Correction: As of 14/11/24 Trump’s total vote is just under 76 million and Harris’s just under 73 million. That means Trump’s vote has risen by 2 million while the drop in Democrat support is around 8 million.
It is important to base analysis on facts not wishful thinking, so, once the final final count is in, I will rewrite this blog.
Nevertheless, the main argument remains valid.
A small increase in the Trump vote, perhaps 2% or so up on 2020, is not a surge, and remains a very thin mandate for the sweeping changes he intends to bring in. He is standing on thin ice and it is likley that the measures he will take will blow up in his face.
The drop in Democrat support, at around 10% of their 2020 vote, remains very large.
The media chatter about fundamental realignments in US politics has an air of the UK in 2019, but where is Boris Johnson now?
Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, with nearly all votes now counted, Donald Trump’s vote FELL by a nearly a million, from 74.2 million to 73.4 million*. This is not the surge the media are reporting.
But, the Democrat vote slumped by 12 million, from 81 million to 69 million. So, this was more a Democrat defeat than a Trump victory.
In some ways it is a Republican victory despite Donald Trump.
As this was based on a squeeze on worker’s living standards with real wages lower now than when Biden was elected, and an anger and fear about the slide in US global standing (Biden first lost significant support at the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal) Trump will find that he is standing on thinner ice than the media are projecting because his economic policy of tax cuts for the rich and tariffs on imports will hit living standards even harder, mass deportations will spark mass anger, as will the devastation brought by wholesale environmental deregulation, not to mention the impacts of letting RFK loose on health.
With Republican control of the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, there will be no checks and balances on this, so the madness will be able to run in full spate until at least the mid term elections in 2 years time. At which point, its likely that the reaction will be severe.
The decision of the Democrats to campaign on what might be called a “Red Wall” strategy,
trying to appeal to conservative leaning voters with conservative leaning policies on immigration,
having campaign sessions with Liz Cheney,
keeping quiet about climate – even after the Florida hurricanes –
remaining muleishly pro-Israel, to the extent that Bill Clinton, campaigning in Michegan, argued that the Palestinians had it coming because they didn’t agree to the bantustan he proposed at Camp David, proved incapable of holding the base they had in 2020.
This parallels the experience of the UK Labour Party, which has relentlessly carried out the same orientation since Keir Starmer was elected leader, with the result that Labour amassed half a million votes fewer in the General Election this year than in 2019 (down from 10.2 million to 9.7 million) only managing to get a huge majority in the House of Commons because the Conservatives had presided over a decline in livings standards even greater than that in the US over the same period, and the right wing vote, for the first time in modern history, was split right down the middle between the Tories and Reform; putting this governmnet too on very thin ice – as local council by elections are showing sharply.
The core lesson for the UK is that an incumbent government that proves incapable of at least maintaining living standards is going to be kicked out. “Its the economy, stupid”.
If this Motion were to be marked as a History essay, it would be unlikely to get high marks for balanced or objective judgement.
More important, it is a motion to pursue the war not to end it.
All of the horrific consequences of the war, which it simplistically, ascribes to one side in the same way that our self serving media do, are arguments to end it as rapidly as possible, not cheer it on, particularly given the dangers of nuclear escalation.
Whatever views members have about the causes of the war, we can surely unite in wanting it to end.
Most people do.
1 A Majority of people in Ukraine now support negotiations to end the war. “More than half of Ukrainians polled by Gallup (52%) agree that: “Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible”, while only 38% want the country to “continue fighting until it wins the war”. This is a remarkable shift compared to a year ago, when 63% wanted to continue fighting and 27% were in favour of negotiations.” From The Conversation. The motion supports the minority view in Ukraine.
2 Majorities in Poland and Italy (both 55%) support a negotiated settlement over supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes to restore the 1991 borders. Almost twice as many also support negotiations over those who argue for fighting on in Germany (45% -28%) and France (43% – 23%) twice as many in Spain (46% -23%) even more than that in Italy (55% – 15%). Even in the UK, with its stifling pro-war consensus in Parliament and media, support for negotiations is now almost level pegging with support for fighting on (32% -36%). The trend in all countries is towards negotiation not endless war. By the time of NEU conference at Easter, on current trends, there will be a majority for negotiations here too. This is partly because only one in ten Europeans now believe that Ukraine can “win”; or that to do so would require an economically, militarily and humanly unsustainable level of military escalation; including crossing nuclear red lines.
