England's shameful conquest of itself

Nearly three decades ago, Danielle and I saw a remarkable production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Slightly over three decades before that I saw the same play, as a special treat offered to us schoolkids, at a remarkable place: the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, which is outdoors and cut into the rock above a sea cliff. That means you get a stunning view of the sea in the background and gulls occasionally swoop over the stage, which is wonderful.

However, the special treat was neither special nor a treat to me. Because one of the things about the Minack is that we had to sit on seats cut into the granite of the hillside. I guess people who’ve been before bring cushions, but we had no such comfortable accessories. The performance, at least as I remember it, and to be fair I should underline that fourteen-year-olds aren’t the most patient of audiences for classical drama, was slow and tiresome. Well before the play had ended, my backside was telling me that it had been far too long. 

The experience left me anything but well-disposed to the play.

But then came that second and outstanding performance, at the National Theatre in London, in 1995. What made it so outstanding? 

First and foremost, it was the casting of Fiona Shaw in the part of the king. A woman playing a king? It was an inspired choice. I think one of the central concerns of the play is the contrast between the king, seen as effeminate and weak, and the character of his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, strong and manly. One of the things the great directors of Shakespeare can do, with writing of that quality, is turn some of the messages around, so The Merchant of Venice, for instance, becomes the tragedy of Shylock rather than the triumph of Portia, or The Taming of the Shrew turns from a celebration of husbandly authority to teach an uppity wife a salutary lessons, into a shocking presentation of male abuse of a woman whose only offence was to show a little spirit.

Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard showed him as feminine rather than effeminate, while Henry came across as macho, not manly, as a bully, not a figure of strength.

Fiona Shaw as Richard II
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

That was breathtaking. But it wasn’t the only aspect of the performance that has stuck with me. One of the great speeches of the play is the dying soliloquy of John of Gaunt, in which he describes England as ‘this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’. It’s one of those Shakespeare speeches like ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet which has an audience listening to it in silent awe, and I imagine puts massive pressure on the actor to bring new life into what might otherwise come across as clichéd.

Gaunt had just got going and tomblike silence had settled on the place when, suddenly, a mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the audience.

I don’t know whether its owner has recovered from the PTSD with which the experience must have left him. All I know is that Gaunt paused while the owner scrabbled in his pockets with the eyes of the entire audience on him, tracking the phone down to silence it. And then Gaunt went on.

Now the thing about that speech is that it sounds at first as though it’s going to be a hymn to England. Indeed, if it’s ever quoted at all, it’s always just the bit about the ‘sceptred isle’ that gets trotted out. If you go on to the end, though, you find it’s quite the opposite. What Gaunt is saying is that England has been brought low, and its decline is down to corruption and pettifogging officialdom. Above all, it’s something England has done to itself. 

That England that was wont to conquer others  
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

It conquered itself. No one else is to blame. The wound was self-inflicted.

That all came to mind when I came across a recent poll that showed that a clear majority of British voters now understand that Brexit has done the UK harm.

Overall, only 22% still think that Brexit has been good for the economy, while nearly 50% think it has been damaging. Only 9% believe that it has done any good for the National Health Service while over 45% think it has been harmful, which is particularly ironic, since the snake-oil salesmen that championed Brexit, especially Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, promised that it would provide an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Perhaps more telling still, while many voters backed Brexit not for any high-minded principle, but out of simple xenophobia and against immigration, 53% now believe that Brexit has made it more difficult rather than easier to control British borders.

Brexit, it seems, no longer has any redeeming features for most British electors. And yet who gifted that poisoned chalice to Britain? Why, voters themselves. 

Predominantly English voters.

Well, if the bard’s to be believed, that was upholding a long tradition. England imposing a shameful conquest on itself. Which leaves only one question.

If it inflicted the wound on itself, does it have the spirit, now voters have recognised the mistake, to find its own cure too?

Laughing at us, not with us

Benjamin Franklin came up with many pithy sayings that have become proverbs, such as, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it”.

Every time I see someone in the British media or politics talking about some aspect of the nation being “the envy of the world”, I cringe.

It’s been said about the National Health Service, where it had some validity until ten years of austerity starved Britain’s favourite institution until it could no longer deliver what the nation needs.

It’s been said about the justice system, despite Britain being the nation where it’s hardest to defend against a libel suit, where the Birmingham Six could be wrongly condemned and the family of Stephen Lawrence denied justice for his murder.

It’s been said about the Army, though it sent soldiers tramping across the Falklands in boots so bad they fell apart on the way.

Still, in some areas Britain had a fine reputation. For instance, for its sense of humour, which God knows we need more than ever. Or, despite Brexiter claims, in international negotiations, where the UK tended to get its own way in the EU (much to the annoyance of France), as Bobby McDonagh, once Irish ambassador to the UK as well as having worked many years with the EU, made clear in the Guardian in July 2019:

British influence in the EU went well beyond that available to most member states. The UK’s impact was exceptional due to several factors. The quality of its civil servants. The effectiveness of its coordination mechanisms. The reach of its diplomacy. The potency of its networking. The admiration for its pragmatism. The predominance of the English language.

Meanwhile, the reputation Britain enjoyed for administrative skill, pragmatism and diplomacy, was enjoyed by the US for its knowhow.

I’ve always enjoyed the story of a Canadian politician who said that, when his country was founded, it hoped to combine French culture with the British political system and American knowhow. Sadly, it had in fact combined the French political system with American culture and British knowhow.

