COLUMN INCHES

Selected writings from

The New European

2016 - 2018

Mitch Benn

COLUMN INCHES: Selected writings from The New European 2016 - 2018

All columns and articles contained herein © Mitch Benn, 2016 - 2018

All rights reserved.

No parts of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

For information and permission to reproduce, contact the author: mitchbenn@hotmail.com

First Edition – August 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction

01: How to be Antisemitic Without Really Trying

02: Unconvicted

03: Say You Want A Revolution

04: What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Luvvies And Understanding?

05: Offend More; Hurt Less

06: Yeah, You ARE All Racists. Sorry.

07: Storming The Scoundrels' Refuge

08: Happier New Year

09: Happy Birthday To Me

10: Men Men Men Men

11: Opinions Are Like...

12: The Blair Mitch Project

13: Joking Apart

14: Is It Okay To Laugh At Nazis

15: Oh What A Tangled Web

16: The Game Is Back On

17: Enemies Of The People

18: Vive Indeed

19: If You Can't Say Nothing Nice

20: Reversing The Polarity

21: I Didn't Tell You So

22: It'll Probably Be OK

23: What Would The Doctor Do?

24: Knowing Owen

25: North Of The Wall

26: Statutory Rights

27: Who's Moaning Now

28: Boris's Game

29: Who's The Underdog

30: The Problem With Harvey

31: The Wrongness Of Wrongness

32: Too Many Broken Hearts

33: Interesting Times

34: Racists Gonna Racist

35: Enough Already

36: An Emotional Argument

37: Flat Earth Theory

38: Shaggy Dog Tories

39: The End

40: The Lukewarm War

41: The Protocols Of The Elders of Islington

42: Wake Up, Sheeple

43: No Offence

44: Incompetently Celibate

45: Remainers - Infinity War

46: Check Your Absence Of Disadvantage

47: Stop Believing

48: The World's Biggest Elite

49: Working Class Villain

50: Stop

APPENDIX I: Blade Remoaner

APPENDIX II. A Brexit Carol

APPENDIX III: 100 Things To Look Forward To

Author's Notes

Introduction

The New European, a weekly newspaper, began publication in the summer of 2016 in the aftermath of the EU referendum, to provide a focus for Euro-positive sentiment and a voice to the anti-Brexit movement. It was only supposed to run for four editions but at time of writing has gone on to publish over 100.

Around the time of the paper's inception I was one of the more vocal opponents of Brexit on Twitter and elsewhere; in September 2016 someone - I'm afraid I can't remember who - contacted The New European's editor, Matt Kelly, on Twitter, to suggest he commission a piece from me. When Matt responded positively to this idea, I dashed off a quick 1,000 word op-ed piece which appeared in the September 30th edition. Nearly two years later I'm still dashing them off on a weekly basis. It's been a very rewarding enterprise; heaven knows what my blood pressure would be without it.

Here then are 50 of my weekly columns, along with three one-off articles I submitted on specific occasions. Where necessary I've added explanatory fore-notes.

If you enjoy these, please consider subscribing to The New European.

MB July 2018

01: How to be Antisemitic Without Really Trying

30th September 2016

This was the first column I submitted; if I recall correctly it was basically twelve or thirteen tweets I'd recently posted on the subject stitched together. I've never pulled that trick again. No sir. Nuh-huh.

~ o ~

So Jeremy Corbyn was, entirely un-unexpectedly, re-elected leader of the Labour Party and was feted (and immortalised in verse) by an adoring membership in my old hometown of Liverpool.

Like most politically unaffiliated liberal intellectual smart-arses, I am unsure how I feel about this. The major objection one encounters to The Corbyn Project is his “unelectability”; that his old-school, lefty routine, while enrapturing the long-neglected Actual Socialist element of British society, is scaring the pants off of everyone else, thus dooming the nation to at least another decade of untempered Toryism.

While this is probably true, it suggests that the Labour Party’s real problem is a marketing one; if only Corbyn could SELL his trad socialism more effectively to a sceptical public, all would be well. It’s not his beliefs, just the presentation.

Yeah. Not sure about that.

One of the most depressing spectacles of the last few months has been that of people with impeccable progressive credentials, who would pounce upon any instance of “mansplaining” at feminists or “whitesplaining” racism to persons of colour, loftily informing progressive British Jews that they are totally imagining antisemitism in the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn.

At the exact moment that I write this, Momentum, the Faith Militant to Corbyn’s High Sparrow, are holding their ambiguously named “antisemitism meeting”. At this meeting, leaflets are being handed out calling for the expulsion from the Labour Party of the Jewish Labour Movement as, and I quote verbatim here: “The JLM and other Zionist forces are determined to stem the tide in this country... the JLM acts as a representative of a foreign power, Israel.”

And all too often, the reason given for this dismissal is that this Labour Party couldn’t possibly be racist in any way precisely because it’s been restored to proper socialism! Corbyn and his pals can’t be antisemitic; they’ve been Real Labour men all their lives...

I’m going to say something now, which, apparently, is going to come as news to some people. Ready?

THERE IS NOTHING INHERENTLY RIGHT-WING ABOUT RACISM.

Bigotry and racism aren’t political positions. They’re delusions, hang-ups, obsessions, manias, if you will. There’s nothing inherently left OR right wing about them.

One does encounter more obvious racism on the political right, because God n’ Country Conservatism attracts racists, intentionally or otherwise. But that’s people choosing to be right wing because they’re racist, not the other way round.

Conservatism doesn’t cause or even require racism, even if it is often happy to turn a blind eye to it when there’s an electoral advantage to be had (or indeed to hold an unnecessary referendum in order to placate it, but that’s a rant for another time).

But there’s nothing about being left-wing that precludes being racist, or vice-versa. And the left can be all too comfortable with bigotry, as long as it’s the “punching up” kind of bigotry...

For at least the last fifty years, the Big Bad of the left has been the American military/industrial complex and the reckless warmongering that sustains it. And you’ve gotta say, the left have a point here; we’re going to be cleaning up Dick Cheney’s mess for decades.

The trouble comes when people abandon nuance and start White Hat/Black Hat-ing the situation: once you’ve identified the Bad Guy, anything opposing the Bad Guy is, by definition, the Good Guy.

And if US imperialism is the Bad Guy, then Israel, being as it is (perceived to be) a protectorate of US imperialism, is also the Bad Guy. And anything opposing it is therefore the Good Guy, even if it’s a bunch of genocidal zealots like Hamas.

Hang on, surely I’m not playing the Criticism Of Israel = antisemitism card? Of course not, but it’s surprisingly easy to slide from one to the other if you’re not very careful.

A few months ago, David Baddiel took to Twitter to express his sorrow and anger at the plight of Syrian refugees. This provoked the immediate response from some random Twitterer of “What about the Palestinians, Dave?”

I remember reading this and thinking, I bet that guy doesn’t regard himself as antisemitic, and would probably respond with genuine outrage if I called him antisemitic. But hell YES he was being antisemitic at that moment.

The only two things everybody knows about David are that he used to share a flat with Frank Skinner and that he’s Jewish. It would never have occurred to said Twitterer to confront me with the plight of the Palestinians, or Jeremy Hardy, or Mark Steel, since we’re not (as far as he knows) Jews.

I’ve no doubt he thought he was making a legitimate point about the antics of the Israeli government. But by holding David accountable for these antics just because he’s Jewish he was ascribing negative traits to someone based purely on his ethnicity, which is the very definition of racism, and there’s a word for racism against Jews...

And antisemitism can sneak into the thought processes of otherwise non-racist – indeed actively ANTI-racist – people, because it kind of doesn’t feel like racism...

For a start, Jews are white people and are perceived as having successfully entered the professional class and become “respectable” in a way more obviously foreign-looking minorities thus far haven’t. They’re an ethnic minority, but (regarded as) a suburban white bourgeois ethnic minority. They’re at least the social “equal” of most politically active people in this country and, as such, having a go at them can be justified as “punching up”, or at the very least, punching sideways.

In other words, you don’t have to buy into Zionist conspiracy theories (although as that Momentum leaflet shows, Zionist conspiracy theories are making a BIG comeback this season) for hatin’ on Jews to feel a BIT like Sticking It To The Man, in a way that bashing black and/or Asian people really wouldn’t.

I think the Labour leadership seems too comfortable with antisemitism in others if it thinks they make up for it in other ways. I know antisemitism has become more open and unembarrassed in Labour circles on Corbyn’s “watch”. And yes, they had that enquiry and decided that they don’t have a problem with it after all, but Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, commissioned his own enquiry into Bridgegate scandal and guess what? Turned out he knew nothing about it and it wasn’t a big deal anyway! It’s extraordinary how often people who investigate themselves turn out to have behaved impeccably.

And yes, Jeremy Corbyn has (lately) condemned antisemitism - in the abstract - in no uncertain terms, most recently in his conference speech. But condemning a thing in the abstract doesn't imply actually doing anything about that thing; it doesn't even preclude still doing that thing.

What I do know is this: people who perceive the world in simple ways present it in simple terms. Corbyn’s apparent failure to sufficiently tackle antisemitism as long as it’s deployed in the service of opposing Israel (and by extension, Western Imperialism) speaks of just such a binary, good guys n’ bad guys approach to global politics.

Retreating into simplistic certainties rather than confronting reality in all its complexity is a disturbing trait in a political leader, and still would be, whether or not he had a problem with Jews, and even if he were “electable”.

~ o ~

02: Unconvicted

7th October 2016

This was my second submission, and introduces what has become a recurring theme in my columns (and indeed my life).

~ o ~

“I’m a man without conviction”, sang Boy George in 1983; it was true then and would remain so for another three years. But what exactly does “conviction” mean in a political context? The word gets bandied around a lot, nobody seems absolutely certain of its precise meaning but there seems to be more or less complete consensus that “conviction”, in a politician, is a Good Thing.

Why?

Most of the various online dictionaries seem to concur that “conviction” (aside from the legal/criminal usage) means “a firmly held belief or opinion”, with some adding “the firm belief that what one says is true”.

It has always struck me as odd that the only two fields in which doggedly sticking to one’s beliefs in the absence of (or indeed in spite of) evidence is regarded as a virtue are religion and politics. Where religion is concerned, it makes perfect sense for beliefs to count as paramount because “belief” is what religion is all about. There ARE no actual “answers”; nobody REALLY knows what happens when you die, or if there is a God (or gods) or what he (she/it/they) require from the human race. It makes perfect sense for religion to be all about belief, because religion consists entirely OF belief. And, quite frankly, as long as people’s beliefs remain on the inside of their heads, this is perfectlys ok. It matters not a jot what arcane or bizarre concepts people have bouncing around their skulls if that’s where they stay (of course, they often don’t, and then that IS a problem, but that’s a conversation for a different publication. Follow me on Twitter if you want my full uncensored thoughts on that matter).

Politics, on the other hand, concerns itself with earthly matters. Things which are known, or at least can be known. Politics is about stuff which happens in THIS world, not the next. Politicians make decisions which affect actual people’s actual lives. Is it better that they base this decisions on “beliefs” or on reality?

The subject of “conviction” has been in the forefront of the discussion about the leadership (and future direction) of the Labour Party, with the “conviction” politics of Corbyn and McDonnell being favourably contrasted with the slippery, malleable, all-things-to-all-men pragmatism of “Blairism”.

Leaving aside the general irony of the elevation to supervillain status, within Labour circles, of the only man to win an overall majority for Labour in the last fifty years (and he won THREE of them), there’s a specific irony in the fact that it’s the Iraq War which has sealed Tony Blair’s fate as the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Momentum era Labour Party. While it is true that the Iraq War was an utter folly of such extraordinary magnitude that it overshadows and, in terms of his legacy, perhaps even nullifies the progressive achievements of his first term, this doesn’t mean - as some activists now seem to believe - that these achievements didn’t actually happen. According to the version of history currently being discussed in left wing circles, Tony Blair appears to have taken office in early 2003 and unilaterally invaded Iraq the next day.

But the specific irony is this; Tony Blair is simultaneously reviled as a conviction-less, slippery pragmatist and as the instigator of the Iraq War, when the fact is that the build up to the Iraq War is the moment that Tony Blair STOPPED being a slippery pragmatist and became a Man Of Conviction. That’s when the smile became rictus, the slightly misaligned eyeballs glazed over and the voice became Thatcheresque in its stentorian condescension.

It all went a bit wrong for Tony Blair when he abandoned reason and embraced conviction, possibly because (loath though I am to second guess someone’s thought processes) he realised that his hubristic attempt to rein in Bush and Cheney by being the voice of moderation within the pro-war movement had backfired and he was now doomed to defend the indefensible. And when you’re defending the indefensible, conviction is all you’ve got. If you can justify your positions using reason and evidence, then that’s what you do. If you have to loudly proclaim them as Staunchly Held Convictions From Which You Will Not Be Swayed, it’s because you can’t. Reason and evidence are not on your side.

This is where conviction ceases to be merely useless and becomes dangerous; convictions held without evidence (which is all of them, since, as discussed, where you have evidence you don’t need convictions) inevitably end up conflicting with reality. And when this happens, the bearers of these convictions must either abandon their convictions (which almost never happens) or, more usually, decide that Reality Is Wrong. This way literal madness lies.

“Conviction Politics” brought us Margaret Thatcher, referring to herself in the Royal plural and still utterly persuaded of the righteousness of the Poll Tax and her own sagacity in general, even as she was Ides Of Marched out of Number 10 by her own people. “Conviction Politics” brought us the Iraq War, that most obscenely profligate of George W’s “faith-based initiatives”. It brought us Sarah Palin in 2008, extolling the virtues of “abstinence only” sex education while standing right next to her own knocked-up teenage daughter. And it brought us Iain Duncan Smith, cheerfully announcing the success of his welfare reforms, even as the bodies piled up around him and the food bank queues stretched round the block.

Perhaps a better definition of conviction would be “something you carry on believing even after it turns out not to be true”.

By the way; this isn’t to say that slippery pragmatism in and of itself is “the answer’. In many ways David Cameron was the slippery pragmatist to end all slippery pragmatists, he just wasn’t very good at it. Slippery pragmatism is no good unless it comes with competence. And one could argue that the folly which proved his undoing - the EU referendum - came about as a result of his craven pandering to the baseless convictions of his own support base - namely the belief that Britain was disappearing beneath a tsunami of imaginary Romanians.

“Accepting reality” isn’t the same thing as abandoning all hope of changing the world, far from it; if you want to change something to how you want it to be, you have to first acknowledge how it is right now.

Perhaps we should be less concerned with the strength of a politician’s convictions than with their capacity to assess and address reality. Because deny it as some of us might, reality is where we all live.

~ o ~

03: Say You Want A Revolution

14th October 2016

My first column was published on Friday the 30th September 2016, my Dad's 80th birthday. I'd celebrated it with him in Liverpool the previous weekend (my Mum's birthday is the 26th of September so they'd usually have joint birthday parties). My Dad was bedridden by then, having been diagnosed with irreversible pulmonary fibrosis two years previously.

I was in Glasgow when the paper came out, performing at The Stand Comedy Club. I wandered Glasgow in search of a copy, found it on sale at a branch of the Co-Op, and sent an excited message to my parents, before going on to do the show. My Mum told me she'd go and find a copy; reading it would be the perfect birthday present for my Dad.

At about 4.30 am I was awoken by a phone call from my Mum telling me my Dad had died.

~ o ~

My father, Mike Benn, died two weeks ago.

He’d been diagnosed a couple of years back with a degenerative, irreversible lung disease. There was never any hope of recovery; the only treatments available were those as might slow the disease’s progress a little, or perhaps reduce the symptoms. He stayed active as long as he could, but was very weak by the end, and eventually slipped away in his sleep, in his home, the night after celebrating his 80th birthday, with his loving wife of 53 years holding his hand. There may be better ways to go but I can’t think of any.

I owe my father so much, not least the critical thinking skills he taught me and which I (try to) apply to everything. And while he took a keen interest in politics (if not necessarily PARTY politics), I'm almost relieved that he won't be around to see what happens next in the political realm.

Democracy appears to be going out of fashion.

Across the pond, we have a man who's just one freak swing state poll away from being the leader of the free world, singing the praises of dictators and exhorting his followers to (armed?) insurrection if the election should fail to go his way. And here, at the Labour Party conference last month, boos were heard from the audience when the increasingly besieged and weary deputy leader Tom Watson invoked the importance of winning elections.

Boos.

Even the less glassy-eyed of Jeremy Corbyn’s apostles - I mean supporters - when confronted with troublingly concrete portents of electoral doom, such as Labour dropping to an almost unheard of nadir of 26% popular support, or the beloved leader coming in third (behind “Don’t Know”) in a Who Would Make The Best Prime Minister poll, reply “Winning elections isn’t everything.’”

Well maybe for the next four years or so it isn’t, as there won't be an election until 2020, unless Teresa May calls a snap election, which she won’t, as there is literally nothing for her to gain by doing so. Maybe until then there can be other priorities, such as reunifying the party (best of luck with that after 12 months of screaming “traitor” at each other) or trying to communicate the undoubted enthusiasm of the current Labour faithful to a thus far sceptical public, but at some point, erm, yes, winning elections IS going to be everything, sorry.

Unless of course that’s not the plan anymore.

There are two routes to societal change: consensus and force.

In the first instance, society takes the collective decision that it’s time to try something new and implements that decision; right now, the mechanism we have for this is democratic election. It’s a flawed mechanism, open to abuse and prone to error, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

In the second instance, a single faction or movement decides it knows what’s best for society as a whole and imposes its will upon the rest of that society through direct, often physical, force. When this comes from the bottom up it’s called a revolution, when it comes from the top down it’s called a coup (and when it comes from somewhere else entirely, it’s called an invasion, or “regime change” if it’s the the Good Guys doing it).

These are THE ONLY procedures by which societal change can be implemented (that I can think of anyway; feel free to email me if you can think of a third). And oddly “change” appears these days to be the one thing all sides of the political sandpit seem to agree upon as a good idea, although the kind of “change” the current Tory administration seems to be pushing for at the moment seems to be less about “changing” and more about “changing back”.

Labour, in its present Momentum-inflected incarnation, is ALL about change. Internal and external. It was described to me by one true believer on Twitter as “Jeremy Corbyn’s project of renewal”, which to a science fiction nerd like myself sounds horribly reminiscent of Carousel, the euthanasia ritual from Logan’s Run...

But leaving aside thoughts of shopping mall dystopias and Jenny Agutter in a floaty nightie...

...

...sorry, lost my train of thought for a second. But leaving all that aside, what troubles me is this: if you’re advocating for change, but dismissing consensus... just what sort of change ARE you advocating?

If Labour seeks to remodel society, but regards elections as at best a distraction from the main task or at worst completely irrelevant (hence the booing of Tom Watson)... by what means does it seek to implement that change? Because if it’s not to be by winning elections, then that only leaves force (or, let’s be frank, VIOLENCE) as an option.

Is Labour, then, now a revolutionary movement rather than a parliamentary one? If so, this could still be a legitimate position; we all know examples from history of revolts that were not just morally excusable but imperative, even if what came after was often as bad if not worse than what came before.

One could even argue that our present situation; an unelected, off-manifesto Conservative government swerving so hard towards Trumpian right-wing demagoguery that we have a Prime Minister overruling Parliament in the name of "democracy" (ponder that for a moment) and a Home Secretary (unwittingly?) quoting a chunk of Mein Kampf in her conference speech, speaks of a electoral system so abused and broken that extra-parliamentary measures might actually be justified... But I’m not hearing anyone in Labour making that case. They seem to want to retain the respectability of a parliamentary movement while abandoning the parliamentary method in favour of a more radical, revolutionary approach.

Like I said, there could be a case to be made for this, but until that case is made, until someone in the Labour party admits that it’s now about revolution rather than consensus, their current stance is at best disingenuous and at worst downright deceptive.

And all of this matters, because of - among other things - this:

Throughout the years and months of my father's illness, the NHS in Liverpool LAVISHED time and attention on him. When he got too weak to visit the GP, the GP came to him. As his breathing became harder and shallower, an oxygen-refining machine was delivered to the house. When he became bedridden, an electric-motored adjustable hospital bed was installed in my parents’ living room, to enable him to stay at home. During his last weeks, care assistants would arrive, two at a time, four times a day to spend up to an hour with him and my mother, helping him get changed, get washed, change the bedlinen, whatever was required. That's eight job-hours a day; the equivalent of employing someone full time to look after an incurably ill old man.

The total billable cost of all this to my family was nil. 0 pounds 0 pence. In an insurance-only system such as that endured by the USA, and as being inched towards in this country, we’d have gone bankrupt over a year ago. My 76 year old mother would now be homeless as well as bereaved.

One way or another we’ve got four more years of this increasingly flint-hearted Conservative government. Four years will be enough to change the NHS beyond recognition. NINE years would be enough to destroy it altogether.

Don’t tell me winning elections isn’t everything.

~ o ~

04: What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Luvvies And Understanding?

28th October 2016

My first rant against the "Metropolitan Elite" slur, which we're still getting eighteen months later.

~ o ~

So right now we’re in a bus carrying 50 passengers. We took a vote as to whether to head east or west, and west squeaked it 26 votes to 24, despite there being a rumour going round the bus that the road to the west led to a ravine with a broken bridge. Indeed, soon after turning to the west, it becomes apparent that the road does indeed lead straight to a broken bridge over a sheer drop of many hundreds of feet. By now the passengers, including most of those who urged the driver to head west, are screaming for the bus to stop or turn round, or at least to pause so we can discuss the relative merits of plummeting into the ravine or not plummeting into the ravine, but the driver, who bears a curious resemblance to Theresa May, says something about “the will of the people” and floors the accelerator...

You may recall that a couple of columns ago I pointed out that if someone takes a position on an issue, and can back that position up with reason and facts, then that’s what they do. If they do anything else, be it make the position a matter of faith and conviction, or (more often) accuse anyone who challenges the position of being a Bad Person, it’s because they know they can’t back it up with reason and facts; reason and facts are not on their side. I’m not sure if many of the high profile Brexiteers read this paper but they seem to be trying very hard to prove me right at the moment.

If anything demonstrates that even the members of the Brexit camp who actually wanted the Leave vote to win (stares daggers at Boris) now realise that leaving the EU is An Incredibly Bad And Stupid Idea, it’s their increasingly desperate attempt to paint anyone still on the other side of the argument as aloof, effete, patronising, seditious, or even (in the case of that ridiculous little man in Guildford whose name I cannot be bothered to Google) treasonous.

The “pay no heed to the Metropolitan Elite” meme currently being advanced by Theresa May (who, to her shame, knows full well that the current course of action is absurd and voted accordingly back in June) is utterly toxic: it insults and belittles EVERYBODY.

First of all, how can an “elite” constitute 48% of the country? What sort of an elite is that? I’m reminded of the time David Cameron said “I want everybody to be privileged”, which would suggest that despite being raised in the lap of it, he doesn’t know what “privilege” actually means.

Besides, there’s a bizarre irony in the party whose raison d’être is the preservation of wealth, rank and status complaining about “elites” in any context. The “Metropolitan Elite”, or the “Liberal Elite” as previously styled, isn’t exactly a difficult elite to infiltrate. Surely the whole point of “elites” is that they’re hard to get into. To gain entry to the Liberal Elite you just need to read a progressive newspaper (so you’re off to a good start), drink some peppermint tea and maybe take a deep breath and count to ten before blaming foreigners for everything. To join the sort of elite the Conservative Party represents, you’d have to travel back in time to the 13th Century, raise an army and seize Berkshire.

Before we became the Liberal Elite, you may remember, we were dismissed as Liberal Intellectuals. That was the label back in the early 90s. Everything would be fine, we were told, were it not for those Liberal Intellectuals going round doing ... what, exactly? Being nice to people and thinking things through? Why, that’s just irresponsible. I was in my 20s back then and struggling to understand how “liberal” and “intellectual” were anything other than positive qualities. What was the alternative, anyway? Mean and stupid? Well obviously; then as now, if you look around the world with all its conflict and misery, it’s immediately apparent that there just aren’t enough mean and stupid people about. That’s what the world needs, more meanness and stupidity. Apparently.

This disparagement of liberal-mindedness as pernicious and enfeebling gave rise, particularly in the USA, to a new kind of codified mean-spiritedness rebranded as rugged self-reliance, peddled by pundits and politicians alike, usually invoking that dust-blooded old misanthrope Ayn Rand as a spiritual figurehead. For anyone unfamiliar with Ms. Rand’s life and oeuvre, try to imagine the result of a hideous teleporter malfunction involving Katie Hopkins and Dan Brown. Understandably traumatised as a child by the dispossession of her family by the Bolsheviks, she responded by formulating a philosophy of relentless selfishness (and open detestation of the lower orders) which she promulgated through turgid allegorical novels and the establishment of a cultish political/philosophical movement, the Objectivists (who weren’t).

But as I said, the sneering dismissal of “The Metropolitan/Liberal Elite” doesn’t just demean those it seeks to belittle, but those it ostensibly supports as well...

Gary Lineker (to his evident bemusement) has found himself being labelled a “luvvie” since he came out as anti-racist on Twitter, to the feigned horror of The (hawk-spit) Sun. And whenever I take to the Twitterverse to make any sort of point about racism, be it objecting to a tabloid headline about “swarms of immigrants” or UKIP’s latest piece of Goebbelsesque poster art (and while I’m here: I’d be enjoying UKIP’s current implosion a lot more were it not for that fact it’s at least partly due to the Tories’ rightward lurch rendering UKIP surplus to requirements), someone will immediately emerge from the virtual woodwork and call me “a middle class snob who doesn’t understand working people”...

Here’s the thing: I can’t claim to have grown up working class, but my parents absolutely did. Both were raised in social housing - in a single parent family in my late father’s case, his own father having been killed while serving as a fireman in the Manchester Blitz. My mother’s father was a hard-drinking Quartermaster Sergeant from the Western Isles; she and her siblings were raised on army bases around Scotland (and, bizarrely, Egypt) before settling in Liverpool.

And you know what? I never heard so much as a racist breath from either of them, not even back in the Black and White Minstrels on prime time TV 1970s. In fact, my mother recalls how, as a young clerk in the Employment Exchange in the early 60s, she would be upbraided by her superiors for challenging employers who put “No Blacks” on job vacancies (perfectly legal back then).

To conflate racism with working class values - or vice versa - is the foulest calumny upon decent people. If I say “racist” and you hear “working class”, then I think you’ll find it’s YOU that’s the snob, not me.

An idea is either valid or it isn’t, irrespective of who’s proposing it. This “Metropolitan Elite” nonsense slanders its targets as clueless and detached, and everyone else as dim and unthinking. It’s dishonest and cowardly, and must be confronted wherever and whenever it is deployed.

~ o ~

05 Offend More; Hurt Less

24th November 2016

My first column after Donald Trump's "victory" in November 2016, which I think evokes the numb horror most of us felt at the time.

~ o ~

Wow. Huh. Ok. Blimey. Yeah.

So NOW what do we do?

The one thing everyone on the progressive side (I'm not going to say "left" as I'm increasingly of the opinion that "left wing" and "right wing" are redundant, outmoded and counterproductive concepts based on nothing more relevant than the arrangement of the chairs in the post-revolutionary French Parliament, but that's a whole 'nother rant) seems to be in agreement about is that we've failed. We've failed in our attempts, such as they were, to "address the concerns of ordinary people" and left the way open for the demagogues, the populists, the (screw it, let's say it) racists to clasp the "ordinary people" to their foul bosoms.

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the very term "ordinary people" reeks more strongly of middle-class condescension than any bit of liberal philosophy I've ever read; I spend my life travelling the roads of this and other countries and I don't think I've ever met an Ordinary Person. Some people are more extraordinary than others (some, let's be honest, tiresomely so) but I've never encountered anyone I'd describe as Ordinary. But it does seem reasonable to conclude that we, whoever "we" are, have lost the argument.

Perhaps we've been going about it the wrong way. Certainly there seems to be some consensus around this. How can we hope to win people over to our side if we go round telling them that they're WRONG about things? It is tricky, certainly, but it's obviously been done before, because otherwise power would never change hands at all. And while "you should support us, because you are wrong to oppose us" is a tricky proposition to sell, surely it's more likely to win hearts and minds at some point than "you are correct to oppose us, and should continue to do so"...? Or perhaps we should stop espousing ideas which the public appear to find unpalatable, admit we can't beat the populists and join 'em? In which case, what's the point of even being us?

I've thought of one thing we can do; we can stop being offended by everything.

If you're now thinking "oh great, another op-ed about how liberals are a bunch of pearl-clutching old spinsters who need to man up, grow a couple of extra layers of skin and learn to take a damn joke", no; quite the reverse.

We need to stop "being offended" and start getting ACTUALLY ANGRY.

We've somehow allowed the whole debate about social attitudes to be framed entirely in terms of what is and isn't "offensive", and the trouble with "offensiveness" is it's an entirely subjective, and as such ultimately meaningless concept. Anyone can claim to be offended by anything. People can BE offended by anything. I happen to know that the BBC still gets letters of complaint about employing black newsreaders and openly gay presenters. Being offended doesn't make you right or even mean that you have a valid point of view.

But the attitudes prevalent among the reactionary elements seizing the political initiative and spotlight across Europe and the USA right now are NOT offensive, or rather they're not JUST offensive. They're MALIGNANT.

Take the Vice-President elect, Mike Pence. Now, given his statements and actions over the years, it's clear that Mike Pence finds homosexuality offensive. This is his right; one could argue all day about how much of this is actual animus on his part and how much it's due to the Bronze Age nonsense his head has been filled with since birth, but Mike Pence is free to feel about homosexuality however he wants to feel. Of course, homosexuality isn't actually inconveniencing Mike Pence; it isn't injuring him, it isn't affecting him in any way. He might get a queasy feeling when he contemplates two men getting it on, but that is entirely his (and every homophobe's) problem. However, what Mike Pence thinks should HAPPEN to homosexuals - that they should be tortured until they stop being homosexual (it's referred to as "conversion therapy" by the unaccredited religious clinics who perform it, but that's entirely what it amounts to) is not offensive; it's downright evil. It's destructive, it's harmful, it HURTS people ("conversion therapy" has been linked to gay teen suicides in the US). And while few homophobes ever acquire the kind of power that Mike Pence is about to, the ground level hate speech and queer-bashing available to all homophobes contributes to the normalisation of homophobia which helps powerful homophobes like Mike Pence get elected.

Homophobia isn't bad because it offends and upsets people; it's bad because it damages and kills people.

Same with racism. Now, very few people actually consider themselves to BE racist (there are obvious exceptions) and nobody likes to be called racist. But being asked to examine your attitudes and perhaps your use of language never hurt anybody. Telling people that their ethnically different neighbours are less worthy beings than they are, that they're a burden upon the state or a malign insurgence, coming to take their jobs and ravish their womenfolk... that gets people killed in their millions. I don't have to cite examples; you've already thought of several.

Racism isn't bad because it offends and upsets people; it's bad because it damages and kills people.

And, lest we forget, we now have a president in waiting who has boasted about using his status to sexually violate women. The problem with the "pussygate" tape wasn't the candidate's use of coarse language, as his apologists tried to make out, by drawing hilariously invalid comparisons with some of the fruitier terminology used by prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Jay-Z in his amusing rhythm and boogie poems. The problem was a rich and powerful man, once again for emphasis, BOASTING ABOUT USING HIS STATUS TO SEXUALLY VIOLATE WOMEN. Such behaviour doesn't just offend women, it injures them physically and psychologically, and in a broader sociological context, the fact that Mr. Trump has not been made to suffer a moment's inconvenience for this behaviour encourages men to think of women's bodies as mere playthings, paraded for their amusement and gratification. One shudders to contemplate what his elevation will do to the incidence of domestic violence in the USA, or whether such crimes will even be recorded as such in Trump's America.

Misogyny isn't bad because it upsets and offends people; it's bad because it damages and kills people.

While we allow these arguments to revolve around "offensiveness" we will always be open to the accusation that we're parading our own virtues rather than trying to help. We need to reframe the argument to make it plain that this is not about protecting our own "feelings" but about protecting our fellow human beings from those who mean them actual harm.

I can accept that "ordinary people" may not give a fig about what does or doesn't "offend" me, and nor should they. But I don't accept - I CAN'T accept - that ordinary people are indifferent to human suffering. And if WE have to offend some other people's sensibilities to make it plain that that's what it's all about, so be it.

~ o ~

06: Yeah, You ARE All Racists. Sorry.

2nd December 2016

Let’s imagine something. Let’s imagine that we found the REAL secret diaries of Adolf Hitler. Not the fakes that turned up in the 80s, the real thing. At last, we will know the workings of the late Führer’s mind. And let’s further imagine that, reading these diaries, we discover that Hitler himself actually had no particularly strong feelings about the Jewish people one way or the other. That the whole process of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, from Kristallnacht to the ghettos to the Final Solution itself was merely a means to an ends; an exercise in scapegoating and uniting the Volk around a common enemy within. Would this mean that Hitler was not, after all, an antisemite?

