Category: Media

The distant roar of a B1 Lancer

One minute I’m listening to the repeating call of a nuthatch. A few minutes later, the distant roar of a B1 Lancer bomber heading for Iran. I’m in the Cotswolds, about ten miles from RAF Fairford. Iran, and as Trump would have it, Iranian civilization, is under immediate threat. (They are as I write gathering in Islamabad for ceasefire talks.)

I’m wondering how the world got into such a mess. How conservative America having elected Trump hasn’t drawn a line when it came to his excesses in the Near East. (Or his pandering to Putin, and disdain for Ukraine. Though the likes of Tucker Carlson are challenging his support for Israel.) Or how they came to elect a charlatan in the first place. This is my attempt, and it is only an attempt (and written, at a distance, by a Brit), at an explanation. Apologies for its length. But if you’re interested in such things, do give it a read.

I’ve always advocated for liberal democracy in this blog, for parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech and association. At the same time, I’m a traditionalist, a lover of country, our institutions, our way of life. I’m sure of my ground on issues of climate change and immigration, race and gender. But in an open, non-ideological society my views may not carry the day.

We’ve always found consensus but now, in the USA, the very idea of consensus is under threat. For decades the far left were seen as a potentially subversive force, and for many on the right social agendas and immigration were seen in the same light. But the actual processes of democracy were only questioned on the fringes. No more.  

I’ve found it useful, especially in the American context, to explore the roles of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals as precursors to the current debates, and current events.

Neo-liberals focussed on free markets, de-regulation and limited government. Individuals were left to help themselves, with minimal support from the state. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, while economically liberal, and more interventionist when it came to foreign engagements, advocated an explicitly socially conservative agenda.

Early neo-cons such as Irving Kristol had intriguing backgrounds as Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s: their opposition to the straitjackets of Soviet Communism morphed in the post-war years into an advocacy of unfettered free markets. The counter-culture of the 1960s was anathema to them. Also anathema were Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had left the existing dispensation regarding race in place. Not so the Johnson reforms.

To liberals back in the 1970s and 80s neo-conservative ideas constituted a separate world. In a sense they triumphed with Reagan but any social conservative agenda never really took hold. Nor did it, as you’d expect, under Clinton, but in the House of Representatives in the 1990s Newt Gingrich did draw up battle lines. You didn’t communicate with the other side. Universities and the radicalism of both faculty and students, and policies of positive discrimination became, the more so as decades passed, anathema to many. Identity politics on the left as they impacted race and gender became defining issues. So too a government which attempted to dictate on education and welfare.

Both sides dug in their heels, both sides demonised the other. Men who worked across the floor of the Senate like Edward Kennedy and John McCain are remembered as relics from another age. The Obama years, aided by Trumpian malice, only served to harden these battle lines. Issues were weaponized. Conspiracies, not least the birthing conspiracy invented around Obama, became common currency. When conspiracies take hold in a society, they are hard to counter, so much more with the growth of social media.  

Many of the left demonized the right on issues of race and gender and immigration. Climate change was drawn into the argument. Changes allowing electoral funding by third parties exacerbated the divide. What had seemed to the political centre-left to be a debate they would win, all in good time, as they’d seen every debate won over the post-war years, was of a sudden very much open to question. What could be seen as arrogance on the left would only have riled the right further.

Battle lines were hardened during the first Trump administration. Battle was joined, and it became brutally one-sided, in January 2025 when Trump returned. Just how much should we pin on Trump? The MAGA movement which he’s help crystallize is small state and conservative and, compared to the hardened neo-liberals, naïve. Trump’s deal-making philosophy gave an opening to others with a far more thought-through agenda, above all the radical neo-conservative agenda of the Heritage Foundation. What the likes of Irving Kristol back in the 1970 and 80s could surely never have envisaged is the venom of the attacks on government institutions and the universities.

It’s given space to outright opponents of democracy such as the libertarian tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Where might unconstrained free markets take us? Democracy could only be an impediment. Just where might AI in the hands of the likes of Thiel and Musk take us?  And Thiel is now giving lectures on the Antichrist, venturing as far as Rome. Whether the Christian nationalism of the likes of Pete Hegseth goes that far, I don’t know. Hegseth of course has the weaponry.

If we are liberals by inclination and belief, especially if we’re watching all this fury from the relatively safe remove of the UK and the even further remove of the Cotswolds, must we wait on the mid-terms and see how much the Iran fiasco has damaged Trump?

