Category: Politics

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A month of ironies

 

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

 

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette.  The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.”  Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic.  “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example.  As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

 

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material.  To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced.  Here are a few reasons why I think so.

 

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.  Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

 

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family.  Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth.  Things about black people.  (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact.  It’s happening more and more.”)  About women.  (“Reject feminism.  Submit to your husband, Taylor.  You’re not in charge…  And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert…  You’ve got to change your name.  If not, you don’t really mean it.”)  About Islam.  (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”)  About trans-people.  (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.  We need it immediately.”).  And so on.  Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

 

September 10th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides).  “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel…  I think it’s worth it.  I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

 

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment.  How tragically ironic and tragically American.

 

September 11th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA.  This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.  Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life…  wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

 

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.  Yes, we do, come to think of it.  Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain.  This was Donald Trump.  Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

 

© Private Eye

 

September 13th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants.  They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain.  According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

 

September 16th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode.  The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

 

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country…  The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism.  The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method.  They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone.  The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

 

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed.  Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.  Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately…  I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

 

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

 

September 17th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.  These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist.  Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

 

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech.  It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion.  That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”  And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.”  But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

 

September 22nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked.  It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC.  A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening.  It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube.  Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

 

In other words…  The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

 

September 23rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations.  Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows.  We don’t want cows anymore.  I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda…  Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

 

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

 

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.  Previously, at the September 18th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan.  And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia.  So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal.   One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

 

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic.  It was just moronic.

 

September 26th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State.  Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so.  It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd.  Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days.  They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy.  They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife.  They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight.  No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

 

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13.  That wasn’t ironic either.  That was karma.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

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Ian Jenkins 1941-2025

 

From facebook.com / Peebles Beltane Festival

 

At the end of last month I received some sad news.  Ian Jenkins, a teacher, a politician and a well-kent face in the Scottish town of Peebles, where I spent some of my formative years, had passed away at the age of 84.

 

He taught me English for four of the five years, from 1977 to 1982, that I attended Peebles High School.  It’s impossible to think of the English-literature texts I had to study during those four years – novels like Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1871) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); drama like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1959), Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959), Barry England’s Conduct Unbecoming (1969) and the Shakespeare plays Romeo and Juliet (1595), Hamlet (1601) and Macbeth (1606); and poems by Robert Burns, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes – without hearing Ian’s voice, with its gentle, mellifluous accent, explaining and quoting from them.

 

He hailed from the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde and, to my ears at least, his accent seemed mellifluous.  Mind you, I came from western Northern Ireland, where folk often spoke broadly, gruffly and roughly.  Compared to there, most types of Scottish accent sounded charming to me.

 

When I was at school, attitudes about educating young people had shifted from the old-fashioned, dictatorial approach to a more humane one.  But even in the late 1970s and early 1980s there remained some intimidating, traditional-minded teachers who made pupils feel as uncomfortable and on-edge in their classrooms as newly-conscripted troops hunkered down in the trenches.  Also, the European Court of Human Rights didn’t get around to banning the tawse – that palm-flaying form of corporal punishment informally known as ‘the belt’ – from Scottish schools until the mid-1980s.

 

But you never approached Ian Jenkins’ classroom with a feeling of trepidation.  You never worried he’d got out of the wrong side of bed that morning and he might lose the rag and start swinging the tawse at the slightest provocation.  No, you looked forward to his lessons because he was a mellow, kindly and jolly soul.

 

And unlike some of his colleagues, he treated his pupils like grown-ups.  I remember the occasional English lesson with him giving way to a debate about one of the big political issues of the time, such as nuclear disarmament – Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, East-West tensions were high and the prospect of the world vanishing in a puff of mushroom-shaped, radioactive smoke was not a remote one – or whether there should be a Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a protest against that Soviet invasion.

 

Another issue of great geopolitical importance we discussed was the terrible performance – under the hapless stewardship of Ally MacLeod – by Scotland’s national football team at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

 

© Revelation Press

 

I remember one lesson that made me wonder how happy he was being a teacher.  In teaching, after all, you tend to talk about the same things year after year, in the same surroundings, with the only element of change being your pupils arriving, growing older, and departing again.  During that lesson we looked at Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem Ulysses, in which the legendary Greek hero is now an old man, is back home after his many travels and adventures, and faces spending the remainder of his life in peaceful domesticity.  But he decides, “To hell with that!”  He resolves to set sail again and look for new adventures: “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world / Push off and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.”

