Tarantula Man – baby-faced assassin

Tory ministers are falling over themselves to demonstrate their complete disregard for the civilities of political discourse. Yesterday it was Brexit Bulldog revealing that the papers he fought so hard to keep secret never existed. Overnight we heard from Spreadsheet Phil that the disabled were responsible for Britain’s dismal productivity. And now Tarantula Man, who a month ago engineered his own promotion to Minister of Defence, is calling for all British former Isis fighters to be hunted down and killed. Thereby descending to the same level as Isis – ordering summary execution of his enemies without legal process. Mr Williamson may look like a mortuary technician or a double-entry bookkeeper but he’s not a man to be messed with – he keeps a tarantula as a pet and if pressed, could tear the wings off a butterfly. It would be pointless to remind him that after 6 years of total war, the victorious allies detained and investigated prominent Nazis and wherever possible brought them before a War Crimes Tribunal. Futile because today’s Conservatives are right-wing extremists for whom the rule of law is just another obstacle to be bypassed. With this wretched form of words - “A dead terrorist can't cause any harm to Britain.” – he seeks to insulate himself from all criticism by implying that any who question him are guilty of wishing their country harm. A cynical explanation of his conduct (and this is a man who reportedly takes pride in his reputation as a cynic) would be that he is fully aware his plan would intensify Islamist grievances and inspire more terrorist attacks on civilian targets. Which in turn would raise the level of public fear to exploit for political advantage and pave the way for ever more authoritarian measures. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, “He’s a thoroughly good egg.”

Easter – a time for fury

Easter is a season with little in the way of comedy to mark its passing although the confectionery industry has always done its best to trivialise the occasion. The Passion and Resurrection may express an alternation of extreme darkness and light – a place for awe and wonder and redemption, but none for humour. So we should all be grateful to our Prime Minister for supplying some inadvertent light relief with her thoughts on the importance of the word “Easter”. Especially amusing in the context of her declared highest priority – bringing the nation together. For someone with no discernible sense of humour, Mrs. May has made a promising start as an entertainer, if nothing else.

On the very day that many were expressing their anger at the harsh and vindictive cuts in benefits for bereaved families the Mother of the Nation was herself roused to fury by the news that the National Trust has omitted the word “Easter” from what is now to be known, unforgivably, as a mere “Egg Hunt”. Earlier in the day she had rejected criticism of the bereavement benefit cuts, defending it as a ‘fair deal for taxpayers’. Nobody has asked her to provide examples of taxpayer grievance at the level of bereavement benefits. Where were the campaigns calling for lower benefits for the victims of bereavement? Who demanded deliverance from the outrageous financial burden imposed on us all by a selfish minority of our fellow citizens who insist on dying prematurely from incurable diseases? Back to the eggs – Mrs. May felt uniquely qualified to pass judgement on this vitally important issue as the offspring of a vicar and a member of the National Trust. Now is the time to take a stand against the tyranny of political correctness and its endless assault on our national religion. Mrs. May was visiting the Middle East to ‘bang the drum for Britain’ and sell even more consignments of lethal weaponry for the purpose of killing and maiming anyone incurring the displeasure of the purchaser. It would be interesting to hear Mrs. May explain what part of the Church’s Easter Message endorses this traffic in human slaughter.

Virtue Signalling for Beginners

It’s my view that the private lives of politicians should be respected as such. But when they choose to disclose details of their private lives we have the right to pay close attention. Almost 9 months have passed since my last comments on the world of current affairs in which time we’ve been introduced to Remoaners, Enemies of the People, Snowflakes, the new Party of Working People, Fake-news, Fake-Potus and Flotus, even Fake-lies, all of which I’ve let pass without comment, having nothing really to add to what has been much better expressed elsewhere. But yesterday’s news that the Prime Minister is abstaining from the consumption of crisps for the period of Lent has roused me from my torpor. 

