Don’t drop the ‘H-bomb’

It is a temptation that is all too easy to give in to.  You either cannot be bothered, or are intellectually incapable of arguing your case on its own merits.  Instead you look for a single world that can be deployed to demonstrate just how important your case is.

Sean Spicer – the man charged with keeping a straight face while announcing the latest twists and turns that pass for Donald Trump’s policies – is merely the latest high profile individual to come unstuck.  Rather than resist temptation, Spicer dropped the H-bomb. 

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Spicer told journalists, was worse than Hitler, because – in the alternative universe of the Trump White House – Hitler never gassed his own people.

Even the most rabidly Trump-supporting, Fox News journalists’ jaws dropped to the floor at this point; since it is precisely because Hitler did gas an awful lot of his own and especially other countries’ people that he is treated as the yardstick against which evil is measured.  After all, there are plenty of dictators who were/are adept at murdering their own people – Stalin may even have beaten Hitler on absolute numbers, while you would have to go a long way to beat Pol Pot on percentages.  Starting wars of aggression is no big deal either – even the freedom-loving USA has engaged in wars of aggression when its economic interests were threatened.  No, what marks the Nazi regime out as uniquely evil was the ruthlessly organised rounding up and industrial slaughter of Germany's and Europe’s Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, political opponents, disabled people and the mentally ill.

That’s the point.  You cannot trump Hitler.  Whichever regime or dictator you are seeking to vilify, whatever crime you are accusing them of having done, the fact is that it was nowhere near as bad as the organised atrocities carried out by the Nazis.  To suggest otherwise automatically means that you belittle and trivialise the Holocaust.

Unlike many on the left, I do not believe that Sean Spicer intended to deny the Holocaust.  His remarks were simply unthinking and ill-advised.  In the same way, I do not believe that Ken Livingstone was being intentionally anti-Semitic when he made the historically contentious claim that Hitler had once aligned himself with Zionists.  The point is that Livingstone’s comments had no bearing on the argument he was trying to make, which boil down to “anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Zionism;” which I guess we already knew.  And clearly, even an unintended implication that what Israel (and Egypt, by the way) is doing to Palestinians in Gaza is on a par with murdering at least six million people and launching a war of aggression that resulted in perhaps 80 million deaths, is simply inflammatory.

The backlash is inevitable.  Instead of looking at the alleged crimes of Assad or the Israeli state, the media spotlight is immediately focussed on the motives of the person who dropped the H-bomb.  Livingstone’s alleged anti-Semitism looks set to cast a shadow over the British Labour Party right up to the next General Election.  The best Spicer can look forward to is to be a figure of ridicule from now on – how on earth are we to give credence to anything that issues from the mouth of someone who apparently didn’t even know that the Holocaust was a thing?  More likely, Spicer will be asked to resign, and will be lucky to get a position in United Airline’s PR department.

These are just the high profile cases.  But they are an echo of a much deeper seated malaise in our modern discourse.  Although for the most part we avoid dropping the H-bomb directly, far too many of us are in the habit of doing so obliquely.  As George Orwell observed as early as 1944:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else…

“All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

Things have only got worse since then.  In 2017, dropping the H-bomb or its F-bomb cousin has become no more than a foolish ad hominem attack.  As with Spicer and Livingstone, the result is that it detracts from the case you are trying to make.  In a sense, it serves to trivialise the horrors committed by the Nazi regime.  At the same time it lets your opponent off the hook.  Farage, Cameron, May and Trump can quite reasonably profess outrage at being compared to Hitler; and their outrage becomes the story.

If you are going to call people names, at least take the trouble to find out what those names mean.  Because people stop listening when it is all too clear that:

“On the Left, the word “fascist” is frequently used to mean “authoritarian-seeming person I don’t like,” or sometimes “militant racist.” It’s just a term of abuse, and the Left has plenty of those already. Maybe if people read the definition, they’ll realize the absurdity of using the term in connection with perfectly lovely people like Pope Benedict XVI.”

As should be patently obvious to anyone on the left at this point, dropping the H-bomb is simply bad tactics.  Not only doesn't it work, it is counterproductive.  It drives the very people we need to win over into the arms of the very people we seek to defeat.  How do we know? Because Donald Trump.  Because Theresa May.  Because Brexit.  Because who knows what in 2017?

So next time you are tempted to drop an H-bomb or an F-bomb, remember what happened to Sean Spicer and Ken Livingstone, and just don't do it.

Looking through the wrong lens?

Sigmund Freud observed that when someone is desperately trying to suppress something, they will likely give themselves away unconsciously.  Thus, the idea of the “Freudian slip” was born.  Why do I bring this up?  Because Britain’s liberal elite just made an almighty Freudian slip – unconsciously giving away its deep-seated fear and hatred of Muslims. I speak, of course, about the unconscious response to events last Tuesday which may or may not have been an attack on Parliament.

Let me ask you this – how do we know that this was a terrorist attack? 

The only rational answer is that we do not.  We assume that it was a terrorist attack.  But – at the time of writing – nobody in an official investigatory role has yet put forward conclusive evidence for this assumption, and we are beginning to see signs that it may not have had anything to do with terrorism.  In the end, it will take a coroner’s court hearing (together with any other official inquiries that take place) to establish the full facts behind the case.

