Boris, Trump and tripping the lie fantastic

There was a time when voters valued honesty in politicians. Not that they expected ever to find any. There’s an old joke about a man lost in a wood and stumbling into a clearing, in which he sees a blind old woman, a pink elephant and an honest politician. So who does he ask to show him the way?

The answer is, of course, the blind old woman, as the other two are just figments of the imagination.

Boris and the great lie

But even if we didn’t expect honesty from them, we kept up a vaguely optimistic pursuit of the honest politician, or maintained the notion as some kind of ideal towards which we might aspire.

Not any more, it appears. In Donald Trump, we have a US president who, if we really push our generosity, may feel is not an actual liar, in the sense that he may not always be deliberately stating as a truth something he knows not to be true. It may rather be that he suffers from a pathological inability to tell the truth from anything he happens to want to believe. Or, worse still, happens to want his voters to believe.

He may simply be lying, but it may actually be that he thinks that his wanting to believe something is true, makes it true.

North Korea hasn’t actually disarmed at all? So what? The disarmament deal that Trump proclaimed after his first meeting with Kim Jong Il is the best disarmament deal there ever was.

All that nonsense about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his opponent? All made up. The fact that a transcript of the call exists, and it confirms the allegation, is neither here nor there. It never happened.

Isn’t a great achievement that China is paying for the tariffs Trump has put on its exports to the US? The miserable line about tariffs being paid by the population of the importing country, not the exporting one, is just an inconvenient factoid. An unattractive notion, and therefore untrue.

But in Britain too we have our version of Trump. Like Trump in the US, Boris holds the highest elective office in Britain. Unlike Trump, I think he has sufficient knowledge and intellectual horsepower to know when a statement is actually false. So when he utters a falsehood, he is undoubtedly lying.

And he seems to lie as naturally, as casually, as automatically as he breathes.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance came when he visited Whipps Cross hospital in North London. When the father of a child who had been admitted to the appallingly understaffed and overstretched emergency department accused him of only being there for a photo opportunity, Boris replied that there were no press present. That was despite the fact that, as the father pointed out, the press were clearly visible just a few steps away. 

Omar Salem points out the photographers at Whipps Cross
whose presence Boris had just denied

The father, Omar Salem, is a Labour activist. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a father, his child was seriously ill, and the staff were hopelessly overstretched. It seems that Boris’s first instinct is to lie, even when it’s obvious that he’s going to be caught out almost immediately.

There were so many other instances. Another was the decision of the Daily Telegraph to apologise for an article Boris published in the paper, forecasting that a post-Brexit Britain would overtake Germany as an economy within a few decades. It seems his argument was based on an analysis he’d ready which simply didn’t bear it out.

Perhaps the most notorious deceit ever was the one Boris associated himself with during the Brexit referendum campaign, that leaving the EU would free £350 million a week to invest in the NHS (the National Health Service). It was particularly barefaced, because it deliberately overstated the contributions the UK made to the EU, ignored the subsidies it received back from it, and left out of account the additional costs associated with Brexit and the revenue loss it was likely to entail.

A far wilier campaigner than Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, far being put off by his terrible track record in this field, Boris has boldly taken the battle to his Labour opponents, precisely on the grounds of the NHS. That takes courage for a Conservative, because this is traditionally Labour’s strong ground. But Boris is promising to spend more on the health service, to employ more clinicians, even to build more hospitals.

In other words, Boris is promising to address the very scandals that the distraught father tackled him over at Whipps Cross.

And yet Conservative Central Office has instructed candidates to sign no pledges on the NHS (or indeed on climate policy). So Boris is making the promises but preparing the ground for reneging on them. As he did over Brexit, when he promised to deliver it by 31 October, “do or die” – he didn’t do, but he didn’t die either.

What’s most surprising about this trail of blatant lies and broken promises is, in an election as wide open as any I’ve seen, with four major parties contesting nationally, as well as the SNP massively powerful in Scotland, Boris continues to lead the polls. At nearly 40%, his standing is weak, but way ahead of anyone else’s.

Above all, what that 40% means is that, for two voters out of five, honesty in a politician is simply not an important consideration. They see it as perfectly legitimate to vote for him anyway.

Sadly, 40% is enough to win in a wide-open field.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but in Britain, you only need to fool 40% on election day to get to do what you want for the next five years.

Shetland: exactly as it ought to be

There’s something satisfying about going to a place for the first time and finding it exactly how you’d expect it to be.

That’s how I felt on my first visit to Shetland this week.

There wasn’t much sun, but when it appeared, it was truly a burst

We – that is, my colleague Katie and I – due to hold three training sessions in the local hospital, arrived by tiny plane, just three seats wide. There was only one cabin attendant, which meant that there were more crew members in the cockpit than in the cabin. The plane was driven by propellers, which isn’t something I’ve seen all that often in recent times.

It came down low on its approach to the airport, so we were practically skimming a slate-grey sea that looked bitterly cold. And suddenly, looming out of the water to our left, was a first island – a mound of rock crowned with grass, uninhabited and sinister in its sheer black sides.

