Eloquent silence of the curious Mr Corbyn

It seems a crisis is stalking Britain. 

It’s the top story on bulletin after bulletin of the BBC. It’s the lead in many papers.

Migrants are crossing the Channel to Britain in small boats. At considerable risk to themselves, in a sea lane with some of the heaviest traffic in the world. Though the issue that seems to preoccupy people most is the way the migrants are undermining the borders that, as the Brexit vote showed, Britain is so keen to control.

The invading hordes have now reached the total of 239 people over two months. To give a proper sense of the dire scale of this incursion, the Greeks have had 500 people arrive by boat in the last week alone. Even in Britain, the Home Office reports that there have been 7444 applications for asylum in the last quarter.

Migrants in open boats in the Channel

It seems that 120 people a month coming over the Channel strike more fear in the British breast than nearly 2500 arriving by other means. Are Britons that terrified of boats? Or, at least, the xenophobes amongst us?

Not that everyone takes such an attitude.

The Bishop of Dover, Trevor Willmott, for instance commented:

It is crucial that we all remember that we are dealing with human beings here. Across the nation, we have been celebrating the season of hope and goodwill as we remember Christ’s birth – let’s not forget so soon that every person is precious.

Nor are such sentiments limited to Churchmen or even the British. John Kelly, soon to be Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff, recently pointed out:

Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people… I have nothing but compassion for them, the young kids.

Not everyone is so generous or tolerant. Here are comments from a couple of politicians. One commented that the government waxed lyrical:

… about control of our borders and being tough on security, but cannot seem to get a grip on criminal smugglers operating a few hundred miles of coastline. We cannot allow this to continue on our doorstep.

Another invited the Home Secretary to visit Dover where the migrants arrive:

I hope Sajid Javid will come and visit Dover and see how things are here at the Dover front line, look to creating a modern Dover patrol force, with the French, to make sure that any craft found in the Channel, whichever side of the line they are, are helped back safely and soundly to the French coast.

What I find most interesting about both those statements is that either could have been made by a Conservative. In fact, only the second one was – the Tory MP for Dover, Charlie Elphicke, speaking to the BBC, apparently feels the situation is grave enough to warrant military terms, such as ‘front line’.

The other is from a tweet by Diane Abbott, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary. I tend to think of her as a close ally of the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though she has established quite a track record as a maverick so she may have been flying off the handle a bit here on her own initiative.

In fact, it would be good to know what Corbyn himself thinks of this manufactured ‘crisis’. But, curiously, he’s staying completely silent. Although maybe that’s not as curious as one might think: he’s done this before.

Over Brexit, he managed to stay quiet on his true position until shortly before Christmas. His admirers claim that this was a clever ploy: he knew that Labour voters were split in their view of the EU. By not committing himself either way, he could hang onto the support of both groups. The stance was hardly honest or courageous, qualities his admirers claim for him, but they felt it was judicious.

As the debate enters its final stretch, he was inevitably going to have to come clean, however. This he did in a Guardian interview where he claimed that 40% of Labour voters were Brexiters. He then declared that if elected Prime Minister, he would continue the pursuit of Brexit, putting him on the side of the 40% – and I think that number’s inflated – instead of  lining up with the 60% – and I think the true figure’s higher – which you might think would have been smarter.

In any case, his refusal to take sides had simply fed the widespread suspicion that he was in fact a Brexiter. A suspicion his interview with the Guardian confirmed.

The odd thing about Corbyn is that, whatever his faults, he’s strong on speaking out for the vulnerable and underprivileged. The homeless for instance. So why hasn’t he spoken out for the people risking their lives crossing the Channel in small boats, at night, in winter? Why instead do we only have a statement from his Home Affairs spokesperson, who seems to want to reduce the issue principally to a matter of security and law enforcement?

This is where things become ugly.

A great many of the people he wants to court over Brexit only voted against EU membership out of xenophobia. They don’t like foreigners. They blame the EU for immigration and they want it curbed.

Given his track record over Brexit, and how he likes to use silence as a tactic, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Corbyn is keeping quiet now, to avoid offending Labour supporters who hold far right-wing views on race and immigration.

