Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

Coronavirus Contrasts

It was a great start to the day to read a piece about the behaviour of a group of parents and teachers in Madrid. Not in a Spanish paper but in the Guardian. And it’s a story that deserves to be known in other countries.

The parents recently ran a confidential survey of the whole parent body, to identify who was suffering the worst economic effects of the lockdown. Then they raised money from amongst themselves and the teachers to help out those most affected.

That included a woman who had lost her job as a cleaner and could no longer afford to feed her daughter. The help of the group meant that they could eat again. What’s more, the group supplied the daughter with a tablet, so that she could follow online teaching and therefore start following the virtual classes her school was providing.

In Britain too people are helping out
A food bank in Bury

This is by no means a unique example. Many of these groups to help the most vulnerable are emerging in response to the epidemic. And there are other examples of strangely community-related behaviour. Taking another example from Spain, I was astonished to read that Juan Roig, owner and Chief Executive of the supermarket chain Mercadona, has decided to take no salary or dividends this year, and to give 70 million Euros to relaunching the Spanish economy.

There’s nothing like a crisis to bring out the best in people. Sadly, it can also bring out the worst.

A US protestor against lockdown
Isn't freedom from fatal disease pretty essential?

There are actions that contrast starkly to this kind of community kindness and mutual support. In particular, in the US there are those groups who are turning out, sometimes heavily armed, but in thankfully small numbers, to demand lockdown restrictions be lifted. They claim to be speaking in the name of freedom. However, since they are clearly not interested in protecting vulnerable people who might be struck down by the virus, they’re only concerned with their own personal freedom.

Presumably, they calculate that they won’t fall victim to the virus.

As it happens, theirs could turn out to be a shortsighted outlook. The virus may disproportionately affect the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, but it has also killed plenty of healthy, young people. In pursuit of one kind of freedom, these protestors are jeopardising another: the freedom to live in safety from a killer disease.

So we see two profoundly different attitudes by individual people. One is community-oriented and altruistic. The other is an affirmation of individual concern and without empathy for others.

What’s true of individuals is true of governments.

The Madrid school group may well find its burden reduced before long. The Spanish government plans to start paying a minimum basic income so that, at least, no one should face homelessness or hunger as a result of the measures it has taken to combat the virus.

The German government, and with even greater success, those of South Korea and New Zealand, acted on time against the virus and applied highly intelligent measures. They seem to have brought the epidemic under control or to be close to doing so, and they have heavily limited deaths.

A nation like the UK, on the other hand, has stumbled from crisis to crisis within the pandemic. The Boris Johnson government was unforgivably slow to react to the growing signs of the scourge about to be unleashed on the nation, and hopelessly inept in its response once it finally woke up. Even today, care workers have insufficient protective equipment and testing is way behind schedule.

Now the Johnson government is trying to force citizens back to work even though little has been done to ensure the safety of workplaces. In other words, it is acting with indifference to human life and it’s no surprise that the death count there is now the highest in Europe and growing.

Worst of all, of course, is Donald Trump in the US. Utterly uncaring of the lives of his fellow citizens, he drives on towards reopening the economy for no better reason than to enhance his hope of re-election. Anyone who questions his views is dismissed as dangerously wrong and a purveyor of fake information, while the greatest disseminator of such information continues to turn his once great nation into an object of pity, and ridicule, internationally.

With the highest coronavirus death count in the world.

When this crisis is over, we shall have to start making some choices. The biggest will be between starkly opposed views of our societies.

Do we prefer the kind of community-oriented approach of the Madrid school group, and the attitude of governments that make protecting the lives of their citizens their first priority?

Or do we prefer the attitude espoused by Trump and the US protestors who place their own desires above those of the society in which they live?

If crises provide a great test of personality, that applies to all of us. Not just occasional heartwarming groups, or even governments whether heartwarming or not. Each of us will be called on to choose between two such profoundly different attitudes towards human life and collective needs.

A lot will ride on the choice we make.

Laughing at us, not with us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not improving US standing in the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting carried away by the community spirit

I get these enthusiasms, sometimes. I really ought to learn to resist them. They only ever get me into trouble.

