A small act in a large cause

It’s not often you get the chance to make a gesture of refusal, however small, to the Trumpists, Brexiters and other xenophobes. 

A recent business trip took me to Imperia in North West Italy. The most convenient way to get there was to fly to Nice in Southern France and then take a train for the short trip across the border and down the coast.

On the way back, I had to change at Ventimiglia, in Italy but just a few minutes by rail from Menton in France. Really. It feels as though if you ignored the rules by wandering off the end of the platform and along the track a bit, you’d have inadvertently crossed the border.

I haven’t entirely mastered the train system between Imperia and Nice. There are Italian trains, there are French trains, there are regional trains that could belong to either country without my having the faintest idea which. Delays on the way back only deepened my confusion. At 11:22, was the train at platform 2 the delayed 11:14 or would that be the one drawing in to platform 6? One way or another, I managed to miss the regional train I was booked on for Nice.

In the meantime, I’d started a conversation with a young man as lost as I was. He addressed me in broken English.

“I am Younis. I from Libya,” he assured me earnestly. I nodded. “You see? Black?” he added, pointing to his arm. 

There was no doubt about it. Not just his arm but all parts of his skin exposed to view were dark enough to qualify for what we call black.

Younis at Ventimiglia
I hope he gets to Paris safely

“Libya not good now,” he continued, perhaps with a view to furthering my education. I told him I’d heard reports to that effect.

“I have brother in Paris. At one o’clock from Paris.”

Did he mean an hour from Paris? I didn’t pursue it as it hardly seemed useful to debate expressions of time in English. He was, after all, heading for France where they were unlikely to be helpful

“I go to Nice. I get to Nice from here?”

I told him yes, I thought so, that we were on the right platform as far as I could tell. I didn’t add that I’d been wrong before. I felt we both needed our optimism kept up.

Eventually a train pulled in. Judging by the name of the company on the side and the direction it was travelling, I felt emboldened to go out on a bit of a limb.

“I think this is the Nice train.”

“Nice?” he said. He had a fetching smile and turned it on me at full beam. Then he leaped through the nearest door onto the train.

I was more cautious and walked up the platform to check with a guard first.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “this is the Nice train. But you can’t use your regional ticket on it. You’ll need a new one.”

I got on and found a seat.

A few minutes later we pulled into Menton.

“This is a service stop only,” the loudspeakers announced, “do not leave the train here. The stop is only to allow the police to carry out security checks. Please have your documents ready if asked for them.”

It occurred to me that things might not go well for Younis, who had assured me that he had “no papier”, that “in Italian they just…” and he made the pantomime of taking a photo, “and they…” with a pantomime of taking prints of all his fingers.

Just then he reappeared and I waved at him. He gave me another beaming smile and walked down the carriage to sit opposite me.

“Where we are?”

“Menton,” I said, “France.”

“France? We in France?”

I didn’t think the beam could be increased in intensity but it was.

“Why we stop?”

“The police are checking papers,” I said, and the beam switched off.

“I no papier…” he repeated, “Italian just…” and he did the finger-printing thing again.

“I know,” I said, “we just have to hope.”

“I no trouble with police,” he assured me, by which I think he meant that he had committed no crimes.

“I’m sure,” I replied, disinclined to explain that to police forces around Europe just being black and undocumented was more than crime enough. He would probably discover that quite soon – I only hoped it wouldn’t be in the next few minutes.

I looked up the carriage. There were no police in sight though there was someone almost as baleful: a ticket collector. He reached us.

“I think I have to buy a new ticket,” I told him, showing him the one I had.

“I’m afraid so,” he said, “that’ll be €12.50.”

A corporate card backed by a company that is tolerant of its staff, even when they get things wrong, put me in a position of some privilege. But then the collector turned to my travelling companion.

“Your ticket, please?”

“What he want?” he asked me.

“A ticket for this train. It’s twelve euros fifty.” I looked at him expectantly.

“I don’t have it,” he said, apparently as distraught as I was unsurprised. 

He’d got into France, a big step towards realising his dream of joining his brother. He’d avoided the police. And now he was going to be plunged into trouble with them, for want of the cost of two coffees in a station cafe.

“I’ll buy his ticket,” I told the collector, pulling out my personal card.

Once the transaction was complete, the collector told me I was very kind, without any obvious trace of sarcasm.