3 Supporters of the motion should be asked if they support the £3 billion a year from the UK, “as long as it takes”, and the sharp increases in military spending now being posed as needed to counter the Russians, if not now, then in a suicidal land war in Europe within the decade. Trump is demanding 5%. Neil Kinnock says 4% would be “reasonable”. Kim Darroch says “more than 3%” would be needed. 5% of GDP on “defence” in the UK would require an additional £60 -70 billion a year. This cannot be done without cuts in every other area. Mark Rutte, of NATO, suggests this could come from “health and pensions”, but we can be sure that everything else, including schools – with 76% of primary schools and 94% of secondary schools already being threatened with cuts this year, even before this starts – and investment in climate transition, would be in the firing line too.
This infographic shows the comparative existing balance of military spending between NATO and the Russian Federation. For every £1 spent by the Russians, NATO spends £11. Even the European NATO powers outspend them by a ratio of £7 for every £1. Proposals to double that can’t realistically be described as “defensive”. We should not support it.
The USC Motion point by point.
Self determination has to apply to all peoples in Ukraine, including the large Russian speaking minority in the East of the country and Crimea. The USC position is based on the delusion that there is one united Ukrainian people, which writes the Russians in the East of the country out of history as if they don’t exist and never have. They did, do, and have been asserting their independence since 2014. Any position on the war that does not recognise this is a denial of reality and principle.
and 3. All children deserve a peaceful education on both sides of the front line. Hopefully we can all agree on that. The USC does not acknowledge that the Donbass has been shelled daily since 2014. Schools and colleges have been hit. Children have been killed. Their lives matter as much as those in the West.
Faina Savenkova in the ruins of school №7 in Lugansk. It was not a warehouse or a military facility. Ordinary children studied in this school. But Ukraine destroyed it during its shelling of the city in 2014.
4. Calling for “Russia” to withdraw from “Ukrainian territory” does not recognise the unresolved national question in Ukraine and, as a result, is a call for the Russian speaking population of the Donbass and Crimea to become refugees en masse. Ukrainian military intelligence is quite clear that the people in these areas have “a completely different mindset” (Kyrillo Budanov, head of Ukranian Military Intelligence) requiring wholesale reeducation and anyone “with blood on their hands” would have to be “physically eliminated” (Budanov again). This could well mean all 55,000 members of the Donbass Militia. Hopefully, we can all oppose that.
5. This point is a cover for NATO to step up the war. When funding, munitions, weaponry, special forces and special advisers, “volunteers”, military technicians and satellite data are core to the war effort this makes it clear that this is not support for Ukraine from NATO, it is the Ukrainian government sacrificing its people on behalf of NATO. A neat formula expressing this relationship is President Zelensky’s comment that his aim is to build “a big Israel in Eastern Europe” – that’s to say, a powerful, technically proficient, military frontier state for the US, guaranteeing its interests in “a bad neighbourhood”. The price being paid by the Ukrainian working class for this ambition is appalling. The fulfillment of this ambition would not be a good development for the working class in Ukraine, or anywhere else.
6. At the moment the Russians are still able to grow their army with volunteers. By contrast, the early surge of volunteers in Ukraine has long subsided and there is now forced conscription with press gangs roaming the streets widespread draft resistance – with films of men being dragged off the streets into military minibuses and putting up a hell of a fight to stay free. In the Autumn there were demonstrations of relatives demanding to know the whereabouts of their sons, brothers, husbands who have disappeared at the front. UAF losses have been horrific, particularly since the start of the Kursk offensive. As a result, Western “supporters” of Ukraine like Senator Lindsay Graham, have been calling for conscription to be extended down from 27 to 18 years old to supply more bodies to feed into the war. President Zelensky has been resisting this so far, for the same reason that the call up age was so high in the first place. With a steep demographic decline since the break up of the USSR, resulting from a low birth rate combined with high emigration, the number of men in their twenties is about half that of men in their forties; so national survival depends to a large degree on not letting them get killed in large numbers. Hopefully we can all oppose that.
