Tom Watson’s latest intervention in the Labour Party appears to be an attempt to create a diversionary disunity where none need exist. In calling for a referendum before an election he repeats the strategic mistake he made in his “Proudly British, proudly European ” article for Labour List in June. Tom’s positions have changed on this. In 2016 the main campaign was to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among leave voters and criticise Jeremy Corbyn for being too soft on freedom of movement. This is what Tom wrote in Labour List in November 2016

“I know some people feel that politicians who campaigned against Brexit are still trying to stop it happening, ignoring the clear decision the British people made back in June. I have to say those fears aren’t completely unfounded.

“The Lib Dems are desperately, openly, shamelessly trying to recover some sort of electoral relevance by coming out as Brexit Deniers. They talk about using a vote in Parliament to stop the Government triggering article 50. They say they will do their best to block it, come what may.

“I can see why it’s attractive to Tim Farron, as the leader of a party on eight per cent, to want to be the party of the 48 per cent. That can never be an option for a party like Labour, that wants to represent everyone. We are not in denial about Brexit. We will not attempt to obstruct the triggering of article 50.”

A continuity of position reflecting deeply held principles is hard to detect. The only sound point in all this is that Labour “wants to represent everyone”, though that should be recast as representing the 99% not the 1%, the many not the few. 

Original blog starts here.

Every week I get an email from Tom Watson (Deputy leader of the Labour Party). This is nothing personal. Were I to write back I would get no replies. His opening section this week is an almost text book example of how to shackle the Labour Party and the people of Britain and Europe to the limitations of their pasts. He starts off promisingly…

Today we are staring down the barrel of a Boris Johnson premiership. In a little over four weeks away, this most self-serving of politicians will likely be handed the keys to the greatest office in the land. With him comes the looming threat of a no-deal Brexit, heaping national humiliation on our country, and a catastrophic impact on jobs and the economy, as we turn our back on our closest and most important allies and friends.

So far so good. But he misses the driving force behind no deal as an immediate threat. This is not a consequence of Boris Johnson’s personality. Johnson is simply opportunistically surfing the wave; on the Disraelian dictum that the first rule in politics is not to betray your principles but to make sure you don’t have any principles worth betraying in the first place. The question is more, what is generating the wave he is surfing?

For the unreconstructed Atlanticist right – for most of the Twentieth century “our closest and most important ally and friend” has been the United States – at least since it put the UK very firmly in its place during the Suez crisis. This was the last time that Britain actually had to face up to its actual position in the world – that it was no longer an independent imperial power capable to projecting its own interests separate and apart from the Pax Americana. The national humiliation was so severe that the British ruling class dealt with it the only way they know how  – a mixture of hard headed calculation and self deluding denial. A strategic recognition that no action could be taken that crossed the United States has been dressed up as a “special relationship”.

This is presented in public as a friendship, at its most extreme a romanticised (and racially limited) notion of Churchill’s “English speaking peoples”, or as a concurrence of economic philosophy “the Anglosphere”; in order to hide the brutal reality of British subordination. In this, the imperative for the British ruling class to go along with whatever the Americans want is presented as  a choice on the UKs part; or as a happy unity of purpose that exists on a sphere more elevated than that of a grubby calculation of interest. In this way illusions about the UK’s power, status and influence can be kept on life support – and all the old symbolism and traditions of Empire survive in a timeless twilight zone –  as though we are doing the Americans a favour by conferring on them our faded sub feudal glamour in return for being their most eager Igor in international relations- as if it was all Harry and Megan. The reality is better expressed  by Tony Blair’s advice to his ambassador to Washington. “We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. Whenever anyone uses the phrase “special relationship”, that is the image that should come to mind.

The time for disavowal is unavoidably past however- because the United States is actively and unpredictably disrupting the multi lateral institutions that it has hitherto relied upon to maintain its global dominance. In asserting “America first” they are tearing off the veils that disguise the power relationships and throwing out the delusions that went with them.

This is being driven by the brute realities of declining economic power, the stagnation of the US neo liberal model since 2008, the growing challenge of China and the existential threat to humanity posed by climate change – a direct threat to the fossil fuel companies that dominate the US economy. The US is increasingly attempting to assert itself unilaterally and in the process is undermining the multi lateral organisations that underpinned the Pax Americana until recently. There are no friends – only interests.  So, the United States under Trump now aims to break up the EU, the better to control its component countries.