Our neighbourhood meets nightly to applaud healthcare workers

In my defence, I’ve been impressed by the way the lockdown has brought out the best in our neighbours, in the little group of houses where we live just outside Valencia. We’ve had gifts of oranges and lemons (no, nothing to do with St Clements) from one neighbour, and we’ve had full meals from others – a paella from one, lentils from another, from a third a rice dish which we were told was absolutely not a paella though to my untrained eye it looked exactly like one (apparently it was made from mountain rice, not rice from the plains where we live, which makes it absolutely, definitely and undeniably not a paella).

From a neighbour: a rice dish (definitely not paella)
and home-made turón (nougat) as a dessert

Danielle responded in the Marie-Antoinette spirit, letting them eat cake. On one occasion she made a lemon drizzle cake, from some of the lemons we were given, and on another an orange cake, from the oranges. Both were delicious and well received.

And that’s when the enthusiasm grabbed me.

“What can I do?” I thought. Followed by a brainwave. “I know! I can cook for everyone.”

“Not for everyone,” said Danielle, incredulously.

“Well, why not?” I replied. “I can do something easy.” And, as an afterthought, I added, “easy and not too expensive.”

That was because I’d first toyed with the idea of doing a smoked salmon kedgeree, one of the dishes I most like preparing, but which costs a small fortune (I’m still paying off the last one).

“I know,” I went on, “given my Italian roots, I’ll make a pollo alla cacciatora.”

I was born in Rome, you see. Still, I guess you can call the dish ‘hunter’s chicken’, given where I got the recipe from. That’s how I cook, by the way. Always from a recipe. I lack the genius to just sort of invent dishes, or improvise them. And in this instance, I was going to use a recipe from the Guardian newspaper.

Well, as the Guardian itself keeps reminding me, ‘trust has never mattered more’. If I turn to the Guardian for reliable information, I might just as well turn to it for my recipes, too. After all, I only have to swallow the information metaphorically; cooking I have to swallow literally.

Got to be sure you can trust the source when you’re going to eat the product.

The sauce too.

Danielle kindly did the shopping. We pretend that’s because I need extra protection from potential carriers of the Coronavirus – men are more inclined to die of it than women, and we suspect Danielle’s already had it anyway, so she may be immune. 

The reality is that her going instead of me has little to do with the pandemic. It’s more that she picks all the things she wants from one supermarket aisle before going into another aisle. I, because I can never remember where anything else is, pick up things from coolers at one side of the supermarket, next go over to the far side to get some fruit, then come back to the freezers, before remembering that I needed vegetables as well as fruit, and they’re right next to each other.

This means that it takes me three times as long as it takes her, and usually I come back having failed to find at least two items from the list.

Finally, the day dawned for my great act of community service. The cooking time was only three-quarters of an hour. I called it an hour to allow for slippage. Another hour would cover chopping carrots and celery and garlic. And then I built in an extra hour just for leeway.

Given that I was preparing a lunch for Spaniards, so for 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, I started work at 11:00.

Do you know, chopping stuff for 16 people takes far, far longer than chopping for three or four? Who knew?

I raced the clock. But when the time got to 2:05 with the 45-minute cooking time still not started, I had to acknowledge the inevitable. Lunch was going to be late even by Spanish standards. It was a depressing realisation. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t going to keep to it. Honestly, it made me feel like a politician. Really bleak.

That’s the thing with my enthusiasms. I set myself up for failure.

Still, late as it was, in the end the lunch wasn’t a complete washout. Normally you should serve a cacciatora with rice or polenta, but I’m not cooking rice for the connoisseurs in the Valencia region, and I’ve never even tried my hand at polenta. They got mashed potato instead. Well, I fancied it. And it’s not something that gets served much around here.

“Mashed potato!” said one of the neighbours, “just like my mother used to make.”

My Guardian-based pollo alla cacciatora.
And definitely not polenta

I can’t be sure that’s a compliment, but I’ve decided to take it as one.

They all said they liked the meal, anyway. I tried it myself, and it seemed OK, so perhaps they weren’t just being polite. After all, it was made with Danielle’s ingredients, a ridiculous amount of work by me, and the backing of the supremely trustworthy Guardian.

