Politics – Page 4 – Blood and Porridge

November 9, 2020November 22, 2020

It’s Biden and bye-Don

Last month, despite what all the opinion polls were forecasting, I predicted gloomily that Donald Trump would probably win a second term in the American presidential election on November 3^rd. My gloom was largely rooted in what I called the ‘shy Trumper’ hypothesis, the notion that many people were lying to the pollsters about their voting intentions because they were too embarrassed to admit they were going to vote for a scum-bucket like Trump.

I already knew what I would write about on this blog in the likely event, as I saw it, of Trump’s re-election. I planned to refer to the satirical 1981 novel Hello America by the late, great J.G. Ballard, which is set in 2114 and postulates an ecologically devastated and almost uninhabited United States of America. An expedition from Europe arrives in the wasteland formerly known as the USA and discovers there, among other things, a madman claiming to be both the American president and Charles Manson. I suspected another four years of Trump, whose penchant during the Covid-19 pandemic for summoning his adoring, mask-rejecting, non-distancing supporters to mass campaign rallies suggested a deadly cult-leader on a far greater scale than Manson, would send the USA well on its way to becoming the surreal, dystopian badlands that it is in Ballard’s novel.

© Granada

Well, as it turned out, the polls did severely underestimate Trump’s support. At the time I write this, he’s accrued more than 70,900,000 votes. Thankfully, however, Joe Biden received even more than that. He’s got just over 75,400,00 votes at the moment and has crossed the 270 college-vote threshold necessary for winning the presidency in the USA’s electoral college system. So Trump seems to be toast. That said, the Orange Malignancy has spent the past few days tweeting and speechifying that he actually won the election, whereas Biden cheated, and has vowed to overturn the results in the courts.

However, that’s unlikely to come to much if the competence displayed so far by Trump’s finest legal minds is anything to go by. At the weekend, for instance, Trump’s lawyer-in-chief Rudy Giuliani and his team flew into Philadelphia intending to hold a press conference to outline their forthcoming legal challenges. Through some mind-melting balls-up, they ended up holding the conference not in the city’s Four Seasons Hotel, but in the parking lot of a gardening centre called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in its outskirts. This was symbolically located between a crematorium and a porno bookstore called Fantasy Island Adult Books. Watching news footage of the conference, I almost expected the centre’s manager to emerge in the middle of it, reveal himself as Borat and exclaim, “Very nice!”

Now while nobody is happier than I am to see Trump ousted from the White House, and I can fully understand why on Saturday when Biden was officially declared president-elect great numbers of people took to the streets of New York, Philadelphia, etc., and started dancing as joyously as the Munchkins did in The Wizard of Oz (1939) after Dorothy’s house landed on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, I’m afraid things are still looking pretty grim for the USA’s future as a democracy. The fact is that nearly half the American electorate, after four years of exposure to the vile, tangerine-skinned creature, were still willing to vote for him.

Let that sink in. Almost half of voters opted for a man who’s presided over the deaths of 237,000-and-counting fellow citizens due to Covid-19 while insisting that it’s just ‘the flu’ and it’ll magically ‘go away’, who’s speculated about how said virus could be neutralised by injecting yourself with disinfectant, who’s contracted the virus himself but still insisted on holding a flurry of superspreading rallies where thousands of his supporters were jammed together in close, virus-friendly proximity. Who’s displayed a complete ignorance of and disregard for science, who’s trashed his country’s environment, who’s helped trash the environment on a global scale too through his lucre-obsessed climate denialism.

Who’s bragged about grabbing women by the ‘pussy’, who’s mocked disabled people, who’s condoned violence against journalists, who’s dismissed whole countries as ‘shitholes’ and whole nationalities as ‘drug dealers, criminals, rapists’. Who’s applauded the supposed fineness of white supremacists, who’s instructed fascist militias to ‘stand by’, who’s emitted a barrage of racist dog-whistles that in Biden’s words are as loud ‘as a foghorn’. Who’s happily played along with the insane conspiracy theories of QAnon whenever he thought it might bolster his support among the extreme-right-wing, tinfoil-hat-wearing fruit-loop brigade.

Who’s cosied up to authoritarian thugs like Putin, Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman and the familicidal Kim Jong-Un whilst insulting leaders of long-term democratic allies and showing a particular misogynistic vehemence for female ones like Angela Merkel. Who’s sneered at his country’s war-dead and derided former prisoners of war for the failing of getting ‘captured’, whilst using his family’s influence to escape doing military service himself. Who’s managed to wriggle out of paying any net federal income tax at all in 11 recent years, whilst in 2016 and 2017 paying the laughably meagre sum of $750 per annum, considerably less than what a citizen earning the minimum wage would pay. Who’s continually boasted about his business acumen, whilst according to Forbes magazine in October 2020 owes more than a billion dollars in debt…

And so on, and so forth.

