Tag: Johnson

Trumpification

Or, the normalisation of Donald Trump.

I ran today up into the local hills, through a village which hardly exists, though it does have a small school for small people. It clings to the hillside. Steep places, almost too steep. It’s called Thrupp.

We had Donald Trump on a state visit earlier this week. Thrupp. Trump. Four letters in common. Nothing else. Thrupp is on the edge of Stroud, a town with a remarkable sense of community. Trump is transactional, cooperation and community an unfortunate necessity.

Thoughts from my diary, from last Tuesday:

‘Trump is on a state visit, and he’s now almost an accepted part of the scenery, and we’ve adjusted, and the abnormal,  for some amongst us, is almost normal, and we’ve adjusted, and we don’t mind, maybe someone so much in the public eye can’t be so bad, maybe we’ve misjudged a little, and he likes Boris, and Boris will be PM, and we’re being promised an amazing trade deal, and we will be absorbed into more than an alliance, a kind of happy subjugation, but we won’t realise it, it will happen by osmosis, we will be absorbed, and we will have the independence of California if we’re lucky, but a right-wing government more suited to a Texas or South Carolina, and we’ll look across to Europe, just a few miles away, and it will seem further away than the USA three thousand miles away, and we won’t mind, Europe has after all been the source of all our problems, and now tucked under a welcoming American arm, we will be safe and sheltered, and sovereign in special subjugated sort of way, and what’s special, again, is that we won’t notice, we will just slide, with a rictus smile on our faces, and the press, the big media owners, will tutor us into a state of contentment, we will conclude we never knew things any other way, and that will be that. Oh happy days!’

Remember, back in 2016, how Ted Cruz called Trump, ‘a pathological liar’, Mario Rubio called him a ‘con artist’, with ‘a dangerous style of leadership’. Paul Ryan characterised comments by Trump, as ‘the textbook definition of a racist’. He turned, in Rubio’s words, the 2016 election ‘into a freak show’. And where are we now – where are the Republicans now? All lined up, Trump their greatest, their only asset.

We have our shouters. Johnson, Farage. We know them well.

Few among the Tories have stood up to be counted, as Michael Heseltine did at the Peoples’ March a few weeks back. Where is he now? Expelled.

I find the feebleness of mind of Tory MPs, their pusillanimity, their willingness to put party and self before country, extraordinary. Yes, with constituents who were Brexit voters – yes, they have a problem. For the diehards, of course, no problem. But for the wiser majority (am I being too kind?), they should be back in their constituencies, arguing with their voters. Winning them over, if they can. Losing their seats next time, if they must. And, yes, they will have to take on the Telegraph and the Mail.

It isn’t an easy life. The stakes are high.

Will they roll over – and accept the Trumpification of their country?

 

Fifty shades of folly

I thought I’d touch this morning on the many kinds of folly. Not fifty, I have to admit. But it makes a good title for this post.

Zenpolitics, born in the measured Obama era, in the first months, didn’t allow for folly. That was my big mistake. There’s much to criticise, much to be angry about, in the years 2009 to 2016, but the wheels just about stayed on track. We argued the parameters of austerity, whether they should be wider or narrower, about the boundaries of wealth and enterprise, and the constrictions of poverty and exclusion.

But I didn’t allow for folly. Which isn’t to say the follies I highlight below are in any way new. They are as ancient as the hills, in one form or another. But they now have become by twists of fate the dominant discourse.

Once folly take root, it shows up in many guises.  One of the most common, and damaging, is taking outlying incidents as the norm. Regaling us with incidents (I’m quoting a recent conversation of mine, typical maybe of half the nation, if polls are to be believed) involving Lithuanian criminals, and benefit scroungers, and over-crowded schools, as if these were the norm across the country.

Anecdote and emotion dictate the debate.

Taking sides is another variant of folly – you’re one one side or the other, no shades of grey inbetween, and that multitude who live on the other side of town from you, and claim benefits, they’re all shrinkers and shirkers.

