I’ve held off writing or even thinking about Brexit and the election. it was all a bit too raw. The Labour Party is still agonising over what went wrong and, in any case, there have been plenty of acute analyses of why things turned out this way. What I think has really hurt many of us is the evidence offered by the election that the country we call home is not the natural home of liberal, humanitarian values. I know that fewer people voted Tory/pro-Brexit than didn’t and that, if only we had had PR life would be different but ……we don’t have PR and the sheer numbers voting for a return of this government despite their record and their leader, means I can empathise with those who say ‘this no longer feels like my country’.

I was going to ask ‘what have we become?’ but it seems pretty clear that there is no ‘we’ anymore; perhaps there never was but many of us bumbled along with a sense of this country as reasonably compassionate and with some sense of social connection at least, if not community. It’s difficult now to believe that stuff. So I’ll avoid the ‘we’ word and consider what the country has shown itself to be, not just around the edges but to a far greater extent than many of us thought possible.

Enough voters wanted to ‘get Brexit done’ to re-elect a party which had already done significant harm to many of them. That’s a bit of a puzzle in itself and the kind of vox pops that feature still in the press and on radio and TV don’t do much more than illustrate an incredible level of believed myth and lie about the EU and what’s coming down the line now we’ve left. What happened to allow government to escape blame for the state of the country and many people’s lives by projecting it all on the EU? I can’t get much beyond most people, and certainly most lower income people, read the Mail or Sun and seem to believe what they read. The word ‘read’ itself may need some qualification. There’s not a lot to read in the redtops but I’m not sure they are read cover to cover. What I guess readers see and internalise are headlines and they clearly move and shape opinion for many voters.

Jeremy Corbyn refuses to rule out CANCELLING Brexit if the Lib Dems prop him up in power as he rants that Boris Johnson would let food be laced with ‘rat hair’ to secure deal with US

Daily Mail, 05/11/19 17:22

Jeremy Corbyn desperately dodged when challenged over whether he would be prepared to revoke the Article 50 process to win over Jo Swinson’s pro-Remain party.

Boris Johnson reveals ‘fast and furious’ plan to bang his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal through parliament within days of winning an election – as Nigel Farage claims the Tories twice tempted him with a peerage in exchange for fighting fewer seats

Daily Mail, 03/11/19 13:34

Boris Johnson wants to get his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit wrapped up by Christmas if he wins decisively in the UK General Election in December, saying his deal will be passed easily in the Commons.

If Boris Johnson wins today, a bright future begins… but if Jeremy Corbyn gets in, the lights will go out for good.

The Sun, 11 Dec 2019, 22:30

Updated: 12 Dec 2019, 7:15

I guess there were lots of reasons why Labour did so badly, a couple of reasons why the Lib Dems bombed (the leader and a pro-remain stance) and really only one reason why the Tories did so well; not ‘the economy stupid’ but Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Think about that; the economy was thought to be less important than Brexit by lots of voters. In live interviews ‘real’ people said they didn’t care if it made them poorer, it would be worth it to be ‘out’. The sentiment was something like ‘we’ve done it on our own before and we can do it again’. The history I’ve studied says we haven’t done it before (if ‘it’ is stand alone and compete and dominate through our genius, industry or military might) and I don’t think we’ll do it this time either. Maybe that’s the other lesson to draw from all this; myth and lie will quite likely beat conviction and truth. We joined the EU, (Common Market as was) because our economy was tanking, not least because our business and industry was (and is) run by the same tribe who run the country and they’re not very good at it. Government, the professions and business are dominated by ex-public schoolboys (with some honourable exceptions, particularly in the Labour Party) who are a million miles away from understanding the lives lived by the poor or even ordinary working people (often the same thing).

Our PM has learned a lot from the US and the ‘Leader of the Free World’

He doesn’t just want a trade deal from America; it’s the first port of call for the Conservative Party when they are short of ideas, hence our education free for all, our impoverished health service, the reduction of benefits to below subsistence level, noises off about politicising the judiciary, racism, loud announcements of policy commitments but no action to deliver them and, oh yes, big, big lies. Post-war and post-imperial has been a rocky road for us; post-EU in a post-truth world is going to challenge Bozzer, but it will challenge the people who voted for him, and those who didn’t, even more.

How we stood alone (not)

When Britain first went to war (1939), it was as the ally of both Poland and France. Australia and New Zealand declared war on the same day as Britain did. They were joined by South Africa three days later, and Canada four days after that. In the following months British troops also fought alongside the Norwegians, the Belgians and the Dutch. In other words Britain was just one part of an international effort.

In May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force fielded a little more than 300,000 men. The French had almost 10 times that number.

If Britain had plenty of allies at the beginning of the war, then the same is true of the end of the conflict. In July 1941, the Soviet Union signed a military pact with Britain. Less than six months later, the United States also joined the alliance, followed by Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and eventually every other state in Latin America. China also joined the Allies.

………Britain was little more than a junior partner in this Grand Alliance. The Soviets did most of the fighting in Europe, while the Americans provided most of the resources. This was reflected at all of the major conferences that took place towards the end of the war, where the two superpowers took the lead on almost everything. At the conference of the so-called ‘Big Three’ in Yalta, in February 1945, British diplomats were already joking that it was actually a conference of the ‘Big Two-and-a-Half’.

WW2: When Britain stood (not quite) alone (https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/britain-stood-alone-ww2-myths-brexit-debate/)

The 8th Army, that’s the Desert Rats, was 25% British and three quarters ‘imperial’; it contained soldiers from Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda. The 14th Army, which fought the Japanese, contained soldiers from India, Nepalese Gurkhas, Kenyans, Nigerians, Rhodesians, Somalis and, oh yes, Englishmen. From a population of under 3 million 43000 wicked fenians from the neutral Irish Republic served in the British armed forces.

It’s called helping people when they’re in trouble.
(https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/learning-from-history/)

When our consciences are pricked by our ‘pull the shutters down’ response to population movements resulting from famine, war, natural disaster or those pesky migrants who just want to better themselves and build a better life for their children (AKA economic migrants…well at least the poor ones), it’s because we want to believe we’re better than we are.

In fact the 21^st century response is pretty well the same as earlier ones. The historic response to large scale population movements has usually been violence and repression springing from fear and suspicion of difference, of ‘the other’, whether it be religion, colour, language or anything else we can spot.

There have been, and still are, exceptions of course, many at the level of individual conscience and action and some on a larger scale. In the UK we still remember the kinder transport which brought 10,000 Jewish children to the UK before the outbreak of war, a magnificent gesture in the context of the times and by comparison with other countries. Perhaps we should not be surprised though that some of the children were ill-treated and exploited when they came –  anti-semitism was not unique to Germany or, come to that, the 20^th century (see  https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/us-and-them).