That surprised me. Most officials, in my experience, disapprove of helping people in what was obviously Younis’s position. But, in any case, I didn’t feel I’d been kind at all. Real generosity would have been to make a long-term commitment to help Younis, and I was doing nothing of the kind. I doubt our paths will cross again. Besides, the sum I’d parted with wouldn’t get me from Nice station to the airport. It wouldn’t cover the price of the meal I had there. I’m not sure it would feed my dogs for more than a day (and they’re little dogs).

Instead, for a small price, I was enabled to do three things that mattered to me:

• Distance myself from Brexiters who, for all their rationalisations, are merely offering cover to xenophobes if they’re not xenophobes themselves
• Reject the Trumps, Farages, le Pens and others who feel they can loudly proclaim their defence of Christian values, despite having had their sense of human compassion surgically excised
• Provide a little assistance to a man who had struggled across the Mediterranean and was now attempting to travel several hundred miles on no money, to make a better life for himself in a nation which, along with my own, had militarily meddled the heck out of his.

Cheap at ten times the price. Now I only wish I’d thought of buying him a ticket all the way to Paris. A missed opportunity.

Pounding the pavements before the poll

General Election time. 

When the notion of “foot soldier” truly comes into its own. It’s the time when we of the Labour Party infantry tramp from door to door around the Luton South constituency trying to persuade voters to re-elect our Labour Member in the last Parliament, Gavin Shuker. With, I’m glad to say, the presence and hard work of the candidate, not above being a foot soldier himself.

Preparing to go door-knocking in Luton South
with the candidate third from left

Far more conspicuously absent from these canvassing parties are the people who spent a small sum to join the party and elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. It’s as if they felt that having achieved that aim, they need do no more, their work was done and they could now sit back and watch the triumphal entry of their man into 10 Downing Street. Their approach does have one benefit at least: they don’t have to suffer the ignominy of hearing what ordinary Labour voters – in many cases, former Labour voters – think of their choice.

One of the more colourful summaries was given me by the man who told me, “we need a Prime Minister with balls. Theresa May has them. Corbyn doesn’t.”

A more strictly political view was that of the man who said he couldn’t “begin to imagine putting Corbyn up against world leaders”. I could see his point: sending Corbyn to bat for us against Putin, say, seems a bit like calling on the boy scouts to defend the nation against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. What would he do? Suggest Vladimir join him to settle our differences over a cup of tea and a slice of cake, perhaps down at the allotment? He’d probably take the polonium Vladimir was pressing on him as a new kind of artificial sweetener.

But my problem was that I couldn’t see how we’d be any better off with the admittedly more forceful Theresa May fighting our corner out there. If all that force, all that drive, all that determination is only used to get us to the front of the queue to lick Donald Trump’s boots, I think I’d prefer the tea and cake approach.

As it happens, I don’t imagine this voter would have backed us this time anyway. He wants a hard Brexit. He’s in the business of selling planes to European clients and is frustrated with all the bureaucracy the European Union puts in his way. I didn’t ask him how he thought the bureaucracy would be any less when he’s selling from outside to an EU nation still bound, from outside. It seemed unfair to point out so obvious a flaw to someone so fervently persuaded of his stance.

In any case, it’s our job to be invariably polite to the voters, and it seems discourteous to make people aware of the incoherence of their arguments.

I’ve yet to meet a voter who has decided to back us because Corbyn is leader. However, this morning we did meet a Corbyn fan whose admiration for our leader has convinced her to not back us. “Shuker’s too right wing,” she maintained, “and he opposed Corbyn, who I’m really keen on, so I can’t vote for him.”

Again, one doesn’t want to point out obvious inconsistencies, so we didn’t tell her that it would be hard for Corbyn to become Prime Minister if people didn’t elect MPs from his party.

As it happens, her position seemed of a piece with the left-leaning Americans who refused to back Hillary against Trump, and so got Trump, or the French supporters of Mélenchon who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Macron against Le Pen, boosting her chances. It’s a hard-left attitude which likes to sit on its hands if it can’t get exactly what it wants, and thereby helps the hard right in its unremitting pursuit of autocratic power.

Well, I shall be going out canvassing again in the remaining weeks of the campaign. To be honest, I position myself to the left of Gavin Shuker and don’t see eye to eye with him on all questions. But I want him re-elected because no disagreement on detail undermines our broad agreement on principles, and above all because I find him honest, hard-working and committed to serving the interests of his constituents.

If that’s not sufficient for some of our Corbynites, I can’t help feeling that says a lot more about them than it does about him.