Jeremy Corbyn: you may like or dislike what he says
But it's when he goes quiet that he’s at his shadiest 

Sadly, it’s not going to be any more effective than his stance on Brexit was. And it’s ironic that a man who claims to be of the Left is appeasing the views of the hard Right. It also shows he’s learned nothing from the history of the 1930s. Throwing raw meat to the xenophobes doesn’t appease them. They only come back for more.

Much more.

Age of midgets

As Britain staggers into an ill-considered Brexit, it feels to me that future generations, struggling with its painful consequences, will look back and wonder at the age of midgets that led them there.

Corbyn, Cameron, May
Do we really deserve no better?

Britain has been here before. Neville Chamberlain trying to buy peace from Hitler. Anthony Eden taking Britain into war over Suez. John Major crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Second or third-rate Prime Ministers failing to meet their challenges.

These are Tory examples, but Labour has its own spectacular mediocrities to add to the mix.

Ramsay MacDonald, as Prime Minister in 1931, led Labour into coalition with the Tories. His austerity policies crucified the people Labour was set up to defend. Tony Blair, though a giant when with Gordon Brown he battled child poverty and invested in the NHS, chose to be a moral pygmy when he obsequiously followed the US into a needless, harmful and unjustified war in Iraq.

It’s such midgets who dominate the British political scene once more.

In both main parties, leaders are giving precedence to the health of their parties over the wellbeing of citizens. Britain is sleepwalking into Brexit, a slow-motion car crash which the rest of us can only watch with growing horror because we don’t have a leader with the guts to step on the brake or turn the wheel.

The Tories are the most culpable. David Cameron, the previous Prime Minister, called an unnecessary referendum in the hope that a comfortable victory for continued EU membership would see off the toxic and insurgent Eurosceptic wing of his party.

Unfortunately, as we know, the result went the other way.

That result was deeply flawed. And not just because the victory was wafer thin.

First of all, it was a choice between a single option – there was just one way to stay in the EU – and a myriad of others – leaving the EU with no relationship in place (hard Brexit), agreeing a trading arrangement, staying in the Customs Union, staying in the Single Market, and there may be others. A plethora of Brexit campaign groups testifies to the diversity of views.

Secondly, Brexiters made false promises. Far from saving money, Brexit will cost us more. New trade agreements will be harder to sign than was claimed, and the terms will be less favourable than those we are giving up. It’s unclear how we can avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

It seems likely that once the real nature of Brexit is known, the level of dissatisfaction would produce a majority for the Remain side at least as big as the Brexit camp won in 2016.

There’s a majority in parliament for staying in the EU, though making it effective would require cross-party cooperation, with pro-EU Tories and Labourites voting together. Against the Tory leadership of Prime Minister Theresa May, but also against the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Alongside Cameron, these are the other two midgets of our time.

May claims to be pro-EU but refuses to oppose Brexit. Corbyn’s a long-term Eurosceptic, but his party has a 2:1 Remain majority. Though his fans trumpet his honesty and courage, he refuses to come clean as a Brexiter or to endorse a Remain position. Again, his fans like to underline the contrast between him and Tony Blair, but this kind of spineless prevarication is like nothing so much as the spin Blair fed us on Iraq while proclaiming his honesty and demanding our trust.

May won’t oppose Brexit for fear of splitting her party. Corbyn won’t oppose it for fear of losing a number of supporters for his own. Both hide behind the ‘will of the people’ as expressed in the referendum. However, Britain isn’t a plebiscitary democracy but a parliamentary one. We elect MPs and delegate decisions to them, reserving the right to remove them next time if they go against our wishes. Constitutionally, nothing stops MPs voting against the referendum result.

That may be too much to ask. Still, the referendum said nothing about what kind of Brexit we should accept. Once the real terms of Brexit are clear, what’s to prevent a specific question being asked about them? Voters could choose between accepting the terms, going for a hard Brexit instead, or staying in the EU. A new referendum would protect MPs from the accusation of rejecting the people’s will.

What would be the harm?