Now, I am not saying that it was not an act of terrorism (which would have to be an organised conspiracy for political ends, not the violent act of a lone individual). I am simply saying that at this point we do not know.  We are currently dealing with narrative rather than fact.  It is a narrative that began with the first pictures of the attacker – a man with brown skin and a beard – on the floor with an armed policeman standing over him.  Just consider for a moment whether the media would have leaped to Islamic terrorism if the attacker been a white male who had gone on the rampage or if a car had been driven into a crowd somewhere other than Westminster.

It is entirely understandable that the security services treated the attack as terrorism.  Without a doubt they will have put into action a tried and tested emergency plan for securing Westminster in the event of a potential terrorist threat.  They will have followed the plan to the letter, and unclouded by personal assessments of the situation.  Obviously the plan needed to err on the side of safety.  So any perceived attack on Parliament will have been treated as terrorism.

The media together with our political leaders have no such justification.  Their task is to ask questions, raise doubts and interrogate the evidence.  Failure to do so can lead to injustice.

In the same way as media coverage of the Hillsborough disaster resulted in the widespread belief that the cause was drunken fans – an injustice that took decades to overturn – the media coverage of events last Tuesday have created the belief that “Britain” has been the victim of a terrorist attack. Confirmation bias will do the rest – ensuring that evidence that supports the terrorist hypothesis will be brought into focus while anything that casts doubts will be brushed over.

To arrive at the Islamic terrorism narrative the media and politicians had to put on a particular pair of lenses.  These brought certain facts into focus while blurring many others.  Most obviously – and this is why I charge the liberal elite with fear and hatred toward Muslims – the fact that the perpetrator had brown skin and a beard, later turned out to be a convert to Islam and had once gone to teach English in Saudi Arabia was taken as sufficient proof that he was a terrorist.  Because, all brown skinned and bearded Muslim men (especially those who have visited Saudi Arabia) are terrorists, right?  (This is what passes for reason in UKIP and the English Defence League, not what we should expect from our political representatives or supposedly respectable journalists at the BBC).

The point is hammered home by the fact that the attacker crashed his car into the wall outside Parliament, stabbed and killed a policeman, before being gunned down just inside the grounds of Parliament.  After all, that’s a little bit like those lorry attacks in Brussels, Nice and Berlin (except they involved hi-jacked articulated lorries because these would cause far more damage than a 4x4 – whereas this was more akin to entirely non-terrorist incidents involving cars mowing people down).  Confirmation apparently came when someone purporting to speak for ISIL claimed that this was their work (although ISIL would lay claim to every car crash, stabbing or gas explosion in the UK if someone else didn’t claim them first).

It is these facts – brought into focus and then amplified by Westminster’s liberal elite – that established this as an act of terrorism in the public mind.  An act, by the way that many among the supposedly anti-Islamophobic political left also unconsciously accepted as a terrorist attack – thereby displaying their own unconscious fear and distrust of Muslims – when they rushed to vacuously point out that not all Muslims are terrorists.

At this point, you might reasonably object that there can be no alternative explanation.  “We are not being Islamophobes; we are simply weighing the evidence.”  After all, what happened was pretty terrifying.  And since events concluded in the grounds of Parliament, surely that means that our democracy, Parliament, the political establishment, the government, Ministers or MPs must have been under attack, right?

Let me offer an alternative explanation – not one that I claim to be true or intend to diminish the horror of the event; but one that, using a different set of lenses allows us to bring certain other facts to the foreground while easing Islam and the political establishment in Parliament further back. 

It turns out that the perpetrator – n. Adrian Russell Elms, aka. Khalid Masood – was an unlikely terrorist; known to the security services, but not on their terrorism radar.  His background, however, speaks of a highly disturbed individual.  The product of a broken home back in the early 1960s when that still carried huge social stigma, Elms/Masood had a track record of juvenile delinquency that led on to an adult life punctuated by occasional spells in prison as a result of various offenses; several involving extreme violence.  Having spent a somewhat transient life, most recently he appears to have rekindled a relationship and moved in with a previous partner in Birmingham.  However, about a month ago the relationship appears to have broken down.  Most recently, Elms/Masood had been staying in a cheap hotel in Brighton.

We all know what happened next.  But at this point we do not know why – and since Elms/Masood is now dead, we will never know for sure what was going through his mind when he drove to London and mowed down 40 tourists on Westminster Bridge prior to his final rendezvous with the security services in the grounds of Parliament.

As Simon Jenkins noted in the Guardian on Wednesday:

“As yet, nothing is known of the motive. All that can be said is that the attacker failed to enter parliament itself. Bystanders were killed and injured, but the massive security inevitable for such an institution was effective in protecting its occupants.” (My emphasis)

What I can say, is that when BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran an item profiling Elms/Masood on Thursday morning, what I heard was strangely reminiscent of a phenomena that emerged in the USA in the 1990s, and came to be known as “blue suicide” or “suicide by cop.”  Again, I need to be clear that I am not saying that this is what happened, I am merely pointing out that it is a credible alternative explanation in which Islam and politics fade into the background.

