England, bound in with the triumphant sea

I hope the 52% are right and, along with the other 48%, I’m wrong

Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes. Change – whether slow and gradual or sudden and violent – is an unstoppable natural force. In every local council election I’ve ever voted I’ve been quite content with the outcome – I’ve always seen a Labour or Green Councillor elected where I’ve been living. In the nine General Elections where I’ve had a vote (1979, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015) I’ve only been happy twice: yes, that’s you, Tony Blair (or at least Chris Leslie who was the young Labour MP who ousted long-standing Conservative Marcus Fox from Shipley in 1997 and then kept the seat in 2001.)

Tony Blair, Chris Leslie, Marcus Fox and Philip Davies

The AV Referendum in 2011

Now I’ve had the experience of two national referenda (one on AV in 2011 and the EU In/Out vote in 2016) and in both cases I have experienced a disappointing outcome. In the first referendum I think the wrong question had been asked for what the majority of people polled wanted (instead of “Should the ‘Alternative Vote’ system be used instead of ‘first past the post’?” the politically actively-engaged wanted something like “Should parliament debate and implement a system different to ‘first past the post’?” The choice in the referendum was between the status quo and a choice that was not a popular alternative. And there was a low turn-out and very many young people were angry with Nick Clegg for climbing into a coalition with the Conservative party.

 

 

The EU Referendum in 2016

The recent EU referendum was called primarily to put an end to in-fighting within the Conservative party. The result turned out to be, in my opinion

• a protest against the Labour and Conservative governments’ inability to manage the consequences of immigration
• a class revolt against the perception of globalisation
• an inability of the Remain campaign to counter the oft-repeated (mythical) Brexit slogan of “Take back control”

Sadly the Brexit campaign persuaded the electorate to Vote Leave on a series of advertising promises and slogans that were misleading or impossible to achieve so, even in the space of two days after the result, key Brexit figures were admitting that

• £350 million per week cannot be put back into the NHS
• immigration levels will not be changing very soon
• economic conditions are likely to be unstable for an unspecified time
• Cornwall and South Wales will not be receiving UK funding equivalent to their EU grants

and, within hours of the decision sinking in

• The Prime Minister resigned
• Scotland announced its intention to reopen Scottish Independence plans
• Northern Ireland’s fragile peace settlement stirred up sectarian arguments about the border with Ireland
• Brexiters were publically wishing they hadn’t voted leave
• Donald Trump and Marine le Pen congratulated Brexiters
• Other far-right organizations throughout Europe rejoiced
• Racist attacks increased in public throughout the UK according to social media postings
• The pound dropped to its lowest level against the dollar in 31 years
• £122bn pound was wiped from the FTSE 100 within minutes of the result
• Europe made it clear that they wanted Brexit sooner rather than later to end uncertainty
• France is pressing for Britain to take charge of its own border instead of processing migrants in Calais

  

  Dangerous politicans and ordinary people who have been hoodwinked, imho

The big statistics

• 17,410,742 voted to leave 
• 16,141,241 voted to remain 
• 13,047,993 could have voted but didn’t (72% of people voted)

One way of looking at the overall figures is that 29 million didn’t vote to leave and 17 million have voted to leave. I know that is not the way democracy works but, if we decide to an adopt an Australian-style points system for immigration (which incidentally increased the number of immigrants settling in Australia….) I hope we can also adopt their voting policy which says that if you are eligible to vote it is mandatory and you get penalties for refusing to vote (you can spoil your ballot paper if you want to protest about the voting choices.)

The age statistics (the saddest statistics of all)

• 18 – 24 year olds: 27% Leave; 73% Remain 
• 25 – 34 year olds: 38% Leave; 62% Remain 
• 35 – 44 year olds: 48% Leave; 52% Remain 
• 45 – 54 year olds: 56% Leave; 44% Remain 
• 55 – 64 year olds: 57% Leave; 43% Remain 
• 65 – 99 year olds: 60% Leave; 40% Remain

In other words, people over 45 (who won’t live with the long-term consequences) voted to deny people under 45 (who WILL live with the consequences) what they wanted. And don’t get me started on the fact that 16 and 17 year olds can join the army, give blood and pay taxes but still don’t get a vote….