There are many levels on which this is disturbing. Beginning with the scale of Mrs. May’s act of self-denial – we are told she is especially fond of salt and vinegar flavour so the inference is that this is a heroic sacrifice on her part. Withdrawal symptoms cannot be ruled out. If she plans to donate the money saved to charity it would over a period of 40 days be unlikely to exceed £10 unless she is given to uncontrollable bingeing (not a pleasant image). I would have been no less impressed if she had given up beetroot or chewing-gum or avocado or nail varnish. No less effective in drawing oneself closer to God. Who would dare to describe this behaviour as virtue-signalling? 

We might ask whether Mrs. May’s choice was designed to make a good impression on all those former Labour voters she is keen to embrace. Perhaps there’s a picture in her mind of the typical Labour voting family gathered in front of the TV on a saggy sofa, sustaining themselves exclusively on a diet of potato snack products. We must accept that between the fashion shoots for Vogue and the turkey-shoots with the Leader of the Opposition, there’s not much time for keeping in touch with ordinary people. So hats off to the May family for all the Happy Meals, Quiz Nights at the local, trips to the Tanning Salon and Car Boot sales where they keep the faith with their social inferiors. 

As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman Mrs. May stands firm in her Christian faith even if it takes a form not universally recognisable as such. She will insist on taking positions on refugees and immigration that fly in the face of the Church’s teaching on the value of charitable impulses and the relief of distress. And though the rich man may yet struggle to enter the kingdom of heaven, he can rest assured that Mrs. May’s first duty as Prime Minister is to defend his prosperity on earth. 

Politicians are notorious for evading responsibility for their actions by defining the terms of debate in the most restrictive and legalistic form. So if we should discover Mrs. May in the act of scoffing a tube of Pringles or cheerfully chomping her way through a jumbo-size bag of Doritos with a clear conscience, she would be ready with a reply. These products clearly do not meet any plausible definition of ‘crisps’, being triangular or parabolic aggregations of corn-starch. Mrs. May will take no lectures from those who would force the public to eat nothing but crisps for Lent. Still less from those who never eat crisps. 

The portrait was photographed on a building in Whitecross Street, Finsbury last September.

Hometown Brexit Blues

I normally avoid writing in the first person in this space. Politics rarely intrudes – I have no interest in offending readers. But when we are overwhelmed by a political catastrophe, it’s time to make an exception. I was born in the North East of England, 3 months after the war ended – a middle-class child and grammar school boy. Something about the region got into my bloodstream and the North East (rather than England) always felt like my spiritual home even though I was relocated to Metro-Land with my family from the age of 13. There’s a place in my heart for Metro-Land (an amorphous entity of surpassing strangeness when closely examined) but the North East (especially Sunderland and Hartlepool) has by far the greater claim on my affections. Perhaps the determining factor was a boyhood fascination with the hard-core industrial character of the place – a thrilling spectacle to an impressionable child of blast furnaces, coalmines, petrochemicals and shipyards.

Outside the urban areas was a pleasing variety of countryside to enjoy – majestic Pennine uplands to surprisingly verdant valleys. Plus the City of Durham – a special place with one of the most spectacular cathedrals in all Europe. Locals were neighbourly and affable in a North Country way and humour (often sharp and quick) was never far from the surface. Many had Scottish or Irish ancestry whose forebears had moved there in search of employment. From a North East perspective almost all of England lay in the South, a city like Sheffield might as well have been a land of palm trees and cocoanut groves. When I got to Metro-Land I learned that Sheffield was a dark and distant industrial dystopia.

It wasn’t a great surprise, but no less shocking for that, to discover on Friday morning that the voters of Sunderland and Hartlepool had voted in greater numbers for Brexit than almost anywhere else in England. A great white working-class electorate sent up a howl of protest against the ruinous effects of half a century of de-industrialisation where the dignity of labour for a majority has evaporated. The solidarity of the workplace has vanished in an atomised, insecure low-wage job market and social provision has been systematically and ruthlessly decimated in an ideological crusade to maintain a low-tax regime for the wealthy and tyrannise the unemployed into a world of zero-hours and short term contracts. Lifelong Labour voters finally responded to the question, “What’s Labour ever done for us?” by deserting the party in tens of thousands.