Although some commentators have claimed that the willingness of millions of Americans to vote for a character like Trump, devoid of anything resembling a shred of moral fibre, shows how badly they’ve been ‘left behind’ in this, the era of globalism, I can’t say I find this argument convincing. You’d have to be extremely left behind, and in absolutely dire circumstances, to believe that Trump is your friend and saviour – when it’s obvious to anyone with a quarter of a brain that he despises the poor, whatever their political creed, and is intent only on lining his own pockets and the pockets of his hideous family. I’m afraid that Trump’s massive election turnout is more an indication that a great swathe of the American electorate either has zero moral compass and zero empathy for others or is as dumb as a sack of cement powder.

Into that latter category I’d put the Trump supporter who, since the election went Biden’s way, has been tweeting angrily about the anomaly of five million votes being cast in Georgia despite ‘Georgia’ having a population of only 3.7 million. So far he’s ignored the people who’ve pointed out to him that he’s confusing Georgia the state with Georgia the country.

Unfortunately, President-Elect Biden has his work cut out if he intends to heal the nation and somehow get those millions of Trump fans on board with concepts like decency, fairness, science, working for the common good and loving thy neighbour. Meanwhile, I suspect that the Republican Party, impressed by how Trump’s unrepentant-bastard approach to politics earned him 70 million votes, the second biggest tally by a presidential candidate in US history, will decide to really go for it in 2024 and field as a candidate some 21^st century reincarnation of Benito Mussolini.

All in all, I’m afraid, there are still plenty of opportunities for the USA to go completely J.G.

Anyway, for now at least, I’m relieved it’s over. I’m truly fed up with having the past few weeks of my life dominated by a 24/7 obsession with American politics. My partner especially will be relieved that she no longer has to listen to me mansplaining the Byzantine workings of the US electoral college: “…Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes, so if Biden can get that, it’ll carry him to the 270 threshold he needs to win, but even if Trump gets Pennsylvania in the end, he can still sneak it by winning Nevada, which has 6 votes, and Georgia, which has 16…”

And she’s American.

© Ayrshire Daily News

October 18, 2020October 20, 2020

Hope for the best, expect the worst

© Stewart Bremner

“Hope for the best, expect the worst,” is a maxim that crops up regularly in Angela Carter’s exuberant 1991 novel Wise Children. The novel’s two main characters, twin sisters Dora and Nora Chance, keep repeating this to themselves so that they remain grounded and their heads stay screwed on while they negotiate the highs and lows, the euphoria and tragedy, of life during eight decades of the 20^th century.

It’s also a maxim I think is worth bearing in mind as we approach the American presidential election on November 3^rd, little more than a fortnight away. Yes, I know the polls indicate Joe Biden has a solid and stable lead over the current, revolting incumbent of the White House. But of course four years ago Hillary Clinton was supposed to have a similarly commanding lead over the Orange Hideousness and we know what happened then.

One thing I suspect is overlooked in these polls is what is known in the UK as the Shy Tory factor. Wikipedia describes this phenomenon as “so-called ‘shy Tories’… voting Conservative after telling pollsters they would not.” Presumably, they lie to the pollsters because they’re too embarrassed to admit they intend to vote for a chancer like Boris Johnson. As a result, “the share of the electoral vote won by the Conservative Party” is “significantly higher than the equivalent share in opinion polls.”

And I imagine you’d feel embarrassed too if you admitted to a pollster that you were going to vote for a crooked, racist, narcissistic, tax-dodging, pussy-grabbing, pig-ignorant malignity like Trump who shrugs off the deaths of 220,000-and-counting American citizens from Covid-19 with the glib platitude, “It is what it is.” Thus, I have a horrible suspicion that the Shy Trumper factor will confound the pollsters’ predictions come November 3^rd.

And that’s before we consider the USA’s idiotic electoral college system, which means that one vote cast in the least populous state, Wyoming, carries three-to-four times the influence of one vote cast in the most populous state, California, and Trump only has to edge it in a few crucial swing states to win. Like his hapless predecessor Clinton, Biden could very well win the popular vote and still lose.

Also, there’s the sad fact that voter suppression has been rife. This has been done quietly through the gerrymandering, trimming of voter rolls and removal of polling stations by Republican administrations in various states, and noisily through Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of ballots submitted by mail. All have been designed to reduce the numbers of voters likely to vote Democrat.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if voting on the day itself is disrupted by Trump-supporting fascist gangs and militias such as the Proud Boys, whom he recently instructed on TV to ‘stand by’. And it’s certain that in the aftermath of an election result that, ostensibly, he loses, he and his lickspittle Republican enablers will use every trick and machination in the legislative book to have votes nullified and overturned so that he manages to grasp that all-important number of 270 electoral college votes.

