Snap! (You’ve got the power)

Actually, technically, she’s got the power. For she, Theresa May, or Mrs May as they call her and May, as I call her, is the unelected Prime Minister of Great Britain now seeking to become the elected Prime Minister of Great Britain with a snap election that she promised never to call. Politicians and promises, eh? Cuh.

I guess it’s called a “snap” election because it’s going to be identical the last one. Snap. In which demoralising case, if the Tories are kept in power for another five years by a Labour party weakened through its own in-fighting and long-term muddle-headedness about Brexit, and the apparent unthinkability of a progressive coalition, there’s a very real chance that this country will snap in half, if not into three pieces.

A snap election is a sneaky bastard trick to pull. The Tories had their strategy and buzz-phrases planned, while the rest of the parties have just a few frantic weeks to catch up and decide on important matters such as whether sex between two people of the same gender is or isn’t a sin, and whether we need Trident or not. (The answers to both of those questions are opaque at this stage.) So we have the unedifying sight of May striding through seas of vetted Tory supporters to stand at a podium and answer no questions as she doggedly and bloodlessly repeats the phrases “STRONG AND STABLE LEADERSHIP”, “THE NATIONAL INTEREST” and “COALITION OF CHAOS” (the latter written and printed up on placards before the chaotic parties announced that they would not coalesce). Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn does what he always does, and does best, which is loosen his tie, leave Westminster behind and walk the earth, engaging with people who would benefit from Labour policy but who are still more likely to vote Conservative.

Good lord, we are in a fucking pickle. Tory austerity and “hard” Brexit seem to play much better in the wider populace than Labour focus on workers’ rights, the NHS and bank holidays, never mind the Liberal Democrat sort-of-anti-Brexit stance, which seems to annoy most people outside of big, complex cities, who accept the fate of a referendum in which 51.9% of the country voted to accidentally cast their beloved sovereign nation as a global pariah and push it to the back of every queue. (Still, at least all the immigrants have disappeared since last June. You just don’t see foreigners any more, do you?)

My total lack of confidence in Labour after Ed Milliband’s dismayingly weak challenge in 2015 (“Hell, yeah!”) was lifted when the membership voted outsider Corbyn in on a thrilling mandate. But the failure of the party to get behind him – or to field a single credible candidate to stand against him – left them in disarray. But I truly believe that now is the time to put squabbles and snipes aside and vote for whichever party can get the Tories out. If Labour are in second place in your constituency, vote for them, for the greater good. If it’s the Lib Dems, vote for them and hope that Tim Farron makes up his mind about the gays at some later stage. If you’re lucky enough to live in a ward where the local Greens speak to the people, vote for them and we’ll sort out bin collection later. (I’ve made no secret of my fundamental support of the Green Party’s policies in the past, but unless there really is a coalition of chaos, it’s more important to oust Theresa May and her privatising PPE asset-strippers than worry about bins.)

I believe this is called tactical voting. Vote with your head, not your heart, and we’ll sort out the details later. Clearly, this would be a lot simpler if the Lib Dems and Labour weren’t too arrogant to pool resources, but we are where we are. And this is where we are:

Personally, if I were in charge of Labour, I would waste no further time campaigning in Scotland. It is an act of hubris. The electoral equivalent of banging your head against a wall. But it’s also a distraction from the job in England and Wales, which are very likely, I think, to be what’s left of the United Kingdom within the next few years. I still wish I could vote for the SNP, but I’m going to have to come to terms with the cold, hard truth that I can’t. Unless I move to Scotland. Which is a temptation. (If I were in charge of any political party, I would ensure that my party leader did not run away from reporters.)

As for UKIP? Are they still going? Seriously, give them no thought. They’ve come in, smashed the place up, and we’re going to be cleaning their mess off the walls for generations to come. Unless Theresa May has a vicar’s-daughter epiphany one night before the month named after her and remembers that she campaigned to stay in the European Union, and calls a snap EU: Sorry About All That referendum based on facts and projections that are too complex to get on the side of a bus, or paste over a photograph of non-white migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, but that’s magical thinking, I know.

When are we going to reach breaking point? It seems to me we’ve had it with Farage and Banks and Nuttall and their cobbled-together saloon-bar fascism. And Farage’s oily ambitions to be a shock jock inside Donald Trump’s bum have now been revealed, so we really should move on. But my worry, among many worries, is that UKIP voters (many of whom were said to be ex-Labour voters) will return not to Labour, but to the warm embrace of the Conservatives, because their leader, who was firmly in favour of REMAIN before she succumbed to “the will of the people”, is seen as “STRONG AND STABLE” in “THE NATIONAL INTEREST” and will stop the non-existent “COALITION OF CHAOS” from prevailing. How? In the traditonal Tory manner: by laughing hard and exaggeratedly in its face like she does to all questions of equality, rights and decency raised by Corbyn at PMQs. She is laughing at you. She thinks food banks are funny. She thinks I, Daniel Blake is a knockabout farce. She thinks an energy freeze is different to an energy cap. She is not shaking with mirth, but self-interest.