We saw more fog than sun.
And no puffins, though we looked and looked

Just then the wind caught us shaking us from side to side until we were a foot or two above the runway. As soon as we touched down, the pilot hammered the brakes, and we stopped just before the runway ran out – as we turned away I could see the black sea just beyond the end of the runway, too close for my liking.

Not sure whether they were Shetland ponies
but they were ponies, and on Shetland

As we got off the plane, straight onto the tarmac, the wind came howling back. There were even airport staff holding the propeller tips on both sides of the aircraft to stop them being whipped round by the wind and potentially injuring someone.

“Really?” a Scotswoman behind me wittily remarked, “Shetland and there’s wind?”

“Quite,” her companion quipped back, “who’d have expected that?”

There’s only one carousel for luggage inside the terminal, and it was out of action. So a woman standing by the door hauled our bags in, one or two at a time, and we collected them from her.

On our way, Katie and I had debated whether we ought to hire a car. We’d been told taxis were expensive. So we went online looking for car rental sites. The one she generally used announced that the driver had to be aged 30-65, and I’m just outside that range (for clarification, I’m not 29). So it wouldn’t hire me a car, but I had to be the driver, as she was only staying one night while I was staying three.

We decided to take our chance on arrival.

The car hire counter was inside the terminal baggage hall. But then the baggage hall is also the arrival lounge and the departure lounge. In fact, the whole terminal building is one long hall with various bits playing various roles. One door leads in from the tarmac for people arriving, and another, for departing travellers, leads out to the same tarmac by way of a security scanner. Indeed, at one end of the hall, behind a gaily decorated partition, there is even the Caffé Volare, which looked cheerful enough.

No surprise, then, that the car rental counter is also inside the building. We approached it while we were waiting for our bags. I explained we wanted a car but I was just a tad over the age range.

“Oh,” said the man behind the counter, who looked little younger than me, “I expect we’ll be able to come to an arrangement.”

We did.

One of the annoyances of hiring a car is that you’re supposed to return it full of fuel. I asked whether there was a filling station nearby.

“There is,” he said, “but don’t worry. If it isn’t full, we’ll fill it for you. And it won’t cost you any more than if you did it yourself.”

This was unusual. And unusually pleasant.

“In fact,” he went on, “seeing how early you’re going to be leaving, I doubt you’ll find the filling station open. Just fill up in Lerwick and don’t worry about the drive here.”

Lerwick, the main town on the islands, is about 40 km from the airport.

We got to the hotel at about 8:30. It was a physician who’d put Katie in contact with the people at the island hospital and he’d also recommended somewhere to eat: The String, he’d assured, us was outstanding. She rang.

“We stop serving at 8:00,” they told us.

Having turned up in Shetland from Spain where people look at you as though you’re mad if you want to eat before 8:00, this was a curious experience.

We had the same response from two other places. There were only two or three places prepared to serve us after 8:00. Since one was our hotel, we ate there.

Eventually we made it to the String
But for lunch. And very good it was

I felt slightly awkward about that because my boss has a rule for us when we’re away from home: “never eat in your hotel, never eat in a restaurant that’s part of a chain, and never eat in the same place twice.” It’s a good rule, and I try to stick to it. But it wasn’t made for Lerwick on a cold weekday evening.

As we were finishing our meal, the cheerful and friendly woman who was doubling up as reception clerk and waiter in the dining room, asked us whether we were planning to go out for the evening at all. We told her we were considering the possibility.

“Oh,” she said, “there’s live music in one of the pubs. Shetland music. If you feel up to it, you might try that.”

Live Shetland music
Though the woman with the fiddle is Danish and the man
holding the guitar beyond her is her husband, from Indonesia

We did. And it was excellent. Although I was amused to discover, from talking to him, that one of the musicians was from Indonesia and his wife, who was playing one of the fiddles (they may look like violins, they may even sound like violins, but when it’s playing a jig, Irish or Shetland, it’s decidedly a fiddle), was from Denmark.

We had a great evening. And Shetland got another opportunity to show its worth: as I left the pub, I realised I’d left my bag behind, with my wallet and my passport in it. But I’d barely started to climb the stairs again before I met a man clattering down them holding my bag out to me.

“Did you forget this?” he was saying.

Nothing was missing from it.

And that wasn’t the last opportunity for Shetland to display what it’s made of. As we walked back, we were hit by the cold of the wind off the North Sea (Lerwick is on nearly the same latitude as Bergen in Norway, which is closer to it than Edinburgh, ostensibly the capital, Shetland being part of Scotland). Rain was spitting down too, and as we emerged on to the harbourside, we could taste salt in the water hitting our faces. The sea, sleekly black and cold, looked troubled, uneasy even, as though it was a bit irritated by this lump of rock sticking out of it and troubling its flow. So it was going to have a go at worrying it a bit.

Practically in Norwy

Pure Shetland. Exactly as I would have expected. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The view from my hotel room
Great to wake up to. If it were always this sunny...

The rain in Spain

It was wonderful having so much of our family with us this week. That’s all three boys, with both daughters-in-law and a granddaughter. The only one missing was our daughter-out-law, whom we’d have been delighted to see too, but she’s a doctor and you know how hard it is for them to get time off.