US knowhow gave the US a huge advantage over Japan in World War II. It had the capacity to build war material at a colossal rate, replacing losses and extending their advantage, at a time when Japan could no longer build either ships of planes.

The Moon landing was another staggering achievement. Second in getting a man into space, they were nonetheless first in putting a man on the Moon (the series For All Mankind gives an entertaining and insightful view of what might have happened had they been second).

When it came to doing things right, it made sense to look at what was happening in the US. And when it came to doing the right thing, at least in politics and administration, you could do a lot worse than turn to the UK.

Both nations built those reputations over years of careful, competent work. Now they’ve lost them.

Not improving US standing in the world

Trump has spent his presidency undoing Obama’s good work before him, on global warming, on international relations and on medical preparedness for epidemics, particularly relevant today. Nothing, however, has shown up his unfitness for the job so much as his handling of the pandemic itself. Many have died because of his slowness to act. Now, many more will die as he forces the nation to open to business too soon, against the advice of his experts, and for no better reason than that he needs the economy to be booming to secure re-election.

In other words, his electoral interests matter more to him than the primary duty of all national leaders, to protect their people. He’s indifferent to the suffering of others. That, incidentally, seems to me to be the textbook definition of a sociopath.

They may be laughing at you these days,
rather with with you...

In the UK, Johnson’s focus was on completing Brexit, with the simplistic slogan, “Get Brexit Done”. It ignored any of the details of how a Brexit would look or the impact it would have. But Johnson isn’t a details man.

His failure to grasp detail is particularly stark in the pandemic. He had several weeks’ warning and much to learn from countries hit earlier. But like Trump, the Prime Minister is more concerned with holding his post than with carrying out its duties. Why, he even failed to attend five meetings of the emergency committee preparing for the epidemic when there was still time to act.

This week, as he announced that it was time to relax the lockdown and send many people back to work, it emerged that he’d made no arrangements to ensure their safety. Laughably, he made it sound as though they should go in on Monday, when in fact the relaxation was planned for Wednesday. Nor could he make clear how they should get there, by their own means or public transport.

This led to the German newspaper <i>Die Zeit</i>, one of many foreign media shocked by Johnson’s behaviour, to comment acerbically, “the government is now trying to pretend that it has the situation under control.”

Far from being the envy of the world, Trump and Johnson have made the US and UK objects of ridicule and pity. British comedy enjoys high international fame, but right now people are laughing at us, not with us. It will be a long way back for both nations to the reputations they once enjoyed, with no guarantee they’ll get there. 

But who’s to blame? They didn’t vote themselves into office, after all.

If you plan to vote for Trump, you’re not making America great. You’re contributing to preserving an administration the world sees as incompetent and which will cause the deaths of tens of thousands of your compatriots.

If you plan to vote Conservative in Britain, you’re trying to preserve a government which is making the country a laughing stock and the most dangerous in Europe for Coronavirus.

We often get the governments we deserve. And if we don’t vote for a better one, we deserve the one we have.

Even if its bad deeds confirm, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, our justified but lousy reputation.

The Walking Dead, or has Sanders done a Corbyn?

‘Dead man walking’ is an overused expression. But I can’t help feeling it fits Bernie Sanders perfectly. Barring some kind of miracle, the only thing that stops his campaign for the presidency being over, is that he won’t admit it.

An analysis in the New York Times rang a bell with me:

While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination.

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be ex-Leader of the Labour Party, led us into two general election defeats. The second, in December, was crushing. His supporters now claim that he ‘won the debate but lost the election’.

How much worse would the defeat have been had we lost the debate too?

Lost causes both. However well read the campaigns may have been

All this reminded me of a note a friend of mine posted online some weeks ago.

I had been wondering how Momentum had been able to do so many things in the General Election that the Labour Party could not or did not do.

A friend in Momentum told me to read "Rules For Revolutionaries" by Bond and Exley.

My first reaction was, “if it’s an idea from Momentum, it’s probably best to stay well away from it”. Momentum is a faction inside the Labour Party that was set up specifically to back Jeremy Corbyn. So it shares responsibility for his failure.

When I expressed my scepticism, however, my friend responded that I should perhaps read the book. That was a reasonable reply, so I did – or rather, I listened to it, my preferred way of getting to know books these days (haven’t tried it? I suggest you do. You can listen while doing something else, which is particularly welcome if the something else is housework).

The book’s by Becky Bond and Zack Exley and it’s a fascinating read (or listen). It’s an American study, so it’s hardly about anything anyone in Europe would recognise as revolutionary. It’s about basic reforms, radical only for the States, such as healthcare free at the point of care or university education without fees.

Many intriguing ideas

It focuses above all on organisation and tactics, drawing heavily on the authors’ experience of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. 

They have some excellent ideas. The biggest is the extensive use of volunteers, rather than paid staff. Volunteers can recruit others who can recruit still more, creating a spreading network of supporters actively working for your candidate.

The other, related to it, is to raise your money from huge numbers of small donations. That’s been very much a keynote of both of Bernie’s presidential campaigns, and it’s impressive: it leaves him beholden only to ordinary voters and not to the huge corporations or lobbying organisations that have been toxifying Washington politics for at least a century and a half.

Not all of this is directly transferable to the UK. For instance, a curse and an advantage of US politics is the primary election.

It’s a curse, as the Democrats are discovering now, because it leaves a party squabbling with itself as candidates vie for the nomination, while Trump sits in the White House trying to look presidential.

The advantage is that it gives candidates a long time to connect with voters to listen to their concerns and to communicate a response.