What we do know about some men who commit suicide is that they have a tendency to impulsive violence and self-destructive behaviour.  Homicide/suicides (in which men kill others before killing themselves) happen roughly once every six weeks in the UK.  Most often they go unreported outside the local papers because the only people murdered are the family of the murderer/suicide victim – tragic but not, apparently, newsworthy.  Sometimes when cases are particularly bloody they do make the news– such as this example from South Wales.  Occasionally, male suicide involves extreme violence that can be directed at random members of the public.  We also know that seaside resorts like Blackpool and Brighton are favoured spots for many potential suicide victims because of the anonymity provided in the B&B/cheap hotel districts.  Strangers come and go unnoticed, and hoteliers do not pry into guest’s private affairs.

One thing we might also consider is that most of the various government suicide reduction programmes since the early 2000s have focused on removing the means of suicide rather than providing services to help suicidal people.  Access to high buildings, for example, is far more difficult today than it was twenty years ago.  Bridges often have netting beneath them to prevent people leaping to their deaths.  This makes the kind of active/public suicide often favoured by men extremely difficult in modern Britain.  Combine this with a sense of grievance toward the public at large and a tendency to violent behaviour, and suicide by cop becomes a plausible explanation.  Elms/Masood’s version of Islam may have further distorted his mental state by allowing him to see himself as some kind of martyr.  But even if not, I can think of no better way of getting yourself shot to death by the security services than by running up to the gates of parliament armed with a knife and shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”  Not only this, but you would be hard pressed to think of anywhere else in Britain that such as response by the police and/or security services would be guaranteed.

Could what happened on Tuesday be suicide by cop?  It might be I have no idea.  In the same way, I have no idea whether it was Islamist terrorism.  Both are possible.  And it is instructive that five days later, the BBC conceded that:

“Westminster attacker Khalid Masood acted alone and there is no information to suggest further attacks are planned, Scotland Yard has said…

“We must all accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this. That understanding may have died with him”

However, the liberal elite’s rush to judgement means, in a sense, that it no longer matters.  For them, this was terrorism long before Elms/Masood got in his car and headed for Brighton.  Why? because in a strange perverted way they needed their terrorist attack.  Rather like the Queen (the current monarch’s mother) at the height of the Blitz in 1940 expressing relief that Buckingham Palace had been bombed: “I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye.”  Following Elms/Masood’s actions, Britain's liberal elite can look Paris, Brussels, Nice and Berlin in the eye.

Here, perhaps, is the problem.  In rushing to satisfy that strongly emotive desire for shared victimhood with our European neighbours, their rush to judgement admits their unconscious and deeply buried belief that Muslims and terrorism really are intimately linked.  And for all of the huffing and puffing about not being Islamophobic, our elites demonstrate precisely how terrified they really are.  Again, in this Simon Jenkins appears to be the one sane voice emanating from the Westminster bubble:

“Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”

Whatever the liberal elite may claim to the contrary, the reality is that by labelling Tuesday’s events as terrorism and responding accordingly long before any evidence had/has been gathered, our politicians and our mass media have demonstrated for the world to see that they are just as fearful of Muslims as the extremists on the political right – the only difference is that the liberal elite are usually better at hiding it.

If you think Trump is bad, wait until you see what comes next

 In it's coverage of the US election, the British media has largely focused on personalities.  In doing so, it is impossible not to spend a lot of airtime talking about the flamboyant (to put it mildly) personality of billionaire former Apprentice host Donald Trump.  A great deal of this is the result of Trump’s own overt racism and misogyny.  But the Clinton campaign has a good deal of responsibility for this too.  This is because they are running a carbon copy of David Cameron’s failed Brexit campaign.

Hillary Clinton is the US Remain candidate; the self-proclaimed safe pair of hands who will maintain business as usual for the next four years.  Like the British Remain campaign, there is no vision of the bright future that Americans can look forward to if Hillary wins.  Instead, the mainstay of the campaign is about just how awful her opponent is, and just how horrible things are going to be if people are dumb enough to vote for him.

As David Cameron discovered – to his, and our, cost – there comes a point when your austerity policies have ground a sufficient number of faces into the mud, that people will vote against anything that the government supports… even Brexit… even Donald Trump.

The problem for those of us on the eastern side of the North Atlantic is that our media rarely reports on the domestic politics of the USA.  This leaves us fondly believing that the presidential election is something akin to a British general election.  Trump and the Republicans are assumed to be something like the UK Tory party, while Clinton and the Democrats are assumed to be like Labour.  In reality, Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party what Tony Blair failed to do to New Labour; turning it into the centre right, establishment party.  This forced the Republicans to breakdown into an approximation of UKIP, containing warring factions of Tea Party head-bangers, Christian fundamentalists and gun fanatics… although still presided over by Washington insiders who had no intention of ever delivering on the  promises they made to their followers.

A more accurate way of viewing the current US election would be to imagine a contest between Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage.  Seen in this way, you begin to understand why so many women and black voters look set to stay at home, even if this gives the presidency to someone as hateful as Trump.  It is why at least a minority of Bernie Sanders’ supporters look likely to actually vote for Trump, while many more will support Jill Stein.  And it is why, despite all of the Trump scandals, not only is he still in the race, but he appears to be overtaking Clinton.

Dig beneath the surface of the official statistics that the Clinton campaign uses to claim that all is well with the US economy, and you discover a more disturbing picture.  While those fortunate enough to hold salaried positions within the orbits of Wall Street, the Washington Beltway and Silicon Valley continue to enjoy six- and seven-figure salaries and all of the benefits of a globally integrated economy, Middle America has been decimated.  As American essayist John Michael Greer observes:

“I suspect that a great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now among working class white people. These are my neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.”