An early indicator might be the Hungarian election next week. Can this new breed of autocrats, hiding behind a democratic veneer, so subvert the democratic process that there is for some countries, Hungary, and, in that terminal scenario, the USA, no way back?

Easter messages

It’s Easter Morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace in the Middle East. No doubt Pope Leo will do too. (See later!) Donald Trump will not listen. But the main headline today is the rescue of an American pilot shot down in Iran. What might have been the other big news story is the first sighting by the Artemis astronauts of the other side of the moon. My sense – our collective sense – of wonder is tempered by the sense that we’re in a space race with China, more serious than the old Russian one, that space could be militarised, that Musk wants to get us to Mars.

Violence where it isn’t explicit is an undercurrent. Trump is part of a long tradition, where violence is visited on civilians. It is as if Netanyahu’s disregard for life in Gaza and the Lebanon and the West Bank has opened a door in Trump’s mind. He will bomb Iran, in his words, ‘back to the Stone Age’.

It is a little realised truth that when the USA has gone beyond its own continental borders and attacked another much older civilisation it has always come off worse. Vietnam looked to be a forever warning. It wasn’t. The Second Iraq War took on a country which occupies the territory, Mesopotamia, of arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Moving into tribal Afghanistan, America in the end proved no match for old loyalties. And now Iran. Iran – ancient Persia – is one of the world’s great civilisations, of a depth and indeed humanity (in its broadest sense) which the USA has never achieved. The current government of Iran is, in the long history of Persia, an abomination.

I’ll quote here from an article by Pankaj Mishra. ‘Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persia civilisation. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez [and others] assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that privileged the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics’.*

It’s worth remembering here that for almost fifteen hundred years since the rise of Islam Christianity remained a tolerated, albeit subordinated, faith under the rule of multiple Islamic states.

Bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ has an irony all its own when asserted by Trump. It should hardly go without saying that Obama and the Europeans’ approach to containing the nuclear aspirations of a brutal regime in Iran was the better approach. Contain the regime, allow the country to function, and wait on a time when some measure of individual freedom can be restored.

There is a long and terrible tradition of violence against civilians in war. Cities stormed could be obliterated, as was Carthage, citizens murdered, raped, enslaved. There is by contrast a nobility in defence, as we saw in the two World Wars. But even then… think of the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Also of Tokyo in the firestorm of April 1945, when clusters of bombs ‘blew open two thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm’. The raid ‘destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg the two years earlier’. Curtis LeMay, the man behind the Japanese raids, won later notoriety ‘ for remarking that the USA should bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.*

This is the language and level of malevolence practised by Donald Trump. The Stone Age should be Iran’s destination too. It is a convenience of war to elide an enemy’s military and its people. It would behove Trump and Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth to imagine themselves under the bombs their air forces rain down on Gaza and Iran and the Lebanon. As we ordinary folk can. Imagine themselves working with the doctors and nurses who tend the dying and wounded. The Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by all members of the United Nations, outlaws the ‘wilful killing of persons not involved in conflict, as well as ‘wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health’, and ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity’. 

We’ve had Pete Hegseth leading prayers at the White House. He is a proponent of a new-wave ‘Christian nationalism’, which by some extraordinary sleight of hand weaponises Christ. He argues for ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’. Iranians are religious fanatics? All Iranians? Can that be any greater a fanaticism than his own? I won’t labour this further now, but whatever we had in World War Two, or in Vietnam, or in the Gulf or Afghanistan, was an attempt to establish, or restore, and embed the ‘old’ rules-based order. Where nations traded and cooperated and we in the West hoped that in time that commercial contact would bring all of us closer together. Now we have the main proponent of that world order taken over by men of violence.

Just how many of us in the UK have registered this agenda, how many who understand when we are enjoined to join the fight just what that fight, that battle, might be? A holy war propagated and proselytised by … let’s leave as ‘men of violence’.

Christian nationalism is the USA has evolved out of more traditional right-wing policies. Just how that has evolved out of small-state and family values American conservatism is a subject for another time. At what point did it become specifically illiberal?

I will sign off with words from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this Easter Sunday morning. ‘On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power…’ He has a battle on his hands against those, amongst them a good few American Catholics (and Protestants), who see their faith as an ‘onward march of Christian soldiers’.  

* Quotations from two articles in New York Review of Books, dated 9th April, by Pankaj Mishra (‘A Bitter Education’) and Joshua Hammer (‘A Man-Made Disaster’)

Is it them or us?

