Left and right: opposite wings or the meeting point of a circle?

“Any delay in the ranks of the left exposes us, at the very least, to a further advance by the far right, which will further reduce the social and political strength of the left in the parliamentary elections.”

That was French Socialist Party politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2002, the first time the far right National Front saw its candidate, Jean-Marie le Pen, win a place in a run-off election for President.

In 2017, no longer in the Socialist Party, Mélechon took a stance on the far left of French politics and came fourth in the first round of the Presidential election, with a respectable but insufficient 19.5% of the votes cast. Once again, the far right is through to the runoff – in this case represented by le Pen’s daughter, Marine. But, amazing to relate, Mr Mélenchon seems to have forgotten his wise words of 2002 about the damage of delay, preferring indeed to delay day after day instead of coming out in favour of the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, front-runner in the first round and now the only candidate able to block “a further advance by the far right”.

Now, why might that be? Could it perhaps have something to do with the sense that rather a lot of Mélenchon’s voters might prefer to go with the hard right in the second round, than with the soft left? And that Mélenchon would rather go along with that than lose contact with a voter base he rather values?

Call me cynical if you like, but that’s what I think is going on. There is in the hard left a holier-than-thou attitude which claims that it’s more principled and honest than the rest of us, but it’s capable of being just as opportunistic and evasive as, say, a Blair or a Putin.

At a deeper level, there is also a deeper link between far left and far right. Both are far out. They like to reason in terms of simple, pure solutions to complex problems, which avoid any of the complexities and messiness of reality. Compromise? That only dilutes the purity of our principles. Instead you end up defending a maximalist policy which, on the left, can lead you to defend the rights of the poor so hard in Venezuela that you bankrupt the country and starve your people. On the right, it leads to taking Britain out of the EU to escape from international control, only to leave it entirely dependent on the whims of the United States (or, worse still, the Trumpiverse).

There is today a taste for the simple and uncompromising. And it leads to the far right and far left both exerting greater appeal than they usually do – and almost interchangeably. Which is why voters can switch from Mélenchon to the National Front without apparent inconsistency.

Nor is this an exclusively French phenomenon. Kate Hoey, left-wing Labour MP for Vauxhall, has an enviable reputation for standing up for the rights of her hard-pressed, poor constituents. And yet, seduced by her enthusiastic dislike of the European Union, she found herself working shoulder to shoulder with Nigel Farage, then leader of UKIP, the British equivalent of the French National Front. They may have come to their common position from opposite directions but ended up, like two halves of a circle, meeting at a single point.

Hoey with her buddy, and supposed inveterate opponent, Farage

In the pursuit of fantasist, simple solutions, people can find themselves with strange bedfellows, though they approach them from different directions. Britain, sadly, is going to be living with the consequences of those fantasies for decades to come, struggling to find a role outside the EU. In France, on the other hand, if the defeat of Mélenchon is followed and confirmed by the defeat of the National Front, that fate may well be dodged.

At least for now.

Seeing off the far right: France was just a start. And we need to stand up for the EU

What a relief to see the French Front National, which came so close to an electoral breakthrough last week, trounced again. It led the field in six of France’s twelve metropolitan regions in the first round of elections on 6 December; it was poised to win control of at least two of them. But then voters closed ranks, choosing one of the other parties even if it wasn’t the one they favoured, to keep the Front out of power.

A relief, but only for a brief reprieve. The FN took a record number of votes. Over 1 in 4 voters chose them. Its strength continues to increase, as it has over the last twenty years. 

The lesson is that we have still to find an effective argument against the far right. One that will actually attract votes, instead of simply providing a way to block one party by voting for another we like only a little less.

Seven French regions for the Centre Right
Five for the Socialists
No room for the Front National

The French picture is particularly telling: François Hollande, the current president, is a member of the Socialist Party but is straight out of the same mould as many right wing leaders – he’s an “Enarque”, a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) which trains leading civil servants. Presidents Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing were Enarques too. It seems that Nicolas Sarkozy, former and possibly future President, attended the equally prestigious “Sciences Po” political science school, though his poor English prevented him graduating. Presidents who actually graduated from the school include Georges Pompidou, François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac. So of the seven Presidents of the fifth republic, from Charles de Gaulle to François Hollande, three are Enarques, and four were at Sciences Po (Chirac straddles both). Only de Gaulle attended neither school, but then he was at Saint Cyr, the top military college, equivalent to West Point in the States or Sandhurst in Britain.

These institutions aren’t just prestigious, they’re exclusive. They train a self-serving elite distinct from the general population. It’s no wonder that there is an appetite among many for something different. If neither main party offers it, they may look for it in a toxic grouping of the far right such as the Front National.

Support for Trump in the States and UKIP in Britain reflect the same phenomenon.

It’s urgent to find an answer. Many are looking for one. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian, for instance, suggested that we should “fight with fire.” He quoted Sunder Katwala of British Future, who criticised Labour’s previous leader Ed Miliband for trying to tell people:

…that what they were really concerned about when they talked about migration was jobs, housing and wages. “He couldn’t talk about the cultural bit,” about people’s fears at the pace of change in their towns and cities. Instead he left those fears “festering in the subconscious”, waiting to be addressed by Ukip.