 

Wistfully, Ian remarked that sometimes he felt he should follow Ulysses’ example and set off in search of excitement and adventure before it was too late.  And by the time of the poem, Ulysses had already done stuff.  He’d fought in the Trojan War, escaped from the cyclops Polyphemus, encountered the sorceress Circe, survived the Sirens, sailed between Scylla and Charybdis and been the lover of the nymph Calypso.  Whereas Ian had merely taught English at a high school in Peebles.  I’m sure, though, countless Peebles schoolkids during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were glad he didn’t clear off as Ulysses did and persevered with the teaching.

 

He certainly had my gratitude, for the help he gave me with my writing.  I’d been writing stories since I was nine or ten years old and in my teens, after class, I’d sometimes approach Ian clutching the latest piece of fiction I’d penned and ask him if he could read it and offer me advice on it.  The poor man.  At the time I was heavily influenced by the great, if verbose, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and my stories were written in florid prose and featured some hopefully horrific (though more often absurd) subject-matter.  For example, one story I gave him was about a man who comes into possession of a grandfather clock that’d once belonged to a witch and discovers that the witch’s monstrous familiar still lives inside it – the inspiration for this effort was Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (1933).  Yet Ian was remarkably patient, civil and encouraging in his feedback.  He did advise me to use fewer adjectives, though.

 

I left school in 1982 but kept in touch with Ian and his wife Midge – who was also a teacher, of French, and who at school had had the unenviable task of trying to coax the euphonic French language out of my broad, gruff and rough Northern Irish-accented mouth.  I frequently bumped into them around Peebles and also sometimes called at their house, which seemed a wonderful place to me because: (1) it was full of books; and (2) it contained whisky too, a generous dram of which was pushed my way any time I visited.

 

Ian was always eager to lend or recommend books to me.  The first time I read Ernest Hemingway, it was a collection of Hemingway’s short stories he’d lent me – no doubt hoping I’d discover from it you could write effective prose without sticking three or four adjectives before every noun.  Another book from the Jenkins lending-library important for me was one that introduced me to the ghost stories of M.R. James.  In the early 1980s, in response to his urging, I procured and read a copy of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), now regarded as the most important Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century.  And he championed the works of Thomas Hardy.  After reading Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), I remember arguing with him – in a friendly way, over a nip of whisky – about the book’s most outlandish character, Little Father Time.  “He’s a bit over the top,” I said.  Ian retorted, “Aye, but he’s fun.”

 

© Penguin Classics

 

I managed, though, to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) before he did.  In the mid-1990s Ian told me one of his pupils had decided to write her English Sixth-Year-Studies dissertation about it.  So, he thought he’d better familiarise himself with Trainspotting to be able to give her support.  “Well,” I asked, “what did you think?”  He replied, “It’s, er, robust.”

 

Then in 1999, like Ulysses, Ian did set sail in search of new adventures.  Okay, he only sailed 21 miles up the road, from Peebles to Edinburgh, where he became a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) representing the constituency of Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, which included Peebles.  But as this was the first time Scotland had had its own parliament for nearly 300 years, it was a historical occasion and being one of the new MSPs was an achievement.  I’d known he was a political creature and in our conversations politics was a regular topic.  He was a lifelong Liberal Democrat, which led to some bickering between us – again in a friendly way, because it was invariably done over a nip of whisky – because during the 1990s my lapel regularly sported a badge for the Scottish National Party (SNP).

 

I lived in Edinburgh during the late 1990s.  July 1st, 1999, saw the official opening of the Scottish Parliament.  As I’ve said, this was the first time since 1707 there’d been a Scottish parliament, so it was a big occasion with a big parade.  Because the streets of central Edinburgh are narrow and aren’t conducive to large crowds gathering to watch a parade, a giant screen had been set up in East Princes Street Gardens so that folk could watch the festivities there.  That was where I headed.  The parade included delegations of schoolchildren from all over Scotland and, at one point, a group of kids from Peebles High School appeared on the screen.  Then the camera cut to an excited, jolly-looking man jumping up and down and waving at them.  I burst out laughing, which prompted a woman standing nearby to ask, “What’s the matter?”  I told her proudly, “That’s my English teacher.”