Like you, probably, I wish there wasn’t a general election. I wish there was more time to prepare, and some different people in charge (it’s a shame that Nick Clegg counted himself out of the leadership with his betrayals, as he’s a very clear speaker and persuasive advocate of commonsense). The opposition is nothing like as strong as the might of the Scottish National Party makes it look. We ended up with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition in 2010 because Labour were too arrogant to countenance a Lib Dem/Labour/Green coalition. We may end up with another Tory government this time if nobody has the guts to collude for the sake of the country.

I hope the pundits are right, and that this is not an election about Brexit, but an election about the future of the NHS. That the future pharmaceutical industry consultant Jeremy Hunt is still in his job after five years shows just how low down the priority list public health provision is for this bloodthirsty government. All the post requires is to keep running the NHS down by stealth, placing negative stories in the press, and economic and statistic inevitability will do the rest, eventually. A few feckless poor people might die in the process, so it’s win-win for Theresa May.

This partly political broadcast is almost over. If you’re not registered to vote, register to vote. If you think your vote will make no difference, think again. It might make the difference between a library and no library, which is stark, even if it’s a library you don’t ever plan on using. Would a world without libraries be better or worse? If you can bear to vote for a party you don’t passionately believe in, in order to unseat a party you passionately despise, do that. Nobody is going to mind.

If you want a crystal example of the disconnect between Tory thinking and cold, hard reality, spend a second or two considering long-retired former Tory health secretary Edwina Currie’s recent Tweet.

She seems actually to think that obesity is caused by over-eating, and not by malnutrition. She also seems actually to think that malnutrition, which means bad nutrition, only applies to starving people in what she probably still thinks of as the Third World. Did I mention that she used to head the Department of Health? This is not just ignorance, it is wilful misreading of the facts to fit a prepared placard. It is also rooted in hatred. Currie is sure to be one of those people who thinks poor people shouldn’t have tellies, and that food banks are a lifestyle choice.

As Billy Bragg always rhetorically asks in such situations: which side are you on? Are you on the side of Edwina Currie, and Jeremy Hunt, and Aaron Banks, and Nigel Farage, and David Davis, and Michael Gove, and Boris Johnson (yes, let’s not forget him just because he’s been put in Big Yellow Storage for the duration of the campaign) and Theresa May? Or are you not?

Eh?

 

 

Would he lie to you?

Some late news just in. There was no cast iron reason for this country to defy the United Nations and invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, shoulder to shoulder ie. behind the United States, and alongside Australia and Poland. (In that initial phase, the USA sent 130,000 troops, the UK 28,000, Australia 2,000, and Poland 194.)  The Iraq Inquiry, better known as the Chilcot Report, revealed to the world the following things that I and millions of others personally knew in our bones in May 2003, and which were basically confirmed by subsequent events: that Saddam Hussein did not pose an “urgent threat” to British interests, that flaky intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was presented with “too much certainty” while its legal justification was “far from satisfactory”, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been fully explored, and that in invading Iraq the UK and the USA had “undermined the authority” of the UN. In short, the whole shit-show ought not to have happened.

Have we who believed Hans Blix and doubted the earnest words of Tony Blair wasted the last 14 years of our lives waiting to find out what we suspected all along? If so, we should be grateful that we had lives to waste; not everybody sucked into the conflict was so lucky. The families of the victims at Hillsborough (many of whom will have also opposed the war) will know this feeling: a combination of relief and fury after so many years being officially dismissed and discounted. No matter what the Dorian Grey painting of Tony Blair says, during those 14 years the world has unarguably become ever more dangerous and less secure, and thousands upon thousands of lives have been lost in the wars waged in the name of “stabilising” a region we – I hate to use that word, but it’s worth rubbing it in – we destabilised. The invasion may not have happened “in our name”, but I remain a citizen of the country that did it. An increasingly ashamed citizen. Many of today’s monsters were forged in the aftermath of the invasion, which, like a post-Brexit economy, nobody had properly planned for. So, rather than go over the coals one more time, or the Chilcot Report in mind-numbing detail, can we just consider the lies?

