Richard III at the “Tommy Robinson” march

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In 1990 there was a production of Richard III at the National Theatre, later also made into a film, which reset it in the 1930s, with Ian McKellen playing Richard as a chain smoking brylcreemed Fascist. This has some power because of the fascistic sympathies of so many of the British ruling class at the time, from Lord Northcliffe to Oswald Moseley and, indeed, the Duke of Windsor. The cast had enormous fun insinuating excruciating Windsor vowels (that rhyme house with mice) onto the deadly playfulness of Shakespeare’s rollicking, knockabout verse.

At the Play’s climax, just before the Battle of Bosworth, McKellen drew out – and if I recall it right – slightly changed a line that could easily be overlooked, making it an overt pivot. Straight after Henry Tudor’s oration to his troops, which could have been a press release written for the start of any war by the Foreign Office today – all about doing God’s work in overthrowing a bloody tyrant* and getting the grateful thanks of generations to come – Richard’s speech strikes a different tone.

Rather than What shall I say more than I have inferr’d? Mckellen says “What to say?” and pauses with a feeling of intense spiritual emptiness, while he tries to think of something…anything…that will motivate his troops.

Then he launches into a barrage of poisonous xenophobia for want of anything positive to offer.

Remember whom you are to cope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways
A scum of Bretons, and base lackey peasants,
Whom their o’er-cloyed country vomits forth
To desperate ventures and assured destruction.

These people are below you; “base lackey peasants”, “vagabonds, rascals and runaways” and foreigners too coming over here from “their o’er cloyed country” to make trouble in a place that would otherwise be just tickety boo.

You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest;
You having lands, and blest with beauteous wives,
They would restrain the one, distain the other.

There you were without any problems, least of all any problems from me, doing alright and then this lot turn up wanting what you’ve got. And they’re after your women too.

Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again;
Lash hence these overweening rags of France,
These famish’d beggars, weary of their lives;
Who, but for dreaming on this fond exploit,
For want of means, poor rats, had hang’d themselves:

These are desperate people without any wealth or hope: “famished beggars”. Lets do the decent thing and send them back where they came from.

If we be conquer’d, let men conquer us,
And not these bastard Bretons; whom our fathers
Have in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d,
And in record, left them the heirs of shame.

We’re not going to have to live with people who we used to conquer and knock about. We’re better than them. We must live up to our forefathers proud Imperial record – and definitely not feel in any way that there is anything wrong with beating, bobbing and thumping other people in “their own land”. You “can’t do defence on the goal line” after all.

Shall these enjoy our lands? lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters?

And don’t forget. They want what you’ve got and they want your women, because ravishing them is our job.

Needless to say, he went on to lose; the offer of a Kingdom for a horse notwithstanding.

Listen to the speeches at the “Tommy Robinson” rally on May 16th and all these themes are there; often articulated by people ventriloquising them off the peg from a ruling class with nothing positive to offer, but centuries of practice in the emotional manipulation of xenophobic fears. The saving grace of Richard III, like all of Shakespeare’s Machiavells, is that he has a wicked sense of humour (and constantly breaks the fourth wall, so we’re in on the joke in a way that makes us all complicit). “Robinson”, that strutting little grifter in the pocket of Elon Musk, does not have the wit for that.

*Henry (VII) of course, went on to be quite the tyrant himself, and a much more thought out and systematic one than most.

Abusive verbal attack on Green canvassers

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This is quite a disturbing post, put up by a guy who is evidently proud of it. It records a 2 minute discussion in the street during the local elections between three Green Party canvassers and an irate local resident; which starts off with him being quite calm and reasonable but ends up with him shouting abuse at them. They remain calm and polite throughout. He was filming the encounter from the start – presumably with a view to putting it about on social media afterwards, as he did.

His tone first starts to rise when he starts to argue that the motion put to the Green Party conference in March that Zionism is racism indicated “you don’t like Jews actually” because “95% …98%” of the Jewish community identify with Zionism. This is wrong on two counts.