Our granddaughter’s family came to us from Scotland. It was good to be able to welcome them to our new home in Valencia not just because Valencia’s such a lovely place, but also because it gets such wonderful weather.

Except when it doesn’t.

And it didn’t this week.

Three days of unbroken rain and frankly chilly conditions preceded their return to Scotland. Where the temperatures are pleasantly warm and the skies enchantingly clear. Spring at its best, in fact.

Rain in Valencia is rain with a vengeance

When I talk about unbroken rain, I’m not talking about the kind of fine drizzle that often spoils an hour or two in England, but only returns after a break for better conditions when one can actually get out with the dogs in the dry. No. I’m talking about rain that’s flooding down when one wakes up in the morning and is proceeding exactly the same way when one goes to bed at night. Great sheets of water that the drainage system simply can’t cope with, so that the streets gradually flood and it’s dangerous (as I discovered) to walk past a puddle as a bus races up the road.

I can safely attest that the rain in Spain is too much for the drain.

Ah, well. At least I know it won’t last. In fact, the forecasts are absolutely explicit on the subject. On Tuesday, the fine weather returns. Temperatures in the twenties (that’s the real twenties, none of that ropey Fahrenheit stuff) and sunny skies again.

A return to springtime, in fact. Just as I’m about to leave for Scotland myself. Where the lovely weather is due to break on Wednesday, with steady rain starting on Thursday. Right through to my return on Saturday.

Ah, well. They do say that into every life, a little rain must fall. Looks like my life is set for quite a lot of the dripping stuff for some days. 

In my view, it’s all down to Karma. As I said, I’m not due home until Saturday. Quite late, as it happens. And that’s Danielle’s birthday.

I suppose I can’t expect meteorology to look kindly on me if I treat my wife’s birthday with such casual indifference. I clearly brought it on myself. And this week I’m going to pay.

Note to self: plan work better next year.

Toffee's diary: strange things. Like trains. And adulthood.

Trains. Terrible things. Do you know them? I didn’t. But I found out a week ago.

They go chunka-chunka-chunka for hours and hours. And sometimes woosh-woosh-woosh. Worst of all, when another one goes by, they go woosh-woosh-roar-roar-roar-clackety-clackety-clack.

It’s horrible. Especially because it goes on and on and on.

Still it was wonderful when we got to the end. It’s somewhere called Scotland. There’s lots of great places. A river we can wander along. A field with lots of other dogs that Luci could run away from and I could play with. And there was even a sea thing which was fun.

“Yes,” says Luci, “where I went in and you ran away.”

Luci went into the sea thing
But I thought it was a bit safer to watch and bark a bit at it

Not really. I didn’t run away. I went in too. But I only went in just a bit. Paws, you know. That was far enough. The rest of the water just kept moving. Luci may have liked that but I though it made more sense to stay near the sand. Sand! That’s great stuff. You can get it everywhere, and dig in it, and even run across it.

What’s more, there were some really nice humans in Scotland. There was a woman who was like our human number 1, but she was even better at picking me up. Rocking me, you know, and stroking me and telling me how nice I was.

“She doesn’t know you like our number 1 does,” says Luci.

And a man too, who’s terribly big. Bigger than human number 2. Amazing. And the third one’s a puppy. I knew that because she was, well, puppy-like. She was taller than my humans and almost as big as the man one, but still a puppy’s a puppy, and you just know when you see one.

Talking about puppies, something really odd happened to me this week. The humans told me I wasn’t one any more. Not a puppy. No idea why. “She’s in season,” the humans kept saying.

In season? What on earth did that mean?

“It’s summer,” said Luci, “that’s the season. Not that you’d know it with the rain. And it won’t be for long anyway. Trust me, I know. I’ve seen seasons come and go.”

Seasons come and go? So what does that mean? That I’ll stop being an adult and be a puppy all over again? I think I’d prefer that.

But the worst of it was that they started talking about me making puppies. Making them? I like being one but I’ve no idea how to make one. Why don’t they just let me go on as a puppy myself instead of trying to turn me into some kind of puppy-making adult? 

“The humans will sort it all out,” says Luci. 

It’s all very well for her to say that: it seems they’ve made sure she can’t make puppies, and I don’t know how they did that, any more than I know why I can’t either but they think I can.

“You’ll find out,” says Luci.

Oh, well. It was fun in Scotland anyway. And now we’re off again. Chunka-chunka-chunka. Woosh-woosh-woosh. But it doesn’t feel so bad this time. Maybe I’m getting more used to it. And, after all, putting up with it worked out pretty well, considering, last time.

Labour: read the writing on the wall!

It’s said that one of the worst problems with having your back to the wall is that you can’t see the writing on it.

Following the local elections in Britain, the writing is in letters a metre high for the Labour Party. The say, “you’ve been weighed and found wanting. You’re driving straight at a cliff edge”.

Labour no longer controls a single council in Scotland, once its bastion. In terms of councillors, it has fewer even than the Conservatives. Seven years ago, the Conservatives seemed to be a spent force in Scotland; today they are resurgent.

In Wales, which Labour has dominated for a century, it has lost over a fifth of its councillors and control of three councils out of the ten it had before.