7. In the event of peace, the “Western backers” will call their loans in and asset strip the country and no one should have any delusions about that. Having sacrificed their sons for the West, the Ukrainian people will have their resources annexed by it for the privilege.
i) Opposing the Russian intervention without considering what came before is like opposing October 7th without considering 70 years of Israeli occupation. There had been a civil war in Ukraine since 2014, when the overthrow of an elected Russian leaning President by a mass movement in the West of the country, – supported organisationally and politically by the US and EU – led to a rebellion by people in Crimea, the South and the East of the country by Russian speakers who objected to the overthrow of a government they had voted for. This was crushed in Odessa, led to direct Russian intervention and annexation in Crimea and to a war in the Donbass, after the new government in Kyiv sent in the army and strafed Donetsk city with helicopter gunships. This war cost 14,000 lives up to 2022, mostly on the Donbass side of the front line.
Attempts to resolve this war through an agreement (at Minsk) to allow autonomy within Ukraine for the Donbass Republics were conceded by Angela Merkel to be an attempt to “buy time” while NATO trained up the Ukrainian Armed Forces so they’d be strong enough to retake the Donbass by force. At this point, the Russian stance was for the Minsk agreement to be implemented. They didn’t even recognise the Donbass Republics. This came to a head in the Winter of 2021 -22 when the formal process of starting Ukraine’s application to join NATO began.
The Russians had made it clear at least since the US backed Orange Revolution of 2004 -5 (hard to deny that this was a colour revolution, since the name is on the tin) that Ukraine being in NATO was as much of an existential threat to them as the US had seen Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. At that point the US had been prepared to risk nuclear war to get them out. The Russians were saying consistently that this was a similar red line for them. So, in the winter of 2021 -2 they put forward a mutual security treaty as a way to avoid the clash that, without it, they conceived was inevitable, if not now, then later when Ukraine was fully integrated and NATO felt able to chance its arm. NATOs refused even to negotiate on this, either because they thought the Russians were bluffing, or that if they weren’t the sanctions they had up their sleeve would be enough to bring them to their knees in short order. They were wrong about both. But, either way, an alliance interested in peace would have negotiated.
Deliberately pushing across the red lines of a nuclear armed state warning of an existential crisis for it is a level of reckless brinkmanship that puts us all at risk and our movement should be challenging that not supporting it.
ii) See point 2 above.
iii) and iv) All civilian deaths on both sides of the line are to be deplored, as are war crimes committed by soldiers of either side. Trying to present only one side as culpable of this, as this motion does, is reminiscent of editions of John Bull in 1915 banging the drum for recruitment in WW1 on stories of “German beastliness”, and it is dangerously similar to the far-right framing of the Azov battalion (or Benjamin Netanyahu) who see themselves in a struggle for Western civilisation against hordes of eastern Untermensch. In Vietnam, the US forces referred to the Vietnamese as “Gooks”. In Ukraine they refer to the Russians as “Orcs”. There is a continuity in this with the Ukrainian nationalists from WW2 led by Stepan Bandera, who are now celebrated in Kyiv, who fought with and for the Nazis, recruited guards for the concentration camps and massacred Polish villagers. The longer the war goes on, the more atrocities there will be.
v) The environmental damage is done by the war itself, not just by one side in it. Some of the most productive agricultural fields in the world are mined by both sides. The Nordstream gas pipeline was blown up by the US . The Zaporozhe nuclear power station was shelled by the Ukrainians for months, as was the Kakhovka dam. All these are good reasons for the war to end, not be pursued.
vi) It is the war and resulting sanctions that is disrupting the supply of food and fertilizer from Russia and Ukraine to the rest of the world. Another reason to end it.
vii) What the USC describe as “Russian occupied areas” are Russian speaking areas that rebelled against Ukrainian nationalism in 2014 and are now part of the Russian Federation; so it is entirely logical that schools there follow the Russian curriculum, not that of the state they rebelled agsinst.
viii) Evacuating children in orphanages and children’s homes from war zones is a necessary precaution to keep them safe. Perhaps the USC thinks it would have been better had the Russians left them in the firing line?
Supporting the trade unions that support the oligarchy that support the war is in contradiction to
supporting campaigns for working class interests, which requires the workers movement not to subordinate itself to its own oligarchy.
1.2 million of the refugees from the war fled to Russia – which is more than any other single country.
Dissidents are also arrested in Ukraine, some have been murdered.
All refugees should be treated with respect and care wherever they come from and whatever the reason.