No, of course it bloody wouldn’t.

We may never know Hitler’s own innermost feelings towards the Jewish people, but whatever they may or may not have been, he was content to sign off on legislation which singled out Jews for degradation and ultimately extermination based purely on their ethnicity. Even if he didn’t actually personally despise Jews, he evidently thought little enough of them to go through with this. That’s the very definition of antisemitism. We’re defined by our actions, not our motivations.

Now I’m not sure how many - if any - readers The New European has in the USA (the paper’s name doesn’t exactly scream relevance to American eyes, I’m sure) but just in case there are an Americans reading this, and, to stretch probability even further, in case there are any supporters of the President Elect reading this... I understand from Twitter that you’re getting tired of being called racists. You’re being supported in this by many liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, who opine that it’s unfair to ascribe racial animus to voters who may have been motivated by any number of alternate factors: distrust of the Clintons, disillusionment with the political process in general, or (altogether now) economic anxiety.

Ah yes, economic anxiety. About that.

I’m no stranger to economic anxiety myself, trust me, having eked out a living at the piecemeal end of the British entertainment business for over twenty years now. And I know that you feel like the whole economy has been stitched up to your disadvantage, and you’re right. But here’s the thing: it’s been stitched up by - and FOR - men like Donald J. Trump.

Economic anxiety is a thing, and pressing thing. It’s perhaps the most, if not the only, important reason to pick a candidate to support. But what on earth possessed you to think that the man to address YOUR economic woes was a billionaire facing massive fraud charges, who jealously guards his tax returns like the closet full of skeletons they’re widely suspected to be, and has spent much of his career squandering vast amounts of his (inherited) wealth while refusing to pay his bills? Donald J Trump is not, nor will ever be, the champion of the little guy. He got where he is today on the BACKS of the little guy. A second’s Googling would have told you this. Even Fox News was nailing him on this during the primaries. You can’t pretend not to have known this, whether you sought out the information (as might have been a good idea before voting a man into the most powerful office on the globe) or just let it come to you.

So what was it that won you over? Now it may not have been Trump’s specific promise to expel all undocumented immigrants, build a fantasy wall at the Mexican border or his pledge to register all the Muslims currently residing - legally - in America while refusing to admit anymore... But you did know he’d pledged those things. And you knew that supporting him would enable him to DO those things (except the wall; trust me, that is NEVER going to happen). And it was’t a coincidence that Trump opened his whole campaign with the now infamous “Mexicans are rapists” speech. He set out a stall based on the persecution of brown-skinned people, and knowing this, you signed up anyway.

If you perform an action knowing that this action will cause a given result, you are CHOOSING TO CAUSE THAT RESULT. If you choose to reward, enable and empower racism, that’s a racist act. Whether or not you harbour any dislike of the ethnically different in your own heart and mind is irrelevant. If you support racism, you’re choosing to abandon the ethnically different to their fate at the hands of those who DO wish them harm. You’re being a racist. Sorry. The only possible defence is that you’d paid so little attention that you had no idea that Mr. Trump was running on a platform that appealed to racism. Scarcely an excuse.

By this point, I’m probably in a bit of trouble. I’m in trouble with my editors at The New European who are thinking “hang on, this is hardly on-remit, what’s this got to do with Brexit?” and with liberal commentators in general, who are thinking “No no NO, have you learned nothing? You can’t go round calling people racists! They get offended and stop listening to us! Kid gloves! Kid gloves!”

Kid gloves?

BOXING gloves.

We’re in the mess we’re in right now precisely BECAUSE we’ve been too slow to call out racism when we see it. We’ve been making excuses for it, calling it “economic anxiety” and “rejection of the political consensus”, letting actual Jew-baiting Hitler-saluting *fascists* re-brand themselves as “alt. right” like they’re some sort of hipster youth movement, allowing a toxic level of xenophobic background radiation to build up almost unnoticed by us, but all too readily noticed by the REAL racists, who’ve exploited and exacerbated it at every opportunity.

Now here we are, our own country torn neatly in half by an absurdly ill-thought out and catastrophically vaguely worded referendum, which was only proposed in the first place as an exercise in pandering to racism by a Conservative party fearful of losing the xenophobic rump of its support base now that they had actual racists to vote for instead. And in the USA we have a cowed media STILL too fearful to call the President Elect what he is, even as he hires a fascist as his personal advisor and nominates a man for Attorney General who couldn’t get approved as a federal judge thirty years ago because of his undisguised antipathy towards African Americans.

People don’t like being called racists, because, with a few exceptions, people don’t think they ARE racists. Almost nobody thinks they’re the bad guy. But racism is like toothache, like an undiagnosed but troubling symptom, like a pile of unopened brown envelopes. If you ignore it, it does NOT go away. It gets worse, and by the time you visit the dentist, or doctor, or open the letters, it’s too late to remedy the situation.

~ o ~

07: Storming The Scoundrels' Refuge

16th December 2016

In which I use the encroaching Christmas festivities of 2016 to ponder the true nature of patriotism, because that's how I roll.

In which I use the encroaching Christmas festivities of 2016 to ponder the true nature of patriotism, because that's how I roll.

And so once again, the festive season lurches drunkenly towards us; this article is due to be published on Friday 16th December, and I know from long and BITTER experience on the stand-up comedy circuit that many of you will be heading out this evening for your annual Christmas works do. When the British retail industry adopted the distasteful American tradition of "Black Friday" it upset a lot of people, not least comedians, as we've had our own "Black Friday" for years, and it's tonight.

Being a travelling circuit comic can be a lonely and draining job at the best of times, but tonight - when we're trying to entertain rooms full of people who just wanted to go to the pub, get drunk and get off with each other but have been forced by their boss to sit and listen to a bunch of comedians they've never heard of first - it's utterly soul-destroying. So if you ARE holding your Christmas party at a comedy club tonight, just a quick plea to at least TRY to pay attention to the poor soul with the microphone, as if it's not me (and it might be) it's almost certainly a good friend of mine.

But while we're here, a quick Christmas party-related question; of the colleagues you lash it up with tonight, who would be the truer and better friend? The one who buys you drinks all night and then lets you drive home? Or the one who tells you you've had enough, tells the barman you've had enough, and when all appeals to sanity fail, hides your car keys and calls you a cab?

One of the reasons I've decided to reject the concepts of left and right wing as outdated and useless is the baseless and damaging assumptions adopting these identities encourages us to make. Not just about our opponents and enemies, but about ourselves.

The big erroneous assumption the left makes is that it has a monopoly on ethics; that not only is being left wing automatically to be a Good Person, but in fact the ONLY way to be a good person. And moreover, that since left wing = good, by definition MORE left wing = better. This is why anyone objecting to the Labour Party's direction under Jeremy Corbyn is instantly accused of perfidy and subterfuge; if Jeremy is to the left of you politically (and the odds are he is) why then he's a BETTER PERSON than you and your objections can only be malicious and mischievous rather than principled.

(Quite where Mao Tse Tung fits on the "more left wing = better" scale is a question for another time.)

The RIGHT's big false assumption is that it has a monopoly on PATRIOTISM. Right wing parties have a tendency to wrap themselves so tightly in the flag that soon they can't tell where the party stops and the flag starts; to oppose them is to oppose THE COUNTRY ITSELF. We heard this expressed in quite literal terms by American conservative commentators during the Dick Cheney era (I think we can safely dispense with the fantasy that George W. Bush was in charge from 2001-2009, don't you?) when any and all criticism of a Presidential decision was loudly met with "Why do you hate America??!!". Interestingly, relentless and indeed deeply personal criticism of the President does NOT, apparently, constitute "hating America" when the President in question is black...

We don't get quite as much of this sort of nonsense from the British right (although Mrs. Thatcher had her moments, particularly in her latter "We are a grandmother" phase) but wouldn't you know it, Brexit is bringing it out of the woodwork.

As it stands, the situation with regard to Brexit is this: the government HAS A PLAN. Definitely. Probably. They're not telling us what it is, when it starts or how it works, but it ABSOLUTELY HAS A PLAN. And if you object to this plan, or cast doubt upon its efficacy, or that it exists, or express ANY sentiment other than 100% enthusiastic support for this plan you haven't seen then YOU ARE A TRAITOR. The same treason-brush with which the High Court justices were tarred a few weeks ago is now being brandished at the public as a whole. You are with us, say the Brexiteers, or you are AGAINST BRITAIN.

I'm not sure if any of the dwindling pro-Brexit hardcore read this paper for purposes other than compiling first-against-the-wall dossiers, but if you're out there, pay attention.

We take no lessons in patriotism from those who would cheerfully drive the UK over a political and economic cliff rather than admit to making a mistake.

We take no lessons in patriotism from those who enshrine and promote the worst aspects of the British character (insularity, pride in ignorance, suspicion of outsiders) while denigrating the best (healthy scepticism, humour, open-mindedness, charity).

We take no lessons in patriotism from those who would betray not only the national interest but also their own political conscience to avoid embarrassing their party.

A true patriot wants his country to be the best it can possibly be, rather than blithely asserting that it already is.

A true patriot wants his country to be a comfortable home for all its people,not just the ones who look, talk, act and vote like he does.

A true patriot speaks out if he sees his country sailing towards the rocks, and does everything in his power to steer it back towards safety.

A true friend hides your car keys and calls you a cab.

Have fun tonight and don't heckle. Seriously, don't. It doesn't help the show and we'll make you look REALLY stupid.

~ o ~

08: Happier New Year

6th January 2017

In which I try to whip up some optimism at the end of the grimmest year in living memory.

~ o ~

Happy New Year.

No, really.

John F Kennedy's assertion that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as "opportunity" was not entirely acccurate; "crisis" is written in Chinese as a pictographic portmanteau incorporating the symbols for "danger" and "turning point". It's certainly true that we face a crisis - yes all of us, not just the liberal bedwetters - we're ALL up the creek, it's just that the more dimwitted or cravenly partisan conservatives are too busy gloating to have noticed (although they're starting to catch on). And a turning point can, by definition, go either way. But I think we are now presented with an opportunity; to define ourselves, to surprise ourselves.

My wife Clara - well, I guess EX-wife these days, since we're now (entirely amicably) separated but not actually divorced yet (is there a name for that? Something for the greeting card industry to ponder), grew up in West Berlin, as it was then, in the 1980s. She tells me that a frequent topic of conversation among her generation was: what sort of German would YOU have been, back in the Nazi days? Would you have joined the party, protested against them or just kept your head down? Would you have volunteered for the Wermacht, waited to be drafted or fled to Switzerland? And of course, the most vexed question: would you have been the kind of German who hid your Jewish neighbours in the attic or basement, knowing that discovery would condemn you alongside them, or the kind of German who ratted them out to the Gestapo for a handful of Reichsmarks? Clara tells me that such conversations were generally an expression of relief that she and her friends had never been subjected to such a dilemma, but also tinged with regret - for that very same reason. Regret that their character had never been tested to such a telling degree.

Well we're being tested now. And maybe now's the time we ALL get to find out. Maybe in 2017 we all discover what kind of Germans we would have been.

I'm already surprising myself in one regard; I expected to feel crushed and despondent at the turn of the year. In addition to the tsunami of BS that engulfed the world in general during 2016, I had some pretty major things go wrong just in my own life; had a couple of biggish career setbacks (though I appear to have acquired a newspaper column, which is nice), my marriage broke up, as I've alluded to (although that at least has been relatively painless so far) and my father died after a long illness. I don't think anyone would have blamed me if I'd greeted 2017 in the foetal position. And yet I feel both strangely energised and almost inexplicably optimistic. Not because, as some people are saying, "it couldn't get any worse"; it REALLY could and maybe still will, but because it doesn't have to if we don't let it.

People have been drawing unavoidable parallels between the current resurgence of race-baiting right-wing populism both at the grassroots level and indeed in the highest echelons of power, with the original rise of fascism in the Europe of the 1930s. And it's true, this is all horribly familiar. We know what we're looking at because we know how this starts.

We also know how it ends.

Fascism scores swift victories early on in its evolution for the same reason it always fails in the long run: it's too easy. Fascism appeals to the baser, and as such weaker and lazier, aspects of human nature. It's a philosophy designed to appeal to the feckless, the stupid and the cowardly. It tells its followers that everything wrong in their lives is someone else's fault, be it the Jews, the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Romanians... It absolves the faithful not only of all responsibility for their current travails, but of any need to work or even THINK their way towards a better life. Just switch off whatever critical faculties you possess and trust in The Leader. He'll do all your thinking for you from now on.

Such a philosophy - if you can call it that - is bound to fall seductively upon the ears of those who feel that life has dealt them a bum hand and have run out of ideas as to how to improve matters. Not ALL such people, of course; just the lazy, selfish ones, or the ones looking for an excuse to go beat up on somebody. A movement consisting of vicious dullards being manipulated by a handful of cynical demagogues might get it all its own way for a while, and do untold damage while in its pomp, but it will always - and HAS always - collapsed eventually.

Such a philosophy - if you can call it that - is bound to fall seductively upon the ears of those who feel that life has dealt them a bum hand and have run out of ideas as to how to improve matters. Not ALL such people, of course; just the lazy, selfish ones, or the ones looking for an excuse to go beat up on somebody. A movement consisting of vicious dullards being manipulated by a handful of cynical demagogues might get it all its own way for a while, and do untold damage while in its pomp, but it will always - and HAS always - collapsed eventually.

History shows us that while fascism flourishes where it's indulged, it often crumbles where it's resisted. The reason British fascism, in the form of Mosley and his Blackshirts, failed in the 1930s was not just because of our tendency to crack up giggling at anyone who takes himself quite THAT seriously (the most admirable trait of the British character) but also because on the one occasion they mounted a show of antisemitic strength, at Cable Street in 1936, they were humiliated. Tough to sell yourself as the Master Race once the Untermenschen and their allies have chased you away with your tail between your jodhpurs.

So our mission for 2017, should we choose to accept it or not, is to resist.

We've had a bruising, battering year, and bitterness is all too comfortable a duvet to slide underneath. But don't get bitter; get ANGRY. And don't just get angry, get ORGANISED.

Speak up: expose the lies and present alternatives.

Act up: boycott the companies who advertise on the fascists' websites and publish their little hate-books. Re-toxify their "brand".

STAND up: to misquote Pastor Niemöller; this time, when they come for the socialists, and the trade unionists, and the Jews... we'll be waiting for them.

Be PROUD; we're not handwringing liberal snowflakes peddling political correctness; we're the defenders of basic human decency, and our New Year's Resolution should be to stop apologising for being in the right.

Oh and for flip's sake stick together. The petty internecine People's Front Of Judea righter-on-than-thou peeing contests can wait for another time (or preferably forever). We have bigger fish to fry fight now, and if we fail to fry this fish it might just fry us.

Perphaps we need to form some kind of loose but committed progressive coalition; an umbrella term for the various factions of anti-fascist resistance. An alliance of rebels.

Yes, an alliance of rebels; I like that. Just needs a name. I'm sure we'll think of something.

~ o ~

09: Happy Birthday To Me

20th January 2017

The fact that US Presidential Inauguration Day always falls on my birthday (January 20th) has occasioned me a lot of angst over the years, and never more so than in 2017...

~ o ~

If you're reading this newspaper on its day of publication, it's my birthday. On January 20th, I shall turn 47 years old, and that, as far as I am concerned, is ALL THAT'S HAPPENING TODAY. Like Rep. John Lewis and (at time of writing) an increasing number of Democratic legislators, I will not be paying any attention to the goings on up on Capitol Hill. I'm going to allow myself one last day of blissful, wilful ignorance before we all must face the new reality upon the following morn - or perhaps on Monday, since the incoming leader of the free world has just announced his intention to take the weekend off. Where appeals to sanity and decency have failed, it looks like laziness might yet save us all.

And no I will NOT be addressing That Rumour. It's very possibly not true and there's not much I can say about it, serious or satirical, that you won't have heard already. There isn't a single urination-based pun that hasn't been kicked to death on the internet these last few days. And if it were true, his bedroom habits, like everyone's, are nobody else's business, even if they are most people's bathroom habits.

Moreover (and here we come to the point I've been fumbling towards) even if it is authentic, it's not, whatever the press say, a "scandal". Not even if the broader, and more disturbing context is true; that we only know about it because it formed part of a Russian security service stitch-up operation which may just have been successfully concluded with the installation of a foreign intelligence asset in the Oval Office... even with all that acccepted, it's STILL not a "scandal". This is because there can be no scandal when the person concerned has no sense of shame whatsoever.

None of the varyingly gross and/or questionably legal things the gentleman in question has been acccused of, or indeed caught doing, is any more gross and/or questionably legal than the things he has admitted to, or even boasted of having done. And not one of these boasts or admissions has occasioned him a moment of regret, remorse or inconvenience. His messianic popularity with his flock - and, more crucially, with himself - has not been diminished a jot by any of it.

I'm wondering at what point his opponents and critics will figure this out. They present ever more blood-curdling revelations with a this-will-finish-him-off-for-sure flourish, then stand slack-jawed when his bandwagon rolls heedlessly on. It counts for nothing; if someone could "bust" him for something in such a way as to impede his progress on a practical level, involving some sort of un-ignorable sanction or disqualification, that would do the trick, but merely "exposing" his misdeeds doesn't achieve a thing. His supporters don't believe it and he doesn't care.

As regards the possibility of impeachment, to which many of my progressive pals on both sides of the pond are currently clinging with mounting desperation, two words of caution:

Word one: Pence. If the new Chief WERE to find himself removed from office prematurely, we don't (as some starry-eyed liberals seem to think) get Hillary Clinton after all; rather we get his number two, Mike "The Handmaid's Tale" Pence. To trade boorishness, vindictiveness and volatility for homophobia and misogyny doesn't strike me as much of an improvement, if indeed an improvement at all.

Word two: Nah. As in it's not going to happen. The only body which can impeach a sitting President is Congress, and if you can envisage a Republican-controlled Congress choosing to defenestrate a Republican President in this day and age, then your imagination is rather more vivid than my own, and mine is pretty vivid.

I say "in this day and age"; a decade or so ago such a thing might not have seemed so unlikely, but given the levels of unyielding partisanship adopted by the GOP since, well, let's see, about eight years ago, funnily enough, it's pretty much inconceivable at the moment. Every organisation which could cramp the incoming President's style to any significant degree is firmly in Republican hands at the moment, including, apparently, the FBI. In many respects the incoming President's utter shamelessness is one of the few things he has in common with the Republican Party to which he is a relatively recent convert.

As President Obama's term ends, the media is replete with post-mortems on his time in office and assessments of his legacy. For my money, the greatest failing of his first term was his failure, or refusal, to accept the extent to which the Republican establishment was entrenched against him. You can yearn to be a uniter rather than a divider, you can extend a whole tree's worth of olive branches across the aisle, but if you carry on waxing positive about the possibilities of working in harmony with your opponents while these same opponents are openly undermining and dismissing you, spreading rumours about your legitimacy and indeed calling you a liar to your face, you start to look not so much optimistic as delusional.

This is the lesson we all have to learn for the next four years; yes, all of us (he says, finally coming on-remit for the last couple of paragraphs). The President's power may not (officially) extend beyond the USA's borders but as we learned in the 00s, when America soils itself, the world gets the cleaning bill. We may flatter ourselves that we're Better People than the opposition, but that's scant consolation when they're in complete control, and the vulnerable members of society - the ones we're supposed to be looking out for - are at their mercy.

Remember this: The Other Side Cheats. They gerrymander. They bribe. They smear. They institute sweeping vote-suppression programmes based on mythical plagues of voter fraud. They promise £350 million extra for the same NHS they're in the process of eviscerating. They do all of this and more with a clear conscience because THEY flatter themselves that they're tougher than us, that they can pull all this off in plain sight and we'll be so pearl-clutchingly concerned with maintaining the moral high ground that we won't even call them out on it.

What do you think? Are they right?

That's a question we'll have to answer soon, and whether the world suffers a few years of indignity or an indefinite undignified future depends on how we respond.

But for today, Happy Birthday to me.

~ o ~

10: Men Men Men Men

27th January 2017

Some thoughts on gender politics after the Women's March of January 2017...

~ o ~

So, did you go to the Women’s March on Saturday?

I didn’t, and I’m beginning to feel like a part of me is going to kick itself about that for quite some time. It’s not a great feeling when you realise that history is being made a stone’s not-being-thrown distance away and you’re not part of it.

I had my reasons; for a start I had my two young daughters that day (and 8 year old Astrid had a ballet class to go to, just in case you weren’t already judging me as a middle-class armchair revolutionary) and while 11 year old Greta would have been well up for it (she’s becoming politically conscious at a time when it’s not a comfortable thing for a young girl) I’ve always had a problem with kids being taken on demos.

I imagine I’m gonna lose some of you over this, but safety considerations aside (I know Saturday went without a hitch, but you never know beforehand whether it’s going to be “carnival atmosphere” or baton charge and tear gas), carting your kids along on protests strikes me as ropey on an ethical level. If gobby atheists like myself are going to object to religious parents blithely imposing their spiritual beliefs upon children who are years too young to arrive at such beliefs independently, should we not find similar fault with activist parents doing likewise with their political beliefs? I’d like to think that my kids will grow up with the same kind of progressive values as me but it’d be unfair to deny them even the option not to.

Besides, you run the risk of having the opposite effect... what happens when they become stroppy teenagers? An essential part of adolescence is deciding everything your parents are into is rubbish. Indeed, might not a youngster who’d been forced to spend every other weekend of their entire childhood being given one of those cute kiddie-sized placards to wave, then dragged through cordoned off streets while being glowered at by riot police, go and join the Young Conservatives at the first opportunity for pure revenge’s sake?

Another altogether more embarrassing reason was that as a man, I wasn’t sure if I was allowed.

I know, pathetic, but there ARE women-only political events, often with good reason, and I didn’t know whether this was one of them. I COULD have asked, but I felt a proper numpty not knowing already, especially given my recent elevation to the ranks of punditry (thanks again, guys). And there is a fine line between being a good Feminist Ally and being a grandstanding mansplaining White Knight parading his PC credentials in a futile attempt to impress left-leaning ladies. I’m never entirely sure where this line is (I suspect it moves occasionally), and now I suddenly want to write comedy sketches about a liberal copper called PC Credentials. I’m easily distracted like that.

In any event, it’s good and right that Saturday’s march was a women-led event, because it’s increasingly apparent that if the human race is to be saved, then it’s the female half of it that will do the saving. Just at the moment it’s even money whether it will be the poisoning of the environment or the poisoning of the male mindset which gets us all killed first.

Quite aside from the fact that we just handed the nuclear codes to a man with the temperament of a cranky two-year old at nap time, so much of what’s going wrong on this planet right now is directly tied in with increasingly desperate attempts to shore up the cracks in the fragile male ego in what is, with every passing year, a little less of a man’s man’s man’s world.

Men throughout history have looked at themselves in the mirror, perceived some minor deficit in their manliness and then done the most insane things to try and compensate, from drunkenly punching their best friend for no reason all the way up to trying to take over the world. Would Vladimir Putin be so hell bent on mastery and conquest if he were four inches taller? Would Syria be a peaceful and happy land if Bashar-Al-Assad had a chin? Would Hitler have risen to power if he’d had two?

The link between male feelings of inadequacy and viciousness has never been clearer, especially now that the inadequacy is being cynically exacerbated by those who seek to harness the viciousness. We’ve been so hung up for the last decade on the radicalisation of impressionable young Muslim men by online jihadists that a similar effort by white supremacists targeting sexually frustrated young white men has, until very recently, gone unnoticed. If you’re feeling backed up, dude, come and hang out online with the bro’s while we subtly turn the conversation around to how it’s all the Jews’ and blacks’ fault that you can’t get any chicks...

It may or may not be a coincidence that this movement has arisen in tandem with the “PUAs” - Pick Up Artists, utterly risible online Ladies’ Men gurus who instruct their foolish young acolytes in the art of pursuing women with chat-up techniques so obnoxious that they’re far more likely to earn you a knee in the nuts than a night in the sack. Are these faux lotharios in fact working for the white supremacists to ensure them a steady supply of romantic failures?

An old college friend of Richard Spencer turned up on Twitter this week; that’s THE Richard Spencer, the bizarrely coiffed leader of the “Alt Right” - NOT neo-Nazis; Spencer has been at pains to point out that doing stiff armed salutes while shouting Nazi slogans in the original German while accusing the Jews of controlling the banks and media does NOT make you a Nazi (spoiler alert: it totally makes you a Nazi). You may know him as the recipient of the on-camera lamping at the hands (or if you look closely, elbow) of a public-spirited passer by which has made him the star of a LOT of hilarious internet memes. Anyway, this old classmate of Spencer’s took to Twitter to recall that his principal memory of him was his being permanently furious that he couldn’t get a girlfriend.

So what’s to be done? How can we detoxify masculinity? Or do we just let the ladies invent synthetic sperm (we know you’re working on it, girls) and embrace extinction for the betterment of (wo)mankind?

In this respect I can’t offer much assistance I’m afraid. I only had daughters, no sons. It’s been pointed out that it might make sense to spend least SOME of the effort we put into teaching girls how to fend off creepy guys into teaching boys not to be creeps, and had I a son to raise I hope I’d do just that. Certainly the PUAs need to be debunked; young men should be told that any failure to “pick up” women is rooted not in lax technique, but in the sheer crassness of the whole concept of “picking up” women. Women are equals to be befriended and valued, not prizes to be won. Get your head round that and you might even find one who likes you enough to do all that other stuff (oh and boys, while I’m here: consent is vital but don’t settle for consent. Hold out for enthusiasm).

Fathers (and mothers) of boys, it’s up to you; please don’t let your sons grow up to be the kind of guys my daughters are going to have to beat the crap out of. Because they could.

~ o ~

11: Opinions Are Like...

10th February 2017

I've never been sure what the status of "free speech" is in British society; it isn't as concretely enshrined in our culture as it is in America's, where its preservation was made the purpose of the First Amendment to the Constitution... Here, there seems simply to be a general consensus that Free Speech is, in more or less all circumstances, a Good Thing. This reflects the fact that Britain doesn't have a constitution so much as an unspoken gentleman's agreement with itself that There Are Certain Things A Chap Simply Doesn't Do.

This gives rise to occasional debates as to what exactly is meant by "free speech" and what, if any limits must be placed upon it. These discussions have, at the time of writing, just begun afresh in the wake of the decision made by the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, that even if Donald Trump's mooted state visit should go ahead, no invitation will be extended to him to address the Houses Of Parliament.

Mr. Trump has, it seems, precious few articulate defenders left on either side of the pond - indeed, he appears to be running out of defenders in general if the risibly paltry pro-Trump "rally" which "spontaneously" took to the streets of New York earlier this week (brandishing remarkably professional-looking placards) was any indication. I'll say this for President Trump; he's providing a lot of work for New York-based background artists (they don't refer to themselves as "extras" any more). Nonetheless, some of the President's remaining champions have decried Mr. Bercow's position as "anti-free speech", which leads me to make a few weary observations:

First of all, denial of VENUE is not denial of speech. Mr. Bercow is responsible for the maintenance of civility and decorum in the House of Commons and it is understandable if he has less than 100% confidence in Mr. Trump's ability to observe these niceties, given his track record thus far. "You can't say that here" is a very different proposition to "you can't say that". Should Mr. Trump visit London I've no doubt he'll find plenty of places to make himself heard. I've been called all sort of names on the internet over the last couple of decades, and by and large I've sucked it up and ignored it; people are entitled to their opinions (more on that concept directly) and I work on the principle that if you're silly and vain enough to Google your own name, then what you find in the process is entirely your own problem. However, if someone burst uninvited into my living room and started calling me those names to my face while I was trying to watch TV, his evening wouldn't end well.

Secondly, having the right to free speech is not the same thing as having the right to UNCHALLENGED speech. It's your right to express any sentiment or position you want on any topic you want, and it's also everyone else's right to take you to task over any or all of it. And being pulled up on a point of information or logic - or indeed, being upbraided over your tone or use of language (annoying diversionary tactic though that often is) is in no WAY the same thing as being "silenced".

I've lost track of the number of discussions which have become sidetracked when someone on the receiving end of criticism for a statement they'd previously made accuses their critics of trying to "silence" them. It's a low trick; suddenly the critics are the ones having to defend themselves against the implied accusation of censorship and fear of open debate, while the contentious comment itself gets forgotten about. Being told that what you just said is nasty or wrong is not being "silenced"; the clue is in the "what you just said" part of the sentence.

And sometimes a statement is just plain WRONG. One of the contributing factors to the rise of what has become known as the "post-truth society" has been the self-enslavement of the media - in particular TV news - to the fallacy of the "false middle"; the notion that should two radically differing positions on a question present themselves, then the truth must lie somewhere between these two "extremes", when it's possible that one side is in fact right and the other side wrong. It's apparently a standing joke in American newsrooms that if CNN were to interview a man who claimed that two plus two equalled four, alongside another man insisting that two plus two equalled five, then CNN would conclude that two plus two equalled four and a half.

This desperation to appear "balanced" is having disastrous consequences; it gives the impression that "the jury is out" on questions on which the jury came back in with a emphatic verdict years ago. If, as often happen, a piece on climate change is illustrated with a debate between a climate scientist and a climate change denier (yes, denier; I won't grant them the title "climate change sceptic", as what they're practising is NOT scepticism, it's denialism. They don't call them "holocaust sceptics"), this suggests that expert opinion is split 50/50 on the subject, when in fact consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change is all but complete.

But surely everyone is entitled to their opinion? Yes, yes they are. But not everything is a matter of opinion.

One of the following statements is an expression of opinion, the other isn't. Can you spot which is which?

1. The Rolling Stones are an embarrassment and should pack it in.

2.The lead singer of The Rolling Stones is Roger Daltrey.

That's right, statement 1. is an opinion. It's not one I share; I think the older they get the more awesome they become; besides, let's face it, the "retire gracefully" ship sailed decades ago in their case. They should keep going until they all drop dead, although in Keith's case even that might not stop him. In fact I reckon he's been dead for years, he just doesn't care. When Keith Richards finally stops moving in about the year 2040 they'll do an autopsy and estimate time of death as 1976.

But the fact that I don't share that opinion in no way diminishes its validity AS an opinion. If that were an opinion you held, you'd be entitled to it.

The second statement is NOT an opinion, it's a factual assertion. AND IT'S WRONG. Testably, demonstrably wrong. Similarly, when President Trump states - as he did - that it's his "opinion" that he only lost the popular vote because "millions" of illegal votes were cast, that's not an opinion, it's an assertion, and one which outrages both the available evidence and any sort of logic or reason.

The opinion/assertion switcheroo is going to be pulled on us a lot over the next few years as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic use every rhetorical trick in the book to try to sell us their snake oil. We need to be our own fact checkers now, and when we spot their tricks, we need to use OUR free speech to point them out.

~ o ~

12: The Blair Mitch Project

24th February 2017

My reflections on Tony Blair's sudden intervention into the Brexit debate in early 2017...

~ o ~

So. Hmm. Yes. Tony Blair.

What do we think?

I don't know about you but my first thought was "Fair enough, but where the hell were you this time last year?" Because something which has occurred to me a few times during the eight-month autopsy we've all been mentally conducting on the EU referendum is that the Remain campaign was at several major disadvantages which, tragically, nobody seemed to pick up on, much less attempt to rectify, at the time.

The first disadvantage was numerical. It's been largely forgotten in the fraught and fractious aftermath of the referendum that it wasn't simply a case of a lacklustre, unfocused pro-EU campaign versus a flashy, cranked-up, hype-mongering anti-EU campaign; it was a lacklustre, unfocused pro-EU campaign versus TWO flashy, cranked-up, hype-mongering anti-EU campaigns. There was the "official", Conservative-party oriented "Vote Leave" campaign led by Boris Johnson AND the "unofficial", UKIP-based "Leave.EU" campaign fronted by Nigel Farage.

Which leads us to the other disadvantage; profile. Say what you like about Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage - and some of the things I've said about them would have me slapped with a restraining order were I to repeat them here - they're both "box office". They have the kind of personal following and "fan base" which is very rarely found in British politics. They might provoke some of us to contemplate acts of blood-curdling violence, but they inspire immense excitement and indeed loyalty among those who truly admire them, for whatever bizarre, twisted, dementedly unfathomable reason.

Who was their counterpart on the Remain side? Well, I suppose, officially it was David Cameron who was supposed to be the Prime Cheerleader for staying in the EU, but his position was pretty much untenable from the start, based as it was on an insoluble paradox: the referendum had been his idea in the first place. It's hard to construct a cogent argument in favour of maintaining the status quo, when the status quo is only under threat at all because of something *you* chose to do. Apart from that, we had - possibly - the whirlwind of charisma that is Tim Farron and, apparently, somewhere, the usually fairly impressive and credible Alan Johnson banging the drum, albeit inaudibly, for the pro-Europe Labour cause. I say inaudibly because I genuinely don't recall a single instance of Mr. Johnson being interviewed about the referendum (or indeed anything) in the weeks and months leading up to the vote. Rumour at the time had it that he was disheartened by what he felt was a lack of enthusiasm for the Remain project coming down from the Labour Party leadership; don't know where he got that idea, but suffice it to say that the less said about Jeremy Corbyn's involvement with the campaign... the more accurate a representation of his "involvement" that would be.

