Tag: Nigel Farage

The Uncivil War (C4)

I watched Brexit: The Uncivil War on C4 (Channel 4) last night (7th January). My last post listed a few good reasons why we had to hang on in there in our opposition to leaving the EU. The C4 play takes us on to different territory. It’s not about the pros and cons of immigration, or sovereignty, or indeed about the EU. It’s about disruption, genius, the triumph of algorithms (or data analytics, to be more precise), and almost incidentally, but powerfully, about an underclass, shown here as middle class, which feels excluded and left behind. And it’s about Dominic Cummings.

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Benedict Cumberbatch is Dominic Cummings, mastermind of the Leave campaign, campaign director of Vote Leave. Cumberbatch is brilliant: totally credible, I was watching Cummings, not Cumberbatch.

Cummings is a disruptor, tired of the old political set-up, loathing politicians, initially reluctant to get involved. He sees an opportunity and shows up the old guard, the twerp Bernard Jenkins and naïve Daniel Hannon, the out-of-his-depth Douglas Carswell, up as servants of the system – different chapters, the same old book. Arron Banks and Nigel Farage come off even worse, as drunken play-acting old fools. (Hard to say it, but the real Farage probably has more integrity than the wastrel depicted here.) There had to be a link between Cummings and the establishment, and that’s lobbyist Matthew Elliott, a man with the ability to muddle along with both sides.

Cummings is waging war, in his terms Dionysian, irrational, emotional, pitched again Apollonian reason and prudence, and bugger the consequences. As he explains to a committee of investigation set up in 2020 (yes, 2020) to no doubt get to the bottom of the whole charade, the means justified the end.

Explains also to Craig Oliver, Cameron’s director of communications, leading the Remain campaign, played with sanity and good humour by Rory Kinnear (an overly-kind depiction, I’ve heard argued). The two men face each other on opposite platforms of a tube station after missing both their trains (symbolic of course), and head off for a pint together. Oliver suggests Cummings should beware of what he’s unleashed (‘I’m worried that we won’t be able to heal’), and Cummings more or less shrugs. They also compare notes on their children – Oliver’s three girls, Cummings’ as yet unborn.

Cummings has a bedroom scene, with his pregnant wife. Oliver a kitchen scene, where he’s taking a conference call with Cameron and Peter Mandelson (which I understand never happened), and feeding four children at the same time. Writer James Graham allows them a degree of ordinary humanity.

Cummings’ masterstroke is to employ AggregateIQ to help him identify potential Leave voters: they identify three million, all of whom they can individually targeted – with over one billion messages during the campaign. Leave immigration to the Ukippers, their supporters are in the bag anyway. Use focus groups to identify the people who really matter: the vast numbers Brexit brought to the fore whom politicians and the media and the big cities had forgotten, and the issues which matter to them.

Cummings didn’t offer, and indeed Gove and Johnson didn’t when they came on board (they’re portrayed as all but prisoners of Cummings’ campaign), any policies, but he set up the enemy, a convenient enemy, the EU, and gave Vote Leave a slogan, initially ‘Take control’, and then, a stroke of genius, adding ‘back’ – ‘Take back control’. He didn’t worry about putting the £350 million a week NHS bus on the road: even Boris couldn’t justify it – but Cummings had made it a fact of life. And Turkey, all 70 million Turks, waiting to head for the UK once Turkey joined the EU. He didn’t need to get into the detail of immigrants scrounging welfare (when they were in fact net contributors through the taxes they paid). Turkey got the immigrant message across.

We are drawn in, initially, to thinking that this a pro-Leave drama, and by the end we know it’s anything but. Leave.UK, the Farage crowd, drew on data supplied by Cambridge Analytica. Cummings worked closely with AggregateIQ. Both organisations were funded by Robert Mercer, also the largest single contributor to the Trump campaign – so the rolling credits tell us.

Probably the only group who come through unscathed are the Leave voters themselves. Leave-supporting politicians are serving their own interests. Cummings is on his own big trip. The system operates for others, and not for the voters. It’s not a matter of age, but of their being the outer suburbanites, the out-west and up-northers, the non-city, non-metropolitan types. No-one had thought to include them in debates, or even to listen to them. There’s a memorable focus group scene where two women, one black, one white, argue – the white woman being accused of racism, and then breaking down in tears – she sees herself not the black woman as the outsider.

No politician escapes. (Cameron half survives, only because he’s not given a part. He’s off-stage, occasionally on film. Reduced to a cypher, appropriately.) They are self-serving, tied to old and failed ways of operating. Creative destruction is the means by which Cummings hopes to bring them down. By the morning of 24th June 2016 we get the impression that he’s realised what he’s done. It’s as if he hadn’t really wanted to win. Others celebrate, he doesn’t. It’s as if he already knows that he’s helped seed divisions that will take years if not generations to heal.

Brussels and Trafalgar Square

Two contrasting events from yesterday (Tuesday 28th):

First, Nigel Farage having the perverse temerity to turn up in Brussels to a session of the European Parliament and throw insults. ‘…virtually none of you have done a decent day’s work in your life’. Some of us would be inclined to level the same charge at Farage. Matched against a Scottish MEP, Alyn Smith, who begged MEPs to help Scotland stay in the EU. ‘I want my country to be internationalist, co-operative, ecological, fair, European …Scotland did not let you down. Please, I beg you, cher colleagues, do not let Scotland down now’.