We have no such institution in Britain. Arguably, we should. I think it most unlikely that Corbyn would have led Labour into the last election if Labour voters, and not just members, had been consulted. But for the moment, we don’t.

However, it is perfectly imaginable that we organise discussions with voters about principles. For instance, in Corbyn Labour has had a leader who was a Brexiter without the guts to admit it. Without that handicap, the Party could have spent the time after the referendum explaining to its supporters that Brexit would harm their lives, even if they had voted for it. That might have kept enough voters on side to win an election, and even have built support to reverse the Brexit result.

So some of Bond’s and Exley’s proposals could certainly be applied in Britain. But surely not by Momentum. Bond and Exley are all about recruiting huge networks of volunteers and empowering them to campaign as they see fit. That means delegating authority, and accepting the small number of inevitable failures for the sake of the far greater overall gain.

Momentum, to give you an idea of how the faction operates, sent out a ballot to its members over the Labour leadership election. Did it delegate the choice to its members? Did it heck. It called on them to either accept or reject only one option, the politburo’s.

Sorry. Momentum has a National Coordinating Group. However it behaves, it’s not actually called a politburo.

None of this, though, is the biggest problem with the book. The real problem is that it was written by people associated with a losing campaign. The book drops a hint as to why Sanders lost.

Becky Bond wrote Rule 4 of the Rules for Revolutionaries. That’s ‘Fighting Racism must be at the core of the message to everyone’.

She describes a public meeting at which candidates were asked to react to the call ‘Black Lives Matter’. My transcription of the audio is:

… his [Bernie’s] response to protestors was to declare, “black lives of course matter. I spent fifty years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity.” Then he continued, “but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK. I don’t want to outscream people.”

It was in this way that Bernie missed a crucial, early opportunity to put race at the centre of the message to everyone.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, particularly the current one, is his inability to gain traction amongst black voters. Like Bernie, Corbyn’s response to accusations of anti-Semitism, was to point at decades of campaigning against racism.

More fundamentally, however, Bond’s account of this moment provides a glancing reference to a much more serious problem that the book fails to address: it doesn’t matter how well you organise if the candidate’s no good. And he’s no good if he can’t put together a winning coalition of voters.

That’s Corbyn, but it’s also Sanders. Not only can Bernie not mobilise black voters, he can’t break out of the narrow circle of those who share his views. Here’s the New York Times again, with comments that apply as strongly to Corbyn:

Mr. Sanders proved unable to expand his base well beyond the left or to win over African-Americans in meaningful numbers. He failed to heed warnings from traditional party leaders, and even from within his campaign, about the need to modulate his message and unify Democrats.

Sanders rejects what he sneeringly refers to as the Democrat ‘establishment’, which makes it surprising that he’s angered by the failure of the centre and right of the Democratic Party to rally behind him. In the same way, Corbynists in Labour denounce anyone else as ‘Blairites’ or ‘Red Tories’. 

That doesn’t matter too much if the objects of their contempt are fellow Labour members. We voted for the Party anyway, despite Corbyn. But outside the Party, there was nothing like Party loyalty to oblige the huge numbers who mistrusted Corbyn to stick with him in spite of their aversion. So they voted against.

It can be invaluable to have clever organisational methods. Great campaigning tools are even more valuable. But if your candidate isn’t prepared to reach out to voters who don’t already share his views, well, he’s doomed before he starts.

Bernie. Jeremy. Walking dead both.

Boris got it done. Or did he?

He got it done!

Boris showing the way forward. And the subtle approach he took

Boris got Brexit done. 31 January, 2020, Brexit Day, is a date to remember. It’s the day that Boris Johnson ended Britain’s 47-year membership of the EU.

Well, ‘done’ is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. It’s one thing for the husband to leave the house, suitcase in hand. It’s quite another to finalise the divorce arrangements, divide the property and start paying the alimony.

What makes it worse is that the lovely young thing from accounting for whom the husband precipitated the split may not turn out to be quite so accommodating as at first he convinced himself. She may, indeed, to be at least as demanding as the wife he left. Not perhaps a problem if you’re Rupert Murdoch, with the resources to meet pretty much any demand from a string of wives. Not so hot if you’re a middle-ranking executive whose income will have trouble stretching to cover both alimony and the mortgage on a luxury new apartment.

That’s when the new-found freedom starts to look a little expensively purchased.

Britain’s in that position. It’s walked out, head held high, nose in the air, daring the deserted spouse to do its worst. But far from being done, the really difficult part of Brexit starts now. The lawyers, in this case negotiators, are getting in on the act, and sharpening the knives.

Brexiters have always claimed that Britain would, somehow, be in the driving seat. It would dictate terms to the remaining 27 EU members, who would fall over themselves in their eagerness to sign a trade deal, on terms favourable to Britain, at the earliest opportunity.

Equally, the rest of the world would be beating a path to Britain’s door to do the same. In the lead would be the US, with Trump enthusiastic, anxious even, to provide his friend Boris with an agreement which might go so far as to sacrifice some US interests, such is his determination to see Boris right.

Meanwhile, the Faragists of the Left, or Lexiters as they call themselves (left-wing Brexiters), claim that leaving the EU is going to free up the country to look after its workers and its poor the way they’d like. Once away from the devious, conspiratorial capitalist club that is the EU, Britain will be free to usher its people into a sunlit, socialist upland.