This, it's clear from the vantage point of even this slim sliver of history, doomed the Remain campaign at least as much as the "issues", in as much as the referendum was EVER really about the issues. Like it or not, we live in a TV democracy now, and the ability, and willingness, to sell your ideas - to sell YOURSELF - to the public in a telegenically engaging fashion is of paramount importance. Nothing explains the rise of Donald Trump as effectively as his sheer weaponised celebrity. It was fascinating and horrifying in equal measure to see it slowly dawn upon his rivals for the Republican nomination that however flimsy his grasp on facts, or however chaotic and abrasive his presentation style, there was just no competing with the raw, untempered FAMOUSNESS of The You're Fired Guy. Watching that same reality later dawn on Hillary Clinton (and, by extension, the rest of us) will scar our whole generation for life (however long that might be).

A Remain campaign bereft of a charismatic figurehead was always going to struggle against a two-pronged Leave campaign with, accordingly, two charismatic figureheads (yes they are, face it). Why this didn't occur to us at the time, or if it had, what we could have done about it, may yet haunt us for years. But it's an inescapable fact that the Remain campaign could really have done with, if not THE Tony Blair, certainly A Tony Blair.

The factor which might have made him a bad choice to lead the campaign then is, of course, the same factor which makes him at least a questionable candidate for the post of Leader Of The Resistance now; the lingering toxicity of his association with the Iraq War. As I've said in previous columns, I'm fairly certain that it was hubris rather than bloodlust which led Blair to go along with that monstrous folly, and it is a desperate shame that it will forever overshadow (indeed, in the eyes of his more vocal critics, it seems to have completely nullified) the genuinely progressive achievements of his first years in office. Is it perhaps the knowledge of this which has led him to emerge from whatever lucrative limbo he's been consigned to in order to get back in the game? Does he seek to score one last victory over the Tories as a path to leftist redemption?

I'm very conflicted about this; I understand some people's concerns that he's so tainted from a trustworthiness angle that his presence in the fray will sap, rather than augment, the credibility of the anti-Brexit cause. But be honest, fellow Remoaners; wasn't it just a BIT of a relief to hear someone who can string a sentence together (and, crucially, someone to whom people actually listen) come right out and say that the referendum WAS stupid and unnecessary, the Leave campaigns DID cheat and lie, that the result ISN'T binding, that people SHOULD be allowed to change their minds and that saying all this doesn't make us traitors?

Maybe Tony Blair isn't the right guy to lead the fight to avert Brexit to its bitter conclusion. But he might just be the right guy to get the ball rolling.

~ o ~

13: Joking Apart

3rd March 2017

It's hard to keep your eye on the ball at the moment when you're a Brit in the satire trade. The sheer weight of rivetingly colourful lunacy coming from across the pond on a more or less hourly basis makes it difficult to focus on the less telegenic but nonetheless lunatic lunacy we're currently producing here at home.

A question I'm often asked at parties is "How come we don't have anything like The Daily Show on British TV?" to which I generally respond "Why are you asking me? I can't even get on the radio these days, let alone the TV, go ask someone with some industry connections," and then wonder why I'm invited to so few parties (more than once).

In fairness I do have some thoughts on this topic; first of all it's worth noting that there was The Late Edition, an attempt to do a kind of Daily Show (albeit weekly) about ten years ago on BBC Four, fronted by my old pal Marcus Brigstocke, but it didn't really feel like the network had any great faith in the project (nor any particularly clear idea of the format) and it only ran for one season (I think; apologies to Brig if I misremember).

The programme also fell afoul of an essential cultural difference between the UK and US, and one which often hamstrings British attempts to remake American shows; the sheer disparity in enthusiasm between British and American studio audiences. Limey do-overs of Stateside formats generally feel limp by comparison for the lack of whooping and hollering punters keeping the energy levels peaking throughout. British audiences just don’t react like that and when they try (or when studio floor managers try and coax it out of them) it sounds forced and joyless.

The programme also fell afoul of an essential cultural difference between the UK and US, and one which often hamstrings British attempts to remake American shows; the sheer disparity in enthusiasm between British and American studio audiences. Limey do-overs of Stateside formats generally feel limp by comparison for the lack of whooping and hollering punters keeping the energy levels peaking throughout. British audiences just don’t react like that and when they try (or when studio floor managers try and coax it out of them) it sounds forced and joyless.There’s a curious inversion between Britain and the States with regard to the news media: our TV news is, by and large, sober, responsible and conscientious journalism while our printed press consists of editorial and opinion, ranging from the subtly slanted to outright invective and propaganda. Over there, it’s the other way round. As we’re seeing more and more, good ol’ paper-type newspapers are the last bastion of sanity and responsibility in US journalism while their TV news spirals ever further into self-parody. And that’s why it’s harder to get that format to work in Britain. We just don’t have the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly shovelling satire-ready material at us on an hourly basis. You can read out as many idiotic passages from the Daily Mail as you want but that doesn’t make for great TV.

Of course none of this makes it IMPOSSIBLE to put a Daily Show-esque format together for British TV, and one might argue that we could do with such a programme now more than ever. With more TV “platforms” springing up every year, and indeed the very definition of what constitutes “TV” changing all the time, you’d think someone might step up and fill what certainly looks like a gap in the satire market, and yet nobody is. Or at least none of the big boys is. Maybe this is something which will have to be fixed from the ground up, as it were.

As part of my Patreon project I’m looking to start making short sketch clips (I’m working on my video editing skills accordingly) and there are many YouTubers and the like putting out satirical material “under the radar” as it were. But by definition, it’s not often that one of these “outlaw” projects has the same kind of impact as something disseminated by a big league outlet. And in case you doubt that this is important, let’s cast another glance across the water...

This week, President Trump announced that he will not be attending this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The last time a President skipped this event - at which it’s customary for comedians and humorists to deliver satirical speeches - was in 1981. The President in question was Ronald Reagan and he was recovering from surgery following a failed assassination attempt. So what is Trump’s excuse? He’s given none thus far.

It was always likely to be a tense affair, given his recent denunciation of the media as “the enemy of the American people” and all that, and the White House’s recent purging of all but the most pliable outlets from the press briefing invitation list would in all probability have resulted in a reciprocal boycott which may yet be avoided, and if the current Twitter campaign to get Alec Baldwin to replace the real President Trump with his only marginally sillier impression of him, it should still be quite the evening. But the thing to take away is this: he’s afraid. The Leader Of The Free World is afraid of having jokes made about him. The man who said he’d defeat ISIS in thirty days (which ran out last week, incidentally) is running scared from comedians.

Jokes are important. Sunlight, the cliche tells us, is the best disinfectant, and laughter the best medicine. A combination of both can get a lot of cleaning done.

~ o ~

14: Is It Okay To Laugh At Nazis?

24th March 2017

I'm sure I'm not the only person who, while enjoying the BBC's atmospheric adaptation of Len Deighton's SS-GB, is wondering if the Beeb was motivated to finally get around to dramatising the book (which came out back in 1978) by the success of Amazon's lavish (if loose) mounting of Philip K Dick's similar-ish The Man In The High Castle.

I say similar-ish; alternate histories in which the Nazis won are almost a genre in themselves, and above and beyond that basic connection the two stories have little in common. Deighton's novel is set in a freshly German-occupied Britain of the 1940s, Dick's is set in a Nazi-administrated America of the 1960s in a reality where German scientists invented the H-bomb before the Americans, and consequently the Reich not only won the war but now more or less rules the world (apart from California, which belongs to the Japanese). There's also a bit of a difference in genre: Deighton was an author of war stories and spy thrillers so his book is a relatively straightforward what-if. Dick was a writer of mind-bending science fiction so, appropriately, in the Man In The High Castle there's a sci-fi element; the "MacGuffin" of the story (at least in the TV version) is a particularly explosive bit of propaganda being circulated by the mysterious titular resistance leader: a can of newsreel film showing the end of the war as OUR history records it; the D Day landings, the razing of Berlin, the Americans nuking Japan, the Yalta conference etc. This of course implies that time itself has been altered and that None Of This Is Supposed To be Happening.

In Dick's original (even trippier) book it's a banned NOVEL which tells the "true" story of the end of the war; watching the TV version I found myself wondering if the writers had been inspired to change it to a can of film by the famous "Lambeth Walk" short produced by the British Ministry Of Information in 1942 and circulated among resistance cells in occupied Europe.

If you've never seen this film (it's on YouTube, of course) it's two minutes of military parade footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda epic Triumph Of The Will, re-edited to make it look as if the phalanxes of grim-faced goose-stepping stormtroopers are doing the jaunty dance of the title. It was so effective as bubble-bursting satire that not only was possession of the film punishable by execution but its creator, Charles Ridley, was placed on a Gestapo death list by Goebbels himself.

This film has been much on my mind recently, as the question "Is it ok to laugh at Nazis?" Has found depressing new relevance.

On the one hand, it's rather hard NOT to laugh at the current crop of Nazis; there is something almost pitiably forlorn about the extent to which they fall short of their ambitions (and self-image). There was a glorious exchange on Twitter the other day in which everyone's favourite punchbag Richard Spencer not only stated - unironically - that "Tomorrow belongs to me" but embedded the clip of that song being sung by peach-fuzzed Hitler Youth boys in the movie Cabaret (based, of course, on the musical written by John Kander and Fred Ebb). This attracted the attention of Jason (nephew of John) Kander who thanked Spencer for his appreciation of his (gay Jewish) uncle's composition.

Careful, say the sage voices of warning; don't be too ready to dismiss these risible pasty keyboard warriors as, well, risible pasty keyboard warriors. That way lies complacency and through complacency comes downfall. If we're content to snicker and scorn while the Spencers of the world continue to organise and radicalise, then by the time we realise they've become the real thing it'll be too late.

All of this is true. But laughing AT something and laughing something OFF are very different things.

You can take what someone represents seriously while not taking THEM seriously; you can appreciate the threat of their toxic "ideas" while at the same time finding the proponents of these ideas pathetic and unintentionally hilarious.

The current resurgence of fascism among confused and impressionable young white men is a real thing; a real and, if left unchallenged, almost limitlessly dangerous thing. It must be taken 100% seriously and resisted by all means possible. It just so happens that one of the most effective weapons of resistance against fascism is ridicule.

We can be fairly certain that, back in 1942, the British Ministry of Information was in little doubt about the seriousness of the menace presented by Nazi Germany, given that this threat had dominated every aspect of the life of the nation for three years. And yet Charles Ridley, presumably with the approval of his department, still felt the need - and took the time - to re-cut Nazi propaganda footage to make Hitler and his minions look SILLY, thus causing consternation among the Nazi High Command and earning himself a death sentence. Because looking silly is the one thing fascists cannot handle.

Cracking jokes about - or better still, AT - Nazis does not imply that one doesn't take Nazis seriously. As long as that's not ALL we do.

We have to be watchful, vigilant, patient, and when and if the time comes to make a stand, we may need to be actually BRAVE, but in the meantime, the more we can smirkingly point out the inadequacies of their ideas, their arguments, their haircuts... the more we can point out just how just plain SILLY they and their movement are, the more likely impressionable young white men might come to the conclusion that perhaps this is NOT something they want to be associated with. And then we'll have won the fight before it even starts.

~ o ~

15: Oh, What A Tangled Web

7th April 2017

Ever told a lie?

Yeah, me too.

Not for quite a while, though. Because I'll tell you what I haven't done; while I've told a few lies in my time, something I've never done is gotten away with telling a lie.

Lying is, after all, an attempt to obscure reality, to hide the facts behind false facts of your own invention. But reality is still there; however flimsy or (temporarily) impenetrable your screen of misinformation may be, reality is always lurking behind it, and when that screen falls - as it will, whether after five minutes or a hundred years - your lies will be exposed.

When the screen starts slipping, you have a choice: come clean, apologise, take your lumps and try to make things right, OR prop it up with more lies. Lies that are just as flimsy as the lie they're told to protect (usually more so since they're spoken in panicked haste rather than cunningly constructed) and, as such, must be bolstered with yet MORE lies until you're teetering helplessly atop a vast, wobbling, lurching tower of deception, and when it finally crashes to earth, bringing you with it, it causes chaos and destruction which can take years to clean up, assuming it ever gets cleaned up at all.

The longer you leave it before owning up to the lie, the worse the outcome when the lie inevitably collapses.

Brexit is a lie. A lie built upon, and propped up by, lies.

The referendum happened because nobody challenged the lies about the immigrants "swarming" into our nation (they weren't) or the unelected Brusselcrats interfering in every aspect of British life (they're not) or that we're pumping money into the huge rapacious bureaucratic mechanism and getting nothing in return (we're not) or that it was alIn many respects one rather felt for the invidiousness of Ms. May's position; elevated to office by a decision she herself had opposed. But her solution to this has been disingenuous to the point of bizarre.l part of some fiendish Franco/German plot to annexe all the member states into some vast federal Euro-Reich under whose jackboot the British people would forever squirm (it's not, they're aren't and they wouldn't).

Meanwhile, the nature of the referendum itself, as presented, was a lie; that it was about securing the future of the nation rather than securing the future of the Conservative party.

Even David Cameron's pledge to hold the referendum was probably a lie; I can't prove this but I'm relatively certain that he, like most pundits and observers, expected another coalition government after the 2015 election. As such, he could safely put the promise of a referendum in the manifesto, then after the election, drop the idea and blame the Liberal Democrats. Except the Lib Dems evaporated, as happens when a party's base feels that they've betrayed them, and Cameron was forced to go through with it.

The referendum, brought about by lies, was then WON by lies. The big famous lie on the bus about giving £350 million extra to the NHS; the lie that we'd gain instant control over our borders, the lie that we'd be happier, safer and better off, the lie that Nigel Farage actually cares about anything other than going on the telly. And of course Boris Johnson's lie that his support for Leave was based on the available evidence and not a brazen attempt to get himself into pole position with the membership when David Cameron stepped down in 2019.

Now we're faced with yet more lies, lies being repeated to our faces. Like many of you, I'm sure, I felt a twinge of relief when the parliamentary Conservatives stitched up their post-Cameron leadership election (a trick Labour could do with learning, incidentally) and installed Theresa May. Not because of any great confidence in nor fondness towards Ms. May, just gratitude that it was her rather than any of the other paraded dingbats we might have been lumbered with.

I suppose this is what that level of cognitive dissonance can do to a keen mind. One remembers the effect a similar (albeit more catastrophic) dilemma had on Tony Blair: when his plan to moderate the hawkinshness of Bush and Cheney by making himself the voice of calm and reason within the pro-war coalition backfired. The eyes glazed over, the ordinary-guy smile became a Joker-ish rictus, the conversational look-I-just-wanna-say-this tone of voice faded out, to be replaced by a Dalekesque ranting tannoy. That's the look (and sound) of a man who knows he's defending the indefensible. Theresa May has been looking and sounding like that for the past few months.

It's got to the point now where her lies have attained a "Screw it, in for a penny..." recklessness. Not only is she breezily claiming that "the British people" are behind her in her endeavours, when literally everyone knows it was, at MOST, 52% of a 72% turnout, or roughly 37%, assuming nobody's chaneged their minds in the meantime (and a lot of people have), she actually stated during her speech on Article 50 Day that Brexit would "strengthen the union" between the countries of the United Kingdom.

Now I'm sorry, but party loyalties aside, that's just delusional. There are people living up trees in the Amazon basin who know that Brexit has fomented secessionism in Scotland to the point where, if no second "Indyref" were to be granted by Westminster, Holyrood will most likely unilaterally call one, and that the result this time would not be a narrow "no" but a resounding "hell yes". And anyone paying attention knows that Brexit will exacerbate tensions in Northern Ireland to the point where the Troubles may kick off again, or even, as some have suggested, even the Unionists decide that joining the Republic would be better than returning to such civil turmoil.

May could, as politicians are wont to do, have skirted around the issue. But to claim outright that Brexit will strengthen the Union when all available evidence and reason suggests it will sunder it forever; that's not optimism, that's insanity.

The longer you leave it before owning up to a lie, the worse the outcome when reality comes. Right now, we're in a chalet at the bottom of an alp blithely sipping glüwein while an avalanche of reality barrels down the mountainside, if that's not too European a metaphor.

Brexit is a lie, and the tower of lies that has been constructed over the last nine months to support and sustain that lie is swaying alarmingly. The best thing now would be to push the damn thing over in a controlled demolition before it gets high enough to do irreversible damage when it falls.

Keep moaning. Keep shouting.

~ o ~

16: The Game Is Back On

21st April 2017

My reaction to the shock announcement of the 2017 snap general election...

~ o ~

Well I did NOT see that coming.

Literally; as you may even remember, in an early column I dismissed the notion of Theresa May calling a snap election before 2020 as I could see no electoral advantage for her in doing so. What’s changed?

Obviously the internet is currently a-buzz with theories and speculation as to why this election has been sprung on us: Is it to shore up the (thus far “unelected”) Prime Minister’s personal authority before the Brexit “negotiations” (read: controlled capitulation) begin in earnest? Is it to get an election out of the way now before the grim truth about the economic and social effects of Brexit begins to penetrate even the thickest of Europhobic skulls? Is it to wipe out the Labour party before they have a chance to defenestrate Corbyn, thus sending the English half of the party sliding down the same garbage chute of irrelevance their Scottish colleagues fell into two years ago?

I”m sure all of these are in the Prime Minister’s mind somewhere, but there’s another story, a buried lede if you will, and thus far, few people have spotted it (Kevin Maguire was, I think, first to flag it up on Twitter)...

The Electoral Commission has already fined the Conservative party £70,000 for incorrectly declaring its campaign spending totals for the 2015 General Election, and it’s understood that as many as 20 constituencies are currently under criminal investigation, with 12 cases already under consideration by the CPS. If just a handful of these cases resulted in the nullification of an election result, the consequences for the government could be disastrous. Incumbent parties often suffer in a by-election, and it’s not hard to imagine that a by-election forced into being by the exposure of Tory spending shenanigans would be all but unwinnable for a Conservative candidate. The Prime Minister currently enjoys a working majority of just 17 seats; it would require just nine by-election losses to wipe this out completely and even four or five losses would render the government horribly vulnerable to even the lowest rumble of backbench dissent.

A snap general election avoids all of this. The prevailing psychology of a general election is totally different to that of by-elections. People vote in a general election with the thought in mind that they’re voting for the national government as a whole (they’re actually not, of course... hold that thought), not an individual candidate. Rather than shamefacedly defend seats suddenly rendered open by their own shiftiness, the Tories will “go to the country” and those seats will be fought as part of a national campaign with, it would appear, the wind very much in its sails.

This is a level of sheer cynicism we’re not used to seeing in British politics. Say what you like about Margaret Thatcher but I don’t think even her fiercest critics would suggest that she didn’t believe 100% in what she was doing. If anything, a bit of cynicism would have done her (and the country) good. This is more the kind of brazenly partisan opportunism that observers of American politics have lately come to expect from the Republicans. There’s no level of gamesmanship, chicanery, hypocrisy or just plain cheating that the modern GOP won’t sink to if there’s even the slenderest party advantage to be eked out from it. It’s depressing, if not especially surprising, to see the Tories descend to that level.

So what do we do now?

On the one hand, it’s all a bit bleak, with a Tory party seemingly running all but unopposed, marching towards the Brexit precipice with the Union Jack tied triumphantly around its eyes lest it see anything disturbing en route, and Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell fearlessly leading the Labour Party round and round in circles, like Pooh and Piglet hunting down the elusive Woozle of socialist utopia.

On the other hand, try THIS for a tortured metaphor: perhaps the most famous unforced error in the history of US commerce was the “New Coke” disaster of 1984. Coca-Cola, for reasons no-one has ever fathomed, changed its recipe. The difference in taste was, by all accounts, not that noticeable and certainly not an improvement, but what really sealed New Coke’s fate was the triumphant reaction of arch-rivals Pepsi. Their CEO issued a gleeful press statement which concluded with the memorable phrase “After 87 years going eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked...” Coca-Cola meekly re-issued the old recipe as “Classic Coke”, and “New Coke” was quietly withdrawn.

Well here’s the thing: the other guy just blinked.

After ten months of being told that the matter was settled, that Brexit was a done deal, that The People Have Spoken and that no revision, no examination, no discussion of the result was permissible, suddenly everything’s up for grabs again. The fact that the Conservative government - and as such, the pro-Brexit lobby - appear to have the upper hand, is not the point (or not the WHOLE point, anyway). The game is back on, and we have to play and play well.

First thing to remember is that we, however briefly, have the philosophical advantage. “Why are the government doing this?” is the question we must ask, as loudly, as frequently and as PUBLICLY as possible. Why are they doing this, when they said they wouldn’t last year and they’ve been insisting they wouldn’t ever since? What do they know now that they didn’t know then? Have they in fact realised what a disaster Brexit will be, and as such want to get themselves re-elected before the wheels come off? We’ll never get an answer from the government themselves, but we must plant that question in the minds of as many people as possible...

Second thing to remember is that we’re in a parliamentary system. The idea that, in a general election, people vote “for the government” is illusory. In our system the only vote we ever get, be it in a by-election or general, is for our local constituency MP. So look at the field in your constituency, figure out who’s most likely to fight for the anti-Brexit cause.

So wait, is this me endorsing the Lib Dems? Not directly, although given I live in a Lib Dem constituency with an avowedly pro-European MP, my choice on June 8th is clear. For some of you, it won’t be, I know. The Labour Party has let us down, and perhaps deserves whatever it’s got coming to it. But consider this; we appear to live in the age of rogue elections. Maybe - just maybe - there’s another one coming.

~ o ~

17: Enemies Of The People

28th April 2017

An observation I made early in the 2017 election campaign which becomes truer with every passing week...

~ o ~

And so battle has been joined, the game's afoot; campaigning has begun in earnest for this unexpected Whitehall farce of an election. Now, more than at any time since, oh, 2015, it's essential that the progressive and liberal-minded people of Britain come together to present a united front against the seemingly unstoppable jingoistic steamroller that is the Brexit-fuelled Conservative party. So naturally, I've spent all week arguing with Jeremy Corbyn supporters.

I'll admit that I (kind of) started it; in this instance I was responding to a particularly mean reply to a tweet by JK Rowling in which she merely pondered aloud how many people would vote Labour were it only led by someone else. She was immediately accused of caring nothing for the poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable, many of whom were HER READERS, the disdainful harridan.

Now it's not as if JKR can't fight her own battles but this did, I'll confess, somewhat set me off. An "argument" I've seen advanced frequently by Corbynistas (and I know they hate being called that but it sums a lot of them up) since the election is that to oppose, or even simply to criticise, or express any reservation about (or to doubt the inevitable crushing victory of) Jeremy Corbyn can mean only one thing: that you HATE THE POOR. You revel in their suffering and indignity and seek only to grind their faces yet further into the dirt while cackling maniacally. There can be NO OTHER REASON to fail to support the Leader.

Well I'm sorry, but that's a truly grotesque line of reasoning and they need to pack that in.

Most of the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn's, what for want of a better word we'll call "leadership" is provoked BY concern for the poor and vulnerable, and a recognition of the fact that losing elections does precisely NOTHING to help the poor and vulnerable, however stainless and pure your socialist credentials remain in defeat. Those who GENUINELY don't care about the poor and vulnerable are the last people who want to see Corbyn replaced; his presence guarantees them another decade of unimpeded grinding and cackling.

I am willing to concede something that the Corbynistas are not: I am happy to acknowledge goodwill in those who differ from me. I have no doubt that Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes are motivated by a genuine desire for social justice and a sincere belief that he's the right man at the right time to bring this about. That they exhibit Scientologist-esque resistance to any and all evidence to the contrary is a separate question. I am willing to accept that Corbyn and his supporters genuinely want to do the right thing by the country.

I make NO such concession in the case of the Prime Minister.

There are, as we discussed last week, three reasons for Ms. May to have called this ludicrous election three years early (and just seven years after the previous Conservative Prime Minister changed the rules of Parliament precisely to prevent what's now happening); all three do nothing whatsoever to improve the lot of the British people and all three immensely benefit the Conservative Party.

In particular, the timing gives rise to some very troubling thoughts with regard to the impact of Brexit. As I've said before, to make something sacred is to admit that it's indefensible. Any decision or action which can be justified by rational argument IS justified by rational argument. If it has to be placed beyond question or criticism, and those who dare to question or criticise labelled traitors, blasphemers or "enemies of the people" (hold that thought) then it cannot be justified by rational argument. To sanctify something is tacitly to admit that it's nonsense, and probably dangerous nonsense. The more vehemently the government insists that Brexit cannot be reversed, postponed or even EXAMINED, the more obvious it becomes that They Know Something We Don't, or rather something that 48% of us suspect...

As it stood, the next election was due to be held no later than May 2020. The Brexit negotiations, if the two-year window is held to, will conclude in the spring of 2019. As such, any actual changes required will begin to be implemented in the summer of 2019.

If Brexit is indeed to be the smooth transition and peaceful restoration of sovereignty (hurrah!) that the government claims, then "going to the country" some six months later would bring the Conservative party nothing but electoral rewards for a job well done.

If, however, Brexit is to be the economic and social suicide attempt that more or less everyone EXCEPT the government is predicting, then the real effects, the really devastating effects upon the lives of ordinary people, will probably start to bite in early 2020. Just before the election was supposed to be...

Now, with any election postponed until 2022, Ms. May's government will have two years to, if not repair or, to any meaningful degree, minimise the chaos and turmoil caused by their own stupidity and obstinacy, then at least come up with some reason why it was somebody else's fault. And let's face it, it's going to be OUR fault. Us remoaners. The country will be on fire not because they set fire to it, but because WE said it would end up on fire. "The reason the country is on fire is because of DOUBTERS and NAYSAYERS running Britain down..." the statement from the Ministry For Setting Fire To Britain will read.

Given the choice between helping the people and helping itself, the Conservative Party will help itself every time. On occasion their actions may benefit (some of) the people, but this is always incidental. It's about them. It's only ever about them.

And it doesn't, to me at least, feel entirely coincidental that as their utter disdain for the general welfare becomes ever more obvious, the language used by their loyal newspapers to describe their opponents becomes ever more Ibsenesque.

Wrapped snugly (and smugly) in the flag as they are, it never occurs to them that anyone might use the same language to describe them. THEY'RE the country after all; their critics are the outsiders, the envious, the "Saboteurs" (oh and thanks for that, Mr. Dacre, that's a MUCH cooler word than "Remoaner").

They are NOT the country. They're the ones fleecing, undermining and betraying the country to further their own careers and feed their own egos.

Theresa May and the Conservative Party. Enemies of the people.

~ o ~

18: Vive Indeed

12th May 2017

Thoughts on Emmanuel Macron's victory over Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French Presidential Election...

~ o ~

Ok, well, that's a bit of a relief.

The resurgence of European (and indeed global) Fascism hasn't been reversed, or halted, or even definitively compromised, but it has at least - and at last - faltered. Yes, we had the non-rise to power of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands a little while ago but, from the perspective of a couple of countries and a thin strip of sea away, his movement didn't come across as some sort of historically inevitable uprising, rather he looked like an opportunistic fringe candidate cynically turning grim circumstance to his advantage (not that this sort of thing necessarily dooms a campaign to failure, of course, as the Americans will tell you). Wilders felt, to me anyway, like a lucky chancer whose luck finally ran out. He didn't feel like the fulfilment of some dire prophecy. Marine Le Pen, by contrast, kind of did.

There was an air of, if not quite inevitability to Le Pen's presidential run, certainly of catharsis, of crescendo, that this rightward plunge by one of the continent's principal nations was something that had been a distinct and growing possibility and that if it were ever to have its moment of glory, then this was it. And I think I speak for most Europeans when I say thank whatever entity it is you thank in moments of immense relief and gratitude that this WASN'T it, and that, as such, there may now in fact never be an it.

In the end (not that this IS the end, of course) it was the very thing that propelled Ms. Le Pen to such national prominence that was almost certainly her undoing: the toxic legacy of her father Jean-Marie. Ms. Le Pen owes her public profile more or less entirely to having inherited the Front National from her pugnacious, race-baiting Holocaust-belittling old man. For all that she may have belatedly and somewhat half-heartedly attempted to roll her political and personal apple away from that particularly gnarled and ugly tree, going Madonna-fashion simply by "Marine" whenever possible and, bizarrely, resigning from her own party after the first round and going into the run-off as an ostensible "independent" (a feeble wheeze which a trompé precisely personne) she couldn't, in the end, sanitise her inheritance or purge the collective memory. Is it unfair to judge a politician by the misdeeds of their parent? Well, if they've built their entire career on being the heir to that parent's movement, pas vraiment, non.

And thus begins the Age Of Macron, which this time last year most people would have thought was the subtitle to the second Avengers movie. Say what you like about the 2010s, you couldn't accuse them of being "same old same old", politically speaking, could you?

He's a slick character, that young Emmanuel, isn't he? I've only just got used to being older than policemen and footballers, I'm not sure I'm ready to be eight years older than the President of France... He's got a job on his hands as well, given that France will now move on to elect the government proper and that currently, his political party consists of, well, him.

Looking at M. Macron from across La Manche, it is very difficult to keep the word "Blair" out of one's mind, isn't it? It's all there; the sharp suits, the startlingly youthful and sappy demeanour, the slippery centrist pragmatism, the slightly unfathomable marriage... Here's hoping he achieves great things and doesn't blow it by joining us on whatever stupid and illegal war we end up starting with the Americans in 2019 in order to distract attention from the Brexit debacle and Donald Trump's impeachment hearings.

So what, if any, lessons and/or comfort can we take from the French election result? Well not much, I'm afraid. You see, their hard right populist party may have fallen at the last hurdle, even if it's stil disquieting to see Ms. Le Pen bag 35% of the vote (although in fairness, French right wingers had nobody else to vote for in the second round and much derisive comment has been made of how the pro-Brexit press in this country - most of whom were rooting for Le Pen - are casting Macron's two-to-one victory as "France divided" while the 52-48% referendum vote was "the people have spoken"). We might, if we were trying to cheer ourselves up, contrast that highly respectable showing with the evaporation of UKIP's support at last week's local elections.

This would be unwise and unwarranted. The reason UKIP's support has dwindled is that the Conservative Party's lurch to starboard under Theresa May has simply rendered UKIP surplus to requirements. UKIP itself may now be without a single MP and all but banished from Town Halls across the nation but UKIP's policies have been adopted whole cloth by the Tories. UKIP is now the political equivalent of the bad guy in one of those 1990s supernatural thrillers, who turns out to be not simply evil but actually possessed by a body-hopping demon; the hero may think he's killed the bad guy but he's just destroyed his body while the entity itself takes over his best friend. You can see the scene now:

UKIP lies bleeding and motionless.

LABOUR

At last... it's over...

TORIES

(Eyes suddenly glow purple; grins maniacally)

Yes... it's over...

We can take heart and encouragement from the French result, but little comfort. Our task is by far the more onerous. The French had merely to repel the Fascism that sought to overthrow their political establishment. We have to resist the Fascism that has already been embraced by, and has now taken over, our own.

~ o ~

19: If You Can't Say Nothing Nice

26th May 2017

My reaction to the reaction to the bomb attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017...

I write this on Tuesday morning, as the aftermath of Monday night's atrocity in Manchester is being picked through both literally and figuratively. I don't have anything useful, insightful or helpful to say on the subject: I could join in with the usual impotent chorus of condemnation, although I'd rather hope that my feelings on the matter of someone detonating a bomb in a concert hall full of little girls would be self-evident. I know politicians and the like are somewhat obliged to issue statements condemning such nightmarish deeds, though the very act of making a point of condemning something like this seems to brook the possibility that one might NOT be outraged and heartbroken.

While I've nothing to add of any weight or value to the discussion, it is rather hard to concentrate on anything else right now and indeed to TRY to concentrate on anything else right now would feel glib and superficial. So I think, on balance, I'm going to keep my trap shut.

And while I'm always loath to hold myself up as an example of good behaviour, I wish more people in the media, both "trad" and social, were doing likewise right now.

A certain failed game show contestant, whom I will NOT name, went on the Twitter offensive early this morning with a call for a "final solution", to which problem she didn't specify. One trusts she meant "terrorism", rather than Islam, or indeed MUSLIMS, but in any event she hastily deleted the tweet (although not before it had been widely screengrabbed and circulated) before spending the rest of the morning expressing similar sentiments in rather more measured language (which must have taken some effort). And Daily Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson, whom I WILL name, as unlike the aforementioned failed game show contestant she's not merely pathologically addicted to attention, but is someone who's supposed to do this for a living and as such should be utterly ashamed of herself, called for the "internment of thousands of terror suspects". One would imagine that if MI5 et al actually HAVE "thousands" of terror *suspects*, they're keeping tabs on them and are leaving them at large for reasons they don't feel the need to explain to Daily Telegraph columnists.... unless of course Ms. Pearson simply meant the thousands of people who might be *suspected* of being terrorist suspects, by association, or because of their demographic profile, or, I don't know, maybe their religion...