1 Those figures are inaccurate. According to this article from the Jewish Chronicle from February 2024, in UK 63% identify as Zionist. And in the US thats 58%. And support for Israel is declining among Jewish people, just as it is more widely; because of what Israel is doing. That 63% in the UK is down from 72% in 2010. This is particularly the case among younger people. 8% in the UK considered themselves to be “anti Zionist” and 15% “non Zionist”. This active opposition is divided between religious currents that see a return to Israel before the coming of the Messiah as heresy, and internationalist Jews who see the adoption of communalist nationalism as a betrayal of the best humanist Jewish traditions. We should note that this survey was carried out by JPR, as the Chronicle puts it “before the current Hamas war,” and “found that support for the ideology of Zionism is slipping in UK Jewry as a whole” even then. So, what we have is not a community united around the Zionist project, but one that is deeply and traumatically fractured by its consequences. Some of that trauma is expressed by the increased vehemence of its supporters as more and more people are shocked by what they see.

2 The core of the argument is, however, whether Zionism can be described in any other way than racist. Liberal Zionists like Jonathan Freedland are without doubt appalled by the behaviour of people like Ben Gvir, partly because its bad PR, but also because it cuts against what they genuinely think Israel can represent. In his arguments around the IHRA definition, Freedland put the point that it is not antisemitic to criticise the state of Israel, but it would be to criticise a state of Israel. The distinction being that to criticise what a state does is legitimate, but not what it is. His problem is that it is impossible to envisage any state of Israel based on the core Zionist principle that the state is, and has to be, fundamentally a Jewish state, that did not treat the Palestinian population that also lives there as a threat; even if just demographically, and did not discriminate against them as second class citizens at best, subject, occupy, ethnically cleanse and expel and, in extremis, bomb them at worst. Its a bit like arguing that you can criticise Apartheid South Africa as it was, but not the principle of Apartheid South Africa. The problem for people like Freedland is that were Israel to treat the Palestinian population that lives under its rule with equality, it would cease to be Israel as a Zionist project and to maintain Israel as it is requires increasing levels of repression. Faced with challenges, “facts on the ground” have to be stamped down harder and harder. And as the power of the United States wanes, the viability of survival as a pro US military frontier state declines with it. The demonstrative violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon prioritise tactical victories over strategic viability and are a demonstration of weakness because they have to do this and keep playing double or quits until they can’t do it anymore. Rowing back from that course before that point is reached would be preferable for all concerned.

The final part of this film is quite surreal. Three very polite, slightly hurt and unhappy looking Green canvassers walking politely away from a man who is yelling at them to “F*** off!” and calling them “Nazis” in full confidence that they are nothing of the sort. Actual Nazis would have attacked him brutally and, I have no doubt, the Green Party people would have defended him from them. Embrace communalist nationalism and alliances get turned on their heads. The paradox of this is expressed by two young Jewish guys I was sitting beside on the tube when J and I were on our way to the Nakba demonstration last weekend. They were quiet outer suburban professionals, having a conversation about how people here had “had enough” and were looking to buy houses in Israel and how prices were now low (which indicates that more people want to sell/leave than move in; because Tel Aviv is actually a lot less safe than London and always will be). As we went along they were sharing info from their mobiles from family who were on the Tommy Robinson march, which they were joining themselves. And that’s where you end up. Finding common cause with people who want to “Unite the Kingdom” by deporting our neighbours.

On the Nakba Day demonstration, there were, among others, powerful and passionate Jewish speakers – you could have heard a pin drop for Stephen Kapos – and all the speakers called for unity against all forms of racism, stressing that “antisemitism has no place in our movement”. On the, much smaller, “Robinson” march Islamaphobia was common ground, with a big Christian Nationalist contingent who want to ban all other religions. When they come for the Mosques in the morning…People like our irate resident and the two young guys on the tube should think that through.

Banksy’s new statue

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The figure of “honour”, atop the rather mournful Guards Crimean War Memorial in the background, seems to be looking at the marching flag man and shrugging. “What can you do?”