However, despite separation, alienation, the internment of many as enemy aliens and all the rest, the 10,000 were profoundly grateful to the UK. Of course we didn’t accept 10,000 sets of parents, many of whom consequently endured and then died in the Shoah.

Attitudes and policies to incomers can shift very quickly, particularly if fires are stoked by right wing politicians and media. France in the 1930s had a huge number of foreign workers and families. The First War had taken a huge toll of adult males¹. By 1934 a combination of France’s need for labour, repression and anti-semitism in eastern Europe, and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria had brought over three million foreign workers to France.

In 1939 the Spanish Civil War ended in Republican defeat. Approaching  340,000 refugees crossed the Pyrenees into France². Most of them walked! It’s been described as ‘the greatest movement of people in this part of Europe since the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Spain in 1492′³.
The French response was punitive. Refugees were herded into concentration camps, where conditions were brutal. The camps also came in useful pre-war when communists and anti-Nazi Germans living in France were detained.

French citizenship, had been granted freely under 1927 legislation until the inevitable backlash following defeat in 1940. Following the Franco-German armistice the same camps and new ones held Jews, Gypsies and dissidents.  The new Vichy regime ‘withdrew’ citizenship from 15,000 foreigners, including 6,000 Jews. Foreign Jews were rounded up, detained and sent to German forced labour or extermination camps by the Vichy regime long before the German authorities occupied and ‘governed’ Vichy.

When things get tough most of us look for difference not common cause.

Here’s another example to depress us all:

In 1947 Indian independence involved partition and massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly formed states.

Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan, and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. 2.6 million moved from East Pakistan to India and 0.7 million moved from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh. The newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude, and massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths vary, with low estimates at 200,000 and high estimates at 2,000,000⁴.

A crowd of Muslims at the Old Fort (Purana Qila) in Delhi, which had been converted into a vast camp for Muslim refugees waiting to be transported to Pakistan. Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1947.

It’s not always the migrants who suffer the most though. If the numbers are right migrants can do pretty well and it’s the indigenous population that gets screwed, or, more accurately, killed. Have a look at:  http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358040.Rivers_of_Blood_Rivers_of_Gold, or
https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/what-a-piece-of-work-is-man-2

In the 19th century, over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas. The local populations or tribes in North America, Brazil, and Argentina were usually outnumbered and overwhelmed by the settlers. There were a few exceptions when ‘the white man’s’ arrogance and conceit  gave a whole new meaning to tragic hubris – Isandlwana in South Africa and the Big Horn in the United States spring to mind.  In the US national myths such as the plucky pioneer families trekking to the promised land and fighting off primitive savages, served to justify the near extermination of native Americans and the ruthless exploitation of natural resources by east-coast corporations. Pastoral people were herded onto reservations because they were in the way and there was

‘gold in them thar (sacred) hills’.

If they wouldn’t go or left again because they faced starvation, they were termed hostiles and hunted down by frequently drunken ambassadors of western and Western civilisation like Custer’s Seventh cavalry⁵. The 7th attempted to surprise and destroy what seemed to be a sizeable (and peaceful) settlement and, not realising it continued out of sight round the river bend, blundered into the largest native American camp ever seen and were annihilated.

The 7th weren’t seasoned ‘Indian fighters’ – 40% of the 7th were born outside the US⁶. Places like England, Ireland, Italy, or Germany. Most of the rest had grown up east of the Mississippi. They looked good though. Horses were allocated to troops on the basis of colour so that they looked the part when they rode out and generally, though not in this case, Custer took the band along to play as the 7th charged.

Nowadays it’s fashionable again to focus on difference, as the right and far right are empowered by Brexit in England and Northern Ireland and Trump in the US. In the UK, as almost a matter of course, married couples are separated if one of them is foreign unless they both leave the country; see, for example, the Guardian of:

28.12.16, “Dutch woman with two British children told to leave UK after 24 years”,
or
28.2.17, “Outcry as grandmother deported after decades in Britain”,
or
1.3.17, “We can’t risk family being split by Brexit.”,
or
2.3.17, “Britain among worst in Europe for dealing with asylum seekers.”,
or
yesterday or next week.

Apparently the Home Office feels that exiled spouses can communicate via Skype, email or letter writing and don’t need to be physically close – yet more proof that the habit of sending small children away to boarding school leads to very serious attachment disorders and empathy deficits in the higher ranks of the civil service or government. Still, they’re only running the country.

In a ‘post-truth’ world reasoned argument supported by evidence may not carry the day. Here’s an observation of one politician’s electioneering technique; guess who it is: …

he advanced no coherent policies, merely a rag-tag of emotional appeals.

One supporter wrote:

I’m delighted at *******’s lack of a programme for a programme is either lies, weakness or designed to catch silly birds. Strength acts from the necessity of a serious situation and can’t allow itself to be bound⁷.

Here’s another quote which resonates with me because it seems to capture exactly our government’s approach to leaving the EU.

A… Government interested only in stoking-up endless constitutional grievance and furthering their obsession with independence, at the expense of ….  public services like the NHS and education, ….given a free pass by Labour⁸.

Small steps can take us to the precipice as easily as giant ones. Traditionally in the West, the far right don’t storm into power and change everything in a moment. Even Trump seems to have decided it might take more than a few weeks to get back to the 1950s. Instead right-wing governments nibble away at rights and freedoms a little at a time, citing internal and external dangers in justification (think Turkey or Poland).  What they do is not always popular but few would take to the streets these days for relatively minor changes. Heavy focusing of blame on outsiders shifts blame away from government until it’s too late to protest or object legally.

So here we are, in the month Article 50 will be triggered, increasingly looking down the wrong end of a telescope at a smaller and narrower world. We’re a million miles away from pre-war Germany, though the values and attitudes found in places like Yarls Wood Immigrant Detention Centre should make anyone uneasy. This is what their website says:

We focus on decency and respect in all aspects of care for our residents and use continuous innovation to further improve and develop our service.

and these are some of their Wikipedia entry section headings:
  Controversies

February 2002 fire
Hunger strikes
Sexual abuse
Detention of children
Deaths
Inquiries into provision at Yarl’s Wood

The UK is not in danger of becoming the 4th Reich any time soon – it’s the direction of travel that worries me.

To paraphrase ‘The Man who Shot Liberty Valance?‘  “when the lie becomes more attractive than fact, vote Trump.” As with almost everything from computers to right wing lunacy, we can proudly claim that Brits chose lies first with our Brexit vote, but, again as with almost everything, Americans did it bigger.

So we will have a new, red-blooded (and very possibly unhinged) man in the White House. Trump, his  supporters apparently believe, has what it takes to tackle U.S. and world (now to be known as ‘Trumpworld inc.’) problems fearlessly and really ‘tell it like it is’. They think he’s going to make things better. Everyone else, i.e. the majority of American voters and  everyone else in Trumpworld,  except Putin and Farage, is plain old frit.