We are no longer viewing events at a distance. This isn’t history. I’ve talked often about the dangers to democracy, our democracy. But now they are here, they are immediate.

Hilary Mantel referred to history as ‘the plan of the positions we take when we stop the dance to note them down’. We are the dance.

We’ve always had sharp differences of view, left and right and in-between. But the principles of representative government, freedom of speech and association, and the rule of law, have in the post-war era, in the Western democracies, never been under threat. Until now. Could it now be, literally, them or us?

We’ve always had a ruling class, defined by money or land, or both, but our democracy has over two hundred years more or less (we could of course go back much further) held them in check. But now we have social media businesses kowtowing to Trump (Silicon Valley likewise), while shedding the responsibilities they once avowed, And the message that they and other media convey so readily is that here – in the UK and in the USA – we’re broken societies, failed states.

We’re at risk of surrendering our democracy too easily.

Reading a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, ‘Shadow Ticket’, I came across the following. The words are the reviewer’s, not Pynchon’s. ‘Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.’

Are we now more willing to cede power to a new ruling class, one that will be disinclined to relinquish that power through the democratic process?

Extending that line of reasoning… it’s argued we want safety from a defined enemy, who the media have helped define for us and who, in the case of the UK and the USA, is an immigrant population who are deemed to be taking our jobs and preying on our services, and on our women and children as well. Take it up another level, and there are conspiracies, and a class, in our case a self-serving middle-class, who are in effect conspiring against us.

The direction of travel is ominous.

Reading Paul Preston’s ‘Architects of Terror’ I’ve been made aware of the role that an entirely fictional ‘Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy’ played in justifying the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Franco likened his victory to that of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, some 450 years before: ‘We have not shed the blood of our dead to return to a decadent past, to the sad liberalism that lost us Cuba and the Philippines.’

Germany after 1933 and Spain from 1936 are just two examples of how easy it is to slip from democratic government, vilified as ‘sad liberalism’, to autocracy.

The violence in Palestine and Gaza, in the Yemen and Sudan, the brutality of ISIS, Boko Haram and Islamic State, have all seemed distant. We didn’t ourselves feel threatened. Putin invading Ukraine has brought it to our doorstep and yet swathes of people across Europe are willing to support him. He represents an old order which, however divided, gave people security. Young people headed to towns, to western Europe, industries closed or moved away, remittances from abroad weren’t enough to secure either prosperity or pride. We’re not yet faced in Europe with the effective transfer of power from the courts to one man, as is happening with the Supreme Court’s connivance in the USA. But we’re heading that way.

We liberals have always thought we had the moral high ground. We’re locked into the old post-war order and it’s as if nothing has changed. But swathes of our populations want to claim back that ground. They don’t have the same sense of moral niceties that we do. To them, our high morality is sham. Our cities prosper while local towns, once the backbone of our prosperity, are in decline. Democracy has failed them. It is our game, no longer theirs.

And look at the language I’m using. Is it really us or them? And which side am I on? Could I be persuaded that democracy has failed, and some form of autocracy, backed up as necessary by violence, might be the only answer?

OK, that’s a rhetorical question, for me at least. But for how many others might it be a reality?

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.

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 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.

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.

Beware the extremes

As the Tories lurch ever further right we have reason in the UK to worry. But they are as weak, absurdly so, as they have ever been. But if, after the forthcoming election, they absorb the far-right Reform Party and travel further to the extremes themselves, and the right-wing media head off further in the direction of conspiracy and talk of a deep state, then we may need to pay closer attention to what is happen in other countries.

In Hungary under Orban, and until recently Poland under the Law and Justice party (PiS), the takeover of the media has been blatant. The aim has been to take over all the key institutions of state, usually in the interests of a socially-conservative and nationalist agenda. The government takes over the media, the judiciary, the universities, and as Donald Tusk is finding in Poland it’s hard to claw back the power of the state once it’s entrenched, especially when you have to use that same power of the state – to return authority to independent institutions – to do so.

Over in the USA the Republicans have effectively captured the Supreme Court. Conspiracy theories are rife. Taylor Swift is part of a Democrat conspiracy. That’s tame compared to QAnon. Conspiracy theory has a long history in the USA, going back to Nativist parties with anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic agendas in the 1830 and 40s. Trump is in there, playing an age-old game.