On the edge of the Nakba Day Rally, walking away from it in the direction of the Tommy Robinson march, Banksy’s latest statue seen from the rear, and situated just outside the Atheneum on Lower Regent Street and Pall Mall, looked like it might have been an unlikely tribute to one of the mass trade union, Irish or Socialist leaders of the 1880s, whose demonstrations against unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts in 1887 were met by volleys of empty champagne bottles flung from the upper windows of the Pall Mall “Gentlemen’s” clubs and a police assault in Trafalgar Square that led to 1 death and 400 injuries; with the army standing by with fixed bayonets. John Burn perhaps. The sort of statue you might see in a country in which the ruling class owns a revolutionary tradition. That of Danton on the Boulevard Saint Germain comes to mind.

However, even from the rear, there was something about the suit that was from a later period. And something about the mechanical toy style of marching that suggested the Right, not the Left.

Looking at it from the front makes all that clear. The huge flag, waving boldly and pointing ever onwards and upwards is blowing back across the marcher’s face, so that he can’t see where he is going. Blinded by belief. And he is stepping confidently forwards, off the edge of the plinth, at the foot of which all the kings horses and all the kings men would have a lot of trouble putting him back together again. The flag has no motif, so it can stand for any set of beliefs that blinds someone to facts and the reality of their situation. However, in the context of the dominant set of statues in London, almost all of which celebrate military figures from the days of Imperial pomp, and in the aftermath of the “put out the flags” movement, its obvious who his target is.

His own video of the erection of the statue underlines this.

As with all progressive statues in London, there will now be a struggle as reactionary forces in local government, like the Conservative Restoration in Westminster, seek to have it removed lest it lead people to think.

What a “hate march” looks like

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For anyone with any difficulty identifying a “hate march”, it looks like this report of this year’s Jerusalem Day demonstration from Deutche Welle.

A crowd chanting “Death to Arabs”, “may your villages burn”, “Gaza is a graveyard”, forcing the Palestinian population to board up their shops and stay inside for fear of the attacks they make on targets who cross their path. It happens every year on May 15th – an Israeli national holiday to mark the conquest of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six Day war in 1967.

This march is a naked celebration of racial supremacy; a model for what a fascist march through a diverse community might look like if it had overt state backing; and it punctuates and celebrates the ethnic cleansing which is displacing the Palestinian population in Jerusalem as well as the West Bank.

There’s a really strange dissonance from a young woman interviewed in the middle of the clip who says “Jerusalem is the heart of Israel. Its the place where you can recognise notes of peace and harmony and basically all the goodness and moral compass that Judaism is trying to show the whole world”. She really seems to believe that. Its hard to think that she’s looking at the same event that the rest of us can see with our own eyes; or what she has to ignore to interpret it like that.

An increasing number of Jewish people across the world are rejecting this kind of disavowell. Many, in the UK, will be on the Nakba Day march today to oppose this “racist system of oppression … ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide” and “against the far right in Britain who glorify Israel’s racism and brutality.” A support that will be in evidence today on the second “Unite the Kingdom” march called by Tommy Robinson, deliberately timed to clash, for those “who have had enough of migration and mass immigration”.

That, I fear, will be what a hate march looks like.

But, as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign puts it “Our unity and solidarity is stronger than their hatred and division.”

Local elections – three different boroughs, three different planets

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Make no mistake, 1445 new Reform Councillors is 1445 too many, but this is below the 1625 they were projected to win and to have maintained the same momentum that they had in last year’s elections, they’d have gained 2050.

So, any story that they are building momentum should bear that in mind. They have about 25% of the vote, and slowly declining, and generate enormous antipathy among much of the remaining 75%.

As almost all of the new Reform councillors are new and inexperienced, the scope for screw ups is immense, and that will slow their further momentum, as the experience of their control in places like Stafforsdhire and Kent already has to some extent; but not derail it in areas where they are strong.

I was looking at the results in the three boroughs I either live in or have some connection with and its like three different planets.

In Islington its a more or less straight Labour – Green conflict. The Lib Dems, who ran the council up to 2010 are a faded force. Tories are nowhere. Nor is Reform. In some wards – on a turn out that ranged from 39 to 49% -Labour candidates were getting around 1600 votes. Greens came in over 2000. Overall, Labour held on with 32 councillors to 19 for the Greens.