It was beaten to the new mayoralties in Tees Valley and the West Midlands in England, both in areas that would once have been regarded as heartlands for the Party. Overall, the pollsters and academics were seriously wrong in their forecast for Labour in England: they predicted losses of as many as 75 council seats. In the event, the Party has lost 145.

Tories exultant as the victories keep flowing in

Reading the writing is no good if your back is firmly to the wall. But the problem is far worse than that. A majority of Party members, representing a tiny proportion of voters as these results show, is determined to cover its eyes with virtual reality goggles. Those goggles show them a sunlit upland where voters are charmed by the honesty and integrity of the present Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and impressed by his commitment to justice and decency, backing his policies in droves until they project him into Downing Street.

It’s a fairy tale that many of us might like to subscribe to. But it has nothing to do with the painful reality that the local election results reveal. Labour does not win power with its traditional bedrock so completely eroded.

Now this is not all down to Corbyn. The decline started under his two predecessors as leader, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Both were poor leaders – Brown had been a fine Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was far too gaffe-prone to lead the party; Miliband was simply gaffe-prone. Corbyn supporters keep pointing out to me how weak they’d been and how the rot had set in on their watch, and that’s true.

However, the implication behind these criticisms is that Corbyn would turn things around. Indeed, he was uniquely qualified to do so. His political persona made him the best choice to right the ship and get it back on course.

What the local election results have shown is how wrong this view was, how justified that of the people who tried to prise the leadership from Corbyn’s grip. Far from turning things around, he has made a bad situation far worse. Instead of bringing a breath of fresh air to the party, he has merely continued the decline from Brown to Miliband, making him the weakest of three weak leaders.

The sad truth is that the virtual reality goggles are still firmly in place. In only one way is Corbyn an innovator: he is the first Labour leader who takes no responsibility for the disasters that happen on his watch. The poor performance is all down to the Parliamentary Labour Party that rebelled against him – although the election results only show how legitimate their aims were – or the media, or even the vile behaviour of the Conservative Party (which seems unfairly committed to the notion of what is known, technically, as “winning”).

His supporters simply can’t read the writing on the wall. It will take a huge effort to get them to abandon the comfort of their nice goggles. But the attempt must be made, yet again.

Because it really, seriously, does say on that wall: “you’re heading straight for a precipice. Change driver!”

Roman Britain? Why, for pity's sake?

There’s something strange about the notion of ‘Roman Britain’. So strange as to seem nearly incomprehensible. And never more so than when I travelled home to England from Rome on Friday.

That morning I had a couple of hours free before I set off for the airport. I decided to pack my coat in my suitcase and head out to find ‘I Dolci di Nonna Vincenza’, the pastry shop my wife discovered and was seduced by when she was out there with me in February.

This meant I was out of doors in a shirt and light pullover. Pretty soon, I was regretting that I hadn’t packed away the pullover too. It was early March but I was wandering the streets in shirtsleeves with a pullover draped comfortably if not particularly stylishly over my shoulders.

At the time of Roman Britain, Rome was certainly the most prosperous city in Europe, in the running for most prosperous in the world. And the weather was doubtless as glorious as it is now. Why would anyone want to go and stand guard on the Empire’s borders in fog-bound, rain-swept Britain?

These were thoughts that invaded me once the glow of homecoming with pastries from ‘Granny Vincenza’ had faded to be replaced by the duty – a pleasurable duty but a duty nonetheless – of walking the dogs. They enjoy their walks and I’m sure they cope with the rain. They even look quite amusing when they get soaked, whereas I suspect I just look bedraggled and a bit sad. Wouldn’t it be fun if we had some of the weather here that I was enjoying in Rome?

A certain charm when wet

I couldn’t help wondering why on earth anyone left Rome to go and stand guard in the fog and rain of Hadrian’s Wall, the Trump-like structure the Empire built against the weird and dangerous barbarians who inhabited Scotland then as now.

The truth, of course, is that few of them did. I imagine the officers would mostly have been younger sons of middle-ranking families, perhaps men looking to make a name for themselves in the legions in the hope of building a career later somewhere more promising and more comfortable. Even they, though, would I suspect have drawn a short straw.

Among the rank and file and the non-commissioned officers, there might have been a few Romans. But the majority were Germans. Tribesmen desperate in the ghastly, and even wetter plains and forests of northern Germany, who had worked out there were only two ways of enriching themselves: raid the prosperous empire west of them, or go over to it in the hope of sharing some of its wealth. The ones on the wall had made the wise choice of joining an army they couldn’t beat.

The orders on the Wall were probably given in Latin. I expect they were executed in German. I’m reminded of a young black colleague in South Africa, who explained to me that as well as English, he also worked in Zulu and Xhosa, but “naturally, I know how to take instruction in Afrikaans”. It was probably like that on the wall.

Hadrian's Wall: Trump-like structure
A failed last line of defence against the scary Scots

After the Romans left Britain, the Romanised Celts who took over clearly felt they could play the same game. They brought in more Germans, mercenaries, to help them fight the wars that broke out between their little kingdoms. But unfortunately, though they saw themselves as inheritors of the grandeur of Rome (one of them was probably the prototype of ‘King Arthur’), they didn’t have the clout of Rome. At its height, Rome probably only had between 15,000 and 20,000 legionaries in Britain, but they were redoubtable troops and the real fear for, say, rebellious German auxiliaries – maybe 40,000 strong – was that the legions could quickly be reinforced from the Continent by men who would exact a terrible vengeance.

