Canny canines and humble humans

It’s always good to have family come to visit.

The poodles like it too. Each in her own way. When my son Michael and our daughter-out-law Raquel first turned up, Toffee went wild with delight. She recognised them at once, despite not having seen them for months, and she was ecstatic at seeing them again. She danced around them and kept trying to leap up and lick their faces which, considering she barely comes to their knees, was an ambitious endeavour.

Luci in front, Toffee behind, in the woods near our house

Luci was more circumspect. She barked at them as she does at all strangers who have the gall to enter her house, at least until they’ve spent twenty minutes there and she gets used to their presence. But her heart wasn’t really in the barking on this occasion. It was obvious she too was impressed by the rapture being displayed by Toffee and must have been asking herself, “if she’s that enthusiastic about them, perhaps I shouldn’t be too concerned. Especially as they don’t seem completely unfamiliar to me.”

Things quickly settled down and everybody got used to everybody else. In fact, they were particularly affectionate to Raquel, with the unerring instinct of any animal to make straight for the one person who is allergic to them. I can only congratulate Raquel on how obvious she made it to them that she returned that affection, and simply coped with the asthma and general discomfort they inflicted on her.

She’s had to head home, but Michael stayed with us. In fact, he took charge of the place while we were out, and kindly even gave the dogs a walk. And not just along the patch of green at the back of the house, but into the nearby woods which are one of the major attractions to living here.

Funnily enough, while Danielle is able to inspire them with enthusiasm for a walk in those woods, and they’re always keen if a whole group of us accompanies them, if it’s just me or just Michael, the dogs seem reluctant to go very far. Take them off the lead too soon, and there’s a risk they’ll make a beeline for home.

It’s not something that I’ve worked out. Maybe they like being out with a group because it feels like a genuine pack, whereas just three of us leave them feeling far too isolated. Unless Danielle is one of those present, since she has about her that air of quiet mastery that inspires confidence in all around, canine or human.

My technique is to keep them on the lead for rather longer than Danielle does. I release them only when it’s clear to them that we’re having the walk whether they like it or not. I have to say that they give every sign of enjoying themselves for the rest of the walk, although I notice that they only really get out in front of me when we’ve turned unmistakably for home. Maybe just because they’d rather get safely back to Danielle as quickly as possible.

Michael used all these traits to good effect when he took them out alone. He doesn’t know the woods particularly well. He therefore kept the dogs on their leads for a while and systematically went the opposite way from where they were trying to pull him. Once he’d decided that they’d gone far enough, he took them off their leads and simply followed them back, getting safely out of the woods.

“At path intersections, they’d stop and look at me to decide where to go,” he told me, “but since they always stopped at the entrance of the path they obviously wanted to take, I simply went that way.”

The technique apparently worked splendidly. They got home without difficulties, having all had a pleasant and relaxing walk.

Which just goes to show how effective it was for all concerned that, having established his leadership, Michael could then let his followers have their own way. Lead then listen? That sounds like a message it would be good to apply more frequently, even outside the limited sphere of dog walking.

When good people do too little...

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Though often attributed to Edmund Burke, we don’t really know whose the saying is. But it’s an important idea. And it’s particularly apt today.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s outbursts against four Democratic Congresswomen were deeply racist: when you tell Americans of colour, living in the US, to go back where they came from, you’re saying that the country is no home for them.

The Congresswomen Trump told to go back where they came from
They are all American. Only one was even born abroad.

Of course, as Hillary Clinton pointed out, in telling the Congresswomen the government in their home country was lousy, Trump was exactly right. Their home country is, after all, the US, and Trump heads its catastrophically bad government.

However, what’s worrying isn’t so much that Trump made his comments, but that a lot of people sympathise with him. They may not want to voice such opinions publicly, since racism for the moment still carries a stigma. But in private, or to themselves, they share his view. As he countered, when charged with racism, “many people agree with me”. As long as many people agree, it can’t be racism. The reality is that the fact that many agree doesn’t alter the racist nature of his views, it only makes them more dangerous, making it more likely that a racist might be re-elected to the White House.

What makes the quotation attributed to Burke so apposite is that there are many who dislike racism but still plan to vote for Trump. They may not be bad people, but they haven’t grasped that no good person can give racism a pass. Good people not acting will allow the evil of racism to triumph.

In Britain, too, the situation is dire. The government is in the hands of a party in which Islamophobia is rampant. But 70,000 or 80,000 members of that party are about to inflict on the whole country a Prime Minister who has expressed Islamophobic views himself in the past, and certainly has no intention of combating them today.

In particular, he refuses to denounce the toxic bilge coming out of the White House as the racist slander it is. Boris Johnson claims to speak for British independence, in his support for Brexit, but he’s so anxious to dance to Trump’s tune that he can’t bring himself to condemn his most poisonous pronouncements.

Opposite him stands a Leader of the Opposition who has just been rightly told by some of his party members in the House of Lords that he had failed the leadership test. And why? Because instead of addressing the problem of antisemitism in his own Party when whistle blowers warn him of it, he’d prefer to deny the truth of the message and then denounce the messengers.

You have failed the test of leadership

This isn’t his first offence. Ever since the Brexit referendum, he has refused to endorse a pro-EU stance, for fear of alienating those xenophobic voters who backed the Leave camp. Here was a chance to denounce racist thinking and back an internationalist position, and he refused to endorse it.