Now, which side do we want to be on? The mean-spirited or the open-hearted? Europe is an attitude of mind. The Leave side claim to be European, but only if you believe in a Europe where we retreat behind our national frontiers. As part of that narrative the EU itself has to be pilloried. I like what I saw of the EU parliament yesterday. Not something I’d always say: no-one argues it’s a perfect institution! But you don’t leave an institution like the EU. You change, you reform, you build, you work together.

One addition: Quentin Letts, in the Mail, had this is today’s paper: ‘The parliament’s president, Martin Schulz, whose only previous job was running a bookshop, appealed for hecklers to desist.’ One could write a whole article about the idiocy of that remark. Running a bookshop is a far superior occupation to that of journalistic hack. I’ll leave it at that. I know booksellers, having been in publishing all my life. And I can recognise a hack at fifty yards.

The second event: the Colliers, Chris, Ben and Rozi, in Trafalgar Square for a pro-EU demo. Also Rozi’s best and oldest friend Lucy. My ex-wife Kathy was I’m sure with us in spirit. An international event, it’s London after all, and one I’m proud to have been a part of.  And I’m proud that our family though no longer together in one sense is so together on this. We all did something right over the last 30 years.

I had to leave the demo and head off to an evening class. In the rain, a 1/2 hour walk. I arrived and the tutor was in full flow… on the subject of the EU. Pro-Remain, but believing we should go along with the result. The class then got my riposte. ‘No pasaran,’ as they say in Spanish (they shall not pass), or ‘no lasagne’, as my mobile phone spellcheck suggested to me last weekend.

The emotions all this brings out are surprising. My plan had been for a quieter mretirement!

I learnt later that the demo had moved on down to the Houses of Parliament. Maybe not so much a demo as a celebration. Being a European, a citizen of the world, is a good place to be.

And if we leave?

If you prefer me writing country notes, or you’re American, and you’re not too interested in British or European politics, do give this post a miss! Though there are a good few parallels with Trumpery.

Also, if you’re expecting me to be mild-mannered, and avoid personalities, well, not this time. There is some pretty egregiously bad behaviour out there.

If you read the press and indeed listen to the BBC news you can get depressed, even feel beleaguered if you support staying in the EU. Michael Heseltine’s demolition of Boris Johnson yesterday, primarily over his linking the EU and Hitler’s ambitions, was featured in the Times, but not in the popular press. Heseltine would be ‘very surprised’ if Boris ever became the leader of the party, and that of course is an implicit part of the Brexit agenda. (How left-of-centre Brexit supporters can justify to themselves facilitating a Boris premiership I don’t know.) So however absurd Boris gets, he remains untouchable – and he is of course aware of that.

I don’t believe for a moment that Michael Gove shares Boris’s view of European history. I wonder (to myself only so far!) whether he might just change sides at the last. He is already tainted by association.

I also wonder what will happen if Boris does, after a Cameron resignation, become PM. Would all his party fall into line? I somehow doubt it – the party is badly split.(Just how far will all this mutual abuse extend?)  So he wouldn’t of course command a majority in the Commons, and in the event of an election there’s a very good chance that a pro-EU parliament would be returned. Would the Tories be able to campaign as a single party? If they did and they’re returned as the largest party, but well short of a majority, would they then still try and force through Leave legislation?

Another scenario: Nigel Farage asserts that, if the result is small Stay majority, there will be a clamour for a second referendum. I haven’t heard it from the Stay campaign yet, and I guess they’re too wise to make the comment – but if the result is a small majority for Leave, I expect there will also be a big clamour for … a second referendum.

Oh the joys of uncertainty and chaos!

If we weren’t all so deeply involved, if a potential Brexit hadn’t got calamity written all over it, these would be fascinating times. They will make good history ….

 

Obama and the U.K.

In a world beset with fanciful notions of power and influence, Obama stands out as a voice of sanity. I love the fact that he went to the Globe to listen to extracts from Hamlet this morning (400 years to the day since Shakespeare’s death), and later on in an address to young people in London urged them to ‘reject pessimism and cynicism’ and ‘know that progress is possible and problems can be solved’. ‘Yes, we can’ for the next generation of voters.

There’s his welcome intervention in the EU debate, making clear the USA view that UK has and will have much greater influence as part of the EU, rather than outside. And pointing out that for the USA a trade deal with the UK wouldn’t be a priority – would come ‘at the back of the queue’. Waverers in the Brexit debate take note.

We’ve had as a response, ‘irrelevant’, from Liam Fox, ‘talking down Britain’ from Nigel Farage (Farage and I don’t live in the same country), and references to Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry from Boris Johnson. To think that a fool such as Boris has aspirations to be prime minister of this country.

‘Take a longer, more optimistic view of history.’ That’s also from Obama’s speech this morning. I’m tired in the context of the EU debate of hearing about a disfunctioning country, and a disfunctioning institution over in Brussels, linked to an extraordinarily optimistic vision of a golden age that lies around the corner, or up in the sky, outside the EU.

(Malfunctions are addressed by imagination and time and hard grind – not by magic pills.)

Aristophanes in his play The Birds positioned Cloud Cuckoo Land up in the sky, a kingdom of the birds between earth and the gods, and that’s roughly where the Brexit campaigners would leave us.

Staying with Ancient Greece, there’s a creature in Greek mythology known as a chimaera, an assemblage of the parts of other animals, ‘a monstrous, fire-breathing hybrid creature’ (Wikipedia). It usually had the head of a lion, and the head of a goat sticking out of its back, and a tail of a snake ending in another head. I can’t resist imagining Boris as the lion, head and shaggy mane, and Nigel as the goat. Who might be worthy of the tail?

Answers, please, on a postcard.