At the same time, the most adventurist fraction of UK capital is seeking leverage up the proportion of national wealth taken in profits by as dramatic an assault on wages, security at work, social benefits and public provision as that forced through by Thatcher in the 1980s (when this went up from 40% of GDP to 45%). This requires a break with EU regulations and adopting the US model. They are well aware that going out of the EU without a deal is needed to do this. The threat this poses to most of us is real. They are talking about not only slashing tax further for companies, setting up free trade ports and enterprise zones (a development strategy used by emerging third world economies desperate to attract investment – any investment) and aim to pump wealth upwards by reducing workers rights to those in force in the US. Consider just two of these.

• The US is the only advanced economy not have have paid maternity or paternity leave as a right. There is only 12 weeks unpaid leave; and this only applies to those at a company of at least 50 employees who’ve worked for at least a year and work a minimum of 25 hours per week.  That excludes 41% of Americans. Lets spell that out. Four in ten Americans have no right to ANY time off if they have a baby.
• In the EU there is a minimum 4 weeks paid holiday, in the US “the law does not require employers to grant any vacation or holidays, and about 25 per cent of all employees receive no paid vacation time” Wikipedia. Lets spell that out too. One in four American workers have no paid holidays at all.

During Donald Trump’s state visit, the President – with his big black motorcade travelling at speed and stretching from one end of the Mall to the other and his evil Osprey helicopters roaring over central London’s airspace – was acting like a new proprietor measuring up the curtains for when he takes over. He was quite explicit that the Health Service will be on the table in the Trade Deal he envisages after the UK crashes out of the EU with no deal. This very helpfully concentrated enough minds in the Peterborough by election to help Labour prevent Trump’s tools in the Brexit Party winning their first seat.

No one in the UK (apart from Nigel Farage) wants the American health care system. Conservative politicians fell over themselves to say that they would “rule it out” of discussion – as if they’d have the power to do that.

All of this makes uniting everyone who opposes no deal in a campaign ferociously against it an imperative. The argument between those who want to remain in the EU and those who believe that the referendum in 2016 requires some form of conscious decoupling from it while retaining a close relationship is a real one, but a second level disagreement when you put the consequences of no deal for people’s lives up front.

What does Tom argue instead?

That is why these last few days I have been making the case for Labour to come out as an explicitly pro-Remain, pro-reform party…. we will have the opportunity this coming week at Shadow Cabinet to take the historic decision to campaign to remain in the EU.

This draws the dividing line in politics between everyone who wants to remain in the EU as it is and everyone who wants to leave, whatever the reasons for that and whatever form they imagine it might take. It is – bluntly – the wrong place to draw the line. The balance between leavers and remainers is still fairly even. Polarising on that line gives the no dealers a larger hinterland and gives them a chance to get their project over the line. Campaigning instead on the consequences of no deal for everyone’s quality of life could produce a dynamic campaign of mass mobilisation capable of defeating them, throwing the Conservatives out of office, changing Britain and having a political knock on effect into the EU itself. Instead of pushing for such a campaign, Tom substitutes a series of assertions about values that are supposedly already British, Labour and embodied by the EU.

…  I said that “our members are Remain, our values are Remain, our hearts are Remain. We need our Labour party to be true to who we are”.

I argued that the core values of the EU – Internationalism, Solidarity, Freedom – are British, Labour values…

The patriotic choice for Britain is to Remain.

This misrepresents the EU and Labour.

• The EU itself says that its core values are “respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law”, so “internationalism” and “solidarity” do not appear in the list. Meatloaf sang – two out of three ain’t bad – but ONE out of three Tom? It, more fundamentally, would be hard to make a case with a straight face that the EU as it stands actually lives up to these values. Just consider the human dignity of refugees; the camps along the Greek border and the use of the Mediterranean Sea as a moat with 597 deaths so far this year. The UK of course – is as complicit in this as every other EU member and would be inside or outside the EU. So no shining city on a hill there – in so far as we want these values in the EU or UK, we have to fight for them and not assume they are already there.
• Many of Labour supporters support continuing EU membership without delusions that the EU as it stands represents any of those values in the way we’d wish it to.

