BBC or Better Be Careful what you wish for

“Democracy,” wrote the American journalist and wit HL Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There are times when some on the left seem convinced that they know what they want, and getting it good and hard might refocus their minds. Not that I’d like it to happen: we’d all suffer if they did.

What makes me say this is the internet meme I keep seeing, with a picture of Peter Falk as Columbo, making his trademark comment: “Excuse me sir… just one more thing” and then asking the (apparently) killer question, “why does the BBC never quiz the Tories about doubling the national debt to £1.9 trillion?”

Back in 2010, the Tories had promised that their austerity programme was a necessary evil to reduce the national debt. It is indeed ironic, at the very least, that after nearly a decade of the evil, the debt, far from being reduced, has doubled. So why doesn’t the BBC quiz the Tories about this sad state of affairs?

The BBC is primarily a news organisation. The doubled debt may be deplorable, but it isn’t news. It isn’t because nobody is quizzing the Tories about it. Not Labour, for instance. If Labour took up the issue in the current general election campaign, it would become newsworthy.

Why doesn’t Labour do that?

Because it would face a counter-attack demanding to know how it intends to reduce the debt. Since Labour is more concerned with some urgent spending commitments – on the NHS, Education and the Police, among many others – the last thing it wants to do is to paint itself into a corner as committed to debt-cutting.

The truth is that the national debt is not an issue in the election campaign. The NHS is. Education. The Police. Housing and homelessness. Workers’ rights. The issues, in fact, on which Labour is quizzing the Tories and on which the BBC also should.

That the BBC were planning to make life difficult for Boris Johnson on such matters is reflected in Johnson’s apparent reluctance to be interviewed by Andrew Neill. Jeremy Corbyn was badly mauled by Neill. Boris would doubtless prefer to be called gutless for ducking the same experience than run that risk. Not honourable or courageous, but wily.

If he doesn’t face the same inquisition as Corbyn did, that’s not the BBC’s fault. It’s Boris showing how deviously he plays the political game.

But back to the national debt. Let’s be clear: for instance, it would be wrong to think that the BBC doesn’t talk about it at all. It took me about three minutes to find a recent piece on the subject. It included a graph showing how the debt has climbed. It’s true that it shows £1.8tn rather than 1.9, but that seems to be down to its reasoning in terms of ‘net’ national debt. Don’t ask me what the difference is – at best I’d be guessing.

The BBC on rising national debt, in a piece from 6 November

It’s true, though, that the national debt isn’t front and centre of the BBC’s news coverage. We don’t get news bulletins telling us that “with the national debt at £1.9tn, double the level when the Tories came to power, rescue workers are still struggling to rescue survivors or recover bodies from the earthquakes in Albania”.

A TV channel that behaved in that way wouldn’t be providing news, it would be peddling propaganda. That’s the way things are in the US.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be news. This blog is propaganda, for a specific point of view (mine). If you don’t like it, that’s fine. There are plenty of others to choose from – the Skwawkbox on the left, for instance, or Guido Fawkes (or the Daily Mail) on the right. What those channels have in common is a lack of journalistic standards. We publish what we believe to be true, or in some cases would like to be true, without verification or evaluation.

If you’re more comfortable with reading material that confirms what you believe, stick to the propaganda. But I think we’d all do far better to have independent organisations publishing seriously checked material, which we can interpret as we wish. As C P Scott, the iconic editor of the Guardian put it, “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. I’d like to have my facts served up to me as accurately as possible. Then I’ll make up my mind.

The BBC doesn’t always get things right. But it does one hell of a lot better than most. For that, I’m hugely grateful.

By way of contrast, take a look at Hungary. It has just announced that it’s pulling out of the Eurovision competition. In itself, that’s hardly world-shattering. What makes the decision importance is its motivation: it’s undoubtedly because the Hungarian authorities see Eurovision as “too gay”. The Hungarian government is increasingly homophobic. There’s little doubt that’s why the nation has pulled out of the competition.

But the decision isn’t the government’s to take. It’s up to MTVA, the national TV network. The problem is, MTVA does what the government tells it to do.

See? What happens when you start demanding that your national broadcaster serves one side more than it currently is? There’s no guarantee it’ll support yours.

Knocking the BBC in Britain doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of the left. It’s far more likely to assist the hard right, which is just as critical of the organisation and far more powerful.

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it a lot harder than you wanted. And there may be nobody out there to cover your denunciations when that happens.

Boris Coup: Day 9

Day 9 of BoJo’s coup, and the wheels have really come off the Borismobile.

His first three parliamentary votes as Prime Minister all went against him. His first Prime Minister’s Questions were a disaster where even Jeremy Corbyn, generally pretty wooden, came across as not just more honest but a lot quicker than Boris. Even though arguably he’s neither.

It looks as though the combative style Boris chose to adopt turned out to be thoroughly counter-productive. Threatening to expel Conservative Members of Parliament (members of his own party) if they presumed to vote against his wishes worked entirely against him. It seems to have strengthened their will to resist his rule. Certainly, without that band joining the Opposition, he would not have lost his three votes.

Nor has carrying out his threat and sacking those recalcitrant members done him any favours. Nick Soames had been a Conservative MP for 36 years, as well as being Winston Churchill’s grandson. Ken Clarke sat in Parliament as a Tory for even longer, 49 years. Phil Hammond was Chancellor of the Exchequer until a few weeks ago, when Theresa May’s government fell.