In Brent everything is fragmented and gone to NOC. 26 Labour, 11 Tory, 11 Lib Dem, 9 Green. Reform are nowhere, even though they’ve managed to bolt on a white racist, angry motorist vote with some of the Hindutva Modi supporting Indians who are still mostly solidly with the Conservatives. A film of a Reform canvassing squad in Queens Park and Kilburn looked like a group of Gujarati football hooligans. Outside Kingsbury tube station last night there was a poster from LBC with Farage on it saying that “Reform is here to stay”. My immediate thought was “not round here you’re not”.

In Thurrock, on the other hand, we are drowning in a Turquoise sea. Reform 45, Labour 2. Conservative 2. On a big turnout. In the East of the borough, despite having the experience of voting in a Reform MP, a former Leeman Brother banker, so obviously not part of “the elite” –  who subsequently lost the whip for dodgy dealings during COVID; claiming grants for companies that had no employees and no turnover – and is, by all accounts totally useless if anyone tries to contact him for help – Reform candidates got voted in with over 2000 votes in several wards. The Conservatives are a busted force, largely because they bankrupted the council when they were running it by investing in speculative solar farms without doing due diligence on the con man who pocketed the money. Greens are weak locally. Labour quite a close second in a few places, but nowhere near close enough. I had a chat with one of the Labour candidates when I was clipping the hedge last weekend. Friendly young black woman, with a competent sort of air about her. She got over a hundred fewer votes than her colleagues, who were both white, which tells you something about this area can still be like sadly, even though its much more diverse than it was. She was also leafletting on her own in one of the wards where there was a projection that Labour could hold out. The leaflet she was giving out had NO political content at all, just a reminder to vote. Without taking the fight to Reform, that could have been counter productive.

There are now a large number of councils where the result is so fragmented that the colour coding looks like a knitting design by Kaffe Fasset; which poses the question of who does deals with whom to do what; and what the national political consequences of that could be.

  • Conservative/Reform blocs are likely to facilitate the reconsolidation of the Right with Reform absorbing the Tories – as both are agents of the Trump administration and will ultimately do what they are told.
  • The dynamic between Labour and the Greens is less straightforward; as all the pressure from the powers that be will be to a) blunt the Greens radicalism b) lock Labour into its current dead end of prioritising military spending and Cold War posturing over the measures needed to improve living standards while doubling down on trying to ape Reform’s xenophobia in the weird delusion that this will attract support. The current Labour leadership seems quite prepared to destroy the Party in so doing.
  • A concrete example of that is the latest teachers pay offer. This is not only below inflation, but unfunded. That means that it would have to come from school budgets; a form of self cannibalisation that will impoverish our schools. The prospect of a teachers strike is now back on the agenda as a result. Not something a government interested in resetting and rebuilding support would want to do.
  • If Labour members want it to survive as a Party with any kind of positive role to play, looking to the example of Pedro Sanchez in Spain – not agreeing to 5% of GDP on war – welcoming migration – stepping up green transition, and building a more positive relationship with China to help do that – would be a step forward.

We have trees!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

When the local council informed us that they would be renewing our pavements at the end of last year, the cover letter mentioned that “existing street trees” would be assessed, any diseased ones cut down and replaced. In the preceding week, the last remaining tree on the slope leading down to the park had been chopped down, and there was no sign of a replacement. So I emailed the person mentioned in the council letter as being in charge of the tree side of things and suggested that, as well as replacing any existing trees, additional trees could be planted on that stretch, which was now something of a desert.

One of the better legacies of the COVID pandemic is a street WhatApp group, which is usually now used for posting up artistic photos, or people asking each other for help with something, so I gave people a nudge on that to also contact the council and request a tree. This really took off and several people did; one even mapping out all possible sites for one, with several asking for one outside their house, others saying no thanks. There was a general consensus that people wanted flowering cherries.

A few weeks after the end of the repaving, seven slender cherry saplings were planted in a morning. There is something exhilarating about bringing a sterile bit of pavement to life, even in a small way. One of my neighbours said it really made him happy to walk past them. And its good to think that, other things being equal, they will still bearound, and flowering every Spring, and putting a little spring in peoples’ steps, for the next hundred years or more. We’ve been advised to water them, as you can’t overwater street trees apparently, and people on the WhatsApp group have stepped up to do it.