So with Trump back in the White House for another four years, how bad will it be? Very bad, I’d say. I expect the USA to become at least a semi-totalitarian state where announcing yourself as a dissident – a Democrat, a liberal, a Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ activist – becomes increasingly risky. Perhaps Trump’s official state apparatus won’t arrest or hurt you, but his unofficial army of gun-toting admirers, the white supremacists, militiamen and QAnon-obsessed conspiracy-theory fruit-loops, will take the law into their own hands and go after you themselves. And should any of his right-wing terrorist fanboys be caught in the act of snuffing out his critics, I sure Trump will bend over backwards to ensure they are treated leniently. Witness how quick he was to defend the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, the delusional 17-year-old who gunned down two protestors during anti-police demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Leniency will also be shown to bad-apple cops and right-wing goons who rough up another group whom Trump despises, journalists working for mainstream and liberal news outlets. During the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year, police emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric were already assaulting and harassing reporters and camera crews. And not long ago, Trump expressed his delight that Ali Velshi, an anchor with MSNBC, was hit by a police rubber bullet while reporting on a protest in Minneapolis. “Wasn’t it beautiful sight?” he crowed at a rally. “It’s called law and order.”

Elsewhere, expect a nationwide ban on abortion. I’m sure, though, that Trump’s wealthy elite will be quietly allowed to purchase super-expensive drugs to combat Covid-19 that have been developed with human cells taken from aborted embryos. The Affordable Health Care Act, hated by Trump because it was an Obama initiative, will go and won’t be replaced. Environmental protections, already trashed, will be trashed further. The forests on the west coast will continue to burn and the White House will react only with schadenfreude because everyone in the fire-zone votes Democrat anyway.

Science will be denigrated and ridiculed. The evangelical Christians who loyally vote for Trump, even he obviously despises them, and even though a less Christian specimen of humanity than Trump is difficult to find, will be rewarded by having science removed from school syllabi, textbooks and museums in favour of their own primitive doctrines about how the world was created and how it functions.

Hundreds of thousands more Americans will die from Covid-19 while Trump, flaunting his supposedly macho disdain for mask wearing and social distancing, will continue to blame China, the WHO and Democrat state governors. People of colour will continue to be murdered by the police, protests against these murders will continue to take place, police will continue to attack protestors, militiamen and looters will continue to take advantage of the chaos, and American cities will become ever-more dystopian.

Interviewed recently in the Observer, Martin Amis observed, “This election is going to be a referendum on the American character, not on Trump’s performance.” As such, it’s tempting to dismiss a second Trump win as an America-only problem. If Americans are dumb and immoral enough to vote for this nightmare, then it’s on them. They own it. Unfortunately, a second Trump presidency will impact hugely on the rest of the world too, via his hostility towards NATO, the EU and the Iran nuclear deal, and his disorientating mood-swings regarding China, and his penchant for being a lapdog to authoritarian dictators while insulting and belittling the leaders of long-term democracies (especially if they’re women).

Of course, the biggest and most disastrous impact of four more years of Trump, who’s pulled the USA out of the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, will be on the environment. His refusal to take man-made climate change seriously may well scupper any chance humanity has of lessening its worst effects. Trump doesn’t care about the millions – billions? – of people who could lose not just their livelihoods but their lives as average temperatures rise, huge areas become uncultivatable and possibly uninhabitable, rainfall patterns change disastrously, coasts disappear under rising sea levels and climate refugees take to the road in vast numbers. Those are the problems of the little people, the losers, the suckers, and Trump only likes WINNERS.

I fear that already we’ve passed a tipping point and our species is inevitably facing catastrophe, that the damage we’ve wrought on our planet’s climate is now embedded in the system and will lead from one devastating consequence to another. But if we haven’t already reached that tipping point, it’s likely that we will have by 2024 or whenever it is that Trump leaves the White House. (Though don’t be surprised if by 2024 he and his minions in the US Senate and Supreme Court have re-engineered the constitution to allow him to remain in power indefinitely.) By the way, Trump’s re-election will only goad the Brazilian fascist Bolsonara further in his efforts to torch the Amazon rainforest.

And yet, I believe that when future historians look back on this period and wonder how humanity managed to trigger such an ecological, political, economic and social horror show, they won’t finger Trump as the main culprit for all this. No, the title of Most Villainous Human Being on the Planet in 2020 will surely be awarded to Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has been instrumental in preparing the way for and then enabling Trump – just as it’s done for climate-change denialism, Brexit and most other things that suck in the modern world. A Trump re-election will be largely due to Murdoch’s Fox News, a sealed-off bubble and echo-chamber for millions of American right-wingers who only want to hear their views confirmed, never challenged.

Future historians? That’s me suggesting humanity has a future, where there’ll be historians. Evidence, I’m afraid, that I’m hoping for the best rather than expecting the worst.

© Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi

September 12, 2020September 15, 2020

He’s not the right-wing messiah, he’s a very naughty boy

From headtopics.com

I try not to post things on this blog in reaction to every right-wing halfwit who says something stupid in the press or on social media. Otherwise, I’d be stuck at my laptop and furiously writing blog entries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, I’ll make an exception in the case of actor Laurence Fox.