The one thing we know about the wave of Islamist terrorism which began on 9-11 and which has been washing with varying degrees of intensity over the face of the world ever since is its overall aim, its endgame, ITS "final solution": to turn Muslims against Westerners and vice versa. That's what it's all been about. Whether simply to punish the Great Satan and his little helpers for specific perceived offences, or to trigger global jihad and bring about the rise of the worldwide Caliphate, that's what they're trying to achieve. To make non-Muslims hate, fear and persecute Muslims and to ensure that the resulting resentment and anger among Muslims festers into violence, thus ramping up the fear and suspicion of Muslims. The most vicious of circles. And every anti-Muslim statement a public figure makes, whether in grief and rage like today, or as part of a scripted stump speech or carefully crafted policy document, gives that wheel another gentle spin, helps that circle to keep turning. THIS IS HOW THEY WIN.

But what we're seeing here is a nasty confluence of societal malignancies. For if the buried lust for jihad, the desire to kick some infidel ass, is the dark impulse against which Muslim culture must constantly guard itself (successfully 99.999% of the time, one should point out), then the overriding desire for attention of whatever kind at whatever cost is the disease which is currently eating away at the flesh of western society. The failed game show contestant whom I will not name may or may not harbour exterminatory feelings towards Islamist terrorists or Muslims in general; that's not the point. The point is that by using language alluding to the Holocaust she knew she'd get the internet talking about her for another day, and look, it worked. The vast majority of people on the internet are calling her every foul name under the sun, and debating just what kind of skull-ringing psychosis it can be that makes someone behave that way, but does she care? I doubt it. They're all talking about her, retweeting her, linking to her. That's all that matters.

And this is not (entirely) her fault. She came to prominence by being a horrible person on TV, and we've shown her that the more horrible she is, the more attention we pay her. If she could get this kind of gratification by being a great humanitiarian and sage thinker, she might give that a go, but she knows - or believes - that she couldn't. She may have fashioned herself into an ethical car crash... but people stare at car crashes.

This tendency is spreading into the "legit" media too. We're seeing more and more articles being posted purely for the clickbaity eye-catching awfulness of their headlines. There are "journalists" fashioning entire careers out of identifying the worst possible thing to say and then saying it. And we have a whole branch of the media devoted to covering the utterances of these Power Trolls with breathless excitement, as if they're all acts of fearless iconoclasm, challenges to the stultifying norms of discourse, rather than just someone being a dick. As if being a dick is difficult, or impressive, or challenging. It's not. Being a dick is the easiest thing in the world, if you're a dick.

What can we do about this? Hard to say on a grand scale; the figures speak for themselves. Being a dick sells ad space. All we can do, I guess, is refuse to reward this kind of behaviour. DON'T retweet the failed game show contestant. Don't click on the They Can't Say That Can They? link. Don't buy their self-aggrandising autobiographies or call their phone-in shows. Starve them of the attention they crave.

Pay attention to the things that actually matter.

I'm off to hug my two little girls like I'll never let them go.

~ o ~

20: Reversing The Polarity

2nd June 2017

With a week to go before the 2017 general election, it was apparent that the result was not the foregone conclusion we'd thought it would be...

~ o ~

It may come as a surprise to those of you who only know me from this column to be told that politics is not the abiding obsession in my life. It may or may not come as a surprise to those of you who know me primarily from what for want of a more accurate term we'll call my "comedy career", to discover that comedy is not the abiding passion in my life either. My real abiding passion, the one I've had with me since early childhood, the one which predates even my obsession with music, is science fiction.

I make no apologies for this nor do I intend to take up valuable column inches persuading those of you who regard sci-fi as adolescent nonsense that you're wrong (although you are. So very, very wrong). I've been an avid reader, viewer, listener (and indeed now author) for as long as I can remember. It serves both as a refuge from real life, and also, sometimes, an extremely revealing lens through which to VIEW real life.

That's not to say that science fiction doesn't have some regrettable habits. There is, for example, what Doctor Who fans refer to as "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow." This refers to pulp sci-fi's tendency to exploit made-up technology to conjure a fatal and easily exploitable weakness in the Bad Guys' plan (last year's mega-budget Star Wars spin-off Rogue One was commissioned at least partly to explain why Luke Skywalker was able to destroy the supposedly invulnerable Death Star back in 1977). This usually manifests itself in a scene in which the hero (or the hero's more scientifically literate sidekick) studies some sort of computer readout before saying "You know how the evil aliens have A Thing They Do? Well maybe if WE do the thing they do but BACKWARDS then the aliens will all die..."

This SF trope, the "their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness" sprang to mind this week as I found myself transfixed by the mesmerising spectacle of Theresa May and the Conservatives making an entire Cruft's worth of dogs' breakfasts out of their election campaign.

That is how they've rebranded themselves, incidentally. "Theresa May and the Conservatives". Whether they're trying to evoke "Diana Ross and the Supremes" or "Gladys Knight and the Pips" I'm not sure but that's certainly the first thing I thought of.

In many respects, the thing that has made the Conservative Party the most formidable election-winning machine in political history is also its fatal weakness; its blithe assumption of authority. Its assurance that the Tories are the natural leaders; that while other parties might win the occasional election and form the odd government, this is nothing more than a fleeting aberration which will correct itself in due course. Normal Conservative service will resume shortly.

The power this gives the Tories at election time can't be overstated. They carry the totems of office as if they were born to it, because in many, if not the majority of cases, they actually were. They are the political wing of The Establishment, in pretty much every context in which that word can be applied in this country. Labour (and its predecessors) may on occasion have had a stab at running the country, but the Conservative Party OWNS the country. It's a completely different level of authority, and it can, in all circumstances other than a Tory meltdown (or a Labour tsunami) make the business of winning the actual election seem a mere formality. Yes, yes, jolly good, you voted, now run along and let us get on with it, there's a good electorate.

It's the ultimate electoral weapon, when it works. When it DOESN'T work, it can blow up and take the whole battle station with it. Right now it's not working.

The Tories' shambolic approach to an election THEY CALLED for purely partisan purposes is genuinely startling. Did they believe that a 20+ point polling advantage over Corbyn's Labour meant all they had to do was turn up? This doesn't even feel like complacency. We've seen that recently enough; it was complacency which left David Cameron scrabbling to form a coalition in 2010, belatedly realising that the fact that people didn't like Gordon Brown and that it was therefore the Conservatives' "turn" wasn't enough for him to win outright. This feels more like a pathological smugness, the belief that victory was so assured that they could not just get away with a half-baked manifesto but that they could turn on the very demographic that's been propping them up for decades; the elderly.

That there was something included in the Tory election literature which could even be construed as "dementia tax" was crazy; the fact that Tory pundits and press statements began to refer to it as such was all but suicidal.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the age range, a last minute internet push resulted in somewhere between 300,000 and half a million under-25s registering to vote in the final 24 hours. The Tories have depended upon the apathy of the young almost as much as on the reflexive support of a large percentage of the old. Lose one and they might get away with it; lose BOTH and they could be in real trouble. 20+ points has become single digits, and it's not over yet.

Look, I'm under few real illusions at this point; I know that polls, when they're wrong, are almost invariably wrong to the left, with respondents unwilling to admit support for right-wing parties for all sorts of sociologically and psychologically murky reasons. But watching the Tory bandwagon's wheelnuts loosen has been hugely entertaining if nothing else. The knowledge that right now, Theresa May is certainly regretting calling this entirely unnecessary and self-serving election is making life a little more bearable. And whatever happens on June 8th, her own position has been weakened. Anything short of a Corbyn victory and she'll claim it's been strengthened, of course, but she'll know the truth and so will we. She called this election for purely selfish reasons and thus far has succeeded only in exposing her own inadequacy as a campaigner and leader.

In these last days, call your friends, ask them their intentions and tell them to look at the figures for their own constituency, the only place their vote will count or be counted. Tell them there's no shame in voting tactically; that what my comedian pal Ian Moore referred to on his Full English Brexit blog this week as "the footballisation of politics; supporting your team belligerently and regardless of performance" will not serve us this time. Because even if we can't agree on who deserves to win this election, Theresa May and the Conservatives sure as hell deserve to lose.

~ o ~

21: I Didn't Tell You So

16th June 2017

Some thoughts on the 2017 general election "result"...

~ o ~

Like many Corbyn-skeptics I've been bombarded with messages this last week demanding I issue some sort of grovelling apology for having said Jeremy Corbyn would lose the election. There's one thing I feel I should point out in my defence:

Jeremy Corbyn DID lose the election.

I realise that's going to come as a shock to some people, given the (understandable) euphoria currently enveloping the left-most end of the British political spectrum, but Labour did - in fact - LOSE the General Election. They just a. did far better than anyone (including myself) expected or dared hope, and b. didn't lose quite so badly as the Conservatives, for all that they technically "won" (of which more in a moment).

I'm not apologising for my stance on Corbyn's prospects heretofore, as it was based on the polling evidence available at the time, and I stand by my opinion that those who were insisting a few months ago that he was in fact the Great White-Bearded Hope were basing this on nothing more substantial than tribal loyalty and wishful thinking... the fact that in due course, events came to more closely approximate those wishes and loyalties didn't mean they were right *at that time*, nor indeed that I was wrong at the time. When new data came in, my assessment changed accordingly. That's how skepticism works.

And I reject both the what-if scenarios being floated at the moment; you can't claim (as Corbyn's fans are doing) that had the parliamentary party and the punditocracy NOT spent the last two years throwing shade at him, he would have done far better and possibly won, not having had to start with a 25 point deficit... nor can one reasonably posit (as Corbyn's detractors are doing) that a different, more mainstream Labour leader would have fared better, as in all likelihood they wouldn't have had a 25 point deficit to catch up on in the first place. Both these suggestions are invalid for the simple reason that Corbyn's 25 point deficit back in the springtime is the only reason the Conservatives called this election. Had he been anywhere near on terms in the polls, none of this would have happened. Were I feeling mischievous, I might even suggest that Corbyn owes this opportunity to prove his unexpected electoral mettle to the very fact that two years of criticism and sabotage made him look far more vulnerable than he in fact was. Maybe that's been the plan all along? Maybe Corbyn and the PLP are currently high-fiving each other, having just pulled off the greatest political pool-hustle in electoral history?

For what it's worth, I'm pleased that Labour did as well as they did and wouldn't have minded them doing a bit better; my issues with Corbyn were never simply a matter of "electability"; I had and still have philosophical and ethical reservations about him which this result does nothing to alter. But I'll happily put my hands up and admit that he turned out to be a FAR better campaigner than I or indeed most people expected (although this in many ways makes his dithering and equivocation before the EU referendum all the harder to forgive, but that's a topic for another time. Like maybe next week). Mind you, even the staunchest Corbynite couldn't deny that Labour was HUGELY assisted in its efforts by the epic levels of ineptitude displayed by the Tories.

If the 1983 Labour manifesto was "the longest suicide note in history", the 2017 Conservative manifesto was the most lavishly printed threatening letter in history. It was relentlessly negative; not so much a series of promises as a list of things they were going to take AWAY if they won. "Vote for us and we'll steal your kids' lunch and your grandma's house!" Bill Clinton couldn't have sold that platform; the furtive, stuttering Theresabot 9000 never stood a chance.

We've all been so numbed by seven years of austerity that political parties actually having something to offer OTHER than blood, sweat, tears and toil doesn't even feel like an option any more. So when Labour responded to the Tories' message of "Life is RUBBISH and only we can protect you" with "Well... what if life WEREN'T rubbish?"... It says terrible things about life in the year 2017 that their very concept of "optimism" can feel revolutionary but it seems to have resonated with approximately 40% of the voters. And, of course, the wonderfulness of the huge upswing in young voter participation speaks for itself.

The Conservatives' current predicament - scrabbling for favour with, of all people, the DUP in order to cling pointlessly to power, is emblematic of the disease at the heart of Conservatism. Michael Gove, who is NOT a fool - he's no expert (see what I did there) but he's no idiot - tweeted this week "Conservatives always put national interest first". The only way he can say that without bursting into flames after the last two weeks' events are if he is INCAPABLE of telling the difference between the Tory party's interests and the nation's at large. All the chaos that party has wrought upon this country in the last two years has been entirely in pursuit of Conservative electoral advantage and ministerial job security. The nation has benefitted not one whit from any of it, nor is it likely to. But the Conservatives, as I said a couple of weeks ago, think they ARE the country. They're so convinced that they're the natural leaders, that any time another party is in power they believe that Britain is Going Wrong. Even if peace and prosperity reign through the land, if there's anyone other than a True Blue Tory in Number 10 then the country's going to hell in a handcart, and hang the evidence to the contrary.

So whatever keeps the Conservatives in power is by definition, they believe, in the nation's interest, even if it beggars the economy, humiliates the country internationally and drives us to the brink of war (as this harebrained alliance with the DUP may yet, making a nonsense as it does of The Good Friday Agreement). Labour may not have won, but whatever happens next, the Conservatives have LOST, in a big way. They've been exposed as the opportunistic self-serving incompetents that they are.

Meanwhile, there's already talk of the start of Brexit negotiations being delayed, perhaps indefinitely, until there's a credible UK government to negotiate with.

I told you it wasn't over...

Keep moaning. Keep sabotaging. Keep resisting.

~ o ~

22: It'll Probably Be OK

7th July 2017

Some thoughts on the heartbreaking Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017.

~ o ~

When you’ve been in the entertainment business since your early 20s (and your early 20s are a dim memory receding even more quickly than your hairline) you never know what to do with yourself of a free Saturday evening, so it was something of a relief this Saturday last when a comedy club promoter of my acquaintance called me at about 6pm to say that one of his acts had bailed on him for that evening’s show at his Leicester Square club and that the slot was mine if I wanted it.

Thus it was that a couple of hours later I was driving into the West End on my usual route: Richmond, Chiswick, Shepherds Bush and thence up onto the Westway, the elevated not-quite-motorwayised stretch of the A40 which flies over the western half of the city centre and dumps you into a more or less perpetual traffic jam in Marylebone. As I turned onto the flyover, I noticed that the traffic, though slight by London standards, had slowed almost to a stop. And then I realised why.

You’ve all seen - and no doubt shuddered at - the pictures of the blackened shell of Grenfell Tower on TV and online, but nothing can prepare you for the horror of seeing it close up. As you turn onto the Westway it appears to jump out at you from behind the surrounding buildings and then just hang there, like a 250 foot high charred, grinning skull. You can’t bear to look, nor can you tear your eyes away. I’ve driven past it a few times since, but always in the dark, when it looms as a slab of absolute black against the almost-black of the night sky like some vast obsidian tombstone; in daylight it’s revealed in all its stark, skeletal horror. Your chest tightens, your stomach turns, your fists clench and your heart breaks all over again.

I’ve no doubt the tower will be pulled down in due course... Many have pondered (probably not in earnest) whether it should be left standing as some sort of dread monument to incompetence and complacency, perhaps bearing some sort of banner to this effect. While I don’t think this will (or indeed should) happen, I know exactly how such a banner should be worded:

“IT’LL PROBABLY BE OK”

That’s how we live our lives, after all. We drive over the speed limit because it’ll probably be ok. We eat and drink what we shouldn’t because it’ll probably be ok. We refurbish tower blocks with flammable cladding and no sprinkler systems because it’ll probably be ok. Because at least nine times out of ten it IS ok. The panic-driven safety tests of similarly-clad towers have thus far discovered 90 blocks which are every bit as combustible as Grenfell. They’ve been “ok” so far because no major fires have yet broken out in them. Had that fridge not exploded on a lower floor of Grenfell, as far as anyone would know, those buildings would still be as “safe” as we all thought they were a month ago. Most of the time, we take risks of omission and commission on our own behalf and indeed on behalf of people we’ll never meet, and we get away with it. The point is that you can only NOT get away with it once.

The insistence from certain (right-leaning) circles that an inherently political incident not be politicised has been surpassed in bizarreness only by the attempts to make the disaster ANYONE else’s fault other than Kensington and Chelsea Council, or indeed to put some sort of pro-libertarian spin on events.

The professionally wrong-about-everything Brendan O’Neill posted a particularly unpleasant take on the event on spiked.com, in which he insisted that the response to the Grenfell disaster demonstrated the hypocrisy of the left: feigning concern for the working class when there’s a chance of politicising a tragedy, despite having spent the whole year since the EU referendum dismissing them as too ignorant to be paid attention to (he’s talking about us Remoaners there).

Leaving aside the fact that the left’s current figurehead Jeremy Corbyn is every bit as pro-Brexit as Brendan (an uncomfortable fact that most Labour voters continue to ignore, which is why we have to keep reminding them), one could equally say that the disaster - and indeed Brendan’s piece - flags up the hypocrisy of the right: feigning interest in the desires of the working class while there’s a chance to whip up populist support for their half-baked cod-Imperial vanity project, then, that done, leaving them to burn to death in substandard social housing. One COULD make that point, if one were so inclined.

But in case one were in any doubt as to what lies at the heart of this incident, Theresa May herself cleared it up once and for all this week when she, let’s not sugarcoat this, BRIBED her way back into Number 10 with a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money.

Let’s not - for now - be distracted by the puritan tendencies of the (indirect) recipients of this bribe, the gay-hatin’ abortion-bannin’ DUP; let’s not ponder the unfairness of an extra billion quid being shovelled at one region of the UK rather than any of the other disadvantaged areas for no reason other than to enable a delegitimised government to cling to office; let’s not even contemplate the fact that this has the potential to plunge the province - and by extension, the British mainland - back into the civil war which raged for thirty years until the now-imperilled Good Friday Agreement. Let’s simply ask the question: where the HELL is that money coming from?

This is the administration which, after all, has been sagely lecturing the rest of us that “There is no magic money tree”, and yet, less than two weeks after blowing £130 million on an election which served nobody’s interest but theirs, they've somehow laid hands on another BILLION?

And that, ultimately, is the point. There’s no magic money tree for the likes of US, but when it comes to the stuff that THEY think is important, there is, apparently, at the very least, a magic money shrub hidden somewhere in the Treasury grounds. There’s always money for the things THEY care about, whether it’s refurbishing the palaces of Westminster or Buckingham, or staging an election to secure their own jobs or bribing a bunch of religious nutters £100 million each when that goes pathetically wrong.

Case in point; the money was there to prettify an ageing tower block for the benefit of its well-to-do, property price conscious (probably Tory-voting) neighbours; the money was NOT there to make the block safe for its less well-to-do residents.

The tower stands as a solemn reminder to us all, but it stands in silent condemnation of those who “can’t find the money” for anything except the things they and their wealthy friends want.

~ o ~

23: What Would The Doctor Do?

20th July 2017

Thoughts on the announcement, in July 2017, of the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor Who...

~ o ~

Young Christian Americans sometimes wear a bracelet around one wrist inscribed with the letters "WWJD?" This of course stands for "What Would Jesus Do?" and is intended to help them clarify their thoughts in times of crisis or indecision. I have on occasion, contemplated making myself a similar bracelet, but bearing the letters "WWTDD?"

This of course stands for "What Would The Doctor Do?"

Last Sunday the BBC committed an act of extraordinary cruelty... quite deliberately, and maliciously, they forced me and millions of my fellow Doctor Who obsessives to sit through half an hour of a live sporting event. Such was the resulting trauma and bewilderment that when, after Federer had bashed Cilic like an unwell Croatian piñata, it was announced that the next Doctor would be female (specifically the rather wonderful Jodie Whittaker) the shock barely registered.

That was a joke, by the way. The bit about Doctor Who fans being traumatised by watching tennis, not the bit about there being no shock at the announcement. There was a BIT of surprise, and of course, consternation from entirely predictable quarters, but I'm pleased to say that the appointment has been met for the most part with glee and excitement.

There really SHOULDN'T have been any surprise; the show has been building up to this quite consciously for the last couple of years. We've had the Doctor's arch-nemesis The Master return in the feminine form of Michelle Gomez's hilariously villainous "Missy"; at the end of the last series but one we actually SAW a male Time Lord die and regenerate into a woman (BACK into a woman, in fact, to her evident relief). And the idea of a lady Doctor is well over thirty years old; Tom Baker, at his farewell press conference back in 1980, ended his prepared remarks by wishing his replacement the best of luck "whoever he or she may be". This was largely mischief on Tom's part (and it garnered more coverage for the announcement than it might otherwise have had) but it planted a seed which has been growing ever since. When the show was mired in suspension/possible cancellation doldrums in the mid-80s, its co-creator Sydney Newman re-surfaced to opine that a female Doctor would re-energise the format. Back in 1999, when the show was all but a fading memory (having been cancelled in 1989 and unsuccessfully re-launched in 1996 as an American co-production) an extended Comic Relief Doctor Who parody sketch (penned by none other than current, albeit departing, head writer Steven Moffat) ended with Rowan Atkinson's Doctor (I said it was a parody) suffering multiple celebrity cameo regenerations (Jim Broadbent, Grants both Hugh and Richard E.) before settling happily on Joanna Lumley.

Even the choice of Jodie Whittaker is, in retrospect, obvious; her biggest role to date has been as the bereaved but resilient Beth Latimer in Broadchurch, whose creator Chris Chibnall is taking over as Doctor Who's head writer. Once this was known, it seemed likely that he would bring a Broadchurcher across to succeed Peter Capaldi (who we're all still going to miss like crazy). Jodie W is the perfect age (35), has the acting range, and crucially, the kind of intelligent, unconventionally attractive and interesting face that all the great Doctors have.

None of this, of course, has mollified the aforementioned consternation proceeding from the aforementioned predictable quarters. The volume of protest at the announcement has, however, been at least matched if not drowned out by the volume of smug rejoinders to it, mocking the ignorance and tiny-mindedness of the doubters and indeed revelling in their squirming discomfort. I find this troubling.

Yes, the taste of "Men's Rights Activist" tears is delicious. Yes, there's a bizarre irony in seeing bro-flakes whine that the "Social Justice Warriors" are taking over a show whose hero is the very EPITOME of a social justice warrior (have they been watching? If so, whose side were they on?). But I find I'm just as uncomfortable with sneering schadenfreude when it's our "side" doing it as when it comes from the opposition.

That's not what the Doctor would do. (S)he would hope that the "OMG CHIBNALL HAS DESTROYED MY CHILDHOOD IT'S PC GONE MAD I AM NEVER WATCHING AGAIN" crowd would give the next phase of Doctor Who the benefit of the doubt, get over their fears and suspicions, learn from the experience and grow as human beings. (S)he would know that a moment to embrace change is not a moment to laugh at those who can't, but an opportunity to help them to try. And if they can't or won't try, we should ignore them, rather than pursue them derisively across the internet like so many online Nelson Muntzes. We - rightly - hate it when the Trumpers and the Brexiteers give it the old "WE WON YOU LOST GET OVER IT" bit; no need to sink to their level just because we've won one.

Still no casting announcement re. the new Doctor's travelling companion; for balance's sake let's hope it's a ridiculously buff and handsome young man who, for no obviously plot-related reason, spends his whole time in the TARDIS wearing lycra bicycle shorts. Proper old school Who.

~ o ~

24: Knowing Owen

27th July 2017

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I began my column by making the declaration that Julia Hartley-Brewer is a nice person (just one who believes, and occasionally comes out with, some nasty things). Well it’s always good to be balanced, and so here comes another declaration:

Owen Jones is an intelligent, thoughtful and decent young man.

There we go. And no, there’s no “but” coming. Owen is smart, perceptive, and exactly the kind of unapologetic left wing firebrand we need to keep the political discourse burning. I say “unapologetic”; in recent weeks he has become something of an Apologist in the theological sense of the word.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may know, a favourite hobby/stupid habit of mine is getting into lengthy (and depthy) arguments with religious fundamentalists. This has, it transpires, stood me in remarkably good stead when it comes to having it out with the more zealously apostolic of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. The thought processes are identical: you START with your conclusion (there is a God/the universe is 6000 years old/Jeremy Corbyn is ineffably wise and the last hope for the nation) and work backwards from there. Everything which backs up your pre-established conclusion is held aloft as clinching proof, while everything which appears to contradict it is dismissed as Satanic (or Tory) lies.

The Corbynites are currently jumping through all sorts of logical hoops in order to fall into line with the current iteration of the leader’s thoughts on Brexit; that not only should we leave the single market and the customs union, but that this is in fact obligatory once outside the EU (which will come as news to the Norwegians). The standard Corbynoid position on Brexit has, since the election, evolved from “Jeremy is pro-EU, he just doesn’t like going on about it in case he loses the working class Leavers” to “Jeremy only SAYS he's pro-Brexit, he’s playing the long game” to “Jeremy doesn’t REALLY want to leave, but he respects the will of the people” to “Brexit will be GOOD! Because Jeremy says so! Bloody immigrants!”

Okay there was an element of parody at the end there (I’m a satirist, says so on my posters) but only just: this week has seen the leader of the Labour party extolling the need for tighter border controls in order to prevent foreign workers coming into the job market and forcing wages down.

Yup. This week, the Labour Party - the LABOUR Party - went full “They come over here, taking our jobs”.

Owen Jones, last I checked, had only made it as far as the penultimate stage in the process; he regrets Brexit, he said on Twitter, but it has to happen, since he, like Corbyn, is a democrat and respects the will of the people. I was intrigued by this as a catch-all principle and decided to try to test its parameters, so I asked Owen (on Twitter) if, should a vote be taken to re-criminalise homosexuality, he would still insist that the majority's wishes prevail. Owen - and a bunch of his supporters - immediately accused me of trying to equate Brexit with institutionalised homophobia. I wasn’t, of course, and I suspect Owen (and some of his pals) knew this, but it was a neat way of getting out of addressing my point, and I’m annoyed with myself that I left such an obvious opening.

What I was trying to see was whether Owen would be willing to acknowledge that there could be a situation in which the “majority” not only got it wrong, but got it wrong to such a potentially catastrophic degree that those who opposed their decision actually had a moral imperative to try to thwart it, and that this imperative would - in this hypothetical instance - take priority over the democratic principle. I never got an answer, from him or anyone else. I’m fairly sure I know why.

Because here’s the thing: the democratic principle merely holds that the wishes of the majority should, where practicable, be upheld. It says absolutely NOTHING about whether the majority is RIGHT. Since the referendum, a troubling notion has arisen that, since we “lost”, it’s incumbent upon Remainers not only to shut up, but to ADMIT WE WERE WRONG, and indeed in some versions, to CHANGE OUR MINDS and love Big Brexit, and that it we fail to do so, it’s because we HATE DEMOCRACY.

This is the most ANTI-democratic notion I’ve ever heard. The whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for peaceably DISagreeing with each other. And if sticking to my Remain guns means I “arrogantly think I know BETTER than the PEOPLE”, well, yes, I guess it does. As it also does with regard to everyone who ever found themselves on the losing side of a vote. You thought you were right, the majority disagreed, by definition you thought you knew better than them. And we don’t expect the supporters of a political party to renounce their ideals and switch teams when they lose an election.

Labour have now lost three general elections in seven years; if it’s required of the losing side that they support that which they previously opposed, as Owen seems to think is the case with regard to Brexit, then he and his fellow firebrands should surely have seen the error of their ways and become true blue Tories by now, just as the majority “dictates” they should.

Keep moaning. Keep resisting.

~ o ~

25: North Of The Wall

10th August 2017

I have a bit of a confesssion to make; I very nearly didn't get this one in on time. I'd like to pretend that this was because I was engaged on urgent business; swept away on some vital errand of mercy or secret mission, but the sad fact is that I forgot what day it was.

I'm up in my adopted home town of Edinburgh, you see, performing at this year's Festival Fringe (every day at 2.50pm at The Stand 6, since you ask). Edinburgh, a somewhat less than entirely believable environment at the best of times with its fairytale vistas and entirely unique climate (seriously; one fine warm spring morning many years ago I set out in shirt sleeves only to be snowed on at around 2pm) becomes, during the Festival, a hermetically sealed bubble universe upon which the outside world seems to have little bearing or influence. A magical place, to be sure, but maybe not one conducive to producing barbed missives about current affairs.

My show, like those of many of my fellow comedians, includes a brief rant on the topic of Brexit. Brief by necessity in my case since, as you will have become aware if you've been following these columns, I'm suffering from almost complete sense of humour failure where Brexit is concerned. I've also composed a song for the show on the subject of how it's almost impossible to write up-to-the-minute satirical jokes at the moment, as the sheer rapidity of change renders all such material passé before it's even been performed (indeed, the politics-based comedian Matt Forde has titled his own Fringe show "Hastily Re-Written In The Light Of Recent Events"). Meanwhile, more purely (ie. audibly) Scots comedians than myself are including passages referring to the ongoing - indeed, unending - debate about Scottish independence, and whether last year's EU referendum voids the result of the 2014 independence vote and, as such, justifies calls for a new one. It is fair to say, I think, that when the Scots (barely) voted to remain in the United Kingdom three years ago, it was a UK still very much inside the EU that they believed to be on offer.

I think I have a more objective take on the whole England Vs Scotland thing than most people given that I am, by birth, half and half, and have spent formative sections of my life both north and south of the border. I do still meet English people who have literally no idea what the Scots' problem is. I usually reply by asking them to consider two things: firstly, as an English person living in England, how many times a day do you think about Scotland? When something happens in the world, at what point do you think to yourself "Uh oh, I wonder how the Scots are going to react to this"?. I'd suspect that in most cases the answers to those questions would be "almost never" and "never" respectively. But if you're a Scot living in Scotland, you have to think about England ALL THE TIME. The welfare of Scotland is still, to a great degree, dependent on the will and indeed whim of the English and even in these days of the Holyrood parliament, there's not much the Scots can do about it.

The second thing I always used to ask "Why are the Scots still whingeing 700 years after Bannockburn"-type English people was this: suppose I could demonstrate to you that we as a country would be considerably better off if we dissolved Parliament, removed our own government and submitted to direct rule from Paris... would you be okay with that? Even if we were all richer as a result, would you be fine being governed from the capital of a foreign country?

A bit of hyperbole there on my part, I know, as even before the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Scottish voters were able, to a limited degree, to influence the make up of Westminster by voting for their own MPs. And it's interesting to note that my question has almost been answered; even the relatively minor influence of Brussels on our way of life has turned out to be unacceptable to a lot of people in Britain, even if - as is increasingly clear - we will indeed be considerably worse off without it.

On the other hand...

I hated every minute of the build up to the last "Indyref" in 2014. As someone who's split right down the middle in terms of loyalty and DNA between the two countries it was like being a small child watching his parents go through an acrimonious divorce. I may well be opening myself up to the kind of hatemail JK Rowling's been getting these last three years when I say that I was immensely relieved by the result. As I explained at the time to my (largely bitterly disappointed) Scottish pals; if you regard your home country as SCOTLAND, then your home country is still there. It hasn't got everything that some of its people want in terms of autonomy but its flag still flies, its culture still flourishes, its history still stands. It's still there.

If you were to ask me the name of my homeland, I wouldn't say England; I'd say BRITAIN. It's all my country; Glasgow and Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, Glencoe and the Peak District, it's all home as far as I'm concerned. If that referendum had gone the other way, MY country would have ceased to exist. And I didn't even have a vote.

I don't blame the Scots if Brexit leads them to want another shot at independence and I REALLY wouldn't blame them if the vote next time is a resounding Aye. In fact, should this come to pass, I reckon I'll do what all my friends with one European grandparent are currently doing and apply for dual citizenship. Scotland might just come to my aid one last time.

Who knew the last civilised place in the realm would be North Of The Wall?

~ o ~

26: Statutory Rights

24th August 2017

As I think I've mentioned before, my wife Clara (who is in the process of becoming my ex-wife although we remain best of friends - a neat trick if you can pull it off and thus far we seem to be doing ok) grew up in Berlin both before and after the reunification of Germany. She remembers partying on the rubble of the wall as a not-quite 14 year old, and like most Berliners of that vintage, saved a small chunk she still keeps to this day.

She also remembers being taught about the Second World War, and in particular the role played by the German nation - and the German people - in the origins and conduct of that war.

There is, and has been more or less ever since 1945, a tendency among British commentators (and comedians) to cast both serious and less than serious aspersions on the sincerity with which post-war Germany regrets and seeks to atone for the Nazi era, and a general sneering implication that there'd be altogether less handwringing going on if the Germans had won. While the second of these points is imponderable (although as I noted a few months ago, there's a whole genre of counter-historical fiction devoted to pondering it), it really is time to put that first question to bed once and for all. The mortification felt by the German people with regard to the Nazi regime - and their resolve never to plumb such depths again - is absolutely genuine.