Just how did the last residual loyalty to the Labour tribe finally fray away? Perhaps the beginning of the end was Peter Mandelson’s term as MP for Hartlepool (“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”) during which New Labour did very little to tackle the desperation and deprivation of the nation’s former industrial heartlands. Was it accelerated by the coalition’s austerity-driven assault on social and welfare provision? Almost certainly. Did a 20 year tabloid (and broadsheet) campaign against the mostly fictional deficiencies of the EU play a part? Definitely. And did the utterly unscrupulous and venomous 12 year blitz of xenophobic propaganda by the same newspapers have an effect? Absolutely – otherwise how can the hostility to immigrants in a region that is one of the last destinations for migrants in search of employment be explained? This is a population, cynically groomed by masters of misinformation, opinion formers who would have served the Third Reich with distinction, given the opportunity. Easily persuaded to place the blame for all their discontents on outsiders and remote Brussels bureaucrats.

This is all deeply depressing but what is even more astounding is that these voters have placed their trust in Johnson and Gove, a Gilbert and George tribute act in which two slightly weird looking performers attempt to outdo one another with the scale and audacity of their lies. The fight-back against an oppressive establishment elite is to be lead by a pair of former journalists whose careers were built on their ability to distort the truth to fit the prejudices of their masters and readers. Their elitist credentials are impeccable – private income, public school, Oxford. Despite that they are essentially puppets of megalomaniac media proprietors. In the case of Johnson, the strings are pulled by the weirdo Barclay Brothers whose Daily Telegraph pages are besmirched by regular windy diatribes from the pen of Johnson – for which dubious services they pay him £250K per year. The Gove strings are pulled by Rupert Murdoch (CEO, News Corporation) by whom he was employed as a Times columnist for almost a decade. Gove is a regular around Murdoch’s dinner table – who knows what they talk about but I can say with total confidence that addressing social and income inequality has never been a topic for discussion. Johnson and Gove are two of the loudest cheerleaders for the callous neoliberalism that drove their new-found followers to despair. 

What next? Can the Labour party find the language to reconnect with its lost voters? Unlikely at present. Is there a Labour leader in waiting with the skills and personality to make a difference? Maybe – but I couldn’t name one. Can Johnson and Gove deliver the White Supremacist State that the worst of their followers believe they have been promised? If they lack the stomach for a programme of repatriation there are others with no such scruples. The recent ugly scenes in Newcastle may be just the start of something very much worse. Johnson and Gove are postmodern politicians – clever and shallow, puny in stature, devoid of conscience, no grace or gravitas. Will they persuade the Scots to remain in the Union? Do they command the necessary public trust to deal with the unravelling of the Good Friday Agreement? Watch them choke as they attempt the simultaneous ownership and consumption of cake. Their false promises and falsehoods exposed will be their undoing. And they will turn to us, hold out their hands and say – it was only ever a piece of performance art. Get over it.

Photographs of St. Andrew’s, Roker

The Lost Counties of Merrie England

About a week ago the Environment Agency announced restrictions on the use of water in the south of England. The television news displayed a map of the areas affected – Anglia, Thames, Southern, Veolia Central and Veolia South East. Some of my close relatives live in Veolia Central and they seem to be in complete denial on this point, clinging desperately to the mistaken belief that they live in Hertfordshire or Buckinghamshire. In what used to be known as Kent there is little recognition of the fact that they now reside in Veolia South East. This must be what the Prime Minister means when he speaks of transformational change – the ancient, obsolete and economically unproductive county names can safely be retired and in their place will be the illustrious names of our finest businesses. It’s another win-win, publicity for business (and recognition of their enterprise and achievement) and a handsome contribution to the local exchequer in return – more good news for the hard-pressed taxpayer. This is only a draft of what might result but we have tried to recognise some of the hidden hands that drive our economy whose innate modesty is reflected in their choice of names that entirely conceal their activities. There’s a place for the consultocracy – the companies that selflessly advise our great institutions on how to improve their performance by dismissing their employees, in return for a nominal sum. Some of the more obscure names belong to a new breed of companies (unkindly known to some as outsourcing vultures) bringing the disciplines of the private sector to tasks that used to be carried out at great expense by feather-bedded public sector timeservers with gold-plated pensions. Of course there are massive implications in terms of mapping, signage and postcodes but all too often this country has been held back by the special pleading of vested interests – this is a time for putting economic interests first and foremost going forward. Traditionalists can be expected to resist but their views can be disregarded as victims of false consciousness.

