Is this the end of May?

With support for "Theresa May's Team" collapsing in the polls, the word hubris comes to mind:  “Excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis (the inescapable agent of someone's or something's downfall).” 

It is worth noting at this point that there was absolutely no need to call an election.  Between 1992 and 1997 John Major managed to run his government on a majority just half as big as Theresa May’s, in the face of a resurgent New labour, and despite his party being divided over Europe.  May, in contrast, could have continued unencumbered by a parliamentary Labour party more concerned with conspiring against its leader than with opposing the government.  Moreover, with the Brexit referendum done and dusted any Tory backbench opposition over Europe could be easily fended off.

What of those crucial Brexit negotiations that May claims the election is all about?  If the Brexit negotiations are as crucial as May says, why on earth are we spending the best part of two months out of the 24 month negotiating window to fight a general election?  More practically, since the election is limited to around 40 million UK voters, how deluded is May to think that the result will cut any ice with EU negotiators who represent close to 500 million people?  The truth is that the size of the government's majority will have no bearing whatsoever on the Brexit negotiations.

The reality is that this election is all about power.  Having carried out a palace coup last year, when she sacked all of Cameron and Osborne’s special advisors, and having confined the remaining pro-Cameron Tories to the back benches, May was still saddled with the 2015 manifesto – which backfired spectacularly in March when her chancellor was forced to U-turn on plans to raise taxes for the self-employed.  The more personal reason for the election is May’s darkly Machiavellian personality and her need to quell the perceived ranks of knife-wielding Tory backbenchers waiting for an opportunity for vengeance.  As one Tory supporter in a now deleted Telegraph article put it:

“Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to Westeros in Game of Thrones: no one who challenges her survives undamaged, while the welfare of the realm is of secondary concern.”

This election – which May herself ruled out time and again – is personal.  Indeed, May has made no secret of that fact.  The campaign literature, the social media advertising and even the campaign bus are all about “Theresa May’s team.”  Any foreign visitor to these shores would struggle to discover that the Conservative and Unionist Party had anything to do with it.

The timing of the election is opportunist too.  It is rumoured – and I have no reason to doubt this – that an unexpected by-election win in Labour’s Middlesbrough heartland prompted the decision to go to the country.  The result appeared to confirm what the opinion polls were saying – that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour looked like losing its Welsh and Northern English heartlands.  With the Tories more than 20 percent ahead of Labour in the polls, there would never be a more opportune moment to call an election.

From the outset, however, things began to backfire.  Two of May’s communications team resigned immediately after the election was called, citing differences with May’s unofficial Deputy Prime Ministers - Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy.  These are the unelected guards at May’s keep, preventing any and all bad news from reaching the delicate ears of their revered leader.  Even cabinet ministers are unable to get past Hill and Timothy unless May has actually summoned them.  Messengers bearing bad tidings are simply turned away.

One such messenger was psephologist Professor John Curtice from Strathclyde University.  Curtice cautioned against taking for granted that a high poll lead would translate into a big majority:

“An awful lot of Labour seats are astonishingly safe and therefore even with a 15-point lead, well yes I think Theresa May at that point will get past the 100 majority mark.

“But let’s just imagine that the lead falls back to seven, back in 2015, a seven-point lead over Labour was only enough to get a majority of 12 and that was only achieved by winning a lot of seats off the Liberal Democrats.”

Whether this message got through to May is questionable.  This is because, in addition to the handful of loyal courtiers who stand between May and the outside world, the Tories have successfully created an outer wall of media mirrors to reflect back the glory of the great leader.  By packing the once respected (and increasingly despised) BBC with Tory insiders like Tony Hall, Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg, the Tory party ensured that Jeremy Corbyn would never get a fair hearing.  The flip side of this particular coin, however, was that Theresa May and her “team” no longer faced anyone brave enough to tell the truth to power.

What happened next will have been as surprising to Labour supporters as it was shocking to the Tories.  Labour had a manifesto!  One of the benefits of calling an early election is precisely that it catches the opposition parties unaware.  They are forced to cobble together in just days a policy platform that they would have expected to carefully craft over three years.