Maybe all that will happen. If so, I will hold up my hand and admit I got things wrong. My fear is that Brexiters have been deluding themselves that the country is in the position of Rupert Murdoch when, in reality, it’s like the middle-ranking executive. And the US isn’t the demure assistant from accounting, anxious to do her new man’s bidding, she’s the former actress and model used to having all the best in life brought to her and thrown at her feet by admirers who are all but worshippers.

The EU 27 have already warned Britain that they see themselves calling the shots. A hugely favourable deal is on offer, but only on certain conditions: the UK must accept that it will be on a level playing field with the rest of Europe. That means maintaining the same standards concerning quality, state aid and workers’ rights. In other words, it means behaving as an EU member, with no say over the regulations it has to follow.

As for the US, it too is going to have its demands. Great deal, on condition that Britain accepts US food standards, drug prices and commerce regulations generally. Brexiters promised that Britain would be taking back control. It seems to me that, in reality, it will be a rule taker.

As for the socialist uplands, the results of the December general election show that this is at best a remote dream. The Conservatives are firmly in power now, and with a majority that may well see them through the next election too. Paradoxically, the Faragists of the Left blame Brexit for this, though it leaves them as keen as ever on Brexit itself.

I could, as I said, be wrong about all of this. That would be a huge relief. But I think that’s the task on Brexiters now: their job is to prove that they can deliver on their promises. And Lexiters have to show how they plan to guarantee better rights and living standards for the underprivileged they claim to represent.

The night of 31 January will be a time of celebration for them. They have the weekend to recover. Then the real work starts.

Let’s hope the hangover won’t be too awful. Because, sadly, it won’t just be Brexiters who suffer it. Sadly, I fear the rest of us will be paying the price of their self-indulgence too.

A bad awakening on Friday the thirteenth

Friday the thirteenth. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for the British Labour Party. Above all unlucky for those the Labour Party is intended to protect.

A party goes into an election seeking a fourth successive victory, something that has only happened once previously since universal suffrage was introduced in Britain. It does it after nearly a decade of ruinous austerity leaving the nation unprotected by a police force starved of resources, and with its national health service struggling even to survive. It does it under the leadership of Boris Johnson, a man entirely exposed as a liar and a cheat.

Such a party with such a leader stands not a chance of success.

Boris Johnson: gloating, entitled, triumphant
The face of Britain for maybe five years, and maybe more

And yet Boris has not merely succeeded, he has emerged with a comfortable majority. Why? Because the forces arrayed against him were so utterly inept that they couldn’t win an election that was offered up to them on a platter.

The Liberal Democrat party had a new leader, Jo Swinson, who ran a lacklustre campaign which left her party with ten fewer seats at the end that it had had at the beginning. One of the seats lost was her own.

Outside parliament, the People’s Vote campaign, far from uniting all the forces favouring continued British membership of the European Union, fell into faction squabbling and purges. Other Remain organisations came up with recommendations for tactical voting to keep the Tories out which contradicted each other. An unedifying, chaotic babble of voices with no clear leadership.

The worst of all, though, was Labour, because it was the biggest party and therefore had the most responsibility.

Jeremy Corbyn consolidated his place in Labour history as the second worst leader the Party has had, behind only Ramsay MacDonald, its first Prime Minister, who betrayed everything it stood for by forming a coalition government with the Tories in 1931. His action reduced the party’s parliamentary presence to just 52.

Corbyn campaigned as a man of principle, but wouldn’t tell the electorate where he stood on the biggest question of his time, Brexit. Most suspected that he remained what he’d always been, a Brexiter, but he compounded that suspicion by making it clear that his refusal to say was designed to avoid alienating either Leave voters or Remainers. Since both sides knew he was equivocating in order to make them both think he was on their side, both sides turned against him.

Few voters understood what was honest about that kind electoral opportunism.

Equally, Corbyn failed to act on allegations of anti-Semitism in the party. At first, my sense was that he was just extremely indolent and couldn’t bring himself to move quickly on the charges that were brought. But then I realised that there were skeletons in his closet too. For instance, he wrote a foreword for the reissue of Imperialism: A Study by John Atkinson Hobson, in which he described the book as “brilliant”. The book talks about European finance being controlled “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience,” which puts them “in a unique position to control the policy of nations”. No prizes for guessing which race Hobson meant.

Was that Corbyn’s problem in dealing with anti-Semitism? He might have had to take action against people expressing views like those he had endorsed in this foreword.

I don’t think many British voters care all that much about us Jews, either for or against. But they’re quick at identifying equivocation and evasion, and what Corbyn was doing over anti-Semitism was extremely dodgy. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism itself that killed him, it was the dodginess.

In the same way, it wasn’t the position he took over Brexit that damaged him, it was the sense that it wasn’t straight.

He compounded these strategic errors with tactical ones, starting with agreeing to the election being held on 12 December, to suit Boris Johnson’s timetable rather than his own. Corbyn, it strikes me, is not particularly bright and didn’t see that if Boris wanted the election now, that was an excellent reason for saying no. Instead, Corbyn went ahead and got creamed.

This is the second time we’ve been through this in my lifetime. The first was in 1983, the last occasion on which the hard left took control of Labour, and was reduced to its smallest parliamentary representation since 1935. That 1935 election, by the way, was significant because it was the first step back towards office by the Labour Party, after its catastrophe of 1931.

The election of 1983 was appalling, therefore. But it has been outdone by the 2019 one. In 1983, Labour emerged with 209 MPs, in 2019 with just 203. The 2019 election has taken over from 1983 as the worst for Labour since 1935.

