Tag: Hungary

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

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…

More thoughts for the day

The death of the Duke of Edinburgh has the nation in mourning. We have something we, most of us, agree on. He was a good man, who, as Prince Albert before him, used his position to advance a wide range of good causes – the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Duke of Edinburgh scheme above all. He was also a fine cricketer, which does count for something.

And Rachael Blackmore won the Grand National quite brilliantly: the first woman jockey to do so.

The BBC ran tributes across all stations to the Duke. But elsewhere…

Hungary: ‘The last radio station that is critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government is due to go off the air.’ Poland: ‘Media freedom …now faces its greatest set of challenges since 2015 as the government continues to wage a multi-pronged attack on independent media … ‘ Both reports are dated February 2021. In the Czech Republic and Slovenia the independence of the state broadcaster is also under threat.

As for the BBC, we’re used to grumbles from left and right about bias toward the other side. Now the left, obsessed by its own squabbles and with a wholly outdated understanding of the working man, and with minimal support in the popular press, has lost all influence. Murdoch, on the other hand, that happy paragon of all that’s best in Aussie and American, is unchallenged. The Sunday Times on the Greensill collapse and David Cameron: hammering the Tory old guard might just suit Murdoch’s politics. Should I be suspicious?

Maybe now, with arch-disruptor Cummings consigned to outer darkness and Covid and the Red Wall north and big spending to focus on, the government will worry less about the BBC. They can burnish their social conservative credentials by insisting refugees go through official channels, as if any refugee has access to such things. They can espouse freedom of speech (in the face of ‘no platforming’) and mock wokery, but legislate to limit freedom of assembly. We will see how far they go.

I referred to ‘an outdated understanding of the working man’ on the left. That takes me to Red Wall seats ‘up north’, and the smart housing estates that are popping up everywhere, where houses are cheap, by comparison to London, and the standard of living, despite lower wage and salary levels than down south, relatively high. That is the new north, and it’s this that is probably driving the big increase in the Tory vote.

The old working class before the WW1 was instinctively conservative and Tory. They knew their place. The new prosperous working class has more confidence, they doff caps to no-one, and they’ve bought into what may or may not be the fiction that they have in the new Tory dispensation a recognised and valued place.

I’m reading Jesse Norman’s splendid biography of Adam Smith. Why would someone of Norman’s obvious sanity be serving in a government where pragmatism and the wide sympathies as evinced by Norman can be in short supply?Norman, on the way Friedmanite economics distorted and still radically distorts what Adam Smith really stood for, is revealing. Peter Kellner in the current edition of Prospect has a letter which suggests we should see the Tory party in terms of a Vann diagram, with old-style conservatism overlapping the new ideological variety. Norman maybe is the true conservative, and he needs to be in there to make certain the ideologues don’t take over.

And, finally, how the 18th century prefigured the 21st. Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, which had been a major port serving Europe for hundreds of years. His father was Comptroller of Customs for Kirkcaldy. The big switch over to Glasgow and the Clyde, and the American trade, not least tobacco, was already happening. By the 1750s Glasgow was importing more tobacco than all the English ports combined. It was the American economy that intrigued Smith. He looked west, not east. We have that dilemma to this day. Do we look west, or east? Glasgow ironically is now a stronghold of support for Scottish independence, and the Scot Nats look to Europe. England on the other hand would love that US trade deal….