There’s not much to report, in general terms, since I last had time to sit down and write a blog. The squirrels have been actively demolishing stale bread and peanuts. Matilda has established a limited routine of short outside excursions to make the most of the daylight, though she’s taking the chance wherever she can to curl up somewhere warm and go to sleep for a few hours at a stretch. Sensible cat.
Misty has been enjoying some longer walkies of late, since we’re into the exam season and Deb no longer has to spend acres of her free time doing unpaid preparation for classes, marking, etc. All in all, it’s been a low-key, end-of-termy atmosphere all round. As the old Chinese proverb has it though, beware of living in interesting times. Ellie decided to test our combined resources the other week and cause a major missing dog alert scare.
She decided she would go for a walk and escaped through the cat flap, unnoticed. We had just got to the "where's Ellie?" stage, with Debbie ransacking the house from top to bottom, when her mobile rang. I picked it up and answered it.
"Hello, have you lost a little white dog?"
"Yes, as it happens we have. Have you found one?"
"Yes, she was in my garden down here in Armitage Bridge, digging a hole in a flowerbed"
"Ah, right. Sorry about that."
"Do you want me to tie her up?"
"You can give it a try, but it never stopped Houdini."
Twenty minutes later the disgraced escapologist dog was once more ensconced on the blanket on the sofa and told by Debbie to stay there and not move, on pain of death.
Thankfully, we have all survived the self-enforced gap in these chronicles of our days, and we are all more or less still here in more or less the same places, physically and spiritually, doing more or less the same things.
When I stopped writing this blog, back in November, it was really to do with pressure of work as much as anything else. What used to be an entertaining intellectual exercise on a Sunday afternoon (for me, at least – I can’t speak for my readers!) had turned into a bit of a tyrannical regime. Partly because the more I wrote, the less difference it seemed to make. I’m not naïve enough to assume that anything I write is going to change the world, but I was dismayed to see the evil seeping out of the shadows on all sides. The Brexit vote gave a great boost to that process, legitimising casual racism and xenophobia and seemingly making it acceptable to say (and in come cases do) things which ten years ago would have been unthinkable.
This was followed by the election of Trump. Although he has turned out to be a disastrous ignoramus who thinks the job is part-time and buggers off to Florida to play golf at every opportunity, he, too, has turned over a lot of stones and allowed the unspeakable and the vile to emerge, blinking into the light. It doesn’t matter that half the time he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing from one minute to the next, he’s enabled, among other things, white supremacy. Last week, two nooses were found in two separate museums of African-American history in the States, having been presumably left there by someone who thought they were “making America great again”.
And the thing was, no matter how much I wrote about this, and pointed it out, and derided it, even mocked it, it still happened, and it happened in greater and greater volume. Anyone who pointed out the obvious fact that Brexit (especially Brexit without access to the single market) was an economic car crash waiting to happen, was labelled a traitor or an enemy of the people.
In an atmosphere like that, it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to spend the four hours or so I normally spent on a Sunday writing my blog, on actually fighting the things I was against, rather than just writing about them. So that is what I did.
So we came to the beginning of 2017. I watched the New Year come in with some trepidation, as a while ago now, I had a premonition that I would die in 2017. So far, I have survived the first five months of that fateful year. But, as they say, there is corn in Egypt yet.
The year began, on the Brexit front at least, with Theresa May insisting that she had all the mandate she needed for the withdrawal, thank you very much, and she was prepared to spend large amounts of government money fighting the court case brought by Gina Miller in an attempt to make sure that parliament at least had a say in the matter.
Then the courts ruled in favour of the right of parliament to scrutinise the Brexit deal, and May was forced to concede that there would have to be a debate. The government came up with the most pathetic, three paragraph Brexit Bill, which was voted through by the Tory majority. That would be enough, then. Theresa May announced that she was going to be difficult, in advance, never a good negotiating tactic, and that if the Europeans started to be difficult in return, she would just walk away. She also threatened them with non-cooperation on security matters. Since we were always going to walk away, one way or another, that wasn’t a very smart tactic either.
Government policy was going to be, it emerged, to kiss goodbye to the principle of access to the single market, because that would also entail accepting the principle of free movement of people. Theresa May was basically pandering to the Daily Mail, here, especially those of its readers who don’t like brown people very much, whether they were born here or not, and who are incapable anyway of grasping the difference between EU and non-EU migration. Not to mention the difference between refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and people who are actually British but who have a different skin tone to Miss Marple.
