LONDON LETTER APRIL 2016
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| The Four Brexiters All for Oneself and Oneself Alone |
The EU referendum campaign has become a disaster for the Conservative party. To watch former cabinet colleagues attack and deride one another provides, for this viewer, a source of entertainment that risks distracting me from the importance of the matter in hand. For Britain to leave the EU would be an unmitigated disaster, a far greater folly than Suez in the long list of missteps the country has made in re-adjusting to a new world role, and with much more catastrophic consequences. Fortunately, in the Leave campaign we are presented with a collection of misfits, wannabe’s, never where’s or will be, and outright loony tunes leading a campaign so inept it could have been lifted from an episode of Monty Python.
Still I am finding it difficult to be completely sanguine, referenda are odd affairs invariably with a subtext, fought over issues wholly irrelevant to the issue on the ballot. Moreover, they can easily be purchased, with high powered pressure groups skewering the debate. I am not a fan, though our democracy does need restructuring to become much more direct and immediate, it is how to achieve this whilst avoiding the pitfalls of a world shaped in the image of Murdoch and Dacre editorials that is the trick.
One thing to be said in favour of this referendum is its exposure of a number of frauds like the outgoing Mayor of London Boris Johnson, whose dog whistle ‘half-Kenyan’ attack on Barrack Obama exposed him fully as the nasty piece of work that has always lurked beneath all that buffoonery. Whilst I have never really understood what Barrack Obama was ‘for,’ and have been bitterly disappointed at his tenure of the White House, he is however so clearly a ‘mensch’ [1]and a class act. In contrast, Boris is as classy as a poodle in a tutu.
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| Class Act? |
The London Mayoral elections can hardly be said to have set the world alight, still again they have again served to illuminate the lengths that the Tory campaign under Lynton Crosby’s direction, with Cameron’s support, has consistently sought to smear the Labour Candidate Sadiq Khan as an Islamist fellow traveller. Sadiq, a man who has faced death threats for his support of gay rights and the rights of women. I will be casting my vote for Sadiq today, he represents just that modern and tolerant strain within Islam that understands the nature of a multi-faith, primarily secular, society. Though as I write this the anti-Semitism I spoke of in my recent post, (see 'Why Corbyn Must Go,' below), has now raised its repugnant head once more and we are forced to witness the odious Ken Livingstone commit career suicide on mainstream TV. It is a career that should have been murdered some time ago.
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| Ken Livingstone |
April may or may not be the cruellest month, but it is certainly the most treacherous. A month that was inaugurated with warm days and cloudless skies, inducing thoughts of getting the sun loungers out has turned bitterly cold with icy blasts of artic air. Further north has seen snow, indeed the other day what I took for heavy rain turned out to be sleet. We have been plunged back into winter. At the same time, I began to feel unwell with stomach cramps and thus began the inevitable hypochondriac speculations and consultations with medics. Now given the all clear- albeit regarding all possible serious ailments – and on the mend, I am still left with the feeling that given my age there will be more of this to come. My former sunny outlook now becoming a memory….
Still before I descend into self-pitying solipsism I am faced with the Tory decision to bar 3,000 unaccompanied children, who having escaped war-torn Syria are now stranded, prey to all manner of exploitation, on the European continent. When reading this I reflected on the inaction of the international community in the 1930’s in the face of the persecution of German Jews. “What were they thinking?” We ask ourselves. Future generations will now ask the same of us.[2]