Sacking figures of such stature from the Conservative Party has excited a great deal of criticism and protest from those who remain.

Phillip Lee literally crossing the House, while Boris is speaking,
to join the Lib Dems and wipe out the Tory majority of one

It also means that his voting strength in the House of Commons is reduced still further. He had, indeed, already lost his tiny majority – of one – when Philip Lee decided to cross the House, voluntarily leaving the Conservative Party to join the Liberal Democrats, choosing a moment of maximum drama and harm to make the gesture: in the middle of BoJo’s report to Parliament on the G7 meeting.

No. Boris’s strongest moves all seem to have backfired. One wonders how long Dominic Cummings, the shadowy figure who seems to be controlling all the doings of Downing Street, will survive. After all, this highly combative, not to say confrontational style, is very much his. BoJo may just have to throw him to the wolves to try to win back some sympathy from his fellow MPs.

If nothing else, the behaviour of those MPs makes clear, if anyone needed it clarifying, just why Boris launched his coup. Parliament is a major annoyance to him. It acts to block the arbitrary decisions of a man who feels his will should be sufficient to set national policy.

For those of us who believe that Britain should be a democracy, that is exactly what we believe its role should be: to prevent arbitrary rule, to stop anyone else setting himself up as some kind of latter-day satrap ruling with virtually monarchical power.

Unfortunately, a great many others take a wholly different view. They mouth the word democracy, but it’s rather like a child denouncing an action as unfair: children don’t usually find it unfair to be given a sweet denied to a sibling, and these pseudo-democrats only complain about undemocratic behaviour when it fails to yield them what they want.

Sadly, there are a lot of people like that. And they weren’t defeated in those parliamentary votes. Indeed, they will certainly resent them, as the papers which reflect their views already do. Indeed, many of them are particularly incensed because one of the votes Boris lost was to call a General Election. Labour abstained and so the motion fell short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Corbyn, say the right-wing papers, chickened out.

The Tory Press whipping up fury over BoJo's defeats

He was entirely right. Because for once he looked at political reality with a clear eye, instead of believing it to be as he might wish it. Labour would lose an election called now. And, if anything, the three defeats suffered by Boris only make that more likely. Those who back him will regard them as instances of Parliament denying them their entitlement, and doing so for self-serving or even corrupt reasons.

Astonishingly, given that no one belongs so entirely to the Establishment as BoJo, they will see him even more than ever as their champion against the established parties in Parliament. They will rally to his cause.

Labour needs to wait. Boris is on a rapid downward slope. The sheen is coming off his premiership. In time, even his supporters will begin to see that.

Corbyn still talks of agreeing to an election soon. That may just be spin, to try to cover his change of position, from forever calling for a vote. If he has any sense, he certainly won’t agree to one in the next few weeks.

A few months from now would be a far more favourable moment. Although I doubt BoJo, or whoever takes over from him, will be half as enthusiastic about holding an election then than they are now. 

Who then will the Conservative press call chicken?

Do Jews matter? Or Muslims?

Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis

Denmark, once a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness, has banned the Muslim full-face veil. It also now operates a system of officially designated ghettos, mostly inhabited by immigrants.

The Danish example has animated the far right in Britain, with Boris Johnson, contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, claiming that, while he doesn’t back a ban, he feels the niqab makes women look like letterboxes or even bank robbers.

Many, even Tories, have denounced the ‘morally empty’ Johnson for encouraging Islamophobia in this way. But he has received outspoken support from Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the hard-right, hard-Brexit wing of the Conservatives. That link between Brexit and Islamophobia is no accident: whatever people may say about ‘taking back control’ or Britain assuming its rightful place in the world, the main motive behind Brexit was xenophobia, and the first target of British xenophobia is Muslims.

The rise of xenophobia is creating a toxic atmosphere in which fundamental values of human rights are rapidly receding. We badly need a force capable of resisting that trend, which is why it’s a tragedy that the British Labour Party, far from fighting this crucial battle, has undermined its own position by failing to refute the charges of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Now, I agree with his fans that the scandal is being sustained by right-wing propaganda against Corbyn and Labour. Where I disagree with them is in seeing this as in any way unprecedented or even unusual. Why, in 1924 the first ever Labour government faced a scurrilous campaign of vilification, including the publication (by the Daily Mail, a sewer then as it’s a sewer now) of a forgery, the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, which suggested that the Communist International was working for a Labour victory.

Attacks on Labour come with the leader’s territory. The hallmark of the leadership is its reaction to them. Sadly, the reaction of today’s leadership has been lamentable.

It could have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples, immediately and in full. It didn’t. It decided that four of those examples would have limited its freedom to criticise the state of Israel. It’s hard to see how: nothing in those examples means that one can’t say, for instance, that the Israeli government’s attitude towards Palestinians is racist and abhorrent.

Corbynistas, however, objected to the four examples as a matter of principle. It had to be principle, since pragmatically it was a senseless decision. Ask most British voters about the Israel-Palestine conflict and it’s likely you’ll be met with ignorance. Those who do have an opinion are likely to come up with a ‘faults on both sides’ kind of argument. They might even say ‘well, Israel has to be able to defend itself against terrorists’. Persuading them that Israeli action goes way beyond legitimate action against terrorism would require a long process of education, and I’m not convinced many voters would be prepared to submit to it.

Oddly, though, the rejection of four examples was not, it turns out, a matter of principle after all. Corbyn has now decided that actually he can accept three of the four examples, so clearly they weren’t that problematic to start with. The suspicion has to be that in time he’ll accept the last one too.