As a graduate of Harrow School and a member of the Fox acting dynasty that also includes his father James, uncle Edward and cousins Emilia and Freddie, Laurence Fox is the epitome of the stereotypically posh and well-connected British thespian. He’s also now a darling of the Union Jack-waving, Brexit-loving, Boris-adoring, Trump-admiring, climate change-denying, Black Lives Matter-rejecting, coronavirus-doubting fraternity whose members include such charmers as Toby Young, Douglas Murray and Darren Grimes.

I’ve never seen the TV show Lewis (2006-2015) that made Fox’s name, and in fact prior to 2020 my only sighting of him had been in the 2001 British horror movie The Hole, made when he was in his early twenties and still able to pass for a teenager. The Hole tells the story of how a group of wealthy, spoilt and generally unbearable boarding-school brats, who include Fox, Keira Knightly and Desmond Harrington, skive off a study trip by hacking into their school’s computer and removing their names from the trip-records. Then they steal away to an abandoned underground bunker close to the school grounds, intending to hide there and party for the few days that the trip is in progress. After they descend into the bunker, they discover that they’ve been locked inside, and of course nobody knows they’re trapped there. Thereafter, things go clammily and ickily Lord of the Flies. The hideous youngsters succumb to paranoia and hysteria and eventual, fatal bouts of illness and violence. It turns out that their ordeal was engineered by the sneakily psychotic Thora Birch. Three cheers for Thora, I say.

The Hole contains a memorable moment where Knightly tells Fox to put his ‘cock away’. Recently, noting the controversies Fox has generated, the film critic Kim Newman wondered why nobody had made a gif or sound-clip of this available online.

Early in 2020 Fox made an appearance on the BBC’s politics / panel show Question Time where he exhibited the same qualities that he’d exhibited in The Hole, i.e., he came across as wealthy, spoilt and unbearable. He claimed the UK press’s treatment of Megan Markle wasn’t the result of racism because Britain was ‘the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe’, which will be a surprise to asylum seekers currently being accommodated by Serco and harassed by members of Britain First, and bleated at a person of colour in the Question Time audience who took issue with him that “to call me a white privileged male is to be racist. You’re being racist.”

Now calling Fox ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ – for I’m sure his multiple family connections did nothing to hinder his ascendancy in the acting profession – doesn’t strike me as racist so much as truthful. However, Fox struck a chord with many right-wing malcontents unhappy with prevailing currents of political correctness and wokeness. People who were nostalgic for the good old days when you were allowed to nod along at Enoch Powell, good old Enoch, warning about how rivers would flow with blood if too many ‘wide-grinning picaninnies’ were allowed into Britain, and allowed to chuckle at Bernard Manning, good old Bernard, telling jokes about ‘darkies’ on the telly, admired the cut of Fox’s jib.

Soon he was being hailed as the new messiah of right-wing common sense and telling-it-like-it-is in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the like. And soon he was popping up here, there and everywhere in the media as a pundit sounding off about the failings of leftie-dominated Britain. (Somehow leftie-dominated despite it having a Conservative government for the last decade.)

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times was quick to do a profile of Fox, in which he self-deprecatingly but possibly accurately described himself as ‘a knobbish dickhead half-educated tw*t’. Fox also revealed that he’d fallen out with his brother-in-law who, believe it or not, is the half-Nigerian comedian, actor, writer and filmmaker Richard Ayoade. Apparently, Ayoade said no when Fox asked for his public support after the Question Time appearance caused a furore. Indeed, Ayoade angrily told him, “You have never encountered racism.” To which Fox replied, “Yeah, I have. I’ve encountered racism from black people towards me, when I was working in Kenya for seven months. It’s the way you’re spoken to – racism can be deferential.”

Now I don’t know what ‘deferential racism’ is. Then again, neither does Fox, for when the Sunday Times interviewer asked him to explain what he meant, he said, “I’m just not smart enough to do it.”

Alas, poor Laurence had barely a moment to enjoy his time in the limelight as the new golden boy of all things un-PC and un-woke before he stuck his foot in his mouth. He criticised Sam Mendes’ World War I movie 1917 (2019) for featuring a Sikh soldier as a minor character. This, Fox alleged during a podcast with James Delingpole (who, incidentally, is another right-wing bladder-on-a-stick), was ‘forcing diversity on people’. Fox had to apologise when it was subsequently pointed out to him that some 130,000 Sikhs fought for Britain in World War I.

This week, Fox has been busy apologising again, to actress and comic performer (and his co-star in Lewis) Rebecca Front. Front, a supporter of Black Lives Matter, had had enough of Fox’s constant jabbering that white lives matter too and blocked him on twitter, which Fox claimed was an act of ‘cancellation’. He and Front then had a private text conversation about it, during which Front pointed out: “Black lives are systematically undervalued. Their work opportunities are fewer, their health outcomes far worse, the criminal justice system works against them. I think the least we can do is let them have a f**king slogan.” Afterwards, Fox tweeted a screenshot of their supposedly private conversation, which of course exposed his former co-star to the possibility of pile-ons and trolling by the demented right-wing dingbats who follow him.