 

During his four years as an MSP, Ian served as the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for Education, Culture and Sport.  It pleased me that Robert McNeil, the journalist and sketch-writer who covered the Scottish parliament for the Scotsman newspaper, referred to him affectionately as ‘Jolly Jenkins’.  I worked on the upper part of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and a couple of times bumped into him there – in those days, the parliament did its business in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall on the Mound, before the official parliament building was opened at the foot of the Mile in 2004 – and, as ever, he was happy to stop and chat.

 

After he stood down as an MSP in 2003, I continued to bump into him and Midge in Peebles.  I’d encounter them at Peebles’ annual agricultural show.  At one show in the early 2010s he told me how pissed-off he was that the Nick Clegg-led Liberal Democrats had formed a coalition government with the Conservatives.  I’d also see them at Peebles’ Eastgate Theatre.  One evening, my partner and I arrived there for a late showing of the 2014 Mike Leigh movie Mr. Turner, which starred Timothy Spall as the unorthodox English painter J.M.W. Turner, and we met the Jenkinses emerging from an earlier showing of it.  “I hear Timothy Spall grunts a lot,” I said.  Bemused, they confirmed that, yes, Spall does grunt a lot in the movie.  Our last meeting must have been in 2015.  That was when I had some work lined up in Kolkata in India and I needed to write the name and contact details of a possible referee on the application form for an Indian visa.  So, I asked Ian if he’d be my referee and, naturally, he agreed.

 

It saddens me that I didn’t see him after that.  My work situation changed, which kept me in Asia for most of the time and reduced my opportunities to go back to Scotland.  Covid-19 happened, which changed my work situation even more and reduced the opportunities to go home even further.  There were many things I’d have liked to tell him during the past ten years.  I’d have loved to report that, finally, I’d managed to read all the novels written by his beloved Thomas Hardy – even the most obscure ones, like Desperate Remedies (1871), A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882).  Not being a fan of Britain’s honours system, I’d have enjoyed ribbing him about the fact that, in 2024, he’d been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) – though I should add that he got his MBE for very good reasons, for his work for charity and services to his local community.  “Does this mean,” I’d have asked, “you can now call yourself ‘Emperor Jenkins’?”

 

Most of all, I’d have liked to tell him that the number of short stories I’ve had published has now reached treble figures.  My 100th story appeared in print in 2024.  At least part of that achievement is due to the encouragement I got from my old English teacher.

 

After he died, one of my siblings sent me a link to a Peebles Facebook page, where the announcement of his passing had brought a flood of condolences and tributes from people who’d known him, often first of all as pupils in his classroom.  It felt like half of Peebles had posted.  Dozens and dozens of messages spoke of his kindness and decency, his patient and good-humoured teaching, his sense of civic duty, how he did his best to help and encourage the folk he came in contact with, how – whoever you were and whenever and wherever you met him – he was always pleased to stop and blether with you.   Which reminded me that my experiences of the man were by no means unique.

 

So, Ian Jenkins might not have been a hero in the roving, adventuring, Greek-mythological mode of Ulysses.  But in terms of the positive impact he had on many people’s lives, and the simple pleasure of his company, he was a hero – a true local hero.

 

© BBC

Posted on

The Boss versus the dross

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ralph_PH

 

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45th and also, alas, 47th president of the United States of America.  He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

 

On May 14th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech.  He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.  Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”  Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people.  So we’ll survive this moment.”

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform.  He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

 

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old.  It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock.  They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978).  “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen.  “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things…  Thank God for him.  But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.”  Kid Rock, please note.  To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing.  But it’s not the insult you think it is.

 

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies.  Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city.  I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy.  Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

 

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s.  Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks.  This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

 

© Columbia Records

 

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it.  One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run.  Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer.  (Nowadays,  having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.)  So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me.  But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

 

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof.  Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades.  And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

 

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University.  I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen.  They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio.  Yes, stuff like that.