More importantly this minimises the range of support for a campaign against no deal by driving a wedge between everyone who is prepared to be a cheerleader for the EU as it currently is – neo liberal warts and all – and everyone else. In that he is seeking common ground with the Liberal Democrats on their terms. It locks us into a polarisation in which the limits of political possibility are either Trumpian crisis capitalism or the politics of the 2010 -15 coalition – austerity inside the EU.

On the contrary – the campaign against no deal has to be the basis on which both of these limiting – and doomed – options are challenged and overcome. We shall…

Postscript two and a bit month later. It is really gratifying that this is exactly the line that Jeremy Corbyn has led on since the middle of August.

Underneath the tall plane trees of the elliptical garden square opposite St Pancras hospital, a woman takes two wolves for a walk. The wolves seem calmer than she is.

In St Pancras Gardens – tucked behind the stations on the edge of Somer’s town – the empty tomb of Mary Wollstencraft – author of the vindication of the rights of women and dead of childbirth induced septicemia at the age of 38 – stands black and grim like a prehistoric standing stone -her body long since disinterred and reburied in the warmer soils of Bournemouth in a posthumous retirement to the South coast. All around, the lone and level lawn stretches far away.

Underneath the red and white arches in the lost streets to the north of the station, a narrow antique shop window displays a row of decapitated mannequin heads from the 1920’s or 30s like a hint for a Dr Who episode that is yet to be written- a male figure with a Clark Gable mustache, a woman with a cloche hat, a golden haired child – all corpse like, with sinister expectant expressions and fixed smiles.

The canyon between St Pancras and the British Library makes the station look like a cathedral to an evil god.

Inside the British Library an exhibition on Imaginary Cities that takes maps and remasters them digitally to make moving grey fractal patterns based on nineteenth century Paris that are nightmarishly symmetrical, a film of a digital cityscape based on early twentieth century New York that feels like a labyrinth with no escape, a 3D rendering of Chicago that has the look and feel of a circuit board. All of these render the city as a machine or a structure in which the human life that animates and transforms it is simply taken as an unacknowledged given. Dead places.

In the “Treasures”  exhibition there are music scores in the hand of long dead composers – or written by a contemporary on their behalf. Luminously neat and celestially symmetrical black lines of a piece by Byrd – composed and written as an act of worship punctiliously spaced, harmonious as a motet sung by angels and authoritative as a set of commandments- lead on to waves of emotion slashed into a score by the barely contained energy of Beethoven’s pen as though he had to rush to channel his inspiration before it was lost- the draft of a song by Mahler, full of anxious scribblings out- showing that genius takes work and the first draft isn’t the last word. The Bach Fugue playing in the head sets was an old conversation between the left and right hands on the keyboard that will go on forever.

Just as the dialogue from the gravedigger scene in Hamlet spoken in the headphones by Laurence Olivier and Stanley Holloway will. Four hundred year old words about the mutability of life, spoken with such passion and wit by actors who died 30 years ago that the last words – “let her paint an inch thick – to this favour she must come” – stand as an epitaph for their lives that is defied by the continuing power of their work.

Outside in the sunshine, the chilly steel and glass redevelopment of the scuzzy back end of Kings Cross looks like an animated architect’s poster – sufficiently antiseptic to make the people walking through it, or holding meetings behind display windows in rooms with bare chairs and flip charts like every other room in the complex – look like holograms. On  an astroturf seating bank alongside the canal like a hanging lawn of mammon, a set of young people sit scattered watching a film of a corporate panel discussion on “advanced analytics” on a screen on the other side. They seem bored. Several have laid down and seem to be asleep. This is part of a  “Festival of AI and emerging technology ” run by an outfit called Cog X that is taking place amid the reconditioned engine sheds of the age of steam. It has the feel of the Chicago circuit board city – but in the middle of it, the canal continues to flow and big geese paddle through the algae alongside canal boats cluttered with bicycles and geraniums.

In the Liberal Jewish Cemetery in Willesden there are plaques on the wall commemorating the dead. Most are from over fifty years ago and tell simple stories of love and loss in a family; given added poignancy by the knowledge that the mourners who installed the plaque with such loving care will now have joined the mourned in the long tight rows of dignified grey graves outside.

