Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

Where are we now??

I abandoned my blog a few months ago. ‘Abandon’ feels like the right word. The liberal world was already in crisis and that was before the profoundly illiberal Trump was re-elected. So much has happened since. It’s more than I could do to resist the temptation to put down a few thoughts on where the world is now.

What kept me awake last night were jail sentences. An American resident illegally deported and now imprisoned in a brutal Salvadorian jail. No, he won’t be returned to the USA, said the Salvadorian president, Bukele. Trump standing alongside smirked a complicit smirk. Does Trump care that Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, and main rival to Erdogan in Turkey, has been locked up on absurd corruption and terrorism charges? Would Trump look to stymie some future presidential challenger if he had the chance? There’s no certainty he wouldn’t. You could argue that nepotism and the accumulation off family wealth are Erdogan’s stock in trade. Looking no further than the role of Trump’s own family, and their financial transactions, and to bitcoin, might one not say the same about Trump?

Imamoglu would have known the risks and yet he stayed the course. There can be no certainty that he will ever be released. Think of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s now 26 years in jail. The title of Ahmet Altan’s book was ‘I will never see the world again’? He did. He was released. Arrested on a whim. Released on a whim.

Courts in Russia hand out long prison sentences for any kind of anti-government expression. Five years for associates of Navalny. Sixteen years for a social media post.

The four freedoms of the European Union, allowing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, allied to freedom of expression, now stand out ever more clearly. Giorgio Meloni in Italy has surprised many by holding true to them, albeit while pursuing a socially conservative agenda. Where might a National Rally government take France if elected next year? What of Orban and Hungary? He’s taken over both the press and courts. Will that be enough to ensure his re-election next year? Might we have another Poland, where the populist Law and Justice government was voted out in 2023?

Law and Justice in Poland, and Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, are both opposed to abortion and wider gender rights. The National Rally in France claims to be an ardent supporter of women’s rights. It supports abortion. But many in its ranks disagree.

On the subject of gender, here in the UK we have had today had a Supreme Court ruling stating that the legal definition of a woman has to be based on biological sex, which is not what supporters of transgender rights had been hoping for. The decision was, I think, inevitable. The safe spaces argument has cogency. But the issue won’t go away.

Staying in the UK. We have Reform still polling 25%. How will that convert into votes come next month’s local elections? Any support for Trump’s tariff agenda will surely be a vote loser, but his attitudes to gender and race, his scorn for academia, his taking down of ‘elites’ and bureaucracy, may well appeal. And that puts Farage on strong ground, even if he hasn’t through his political life ever propounded a sane, considered and politically workable policy. A focus on investment and social mobility has to be the way to handle social division. Not disruption for its own sake

We should be focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, and, as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary has bravely tried to do, on Sudan. Helping Ukraine produce the weapons it needs, as well as supplying from our own stocks. Holding Putin to account for the incredible number of his own Russian soldiers killed in pursuit of a very personal vision he has of restoring the old Soviet hegemony. (Yes, we were at fault for being far too slow to recognise this was his intent. And for our Western arrogance. But that story is not for here.)

Also, holding Netanyahu to account, as we should the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and government forces in Sudan for the appalling loss of life they’ve inflicted. There is also Taiwan, and what China might yet do. We’re now in the crazy position of taking sides with China in a trade war against Trump’s USA, when Xi Jinping’s China is the most illiberal society of all.

Even truces or cease-fires can be hard to imagine. In Sudan, Arab versus non-Arab divisions in Darfur have been intractable for decades. In Israel/Palestine divisions go back a hundred years. For Ukraine/Russia it’s many hundreds of years. The UK and the EU working together on defence, and the UK and France, Starmer and Macron. That at least has to be positive.