May’s ruled it out. She feels, probably rightly, that it would deepen the rifts in her own party.

Corbyn’s ruled it out too. Though, as is his wont, in no consistent way. When Diane Abbott, a supporter within his leadership team, called for a second referendum he took no action. That was odd, because she has a trail of public relations disasters behind her, for which most Shadow Cabinet members would have long ago been sacked. When, on the other hand, his rival Owen Smith made the same suggestion, he was fired at once. It seems that Corbyn, a serial rebel – 500 votes against the party leadership before taking the leader’s mantle himself – is happy to be a top-down autocrat when it suits him. He also endorses the conservative principle of collective cabinet responsibility over the national interest, when he can use it as a weapon against an opponent.

Like Blair, he prefers pragmatism to principle and personal authority over the national interest. He also seems committed to preserving another fine tradition, that of political double standards.

So the midgets at the head of both parties keep the country firmly on the road to Brexit and the slow-motion car crash continues to unfold before our fascinated but impotent gaze.

The final judgement will be made by later generations. It is they who will suffer the consequences of Brexit. I suspect they’ll be asking, ‘how did our parents choose such petty and incompetent leaders when we so badly needed figures of stature?’

Which is my own question precisely.

A racially pure Britain

It’s been quite a month for racial awareness in Britain.

First we learned that the country’s first inhabitants were black. The first recognisably human people to populate the island, some 10,000 years ago, were dark-skinned, new research into so-called ‘Cheddar Man’ has shown. Bad news for those grieving for the ancient racial purity of the country. At least if they’re white.

Next we had the news that quite a while after Cheddar Man’s time, around 4500 years ago, a bunch of people showed up from the Continent. These were the ‘beaker people’, so-called because of finds of a distinctive style of pottery beakers with a flared lip. DNA analysis has shown that they’re distinctly different people. They turned up in Britain and the previous inhabitants simply vanished into the background, never to re-emerge.

One of Britain's original inhabitants, apparently

So the population of Britain was originally black. Those people were then supplanted by immigrants from Continental Europe, though what their colour was I don’t know: what I’m focusing on is that they came from what is now the EU.

What this means is that all those concerns about immigration that drive Brexiters are entirely misplaced. Especially when they target immigration from the European Union. We – and indeed they - are the immigrants from Europe. Without such immigration, few of us would be there.

The third piece of news that caught my attention in this context was the statement of Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary (Labour’s spokesperson on home affairs), that some use the term ‘immigration’ as a euphemism for ‘race’. Good for her for having said it. To be honest, the statement is so obvious that it really shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but it certainly is. There are far too many siren voices, particularly worried about the pro-Brexit sentiments of the North of England, who keep urging the rest of us to understand the ‘legitimate’ concerns in some communities about immigration.

Well, if it’s a euphemism for racism, as it all too often is, I see no reason at all to accommodate it.

In any case, these new findings of archaeologists should have left the xenophobes in disarray. Let’s say we do set out to get rid of the immigrants from our midst. One of the geneticists who worked on the Beaker people project reckons that “at least 90% of the ancestry of Britons was replaced by a group from the continent”. That would suggest something like 59 million would have to leave Britain.

Angela Merkel has been good about taking refugees in the past. Today, however, the pressure is on her to stop. And in any case – nearly 60 million? Could be tough.

Interestingly, that would leave a very small number of Britons on the island. It might be hard for them to keep basic services going – the schools, say, the hospitals, the trains. But then I suppose that’s the problem with people who want to create ethnically homogeneous nations: they don’t realise they’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Still, they would at least have achieved their aim. The country would at last have shaken off the impact of 4500 years of immigration. It would be racially pure.

And, of course, black.

A triumph for the LibDems. A defeat for the Tories. A warning for Labour

It’s always satisfying to see a Tory government being given a bloody nose. 

It’s even more satisfying when it’s a victory for those who don’t accept the Brexit verdict as irrevocable. 

And it’s best of all when it’s administered to an unpleasant individual of thoroughly toxic views.

All that happened this week.