Post-Brexit, access to the single market is absolutely essential, crucial, to our economic wellbeing. Why? Because we have nothing to put in its place. If May had any sense whatsoever, she would be doing whatever she could to try and secure a deal that was as close as possible to what we had before people were led astray by the lies of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. She clearly does have sense. She’s an intelligent woman. But she’s looked at the situation, and she’s thought well – if I am “against” immigration, it’ll play well with my semi-literate supporters. So I’ll go with that. She’s gambling my economic future – and yours – on getting back in for another five years. The single market amounts to 40% of our service industry exports. Where are we going to replace that from?
So. Anyway. Theresa May has now called a general election, even though she didn’t have to. Why?
There’s more than one answer to this.
Firstly, she always does the opposite to what she says she will do. She wants “the best possible Brexit for Britain”, then she chooses the worst possible option. She wants to help the families that are “just about managing”, then pilots a batch of welfare reforms including the rape clause. She says she won’t call a snap election, then she calls one. Do we sense a pattern developing here?
“No, I would never in any circumstances sell my granny,” followed by “the sale of my grandparents was the only democratic step available to implement the will of the people, who voted marginally for me to sell my granny into slavery…” Smells like May spirit.
There were, at the time she announced the poll, currently 30 Tory MPs under investigation of one sort or another for election fraud. That was more than the government’s majority. So, by calling this election (and they are ALL standing again, the brass-faced cheek of it!) she was hoping that it’ll all be swept under the carpet. As it turned out, she needn’t have bothered, because when push came to shove, the CPS was unable to locate its seed pods and also mislaid several crucial vertebrae, and the end result featured more whitewash than my local branch of B & Q. I do hope the electorate in the constituencies concerned will be taking notes about how many “central office” workers are battlebussed into their constituency this time around, because as sure as hell, Channel 4 will be.
Then there’s Brexit. The most obvious reason, in Brexit terms, is that she realises this is it. It will only go downhill from here. She has triggered article 50, and the ponderous machinery of the EU giving us a good (and well-deserved) kicking for leaving has only just commenced. As it lurches into action and progresses over the next two to five years (depending who you believe) and things get worse, as they grind us down, and the true scale of the economic catastrophe of Brexit hits home, her ratings will plummet. Nobody will remember that she was once an advocate of “Remain” (once again an instance of her flip-flopping, by the way). Given that things are on the economic slippery slope to Shitsville, Arizona, it makes sense to call the election now, for her, at any rate. It’s the opposite to Labour in 1997. Things can only get worse.
What it boils down to at the moment is that a woman has called an election to give herself a mandate which until very recently she denied to her last breath that she needed, a mandate to get what she calls the best deal for Brexit, which, if she has her way, will remove our access to the single market, and which will then actually be the worst deal for Brexit.
Who should we vote for, then? Clearly, not her!
Well. This is an election which is overshadowed like none before it, by the subject of Brexit. Irrespective of your voting history, or your or your family’s tradition of tribal voting history, it’s quite simple.
If you think Brexit is a horrendous mistake that’s going to damage your prospects and those of your children and possibly your grandchildren (even if you originally voted for it and have changed your mind as it’s become apparent what a balls-up it will be) then vote tactically in your constituency to cause maximum damage to the Tories and keep them out. Even if that means voting for the Literal Dimwits, see below. Just hold your nose and do it. The fewer seats the Tories get, the less damage they can do. If Theresa May is seeking a mandate to wreck the UK economy by leaving the EU on the worst possible terms, then deny her that mandate.
This will not however derail Brexit, because the Labour Party are also committed to the process. One unexpected bonus of a Labour victory is that Corbyn is a stubborn old git (witness him clinging on like a limpet despite the Blairites’ attempts to dislodge him). They should send him in to do the negotiations.
It’s highly possible, though, that Labour will lose the election. This is yet another reason why May has gone for it now. The feebleness of the opposition. They (Labour) have passed up a great opportunity by not coming straight out and saying “Vote for us and we will reverse Brexit”. They have played the entire Brexit thing wrong, though, right from the very start. And the blame for that particular tactical ineptitude does rest, largely with Jeremy Corbyn.
But if Labour are massacred at the election, it won’t ALL be Corbyn’s fault. There is also the small matter of the Parliamentary Labour Party having spent the last four years trying their very best to undermine him. If Corbyn does lose, they will be at least as much to blame as he is. And somehow, they should be punished for it. At least Corbyn is having the sense to try and position himself as an anti-establishment, anti-elite candidate, having seen how it worked for Trump. But he seriously needs to up his game. The trouble is he’s obviously a fundamentally nice, honest straight-up sort of a guy, and this works against him in a political world where, to succeed, you have to be a lying venal evil corrupt shyster.