Planting trees is, apparently, one of the most popular things a local council can do. I’d also suggested to them that they include a proactive prompt asking people if they wanted trees in their street every time they do a pavement upgrade, so this can be built into the strategy they already have for increasing tree cover across the borough. I’m not sure if this is happening, but it would be very useful if it is.

By contrast, this discarded Xmas tree has been put under guard by Cadent.

Why the education system does not meet the challenge of climate breakdown…yet

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Photo: Suzanne Jeffery

This is the text of my talk at the Climate and Nature Education Festival on 14th March.

  1. It is obviously in the interests of humanity as a whole to act together to limit the damage done by GHG emissions.
  2. But this isn’t happening – fast enough – because the society/economy/polity/education system we have globally isn’t based on the interests of humanity as a whole and the interests of nations not on the interests of the nation as a whole. When Donald Trump says “America will make a lot of money” on the back of the current oil price strike arising from his attack on Iran, he means the US oil companies that will rake it in from inflated prices, not the people paying through the nose for increased petrol prices at the pumps. On a more parochial level, we hear a lot about “the national interest” and it’s important to be clear that this is not the interests of the people who live in the country, but that of the people who OWN it; which is not only not the same thing but often – usually – contradicts it.
  3. An anecdote. My Dad worked for Proctor and Gamble at the West Thurrock factory for most of his life. When he was about 40 he and several other shop floor “mature work oriented individuals”, as the company put it, were put on a course to make them more valuable and motivated human capital for the company. As part of this they were asked “What do you think the company is for?” Thinking about what they did all day, and being use value oriented, as working class people tend to be, they said “to make soap powder”. “That’s where you’re wrong” they said “The purpose of the company is to make money (Exchange Value in Marxist terms) If we could make more money doing something else, we’d do it”. That’s probably why P&G manufactured both Sunny Delight and Napisan (and in blind taste tests…)
  4. And that’s the crunch. When it comes to many aspects of the green transition that we need, it cuts across profitability. Take insulation. If done properly that cuts demand, costs and CO2 emissions. Win, win, win for us. But lose, lose, lose for the companies that make money off selling the fuel. The same goes for efficiency standards. It’s why Trump is relaxing them. 
  5. And on the level of profitability, for Oil and Gas companies that were flirting with renewable divisions a few years ago (Beyond Petroleum and all that) Fossil Fuel investment has a rate of return between 4 and 5 times greater than investment in renewables. It may be going to kill us to keep doing it, but the bottom line is the bottom line. This is judged in quarterly returns…and in the long term, as Keynes so rightly said, we’re all dead. And that doesn’t just motivate the direct FF companies, but also the banks that lend to them. A CEO of one of the big US banks that pulled out of Mark Carney’s attempt to set up a global financial alliance for transition investment said they were doing so because putting any consideration other than maximum returns for shareholders is “immoral”. This was also expressively put by Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI who said “I think AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” So, that’s alright then…
  6. So, the transition won’t simply not be led by these people, they have been, are and will resist it. And this is not simply at the level of companies and civil society, but state capture. The Trump administration in the US is the acme of this. I’d argue that Trump is not an aberration but an expression of Tech Bro Fossil Fuel dominance in the world’s leading imperialist and petro state in an attempt to reassert its slipping global dominance by bullying other countries into buying their oil and LNG and throwing its immense military weight around ($1.5 Trillion war budget coming next year, so the manic pace that we’ve already seen this year is just an overture) before the 60% of the world that has already passed peak FF use really consolidate that with a flood of cheap Chinese solar panels and get out from under.
  7. A central aspect of this is a war on scientific truth on climate and environmental protection that defunds and deplatforms both study and teaching – presumably on the philosophy that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. And the promotion of abject subaltern political formations that will do likewise across the world, like Reform here. And not just Reform. “The model” for Kemi Badenoch (and this is a quote) “is Javier Millei”. We can guarantee that a Reform/Tory government will mean a direct assault on any attempt to address climate change in schools.
  8. I’d also argue it is no accident that the core of industrial/energy transition globally is China – where, even though they have a very powerful private sector – in the final analysis, the economic plan is determined by the state (and 50% of wind/solar installations are done by state owned enterprises).