I’m not quite sure what this implies. Should we go along with the fears UKIP stirs up? Should we back right wing calls for tougher limits on immigration? Should we demand such limits even though we know they can only be achieved if Britain leaves the European Union?

Or isn’t that just fighting xenophobia with more xenophobia?

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and once more a Member of Parliament, gave us some more anti-EU rhetoric today. He wants the EU to limit freedom of movement.

There are three fundamental freedoms of movement guaranteed by the EU: of capital, of goods and of labour. None of them can be abandoned by a nation wishing to remain in the Union.

So far, I’ve heard no one call for limitations on the first two. They principally serve the owners of capital and producers of products.

The third directly benefits workers. In the US, anyone who finds an opportunity in another part of the country, however distant, can travel to take it up, with no need to establish new residence or employment rights.

The EU covers under half the surface area of the US. But it’s only thanks to the Union that workers within it enjoy similar rights. So giving up freedom of movement would mean losing a key right.

Nor is it the only right the EU protects. Nothing prevented UK employers imposing back-breaking hours of work on employees, until the EU’s working hours directive came into force. 

David Cameron is trying to obtain from the EU the right to deny in-work benefits for four years. The move’s aimed at immigrants, but would also affect young British workers (those with under four years of employment.) The EU has, so far, rejected that proposal.

Many British workers enjoy rights protected by the EU. On the other hand, freedom of movement also gives EU migrants the right to settle and work in Britain. Limiting those rights would accommodate the cultural resistance to change Freedland mentions. Is that supposed to be worth the price of leaving the EU? Fundamental rights to avoid cultural discomfort?

Seriously?

It surely makes more sense to marshal arguments against these views. Show, in fact, that the xenophobes have got it wrong. That way we really would find a way to answer the groundswell of support for the right. Which we certainly won’t do by going along with its prejudices.

The French FN, Donald Trump and British UKIP show how urgent that is.

Franco's gone, but are his heirs coming back?

Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who held dictatorial power over Spain for just shy of forty years up to 1975, was born one 4 December (specifically, the one that came in 1892) and died on a 20 November (the one in 1975, natch – I reckon I gave that away earlier in this sentence).

That means we’ve been getting a bit of a flurry of reflections on Franco recently. They’ve made me think of my own slight experience of that fine chieftain, the last fascist dictator in Western Europe – or last so far: we haven’t seen the French Front National really get going yet and, if Labour can’t neutralise them, UKIP could offer us some Trump-like surprises in Britain too.

The Spanish Caudillo, with a mate of his

Way back, in about 1967, my family was on holiday in South West France, in a trip which took us right down to the Spanish border at Hendaye. Would we go across? Would we pop over? What was right, what was appropriate?

These were momentous questions. Many of our friends, two of my teachers even, were exiles from Franco’s Spain. Would visiting the country, while the dictator was still in power, be a breach of faith, a betrayal of the principles we shared with them?

In the end, we went across. Just for the day. I remember we bought leather wine gourds for my brother and me. They had spouts from which one could squirt a stream of drink straight into one’s mouth, whether wine or anything else. It didn’t actually matter what liquid we squirted, as they all tasted brackish and foul from the pitch with which the inside of the ghastly container had been lined. It was such fun squirting the stream that it took me ages to stop denying how horrible anything from it tasted, and chuck it out.

Our home was in Italy in those days, and since none of us spoke Spanish, we tried to get by in Italian. It worked fine until we wanted a beer – “birra” doesn’t sound anything like “cerveza”. The experience was almost as unsatisfactory as drinking anything from one of awful gourds.

Eight years later, I was working in what was called the “lift section” of the Greater London Council. Even that Council itself has disappeared since then, undone by a Maggie Thatcher who loathed the fact that it was run by lefties, and who wasn’t above making a long-term damaging change to attain a short term political goal. For some time, London was the only city its size without a strategic authority to manage its affairs as a whole, instead being run by a plethora of councils in the individual boroughs, each working to its own agenda.

As for the lift section, it had nothing to do with uplift or anything inspiring like that. Oh, no. It was concerned with what our transatlantic cousins call elevators. We took calls from caretakers on housing estates to report lifts out of action, or to yell at us because we hadn’t fixed them yet, and passed the information on to a bunch of engineers who took responsibility for getting the repairs carried out.

In their own good time.

As light relief from this exacting work, we’d sometimes be asked to add up the totals of huge piles of invoices. We’d do that on calculating machines which had a big handle you pulled downwards each time you’d entered a number by changing the settings on a series of dials; as you pulled the handle towards you, it made a lugubrious clanking sound followed by a clashing of rotors engaging, and one more number would be added to the total.

The final figure never corresponded with what you were expecting but, since the only way of correcting a problem was to go back and start all over again – you couldn’t just correct individual figures as you might, say, in Excel – we’d usually go through the process three or four times and then decide that whatever we’d got was as near as dammit and stop there.