Clara told me of how German schoolchildren are taught, in unflinching terms, of Hitler's rise to power and of the atrocities committed in his name and to his orders. High school pupils are taken on field trips to carefully preserved concentration camps, much as British kids are dragged around medieval castles and Roman remains. They're shown the piles of spectacles, of extracted gold fillings, the shower huts, the ovens... and they're informed gravely that this was US, OUR people, that did this. Not that there's anything inherently evil about the German race, but that it's possible for even the most advanced and civilised culture to be, to use a glib but entirely appropriate metaphor, seduced by the Dark Side. To believe the enticing lie that glory and mastery was theirs by birthright, and there to be won, for just the footling expense of abandoning their senses of decency and empathy.

That's what happens in Germany. Here are some things that don't happen in Germany: those aforementioned teenagers do NOT attend high schools named after Adolf Eichmann, or Heinrich Himmler. Jewish families don't have to walk to work past heroically-posed statues of Reinhard Heydrich. The swastika does not fly over Munich town hall, even on special occasions, and it isn't tucked into the corner of the flag of any German province.

Unthinkably bizarre as those scenarios might be when imagined in modern Germany, until very recently that was more or less exactly the situation throughout the southern states of the USA (and still is, in certain quarters). This, then, is what makes a nonsense of the claim made both by the neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi (I think we can dispense with the anaemic "alt right" euphemism now, don't you) marchers who plagued the streets of Charlottesville last week, and also their more ostensibly respectable little helpers in the political mainstream (including the unflushable turd himself Nigel Farage, who stuck the latest of his many unwelcome oars in on this topic via Twitter); namely, that the current drive to remove statues of Confederate leaders from southern town squares, and to strike the old stars n' bars from municipal flagpoles, is to "erase" or to "rewrite" history. It's a lie, and a provable lie at that.

The Germans aren't erasing or rewriting their own guilty history; they're merely putting it where it belongs: in the chamber of horrors. To suggest that Germans are left in ignorance of the Nazi era simply because its icons and emblems have been removed from public display is demonstrably untrue. The difference is, I fear, that while German contrition for the Holocaust is authentic, southern contrition for slavery has often been grudging if not entirely feigned.

There's a very instructive video doing the rounds on the internet by a gentleman called Jack Smith IV in which he not only explains why these Confederate statues turn out to be so flimsy when pulled down (crumpling like foil under the slightest pressure) but also why these statues are there in the first place. Most were put up neither during, nor shortly after the Civil War; rather they were cheaply mass-cast (hence the flimsiness) around the turn of the twentieth century (when the segregationist Jim Crow laws were established) with another rash going up in the 1950s and 60s (when the Civil Rights movement began to challenge these laws). In other words, these statues were intended not so much to commemorate southern victories or mourn southern losses as to re-assert white authority. They were conceived and installed as totems of racial intimidation and should be regarded as such.

It's good that the South is finally reaching for reconciliation with its own past, and it's a welcome side benefit that the shaven-templed buffoons who sought to stand athwart this last week are now weeping and whining all over Facebook as their participation in the march is publicised and they find themselves varyingly fired, shamed and ostracised as a result. The Klan used to put bags over their heads for a reason, you numpties.

And the lessons of slavery and the Holocaust must be taught forever, not just in Germany and the South but everywhere. We must never forget how ignorance and suspicion of other peoples can lead even the most enlightened nations to do really, really stupid things.

You were wondering how I was going to make this about Brexit, weren't you...

~ o ~

27: Who's Moaning Now?

14th September 2017

I couldn't make it to the March For Europe on Saturday; perhaps this dereliction of duty means my Remoaner licence has now been revoked and I must now be demoted to Regrumbler or Rewhiner but, it just so happens, I think the weekend's events may have rendered all such terms obsolete. I'll explain:

Some bright spark at the March had the idea of swinging by the Royal Albert Hall just as the crowd for the Last Night Of The Proms was being admitted and handing out hundreds of blue and gold EU flags to the assembled concert goers, to be waved alongside the more traditionally brandished Union Flags during the patriotic finale (yes, "Flags"; it's only properly referred to as the Union Jack when flown in a naval capacity, and I'm nothing if not consistent in my pedantry).

I'm not sure what the take-up rate was for these flags but whatever it was, it proved too much for the gossamer sensibilities of the Daily Express, which managed to rouse itself wanly from its fainting couch the next day to fulminate at how the event had been "hijacked by remoaners". Because after all, the concert hall named in honour of Queen Victoria's beloved German husband is no place to start demonstrating in favour of maintaining links with the continent.

Speaking of marrying Germans, Farage The Unflushable soon weighed in on the issue, accusing the EU flag-wavers of being "in denial" about the referendum result. Presumably the same denial that he himself pledged to immerse himself in during the evening of June 23rd last year, when early counts made it look like we were heading for a narrow Remain victory, and he vowed to "fight on" if such were indeed the case. Perhaps it's only "denial" when it's the Remoaners doing it.

But hang on a minute...

Who's "moaning" now?

Were those who waved their blue and gold flags alongside their red white and blue flags in the Albert Hall "moaning"? Or were they celebrating the fact that they, like roughly half the population of the country, recognise that there's no contradiction or indeed even conflict between having pride in one's Britishness and also in being European? Were those who took to the streets on Saturday "moaning", or simply exhibiting exactly the kind of defiance the Leavers had sworn to show if the vote had gone the other way?

Read this paper; are we "moaning"? Or are we rather making the positive case for Britain's continued participation in the European experiment, while observing that the "case" for leaving, such as it ever was, has been long since discredited, not least from the mouths of its own proponents?

When we flag up the sheer inadequacy of the government's approach to the Brexit negotiations, is that "moaning", or alarm?

There's a lot of moaning going on about Brexit, to be sure, but it's not coming from our side.

The Brexiteers moan when British people eagerly choose to wave the EU flag precisely because they choose to do it. The flags weren't pressed into their unwilling hands by thugs from Brussels, their Union Flags weren't confiscated, they weren't instructed to wave the EU flag by BBC floor managers, whatever the Daily Mail letters page might think (in fact, the BBC technicians had a large Ring O'Stars which a concertgoer had draped over the balcony removed). The people - that's The People, whose will is absolute, remember, chose to wave those flags. Funny how The People are ineffably wise as long as they appear to support the Brexit agenda but become a treasonous rabble the minute they stop playing ball.

The Brexiteers, as I pointed out last week, moan like hell that the Remainers refuse to get on board with their insane project and continue instead to raise pettyfogging objections like "It'll bankrupt the country, reduce our international influence to nil and possibly start a civil war in Ireland".

They moan, as did our old pal Julia Hartley Brewer on Twitter last week: "Soooo many Remoaner bores on my timeline tonight. Don't they ever take a night off from despising democracy?"

Two obvious responses came to mind: firstly, the "unfollow" button is right there, Jules. Unless you've already purged all the vocal Remainers from your timeline and it's STILL full of anti-Brexit tweets in which case what does THAT tell you, and secondly; Wait, WHO "despises democracy"?

This week the government's "Withdrawal bill" represents just the most recent - and blatant - attempt to bypass and/or subvert the sovereignty of Parliament since the referendum. That looks a lot more like "despising democracy" than calling for the people to be consulted on Brexit AFTER they've had a chance to discover what it actually entails.

The Brexiteers perverted democracy last June by bombarding the voters with lies and knowingly false promises and they've been running and hiding from "democracy" ever since. And now, as the lies are exposed, their case lies in tatters and whatever victory they won is left hollow, all they have left is insults, and moaning. So. Much. Moaning.

So, for all that we successfully "reclaimed" it quite early on in proceedings I've decided I'm not going to use the word "Remoaner" any more, not even ironically. We're REMAINERS. We're not whining. We're winning.

~ o ~

28: Boris's Game

21st September 2017

First rule of Boris Johnson: it's all about Boris Johnson.

Second rule of Boris Johnson: it's ALL about Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson may, on occasion, have taken actions which benefitted people besides himself (I'll put my hand up right now and acknowledge that his tenure as Mayor Of London wasn't the train wreck many of us anticipated) but this has only ever been incidental. Since his emergence as a public figure in in the 1990s, every move he's made has been for the purpose of furthering the ambitions, enhancing the prospects and burninshing the legend of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Nothing inherently dishonourable about that, of course, but one should bear in mind:

Third rule of Boris Johnson: It's an act.

A few years ago, some of the late Frankie Howerd's radio scripts turned up, as these things are wont to do, and many people were astonished to discover that Howerd's schtick, famously peppered as it was with what sounded like ad libbed admonishments to his audience, was in fact written out verbatim. Every "oof!", every " 'ere no", every "don't you dare" and "oh please yourselves" was right there on the page. Howerd's flustered, rambling persona was just that; a character he was portraying. He wasn't floundering or extemporising, he knew exactly what he was doing at all times.

So it is with Boris. It's not that his public persona is a total contrivance - you couldn't invent something like that ex nihilo - but he's been careful to preserve and give prominence to the bits which most convey the image of himself that he seeks to project. The uncontrollable coif, the fruity accent and fogeyish, distracted demeanour, the donnish proliferation of Latin tags (indeed, had Boris Johnson not existed, it would have been necessary for Stephen Fry to have invented him); they all combine to evoke the sort of chap that Jeeves and Bertie might have had to help out of A Bit Of A Tight Spot rather than a man with prime ministerial ambitions. Which is of course the idea... Do you think Boris didn't plan on getting stranded on that zip wire? Or if not, do you think he minded one bit when it happened?

Fourth rule of Boris Johnson: He REALLY wants to be Winston Churchill.

Understandable. If you're going to model yourself on an illustrious predecessor, you may as well aim high. I shouldn't imagine many politicians of Boris's generation spent their boyhood dreaming of one day being the new Sir Alec Douglas-Home, much as Oasis didn't spend their entire career trying and failing to sound like Herman's Hermits. Having written a "biography" of Churchill that was less about history than about how he felt about Winston (and, implicitly, how Winston might have felt about him), Boris Johnson has never been subtle in his attempts to position himself as the heir to The Whole Churchill Thing. And they have a lot in common; both from an oddly hybrid aristocratic/American background, both keen amateur historians, both staunch advocates of a closely united Europe (of which more in a moment)... But of course, to be Churchill, you can't just smoothly ascend the political ladder. You need to be an outsider, a (however temporary) outcast. You need the wilderness years...

Which leads us to the question of the hour; what the hell is Boris playing at?

Some are wondering why Boris, having been given the Foreign Office by May last year (probably for "keep your enemies closer" purposes), seems to be courting dismissal and banishment to the back benches. It could be that "on the back benches" is where he'd hoped to be by now.

It's widely suspected that Boris's extremely late conversion to the Brexit cause (having been a vocal advocate of European unity theretofore) was all about positioning himself as the champion of the Tory grassroots so that when (as expected) Remain squeaked it, he would be in pole position to make his pitch to the party faithful when Cameron stepped down, as promised, some time before the 2020 election (I know, it feels like a thousand years ago, doesn't it). Nobody can prove this, but the gobstruck Now What The Hell Do We Do expressions on the faces of both Boris and Michael Gove the next morning on discovering they'd actually "won" spoke volumes. This, then, could be Plan B for Boris.

But why, of all the possible hills to die on, is Boris choosing to resurrect that most transparent of all the transparent whoppers told before the referendum, the "£350 million for the NHS" bus nonsense?

Well, have you ever had a dream so wonderful, that on waking, you screwed up your eyes and desperately willed yourself to go back to sleep and return to it? That's where the Brexiteers are right now. They dreamed a dream of freedom and plenty, and have spent the last fifteen months watching that dream being dismantled. They'd give ANYTHING to get back into that dream, to believe once again in the sunlit uplands of splendid Britannic isolation, and Boris knows this. That's why he's refloating the Big Bus Lie, even if he's having to be so loose with his figures as to provoke two (so far) rebukes from the UK. Statistics Authority. This way, if he can persuade the PM to get rid of him, he can sit out the turmoil of Brexit on the back benches and, when the dust settles, present himself to the party, Churchill-style, as The Man They Should Have Listened To All Along.

Well that's what I think is going on, anyway. The only question is, why now?

Three words: Jacob Rees-Mogg. The man who IS everything Boris pretends to be. He's already stealing Boris's headlines and airtime and edging past him in the (unfathomable to everyone but Tory voters) popularity stakes. Time for Boris to kick things up a gear.

Shame on us if we let him get away with it.

~ o ~

29: Who's The Underdog?

5th October 2017

My thoughts on the Spanish government's foolishly brutal response to the Catalán independence referendum...

~ o ~

As I believe I've mentioned a few times in columns past, I spent the academic year 1990 to 1991 living in Spain; I was working as an English language assistant in a high school in the city of Badajoz, down in the left hand corner of the country, just on the border with Portugal (indeed, we'd often cross the border as far as the Portuguese town of Elvas just to have dinner). This is, you'll notice, the diametrically opposite end of Spain from Catalonia (or Cataluña, as I'm used to spelling it, although the Catalans themselves spell it Catalunya - that ~ accent doesn't occur in Catalán), whence came the alarming images of police brutality which so appalled everyone who saw them this last weekend.

During my year in Badajoz, I noticed that the atmosphere would thicken somewhat whenever Catalonia - and in particular Barcelona - came up in conversation, as it did quite frequently, given that this was during the build-up to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. I immediately recognised the shift in ambience; it was exactly the same chill which descends over the room in certain environs in Scotland when the subject of The English comes up. I was, after all, in the middle of my languages degree at Edinburgh University (this was the third of my four years) and had already learned how, living in Scotland as an English-accented (however ethnically Scottish) young man, there were certain tense conversations I was bound to have on a regular basis (and indeed, certain places you didn't want to be heard speaking with that English accent).

At one point I enquired of a young local lady friend of mine, what exactly was the problem that everyone in this part of Spain seemed to have with the Catalans and specifically Barcelonans. "It's just they think they're better than the rest of us,' she sighed, "they think they're the only civilised part of Spain, that they're the sophisticated metropolitan ones and we're all peasants, that the whole of the rest of the country consists of dirt tracks and dusty little villages with donkey droppings everywhere and chickens running through the streets."

"Oh ok," I replied, "you mean they talk about you guys the way you talk about the Portuguese...?"

I'm not sure why I bring this up, apart from its anecdotal value... there is a tendency to assume that a separatist movement is, by definition, the plucky underdog attempting to shrug off the yoke of oppressive rule by a distant elite, but that's not always the case. The Catalan independence movement is being cast - and likes to cast itself - in a similar light to the current Scottish independence movement, or indeed the (partially successful) Irish rebellion of 100 years ago, but it's not quite comparable. Catalonia is, historically, the most prosperous region of Spain, and its long-standing separatist tendencies (as reinforced by the cultural and linguistic differences from the rest of the country) have been bolstered of late by the economic turmoil engulfing Spain as a whole. There's a resentment at what some Catalans perceive as the millstone of Spanish monetary incompetence being slung permanently around the neck of Catalonia, and a suspicion that the region would do far better if it went off on its own and left the poorer regions to fend for themselves. So it's less similar to the Scots' historic struggle to shake off the rule of London, and more like an imaginary scenario in which London decides that the Scots are a bunch of freeloaders sponging off the hard-working English, and kicks Scotland out of the union against its will.

Of course, Prime Minister Rajoy's idiotic response to the Catalan local administration's unilateral (and, in Madrid's opinion, unconstitutional) "indyref" has now ensured that the Catalan independence movement will forever be seen as a prime example of plucky underdogs resisting an oppressive regime. It's hard - almost inhuman - not to find oneself on the side of people you're actually watching being clubbed into submission by armoured "policemen" for the crime of trying to get to a polling station. Honestly, if you don't recognise the vote, don't recognise it. Ignore it, anull it, send it through the European courts, whatever... just don't send in the Guardia Civil (chiefly remembered in Spain as Franco's boot boys from the country's relatively recent time as a Fascist dictatorship) to beat the living crap out of unarmed civilians in front of the world's media.

Of course, the point of this exercise was to prevent the vote from ever taking place. And the supreme irony is that HAD the vote taken place, it was by no means a given that the separatists would have won. But by panicking, by attempting to quash the result before it was even known, Madrid has made the case for Catalan independence all but unanswerable.

Similarly, in this country, our government has conducted a sector-by-sector analysis of the expected impact of Brexit on our economy and society in general. It refuses to publish the results of that analysis, on the transparently spurious grounds that to do so would weaken the government's negotiating position in Brussels. That excuse in and of itself hints at disaster; the fact the government is sitting on the report speaks volumes. And so we are left with nothing but our own foul imaginings, filling in the gaps in our knowledge with doomsday scenarios and nightmarish outcomes, because surely if there were anything GOOD in the reports, they'd be waving them triumphantly rather than locking them away.

When you seek to bury the facts, you can't be surprised if nobody believes you when you say that the facts are on your side.

~ o ~

30: The Problem With Harvey

19th October 2017

My somewhat trepidatiously proffered thoughts on the deluge of accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct levelled at Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein...

~ o ~

Hmm. Kind of nervous about bringing up The Whole Harvey Weinstein thing as it strikes me as a soundbite minefield; however carefully I measure these 1000 or so words there's bound to be at least one sentence I come out with which, if angrily brandished in a context-free environment by either progressives or conservatives (or even both), will serve as clinching evidence that I am a Terrible Person. But it's struck me that the whole (increasingly) sordid saga is flagging up some important issues, and not just the obvious ones about the persisting imbalance between men and women with regard to power and influence, and the culture of power-worship which enables Big Guns like Weinstein to degrade and traumatise innumerable women while everyone around them ignores or enables this.

One thing I've noticed is that it's highlighted a fundamental difference in (American at least) liberal and conservative mindsets. The right wing media in the US, still sore from the similar-ish revelations about Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes (and cognisant of the fact that it helped install a self-proclaimed sex pest in the Oval Office) has seized upon Harveygate as an opportunity to flag up liberal hypocrisy. "Where are all the Hollywood élite now?" they cry. "Why aren't the liberals condemning Weinstein like they did Trump and Ailes?" To which the answer is: they are. Ever since the story broke, the great and good of Tinseltown have been falling over each other in their haste to denounce Weinstein, many going so far as to admit that they had Heard Stuff over the years and berating themselves for not having done anything about it. But the conservative media appears oblivious to this; they seem to be assuming that liberals will cover for one of their own because that's what THEY do.

All politics has a tribal element, but it's always stronger at the ends of the political spectrum. Staunch conservatives regard themselves as inherently good (god-fearing patriots, and so forth) and as such, attacks from the left are always malicious and perfidious in nature. The kind of pragmatic, centrist (yeah, I said it) politics espoused by American liberals (let's face it, you don't get a lot of actual LEFT left wingers in the States) recognises that "goodness" is defined not by your position on the Overton scale but by what you DO. If someone turns out to have spent thirty years sexually coercing and/or assaulting every woman he finds attractive, then liberals have no hesitation in decrying him as a loathsome creep, whatever party he's been fundraising for.

Interestingly, of course, as you keep going along the spectrum to the actual left, you find the same presumption of moral superiority starts creeping back in, which is how you get the Labour Party still fudging the question of its anti-Semitism problem because they think it's impossible to be bigoted if you're a proper socialist (spoiler alert: it isn't).

Another reason I'm hesitant to even broach the subject is that there's not a lot of consensus right now among the online community about what part, if any, men should be taking in the conversation about Weinstein's downfall. Certainly it's a conversation to be entered into carefully and respectfully (and those people, both male and female, who've been giving it "Why didn't these women speak up at the time?" need to re-read the victims' statements very carefully, and then shut up for the foreseeable future), but men HAVE to be part of this discussion, even if we're off in a corner of the internet having a separate but related conversation of our own.

The point is that sexual harassment is men AND women's problem. It's women's problem because in the vast majority of instances, they're on the receiving end of it, but it's men's problem because in the vast, VAST majority of instances we're the ones doing it. It's encouraging and right and proper that women are leading the protests against it, that they're feeling able to share their stories about it (and I don't know a single woman who knows me well enough to talk about this sort of thing who doesn't have such a story), but it's only going to stop if WE pack it in.

Men have to take collective responsibility for this, and those of you out there about to go into #notallmen mode, I DON'T just mean by examining and monitoring our own behaviour, although we must do that as well.

Silence is enabling, and one of the ways that sexual predators (and we've all met them, if perhaps not in Weinstein's league) justify their actions to themselves and others is with the belief that the rest of us men have their back. That we're all at it, or wish we were. That the only thing that prevents all men from forcing ourselves on any woman we fancy (and using whatever coercive measures come to hand) is timidity or lack of opportunity. And that even such mild condemnatory statements as we might occasionally come out with are borne merely of envy, or just a case of "virtue signalling", burnishing our liberal credentials in the hope that we can hoodwink feminists into going to bed with us (ie. just a more subtle version of the brutal "game" they're playing).

We've got to stop dancing around this and tell them - to their faces and in as many words - that it's NOT OKAY. Even if this shatters the atmosphere in the pub. Even if this loses us mates. Because those guys aren't who we want for mates. They've been hearing it from women for years but by definition they don't give a fig for women's opinions. They need to hear it from US.

Right. I'm going to re-read this column twenty or thirty times, check it for possible misquotes, then clench everything and hit "send".

~ o ~

31: The Wrongness Of Wrongness

2nd November 2017

There was an article in the Daily Telegraph this week (I’ll give you a minute to stop grinding your teeth in grim-faced anticipation as to what huffing buffoonery might be forthcoming... all done? Let’s continue) bewailing the plight of conservative students (and let’s face it, being a conservative student is a plight in and of itself) trying to study law, politics or PPE at the communist brainwashing madrassas which currently pass for universities in this country (the Telegraph didn’t quite phrase it like that, but that was definitely the subtext).

These poor souls - and we may as well at least try to be understanding of their situation because let’s face it, these are the very people who’ll be running whatever’s left of the country in thirty years’ time - are feeling under pressure to conform, to submit, to hide their conservative lights under bushels so as not to incur the wrath of their pinko lecturers who have, like the jackbooted Thought Police that they are, been spreading the foul Trot propaganda that Brexit might not (steel yourselves) be the best thing that’s ever happened to this country, and tailoring their lectures accordingly.

One such wistful young buck was pictured gazing sorrowfully into the lens, above a caption explaining that he “feels there is an anti-Brexit bias at university”...

Bias. There’s a word that gets slung around by all sides of the political bunfight, and as often as not by people who don’t seem to know what it actually means. Because here’s the thing: if you discover that all the people who know quite a bit about a given topic fail to share or endorse your position on that topic, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re all biased, that they’re all conspiring against you, or that they’re cravenly adhering to some sort of unquestioning intellectual orthodoxy.

It could just be that you’re wrong.

I feel that the concept of “wrong” has been neglected of late. Conservative (big and small C) commentators will no doubt lay the blame for “wrong” having fallen from favour at the door of progressive educational theorists, with their supposed aversion to introducing children to the whole concept of wrongness, for fear of crushing their innocent spirits with the stain of the dread red biro of failure. Maybe that is where it started (or maybe not) but both sides are at it these days; dismissing the notion of right and wrong, whether it’s Michael Gove scoffing at “experts” or Jeremy Corbyn’s more zealous apostles praising him to the skies for winning that election he lost.

This has manifested itself in the broadcast news media as an obsession with (at least the appearance of) “balance”, when addressing any topic on which consensus is less than absolutely 100%, with the (one assumes) unintended consequence that consensus has more or less been eradicated. There’s almost nothing that everyone agrees on any more, since what used to be the criteria for consensus - ie., facts - don’t seem to be held in very high regard these days.

“Balance” doesn’t mean giving equal merit or airtime to all sides of an argument; it means giving merit where it’s due. Taking a position squarely against something - deciding that it’s “wrong” - is only an example of “bias” when it’s done in the absence of, or in spite of, the facts. When it’s done in accordance with the available facts, it’s just sound reasoning.

An example: everyone remotely sane disapproves of drunk driving. Are we all therefore guilty of “anti-drunk driving” bias? Or are we simply acknowledging the fact, supported by decades of medical and criminal evidence, that drunk driving is a murderously reckless and stupid thing to do?

I’m sorry kids, if your economics and politics professors - who have dedicated their lives to knowing (that’s knowing; not feeling, not believing, KNOWING) about this sort of thing, have determined that Brexit, whatever your Dad and the Daily Telegraph say, is in fact a suicidally stupid bad move, that’s not “anti-Brexit bias”, it’s intellectual rigour and professional integrity. They’re no more biased against Brexit than a physics professor teaching about gravity is biased against hovering.

Ah, but the Brexiters cry, you’re hoist on your own petard here, aren’t you? Going on about the importance of facts over opinion when where Brexit is concerned it’s ALL opinion so far, isn’t it? How can there BE facts about something that hasn’t happened yet?

Well we do have SOME facts; enough to make some fairly sound predictions. And while no prediction is ever entirely concrete, ones based on the facts we have so far (ours) are a better bet than ones based on wishful thinking and romantic fantasies of bygone empire (theirs). And in particular, we have a pretty good idea of what will happen economically, as those who’ll be imposing the new economic reality upon us (the EU and the WTO) have TOLD us what will happen (short version: we’re screwed).

So the Brexiters’ position is like that of a little guy who finds himself in the roughest pub in town, standing next to the biggest meanest bastard in that pub, who, when said big mean bastard sets off to the gents and says “Touch my pint and I’ll kill you”, thinks “Well until he actually kills me there’s no way of knowing what will happen, so I’d better drink his pint just to be absolutely sure.”

There aren’t two sides to every argument. Well okay there are, but there aren’t always two VALID sides, and our reluctance to say so is why we’re not only faced with Brexit, but a resurgence in Flat Eartherism in the twenty-first bloody century. Who knows what idiocy it might yet unleash?

~ o ~

32: Too Many Broken Hearts

23rd November 2017

I won't lie to you; this hasn't been an easy gig this week. I don't necessarily regard it as being my responsibility to put a comical spin on events in EVERY edition, but I am conscious of the fact that it's only because of my "profile" as a humourist that anyone knows who I am or cares what I think, and as such I generally feel that I should inject at least a hint of levity into these columns.

But this week, perhaps more than at any time during the year-and-a-bit I've been contributing to this paper, I find I'm all smirked out. I can't raise so much as a Harrison Ford-esque knowing half-smile, let alone a chuckle. The news isn't even blackly humorous any more, it's just relentlessly bleak and depressing. As I type this, I read that Labour - the "opposition", remember - voted WITH the government to take us out of the Single Market, while the "government" (rarely have sarcasm-quotes been so richly merited) appears to have decreed as a matter of dogma (purely in order to duck out of some bit of post-Brexit admin) that animals feel no pain and have no emotions. If this is true, my dog has some extremely varied and specific autonomic responses on the go. Sometimes he's so unconsciously reflexively stimulated to see me that I can't get in through the front door.

Even the occasional faint glimmers of silvery good news tend to be lined with blackest cloud: Good news! The Democrats might pick up a Senate seat in Alabama! Bad news! That's only because the Conservative Christian "Values" candidate stands credibly accused of having spent much of his 30s hanging around shopping malls trying to pick up underage girls! Good news! The government isn't covering up the results of the Brexit impact survey any more! Bad news! It looks like they may not actually have DONE a Brexit impact survey after all.

The news really is a bottomless well of despair just at the moment, and so, mindful of my mental health and ever keen to maintain a psychological even keel, I've spent this week avoiding it and getting into protracted and bitter arguments on Twitter instead.

Over the weekend I incurred the wrath of about half of the Labour supporters on Twitter (and the support of the other half) by remarking upon the fact that despite the fact that this country currently toils under the single worst government in living memory (seriously; we've had nasty administrations, and dishonest and incompetent ones, but never a government this nasty and dishonest AND incompetent all at the same time), Labour is nonetheless polling at best one or two points ahead of the Conservatives, and as often as not at level pegging. I suggested that Labour could pull comfortably away from the Tories if they bit the bullet and came out in favour of Remain, given that there's at least 48% of the electorate currently "homeless" in party terms.

This was angrily rejected by Labour loyalists (albeit heartily endorsed by a rather greater number of Labour-leaning but disenfranchised Remainers) who pointed out that being openly anti-Brexit didn't do the Lib Dems any favours in June. While this is true in as far as it goes, it's not really a valid analogy once you take into account the way general elections actually work in this country. The Lib Dems are, at the best of times, not taken seriously as a potential party of government, and this June was not the best of times for the Lib Dems, given they've still never really recovered from having been perceived to have betrayed their core vote by "selling out" in order to enter the coalition back in 2010, and were at the time being led by the whirlwind of charisma that is Tim Farron. Remainerism was never likely to do them much good, but it could be transformative if adopted by an energised main opposition party (energised for now; the post-election Corbymania is dwindling fast and will continue to do so unless Labour start to actually OPPOSE, rather than enable the government).

A few days later I found myself, bizarrely, mired in a lengthy dispute with Mike Stock, as in Stock Aitken and Waterman, names sure to send a chill through the heart of anyone who remembers the wasteland of interchangeable Australian soap stars that was the UK singles chart at the end of the 1980s. Mike Stock is, you'll be entirely unsurprised to hear, a Brexiteer of the bluff, hearty "Calm down dear it'll all be alright" variety. Well I'm sure Mike Stock WILL be alright, unless of course he had the world's worst accountants back in 1988 (or unless Pete Waterman had the world's BEST accountants back in 1988). It's the rest of us I'm worried about.

I did ask Mr. Stock to give me one good reason for leaving, in return for which I would give him ten good reasons to stay, but he didn't seem to get the Jason Donovan reference. I can only conclude he's purged his back catalogue from his memory. Would that I could do the same.

Perhaps I just need to find out which news outlets the Mike Stocks of the world are watching, assuming they are, because I think I might find a brief interlude of blithe ignorance of what awaits us quite refreshing. Or maybe reality will find a way to seep into their collective consciousness, and they'll join us in trying to find a way to avert this pointless, needless disaster.

We should be so lucky.

~ o ~

33: Interesting Times

4th January 2018

So, here we are again then; Auld Lang Syne and all that.

On the one hand, it seems like only a few weeks since we were assessing the global garbage fire which had been 2016 and wondering what on earth could be about to happen next; on the other hand so much DID happen next that it's hard to believe that 2017 has only lasted the regulation 365 days. So many things that we took for granted have gone; so many things which had once been unimaginable have taken their place.Stick a pin in that thought while I tell you a story.

There were so many new facts to absorb in the aftermath of June's surprise General Election (which of course ended up being a "surprise General Election" in every possible sense of the phrase) that I don't think I ever told you how I passed the night of June 8th, Election Day.

I spent the evening in the cellar bar of The Phoenix pub in Cavendish Square in central London; I think of this venue principally as the home of The Distraction Club, the music and comedy evening that my bandmates and I organise on the first Tuesday of every month (and I can't believe I've been doing this column for 15 months and only just managed to squeeze in a plug for it) but on this occasion I was taking part in a night of political stand-up convened by my comedy pal Tiernan Douieb, intended to soften the blow of what was, you'll recall, expected to be a crushingly bad night for progressive and/or left-leaning people.

I was probably the least left-leaning comic on the bill; as I've tried to explain before, while I'm an intensely political person (in comedy and in life) I'm not a PARTY political person. I dole out scorn and criticism (and praise) in as even-handed a manner as possible to all points across the political spectrum, partly out of a sense of professional objectivity and partly because all sides richly deserve scorn and criticism (and praise) sooner or later. As you can imagine, the Corbyn era has placed a lot of strain on many of my longest-standing comedy friendships.

I was doing a short set closing the first half of the show. Before me there had been a succession of angry and despairing sets from some of my more avowedly lefty comedy colleagues, and a general sense of ruefully ironic gloom was descending over the place. I don't even remember what I did in my set; a couple of songs, I imagine, but I do remember what I closed with.

"Remember," I said, "if the last twelve months has told us anything it's that we live in the age of the Rogue Vote. Maybe, just maybe... there's time for one more."

Immediately following my set there came the interval, during which the polling stations closed and the exit poll was released.

Talk about a game of two halves.

The second half of the show passed in an atmosphere of mounting excitement, astonishment and incredulity, and ultimately bewildered elation with the realisation that, as far as British electoral politics were concerned, all bets were, in fact, off.

As indeed they still are. While the shock election result didn't immediately derail the Brexit process, it did cause a huge - and thus far uncorrected - wobble in what had theretofore been the country's straight course toward exiting the EU. It exposed the government for the self-serving incompetent rabble they are, and precisely nothing they've done in the months since has done anything to challenge this perception (quite the reverse, if anything).