No doubt realising that the spat was attracting attention and he wasn’t coming out of it well, he later announced: “…I tweeted a private text message. It isn’t true to my values to make a private conversation public just to make a point. I regret it.”

Self-pity is a major part of Fox’s schtick. He wails that nasty snowflake lefties, like Front, are out to cancel him. He wails that as a well-known, expensively educated, massively well-connected white person he should be getting as much attention as all those disadvantaged, oppressed-for-centuries black folk. And he wails too that his acting work is drying up because most of the showbiz world doesn’t like him for his untrendy views. I would have thought that in 2020, the year of Covid-19, a lot of actors’ work has dried up. Though after the spectacle he’s made of himself recently, would anyone want to spend the entire duration of a film-shoot or the entire run of a theatrical play in his unsufferable presence?

I suppose once upon a time I’d have taken comfort in the fact that the best the intolerant right can do for a figurehead is a bumbling, forever-shooting-himself-in-the-foot idiot like Fox. Surely that would mean they could never constitute a serious threat to society. However, when you look at who’s occupying Number 10 Downing Street, you realise being a grade-A jackass is absolutely no impediment to power these days. God help us. Laurence Fox could have a long and successful political career ahead of him.

© Canal + / Pathe / Buena Vista Distribution

July 28, 2020

George, where did it all go wrong?

© The Belfast Telegraph

Last Thursday saw the Prime Minister of England – sorry, Prime Minister of Britain – Boris Johnson arrive in Scotland for a one-day charm offensive. This was intended to remind Scottish people of how lucky they were to be part of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the ‘mighty’ union as Johnson grandly put it, and dissuade them of any mad notions of voting for Scottish independence, which, according to recent opinion polls, 54% of them are now minded to do. Determined to press the flesh with the maximum number of Scottish people during his visit, Johnson flew into the bustling Caledonian metropolises of the Orkney Islands and RAF Lossiemouth. A little unfortunately, the Orcadian mainland is home to a small settlement called Twatt, which led to some unkind quips being made on social media about there already being ‘one Twatt in the Orkneys’. It was also slightly unwise for the PM to parley with some local fishermen and pose for photographers holding a pair of clawed, antennae-ed crustaceans, as social media was soon heaving with comments about how he ‘had crabs’.

But Johnson isn’t the only British political chancer to have foisted himself upon Scotland recently, proclaiming the message that red, white and blue unionism is good while Saltire-waving indie is bad. For July 2020 has seen the return to Scottish soil of one George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway. Or to give him the title that immediately appears when you type his name into Google, ‘George Galloway cat.’

It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time I considered Galloway one of the good guys. Well, one of the goodish guys at least. This was while he served as Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead, later Glasgow Kelvin, from 1987 to 2005. For many years Labour MPs formed the bulk of Scotland’s representation in the House of Commons, but apart from a few high-fliers like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and George Robertson, destined for cabinet jobs under Tony Blair, they were an uninspiring lot – a big, grey Scottish-accented blob whose only function was to shamble through the voting lobbies at their party’s bidding. They were nicknamed the ‘low-flying Jimmies’, though to my mind they were a living, if barely sentient, definition of the Scots word ‘numpties’.

However, the Scottish Labour MPs contained a small but interesting awkward squad. The squad included the admirably his-own-man Tam Dalyell; and the very leftward Ron Brown (who shocked the British establishment by heading off to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and then on his return warning that it probably wasn’t a good idea for the West to fund the Mujahideen, later to morph into the Taliban); and the trio of Dick Douglas, John McAllion and Dennis Canavan, all of whom would later end up estranged from the Labour Party and end up supporting the cause of Scottish independence. Plus, of course, the ultra-awkward George Galloway.

Galloway was too left-wing for traditional mainstream Labourites’ liking, which was fine by me. I also approved of his constitutional stance. Though he didn’t go as far as espousing independence for Scotland, he advocated a large measure of home-rule for the country within the framework of the UK. And when John Major’s Conservative Party won the British general election in 1992 and dashed hopes of a devolved Scottish parliament being set up for at least another half-decade, and a campaign movement called Scotland United was formed to maintain pressure for the creation of such a parliament, I wasn’t surprised when Galloway became one of the movement’s leading lights.

From twitter.com/thoughtland

To keep the issue in the public consciousness, Scotland United held rallies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I participated in a couple of these, though I can’t remember Galloway addressing the crowds. I do remember, however, one Saturday marching down to Leith Links in Edinburgh where, after speeches, we were treated to a gig by the Scotland United-supporting pop / soul band Deacon Blue. At one point, singer Ricky Ross pointed out the nearby premises of Leith’s Conservative and Unionist Association and started singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which contains the pertinent lyrics, “…how does it feel / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown…?” The memory makes me nostalgic. Trying to establish a Scottish parliament by having Deacon Blue sing Bob Dylan at the Tories. Those were the days.