 

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male.  Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’.  Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’.  This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was.  Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

 

© Columbia Records

 

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van.  For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles.  As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music.  But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

 

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub.  At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

 

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most.  I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying.  The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them.  Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself.  And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85.  In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad.  But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

 

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s.  This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’.  It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan.  The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

 

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen.  The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black.  At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer.  And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan.  I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.  Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!  I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

 

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills.  In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

 

© Columbia Records

 

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste.  To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen.  The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me.  I can’t see it at all.  I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff.  And it just doesn’t ring true.”  Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

 

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too.  The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability.  He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.”  Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality.  As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison.  “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen?  You should really check him out!’  I just ignored it.  Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video.  Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

 

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies.  For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder.  And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen.  I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

 

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day.  Hail to the Boss!

 

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

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Eco chamber

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts

 

A follow-on from my previous post…

 

Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

 

This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).  I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’  My answer was positive.  I was a smart boy.”  It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally.  It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

 

Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now.  Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones.  But what about those 14 traits of fascism?  How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?

 

Spoilers…  A lot.

 

The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc.  This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”

 

Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’.  So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’.  I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males.  And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

 

Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’.  Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists.  Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’?  Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.

 

© Lumen Press

 

Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’?  Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”

 

Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’?  Tick, tick, tick and tick.

 

I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”.  In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression.  Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.

 

I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.

 

And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently.  It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages.  Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

 

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

 

Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few…  Public representatives unable to grasp the issues…  Critical faculties in decline…  Dumbing down…  Soundbites…  Pseudoscience…  Superstition…  Yes, Carl, you nailed it.  I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.

 

© Random House

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You won’t ever be happy

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

 

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th president of the United States.  For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45th president obviously wasn’t enough.

 

Already those two weeks feel like two decades.  I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse.  I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

 

It’s been relentless.  One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!”  The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change.  They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

 

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’.  Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering.  As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

 

What else?  Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea.  He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else.  Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

 

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’.  (What next?  One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.)  He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project).  And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods.  I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

 

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

 

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears.  They must feel like they’re in heaven.  Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards.  They’re bathing in libtard tears.  They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning.  They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on.  They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

 

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news.  You won’t ever be happy.

 

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially.  The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that.  So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends.  A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

 

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now.  There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments.  But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

 

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros.  They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers.  (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.)  Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit.  And there’s not a peep out of them.

 

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

 

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems.  You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies.  But no, they’ve been strangely quiet.  Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it.  He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

 

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him.  If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices.  Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather.  Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously.  A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong.  Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises.  He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring.  The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

 

And that’s not all, Trump supporters.  Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy.  Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy.  To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail.  Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it.  You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years.  (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

 

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes.  Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.  They’re to be riled up, permanently.

 

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy.  As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

 

From pixabay.com / © heblo

Posted on

The controls are set for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

In my previous blog-post, I cited the ending of the apocalyptic 1961 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, where we’re inside a newspaper office and see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One page’s headline announces WORLD SAVED.  The other announces WORLD DOOMED.  Which headline, I wondered, would be appropriate after the US presidential election on November 5th?

 

Well, the results are in.  And it’s…

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

I think I’ll stay away from the news for the next week or so, as it’s going to be full of the sights and sounds of the very worst people on the planet popping open the champagne and jeering and crowing about Trump’s win – from despots and corrupt authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban and Aleksandr Lukashenko to billionaires who believe (probably rightly, given the evidence now) that democracy is something that can be bought and sold in the quest for profits, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Marshall and all the other media tycoons, hedge-fund moguls, oligarchs, oil barons and would-be tech overlords.

 

Despite a majority of British people hating Trump’s guts, Britain’s press and social media will be particularly infested with sycophants drooling and slobbering over the orange turd’s victory.  These range from online grifters who make their money whipping gullible people into frenzies of paranoia and hatred, such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Neil Oliver, Tommy Robinson and failed nepo-baby thespian Laurence Fox; to the preening hacks who pen vitriol for the country’s right and far-right-wing publications, like Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Douglas Murray, Piers Morgan and Isabel Oakeshott; and to its most discredited, unsavoury and opportunistic politicians, such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.  So, I’ll avoid that lot too for a while.  I don’t want to be put off my food.

 

Many hideous people are no doubt licking their lips at the prospect of the dystopian years ahead, thinking about what they can do as part of the Trump bandwagon and how they can line their pockets from it.  I’m sure that includes all those I’ve mentioned above.

 

Finally, I now find myself thinking of the ending of another 1960s sci-fi film, that of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968).

