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 argumentthat 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 brevityI could have added that
“Europe lay in ruins” in 1945 precisely because the dog eat dog rivalrybetween 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.
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.
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 athletessince, 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.
Seen at Kingsbury tube station yesterday. Marie Antoinette, well known for taking the “off the shoulder look” to extremes. If the V&A cafeteria has not booked in extra supplies of cake, they are missing a trick.
On my search for sandalwood shaving cream from Taylors of Old Bond Street, because it makes having a shave more of a pleasure and less of a chore, I missed the shop because I was so gobsmacked by the prices in this tailor shop on the corner of Piccadilly Arcade. Taylors, although of Old Bond Street is, peculiarly enough, in Jermyn Street. Look at the price tag on the blue jacket.
I mean, its a nice jacket. But initially retailing at £1750, now a snip at £995? People who might think that a bit of a steal have no idea what life is like for most of us – or possibly do and don’t care a great deal. The slogan on the back of Melania Trump’s jacket stating exactly that while touring immigration detention facilities on the US Mexico border was such an in your face message – and so obviously true – that commentators tried to pretend that it was irony. Let them eat wormy food. The popularity of these people is now being shown in the attendance figures for her Biopic. Almost empty cinemas casting a hollow echo to their narcissistic presumption.
I wandered off down the street looking into other shop windows and found a pair of beautiful, highly polished brown shoes retailing at £605 (for the pair, not each). You would be afraid to actually wear a pair of shoes like that. Maybe you’d put them in a cabinet. Possibly at the V&A.
I recall once dispersing from a teachers unions march to defend our pensions, with my school union group banner slung over my shoulder, walking through the usual rush and bustle on the East side of Picadilly circus, all the tatty tourist barking from the Trocadero and that slight sense of sleaze that spills over from being so close to Soho, passing through a sort of portal at the top of Lower Regent Street, which was packed with black bomber jacketed Greek Football fans from one of those continental clubs that still thinks its 1935 (or wishes it was) to emerge into Picadilly proper and a different city, all Royal Academy and Fortnum & Masons; and finding myself being stared at by more than one man wearing a cravatte.
Taylors, however, when I walked back up the street and found it, was delightful. I was expecting a bit of being looked at down at along people’s noses, especially as I was wearing a Keffiyah, but everyone was extremely friendly, polite and helpful. Tiny little shop full of good quality products, attractively arranged, full of people buying them, in a away that felt more cosy than crowded; and an actual barbers shop at the back, smelling like a barbers, so a working shop with products and praxis rooting it in its job, with a couple of plump Turkish looking blokes with their sleeves rolled up ready to do the business wearing welcoming smiles – possibly because I was wearing the Keffiyah. A very polite young man, formally dressed, opened the door for me on the way out. Classy, in a good way.
Today’s busker at the junction of George St and the High St was a woman playing the accordion in a series of slow waltz like tunes that were hard to identify. One sounded a bit like “Chim Chimmeny, chim chimmeny, chim, chim cheeree” as reimagined by a Klezma band from Bucharest. There was something quite mournful about the tunes, but infectious enough to walk along in a waltzy sort of way, one, two, three… one two, three. Walking any other way would have been walking against the rhythm, in the street, in my head. As it was, I was the only one in step.
When Stephen Spielberg asked John Williams to compose the music for Schindler’s List, Williams told him that to do justice to the full horror of the death camps, he’d need a really Great Composer. Spielberrg said he agreed, but, regretfully, they were all dead. Implication, you’ll have to do.
In the event, Williams did a pretty moving job, but, listening to a version of thethird movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, I think he could have used that. A slow tempo, mournful version of Bruder Martin (the German version of Frere Jacques) composed as a funeral march and reflecting on the deaths of children.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the child mortality rate in Austria – where Mahler lived – ran at roughly four children out of every ten dead before they reached the age of five. Every year for a hundred years. This only started to decline at the beginning of the twentieth century; too late for Mahler, eight of whose 14 siblings died in infancy, as did his eldest daughter.
Knowing that, its hardly surprising that he wrote a song cycle called Kindertotenlieder (songs on the deaths of children).
But, all that was from natural causes, poverty, squalor. The Nazi extermination drive was to kill 1.5 million children, mostly Jewish, on an industrial scale. The local library has a Holocaust Memorial Day table with a selection of reading. It struck me that there was nothing on it by Primo Levi, whose memoire stories like Moments of Reprieve and If This is a Man are remarkable for finding fragments of humanity in the most inhumane possible circumstances which in no way diminishes the horror of it, quite the reverse.
I asked the librarian if they had any of his books. She had never heard of him and looked him up on the system. “The chemist?” having found his scientific book The Periodic Table, which he wrote after the Auschwitz books. She looked a little further and found them. I recomended that they be put on the table, and I think she was going to do it.
As I left I remarked, “you could probably do with putting a sign with the books reading ‘This is where racism leads you’.” She smiled, made moue and said “we can’t be that direct”. A pity.