Not only did Labour have a manifesto, their communications team – who have been widely criticised for not being media savvy – understood the huge gains that could be made by “leaking” the manifesto to the media ahead of its official launch.  The media played their part brilliantly simply by unconsciously sticking to the narrative that Labour’s manifesto was going to be a repeat of the 1983 suicide note.  Before they knew it, the media were highlighting popular policies like renationalising the railways, energy and water infrastructure and properly funding police, schools and the NHS.

The Tory manifesto turned out to be exactly the one that their strategists had expected Labour to produce.  Ill-thought through, lacking detail and un-costed, May’s manifesto looked like it had been scribbled on the back of a sheet of A4 on the way to the launch.  As Fraser Nelson in the pro-Tory Spectator lamented:

“Not since Labour’s 1983 ‘Suicide note’ has a manifesto launch done so much to cheer the other side. I’m not sure quite what the thinking was behind those fervent disavowals of right-wing politics and the embrace of bad Labour ideas, but if the aim was to lure Labour voters then it doesn’t seem to have been a great success.”

Within days of the manifesto launch, Labour had closed the gap with the Tories.  One YouGov poll put May’s lead at just 5 percent.  However, all of the polls followed the same trend, showing the gap between the parties narrowing.  Baring a miracle, May’s dream of 100 or more new Tory MPs all owing their position (and thus their loyalty) to her looks to be over.  On a five percent lead, May would be lucky to keep the majority she has.

The news today – ironically the last day of May – is that a YouGov poll predicts that Britain will vote for another hung parliament with the Tories emerging as the largest party, but unable to form a government.  Were this to be the case eight days from now, Theresa May can look forward to another long walking holiday in the Welsh hills.  Because the only way that she can remain as Prime Minister is to win a majority.  This is simply because the arithmetic doesn’t work for the Tories.  The SNP are expected to hang onto 50 of the 54 seats they won in 2015.  Short of Theresa May offering Scottish independence in a coalition deal, they will not go near a Tory party that is toxic north of the border.  The LibDems are expected to get ten seats (up from 9); not enough to form another coalition with the Tories even if their remaining MPs were foolish enough to repeat their 2010 mistake.

The alternative of some kind of “rainbow coalition” involving some or all of the nationalists, greens, LibDems and Labour is as implausible.  If today’s poll were to be correct, such a coalition would still fall 5 seats short of a majority.  Even if the polls continue to move in favour of Labour, it is impossible to see how a pro-leave Corbyn leadership can be reconciled with the passionately pro-Remain LibDems and nationalist parties.

Of course, with a week to go, and given the unreliability of previous polls, the election could still go either way.  But if you wanted to place a ten pound bet at very good odds on an outcome that we have not seen since the 1930s, you might want to consider the possibility of some kind of national government.  This would occur simply because once it becomes clear that neither May nor Corbyn can command the majority in parliament, the only three options remaining would be:

• to follow the Belgian example of not having a government for the foreseeable future;  
• to inflict yet another unwanted general election of the British people; 
• or do what many councils across Britain do when the votes work against them, and form a coalition out of the two largest parties.

In the face of the ticking Brexit clock, only the last of these is acceptable.  Moreover, whatever else may be happening in Britain, inside the Westminster Bubble, large numbers of Tory and Labour MPs have more in common with one another than with their respective leaders.  With this in mind, in the event of a hung parliament, I wouldn’t rule out a centrist coalition put together with the explicit aim of seeing the country through the Brexit emergency.

A weak and insecure woman

There are many facets of yesterday’s hack of the NHS computer systems that can be laid squarely at the government’s door.  Most obviously, the discovery that among the “inefficient back office functions” that Jeremy Hunt had happily taken the axe to was the small matter of keeping the NHS computer security up to date.  As the BBC reported:

“Up to 90% of NHS hospitals are still using the Windows XP programme, with experts suggesting that the 2001 operating system has made the NHS vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”

Perhaps less obviously, it is now clear that the malware that shut down the NHS systems was created by the security services.   The development of these tools – and the risk that they would fall into the hands of criminals – was a key reason that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (and many others) warned Theresa May that her Snoopers Charter would lead to exactly the kind of events that unfolded yesterday:

“This snoopers charter has no place in a modern democracy - it undermines our fundamental rights online. The bulk collection of everyone's internet browsing data is disproportionate, creates a security nightmare for the ISPs who must store the data - and rides roughshod over our right to privacy. Meanwhile, the bulk hacking powers in the Bill risk making the internet less safe for everyone.” (My emphasis)

On these two grounds alone, the government must be held to account.  There is, however, another facet of yesterday’s events that is far more worrying than a serious but transitory computer hack.  This is the haste with which Prime Minister Theresa May abandoned the campaign trail in order to “take control” of the unfolding situation.