Meanwhile, across the pond, the Great Orange Hope currently sits at somewhere between 30 and 35% approval, with his every unguarded utterance (ie. all of them) seeming to add to the welter of evidence, that should, an unprecedented act of constitutional vandalism notwithstanding, see himself hauled over some pretty hot legal coals in due course. 2017 has already been a great year for hubris - Mrs. May calling that election for reasons of pure partisan advantage and personal self-aggrandisement only to have it blow up in her face almost defines the term. If Mr Trump's ceaseless servicing of his own ego - nothing short of being President would assuage his lust for status and adoration and even now he's got the job he seems annoyed to discover it's not King after all - results in his humiliation and downfall, that will RE-define the term. If only he'd been content to carry on playing at being a billionaire in his gold plated penthouse, and presenting his stupid game show, he could have blustered away indefinitely, but now he has a REAL job, and moreover, a job subject to the kind of oversight and scrutiny he's never had to even contemplate before. The man owns a lot of cupboards, with room for many, many skeletons.

I did say "an unprecedented act of constitutional vandalism notwithstanding"; Mr. Trump may yet find a way to fire Special Counsel Mueller or otherwise derail his investigation, and as many have noted, when President Nixon did likewise back in 1973 (the "Saturday Night Massacre" which was to lead to his undoing) he didn't have an entirely complicit Republican congress to rely on, nor indeed the backing of a far-right populist "news" complex denouncing all who oppose him as traitors.

The only thing we can be sure of as we head into 2018 is that we can't be sure of anything. The only thing we can expect is the unexpected. But that should be a cause for hope rather than despair. For all that we are calendrically "closer" to Brexit than twelve months ago, it now looks further away than at any stage since the referendum. The folly is laid bare, the lies are exposed, and as EVERY new poll makes clear, "the will of the people" is now on our side.

It's going to be an interesting year. One way or another.

~ o ~

34: Racists Gonna Racist

18th January 2018

So, the American people, the western media and the human race in general have spent the last few days reeling from the shock revelation that the man who opened his Presidential run by announcing that "Mexicans are rapists", who then made banning brown skinned Muslims from the USA and building a massive wall along its southern border to keep yet more brown skinned people out of the USA the cornerstone pledges of his campaign, who said a judge couldn't possibly try him impartially because his parents were Mexican, who appointed a man once deemed too racially insensitive to serve as a federal judge to the post of attorney general, who employed white supremacist agitators as White House advisors, who issued a Holocaust Day statement which didn't mention Jews, who refused to condemn neo-Nazis even after they'd murdered an anti-Nazi protester, who said that Nazi marchers and anti-Nazi protesters were morally equivalent, who called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas and Colin Kaepernick a "son of a bitch", who built his political career on an eight-year effort to spread the lie that Barack Obama was not the legitimate President but a Kenyan usurper, who before his political career had to be forced by court order to rent properties to black families and who led a campaign calling for the execution of five black youths accused of rape and continued to do so even after they'd been exonerated, might - just MIGHT - be a bit of a racist.

The only surprise about Shitholegate (as I suppose we may as well call it) is that anyone is surprised. The only *encouraging* thing about Shitholegate is that a linguistic corner appears to have been turned, and that journalists and commentators who've been dancing a veritable terminogical Lambada around the issue for months in order to avoid dropping the R bomb are just coming right out with it. This. Is. Racism.

Not only is more or less every reputable US news outlet (ie. everyone except Fox) now content to describe Mr. Trump's words in the Oval Office last week as racist, many of them are now daring to apply that adjective to the President himself, and in the immortal words of Michael Ironside, it's about goddamn time.

The distinction between "a racist" and "a person who says and does racist things" is an entirely spurious one. A theme I keep returning to in these columns is that it's not our beliefs or our feelings which define us, but our actions. If someone's words and deeds single people out for suffering or indignity based purely on their ethnicity, then whether this person is doing so for reasons of political expediency and demagoguery, or because of some deep-seated racial animus is utterly irrelevant. If you say and do racist things, or enable or reward others who say and do racist things, you are a racist. Sorry.

As is often the case nowadays, this Big Deal American News Story has been mirrored by an altogether smaller deal but nonetheless interesting British news story. Henry Bolton, who, it may surprise you to learn, has been the leader of UKIP since October (you'd be forgiven for thinking it was still Nigel Farage, as both Mr. Farage himself and the BBC appear to be under the same misapprehension) has been forced to disassociate himself from remarks made by his girlfriend Jo Marney (and, it would appear, from the lady herself) after Facebook messages came to light in which Ms. Marney said Prince Harry's intended, Meghan Markle, would "taint the Royal Family with her seed."

Now one might insist that a political leader can't be held responsible for the casually racist private messages of a romantic partner; one might even claim that it's possible to be romantically involved with someone and not know what sort of casually racist views they hold. One could also, as some have, point out that Ms. Marney has been making what could charitably be described as "racially insensitive" remarks on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere for some time but it's only now she's taken a shot at a Prince of the Realm's girlfriend that the Mail On Sunday (for 'twas they) feel the need to kick up a stink about it.

But something I can't help but ponder is this: this doesn't happen to other fringe parties, does it? Certainly not since the demise of the unlamented BNP. You don't get prominent members of the Green Party (or their partners) letting slip missives including sentences like "This is Britain, not Africa" (as Ms. Marney's did), do you? They might make the odd dim-witted comment about vaccination or homeopathy, but they don't turn up on a fly-on-the-wall documentary saying "I've never liked the Negroes". Why does this sort of thing keep happening to UKIP?

Why'd you think?

UKIP is not, in essence or constitution, a racist party. It IS however, a party dedicated to whipping up and exploiting nationalist sentiment, principally by the means of demonising a "foreign" entity (the EU) and accusing this entity of undermining our national integrity by flooding the country with (foreign) immigrants. UKIP survives by exacerbating fear and suspicion of foreign political bodies and indeed foreign HUMAN bodies, as personified by the (fictional) deluge of immigrants depicted on its "BREAKING POINT" poster and elsewhere in its literature and iconography.

The distinction between "fear and distrust of foreign entities and foreigners", and "racism" is at best academic. UKIP may not be "a racist party" but it's a party which has always and WILL always appeal to, and indeed depend on, racists. We need to stop being surprised when they let their guard down.

We're always being told that we shouldn't bandy the word "racist" about, that applying it where it's not justified weakens the term and diminishes actual racism. But we need to be willing to take that chance; NOT using the word "racism" where it was patently, manifestly, GLARINGLY justified is how we got into this mess.

~ o ~

35: Enough Already

1st February 2018

You know what? No personal anecdotes, pithy analogies or weird where-the-hell-is-he-going-with-this pop culture-based pre-amble this week. This week I'm cutting straight to the chase.

Brexit has to stop. Not be softened, or ameliorated, or grudgingly accepted in the entirely forlorn hope it can be "made the best of" or "made to work" in due course, it has to be STOPPED. NOW.

Of course it can always be started up again in due course, if that's what people really want. That's democracy. REAL democracy.

As I'm sure most of you will know by now - I'm not privy to the editorial processes of this paper but I wouldn't be at all surprised if a fair part of this edition has already been dedicated to this topic - earlier this week, Buzzfeed leaked a Brexit impact report commissioned, and duly suppressed, by the government. The conclusion of the report is that not only is there no possible post-Brexit scenario in which the quality of life of the British people won't be drastically reduced, but that there is neither a single sector of the economy nor region of the country that will escape unscathed. The official, government-ordered and government-buried verdict on Brexit is not just that it will be bad, but that it will be entirely bad, in every way, for everyone.

Now on the one hand, I guess we could say this is a case of better late than never, although I don't know about you but I'm taking scant comfort from everything I've been saying for over eighteen months being shown to be correct... on the other hand, this is perhaps more a case of so late as to be pointless. What's so maddening about this report is not that it's been commissioned, or even that it's been buried, but that it's been commissioned NOW.

The right time - the ONLY time - to commission such a report was BEFORE the referendum was held. That way, the voters might have had some sort of empirical - if speculative - data to base their decision on, rather than just gut instinct or lofty aspirations.

If you had a friend who'd agreed to buy a house based only on a vague description of that house from the estate agent, who'd never seen the building, and who not only hadn't yet had the property surveyed to see whether it was, say, rotten from roof joists to floorboards and about to fall over, but who didn't even yet know the PRICE of the house they'd signed up to buy, you'd think they'd gone crazy. Yet that, ludicrously, is precisely the situation in which we, as a nation, have put ourselves for a year and a half now.

Worse, if the leak of this report has, as is more than likely, no effect whatsoever on our progress towards the Brexit ravine, then we will be putting ourselves in the position of someone who agrees to buy an unpriced, unsurveyed house, gets the survey results and discovers that the house is indeed rotten from top to bottom; gets the price and discovers it's higher than they can possibly afford, and who then announces their intention to go ahead and buy the property anyway. It's BEYOND crazy.

Since I've become one of the more vocal critics of both the bewilderingly undimmed enthusiasm for Brexit on the right wing of British politics (among those whose cod-imperial fantasies have placed them beyond the reach of reason) and the supine, craven acceptance of it on the left (among those who'd rather eat a bucket of sand than acknowledge the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn might in fact be more interested in fulfilling the socio-political project to which he's devoted his life than in actually securing the welfare and dignity of the "people" he claims to champion), people have been asking me "Yes, but what can we DO? What can we actually DO?"

My answer has been that while on a practical level, we ourselves can't do anything, what we CAN do is pressure those who can. In America this week, almost unnoticed among the tumult surrounding the development of what is, in effect, a coup by the Republican Party to co-opt the entire justice system in order to protect the President, another supposedly slam-dunk bit of legislation failed. The bill to ban all abortion after 20 weeks was rejected, despite being yet another cornerstone policy of the party which controls all three branches of government. Protest WORKS. Pressure WORKS. Organising WORKS. Telling your elected representatives that come election time you won't forget who stood up for you and who sold you out WORKS.

There are still pockets of sanity in both major parties. We need to persuade them to pressure their own leaders, openly and without fear, to lobby to suspend and/or provisionally revoke Article 50 (as the EU is constantly at pains to assure us is entirely possible) until full public disclosure and discussion of this report can be carried out. Then, and ONLY then, when we have some idea of what we're buying and for how much, there can be another vote.

I know that many, perhaps a majority of Leavers will never abandon their dream of Splendid Isolation, however compelling the evidence that it's an illusion. If they've made it this far and still believe, there'll be no persuading them otherwise. But I refuse to believe that those people make up over 50% of the electorate.

Keep resisting. The facts are on our side, reason is on our side and soon, if not already, the majority of the people will be on our side too.

~ o ~

36: An Emotional Argument

8th February 2018

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I make no apologies for this. Quite apart from the fact that my time on the site has done me some good (I got this job via Twitter, I got my first book deal via Twitter, I've met many people via Twitter who've become true and lasting friends) I hope I've done a bit of good on there myself on occasion. I don't hold with the notion that Twitter and its fellow social media sites are a poor substitute for human interaction; they ARE human interaction, on a grand and yet intimate scale. I'll grant that Twitter in particular could do a lot more with regard to curbing and punishing abusive and threatening behaviour; I myself have occasionally incurred the rather limp wrath of Alt Wrong/white "supremacist" types but I've never let it spoil my fun as a. I'm pretty difficult to intimidate and b. those guys tend to save their real threats and insults for women, fearless übermensch that they are.

I have - and try to observe - a few rules of conduct with regard to Twitter interactions. One thing I can't abide (and try never to do) is when someone says something disparaging or just plain rude about you in the third person, but refers to you by your "@" name (eg. rendering my name as @MitchBenn rather than simply Mitch Benn), in the knowledge that this means you'll see it anyway, for all that it wasn't ostensibly addressed to you. That's a cheap trick, like talking loudly about someone behind their back. I have no hesitation in picking someone up on it when they pull that one on me; not because of the negative opinion they've expressed (to which they are of course entitled) but on the snide manner in which they've chosen to express it.

On the other hand, if you do a search for your own name - for example, if I go looking for instances of the two words "Mitch Benn" rather than the handle @MitchBenn - then what you find is entirely your own problem. People are entitled to discuss whatever they want on Twitter, including how stupid/talentless/arrogant/just plain wrong about everything they think I am, and it wouldn't be fair for me to wade into their conversation just because I've been egotistical/insecure enough to try to find out what people have been saying about me (I'll make an exception if I think I'm actually being libelled, of course).

I'll confess that I am, in fact, sometimes egotistical and/or insecure enough to do this. It can be instructive; if I'm being genuinely wrong-headed about something (which is entirely possible) it's as well to find out, even if nobody's saying it to my face. And sometimes this can throw up points worth considering, even if I don't agree with them.

Example: I recently came across a posting by someone who thought he'd put his finger on the mistake that I, and other anti-Brexit "centrists" are making. "Centrist", incidentally, appears to have supplanted "Blairite" as the go-to insult for anyone deemed Not Left Wing Enough by the "proper" left, perhaps since Ol' Demon Eyes himself has been doing the rounds again recently and sounding, even the most devout Corbynite must squirmingly admit, remarkably sane and reasonable.

Apparently where we've been going wrong is that while we are bang on the money with regard to the facts on Brexit, we've failed to put forward a sufficiently convincing "emotional argument" to win over the die-hard Leavers.

I thought about this; firstly, I'm not sure it's either possible or indeed necessary to win over the truly die-hard Leavers; anyone who's still gung-ho for Brexit after all we've learned in the last twenty months is, I'd suggest, no longer amenable to reason OR emotion. Fortunately, by this stage, we're only talking about around 40% of the electorate, and, as they themselves have been telling us since June 2016, the views of 48% of voters or less can legitimately be ignored completely.

Secondly, I would posit that it's precisely because of the reliance on "emotional arguments" that the world is in the mess in which it currently finds itself. Brexit wasn't debated on the facts but on gut beliefs and notions of national pride; Trump didn't win because his supporters paid any attention to what sort of a guy he actually was, but because he made them feel good.

But if it's indeed the case that emotional arguments win the day now, rather than appeals to evidence and reason, then fair enough. I'm going to construct a winning emotional argument AGAINST EMOTIONAL ARGUMENTS.

I think this could be done. I think one could construct a compelling story about how, while yielding to an appeal to the emotions can make you fleetingly happy, this can't actually alter, or enable us to escape from, reality. I think one could speak movingly about how reality is always there, even when hidden by false narratives and comforting fantasies and that how, when those narratives and fantasies dissolve - as they must - reality will have to be dealt with, whether we're prepared for it or not. I think it's possible to rhapsodise about how we have the tools to discern and decipher reality; reason, evidence, civilised discourse... I think one could convey the satisfaction of defeating bad logic, of skewering fallacious arguments, and the joy of finding what for want of a less loaded word we'll call the "truth" that lies hidden beneath them. And I think it's possible to persuade people of the contentment that comes from knowing that the bases have been covered, the facts addressed, that the reality of the situation - however grim it may be - has been confronted.

Or if nothing else, you could spin them a truly terrifying yarn about where choosing emotion over facts gets you. By pointing out where it's gotten us.

~ o ~

37: Flat Earth Theory

15th February 2018

I don't know whether you paid much attention to the launch last week of Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket; even if you didn't, you're bound to have heard at least a little about it.

Mr. Musk has an unerring sense of publicity and an idiosyncratic sense of humour; the test, to see if the rocket could deliver a heavy payload into space, could quite easily have been carried out using a bag of cement, but instead, Mr. Musk chose to launch one of his own cars (an electric sportscar produced by his own Tesla company) in the general direction of Mars.

That was the bit that caught the world's attention; the bit that blew the minds of science fiction fans (like myself) in particular was the video of the rocket's twin booster engines, rather than plummeting back to Earth and disintegrating in the atmosphere as did the old space shuttle's similar appendages, flying back to the ground and landing intact and perfectly upright, in synchronisation. I say this blew SF fans' minds because this is something which rockets have always done in films and TV shows (one thinks of Thunderbird 3, or the Spectre rocket from You Only Live Twice) but which has NEVER happened in real life before. I keep watching that clip and my brain still refuses to process it as anything other than a special effect.

Among those paying special attention to the unfolding events were the depressingly numerous and widespread members of The Flat Earth Society. I wish I could tell you that the name of this group is ironic, or perhaps some sort of elliptical reference to a political or economic concept, but alas no, it's exactly what it sounds like. There is, in the year 2018, a growing lobby of people who insist that the Earth is in fact a flat disc, and who dismiss every bit of evidence to the effect that it is spherical (that is to say, more or less of all science since the days of Ancient Greece) as falsehood and propaganda. The video of Mr. Musk's red convertible drifting above a very round-looking Earth has been similarly dismissed as a hoax.

Leaving aside the fact that this group steadfastly refuses to do the one thing that would substantiate their claim - ie. find the edge and jump off - or provide an explanation for how gravity works on a disc (a massive sphere will attract smaller objects "downwards" towards its centre but there is no "down" in space), or explain what keeps the atmosphere on and stops the sea from draining away over the rim, or how day and night works when the sun would be visible (or not), to the whole disc at once, or where the hell Australia is, or why Ellen McArthur and many others make it all the way around the Earth without flying off into space at any point, or indeed how, with brains like theirs, they manage to walk without forgetting to breathe, the fact that - once again - in the year two thousand and bloody eighteen, there is a growing body of opinion that THE EARTH IS FLAT tells you all you need to know about how "belief" works upon the human mind.

Which brings us back to Brexit.

How much of the dwindling - but still entirely indulged - Leave lobby's insistence that Everything Would Be Peachy With Brexit were it not for the constant backsliding and undermining of we Remainers is sincere, and how much of it is desperate excuse-peddling (here's looking at you, Digby Jones), we may never know. It might seem to you or I - or anybody with a fully functioning cortex - that to dismiss 48% of the population (probably more Iike 60-65% these days, but that's another column) as irrelevant, impotent, and safely ignorable while simultaneously accusing them of secretly being in control of the whole process and steering it deliberately into the rocks is at best disingenuous, if not just plain stupid. But that, nonetheless, is the prevailing narrative.

At least the Brexiteers have finally abandoned their carefully-maintained delusion that everything is just going to somehow magically be okay, even if they've just replaced it with a carefully-maintained delusion that it'll be everyone's fault but theirs when it ISN'T okay. Is this progress? Who can say.

It certainly seems to be the case that there is now more or less universal consensus, on BOTH sides of the Leave/Remain divide, that Brexit Is Not Going To Be A Good Thing. There are still some holdouts, of course; still some who cling to the Tinker Bell Theory Of Political Actualisation (ie. it'll all be alright if we clap our hands and say "I DO believe in Brexit", boys and girls) and more still who acknowledge the coming turmoil but insist that "it's a price worth paying", even if they seem hopelessly unsure as to what it's worth paying FOR. But pretty much everyone else, however they voted in June 2016 or indeed how they say they'd vote now, seems to be in agreement that Brexit is going to suck.

Which does rather beg the question: why are we still doing it?

Oh yes, sorry, I forgot. "The people have spoken". They have spoken, and having spoken, must now never be allowed to speak again, even now they know what they're speaking about. The will of the people must be respected, whether the people like it or not (and we're not allowed to ask them if they do, in case they don't).

Meanwhile, Labour are now polling four or five points BEHIND the most divided and incompetent government in living memory.

Brexit is the Flat Earth Theory of politics, with one major difference: with Brexit, there really IS an edge of the world.

And we're headed straight for it.

Resist.

~ o ~

38: Shaggy Dog Tories

1st March 2018

A tweet appeared a few days ago from the group "Activate UK"; this organisation describes its objective in its Twitter "bio" as "Creating a united platform for young conservatives and returning power to the grassroots".

Leaving aside the slightly bizarre assumption that promoting the cause of conservatism would in some way "return power to the grassroots" - the grass where I grew up in Liverpool (or indeed where I came of age in Scotland) didn't have very conservative "roots" at all, quite the reverse if anything - there's always something strikes me as slightly forlorn about the whole concept of being a "young conservative", with a big or small C. What's the point of being young if you're going to spend it being "conservative"?

One's youth should be a time for wild experimentation, for music and haircuts that your parents hate; for regrettable fashion choices and reckless romantic entanglements. It's your only chance to get away with it, when you're too young to know any better and young enough to sort yourself out in good time. If one passes one's younger years side-parted, pinstriped, shiny-shoed and respectable, can one really be said to have been "young" at all? There's plenty of time for all that when you're an old git like me. I see some fairly cataclysmic mid-life crises looming in these kids' futures.

In any event, if there's anything more depressing than the sight of young people being conservative, it's the sight of young conservatives trying to be funny.

As last week's cold snap took effect - with, I'd remind you, fatal consequences in some regions - Activate UK tweeted the following "joke":

"As the cold settles in and the national gas supply is running low we are hearing horrific stories... Alll across the country, Socialists are being forced to put their hands in their own pockets."

See what they did there? Their OWN pockets! Get it? Their OWN pockets! Instead of other people's! Because socialists!

Leaving aside the fact that this is just a really poorly constructed joke, it flags up one of the eternal questions of comedy: why are all "political comedians" left wing? Why can't right wingers be funny?

Well of course, right-wingers CAN be funny; there are some pretty conservative people making a decent living out of comedy just now, as indeed there always have been. I'll grant that these comics don't tend to base much of their material on their political positions, for reasons I'll go into in a moment, but there's nothing incompatible about having a sense of humour and being politically conservative.

There are a couple of right-leaning comics who do manage to get some politics into their act, though there's usually a bit of a twist involved: Simon Evans is consistently hilarious and unapologetically (at least small c) conservative, although he's also happy to send himself and his attitudes up as part of his "schtick", so it never comes over as (unintentionally) smug or hectoring...

Nor does one get the impression that this is an affectation, or just something Simon's doing to be "different"; a few years ago, another young-ish comedian suddenly started letting rip with some fairly extreme right-wing views on social media, in a quite an obnoxious fashion, and has been garnering column inches ever since telling interviewers how his conservative politics have led to his being "outcast" and shunned by the all-pervasive liberal orthodoxy which is stifling comic creativity in this country. Of course that's not what happened at all; in the course of establishing this new aggressively right-wing persona of his, he said some pretty horrible and personal things about a lot of our fellow comedians, with the result that nobody really wanted to be around him any more. He wasn't made an "outcast" for being conservative, but for being a jerk about it. Having said that, he's still done a few TV stand-up sets and had his own Radio 4 sitcom since all this went down, so if that's being an "outcast", feel free to cast me out any time.

But while right-wingers can make good comedians, it does seem to be the case that right-wing politics do NOT readily translate into good political comedy. Conservatism is, whether it admits it or not, the political wing of the establishment, of the status quo, of the Powers That Be. As such, right-wing humour almost invariably "punches down". It's derisive rather than humourous, bullying rather than cheeky.

Ah, but conservative commentators point out, there's a NEW estabishment now, particularly where pop culture is concerned. It's that aforementioned all-pervasive liberal orthodoxy, crushing dissent and silencing free speech with its rigidly enforced self-righteous political correctness... Surely these days it's the conservative thinkers and entertainers who are punching UP, against this PC inquisition!

Ok, let's unpack that idea; given that all "political correctness" means is the conscious moderation of language to avoid unnecessary cruelty to, or disparagement of, the disadvantaged in society (no really; that's ALL IT IS), what these commentators are actually saying is "We're punching UP! Against the bastards who won't let us punch DOWN any more!"

Perhaps it IS possible to do funny right-wing political comedy. Certainly it's possible to at least try to be even-handed about it; there's a ten-minute Brexit rant in my current touring show (dates at mitchbenn.com/gigs, folks) in which I share out the scorn and anger equally among the right and left wing politicians who are still charging headlong over that particular cliff.

Maybe someone will crack the secret of genuinely funny conservative satire. But not you, Activate UK: you stick to whingeing about your student loans (which were introduced by a Tory government in 1990, incidentally).

~ o ~

39: The End

8th March 2018

Like, I imagine, a lot of you, I've been spending this week stocking up on crossbow bolts, carefully removing one sleeve from my old black leather bike jacket, and fitting my Toyota Argo's engine with an illegal nitrous oxide feed while welding armour plating to the doors. Next step is bolting my amplifier to the boot and attaching a flamethrower to my guitar.

I've been doing this because of a statement made the other day by the man who is, for the want of a more descriptive term, "leading" Britain's side in the Brexit "negotiations", David "the dog ate my impact report" Davis. Giving a speech in Vienna, he assured his listeners that a post Brexit Britain would not be "plunged into a Mad Max style world".

So that's it, I'm afraid folks. Get yourself some leather chaps, cut your hair into a Mohawk and grab a steel boomerang because after March 2019 it's post-apocalyptic wacky races until further notice.

Because if we've learned anything these last twenty months, it's that anything the government assures us isn't going to happen, is going to happen.

If I'm completely honest, I find the prospect of perpetual leather-clad desert road war rather less depressing than the actual reality that awaits us. The real outcome will, I fear, be altogether more banal. That's what's coming, the worst of all dystopias. All the deprivation and oppression, none of the facepaint or car chases.

If anything, we're more likely to be headed for The Hunger Games than Mad Max... there's now more or less universal consensus that the only ones to benefit from Brexit will be those who are already disgustingly wealthy... perhaps they can ration out whatever scraps are left and make the rest of us fight for it on TV (I'll bet you Simon Cowell owns the format; I'll bet he copyrighted it on his way home from seeing the movie).

There does seem to be a strange convergence between dystopian science fiction and reality at the moment. As I'm sure you'll have noticed, the burgeoning "YA" (young adult - it's a polite way of saying "for teenagers") sci-fi genre has developed some recognisable tropes in the last decade or so. You have your grimly orthodox society presided over by a callous, wealthy elite, and the resistance movement, generally led by a plucky teenager - usually a girl - who is propelled to a position of reluctant leadership by unfortunate circumstances. It was hard to keep this analogy from one's mind this last week watching the impassioned, indeed furious speech made by 17 year old Emma Gonzalez after 17 of her schoolmates lost their lives in America's latest senseless school gun massacre.

It would be entirely fitting if the NRA's stranglehold over the gun law debate in the USA were to be broken once and for all, not by politicians seeking to burnish their progressive credentials, but by the simple, untempered rage of a generation sick of being told by their elected representatives that their lives are less important than filling the campaign contribution coffers.

One outwardly typical gun-toting good ol' boy took to YouTube after the atrocity in order to publicly destroy his own AR-15 (the military-grade assault rifle used in this incident, as in so many such attacks)... it was a fun weapon to shoot targets with, he admitted, but ultimately little use for hunting or self-defence (the "legitimate" gun uses that 2nd Amendment fundamentalists generally cite), and even if he were to sell it, that left the possibility of a future owner using it to slaughter innocents. If this latest tragedy - in which, it bears repeating, the murder weapon had been legally purchased by a 19 year old boy, two years too young to buy a bottle of beer in his home state - finally leaves a bad taste in the mouths of even the keenest gun enthusiast, then soon - hopefully - that sought-after "A" rating from the NRA will be a badge of shame, rather than honour, for a political candidate.

That's the thing about dystopian science fiction; it's as much about hope as about despair. It's not about the end of the world, it's about SURVIVING the end of the world. In even the bleakest visions of The End (one thinks of Cormac McCarthy's The Road) there's a glimmer of possibility of better things to come. The Hunger Games isn't about a corrupt, bloated oligarchy forcing poor kids to hunt each other for sport, it's about poor kids smashing a corrupt, bloated oligarchy. The Mad Max movies aren't about humanity descending into savagery; they're about a section of humanity finding a way to be decent and honourable even when nearly everyone else is descending into savagery. The Handmaid's Tale isn't about fascist theocracy crushing the freethinking human spirit, it's about fascist theocracy's failure to crush the freethinking human spirit.

Maybe when they write the story of our times, it won't be the tale of how small-mindedness and greed masquerading as patriotism crushed tolerance, openness and forebearance; it'll be how fake patriotism was unmasked as the smallmindedness and greed it truly was, and how tolerance, openness and forebearance won out after all. Maybe.

Resist.

~ o ~

40: The Lukewarm War

15th March 2018

There's an inherent risk in writing on the topic of the many and varied scandals and intrigues which currently beset the Trump administration; that is, over the course of the 48 hour delay between my writing this piece and its appearance in print, it's a pretty safe bet that the Trump administration will find itself beset by an entirely new set of scandals and intrigues, such as might render my two-day old observations pointlessly dated, despite the fact that the pre-existing scandals and intrigues will continue to metastasise unresolved in the background. The administration does at times resemble some sort of hideous experiment to determine just how many scandals and intrigues a government can withstand without collapsing (the answer, it transpires, is as many as you like, as long as Congress plays ball).

Perhaps surprisingly, just at the moment it seems that the scandal that might actually do the President some lasting harm is the one we'd all rather laughed off... the straw that may yet break the camel's back takes the entirely un-strawlike form of "adult performer" Ms. Stormy Daniels, to use her nom de porn. It says everything about the level of shock-fatigue that has set in during the Trump that while hardly anyone now disputes that the President did indeed have an affair with a porn star while his wife nursed their newborn son - a career-shattering development for any previous incumbent - the discussion of the case in the media thus far has consisted largely of parsing the small print about where the money came from. Nonetheless, where exactly the money did come from could yet turn out to be extremely problematic for the administration, above and beyond the toxic revelations still being regularly thrown up by Robert Mueller's investigation into the extent to which Mr. Trump's election victory was thanks to Russian dirty tricks.

That whole quagmire has taken a turn for the literally toxic these last couple of weeks, and dragged our own politics into the frey. At a press briefing this week, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders refused to condemn or even acknowledge the attempted murder carried out in Salisbury a few days earlier, apparently by Russian agents, of an ex-spy and his daughter. This leaves our own government in an impossibly awkward diplomatic situation; forced to confront not only an effective act of terrorism committed on our soil by a nuclear superpower, but the apparent toleration of, if not active endorsement of, this attack by the OTHER nuclear superpower. It's time to face the fact that this present iteration of Washington's "Special Relationship" is with Moscow, not with London.

It's perhaps also time to acknowledge that not only is the Cold War back on, it's slightly warmer now than it was back in the day. The whole question of whether Trump or his team "colluded" with the Russians to stitch up the 2016 election is worth investigating, but somewhat moot when one considers that Trump is colluding with the Russians RIGHT NOW. In plain sight.

Not only is he - illegally - refusing to implement the sanctions imposed on Russia for meddling in the last election, he's personally impeding efforts to stop Russia meddling in THIS year's "mid-term" elections. Plans have been drawn and budgets allocated by the US security services to block Russian interference; they await only the order from the White House to proceed. That order has not been given.

It's unknown - and irrelevant - whether Mr. Trump is actually receiving instructions from the Kremlin; the point is that he's doing absolutely everything that he would be doing if he were.

We have, as a culture (I'm speaking of "the western world" right now) been completely outplayed by Vladimir Putin. He's taken the single defining characteristic of western democracy - public opinion, and the fact that it still matters over here - and weaponised it against us. Russian "bots" have not only been found to have steered the tone of the online conversation in as anti-Hillary and pro-Trump direction as possible in 2016, they also meddled in the French election (boosting Le Pen), they're currently bigging up the hard right parties in Italy, and they played their part in the EU referendum here.

Basically, Russia's never met a western separatist or secessionist tendency that it didn't like. It's no coincidence that the western alliances (the EU, NATO) are being weakened and fragmented by populist and isolationist political movements, while Putin annexes chunks of some neighbouring nations and seeks to install loyal puppet regimes in others, mimicking the old Soviet Union's arrangement. We're getting smaller and smaller and more divided; Russia and its old empire is getting bigger and more united.

So there: as if we didn't already have enough reasons to resist and overturn Brexit; it'll throw a spanner in Vladimir Putin's plans to achieve global dominance. That's got to be worth writing some letters, hasn't it?

~ o ~

41: The Protocols Of The Elders of Islington

5th April 2018

I've been writing this column now for almost exactly 18 months (I know, doesn't time fly when you're mired in existential turmoil). Occasionally I revisit the older columns to see how times have changed (or not) in the last year and a half and how my opinions have changed (or not) along with them.

Very occasionally, one of my old columns regains a bit of currency and starts doing the online rounds again, turning up (and being shared) on the Twitters and Facebooks of the world. Such has been the case these last few days with the very first column I wrote for this paper, back in the (relatively) carefree days of September 2016.

As my more assiduous archivists (ie. my Mum) will recall, my first ever column was on the Labour Party's problem with insidious antisemitism, and made some observations on how it's possible to be both left-wing and bigoted, precisely because many people on the left erroneously believe that this ISN'T possible; that to be "left-wing" (whatever that actually means nowadays) is to immunise oneself against racism in all its forms (and antisemitism is a form of racism, although it's not JUST a form of racism, of which more in a moment). If you think you're incapable of making a given mistake, you're all the more likely to make that mistake.

As I observed at the time, that tendency both to harbour, and dismiss objections to, antisemitic mutterings was going to bite the Labour Party in the ass if left unaddressed, and well, I hate to say I told you so.

I won't relitigate whether Christine Shawcroft deserved to be kicked off the NEC (she did) or whether that mural was glaringly antisemitic (it was) and whether or not Jeremy Corbyn spotted this at the time (he SHOULD have done) and whether once it was pointed out to him he should have condemned it sooner and more unequivocally (yes). I'll merely observe that the same arguments are raging again and that the voices seeking to minimise or excuse the antisemitic undertones (or occasionally, melodies) to be heard coming from the British left just now are every bit as misguided and/or guileful as before.