Labour List published an article from Peter Hain this morning arguing that the government should take on debt to finance its war preparations. This is my letter in response, which I’m pleased to say that they published as the top letter. Some of the points will be familiar for anyone who reads these blogs, but bear repeating because they are routinely ignored in the mass media.
Peter Hain’s argument that the government should borrow to finance an armaments drive has three problems.
The quantity of money required to reach 5% of GDP on war would be £77billion every year. George Robertson’s projection for Euro NATO standing alone without the United States is 7%. The costs of paying the interest on this rapidly accumulating debt would be crippling, and it would act as an enormous financial black hole sucking resources away from everything worth while that government can do. Overseas aid was just the start. A militarisation drive would impoverish us across the board, as well as, with “a whole society approach”, copper bottom restrictions on dissent and pose questioning as treason. “Military Keynesianism” is also a mirage. Investment in weaponry does not build anything worthwhile that people can use, or that makes life better, as investment in sustainable energy, health services, public transport etc do.
The presumption of an impending war with Russia – in which we should be prepared to “lose our children” -is a form of madness. It is posed as a defensive response to Russian aggression. But Russia has neither the capacity nor the desire to attack the rest of Europe. It has taken them four years to occupy parts of Ukraine that mostly speak Russian and where they have substantial local support. Trying to occupy Western Ukraine or, say, Poland, where they would face intense hostility from the top to the bottom of society would be, as US Conservative analyst John Mearsheimer puts it “like trying to swallow a porcupine” At the moment, Euro NATO, without the USA, already outspends the Russians by 3.5 to 1, has twice as many service personal and advantages in all kinds of war material that range from twice as many aircraft and tanks to three times as many artillery pieces. Trying to double this again cannot be seen as defensive, but is preparation for a possible offensive operation which, if carried out successfully, couldn’t help but trigger Russia’s nuclear thresholds so, to put it bluntly, this is a course that can only end in us all being killed by it. The alternative of finding a European modus vivendi with Russia through negotiation seems to have been lost in a red mist. Time to sober up.
There is no collision with Trump. European NATO countries will not stand up to him over Greenland, they will accommodate. Justified hostility to Trump is being used to give him exactly what he wants – a huge arms drive that will further disadvantage European economies, lock them into a confrontation with Russia, to the mutual harm of both – and leave him with a free hand to intervene at will across the rest of the world while preparing for the ultimate military showdown with China before its too late (before the US is overhauled by peaceful economic competition and its fatal, fossil fuel based paradigm of modernity tossed into the dustbin of history by the spread of cheap Chinese solar panels).
None of us has any interest in any of that. We cannot afford to sleepwalk into World War 3 the way that the Great Powers did into World War 1; any talk of war being “inevitable” tends to become a self fulfilling prophecy. As we won’t survive such a war, it is profoundly irresponsible and light minded to become a cheer leader for the course towards it.
Please note that Facebook blocks my blogs, and doesn’t reply tom questions why, so, if you think these argumenst are worth getting about, please pass them on through other media.
I have, nevertheless, been doing so since the Vienna New Years Day Concert in 2014. Barenboim was conducting, and, as he marched on stage for the traditional final encore with an imperious flick of his baton, rather than crashing straight into the opening chords, a snare drummer tapped out a call to arms – tappity tappity tappity tap – trrr rrrr – RAT TAT TAT!
A whole set of emotions welled up. That sort of rhythm is designed to do that, meant to rouse the listener into a heightened emotional state and carry them away to take the Emperor’s Schilling; and visions of drumhread recruitment in towns and villages all across the Austro Hungarian Empire – and the rest of Europe – invaded my mind, along with a historical memory of what happened next that none of those swept up in war euphoria, or war fatalism, a hundred years before could possibly have had.
Painting of a soldier undergoing surgery by surgeon and painter Henry Tonks circa 2015from Faces of Britain by Simon Schama.
A quote from the same book. The nature of trench warfare, punctuated as it was by futile forays over the top, had exposed the heads of soldiers, nothwithstanding their helmets, to taking fire in the face. Exit wounds were gaping. Some shells had been designed to spray schrapnel, to devastating effect. Magnesium fuses were encased within, expressly intended to catch fire when lodged in tissue, resulting in the burning away of noses, eyes and cheeks.
More than 20 million dead at the end of it. And a comparable number wounded or mutilated. And World War 2 was worse. World War 3 has been unthinkable because there would be no one left at the end of it, brief though it would be.
Yet now we have the uncrowned heads of Europe and their media shils single mindedly trying to make it thinkable. Preparing us for a war with Russia by the end of the decade. Mark Rutte thinking he can succeed where Charles XII, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler failed.
Posing a war of choice as “defence”, as they always do, as every power did in 1914, avoiding any mention of the nuclear risks, avoiding any mention that they already outspend the Russians 3.5 to 1, avoiding any mention that Russia has neither the intention nor the capacity to invade the rest of Europe, avoiding mention of any alternative course, as if “war, war” is better than “jaw, jaw”.