The Liberal Democrats are against Brexit, so theoretically, anyone who thinks Brexit (or at least Theresa May’s version of it) is insane should vote Lib Dem, shouldn’t they? Well. Yes, on the face of it, if you could but trust them. However. Last time, they said they wouldn’t put up tuition fees. Then they U-turned on that, and spent five years propping up the Tories while they waged class war on the ill, the old and the disadvantaged. So, handle with extreme care, especially as their leader is a religious fruitcake. If a large number of people vote Lib Dem just because they want another referendum on Brexit, then the Tories especially if their majority is reduced again, will just subsume the Lib Dems into another coalition and the second referendum will be quietly abandoned.
In case you were still toying with the idea of voting for the Tories, though, I just thought I’d list a few of the things you’ll be voting for if you do.
Further cuts. Anyone who thinks that there is going to be an extra £350m per week for the NHS after we leave the EU is living on the Planet Deluded. It was a lie. If we leave the EU without access to the single market, which is what Theresa May wants, and the economy tanks, which it will, the tax take will drop, and they will not even be able to meet their current spending commitments, let alone guarantee the replacement of EU grants which we used to get with direct government grants from Westminster. So, well done, turkeys, you voted for Christmas.
In fact, if you are voting Tory, you’re also voting to disband the NHS. Let’s hope you’re in excellent health and/or a member of BUPA.
You’re voting for the dementia tax, to take away your home to pay for your care in old age.
Homelessness, including of ex-service personnel.
Food banks.
Kids going to bed hungry.
Women having to prove they were raped in order to claim child benefit.
Selling Arms to the Saudi Arabians to be dropped on starving children in the Yemen.
Bombing the Middle East for no reason and creating more terrorists at home and more refugees.
Letting said refugees drown in the Mediterranean, once they have been created.
The return of fox hunting.
Culling badgers to keep farmers happy even though it will do sod all to stop Bovine TB.
To name but a few. I mean, fine, if you’re OK with any or all of the above, then go ahead. Let me know how you sleep at night. If at all.
Meanwhile: for the rest of us. Vote however you must to stop the Tories. UKIP are irrelevant, although they’re now unashamedly showing their true racist colours (which they denied last June when Farage published that poster that led Thomas Mair to kill Jo Cox) with their proposed burkha ban. The Greens are hopelessly woolly and idealistic, and you can’t trust the Lib Dems. They say one thing, then do another. But if you do have to vote Lib Dem because they’re the only ones likely to beat the Tory in your constituency, well, I guess we just have to hope for the best.
If the Tories get back in then you are giving Theresa May a blank cheque to accept the worst possible deal for Brexit. She would rather harm the economy than upset the Daily Mail and its readers over the issue of free movement. That will damage your prospects and the prospects of your children, if any, and the prospects of the country as a whole. Theresa may is NOT a stable and strong leader, she is a weather vane who goes whichever way the wind blows, and she has the limited tactical skill of Roy Hodgson, as well as looking increasingly like him, in a bad light. And her hair looks like it was cut by the council. You may think I am being nasty and trivial, and resorting to personal insults. Just go and have a look at the way the Tory campaign has been targeting Corbyn. If you can’t take it, Theresa, you shouldn’t dish it out.
Britain is better than this. It’s not too late. Get shot of them, or at least stop them causing any more harm, and maybe the rest of us can sit down over a nice cup of tea and start the monumental task of sorting out this immense avalanche of Brexit crap that David bloody Cameron’s stupidity and hubris has landed us with.
This election has also been overshadowed, of course, by the terror attacks in Manchester and London, and as I type this there are still three says to go during which there could be still further atrocities. The people who are carrying them out are doing it because someone (presumably whoever radicalised these wingnuts in the first place and told them to go out and do their duty for Allah) wants to disrupt the democratic process. ISIS, if it is ISIS, would dearly love to see the entire country in lock-down, yet more hatred and division between the Muslim community and the rest of society, and the election cancelled. However, I am sceptical about the formal involvement of ISIS. It seems much more likely to me that these people were “radicalised” and took matters into their own hands, leaving ISIS to claim the credit.
In the wake of the Manchester attack, Corbyn was criticised for suggesting that we should try and understand the reasons behind this type of murderous act, in order to cut it off at the root cause. He drew attention to our foreign policy, and was roundly vilified for this. The media, particularly the BBC for some reason, have been biased against Corbyn from the outset, and generally the standard of debate in this campaign has been appallingly bad, especially in programmes the BBC have hosted, such as Question Time which had a room packed with rabid Tory supporters salivating at the prospect of Corbyn refusing to be the first one to launch a nuclear strike! So in one sense, the reaction Corbyn got, with people calling him a sympathiser and an appeaser, was to be expected.