One cannot help but notice the similarities that underlay the British vote to leave the European Union.  As Guardian journalist John Harris warned in the weeks leading up to the vote:

“Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood…

“In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham, Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging that they threatened to turn into clichés, but all the more powerful because of their ubiquity. “I’m scared about the future” … “No one listens to us” … “If you haven’t got money, no one cares.”

Promising business as usual to millions of families in the respective rust belts of the UK and USA is simply not going to work.  All of the hope that swept Obama into office has been spent.  Nobody is listening to the political class anymore because (just like Tony Blair’s fictitious “third way”) it was a confidence trick.  As Greer points out:

“The talking heads insisted that handing over tax dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs back to American communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax dollars and walked away. The talking heads insisted that if working class people went to college at their own expense and got retrained in new skills, that would bring jobs back to American communities; the academic industry profited mightily but the jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of people buried so deeply under student loan debt that most of them will never recover financially. The talking heads insisted that this or that or the other political candidate would bring jobs back to American communities by pursuing exactly the same policies that got rid of the jobs in the first place—essentially the same claim that the Clinton campaign is making now—and we know how that turned out.”

When Trump says he is going to tear up the trade treaties that allowed corporations to move people’s jobs to Asia, it resonates.  When he tells Ford’s executives that if they move their factories to Mexico, he will slap a 35% tariff on them so that they will never sell another car in America, it resonates.  When he tells the member states of NATO that they have to pay their fair share if they want to remain in the club, it resonates.  These are the messages that have brought thousands of people to Trump rallies.  They are the messages that the media has largely ignored.

Perhaps it takes a comedian to draw the conclusion that nobody else want to make.  US comic Bill Burr (contains swearing) points out that:

 “If Trump wasn’t such a jerk-off, it’s really what the country needs.  You need somebody who isn’t part of the f***ing system…”

In this, the Clinton campaign’s decision to focus on Hillary’s long career in politics is backfiring in exactly the same way as Cameron’s decision to use a parade of establishment figures to warn of the dangers of leaving the EU backfired.  When the people – or at least a large enough minority of them – have lost faith in the system, you have to demonstrate how you are going to change things.

Will Trump deliver?  We may never know.  The US Electoral College system awards Hillary Clinton around 100 delegates before the election has begun because of the Democratic Party’s control of California and New York.  Even if Trump wins the popular vote, Clinton is still favourite to win the election.  But Trump can still do it if he is able to swing key states like Florida (where Bush defeated Gore 16 years ago).

While a Trump victory is likely to produce the sort of media hysteria that followed the UK referendum result, Trump is no more likely to be able to deliver on his promises than are the Leavers in the UK.  Trump will have to sway a resentful congress to deliver on his domestic policies.  And while he will have more freedom of movement in foreign affairs, the military-industrial complex is unlikely to roll over if the trillions of dollars of military spending (and all of the jobs that go with it) is threatened.

This hints at a deeper and far more troubling problem.  If Clinton wins – as is most likely – things will stay as they are.  Inequality will increase.  Poverty will worsen.  US taxpayers will continue to bail out a finance and banking industry that should have been allowed to crash eight years ago.  The US will become ever more embroiled in foreign wars from which it has no idea how to extricate itself.  It will continue to support global corporations at the expense of domestic jobs.  It will continue to incarcerate a third or more of its black population.  And gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.

If, on the other hand, Trump wins, it is highly unlikely that he is going to reverse the ills of four decades of globalisation and neoliberalism.  The power of the corporate lobby in Washington more or less guarantees that what few reforms a Trump presidency is able to deliver will favour the already wealthy… most likely at the expense of the poor.  And gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.

As Greer warns us:

“Thus the grassroots movement that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in the teeth of the GOP establishment, and has brought him to within a couple of aces of the White House in the teeth of the entire US political class, might best be understood as the last gasp of the American dream. Whether he wins or loses next week, this country is moving into the darkness of an uncharted night—and it’s not out of place to wonder, much as Hamlet did, what dreams may come in that darkness.”

Four year from now (if not before) the anti-establishment leader who emerges to take on the Washington insiders is unlikely to have the kind of skeletons that fell out of Trump’s closet on the road to 8^th November.  But he or she may have all of the racism, misogyny and misanthropy of the very worst kind of right-wing populist… a candidate with all of the skills and none of the flaws of Trump.  In the absence of a serious shift in economic and social policy, American democracy would struggle to defeat such a figure… still less outlast one.

Really?!!

Do you remember the night the paramilitary wing of the Conservative Party went around smashing the windows of Polish shops across Britain?  What about that time they set up a socialist sympathiser to burn down the houses of parliament?  Perhaps you remember how they used that incident as a pretext to ban opposition parties and to arbitrarily detain anyone considered to be a political opponent?  What about that night when they rounded up many of their own supporters and had them shot?

No, nor me. 

But reading articles on the blogosphere, posts on social media, and listening to comments from people who should know better, you might be forgiven for thinking that Britain had recently experienced some kind of Nazi coup.