We are as a shadow.

Two, next to each other, tell a wider story in an equally quiet way. One man, born in Breslau in 1903; died in London in the 1960s. An escape from Germany both personal and historic. Another, a young man of 22, eldest son of his loving parents, died of his wounds in Spain in 1938. “Everything he had, he gave for his ideals.”

We are as a grass.

Walter was 95. Sent for safety to his uncle in England in 1937 at the age of 14 as the Nazis tightened their grip, he was arrested by the Gestapo while trying to return to visit his parents in the summer of 1938 and re-deported as a “Jewish alien”. His parents escaped Germany just in time in 1939 – which did not stop Walter and his father being interned at the outbreak of war by the British authorities as “enemy aliens”.

A founder member of CND, Labour Party candidate in the 1959 General Election, he saw his socialism as an expression of his deeply held Jewish faith and values; requiring empathy and solidarity with all oppressed and persecuted peoples; and was as likely to argue with his rabbi as he was his Party Secretary. He never believed that the solution to persecution was to become a persecutor of others. He had more dignity than that.

He marched to Trafalgar Square in 1956 to oppose  the Suez invasion – and from it to Aldermaston in 1958, supported the Committee of 100 sit downs against nuclear weapons in 1960 – and on up to today – he never let up. At the 2005 Labour Party conference – at the age of 80 – he heckled Jack Straw’s claim that the UK was only intervening in Iraq to build peace and democracy. His one word comment “Nonsense!” an irrepressible outburst of indignation at such transparent flim flam, earned him forcible ejection by a pair of security heavies and detained and questioned under section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The backlash that this generated not only led to Walter receiving an apology from Tony Blair, but also to his election to the Labour National Executive the following year. It also partially derailed a practice, then being sneaked in and becoming habitual, of using Anti -Terror legislation to detain anyone protesting against a centre ground mainstream consensus. According to The Scotsman, 600 other people had been detained under this act at the same conference – some protesting at the Iraq war, some OAPs complaining about pensions.

He was a long time friend of Jeremy Corbyn dating from their time together in CND in the 1980’s. Jeremy would have attended the funeral had he not been in Normandy for the D Day commemoration; and sent a heartfelt message and tribute. Pictures of Jeremy on that day quietly listening to D- Day veterans of Walter’s generation show the kind of humanity and opposition to patriotic bombast that they shared. Its hard to imagine Donald Trump or Boris Johnson sitting so quietly and thoughtfully, nor listening so intently. Walter always stood for the view that respect  comes from love and brings us together – a human quality which we all owe to each other – the opposite of self subordination to those with power or wealth governed by ritual.

He was gentle, irascible, stubborn, principled, dedicated. A good man, whose like we need more of.

I did not know him well, and the longest time I spent with him was when he offered me a lift up to a Labour CND AGM in Sheffield some time in the late 1980’s. When people who knew him asked me how I was getting there and I said “Oh, Walter is giving me a lift”, they would smile and raise their eyebrows. One of them should have warned me.

It was clear almost from the first second I strapped myself into the passenger seat that Walter was a spectacularly bad driver. It got worse from there.

Driving off with barely a backward glance, to a symphony of horns and barrage of startled looks from other drivers, we kangarooed  a bit up to Stoke Newington, where Walter drove into a petrol station by way of the exit.

He parked by the petrol pumps in front of an outraged orthodox Jewish guy – who had come in the right way with every expectation of being able to park at a petrol pump and fill up- but instead had us suddenly appearing right in front of him and blocking his way. He got out in his big black hat, hands on hips, and glared at Walter, who glanced vaguely at him and gave a dismissive wave of the hand; before realising that the petrol tank was on the other side of his car from the pump. Exasperated but undeterred, Walter heaved the pipe across the top of the car and just about got the nozzle into the tank and filled it that way. The other driver looked straight at me and I shrugged with what I hoped was a winning grimace.

Driving round the cars in front and exiting through the entrance, we headed for the Motorway, which you would think might be smoother going.