What links Soweto with Wembley; plus not letting evil prevail

What an iconic image the first multi-racial elections in South Africa left us. Do you remember the pictures of the queues snaking around the fields under the blazing sun for hours? Those who had been denied the right to vote turned out in millions to exercise it for the first time.

Voters queue to vote in the South African presidential election, 1994

Now I’ve lived a rather more restrained version of that experience myself.

There was a lot less sun. In fact, it was frankly cold, but this is an English May and you have to expect just about anything. It also didn’t take anything like as long: we waited an hour and a half, not the eight hours many South Africans had to hang around for back in 1994. But still, the queue was impressively long and gave a powerful sense of the commitment many feel to their rights.

The setting was a French school, oddly called the ‘Lycée Winston Churchill’, in Wembley, an outer suburb of North London, most famous as the home of the English national football stadium. The occasion: the second round of the French presidential election, pitting Emmanuel Macron against Marine le Pen.

As I hold French citizenship as well as British (a bit of a bolthole, that, against Brexit), I was entitled to vote. I went with my wife (French from birth) and another French friend.

We were there because we believe in the principle, often and probably incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke, that “for evil to prevail, it is sufficient that good men do nothing”. Sitting on your hands is to do nothing. And a victory for the hard-right Le Pen would have given us a nasty object lesson in what it means to see evil prevail.

This makes it a little surprising that many on the left were calling for their supporters to abstain. They didn’t particularly like Macron so they preferred not to vote at all. It’s quite a common view – many on the left refused to back Hillary Clinton in the US, for example, and many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain believe that Labour has to retain him as leader because he’s “right” (or rather “left, therefore right”), which makes him preferable to someone who might actually win.

Sadly, we’ve seen the consequences of that kind of view. In the US, you get Trump. In Britain, you get May – not as dire as Trump, but she’s going to inflict a great deal of pain nonetheless.

Well, we wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t happen in France. So we travelled three-quarters of an hour each way and queued for an hour and a half to make sure there would be at least three more Macron votes in the count.

We queue to vote in the French presidential election, 2017

We did that with pride. It was good to be in that crowd. In the first round, French voters in Britain gave Le Pen just 2.9% as opposed to the 21.3% she notched up across all voters. Those who live in other countries are perhaps less keen on narrow nationalism, more open to others and to the free mixing of peoples. It felt good to be among them.

But it also felt good to be backing someone who could win an election. As he now has. In Britain, I’m campaigning for my local MP who faces a tough re-election challenge. I very much hope he’ll get back in, as he’s likeable as well as being honest, hard-working and competent. And, though it’s going to be a hard fight, he has a chance.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for our party leader. He doesn’t stand a chance in hell. That means it’s damage limitation all the way.

Macron, France's youngest president, will do less good than many will have hoped. He’ll even do some harm. Overall, he will surely disappoint, as Tony Blair did. But at least he can do some good, again just like Blair. After all, you can do nothing at all if you lose, however good your intentions. Macron and Blair won and if their achievements belie our hopes, at least they got into a position to achieve something.

In any case, the three of us in that Wembley queue will know one thing at any rate: that we can be counted among the good men (and women) who, by doing something and not sitting on our hands, prevented a far worse evil prevailing.

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.

Birds of a Brexit feather?

Birds of a feather flock together, they say. Or to put it the way the French do, tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Erdoğan, Trump and May. Birds of a feather? 

Germany has just elected a president of the centre-left, backed by both the two biggest parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and her coalition partners, the Social Democrats.

It was interesting to be in France last week. Support for the Conservative candidate for the presidential election in May has collapsed, following the publication of revelations about his use of nearly a million euros of public money to employ as political assistants his wife (who claims she did no work or him) and his children (who weren’t qualified for the work they were ostensibly asked to do. Meanwhile, the far-right candidate, Marine le Pen, may we have seen her support peak, at a shockingly high level – perhaps as high as 30% – but with a growing probability that she’ll struggle to raise it any higher and will therefore miss her chance at the presidency. This has raised hopes that  a moderate candidate of the centre left, Emmanuel Macron, may take the prize.

Following on from the defeat of the hard right candidate for the Austrian presidency, it begins to feel as though the unappetising xenophobic nationalism that has gripped Trump’s America and Brexit Britain may not after all be unstoppable. It may, indeed, already have reached its high-water mark.

There’s a glimmer of hope in the darkness, then. A sense that the infection that has been poisoning our societies can be resisted. A growing feeling, even, that Europe can pull together, stand united, and uphold the kind of values we thought, in pre-Trump days, were secure in the democracies.