There was no good reason for it to go wrong, right? It just represented a lot more work than I’d hoped.

Me and my bursts of enthusiasm.

An exceptional woman taking on the pandemic

A great many nations must be looking at New Zealand and envying that country its outstanding Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Jacinda Ardern after the Mosque shootings
Exactly the right mix of kindness and steely firmness

You may remember how well she reacted to the Islamophobic shootings at two Mosques in Christchurch. She came through with exceptional tenderness, hugging survivors and the bereaved, but also with all the firmness needed. She said of the killer “we will give him nothing, not even his name” when she reported on the incident to Parliament and, indeed, did not name him.

She followed up with tightened firearm regulations, proving that she has real steel in her when necessary, achieving more than Trump ever even attempted (Obama tried but was denied) in the face of the terrible shootings in the US.

How much we yearn for an Ardern in other countries.

Take the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, hospitalised for CVid-19 infection. I’m glad he no longer needs Intensive Care, and he has my sympathy while he remains hospitalised. However, that’s neither more nor less sympathy than any of the other 16,000 or so patients admitted to hospital in the UK for Covid-19 treatment.

The Romans used to say that you should say nothing but good of the dead. In Johnson’s case, people have been quick to point out to me that I should say nothing but good of the sick either.

This reminds of the time, over four decades ago, when I was working in the British Civil Service, and one of my jobs was to track down fraud on National Insurance benefits. In a training class, I listened to ways of tracking down such nefarious behaviour by, among others, pensioners.

“We go after pensioners?” I asked, surprised.

“You don’t think,” the trainer replied, “that someone who’s spent half a century being a rogue is going to mend his ways on his sixty-fifth birthday, do you?”

Yes, I feel sorry for Boris. But the fact that he got sick hasn’t stopped him being a self-serving, narcissistic liar. And I feel a little frustrated by the general consensus out there that I should stop saying so until he’s fully recovered.

Fintan O’Toole, an excellent journalist who usually works on the Irish Times but also contributes to the Guardian, sums up the situation perfectly in a piece about ‘British exceptionalism’ has been exposed as a myth by Coronavirus. As he points out, Boris delayed for far too long in addressing the Coronavirus outbreak. He also seemed to apologise for imposing the partial lockdown now in place in the UK. In particular, he seemed concerned about restricting the fundamental right of British citizens to go to pubs, as though there were such a right.

As O’Toole suggests, it’s clear that his real worry was that the measure would prove unpopular. So he was anxious about losing votes, as though that mattered more than saving lives. Which, for him, perhaps it does. Certainly, lives have been unnecessarily lost because of his reluctance to take the required action.

I don’t pretend that the Prime Minister of my new home country, Spain, was faultless in his handling of the crisis. On the contrary, he was far too late off the mark. But once he grasped the full import of the crisis, he introduced a far stricter lockdown than in Britain.

The lockdown has been painful, but it seems to be working. For nearly a week now, we’ve seen the numbers of new cases and new deaths falling day by day. Boris could have seen how Italy and Spain reacted (but was he looking?) and learned the lesson (but is he open to being taught?)

Obviously, Donald Trump is a far worse case still. In denial for weeks, pretending that the epidemic was of little importance, taking the wrong action (such as banning flights from China) when he took any action at all, repeatedly trying to belittle the significance of what was going on. Why, he’s even appointed as ‘Coronavirus Tsar’ one Peter Navarro, who has no medical expertise whatever.

And there are plenty of other examples of utter failures in positions of leadership around the world.

How did Ardern react to the pandemic?

She has gone for an ‘elimination’ strategy, as explained by two epidemiologists, Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, also writing in the Guardian. The aim is to stop all transmission of the disease within New Zealand. Returning travellers are being stopped at the borders and quarantined. The whole nation is under lockdown. Meanwhile, the authorities are tracking the cases that remain in the community, with a view to treating those patients before others are infected.

That’s what it means to have a leader in charge. She has the steel to impose a full lockdown. She has the determination to apply the strongest possible approach to the virus – elimination rather than mere containment. It may, of course, still not work, but it’s looking good at the moment: case numbers are falling and so far, there have been just four deaths.