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Not only does this conclude with Charlton Heston discovering the Statue of Liberty buried up to her chest in sand – indicating that the USA, plus the rest of human civilisation, are now extinct and lie hidden under millions of tons of sediment – but it shows Heston having a meltdown in front of this haunting and pitiful spectacle.  “You maniacs!” he rages.  “You blew it up!  Damn you!  Goddamn you all to hell!”

 

He could have been referring to those millions of Americans who thought it was a good idea to vote Donald Trump back into office the other day.

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

Posted on

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.  (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.  Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.  The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.  The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation.  Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

 

Yes, the film’s science is wonky.  A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.  Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.  Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

 

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

 

The film ends ambiguously.  The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.  Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.  And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

 

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today.  November 5th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.  That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.  The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’.  A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

 

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president.  He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.  Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).  The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

 

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days).  Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.  Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

 

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.  Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

 

So, world saved or world doomed?  We’ll find out a little later this week.

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

Posted on

The Eck’s Factor

 

From the Jersey Evening Post

 

So it’s farewell to Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, former leader of the Scottish National Party and the man who gave Scots their first opportunity in 300 years to make their country independent again.  The most formidable Scottish politician of his generation – of a couple of generations, surely – Salmond was apparently the victim of a heart attack soon after he’d given a speech in North Macedonia on October 12th. 

 

To say I had conflicted feelings about Salmond is an understatement.  For a quarter-century, from his election to the London parliament in 1987 to his resignation as Scotland’s First Minister in 2014, after the referendum on Scottish independence went against him and 55% of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the United Kingdom, he was a man who achieved what had previously seemed impossible – he made Scottish politics interesting. His eloquence, wit and energy gave Scottish politics some oomph.  He gave it the elusive ‘X’ factor.

 

And then… It went pear-shaped.  I’ll stress the fact that in 2020 Salmond was cleared of the charges of sexual misconduct levelled against him.  Also, the Scottish government, which bungled the initial investigation into him, and the Scottish media, which gleefully turned the coverage of Salmond’s trial into a circus, came out of the affair poorly too.  But Salmond’s own lawyer admitted his client “could have been a better man.”  All too often in Scotland’s top political job, he’d behaved with the decorum of a lewd schoolboy – to the point where staffing procedures around him were changed to prevent women having to work with him on their own.  Also, after the trial, which had been a traumatic experience for the women who’d spoken out against him, Salmond displayed zero contrition.  He could have shown himself to be ‘a better man’, but didn’t.     

 

Anyway, here’s a slightly revised excerpt from something I wrote about him in 2021.  It was just after the Alba party, which he’d formed in the wake of his acquittal, had flopped at that year’s elections to the Scottish parliament.  Obviously, since I wrote it, the electoral shine has faded from the SNP too.

 

From en.wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Government

 

For the last 35 years, since the dark days when Margaret Thatcher ran Scotland with the imperious disregard one would give a colonial possession, Scottish politics has felt like a rollercoaster with both giddy peaks and despairing troughs.  And Salmond has been a constant presence on that rollercoaster.  I know plenty of people who detest him but I’ve seen him as a force for both the good and the bad, the good earlier on and bad more recently.  It’s the memory of the good things that makes me sad to see him end up like this, even if he brought a lot of it upon himself.

 

I remember when I first saw him.  One afternoon in early 1987, while a fourth-year undergraduate student, I was nursing a pint in the Central Refectory building at Aberdeen University.  I noticed from the corner of my eye a group of students whom I knew as members of the campus branch of the SNP – Alan Kennedy, Val Bremner, Gillian Pollock, Nick Goode – enter and wander over to the counter.  They were in the company of a young, round-faced bloke in an un-studenty suit, shirt and tie.  I identified him as an up-and-coming SNP politician whom Alan Kennedy, a good mate of mine, had told me was standing in the next general election in nearby Banff and Buchan against the incumbent Conservative Party MP Albert McQuarrie.  He’d come to the university that day to address the SNP group and this was the SNP students showing their visitor some post-talk hospitality.  The politician, I’d been assured, was one to watch.  Indeed, Alan said something along the lines of: “He’s going to do great things.”