Had he done that at the beginning, the attacks would not have stopped, but at least with swing voters he might have been given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Look, he’s accepted the international definition of antisemitism,’ they might have said, ‘and done it immediately. What more can you ask?’

By doing it late and reluctantly, he just looks truculent and unprincipled. He forfeits the credit he might have won otherwise.

Lousy politics.

The implications are more serious than that, however. After all, it isn’t antisemitism that is the most virulent form of racism in Britain today. It is far less widespread or intense than the Islamophobia which permeates society, as exemplified by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what needs to be resisted before we follow Denmark down the ugly road it has taken.

But how does one resist racism by others when one’s own track record isn’t spotless? Until we’ve cleared ourselves of the charge of antisemitism, Labour can’t claim to lead the fight against racism. Boris may be morally empty, but a counter attack would be far more effective if we’d first secured the moral high ground ourselves.

The toxins run deep. A minority of Labour favours Brexit. Sadly, with his talk of the benefits of a ‘Labour Brexit’, the suspicion is that Corbyn is with that group. That gives it disproportionate power. So it’s unsurprising that the leadership is resisting, despite powerful pressure from the membership, attempts to have the forthcoming Labour Conference debate backing for a second referendum on the EU.

The French equivalent of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is ‘tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Labour Brexiters are rubbing shoulders with the xenophobes they should be opposing. If they help reinforce racists’ views, they shouldn’t be surprised when they become tarred with that brush themselves. Backing Brexit lands them in the xenophobe camp.

Sadly, while it may only be Jews who are upset with Labour now, it’s Muslims who are facing general hostility. We should be strong in our defence of their rights. And not just for their sake: allow discrimination against the Jews or Muslims today and, who knows, in the long run you too could be the victim of your short-sightedness.

Niemöller adapted to our times

Thank you for the irony, Daily Mail

It’s not often that the British Daily Mail makes me smile, but it did today.

It was the headline that got me going: “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR ENGLAND?” it demanded to be told.

Usually I’m put off by what is, after all, the paper that lines the sewers of British journalism. It could have been for the Mail that the celebrated ditty was written:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God!
the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed,
there's no occasion to.

In this case, however, my reaction was that of a lover of irony. There were, after all, simply too many layers of irony in that headline for them not to be appreciated.

The article is about what the Mail sees as a battle between Britain and the EU, currently being waged without much conviction by David Cameron’s government. From the perspective of the Mail and others that share its political outlook, this is a battle for the very soul of Britain, threatened today by all those nasty foreigners across the Channel.

The reference in the headline is to one of the most poignant moments in the history of the House of Commons. I’ve mentioned it more than once before, but it was an inspiring event so I make no apology for talking about it again.

The then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had just flown home from a meeting with Hitler, in which he’d been joined by the French Prime Minister Daladier. On arrival back home, he had waved an agreement that, he claimed, guaranteed “peace for our time.” It gave Hitler a free hand to dismember Czechoslovakia, in return for his not threatening any French or British vital interests.

Hitler ignored the agreement and within a year, we were at war with Nazi Germany.

The time of the agreement was perhaps one of the most humiliating in Britain’s long and colourful career. A great many people felt that way, even then. When Chamberlain made a statement on his meeting to the House of Commons it was greeted by silence – shamed silence. And when the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood, stood to reply for the Opposition, a voice called out from the other side of the house – the Conservative, Government side – “speak for England, Arthur.”

So that was irony number 1. It was a Tory, Leo Amery, who called on a Labourite to speak against the Tory Prime Minister.

Irony number 2 is that he made that call in the name of England. But the whole of Britain was affected. Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish would share in the ignominy, as they would share in the sacrifices that the war would entail.

Irony number 3 is that the Mail claims to be speaking for Britain, and also referred only to England.

Irony number 4 is that Leo Amery was speaking out against Nazi Germany. The Mail is railing against a bunch of politicians, no better or worse than others, but as committed to democracy as any current member of the British Parliament.

The Mail says in its article that it’s drawing no parallel between the EU and Nazi Germany. But have you been watching the excellent French series on TV at the moment, Spin (Les hommes de l’ombre)? There’s a moment in it in which the protagonist refers to her adversary as “disloyal” and immediately corrects herself to “loyal”. It’s deliberate: her correction is designed to free her from attack for her insult, but the insult is out there.

The Mail’s use of that headline draws the parallel, even if the body of the article denies it.

Finally, and funniest of all, the Mail is the newspaper which, back in the 1930s, supported Hitler and his British (indeed, English) opposite number, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. How wonderful that it should now quote the great anti-appeasement Tory Amery to lambast David Cameron over his support for the EU…

Glorious stuff, isn’t it? Well worth a smile. And I suspect there’ll be plenty more such irony before we get our referendum on continued British membership of the EU.

That’s British membership including the English, by the way.

The Great British Bake Off, antidote to the bad news in a world dominated by superpower jostling

It’s great to come across the odd good news story out there, in amongst so much that’s bad.

Few are worse than the intensifying Russian intervention in Syria. What’s worst about it is that it reminds me of the behaviour of Germany in the run up to the First World War: Germany had emerged as a nation only rather late – it was proclaimed, ironically in France, only in 1871 – so it missed out on that precious time of empire building by so many other European powers.