Despite that, however, he was dead right. Until someone starts to look seriously at our actions in the Middle East and starts to question our motives and our objectives, and whether or not these are being achieved, we will never get to the bottom of ISIS-inspired terror acts and we will never have a coherent strategy for stopping them. There is a difference between seeking to understand something, to know why it happened, and condoning it, despite what Theresa May would have you believe.
Can anybody tell me, right now, why we are still bombing Syria? The underlying justification, of course, is the bombing in Syria is part and parcel of the ongoing policy of meddling and regime change that has been going on ever since Tony Blair took us into Iraq on George W Bush’s coat tails in 2003. Iraq ended up a basket case, a cradle for ISIS. Libya is now a seething soup of anarchy, a failed state, a breeding-ground for extremists and people-traffickers. Syria is the worst one yet: not least because for a while, we were trying to help the “moderate” Syrian dissidents to unseat Assad, which of course is also what ISIS wanted, so we were on their side militarily, if not ideologically. We also sell lots of arms to Saudi Arabia, at least some of which end up by various circuitous routes in the hands of ISIS.
But back to the original question: what are we trying to achieve. The RAF carry out their extremely expensive bombing missions with skill, bravery and professionalism. The current rate of child benefit is £34.40 per week for a family with two children. A six-hour bombing mission on Syria costs £508,000, based on a Tornado clocking up £210,000, 4 Paveway guided bombs at £22,000 each (the same ones we’re currently selling to the Saudis so they can use them on the famine-hit rebels in the Yemen) and 2 Brimstone Missiles at £105,000 each. In other words, the cost of just one bombing mission would pay that family’s child benefit for 14,767 weeks, or 283 years!
But surely it would be worth it if we achieved something? However, spending £508,000 to destroy a Toyota pick-up truck approx value £1500, plus six occupants, say, doesn’t make economic sense. It’s gaga. It doesn’t make military sense either: each of those six will be celebrated as martyrs and replaced by six more, or maybe sixty more. There will be plenty of new video footage of dead children, in Aleppo and elsewhere, to be skilfully edited and shared online by those shadowy people who will use it to radicalise the stupid, hard of thinking, and mentally ill young men who actually carry out these barbarous acts in the name of a warped version of something they don’t really understand but follow in blind faith.
Why do ISIS want this? They want to re-establish a caliphate for their type of “Islam”. They think that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims. They believe that the western way of life is corrupt, immoral and irreligious (they may have a point there). Of course, you may feel their views are several stops beyond Barking and well off the bus route, but that is irrelevant. They’re the ones who believe it, and they’re the ones with the bombs, knives, and out of control vehicles.
There is depressingly little analysis when these sort of things happen. The media and politicians simply state “they hate our freedoms” and leave it at that. The world of social media is immediately besieged by people demanding a backlash, ranging from the ignorant and ill-informed, like Donald Trump and Katie Hopkins, to the more sinister dark forces of the far right who want to use attacks like this to divide off and limit the Muslim community on the grounds that, as they would say, all Muslims are potential terrorists. Actually, since Katie Hopkins, in a since-deleted tweet after the Manchester attack, called for a “final solution”, maybe she belongs in both categories. Either way, it cost her her job at LBC, and deservedly so.
But what should we do? When something like this happens, what lessons can be learned? The standard response is we must get tougher, and “moderate” Muslims must do more. Meanwhile, we all change our Facebook statuses. This is not necessarily a criticism – sometimes the wave of compassion and sorrow that sweeps across Facebook is the only way in which some people can register sympathy with the victims and horror at the actions of the perpetrators. It would be good, though, if from time to time, Facebook acknowledged that bombs are killing children all over the world especially the Middle East, and very few, if any, of them are remembered with a mass status-change on Facebook, even though many of them will have been killed with British-made munitions.
For what it’s worth, I think that all the getting tougher in the world will be of minimal use until and unless we stop bombing Syria ourselves, put a massive diplomatic effort in to persuade others to do likewise, stop selling arms to people who pass them on to ISIS, and work internationally through diplomatic channels to cut off the funding which fuels much of the activities ISIS carries out.
As far as the “moderate” Muslims are concerned, the media needs to start realising that every time something like this happens they should give the “moderate” Muslims a platform to actually say their piece. Unfortunately, the headline “moderate Muslim condemns violence” doesn’t pull as much weight as a Jihadi pronouncement or a Fatwah from some wingnut who has about 12 followers and is in no way representative of Islam as a whole. The BBC, sadly, has a track record of giving shouty-barmy fruitcake extremists with a relatively small following a disproportionately large platform for their hate-mongering – Nigel Farage springs to mind.