The British kings didn’t have that deterrent force. When their mercenaries decided they didn’t want to go home, but preferred to stay, grabbing themselves some of the best land without so much as a thank you, and more likely with a blow, there wasn’t much the little kings could do about it.

And before very long the Celtic tribesmen, Romanised or not, found themselves either (a) dead, (b) pushed into Wales or (c) assimilated into the new Anglo-Saxon dispensation that had taken over the land. A large portion of Southern Britain had become England.

It occurs to me that this may be the root of the xenophobia so many Englishmen continue to suffer from and which fuelled the Brexit vote. Deep in our atavistic souls we feel that we are immigrants ourselves, outsiders who overstayed our welcome and took over. Some at least fear that the same thing might happen again, as we bring in Poles and Bulgarians to run our health service, our hotels and our trains, and worry that they won’t go home. After all, there’s a terrible risk that Johnny Foreigner may prove much better at those jobs than a lot of our own people.

We know what happened when we pulled off that trick against the original Brits.

Strange, though, isn’t it? After all, if I could choose between a balmy March morning in Rome and a wind- and rain-swept one in England, I know which would seem preferable. 

Believe me, I’ve had recent experience of both.

There's nationalism and nationalism

While on a visit to Llanelli in South Wales, I found myself chatting to a pleasant woman who had spent some years working in bookshops.

“The worst thing about the London-based salesmen for the publishing companies,” she told me, “was that they didn’t want to come down to see us. One of them even said they only delivered to the mainland.”

It’s an interesting notion. Because, you see, Wales isn’t in fact an island separate from England.

OK. So where's the sea between England and Wales?

The conversation reminded me of one I had decades ago with a Welsh lawyer. A fluent Welsh speaker, he’d built quite a practice in a rural area providing legal services to farmers and others whose English was poor.

“We’re always talking about nationalism in this country.” 

We were in Wales at the time and there was, indeed, a great deal of talk about Welsh nationalists who were on the rise and, in their most extreme manifestation, had even taken to torching Welsh cottages owned by absentee English proprietors.

“But,” he went on, “I don’t think it’s Welsh nationalism that’s the real problem. It’s English nationalism.”

He was on to something, it seemed to me. After all, Welsh, Irish or Scottish nationalism might be the ones that made the most noise, but what they were noisiest about was the need to resist an arrogant and overbearing England, intent on treating them as second-rate citizens with no specific needs of their own.

Why, even the iconic British red postboxes had been emblazoned “E II R” since Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. However Scotland, part of her realm, had never had a first queen of that name. For the Scots, the present queen is “E I R”.

A trivial matter? I’m sure it is in itself. But symbols matter and Symbolically the postboxes proclaim “Scottish history doesn’t matter. It’s been subsumed into English.”

How English history subsumes Scottish

Both sides of this divide are nationalistic. But there is a difference: Scots and Welsh nationalists, and their Irish predecessors who successfully achieved independence for their nation, are speaking out in defence of rights denied. The English nationalism is an empowered variety, proclaiming its own entitlement to deny rights to others.

It’s that kind of rampant, ugly nationalism whose rise around the globe is so worrying today. It’s bad in Britain. Here English nationalists, ironically supported by the Welsh on this occasion, inflicted Brexit on the entire population of the island, and the six counties of Ireland that are attached to it. It has become ever clearer that the hopes on which that movement based itself are entirely unfounded, not just illusory but self-delusory: there will be no savings to plough back into cherished national institutions like the NHS, despite the deceiving promises of the Brexit-backers; there will be no repatriation of control, but deepened dependency on others, such as the US, without Britain even enjoying the limited say in the making of their policy that it had in the EU; and, it has now been admitted, there will not even be the kind of reduction in immigration Brexiters had hoped for, such is our need for foreign labour to keep our society moving.

However, that only means that Britain will suffer for Brexit. Damage may be inflicted on other countries, but it will be relatively minor.

In the US, however, we have a team in power that has explicitly adopted the slogan ‘America First’. It sounds noble but in reality it means ‘everyone else a (distant) second’ (which, it has to be said in passing, makes it particularly ironic that Brexiters are looking to the US for national salvation). And the worst of it is that Trump has his finger on the button for an unimaginably powerful force – a huge nuclear stockpile.

On top of that, to ensure that in future the America he wishes to put first wins its wars, he’s looking for a large increase in military spending. To achieve it, he’s prepared to cut environmental protection and foreign aid, because he prefers dominating the world to keeping it habitable, and things it makes more sense to bomb people than feed them.

Refusing to deliver books to a part of your own country on the insultingly false belief that it’s an island is bad enough. It’s only the start of the harm that nationalism can do. It can go far further, hurling a nation into regression as Brexit will do, or worse still, jeopardising the future of the world as Trump now threatens.

Ugly and unpleasant, rampant, empowered nationalism turns out also to be dangerous.

Scotland: family, dogs, politics and art

It’s wonderful visiting family in Scotland.

In fact, there are only two things that worry me about being here. 