These sentiments trivialise the experience of the millions of people who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis in the 13 years that the “Thousand Year Reich” existed.  Putting yourself on a par with Europe’s murdered Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled children and people with mental illness because your country is about to adopt the immigration policy operated by the EU, but on a national level arguably amounts to Holocaust denial and is at best an example of the childish whining of affluent liberal privilege that lets the Tories and their paymasters off the hook.

This aside, the idea that anything much has changed about the Conservative Party – or those factions in the UK that they appeal to – is little more than a collective lapse of memory.  The Tories always were the party of imperialism.  They have racism in their blood.  In the 1920s and 30s, they happily ordered the use of chemical weapons against rebellious tribesmen in those parts of the Empire that they could no longer afford to police.  Let us not forget that under the Tories in the 1930s, Jewish refugees were routinely refused asylum in the UK.  Even after war had broken out, in 1940 Churchill ordered the internment of refugees alongside their some of their Nazi oppressors on the Isle of Man.  It was only after the war that the Tory establishment chose to highlight the minority of cases – such as the privately-funded Kindertransports – where Britain did grant refuge, in order to gloss over the way they had actually behaved.

Nor did things improve much after the war.  Does anybody remember Peter Griffiths?  Griffiths was elected to Parliament in the 1964 general election in what should have been the safe Labour seat of Smethwick.  What was the election slogan that is thought to have swung thousands of traditional Labour voters behind him?  “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”  Four years’ later we had Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech.  And in the 1970s and 1980s we had to put up with the casual racism of the Thatcherites – remember Norman Tebbit’s “cricket test”?  What about Teddy Taylor calling for Nelson Mandela to be shot?  Let us not forget that the Thatcher government – apparently regarding Powell’s warning as a target – managed to kick off race riots in such places as St. Pauls, Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth.  And that strand of Tory racism didn’t end in the 1980s either.  More recently, we were treated to Zac Goldsmith’s attempt to channel  Peter Griffiths in the campaign to become London Mayor.

Beyond party politics, anyone who stood on a football terrace in the 1970s and 1980s will be thoroughly confused by the idea that there is anything new about racism and racial hatred among Britain’s working class.  Indeed, prior to the Race Relations Act, trade unionists were often among the worst supporters of racial division and discrimination – particularly at the workplace and branch level.

No doubt black and minority communities that have suffered decades of both institutional and casual racism will also be wondering why it is that middle England has only just discovered that racism is a thing.  

As Ian Leslie at the New Statesman says of middle class liberal shock:

“One way to think about the [Brexit] vote is that it has forced a slightly more equitable distribution of anxiety and alienation upon the country…  I feel like a big decision about my life has been imposed on me by nameless people out there. But of course, this is exactly how many of those very people have been feeling for years, and at a much higher level of intensity.”

Sadly, the failure of social democracy (which we are seeing across the developed world) to respond to the needs of working class people in the ex-industrial regions has helped to fuel the emergence of extreme right wing populist parties like UKIP, Golden Dawn and the Five Star Movement.  In the UK this has not been helped by 40 years of politicians from all parties blaming Europe for every unpopular policy they chose to implement, while shouting at the top of their lungs that there was no alternative.

What is less obvious is that the centre-right is also in crisis.  David Cameron only promised the Brexit referendum as a device to win voters from UKIP in May 2015.  He no doubt assumed that he would find himself in another coalition with the LibDems, who would force him to drop the proposed referendum.  When this backfired, he blithely assumed that he could win the referendum using the same “project fear” that won the Scottish independence referendum. Given the choice between business as usual and a gamble that things just might improve by leaving the EU, 17.5 million Britons voted to leave.  (Still, at least UKIP is in meltdown – so we can congratulate Cameron for achieving one of his aims).

Teresa May is, of course, desperately trying to clear up the mess.  A large part of this project involves making the requisite noises on immigration to appease the sizeable UKIP tendency within the Tory Party while she desperately seeks a way of delivering a form of Brexit that meets the needs of the Tories’ elite corporate backers.  The reason that, for May just like Humpty Dumpty, “Brexit means whatever I want it to mean” is precisely because the moment anyone writes down what it actually means, the Tory Party will rip itself apart.  Anything short of a complete and unequivocal withdrawal from the EU will send the head-bangers rushing for the exit.  Anything short of full access to the single market (with all that that implies) will send the centrists over to the Blairites, LibDems and (out of self-interest) the SNP, with the possibility of an anti-Brexit national government.

It is hardly a coincidence that the left is also split.  Neither the Blairites nor the Momentum movement has put forward a realistic alternative to the Tories.  Nor is it likely that the millions of working class voters who haven’t been roused to join the Labour Party in order to back Corbyn (still less Owen Smith) are going to twiddle their thumbs until the left finally gets around to developing a manifesto that at the very least addresses the hardships that they have had to put up with for the last couple of decades. In the absence of this alternative, these millions may well be persuaded to tip the balance once more in favour of a right-wing agenda.

Herein, perhaps, is the most important lesson we should draw from the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  For while those who wish to associate the current Tory Party with the Nazis are quick to point to the fact that the Nazis were elected (although Adolph Hitler was not – he was roundly defeated in the 1932 Presidential election by Paul Von Hindenberg 53% to 37%); they neglect to point to the fact that the Nazis never had a majority.  The reason they were able to take power was because the much larger German left was divided between the social democrats and the communists, who each chose to regard the other as a greater threat than the Nazis.