Here are some examples which give an indication of the new Pres’s Trumpworld view: we should all get the hang of this stuff because he’s a tad scary when he thinks we don’t agree with him and doesn’t understand why the US would have nuclear weapons and not use them. So fix these pithy ideas (is that the right word for Trump’s thoughts?) in your mind.

He’s got a big willy. We know because he told us:

“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said, raising them for viewers to see. “And, he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”

Global warming is a scam.

Global warming, AKA climate change, (renamed, he says, because it wasn’t getting warmer so ‘they’ had to call it something else), is a lie invented to benefit Chinese Industry. He tweeted in 2012 that

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

Here’s more of his tweeting:

“It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It’s now CLIMATE CHANGE.”

“Record setting cold and snow, ice caps massive! The only global warming we should fear is that caused by nuclear weapons – incompetent pols.”

“Windmills are the greatest threat in the US to both bald and golden eagles. Media claims fictional ‘global warming’ is worse.”

“NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

And here’s one great response:

“When it comes to global warming, I’ll trust the world’s scientists. If I need help filing bankruptcy I’ll listen to you.”

This could be a very long list of Trump’s beliefs but I’ll stop here. Should we be bovvered? Was he just kidding? Well, he’s appointing his family,  friends and other scary people to key roles. Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist for example, will help him run Trumpworld. According to S.E. Cupp (author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity,” co-author of “Why You’re Wrong About the Right” and a columnist at the New York Daily News) Bannon’s website is rife with bigoted, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynist content. No wonder the Pres. likes him.

Not to worry, maybe the Vice-President will be a restraining influence. That would be Mike Pence, who believes smoking doesn’t kill. Pence is pro-tobacco. I love the ‘reality check’ bit below:

“Time for a quick reality check.  Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill……..Two out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and nine out of 10 smokers do not contract lung cancer.” 

The Huffington Post’s feeble rebuttal of Pence’s  refreshing debunking of smoking myths resorted to science and data of all things:

“according to the American Cancer Society, cigarettes account for 30 percent of all cancer deaths and kill more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, HIV, guns and illegal drugs combined. Beyond cancer, smoking damages almost every organ in the body, including the lungs, heart, blood vessels, reproductive organs, mouth, skin, eyes and bones.”

Typical of the liberal elite to quote facts. But really, what have facts got to do with it?

Well what a couple of weeks. Don’t know about you but I can’t wait to have Mrs Dale’s Diary back and get shot of that ridiculous new Archers nonsense. That was what the vote was about wasn’t it? We can take back control and return to worrying about Jim overworking and Captain going missing again…..Mrs Dale’s always got a lot on her plate……

Now we’ve got a woman, of all things, leading the Tory Party and the country; I’m not sure Mrs Dale would be too happy about that. Always remember, behind every great woman there’s a Dennis Thatcher. Still, Theresa May might be nasty but she has a sense of humour, hence the gift of death by a thousand gaffes for Boris as Foreign Secretary….and poor old Govey kicked into the very long grass..,…sob, sob. All this and an ageing Blair explaining that we were all quite wrong and sometimes leaders have to make tough decisions. If it looks like a megalomaniac, talks like a megalomaniac…..you know the rest.

Anyway, putting all that to one side (keep up; this is a fast moving piece), I’ve been reading a very long and frankly stodgy book about the early history of the Christian church and its attitude to, and persecution of,…well everyone else, but especially Jews, ‘Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews’ by James Carrol.

The book traces a line from the Christian church’s teaching and treatment of the Jews to the Holocaust. I’ll try to summarise some key points. First a little-known fact….early Christians were Jews…and apparently, so was Jesus, although not according to Hollywood.

Googleimage

It took a long, long time for non-Jews to be admitted to the Christian sect/church. It was good old St. Paul (plain Paul in those days) who persuaded the early Christians that gentiles should be admitted since God was inclusive, the god of all. Gentiles being gentiles they were soon taking over. Still Christianity might have limped along if it hadn’t been for politics. Constantine (Constantine the Great, also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine, Conny to his friends), Roman Emperor from 306 to 337 AD, really let the cat among the pigeons (or do I mean out of the bag?)

by curtailing the right to worship any old, or lots of, god(s) by making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. It wasn’t so much that he plumped for the wrong god – he could have chosen any from what was a pretty long list and had the same result. Using religion as a unifying force of empire prompted the creation of a formidable religio/political organisation, the Catholic (in the sense of all-embracing) Church.

So the church grew and transformed over time from a minor Jewish sect to a religion in its own right, largely due to Constantine and, quite early on, came to regard Judaism as a heretical religion. Jews wouldn’t accept Jesus as a deity, worse had crucified him and were therefore clearly guilty of ‘murdering’ the son of God. The, by then definitely non-Jewish, Catholic Church therefore took the view that Jews should be ‘preserved’ as witnesses to their crime and the truth of Christ. They should also be scattered and allowed to live but not thrive because of what they had done.

While, at times, in parts of Europe and even in Jerusalem, Moslems, Jews and Christians lived and worked together, collaborating in an atmosphere of great scholarship and creativity, for most of the pre-twentieth century the Church actively denigrated and persecuted Jews. The menu included forced conversion, public burning of holy books, forcing them to dress so that they might be instantly recognised, expelling them, killing them, or simply building ghettos within which to confine them. Does that sound at all familiar?

The Crusades, Christian ‘holy’ wars, triggered significant increases in Jewish persecution. While crusaders were notionally traveling across Europe to retake the Holy Land from Islam, they took the opportunity to attack Jewish communities along the way and large numbers of Jews, under the protection of the Church (as living witnesses to their crime remember) committed suicide or were killed rather than convert to the ‘true’ religion .

At times, of course, significant numbers of Jews did convert, but that didn’t fool the Church. It decided that they probably didn’t mean it and tortured them to prove it. Pope Boniface VIII decreed that every creature was a vassal of the Pope and Pope Pious IX claimed Papal infallibility. Who first made Jews wear a yellow star?…….. a Pope. The Church’s certainty about the rights and wrongs of all this came from the ‘fact’ that the Pope was God’s representative on Earth…well you can’t get a better source than that can you? Who gave the Pope that job description? Well the Pope did. I’m not sure he actually consulted God about it though.

I think that’s what is technically called a closed loop system.

Great debates between Jewish scholars and friars charged with converting the Jews might well be ‘won’ by the ‘wrong’ side but that didn’t matter, in fact it simply proved the devilish cunning of the Jew. Jews were blamed for outbreaks of plague though it scythed down its victims without reference to their religion. Jews were accused of sacrificing babies (the blood libel, which, ironically, may have arisen because of the sacrifice of Jewish children by their parents during Crusader raids on Jewish communities) and condemned for usury, lending money for profit. Jews were banned from all other ways of trading and, guess what?… Christians also practiced usury; it was forbidden by the Church but there you go.

