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.

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.

Pandering to the old folk

We are overloaded in our politics toward older folk, of whom I’m one. I watched in 2016, as a teller, as sixty consecutive voting slips from my own area were unfolded, literally, as votes for Brexit. I’d moved a little further out of London, beyond the liberally-minded borough of Richmond, and into an area where immigrants rarely ventured but where they were often stigmatised.

Taking the tube, the mix of my fellow passengers changes from Hammersmith, and then on into town. I’m happy with that. It’s the way London should be – cosmopolitan. Ideas mixing, the serious and the radical and a little bit of the crazy too.

Why is it that as we grow older we narrow our horizons? Literally.  Live, maybe not so much in fear of, but apprehensive about, what we see as the unknown. Not least immigration and climate change. Every generation as it ages grips harder onto the world and institutions it knew in its prime. Being conservative becomes a badge of honour, it gives a sense of belonging. It reads the same newspapers. And it tilts toward UKIP and Brexit and now Reform and Faragist obsessions.

We run the risk of, by our attitudes, holding our country back. Politics demands change and adaptation, and we resist it. We need to allow the generations who do the work, and politicians who represent them, to be the primary policy-makers. They will, after all, fund the pensions on which our welfare depends.

By that argument, should not we, as the oldies, relinquish some of our power and influence over the future of the country? I don’t want to see politicians pandering to us to get our votes. We need instead local political parties, parliamentary candidates and MPs who have a single-minded focus on building both the country’s economy and its productivity.

We want policies decided not on the basis of jam for the oldies but on the economy and on investment, on housing, and working conditions, as they affect younger generations.

There’s one obvious problem – the young don’t vote in the numbers that we oldies do. The Tories have less than 10% support among 16-24 year olds. And yet how many of those who can, the over 18s, will actually vote?

But who will they vote for? Look to France. We used to think young people everywhere instinctively inclined to the left. A 28-year-old and charismatic far-right party leader, number two to Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, is giving the lie to this. He’s adept in using social media, TikTok especially. Gender and race are not the primary issues (though the old hard right wouldn’t agree). Instead, the focus is on insecurity, job prospects, and a future where the rising prosperity earlier generations relied on is no longer guaranteed for them. Also, a wider sense that traditional parties are compromised.

If we believe in the post-war world order of toleration and international trade, in open minds and open borders, we liberals (and we older liberals!) have to be pro-active. Maybe Labour under Keir Starmer, if elected. will take the first steps in that direction. Restore confidence among younger generations in our political system. So they don’t reject it. That’s no small ask.

We’ve been here before

We think our own times unique – but we’ve been here before.

I’ve been reading Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s autobiography. He has memories, almost fond memories, of the world before 1914.

In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilised. The forces of reaction and barbarism were still there, but they were in retreat… it looked as if militarism, imperialism and anti-Semitism were on the run.

We were of course mistaken in thinking that the world really might become civilised but the fact that it didn’t does not prove that our optimism was foolish or credulous… It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality – political and social – and toward civilisation which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914. They postponed the danger of our becoming civilised for at least 100 years.

There is a terrible irony in that last line. Where they were before 1914 is not so far from where we thought we were either side of 2000.

The columnist ‘Charlemagne’ in an article in The Economist fastens on 1999 as ‘peak Europe’, when 300 of the world’s top listed companies were European, and and it looked as if China and Russia could be part of a Western-inspired economic and liberal order which could be ‘the end of history’.

We also had a sense that the forces of barbarism were still there but in Woolf’s words were ‘on the run’. We hoped, even thought, that the ‘movement towards liberty and equality – political and social’ was so strong that ‘it would carry everything before it’.

And yet … 2014, a century on from 1914, was just a year after Xi Jinping had come to power. Putin was confronting the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The enemies of the liberal order ‘had seen the risk’. Ukraine and Hong Kong exemplify the threat today. Might other countries follow the example of Hungary, and indeed of Donald Trump, as might be? Where might Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella take France if their party, Rassemblement National, is victorious in the French election in three weeks time?

Woolf, in his seventies, was looking back from the late 1960s. There’s an almost elegiac tone. Yes, the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear threat had a stark reality. But we knew what we stood for. Do we now?

We do need certainties. And, indeed, defiance. ‘Charlemagne’ ends his piece by striking exactly the wrong note. ‘Perhaps Europe peaked in 1999. Or maybe it failed to see it was already in decline.’

A cheer or two for democracy

‘The tyranny of the discontinuous mind.’ That’s Richard Dawkins, quoted by Adam Rutherford in a discussion with David Runciman about taxonomy, our human instinct to classify when in reality everything is in a state of flux. The context was the Linnaean system. It applies to plants, of course, and the way we classify racial types (with historically pernicious consequences) and also, in our own homes, the way we classify books as fiction and non-fiction and more, when there is in reality massive overlap.  