Tacking another tack, what of Starmer’s benefits policy? His return to the old Blairite and especially Cameronian agenda of reducing benefits. There’s been a massive increase since 2019 but it’s argued that we’re only now approaching the level of benefits enjoyed in some other Europeans countries. At the same time, there has to be a reason for this surge in the take-up of benefits. Are we genuinely less healthy, physically and mentally? I can see both sides but there are good reasons why a financially straitened government has to take the action it’s taking.

Tariffs are our current obsession. It seems we might, in the UK, escape the worst of them. We shall see. But such minor straws of good fortune in the current whirlwind are no more than straws. As I said many times in this blog we must deep-anchor our liberal values, personal, social and economic. I think we have currently a government with as good a chance of handling our current crises as we’re likely to have. That is a small mercy.

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

Kind of Blue – Miles Davis, football and the night sky

In case you’re wondering. This isn’t Zenpolitics. It’s me, sounding off. This will happen occasionally. I might occasionally touch on politics. And Zen remains a lodestar for me. But trying to put the two together in today’s world is a fool’s game. But that won’t stop me, from time to time, sounding off.

**

You lose so much more when you don’t know what it is you’re losing.

Jazz

I recently caught up again after forty years with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I was listening on Apple Music via my iPhone. I let it run and more music followed, all of which I engaged with, but none of which I’d chosen. My old CD player sits quietly by, like my CDs, reminding me of days when I chose my own music, rather than ‘my’ music choosing me.

There’s so much choice in every possible field out there. Algorithms are our masters and mistresses and they can be so much fun. They do the choosing for us. But it’s their pathway, not ours.

*

Can I apply the same line of reasoning to baseball and from there to football (soccer, if you will)? It’s data analysis that’s the starting-point for what follows. Algorithms have now taking it all so much further.

Baseball

I’ve just read Michael Lewis’s ‘Moneyball’. (Having also caught up with the movie. Both are marvellous.) Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland As, is the hero. He disallows all the personal judgements of the coaches old and new who trusted their instincts and experience. On what basis?

The early-80s had seen a revolution in financial markets. Data was computerised and risk could be offset by grouping mortgages and loans into financial instruments which revolutionised both the markets and precipitated extraordinary growth. No-one had thought until the mid-90s of inputting baseball data, every aspect, every player, past and present. The big event as every American and few Brits know is the annual draft, when players are selected. The stakes are high and the bidding rapid and the more you know about a player the better you can match him to your requirements.

One Harvard maths graduate hadn’t followed the path to Wall Street. He analysed every bit of baseball data he could access and then came to work with Billy Beane, and they put together teams (their players kept getting poached, so ‘teams’ is the word) which out-performed the big-league teams with only a third of the budget. Their players were highly effective at some specific aspect of the game, not all. They balanced their skill sets, where other teams went for the all-rounders, the big hitters, the more obvious superstars.

Football

They were scorned and ridiculed by the old school. Now it’s the norm. Also for other sports. I saw a T-shirt yesterday (they come with a million different messages) with all the different team formations we now talk about in football, variations on 4-3-2-1 upwards and downwards. (Liverpool have played 4-2-3-1 for the majority of games this season.)

Players must have the characteristics to fit a manager’s preferred set-up. One message from Oakland: you need manager, coaching team and owner all of one mind and in it for the long term. (Or at least until disaster strikes!) Another message: scouts and manager have to look for players who might not be the most glamorous, who may be undervalued elsewhere, but who might just blend into the kind of lower-budget teams, the likes of Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest, who’ve proved they can take under-performing big names apart.

The big teams have of course now learnt the same lesson. They stretch their recruitment net wide. (Check out the algorithm-based assessments of Premier League players that the Football Critic website runs each week.) But there are always the smaller clubs who undistracted by current success recruit teams that can take on anyone. Maybe they’re just using algorithms better. Watching how all this happens is one of the joys of football!

All this close analysis does sound heavy duty. Is putting a decent team together now very little about hunch and much more about data? Be that as it may, it does mean that the clever small guy can sometimes come out on top against the not-so-bright big guy, and that does just keep on happening.