The instructions for the Executive do not support a campaign to end the war and the suffering attendant on it.
All the links they propose are with organisations in the West of Ukraine that support the continuation of the war, and therefore the sacrifice and suppression of the working class. We should reach out to teachers in the Donbass too and should campaign for a ceasefire and peace talks without preconditions.
Photos of children killed in the Donbass by Ukrainian shelling from 2014 onwards on display on the Arbat in Moscow. There are more than 300 of them. Photo Dan Kovalic
One afternoon in 1940, before he was evacuated, my dad, his parents and their neighbours were drawn outside their house in Ireton Place in Grays by the shattering percussion of the Hogg Lane Anti Aircraft battery opening up at Luftwaffe bombers heading upriver towards London. Everyone stood in their front gardens and looked anxiously upwards.
The aircraft could not been seen because of low cloud. Bursts of flak puffed amidst it.
The anti-aircraft battery was loud. It was barely a quarter of a mile away at the crown of the Hogg Lane hill, just beyond Wallace Road, the other side of the thin end of the Titan pit and the allotment. Being on the top of the hill, it had a command over the Thames flood plain below. Navigating by eye, Luftwaffe pilots found the Thames a useful routemap up to London, but had to run the gauntlet of dozens of Ak Ak batteries on the way. This map just shows the heavy batteries. Regular batteries like the Hogg Lane one are not marked.
These are Vickers 3.7 inch anti aircraft guns – the main calibre used in the UK during WW2 – about the same as the more well known German 88 mm gun. It could fire a 13 Kg shell up to 9 kilometres high at a velocity of 800 -1000 metres per second at a rate of 10 – 20 rounds per minute (one every 3 to 6 seconds). This is not a photo of the Hogg Lane site but looks similar, with, from memory, four concrete bases in a kind of four petal shape to make a firm platform for each gun, with a concrete bunker in the middle to store ammunition. This was abandoned at the end of the war and was used to play on by successive generations of children – “let’s play over the army barracks” – until the landscape was obliterated by the Chafford Hundred development in the late eighties.Photo Wikipedia
These guns didn’t often hit anything, but it was devastating when they did. At around this time a Junkers 88 was hit flying at 30,000 feet over Purfleet, disintegrating the plane and killing the whole crew of seven. The youngest member of it was 19, the oldest 26.
Standing outside during an air raid is never a good idea. A friend who grew up in Mumbai told me that during the 1967 Indo Pakistan war – the second one over Kashmir – people would initially go up on their roofs to look at the show when the Pakistan Air Force made raids – and many were killed or injured from falling schrapnel – so that was a short lived diversion.
It surprises me that my grandad’s curiosity got the better of the ingrained caution built into surviving almost three years as a teenage soldier on the Western Front. At one point his regiment was redeployed to Ireland, so perhaps I owe his survival, and my existence, to the IRA, whose insurgency got him out of the trenches for a while.
My family and their neighbours were luckier than the people hit by schrapnel in Mumbai.
There was a “ping” as something hit the roof and a piece of metal bounced off onto the garden. A warning in a way. It was about the size of a fat finger, smooth on one side but visciously jagged on the other. Hot too. As no aircraft were hit by the bombardment, the shell fragment must have been “one of ours”. My granddad picked it up and kept it as a memorial for about twenty years, wired down to a piece of hardboard to keep it safe in the glass fronted bookcase with the tiny ivory elephants and three wise monkeys he had brought back from India when deployed there in the 1920s.
My speech at the Rally for a Just Transition outside the Treasury last week
When people say “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy BUT we need to save jobs” we need to change one word in that sentence. “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy AND we need to save jobs”.
At the 2017 COP in Katowice – held in the middle of the Silesian coalfield, where the delegates said that they could smell the sulphur on the air – sensing a threat to their jobs, the local mineworkers branch of the Solidarnosc mineworkers union voted that climate change is not happening.
While that’s an understandable defensive reaction, it actually disarms these workers two times over.
It makes it impossible for them to campaign to save their families and communities from the consequences of climate breakdown.
It makes it impossible for them to defend their jobs, because that defence would be based on a fantasy.
That underlines the point that, whether we are a trade union seeking a future for our members – or a government seeking a sustainable future for society – we have to base our policies on reality.
Which brings us to the North Sea.
Oil and gas production in the North Sea is caught in a pincer that has nothing to do with government policy.