Now, there’s a particular type and style of man who emerged from the thirties and forties, immediately recognisable to anyone who knew it. He wore corduroy trousers with a tweed jacket, generally with leather patches on the elbows, and thin rimmed glasses behind which lurked a pair of sharp and intelligent eyes. He was quick-witted, well read, often Jewish and always left wing (I say that with nostalgia: many men from the Jewish side of my family fitted that stereotype, hard to remember at times these days when the British Jewish community is so generally Conservative).

In particular, those were the men who’d either fought in the Spanish Civil War, along with the George Orwells of this world, or at least raised money for the Republican side and campaigned for the support it so badly needed and never received.

In our lift section office in 1975, one of our engineers was straight out of this mould. A throwback, already way behind the times. Dressed exactly as I’ve described, expressing exactly the views I suggest – though always indirectly, of course, by implication, as befitted the office environment.

“Hey,” we called as he walked in on 3 December 1975, “Franco died yesterday!”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m devastated.”

“What do you mean?” we asked, nonplussed.

“I blame his doctors,” he replied, “they should have kept him alive for another six months of increasing agony.”

Well, they hadn’t, and he’d gone. We shall never see his like again. Or at least we can fondly hope so.

But when I hear Nigel Farage, Donald Trump or Marine le Pen, I’m afraid his spirit could come back to haunt us yet.

After Scotland and Turkey, do we all have to become nationalists?

What a joy it is to see a people, saddled with a centralising, increasingly autocratic ruler, turn out and vote to stop him gathering still more power to himself.

That’s what happened on Sunday in Turkey. The HDP, generally described as “pro-Kurd” – the difference from a Kurdish party is that the HDP, under its co-Chairman Selahattin Demirtaş, wants to extend its appeal beyond the Kurdish 20% of the population – took enough seats in the general election to deny the ruling party a parliamentary majority. Suddenly, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the former Prime Minister who had moved to the symbolic office of President in the hope of turning the post into something with real executive power, has to go back to the drawing board.

Selahattin Demirtaş of the HDP
which put Erdogan firmly in his place this weekend

So an essentially nationalist party, albeit one that has decided to broaden its appeal outside its region, has, without coming even close to winning the election, made such a breakthrough as to transform the political atmosphere.

Of course, that’s a phenomenon we know sadly well in Britain too. Here, as in Turkey, a nationalist party representing one part of the nation, has won a sweeping victory in its own region, Scotland. The Scottish National Party has reduced, for now at least, the previously dominant Labour Party to only one seat. And, like the HDP, it has found a way to articulate a message that is more than nationalist – indeed, its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has emerged as a more committed evangelist for moderate social democracy than anyone the Labour Party has found in recent years.

That’s not to say that everyone in the SNP is particularly nice. I had this from a supporter, probably a member, on Twitter the other day: “…your [Labour’s] demise in rUK [the rest of the UK, without Scotland] is also assured. You have as much future as the UK – none.” It’s intriguing that someone can take so much gloating pleasure from the notion that the rest of the UK has no future – a prospect that would cost us dear, but gain him nothing.

Incidentally, that is the classic definition of envy: delight in harm to someone else, for its own sake. So when it comes to the politics of envy, this statement perfectly expresses it.

Nevertheless, it does seem that in its majority, and at the top of the party, the SNP manages to offer a real alternative to the traditional, rather monolithic and uninspiring parties that have dominated the scene for so long. Like the HDP in Turkey. It’s true that the SNP remains entirely nationalist – Scottish, where the HDP is simply pro-Kurd – but it does seem as though nationalist politics might, at the moment, be quite an incubator for social-democratic or liberal thinking.

Sadly, nationalism is also an incubator for far less agreeable things (perhaps rather like my Twitter acquaintance). The far-right, xenophobic, homophobic United Kingdom Independence Party is nothing if not deeply nationalistic. So is the Islamophobic, authoritarian Front National in France. Like the HDP and the SNP, these are parties that are gaining support and upsetting the excessively comfortable political arrangements that suited our leaders in the past.

The uglier face of nationalism:
Marine le Pen of the FN in France, like Nigel Farage of UKIP in England

Does that mean if we want to see some change, we have to choose nationalists of the left or right?

How dismal the prospect would be if the answer to that question were “yes”. Because, and again my SNP-supporting adversary seems to make the point, it doesn’t take much for a nationalist of the left to flip into something pretty hateful and little different, in brutality of outlook, from a nationalist of the right.

Which means that we need to find that flame that lights up the HDP and SNP and light it in our old, non-nationalistic parties of the Centre-Left. The next few months are going to be crucial in Britain, to see if we can pull that trick off with Labour. But we need to see it happen in a great many other countries too.

In the meantime, though, we can at least celebrate the result in Turkey. it doesn’t matter that the HDP has nationalistic roots. At least it has given an increasingly autocratic politician a bloody nose.

To be fair, one even has to have a little sneaking admiration for Erdogan himself. For the moment, at any rate, he seems at least to have accepted the people’s verdict. There are plenty of countries – Russia for instance – where that couldn’t be guaranteed.

The Clarkson story: a parable for our times

It’s amusing to follow the ferment about Jeremy Clarkson, star of motoring programme Top Gear, that led to his being suspended by the BBC after what it called a “fracas” with a producer.