Germany could have taken the intelligent decision that imperialism was inherently immoral (how on earth does one seriously justify a bunch of Brits, from a nation with terrible poverty, ill health and criminality in the nineteenth century, telling Indians how to live their lives?) and didn’t even benefit the imperial power that much (Britain remained racked by poverty, ill health and criminality when the Empire was at its height). Instead, it decided to get in on the act and carve out its own dominions, an ambition which led to increasingly intense clashes with France, Russia and Britain, and then the great 1914-1918 bloodbath.

So it’s worrying to see history repeating itself. The US under Dubya, enthusiastically supported by Tony Blair as British Prime Minister, went blundering into Iraq without international endorsement or legal basis, with results from which we’re still suffering twelve years on.

The worst aspect of that is that it established a precedent for ignoring the UN or norms of international legality, and simply using brute force, because one can.

Russia, reprising the role of Germany 140 years ago, instead of deciding that this kind of behaviour is reprehensible, leads to highly undesirable unplanned consequences, and ought to be avoided, has decided that anything the US can do, it can do too. So it’s blundering into Syria, making a painful situation far worse.

Why, if the latest reports are to be believed, it’s even rivalling the US in its capacity to create collateral damage, or even collateral mayhem: it seems four of its missiles may have hit Iran instead of Syria. I suppose one or two thousand kilometres of inaccuracy are to be expected in what specialists like to refer to as the “fog of war.”

Anyway, it’s in this context that I was delighted to find out about the winner of this year’s Great British Bake Off competition.

Now this is a pretty great programme. I watched it one year, though I gave up afterwards and watched neither of the last two competitions: I find the experience too stressful. It’s like watching England play rugby: it’s occasionally satisfying but often deeply depressing. In fact, in many ways the Bake Off is worse. At least on the rugby field, I know who to support and, therefore, by the simplest possible process of elimination, who to oppose. With the Bake Off, I sympathise with absolutely everyone, and want each of them to win, which means I’m distraught over the weekly elimination of a contestant, and inevitably disappointed over the final result by the failure of all the others who didn’t make it.

Nadiya Jamir Hussain, on her way to Bake Off victory

Still, I have to say that I take great pleasure over this year’s winner. She’s Nadiya Jamir Hussain, and she competed in a hijab.

We’re a long way from true assimilation in this country, and assimilation is never really reliable anyway (the Jews thought they’d achieved a high degree of assimilation in Germany in the nineteenth century, and look where that got them in the twentieth). Still, it’s good to see that a British woman can be celebrated by a British institution – the BBC had the year’s highest ratings for any programme, on any channel this year, for the final of the competition – even though she’s a Muslim.

At least there’s some progress, then.

Of course, we then have to return to all the everyday problems of racism in Britain – only today there’s been a new outcry over the poor level of dementia care offered to patients of Afro-Caribbean ancestry – but, hey, at least we can take a brief timeout to enjoy one positive event.


Postscript It was amusing to see the Guardian report that the Daily Mail failed to give front page coverage to the Bake Off result this year, as it had in the past. 

At least the paper that supported the Nazis in the 1930s has retained some consistency with its roots.

Time to "rediscover what it is to be human."

It’s good to see religious leaders standing up to denounce immorality – especially when for once it isn’t sex they’re talking about.

It’s particularly welcome when it is a Christian leader revealing how deeply unchristian David Cameron is, despite his frequent professions of faith. In this instance, the speaker was the bishop of Dover, Trevor Willmott, commenting on the so-called crisis of migrants in Calais.

I say “so-called” because there are at most 3000 of them (compared to the 60,000 who turned up in Italy in the first six months of this year), and it isn’t even clear that all of them want to come to England. I heard one interviewed by the BBC, saying she hoped the world might hear them, and maybe someone in the world might find it in their heart to help them.

Even so, Cameron has decided to provide dogs and guards and better fences to Calais, to make sure that none of these immigrants make it to Britain. So for him the question is merely to be met with security measures, rather than to be treated as a social and political issue, that needs to be handled with compassion towards people who are fleeing some of the worst dangers on the face of the Earth.

What underlined the moral problem was Cameron’s description of the people in Calais as a “swarm of migrants.” It was that use of the word “swarm”, as though we were dealing not with humans but with locusts, that caused the worst shock.

The bishop, talking with the support of the Church of England, pointed out that “we’ve become an increasingly harsh world, and when we become harsh with each other and forget our humanity then we end up in these standoff positions. We need to rediscover what it is to be a human, and that every human being matters.”

Not an infestation, not a swarm
Just humans facing desperate hardship

A salutary reminder. And here’s another – a reminder of a previous time when we in Britain closed ranks to resist swarms of immigrants.

“The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring into this country from every port is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.”

Thus spake a magistrate in 1938, quoted with approval by the Daily Mail, the paper which supported the Nazis in Germany at that time, and the British Union of Fascists in its own country.

Recently, the Czech Republic honoured Sir Nicholas Winton who brought 669 children out in the “Kindertransporte”, to save their lives in Britain. This was felt to be only what he deserved, including by the right wing press. They’re correct, of course, but it’s worth remembering that we’re talking about under 700.

For the first six years of the Nazi regime, the only Jews affected were in Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. These were Jews that could have been helped, in a way that when it came to Poland, rescue was impossible: the Nazis appeared in their country so rapidly, and Britain in any case declared war on Germany. But something could have been done about German Jews.

There were a little over 500,000 of them when the Nazis came to power. By 1941, around 160,000 of them were still there. They were, almost without exception, murdered. Jews who left for other European countries, like France, which later fell under Nazi control, were also mostly killed.