Still, it was already clear that Galloway had a dodgy side. From 1983 to 1987 he’d served as general secretary of the British charity War on Want and stories of his antics during a conference in Greece – Galloway confessed to getting to know some local ladies ‘carnally’ – led to embarrassing tabloid coverage. I seem to remember one newspaper reporting his attempts to justify his behaviour with the headline I BONKED FOR BRITAIN. This presumably helped give rise to Galloway’s nickname ‘Gorgeous’. Meanwhile, his simultaneously smooth and self-righteous manner caused a lot of people I knew, even ones who shared his politics, to profess that they hated his guts.

During the next two decades, following Galloway’s exploits was a seesawing experience. He’d do something crap, then redeem himself by doing something impressive, then blow his restored credibility by doing something crap again. At the crap end was his grovelling to the Iraq despot Saddam Hussein, which in 1994 saw him utter the famous line, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Later, Galloway claimed, not very convincingly, that he’d aimed this line at the long-suffering Iraqi people rather than at Saddam himself.

But he deserved kudos for his opposition to George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair’s misguided, mendacious and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. He denounced Bush as a terrorist, got himself expelled from the Labour Party, sued and won against the Daily Telegraph after it claimed Iraqi agents had secretly paid him with cash from the United Nations Oil for Food programme, and then squared up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in 2005. The senate confrontation was probably his finest hour. He gave those senators a mauling. “…(I)n everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right,” he declared, “and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

Though he’d torched his bridges with the Labour Party, Galloway managed for a time to defy Enoch Powell’s famous adage that ‘all political lives… end in failure.’ He formed the Respect Party, stood for election in the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and won it from Labour. He stood down as MP there following a schism in the Respect Party, but in a 2012 by-election pulled off a similar stunt by winning Bradford West from Labour. Both constituencies had sizable Muslim communities and there were copious allegations about Galloway dishing religious-related dirt on his opponents – that in Bethnal Green he’d played up the fact that the Labour incumbent, Oona King, had a Jewish mother; that in Bradford West he’d raised the issue of the Labour Party’s Muslim candidate drinking alcohol; and that in the run-up to the 2015 general election he’d accused his Labour challenger, another Muslim, Naz Shah, of supporting Israel and lying about an arranged marriage. But Shah had the last laugh because she won Bradford West back for Labour.

© Channel 4

True to form, Galloway’s 2005 triumph in Bethnal Green was soon negated by his idiotic decision to take part in the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother. This resulted in such colossally cringy moments as George, no longer so gorgeous, dancing in a leotard beside the late Pete Burns of the band Dead or Alive, or pretending to be a cat and licking cream off the lap of actress Rula Lenska. Hence the word ‘cat’ popping up beside his name on Google searches.

More seriously, Galloway secured a job as a host on the Iran-government-funded Press TV in 2008 and that same year earned himself the ire of gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell for claiming that a gay man executed in Iran was punished for ‘sex crimes’ rather than for being gay. He landed himself in more hot water in 2012 when he defended Julian Assange against rape charges by describing having non-consensual sex with a sleeping woman (after consensual sex with her when she was awake), which Assange was accused of doing, as ‘bad sexual etiquette’ but ‘not rape’.

Galloway’s support for Assange was evidence that, as the 2010s progressed, he was increasingly happy to clamber onto any bandwagon that he thought would boost his profile. So he campaigned vociferously for a ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence – ‘just say naw’. Mind you, he was scathing of his ex-comrades in the Labour Party who’d joined forces with the Conservatives in the anti-independence Better Together movement. “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative,” he told Prospect magazine, “please shoot me.” Remember those words. Prior to the referendum, I watched him in a televised debate and discovered that, like a cartoon character, he’d now acquired a costume, a rarely-off-his-head fedora, and a catchphrase: “That is nonsense on stilts!”

Perhaps upset that his contribution to saving the United Kingdom didn’t result in ennoblement by a grateful David Cameron – he could have been Lord Galloway of Nonsense-on-Stilts – George then threw his lot in with the Brexiteers and campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016’s referendum on that matter. This spawned some nauseating photographs of him, a supposed socialist, posing with Nigel Farage, ex-City of London spiv, immigration dog-whistler and Donald Trump’s biggest British fanboy. That said, pictures of Galloway embracing the extreme right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon at a debate in Kazakhstan in 2019 were even more mind-melting.

The increasing number of causes that Galloway hitched himself to seemed in inverse proportion to the number of votes being cast for him in elections. A 2011 attempt to get into the Scottish parliament saw him win a less-than-awesome 3.3% of the vote in Glasgow. His performance in the 2016 London Mayoral contest was even worse (1.4%) and attempts to run in English constituencies in the 2017 and 2019 general elections had equally dire results.

Now George has a new wheeze, which is to run in next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections as head of something called Alliance for Unity, of which he says: “We have only one goal – to get the SNP out.” To this end, Galloway has declared himself willing to work with even the Conservatives. Yes, this is the man who a half-dozen years ago invited folk to shoot him if they ever saw him do that.