The rumours are that, in this instance, a “fracas” meant a punch thrown.

What makes the story more interesting than a banal news item about crass behaviour, is that Clarkson represents something quite profound in English society, indeed in society of most developed economies today. Considering that he’s spent years cultivating an appeal based on shallowness, it’s even remarkable that he can represent anything profound on anything.

Jeremy Clarkson
Some find him appealing

He’s regularly in trouble for using derogatory, even racist language, or just for slurring other people or even whole nations. He had to leave Argentina in a hurry after sporting a number plate (H982 FLK) which some thought was a reference to the 1982 Falklands conflict. He had to apologise to Mexicans for describing them as lazy and feckless. He riled India too with some tasteless comments.

What these incidents all have in common is that they’re delivered in a humorous way, which makes it hard to criticise them without seeming humourless oneself. My difficulty is that comments whose only effect is to offend don’t strike me as all that funny, and making them sound funny, only makes them more offensive.

In passing, I feel exactly the same about some of the more tasteless cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published by organisations such as Charlie Hebdo.

What the attitude reflects is a sense that it’s OK to be offensive about other people, and whole groups of other people. Those who think like Clarkson will assure you that they’re not racist, they’re merely upholding the right to say what they think (so they’re actually staunch protectors of free speech, not just bullying boors), and reject Political Correctness (to which they’ll usually tack the words “gone mad”).

It’s those attitudes that have led to the rise of parties such as UKIP in England or the Front National in France. They too would claim not to be racist, but to speak simple common sense for ordinary people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that behind their rejection of Islamist extremism, say, there’s actually a dislike of anyone espousing Islam, and behind that, as a recently-former UKIP Councillor revealed, a dislike of anyone black (she claimed she couldn’t bear to look at black people).

So it’s a racism that generally dare not speak its name.

What makes its role so sad is that often the people who admire it most, the fans of Jeremy Clarkson, for instance, admire it for its strength. Clarkson has the courage to speak out and say the things many believe but don’t dare express. His boldness is admirable to them.

Taken to its extreme, this attitude can become deeply dangerous and corrupting. If three young girls from East London chose last month to travel to Syria to join ISIS, I can’t help believing that much of the attraction was to a movement with the courage to say out loud what others merely feel but are too timid to voice. And ISIS of course goes still further: it takes cruel action, instead of limiting itself to cruel words.

There’s no comparison in degree between a Clarkson bullying jibe and an ISIS beheading, but they’re still linked, by indifference to hurt, by a breaking of the normal bonds that prevent us acting on such aggressive impulses, and by the sense in many others that this is an expression of courage.

What’s particularly interesting about the Clarkson case, however, is the money aspect. As well as having made a fortune from it himself, under his tenure Top Gear has become one of the BBC’s most successful programmes. That touches on another problem in our present societies, the power of money. Given what he brought in to the Corporation, Clarkson must have felt himself to be immune to any kind of action against him. Whatever his behaviour, the BBC could never part company with him – they’d be cutting off the hand that fed them.

So it’s striking that the BBC has suspended him. They’ve even cancelled the last three programmes in the present series of Top Gear. And that really is a major step.

Because it says “there are certain forms of behaviour that we simply won’t tolerate. And it makes no difference how wealthy you are, or how much wealth you generate.”

It’ll be interesting to see where this story goes next…

At the end of 2014: a glimmer of hope for 2015?

If 2014 had a dominant issue, it would have to be immigration.

Anti-immigrant feeling is on the rise across the rich nations, with some countries such as Britain, France and Sweden seeing brutally xenophobic parties of the far right advancing threateningly. Indeed, such views are affecting, or perhaps I should say infecting, the entire political establishment: the British government has even announced it no longer intends to help finance rescue missions for migrants left to drown in the Mediterranean. It seems a death sentence is a fitting punishment for people attempting to reach Europe illegally.

Citizens of a Christian nation show their compassion

Much of the hostility comes from significant sectors of the working poor, traditionally the natural supporters of the Left, so it too feels pressured to make concessions to views it should be resisting.

While there’s no excuse for it, the spread of xenophobia among the poor isn’t hard to understand. Men and women in unskilled work are on pay that barely allows them to survive. The alternative of eating or heating is starkly posed to many families, especially to the 622,000 (according to the most recent UK government figures) on zero-hour contracts, technically in employment but with no guarantee of either work or pay. It’s no surprise that Britain’s Trussell Trust, which was feeding 30,000 people at food banks in 2007, is now feeding a million.

Life for the poor is even more precarious because, in economies struggling to recover from the 2008 shock, redundancy is an ever-present threat. So yawning before them is the black hole of unemployment, an increasingly desperate state as benefits are reduced in the name of austerity, or withheld as increasingly stringent conditions of entitlement are imposed.

In these circumstances, it’s easy to believe that immigrants in unskilled work are taking jobs which might otherwise have gone to native-born unemployed. Many of these immigrants accept lower wages, so there’s the sense that they are undercutting applicants from within the country. When skilled jobs, for instance in healthcare, go to immigrants, that too can be seen as denying opportunities locally.