Sadly, for those nations where the populist currents have already wreaked their toxic harm, that doesn’t make life any easier. Facing a cold, bleak world out there, Britain is having to go, cap in hand, to some dubious friends. In order that it can leave the EU and turns its back on the old friends who may soon be making a stand for the principles we previously believed Britons held dear.

Theresa May was proud to be the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump. That’s the man who, on grounds of security against terrorism, has been trying to exclude foreigners from seven countries which have never been the source of an attack on American soil. Foiled by the judiciary in his first attempt to impose that diktat, he has resorted to attacks on judges worthy of autocrats anywhere. He’s not keen on journalists who dare to criticise him either.

His visitor, it seems, isn’t that keen on them either. It has been revealed that May’s government is planning legislation against whistle-blowers that threatens them, and journalists who publish the information they provide, with prison. Another hallmark of the authoritarian regime.

Which leads neatly into the tale of May’s next foreign visit, to Turkey. There she called on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the strong man who hasn’t merely attacked the judiciary in words, but has dismissed 125,000 people from their jobs, including police and judges, on no better grounds than a denunciation by anonymous informers. Indeed, he even has 45,000 in gaol facing terrorist charges.

Trump and Erdogan. These are the people Brexit Britain has to hang out with.

Does that tell us what Britain’s becoming? Because that feels like a pretty dismal picture of the nation.

Drive people to despair and they do desperate things

Many of those US blue-collar workers, the natural constituency of the Democratic Party, who voted for Trump were driven by anger and frustration. Many find that even holding down two or three jobs, they still can’t make ends meet. Feeling let down by the system as it is, and feeling that the leaders they previously trusted are simply part of that same system, they turned to a more radical alternative.

In Britain, seven million people are now in precarious employment. They are in jobs in which they have no guaranteed hours, but they still have to make themselves available, with no assurance that they will be given anything to do or any pay for doing it. Others are given workloads that are all but impossible to clear, or require multiple hours of unpaid overtime to finish. It’s become easy and the norm for companies that hit any kind of financial problem to shed staff, so executives who have failed to achieve their own, often deeply unrealistic targets, can make others take the fall for their poor decisions.

We haven’t yet had a Trump in Britain. What we have had, however, is nearly seven years of government by the Conservative Party, alone (now) or as the dominant partner in a coalition (up to 2015). In its early days, it liked to claim that “we’re all in this together”. Now, under new management, the government claims to want to assist the “just about managing” or “JAMs”, the very people driven to desperation in the States, the ones who have to swim with all their strength to keep their noses just below water.

A new study shows, however, that without a major change of course, life for the JAMs is likely to get harder to the tune of £2500 a year less income by 2020. For all the pledges, desperation is set to increase for the already desperate.

If that kind of despair gave us Trump in the States, it’s likely to have as damaging an effect in Britain too. Or in France, where Le Pen lies in wait, or the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders is the likely beneficiary, or in a host of other countries where the far right is building a head of steam.

As American voters will discover over the next four years, the sad truth is that the leaders who come up with the simple answers – “get out of the European Union”, “drain the swamp”, “build a wall” – only make matters far worse for the very group that puts them in power.

What’s the alternative?

It has to be a leadership as radical and inspiring as Trump’s, but genuinely committed and not merely committed in words, to addressing the problems of those who are suffering such hardship today – and far worse hardship tomorrow. Unfortunately, in most countries those who should be providing that kind of leadership seem, like Hillary Clinton, to be tied to the system that creates the problem and unable to inspire confidence in those they ought to be representing.

The Democrats in the US are facing a particularly toxic Republican in the White House, whose party controls both Houses of Congress and will entrench a majority that shares its views in the Supreme Court.

The Socialist Party in France has led a failed government and is now expected to go down to comprehensive defeat in elections next year.

In Britain, the unions inflicted on the Labour Party a leader, Ed Miliband, who was likeable and intelligent, but could never convince voters that he could be Prime Minister. Now a majority of Labour’s membership has elected Jeremy Corbyn, not once but twice. He too seems likeable and intelligent; he certainly has a radical message but seems not to be getting it through to anything like sufficient numbers: Labour is languishing ten to fourteen points behind the Conservative Party, far too wide a margin to be attributed to the simple and now notorious inability of polling organisations to achieve accuracy.