I could also apply this to our democracy, to politics, to our party system. As parties try and shoehorn policies into manifestos we can see how imagination and big ideas are constrained. We get frustrated, and yet, is there any other way to manage a democracy?

We do need to clear about what we stand for. The old divides, Tory/Whig, Tory/Liberal and Tory/Labour, had a rhythm and a recognition that power alternated as an expanding electorate dictated, however great our misgivings might be. ‘Tory’ and ‘Labour’ now don’t mean quite what they did. That of course is part of our current problem.

Politics depends on classification. We need to know where we stand, and where others likewise. But, taking the broader picture, behind the apparent certainties lay a rhythm and underlying that rhythm was a sense of progress. In our own time progress has hit the trip wire of populism.

I’m well aware of the very alternative and wonderfully cynical view of a certain Groucho Marx: ‘Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’ But while it might have a ring of truth it really isn’t helpful.

It’s getting too close to a populist’s playbook. Budding autocrats would concur. You remould the institutions and take over the media and the courts. You suppress dissent. The Orban playbook. I’m reminded of Alastair Campbell’s three Ps, populism, polarisation and post-truth, which in his view, form the foundations of autocracy.

‘Democracy’ as a classification is ancient. Aristotle and Plato differed in detail but autocracy and oligarchy glorified as monarchy and aristocracy were their preference. History shows us where they lead. Aristotle and Plato saw democracy as mob rule, which in ancient Athens was limited by strict property and men-only qualification.

We have by happy accident and occasional design and a huge amount of good fortune fashioned a working democracy which is based around a free press and honest reporting and high levels of education and awareness. It also requires high levels of integrity among our politicians. And from our popular press.

To have the kind of democracy we have – we don’t know, we don’t appreciate, how lucky we are.

Hay Book Festival 2024: day two – libraries, a little levity and big reads

A second day at the Hay Book Festival. Hazel and I walk around the town, have a coffee, browse (and buy!) second-hand books, she contemplates buying a very ancient-looking and very heavy stone trough for her garden. Impossible to carry.

To be more serious. There was a short item last night from the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in Russia on a still surviving George Orwell library. They have now been told to find new premises. Free speech and free thinking are dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. Compare Hay. It has no newspaper sponsorship, no political connections. If it’s left of centre, then maybe that’s just because it’s where freethinking takes us.

From the town it’s a ten-minute walk to the festival, just time for lunch, good Indian fare, on paper plates, then our first session, Hazel and I together, Ken Follett and Kate Mosse, two amazing historical novelists, talking. How do they start? He maps out an outline, she launches in, having gone through a total immersion in the period. Her characters speak to her.

We’re in a safe zone, as I am at 2.30, listening to Katherine Rundell being interviewed with her adult (Faber) and children’s (Bloomsbury) editors.  Her book, Super-Infinite, on John Donne, is marvellous, but she is also a hugely popular children’s author, her last being the much-acclaimed Incredible Creatures. She is super-bright and self-assured. She enjoys roof-climbing and tight-rope walking and turns cartwheels before breakfast.

But we lose something of that self-assurance and sure-footedness at 4pm. The subjects are, or should be, challenging. Hazel is off to hear Caitlin Moran talking about men, and feeling sorry for boys who don’t quite know their role any more as women rise higher. My session is a panel taking about ‘The Limits of Comedy’. ‘Play the room’ was the main message from comedy writer Joel Morris. And don’t pitch too low, that is, don’t play too safe. You can only find the limits by playing to them.

The problem – comedy goes viral, it slips out to where it was not intended to go, and offence is caused. For Morris (I’m quoting from an article on the Chortle website, marking the publication of his new book, Be Funny or Die) that is in the very nature of things. ‘Comedy is meant to divide us, and delight us, to appeal to niche audiences … It’s meant to gather us in small tribes under the flag of whatever joke we, and only we, like best.’

5.30 Hazel listens to Channel 4’s international editor, the brilliant Lindsay Hilsum and two other very fine women journalists talking about the Gaza war. I should have been there.

I’ve chosen, as with comedy, something that’s important, but less in the limelight. Sadly, my session, Beyond Conflict: The Role of Libraries, with Elif Shafak and Priscilla Morris, and vice-patron of Book Aid International, Paul Boateng, in the chair, never quite takes off.  Priscilla Morris reads a passage from her novel, Black Butterflies, about the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo. Ukraine and especially Gaza have seen libraries destroyed. Book Aid is doing a valiant job in Africa. Back home we have school libraries (and in the USA school librarians) threatened. Questions widen the debate but there’s too little on the action we might take. How can we extend the successful focus on literacy (and numeracy) in our schools to a love of reading and literature? And, indeed, history and music? 