Michael Parkinson wrote about his childhood memories of ‘Skinner’ Normanton and Barnsley FC. And remember Vinnie Jones from thirty years ago? OK, they kicked a few shins and pushed the boundaries. But how much have we lost by football losing the hard boot and the raw edge?
*

We could apply similar arguments to almost every sphere of life these days. We’re told, for example, that if you find yourself a green field, could be a football pitch (no floodlights), and look up to the sky, you can find all the planets in alignment this month. We all troop outside and try and fathom what’s going on.

What we miss is the fact that the night sky on a clear night is always amazing. The fun lies in tracking the planets month by month.

Take the world as it comes. Don’t try and boss it too much.

Better a team of non-algorithmically-chosen players making music (sometimes massively off-key) on a football field? Or an information-driven well-oiled machine that knows how to win?

It’s a question to which there isn’t a simple answer.

Goodbye to all that

If I can resist the temptation to hit the keyboard again – this will be my last post, after fifteen years. There is a time and a season for all things.

We’re in crisis times. The height of the Cold War might have matched them but I was a toddler or grubby-kneed kid at the time. We’ve lived in a blissful paradise in the post-Berlin Wall years. And we never doubted liberal democracy. But from our elevated heights we’ve looked down on other countries. Dictators and ideologues have seen their chance and fired up negative sentiment. They are calling the shots.

There is also a new and disturbing breed of doubters on the right of our own politics. They focus on a false dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism. Left matched against right is a better way of characterising differences of opinion. (We don’t have socialists in the manner we used to, but we do have wide sections of the population committed to social action.) Or engaged state versus small state.

Issues of immigration, race, gender, sovereignty, Empire and its legacy, all divide us. No liberal society or any part of it should seek to dictate their resolution. We must hold fast if we are to avoid the populism of a state-controlled media and courts (illiberal democracies as they are rightly characterised), and all that might follow.

As a good liberal I believe we will prevail again, with our freedoms to write and think and associate and vote intact. But any resolution will be well beyond my lifetime.

That’s driving my decision to bring this blog to an end. It was all, in those heady days fifteen years ago, about enhancing liberal democracy. It’s closer now to a behind-the-barricades defence.

A few final thoughts. All rather negative. But hang in there, if you can bear it, to the end.

Is there any optimism left in the world? Must we all now hunker down with our own private pleasures, treat wars in Gaza and Ukraine as on another planet, play wait-and-see with Trump, until the inauguration, and then wait-and-see what happens, and all the while acclimatise ourselves more and more to disaster, so that with each month that passes we hunker down yet further, retreating into rabbit holes?

Forget the geopolitical, you might say, what about the UK? We have farmers demonstrating over the introduction of inheritance tax on farmland above £1m in value, with Jeremy Clarkson a tub-thumping arch-hypocrite to the fore, and the Daily Mail et al stirring up their ancient readerships.

Surely, the government could have anticipated there’d be a furore?

Likewise on the Winter Fuel Allowance. Removing it within weeks of the election was a lousy idea. It has coloured everyone’s view of the new government.

So, yes, we can engage with our own home-grown politics. But it’s pretty bleak story. And then there are the climate-change talks in Baku, a fossil-fuel paradise, of all places. And I haven’t mentioned China.

How many more reasons for gloom? And yet, it’s always been like this, going back two centuries and more, bad times then good times then bad times. We’ve hung in there before. We have to now. Liberal democracy has been hard-won and it’s now in the gene pool of the world. Autocracies take many forms. Liberal democracy at its core has one simple core liberal message. One I’ve elaborated on it in this blog for fifteen years.

Keep the faith!