The common theme Corbyn’s and the others’ dismal attempts to confront Boris was lack of leadership. None of them could rally the disparate forces opposed to his plans into a focused movement against him. Now he’s in with a vengeance, and his vengeance will be terrible.

He will, of course, now force Brexit through. Since it is not the fact of leaving the EU that will be hard or soft, but the nature of the trade agreement we negotiate or fail to negotiate with the EU, we are by no means yet safe from a hard Brexit.

Next will be the continued attacks on the poor and on public services. Boris will continue to promise greater investment in the police, in social care and in healthcare, but the reality will be otherwise. After a few years, the poor and many of the not-so-poor will be a great deal less well off than they are today.

What does all this mean? 

The fightback starts today.

The first step is to take back control of the Labour Party. Though Corbyn has said he will not lead Labour into another election, there are signs that some Corbynists at least will attempt to retain their dominance in the party. That may be less easy for them to do than they think. Some of the most zealous will certainly stick with the project but others may drift away, disappointed by the results. Others may simply realise that they would do better to work with other currents inside Labour, that a compromise that gives some of what they want is better than purity which gives them none of it.

Assuming that we can pull together to elect a leader who actually leads – and there are people who meet that requirement in Labour, such as Yvette Cooper or Keir Starmer – then a long slow process begins. After the crushing defeat of 1983, Labour lost two more elections before winning one. Can we win more quickly this time? Let’s hope so, but let’s remember what a long haul it was back then.

The other crucial step is to start the process of getting Britain back into the EU. That will certainly be a generational matter. I don’t expect to live long enough to see it myself, but it needs to be started. It is linked with the first step, since Labour has a crucial role to play in the process, and can’t while led by closeted Brexiters.

There are difficult times ahead. But difficulties aren’t overcome by not confronting them – Corbyn’s experience on Brexit and anti-Semitism shows that. A real leader will confront them, and real leadership is what we need.

Above all, we have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve been through it twice, in 1983 and 2019: the hard left takes charge and we’re thrashed in the subsequent election. That demonstrates the principle that if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you merely repeat them.

Two such routs were bad enough. Let’s make sure we don’t have a third.

Boris, Trump and tripping the lie fantastic

There was a time when voters valued honesty in politicians. Not that they expected ever to find any. There’s an old joke about a man lost in a wood and stumbling into a clearing, in which he sees a blind old woman, a pink elephant and an honest politician. So who does he ask to show him the way?

The answer is, of course, the blind old woman, as the other two are just figments of the imagination.

Boris and the great lie

But even if we didn’t expect honesty from them, we kept up a vaguely optimistic pursuit of the honest politician, or maintained the notion as some kind of ideal towards which we might aspire.

Not any more, it appears. In Donald Trump, we have a US president who, if we really push our generosity, may feel is not an actual liar, in the sense that he may not always be deliberately stating as a truth something he knows not to be true. It may rather be that he suffers from a pathological inability to tell the truth from anything he happens to want to believe. Or, worse still, happens to want his voters to believe.

He may simply be lying, but it may actually be that he thinks that his wanting to believe something is true, makes it true.

North Korea hasn’t actually disarmed at all? So what? The disarmament deal that Trump proclaimed after his first meeting with Kim Jong Il is the best disarmament deal there ever was.

All that nonsense about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his opponent? All made up. The fact that a transcript of the call exists, and it confirms the allegation, is neither here nor there. It never happened.

Isn’t a great achievement that China is paying for the tariffs Trump has put on its exports to the US? The miserable line about tariffs being paid by the population of the importing country, not the exporting one, is just an inconvenient factoid. An unattractive notion, and therefore untrue.

But in Britain too we have our version of Trump. Like Trump in the US, Boris holds the highest elective office in Britain. Unlike Trump, I think he has sufficient knowledge and intellectual horsepower to know when a statement is actually false. So when he utters a falsehood, he is undoubtedly lying.

And he seems to lie as naturally, as casually, as automatically as he breathes.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance came when he visited Whipps Cross hospital in North London. When the father of a child who had been admitted to the appallingly understaffed and overstretched emergency department accused him of only being there for a photo opportunity, Boris replied that there were no press present. That was despite the fact that, as the father pointed out, the press were clearly visible just a few steps away. 

Omar Salem points out the photographers at Whipps Cross
whose presence Boris had just denied

The father, Omar Salem, is a Labour activist. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a father, his child was seriously ill, and the staff were hopelessly overstretched. It seems that Boris’s first instinct is to lie, even when it’s obvious that he’s going to be caught out almost immediately.

There were so many other instances. Another was the decision of the Daily Telegraph to apologise for an article Boris published in the paper, forecasting that a post-Brexit Britain would overtake Germany as an economy within a few decades. It seems his argument was based on an analysis he’d ready which simply didn’t bear it out.

Perhaps the most notorious deceit ever was the one Boris associated himself with during the Brexit referendum campaign, that leaving the EU would free £350 million a week to invest in the NHS (the National Health Service). It was particularly barefaced, because it deliberately overstated the contributions the UK made to the EU, ignored the subsidies it received back from it, and left out of account the additional costs associated with Brexit and the revenue loss it was likely to entail.

A far wilier campaigner than Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, far being put off by his terrible track record in this field, Boris has boldly taken the battle to his Labour opponents, precisely on the grounds of the NHS. That takes courage for a Conservative, because this is traditionally Labour’s strong ground. But Boris is promising to spend more on the health service, to employ more clinicians, even to build more hospitals.