Some will say that New Zealand has the advantage of being an island nation. That’s true enough. But then what’s the UK’s excuse? Cases and deaths are both still rising fast there.

The example set by New Zealand depends on having a Jacinda Ardern in charge, and they’re sadly rare. Most of us are stuck with a Trump or a Boris. But that only underlines how important it is for us all to grasp what might seem a truism: we need to focus on finding leaders capable of leadership. Because for some time now, we seem to have selected our top politicians on other criteria.

And how well would you say that’s going?

Tackling the epidemic

My good friend Fabio is Milanese. As a native of the great city of Rome, I tend to think of Milan as South Austrian. You know, things happen on time, the streets are clean, and where there is bustle there is also a sense of purpose. None of these charges can be levelled against Rome.

Rome to me is the essence of Italy. Milan is northern Europe.

Still, I suppose technically Fabio is, nonetheless, Italian. And as a resident of the region of Lombardy, he was already subject to the coronavirus lockdown even before the Italian government extended it to the entire country. The “situation,” he wrote to me, “is surreal. Unimaginable.”

Top left: deserted arcade in Milan. Bottom left: Fallas crowd in Valencia
Right: two women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket

Certainly, if Milan maintains its sense of purpose – as I’m sure it does – the bustle is gone. Places usually thonged by crowds of both locals and tourists are now deserted. The atmosphere must be eerie, to say the least.

Most recently, Fabio has gone still further, calling for the deployment of the army. Why? People have been breaking curfew rules, kids have been getting together out of doors to have drunken parties, the lockdown isn’t being respected.

I have to say that this doesn’t entirely surprise me, and it may strengthen the sense that the Milanese are, after all, truly Italians. One of my college lecturers was Catholic and she told me of a conversation she once had with an Italian bishop.

“Why,” she asked him, “does the Pope issue instructions that are so strict it’s almost impossible for English Catholics to follow them?”

“Ah,” he replied, “The Pope is Italian.”

This was the time before we started to get Popes from other parts of the world.

“The problem with England,” the bishop went on, “is that its culture is Puritan. This even affects the Catholic community. They try to follow Papal instructions to the letter. But the Pope’s Italian, and he knows Italians will ignore 90% of what he says. So he deliberately makes his decrees particularly strict. I can see how this makes for problems in England.”

As with spiritual instructions, so it seems with government ones: total compliance isn’t the first reaction of all Italians.

Still, it seems Fabio’s plea didn’t fall on deaf ears. He tells me the army is indeed being deployed. Maybe, with bad grace, and under the baleful stare of men with guns, more Italians will now begin to take the lockdown seriously.

Meanwhile, where we’re living, near Valencia in Spain, we’re in the runup to the great fiesta of the Fallas. Celebrations are already under way, with thousands of people thronging the streets. Rather like the marches for International Women’s Day at the weekend. It’s hard not to admire such a tenacious attachment to traditions, particularly to joyous ones. On the other hand, we’re now up to 1600 infections across the country, 10% of the total in Europe. That’s still far behind Italy, with over 9000, but we’re catching up…

Some are beginning to question just how responsible our devil-may-care attitude may be.

Interestingly, it was announced only today that the Fallas would, even at this late stage, be cancelled. Or at least postponed. I haven’t asked Fabio, but I suspect I know what his reaction would be… For my own part, I wasn’t going to be going to any of the major events.

It strikes me that we need to take the epidemic seriously. Which isn’t the same as panicking about it. The women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket strikes me as at best an over-reaction. At worst, it’s a reversion to the worst instincts of man.

But claiming that nothing much is happening, as Donald Trump has? Or not cancelling major public events? Or simply not keeping contact between people to the minimum absolutely necessary? That doesn’t strike me as healthy either.

The Italian government’s action may, as Fabio says, create a surreal atmosphere. But I really can’t see how else you limit the spread of a virus.

The saddest aspect of all this? It’s the lack of an internationally coordinated response. In a time of nationalism, individual countries seem to have decided that they must simply do their own thing.