I’ll end with some thoughts from Antonio Gramsci, who argued that any education system exists to replicate the social order that it serves. And that’s not just a matter of educating for necessary technical skills, but also attitudes, morals, aspiration and narrative frameworks that sustain that society as it is. Our problem is that the society/economy/polity that we have is unsustainable and that sets up a tension and contradictions that we have to fight our way through. The need to anticipate and prepare not simply for “the jobs of the future” but prepare future citizens for a social and economic order that we don’t have yet runs slap up against all the inertia and commanding heights of an education system designed to sustain the order that we have. In that context we have to use whatever levers and footholds we have within the system – embodied in eg the DFE NZ strategy like sustainability leads, climate action plans, national education nature park etc to prise these contradictions apart and push them further – for whole school curricular and campus transformation initiatives and pushing through the ambiguities of the DFE’s “Impartiality Guidance” – on the basis that recognising the reality of climate change is – as the guidance states – true; so Parties that deny it are not basing their politics on reality…and should be treated as such. A clear consensus for the education unions on this point – that climate change is not “above politics” but foundational to any relevant politics is essential – if we want to safeguard our students from Fossil Fuel glove puppets and charlatans.

“Forward to the Past”- Rubio’s Munich Security Conference speech.

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This is a brief letter to Labour List, which they published in their “Letters of the Week” section.

Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference was a call for a reassertion of unashamedly racist “Western” imperial dominance, for Europe to slash its welfare states and green transition, to prepare to compete for “new frontiers” of exploitation in the global South through assertions of raw military power. The audience gave him a standing ovation. This is a route to catastrophe; austerity and crumbling infrastructure at home, along with tearing our communities apart ICE style, and military adventurism abroad – replacing aid with raids. It should be utterly rejected, not greeted with “sighs of relief”. 

Laura Kyrke-Smith and Melanie Ward’s argument that Europe “must stand strong” on its own does not confront the projection by George Robertson that doing so militarily within the current framework of escalating  the confrontation with Russia, would cost not 5% of GDP but 7%. That’s an additional £135 billion every year. That would be ruinous in the immediate term and, in so far as it sucks resources away from the energy transition, will kill us in the longer term, even if the temptation to use all this hardware is resisted and it didn’t lead to nuclear war within the decade.

What we need instead is meaningful peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine to resolve this European civil war, reintegrate our economies within a mutual security arrangement that would also help us form a more developmental relationship with China and the rest of the global South.

With less concern for brevity I could have added that

  • “Europe lay in ruins” in 1945 precisely because the dog eat dog rivalry between imperial powers that Rubio sees as a model for the future, came home to roost in the imperial heartlands in two World Wars once the global South had been fully carved up.
  • Saying “we are not afraid of climate change” is an attempt to will it away instead of dealing with it; empty bragadochio an expression of fears that have been suppressed.
  • In claiming the Rolling Stones as exemplars of White Western Civilisation, he obviously hadn’t done his homework on who the Rolling Stones themselves were inspired by, or heard anything by Muddy Waters.

On being adopted by a black cat

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At the window watching the world go by...

Shortly before my Mum died in September, we started getting visits from a sleek, skittish, young black cat. There are quite a few cats around, and several wander through the back garden from time to time, especially since we set up a bird feeder and attracted lots of flying food. This one had a bit of an edge to her though. She wasn’t just wandering, she was hunting; first burning herself on my attention by pouncing at a wood pigeon that had complacently waddled too close to the bushes where she lay in ambush. And this was no half hearted jump, but a ferocious, explosive, lightning fast leap, a good yard into the air, with her claws out and front legs wide, narrowly missing the pigeon which arced away in a flurry of wings in a kind of lazy panic. Some time later I saw her explode up through the pear tree after a sparrow, which flitted off even faster. David Attenborough’s crew could lie in wait for weeks for a shot like those.