One is the fine piece of art by my granddaughter Aya in her younger days, enjoining me to save energy. The message is fine but, if I see it first thing in the morning before I’ve got up, all it does is encourage me to roll over and sleep a little more. 

Fine work by Aya.  But with an undesired effect

The other concern is the automatic kitchen bin: walk past it and the lid springs open, looking like nothing so much as the open maw of a famished predatory bird demanding, “feed me, feed me.” It’s worse than Luci, our poodle, and Luci may be small but I've never known a creature more enthusiastic about being fed at any time. Even she, though, doesn’t seem as ravenous as that accursed bin.

Luci’s with us, as it happens. I’m not sure how much she liked the train trip, but she took it reasonably well. At any rate, I’m proud of her for having found herself a seat, which is more than Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader, famously could on the same service a few weeks ago. He made a plaintive video about his experience; I’m glad to say Luci avoided any kind of whinge.

Luci showing she can get more comfortable on a
Virgin East Coast train than the Labour leader can

Scotland continues to be the one part of the United Kingdom with political leadership. It was that way under Alec Salmond, it’s still that way under Nicola Sturgeon (nothing fishy about those two). One of the characteristics of the historically great leaders is to fight the battles one can win and leave others to one side until circumstances are more propitious. Immediately after the Brexit vote, Sturgeon was waving the banner of a new independence referendum – Scotland voted massively to stay in the EU and would not accept being driven out by England and Wales. Now, however, Sturgeon’s putting all that on the back burner, saying instead that, “Scotland should have a conversation about independence.” So where’s the new reticence from?

Sturgeon can read an opinion poll and has the sense not to write it off. The latest shows that only 37% of Scots want a new independence referendum right now, and a majority would vote No again if one were held. So she’s proposing to go on discussing it but backs off from forcing the question right now. If only other leaders displayed such practical wisdom.

But enough of all that. One of the advantages of being up here, in the village of East Linton, was to get away from ghastliness of politics for a few days. It helps that we turned up just in time for the opening of the Art Exhibition, for which this year’s Convenor (like last year’s) is my daughter-in-law Senada Borcilo. 

Senada welcomes us to the exhibition

East Linton is a small village which seemed to face near-terminal decline back in the sixties. Launching the annual Art Exhibition in 1968 (ah, the nostalgia: the Paris May-June events were still fresh in our minds, the hippies were yet young) was one of the initiatives intended to rejuvenate the place. Since then the village has been re-energised, with a lively centre boasting new shops and a pub or two serving good food, a thriving school (Aya’s school) and, of course, a growing, vibrant Art Exhibition now in its 48th year. It remains true to its founding principles, ploughing profits back into the community and continuing to accept art from both amateur and professional artists.

Pictures at an exhibition
Winter Sun was one – or rather three – I particularly liked

The show this year is the biggest it’s had, making it the largest art show in a single venue (as opposed to open-studio type events) in the whole of the county (East Lothian). It’s a great show, with some eye-catching pieces.

A great change from the dismal picture of England’s political landscape.

Brexit: the triumph of Project Fear

When backers of the campaign for Britain to remain in the EU pointed out the dire consequences of leaving the EU, they were accused by Brexiters of running Project Fear.

It’s true that statements of such as Britain’s soon to be ex-Prime Minister David Cameron, rather overstated the case. He sometimes seemed to suggest that leaving the EU would plunge Britain into immediate bankruptcy or trigger a third World War. Still, it will certainly have consequences that, if not quite so fearsome as those, will be pretty dire all the same.

For instance, the US and the EU are in the midst of negotiations for a trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP. It’s massively skewed towards serving US interests at the cost of Europe’s. In particular, it could damage Britain’s NHS by forcing it open to US private corporations.

A number of European voices – but not Britain’s – have been raised against TTIP provisions. Indeed, Germany’s Angela Merkel has said the whole Treaty might have to be abandoned. The US is going to have to shift if they want an agreement in place.

Brexiters argue that Britain will do better negotiating a deal directly with the US. However, Barack Obama has made it clear that a trade agreement with Britain alone would not be a high priority for the US. They would, no doubt, put one in place, but does anyone believe that it would be on more advantageous terms than the EU can obtain? Would Britain be in a position, deprived of its membership of the EU free trade area, to resist the terms the US dictates?

Another issue that constantly re-emerged during the campaign concerned fisheries policy. But European waters have been over-fished for decades, and stocks were drastically declining. A long process of negotiation led to agreements on preservation that everyone resented – compromises, by their nature, often please no-one – but at last stocks are beginning to grow again. Does anyone really believe that re-introducing a free-for-all will improve the situation?

Then there’s the break-up of the UK itself. The Scots voted massively to remain in the EU. Within hours of the announcement of a Brexit win, the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, told us a new Scottish Independence Referendum was back on the table.

Does anyone believe that the Scots would not be likely, on this occasion, to vote in favour? Last time the EU said they wouldn’t look kindly on an application for membership from an independent Scotland. Does anyone believe that they might not, this time, be only too happy to have them join?

So there are things to fear from the decision for Brexit. Pointing it out doesn’t mean the Remain campaign ‘Project Fear.’