That’s a pity. Although I was encouraged to see a suggestion that the virus itself might provide a solution to the problem. Will Hutton, in the Observer, the sister paper of the British Guardian, argued that the infection might drive us to improve what globalisation means.

Meanwhile, Fabio, hang on in there! This won’t go on for ever. And, unimaginable though the short term results are, the actions of the Italian government may well turn out to be the most effective response to the problem.

I certainly hope so.

The Skwawkbox, or master class in writing fake news

“The TV News is lying to us. I get my information from Facebook, friends and social networks.”

An interesting comment. Many people in the England, the US or other nations might well share the sentiment. In this instance, it came from Spain.

It could also have come from the left as plausibly as the right. The BBC has been upset by the attacks on it from the left, just when its very existence is coming under threat from a right-wing government. We might soon see a great public broadcaster muzzled by the right while the left does nothing to defend it.

In this case, the speaker was from the right. He was a supporter of the far-right Spanish party, Vox. The left-leaning paper El País was interviewing him for a study of where Vox gets its support.

He prefers to get his news from Facebook, his friends and social networks. Which is another way of saying that what he wants isn’t information, it’s confirmation. He will find those groups and posts, or friends, who believe what he believes, and always strengthen rather than challenge his views.

That’s much more comfortable. It’s also how fake news spreads. That’s true whether the fake news is generated by a propaganda mouthpiece of the right, such as Guido Fawkes in the UK or the White House in the US, or the left, such as England’s Skwawkbox.

Purveyors of fake news
A rare photo of publicity-shy Skwawkbox founder Steve Walker (l)
Paul Staines of Guidow Fawkes (c) and the White House ranter

In answering a recent FaceBook comment of mine, a critic pointed me to a link to a Skwawkbox page which had the headline:

EXCL: NCC FORCED TO REJECT UP TO 90% OF ANTISEMITISM EVIDENCE AS UNFIT – MULTIPLE DEATHS FOLLOW EXPULSIONS

The claim, right at the start of the headline, to exclusivity is clearly a source of pride to the writer. To me, it just says, ‘no reputable journalist has picked up this story’. Clearly, the poster of the link was, however, entirely disinclined to wonder about the item’s reliability.

The story itself opens with:

A Manchester woman has died within days of her expulsion from the Labour Party under a new disciplinary system.

The woman, whose identity has been confirmed to the SKWAWKBOX, is understood to have died on Tuesday as a result of a brain haemorrhage that locals are linking to stress brought on by her summary expulsion under a new ‘fast track’ process in which the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is expelling members against whom antisemitism complaints have been made.

It seems the person who pointed me to this piece had confidence in it. But all it’s saying is that someone, unnamed to us though the Skwawkbox claims to know who she is, is said by some anonymous source and their equally unnamed friends, to have died within days of being expelled from the Labour Party.

Given the headline with its reference of the lack of validity of ‘90% of Antisemitism evidence’, the implication is that the evidence against this woman was weak.

However, we can check none of this. We don’t know the name of the woman. We don’t know the names of the people living locally who commented on her death. We don’t know what evidence was brought against her, let alone whether any proportion of it, or none at all, was deemed invalid.

In fact, we don’t know whether the 90% figure is accurate. Any more than we know whether evidence rejected by the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party ought in fact to have been admitted.

The piece is written in such a way that it’s impossible to verify any of its allegations. It may be that I’m too cynical, but I believe that anyone who makes claims that can’t be verified, is afraid of any kind of questioning. That’s likely to be because they’re afraid the case will fall apart if it’s examined too closely.

The naivety of certain commentators, such as my critic, lies in the refusal to see this obvious truth.

As a result, I thought the best response was to write a piece of my own, applying exactly the same journalistic standards as the Skwawkbox.

A reliable source leads me to understand that the woman who died in Manchester soon after being expelled from the Labour Party, had faced multiple charges of antisemitism backed by overwhelming evidence.

While a proportion of the evidence submitted was found to be too circumstantial or too weak, more than enough was both conclusive and believable, in many cases confirmed by multiple, independent sources.

Her death soon after the expulsion was a tragic coincidence. 