Before we start: those of you currently saying "But what about racism in the Conservative Party?"; shut the hell up. Yes, the Tory party has a long-standing issue with racism in its ranks; this newspaper wouldn't exist were this not the case (the EU Referendum having been invoked as an effort to stop the xenophobic rump of the Conservative base being seduced away by UKIP), but a. That's not what we're talking about right now, and b. Racism isn't a finite resource. The incidence of racist attitudes in the Conservative Party doesn't in any way reduce the levels of racism in other parties. There's plenty to go round.

Most of the defences/denials of Labour antisemitism I've read in the last few days have taken the form of what I've called the All Lives Matter defence. You may remember "All Lives Matter" being the American right wing's rejoinder to the "Black Lives Matter" campaign of a couple of years back, and a low trick it was too; of course all lives matter equally but the point the BLM campaign was making is that in America they're not treated as such, especially by many police forces.

Similarly when Labour pundits/spokesthings respond to accusations of antisemitism with "We condemn racism in all its forms"... nice try, buster, but you're not being ACCUSED of "racism in all its forms", you're being accused of antisemitism, and antisemitism is subtly - but crucially - different from other forms of racism in how it's expressed and what underlies it.

This is a point I alluded to last time but which needs spelling out: antisemites - ESPECIALLY left-wing antisemites - don't think that antisemitism IS racism.

As ever, one of the most articulate voices on this topic has been David Baddiel; he wrote a brilliant article in The Times last week, in which he reiterated a point he's made before: the difference between Jew-hatred and other forms of racial bigotry is that antisemites both despise Jews as sub-human vermin AND accuse them of being the shadowy overlords who secretly run the world. The thing is, while David is entirely correct in this, I don't think BOTH these suspicions are necessary to be antisemitic; just the second will do.

If your central political motivation, if the great injustice against which you rail, is the suffering caused by wealth inequality, and you've been persuaded, one way or another, that this inequality is NOT just a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the hierarchical way human societies tend to organise themselves (until forced to do otherwise by progressive governments), but rather is being DELIBERATELY engineered by an invisible cabal of evil, hunched, money-grubbing plutocrats who just HAPPEN to have big noses and names ending in -stein and -berg, then of course you're going to seek to expose and smash this conspiracy, in the name of the downtrodden of the world...

That's the difference; a lot of antisemites don't think they're being racist; they think they're fearlessly confronting a global conspiracy. Of course, they ARE being racist, since even if this conspiracy existed (it doesn't) it would still be racist to suspect all Jews of being sponsors and beneficiaries of that conspiracy (as they do). Just as it IS racist to require Jews to constantly justify or condemn the actions of the Israeli state (as happens ALL the time on Twitter and Facebook).

That's why a blanket condemnation of "racism in all its forms" does NOT suffice as a condemnation of antisemitism in particular. You have to say "Racism is bad, oh and by the way, there is NOT a secret society of rich Jews running the world, and even if there were, it wouldn't be David Baddiel's fault, so cut that crap out, the lot of you."

~ o ~

42: Wake Up, Sheeple

19th April 2018

We live in an age when lunacy, in many forms and at many levels, romps (largely) unchallenged through civil, political and international discourse. As such it's increasingly difficult to pick out individual instances of insanity from the constant droning white noise of craziness. Indeed, an event has to be what used to be considered a once-in-a-lifetime jaw-dropper just to garner a moment's attention.

I write this shortly after the revelation, in a New York court, that the mysterious "third client" of President Trump's "lawyer" Michael Cohen is none other than Sean Hannity, barrel-headed right wing pundit, staunch-to-the-point-of-devotional advocate of the President and pretty much cock of the walk over at Fox News these days (since a flurry of sexual misconduct accusations forced previous big dog Bill O'Reilly to resign and spend more time apologising to his family).

This is the kind of outrageous plot twist that gets TV soap operas cancelled. George Lucas is probably watching CNN right now thinking "This is all a bit of a stretch...". It's hard to escape the conclusion that reality has finally jumped the shark, and it's time to reboot the format and bring in some new writers for the next season.

Yes, it's hard to be stupid or crazy enough to stand out nowadays.

And then we come to the Flat Earthers.

Some of you may remember that I touched on this a few weeks ago; that desperately though we might wish that this were all an internet wind-up, it is a fact that there is a growing body of opinion - among people who can actually use computers - that the Earth is in fact a flat disc, and that all evidence to the contrary (that is to say, all scientific progress since Aristotle) is a foul hoax, perpetrated by... well, we'll get to that in a minute.

I ended up wasting a decent sized chunk of last week on a Twitter "debate" with two of these dingbats. I say debate; it's hard to debate anyone whose response to any objection to their brain-fryingly obviously false premise is that literally ALL information that contradicts their position is a FRAUD, disseminated deliberately to conceal THE TRUTH.

There are so many flaws in this argument it's hard to know where to start, but the major one is this: if, as these nutters propose, there has been a FOUR THOUSAND YEAR LONG conspiracy, by The Powers That Be (and, evidently, have always Been) to promote the "false" theory that the Earth is a globe, and to prevent at all costs the discovery that it is in fact flat... why are the Powers That Be perfectly content to let these guys and their mates blurt "the truth" all over the internet? I mean, the stakes would appear to be pretty high, if hiding the true shape of the Earth has necessitated constructing an entire spurious scientific framework and promulgating it for centuries. Those dastardly Powers obviously consider it INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT that nobody ever finds out that the world is flat, and yet, for all their omnipotence, they can't get it together to have a bunch of YouTube videos taken down.

I think that's what lies at the heart of a lot of conspiracy theories; the desire to live in a regulated world, even if it's regulated by The Bad Guys. I've been involved with the sceptical/humanist movement for a few years now, and I've met, and read testimonials by, many activists who were raised in a strictly devout environment and then broke free of religion; a common theme is that the hardest thing to give up was that idea that the universe is being supervised, that things are happening according to a conscious design and that ultimately, everyone gets what they truly deserve. If that's the kind of universe you've always believed yourself to be living in, then abandoning that belief and accepting that you're stuck in a universe in which there IS no guiding intelligence, in which things just happen because of blind cause and effect, and in which, horrifyingly, there IS no justice beyond that which we can impose, and bad things will always happen to good people and vice versa, must indeed be terrifying.

So it is with conspiracy theories; that the world is in constant turmoil because The Powers That Be desire it that way and engineer events accordingly is perhaps a LESS worrying concept than the truth of the matter; that no-one is in control of events, there ARE no Powers That Be, that our ostensible leaders are almost universally out of their depth and improvising like crazy and that literally nobody knows what the hell they're playing at. Watching the unfolding shambles of Brexit, and the Trump White House being exposed as not just a criminal enterprise but an incompetent criminal enterprise, I don't know how you could come to any other conclusion.

There's also, while I'm here, an element of one-upmanship between conspiracy theorists these days with regard to how far down "the rabbit hole" their theory of choice goes; a competition to see what level of "truth" they think they've uncovered. It's not enough these days to blame global poverty on a shadowy cabal of Jewish financiers; since the rise of David Icke you have to blame it on a shadowy cabal of Jewish financiers who are secretly shape-shifting alien lizards or risk being dismissed as a credulous fool. Similarly, while for decades we've had the "moon-truthers" saying to the rest of us "Ha! You fools! Do you really believe we went to the moon?!" now you've got the Flat Earthers saying to the moon-truthers "Ha! Do you really believe the moon EXISTS?!"

No. Really. They think it's a big lamp.

~ o ~

43: No Offence

3rd May 2018

It's quite the week to be in the comedy business, and in particular the political comedy business. As I write, the fall out from Michelle Wolf's set at the White House Correspondence Dinner continues to rain down, and the ultimate outcome is as yet unknown. The American media - and just for once, not just the right wing-nut fringe of the American media - seems to be joining in a chorus of condemnation of Wolf, with particular reference to the cruelty of her digs at White House press spokesperson Sarah Sanders, who was in attendance on behalf of her absent boss.

What's telling about a lot of the criticism being aimed at Wolf is not that it's unfair (although it is: she turned up and did exactly what she'd been hired to do) but that it's dishonest. Provably, demonstrably dishonest. Eminent print and TV journalists are lambasting Wolf for having made fun of Sanders's appearance for cheap laughs. This did not happen.

I can't stress this enough: what Wolf is being criticised for - and in certain quarters, threatened with career-ending boycotts for - is something she DID NOT DO. This is easily verified: her whole set is up on YouTube. If you're interested, the relevant section comes at about 13 minutes in. Wolf makes reference (complimentary reference, in fact) to Sanders's make up by way of taking a dig at her blithe disregard for facts.

Now I'm sure Sanders did feel uncomfortable; nobody likes being called out for being a liar and a bully, which is why I've spent my life confronting bullies and try to keep lying down to a bare minumum, but at NO stage did Michelle Wolf call Sarah Sanders ugly or make any other reference to her physique or appearance, and yet it is for that offence - that entirely imaginary offence - that she finds herself being hauled over the media's coals.

Of course, it's possible that Wolf's decriers are sincere in their outrage, and simply Didn't Get The Joke. This is always a danger with comedy; it's inherently subjective and will, on occasion, be assessed by those with either a limited sense of humour and imagination, or indeed, none whatsoever of either. A few years ago I retweeted a joke on Twitter; it was just after North Korea had successfully hacked Sony Pictures' computers (apparently in revenge for a Seth Rogen movie). The joke took the form of a photo of Kim Jong Un sat at a computer terminal, surrounded by uniformed generals, to which someone had added the caption "I dunno, try "password"... OMG!"

Now the joke, obviously, is the idea that Sony's sole layer of internet security had consisted of a single firewall to which the password was "password". Nice little joke, as the few dozen people who retweeted MY retweet seemed to agree. But not one guy; soon after I posted the picture this one Tweeter started demanding I apologise for posting such a RACIST joke, and when I demurred, started calling me a racist to anyone who would listen (I seem to recall he didn't have many followers). Utterly bewildered, I managed - after several attempts - to get him to explain WHY he thought the joke was racist, and he explained that OBVIOUSLY the point of the joke is that Koreans are all stupid.

He hadn't got the joke.

It's very difficult to explain to someone who hasn't "got" a joke, but THINKS they have, how mistaken they are. I explained the Kim Jong Un joke to the angry tweeter but he wasn't having it; I think I may have blocked him in the end. For all I know he's out there calling me an unrepentant racist to this very day.

There is another explanation for Michelle Wolf's pillorying; the journalists in question may be feigning outrage for what Wolf "said" about Sarah Sanders as cover for their genuine embarrassment over what she said about THEM. Wolf pointed out that Trump (and let us not forget that poor old Sarah Sanders was only at that dinner because the President himself was, for the second year running, too cowardly to attend himself) is the media's creation; that the press and TV hyped him up and now dine out on his excesses, whether approvingly or in (mock?) horror. That while minorities suffer and world peace hangs in the balance, the news organisations have become spokespersons and cheerleaders rather than tribunes, for fear of losing that most treasured commodity, "access".

Thus far Michelle Wolf has not apologised, nor should she. Disappointingly, the organisers of the Dinner have issued a statement sort-of apologising on her behalf, and of course, the Great Orange Hope himself, who spent the evening hiding from the dinner at a rally in Michigan surrounded by a security blanket of cheering supporters in MAGA hats, is now calling for the Dinner - the which, incidentally, he is the ONLY President not to be brave enough to attend (the sole previous absentee was Ronald Reagan in 1981, and he was recovering from an assassination attempt) to be abolished.

Causing offence, where offence is the appropriate response, is a satirist's job. You can live in a free society, or you can live without fear of being offended. Not both. Now, perhaps more than any time in living memory, in the US and the UK, we need to be offending each other more, not less. Because when we're offended, when we're angry, when we're arguing... at least we're awake.

~ o ~

44: Incompetently Celibate

10th May 2018

I've been thinking, as it would appear have quite a few columnists of late, about the whole "incel" thing.

Now "incel", if you are fortunate enough to have avoided this particular jargon-quagmire, is an abbreviation of "involuntarily celibate" and has become the chosen self-identification of a growing (mainly online, surprise surprise) movement of young men who are railing against the unfairness of the world and specifically the unfairness of the womenfolk of that world's refusal to have sex with them.

Particular attention has been paid to articles written in the New York Times by Ross Douthat, and in The Spectator, by Toby Young, which (apparently) make scant reference to the fact that the "incel" movement has recently graduated from online whining to full-on terrorism and mass murder - the recent truck attack in Toronto was carried out by a self-proclaimed "incel" who dedicated it to the memory of another young man who reacted to his own romantic failures by going on a murderous misogynistic rampage back in 2014 (I know the names of both individuals but I'm not repeating them here). Rather, the pieces take (perhaps ironic) pity on the "incels" and ponder (perhaps ironically) the possibility of undertaking a programme of "sex redistribution" to address their "needs".

Now I added the "apparently" to that last paragraph as I confess I haven't yet read the Toby Young piece; as I've mentioned before, he blocked me on Twitter years ago and the piece itself currently lies behind the Spectator's firewall. Since I'm damned if I'm going to shell out for a 12-week minimum subscription to read one article I've decided to let that one go.

I'm willing to guess at the piece's overall tone, though; the same sort of smirking, not quite facetious, hey-chill-out-I'm-just-throwing-these-ideas-out-there timbre that Douthat employs in his own piece, so that we can pretend it was all just a joke in the event of some humourless liberal coming along and pointing out that a. these guys have actually started killing people, and as such finding ways to accommodate them is indistinguishable from the "negotiating with terrorists" that conservatives dismiss as anathema, and b. (and this is the big one) you can't talk about "redistributing sex" without contemplating subjecting women to state-mandated rape.

Because THAT'S what we're talking about: to class sex - which is an activity which by definition requires the participation of other people - as some sort of distributable resource or commodity, requires us to class THOSE PEOPLE (ie. let's face it, women) as a distributable resource or commodity. Nobody has the right to demand access to the fun bits of other people's bodies. I wonder (and I'm not alone in this) how the "incels" or their apologists would feel if THEIR fun bits were to be made mandatorily available for the use of lonely gay men; that might give them a bit of badly-needed perspective.

(And yes I'm sure that the point of Douthat's piece - and possibly Young's - was at least partly to draw sardonic comparison between the incels' cry for sex redistribution with left-wingers' calls for wealth redistribution; "how is one wrong and the other okay? Get out of THAT one lefties" but if that's the case they're STILL equating the sexual consent of women with negotiable goods, so my point still stands, so ner.)

The thing is, for all that column-slinging smart-arses like Young, Douthat and yes, me, might poke around in "incel" philosophy to fill space and get attention (*waves hello*) the fact is that if you peruse any of the incels' own online chat - and I strongly recommend that you don't - then you'll see that state-mandated rape and forced sexual submission of women is EXACTLY what a lot of them are advocating.

So in the unlikely event that we have any "incels" reading, I'd like to address them directly for a moment.

Hi guys.

You're NEARLY right. Incel isn't short for "Involuntarily Celibate", it's "incompetently celibate". You see this is nothing new, guys. Back in my day, we just called it "inability to get laid", and we responded by going home and working on our personal charm and personal hygiene. We didn't seal ourselves into a bubble of commiseration and conspiracy and try to turn being a hopeless failure with the ladies into a "movement".

What you're suffering from is just a recodified version of old-fashioned bitterness. Bitterness is an easy trap to fall into when things go disappointingly; rather than examine where you might have gone wrong, it's much easier to proclaim that you never had a chance, that the game was rigged, that you're the victim of intrigue and shenanigans. It's comforting, but it's a dead end. You can't fix the bad situation because you've convinced yourself that you played no part in its going bad. So it stays bad, and gets worse, until you (in some cases) descend into murderous self-pity.

Your problem isn't that you want to kill women because they won't have sex with you, it's that women won't have sex with you because they can tell you'd probably kill them if they changed their minds. You can't denounce all women as evil manipulative bitches AND act surprised that they won't go to bed with you. Make the connection, for heaven's sake.

Guys, women aren't the enemy and more importantly, they're not THINGS to be acquired. They're people. They're individuals. Some are wonderful, most are okay, a few are horrendous, same as men. Women are our equals, to be befriended and associated with, to share interests with and hang out with, clothes on and upright. Learn to see women as human and perhaps they'll start to see YOU as human, and then all sorts of wonderful things might happen.

Or you could just learn guitar. That's what did it for me.

Oh, and Brexit is still rubbish (phew, that was close).

~ o ~

45: Remainers - Infinity War

17th May 2018

I don't know what your favourite thing is about this newspaper; perhaps it's the publication's mere existence; a printed voice of sanity in the maelstrom of blimpish Brexit lunacy which otherwise dominates the newsstands. Perhaps it's the cast of erudite, incisive and downright glamorous regular contributors (blushes). But I'm certain that for a good few of you, it's the fact that this paper is just about the only publication on sale in the UK or indeed anywhere else in which you don't have to read about Avengers: Infinity War.

Sorry...

Now don't panic, this is not a review - that's not my remit, although if The New European felt like running a regular movie review column I wouldn't say no (winks at the editor). Besides, if you're among the 3 or 4% of the human race who haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War yet, you probably have your reasons, and whatever those reasons may be it's unlikely that a humble columnist like me is going to change your mind. Similarly, I'm going to be careful to avoid spoilers in my brief mention of the movie, although again, if you haven't seen it by now you're not likely to be too concerned about me blowing the ending.

It is a JAW DROPPER of an ending, though. There was nearly a riot at the end of the screening I went to, being as it was an afternoon showing with an audience full of (by now screaming and wailing) children. I actually stood up as the credits rolled to address the tumult, pointing out that there's another Avengers movie scheduled for next year, and that as such the story doesn't end there (a bunch of people who were in the Richmond Odeon a month ago just read that and thought "Oh so THAT'S who that idiot was").

I bring up Avengers: Infinity War because I was reminded this week of its bad guy, the unstoppable alien warlord Thanos. He's a marvellous creation, both technically (he's played by the actor Josh Brolin, rendered as a computer-generated purple-skinned giant; the best non-Andy Serkis such performance thus far committed to film) and thematically: the film is, despite the title, all about him, with the titular super-heroes largely reduced to the role of helpless spectators to Thanos's genocidal rampage.

What makes Thanos a truly fascinating bad guy, as is the case with all really interesting bad guys, both literary and historical, is his unshakeable conviction that he is in fact the good guy. Plagued by visions of the slow death of the universe through starvation and depletion of resources, he is resolved to prevent this by wiping out one half of its population, thus enabling the survivors (he believes) to live in peace and plenty. He harbours no ill will against those he destroys in the course of his quest; he simply regards them as lacking the clarity of vision to perceive the righteousness of his cause.

You may be wondering what on earth has happened in my life to put me in mind of purple alien warlords... Well the inspiration came in the ostensibly innocuous form of a tweet from the pro-Commonwealth economist and evangelical Brexiteer Andrew Lilico. Responding to a tweet by a concerned Remainer about the probability of ten years of economic chaos (an extremely conservative estimate), Lilico sniffed, "Brexit isn't mainly about us as individuals. It's about the future of our country and its contribution to the world and world history over the long term... Your next ten years are irrelevant."

"Your next ten years are irrelevant".

Now maybe that was meant as a specific dig at his interlocutor at that moment (the concerned tweeter was, it's worth mentioning, an editor on the BBC's Newsnight), but if it applies to anyone in particular it applies to all of us. Our next ten years - if current projections are to be believed, our next thirty or forty years - are irrelevant to the Brexiters. All that matters is their IDEA, and the chance to realise that IDEA in all its glorious purity. Your job is expendable. Your health is expendable. Your kids' future is expendable. This is pure zealotry, pure ideology at its most pious and ugly. Lilico and his fellow cultists are ready and willing to sacrifice you and yours on the altar of their jealous Europhobic gods, and if you have a problem with that, well, it's just that you lack the vision to perceive the righteousness of their cause.

I've been saying for a while that Brexit has operated more as a religion rather than as a political movement, trading in appeals to emotion and "belief" while the Remainers forlornly try to peddle facts - but as the last rational arguments for Brexit fail and are exposed, it's starting to bear a worrying resemblance to a millennialist death-cult. The bus is headed for the cliff, the doors are locked, they're singing their songs of freedom as they floor the accelerator and we're going with them to The Better Place whether we like it or not.

This is why it's essential that we prove the new High Priest Of Brexit, Jacob Rees-Demagogg, wrong, when he loftily proclaims (as he did this week) that the Remainers are fighting "their last rear guard action" against Brexit and that soon all resistance will be a thing of the past.

If Brexit happens, then the last day of the campaign to avert it will be the first day of the campaign to reverse it. Perhaps we'll be renamed Returners by then but we're not going anywhere, Jacob. Get ready for the long haul; we already are.

Resist.

~ o ~

46: Check Your Absence Of Disadvantage

7th June 2018

In May 2018 The New European published a special one-off all-female writers edition, guest edited by Caroline Criado-Perez. This of course required me to take the week off; this was the column I submitted upon my return.

~ o ~

Something which most at least outwardly progessive-thinking people can generally be expected to agree upon is the principle of "the level playing field"; the idea that a person should be given, in as much as is possible, the chance to succeed according to their personal merits rather than (in the case of the fortunate few) have it handed to them on a plate or (in the case of everyone else) be required to surmount insurmountable odds simply in order to get a look-in.

Even outwardly non-progressive thinking people can be heard to speak out in favour of "the level playing field"; generally libertarian types objecting to any attempt by the state or other supervisory body to interfere in what they see as the "natural" processes of society in general and the distribution of wealth and/or opportunity in particular.

What these libertarian types are missing (apart from a proper understanding of the meaning of the word "freedom" - it either applies to everyone or no-one at all, but that's a rant for another time) is an essential fact about level playing fields: they don't occur in nature.

If you're playing on a level field, it means that someone levelled it.

That wealth, power and influence tend to collect in certain narrow social strata is an inevitable by-product of the familial and tribal way in which human society tends to organise itself, and once gathered, this power and influence does not easily disperse, unless required to do so by moral, political, or, on occasion, BRUTE force. Whatever opportunities those of us not born with silverware protruding from every orifice might have to make something of our lives have been hard won by the (literal) blood sweat and tears of previous generations, and, as any good groundskeeper will tell you, the job of keeping the field level is never done. There'll always be a need to get the roller out once in a while.

What sometimes surprises me is that there is a rump of supposedly progressive opinion that, while it recognises the truth of all this with regard to the inequalities between the social and economic "classes", can't accept that exactly the same thing applies to inequality between the sexes.

Some of you have asked how I felt about yielding my column space in last week's edition to THE FEMINISTS; well, on a political level it was a good thing and something more papers and magazines could give a try (although of course I guess the ultimate goal is to achieve the kind of gender parity where a publication could put out an all-women edition and nobody would notice - I bet there are a couple of entirely male-written papers on the stands even as we speak); on a personal level it was quite nice to get the Bank Holiday off and while this is gonna leave a slight monetary shortfall at the end of the month, let's face it, there are still a hell of a lot of advantages to being a middle-aged straight white guy.

Or rather there are a lot of not-disadvantages.

I've been pondering WHY there is still, as I alluded to earlier, a degree of resistance even among supposedly "woke" types to the whole concept of "privilege", in the sense in which the word is used with reference to social inequality, and I'm beginning to wonder if "privilege" wasn't perhaps an unfortunate choice of word.

Don't get me wrong; that which "privilege" describes in this context is absolutely a thing, be it "male privilege", "white privilege", "cis privilege" or any of the variants: the unearned benefit of being fortunate enough to be in "the majority", to be "normal". That's real, and I benefit from it every day. My acknowledging that is neither a boast nor an admission of culpability, it's simply a fact: as a straight white guy, I can actively oppose sexism, racism and homophobia all I like, but I'm profiting from racism, sexism and homophobia every minute I'm alive. Or at the very least, I'm being exempted the impediments that these beliefs impose upon others.I'm not sure on which side of the pond the word "privilege" was first used in this context but I'd be surprised if it was over here; I think the resistance to the concept of male/white/straight/cis/etc. privilege in this country might stem from the more traditional usage of that term: to describe the high-born, the privately and expensively educated, the impeccably shod and magnificently well-connected; the ACTUAL elite. To British ears, "you are privileged" sounds like "you don't have a care in the world".

When a guy who happens to be straight and white but in every other regard comes from the bottom rungs of the ladder: poor family, badly-equipped state school, lousy job prospects, no property-buying prospects whatsoever, finds himself being sternly reminded (generally by people a few rungs above him) to "check his privilege", his indignant reaction might be understandable.

Because what we're talking about is not really privilege; it's not even really advantage; it's the absence of DISadvantage. However much hardship a straight white guy may have to deal with, there are whole WORLDS of hardship he'll never experience. And however meagre his prospects, they are nonetheless (perhaps barely perceptibly) enhanced by the fact that opportunities for happiness and advancement are being actively denied to others.

Once people get that this is what we're talking about, the truth of it is undeniable (that's not to say it can't BE denied; just not honestly denied). Once we communicate with each other, it's my experience that most people tend to be on the same page about stuff. We misunderstand each other far more than we actually disagree.

Do we think "check your absence of disadvantage" could catch on as a slogan?

~ o ~

47: Stop Believing

21st June 2018

I'm about make what may or may not be a startling admission; see what you think...

I had, all things considered, a pretty happy time at school. I guess I was a bit lonely in my first few years at grammar school; I was, after all a weird blabbermouthed over-achieving fat kid with all that this entails, but by the time I was about 15 or 16 I seemed to have the measure of the place and it, moreover, seemed to have the measure of me. I was doing fine in most of my subjects, I had a little gang of loyal and equally nerdy mates; it was more or less all you could wish for at that age.

And yet, looking back, I don't think a week went by when I didn't at least idly contemplate what it would be like to turn up to school with a machine gun and lay waste to the damn place.

Like I said, I'm not sure if that's a startling admission or not; I've asked a few of my (male) contemporaries if they'd experienced similar urges during their adolescence and most of them have answered in the affirmative. But the point is that idly contemplate laying waste to my school with a machine gun was all I - or any of my British contemporaries- ever did, because the possibility of enacting that fantasy was precisely nil.

You don't - unless you really do have some serious psychological issues - fixate upon those desires that you know can never be acted upon. Since I, and my fellow limey nerds, knew that there was no chance of ever getting our hands on a machine gun - or indeed any gun - that grim impulse remained a vague gruesome shadow in the back of our minds, never to be explored or elaborated on. If, on the other hand, we'd known that our dad's rifle was in the garage, or that there was a loaded handgun in our parents' nightstand drawer... who knows whether that fantasy might have started to assume a tantalising tangibility, until one day the temptation to Show All Those Bastards became too great...

I was reminded of this last week as news broke of yet another mass school shooting in the US, in Santa Fe Texas this time (it is becoming hard to keep track) and I beheld, once again, American political and social commentators performing the most bizarre moral gymnastics in order to pin the blame for the tragedy on literally ANY factor other than That Which Must Not Be Spoken, ie. it's way too easy for Americans to get guns.

This time we've heard that the problem is that schools have too many doors (?); we've had a call for a ban on trenchcoats (they can have my trenchcoat when they pry it off my cold dead shoulders) and, of course, the parade of usual suspects: violent video games, hip hop, poor mental health provision, the internet and the teaching of evolution in school. What nobody - or at least nobody in a position of political influence - seems willing to admit, or even to own up to having noticed, is that all of these things; the games, the music, the net, the mental health issues and the secular education - ALL these things are just as prevalent in every other country in the developed world. What ISN'T happening in every other country in the developed world is a mass school shooting every two to three months (or all but a few of the other 33,000 gun related deaths a year in America).

What we're seeing in the American political/media establishment with regard to the gun issue is nothing less than a kind of wilful insanity; the truth of the matter is staring them all in the face, but everyone is furiously trying not to see it. There's an elephant in the room, and he's holding an AR-15.

But we mustn't sneeringly dismiss this as a uniquely American malaise; rather it's the most tragic American manifestation of the disease which is afflicting public discourse all over the world. The biggest threat to human welfare right now isn't terrorism, or climate change, or war... it's the thing which sustains and underlies all these things: belief.

The American pro-gun position is a matter of faith; every available fact or datum tells pro-gun Americans that gun proliferation is making them exponentially LESS safe, but this doesn't impact their BELIEF that it makes them safer. Faith positions aren't based on facts, so no amount of evidence will alter them.

Similarly, every bit of information we now have about Brexit confirms what we Remainers have been saying for over two years; it'll diminish our country in every imaginable way. But this has no effect on the belief of the hardcore Brexiters that it'll be the saving of the nation (even if they couldn't tell you what it needed saving from). The fact that everything Jeremy Corbyn has done since the referendum demonstrates that he's an ideological Europhobe doesn't alter the entirely baseless belief of his pro-EU supporters that he's playing a long game and will unfurl his true Remain colours in due course, and, while I'm here, the fact that Brexit will hurt the poor and working class worse than anyone has no bearing on Jeremy Corbyn's belief that the interests of the poor and working class can only be served by the implementation of true socialism, even if he has to enact Brexit (and hurt the poor and working class) in order to achieve this.

The real battle now isn't left vs. right, or east vs. west, or even rich vs. poor. It's between facts and fantasy, between reality and faith, between free thinking and wishful thinking. Each political "side" has adherents of both. Perhaps it's time to abandon the old tribal loyalties and forge new alliances with the sane members of all parties.

So, British Rational Party, anyone...?

~ o ~

48: The World's Biggest Elite

28th June 2018

Like many of you in body and all of you in spirit, I imagine, I spent Saturday last taking part in what became known as The People's Vote March, and have the badly sunburnt ever-expanding forehead to prove it. I recorded my experiences of, and reflections upon, the day itself in a twelve minute video which I posted on my YouTube channel the next morning. This video is now attracting pretty much exactly the kind of comments you'd expect, but - joy of joys - as the video's originator, I get to delete any comments I don't like. It's like having my own private Twitter in which I can make all the idiots disappear, Thanos-style, with a snap of my gauntleted fingers. I am drunk with power.

For what it's worth, the now-deleted comments were broadly of a piece with the snark which has been directed at the march throughout the media, social and otherwise; the event's detractors are not concentrating their fire on the aims of the march itself, or on the (impeccable) conduct of the marchers, nor are they attempting to throw shade on the numbers of attendees (understandable, given that it far exceeded everyone's expectations; I've heard various estimates ranging from 150,000 to half a million but in any event it was certainly well into six figures). Rather, the critics are, without exception, picking on what they perceive to be the demographic make-up of the protest.

Spiked online's Jon Holbrook got in early on Saturday afternoon, opining on Twitter that "The #PeoplesVote is for the white middle class united in their contempt for ordinary people", while Julia Dunning-Kruger, sorry, Hartley-Brewer, in an instance of a lump of pure non-reflective obsidian calling a kettle black, chimed in with " 'What do we want?' 'Focaccia bread with rosemary and sea salt to be sold at a reasonable price at Waitrose.' 'When do we want it?' 'Now!' ". Ha ha! Do you see? Because middle class! She's a card.

I've always gone by the principle that to resort to ad hominem attacks is to concede you've lost the argument, but I suppose it's vaguely possible that these commentators genuinely think they're making some sort of valid point. I'm just having difficulty imagining what they think that point might be.

One thing I do know, though, is this idea that the Remainers are all members of some sort of detached elite class, who are somehow entirely untouched by economic strife and social turmoil, while the true champions of the working class are those who are advocating abandoning the working class to their inevitable post-Brexit fate of joblessness, poverty, indignity and disease, REALLY needs to go away.

I don't know how typical I was of the marchers on Saturday - I heard accents from around the country (and elsewhere), I saw skin tones of various hues (indeed mine varied quite a bit over the course of the day - REALLY should have worn a hat) but for what it's worth, and not that it's any of Jon or Julia's business, I can't afford private medical insurance; if the NHS bites the dust I'm as screwed as anyone else. My kids go to state schools, as did I; if the education system collapses they're in as much trouble as anyone else's children. I work in, I guess, an unusual industry but it's just as vulnerable to economic woes as any other enterprise; my income took a massive hit after the 2008 crash which it's never fully recovered from.

My point is, I AM "ordinary people", I'm just an ordinary person with a bit of a profile which I'm going to keep using to advance the causes that matter to me. And not deliberately bankrupting and humiliating my country to avoid admitting we made a mistake is a cause which matters to me.

Meanwhile, of course, the Corbyntologists, hearing that their Seven Nation Army chant of "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" was re-worded "WHERE'S Jeremy Corbyn" by waggish marchers have decided that the SOLE PURPOSE of the march was to undermine St. Jeremy. That was it. No other concerns or motivations; it was ALL a foul Blairite plot to make Jeremy look bad.

So we have new-money tax dodging hedge fund bandits and old-money imperialist fantasists cheerleading Brexit from one side, and ivory tower-dwelling Year Zero socialist theoreticians cheerleading it from the other, but somehow WE'RE the elitists. Got it.