Of course there were members of the Church who were appalled at all this, who protested and preached against the perversion of Christian values. Strangely, by and large they didn’t do well; many were burnt to death to show them and others the error of their ways. Those who zealously pursued the orthodoxy of Jewish guilt, degradation and punishment fared better, rising in the hierarchy and, as often as not, being sanctified.

This piece isn’t an anti-Catholic rant. Martin Luther, hardly a pillar of the Catholic Church, wrote ‘On the Jews and their Lies’ and in his last sermon before dieing he condemned Jews. On his death bed, having complained of chest pains, he said that Jews had ‘done this’ to him. 450 years later on Kristallnacht, Martin Sasse, the Lutheran bishop of Thuringia, celebrated that

‘On November 10^th, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.’

It’s not an anti-church rant either. Karl Marx agreed with Luther. His first significant essay was ‘On the Jewish Question’ in which he wrote:

‘Money is the jealous god of Israel, besides which no other god may exist.’

Marx’s ancestors were devout Jews and some were Rabbis. To all intents and purposes the Communist Manifesto simply replaced the word ‘Jews’ in his first published essay with the word ‘capitalists’.

Or, if you want a free thinker, try Voltaire:

‘Jews are, all of them born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts…….. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.’

Why is this history of religious intolerance and persecution worth writing about? For me it’s because history isn’t dead and may repeat itself not as farce but as a tragic loop.

‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’
George Santayana (1863–1952)

Interestingly, Santayana also said:

‘Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.’

which neatly sums up what happened to a minor Jewish sect which got above itself ……..with terrible consequences.

Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals – that’s what we are programmed to do. Have a look at the Milligram experiment findings in an earlier blog if you need convincing:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Stanley Milgram, 1974

We are all captives of our culture and upbringing and, the more we close in on ourselves and emphasise difference, the narrower and more bigoted our world will be.

That’s why Brexit frightens me. The EU referendum campaign was more like American politics than anything we’ve seen before. Experts were derided, lies told wholesale, promises made which could never be kept, and truth flatly denied, all to gain a result. As O’Nora Oneill put it:

‘A bonfire of accusation and name calling, of back-stabbing and ambition’

Sure we’ll all be poorer and the world less safe but the rise of the politician as bigot and liar, sneering at the poor and disadvantaged and actively working to make their lives more miserable so that we can all feel better if we’re on the inside…that really is the worst damage. I was raised a Christian but given no knowledge of the history of my religion or the crimes committed in its name. I was taught that we stood alone during the Second World War and pretty well saved the world from, and for, Johny Foreigner. Nobody mentioned that the 8th Army, the Desert Rats, was 25% British and 75% ‘imperial’; it contained soldiers from Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda. The 14th Army, which fought the Japanese in the far East, contained soldiers from India, Nepal, Kenya, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Somalia and, oh yes, England.

We seem to be shifting back to a world of us and them – hard-working families and the work-shy poor, immigrants and refugees (often conflated) and the English, faceless European bureaucrats and …..? We have rising anti-Semitism, rising hate crime and rising intolerance of others. Refugees are feared and abandoned to their fate, drowning in their hundreds or walking across Europe in desperate reverse children’s crusades.

Stephen Hawking had a piece in the Guardian recently which made the point:

If we fail (to collaborate) the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.

Or as Benjamin Franklin said:

“we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately”?

I thought it might be  interesting to compare the thoughts of the EU founding fathers with the, perhaps a tad less sophisticated, thinking of our government heroes and Brexit fans.

I know the EU isn't what it was meant to be and its failure to deal with a terrible humanitarian disaster shames most member states but, even so, the distance and difference should give little Englanders pause for thought.

“First they make us pay in our taxes for Greek olive groves, many of which probably don’t exist. Then they say we can’t dip our bread in olive oil in restaurants. We didn’t join the Common Market – betraying the New Zealanders and their butter – in order to be told when, where and how we must eat the olive oil we have been forced to subsidise.”

so said Nigel Barrage, ex-city banker and UKIP leader. In a mellower mood he had this to say:

“With thousands of Islamist terrorists exploiting the migrant crisis, we would be far safer outside of the EU. It is safer to vote to Leave the European Union and take back control of our borders. A vote to Remain is a vote for massively increased immigration into Britain. Britain must not be dragged into an EU common asylum system. Let’s Leave EU & take control of our borders.”

Boris Johnson, leader in waiting (he thought), said:

“leaving the EU would be like breaking out of jail….”

Mind you he also said:

“Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”

In 1963 Jean Monet, not English so obviously to be discounted, said:

“The common market was not set up simply to establish a better system of trade in goods, nor to create a new power. Our main objective was, and still is, to create a unified Europe and remove the spirit of domination from relations between countries and their peoples, which has several times brought the world close to destruction.”

and

“Making Europe is making peace.”

Robert Shuman (also not a Brit I'm afraid) said:

“We do not, nor shall we ever deny our country or forget the duties which we owe it. But above each homeland we recognise with increasing clarity the existence of a common good, superior to the national interest, a good in which the individual interests of our countries will meet and merge.”

And Geoffrey How (British but wet) said (my underlining):

“The sovereign nations of the European Community, sharing their sovereignty freely (…), are building for themselves a key role in the power politics of the coming century”.

Our p.m.,Diddy David,  said:

“There is no doubt in my mind that the only certainty of exit is uncertainty”

 Angela Merkel seems to have a slightly broader and more compassionate perspective - she said of the refugee crisis:

“I lived behind a fence for too long for me to now wish for those times to return.”

So there you go - the real choice is between narrow (and actually mistaken) self-interest with a whiff (or more) of racism, or the kind of moral leadership offered by Europeans a little more committed to social justice than England's finest. Put another way, would you rather live on an (admittedly large) American aircraft carrier and have unfettered government from the party that is privatising health, education, any thing else left in the public sector - and the ducks on the wall if you don't hide them soon - or see Tory social and economic policy and asset stripping moderated by Angela's Europe. I'm with David Hare:

“They claim to have rescued Britain from industrial chaos. But in fact Margaret Thatcher and her heirs have created a selfish and divided society in which politicians and the people regard each other with mutual contempt”, David Hare in the Guardian, 8.3.16

Vaclav Havel said this ……..but I wish I had.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

An extraordinary open letter appeared in the Guardian on October 12th. Signatories included 12 retired judges, 102 QCs, 29 partners and directors, 24 law professors, 127 barristers, 24 solicitors and 23 law academics. It called on the government to do more to help the EU attempts to aid the refugees making their way to safer European shores. Specifically it called on government to do four things:

• take a fair and proportionate share of refugees;
• help establish safe and legal routes to the UK as well as the EU;
• help establish safe and legal routes within the EU, including the UK;
• help establish access to fair and thorough procedures to determine eligibility for international protection wherever it is sought.