This is part of a “whole society” approach aiming to make us stand to attention and salute without question. The most dangerous aspect of this sort of war fatalism, linked to escalation in arms build ups and suppression of dissent as treason, is that it poses war as inevitable – and when all sides accept that that is the case, war is what you get.
None of us has any interest in that. Not least because we’d all be dead at the end of it.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin did it again in this year’s concert. He made the usual speech before the encores – “music can unite all of us because we live on the same planet” – which felt peculiarly hollow this year, given the way the drums are beating all over Europe. Then off into Blue Danube and Radetsky, with the drum call to start and the well heeled Viennese spiessburger audience clapping enthusiastically along in a joyful romp towards Armageddon, just like so many of their ancestors did in 1914.
In an ironic counterpart, the final song in Jules Holland’s New Year Hootananny the previous evening was a singalong version of “Enjoy yourself (its later than you think)”.
New Year resolution for 2026, to beat a different rhythm and break up the march to war.
I see that Reform has launched a “Christians for Reform” movement for the sort of true believer who thinks that “turn the other cheek” is a reference to mooning someone you don’t agree with.
At the launch Sarah Pochin MP* said that “we are fundamentally a Christian country”; which might be seen as trying to bolt the door after most of the horses have fled. At the last census fewer than half of the population identified as Christian (46%: 13% fewer than ten years earlier); and these combine a multitude of sins. Most of them embracing the sort of values that Nigel Farage sees as “woke”, and gives as a reason for not going to Church.
So, Reform believes in Christianity, but not the Christianity expressed by the Church of England, or, for that matter, Jesus.
Lets see…
“Love thy neighbour as thyself”.
“It is easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than a rich man attain the kingdom of heaven”.
Neither of those will fit neatly into the manifesto.
Which makes Anne Widdicombe’s remark that this launch was “the day when Reform and Christianity are merged” sound like an attempted hostile takeover.
Similarly Tommy Robinson’s Union Jack bedecked Carol Service in Whitehall billed as “putting Christ back into Christmas”, comes across as stuffing Him back in there hard whether He likes it or not (once He’s had His head shaved, a bulldog tattooed on his forearm and his sandals replaced with bovver boots). I do wonder what they were singing…
Possible slogans for a Christian Nationalist Christmas.
There is definitely no room at the Inn.
The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.
Blessed are the gobby.
Peace and Goodwill are for wimps.
Forgive us our historic trespasses, but crush those who we fear might trespass against us because of them.
Keep your widow’s mites, we want crypto.
*Last autumnPochin famously complained about adverts being too “woke” because they were “full of Asian people”. So, she may not have noticed, is the Bible.
Its not every day that I read the Daily Mail. Finding one abandoned on the train to London, I read through it; which was a bit like wading through a river of sneering bile. One article in particular grabbed my attention, prompting this letter to the editor.
Sir,
Your article “The shocking map of Britain that reveals true scale of sex crimes by illegal migrants”, as a result of “the most comprehensive study of such incidents ever compiled, combing the records of crown and magistrates courts around the UK to document the vast number of asylum seekers…who have committed sexual offences over the last three years” managed to find 59 cases.
Your reporters must be aware that in that three years 285,523 people claimed asylum in the UK. So, if 59 of those committed sexual offences, 285,464 did not. Which of these two numbers looks “vast” to you? I suppose a more accurate headline reading “Only 1 in every 4,758 asylum seekers committed a sexual offence in the last three years” would not have suited your purposes.
Just to underline this point, during the same three years there were a total of 592,882 recorded sexual offences. If, as you say, 59 of these were committed by asylum seekers, then 592,823 were not. If 59 is “vast”, what word would you use for 592,823?
Indeed, if you were to give coverage to all these offences, most of them carried out by born and bred Brits, to match the two and a bit page spread you gave to the 59, you would have needed a newspaper roughly 20,000 pages long to get them all in. I don’t suppose that would have conveyed the message you wanted either.
Is it too much to expect that you stop distorting the facts on this most emotive of issues?
In news coverage on TV and radio in the last two days there has been almost blanket coverage of the horrible antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach in Australia that killed 15 people.
Since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, the IDF has been directly killing an everage of 6 people every day (383 up to 12/12/25, so 32 times as many as were killed at Bondi).
People have also died from the less direct impact of malnutrition, illness, hunger and lack of shelter (with at least 12 dying from the effects of the floods over the weekend).
In the last two days, the IDF have shot and killed 2 children – one in Rafah, one in Jerusalem – and shot and injured two more.
May I ask why it is that there has not been similar blanket coverage of these horrible attacks in the interests of “balance”; particularly given the discrepancy in casualties and the suffering that brings?
If the gunmen in Bondi were unfeeling monsters to kill 12, what does that make the IDF to kill 32 times as many?
Urban ramblings 