeson. Apparently, what first attracted her were his silk socks, which she got to examine closely when sitting on the floor at a party, with her back to the couch on which he was sitting more comfortably. That, apparently, was as good a start as any to a relationship that led them into a marriage lasting from 1951 until his depressingly early death in 1983.

The marriage took her from Paris to Rome, where her two sons were born. From Rome, they moved to Kinshasa in what was then called the Democratic Republic of Congo and is called that again after spending some time as Zaïre, though its relationship to democracy has always been distant. In the last of Leonard’s professional moves, they travelled from Kinshasa to New York. There she was at last able to satisfy her desire for a university education, obtaining a degree from City University of New York, with the best class (Summa Cum Laude, with highest praise) and winning herself the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa key.

The couple enjoyed a brief retirement during which they split their time between France and England. When that was ended by her widowhood, she moved to Oxford, much to the astonishment of most people who knew her, since she’d had no previous connection with the city. It suited her well though, giving her a wide new circle of friends (including the local Labour MP) and the opportunity to serve as a City Guide, which she did with great enthusiasm, until infirmity at last forced her to stop.

Like her first quarter century, she lived her last in England. A profoundly different England, no longer the leading nation of a Britain that bestrode the world, but part of a middle-ranking power that was, at the time she moved back, at last building itself a future as a part of Europe. But then she was saddened, as I was, when it turned its back on that project, and on its neighbours, by voting to leave the EU, in what looked like nothing more than a last desperate grasp at global glory, something that was already slipping from its grip when Leatrice was born, and had long gone by the time she died.

Still, it was England, it was her home, she felt comfortable there, and that made it a good place to see out her last years.

She died on her 94th birthday, on 11 July 2018. So today I can raise a glass to her twice: once for the 100th anniversary of her birth, and once more to the way she managed, although unconscious at the time, to make it to one last birthday.

On my brother’s behalf and my own, that’ll be my salute to our mother Leatrice and the remarkable life she lived in some rapidly changing times.

Leatrice with Leonard in France in the 1980s

What a relief it was to have it confirmed by an exit poll last night that Labour, led by Keir Starmer, was on its way to a massive win over the Conservatives in the election of 4 July. 

The BBC projecting of the exit poll for the Labour landslide

July the fourth. Celebrated in the US as Independence Day. In Britain it was the occasion that the electorate marked its independence of a Conservative government that had nothing more to give. Another moment to celebrate.

I may have overstated when I said that it had nothing more to give. With most governments, including ones we don’t like, we can usually point to one or two achievements and have to admit, even if between gritted teeth, ‘well, it’s true, at least they did that.’ I can think of nothing, in all honesty, which fourteen years of Conservative rule have left in a better state than when they came to office.

That’s even on their own terms. The Tories were obsessed with public debt when they came to power, but they leave it higher now than back then. They were also obsessed with immigration, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that many sectors of the economy need immigrants – healthcare, agriculture, catering for instance – just to keep turning over. But even they admit that illegal immigration is out of control.

The health service is in crisis. Schools are crumbling, literally, with ceilings falling in due to dud cement. The Tories presided over the terrible self-inflicted wound of Brexit. The party of law and order has seen prisons releasing inmates early because they can’t handle the numbers. The police force hasn’t the resources for its task. And the nation’s rivers and the sea off its beaches are flooded with untreated sewage.

As you can imagine, that’s why it’s a relief to see that government go.

But in 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, I reacted with joy, not just with relief. That’s because, whatever his faults, he was a man that inspired. And indeed his government, despite its many errors, the most appalling of which was the Iraq War, did much to be proud of: huge improvements in the health service, freedom of information, devolution to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, the Good Friday Agreement over Northern Ireland, and much more. 

In 1997, we could sense all that promise and, boy, it felt good to be alive.

But Blair’s government was elected by 13.5 million people. They represented 43% of the votes cast. Britain uses a first-past-the-post system, by which it only takes one more vote than any other candidate, without necessarily having a majority of the votes cast, to win election in a parliamentary constituency. That’s why a government can win a landslide majority in the House of Commons on a minority of the votes, as Blair did in 1997. 

Taking 43% is actually quite respectable.

The 2024 election also gave Labour a landslide majority in the Commons, but this time it took only 9.7 million votes, 3.8 million fewer than won by Blair in 1997. And that represented only 33.8% of the votes cast, not a great deal more than one vote in three. Putting it another way, there were very nearly two votes against Labour for every vote for it.

What makes those figures particularly stark is that at the previous election, in 2019, Labour had its worst result since 1935. It took just 202 seats in the Commons, under half its haul this time. And yet it took 32.1% of the votes cast – so though it has more than doubled its total of seats, Labour only added 1.7% to its percentage of the popular vote.

That’s the difference between the catastrophic defeat last time and the historic landslide victory at this election (Starmer will have more Labour MPs behind him than Blair did).

What this means is that what has taken Starmer to Downing Street isn’t a huge wave of support. It’s a tsunami of dissatisfaction, even bitterness, directed against the Tories. A well-deserved tsunami. But it leaves Starmer with a massive task to win positive support for Labour. He has to do it quickly. His majority of over 170 looks unassailable, enough to carry him through to victory at the next general election too. However, if you look at the percentages of votes cast, you can see that it’s a lot more fragile than that, with a couple of percentage points marking the difference between massive victory and crushing defeat.

After all, looked what happened between 2019 and this year. Back then, it was the Tories who won a landslide. This year, they’ve lost 250 seats and emerged with the lowest number of MPs in their history. That’s how quickly and how massively things can switch around.

Starmer understands all that. In his first speech as Prime Minister, he explained:

our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal and a return of politics to public service. When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future. But we need to move forward together. Now, this wound, this lack of trust, can only be healed by actions, not words. I know that. But we can make a start today, with the simple acknowledgement that public service is a privilege and that your government should treat every single person in this country with respect. If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not – in fact, especially if you did not – I say to you directly my government will serve you. 

He knows he needs to rebuild trust and he can only do that by serving the electorate, especially the two-thirds of electors who voted against him. I wish him well with that task. It’s a big one, and Britain needs him to succeed in it.

Before I leave, I have to mention the man he defeated, the outgoing Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When he announced his resignation, he said:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our Prime Minister. In this job, his successes will be all our successes. And I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man who I respect.

It’s refreshing to hear a politician talking about an adversary as someone he can respect. One of the worst aspects of politics today – especially in such campaigns as Trump’s in the US – is the apparent belief that it’s not enough to defeat the other side, you have to eliminate them.

Adapting a phrase from Macbeth, I can say of Sunak that nothing in his time in office became him like the leaving of it.