Zac Goldsmith ran an unpleasant Tory campaign to be Mayor of London last year, calling on racist and Islamophobic notions to try – and, fortunately, fail – to beat Labour’s candidate, Sadiq Khan, whose name is probably enough to explain the racism and Islamophobia. Not to justify them, of course, but certainly to explain why an unprincipled candidate would resort to them. 

This year, he resigned from the Conservative Party and from Parliament to precipitate a by-election in his constituency of Richmond Park, where he ran as an independent against the government’s decision to build a new runway at nearby Heathrow airport.

The Liberal Democratic candidate, Sarah Olney, a strong supporter of continued membership of the EU, chose not to campaign on the airport but to focus on Brexit instead. To widespread surprise (including my own), she snatched the seat from Goldsmith, converting his majority of 23,000 votes into her own of nearly 1900.

An excellent result.

The defeated candidate (for local MP and London Mayor)
and the victorious LibDem

If I have a quibble it’s that we had to depend on the Liberal Democrats to win this victory. The main party in opposition to the Tories is my own, Labour. It should be the one challenging the government, and all the more so since the Liberal Democrats were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015. That was both a betrayal of principle and counter-productive: it reduced the party’s presence in Parliament from 62 to eight. The Richmond Park result may suggest that things are turning around for the LibDems (though one win doesn’t make a resurrection), but it certainly reflects a Labour failure.

Why do I say that?

If Sarah Olney’s win owed a great deal to the LibDems’ position against Brexit, undoubtedly the biggest question for the vast majority of voters, her party was able to make it their own because Labour’s silence on the subject has been deafening. 

Why is it so quiet? Silence is always hard to interpret, but occasionally it gets broken. John McDonnell, a close ally of the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, recently described Brexit as an “enormous opportunity”. This seemed to confirm a suspicion many of us felt that the Labour leadership wasn’t particularly comfortable with the party’s official policy of backing continued EU membership. 

Meanwhile, siren voices on the right of the Labour Party are calling on us to address anxieties over immigration in Labour’s traditional voter base. Again, this provokes suspicion, in this case that we are being urged to move rightwards, to counter the challenge presented by the extreme anti-EU and xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. As another of Corbyn’s allies, Diane Abbott, recently pointed out – correctly – Labour can’t win by being UKIP-lite. If people want UKIP policies, they’ll vote UKIP. Labour doesn’t beat them by accommodating them, but by explaining that turning against foreigners won’t address any of the real problems affecting our supporters, which are poverty, insecurity and joblessness. Instead, we need to tackle the causes of economic decline – not least of which is the decision to leave the EU.

That’s hard to do if you’re not too sure about the EU yourself. Hence the silence.

The problem is that silence isn’t leadership and leadership is what voters are crying out for. Labour isn’t doing leadership right now. There was recently a Parliamentary vote, on a motion advanced by the Scottish National Party, to investigate Tony Blair’s role over the Iraq War and his possible misleading of Parliament at the time.

There are two positions one can legitimately take on the issue. 

The SNP’s would be that Blair behaved unconscionably and needs to be held to account by Parliament. 

The majority Labour position, with which I agree, isn’t simply one of “hands off our former leader” but rather argues that the problem was that Blair had far too much authority, allowing him to commit the country against its will. So it was an institutional issue, not a personal one, and it needs to be tackled at that level. That ties in, for instance, with the calls for Parliament and not just the present Prime Minister to have the final say over Brexit.

A third position is illegitimate. That’s to have nothing to say on the matter. It’s striking that all three of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott stayed away from Parliament at the time of the debate.

Silence, like over the EU.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Similarly, voters abhor silence. While it stays quiet and on the fence, refusing to lead, the group that technically controls the Labour leadership leaves the Party vulnerable to attack by those who flow in to fill the political vacuum – whether from UKIP or from the LibDems.

So the Richmond result isn’t just a victory for the LibDems. It isn’t just a black eye for the Tories. It’s also a serious wake-up call to Labour.

The leadership needs to make up its mind: start leading, on the issues that matter to the electorate, or see our support continue to erode. Otherwise – please just stand aside and let someone else take over. 

Someone who has something to say. 

Someone who’s prepared to get out in front and lead.
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