The same source confirms that the woman had a serious and long-term circulatory condition which was both inoperable and likely to lead to life-threatening trauma if triggered by, say, an external shock. My source confirms that she had such a shock, unrelated to the expulsion, before suffering a massive and tragically fatal aneurysm.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the woman’s loved ones in this terrible moment for them. However, it has to be stressed that her death, while tragic, was not associated with the disciplinary action Labour had taken against her. Her expulsion was inevitable, given the incontrovertible evidence that she made antisemitic statements, repeatedly, over a long period.

There is no place for anti-Semites in the Labour Party.

Now here’s your challenge: prove that any of what I’ve said is untrue.

When the little kid tries to play in the big boys’ playground

Early in August, the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the Spanish Ambassador to protest at the seizing of the oil tanker Grace 1 in Spanish waters. The embarrassed Spanish diplomat had to explain that while he, and his government, agreed that the incident had occurred in their waters, Britain claimed them for itself and when it sent Marines to take control of the vessel, it did so without consulting Spain.

Britain seizes the Grace 1.
The act of a might imperial power

It was an action worthy of an Imperial power. Britain, after all, only claims jurisdiction over those waters through its possession of Gibraltar. That’s a rock the size of a (very) small mountain, attached to the Spanish mainland and nearly 2500 kilometres from London. Britain took possession of it in the early days of its imperial expansion and only by right of war, since it was handed over by the Treaty of Utrecht which concluded the War of Spanish Succession.

Why on Earth was Britain involved in a war about the Spanish succession? You may well ask. Especially as most of the fighting took place in Germany anyway. Please don’t expect logic in any of this.

So the anomalous possession of a piece of obviously Spanish territory gave Britain the right, or so it felt, to seize an Iranian oil tanker. It did so on the grounds that the tanker was breaching sanctions against Syria, contrary to decisions of the European Union. That’s ironic since Britain is hell-bent on leaving the European Union, but that clearly didn’t stop certain people thinking that EU law provided useful cover for doing what they wanted to do in the first place.

In passing, it’s actually questionable whether EU law really did. Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister and an expert on these questions, told the Guardian:

The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me. One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU. And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others. That’s what the US does.

Spain claimed that, in reality, Britain was merely reacting to a demand from the US. Since the Americans have since made an attempt to seize the ship through the Gibraltar courts, it’s hard not to believe that this might, indeed, have been the case. It was US policy, rather than British, that led to the ship’s seizure.

So we have the curious spectacle of high-handed, possibly illegal, imperial action being taken by Britain. And yet it did so as no more than the poodle of the United States, a true imperial power where Britain, once a great power, is today a bit player in the game of global politics.

We didn’t have to wait long to have that proved to us. On 19 July, the Iranians seized the British tanker Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. Britain was powerless – literally – to act. It had a warship in the region, but far too far away to intervene. And in its much reduced state, it could only choose to send one more ship. Britannia once ruled the waves, but no more. Today it can’t provide military protection for its merchant navy.

Iran seizes the Stena Impero
Tit for tat, calling the bluff on British powerlessness

It no longer has the force to play the stooge for Trump’s US, let alone play with the big boys in its own right.

It might be wiser, you might think, for it learn the lesson and stop throwing its limited weight around. Indeed, it might be wiser if it stopped pretending that it was big enough to play on the world stage with the real powers of the world. The US is up there in the top tier, but even Iran is a major regional power. Britain? A minor power on the edge of Europe.

Which is why leaving our union with 27 nations in Europe is such a self-destructive move. We’ve demonstrated we can’t stand alone. But some old-Empire nostalgists are going to force us to try anyway.

The postscript to the Grace 1 story shows the only piece of wisdom in this whole sorry tale.

Gibraltar may be a quirk of history, at least insofar as belonging to Britain is concerned. But Gibraltarians have their heads screwed on properly. They voted massively against Brexit. And now the courts, followed by the territory’s first Minister Fabian Picardo, have shown the guts to stand up to the Americans. The court would not support the US claim to impound the ship. And the First Minister has released it.

Now that really is taking back control, the slogan of the Brexiters. However, it happened in opposition to US demands. Which we’ll certainly be far less able to resist once we leave the protection of the EU.