Following the same line of thought, you’re a refugee, or you’re an economic migrant. The former good, the later bad. No shades of grey. And no recognition of the fact that all our forebears  were migrants once upon a time.

In dealing with mass movements of population, maybe the greatest issue of our time, it does no service to either argument or individual to stigmatise.

Brexit might in time, with a clear run, have learnt to speak truth, but with a siege mentality taking hold the old shibboleths are gaining new traction. The same mentality is feeding another kind of folly. Denial. Denial that it could all go wrong – has gone wrong. The comforting belief that Northern Ireland can be shunted forward forever as an issue. That we have a plethora of options other than a customs union with the EU.

Only last week the outgoing president of the CBI said that sections of UK industry faced extinction unless the UK stayed in the customs union.  And yet that is precisely what our prime minister has ruled out.

Denial invites rhetoric. Boris Johnson recently argued to Conservative donors that Britain is at risk of ending up in ‘a sort or anteroom of the EU’. He blamed this on insufficient resolve from the PM, and strong resistance from – the establishment. That old and easy target. (Who are Tory MPs, other than the establishment?) Keep the faith, and all will be well, I believe was the tenor of Johnson’s speech. Churchillian rhetoric may have a time and place. But it sounds foolish now.

That take us neatly on to another kind of folly – the strong leader. Oh, how we need one. Trump ‘would go in bloody hard’, argued Johnson. So we would be pugnacious toward the EU, and go cap-in-hand to a US president we can’t afford to offend… And we’re assuming that Trump will emerge triumphant from all his bombast.

And if he does, and the idea of strong leader triumphs, representative democracy will be the loser. It’s argued that American democracy is strong enough in its institutions to withstand Trump. Would our unwritten constitution stand up so well? It is folly to put it to the test – to attack the judiciary, to bandy words like traitor.

The folly of blame, and panic. Blaming the prime minister who ‘is a Remain voter who has sold out the Brexiteers at every possible opportunity’. (I’ve borrowed the paraphrase from the Economist.) Brexiteers are being stabbed in the back. Much could be said about the resolute incompetence our PM, but I’ll spare her that charge.

But I will level another – the curious pusillanimity of Remain-supporting Tory MPs who have lined up behind Brexit, mealy-mouthing their change of mind and heart, engaging in protracted acts of self-preservation, in the face of possible de-selection.

They may wish to row back from their conversion, but having changed their minds once would they dare do so again? They’re trapped. Maybe a few journalists out there, on the Telegraph, and the Spectator, find they’re in the same place. They’ve spoken out so strongly in the past – dare they turn their coats now?

The likes of Arron Banks have long sought to change the frame within which we see and understand our world – to something less liberal and more confrontational, the loner doing better than the pack, ideas backed by the Koch brothers in the USA, and realised after a fashion in Donald Trump. Folly lies in the failure of so many to realise that the frame has been manipulated, by money, Super-PACs in the USA, media owners in the US and UK, so they think they’re on the same song sheet they always were, but someone’s changed changed the words, and they haven’t noticed.

We haven’t reached that point here, but Trump’s caging of immigrant children, after separating them from their parents, should be simply inconceivable. Yet swathes of the American public went along with it. And Tory politicians here were slow to condemn, fearful of upsetting a government on whom they will depend to an unconscionable degree if a hard Brexit were ever to happen.

The frame becomes a cage. The folly of not reading and remembering your history.

Folly also lies in an increased propensity to lie as your position weakens. Brexit supporters always played fast and lose with the truth – promises come cheap and uncosted. The increase in NHS funding promised this week resurrected the idea of a Brexit dividend for the NHS, famously associated with the Brexit red bus. All serious commentators make it clear that the British economy will sustain significant damage as a result of Brexit. And even if that only applies to the short and medium term, and trade secretary Liam Fox is able to conjure trade deals further down the line that magic our GDP to new levels (an unlikely scenario) – that is the long term. The increases in NHS funding are for the period up to 2023-4. There can be no Brexit dividend over that period.