So, she was hungry. She also had no collar, so we thought she was a stray. Having rescued a cat on a previous occasion, an old reflex was rebooted and we started feeding her a bit. She was extremely wary. Watchful. Would bolt food while nervously looking around, and jump off if we got too close. After a while she relaxed enough to come in and eat and we started worrying whether she belonged to someone else and, even more, if she didn’t that we might be taking on more than we could cope with.

So we put a poster up on the front gate, a couple of local shops (tanning salon, chippy, general store, stationers) and online on cat rescue FB pages. No response. As the nights drew in and it got colder and wetter, we started asking neighbours, eventually canvassing the whole street. We started on a house that we had been partly directed to as a possibility with a hopeful feeling. As my daughter and I stood there, with looks of friendly anticipation on our faces, I suddenly had a slightly sinking feeling. “Oh God!” I said “I bet they’ll think we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses”. At that point, the door opened. A slab of a man holding a dog seemed to look through us with a face that was grimly expressionless, or perhaps expressionlessly grim. Whatever it was, it didn’t change, nor did he utter a sound, as he closed the door firmly in our faces in a definitive sort of way before we’d had a chance to explain why we were there. As Butch Cassidy might have said, whatever we were selling, he didn’t want it.

It got better after that, all sorts of people, little old Indian lady, cool young black guy, Eastern European family with shy kids, the women with the tans and full lips from the salon, all of them friendly and helpful, none of them recognising the cat from the picture. We called it a day at the house opposite where a bloke with tattoos said “yeah, we got a cat. Its my girlfriend’s and I f****** hate it”. As we beat a retreat to his front gate he said “You can chuck it under a lorry for all I care” in a cheerful sort of way.

On following days we worked our way up the remaining bits of the street, and seemed to be getting warmer. One woman in the streets at the back recognised her as an occasional visitor who would appear at her kitchen window when she was feeding her own cats and beg a share off her once or twice a week. Another said he’d seen her climbing over his back fence, and she’d skedadelled as soon as she knew she’d been spotted. It was quite a revealing walk round. The cat owners knew the other cat owners. It was much less stressful than political canvassing. Knock on a door with a rosette or sticker on your lapel and you are volunteering yourself as a target for all sorts of resentments, some of them merited.

On the day that we’d arranged one of the cat rescue people to come round and scan her for a chip, she turned up wearing a collar. The scan showed a chip belonging to someone along the road, and that her name is “Hiccup”*, but data protection meant that we weren’t allowed to know who her owners were or where they live. We passed on our number and asked them to call us, but they haven’t. So, we’re now in a “Six Dinner Sid” situation in which she turns up most days, we let her in and let her eat a bit – as she always seems hungry and still has a lean nervousnesss about her.

She has developed an expectation of being let in too. One afternoon last week I saw her stalking purposefully down the path towards the back door, opened it as she got there, and she walked in without breaking stride. I felt as though I should have saluted. She now explores, sits on the windowsill and watches the world go by, curls up on my chair and goes to sleep, dances around our feet, does somersaults and head nudges and is generally affectionate and playful. Except when she’s eating a “Bonkers” chicken “lolly” and you pull it back a bit so she doesn’t crunch it all at once. At that point she turns into Gollum. Head hunches, yellow eyes narrow and glare, paw streaks forward with claws out to hold on to it. “My precioussss!”

* We’d been calling her Imli (which is Urdu for tamarind, because she has a brownish sheen to her black fur). I’d been inclined to call her Nefertiti, because she looked like Egyptian cat statues from that period. But, as T S Eliot so wisely noted, cats have many names, at least one of them known only to themsleves. So Imli- Nefertiti – Hiccup it is.

“Terrorists” don’t litter pick

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I have spent too long in the last two years feeling inhibited about wearing a keffiyeh; because it felt disrespectful to people who have been so relentlessly bombed and starved. To identify with them without undergoing what they are going through seemed somehow trivialising. Not worthy. This was, of course, absurd self indulgence. The point of wearing it is to show solidarity. Now that we are over two months into a “ceasefire” during which the IDF have carryied on relentlessly, remorselessly firing and killing people every single day, it feels disrespectful not to put it on.