History is my subject. If we forget, or learn our history through a distorting lens, we will indeed be condemned to relive it. Hay is part of a long and until recently ever-extending tradition of investigation and understanding and tolerance. The last fifteen years or so have, despite Obama, taken us in another direction. The message must be – yes, we still can.

The Hay Book Festival 2024: big money, mushrooms and make-or-break elections

It’s election time UK. (And in India. And in South Africa.) We’re waiting in a decision in the Trump trial. And… it’s the Hay Book Festival. A good place to get a wider perspective on events.

Two superb investigate journalists, Carole Cadwalladr and Tom Burgis, began my day. They were talking to Oliver Bullough. Burgis’s book, ‘Cuckooland’, is all about money buying access and influence, at the highest level. Burgis’s anti-hero is ‘communications entrepreneur, philanthropist and thought leader’ (as his Foundation describes him), and major Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi.

He brought a defamation case, which he lost, against former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie. She had investigated his background and he didn’t like the attention. Legal action was something he could take on without a moment’s thought, which wasn’t true for Leslie. Nor was it true of the legal action taken against Burgis himself in another case, which he won, brought by the Kazakhstan-based Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC).

Carole Cadwalladr is well-known for her role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But in a defamation case brought by Brexit funder Arron Banks she lost and had an award of £1 million costs against her. Crowdfunding came to her rescue.

Money will buy you the service of London lawyers at £600 an hour. SLAPPS, standing for ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’, is an acronym which neatly sums up the way lawsuits are being used by the super-rich.

A whole new breed of super-rich arose out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today it involves oil and mining executives, mega-industrialists and indeed corporate lawyers across the globe. And, as they seek, and gain, influence, in the UK they can draw on Quintessentially, the ‘concierge’ services on one Ben Elliot, which acts as a broker for their much-paraded philanthropic instincts. Johnson elevated Elliot to the position of Tory party co-chair.

Just last month I was in Malaga, and admiring, if that’s the word, three super-yachts moored in the harbour. Status unknown, maybe for sale. The one-time owner of one was the co-founder of WhatsApp. Another, even grander, had been the plaything of a now-deceased Kazakh mining magnate.

My next event was amazingly and wonderfully different. The book: ‘Entangled Life’, by Merlin Sheldrake. Compare our brief lives and absurd ambitions with the rather longer life of plants, ‘which only made it out water 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi…’ If we didn’t have fungi today we’d be under piles of waste miles high. (Or piles of shit if you prefer.) The myriad species of fungi are our disposal agents. Sheldrake’s book is an award-winning bestseller and he is himself a mesmerising and fluent speaker. Seek him out. Read his book!

Thomas Halliday’s wonderful book, ‘Otherlands’, a ‘reverse’ history of the last 500 million years, had the same effect on me. Both books inculcate a sense of wonder at the longevity and complexity of life of our planet. But they also demand our humility. And remind us that, if we want to hang around for a while, we’d do better supporting our planet rather than taking it apart.

I was back in the crisis world of now for my final session, with Matthew D’Ancona talking to Sarah Churchwell, Matt Frei and Carole Calwalladr. Subject: the UK and US elections. From the Wood Wild Web (the maybe-not-always benign subterranean network by which the myriad strands of fungi link up our above-ground world of plants and trees) to the World Wide Web. To the internet. To social media. Cadwalladr highlighted the role of ‘influencers’, who are everywhere.

Frei preferred to focus on Fox News and their role in breaking down that broad consensus which has held the USA together for more than two hundred years – based around an acceptance of the constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, open to multiple interpretations but always operating through a trusted electoral system, and a Congress where both sides could talk, and on occasion work together.

Churchwell focused on a second-term Trump and how he would casually subvert this system, without remotely understanding himself what the consequences could be. Half of America believes that a Biden victory would be the end of democracy, half believes a Trump victory would be. Trump and indeed his acolytes such as Tim Scott refuse to say whether they will accept the result of the next election.

The UK election hardly got a look in. The Tories have shaken down to a rump where Grant Shapps is our defence minister. They’re easy about donations from the rich and powerful, and mercenary activities such as selling games of tennis with Boris, and dinner round at Michael Gove’s, for big sums. They’d like us to think this is the new normal.

I love the passion of Hay. We were a bunch, a mega-bunch, of serious and animated book lovers. It rained all day, but no one complained.