Pyrrhic Victory

A pyrrhic victory is one where even the commanders wish they hadn’t won because the costs have been too great. The term is used as an analogy in fields such as business, politics, and sports to describe struggles that end up ruining the victor. There are already signs that the Brexit leaders are unsettled because David Cameron has unexpectedly resigned without triggering Article 50 - and they are hurriedly meeting to formulate the Brexit plans, speculating about who would be brave enough (anyone?) to trigger Article 50. In the case of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, he defeated the Romans at Heraclea in 280BC and Asculum in 279BC but his army suffered irreplaceable casualties. And the Romans kept coming. And coming. And coming. In Plutarch’s account he cries:

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

The Romans kept coming. One anxiety I have is that the people who voted Brexit will gradually realise that the country is not suddenly Ye Olde Merrie England and

• Immigration will continue much as before (unless there is a proper overhaul of tax evasion, zero hours contracts, minimum wages, working tax credits, back-to-work programmes, the education system, the entire welfare system including pensions – all of which could have politically happened whilst still being a member of the European Union)
• Laws will continue much as before (unless there is an erosion of workers’ rights, health and safety recommendations, extra laws to try to get the same rights as we currently have for trading as part of the European bloc)
• All the changes to the law, to trade agreements, to infrastructural and cultural investment will take many years, a lot of money (I wonder where that will come from?) and, oh yes, a great many bureaucrats to work it out. Who has the skills to do this sort of work? (People working for the European Union…. Or, more worryingly, Brexiters who don’t have a clue….?)

  

  In a few years time....

I hope the 52% are right and, along with the other 48%, I’m wrong

I started with the above sub-heading and it is worth repeating. I find it very easy to admit when I’m wrong and I always apologise if that happens. I hope the dreams of the Brexiteers are realised, as long as that doesn’t mean England becomes a mean-spirited, inward-looking, isolated land that gets stuck in the past. Past blogs have outlined

• My main arguments for Voting Remain (“Remain or Brexit pursued by a (Russian) bear?”)
• Why England is genetically European (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”)
• Shakespeare’s attitude to refugees and migrants (“The sea hath cast me on the rocks”)
• Why some older people who fought in Europe support Remain (“Harry’s Last Stand”)
• Shakespeare’s pan-European world view (“Would Shakespeare want us to leave Europe?”)
• Myths about how Europe controls us (“Europe and the “Tampon Tax””)

I'm not traumatised by being on the “losing side” (I like being in a minority and an underdog) although, quoting from my blog about "Amsterdam, City of Sin":

“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” (Anne Frank)

Financial Times reader Nicholas Barrett's viral post

What have we done? (John of Gaunt in Richard II says)

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry….
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out….
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

The United Kingdom, Great Britain, Little England (and Wales) - what does the future hold?

The sea hath cast me on the rocks

What would Shakespeare do?

Some people use WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) as a guide to life’s difficult questions. It is no surprise to my family and friends that my internal guru question is WWSD…. What would Shakespeare do? Would he vote to Remain in Europe or Brexit pursued by a bear?

What I have been I have forgot to know

Shakespeare’s writing always seems to empathise with castaways. A previous blog highlighted Thomas More’s appeal to the mob to embrace the migrant (click here to read.) Characters washing ashore in other lands feature throughout the plays: the Antipholus twins, their parents and the Dromio twins in The Comedy of Errors, Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Pericles and Thaisa in Pericles, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest. Shakespeare’s work is riddled with characters recovering from being adrift and cast out. Pericles, washing up on the shores of Pentapolis expresses how many migrants must feel:

Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rocks,
Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left me breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death….
A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him….
What I have been I have forgot to know

 European locations and European sources

Apart from setting his plays all around the Mediterranean (see map at the end of this blog – click here) Shakespeare also went to European writers to source his plays: Leo Africanus (Spanish Moroccan), Appian, Homer and Plutarch (Greek), Ariosto, Bandello, Boccaccio, Castiglione and Cinthio (Italian), Belleforest and Froissart (French), Montemayor (Spanish), Ovid, Plautus, Pliny the Elder and Seneca (Roman Italian.) Most of these were most likely in translations but it was clear the influence of Europe animated Shakespeare's writings. My head and heart tell me that if My Boy Bill could vote in the forthcoming EU referendum he would vote Remain.