On my way to the Palestine soldarity demonstration last Saturday, I was walking down an extremely steep hill that should probably have bannisters, when a woman coming out of her house spots my keffiyah and asks if I’m going to the football, before correcting herself, because its obviously not a team scarf. “No, the Palestine demonstration” I say cheerfully, smiling at her, because its something that should not be seen as an“out there” activity – the way the government and press presents it – only carried out by people you can put in a pigeon hole marked “dangerous” – when anyone can go, and a vast range of people who have basic human empathy do. As a result, its also a lot safer and more peaceful than a lot of football matches too of course; and a lot more good natured.

In something of the same spirit, as I’m leaving the flat with the keffiyeh on, and come across a pile of potato peelings, old spuds and eggshells that someone has considerately left splattered across the pavement, I go home, get my spade and food waste caddy and shovel it in; because “terrorists” don’t litter pick. And I am extra polite and considerate all day for the same reason. If you are wearing something that identifies you with people who are being attacked, and the commanding heights of government and media are portraying those people and anyone expressing solidarity with them as some sort of threat, opening the door for people, or gesturing for someone to get on the bus first with a smile, undercuts their smears about who we are. Speak softly and carry a strong message.

The opposite of the approach recomended by the pharmacist in my local chemists, with whom I often banter. “How you doing?” “OK, pootling along. One day at a time”. “Good idea. Keep your head down”.”Nah. Won’t be doing that!” At times like this, we need to keep our heads, and elbows, UP.

Walking on further, it occurs to me that during that whole hyped up broo ha ha about the ban on Tel Aviv Maccabees fans travelling to that game at Aston Villa, and subsequent witch hunting of the West Midlands chief constable out of his job – as if these fans didn’t have a reputation inside Israel for racist thuggery, and as if the Amsterdam riots hadn’t happened in the way we saw them do – put emotively as “Jews are being banned from watching football” (as if all Jewish people are complicit in their behaviour, as antisemitic an identification as any you could wish for) no one mentioned the fact that football teams, or players, from Gaza were routinely not allowed out of the strip in the “normal” conditions before Oct 7th nor that, as of August last year, the IDF has killed over 672 Palestinian athletes since, including over 240 footballers; so perhaps some sense or proportion might be in order.

A sartorial paradox is that I’m also wearing my Dad’s old raincoat, bought from Israel supporting Marks and Spencers. A strict interpretation of BDS would consign this garment to the bin, but in some ways wearing it could be seen as a sartorial expression either of a two state solution and/or a one state solution – an Israeli mac and a Palestinian keffiyeh coexisting alongside each other, or, indeed, together in one ensemble.

On my way past the last contingents streaming into Whitehall from the Strand two hours after it started, with a spirited version of Bella Ciao belting out from a mass drum band powering the sort of resistance dancing that uncowed people do, an old friend tells me to “watch out for the far right in Trafalgar Square”. The last bitter fragment of UKIP, people for whom Nigel Farage is too much of a softy sell out, a sliver of ice in the heart of the body politic, “the cold cursing the warmth for which it hungers” as Tolkein put it, had planned a march on Tower Hamlet that afternoon. Anything Oswald Mosley could try. Perhaps for their own protection, the police had banned them from doing so and given them a route provocatively close to the Palestine demo, perhaps hoping for incidents that could then be played up to ban future marches. Checking out their route before coming in to Central London so I wouldn’t walk into the middle of them unawares, I’d noticed that they had been given an embarassingly tiny, tiny patch of Marble Arch to assemble in; with strict instructions to stay on it or face arrest. Walking up alongside the Square, where they were supposed to be rallying, there was no sign of them until a small knot of people, that could at first glance be mistaken for a tourist walking party, could be glimpsed gathered in a desultory huddle outside the National Gallery. One or two Union Jacks, a couple of wooden crosses of the Christian nationalist persuasion and, at the back, a small phalanx of Iranian monarchist flags mark them out as the weird bloc they are. I head into St Martins crypt for a coffee and to meet a man about the climate crisis.