Britain took about 40,000 of the Jews who got out. That’s about 10% of the total. Under 10% of the whole Jewish population of Germany. About a quarter as many as those who were killed. So while it’s wonderful to recognise men like Nicholas Winton, it would be unfortunate if we allowed sentimentalism about those 669 children to blind us to the fact that we left so many to face the horror of the gas chambers.

“We need to rediscover what it is to be a human, and that every human being matters,” said the bishop of Dover. That was something we forgot in the 1930s, when powerful men decided that the arrival of German Jews in Britain was “becoming an outrage.”

Learn the bishop’s lesson and we might avoid behaving so shamefully this time round.

The sewers spread more smears

If you want to smear a politician, there are many accusations you can make: espionage, perhaps, or corruption; if you want to get domestic, it could be adultery or using prostitutes; but, boy, you really get your shaft home if you accuse a leading figure of paedophilia.

So that’s what the Daily Mail, which passes as a newspaper in Britain, has decided to do to Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party. Caught up with her in the smear is her husband, Jack Dromey, a Labour MP since 2010 and a leading trades unionist before then. Because it’s best to do these things in threes, the Mail has also got its knife into Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour Health Secretary.

Harriet Harman: the Daily Mail's latest target

Now you can make a smear up wholesale, and the Mail has done just that in the past. But it’s best if you can give it some slight basis in fact, on the no smoke without fire principle. All three these people worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties, now called Liberty, at different times in the seventies and early eighties. In the 1970s, the NCCL accepted an affiliation from a body called the Paedophile Information Exchange. 

It never should have taken that affiliation. Shami Chakrabarti, who now heads Liberty, apologised for this grave mistake only last year, saying that “it is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s.”

In those days, the NCCL had 1000 affiliates, and to my knowledge just one rotten apple. On almost all questions, they and its successor pop up regularly on the right side of questions: defending individuals from injustice, police violence or limitations of freedoms. It made a mistake and a serious one over the PIE, but I can understand people like the Mail’s victims choosing to stay with the organisation despite it.

In any case, the Mail is attacking individuals and not an organisation. The nub of their charges is that Harman herself was soft on paedophilia. She, they claim, worked to get the age of consent reduced to 10 and to soften regulations against taking photographs of children.

The reality, as she made clear, is that she never advocated reducing the age of consent to 10. She asked for the age of consent for homosexuals to be made the same as for heterosexuals. As for photographs of children, she was endeavouring to ensure that innocent photos of children taken by parents (perhaps in a bath – and I know I have some glorious ones of the aftermath of my boys’ unilateral decision to repaint their room) or pictures used for sex education, should not be criminalised.

The reality is that Harriet Harman’s only offence is that she’s taken a political stance that doesn’t appeal to the Mail.

And what of the Mail itself?

Well, it has quite a colourful track record. For instance, Britain has been struggling with a series of measles epidemics over the last few years, because a since struck off doctor called Andrew Wakefield published now discredite research suggesting that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine was dangerous. The ensuing panic led to major drop in vaccination rates and the subsequent epidemics.

Who gave his results the publicity they needed? Why, the Daily Mail. And they’re publishing articles still: Melanie Phillips, the star journalist on this story, is still writing material giving credence to Wakefield’s continued rants.

But that’s only the most recent of the Mail’s journalistic triumphs. They reached the high point of their existence came in the 1930s, when they supported Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. And as supporters of his, they naturally also approved of his good friend, Adolf Hitler.

Even earlier, in 1924 the first Labour government in Britain was facing a general election it was likely to lose. Just seven years after the Russian revolution, Grigory Zinoviev was still a leading member of the Soviet Communist Party. Just four days before the election, the Daily Mail published a letter from him to the British Communist Party suggesting how advantageous a Labour victory would be.

Did the letter lose the election for the Labour Party? Possibly not. But the Liberal vote collapsed and the Tory vote rose: the general interpretation is that anti-Socialist Liberals switched in droves to the Conservatives.

And the letter? It was a forgery.

Every country needs its sewers and its cesspits: they serve a vital role. It’s just a pity when they masquerade as newspapers. And poison the minds of anyone they can reach.

Grenoble thoughts: why on earth does Britain want to leave the EU?

So yesterday David Cameron announced that, if we do him the great honour of re-electing him in 2015, there would be a referendum in 2017 on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union. 

It seems there’s a growing consensus that the British electorate, guided by such fonts of enlightenment as UKIP and the Daily Mail, needs to be allowed to vote to leave the Union.

UKIP, for those blissful enough never to have heard of the United Kingdom Independence Party, recently had to expel some character who’d won a Council seat on the party’s behalf, for saying that the lousy weather we’ve been enduring in Britain is all down to divine punishment for legalising gay marriage.

Since then, the leader of the party has decided to write off the Party’s 2010 election manifesto as ‘total drivel’. What he hasn’t explained is why the Party adopted a load of drivel for its policies just four years ago. Or why anyone should have any confidence that the next set of policies won’t also be drivel.

As for the Daily Mail, the measure of its reliability is perhaps best summed up by two stories it had to withdraw last year: that 878,000 people claiming invalidity benefit had abandoned their claims rather than face a further medical exam, a story without a trace of truth, but which contributed wonderfully to the atmosphere of claimant-hatred the Mail likes to whip up.

The second was that a Portsmouth school refused to serve water to pupils on a hot day, because it was Ramadan. Again, entirely false. Again, why would that matter if the aim of the exercise is just to ratchet up Islamophobia?