Harry's Last Stand

Harry Leslie Smith and the organisers of the Bradford Literature Festival, Syima Aslam and Irna Qureshi

Inspirational speaker

At Bradford Literature Festival on Monday 23rd May I was privileged to see, hear and shake the hand of Harry Leslie Smith, born in 1923, RAF veteran of World War II, carpet designer and importer and, in modern times, a campaigner for social justice. Harry attracted international attention following a speech at the 2014 Labour Conference which you can see and hear by clicking on the youtube link here.

Harry signs books after reminiscing about the UK before World War II

Worried about The Divide
Like many, Harry is worried about the division between the top few % and the massive majority in terms of access to opportunities and a 21st century standard of living. He has an authoritative and historical perspective on what life in Britain was like in the 1920s and 1930s. Harry sees the Clement Atlee government’s achievements (1945 – 51) as too important to sacrifice to Thatcherite/Blairite politics that he describes, memorably, as “capitalism metastasised by greed.”

Nostalgic Obsession

Harry stays positive because he believes that true democracy will find a way forward. I learned that he thought the UK would be better off staying inside Europe in the longer term (for global humanitarian-historical reasons) and that he thought Jeremy Corbyn’s presence on the scene could signal a new style of politics, if only the media and Blairite-disciples would listen and contemplate history’s darkest corners to see there is another way of organising society. Cameron and co are, Harry worries, leading us back to the society of the 1920s and 1930s – maybe our nostalgic obsession with Downton Abbey feeds into this narrative and why the series had to stop before we witnessed the Crawley family diversifying into the financial industry and the house being sold to the National Trust.

Vote!

Harry is furious with people who boast that they don’t vote (or adults who shockingly have never voted.) The ruling elite (whether left or right, Labour or Conservative) who enjoy lining their own pockets rely on a low turnout and want the majority of adults to remain passive, which they do, largely through being (mistakenly) convinced it makes no difference. Harry believes that we get the politics we vote for but unfortunately he thinks that many post-Thatcher politicians are feathering their own nests before fighting for what’s best for the country. So his message is simple: vote. Vote every time. Try to understand the issues before you vote. Think through the consequence of the decision for which you opt. Don’t believe everything you read. Read the other side. Beware of spin. Beware of vested interests. But vote. Whatever you do, vote! I agree, Harry.

“I am history and I fear its repetition.”

Few, if any, modern politicians can boast direct memories of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s and a decreasingly small number of people have memories of being adults who participated in the post-war reconstruction of Europe 1945 – 1955. Harry is one of those men. He spoke:

• vividly about the gnawing poverty his family experienced (scavenging in the bins of the Midland Hotel in Bradford for food)
• movingly about how his father had to move to a doss house after losing his job so Harry’s mother could enlist an employed pig farmer to be her new partner (to feed her children)
• poignantly about his astonishment (during his WWII tour of duty) when he realised the governments on the continent (for example, in Belgium and the Netherlands) had prioritised affordable and civilised accommodation for poorer people prior to war breaking out
• powerfully about his current fears for the welfare and education systems in Britain and the NHS in particular, worrying that they are being subjected to a market force philosophy which does not fit with their original concept

Were we kinder and more welcoming to refugees when the country was poorer?

Barbed with the thorns of a refugee crisis

The above subheading is not about today’s refugee crisis – it’s from an essay Harry wrote in The New Statesman about his memories of post-war Europe and how he was being reminded of it on a visit to the refugee camp in Calais:

The armistice was barbed with the thorns of a refugee crisis, with more than 20 million people swept away from their homelands because of the fighting, the threat of reprisals from foreign armies and the prospect of starvation. Seventy years on, I can recall with vivid clarity how the crisis flowed across Europe like a tidal surge of despair. I caught my first sight of the refugees from the back of an army truck: hundreds of civilians with cardboard suitcases, walking wearily beside the road. Some had fled the Soviet or German armies. Others were former slave labourers – desperately thin and wearing tattered prison uniforms and workers’ clogs – traipsing back towards the land of their birth or to a displaced persons’ camp. All were homeless, many were stateless, and each face I glimpsed seemed to carry an expression of terror.