On the contrary, the party of the fearful was the Brexit side. The bold choice is to work with others, because you have to lower your defences as your partners lower theirs, to enable cooperation. These are exciting challenges to meet, but they expose us to risks just as they open opportunities for mutual benefits.

The fearful response is to turn our backs on the opportunities, in order to avoid the risks. Frightened people want more defences against the outside world. In the Brexit debate, the code for that fear was “immigration.” Immigrants were blamed for our ills, and the EU was blamed for immigration.

It was the fear campaign that voted against the EU. Sadly, they’ve only prepared new disappointments for themselves, because what they feared wasn’t caused by the EU. The British economy has institutionalised precariousness at work, so no one can feel their job is safe. It has put downward pressure on wages, as people lose jobs and can only find work at lower salaries. It has starved our great public institutions, the NHS, Education, the Police, so people find it increasingly difficult to count on the services they’ve felt in the past were theirs.

Neither the EU nor immigration was responsible, however. These are consequences of a policy of austerity, which isn’t delivering growth, but is delivering pain. Brexit isn’t going to improve that. On the contrary, it’s going to make things worse.

As predicted, the Brexit vote has precipitated teh resignation of David Cameron. Those suffering the pain of austerity realised he was a pretty lousy Prime Minister. However, his likely successor, Boris Johnson, will be far worse. Even more frightening is the figure in the shadows behind him, the man who was most openly triumphing over the Brexit vote, UKIP leader Nigel Farage. His influence will be toxic: if the referendum campaign had a merit, it was above all in exposing him as the racist we always knew he was.

Is this the most frightening face of Brexit?
Hard right-winger Nigel Farage celebrating take-off

He’s on the up and up. The problem with the style of approach adopted by the likes of Cameron is that it only encourages the hard right represented by such as Farage. Throw them a concession, and they demand more. Cameron only called the referendum to satisfy the right wing of his own party, and look what happened. Now we’ve had a Brexit vote, and the hard right is cock-a-hoop.

That’s where fear got us. And if you think that what’s about to happen now is a lot worse than what the Brexiters feared before – well, I can only agree with you.

Voting Remain: it's about a lot more than a point or two on GDP

When German troops entered Alsace in Eastern France in 1940, the Gestapo arrested a great many potential opponents. One of these was the father of a friend of mine. The friend was four at the time and never saw his father again. Indeed, he never found out what had happened to him.

He told me this story soon after the introduction of the Euro, holding a Euro coin in his hand, with tears in his eyes, as he said, “I never thought I’d see the day when we had the same currency as them.”

A fluent German speaker living just a few kilometres from the border, he was a regular visitor to the other side of the Rhine. He had nothing but the most cordial feelings towards the erstwhile enemies of his country. In the Euro, he saw the embodiment of a determination that they would never be enemies again.

That’s why I find the EU debate in Britain today so lamentably trivial.

The EU isn’t about a few points on or off GDP, or the cost of holidays in continental Europe, or even whether immigration can be reduced or will rise still further. The EU and even the Euro, which is far more than merely a financial instrument, are about a political will to prefer peace over war and cooperation over conflict.

Just some coins – or something rather more significant?

That’s after a millennium and a half, since the end of the Roman Empire, regularly punctured by increasingly destructive wars.

How can we bear to make it about the accent of the woman serving us breakfast in a hotel? Or whether a Polski Sklep has opened where there used to be an Italian tailor’s? Or whether those young men cleaning our car so efficiently are Bulgarian rather than East Anglian?

That being said, there will naturally be economic consequences if we leave the EU. There would be short-term disruption. The currency is likely to fall. Unemployment would probably rise. Inward investment would fall. Tariff barriers might be erected, making it harder to export our goods to the Continent, and more expensive for us to buy imports from it.

None of this would spell catastrophe for Britain. The country would muddle through the short-term pain. It might be a little poorer, but it wouldn’t go under.

In the longer term, though, this is a world increasingly for the big battalions. China is a dominant power. India isn’t far behind. The US, smaller in population than either, remains the financial powerhouse. In such company, the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc with a population of half a billion, can hold its own. It will be taken seriously. Britain will not – and it may not even be Britain if, as seems likely, Scotland made a second and successful bid for independence, followed by re-entry to the EU.

Britain would be with the also-rans. The countries that get included in deals that others have negotiated. Brexiters often point to Norway as a successful European nation outside the EU. They fail to mention, or may not know, that Norway makes substantial contributions to the EU, as Britain does, and has to accept EU rules, including freedom of movement. That’s the price of trade with the EU.

So the difference between Norway and Britain is that Norway has no say in the rules it has to obey. Brexit will deprive Britain, or England-and-Wales, of its say too.

Naturally, England-and-Wales might decide not to accept EU regulations, and deal with the major economic powers alone. It could do that, but when China has to prioritise negotiations with the US, EU, Russia, India or England-and-Wales, it’s unlikely to be the minor off-shore European player that will preoccupy it most.

What this all means is that on its own, England-and-Wales would continue its decline from world power to minor island. We’ve been there before. 300 years ago a French visitor to England wrote a traveller’s book about the country: people knew little about this little, fog-shrouded island to the North West.