 

A few months later, on June 11th, the general election took place and this rising SNP star wrestled Banff and Buchan away from Albert McQuarrie and became its new MP.  I recall McQuarrie, a doughty old-school Scottish Tory MP who revelled in the nickname ‘the Buchan Bulldog’, bursting into tears during a subsequent interview at what he saw as the unfairness and indignity of losing his beloved constituency to an SNP whippersnapper.  He was perhaps the first politician, but certainly not the last, to have his nose put out of joint by Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

 

By the early 1990s, Salmond was SNP leader.  I lived in London at the time and occasionally I’d drink with a Labour Party spin doctor, also from Scotland.  He had no inhibitions about telling me, at every opportunity, what a detestable creep he thought Salmond was.  With his smartass manner and habitual smirk, which frequently expanded into a Cheshire-cat grin, and a general arrogance that no doubt came from knowing he was intellectually and rhetorically streets ahead of the numpties making up the majority of Westminster’s Scottish Labour MPs, you could understand how much of an annoyance Salmond was to his opponents.  But back then the SNP had just three MPs, so at least he could be dismissed as a minor annoyance.

 

How long ago that seems now.  In those far-off days, the Labour Party controlled much of Scotland at council level, provided the lion’s share of Scottish MPs for Westminster and, when it arrived in 1999, dominated the Scottish parliament too.  If their party also happened to be in power at Westminster, which it was occasionally, Scottish Labour-ites surely felt like masters of all they surveyed.  If the Conservatives were in power at Westminster, which they were most of the time, those Scottish Labour-ites grumbled a bit, but diplomatically kept their heads down while right-wing Tory policies were imposed on Scotland.

 

Then in 2007 the sky fell in.  Salmond’s SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament and he became Scotland’s First Minister.  The SNP have remained in power there during the 17 years and three Scottish parliamentary elections since.  They also won the majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019.  They lost the independence referendum in 2014 – an event that led to Salmond resigning as First Minister and making way for his deputy and supposed protégé Nicola Sturgeon – but the percentage of the vote they got, 45%, was still far more than what anyone had expected at the campaign’s start.  They upended the cosy old tradition of Scottish deference to the London-based overlords.  Thank God for that, in my opinion.

 

© William Collins

 

This stuck in many craws. Not just in those of the Scottish Labour Party, with its historical sense of entitlement, but in those of the majority of Scotland’s newspapers, whose hacks had enjoyed a close relationship with the old political clique and liked to see themselves as part of Scotland’s establishment. It must have horrified them to discover that, no matter how negatively they reported the SNP and its performance in government, a significant proportion of the Scottish public ignored them and kept on voting SNP.  Meanwhile, the grin of Alex Salmond, the bastard who seemed emblematic of their good times coming to an end, grew ever wider, his mood grew ever merrier and his girth grew ever more Falstaffian.

 

However, from 2017 onwards, Salmond’s many foes scented blood.  2017 saw him lose the Westminster seat that, after quitting as Scottish First Minister, he’d been elected to in 2015. That same year, he put on at the Edinburgh Festival a chat-show called Alex Salmond: Unleashed, which from all accounts was a graceless, self-indulgent and ego-driven mess.  Soon after, he developed his stage-show into a programme called The Alex Salmond Show, which was broadcast on RT, Russia’s international English-language news channel.  Associating himself with Vladimir Putin’s televisual voice to the world was not a wise move. Salmond hadn’t just given his detractors ammunition to use against him.  He’d handed them a whole arsenal.

 

I’d always assumed there was no dirt to dig up on Alex Salmond, for the simple reason that if there had been, his enemies in the old Scottish establishment would have dug it up and used it to wreck his reputation long ago.  Thus, it was a surprise in 2018 when the Daily Record newspaper reported that Salmond faced allegations of sexual misconduct while he’d been First Minister.  This had lately been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish government and its findings had been passed on to the police.  Although Salmond made sure there was a legal review of this, which resulted in the Scottish government admitting that its investigative procedures had been flawed and paying him half a million pounds in legal expenses, the police still charged him with 14 offences, including two counts of attempted rape, in 2019.

 

One year later, Salmond was cleared of these charges. The prosecutors dropped one charge, the jury found him not guilty in 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’.  Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, been overly ‘touchy feely’ with female staff and ‘could certainly have been a better man’.