Today there is far more common ground in practice between the left social democracy of Corbyn (who is no more a communist than May is a fascist) and the centrist social democratic Blairites within the parliamentary labour party.  Nevertheless, at a moment of extreme national crisis (itself reflecting a growing international crisis) it is the left that has chosen to publicly rip itself apart.

If you are really concerned about fascism you would do well to ignore Teresa May’s Tories altogether.  After all, that particular leopard will never change its spots.  It will play on fear of immigration and hatred of the other to divide and conquer.  But this can only work if it faces a divided opposition that can offer no alternative (beyond turning the clocks back to 1997 or 1983) to speak to the contemporary needs of millions of ordinary people.  As the ill-fated Mr Miliband demonstrated last year, that “alternative” has to be something more radical than standing a cigarette paper’s width to the left of Amber Rudd.

So if you really want to do something that counts, stop empowering the Tories by responding to their agenda.  Instead, start banging some Labour heads together and remind them that this is not about them.  They are there to represent the interests of ordinary working people (the clue is in the name) and if they feel that is too much for their fragile egos to handle, then perhaps like the rest of us when faced with a job we don’t like doing, they should stand down and let someone else take their place.  It is Labour (and Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru and even LibDem) MPs who will determine how this national crisis pans out.  It is about time they got their heads out of their collective arses and got on with the job.

You still don’t get it do you? Europe doesn’t want you back

It is hard to underestimate the shock of the Brexit vote last Thursday.  Nobody expected it… and I mean nobody.  Even Farage had conceded defeat by 11.00pm on Thursday night.  Come Friday morning, the reason pro-Brexit Tories like Johnson and Gove look so glum was that the British people had just handed them a live hand grenade – this was meant to be political theatre in which Vote Leave would graciously lose, and Johnson could go back to his party and say, “well I tried.  Give me the leadership and we’ll do better next time.”  Not for a moment did these people think they were actually going to have to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Since Friday – with the exception of the Parliamentary Labour Party; who have decided that now is the right time to put sordid self-interest ahead of addressing the biggest national crisis since Dunkirk – British politics has been taken up with damage limitation.  Prominent Vote Leave campaigners have made clear that they have absolutely no idea what Brexit means, still less a plan for carrying it out.  Leave voters across the country have come forward to explain that they had only intended their vote as a protest.  Labour MP David Lammy has called for Parliament to end the insanity by simply refusing to accept the referendum result.  LibDem leader Tim Farron has promised to stand at the next election on a manifesto to overturn the Brexit vote.  In the media, even arch-Eurosceptics like the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie are regretting voting to leave on what has turned out to be an entirely false prospectus.

On the Brexit side of the vote, victory has descended into outbreaks of racial abuse, as foreign nationals have been told to pack their bags and f*** off home!  Britain has held a mirror up to its face and the picture we have seen is ugly and dangerous.

Many of the 48.1% of people who voted to Remain are outraged.  In Scotland, the most likely result is a new independence referendum as the only mechanism for keeping Scotland in the EU.  In the metropolitan cities of England and Wales there have been big pro-EU demonstrations.  Campaign groups have been formed with the explicit aim of overturning the Brexit vote.

In all of this British naval gazing, one ominous fact is being overlooked: THE EU DOES NOT WANT BRITAIN!  That’s right; the EU has reached the end of its tether.  For 40 years they have had to put up with British exceptionalism – opt-outs here, rebates there, and all the while British politicians and journalists blaming all of the ills of their collapsing society on Brussels. 

Although European governments are as concerned about the economic damage caused by the Brexit vote, they at least had the wit to prepare for it.  In Britain, we can thank Bank of England officials for developing contingency measures that an arrogant Prime Minister simply assumed would never be needed.  But there are always advantages in an economic crisis if you can position yourself correctly.  France will be delighted by Britain’s departure – and not just because of all the bad blood from Crecy to Waterloo.  In the EU as currently constituted France is the junior partner among the big three EU economies (Germany, Britain and France).  Take out Britain and the EU becomes a Franco-German duopoly.  Germany – by far the strongest economy in Europe has always looked enviously at the primacy of the City of London as Europe’s financial centre.  With Britain out of the way, and the City no longer bolstered by the economic stability of the single market, Frankfurt can finally emerge as the 21^st century financial capital of Europe.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the world yesterday that: “We can see no way to turn this around.  It's not a time for wishful thinking, but of contemplating the reality” she was not making a legal case.  In fact there are 1001 legal means of preventing withdrawal from the EU from happening.  What Mrs Merkel was really saying was “Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.”  Quite simply, even if British politicians attempt to find a means of reversing the referendum result, EU leaders are not going to allow it – the people have spoken; you must abide by their decision.

The EU is not going to dance to Britain’s tune any more.  As things stand, Britain is clinging by its finger nails to its access to the single market.  It is only the clause that says it has to be Britain that triggers an Article 50 withdrawal that is keeping us there.  EU leaders will bring all the pressure they can to bear upon the next Prime Minister to fire the starting gun as soon as possible.   As Jean-Claude Juncker said yesterday, the next Prime Minister will be given just days to trigger Article 50.  Once that happens, the choice facing Britain is stark – either sign up to all of the things that the referendum result was opposed to – without having a seat at the decision making table – or go trade with someone else.