The Mail wasn’t always as anti-European as it is today. For a time, it was really rather keen on the German government, but that was back in the 30s when it won itself the reputation of being the paper that backed Hitler.

These are the currents in British society that are moulding the debate on Europe today. Voices are raised against them. The Guardian and the Independent run articles making clear that much of the worst propaganda is false, that most immigrants from the EU, for example, come to Britain to work: a smaller proportion of them claim benefits, or are involved in crime, than of the native population.

But these are quality papers and their circulation is limited. They don’t have the voice or the reach of the Mail or the stridency of UKIP.

What’s odd is why there is such hostility to Europe in Britain. For instance, it became clear last week that the only protection we have against illegal snooping by our security services is provided by the European Convention on Human Rights. And yet the legislation incorporating that convention into British law is a constant target of diatribes in the press and, sadly, of criticism by large numbers of voters too.

Somehow, UKIP and the Daily Mail have managed to turn ‘human rights’ into a toxic notion. For humans. Many of them with far fewer rights than they need.

What’s worst about all this is that for so many people in Britain, Europe isn’t even a foreign place. Somewhere between a million and a million and a half Brits live and work in other EU countries. And vastly more travel regularly to those countries on shorter visits, for holidays or business reasons.

That was brought home to me powerfully when I arrived at Grenoble airport yesterday, the very day the news of Cameron’s referendum pledge broke. It’s what I would probably call a regional airport. But, according to someone working there it’s a seasonal airport too. Jobs in the winter only, she told us. For all the people who want to go skiing in the French Alps.

So I took a look at the Departures board.

We want to get out of Europe. So why do we go there so much?

The only non-British destination was Copenhagen. And, quite honestly, the way they speak English there, the Danes might as well be British anyway. After all, after The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, we’re already completely converted to their TV series.

Looks like rather a lot of Brits are already living as though, despite the Channel, they really belong to Europe.

So why are we so keen to get out?

Protecting citizens against the threats of feckless Liberals

‘The Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists,’ proclaimed the Daily Mail this week.

The Mail gets the knife into the Guardian

I read recently that it’s deeply unfair – lazy history, in fact – to point out that the Mail was the paper that supported the Nazis in the thirties, so I shan’t mention it here. Let me instead say that the Mail tends not to be on the side of the little man, but prefers to throw its lot in with the great, the powerful and the wealthy, all three usually much the same thing.

The Guardian, on the other hand, tends towards a kind of wet liberalism with which I also like to identify. So the Mail wasn’t so much turning on one of its own, as pursuing its long vendetta with a publication it anathematises.

In this instance, it was referring to comments made by Andrew Parker, head of the British security service MI5, about publication of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the way the NSA in the States and GCHQ in Britain snoop on pretty much the whole population.

‘Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists,’ Parker intoned. ‘It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will.’

The controversy keeps rumbling on. David Cameron, for instance, has come out in support of the Mail and castigated the Guardian. And the accusation is serious, suggesting that the revelations lay us open to attack by some of the most fearsome, and hateful, people out there.

Not everyone agrees with Parker, though. As the Guardian informed us, Nigel Inkster, former director of operations and intelligence at the counter-intelligence agency MI6, believes that ‘those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told much they didn’t already know or could have inferred.’

Well, quite. It’s emerged that Osama bin Laden simply had no telephone or internet connection in the house where he lived, and was eventually killed, in Abbotabad in Pakistan. Serious terrorists know they need to keep well away from phones and e-mail if they want to stay safe.

Not that it kept Bin Laden safe.

It seems it’s the rest of us that the spooks want to keep in the dark about the extent of their spying. Perhaps because they feel a little embarrassed to admit how much they’ve been sneaking into the private affairs of the very citizens they’re charged with protecting. Perhaps because they know just how dangerous that kind of behaviour is.

Why is it dangerous? Well, I don’t believe the current British government, however vile it is, really wants to use intelligence obtained by clandestine means to crush opposition or hang on to office. Nor do I think that the current intelligence chiefs are motivated by anything other than the sincere commitment they proclaim, to defeat terrorists and any other enemies that threaten us.

But what if we found ourselves with a different government and a different set of espiocrats running the spy establishment?

After all, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the winter olympics in Sochi, in Russia. It looks as though they are going to be the most heavily monitored games in history. Russian intelligence organisations will be reading e-mails, listening to phone calls, checking on internet traffic, of competitors, spectators and journalists alike.

Putin’s Russia has recently taken a further lurch into homophobia. A tightening set of restrictions are being placed on its gay community. It’s a safe bet that one use of all this surveillance is going to be against anyone trying to resist this shameful trend. 

That’s when this level of spying becomes extremely disagreeable. But, some will say, it couldn’t happen in the West. Could it?

We’ve recently seen a big upsurge of support in Britain for the so-called United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. It’s one of those classic protest movements which is defined above all by being anti: anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-European Union. And, in particular, anti-gay: it has opposed government moves to legalise same-sex marriage, for instance. It is hardly inconceivable that, despite the resistance many of us will put up, UKIP might find itself in the not very distant future at least able to influence power, perhaps even as a coalition partner in government.

Now imagine a UKIP minister – and still worse a UKIP Home Secretary – turning to an intelligence service under his authority and asking it for information about gay activists. The spooks might refuse, but they could be replaced. And with the lack of legal oversight revealed by Snowden, how would we even know whether they’d refused or not?