Homelessness, on the rise in Britain, as is the use of food banks

Worse off by £2500 a year, by 2020. That represents around 10% of the median income in Britain today. A drop of that scale will drive up homelessness, hunger and disease among people who are already struggling. That is the price being paid by those least able to pay any price at all.

And it’s the price of Labour’s failure to win traction in the electorate. It underlines the urgency of addressing that problem today. For a lot of people, not just in Britain but across the developed world, tomorrow may be far worse.

As the election of Trump demonstrates.

Republican values and the burkini ban

In Britain, we proclaim the sanctity of “national values”. These are wonderful things, like tolerance and respect for the views of others. Sadly, they’re often espoused by people who want to ram them down the throats of minorities, whether they like it or not.

In the States, as far as I can see, the preference is for “American values” or “traditional values”. They tend to be much the same, and there seems to be just as little compunction about inflicting them on other people. Some championing them might, say, propose to ban an entire religious community from entering the country.

In France, the equivalent concept is “republican values”. In one of my favourite films, Casablanca, there’s a moment that grates each time I hear it (and I’ve watched the film a lot). It’s when the character Yvonne, tearful after singing the Marseillaise, cries out, “Vive la France! Vive la démocracie!” That’s a splendidly American slogan artificially transferred to the mouth of a Frenchwoman. In reality, her words would have been, “Vive la France! Vive la République!”

The founding document for France’s valeurs républicaines was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted as the Revolution was getting under way and before the country had even become a Republic.

Article 4 boldly declares:

Liberty consists of being able to do anything that does no one else any harm: in other words, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limit other than those that guarantee to other members of Society the enjoyment of those same rights. Those limits may only be established by Law.

The declaration isn’t a religious document. It makes no reference to God or to any Church. But it isn’t anti-religious either. So article 10 asserts:

None may be disturbed for their opinions, including religious ones, as long as their expression does not disturb public order as established by Law.

France is currently gripped by a debate over whether the burkini, the whole-body covering swimsuit favoured by a tiny minority of Muslim women, can legitimately be banned from French beaches. Those who favour the ban include the former and likely-to-be future President, Nicolas Sarkozy, the current Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, and naturally the leader of the far-right Front National and presidential contender, Marine le Pen.

A Muslim woman obliged to remove a long-sleeved top on a beach
Not so nice of the Nice police

They all see the ban as a necessary precaution to protect republican values from the threat posed by Muslim extremism. They are all the more urgent in their call for the ban as a response to the terrorism of recent months. This despite the fact that, to my knowledge, not a single act of terrorism has ever been carried out by a woman in a burkini.

It’s not obvious, on the other hand, how they reconcile it with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

First of all, let’s dispose of the simplest objection: ‘Man’ in this context means ‘mankind’. The rights apply as fully to women as to men.

Is the ban consistent with article 10? Is the wearing of the burkini likely to lead to a disturbance of the peace as foreseen by law? There have certainly been nasty scenes of public disorder over the wearing of Muslim garb, but generally in the form of abuse of the Muslims. “Go home” people have shouted, at women who in many cases were already at home, being French. The women were the victims of the disorder, not its instigators. Describing their actions as a breach of the peace seems like turning rape victims into criminals.

As for article 4, what could be clearer? You have the right to do whatever you like as long as your action doesn’t limit anyone else’s rights. How does the wearing of a burkini affect anyone else’s liberty? It doesn’t stop other people using the beach. It doesn’t stop them wearing revealing clothes. It doesn’t even stop them thinking the burkini inappropriate beachwear. It limits no one else’s rights.

Far from upholding republican values, the burkini ban seems to trample on the very principles they enshrine.

The truth is that the ban has nothing to do with republican values. It’s about people who have been frightened by an enemy who reaches into our midst and kills at random. A hidden enemy against whom we can’t hit back. Fear and frustration have brought to the surface a tendency latent in us all: racism is on the rise again. Muslims today must feel like Jews did when anti-Semitism was rampant but the holocaust hadn’t yet got going: they must be worried to go out, they must be worried to travel, they must feel that they can expect no protection from state.

We’ve been her before and we know where it leads. We need to stop it now before it descends to the next stage.

The signs aren’t good. Sarkozy is a significant political figure. In Britain, Nigel Farage campaigned against the EU with a poster declaring the country to be at breaking point, against a photograph of Syrians queueing to enter Europe. In the States Donald Trump is Farage’s pal, and he’s called for a wall against Mexicans and a ban on Muslim entering. This is the establishment giving racism a respectable face.