So it’s easy for the far right to whip up bitterness against immigrants. And yet it isn’t immigrants who introduced zero-hour contracts, but employers wanting to cut payroll costs. Nor do immigrants demand lower wages, they merely accept them as preferable to the conditions they’ve left behind. Nor, finally, is it immigrants who are keeping locals out of skilled work, but short-sighted economic policies that deny training opportunities to our young people.

The attraction of making immigration the issue is that immigrants are generally easily identifiable, whereas the corporate or political figures responsible for the real problems prefer to say out of sight. Immigrants become an easy scapegoat for all our ills, easy to fear, easy to hate. Parties based on humanity’s baser instincts, like UKIP in Britain or the Front National in France, rise on those feelings.

So it was refreshing, in this toxic atmosphere, to sense a glimmer of optimism at the end of the year. At the beginning of December, the OECD, the club of the most prosperous nations, published a study which, first, confirmed the blindingly obvious, that inequality is increasing, but then went on to assert a truth which badly needed stating: far from encouraging growth, inequality holds it back.

Estimated consequence of changes in inequality (1985-2005)
on subsequent cumulative growth (1990-2010) 

This is dynamite.

Firstly, it gives the lie to the Reagan-Thatcher sacred cow of trickle-down economics: let the rich grow richer, and their wealth will flow downwards to enrich the poor in turn. It turns out that enriching the rich just makes the rich richer. The only surprise is that anyone’s surprised.

Secondly, it shows that inequality doesn’t even encourage economic growth. Many once believed that it was better to have unjust distribution of a bigger cake, but the OECD shows that unjust distribution itself slows the growth of the whole cake. Increasing inequality between 1985 and 2005 held growth back by 8.5% on average across the OECD between 1990 and 2010.

It seems that fairness isn’t just morally preferable, it’s more economically efficient.

So, if all but a tiny minority of us are feeling poorer, it’s because we’re becoming poorer. The zero-hour contracts, the downward pressure on benefits, the cuts in public services aren’t about fixing the economy. They’re the necessary price of growing inequality, where the wealthiest 1% or even 0.1% prosper, but the least well off 40% see nothing grow but their suffering.

These are key notions, and all the more so since they’re being voiced in the wake of one of the more important publishing events of recent years: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century. He shows, with real data to support his argument, that inequality is growing ineluctably. What’s more, while in the twentieth century there was a reduction in inequality in income, that trend is recent and by no means guaranteed. Nor has there been any corresponding reduction of inequality in wealth:

… the upper decile own 60 percent of Europe’s wealth and more than 70 percent in the United States. And the poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.

Piketty’s central contention is that for as long as the rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of growth in the economy, the gap between the wealthiest in society and the poorest – note the depressing finding that half the people own less than 5% of the wealth – will continue to widen. And we now know this restricts overall growth.

Why do we allow this to happen? Because people with property of $100,000 or $200,000 think of themselves as on the brink of wealth, and believe their interests lie with the very wealthiest, those whose property is measured in the millions. They support measures to shore up inequality because they believe they may in time benefit from them.

Meanwhile the poorest, apparently impotent to change anything, with no voice in politics, look for an easy target. Blaming immigrants is a convenient way to explain their difficulties, and they rally behind UKIP or the Front National or their ilk.

But Piketty and the OECD, joined even by the IMF, have highlighted the real cause of their problems: inequality.

That’s what gives me some encouragement at the end of 2014. The terms of debate are beginning to change, at least at top levels of economic thought. Perhaps we can encourage some trickle-down in ideas, even if it has failed in finance. If the parties of the Left can find the courage to reject facile immigrant-bashing, and to challenge the failed economic wisdom of the Reagan-Thatcher legacy, then they may mobilise support for progressive change. Towards greater justice, and towards greater efficiency at the same time.

It wouldn’t be a moment too soon.

Happy 2015. I hope.

Immigration: aiming at the wrong target

We never seem to stop talking about immigration these days. And yet the real problem we face isn’t immigration – it’s precisely all that talk about it. Or more generally, the someone-else-to-blame mentality that lies behind all the hot air and bad temper.

Anti-Immigration: it's all the rage
Even among people descended from immigrants

One of the more remarkable women I know of was Emilie du Châtelet. She became a champion, in the eighteenth century, of what the best recent student of her life, calls “feminine ambition”: she forced the scientific world to take her seriously, publishing extensively on physics, including a translation of Newton’s Principia which she raced to complete before her premonition of death was verified.

She had a servant called Sébastien Longchamp, who would ultimately be dismissed from the household she shared at the time with Voltaire. Decades later, after his own death and even that of the man who published them, Longchamp’s Memoirs of his time with the illustrious couple appeared. One has to question the reliability of such a source; even so, there are some stories he tells in his ‘what the Bulter saw’ document, that ring true.

He tells, for example, of a summons to her bathroom, to fetch more hot water from the fireplace and pour it into the bath. As he came to edge, he realised that she was entirely naked, and the water completely transparent. To avoid being scalded, she parted her legs so that he could pour the water safely away from them. When he tried to do so with his eyes averted, she admonished him for getting the hot water too close to her body, so he was obliged to watch what he was doing and therefore view her naked.