I had studied this behaviour before, but in a different context.  It reminded me of the antics of General Neil Richie, the dangerously incompetent commander of the British Eighth Army in North Africa whose attention to detail and constant interference in the work of his subordinates led to the piecemeal destruction of his army, the fall of Tobruk, and, were it not for the last ditch actions of Auchinleck to hold the Germans at El Alamein, might well have cost Britain the second world war.  Too much attention to detail and too much interference with one’s subordinates turn out to be common traits that define incompetent leaders.  According to General Messervy (quoted in Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence):

“Richie was all haywire by then.  All for counter-attacking in this direction one day and another the next.  Optimistic and trying not to believe that we had taken a knock.  When I reported the state of 1^st Armoured Division to him at a time when I was planning to use it for counter-attack, he flew to see me and almost took the view that I was being subversive...

 “Confident and decisive in his speech, but one did not always feel he was quite so confident and decisive in his own mind.”

Dixon suggests that the drive to leadership that produces both successful and incompetent leaders is a matter of motivation.  The first are those who seek success, the second are those attempting to avoid failure:

“Although these two sorts of achievement-motive may bring about rapid, even spectacular, promotion, their nature and effects are very different.  The first is healthy and mature, and brings to the fore those skills required by the job in hand; the second is pathological, immature, and developing of traits, such as dishonesty and expediency, which may run counter to those required of high command.”

The comparison of military leadership (and competence) with government is apt.  Not least because in Brexit the UK undoubtedly faces its worst crisis since the end of world war two.  Get it wrong and the consequences could be truly devastating .  So we need to be sure that the leader we choose to lead the negotiations is up to the job.

There is good reason to believe that May is not the strong and stable leader we need.  She has surrounded herself with incompetent ministers – not only her useless Health Secretary but also a Justice Secretary who fails to uphold justice and a Foreign Secretary who is so dangerous that he is apparently locked in a cupboard somewhere in the middle of the Gobi Desert where there is no chance of his getting in front of a camera or microphone until the election is over.  If May is the strong and stable leader she claims to be, how is it that these buffoons are still in her cabinet?  And if they are not buffoons, why is it that May interferes in their work and refuses to let them out on the campaign trail?

Nor is it only her dealings with cabinet colleagues that suggests that May is not the strong and stable character that she claims.  She has form when it comes to her staff too.  Back in February Mrs May effectively fired the esteemed Sir Mark Lyall Grant for what the media chose to refer to as “mansplaining” but might more accurately have been a senior civil servant patiently explaining why Mrs May could not have her own way.  If this were an isolated case, we might give Mrs May the benefit of the doubt.  But far from a one off, it is beginning to look like May’s modus operandi.  At the start of the election campaign, Mrs May lost both her Press Secretary and her Director of Communications:

“Both Ms Perrior and Ms Loudon had experienced frustration in accessing key meetings and information in Downing Street since their appointments last July.”

These resignations give us some indication of what Kenneth Clarke meant when he referred to May as a “bloody difficult woman.”

The very decision to call a snap election at the start of a brief 24 month window in which the UK’s exit from the EU has to be negotiated smacks of incompetent leadership.  If May truly was strong and stable, she would be overseeing her ministers and senior civil servants as they negotiated Britain's exit from the EU.  Instead she is on a bus that makes clear the election is all about her fragile ego (no obvious mention of the Tory party). 

The risk is that she will do to the Brexit negotiating team what she has previously done to her own staff, and what she did to the hapless Hunt in the face of what turned out to be a fairly ordinary malware fraud.  That is, like General Richie in the North African desert, she will interfere and flip-flop to such an extent that her negotiating team is paralysed in the face of an EU team that simply cannot afford to let the UK leave the EU with a good deal.

If the polls are correct, then Mrs May will be back in Downing Street on 9 June.  If so, I fear that a weak and insecure woman who is motivated more by fear of failure than any true desire for her country's success is about to deliver the worst possible Brexit – the one the EU bureaucrats on the opposite side of the table want; the one that punishes Britain as an example to any other member state that contemplates leaving.

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.