There’s hope yet, though. The Cour Constitutionnel in France has ruled the ban illegal, which suggests that some in France remain truly committed to republican values. However, Sarkozy had already said that if the court made that choice, he would campaign for a change in the constitution. The court's resistance was edifying but may not last long.

More encouraging was hearing Angela Merkel speaking to German TV.

“If I have to apologise for showing a friendly face [to people from other nations],” she said, “then this is not my country any more.”

Merkel’s no radical Lefty. She’s the Christian Democrat leader of Europe’s most powerful nation. If such voices are still speaking out, and can still be heard, then hope isn’t wholly lost. We just need to join our voices with theirs.

In defence of republican values. Or American values. Or traditional values. Or national values.

In fact, in defence of decent values anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

French tales of two sad women

How tough life is in politics. It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for politicians. Were it not for the fact that for every one that gets into the game, there must be a couple of hundred who would leap to take over from them if they could.

It was yesterday’s French elections that reminded me of the tribulations of the politico’s life. I was moved by the sad cases of two fine women. 

Well, perhaps not that sad. And you’d have to be a slave to a kind of thoroughly inappropriate old-world chivalry to apply the word ‘fine’ to the second of them. 

The first was poor Ségolène Royal. She ran for president against Nicolas Sarkozy last time round, in 2007. Hers must have been one of the weakest campaigns I have ever been horrified to observe. The culmination was when a comedian phoned her pretending to be the Premier of Quebec, and she walked straight into the trap eyes wide shut, making indiscreet comments about regional independence movements that Sarkozy then used against her.

Soon after her defeat she separated from her partner of nearly thirty years and father of her four children, François Hollande. Yes, that Hollande. In a move that does her great honour, she supported his campaign for the presidency this time round, which meant overcoming her animosity towards the woman Hollande left her for, Valérie Trierweiler.

In a move that does her far less honour, she offered that support as part of a deal that would see her appointed president (speaker) of the French lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. Of course to be given the job, she needed to be a Deputy (MP) herself and Hollande organised for her to be adopted as candidate for the seat of La Rochelle. Unfortunately, La Rochelle already had a perfectly good candidate from the Socialist Party, Olivier Falorni. 

He wasn’t wholly overjoyed with the decision to push him aside for Royal and refused to stand down.

Many, many years ago I lived for a while in the seedy but interesting borough of Leyton in London’s distinctly unfashionable East. Leyton had been the setting for a remarkable event in British political history. In 1964, Labour returned to power after 13 years in opoposition. Sadly, the Labour spokesman on Foreign Affairs, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat in the general election. The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, however refused to give up on his desire to appoint Gordon Walker Foreign Secretary. The sitting MP for the solid Labour seat of Labour was persuaded to resign to make way for Wilson’s man.

The people of Leyton were having none of it. For the only time in its history, the constituency elected a Conservative and Gordon Walker was left to lick his wounds.

It’s a good lesson. It isn’t always smart to treat the electorate as if they were just ballot fodder, only there to help stars of the political scene further their careers. 

Poor old Ségo. She’s just made the same discovery. The people of La Rochelle turned out for the dissident Falorni and denied her the seat she sought.

What makes her case all the more curious is that Trierweiler, the new girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend and new President, who it seems loathes her predecessor, had tweeted her support for Falorni. The scandal that ensued may not have lost Royal the election but it certainly didn’t help.

Who said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? In this love triangle, you might have thought Trierweiler was the woman blessed. But it clearly doesn't do to cross her. And apparently you cross her just by being the wounded party in the triangle. 

Ségo: just one things after another

Whose was the other sad, or perhaps not so sad, tale? 

Why, Marine le Pen’s, in the northern constituency of Hénin-Beaumont. The worthy daughter of Jean-Marie le Pen and his successor as leader of the National Front, she has done much to raise the tone of political discourse in France. For instance, by launching a controversy over the domination of the French meat trade by Halal products. She turns out not to have been completely wrong: it seems that as much as 2.5% of meat on sale in France is Halal. That means that you only have 39 chances out of 40 that any piece of meat bought in the country will be non-Halal.

It seems that not enough people are that bothered. Despite her remarkable score in the presidential election, where she took 18% of the votes in the first round, she lost in Hénin-Beaumont. And by a mere 118 votes. How frustrating must that have been? Particularly as her upstart niece has managed to get herself elected in the South, to become the youngest MP in the country.

Oh, the bitterness of it for Marine. 

My view? Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. 

Marine: deserving case