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

Trump the day after

Trump has won. The end of innocence, and maybe the end of this blog? (Or maybe not!) I began it in the early Obama days, on a note of huge optimism. Obama gave us Obamacare but he didn’t sort out the malaise in the American blue-collar economy and in the end he, and Biden after him, had no answer to a Southern Baptist-style resistance to any kind of deep social change. The open economy will become as far as Trump can take it a closed economy, operating behind tariff barriers.

I’ve been as guilty as anyone of denigrating Trump. I say ‘guilty’. Yes, he does remind me of the Antichrist of the Left Behind novels. He has Messianic tendencies. He’s happiest dealing with autocrats. He aspires to be one himself. Power rather than leadership is his game. And yet… he read the runes, he caught the mood and he’s been remarkably consistent. He made the economy the one big decisive issue, which it always is. Yes, it’s performed well compared to the rest of the  world over the last three years but it hasn’t brought jobs back where it matters in the Rust Belt, and inflation, however much it can be tied to the response to Covid, is a real big issue.

(I am, however, reminded of a comment by an Austrian ex-Nazi I came across yesterday. He argued in 1946 that he’d only supported the Anschluss in 1938 because he thought it would solve his country’s economic problems. Prioritising the economy can take us down perilous routes.)

How quickly tariffs, by reducing imports, can open up new jobs and a new prosperity for American workers is a very open question. Will they have the opposite effect? We may soon be back with higher levels of inflation, underpinned by low interest rates, if Trump can somehow override the opposition of the Federal Reserve.

The other big and decisive issue has of course been immigration. If a pushback in the other direction stops the northward movement in its tracks then the immigration tide might just be turned. If there no promised land you’ve nothing to head toward. How he plans to send back illegals in their millions is an open question. Is it feasible? And who will receive them? And what impact could it have on an American economy which needs immigration?

Putin will be happy this morning. Xi Jinping has reasons to be worried. If tariffs hit home then he’ll have to find new markets, not least by injecting demand into his own economy. Narendra Modi will be smiling: he will once again have a like-minded president to deal with. Israel – Trump could bear down on Netanyahu in a way Biden couldn’t and Harris wouldn’t have been able to. Netanyahu won’t have much pushback if Trump wants to be assertive. Trump is of course strongly pro-Israel but he will also want to show that he has a magic power to bring wars to an end.

Ukraine. It should have been the first of my list of foreign policy issues. The conflict has become normalised. We can get used to war. Boundaries will be as they are now on the battlefield. The Donbas will be lost to Ukraine, maybe forever. Ukraine won’t get NATO membership. What guarantees will it get? An end to war on terms which allow for their country’s survival may be acceptable to most Ukrainians.

As for NATO, it will survive but in how much of an emasculated form? And the EU: Trump won’t give its concerns and welfare a second thought. It might be different if there was a big European figure with Trump-like tendencies he could sit down with. Hungary’s Viktor Orban writ large. Nor will he have reason to give the UK much attention, save insofar as it can provide him with more golf courses.

We have to hold our breath, to hope he doesn’t take on his domestic ‘enemies’ as he has threatened to do. That he doesn’t attack institutions as the Heritage Foundation have suggested he should, and impose new conditions of loyalty on Federal officials. That the next midterm election will be free and fair.

As I write I don’t know if the Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives. If the Republicans control both sides of Congress then Trump will have untrammelled power.

Welcome to the uncertainty. We just don’t know how it will all play out.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it

Book festivals are a feature of our times. The two big festivals at Hay and Cheltenham bring in big crowds. Over the last two days in Cheltenham the subjects of events I’ve been to have included trade routes centred on ancient and medieval India, the American election, and Palestine and Gaza. They are apparently disparate but there is a link I’d like to explore.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the subject, ‘Trump: The Sequel’, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, referred to his belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian civilisation.  That set me thinking. It’s not a notion to which an Indian would subscribe. 2000 years ago, and more, India traded west, to Rome and Europe, and east, as far as China. Both Hinduism and Buddhism had their origins in India. It is a necessary humility on our part, in our modern world, that we recognise India as having a status equal with our own.