Besides which, in an atmosphere in which certain people had come to regard gays as a threat, as they apparently have in Russia, wouldn’t the spies feel it was their duty to report on them?

And here’s another scenario which is at least as insidious.

Britain is a country run by wealthy people who know and support each other. Imagine a minister about to be exposed for abusing his office by a journalist who is, perhaps, not entirely without blemish himself – maybe he’s having an adulterous affair. The minister picks up the phone to his old friend, perhaps someone he was at school with, in the upper reaches of one of the intelligence organisations.

Without oversight or proper legal control, who can say with certainty that the friend won’t get the information the politician wants and leak it? Perhaps not to the Minister, but to a pliant organ of the press. Then the journalist is discredited, his career perhaps wrecked, over a matter irrelevant to his work, while a bent Minister is spared the exposure he so richly deserves – and which we so badly needed for our protection.

A gift to terrorists? By publishing the Snowden material, the Guardian has made a gift to ordinary citizens, increasingly vulnerable to bad behaviour by government supported by the spooks.

If the Mail‘s so upset, that only shows how quickly the establishment closes ranks against any move that champions the citizen against the powerful.

Coming down to earth

If Christmas is a family time, we did it right this year. We saw my mother and my brother; we had our granddaughter with her parents in the run up to Christmas; and at various times over the Christmas and New Year period our other two sons and one of our charming daughters-out-law.

It was only on Monday that our daughter-out-law left, to start a new job in Madrid, proving that jobs can be found in Spain despite the much trumpeted unemployment. One son went on Wednesday, the other on Friday, so the wind-down after Christmas has been tapered, not brusque, making the transition back to work, which I found painful this year, easier than it might have been.

Now, though, we’re back to our own devices, with little to show for the festive period but a large number of bottles for recycling and some kilos to lose.

One lasting legacy of the family visit is a recommendation my son Michael made to listen to a great podcast series: The History of Rome by Mike Duncan. This is the internet at best: somebody who has nothing to gain by it has simply prepared and delivered a history of Rome in dozens of bite-sized episodes, with just the right level of detail to be informative while remaining entertaining. 

Listening to this excellent series I was particularly struck by the history of Etruria. It was the home of the Etruscans, a nation of extraordinary wealth and culture. And indeed power: in the early years of the city, Rome was ruled by Kings and the last of these were Etruscan.

Many centuries later, in a struggle with another and equally ruthless imperial power, Benjamin Franklin would tell his fellow revolutionaries, ‘We shall hang together or we shall hang separately.’ The Etruscans were hanged separately. They wouldn’t bury their differences and they paid the price. 

Take Veii, once their wealthiest city, their jewel, not ten miles north of Rome. Never heard of it? Nor had I, or if I had, I’d forgotten. Today it’s part of a village in the Rome municipal area. With some fine ruins. 

I can imagine the scene, just before the slaughter of the population when Veii fell to the Roman siege (the soldiers broke in through the sewers, demonstrating that for all their love of honour, Romans valued success still more). I picture a worthy citizen, not realising that he would meet a violent death within a few hours, declaring ‘Veii has always stood proud and wealthy, the greatest of the Etruscan cities, and we’re certainly not giving up our independence to them, far less to those upstarts from down the road who’ve had the temerity to send an army against us.’

The rest, as they say, is history. Etruscan has vanished as a language. The people of Etruria were completely assimilated into Rome, speaking Latin and playing their own part in Roman life within a few generations.

Veii: not a lot left. The price of standing aloof?

Over the Christmas period, the British Conservative Party moved ahead of Labour in the opinion polls. 

That statement may seem unrelated to what came before, but bear with me: I shall explain.

That Conservative lead is particularly bad news for Labour. In mid-term, an Opposition needs to be building up a good lead in the polls if it’s to win the next election: there tends to be a swing back to the incumbents in the final stages, so the Opposition needs a cushion. Being behind is pretty desperate.

What caused the Conservative surge? 

On 10 December the Daily Mail referring to a historic moment the day before, told us ‘Defiant Cameron stands up to Euro bullies...’ This was the historic moment when Cameron vetoed changes to EU treaties so that the whole organisation could get behind attempts to solve the Eurozone crisis.

Others less inclined to see Cameron as a latter day Titan taking on the erring gods have taken exception to the word ‘veto’. Usually a veto, as they point out, stops something happening. This veto meant that 26 countries would go ahead and do it anyway, but without Britain. 

I sometimes wonder whether Cameron only realised that afterwards. Because as soon as he’d cast his vote, he told our EU enemies, sorry partners, that they couldn’t hold their discussions in EU buildings - you know, ‘if you’re not going to play by my rules, I’m taking my ball away.’ Later on, Britain backtracked from that position - civil servants, who are professionals after all, probably pointed out that this might not be the best way to make friends and retain some influence among people whose support we might need again some day.

But the virulence of Cameron’s initial reaction does rather suggest that he caught himself by surprise, doesn’t it? I can see him saying ‘well, you can’t do that because I’m saying ‘no’, so there, now what you are you going to do, eh, don’t look so clever now, do you? What do you mean? You’re going to go ahead and do it anyway? What without us? You’re going to ignore my veto? Well - if that’s the way you want to play it, you can’t use these nice offices then...’

In Britain though we tend not to think about the after effects of this kind of gesture but prefer to concentrate on the gesture itself. People loved it. ‘Standing up to to the Euro bullies’. Wonderful stuff. And it got him a tick up in the polls. Ahead of the opposition. Brilliant.