Of course our more responsible journals were a tad discommoded and wasted no time in putting the truth out there:

So this dastardly attempt to sway right-thinking Brits can can be safely ignored, thank goodness.

However, in what can only be seen as a conspiracy, another far left radical group then weighed in. Apparently in September 84 bishops signed a letter to our leader (Diddy David) asking him to increase the number of refugees we will take (over 5 years) from 20000 to 50000 and offering to mobilise the church in a national effort to provide accommodation. Government’s response to the crisis (and the letter,  which received a cursory acknowledgement) was described as ‘increasingly inadequate’. The bishops letter letter also had a four point plan (more evidence of conspiracy I think) and referenced this country’s ‘great tradition of sanctuary’, calling for a drawing together of ‘civic, corporate and government leadership to co-ordinate efforts and mobilize the nation as in times past’.

Fortunately our free press were on hand again:

Conservatives criticise bishops for attack on Syrian refugee …

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”?

The Second World War saw huge movements of displaced people fleeing conflict. We generally focus on local, that is British or, at best, European issues, but these movements took place on every continent. In Burma, for example, 600,000 people were displaced when the Japanese invaded and as many as 80,000 of them died (the total displaced across the world during the conflict is estimated as anything from 11 to 20 million. Of course that was wartime wasn’t it and this is different….. except……
Wars, conflict and persecution have forced more people than at any other time since records began to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere, according to a new report from the UN refugee agency.

UNHCR’s 2014 Global Trends Report: World at War said that worldwide displacement was at the highest level ever recorded. The number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago. In 1945 the world population was around 2.3 billion compared with 7+ billion now so we have proportionately as many refugees world-wide now as we did then but not much sign of the kind of efforts seen then to address the problem.

Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest.
UNHCR, June 18 2014

Media reports now in the UK are focusing on a hardening of attitudes in countries like Germany, and that allows our benighted government, smugly looking on from the sidelines, to think they got it right. I suppose they did, as long as we are able to ignore the terror, pain and suffering of those the UK government has elected not to shelter. Our leader calculates that his refusal to join an EU-wide initiative will prove a useful demonstration that he is someone who cannot be bossed by Europe and spike UKIP’s guns more effectively than poor old Teresa managed to do in her conference address (described as ‘thoroughly chilling’ by the Refugee Council and ‘irresponsible’ by the Institute of Directors (another looney-left group).

There was plenty of bigotry and racism around in the 1940s as a glance at the Mass Observation Archive will quickly reveal (try ‘Private Battles, how the war nearly defeated us‘) and there’s plenty of evidence in on-line threads on the current crisis to show those qualities are still around (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/refugee-crisis-governments-inadequate-response-attacked-by-church-of-england-a6699166.html).

Best to leave the last word to actor Juliet Stevenson:

‘History will judge us and our response to this crisis. Many people feel ashamed to be in a country where we say we will only take 20,000 over five years….your house is being bombed this week, you are living in a refugee camp where typhoid is rife – it is no good to say we will come back in five years.’

You might find the answer in ‘A Very British Ending‘ by Edward Wilson (Arcadia Books, 2015). The extent to which you’ll find the book convincing will depend on your age, memory and whether you buy conspiracy theories or not.  It’s about a left-wing labour prime-minister targetted by UK and US establishment interests and our secret service – seems pretty convincing to me!

To be sure Jeremy will be blitzed by most of the British media  and smeared from here to Moscow, I mean just look at that hat for God’s sake! Obviously a commie enemy of freedom and the ‘American way!’

Interested parties will foment splits within the labour party too – that’s only to be expected. But I wonder how dirty it’s going to get.  I’m not sure what a Democrat-led US government will do about it let alone Donald Trump (pardon me) and the looney right.  After all there is a lot at stake; if we’re not careful we’ll find ourselves living in a country where ordinary people influence government and have a say in policy – that’s dangerously like some kind of, some kind of…what’s the word…… democracy.  I’m not totally sure either that ‘Diddy David’ (Cammo to his friends),  is as happy as he claims about the Labour Party committing suicide by electing a mad scientist……. sorry mad socialist leader who will destroy the economy, enslave hard-working families and sell us to Putin. If he practices looking like everyone’s favourite uncle (see below) it might be the beginning of the party not the end of the Party!

By chance the other day I took out from the  Morrab Library an old book by Mavis Nicholson called ‘What did you do in the war Mummy?’

The book carries two key messages (three if you include the class distinction which permeates its stories):

• the first is that the war liberated many women from their expected roles and places as dutiful daughters then (house)wives and mothers and allowed them to go on post-war to achieve extraordinary things;
• the second is that some women, like some men, displayed extraordinary courage and endurance (if you only read one piece read ‘Odette Hallowes, a different kind of courage’).

Odette, who took eight years to physically recover from the torture inflicted on her in Ravensbruck so that she was able to walk again,  said of women:

“……I believe in women. I have seen women and I admire their courage. I’ve seen women in such desperate situations, reduced in so many ways, and still proud….It’s only men who don’t want to know. They are frightened of women……They know very well that in different ways women are as courageous as they are.”

The same book had a chapter on the wartime experience of Helen Bamber and had something to say which, seventy years later,  seems totally relevant. In 1945, at the age of 20,  Helen Bamber volunteered to help survivors of the concentration camps.  She worked in Bergen-Belsen for two years.

Later, she chaired the British section’s of Amnesty International’s first medical group and in 1985, founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now known as Freedom From Torture).

In 2005, aged 80, she co-founded the Helen Bamber Foundation which had a broader remit,  including not only torture survivors, but those who had suffered other forms of human rights violations, including those brutalised by criminal gangs, trafficked for labour or sexual exploitation or kept as slaves by profiteers or families, who often sought international protection but continued to be dehumanised as liars, cheats or asylum seekers.

(Biographical details from The Guardian Obituary, Sunday 24 August 2014)

Helen Bamber died in 2014.

She said this about working with concentration camp survivors:

“I…realised that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t take away the horror. What did matter was to listen, to hold them as they rocked backwards and forwards, to receive the horror so that they did not hold it alone, to hold it with them.”

and she said this about official attitudes to the survivors:

“When Belsen was first liberated by the British Army, there was an atmosphere first of horror and disbelief, turning into compassion and anger. But as time went on compassion turned to irritation…they were seen as a nuisance, as is so often the case with present survivors of man-made catastrophes.”