So that’s it.  Britain is out of the EU.  Not because millions of ordinary Britons wanted it that way, but because given the choice between a union of 27 countries plus one eternal whinger and a union of 27 countries abiding by the same rules, the EU has chosen the latter.

Twenty-six years ago, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper stood on the white cliffs at Dover, put two fingers up toward Europe and shouted “Up Yours Delors” to the then EU Commission President.  Today, Jacques Delors’ children are stood on the white cliffs at Calais returning the complement.  It turns out that it isn’t foreigners who will have to f*** off home… it’s us.

We voted for it; but what – exactly – does Brexit mean?

Why did 52 percent of us vote for Brexit last Thursday?  Although most media attention has focused on immigration, according to a poll by Lord Ashcroft, this was only the second reason given by those who voted to leave.  More important was the belief that decisions about the UK should be taken by the UK.  The third most popular reason was that voting to remain entailed having little choice about how the EU expanded its membership and powers in the future.

Given these concerns, we might expect that the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign would have a blueprint for how these aims are to be achieved now that Britain has indeed voted for Brexit.  Unfortunately, it turns out that there was no such plan – Leave campaigners argued that it was up to 10 Downing Street to create one.  However, the Prime Minister has resigned and is reported to have asked colleagues “why should I stick around to do the hard stuff?”

A small Cabinet Office team (dubbed “the Brexit unit” by the media) has now been assembled to work under Oliver Letwin to sketch out the steps required to trigger an Article 50 notification that will officially inform the EU of Britain’s intention to leave, and will begin the process of establishing the terms under which Britain will leave – note that this is a very long way from a final exit from the EU, which some expect to take a decade or more.

Ideally, before Article 50 is officially triggered, the new Prime Minister will want at least a broad outline of the kind of relationship with the EU Britain will want to negotiate.  This is likely to require a general election to provide the new Prime Minister with the legitimacy to develop a negotiating stance.  The trouble is that unless Article 50 is triggered before a general election, the election is likely to end up being about whether or not to trigger Article 50 at all – if the opposition won on pro-EU manifestos, this would give them the necessary legitimation to overturn the result of the referendum itself.

So the new Prime Minister will have just weeks to decide what Britain’s relationship with the EU is to be after Brexit.  The three options on the table are some modification of:

1. The Norwegian model in which Britain continues to participate in the single market through the European Economic Area. 
2. The Swiss model in which Britain attempts to access the single market by negotiating new bi-lateral trade treaties with each of the remaining 27 EU member states.  The Swiss have been working on their unfinished version of this for the best part of seven decades.
3. World Trade Organisation rules in which Britain effectively tears up all existing rules and seeks a preferred trading status similar to Turkey or Ukraine.

In practice, the first option is worse than ignoring the referendum result, since it entails operating by EU rules over which Britain will have ceded control, continuing to pay into the EU budget, and continuing to allow the free movement of people.  The second option may be little better, since an embittered EU has no incentive to ease Britain’s exit given that this may encourage others to consider referendums of their own.  It may well be that the free movement of people will be a red line issue for any of the EU member states Britain seeks treaties with.

In reality, then, the only option that guarantees that the result of the referendum is enacted is the one in which Britain tears up every agreement that it has entered into in the course of the last 40 years.  That option, unfortunately, is simply insane.

On the international stage, Britain is party to hundreds of international treaties signed by the EU.  Each of these would have to be renegotiated separately by Britain with each of the other signatories.  Nationally, conservative estimates suggest that parliament and the civil service could be tied up for a decade.  As Alex Barker and Alan Beattie in the Financial Times report:

“Senior officials see the untangling of 40 years of EU membership as something akin to a legal “revolution” that would dominate the Queen’s speech for the next five to 10 years.

“This includes deciding what to keep, amend or reject from thousands of EU related laws on the UK statute book and 12,295 regulations that have direct effect and would cease to apply the moment the UK leaves.”

Simply scrapping the European Communities Act 1972 – as suggested by some Vote Leave campaigners – without first updating all of the EU-based law first would leave every business in Britain trading illegally until such time as replacement British law was enacted.  For example:

“Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, points out that much of the trading done in the City of London would overnight become illegal unless new provision were made. The process of reviewing this legislation — working out what to keep, what to amend, and what to remove — would be lengthy, complex, and contested.”

Beyond this written legislation is all of the case law that has developed over four decades.  Philip Kolvin QC sets out the scope of the law related to leaving the EU:

“The consequences for our legal system have barely figured in [the debate on Brexit]. But EU-inspired or mandated legislation is part of the bedrock of societal protection. I speak of health and safety, town and country planning, ecological protection, freedom of information, data protection, competition, discrimination, public procurement, indeed the very concept of proportionality which governs much of our regulatory system. Are these protections to be thrown onto a bonfire of laws? If not, which are to survive and which are to be replaced, and if so by what?”

Presumably, the status quo will have to remain for the decade (or more likely decades) while all of this law is being re-written.  And any changes will have to go through the usual Parliamentary processes... hardly the "scrapping EU bureaucracy" that most Leave voters had in mind.