And so it came to pass, except for Walter’s alarming difficulty in maintaining either a steady speed or any lane disciple whatsoever. We would continually be drifting from the slow to the middle lane and sometimes maintain a steady position straddling both, with other vehicles forced to suddenly brake or swerve around us – some of them honking in terror as they did. Sometimes we would bump over a cat’s eye and Walter would reflexively flinch and take his foot off the accelerator, causing us to slow down unpredictably – forcing more swerves and honks from all around us.

When we got to Sheffield, we encountered a roundabout. Being uncertain of where we were, or which road to go off on, Walter stopped – on the roundabout – while he gathered his thoughts. More honks and swerves.

As we finally walked in to the meeting in Sheffield University, people looked round and smiled at my shocked, ashen complexion and somewhat staring eyes. “Ah, another survivor” said one.

I have been grateful ever since that I’m still here, that Walter, despite this journey and many others like it before and since, lived on to 95 and was as disputatious and questing as ever. Captured by one of his last conversations that has been making me smile since Carol Turner told it at the funeral.

5 in the morning on one of the last days.

Walter: Nothing is certain. I might not make it to the morning.

Carol: Oh, you’ll make it to the morning Walter.

Walter: But how can you be SURE?

We are as grass.

The threatening tattoo on the tightly muscled man at the bus stop turns out to be of Winnie the Pooh in the hundred acre wood.

In the bright clear morning, a grey faced man in a battered green anorak and felt boots, lined beyond his years and looking like Strider in the Fellowship of the Ring but with a bottle leaning heavily in his pocket makes heavy weather of pushing a bike away from the shop.

The slightly plump proprietor of the Afghan greengrocers in Colindale – a tiny labyrinth that still has the floor tiles of the chemists it used to be – crammed with humming refrigerators of Halal meat – fruit and veg that varies from fresh to salvageable, shiny aubergines, bright red vine tomatoes – a new continent of  dried fruits and seeds, golden raisins, red raisins and apricots and nuts with unknown names – caves of biscuits and gur – alcoves of tins and pickles – a wall of unknown Persian pastries -lolls behind his tiny counter like a Pasha; wearing a contented smile and one of those Afghan hats that looks like a pie made of felt. He gives us a good deal for Mangoes.

Trump’s Apprentice

Gurning Nigel sneaks

Out the back as Peterborough

says “You’re fired.”

Willesden High Street

Ziggurats of gold

Baklava – frame thin hunched men

Smoking mean roll ups.

Gravestone

‘Gainst the grave stone

a forgotten umbrella

leans in tribute.

June 6th … D- day.

The re-opening of the western front in 1944 is usually seen in the West as the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. 24 000 soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada struggled up the beaches of Normandy making the way for 140 000 more to land behind them; or were dropped behind the Atlantic Wall by parachute or glider to claw out a beachhead against ferocious Axis resistance from 50 000 soldiers – many of them conscripts from eastern Europe -that left 10 000 allied and 4- 9 000 German causalities by the end of the first day – just under half of them dead.

The first 25 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” is a sickening vision of what this must have been like; and anyone tempted to spin this horror into cheap and easy glories to batten on, to stand on platforms taking salutes while dreaming of golf courses and real estate developments, or demean these men’s suffering into unearned patriotic bragging – “two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah” – should be forced to watch this sequence and imagine themselves in it.

This was a huge struggle. By the end of July,  1 332 000 allied troops in Normandy were pushing 380 000 Germans back towards Paris. Casualties at this stage were around 120 000 on each side. Large cemeteries had to be built to hold and commemorate them.

This much – in outline at least – we remember. There have been commemorations on the 50th, 60th and now the 75th anniversaries. There have been feature films. Google this and you will see “7 must see D Day films” – so there must be quite a few more that are “maybe see”. Those of us of a certain age will have seen “The Longest Day” almost as many times as “The Great Escape” and have memorised catch phrases from it – “the trouble with being one of the few is that you keep getting fewer”…”The Luftwaffe has had its moment” etc etc. We are not likely to forget.

But forgetfulness can sometimes be less significant than the things we are blind to in the first place. The British version of World War 2 puts us in the centre of things, much like maps here centre on the Greenwich meridian. The Eastern Front barely features in the collective world view here – in which “plucky little Britain” “stood up to Hitler” with a bit of help from the Yanks. The Russians barely feature at all, though, if pushed, some people could reference Stalingrad – the crushing defeat in 1942 that lost the German Army 17 divisions and its delusions of invincibility – as quite important.