That got me thinking of other times in history when people have struck out on their own and told their partners to get stuffed. The Italian city states, for instance. Our daughter-in-law, when our granddaughter’s family came to stay with us, gallantly stood in a queue at the National Gallery for four hours so that we could all go and see an exhibition of paintings by her long-time favourite, Leonardo da Vinci. 

I particularly liked the pair of fabulously beautiful portraits of Ludovico Sforza’s wife and mistress. I often wonder how each of them must have felt about the other picture. And I can just imagine Sforza saying ‘Milan isn’t just an Italian city. It’s a proud and powerful centre with a long history of its own. We’re not going to be sucked into some kind of bogus unity with the rest of the peninsula.’ But while Leonardo was there, the French turned up and sacked the place, and over the next few centuries, Italy was regularly the playground of invading armies.

Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine: Ludovico Sforza's mistress
Culture, wealth, sophistication - but they were no protection against the French

One of the places I particularly liked in Alsace, where we used to live, was the Haut Koenigsburg, a fine castle beautifully and inaccurately restored by the German Kaiser Wilhelm (Alsace is like that: what country it’s in depends not just on geography but also on history). Why did the castle need restoring? Because it had been overrun a Swedish army. Swedish for crying out loud. Why the Swedes? Because until all those little German princedoms finally got together and sank their differences, Germany, like Italy, was a wonderful place for other countries to fight their wars.

Like Veii and the other cities of Etruria, the proud little Italian and German States were hanged separately because they wouldn’t hang together. 

Well, the Conservatives have drifted back behind Labour again. Not by much, but still behind. It’s as though after the excitement of the veto that never was, cold reason has reasserted itself. Ater all, nothing has changed. The French and the Germans haven’t surrendered to us. The economy is still dire. Unemployment is still rising.

It’s a bit like us taking out our empty bottles and resolving to lose those extra kilos. After the warm glow of the festive season we’ve had to come back to earth. Reality once more exerts its sobering influence.

Privacy 2: outing gays and hunting ministers

Benjamin Disraeli injected colour into the role of British Prime Minister, in every sense of the word. He liked to wear purple velvet and would affect white gloves with rings outside them. He also had a way with words. Told on his death bed that Queen Victoria wished to visit him, an unheard of royal honour for a man born a commoner, he apparently turned the offer down on the grounds that ‘she will only ask me to take a message to Albert’, her late husband.

Charm was another of his qualities. ‘When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone,’ recorded a young woman who had the privilege of dining on separate occasions with both Disraeli and his rival Gladstone, ‘I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.’

Winston Churchill said of his political opponent and erstwhile former deputy Prime Minister from the war years, Clement Atlee, that he was ‘a modest man, who has much to be modest about’. George Bernard Shaw sent Churchill a telegram reading ‘Two tickets reserved for you, first night Pygmalion. Bring a friend, if you have one’. Churchill replied, ‘Cannot make first night. Will come to second. If you have one.’

It wasn’t only Conservative politicians who specialised in barbs, of course. One of the harshest but in my view finest was provided by Aneurin Bevan when he turned his guns on the Conservatives themselves: ‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.’ I think we got the message.

Denis Healey, probably the finest leader the British Labour Party never had, and the greatest Prime Minister Britain missed out on, had plenty of excellent and highly quotable aphorisms. ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging,’ has to be a particularly useful suggestion which I wish I could learn to follow more often. And he also provided the useful legal advice that ‘the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall’.

Much more recently, when the new coalition government was formed in this country, David Laws of the British Liberal Democrats was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the number two position in our finance ministry. When he took up his office, he found the traditional letter from his predecessor, in this case Liam Byrne. It read ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I'm afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam’.

That was just three weeks ago, but David Laws has already had to resign. Why? Because he’s gay.

That may seem extraordinary. After all it isn’t illegal or even much of a matter for comment to be gay in Britain. We’ve had numerous openly gay ministers already. The problem with Laws is that he chose to stay in the closet. So when it came to claiming for expenses, instead of declaring his home as shared with his partner, he claimed for rent paid to his partner as landlord.

A committee of enquiry is looking into the matter, but for now it looks as though he made no more than he was entitled to from the arrangement. Technically, however, it was a breach of the rules.

The Daily Mail, one of the least pleasant of our scandal sheets masquerading as daily newspapers, decided last week to denounce Laws. Faced with a media maelstrom, Laws felt he had no choice but to resign.

Today he is quoted as saying, ‘I should have been more open’. Well, perhaps he should have been, perhaps he shouldn’t. I don’t see how it’s my business or that of any other voter. I’d far rather we all took a decision on David Laws based on how well or how badly he performs in politics. Everything else falls into the strictly private realm.

My last post was on privacy. Isn’t this a much clearer example of where privacy really needs to be protected than, say, on Facebook? Can we tolerate a technical offence bringing down a minister? More to the point – can we tolerate that minister being driven out for his sexuality?

You may agree or disagree with the politicians I quoted at the start of this piece. You may find them amusing or detestable. But they were certainly characters, they were colourful, they rose to challenges.

If we let organisations like the Daily Mail get away with their poisonous little crusades, we’ll end up with politicians who are without exception straight, white, middle class, male, middle-aged and nominally Christian. They’ll have the purity of cotton wool. They’ll have the respectability of a tweed suit. They’ll have the dynamism of a communion wafer.

And the wit and charm of a George W. Bush.