What Brexiters wish for and what they get may be entirely different things.

Corbyn, or socialism in words

First, a short cautionary tale for our times.

The top man in an organisation appoints a friend as a senior executive. She proves a most loyal supporter, if far less kind to the other employees, fiercely driving them to accept her rigid discipline, and rewarding them far less than they probably deserve, and certainly need. He awards her a 15% salary increase, putting her on nearly four times the median household salary in Britain, while she limits everyone else to 2.2%.

That’s not just less than a sixth of what she got, it’s less than the rate of inflation (measured by the way retail prices are going), so it’s effectively a pay cut.

It’s the story of Britain over the near-decade of austerity: real wages fell year after year until 2016, since when they have flatlined. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires is rising, and the total fortune they hold keeps going up. Those least able to absorb the pain of austerity are paying the price, while a self-serving elite makes sure it’s well protected from its worst effects.

Real value of wages over the near decade of austerity
from Full Fact

That’s Tory Britain for you.

That’s what Labour exists to combat, and never so energetically than when the Left is in charge. So with Corbyn as leader, we would expect the fight to be waged all the more intensely.

Except that the cautionary tale I started with wasn’t about the Tories. That was the Labour Party. The top man is Jeremy Corbyn. The tough operator he appointed and then rewarded with a 15% increase is his chief of staff, Karie Murphy. Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, one staff member said of her:

It’s got to the stage where people are afraid to speak up as individuals, because when you do you get sent to Siberia. When an individual has that much power in an organisation, it’s a concern.

Guardian photo of Corbyn with his Chief of Staff, Karie Murphy
Apparently a dangerous woman to challenge

All the worst aspects of a bullying, top-down, private-sector organisation, in fact.

Now when I first posted on this subject, a Corbyn supporter replied to me to point out that decisions on pay weren’t in the leader’s gift. My first response is that this is a standard Corbynist copout: anything good that happens is all down to the revered leader; anything bad is somebody else’s fault.

My second response is that Corbyn is constantly promising a fairer, more equitable, ultimately more socialist distribution of the resources of society. That’s going to take a huge effort from a Labour government (assuming Corbyn can get into government at all, which is by no means a foregone conclusion): convincing parliament to pass the necessary legislation; working with a lot of public and private-sector organisations to ensure not just the letter but the spirit of the measure is applied; convincing many reluctant if not frankly hostile groups to accept the principle on which it’s based.

If Corbyn can’t even get them accepted within his own organisation, the Labour Party, what possible hope is there of his achieving anything in society in general?

But there is another and far more worrying implication of this story.

Does Corbyn really mean what he says? There is a conviction on the far Left, as on the far Right, that anything they say must be correct simply because they say it. Corbyn claims he is a socialist, so what he says, and what he does, is socialism. Consequently he can apply a deeply iniquitous and thoroughly right-wing wages policy, and it’s socialist because it is he who is behind it.

Might that not be exactly what he does if he ever gets into Number 10? Let himself be convinced that a wrong-headed approach to wages must be the Labour way, because he incarnates Labour values? His track record rather suggests that this is just what he’s doing inside the Labour Party, after all.

Or, to put it in simpler terms, if he can’t even implement socialist values within his own party, why should anyone trust him be a socialist for the nation?

Fake news and the MSM

Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council, wondered this week about the ‘special place in hell … for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

In Dante’s Inferno the deepest circle in hell is reserved for traitors. Sounds about right for people who lure their nation down a road with no idea where it leads.

There was, inevitably, an outcry in response to Tusk’s comments. But an EU source confirmed that he stood by his words. “He remains of the view that while the truth may be more painful, it is always more useful.”

That’s not just true, it’s far more significant than the “special place in hell” remark it followed. The truth isn’t always comfortable. Indeed, it’s often challenging.

That’s something that needs to be said and repeated . Especially today. There is a spirit in the air that says “only what I want to hear is true”. The spirit is entirely non-partisan, embracing both left and right. Corbynistas in Britain or Trumpists in the US are as eager as each other to denounce the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media) for peddling ‘fake news’. But when you look more closely, you find that what they’re really objecting to is news that makes them uncomfortable.