The oil and gas fields are becoming exhausted – and even investment in new fields would make an insignificant difference to the speed of the decline in production, and therefore jobs.
Oil demand has either peaked already, or will soon. That sets up a scenario in which the major oil companies are fighting like rats in a sack over the remaining profitable years. As oil demand declines, the only viable companies will be those able to extract oil from the easiest, therefore cheapest, places. That means OPEC, essentially. The Western oil majors will start to go to the wall in order of size and the extent to which their reserves are difficult/expensive to extract. The writing is on the wall for all of them, but BP and Shell will go down long before Exxon Mobil.
But these companies aren’t going down without a fight. They are pushing back hard against the shrinking of their markets, against taxes on their profits.
Part of this is the abandonment of transition plans from fossil fuels to renewables on the part of these comapnies because, in the short term, the former are more profitable. This dooms them and everyone working for them.
The bottom line is that the transition to renewables in the North Sea is not a threat to jobs in the North Sea, its the only lifeline that workers there have.
Thisis a video of the rally outside the Treasury.
📣 Please like & share the video to amplify our demands ahead of the budget!
On the Metropolitan Line on the way to the joint unions and climate movement rally for a just transition outside the Treasury building, a bloke gets on the tube wearing a blank expression and a black jacket with the legend “Find your own way” on the breast pocket. Its hard to tell if thats a personal philosophy, or advice.
Rising up through Westminster tube station, built at a time of intense de-industrialisation and therefore designed to look like the inside of a power station, a crocodile of kids on a school trip walk across on a higher level. They are wearing scarlet peaked hats, which are a bit MAGA, but, small as they are, they seem calmer, more mature than the people you get at Trump rallies. Odd moment at one of those recently. He complained that the teleprompter had cut out. You mean that stuff is scripted?
At the Portals of Power. Outside the Treasury building (author with Greener Jobs Alliance banner in evil looking black hat).
A lively rally outside the Treasury. A mix of Scottish trade unionists and other UNITE members, the Stop Rosebank campaign, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance, Greenpeace and Scottish FOE. More women than men, including among the speakers. Lots of speeches and chants, people passing sometimes bemused, but a lot of honked car horns and fist pumps from drivers. A letter signed by 60 organisations calling for the government to fund a transition for North Sea Oil and Gas workers so their skills can be redeployed, handed in at the end. It would cost about a billion a year – small change given the totality of government spending and a sixth of what they are spending on maintenance on the Trident missiles they occasionally misfire into the Carribean on tests. Hopefully, when it was handed in by a delegation that included UNITE and Greenpeace representatives, someone from the Treasury was engaged in a discusion about it and was given some food for thought.
In the basement of Central Hall Westminster, the enormous HQ of the Methodist Church, they have a cafe that is a bit hidden away, named after John Wesley, founder of the Church, which a little group of us from the Greener Jobs Alliance repaired after the rally for a bit of caffeine fuelled repair and bounce ideas off each other. Its a light and airy cafe. A bit of a discovery. Good coffee. One of my comrades in Green arms was very complimentary about their bacon rolls. Its a little odd because Wesley himself was not especially fond of coffee. In his Primitive Physick, his rather austere guide to diet and exercise he notes that “Coffee and tea are extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves.” However, while he was not especially fond of coffee, he definitely didn’t like tea, blaming it for “Symptoms of a Paralytick Disorder” in himself and, watching people on the street, concluded that there was a lot of that about. He gave it up altogether in 1746, arguing with a friend that “You have need to abhor it as deadly Poison, and to renounce it from this very Hour.” Now they sell mugs with his face on it, but without the quote.
Although, equally oddly, he didn’t note that coffee and tea can be exteremely hurtful to persons who have weak bladders, one of the best things about the place is that they have twinned their toilets with facilities their church has built all over Africa. Every urinal has a little photo above it of a thatched shack in Zambia, or the DRC explaining where it is. They are all unique. The urinals are all the same. None of them is by Duchamp. The shacks are like the Ventilated Improved Pit toilets at Vanghani school in Limpopo, South Africa that I visited in 2005. A gigantic pit with a long drop from a basic toilet seat. The idea being that whatever goes down will be absorbed and the hole will never fill. Works very well. No need for flushing. The pictures felt like humanity and hope.