The effect on future law making is going to be disastrous if large numbers of civil servants have to be relocated to the Brexit Unit to carry out the nuts and bolts of renegotiating and redrafting Britain's legal framework.  Bear in mind that the Civil Service has been parred to the bone as part of the government’s austerity programme.  Trade negotiations will pose significant difficulties, since most of Britain's international trade specialists retired more than thirty years ago because EU membership meant that they were no longer needed.  It might be possible to bring in outside contractors to take on some of the extra work, but this also has its problems, since the multinational law and accountancy firms with the spare capacity to take on this work may prefer more lucrative contracts with the 27 EU member states that Britain is seeking to negotiate with.

Beyond having to spend an inordinate amount of money (perhaps no bad thing if it stimulates the wider economy) time and effort on unpicking and redrafting the best part of 40 years of International and British law, it is far from clear what, exactly, Brexit means.  Ironically for the large racist contingent among Brexit voters, the one thing it does not affect is the status of EU citizens already living in Britain.  Their rights are guaranteed by United Nations treaties that Britain entered into in the aftermath of World War Two.  Quite simply, unless the Brexit camp are prepared to turn Britain into a rogue state – with all the trade sanctions and the potential threat of military action that this would entail – nobody is being deported or forcibly removed.  Indeed, the likely consequence of Brexit is that even more people will obtain joint EU/UK citizenship.

It is far from clear what people thought they were voting for when they voted to leave.  It is even less clear what sort of settlement Britain will eventually reach many years from now.  What is clear is that most Leave voters are going to be sourly disappointed by the end result in any case.

Our UKIP future?

If you were looking for one individual responsible for Thursday’s Brexit vote, you could do a lot worse than single out Neil Kinnock.  It was Kinnock – faced with a wave of working class unrest in the face of a callous Thatcher government – who decided that it was easier to ward off dissent with rule changes rather than arguments.  Beginning the process of disconnecting the Labour leadership from its grass roots, Kinnock lit the fuse than exploded last week.  Kinnock’s reforms paved the way for the war criminal Blair – whose endorsement of the Remain campaign added at least 10% to the Brexit vote.

The harbingers of Thursday’s result were there for anyone who cared to look.  The draining away of the Labour vote (hidden by the lack of a credible Tory party) after the 2001 election.  The rise of the LibDems as a protest vehicle for disgruntled ex-Labour voters in 2010.  The annihilation of Labour in Scotland and the rise of UKIP in the Labour’s former urban and ex-industrial heartlands.  For the most part, Labour MPs had been able to ignore these storm clouds because support among the metropolitan middle classes and the vagaries of the First Past the Post electoral system worked to keep them in office.  But faced with a referendum in which every vote counted, the mass of disenfranchised working class voters took the opportunity to kick the political elite in the only way on offer – Despite the calls of the Labour leadership, the Tory high command, the leaders of big business and high finance, the chose Brexit.

The Parliamentary Labour Party’s (PLP) choice to commit ritual suicide by removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader does nothing to win back the mass of people who voted for Brexit; not least because the PLP is staunchly pro-remain.  Quite rightly, working class voters will see the attempt to change leader as a precursor to ditching the referendum result.  And beyond this, the idea that an already out of touch PLP is going to win seats in constituencies that have long-since ceased being pro-Labour is fantasy.  By removing Corbyn, all they are doing is divesting the party of tens of thousands of metropolitan activists.

In these circumstances, outside Scotland, UKIP is well placed to take swathes of Labour seats in Britain’s most depressed regions.  In this, they will be ably assisted by Boris Johnson who, if he becomes the next Prime Minister, will actively seek to overturn the referendum result.  Johnson’s backsliding over immigration controls; remaining in the single market; and continuing to pay into the EU smack of a betrayal of Brexit voters that is unlikely to be forgiven.

This creates the grounds for an In v Out election in the autumn. 

An election is inevitable given the tiny majority that Johnson will inherit if he becomes leader.  But to heal the division within the Tory party, Johnson will have to back pedal on all of the promises made during the referendum campaign. Labour, under their new leader, will also be fighting on a pro-remain ticket.  But unlike during the referendum campaign, by ditching Corbyn they will have lost many of the activists they depend upon to turn out their voters.

Given the peculiarity of their situation, the Scottish National Party will bolster their support north of the border.  In England and Wales, however, UKIP will emerge as the only pro-Brexit party that voters can rely upon to protect last Thursday’s result.

Close on the heels of such a major political upheaval, it is inconceivable that the Brexit vote is simply going to go back into passivity – staying at home and allowing Labour and the Tories to slug it out.  While the pro-remain vote (already a minority) will be split between Labour, the LibDems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Tory party; the Brexit vote will gravitate to the one party they can be sure will protect the Brexit result.

As we learned in the course of the referendum campaign, jumping up and down and shouting the word “racist” at the top of your voice does absolutely nothing to deter people from voting for a right-wing proposition.  Clearly extolling the virtues of remaining in the EU is not going to work.  Only a serious package of reforms aimed at reversing the growing inequality of the past 40 years can prevent the mass of the working class staying with UKIP.

It is unlikely that UKIP will be in a position to form a government in October.  This said had Britain voted under a proportional electoral system in 2015, we would now have a Tory-UKIP coalition government.  That coalition is a very real possibility in the event of an autumn election… I don’t like it, but I can see no way of avoiding it.