 

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, now totally at odds with Salmond, were subject to both an investigation by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and an independent investigation about how they’d handled, or mishandled, the affair. The committee concluded there’d been both individual and corporate incompetence but these conclusions weren’t enough to topple Sturgeon. The independent investigation judged that Sturgeon hadn’t breached the ministerial code, something that Salmond and his supporters, convinced of a conspiracy against him in high places, maintained she had.

 

From facebook.com

 

In 2021 Salmond founded the Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, and claimed this wasn’t an attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the Scottish election that year – Salmond’s revenge after his acquittal.  Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t work because the SNP ended up with 64 seats in the new parliament, with the Greens bumping up the number of pro-independence MSPs to 72, compared with the Unionist parties’ tally of 57 MSPs and Alba’s tally of zero.

 

It didn’t help Alba’s cause that it attracted a lot of fringe-dwelling dingbats in the independence movement, dingbats whom I’m sure Sturgeon’s SNP was delighted to see head Salmond’s way.  These included conspiracy fantasists (former ambassador Craig Murray, a man who couldn’t pop out to the shops to buy a pint of milk without claiming to have met an MI5 operative and uncovered an evil plot by the British government along the way), frothing social conservatives (Margaret Lynch, who peddled the lie that LGBT organisations were trying to lower the age of consent to ‘ten’) and the generally ‘hard of thinking’ (MSP Ash Regan, whose big idea was to create an ‘independence thermometer’, measuring Scotland’s readiness to leave the UK).

 

Finally, one thing I will say in Salmond’s defence.  The Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case.  From columnist Alex Massie declaring at the investigation’s outset that ‘WHATEVER HAPPENS, IT’S OVER FOR SALMOND’, to the Herald previewing the trial with a ‘Big Read’ feature that it illustrated with pictures of the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, Charles Manson and Adolf Eichmann, to a dodgy, nod-and-a-wink post-trial documentary by the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, the tone of the coverage didn’t suggest that a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’.  Rather, it suggested that a person is ‘guilty because we want them to be guilty’.

***

The piece I wrote in 2021 ended with an observation, “the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track,” and a plea to him: “Call it a day for Christ’s sake.” 

 

Since then, of course, Nicola Sturgeon’s reign as Scottish First Minister has come to an ignominious end too.  These events call to mind the famous quote by that old Conservative politician and racist Enoch Powell: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

 

If only Alex Salmond had kept his hands to himself whilst First Minister.  And if only he’d retired and accepted the role of distinguished ‘elder statesman’ in 2014.  He wouldn’t have disproven Powell’s famous edict, because his career would still have ended with the disappointment of the referendum.  But at least today I’d be remembering him as ‘a better man’.  And it’s as ‘a better man’ that I’d like to remember him.

 

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

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Mither

 

© Jim Barton / From wikipedia.org

 

Today, September 18th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence.  Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom. 

 

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither.  This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing.  It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie.  Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

 

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here.  I now give you…  Mither.

 

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning.  I hadn’t heard her go out.  I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

 

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office.  ‘You were outside.’

 

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself.  Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it.  She smoothed her skirt across her knees.  She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts.  ‘Aye, Norrie.  I’ve been out and about.’

 

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand.  ‘What’s this you’re reading?  Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

 

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language.  But I stayed patient.  ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither.  It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’  I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence.  ‘Unexpected.’

 

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

 

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither.  But they seem decent.  He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina.  And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

 

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again.  Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

 

I pressed on.  ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither.  It’d be bad for them.’  Why did my voice tremble?  Why was I afraid?  ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up?  And the banks…  Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

 

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

 

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be?  We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it.  We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency.  Or worse, the euro!’

 

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down.  Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

 

‘Aye, of course it does.’  I faltered.  ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

 

She sighed.  ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie.  And I’ll tell you why.’  She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it.  She placed a fingertip against Kenneth.  ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors.  One of our Conservative Party councillors.  But that fact isn’t mentioned here.  It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

 

I chuckled nervously.  ‘Now Mither.  I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

 

Mither rose from her throne.  ‘I am unbiased.  My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts.  Facts, mind you.  Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year.  Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

 

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces.  Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf.  I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

 

I seethed.  How I hated, how I loathed this referendum!  Setting family members against one another day after day!  I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture.  Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

 

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18th, to come – and take place and be over with.  The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly.  And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me.  I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door.  A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood.  Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

 

I began to panic.  God, could it happen?  I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots.  While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

 

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

 

She sensed when I was worn out.  While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

 

These might be wee things.  If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland.  The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner.  Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

 

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors.  It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone.  But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

 

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

 

The evidence disturbed me.  When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead.  She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them.  What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me.  I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

 

‘Yes!  Yes!  Yes – !’