The Deep State, a nefarious coalition of the various forces running the liberal (socially and economically) state, is a Trump obsession. Conspiracists gravitate to such notions. Liz Truss on a US tour talked about a British ‘Deep State’. In a recent podcast Ed Balls and George Osborne wondered where that Deep State might lie. What or who did Truss mean? The Civil Service? The Financial Times? They landed, for want of better, on The Economist. I will be searching there for signs when I next read it, wary of how I might be influenced in covert ways…

Just a few days ago I was listening on a car journey to a podcast where the subject was the possible takeover of the Daily Telegraph by Paul Marshall, a vastly wealthy hedge fund owner and co-owner GB News. (Al Jazeera is far more informative.) I was high in the Pennines, the M62 snaking beneath me, and that sense of a vast empty space stays in my mind.

Marshall (as reported by the charity ‘Hope Not Hate’) has liked on his X/Twitter account posts (all now deleted) that refer not just to ‘losing patience with fake refugee invaders’ but also to the survival of European civilisation requiring mass expulsions. (The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ assumes a vast plot to replace our existing Christian with an Islamic population and culture.) Let’s assume they aren’t his real opinions. But if so, why the ‘likes’? Marshall is a practising Christian of a very born-again and conservative (and, arguably, very un-Christian) persuasion.

The Telegraph may or may not be safe from Marshall. For now it looks as if we will safe from the Telegraph, assuming Labour gets elected. But longer term – the old sane Toryism of the Telegraph under its long-time editor Bill Deedes (‘Dear Bill’) may be lost forever.

The old post-war centre of gravity is shifting right. Obama and an enlightened middle ground seems light years away. But it was only 2009…

Ukraine, Russia – and the world

Do I head to Northern Ireland with this post, or to Ukraine, or to India, or stay back home…? Northern Ireland, and that absurd boast from Rishi Sunak that Northern Ireland now has the best of both worlds. It can trade with open borders with the rest of the UK, and with Europe. Just as we all could do before June 2016. We will leave it there.

Ukraine: the issue our government should be focusing on. Instead we have and will have more of that ruinous Brexit aftermath.

It was my privilege with many of my fellow villagers to attend a Ukraine evening at the Ukrainian Social Club in Gloucester, which dates back to immediately after the Second World War. One highpoint was the dinner, with local dishes, beginning with borsht and ending with a layered coffee cake. Next came an auction, with a highlight being a very fine birch-wood clock, retrieved I believe from a bombed-out factory. It will in the near future have pride of place on the wall of our village hall. And, finally, a concert: solo violin, accordion, a Cossack dancer of extraordinary style and agility, and singing – adults and children – and Oksana in a long white dress and silver boots leading us, it seemed incongruously, but maybe not so, in the chorus of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

They were fundraising, we have to remind ourselves, for a war. Even Switzerland has to re-think its historic neutrality, though it’s not there yet. But more than that, we had a sense of a country, a culture and a language, and a thriving democracy (corruption issues notwithstanding). The contrast with their eastern borderlands, and with events in Donbass, is so extreme. And yet, Russia is the land of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam.

(Thinking of Donbass … Shakhtar Donetsk are one of Europe’s leading football teams, but they no longer play in Donetsk. In 2014 they moved to Lviv and now are playing matches in Kyiv.)

And they love their Shakespeare in Russia. I thought of Shostakovich’s curiously-named opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The story is very different from Shakespeare but we have Lady Macbeth (she is planning a murder) as a universal trope or archetype. But I’m assuming any hint of the subversion of an existing order would be too much in Putin’s Russia, as it was in Stalin’s.

We went to Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest last Thursday. Prospero and Ariel are played by women, and quite brilliantly and convincingly so. There was a very special and personal link between them. Could we imagine a woman playing Prospero in a Russia where gender roles are increasingly narrowed down to the old male and female and ‘there-shall-be-no-other’ split?

We are curtailing our imaginations, we are losing creativity. Erdogan imprisons any journalist with a creative and thereby critical take on the country’s fortunes. He’s an example to Narendra Modi, responding to a recent highly critical BBC documentary with a police raid on BBC offices in India, on the grounds of tax irregularities. A charge of corruption is the reason for the arrest of one of the leaders of a rising opposition force in India, the Aam Aadmi party.

Istanbul’s mayor, a leader of the main Turkish opposition party, has been sentenced to over two years in prison for ‘calling members of Turkey’s supreme election council “fools” in a press release three years ago’. There’s a crucial election coming up.