A little closer to home there is an alternative and wider appellation than Judeo-Christian and that is ‘people of the book’. It’s an ancient Islamic term that refers to religions which had a shared scripture with Islam, and that included Christianity. ‘People of the book’ were protected in Islamic countries by a legal status known as ‘dhimma’.’ There is of course a wider, non-legal status – our common humanity.

We have 1400 years of divisions between Christian and Muslim. It is helpful to be reminded of that common heritage, as I was when we listened intently to two Palestinian novelists talking about their books, and about their life stories. One growing up away from her home country, the other growing up in Israel, near Jaffa, from which her parents had been forced to move.

I am English, and a Christian. My instinct is indeed that my heritage is somehow special, focused on notions of democracy and liberty, and freedom of speech, which struggled to find acceptance anywhere in the world down the millennia. Including our own, until relatively recently. I will always argue passionately for liberal democracy and a superior form of government, but to argue beyond that, for some kind of special status, and more than that, for superiority, we are on dangerous ground. (Is Christianity inherently democratic? That would be an interesting discussion.)

Other civilisations have their own sense of their uniqueness, as places apart from others, offering a world-view no others can. The consequences can be pernicious. China defines itself against the West in terms of its four-thousand-year history, and boundaries defined as the furthest point of its past imperial expansion, which has had terrible consequences for Tibet and the Uyghurs.

There’s also a deep significance in the combining of ‘Judea’ and ‘Christian’. Christian history has until recent times treated Jews as outsiders in their midst, never escaping guilt for the death of Jesus, tolerated and too often terrorised and murdered.

Now all is changed. The Jewish people have a home, and Western and specifically Christian support. ‘Judeo’ now combines easily with ‘Christian’ and Palestine is viewed by the American and most European governments from an Israeli and not an Arab standpoint. Atrocities can be justified.

The best teachers and some of the best friends of my life were Jewish. I am a passionate supporter of the Jewish people, of co-existence of Palestinian and Jew, and I am a Zionist if Zionism had recognised the constraints that sharing territory with another people, who had occupied that land for many centuries, involved.

‘Judeo-Christian’ is at risk of being associated with a right-wing and intolerant agenda, and with a form of populism that at its extremes becomes the ‘great replacement theory’, whereby an Islamist (not Islamic) conspiracy aspires by means of higher birthrates and migration to become the dominant force in Western cultures. It is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, used so perniciously from the 1920s onwards by Hitler and others against the Jewish people, refashioned.

The testimonies of the two Palestinian novelists, talking about the lives and reading from their novels, will stay with me forever. They have lost their country, and those who choose to fight on their behalf are terrorists. Terrorists, as the Irgun were considered, fighting after World War Two for a Jewish state against the British.

Beyond October 7th, and the retribution that followed, and continues, lies a Palestinian state, and a radical cessation of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. And an end to the notion that there is anything biblical, Jewish or Christian, about the process.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it.

What might happen next in France?

The news from France last evening briefly pushed aside Emma Raducanu, Starmer’s whistle-stop journey through Britain, and Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix. That last one got a cheer from me, but the defeat of the National Rally (RN) in France really lifted the spirits. I’m not just a bit of a political junkie, I’m a foreign affairs junkie. What goes on in India, Russia, Germany, above all the USA, really matters.

Starmer’s election had already lightened the mood. Now the news from France: the National Rally pushed into third place in the second round of the parliamentary elections by the New Popular Front (NPF), with Jean-Luc Mélenchon France Unbound the lead party, ahead of President Macron’s Ensemble alliance.

Big questions were raised weeks back over Macron’s decision to call a parliamentary election in France. Various shades of madness. Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics podcast was appalled. It made no sense. But to Macron it did.

I’m writing this from what might just be a Macroniste point of view. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. But I’m intrigued as to why he called the election.