He intends to stand in the south of Scotland, a rural, down-to-earth area where I can’t see many people falling for his self-serving, narcissistic brand of bullshit. Maybe he figures he stands a chance because he shares a name with one of the regions there, Dumfries and Galloway. And who does he really expect to vote for him? Not Scottish independence supporters, obviously. Labour supporters will hardly vote for someone so willing to climb into bed with the Tories. And the hard-line loyalists / British nationalists who increasingly form the main support for the Scottish Conservative Party these days will hardly be enamoured with someone who’s said of Northern Ireland: “There is no Northern Ireland. It is six counties in the north of Ireland. It should have never been in the British state in the first place.” Nor will his urging of Arabs to kill British troops in Iraq in 2003, one of the final straws that got him chucked out of Labour, win him their admiration either.

George Galloway may still look, talk and act like the cat that’s got the cream. But I suspect he’s now used up the last of his nine lives.

May 29, 2020June 29, 2020

Millennium Dom

From the Cyprus Mail

Spin doctor Dominic Cummings, the Svengali to Boris Johnson’s Trilby, the Rasputin to Johnson’s Tsarina Alexandra, the organ-grinder to Johnson’s dancing monkey, the puppet-master to Johnson’s, well, puppet, has become Britain’s Most Hated Man.

That’s because everyone in Britain now knows that Cummings didn’t just break the coronavirus-lockdown rules that he himself helped draw up for the population, but pulverised them. The Gollum-like governmental advisor apparently believed that rules exist only for plebs and he, as a superior being, had a divine right to flout them. In late March he drove his wife and child 260 miles from London to his parents’ farm near Durham in northeast England, while his missus was displaying coronavirus symptoms. He developed symptoms soon after. Also, while in the northeast, he drove 30 miles to local tourist attraction Barnard Castle, an action he subsequently justified by claiming he’d done it to check if he could drive safely even though the virus was affecting his eyesight. I guess that’s the equivalent of a brain surgeon performing an operation to check if the palsy he’s been suffering from isn’t making his hands shake too much.

I should say not quite everyone in Britain is baying for Cummings’s blood, for I’ve noticed a few right-wing folks complaining on social media that Cummings has been the victim of a stitch-up by Britain’s hideous lefty mainstream press. Such people regard Cummings as the Messiah, thanks to him being Campaign Director of the Vote Leave movement in 2015-16 and playing a major role in getting Britain out of the European Union. According to them, the lefty newspapers that have it in for poor Dom include that notoriously socialistic organ, the Daily Mail. Looking at the state of the comments posted by those fulminating right-wingers, I just hope they cancel their subscriptions to the Daily Mail and invest the money they’ve saved in taking punctuation courses where they learn how to use apostrophes correctly.

Anyway, reading the screeds of print written about Cummings in the past week, I’ve been reminded that Cummings first made a name for himself during a little-remembered episode in recent British political history. It happened shortly after the advent of the new millennium, in a part of the world where I was living. I’m talking about the referendum on setting up a regional assembly in northeast England, held in 2004.

Soon after Tony Blair’s New Labour government arrived in power in the late 1990s, devolution was implemented in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom, with the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and Northern Irish Assembly. This left England as the only part of the UK without devolved government, which caused some awkward anomalies. How, for example, could Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians turn up at the British parliament and vote on issues affecting the English population, when English politicians weren’t allowed to attend the three devolved parliaments and have a say on equivalent issues affecting the populations there, like health and law enforcement, entrusted to those parliaments under the devolution settlement?

The Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act of 2003 was meant to restore constitutional balance. It was envisioned that, eventually, eight regional assemblies would operate across England. As England had a population five times the size of that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, a patchwork of small English assemblies would ensure that too much power wasn’t concentrated in a single, huge English assembly. And the first English region to get the chance to approve the establishment of its own assembly was northeast England, which had an all-postal ballot on the matter on November 4^th, 2004.

Cynics would say that the northeast was given first say because it seemed highly likely to do what the government wanted it to do. It was deeply pro-Labour at the time and contained Tony Blair’s constituency, Sedgefield. Also, it seemed the English region with the strongest local identity – a place that’d want its own assembly making decisions on its behalf rather than having decisions imposed on it from faraway London. At the time I was living in the northeast’s biggest city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and, without wishing to confuse the city with the region, I have to say the Geordies of Newcastle did seem a complete race apart.

I’d spent most of my youth in Scotland, where devolution had been a burning political issue for a generation. There’d been a referendum about establishing a Scottish parliament back in 1979 and a majority had voted in favour of it. Due to some disgraceful rule-bending by the Labour government of the time, though, it was decreed that the majority wasn’t big enough and the parliament wasn’t delivered. Soon after came the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which massively reshaped the economy and culture of the UK in the 1980s. Most people in Scotland didn’t vote for Thatcher but the existing constitutional set-up left her free to do what she wanted with the place – a sorry state of affairs that resulted in the nadir of the Poll Tax, imposed solely on Scotland in 1989 as an experiment to see how it was likely to go down in the rest of the UK. A great ‘what-if’ of Scottish political history is how a Scottish parliament, if one had been created at the end of the 1970s, might have stood up to Thatcher. I certainly can’t imagine things being any worse than they were. Anyway, it seemed to me a no-brainer that people in northeast England should get their own assembly in 2004.