Historians often cite Watergate as a watershed moment when the public “lost faith” in its elected politicians. Certainly, the grotesque televised image of Richard Nixon declaiming in 1973, “I am not a crook” provided a pivot for this apparent awakening (a moment echoed by Bill Clinton’s similarly perjurious public address in 1998: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”). But not only was Nixon not the first dishonest politician, he was not the first dishonest president. They’re all at it. Because power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and, to quote Everything But The Girl, little Hitlers grow up into big Hitlers. The business of running a country, whether it’s as small as Iceland, or as vast as Russia, involves compromise. I guess it has to, like any relationship. In government or junta, commercial and civic interests must be served at the same time. An electorate, or a non-electorate, must be kept onside, for fear of deselection, or coup.

Sometimes, decisions made in the secret corridors of power have life or death consequences. Most of us, let’s be honest, couldn’t handle that. Indeed, the old truism that the very worst kind of people to be politicians are the people who want to be politicians resounds still. Running a country is an insane fantasy that most of us rehearse over breakfast (“If I was in charge … I’d making voting compulsory/ban mobiles in schools/put registration plates on bicycles/remove charity status from public schools/give automatic custodial sentences to internet trolls etc.”). We are currently going through a leadership election that will put someone else in charge of our country, at least one of whom will have been tied to a Leave campaign based on lies or assertions with no basis in fact. Whether she – and it is likely to be a she – is up to the job is only something we can discover by letting her do it. We came dangerously close to having Boris Johnson imposed upon us as our leader, thanks to the boneless leadership of David Cameron. The former is a man priapic on adulation who thought leading a country was his birthright; the latter seemed to treat the job as a sort of wheeze and couldn’t wait to put it behind him. Both are dangerous. Both went to the same schools. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, someone who was in the Bullingdon Club always gets in, right?

There is talk of a “disconnect” between people and politics. It’s why the inarticulate bully Donald Trump is presumptive Republican nominee when the commentariat dismissed him as a joke. It’s why the mild-mannered Jeremy Corbyn won a mandate from members of the Labour party in the vacuum after Ed Milliband and has since struggled to keep the Teflon-hearted Blarites within the PLP onside. And it’s why the Leave campaign’s parish magazines the Express and Mail were so effective in the peddling of myths. The balance of power now rests in the limbo between what politicians think they know about what ordinary voters know, and what ordinary voters know they know. It’s why we are one piece of paperwork away from leaving the EU after 43 years of growth and that racism has reared its ugly head again in a way not seen since the 70s – a decade which, by the way, wasn’t as good as the music, films or sitcoms made in it. Whether people are racists or simply voters struggling to replace the old certainties like jobs, security and community that have been taken away by successive administrations in hock to the free market and the City, they clearly don’t feel represented. Nor, by the way, do I. (My politics pretty much align with Corbyn’s, a man seemingly too Labour to be allowed to lead the Labour party.)

“Protest vote” is a catch-all phrase, simultaneously stirring and active, and negative and self-isolating. It can mean something passionate and personal: voting for an independent candidate, let’s say, in a local election, or voting Green, as I have done, even though there appears statistically to be no way the candidate can get in. But voting Leave in a zero-sum referendum to show the politicians that you no longer have faith in them is a protest only in theory; in actual fact, it is a vote for uncertainty. A malignant symptom of the current democratic malaise, it led the 51.9%  to opt to leave the EU because they had genuine, concrete reasons for wanting to “take back control” from Europe, the promise they were made by politicians who could barely agree between themselves whether they were pro-Europe or not. I feel sad that many people, with good reason, believed that to “take back control” meant some kind of meaningful independence. The crushing irony is that in “taking back control” from those fabled Brussels bureaucrats, Leave voters “gave control” to the right wing of the Tory party, a party that despises the jobless and the poor, and is dismantling the very state that might look after them.

We’re so jaded we expect lies to be told in election campaigns. And yet, we swallow the lies. That the Tories care about “hardworking families”? That £350m of “our cash” (Johnson, Gove and the rest were clever to make it sound like bureaucrats were picking our pockets) would be given to the NHS? By a party that seeks to privatise the NHS? More lies. That Saddam Hussein could get a chemical weapon to the UK in 45 minutes?

Here’s the irony. Tony Blair, who was unfortunate to be given a surname that contains the letters L, I, A and R, seems to think he has been cleared by Chilcot of actually, literally telling a lie to us, while Alistair Campbell is smug about being cleared of “sexing up” the intelligence dossier, but in buttering up the electorate, and Parliament, for war, they implicitly lied from the moment Blair told Bush he was “with him, whatever” in the 28 July, 2002 memo. Thereafter, war was not an option, it was a foregone conclusion, and any speech or comment that Blair made after that date which did not reveal the deal he’d made is in my eyes rendered a lie.

Here’s the killing joke: I think he’s telling the truth when he says that, given the choice, he would invade Iraq all over again.