Another failure of leadership.

Ever since I first saw it, I’ve loved Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. At one point the protagonist, an artilleryman who’d commanded a machine gun battery under attack from cavalry at a recent battle, describes how they’d laughed when they first saw unprotected horsemen attacking their powerful weapons:

… but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldnt fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life…

[Those aren’t typos, by the way: Shaw didn’t like apostrophes…]

Unloaded guns won’t defeat an enemy. Labour has at the top a man who has failed the leadership test. He’s a gun that can’t fire. And with this we are to confront a racist and puppet of a racist, in the most powerful office in the land.

Corbyn may well not be an antisemite. But he’s soft on antisemites. Why? Sadly, because many of them are keen supporters of his anti-Israeli stance. And to retain their support, he’s prepared to backpedal in his fight against racism. Just as he was prepared to accommodate xenophobic leave voters to keep them on side (an approach which, as it happens, has failed).

So in both main parties in Britain, as in the United States, some of the most evil ideas to have poisoned human life down the ages, culminating in the terrible racist atrocities of the twentieth century, are allowed to grow from strength to strength. Merely because good people won’t stand up against them. “Corbyn’s a man of principle,” they say, “he has some great ideas on the economy or foreign affairs. Let’s pretend there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party.”

And the corrosive effect spreads further. Evil moves towards its triumph. Because the good do too little to stop it.

Great advice, showing exactly what Labour shouldn't do.

Labour was warned in plenty of time, we’re told, that it was heading for a drubbing at the polls. According to the Guardian, James Morris, chief pollster to the party under Ed Miliband, reported that:

There were three very clear threshold issues where the party needs to show a new approach: immigration, benefits and the deficit/economy.

On the first of these, Morris provided useful detail:

Labour is seen as having consistently ignored English people’s views on immigration. A Labour leader who wants to show change has to show that they understand that. This is not just an issue for lost working-class voters – it was central to Middle England and a major concern for Lib Dems. Out of the 40 people who took part in the groups only one person mounted any sort of defence of a relatively open policy on immigration.

The concerns were broad. Among C2s and Ds there was a particular concern about competition from eastern European migrants for work (esp in the trades). There was a universal concern about benefits and the provision of services, with immigrants sending child benefit abroad symbolic of the issue. Just as common was a cultural concern. This was partly about people adopting British culture when they come here and partly about standing up for British and in particular English traditions and English people. There was a strong sense that people who are born and bred in England should be prioritised.

So according to Morris we lost because, among other things, we failed to accommodate the fact that a great many people in Middle England feel their jobs, or even their cultural identity, threatened by the influx of immigrants to this country.

A lot of people issue this kind of warning. It usually takes the form “we have to learn to take voters’ concerns about immigration seriously.” That’s actually code: what it means is that we have to adopt those concerns as our own, to make ourselves attractive to voters who feel them.

What about “cultural concern”? This was perhaps best voiced by the politician who complained about finding himself in a train carriage without a single other English speaker in it. The same politician also pointed out that few of us would want Romanian neighbours.

The politician who made those two comments was Nigel Farage, leader of far-right UKIP. It concerns me that a Labour Party pollster might be recommending moving closer to the kinds of positions that Farage espouses.

Personally, I always find a charm in being surrounded by people speaking other languages, since it shows what a magnet Britain can be at its best. As for Romanian neighbours, I’m delighted with out Polish neighbours and I have a close and much appreciated Romanian friend. People who share Farage’s view of foreigners, far from being emulated, should perhaps be encouraged to be more tolerant and enlightened.

Incidentally, doing that is what we call leadership. Adopting their views is followership. What Labour needs to do above all else is learn to lead. It used to know what that meant, and it badly needs to find out again.

In any case, on the subject of leadership, what Morris fails to take into account is that large swaths of voters are unmoved by policy. We have to have policies in place, because they are our pledges of what we shall do – or at least attempt to do – if put into office. But people who are genuinely interested in policy are primarily insiders and a relative small band of others who follow politics with enthusiasm.

As we know, the vast majority of the electorate is completely switched off from politics, and that means switched off from policies.

Ed Miliband: likeable, bright, honest
But not perceived as a Prime Minister. That was the problem, not policy

What will enthuse those people is a sense of confidence, and better still inspiration, in the leadership of the party. They have to feel that they can see the leader in Downing Street. I doubt many of the policies that Ed Miliband promoted cost him votes; his inability to eat a bacon roll in front of the cameras, or to remember the key passages of a crucial speech, did far more to shake the confidence of huge numbers who therefore thought Cameron was simply more suitable.

No amount of triangulation, of selection of carefully crafted policies that will please the maximum number of people for most of the time, will address that problem. For that we need a person who, with or without justification, will be trusted with the keys of number 10.

So my view is simple. If we lose an election because we refuse to compromise on matters of fundamental principle, for instance because we will simply not accommodate the views on immigrants peddled by a Farage, then fair enough. There’s a majority against us on a matter on which we can’t budge.

We need to be convinced that on such questions, we really won’t ever budge, whatever the siren voices may be saying, even the siren voices of pollsters.

If, however, we lose because we have saddled ourselves with a leader who simply can’t connect with ordinary people, then that’s an altogether different matter. That’s our fault. It’s dumb and unforgivable.

Now that, James Morris, is the problem we need to fix. Policy is secondary. And compromising on principles is intolerable.