Echoes of the migrants ‘swarming’ at Calais would you say? How have we come to this place, where we have a government committed to spending any amount of aid money to keep refugees out but refusing to play any part in a Europe-wide strategy to give sanctuary and care to dispossessed, hungry, frightened and, yes vocal, refugees? Germany is now the moral, as well as the economic, leader of Europe, while our government focuses on keeping refugees out and labelling them economic migrants in much the same way they have labelled the working and non-working poor as responsible for their own misfortune.  During the last war London was full of people of every nationality and they were welcomed,  poor or not.  In fact having money rather than being poor was a  cause of Anglo-US friction – “Over -paid, over-sexed and over here”.

The 8th Army, that’s the Desert Rats, was 25% British and three quarters ‘imperial’; it contained soldiers from Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda. The 14th Army, which fought the Japanese, contained soldiers from India, Nepalese Gurkhas, Kenyans, Nigerians, Rhodesians, Somalis and, oh yes, Englishmen. From a population of under 3 million 43000 wicked fenians from the neutral Irish Republic served in the British armed forces.

It’s called helping people when they’re in trouble.

Post-war, government after government fretted and havered about immigration while boarding houses displayed signs saying ‘No dogs, no Irish and no blacks’. It needed Wilson’s labour government to say publically at Conference something principled and forthright (the whole speech is worth reading if only to show how much ground we’ve lost since then):

We cannot take the risk of allowing the democracy of this country to become stained and tarnished with the taint of racialism or of colour prejudice. I want to make it clear that in the positive policies set out in the White Paper for assimilation, for absorption, for integration, we proceed from the proposition that everyone living in this country, everyone who has come in or will come in is a British citizen, entitled to equality of treatment regardless of origin or race or colour.
Leader’s speech, Blackpool 1965

Do we need another war or maybe just a change of government?

I don’t know whether to feel miffed or pleased to have been allowed in. I left when the first Blair government started to denigrate single mums as work-shy spongers, not least because my old mum was one and living partly off benefits, in her case a war widow’s pension.

I wish I’d stayed in a way because then I could have left over the over the Iraq war.

Anway, I’ve rejoined and I think I’ll be voting for Jeremy for leader and as deputy, for Caroline Flint. I’ve listened to the other leadership contenders and watched them trim this way and that as the Jeremy bandwaggon trundled happily along. I like Andy and I like Yvette despite her being married to Ed, who managed the scapegoating of Sharon Shoesmith and then defiantly tried to justify his bluster and bullying. The memory of a Labour Secretary of State running with a pack led by the Sun, Mail and Express was less than edifying. Andy is genuinely able and I like a lot of what he says. But, but, but…….Labour won’t win Scotland, won’t see off UKIP, won’t recruit shattered lib-dem voters  by fighting for the centre ground, and, if being electable means being quite like the Tories, what’s the point. They’ve gone after the poor, the disabled, the refugees, the education system, the health service, local democracy and local government. They’ve established a virtuous funding circle by selling off our state to business interests who then fund the Tory party from company profits – what’s not to like. But, I’m naive enough to believe in:

• social justice,
• equality of opportunity,
• that if you’re down you might need support not sanctions to drive that last nail in your coffin
  and
• that the market and global capitalism may not be our best hope for the future.

And I don’t believe an economic system that causes shortages of food and basic commodities in the name of profit makes much sense any more than I think asset-stripping the planet is a sustainable strategy.

Why didn’t young voters vote last time? Because they didn’t know that one of the parties had come out of struggle and martyrdom to fight for  oppressed and exploited working people. Without that history they were forced to look at what the parties said and, afraid of losing the centre, Labour trimmed and trimmed, terrified of upsetting anyone. So I’m voting for Jeremy. He may not form a government but he’ll certainly form an opposition that’s worth listening to. Of course the ‘free’ press will go for him and forecast calamity and chaos, but that’s what austerity is like now for many people.

Down in the far west of Cornwall are two Cornish communities about a quarter of a mile apart. One, down in the cove has always been a fishing community, the other up the hill, has always farmed. During the First World Way the men who volunteered or were drafted refused to serve alongside one another because they had never got on.

The world has shrunk a bit since then of course but the attitude still prevails especially when the going gets tough at home. In times of crisis we tend to emphasise difference; colour of skin, gender, faith (or lack of it), nationality, language and other things all allow us to hunker down into tribal animosity. Political parties, particularly on the far right, love difference; it gives them (and us) someone to blame. It’s a tried and tested technique; Hitler did it brilliantly . In the UK today the line is drawn between ‘hard-working families’ and benefit scroungers and benefit tourists and there is a strong lobby to cut foreign aid and look after those ‘nearer to home’. The truth is, I think, that the world’s problems are our problems and we can’t hide from them and prosper. That’s why I support Freedom from Torture, a charity which helps and supports victims of brutal and inhuman treatment whoever they are and wherever they come from. It’s not a popular cause in the way that animal and children’s charities are popular; most people don’t really want to think about the terrible crimes which are committed across the globe . This makes the charity even more important at times like these and I tell myself that every few pounds raised may make a difference to the recovery of a son or daughter or their parent.

It’s not easy for anyone to get into the U.K. these days and the initial experience of some refugees, already traumatised at the hands of brutal regimes or individuals, can be imprisonment in a detention centre.

I remember as a youth, sitting in the university common room reading ‘Time’ on Vietnam and thinking the world had gone mad. The most powerful country in the world was spraying toxic weedkiller, killing everything from jungle to subsistence peasants, all in the name of freedom. Mad then is a lot madder now. Fences to keep out refugees and an absolute bar on economic migrants (unless they’re very rich economic migrants) means, not gated communities keeping out the poor, but gated countries. Logically, in the end we’ll move from letting ‘them’ die to killing them. The Mail’s headline today (28th August ) read ‘Migrants: how many more can we take?’ The Guardian of August 10th clarified the ‘swarming’ that is claimed to threaten us:

Estimates suggest that between 2,000-5,000 migrants have reached Calais, which is between 1% and 2.5% of the more than 200,000 who have landed in Italy and Greece……In reality, the number of migrants to have arrived so far this year (200,000) is so minuscule that it constitutes just 0.027% of Europe’s total population of 740 million. The world’s wealthiest continent can easily handle such a comparatively small influx.

There are countries with social infrastructure at breaking point because of the refugee crisis – but they aren’t in Europe. The most obvious example is Lebanon, which houses 1.2 million Syrian refugees within a total population of roughly 4.5 million. To put that in context, a country that is more than 100 times smaller than the EU has already taken in more than 50 times as many refugees as the EU will even consider resettling in the future. Lebanon has a refugee crisis. Europe – and, in particular, Britain – does not.