There are no English language feature films about Operation Bagration.  Most people here will never have heard of it unless they are military history buffs. This leads to – or grows from – an insular way of looking at the world that can further lead to serious self important mistakes when making judgments about it – in the same way that absorbing the proportions of Mercator’s projection maps makes appreciating the real and relative size of places almost impossible.

Between 23 June and 19 August 1944, an offensive by 1 670 000 Soviet troops killed or captured almost all of the half a million experienced German soldiers of Army Group Centre in what is now Belorussia. The scale of this is almost unimaginable. Army Group Centre was a quarter of the entire Wehrmacht on the eastern front. They suffered 400 000 casualties out of an initial force of 450 000.  20 Divisions were destroyed. Three quarters of the corps or divisional commanders were killed or captured. Prisoners taken in just one sector north of Minsk were paraded through Moscow 20 abreast and took an hour and a half to pass.

Red army losses were 180 000 killed and another 590 000 wounded.

So, if watching the coverage of today’s commemoration, cast your eyes and thoughts eastward as well, lest the things we are used to remembering block our minds from the things we need to know about.

The trench like strips dug out by Brent council to sew the seeds for its wildflower bee corridor jogged my memory to an actual trench that was dug in the playing field opposite where I grew up.

Thurrock council got round to filling it in during the early 1960s. Until them it had been a set of undulations at the top of the slope that we used to run up and down and in and out of. Quite fun. It was a little way away from a terrifying piece of play equipment that was like a battering ran slung with chains onto a framework like an enormous swing that bigger kids would shove wildly backwards and forwards and tell dark tales of getting enough momentum to make it loop the loop. Luckily, no one was killed.

The trench had been there since 1938. During the Munich crisis everyone was expecting war to be imminent. The Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica the previous year during the Spanish Civil War was newly scorched into people’s anxieties through newsreels at the cinema. People would often go to the pictures several times a week and there were several cinemas – including the mighty “State” on George Street, with seating for 2 200 people a time. There was room for another 800 at the Empire just round the corner in the High Street and another 1 500 at the Regent on New Road. People experienced the shock of this news together, socially – not just in family groups in front of the telly as they might have done later, or individually through their mobile phone as they would now. Word got around. Directly. Everyone believed that “the bomber will always get through”.

In the absence of the plans or capacity to issue air raid shelters that were in place by the following year, the local council dug trenches in parks for people to shelter in. Local World War 1 veterans like my grandfather – who knew how to dig a trench from bitter experience – went with their garden spades to help out.

On first hearing about this – and not knowing that it was an air raid precaution – I had assumed that the trench had been dug as a military gesture. It was at the top of a slope up to our estate’s western horizon on Wallace Road – which was sufficiently close to keep sunsets cosily domestic enough not to be a place you’d want to ride off into – and therefore perfect for the Home Guard to put flanking fire into the side of any Wehrmacht division foolish enough to venture up Hathaway Road in search of Fish and Chips at the Modern.

The mystery of the topsoil trenches in the local park is solved. Brent council has dug hundreds of long wavy strips like them across parks from one end of the borough to the other; and planted wild flower seeds to provide a bee corridor. With the terrifying decline in insect populations globally – and the sight of people in China already having to pollinate trees by hand – this is a very timely initiative. Parts of local parks were already left to “meadow” last year – making them somehow gentler, more relaxed places – as well as encouraging insect life. This is a very limited form of re-wilding – and we won’t be getting wild boar any time soon – but looking across the park now is more like being in the countryside than an over clipped, tame city space; and all the more therapeutic for that. Now that London is the world’s first National Park City and aiming for 50% green space by 2050 – even as the population goes up to nine million – we will need more and more of this.

On the high counter in the window at Nandos, three ambulance workers with thousand yard stares, sit in a line munching wraps.

Outside Kingsbury Fruit and Veg, a doppelganger of Ghandi, sitting on a bollard feeding birds.

A Buddhist priest in crimson robes carries his shopping to the bus stop, staring at the world though aviator shades, next to serious young Romanians in their Sunday best carrying heavy black bibles.