Mme du Châtelet was by no means promiscuous. She would certainly not have appeared naked before a man. But that precisely is the point: Longchamp was not a man. He was a servant, and to a noble such as Emilie, that is less than a man. There was no need for modesty before him.

An outspoken champion of rights – hers at least – against the stubborn conservatism of her time could harbour such views. That may make it less surprising that men who took their commitment to freedom and equality so far as to engage in armed rebellion against British rule in North America, could nonetheless condone slavery. There’s no doubt that men like Thomas Jefferson were made uneasy about keeping slaves, but not enough to free them, at least in their own lifetimes.

Surely the answer is that they didn’t see their slaves as truly men or women (they certainly saw them as women in some measure: Jefferson fathered several children on one). Like Longchamp, the slaves were lesser humans, different enough from the masters to warrant denying them their liberty.

Now fast forward two and a half centuries.

We live in a world that is more unequal than at any time since the end of the Second World War. In England, 1.4 million people have an annual income of under £6000 a year; 6000 have an income over £1 million. On their own, the income of each of those super-rich is worth over 150 times that of the people at the bottom. And there many hundreds of people who take many more times still that lowest level.

With that excess money, they can fund politicians and buy them. They can threaten to move their wealth elsewhere to get their way. They have in particular bought the British Tory Party, and are now buying UKIP; it is no accident that while their earnings have grown over the last four years, those of the poorest have fallen still further.

The people who take that money and exercise that power know they deserve it. They know they are exceptional. They excel those who have, and receive, less. In other words they know themselves to be superior. The rest of us may be human, but we are a lesser kind of human. 

 There are 6000 of them which, funnily enough, was the size of the French aristocracy in the eighteenth century too. Like them, their position is based entirely on wealth. It’s no surprise that they preserve and maintain the same attitudes.

There are so many more of us. And we have votes. Why don’t we put an end to their domination?

Because instead of opposing them, we aspire to be like them. We protect the rights of the wealthy in the hope that some day we’ll join their ranks, and enjoy that protection.

However, since we certainly don’t want to blame ourselves for our troubles, we have to find someone else to blame. How about immigrants? There are relatively small numbers, they’re relatively easy to spot, and it’s easy to come up with some kind of justification based on our being the true possessors of this land while they are interlopers in it. Though the English took the country from the Celts, as did the French, and the Americans took it from the Natives who were there before them.

That’s the trap that UKIP or the Tea Party or the Front National in France lure us into. Blame the other, the foreigner, the alien. The lesser human.

The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and above all the fact that his killer has avoided any kind of justice, shows how those ideas are as strong today as they ever were. American Blacks may not be slaves, but who can say that Whites regard their lives as equally valuable?

Here one in six of our voters rally to the xenophobes of UKIP, and a higher still proportion of French voters flock to the Islamophobic Marine Le Pen. So we talk endlessly about the perils of immigration and do nothing about those who steal the bread from our mouths.

What of those people, the ones who really run the show and cause our problems? 

They’re laughing at the lot of us. All the way to the bank.

Beefing about nationalism

“All meat sold in this store,” said the sign, “is British.”

That had me smiling wryly. Because I lived in France for ten years and out there they had signs proclaiming all the meat they were selling to be French. Indeed, during the mad cow disease crisis in Britain, French butchers were strident in their insistence that none of their beef was British.

A guarantee to make us feel safer
Well, unless you're French. Or from anywhere outside Britain

Now I have no objection to people demanding that their food be safe. To be frank, I’d also rather prefer it that way. I’m not convinced, though, that the fact that it’s being produced by compatriots offers any guarantees. I really don’t see why I should expect British farmers or food companies to be any safer than French ones – or vice versa. They all, after all, use the same techniques and products as each other.

But food is a visceral matter. I’ve known Jews or Muslims, for instance, who have abandoned every aspect of the practice of their faith who can’t free themselves of their dietary laws: once your body has learned that pork is unclean, it’s hard to shake that feeling. Bear in mind that it is a feeling, far more than a belief. The faith, say that certain rituals must be performed on certain days, is relatively easy to shake because it is a matter for the mind; but the body is far more basic and far more conservative.

So when we feel threatened in our food, we run for atavistic cover: back to what we identify as our community. So British (or French) food is safer because France (or Britain) is our country.

Nationalism is the belief that one country is better than others, simply because it’s ours. And the example of the fatuous posters about locally produced meat underlines how widespread and baseless, that belief is. 

It wouldn’t matter if that was as far as it went. But in England today we see the rise of a viciously nationalistic party, UKIP, which wants to further inflame national sentiment and build its popularity on it. So its primary stance is anti-immigrant and, make no mistake about it, their objection to immigrants isn’t truly economic or even political, it’s simply based on the crassest of gut-feel dislike of the foreigner for no other reason than he or she is foreign.

Unsurprisingly, as the two nations are so close, and not just geographically, France is seeing the parallel growth of an equally vicious, xenophobic nationalist party, the Front National, with views that mirror much of UKIP’s stance.

Both parties would, naturally, strongly maintain the superiority of their country’s meat over that of the other – or indeed any other. The people of their nation are better, the foodstuffs of the nation are therefore better.