Each asylum seeker in Britain gets a meagre £36.95 to live on (and they are not usually allowed to work to supplement this sum). In France, whose policies are supposedly driving up the numbers at Calais, migrants actually receive substantially more. According to the Asylum Information Database, asylum seekers in France receive up to £56.62 a week. Germany and Sweden – the two most popular migrant destinations – pay out £35.21 and £36.84 a week respectively, only fractionally less than Britain.

….the number of African migrants is significantly less than half (of the total). ……many of them – especially those from Eritrea, Darfur, and Somalia – have legitimate claims to refugee status.

Contrary to the perception of the UK as the high altar of immigration, it is not a particularly major magnet for refugees. In 2014, just 25,870 people sought asylum in the UK, and only 10,050 were accepted. Germany (97275), France (68500), Sweden (39,905) and Italy (35,180) were all far more affected. When the ratings are calculated as a proportion to population size, the UK slips even further down the table – behind Belgium, Holland and Austria. If the ratings were calculated on 2015 rates, then even impoverished Greece would rise above the UK in the table. Just as tellingly, the UK has welcomed just 187 Syrians through legal mechanisms at the last count. Turkey has around 1.6 million.

I remember reading somewhere that we’re all descended from Atilla the Hun but I’m not convinced. We do like our myths though don’t we? What are you, Saxon, Viking or maybe a Celt?

Sadly genetic evidence suggests “None of the above.” Most of the mixing which made our ‘island race’ took place a bit before that lot it seems; just after the last glacial maximum in fact. Glaciation wiped out any of our species in these islands and in lots of other places. The two refuges were in Iberia and central Europe. From there, mainly Iberia, people moved out. Those from central Europe tracked across and up to Northern Europe and some carried on walking until they got to Brighton, which in those days didn’t even have a pier. The Iberians walked up the Atlantic coast and walked over what was then land, to kick-start the plucky little English/UK tribes off, in Mesolithic and Neolithic times, 20000 or so years ago.

Angles contributed a few genes much later, around the 5th century (which might explain Norfolk) as did the Vikings but the Saxons and Normans gave us very few and that’s about it. The English, Welsh, Scots and Irish were around for a long time before these mini iron-age incomers and the dominant genes of most of us make us Basque(ish). So no Saxon grundling of the noble Celts and no replacement of a, or some, Celtic languages with Saxon. There were probably lots of different languages spoken in these islands by the time they really were islands after rises in sea level. In any case English has more in common with Scandinavian languages that Germanic ones. Imagine what the Tory party, let alone UKIP would make of us actually being part of the European mainland and being genetically ‘foreign’ to boot. As for Michael Gove……………………Hola

Who are we now though? Isn’t that a more interesting question?

It’s hard to talk about a ‘we’ really because we’re still tribal and regional so I’m going to focus on Daily Mail readers.

Well, we seem to dislike foreigners, especially if we can tell they’re foreign; skin colour, dress and first language are helpful here. We’re convinced we’re being swamped and are happy to have a government which commits to impossible ‘stop them coming or send them home if they manage to get in’ targets, even if that makes us racist, hurts the economy and ruins our university system. We don’t like Johny Foreigner. We tolerate a border agency that offers incentives for hitting ‘keep them out/send them back’ targets, ignores little things like being victims of torture and ensures that while they’re here they are poor, hungry, unemployed and stigmatised. We accept things like the hiring of a private jet in a failed attempt to deport a Nigerian who was near to death; it cost around £100,000 and failed because other countries wouldn’t let the aircraft land[1]! By the way, don’t you think the name Farage sounds a tiny bit foreign?

We don’t like the EU either. We think it’s a bureaucratic nightmare costing us squillians that would be better spent at home. We’ve forgotten that it came out of two world wars and that the federal project is meant to prevent another one and seems to be working. We don’t care if the legislation is about consumer protection, human rights or workers’ rights; we want a ‘flexible’ labour market (as long as immigrants can’t access jobs) so that employers can do what employers always do if they can, i.e. stuff the workers. O.K. economists and business leaders know that the consequences of leaving are frightening but we don’t care; China is buying a lot of Jags so we’ll be fine.

We think the rich deserve it and so do the poor. The rich create jobs (presumably by employing people to count all their money) and the poor are scroungers and ne’er-do-wells who need to be made to realise how awful they are by making them poorer, cold and hungry…particularly the disabled, the sick and the young. We also think the bloated public sector (all those doctors, nurses, teachers and the rest) needs selling off so that Capita et al can take what’s ours and make money from it.

Oh yes, and we believe in a small state, a bit like neo-cons in the States. We are a sovereign nation though, so it’s not all doom and gloom. Alright we are in thrall to the U.S. and a broken economic system that does little or nothing for most people, depletes non-renewable resources and is (not so) slowly killing the planet but we’re free to make those choices or will be once we leave the EU.

We don’t mind being occupied by foreign forces, as long as they’re American and ‘on our side’. Sadly, the US is not on our side and not always a force for good; it’s a force for the US. A large proportion of the US population (and ours) seem to think this means the same thing. This simple, if irrational elision starts with the US being a bastion of freedom and Christian values in a world of dangerous extremists and lefties opposed to free enterprise; it follows that anything the US does is good and anyone or thing which opposes the US is, necessarily, bad. It’s just a kind of extension of the old ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States’ syndrome – what’s good for the US is good for the world.

US forces are accommodated on 35 sites in Britain. Collectively, these occupy about 10 square miles. Of these sites, six are one square mile or larger and four host more than 1000 US personnel each. All US bases in Britain are advertised as Royal Air Force facilities. Approximately 16,500 US forces personnel are attached to US bases on British territory, compared with about 1,000 personnel of other nations’ forces. The largest US facility in Britain is Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk at 2.8 square miles with a personnel complement of over 5,000. This makes it larger in terms of size and personnel than the largest British RAF base, Brize Norton.

United States military and intelligence bases in Britain – a briefing, Quaker Peace & Social Witness Peace Campaigning and Networking Group

So, basically, we’re mainly Spanish and totally irrational. Thank goodness for long-haired, lefty Guardian readers.