There is, for instance, an inclination in certain circles of the left to feel that the government of Venezuela deserves unqualified backing because it proclaims itself to be Socialist, and in such circles, merely to make the claim is enough to win support. It isn’t true of everyone. Emily Thornberry, for instance, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman recently pointed out that, while calling himself a socialist, President Maduro has betrayed every principle of socialism.

Emily Thornberry gave a thoughtful and thought-provoking speech on Venezuela
and, remarkably, the Guardian reported on it fairly and extensively

It was interesting reading the report of her speech, in that MSM outlet the Guardian, which gave it balanced and extensive coverage. For instance, she argued, in my view courageously and convincingly that, for all Maduro’s failings, it was wrong to recognise the legitimacy of the self-proclamation as interim president of his opponent Juan Guaidó:

We need to give them time, and that offer has been made internally and externally. We need to ensure that happens – that is the best way to proceed, rather than to suddenly say: ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough. We recognise X. We do not recognise Y any more.’ It’s not the way to treat another country, even a country in as desperate a situation as Venezuela.

Such good sense and moderation isn’t universal in the Labour Party. Many in Labour still claim that the desperate state of Venezuela is all the fault of US sanctions. They refuse to accept that Venezuela is an oil economy and has faced sanctions for a far shorter time than Cuba, which does at least manage to feed its people and provide them with healthcare.

But these people don’t read MSM papers like the Guardian. Instead, they read outlets like vezenuelaanalysis.com which tell us that what is happening in Venezuela is an attempted coup against Maduro. And what is this source of information? It’s an online paper founded with money from the Venezuelan government and which claims to be supported today entirely by its readers – though we don’t know who those readers are. A recent reposting of a link to one of these stories included the comment “You won’t see this in Western media”. Well, that’s true. And I would hope not. Because the media I read – the Guardian, the Independent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others who aspire to professional journalism – don’t take their information from sources whose background is unclear, whose standards are unknown, and whose bias is obvious.

But the beauty of this Venezuelan paper is that it tells its readers what they want to read. And to many people that’s what matters today: not to learn from what they read, as I did from Thornberry’s remarks, but to have their faith confirmed. Because they aren’t looking for evidence, they are driven by belief. And that seems to be a deeply ingrained need in many circles today.

Look at the anti-vaxxer movement. It is having some success, with vaccination rates too low in more and more countries. But somehow anti-vaxxers see no connection between those low rates and the rising numbers of infections, and even deaths, from entirely preventable diseases.

We even see believers in a flat Earth growing in numbers, even though in one instance at least, their very attempts to prove their faith depends on systems based on the Earth being round.

There’s a widespread thirst for belief, not knowledge. Independent of evidence.

The other end of the political spectrum is entirely symmetrical. In the US, the National Enquirer is trying to pressurise Jeff Bezos over some compromising texts and images a hacker has passed them. There can be differing views over whether or not Bezos should have sent those messages. What, however, seems clear is that he is being targeted because he’s the owner of the Washington Post or, as Trump calls it, the Amazon Washington Post (Bezos is also the founder of Amazon).

Here’s the Tweet in which Trump reacted to the first announcement of the revelations about Bezos:

So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!

What doesn’t Trump like about the Washington Post? In the same way as the Maduro fans who can’t cope with Guardian, he hates the fact that the Post sometimes publishes information that isn’t – how shall I put this? – entirely flattering about him.

Both the Maduro supporters and the Trump fans reject the ‘mainstream media’ that sometimes challenges their beliefs with evidence – because those pesky publications insist on standards which involve such boring things as confirmation of sources and careful editing of material for accuracy. That’s not to say they never make mistakes – they certainly do – but it does mean they don’t just spew out propaganda.

No good if you’re flat earther. And the anti-vaxxers, Trump worshippers and Corbyn cult adepts aren’t much different from the flat earthers. Belief trumps information. The truth, as Tusk made clear this week, can sometimes be more painful, and they don’t want that pain.

But the truth’s also much more useful. As I found from Thornbery, in the Guardian this week, when she opened my eyes to another way of seeing things.

A salutary experience which, sadly, the true believers deny themselves.