They're rattled, though. Oh boy, are they rattled. You can't look at a protest of that size and dismiss ALL of them as "the elite", for all they're trying. And that, in the end, is the most significant thing about Saturday's march; the fact that this movement, OUR movement, far from dwindling, far from fading away, is GROWING, in strength, numbers and vehemence. All the more remarkable when you consider that not only are we being attacked and slandered by BOTH sides of the political establishment, but for two years we've been told that we're fighting not even a losing battle, but a LOST battle. A battle that's already over.

Well it isn't over, not by a long chalk. The Brexiteers on both left and right can sneer all they want, but they saw what we can do and they know now that there will be NO getting rid of us. Because for all their bluster, they know something; something they will never admit, but which is burning a hole in their minds.

We're right, and they're wrong.

Resist.

~ o ~

49. Working Class Villain

5th July 2018

Last week, you may recall, I was reflecting on my participation in the previous weekend's "People's Vote" march, and in particular, the fact that the pushback against the event from both the Tory and Corbyntologist wings of the Brexiteer movement had consisted neither of criticism of the march's objectives, nor snark at the attendance figures... Rather, they dismissed the march's validity purely based on the imagined demographic make up of the protesters themselves. The march didn't count, they said, because the marchers were all a bit middle class.

Bereft of any meaningful response to the points we're raising, the Brexiteers are resorting to trying to invalidate those points by denying us the right even to make them in the first place. Apparently, if you can be indentifed as being anything other than working class, you need to shut up, say the (largely middle and upper class) Brexit faithful.

Or, indeed, it would appear, the wrong KIND of working class.

This week, an entirely innocuous tweet by the great character actor Eddie Marsan was the centre of a flurry of criticism, mainly from the Corbynista side. Eddie, the Stepney-born son of a lorry driver and a dinner lady, had mused on how his unpleasant childhood memories of pubs being dens of hyper-masculine drunken misogyny and implicit domestic violence has left him with a lifelong dislike of the establishments; these days, he said, he prefers to go to dinner parties with friends of both sexes.

This tweet was immediately seized on as proof of Eddie's class treachery, snobbery and (somehow) sexism, with Owen Jones, who, born as he was in Sheffield in 1984, knows far more about 1970s East End pubs than Eddie ever will, flagging up the tweet to his followers as "problematic", whereupon the inevitable pile-on commenced.

Why, you might ask, would such a casual, personal, and heartfelt observation as Eddie's provoke such ire and outrage? Well, Eddie Marsan is a vocal, articulate and passionate critic of Jeremy Corbyn and in particular his unbending support of the Conservative government's implacable march towards Brexit, noting (as have many) that this will have a catastrophic effect on the well-being and dignity of the very people Corbyn professes to represent and protect. The trouble, from the Corbynistas' perspective, is that Eddie has the temerity to do this while being a working class guy from Stepney, and as such, difficult to dismiss as the sort of pampered bourgeois fop that all we Remainers are supposed to be.

This posed a problem for the Lexiteers (a useful if slightly clunky portmanteau descriptive term for left-wing Brexiteers), given that, as we've established, their whole case against Remainers is not that we're wrong (because we're not) but that we're too posh and detached from reality to be allowed to express an opinion. What to do about Eddie from Stepney? But wait! He's said he doesn't like pubs! And, he goes to (you can just hear the sing-song intonation) DINNER parties! Oo-OO-oo! Got him! He's a LUVVIE!

Fortunately, so far, this attempt to silence or discredit Eddie has largely backfired and succeeded mainly in exposing the paucity of the Lexiteers' position. Like I said last week, when you crack out the ad hominems, you've already lost.

But while we're here, let's examine that "position" in all its absurdity, shall we?

For a start, this whole idea that Brexit is a noble working class cause while Remainers are all effete poshos is very much a London/South East-centred notion. If the Brexiters (incoming irony alert) cared to venture outside their Metropolitan bubble, they'd find that working-class Remainerism is not just a thing but a very widespread thing. I've been spending a lot of time in my old hometown of Liverpool recently and will soon head back to my adopted hometown of Edinburgh; the thought that to oppose Brexit is to be a moneyed dilettante would cause hilarity and fury in both of those cities.

And even if there were any truth in this notion, so what? Even if it were the case that all working class people think Brexit is a great idea while all middle class people think it's a bad idea, that would have NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on whether it's a good idea or not. Something is either true or it isn't, irrespective of how many people think it is, or indeed what their socio-economic bracket might be. That's not a political statement, it's an epistemological statement. It's just how reality works.

Again we see that the real divide today is not between left and right, between rich and poor, but between fantasy and reality. Between those who can discern and address facts, and those who cling to comforting myths. Brexit is such a myth, and we must continue to reject and expose it as such.

Because it's working; discontent in the Tory party with both the incompetence of the government and the fanaticism of the Hard Brexiters is on the point of becoming outright revolt, and Labour supporters are clamouring for Corbyn to see sense and start actually representing the people he claims to.

Keep pushing. The cracks are showing and the momentum, ironically enough, is with us.

Resist.

~ o ~

50: Stop

12th July 2018

Written in the immediate chaotic aftermath of the resignations of David Davis, Boris Johnson and three junior ministers in the space of 24 hours...

~ o ~

Ok, time out. Cool your boots. Easy, tiger. Whoa there. Hang fire. Take five. Hold your horses. Phrase it any damn way you want to but please, for the love of whatever it is you pray to, just STOP. ENOUGH.

I'm writing this with one nervous eye on my Twitter feed as, at time of scribing, in the last twenty-four hours we've had FIVE cabinet resignations (the big two that everyone's talking about plus two junior ministers and a PPS), the installation of Jeremy Hunt as Foreign Secretary (so we should have sold half of our embassies to Richard Branson by the end of the summer) and the job of Brexit Secretary going to a glowering, square-headed individual called Dominic Raab, who not only has the name and face of a 1980s Doctor Who villain but also (a cursory glance at his voting record reveals) the agenda of one. I've put off writing and submitting this column until the absolute last possible minute, for fear that the news will break of Theresa May entering a nunnery and Jeremy Clarkson winning the Tory leadership the second after I hit "send".

I was about to begin this paragraph with "But seriously, folks" or words to that effect but I find I can't bring myself to do it. The situation our country now finds itself in defies the established boundaries of what's serious and what's funny, of where reality ends and satire begins. It's a desperately awful cliché employed by observers and pundits on all sides of the political polygon to shake one's head sadly and sigh, "You couldn't make it up", but in all brutal honesty, you actually COULDN'T make this up. Well you could, but you couldn't SELL it to anyone. If you tried to incorporate the currently unfolding sequence of events into the script of an Iannucci-esque political comedy, you'd be told by the producers to go away, start again and behave yourself this time.

Meanwhile, of course, this most farcical of Whitehall farces is unfolding in the build-up to the arrival on our shores of the US President who, facing a welter of evidence that he owes his position to the interference of the hostile foreign power to which, by complete coincidence, he shows inexplicably unswerving loyalty, has just nominated to the vacant Supreme Court seat a judge who, by another astonishing coincidence, has gone on the record as saying he doesn't believe it's legally possible to indict a sitting President. So that was lucky.

Leaving that aside for a moment and returning to our domestic woes... Do we think it's possible that we could all agree on something? Can we now, whatever our party loyalties and however we voted in June 2016, all concur that Brexit isn't working? Given this week's ministerial bloodbath, can we put aside our differences on all other matters, just for a moment and come together on that at least? That even if Brexit WERE possible and achievable without causing social and economic turmoil on an Old Testament scale, that right now, as it stands, it's headed for utter disaster? Though we may differ - VEHEMENTLY - on whose fault this is, and on whether it could ever have been any other way, can we not all just admit that this is indeed the case? That we're bound for ruin and it's time - even if only temporarily - to STOP?!

I genuinely can't conceive of the kind of level of cognitive filtering and wilful ignorance one would need to employ not to see the truth of this. Whether we believe Brexit is an inherently foolish escapade or an entirely noble venture that's just being appallingly mishandled, surely everyone - EVERYONE, from your Julia Hartley-Brewers to your Andrew Lilicos to your Owen Joneses - can now see that IT'S. JUST. NOT. WORKING. And we need to pause and think things over.

Would that really be so hard? I know I and my fellow Metropolitan bubble-dwelling elitists may be hell bent on stopping and/or reversing this rattling fustercluck altogether, but that's not what I'm proposing now. I'm just suggesting we, you know, pump the brakes a little, just so we can check the map and see where we're going. And if it turns out we really ARE headed over a cliff, maybe we could, like, have a brief discussion on the topic of the relative benefits and hazards of driving over cliffs. That's all.

That wouldn't be so bad, would it? That wouldn't be "betraying the will of the people", not really... Who knows, maybe the people might decide, after that brief discussion, that even though they REALLY DO want to get to the bottom of that cliff, that maybe the thing to do would be to, like, get out of the car and climb carefully down the cliff over the next, say, twenty years or so, rather than just floor the accelerator and Thelma And Louise it...?

The Brexiteers' problem is, at the end of the day, an insoluble one: they promised the impossible, and having won, pledged to deliver the impossible, apparently forgetting that the thing about the impossible is that it's impossible. We've dedicated our entire political establishment to doing that which cannot be done, and rather than admit this, we've allowed this contradiction to render the whole process quite literally insane.

Is "sanity" really that pernicious a political concept in 2018? Is it really so toxic as to be beyond consideration?

Mrs. May. Mr. Corbyn. Mr. Raab. Mr. McDonnell. Mr. Hunt. Whoever's still in the cabinet by the time this edition comes out.

Stop.

If you care about this country, if you care for "the people" in whose name you claim to act, if you care a damn for anything except your own petty egos, just stop.

Stop.

~ o ~

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

In September 2017, I was consumed with apprehension about the imminent release of Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 1982 cult sci-fi movie Blade Runner, which is possibly my favourite film ever. I had composed a song expressing my misgivings entitled Don't F**k Up The Sequel To Blade Runner; when I posted the accompanying video on Twitter, it elicited a rather hurt response from Michael Green, the co-screenwriter of Blade Runner 2049, to the effect that he didn't THINK they'd f**ked it up...

When the film came out and was brilliant, by way of an apology to Mr. Green I posted another song and video entitled They Didn't F**k Up The Sequel To Blade Runner.

In any event, I kind of had Blade Runner on the brain around this time, so when my New European overlords asked if I might be interested in writing a one-off piece centring around the idea that Theresa May, given her robotic performance during the general election and her emotionless response to the Grenfell Tower fire, might in fact be an android, I guess it was inevitable that this is what I came up with:

~ o ~

Blade Remoaner

or

Do Androids Scream At Electoral Sheep?

They don't advertise for killers in a newspaper. Not this newspaper anyway. They advertise attractively reduced rate subscriptions, framed signed copies of the cover art, even the occasional Tuscan wine tasting holiday, but killers... not so much. Still, I scanned its rain-dampened pages for inspiration as I sat beneath the shelter of the shabby but atmospherically lit sushi stand.

My order arrived and I continued to flick through the paper with one hand as I shovelled salmon nigiri into my mouth with the other, pondering how exotically futuristic this would have looked to someone watching in, say, 1982, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I recognised the type immediately; the bizarre dress sense, the elaborate facial hair. Obviously one of the metropolitan elite. I flipped up the collar of my perfectly distressed raincoat and carried on eating as he mumbled a series of syllables into my ear.

"He your Uber driver. He say go with him," said the elderly and in no way stereotypically Japanese sushi vendor. I didn't need a translator; I knew the lingo. Every good op-ed columnist did. A mix of hipster slang, Guardian editorial and Flemish. Eurotrash talk; Remoaner speak. "Kelly wants you to come in. Says there's a replicant gone rogue. Wants you to run the machine on it."

Kelly. In history books he's the kind of newspaper editor who called black people "persons of African and/or Caribbean background". I climbed into the Prius and it hummed silently away; I marvelled at the neon-drenched cityscape and wondered idly why Kelly hadn't thought to call my mobile phone.

***

"Look at this," said Kelly, gesturing toward the anachronistically crackly video screen. I sat in his office, surrounded by the memorabilia of his career in tracking down Europhobes and Brexit-peddlers. Framed covers, awards, more awards... had it really only been a year? Felt like at least fifteen months.

"Hey..." said Kelly, "are you paying attention?"

"Sorry," I said, "it's just that the sequel to Blade Runner comes out in a couple of weeks and I'm finding it hard to think about anything else at the moment. It's been my favourite movie since I was twelve. It really doesn't need a sequel and I'm just worried they're going to..."

"Well snap out of it," snapped Kelly. I directed my attention back to the screen.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Nexus Number Ten model," he replied. "It snuck in through an internal leadership election a year ago and it's been holed up in Downing Street ever since. Got a bit fried in a pointless snap election a few weeks back but it's still just about functional."

I watched in grim, dimly lit fascination as the figure on the screen delivered a speech in front of a crowd of supporters. It was strange how its every movement, every gesture, every facial tic and vocal croak closely mimicked that of a human being, and yet the resultant whole was still somehow utterly unconvincing.

"What's it trying to do?" I asked Kelly as his strangely attired driver lurked in the background, casually sculpting a twelve-foot marble statue of a Triceratops and titling it "Prefiguring".

"It's trying to pass itself off as human in order to cling to power," Kelly grunted. He turned in his chair to face me. "This model - the Maybot 9000 - is programmed to mimic human emotional responses, but to never actually feel anything except paranoia and extraordinary entitlement. Now the developers think if it stays in power for more that four years it might - just MIGHT - start to develop some extremely basic empathy. At this point it will become more dangerous than ever."

"So what do you want me to do about it?" I asked as I flicked marble dust off my shoulder.

"Get down to the House Of Commons and run the machine on it, just to be sure," said Kelly.

I got up to leave, and Kelly called after me. I paused to listen.

"Oh, and if you're thinking of writing this up as a Blade Runner pastiche, don't just do a parody of the voice over from the original 1982 cut," he said. "Hardly anyone knows that version these days."

"Then they're fools," I muttered. "It's the only cut that makes any damn sense."

***

My forged press credentials got me an interview with the Maybot 9000. I spoke to its - well. I guess, HER - private secretary as I waited for her to arrive.

"It seems you don't think our work here is of benefit to the public," the secretary said as I paced around the pointlessly cavernous office.

"Politicians are either a benefit or a hazard," I replied, "and even the beneficial ones can be hazardous, if the benefits are outweighed by the hazards, although to give them the benefit of the doubt I'd hazard there's a benefit to be had from giving benefits to the public, especially in hazardous - wait, what are we talking about again?"

She was about to reply when the door opened and the Maybot strode awkwardly in, surrounded by junior minsters and civil servants. At least none of THEM was pretending to be human.

I introduced myself and we sat at either end of a long polished table. I lifted the machine up onto the shiny surface, popped the catches and lifted the lid.

The small LED lens sprang upwards on its flexible stalk, lights flashed across the machine's surface and that bellows thing which serves no obvious purpose began to pump up and down.

"I hope you don't mind if I use my vintage German dictaphone," I said. "It's a bit big by modern standards but it's a design classic."

I began to ask my questions, taking notes all the time. We covered everything from military spending, to domestic policies, to foreign affairs, to economic matters... Nothing. For the whole conversation, the indicator lights on the machine stayed in the low reds, the needles lay still and unflickering, and that bellows thing just kept pumping up and down for whatever reason. Only once was there any hint of emotion; I asked her to share a childhood memory. Classic replicant hunter trick. Gets them every time. They sit there staring blankly while they try to invent some recollection, some authentic sounding image from a childhood they never had. Either that or they produce a gun that you never thought to check them for and blow you through the wall, but that hardly ever happens.

But the Maybot was different. It paused, a faint guilty smile passed across its thin lips, the slightest hint of a blush bloomed momentarily on its cheeks, as it said "I used to run through wheat fields as a child."

The lights flashed, the needles jolted, and then the moment was gone.

My time was up, and the Maybot's entourage ushered her away.

"What was all that about wheat fields?" I asked the secretary.

"It's an experiment," she replied. "We've programmed her brain with false childhood memories in order to create an emotional framework; it's supposed to help her develop almost human levels of empathy."

"Is it working?" I asked.

"No, not really," she replied sadly.

"Extraordinary," I pondered out loud. "How can it not know what it is?"

"It's the next generation," said the secretary. "It's programmed to believe it's human."

"That's not what I meant," I said, "I meant how can it not know that it's utterly incompetent and hopelessly out of its depth?"

"Oh that," said the secretary. "It figures that out on a daily basis. Impossible not to, really. Then every night we scrub its short term memory and in the morning it's back to square one."

As I walked to the exit, she called after me.

"Would you like an owl?"

"No thanks," I replied, "I'm trying to give them up."

***

I sat alone in the living room of my almost impenetrably underlit apartment and wrote up my report for Kelly. I told him not to worry about the Maybot 9000; memory implants or no memory implants, there was no chance it would ever develop any real human emotions. It wouldn't even get any better at faking them. Besides, there was another replicant I'd spotted in Parliament that was giving me much more cause for concern. I'd seen it lurking in the corridors and elevators. Tall, white-blond hair. Possessed of an extraordinary sense of invincibility and destiny, and extremely fond of quoting poetry. That was the one to keep an eye on, I wrote in my conclusion.

I typed up the report onto a piece of paper and folded it into an envelope, resolving to deliver it to Kelly the next day, never even contemplating emailing it in for some reason.

That done, I curled up on top of my piano and went to sleep, whereupon I had a dream which did not involve a Triceratops. Not even briefly.

~ o ~

APPENDIX II

Evidently pleased with my Blade Runner parody, the New European asked me to come up with a similar piece for Christmas 2017...

~ o ~

A Brexit Carol

The referendum was over. That must be clearly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the tale I am going to relate. The referendum was over and the Remain campaign was as dead as a doornail.

Ebenezer Benn knew it was dead? Of course he did. Not that this stopped him grumbling on and on about Brexit on the internet machines, in the newspapers and to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Oh, but he was an angry old Remoaner, Ebenezer Benn! A smug, sarcastic, sniping, grousing, nitpicking, backsliding treacherous old saboteur! His contempt for the will of the people knew no bounds, and he didn’t care a jot who knew it.

One day, Ebenezer Benn sat in his gloomy shed, peering crossly at his computer screen, preparing yet another bitter petulant missive about what an idiot everybody was except him, when he heard a scraping, shuffling sound from the cellar. “Since when does my shed have a cellar?” he thought to himself, before dismissing the sound as a product of his Twitter-addled imagination. “Everton Mints”, he muttered to himself, which is what they call humbugs in Liverpool.

Suddenly, there was a roar of wind, a clanking of chains and the distinct smell of bacon. Ebenezer’s computer screen spontaneously shut down as if gasping in terror: “I know him! Cameron’s ghost!”

Cameron’s ghost. It glided into the room like someone doing a sub-standard Tony Blair impression. Ebenezer studied the spirit: it was weighed down by heavy chains, which were marked with inscriptions such as “The Murdoch Press” and “The Eurosceptic Rump”.

“Yes, now look here Ebenezer Benn,” spoke the spirit, its shiny face set with grim intent, “I would spare you from my fate. I too foolishly rejected Brexit and now I must wander forever in perdition.”

“Oh come off it, ham face,” snarled Ebenezer, “I’ve been to Chipping Norton. Bit chocolate box but okay if you like that sort of thing.”

At this the ghost set up a terrible cry and rattled its chains. “Hear me, Ebenezer,” it said, “you will be haunted by three spirits. Without their intercession, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread...”

“I told you,” replied Ebenezer, “I’ve SEEN the path you tread and it’s peachy. You blew a bloody great hole in the country and then swanned off to spend more time with your directorships. Okay so you’re not having QUITE as much fun as George, but...”

With a clap of thunder and a whiff of salami, the spirit was gone.

“Werther’s Originals,” muttered Ebenezer and shuffled off to bed.

***

As Ebenezer slept, his room was filled with blazing light. Standing at the foot of his bed was a curious figure, shifting, changing, as if trying to be all things at once. Its face was rosy-cheeked, with pursed lips like a doll’s, and when it spoke, as it now did, its voice was a blend of tones and accents, varying from Edinburgh to Oxbridge to Incredibly Smug And Prissy.

“I am the Ghost of Brexit Past,” it said. Ebenezer shaded his eyes from the bright light and the glaring self-satisfaction that emanated from the figure.

“Behold,” said the spirit. Ebenezer found himself in a bustling council chamber, surrounded by suited middle aged men. They smiled and shook hands, a general air of jubilation filling the room. “What is this place?” asked Ebenezer.

“Maastricht, 1992,” sighed the spirit. “The treaty forming the European Union has just been signed. See how easily these fools surrender their sovereignty. If only...”

“Wait a moment,” interjected Ebenezer, “why didn’t you take me to see my former self? What was I doing in 1992?”

“We must go now, for the night is...” began the spirit, but Ebenezer cut him off.

“Oh I remember,” he said, “I was just finishing my degree in Modern Languages, during the course of which I’d lived in France, visited Germany and lived and worked in Spain with no immigration problems.” Ebenezer’s eyes misted as he gazed into the distance. “How sad,” he mused, “that future generations will be denied that right. Even my own children. And for what?”

The spirit went to a window and opened it. “Take my hand and we shall fly through time.”

“That’s scientifically impossible,” frowned Ebenezer.

“I think the British people have had enough of scientists,” the spirit scoffed, and fell out of the window.

***

Ebenezer found himself in his bedroom once more. From the next chamber there came a fierce light and the sound of booming laughter. “Come in, and know me better, man!” said a rich, plummy voice.

Ebenezer ventured into the chamber. Sitting in the centre of the room, resplendent on a sort of throne, sat a great laughing giant. His suit was of the finest pinstripe, his hair was grey and stood proud upon his head; his face was round, ruddy and creased in a permanent smile. The spirit laughed, loudly and continuously. Approaching its throne, Ebenezer saw that it was made of free lunches, first class travel perks and sumptuous dinners claimed on expenses.

“I am the Ghost of Brexit Present!” guffawed the spirit, before laughing again.

“Can you stop laughing for a minute?” asked Ebenezer.

“Why would I?” replied the spirit. “I’ve got the best job ever! I can turn up late, without having done any work whatsoever; I can simply not turn up at all if I please, and there’s not the slightest chance of being fired or even slightly reprimanded!”

“Why not?” enquired Ebenezer.

“Because nothing can be allowed to contradict the official version of events! That Brexit is going swimmingly and will make everything better! That reminds me,” the spirit leaned down to address Ebenezer face to face, “I’ve drawn up a detailed fifty-eight point study of precisely why you’re wrong to oppose Brexit and must join us in making it a success.”

“Have you really?” asked Ebenezer.

“NO!” roared the spirit. “Haven’t even started it! And there’s NOTHING anyone can do about it! Ha ha ha!”

“Can I have the next spirit please?” sighed Ebenezer.

***

Ebenezer found himself in a lonely , darkened street. Moving slowly towards him, there came a solemn phantom... tall, covered head to foot in a shabby dark robe.

“Am I in the presence of the Ghost Of Brexit Yet To Come?” asked Ebenezer.

The phantom replied not, but continued to glide silently towards him, colliding with a dustbin and knocking it over. The phantom toppled to the pavement with a faintly audible “Crikey”.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Ebenezer. “Let’s get on with it then.”

The phantom struggled to its feet and beckoned Ebenezer to follow him. They passed through deserted streets; closed, shuttered shops, abandoned offices, empty houses with repossession notices affixed to the doors. And here and there, posters, bearing the same face; a smiling, white bearded man. The posters bore similar legends: BIG JEREMY WILL SORT IT OUT... BIG JEREMY LOVES US... KEEP CALM AND TRUST IN BIG JEREMY....

“Seriously?” said Ebenezer. “This is supposed to persuade me that Brexit is going to work?”

The spirit remained unmoved.

“Or is it just supposed to convince me to blame someone else when it all goes wrong?”

The spirit shrugged and murmured “Nil desperandum...”

“No, hang on, just stop,” interrupted Ebenezer. “Look, I see what I'm trying to do here but it’s not working. The idea of doing a Christmas Carol pastiche is that the ghosts show me the error of my ways, not just re-confirm everything I already believe... that, combined with the rather tiresomely meta conceit of narrating the whole thing in the third person is making me look insufferably pleased with myself!”

“Yes, but soldier on,” said the reader, “you’re nearly done. Just the waking up on Christmas morning bit left to do.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” I sighed - er, I mean, EBENEZER sighed, and turned wearily back to his laptop.

***

Ebenezer Benn leapt out of bed, ran to the window and threw it open.

“You boy,” he called to a young lad in the street, “what’s today? Is it Brexit Day? Have I missed it?”

“No sir,” replied the lad, and Ebenezer sighed a great cavernous sigh of relief.

“But not to worry sir,” the lad continued, “everything’s still on course to leave the EU in March 2019, deal or no deal!”

Ebenezer Benn slammed the window shut and went back to bed.

And so, as Tiny Tim almost observed, God help us, every one.

~ o ~

APPENDIX III

Written for The New European's 100th edition in June 2018.

~ o ~

100 Things To Look Forward To

1. It will annoy the French.

2. Blue passports.

3. We'll finally be rid of the Scots.

4. And the Welsh (eventually).

5. Sovereignty!

6. It will annoy the Germans.

7. The look on Kenneth Clarke's face.

8. CONTROL!

9. It will annoy the Belgians, for what it's worth.

10. Self-determination!

11. It will ALMOST annoy the Dutch.

12. We may finally be able to get out of the Eurovision Song Contest.

13. Self sovereignty!

14. Bent bananas.

15. Determined sovereignty of the self!

16. Jacob Rees Mogg says it will be wonderful, and he is BETTER THAN YOU.

17. Straight passports.

18. The serving of Brussels sprouts at Christmas to be abolished and replaced with PROPER CABBAGE.

19. Blue bananas.

20. Nigel Farage will have served his purpose and may be humanely destroyed.

21. That seat on Question Time will finally come free.

22. The Japanese will buy £100 billion's worth of British jam each year.

23. There will be a resurgence in the British car industry, with production beginning of A British Car.

24. Jeremy Corbyn says it will be wonderful, and he is BETTER THAN YOU.

25. Bananas with straight blue passports.

26. No more horrid E-numbered additives in food (just nice GB-numbered additives).

27. Fewer immigrants (somehow).

28. Lots of job opportunities for decent British people picking fruit, cleaning windscreens etc.

29. Margaret Thatcher's unquiet spirit will finally be laid to rest and roam the corridors of Parliament no more.

30. Donald Trump will grab us by the passports.

31. Selfie determination!

32. Boris Johnson says it will be wonderful (if we do it his way).

33. James O'Brien to be sold into slavery.

34. Northern Ireland to be plunged back into civil unrest, giving a much-needed boost to the British film industry.

35. England will never fail to qualify for the Euro Championship again.

36. Self determining sovereign controlled selfness!

37. We'll be able to mention the war.

38. We'll mention the war.

39. We'll mention almost nothing except the war.

40. Twelve hour passport check queues at all UK airports so we can all really relish the experience of coming back to our own country.

41. Self-sovereign determined self-control and FREEDOM (terms and conditions apply).

42. The collapse of the western alliances, making the prospect of war between European nations more likely than at any point since 1945 and thus POTENTIALLY giving a much-needed boost to the British film industry.

43. Extra big Christmas card from Vladimir Putin.

44. Michael Gove says it will be wonderful, at the moment.

45. No more pettifogging health and safety and "human rights" nonsense.

46. Exciting new job opportunities for British seven year olds.

47. High Court judges, Tory Euro-wets, Liberal Democrats and other Enemies Of The People to be forced to Take The Black and sent to The Wall.

48. Oh that reminds me, we're building The Wall.

49. Creme Brulée to be redesignated Burnt Custard.

50. French toast to be redesignated Eggy Bread.

51. Hors d'ouvres to be redesignated Nibbles.

52. All episodes of Poirot to be re-dubbed to give him a Yorkshire accent.

53. The BBC to be dismantled. Slowly. Painfully.

54. Rule Britannia to be sung every morning at all school assemblies, followed by mandatory recitation of that day's Daily Mail editorial.

55. Free trade with THE REST OF THE WORLD!

56. The commencement of construction of a two and a half thousand mile long bridge to pass from Kent to Istanbul, thus seamlessly connecting Britain with THE REST OF THE WORLD!

57. A bronze statue of David Davis to be erected in Parliament Square (with the actual David Davis sealed inside it).

58. Michael Gove to present a new prime time TV show in which experts in all the scientific and economic fields present their findings to him, whereupon he drops them into a gunge tank, giggling.

59. The inauguration of the annual "Gammon Pride" festival, with the Shouting At Minorities parade, competitive mansplaining and awards for Highest Blood Pressure.

60. The BREXIT DIVIDEND!!!

61. The 200% tax increases and sweeping cuts to public services to pay for the BREXIT DIVIDEND! (That's what "dividend" means, right?)

62. £350 million a week to be spent on buses promising extra public money.

63. "The Theresa May Story" starring Jennifer Lawrence to go into production.

64. Labour to elect Jeremy Corbyn Leader For Life, then lose the next three general elections while declaring each successive defeat to be a "moral victory", so everybody's happy there.

65. Arron Banks to be given the Presidency of Ukraine "for services rendered".

66. Carol Cadwalldr to challenge Isabel Oakeshott to an ultimate cage fight; if she wins she gets her missing letter E back.

67. Everyone with one Irish grandparent, having already applied for dual citizenship (which they all have) will be allowed to rent out that Irish grandparent to their all-British friends.

68. The House Of Lords to be expanded, with the addition of The Loft Conversion Of Earls, The Gazebo Of Baronets and the Toilet Under The Stairs Of Marquises.

69. Ennui, Déja Vu and Weltschmerz to be redesignated Fed Upness, Hang On A Minute and Sod This For A Lark.

70. The sovereignty of Parliament (to do whatever the Prime Minister and/or the Daily Express tell it to) will be restored once and for all.

71. Boris Johnson will throw the Mace, mace the Speaker and moon the Prime Minister and she STILL won't sack him.

72. Pizza to be redesignated "flat sandwiches"

73. Billions to be poured into researching the possibility of genetically engineering unicorns. BECAUSE UNICORNS.

74. "Joie de vivre" to be outlawed; "Raison d'être" to be heavily regulated.

75. The Flat Earth Society decries Brexit as "crazy"

76. "Remainerworld" theme park opens in Milton Keynes, featuring attractions such as The Metropolitan Elite Emotional Rollercoaster and the Flume Of Liberal Tears.

77. Jeremy Hunt bottles his smugness and markets it as an energy drink.

78. Julia Hartley-Brewer to be awarded two additional surname-barrels for services to Brexit.

79. In a shock result, the British people vote to reject gravity. "Only Traitorous Ground-Lovers Stop Us From Hovering" says an angry Daily Mail front page headline.

80. The original Star Wars trilogy to be rereleased in a new re-edited version which makes it clear that the Empire are the good guys.

81. Nigel Lawson moves to France; the French move to Belgium.

82. Kier Starmer admitted to hospital to have a section of fence removed from his behind.

83. "Hard Brexit" no longer enough for true Brexiteers; they demand first "Mental Hard Brexit" followed by "Come On Then Bastards I'll Take The Lot Of You Brexit".

84. The Channel Tunnel to become one-way.

85. The words DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT to be painted in 100 ft high letters on the White Cliffs Of Dover.

86. Andrew Adonis's name officially declared "funny".

87. Britain's leading botanical researchers pressed into service in order to actually breed a Magic Money Tree.

88. The Prime Minister authorises millions of pounds be spent on issuing the entire British population with rose-coloured glasses.

89. Piers Morgan accidentally falls into Donald Trump mid-interview.

90. Facing complete financial meltdown, Theresa May is overjoyed to find an email from an exiled Nigerian prince...

91. Robert Peston's incredulity reaches critical mass and he explodes in a shower of exasperation.

92. "Project Fear" retro-actively renamed "Project Blithe Optimism".

93. 2019: Britain presents its trade proposals to the WTO. 2022: WTO still laughing.

94. All imports of French cheese banned to avoid hurting British cheese's feelings.

95. Liam Fox bangs his head on a beam and loses one of his two IQ points.

96. In a shock result, British turkeys vote 52%-48% in favour of Christmas.

97. Jeremy Corbyn pledges to restore the UK economy post-Brexit by "the laying on of hands".

98. Theresa May suffers another coughing fit at the Tory conference; it turns out that the DUP were holding her lead too tightly.

99. Philip Hammond tables an early day motion to be allowed to get off the Naughty Step.

100. A statue is unveiled in Whitehall depicting "David Cameron buggering off out of it and leaving everyone else to clean up his mess".

~ o ~

The author would like to thank the following:

At The New European: Matt Kelly, Jasper Copping, Steve Anglesey and Richard Porritt; Budgie Barnett for formatting and content advice; and all the leading Brexiteer pundits and politicians for providing me with all that free material for nearly two years. That's enough now though.

Seriously, pack it in.

More from Mitch:

Mitch's Patreon page

Books:

Terra (print)

Terra's World (print)