When you ask most people what they mean by “getting tougher”, they come up with things like banning the Burkha or curtailing immigration. Neither of these things seems particularly relevant to the situation to me. If a bomber had carried a bomb in from Pakistan under her Burkha, you may have a point. But as it stands, you are looking at the actions of disaffected “radicalised” young men. Other ways of “getting tough” often advanced are more legal powers, new laws, and more police. In fact, we have a whole raft of knee-jerk, anti-libertarian legislation in place, some of it dating back to the days of Tony Blair. We need to be very careful before we set off down the road of creating yet more thought-crimes without due process and with ever stronger sentences. There is a much more cogent argument to be made for more resources, though this is the most embarrassing part of the situation for Mrs May, since she spent most of her time at the Home Office instituting swingeing cuts in front-line police numbers.
This, again, though, needs to be handled with care. The end of that road is a shop-thy-neighbour police state with barbed wire all around the coastline and machine-gun towers at 50 yard intervals. Then we will have given away our few remaining freedoms, trading them for an illusion of safety, and ISIS will have won. On that subject, as well, I have seen calls for retaliation to go into the Middle East and “take them out”, which is, of course, exactly the type of reaction they are seeking to get out of us. Nothing would please them more than to see British troops engaged in hand to hand fighting in the rubble of the suburbs of Syria’s ancient cities. We have to face this fact. We will never defeat ISIS militarily. Even if Trump drops the big one, which would be a disaster in so many ways. But then he is a disaster in so many ways.
Meanwhile, here is a small lesson from history, to those who feel they can scare us with bombs. In 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Manchester. Manchester came back, stronger than ever. In 1996, the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre in Manchester. Manchester came back, stronger than ever.
The Manchester attack and the horror in London are full of raw grieving and sorrow for all those people affected. Nothing will ever make it better for those who have lost friends and family. But make no mistake, whoever was responsible. Manchester will come back, stronger than ever.
From 7 September 1940, just over a year into the war, London was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe for 56 out of the following 57 days and nights. They dropped about 45,000 tons of bombs on the capital. By the end of May 1941, 43,000 people had been killed and over a million houses damaged. Over 750,000 tons of rubble was removed from the capital over a six-month period and used as hardcore for the runways of the RAF bases which were springing up all over East Anglia. London survived, and came back, stronger than ever. Make no mistake, whoever was responsible. London will come back this time, stronger than ever.
Anyway, today is the feast of St Boniface, whom I have already “done” on this blog a year or so ago, so there doesn’t seem a lot of point in recording the details of his martyrdom once again today. Martyrdom, in any event, is a two-edged sword. The people who carried out the attacks I have just been writing about would have no doubt called themselves martyrs. Martyrdom can be heady wine. St Boniface and his companions were the victims in the case of his martyrdom, and I suppose you could draw a distinction between martyrs who died selflessly for their faith, and “martyrs” who died selfishly, taking innocent people with them.
As for me, I haven’t been venerating any martyrs particularly, of late. The pressure of work and the additional tasks involved in trying to get our house sorted out before I become too decrepit to either take part in the process or benefit from it, has taken up even the time I used to spend painting eikons, although I have managed to fit in one or two. Easter, which I do normally find to be a spiritual time of the year, passed almost unnoticed, in a blur of activity and a whine of power-tools. I have done two (unfinished) of the Stations of the Cross which I promised to do at the start of the year. I don’t pray much any more, either, other than when I remember. Probably the most spiritual thing I do these days is listen to music. Last Sunday I was reading the Lord’s Prayer in Latin while listening to Allegri’s Miserere, which is pretty full-on and hardcore in terms of my Medieval life. Then I went out and gathered some herbs for tea and some twigs for the fire. All it needed to top it off was some bowel surgery with a twig and a tasty meal of plague rats on skewers.
I started typing this on Saturday, and it’s now 7.30pm on Monday, and various inhabitants of the house are looking at me with the sort of look that says “where’s my tea”, so I guess I had better get on and do it.
It’s odd to think that, 73 years ago tonight, lots of brave men were bobbing about feeling seasick in landing craft of a choppy English Channel, waiting to land at dawn on the shores of occupied Europe and begin the process of ridding the world of fascism. For now, at any rate. No doubt Britain First will be urging us to remember the Normandy veterans tomorrow.
Whatever happens this week, we need to keep on keeping on. I’m not going to say “keep calm and carry on”, because I prefer “close ranks”. God alone knows what else this week holds, what other horrors, but at the end, we still need to stick together, and celebrate small victories. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time.
Welcome back. If I can welcome you back to your own blog. I'm pleased to see you return.
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