On the corner outside Westminster Hall, a bloke in his sixties is standing with a home made contraption with a message about the overuse of plastics that looks like a full size crucifix for plastic bottles, which hang from the cross bar like shot game birds. Its so large that its hard to miss. I go over and offer some encouragement and find out that he is doing it off his own bat, not attached to any campaign, just personally motivated to get a worthwhile message out there. Beats sitting at home watching Homes under the hammer I guess. I suggest it might be an idea to have a map showing nearby water fountains and he says that there aren’t any nearby, and those that do exist are often hidden away in odd corners, perhaps so they don’t get worn out by anyone using them.
Opposite him, a big blue banner and EU flag with the slogan “We’re still here because Brexit is still crap”. I think this might have been the bloke who played “Things can only get better” as an accompanyment to Rishi Sunak’s ill judged General Election announcement; one of the things contributing to Sunak’s increasingly frustrated demeanor as he talked on through the wind, talked on through the rain, and walked back into Downing Street very much alone. Perhaps “Singing in the rain” might have been better.
By the statues in Parliament Square, a tour guide rattles through his spiel to a group of teenagers with 1,000 yard stares. General Smuts is turning green behind them.
On my way back down the tube, a family of French tourists walks up the steps towards the exit. As they get half way up, the two toddlers with them, who look like illustrations by Shirley Hughes, look up and out and catch an eyefull of Big Ben at a sharp angle, framed by the humdrum surroundings of the exit and backlit by a bright blue sky, all tall, gothic, gold and glittering in the sunlight, and their eyes widen and jaws drop – “OOOOH! Wah!”
Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.
The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.
But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.
Editorial
A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.
Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”?
Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.
Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.
Watching the “beauty parade” of the final four Tory leadership candidates standing at their conference this week was an exercise in mental masochism best summed up in the phrase “appalled, but compelled to look”. This is, after all, the Party that voted for the very strange Liz Truss the last time they had a chance, and has barely changed or reflected on the experience.
First up was Tom Tugendhat. He came across to me as a man who is sufficiently sensitive and intelligent to be clinically depressed by the things that he believes in. And oddly two dimensional, like one of those cardboard cut outs they used to have in cinemas pointing you to your seat in the lower stalls or, in the case of the Conservative Party, the upper dress circle. the victim of a definite charisma by pass operation. War hero as dweeb.
Then James Cleverly, who went down better than the others because he actually had a sense of humour. Jokes by numbers from the other candidates fell into dead air where they had expected – or longed for – laughs. But, just as he was coming across as a relatable human being, he would say something mind numbingly dim. Given the audience, that also went down very well indeed.
Then Robert Jenrick. A man who gave one of his children the middle name “Thatcher”. Cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent child. I wonder if he’d have painted over the murals in her bedroom if he thought it would garner him a vote or two. But, even as a cartoon villian, there is something fake about Jenrick. Trying much too hard without the capacity to make it. Auditioning to act a big role but without the authenticity to live it. If Tugendhat is a cardboard replica of himself, Jenrick is an AI generated hollogram, or possibly hollow gram.
And rounding off a grim morning, Kemi Badenoch. Like Suella Braverman, Badenoch ingratiates herself into a party of xenophobes by being even more xenophobic than they are. In Braverman’s case, trying to contain the resulting psychic contradictions makes her a walking nervous wreck. Badenoch, by contrast, keeps things crushed under an icy control that allows her to blot out the fact that, for the racists she is trying to appeal to, “stop them coming” is just the first step to “send them back” – and the “them” would include her.
Having heard all four pitches, there is a standard script that barely varies, that goes something like this, but with a few of the unspoken parts added.
My friends (checks back for dagger).
You should vote for me becauseI have a personal backstory that involves self sacrificing, hard working parents who enabled me to slip up the greasy pole of achievement in a way that most people won’t, and that’s their fault for not being their best self.
I will never apologise for our record of achievement in office, that has just led us to being turfed out on our ear with the lowest number of MPs since 1832; so the first thing I want to say is sorry…but it wasn’t our fault.
Everything we did in the last 14 years was constrained by the Left establishment in the civil service and next time we shouldn’t be so restrained and perhaps should lock some of them up.
But look at the positives. We got Brexit done! And hasn’t that been a success?