 

And she’d argue.  Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded?  In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

 

‘So go on.  Tell me.  Explain.  Why can we not be independent?’

 

‘Because… We can’t!  We just can’t!  We’re too… too…’

 

‘Too wee?’

 

‘Aye!  Well, no.  Not that, not only that.  We’re also…’

 

‘Too poor?’

 

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent.  But the main reason is that we’re…’

 

‘Too stupid?’

 

‘Och stop it, Mither!  Stop!  You’re putting words in my mouth!’

 

‘But you agree with that basic proposition?  Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’  She sighed.  ‘That’s what we’re up against.  A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

 

I stormed out of the room at that point.  What horrible people had she been talking to?

 

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak.  After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there.  It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on.  The leaflets in the rack had changed.  The tourist ones had disappeared.  In their place were different ones.  Political ones.

 

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack.  Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland.  Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence…  One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

 

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet.  It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address.  My insides turned cold as I read the address.  I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse.  I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

 

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office.  I’d been dreaming.  A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum.  Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me.  I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant.  The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader.  He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

 

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately.  To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it.  He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence.  And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour.  Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t.  They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

 

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon.  It was our town.

 

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while.  I went upstairs and knocked on her door.  There was no reply.  The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me.  Then I headed for the middle of town.

 

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub.  The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience.  I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me.  It contained fewer people than I’d expected.  Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes.  Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

 

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

 

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone.  It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

 

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

 

‘He won’t answer the question!’

 

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

 

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me.  The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face.  A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands.  As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton,  lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

 

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

 

What happened next is confusing.  I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions.  I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her.  But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground.  Mither had disappeared.  She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought.  She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

 

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand.  Now it was a ruin of broken shell.  Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

 

Then I was being helped to my feet.  Around me, I heard voices:

 

‘Who is it?’

 

‘Some auld lady.’

 

‘No, wait… Christ!  It’s a man!’

 

‘It’s young Bates.  You ken, Norrie Bates?  Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

 

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

 

Someone took my arm and led me away.  Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone.  We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there.  I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours.  He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

 

© Yes Scotland / From wikipedia.org

 

Dougie looked perplexed.  He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve.  ‘Norrie,’ he said at last.  ‘I think you need to go home.  As fast as you can manage.’

 

My head ached.  Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain.  I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet.  It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin.  In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped.  ‘Aye,’ I whispered.  ‘I’ll go home.’

 

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now.  ‘How’s your mither?  I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19th.  The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result.  Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

 

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets.  On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it.  That was another lark she’d been up to.  Knitting for independence.

 

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew.  The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

 

But I repeated the news.  ‘Mither.  It’s a no.’

 

She didn’t answer.  No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning.  I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her.  But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

 

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

 

© Paramount Pictures / From tvtropes.org

 

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins.  No apologies to Jim Murphy.

 

And tomorrow, on September 19th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi.  Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson.  Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it.  Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister. 

Posted on

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

 

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

 

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result.  This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years.  It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government.  They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

 

But first…  A message for viewers in Scotland.

 

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine.  As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

 

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me.  Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith.  To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

 

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster.  The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway.  But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

 

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show.  And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’.  And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’.  This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs.  And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

 

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath.  That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

 

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland.  Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories.  When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls.  When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

 

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015).  For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile.  Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party.  (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.)  And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

 

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally.  While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried.  Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast.  That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017.  What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories.  If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

 

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long.  Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years.  For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

 

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch.  As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership.  I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029.  Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

 

© BBC

 

Oh well.  You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats.  I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth.  Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey.  Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

 

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan…  Oh, how I laughed.

 

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

 

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk.  The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it.  Far from it.  Truss has been blaming everyone but herself.  She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership.  Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump.  I do hope July 4th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

 

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five.  Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage?  Don’t bet your life savings on it.