That was when England was on the way up, becoming a major economic power, not in its decline.

Far from spelling the end of British values, I therefore see in the European Union a way of preserving them within a structure that we can help make far more than the sum of its parts. The alternative, it seems to me, is continued descent into irrelevance. And relative poverty.

That’s my positive case for staying in the EU. 

There’s a negative case against Brexit too. It came out most clearly when Nigel Farage unveiled a new poster campaign on the theme “Breaking Point.” It showed a queue of people trying, apparently, to get into Britain, taking us to the point where we might break under the strain.

Nigel Farage showing off his poster

The photo is of Syrian refugees in Slovenia. None of them is ever likely to get anywhere near Britain. On the other hand, they’re all dark-skinned.

That makes explicit something semi-hidden inside the Brexit campaign. It draws a great deal of its strength not from economics, not from a commitment to Britain’s culture and its prospects for the future. Instead, it draws on something much uglier than that: a hatred of other people, of foreigners, above all, of other races.

As Brendan, husband of murdered MP Jo Cox, said, “She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.”

Hatred is poisonous. Even if there were a compelling argument for Brexit, that bitterness is enough to put me off. There’s a toxic drive behind the Leave campaign from which our nation, or any other nation, can only suffer.

That, more than anything, needs to be resisted.

Jo Cox, murdered pro-EU MP
Her husband launched an appeal for love, and against hatred.

Disaster avoided, but success is still to work for

In the end, it didn’t happen. 

Predictions of a Labour wipeout in yesterday’s UK local elections weren’t fulfilled. The reports of Jeremy Corbyn’s execution by a disdainful electorate turned out to be premature at least. Labour lived to fight another day.

It wasn’t for any want of wishing. A great many people were longing for his crushing rejection. Sadly, a disappointing number of them were in leading positions in the Labour Party.

In local councils up and down England, seats were being contested that were last fought in 2012, something of a high point in Labour’s standing in the councils. Even yesterday morning, the BBC was reporting the likelihood that the party would lose “dozens” of seats. In the end, the number was 23 – so just short of two of those dozens. They won 1291, which is just short 108 dozen. So they came close to a historic high.

A point not made as loudly as it might since the elections is that, if Labour clung on to most of its gains from the surge it enjoyed in 2012, the Conservatives were able to advance little from their lamentable levels of that year.

In Wales, they lost one seat leaving them one short of half the total, but still very much the largest party in the principality.

Labour’s worst result, of course, was in Scotland. A nation that Labour once dominated has now gone over massively to the Scottish National Party. Labour’s historic defeat there was still more strongly underlined yesterday when it was overtaken by the Conservatives, a party that went into decline in the 1950s and has led a rump existence north of the border for half a century.

There’s no denying the seriousness of the blow. On the other hand, it’s no bad thing to see Labour gradually being weaned of its dependence on Scottish votes. Especially with the still strong likelihood of Scotland separating from the United Kingdom, Labour needs to learn to win in England.

Which takes us to the best of yesterday’s news: London. We’ve had eight years of Conservative rule in the capital, and by Boris Johson, perhaps embodies pure privilege with all its arrogance and entitlement more than any other. Yesterday Labour has won both the Mayor’s office and the London assembly back – electing as Mayor Sadiq Khan, the son of a bus driver, educated not at Eton and Oxford, but at a local comprehensive (state) school and the University of North London.

Sadiq Khan, son of a Pakistani bus driver, new Mayor of London

Symbolically, the victory is most important for being the first time a Muslim has become Mayor of a major Western city. That’s significant for two reasons. At a global level, it matters because it shows Muslims everywhere that the extremists are wrong, that we are at last beginning to reach a place (despite the Trumps of this world) where a Muslim can pursue the most exalted of careers.

It also makes an important point about the value of immigration.

At a more local level, the Khan win shows that a racist campaign need not succeed. Khan’s Tory opponent tried to brand Khan a companion of extremists, playing into the racist narrative that any Muslim, merely as a Muslim, must be suspect in the Western world. That slur was massively rejected by an electorate that gave Khan the largest personal vote ever received in British history. There had also been a last-minute attempt to smear Labour as anti-Semitic, which may have cost the Party votes in the capital with its relatively large Jewish community. Khan has made it absolutely clear that he holds no such views, and it was encouraging to see him winning in spite of the attack.

So, overall, where do we stand? As Jeremy Corbyn put it, Labour hung on. Obviously, hanging on is nothing like good enough. We have a long way to go to unseat the Tories. That will only happen when we learn to do better than in the past, rather than more or less doing as well. However, yesterday’s results were anything but disastrous. They form a good launchpad for improvement.

Certain things have to happen now. The Party has to learn to take on the Tories far more effectively. Above all, it must learn to stop its own infighting. In that context, it’s sad to see two Labour MPs point out in the Guardian that they were wrong to nominate Corbyn for the leadership. Corbyn is the Labour Party leader; attempting to replace him would be distractive and disruptive; it would almost certainly fail since the membership massively backs him. So – get on side, focus on the real opponents and get the Party moving forward – for the country’s sake, as well as our own.

Yesterday shows we can do it. With a government that is destroying the health service, education, even the police, we know it’s time. Let’s now find the will.