In other words, Boris is promising to address the very scandals that the distraught father tackled him over at Whipps Cross.

And yet Conservative Central Office has instructed candidates to sign no pledges on the NHS (or indeed on climate policy). So Boris is making the promises but preparing the ground for reneging on them. As he did over Brexit, when he promised to deliver it by 31 October, “do or die” – he didn’t do, but he didn’t die either.

What’s most surprising about this trail of blatant lies and broken promises is, in an election as wide open as any I’ve seen, with four major parties contesting nationally, as well as the SNP massively powerful in Scotland, Boris continues to lead the polls. At nearly 40%, his standing is weak, but way ahead of anyone else’s.

Above all, what that 40% means is that, for two voters out of five, honesty in a politician is simply not an important consideration. They see it as perfectly legitimate to vote for him anyway.

Sadly, 40% is enough to win in a wide-open field.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but in Britain, you only need to fool 40% on election day to get to do what you want for the next five years.

Poignancy

All Saints Day. The day after Halloween. You could tell here in Madrid, if only because some of the people we saw had clearly not finished celebrating from the night before.

Halloween revellers in the Madrid metro
Heading home late the morning after

We were in Madrid because that’s where my company’s offices are. My ex-company. That ‘ex’ is the reason I had to visit the office at all. Because, while an event that should have happened on Halloween didn’t, one that shouldn’t have, did.

31 October was the latest date that Britain was to leave the EU. This was absolutely clear. To Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, it was a matter of ‘do or die’. Indeed, he said he would rather die in a ditch than accept that he had to get a further extension to the Brexit timetable.

But he didn’t do Brexit by the deadline he set. Nor did he die. A ditch? No trace of one in his existence yet. It’s enough to make one wonder whether one can entirely trust his word. Many tell me that you know that Boris is lying by the fact that he’s breathing. However, as my American friends can no doubt testify, you just don’t get pathological liars leading major nations.

Do you?

So no Brexit. Or at least not yet.

On the other hand, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen was my brusque and involuntary departure from the company. Halloween was the day of my latest redundancy. But at least, on this occasion, I’m going out on a high. This was undoubtedly the best job I’ve had, with the best boss and the best team. What’s more, a great many people with whom the team worked have written to say how much they’re going to miss us. My quarrel isn’t with anyone I know but only with people who haven’t the faintest idea about what the team was doing. Just a pity that, despite knowing so little, they were the ones taking the decisions.

Good memories accompany my departure, and contacts I hope will endure, with former colleagues who are also good friends.

We took advantage of our presence in Madrid to see our sons and their partners and, in particular, our new granddaughter Matilda.

Matilda appreciating life

It was on our way to one of those visits that I was struck by a statue near the metro station we were using. It’s dedicated to the “Atocha lawyers”. They were members of a group involved in the defence of workers’ rights in the early years of democracy, after the death of the dictator Franco. On 24 January 1977, far right terrorists attacked them, leaving five dead and four injured.

Monument to the Atocha Lawyers

The main targets of the attackers were trades union leaders from the Communist Party, at that time still banned. Ironically, its legalisation was accelerated by the attack. That’s the response we should all have to terrorism: when our rights are attacked, we should respond by strengthening of those rights. That’s not always the case: since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in England, the momentum for Brexit, which she loathed, has if anything increased.

The statue in Madrid is a moving reminder of how costly it can sometimes be to defend rights. And how important.

Equally touching was a pair of paintings I saw in one of my favourite galleries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The first was a portrait of Quappi in a Pink Jumper, full of affection but also of forceful personality. 

Powerful, intriguing portrait by Beckmann
Quappi in a Pink Jumper

I hadn’t previously come across the painter, Max Beckmann. He was German, but he died in the US, and the painting was dated 1932-1934. Which places it in just the time Hitler was coming to power.

Max Beckmann in one of his many self-portraits

Later, I looked him up. When Hitler denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1937, many of Beckmann’s canvasses were seized and some were included in the degenerate art exhibition of that year. He fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where he somehow managed to survive the war and German occupation, in the course of which the attempt was made to force him into the German Army, even though he was 60.

In 1948, they left Europe for the US where he renewed a successful career not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Far too short a career, as longstanding heart disease killed him in 1950 at the age of 66 (my own age, so I can testify that it’s far too young to die).

According to his widow, he had been on his way to see one of his paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And who was that widow? Why, the Quappi of the painting. It seems that the affection it radiates isn’t simply art. It reflects a real sentiment.

Degenerate art? How could the failed painter Hitler have any idea of what was good or what wasn’t? And what a disgraceful abuse of power it was to oppress men like Beckmann, as it was to murder the Atocha lawyers.

The US gained by Germany’s attempt to crush Beckmann. As the Spanish Communist Party benefited from the right-wing attempt on some of its leaders. A lesson worth remembering at a time when many in America, or Britain, seem indifferent to the value of tolerating opposing views to one’s own.

My Halloween trip was full of poignant moments. Leaving a much-loved job. Seeing some much-loved family members. And admiring two works of art dedicated to the protection of much-loved freedoms.

Boris Coup: Day 59 (yawn)

He came in with a roar, and is going out with a whimper.

Benito: an autocrat who kept Parliament and judges under control
But, in the end, it didn’t work out for him either

Boris Johnson, in his autocratic ambition, wanted to dominate British politics like Mussolini dominated the politics of Italy. He gaily suspended parliament, and only discovered afterwards that he didn’t have the judges on his side (Benito was much more careful in ensuring he could count on the judiciary), so his bold and splendid Trumpian act was ruled illegal by the courts.