Honestly.

 

 

Your country needs EU

Nigel Farage, a man who is not even an MP, and whose party only has one MP in the House of Commons, is the most influential politician in Britain. Farage need only sit in a snug bar somewhere on the Kent coast, telling stories of his days as a commodities broker to other members of his golf club over a succession of pints, between now and the EU referendum vote on June 23 and his supreme power will be unabated. He did this.

Welcome to Europe: The Final Countdown. Our dearly beleaguered Prime Minister, David Cameron, sort of accidentally made a manifesto pledge before the general election to hold an EU referendum in this parliament, solely to stop those on the right of the Tory vote from emigrating to UKIP, whose leader continues to be the kind of bloke you’d like to have a pint with, something no Tory can claim to imitate. If ever a man can congratulate himself on undue national and international influence from a position of relative electoral obscurity, it’s Nigel Farage, without even being electable in South Thanet in 2015, where the oast houses have spikes mounted on them to repel parachuting foreign invaders. Farage has forced the Conservatives to hold a referendum that their leader, their chancellor, and 25 members of their 30-member cabinet did not want to hold. Well done, Nigel. Mine’s an imported European lager.

And yet opinion across the country – crucially among the tiny percentage of the electorate who will bother to drag their arses out of bed on June 23 to place their democratic cross in one of two boxes and change the future of the country forever – still seems evenly split. In which case, there is a very real chance that this country will vote to leave the European Union after 43 years of membership, in a couple of weeks’ time because of one powerful, elected politician’s fear of another one, whose only mandate is to be a member of the European Parliament he wants not to be a member of with every fibre of his being . The whole thing is a giant pisstake. And the joke’s on us.

We have the sitting government, “officially” neutral but no such thing, with its electoral mandate, desperately trying to get the voters of Great Britain and Gibraltar to vote “remain”. (I am a big fan of lettuce, and I wish to vote “Romaine”.) But some rather noisy and famous members of the Tory bloc – including one of the noisiest men in Britain, Boris Johnson; the ghoulish IDS; the one who can’t stop laughing, Michael Gove; the man with a cardboard box full of his belongings ready on his desk, John Whittingdale; grey Chris Grayling; entitled Zac Goldsmith (who has gone mysteriously quiet since throwing the London Mayoral election away by pretending to like Bollywood films when he hasn’t seen one); Liam Fox; Priti Patel; and assorted former Chancellors now in the Lords – are currently, and persuasively, filling their compliant parish magazines ie. the Eurosceptic news media (specifically: the Times, the Telegraph, the Sun, but most pantingly the Mail, the Express) with stories of “CRISIS”, “HARM”, “INVASION” and “EU KILLERS AND RAPISTS”, which work on a very primal level, and have little to do with the “leave” campaign’s refrain, “We want to make our own laws, and not have them made for us by a coterie of cheese-eaters in Brussels.” They have largely to do with fear. Fear of foreigners, specifically Turks and Albanians currently. Fear of invasion. Fear of our “way of life” being threatened by boatloads of Bulgarian pickpockets.

A sensible debate needs to occur on immigration, and our role in the current global displacement crisis. But there’s no time to do this properly between now and June 23, which is under three weeks away. And while Cameron fairly sensibly but never passionately states the case, as he did over and over again on Sky’s EU Debate last night to an audience who wouldn’t stop shouting out before the roving mic arrived, that leaving the single market would damage the UK economy (something most economists pretty much agree on in principle), it’s not getting through to those in zero-hours jobs or less-than-zero-hours no-jobs, or indeed those in actual jobs that don’t cover the cost of living (“the working poor” is a phrase that should strike fear into the hearts of all of us). Or people who live on the south coast. One photo of a row of tents battered by the coastal winds on a clifftop in Calais, each one containing at least one Albanian with an eye on the coffee shops of Dymchurch, beats a hundred statements from the Treasury or letters in the Telegraph signed by a slimy coterie of CEOs.

Personally, I’d stay in, if only for the employment rights enshrined into European law that the Johnson regime would rip up within days of entering Parliament. I have nothing personal to gain from the EU, but it feels better to be in it than not in it. This country is small-minded and insular enough already, without literally becoming an island. (It was during the dangerous George W Bush years that I really started to believe in Europe as a necessary political counterweight to US neocon insanity – which hasn’t exactly gone away, has it?) I have no love of the financial services industry, or of “big business”, and I certainly have no love of David Cameron and his chums, and as such it feels weird to agree with them on anything, but that’s how I feel in my bones. I despise the Tories. But I actually fear Boris and the “leavers”. And if there’s one thing that seems to be driving this debate, it’s fear.