Sadly, these attitudes are spilling over and infecting far too much of the life of each of these nations. The French FN is whipping up Islamophobia as part of its hatred of anything it sees as extraneous and those attitudes are spreading through an increasing portion of the institutions of society; in Britain, both the Conservatives and, sadly, Labour are trying to woo support among UKIP voters by making dangerous concessions to its views.

It’s no surprise that for all its talk of sympathy with the sufferings of Syria, Britain has let in just 24 refugees from that country.

Nationalism is toxic and it’s deeply anchored. Indeed, there’s only one sentiment capable of supplanting it. Curiously, that’s best exemplified by another matter of nationality of meat. 

When the European Union decided to ban beef imports from Britain because of Foot and Mouth, many Northern Irish farmers asked to be reclassified as Irish.

Wonderful, isn’t it? Many of these men are the descendants of Edward Carson who proclaimed “no surrender” to the attempt to push the North into an independent Irish Republic. Many would have voted for Ian Paisley’s party during his “Never, Never, Never” phase. Over their dead bodies would they ever be made to give up their British status and become Irish.

Until, that is, they were hit in their pocket books. Then, yes, being Irish was a legitimate demand and they pursued it energetically.

Come to think of it, that might be the best answer to the threats nationalism poses. Not guns and bullets. Just a little money to persuade its adherents that their bread might be better buttered on the other side. In the long run, it might be a lot more effective.

And, actually, cost a great deal less.

After an Earthquake, reconstruction

So now we’ve had the earthquake in Britain. UKIP topped the poll for the European elections. We know the worst, and we know its extent.

After an earthquake, the first task is rescue and recovery. But actually this one wasn’t that scary. It’s nasty to see success for a party which, while strenuously declaring itself to be neither racist nor homophobic, somehow keeps turning up spokespeople who express thoroughly racist and homophobic views. Nevertheless, these were elections for the European Parliament, and though UKIP ran a campaign claiming that 75% of our legislation is made in the EU, the reality is that power still remains in London.

Victory in a forum which exerts little power over us? It’s not as catastrophic as success in Westminster elections would have been.

So no rescue or recovery. Instead we move straight to the next phase: reconstruction. And there we certainly have a lot of work to do.

While UKIP came top, it took just over 2% more of the vote than Labour. The last time the elections were held, in 2009, Labour fared miserably; it has rebounded into a perfectly respectable position. It has even forced the Conservatives into third place. That’s the first time they’ve fallen so low in a national poll. Not the first time for ages, the first time ever, in their entire history.

All that’s good. What’s much more worrying is that Labour took under 1.5% more of the vote than the Conservatives. That’s far too anaemic a lead for an Opposition party a year out from a general election: there tends to be a swing back towards government in the last few months and Labour is perilously close to losing its lead.

It isn’t clear whether that wisdom remains true in the new environment created by UKIP, with four parties in contest. Or five, if we include the Greens, and we should, since they overtook the Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the present government, last week. 

Maybe there will be less of a resurgence of government popularity in these circumstances than in the past, but I don’t think Labour should rely on that faint hope. Especially as a lot of UKIP supporters in these elections are likely to return to backing the Conservatives next year.

No, reconstructing a politics in Britain based on simple liberalism and tolerance is going to depend on Labour taking positive action itself. And the big question is going to be, what sort of action?

Commentators are all saying that UKIP’s success is going to force the other parties to consider its agenda more seriously. And that agenda has just two points: anti-immigration and anti-EU. The Tories will find it easy to move closer to those positions, but what about Labour?

Ed Miliband's task for Labout
win support back from UKIP without adopting its positions

Adopting a similarly little-England and xenophobic stance would be wrong in itself. Labour stands for inclusiveness and for international collaboration. Coming down hard on immigrants and opposing the EU means betraying fundamental principles.

But in any case it would do Labour no good. If I’m going to vote for a party which has those views, why would I vote for one that has only adopted them recently and doesn’t really believe in them? I might as well vote for the real thing. No, Labour needs to do something much harder. It needs to take on the UKIP discourse and show how profoundly misguided it is.

It has to argue the case for the EU, a reformed EU by all means, but the EU all the same; and it has to argue the case for Europe’s open borders – surely one of the great extensions of human liberty the European experiment has given us. And also deeply necessary, at a time when we need immigration to shore up an ageing workforce.

Labour needs to argue that case with conviction to win back enough supporters from those tempted by UKIP to give it a 5 or 6 point lead. That would be sufficient. But it isn’t going to be easy.

Put off by the scale of the challenge? 

Marine le Pen: the French have a real, devastating earthquake

Think of our friends in France. There the elections were won by a Front National which even UKIP is shy of, because of its racism. And the Socialists, far from coming second, came a poor third, massively diminished by a weak and ineffective President Hollande.

At least reconstructing after our own earthquake is a much more manageable task.

European Elections: the earthquake finally happened for UKIP. But it wasn't that big...

Well, it’s been an interesting night here in Britain, as it has throughout Europe, as we counted the votes for the European Parliament.