No sooner had the suspension been overturned than it became clear how necessary it had been to him. He has yet to win a substantive vote in the Commons. Every time he pushes for something, the MPs push right back…

This has enabled him to present himself as the people’s representative blocked at every time by those pesky MPs trying to flout the people’s will. A latter-day David taking on the Goliath of the Establishment.

This is amusing. What can be more British establishment than a man who was educated at Eton and Oxford and has lived the life of an entitled grandee ever since?

There are, however, people sad enough to fall for this tale. But then there are people out there sad enough to believe that Britain will be better off outside the EU than in. Basically, there are a lot of sad people.

They’re also misled. By blocking Boris, MPs are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re holding government to account. Those who feel they should let Boris do just what he wants are endangering the very basis of our democracy. I hope we never see governments that can do what they want whether our representatives like it or not.

Now Boris has come up with a new Brexit arrangement rather worse than the one Theresa May agreed. He tried to force it through in just a few days (coup habits die hard) and was told by Parliament that they weren’t having that. So now he’s proposing a deal to MPs themselves: if they’ll let him have a General Election on 12 December, he’ll give them more time to scrutinise his bill.

This is a curious and interesting approach to compromise.

MPs are taking the extra time anyway, whether or not he concedes it to them. So it’s hard to see how Boris is offering them anything they couldn’t take for themselves. In return, he wants them to do him a favour. Poor Boris. He needs to take a few more classes on the art of the deal, which usually involves both sides offering the other something they couldn’t get any other way.

He should certainly take those classes from someone other than Donald Trump, who, like Boris, seems much better at claiming he’s made deals than actually concluding them. As he’s shown with North Korea.

Why does Boris want a general election? Well, he’s tired of being defeated in the Commons. He thinks an election would give him a majority. With a ten-point lead in the polls, that makes sense. Unfortunately, plenty of people even in his own party aren’t so sure. Boris has always liked to play the buffoon, but unfortunately a lot of voters now seem him as a buffoon. That lead might vanish in the campaign.

To get an election, Boris needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament. For that, he needs Labour MPs to agree. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been demanding an election, long, loud and frequently, pretty much since the last one. Why? He thinks voters love him and he can win. A ten-point poll deficit? He reckons he can turn that around.

His supporters agree, because last time he came from even further behind and came a far better second than anyone had expected. They seem to forget that coming second is of no value. There are no silver medals in parliamentary elections. Come second, and you’ve lost.

A lot of Labour MPs are beginning to wonder whether a general election right now’s such a good idea. After all, Corbyn did better than expected when he was barely known to the electorate. He was also up against a dismal campaigner, in Theresa May. This time, voters have had plenty of chance to see how he dodges the difficult questions, how he dithers in reaching a decision – why he’s even dithering now, over an election – and he’s up against a far better campaigner in Boris.

The net result of all this? We have no idea of how things will turn out. Will Boris get his deal through Parliament? Will he get his election? Will he win or will he lose?

Looks like we have further exciting times ahead. Rather like the last three and a half years since the referendum. Yawn.

Brexit started as a spectacular catastrophe. It’s morphing into a boring disaster. Alas, poor Britons.

Metro lessons in understanding. And misunderstanding

There are times when I wonder why I ever take the car into central Valencia. It’s not so much the traffic, though that can be a pain (it’s sad how few cars around here seem to be fitted with working indicators), but more a matter of finding a parking space once there. That can take practically as long as the drive in.

Our metro station. A sight worth seeing in its own right

Besides, our local metro station is in a forest. Not a pleasure to pass up, is it? That’s why when I picked up two Croatian friends who were coming to stay, I went by metro instead of by car, even though it meant hauling a case through the woods afterwards. It was a chore, but a small price to pay for a woodland welcome…

“So,” said one of the friends, “what’s the name of the final destination of this train?”

The station is called ‘Lliria’. That initial double-l always intimidates me. It’s as worrying in Spanish as it is in Welsh. For the Spaniards, it seems to be a cross between the ‘j’ in ‘you’re joking’ and the ‘y’ in ‘you’re kidding’, but quite where in between I have trouble deciding.

Still, I’d heard the name many times. I had an answer to the question.

“Liria,” I told him.

Was that right, though? A double ‘l’ pronounced as though it were single?

On the train, as in most countries, a small minority was absorbed in conversation, another reading, another just staring blankly into space. The vast majority were glued to their phones.

One woman had been separated from her friends by the arbitrary emptying of seats. She’d shifted from absorption in conversation to blank staring. She started to pull out a phone, but before she could get focused, I seized my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you pronounce the name of this train’s destination?”

She looked momentarily shocked. A stranger? Talking to her? In a metro? But she gathered her thoughts quickly.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“No, no. I don’t want to go there. I just want to know how to pronounce it.”

“You want to know how to pronounce Liria?”

That was quite helpful. A question that contained the answer to mine. Clearly I’d got it right.

Then, however, her friend, two seats away intervened.

“Jiria?”

Of course, she may have said ‘Yiria’. But I heard ‘Jiria’. And, either way, I was back at square one. Was the town called ‘Liria’ or ‘Jiria/Yiria’?

The first woman, now smiling as she understood that I was just a foreigner trying to come to terms with the language, came to my rescue.

“Liria in Castilian. Jiria in Valencian.”

That may have been ‘Yiria’, but I’d got the message. The town’s name was different in Castilian (the Spanish national language) or Valencian (the regional language).