It's easy to forget camps like Calais have happened before....

Moral, political and human responsibility

…..Exploring the (modern-day “Jungle” in Calais) camp, I eventually met a young South Sudanese man who told me about his journey to Europe. With dignity, he explained that he had left his country not for money, education or better clothes, but to escape death in civil war. In so many ways, he reminded me of my best friend, who had fled Poland to avoid being enslaved by the Nazis in 1939. Like the South Sudanese young man, my friend walked through many countries before he reached Britain in 1940.
….Before I left, I watched a young boy aged around 11, an orphan, kicking a football and laughing. Will he have the opportunity to live long enough to talk about his turbulent youth and the greatest refugee crisis to strike Europe since the Second World War?
     The world has changed since I was young. It has not grown harder: just more foolish and selfish. I have seen camps like the Jungle before – at the end of the war. But back then, there was a desire among ordinary citizens and their leaders to alleviate the plight of refugees. Today, it is different. The common will to do good, or at least maintain a decent society for all, has vanished. Our politicians – and we, the ordinary people – are ignoring our moral, political and human responsibility to be our brothers’ keepers. In the end, the only thing that separates us from those who live in the Jungle is luck – and any gambler will tell you that this can change at the turn of a card.

Man's Dominion

Graffiti in Dunedin

What is “cultural cringe”?

New Zealand tourist guides write about the “cultural cringe,” a self-deprecating Kiwi inferiority complex – the idea that everywhere else must be better!!?? Yet my reading about North Island and South Island suggests to me that New Zealand punches way above its weight. Three activist facts alone suggest a country with robust politics where tradition is not hidebound:

New Zealand suffragettes and the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior

• New Zealand was the first country to offer universal female and male suffrage (in 1893)
• Between March 2005 and August 2006 New Zealand became the only country in the world in which all the highest offices in the land were simultaneously occupied by women (Head of State, Governor-General, Prime Minister, Speaker and Chief Justice)
• In the wake of the French bombing of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in 1985, a flotilla of private New Zealand yachts occupied the Pacific Ocean where France were intending to carry out nuclear tests – radical and brave!

Prince William participates in a Maori greeting

An idealised alternative England?

In shorthand media mythology, New Zealand promotes Commonwealth values of democracy, fairness, tolerance, equal opportunities, sustainable development and environmental guardianship. Commonwealth values are indeed inherent, but so is weird comedy in the form of the Flight of the Conchords (Bret McKenzie and Jermaine Clement.) Tolkien might be English but it took a New Zealander, Peter Jackson, to realise successful movie versions of his works. Director Jane Campion and actors Russell Crowe and Sam Neill are three more examples of why “cultural cringe” is unecessary.

Sam Neill, Jane Campion, Peter Jackson, Flight of the Conchords, Russell Crowe

Other notable cultural figures and history makers include: Manu Bennett (actor), Eleanor Catton (novelist), Richard Curtis (writer), Alan Dale (actor), Kerry Fox (actor), Janet Frame (writer), Sir Edmund Hillary (mountaineer), Lucy Lawless (actor), Jonah Lomu (rugby player), Katherine Mansfield (writer), Temuera Morrison (actor), Anna Paquin (actor), Ernest Rutherford (scientist), Kate Sheppard (suffragette), Kiri Te Kanawa (soprano) and Karl Urban (actor).

Successful Kiwis

Add these to Lorde and Aaron Smith and you see what I mean – “cultural cringe” is unnecessary.

Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider

Asserting Identity and Sacred Nature

One of my favourite films is Niki Caro’s film of Witi Ihimaera’s book Whale Rider starring Keisha Castle-Hughes. I think the film shows that you can assert your own identity against the odds. New Zealand, in such a remote location, has certainly asserted its identity. The tension between tradition and modernity is at the heart of Whale Rider, as the Maori people in the film/book negotiate modern times. The beginning of the story introduces the interdependence of mankind and nature; humans as stewards of the natural world. I get the sense that New Zealanders take the governance of the planet seriously - and in a humanitarian way. The following poem (found on David Hardy’s website and reproduced with his permission) captures the message:

Man’s Dominion by David Hardy 

When settlers came from overseas 

Overwhelmed, they were, by trees 

Like nothing else they’d ever seen 

For most of them were evergreen 

It wasn’t long before they tried 

To make the landscape countryfied 

They burned the bush and planted grass 

The scar might show - but time would pass 

Besides the cattle, sheep and horse 

The predators were brought in force 

They introduced for sake of sport 

The animals that could be caught 

To hunt and shoot and fish and snare 

They brought the rabbit, deer and hare 

And very soon the people found 

Erosion, rocks and barren ground 

The deer ringbarked the forest trees 

That died as though they had disease 

The goat came later on the scene 

And ringbarked where the deer’d not been 

The rare and tender little plants 

Most succulent inhabitants 

No one, then, assessed their worth 

They disappeared right off the earth 

With ignorance and greed they came 

And mankind now is just the same 

We’re losing species year by year 

So at that rate they’ll disappear 

AND SO WILL WE

The horrors of Isengard and the beauty of Fangorn

David’s poem chimes with the environmental messages built into Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the destructive forces of Sauron and the military violence of the Orcs pitted against the homely values of the Hobbits in the Shire and the world-weary Ents, the ancient shepherds of Middle Earth forests.

Isengard being destroyed by orcs; Merry and Pippin enjoying an Ent ride in Fangorn.

It strikes me that New Zealand was the perfect place to film Tolkien’s works since it has had its share of environmental struggles. The history of the country is riddled with battles, massacres, treaties and land negotiations between the European colonizers (from 1642 onwards) and the Polynesian migrants who developed the Maori culture and who began settling first around the year 1200.

Journey to the other ends of the earth

New Zealand is only one possible destination among many. Will I go there one day? Time will tell.





In the meantime, I’ll enjoy a glass of crisp and cold Marlborough wine and hum the theme tune to Fellowship of the Ring.

This England: the 2015 General Election

Election dust is settling

Who knows what the next five years will bring politically? The Conservatives suggest we will avoid chaos under their rule but, if history teaches anything about the Tories and Europe, their party will soon be fighting each other about how to interpret the pledge to hold a referendum about staying or leaving Europe. Dangers ahead appear to include – (hyperlinks to articles on each one if you want further reading) –

• the arguments over Britain’s role in Europe.  In an increasingly globalised world, do we really want to stand alone?  I don’t.  I’m sure that in the future, those nations that form alliances will be stronger and safer than nations going it alone.
• the dilution of the Human Rights Act (although I predict that this is a red herring, given the way international law works)
• the independence and efficiency of the NHS (and a hope that already-rich companies don’t cream off too many bags of profit from clinical commissioning)
• the non-accountability of the academy programme in schools (so hopeful under Labour and now being used as a tool to hammer local services)
• further cuts to the welfare of vulnerable people (given that the biggest part of the welfare bill goes to pensioners and working tax credits i.e. pensioners and those being paid measly wages because of the profits being creamed off the top of the pile by the super-rich.)  I am especially concerned about the welfare of disabled people and those with mental illness – a concern that links to my worries for the NHS.
• a widening of the gap between the bottom of society and the super-rich who leech off the UK’s economy.  Shouldn’t The Spirit Level become compulsory reading for everyone who lives on the planet?
• I’m ambivalent about Scotland becoming independent as I’ve mentioned earlier – my head says yes even though my heart says no – though I think it will pave the way for a future Northern Territory!
  

John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Patrick Stewart and Michael Pennington as John of Gaunt with their prophecies about England

Nil desperandum

This will pass
The world goes on
Even though Spring follows Winter and Autumn comes before
And Summer flares often enough across the land
Even though Time passes as surely as the Sun rises
And Governments that emerge will just as surely fall
Even though Boys and Girls will couple and depart
And Men and Women will endure and survive
Even though Death stalks the fields and reaps random targets
And Mothers squat, spread or kneel to squeeze out brats anew
Even though the Heart beats and sometimes feels shredded
Even though the Lungs fill and breathe, though often spray nonsense
Even though Love, Desire, Passion and Compassion
Are compromised by Doubt, Pain, Struggle and War
The world goes on
Hoc transibit