The results in Britain, as shown by the BBC

In Britain, UKIP came first. And that means that the commentators who’ve been talking up a UKIP earthquake, will feel justified. They’re not entirely wrong: UKIP have never previously won a national election of any kind, so we have to say well done to them. Even if it’s between gritted teeth.

Then, however, we can qualify that a bit.

First of all, and it’s part of the problem with the European Union, no one cares very much about the European Parliament. So they don’t mind voting strangely in European elections, handing the mainstream parties a kicking when it’s not actually going to change very much. There were indications of that in the fact that the elections were held in Britain on the same day as the Europeans, and in those local elections – which can actually affect voters’ real lives – they handed the victory to Labour.

Indeed, though UKIP came second in terms of new council seats gained, that still left them fourth in terms of representation, and in control of no councils. It seems that UKIP could only gain its victory in an election that voters felt wouldn’t affect them. 

Besides, the victory wasn’t that big: they have a lead of only 2.1% over Labour.

In many ways, what matters more was what happened to the other parties.

The Liberal Democrats are down to just one seat and saw their percentage of the vote halved. It seems that they’re being punished for having won themselves a great reputation sniping from the left at Labour when it was in power, and then joining a government of the right led by the Conservatives. We all saw it coming – I’m sure even they did – and now it’s on them.

The Greens overtook the LibDems, taking three seats and moving to near 8% of the vote and fourth position.

The Conservatives came third. That’s the first time in the entire history of the party, since its foundation, that it has come below second in any national election. Quite a record to break.

And then there’s Labour. It was only given a clear advantage over the Conservatives by the London result, a massive victory for Labour that left UKIP in third place. A result which made me feel less bad about staying up till 3:15 to see it announced. But Labour’s lead over the Tories is under 1.5%.

Labour leading by 1.5% a year out from a General Election? That’s far too tight. As I wrote about the local elections, there’s one big lesson for Labour to come out of these elections: the party needs to lift its game and lift it big.

Meanwhile, of course, this wasn’t an election just about Britain. The saddest aspect of it? A huge victory for the Front National in France, despite its deeply xenophobic message: even UKIP, itself frequently suspected of racism, regards the FN as too racist to work with. A victory for the far right in Denmark, and in numerous other countries around the Continent. Perhaps the most worrying for its symbolism, small though it is numerically, is the election of a neo-Nazi from Germany.

There are difficult times ahead for the whole of Europe. And Britain’s problems are just part of that big picture.

Speaking out for the rights of Morons

One of my favourite lines, from a film full of them, is spoken by Tom Cruise as a young naval lawyer in A few good men: ‘my client's a moron but that's not against the law.’

Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Kaffee: no moron he

Being a moron certainly isn’t against the law, and never should be, and not just because a lot of lawmakers would be in gaol themselves if it were. The prison population would explode to levels that would make today’s overcrowding seem trivial. And the worst of it: no-one would be immune. I like to think of myself as not a moron, but I wouldn’t be the judge; the thought that someone else could decide whether my ideas were sensible enough to justify my being left in freedom is one I'm not especially comfortable with.

All this came to mind when I saw that Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the ugly Front National ultra-right wing party in France, had lost his appeal against a conviction for denying crimes against humanity. The French Senate recently passed legislation banning denial of Turkish genocide against Armenians. Holocaust denial is a crime in numerous countries, most notably Germany.

Le Pen, on the other hand...

There’s no doubt that few people deserve gaol as much as Le Pen (not that he’s likely ever to go there), but in his cases it would be for demagoguery and the attempt to legitimise racism, not for his dotty opinions. His views on the extent and depth of the holocaust and other Nazi era crimes against humanity strike me as completely the wrong issues on which to attack him.

After all, what is holocaust denial when it comes down to it? I’m certain that Le Pen would accept, say, that several thousand Protestants were massacred in Paris in 1572. And yet the evidence for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre is far less extensive and detailed than for the Holocaust. If we’re prepared to accept the evidence of the earlier crime, how can one explain the refusal to accept the much greater evidence of the later one? Except, that is, by assuming that the person doing the denying is, to use Tom Cruise’s technical term, a moron.

That, I repeat, shouldn’t be against the law. In fact, the law should get out of our heads. It shouldn’t be pronouncing on what we think but only on what we do. To take a completely different matter, I’m not convinced that the rule of the Umayyad dynasty, for example, would inspire many of us these days to want to bring it back. If others, however, believe in a revival of the Moslem Caliphate, I see no reason why they should not say so, or even debate the use of violence to achieve the aim: it could be argued that a debate on what is or is not legitimate violence is overdue. It might have been useful before Coalition forces invaded Iraq.

If, however, those who seek a new Caliphate decide to take their use of free speech to the point of inciting others to actual violence here and now, of neogiating the purchase of arms for that purpose, or of conspiring with others to wreak violence on the rest of us, then they have stepped beyond what the law should tolerate. Then it should intervene.

In other words, the law should prevent certain actions, even if they are only planned actions. It should not attempt to prohibit thoughts, or the open expression of those thoughts. However bizarre and ill-founded they are. 

Let’s remember: merely being a moron may be offensive, but it should never be regarded as an an offence.