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “we’re not racists in Valencia. You can talk Castilian to us and we’ll answer in the same language. We’re not like the Catalans.”

Valencians aren’t keen on being confused with Catalans. Their language, Valencian, many like to point out, is absolutely not Catalan. For the record, one Valencian friend we asked quickly checked that no one was listening, before telling us that, in all honesty, Valencian really is Catalan.

The reference to Catalans made the conversation more general, as people dived into the current hot topic in Spain, the campaign for independence in Catalonia and the demonstrations, some with outbreaks of violence, that followed stiff gaol sentences handed out to some of the leaders. In Valencia and, I suspect, in most of Spain outside Catalonia, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the independence movement, and the people in the metro were no exception. One woman spoke up for the notion that the national government could, perhaps, use velvet gloves a little more, rather than mailed fists, but she didn’t get much support.

I used to be quite keen on the Catalan case, since they seemed to be something of a different nation, with their own language and traditions, but since the Brexit torment started, I’ve rather cooled on the idea of people walking away from the wider organisation they belong to, just because they can’t be bothered to help reform it.

My Croatian friends had just come from Barcelona. We shared their news that while there was indeed some violence in the city, it was localised and most places were quiet. Everyone nodded at that and made some comments about journalists always focusing on the bad news, but they quickly got back to the more interesting topic of how annoying the Catalans were.

Some Catalans making a point
Not all Spaniards are wholly in favour, though

That didn’t last long, though. The women noticed the young lads across the carriage were eating some kind of multi-coloured hoops, out of a plastic bag. Cereal perhaps, but as one of the women said, it looked like the kind of thing she might feed to her cat. I’d just be thinking that it could have been dog food, but that was close enough.

The lads were courteous and offered the bag around. There were no takers, though. Perhaps we all felt that we didn’t really belong to the right species for the stuff.

The woman I’d first spoken to got off the train before us. She waved as she left and wished us a good evening.

“The language lesson was free,” she said. “A Catalan would have charged for it.”

With those words she left me amused at how easy it was to break down the barriers between fellow travellers on a train, at how friendly relations could be between people from three different countries with three different languages, and at how that contrasted with the animosity on display towards people from just up the road who spoke a language practically identical to their own.

Metro trips are much more fun than car journeys. And so much more instructive.

Boris Coup: Day 28

Isn’t it great? 

Today, on day 28 of his coup, we have official confirmation, from the highest court in the land, that Boris Johnson broke the law. Which means trying to avoid scrutiny by proroguing parliament wasn’t just a naked power grab, it was illegal.

The UK Supreme Court on its way to the ruling that
outlaws Boris and his coup

To those who’ve claimed that my use of the word ‘coup’ is over the top for what Boris has done, let me just say that an illegal power grab seems to be the textbook definition of a coup. No tanks on the streets, sure, but a coup all the same.

For the moment, the UK remains, however, a state ruled by law. This decision ought therefore to be obeyed. Johnson says he will respect it, but who knows? He broke the law with the prorogation itself, so no one can say with any certainty that he won’t try to break it again. One can only hope, but watch him carefully.

If Parliament holds its nerve, it can even bring him down now. If enough Tories, or more to the point ex-Tories kicked out by Boris, join with enough Opposition MPs, they can pass a no-confidence vote.

Then things would get really interesting. There would be an opportunity to form what many are calling for, a government of national unity. That’s when we’d come up against another hitch. Jeremy Corbyn, leader in name of the Labour Party, has said he would not support anyone other than himself to lead such a government. Few MPs – indeed few voters – would have any more confidence in him than in BoJo.

After all, why should they? Who led the fight back against BoJo’s coup, the one that led to today’s Supreme Court Decision against him? The Scottish and Welsh governments, and a series of individuals, most notably Gina Miller who has now won two major decisions against the government (the other one was to force a parliamentary vote on Brexit at all).

But where was Corbyn?

Why, he was plotting against his Deputy Tom Watson. He confirmed as much to Andrew Marr on BBC TV on Sunday, when he said that, while he knew there were conversations “about the role of deputy leader”, he “did not know that that particular motion was going to be put at that time.”

A non-denial denial. In other words, he knew about the plot. And to all those who say that Owen Smith mounted a coup against Corbyn when he ran for leader, I would reply that it was a legitimate political action, respecting the Labour Party Constitution, open, transparent, followed by debate, and with a result accepted by the loser.

What happened in the move against Watson was that a motion to abolish his position was brought in, without notice, at the end of a meeting, to try to nod it through with minimal debate. Now that’s a coup attempt.

So Corbyn played a minimal role in the fight against the Boris coup. And he showed himself capable of being as nasty and underhand as any machine politician. Indeed, rather like Boris himself.

So why would anyone want him to take over?

If a unity government is to be formed, therefore, there will be a lot of obstacles to overcome. We’d need both Labour and Tory MPs to rebel. In short, we’d need MPs to stand up to the deplorable leaders both main parties have inflicted on themselves.

Of course, we shouldn’t write off BoJo yet. There’s a chance he may just brave his opponents, even in defiance of the law. Or then again he may play on Corbyn’s obsessive ambition to get to Downing Street: Jeremy may not be able to resist the temptation of an election, even though he’s fifteen points behind in the polls.

Then Boris might get back with a Parliamentary majority. Which would mean he could exercise personal rule even within the law. Giving us hard Brexit, subservience to the US and an assault on basic rights.

Then we’ll really know what “taking back control” means.