We have here a simple unvarnished untruth. Folly shades readily into untruth to protect itself. We’re engaged now in the most egregious and protracted act of folly in modern British history. When a pressure group surprised by power flounders. Historians will have a field day. Unless of course folly wins the day, and as in other countries historians come to toe a party line.

Finisterre – end of the known world…

Last year walking the Camino across Spain I put all thoughts of politics out of my mind. I posted a blog when I returned, entitled ‘On being a European’. I had confidence a European and international outlook would win out in the end, whatever the short-term travails. The Brexit vote hit that confidence hard, but walking the Camino Portuguese, and the passing of the weeks, has helped bring calm and perspective. And a shrug of the shoulders – can we really be so daft?

At Cabo Fisterra, Cape Finisterre, where I ventured after Santiago, I clambered down the rocky slope below the lighthouse, and looked out west, over a stretch of ocean which to the Romans would have been at the very edge of the known world – finis terrae. The ocean as the Styx, and somewhere out there would have been Charon, with his boat, ferrying souls.

High cloud patterned the sky but didn’t reduce the sun’s intensity. Mist held to the coast behind me, but not out to sea.

In medieval times, likewise, this was the end of the world, and pilgrims would continue beyond Santiago to Finisterre. In the voyage of St Brendan he sails out west from Ireland and passes over into paradise.

I’ve this fantasy of May, Davis, Fox and Johnson, sitting in a restaurant, at the end of the world (borrowing from Douglas Adams!), having a last meal before they cut ties with Europe and venture off into the unknown. The ocean is peaceful just now but the autumn and winter storms will be mighty.

On another tack, but still in Spain, there’s a quote I like from Gerald Brenan’s classic book, The Face of Spain, about Spain, but more applicable to the UK just now: ‘I do not know where we are going, but I do know this – that wherever it is we shall lose our way.’

And China…. thinking walls, not oceans…. I’ve a sense that the Emperor Shih Huang Ti’s behaviour, as recorded in Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, might just have relevance to our own times: he ‘ordered the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books preceding his reign, so that history would henceforth begin with him and his wall.’

In this post-expertise age, we are in a not dissimilar place. We might just finding ourselves using a new, unknown and very friable building material, not stone, not brick – but brexit. On one side of the wall, the old Europe, and on the other, the ocean.

The same again please

Written before May announced and Johnson renounced, and then Gove pronounced. More on that later…

I’ll argue to the end for the re-assertion of parliamentary democracy (over referenda) and continued membership of the EU. And millions with me, I know. But, if that doesn’t happen, what should we argue for – what should we demand?

The same…

If we can’t have the EU we need the EU without the EU. The same workplace, health and safety, and environmental legislation, the same Europe-wide agreements in science, the same cooperation in the arts.

What we still want to be a part of came about because of the EU. That fact will be more than apparent for many of us. Maybe the realisation will strike home for a few Leave voters.

The same vision: that’s more difficult – the open inclusive vision that many of us have is simply not shared. And that, as long as it doesn’t shade into bigotry and prejudice, I can just about accept – I must accept. (That it did so shade in the referendum is a challenge for all of us.)

The same trade deal: all save a few economists on the neo-liberal wing of the Tories (or beyond that wing) would like to be spared tariffs, would want to be part of a single market. EU regulations would have to be adopted by the UK – little option but to do otherwise – and any reining back would be a betrayal of civilised values.

Compromise is sometimes possible: in some areas we have to take a stand. And that means immigration, the devilish strand that is woven through history. Our forebears somewhere way back were immigrants, and their progeny a generation or two down the line took up against the next wave. Each generation has to manage the issue as best and as widely as it can.

Wisdom in a referendum too easily goes out the window, as it has done here. Fertile ground for wild statements appealing to the worst in people. I would have trusted Cameron to bring that wisdom to any negotiation. I think I might also trust Stephen Crabb. Start out with a degree of humility not arrogance. Boris Johnson has today disqualified himself, though there’s no more humility there than in his nemesis, Michael Gove.