[1] Observer, 01.12.2013

I’ve been trying to work out what drives the looney right in this country, apart, of course, from the fact that they are looney.
What, for example, would prompt a party in government committed to a slogan like ‘we’re all in it together’, to think in the lead-up to an election, that even more austerity, hammering the already well-hammered poor, ‘protecting’ not increasing inadequate health service spending and leaving the European Court of Human Rights so that ‘political control’ resides with parliament (i.e. them), are vote winners? That’s without even mentioning the EU and education!
I think I understand Nigel Farrago; he’s capitalising on the general disenchantment brought about by widening inequality and increasing austerity after bankers (largely Tory) ruined economies across the world. He’s a populist, happy to hoover-up the voters who’ve lost faith in mainstream parties. It happened in the UK and Germany in the thirties; Mosely was our Nigel then and the Germans went for a little Austrian bloke. Farrago is probably as genuine as he seems and a lot more likeable than oily (but earnest and statesmanlike) Dave or beseeching Ed. Personally though, I wouldn’t trust him to run the pub he drinks in let alone organise a party in a brewery. He might well be a genuine neo-con. and the health service would certainly not be safe in his very shakeable hands. He would though, stop all these foreigners ruining the country and leave the EU. Dave would too of course, whatever the cost, if he felt it right and the British people voted for it (looks earnest and statesmanlike as he says it).
Anyway, I actually think there might be obvious explanations for the right’s obsession with Europe, immigration and benefits. The last one, benefits is easy – by and large the looney right are not on benefits. They are thus a tad out of touch…………
Just after the war Winston asked to see what rations looked like.

“Not a bad meal, not a bad meal”,

he remarked when shown the latest rationing plans after the war.

“But these are not rations for a meal or even a day,”

an embarrassed colleague explained.

“These are for a week!”

There’s a fabulous book on London hotels during the war, ‘The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels’, by Matthew Sweet which details the life of the rich and ‘important’ during the war years. Life went on pretty much as it had always done at Claridges and the Ritz, except, of course, that foreign maitre d’hotels and chefs were interned. Basements were turned into luxurious air-raid shelters and the bubbly continued to flow. In the meantime government resisted access to the tubes at night and the provision of deep shelters for ordinary Londoners until the tubes were forcibly occupied and the East-end communists ‘invaded’ (for one night only) the Ritz (I think it was the Ritz) and were allowed into its shelter. Maybe George, the second-hand car salesman, thinks benefits are paid daily?

The fixation on the impact of immigration on our small and over-crowded island is trickier. On the whole the wealthy are pretty well insulated from all this too but voters aren’t and our ‘man-of-the-people’ Nigel, ex-city and ex-Tory Party member, has the ability to voice the fear and insecurity of largely white, conservatives (small c) who have seen dramatic changes to their communities coinciding with largely negative economic change; for them 2 and 2 do make 5 – it’s obvious whose fault it all is.

Immigration has been an issue in this country since at least the Second World War; actually since at least the sixteenth century when I come to think of it.

“Sundry persons being strangers … have of purpose brought their wives from the parts beyond the seas, to be delivered with child within this city, and in other places within this realm of England, and thereof do take special testimonials thereby to win to those children the liberty that other Englishmen do enjoy”.

Complaint, brought before the Court of Aldermen in London in 1576.

Post-war, the issue was how to attract New Commonwealth migrants as cheap labour but turned to a concern, and then a fear, that there might be too many of ‘them’ given the colour of their skin. Not unreasonably, men and women who had fought for the motherland during the war were interested in a better life here after the war. Successive governments agonised over what to do at a time when lodgings posted notices saying ‘no blacks, no Irish and no dogs’. Most governments backed off actually doing anything but the Wilson government introduced both immigration curbs and anti-discrimination legislation. Wilson said this at Conference:

”…everyone living in this country, everyone who has come in or will come in is a British citizen, entitled to equality of treatment regardless of origin or race or colour.”

It would be nice to think a politician would dare to say that now.

That government did other things too. Here are some examples from its first term:

• giving pensioners the right to free or concessionary bus fares;
  raising pensions;
• abolishing the earnings rule for widows and increasing the widows’ pension;
• abolishing prescription charges;
  providing security of tenure for families in their homes and putting an immediate stop to evictions;
• repealing the Tory Rent Act and providing machinery for fixing fair rents, and enabling the power to fight the evils of Rachmanism;
• legislating for statutory redundancy pay.

It would be nice to think a politician would dare to….oh I’ve already said that.

Why though, the equation of EU with evil empire? I think it might be because they know something’s wrong and have to blame someone or something. Clearly it must be the fault of foreigners that we no-longer have an empire, are not top-dogs and the price of a Porche is getting ridiculously close to some people’s meagre annual bonus. The EU hampers our freedom and the flexibility of our labour market; it’s stopping us getting rich, or in the case of the looney right, richer. Actually, they are right to blame foreigners for some of this – they’re just looking in the wrong direction; they need to look west not east in fact. During the First World War, Britain incurred debts equivalent to 136% of our gross national product and our major creditor, the USA, began to emerge as the world’s strongest economy. Even then, we weren’t quite all in it together. By the end of the war we were in quite different ‘its’ rather than standing in the same stuff! There’s quite a difference between clover, which the US was in, and our, less sweet-smelling, footing. For the UK, the end of the war, even without the flu deaths, was not about getting back to the way things were. More British than German workers were involved in strikes in 1919. Unemployment in 1921 reached its highest point (11.3%) since records had begun. Staple industries contracted and working women were forced gave up their jobs to returning soldiers.

Cuts in public spending were introduced in 1922 to ward off inflation and pay down debt and an ambitious reform programme, which included major public housing and health schemes, was not implemented – no homes fit for heroes. We never did repay to the US our First World War debts (or recover the money we lent to allies, including Russia) but in 2006 we finally paid off our World War 2 debt to the US. The price of US generosity in the Second World War was huge, even if we discount our bankruptcy. In exchange for US loans and lend-lease we gave all out technical secrets to the US, military and otherwise, including our advanced nuclear fission work (just after the war a US bill forbade any sharing of their nuclear research with any foreign country including us) and ceded territory and bases to our ally. Roosevelt joked, when he was told during the war that Britain was broke, that he’d just have a quick chat with Winston and take over the Empire. The Americans were, because of their own history, anti-imperialist and part of the price exacted was the end of Empire, ours anyway – hard to argue with that really. However it left the door open for the US to become a cultural and commercial imperialist on an unprecedented scale, not to mention an occupier of foreign territory: in 2011 a Republican claim that the the U.S. had 900 bases across 130 nations was checked against available statistics by Politifact.com and found to be credible – not bad for an anti-imperialist empire, I mean country.

It is a bit difficult to blame the US for our troubles though, especially if we are right-leaning in our politics; we’ve adopted their approach to business and education and are planning to do the same in health so it’s much easier to blame the Europeans and the bureaucracy of the EU with all its ridiculous legislation about

• health and safety,
• human rights,
• employment law,
• environmental protection,
• consumer protection,
• bendy bananas (just joking)
  and so on, which all gets in the way of our right to make our own decisions as British, well English really, right-wing loonies.

When Winnie went to the East End during the blitz,  put two fingers up and said,

”We can take it’’,

the response was,

‘‘You don’t bleedin-well ‘ave to!’’

After the war, in a bankrupt country, a labour government somehow found the money to give us a welfare system and the National Health Service.

It would be nice to think a politician would dare to….oh I’ve already said that, said that, said that………