Rupert Murdoch admits that his TV channels in the USA went along with the Trump lie about a stolen election. They are polishing their hate figures in the USA, polishing their anger. There’s a very relevant comment in an article by William Davies in the current London Review of Books. He highlights Donald Trump’s ‘affective state of seemingly constantly being on the verge of losing his temper’, adding ‘a sense of danger and excitement to his political career’. ‘Boris Johnson, by contrast, always appears to be on the verge of bursting out laughing’. Both approaches win converts, as we’ve seen only too well.

We have to be watchful on all sides and everywhere. Republicans in Congress are challenging the levels of expenditure on the Ukraine war. Maybe they aren’t as foolish and sinister as Trump in his cosying to Putin, but they haven’t fully bought into the reality that this is where democracy, as we understand it, stands or falls.

The reality is that democracy is for many, on the right primarily but also on the left (think Lopez Obrador, known as ‘AMLO’, in Mexico), seen as the way to power, and once they have that power they are keen to pull up the democratic drawbridge after them.

Bring on the Ukrainians: they are focusing our minds. We can see where our complacency might lead.

Travelling in India …

I began my last blog with a few words which may give a misleading impression.

‘All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to.’

We returned from a two-week holiday in north-western India six weeks ago.

‘On the surface.’ I left open what might lie below the surface. India as envisaged by Nehru and the Congress Party in 1947 was to be a secular, non-aligned state. Nehru looked to the West, but also to communist Russia. India was partitioned, with terrible consequences, and the tension between India and its neighbour Pakistan is palpable, seventy-five years on, even to short-stay visitors. The army’s presence, in the areas where we travelled, is everywhere.

Over the last seventy years the Congress Party has gone into sharp decline and the fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP, has taken hold of the levers of power, at a national and increasingly local level. The BJP under Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014.

In 1992 Hindu activists destroyed a mosque, at Ayodhya, on a site widely believed to have been the birthplace of the god Rama. If this act was symbolic of an India reconstituting as a Hindu state, the 2019 decision of the Modi government to revoke the status of Jammu and Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim territory, as a self-governing entity, and the transfer of power to the central government, was, and is, widely seen (outside India) as brutal act of suppression of Kashmiri, and Muslim, aspirations. Also pertinent is the 2019 legislation extending the National Register of Citizens to the whole country which would have the effect of leaving several million Muslims stateless.

Our own sampling of Hindu opinion during our stay in November suggested a disdain toward a Muslim population which is more and more ghettoised as threats and sometimes specific acts of violence increase. The irony of Delhi’s and Agra’s great tourist locations being Mughal and therefore Muslim forts and mausoleums, not least the Taj Mahal, seemed lost on our (otherwise splendid) Hindu guides.

All that said, India remains a functioning democracy of not far short of 1.4 billion people. We were in Shimla on election day for the state of Himachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly. We chatted to a friendly BJP teller outside a polling booth. (The BJP were noisily confident, but in this particular election they lost – and Congress won.)

The mood among the Hindu population was positive, almost aggressively optimistic. The economy is growing fast, and Modi, like him or not, is an influential figure on the world stage. The contrast I made in my last blog between the UK and India is for real.

And yet … quotes from my travel journal are apposite here:

‘Am I soft-pedalling on Modi too much? What of the Hindutva nationalist philosophy of the BJP? The Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy is no friend of the BJP. She writes in a recent book of essays of how “the holy cow and the holy script became of the chosen vehicles of (Hindu) mobilisation”. The “holy script” is Hindi…

… In The Times of India I read about a move to convert Christians among the Adivasi, India’s indigenous tribes, to Hinduism. Shivaji, the 17th century Marathi leader, is celebrated not least in movies as a Hindu proto-nationalist. The Shiv Sena movement, the leader of the local branch of which was shot the day before our arrival in Amritsar, is radical in its advocacy of a pure and dominant form of Hinduism. Muslim culture, and the Muslim population, which existed side by side with Hindu culture for many centuries, is under unrelenting pressure. And yet Bollywood still has many Muslim stars.’

Arundhati Roy, as an outspoken opponent of a regime increasingly hostile to dissent, lives dangerously. She sums up the situation, as she sees it, succinctly as follows. (The RSS is the ideological arm of the BJP.)

‘The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of a National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions all they need to do is pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villain, Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi infiltrators or anyone of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors.’

India has a militant China on its Himalayan border. It needs a strong army and a strong leader. You could argue it now has both. And a growing economy. But the cost in terms of its move away from the secular and open society that Nehru aspired to has been a high one.