However, in the run-up to the referendum, I realised my devolutionary enthusiasm wasn’t mirrored in the Geordies and north-easterners around me. This was largely due to the influence of the anti-assembly campaign North East Says No, chaired by local businessman John Elliot and with a certain Durham-born, Oxford-educated character called Dominic Cummings as one of its prime movers. The anti-assembly campaign whipped up resentment against the proposed establishment. It warned that an assembly would be an unnecessary extra layer of government, diverting yet more public money into the pockets of yet more politicians – and diverting it away from areas that really needed it, like health. “More doctors,” declared one of its ads, “not politicians.” Actually, that sounds familiar. Didn’t Dom peddle a similar message in a more recent political campaign? Although in Newcastle in 2004 I didn’t see it emblazoned on the side of a bus.

From wikipedia.org

It didn’t help the assembly’s cause that the senior politician entrusted with overseeing its creation was deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who famously had not one but two princely Jaguar motor cars at his beck and call and generally wasn’t known for his frugality.

Cummings’s anti-assembly message certainly got through. With hindsight it was scary how many left-wing, liberal-minded people I knew in Newcastle, who’d normally have detested everything Cummings stood for, unconsciously parroted his rhetoric. I remember in my workplace a Russian woman, who had British citizenship and the right to participate in the referendum but wasn’t too clued-up on local politics, asking a colleague for advice on how to vote. The colleague, a Guardian-reading progressive if ever there was one, promptly told her the assembly was a nonsense and to vote against it. Meanwhile, my best mate in Newcastle, also no right-winger, dismissed the proposed assembly as a ‘white elephant’ designed to ‘line politicians’ pockets’.

It didn’t surprise me, then, when Prescott and company lost the referendum and a majority voted against the assembly’s establishment. It did surprise me how emphatic that majority was – of those who bothered to vote, 78% voted against it. And that wasn’t only the prospect of a north-eastern assembly killed stone dead, but the prospect of any future devolution in England generally. No politician would touch the project after that whipping. Dominic Cummings had secured his first and, alas, not his last big victory.

Although Newcastle is pictured by some as a drunken hellhole where ghastly nightclubs are pillaged by stag and hen parties clad in little more than jockstraps and G-strings while freezing easterly gales howl around them from the North Sea – an image that admittedly isn’t wide of the mark if you venture into the city’s Bigg Market district on a Friday or Saturday night – I thought it was a great city. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there during the first half of the noughties. It had some great pubs (away from the Bigg Market), a good live music scene, decent shops and easy access to libraries and galleries. You could generally find whatever it was that floated your boat, be it antiques markets or creative writing groups or comedy shows or whatever. And I loved how you were mere minutes away from some of the most scenic landscapes in England. And the Geordies were great company. Indeed, I would have stayed for longer if the money I was earning in my job there hadn’t been so crap.

Looking back, though, I was probably lucky that I left Newcastle when I did and avoided the years of austerity that were inflicted on it by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 onwards. The newspaper reports I’ve read about what happened to Newcastle make grim reading – slabs of money hacked off its budget every year, a total of some 300 million pounds lost by 2019, with a resulting cull of libraries, youth clubs and children’s centres and a general neglect of public services. Even the city’s lollipop men and ladies weren’t spared – their numbers declined from 64 to seven in the space of five years. Would a north-eastern assembly have been able to protect the city against some of this savagery? Like the hypothetical 1980s Scottish parliament and Margaret Thatcher, I doubt if it would have made things any worse.

Incidentally, I think the missed opportunity of the English regional assemblies will contribute eventually to the breakup of the United Kingdom. Occasional senior Labour politicians – Gordon Brown especially – still talk up the prospect of a federal UK as a way to keep Scotland British. With their parliament nestling amid a bunch of similar-sized English ones where power is equally distributed, the Scots, the theory goes, will neither feel neglected nor get ideas above their station. They’ll accept they’re fairly treated and accept their lot as happy Brits. That might be true in an alternative universe, but it isn’t going to happen in this universe. There won’t be a properly federal UK because people in England, as 2004 proved, aren’t interested. And with so much power entrusted to dolts like Boris Johnson in London, I can’t see the Scots putting up with the existing constitutional status quo for much longer.

Modern right-wingers adore Dominic Cummings for what he’s supposedly done to restore British sovereignty. But he’s actually done more than most to crock the whole concept of Britain. Thanks in part to his exploits, including those in 2004, Britain as a union of four nations is doomed. Dom-ed, in fact.