Vichy-on-Thames

When Britain’s coalition government came to power in May last year its intentions were rather fuzzy apart from the priority it would be giving to eliminating the deficit by imposing draconian cuts on public expenditure. What has since been revealed is that the real project is to bring about the final triumph of organised capital over public provision of services. Substitute organised capital for the Wehrmacht and the parallels with Vichy France are rather striking. Two nations in crisis, each with an untested form of government. Our coalition government, like the Vichy administration, is composed of politicians with a broad spectrum of views, many of whom have unhesitatingly abandoned their most cherished principles. The coalition claims that it has no choice but to follow its austerity policy because of the unprecedented incompetence and irresponsibility of its predecessors. (Mr Clegg, the leading collabo, in a recent interview with Channel 4 News, referred to the “appalling inheritance from Labour” no less than 7 times.) In the same way, Vichy blamed the failure of France to resist the German military advance exclusively on the moral laxity and cowardice of the Third Republic, especially the Popular Front, and claimed that they had no choice but to come to an accommodation with the occupying power. Thus we see how easily and effectively the banks and financial institutions in Britain and the armed forces and military leadership in wartime France were officially absolved of any responsibility for the crises facing their respective countries.

The coalition has embarked upon a cultural assault on the public sector - not simply held up as an example of chronic inefficiency and waste where employees allegedly enjoy higher wages and better working conditions (with gold-plated pensions) than their private sector equivalents but, even more damagingly, as enemies of private enterprise dedicated to obstructing entrepreneurship with red tape of their own devising and by extension, responsible for any failings on the part of British business. The success of this propaganda campaign can be measured by a recent opinion survey finding that 70 per cent of private sector employers would not consider employing a candidate who had previously worked in the public sector. There is, as yet, no proposal to draft former public sector employees into labour camps but it wouldn’t be inconsistent with this narrative.

In Vichy France a similar culture war was underway with the object of undermining any lingering pride in French cultural achievements and inducing a state of mind where the only realistic position was to acknowledge the cultural superiority of the invader. In Britain, business, in the form of any willing provider, is preparing for the ultimate assault on what remains of the public sector after three decades of looting the most profitable elements. The jewel in the crown is the NHS and legislation is on the way to insinuate private enterprise into the service wherever it can abstract value for redistribution into private hands. The most unequal country in Europe in terms of income distribution, social mobility, education, physical and mental health and trust has a government that has turned its back on these problems to pursue policies that are certain to intensify inequality.

How far can we push this analogy with Vichy? Mr Cameron lacks the distinguished military service to make a convincing Marshal Pétain and Mr Clegg is, physically at least, no Pierre Laval. Mr Pickles however, with his glorious history of defending the city of Bradford from the tyranny of Socialism, is an ideal candidate for the role of Pétain. Whether he possesses the vanity to commission 200,000 busts of his remarkable figure (Le Vainquer de Bradford) for display in public buildings, as Pétain did, is something I hope we never find out. It would be interesting to know if even the Vichy régime had a philosopher in its ranks who could match the perverse brilliance of Mr Duncan-Smith when he recently remarked that placing extra cash in the hands of the poor often had the effect of making their lives worse. I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that he has not been heard to deploy this argument in the vexed matter of bankers and their bonuses where it might make some sense. It would take the proverbial heart of stone not to be moved by the tortuous utterances of the Quiet Man as he struggles to reconcile an over-sensitive social conscience with a fundamentalist adherence to the sacred principles of free market economics.