We’ve been saying we want to get immigration down for 14 years and now we mean it. I will set a cap/legal limit, regardless of the damage that will do. If we start running out of construction workers, fruit pickers, care workers or nurses, thats the price we pay for not having quite as many foreign sounding people on the bus. Always remember. Queuing, and grumbling in queues, is a Fundamental British Value, and we intend to give people the chance to be in many, many more of them, going forward.
And we will pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, because we are Fundamentally British and don’t see people born elsewhere as completely human. After all, we are the Party of the family, except when it comes to the brightest and the best from the rest of the world, who we will generously allow to migrate in to work for us, but not allow to bring their family with them.
And shouldn’t they be grateful to live among such Fundamentally British tolerant people?
Because no country has given the world as much as we have, from industrialisation to the internet (I won’t mention all the cultural things because thats just Hippy dippy Left wing nonsense) so, let’s face it conference, they owe us. Perish the thought that we took anything for ourselves at the time.
So, we should be proud of our History. All of it; especially the parts we should be ashamed of.The slave traders, whose statues proudly adorn our public spaces, owners of dark satanic mills, plantation owners, rack renters, leaders of punitive expeditions and arms dealers made this country – and our Party – what it is today. We stand on their monstrous shoulders and should be proud to do so.
But now, we live in a more dangerous world, so we will make it safer by increasing UK arms spending to 3% of GDP. After all, this country only ever acts militarily in self defence. I learned this myself on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan and, indeed, Luton.
And we will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, as it bombs its neighbours into the stone age, because if you can’t stand by an ally when it is commiting a genocide, what kind of fair weather friend are you?
And we have been such a friend to Ukraine that when there was a chance to secure a peace settlement within two months of the war starting, we made sure they didn’t sign up. I now pledge them £3 billion a year in continued military aid – a boost for our Fundamentally British arms industry – for as long as they can keep press ganging their men to fight.
I am not a climate denier, but I am a Net Zero sceptic.So, the problem is real, but we have no plans to deal with it. We made a mistake to set targets without plans, so the solution isn’t to develop a plan, but to abandon the targets. That’ll sort it.Hopefully none of you were flooded out this week or, if you were, you were here and didn’t notice.
And we cannot be content with the managed decline of our economy. Let us shift the burden from the broadest to the narrowest shoulders; as a reward for all that hard work that makes those of in this hall so smugly well off.
Because we believe that you, and hard working families, should keep more of your money, and less of it should go to people who don’t work hard, like train drivers and teachers and doctors.
Relieving the tax burden on the wealthy has nothing to do with our corporate paymasters, and everything to do with encouraging people to build businesses around their kitchen tables (with or without an Allen key from ikea). Because nothing enables small business success more than liberation from paying for burdensome regulations like too much maternity pay, or being held back by health and safety gone mad. Risking two, three many Grenfells in the future is part of the brave new world of uncertainty that we should embrace with enthusiasm, as it sorts out the sheep of enterprise from the goats of failure.
Winners gonna win. Losers gonna lose.
So, let us beat the drum for capitalism, which is taking the number of food banks and people sleeping rough to ever greater heights.
The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.
This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.
For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.
“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”
“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.
Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”
“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”
Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.
Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.
Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?
Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.
Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.
Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!
Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.
Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!
Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.
Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.
Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.
And two from last week.
A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.
And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?
Travelling on the bus up Golders Green Road, the hoardings just opposite Grodzinski’s bakery (now modernised but smaller than it was) are covered with A3 posters of the Israeli hostages. 97 of them are still alive. If you were to stick pictures like this of them up alongside the road in a single line they would stretch for approximately 100 metres. About the length of three semi detached houses side by side.
As of April this year, Israel was holding 3,660 Palestinian prisoners in adminstrative detention, that’s to say without trial. Hostages by any other name. Rarely mentioned on the news. No imperative to release them. Effectively invisible. No pictures of them up on hoardings anywhere. But if you were to stick them up in a single line of A3 posters, it would stretch for about 1,220 metres. On a street of semis that would not stop at number 6, as it would with the Israelis, but at number 73.
If you were to stick up posters of the Israeli victims of the Oct 7th attack on the same street it would not get so far. About 400 metres, just to number 24. You could walk it in a couple of minutes. Doing the same for the 41,534 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since, and you’d need a road more than ten kilometres long. Walking at an average 3mph it would take you more than two hours to get to the end.
Urban ramblings 