He had a marginal, just-about-working majority but the RN had just won big in the European elections, and they had momentum. And it was building. Delay until the presidential election in 2027 and Marine Le Pen might just have been a shoe-in. France’s record as one of the strongest European economies and a leader in Europe would have counted for nothing. Maybe better to face the issue head-on now.

The assumption seems to be that he expected a centrist majority. A coming together of centre left and centre right. But did he? He will surely have factored in the possibility of a strong hard-left showing.

The Mélenchon left is France is well-entrenched and opposed to Macron on key issues like pension reform and retirement age. The financial markets see the NPF as ‘dangerous for the economy’. They may be right, but I don’t see them as an existential threat. They are not threatening the institutions of democracy in the manner of Victor Orban in Hungary. (Though Mélenchon has only recently come out with full-hearted support of Ukraine.) Also, the far right’s nativist agenda is anathema to the French left.

While I can’t see Mélenchon compromising I can see others on the left working with Ensemble to form a left-of-centre government. The aim of any such government should surely be to target the biggest issue, in France as it is in the UK – the sense of being overlooked, left behind, by a city-based, out-of-touch and (in France’s case – not the UK’s) overly technocratic government.

It may be that Macron had factored in something like the outcome we had yesterday. The European election may have convinced him that some kind of change of direction was needed. And he may indeed have no choice but to tack toward the concerns of small town and rural France, where the RN’s base lies. We will see how things work out over the coming days. Before the Paris Olympics get underway?

Beyond that – will it be chaos? Or disaster? In either case, giving the RN a free run.

The day after election day

Elections are emotional occasions. And referenda: I remember lunchtime drinks after a night watching (literally, as a teller) as voting slips were unfolded in 2016. The empty glass. This time, a chunky bacon bap and a full cup of coffee at the local village hall.

As for the big-timers. Exultation: arm-waving and Sweet Caroline if you’re Ed Davey, big big smile if you’re Keir Starmer. Glad-I’m-out-of-it chuckle from Jacob Rees-Mogg. (He may be fooling us.) Hiding on the age of the stage, in a state of shock, thoroughly deserved, if you’re Liz Truss.

But then there’s Nigel Farage. He’s going for Labour, he says. He thinks their support is wafer-thin. That he can win folk round with his rabid ‘Britain is broken’, left-behind, anti-immigrant narrative. He’s now in parliament. He has a mouthpiece.

I’d like to disregard him, but he is a superb maker of noise. A favourite word of Labour in its early days was fellowship: Starmer is part of a long tradition. Compare Farage. A man without a sense of history. He pitches one group against another. He feeds off hostility behind that over-wide smile. He’s at home with Trump. Half-truth comes easily.

Contrast key words in Starmer’s Downing Street speech yesterday: ‘stability and moderation’ (two words working as one), and ‘service and respect’ (again, two as one). Compare the provocateur that Sunak had become, pushed by party and media.

One interesting stat: more than half the new intake of MPs are new to parliament. In 2019 only 21.5% were new. In every way, we’ve a clean sheet. Farage and his small team won’t be the only newbies, though they may shout more. 

Also catching my eye. Larry the cat has now over thirteen years outdated five Tory prime ministers. The green of Angela Rayner’s trouser suit walking to 10 Downing Street. (She is Stockport. Her, and my, home town. I’m proud of her.) And Wes Streeting lost in a sea of nautical metaphors. Don’t sail when you’re tired!

Back to the essentials. How will Tories respond now? Penny Mordaunt, speaking when she lost her seat: make it a broad church. Robert Buckland and Grant Shapps are of similar mind.

Invite Farage in, match him with Braverman, and the Mail and Telegraph, and we will have division, and some pretty wild misreporting. If Starmer can push through his agenda, then Farage and the Tory far-right will have less and less to rant about. The far-right want there to be battle-lines. Play their game, put our liberal democracy into play, and the battle would become existential.

A Labour landslide – what next?

10.30, Friday 5th July. The day after an election in which Labour won a landslide victory. Mainly because the Tory vote imploded …

It’s raining as we wait for Rishi to say goodbye on Downing Street. As it was when he announced this election. It won’t dry up any time soon: this is a bad July. But, yes, good for Labour, though its share of the vote hasn’t changed from 2019. That’s remarkable. What matters, though, looking at it backwards, is that they haven’t lost voter share. They’ve held theirs, while everyone else, save for the Tories, has gained.

Yesterday’s vote was the ultimate anti-incumbent protest. No British government has, arguably, ever made such a mess, and they’ve kept it up over fourteen years. The electorate though hadn’t abandoned the Tories until Johnson partied and Truss went over the top.  Vast swathes then went in different directions, moderates to the LibDems and populists to Reform.

Underlying it all, and I’ve been doing a quick calculation with every result, and I was watching until 4am (lazy you might say – why not all night?), is the left-of-centre against right-of-centre vote, broadly defined. How do the combined votes of left and right stack up? On the left we have new Labour (mark 2) and old socialist, including one Jeremy Corbin. And we’ve the LibDems – wow! I didn’t expect that. And the Greens. And Plaid Cymru. They are all democrats, all part of a great tradition of evolving liberal democracy.

As for the right-of-centre, many will be died-in-the-wool Tories who simply couldn’t change their spots, or soften their deep-blue shading. But there are the Bravermans. And there is Reform.

How do the percentages work out? 52.6% for Labour, the LibDems and Greens, taken together. And 38% for the Tories and Reform. Others including the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland parties 9.4%. (Figures corrected from the first version of this post.)

I was watching those early results, from Sunderland and Blyth. The North East was so strongly Brexit and that left-behind, anti-sentiment now finds a home in Reform. It is those two descriptors – left-behind and anti-immigrant – that go far to define Reform.

What Labour has to do is take the North/South divide head-on. If they do their almost 35% share of the vote should increase next time. Labour has to re-establish that link with those old, and socially conservative, and indeed older-by-age working-class constituencies. It can still be a big-city party. Its performance will be judged, it goes without saying, by the performance of the economy, but also crucially by its attitudes to health and social care. They, even more jobs and housing and education and climate and indeed gender, will be the defining issues. Get them right, and so much else will follow. Not least a healthy and motivated workforce.

Stroud is my local constituency. High turnout, 71%, a Labour gain. Twickenham, my old constituency, LibDem hold on a 72% turnout. Compare Sunderland and Blyth, both 53%. There, Reform got their vote out. Vast numbers of others, maybe of the ‘they-are-all-useless’ persuasion, will have stayed away. Trade unions used to give voters an identity. No more. Devolving power and local accountability will help. But they must show tangible results. Otherwise, the Britain-is-broken, keep-the-bastards-out Reform mentality, the Farage farrago of false and half-truths, will entrench.

Look over the Channel. The second round of the French election is this coming weekend. I was listening to a radio piece about Langres, a rural French town with a grand cathedral, where I stayed several times on childhood trips through France. It has these days 25% unemployment. It votes National Rally (RN). The perceived gap between Paris and the provinces is, and is perceived as, vast. This gives the RN its way in, with all the anti-immigrant, find-a-culprit mentality that goes with it.

I don’t doubt Starmer and his crew are more than aware of all this. That’s what will make the next few weeks so interesting. It’s so crucial to get the direction right. France will probably have chaos before any resolution.  Macron has big ideas and big solutions, he’s been looking to the future, but, it seems, he hasn’t paid sufficient heed to the present. Starmer must take that hard lesson on board. Think small as well as big. Country as well city. Somewhere (where you’re rooted, where you’ve always been) as well anywhere (where you’ve left home, you’re metropolitan, you’ve been to uni).

Charisma helps. But then Farage has a warped mind of charisma. Being ordinary also has its big advantages.