The Typewriter

The morning was misty, dark blue and cold. Swen flicked on a table lamp and sat down at his typewriter. His chair scraped across the wooden floor toward the table. As he shifted his center of gravity he began to collect his thoughts. His fingers engaged the steel enameled keys, embellished with the familiar code; he hunched over his place-setting, just like he was sitting down to breakfast.

The light from the lamp cut through the blue; he felt its warmth on his face. His thoughts began to work in unison with the machine; transferring his words to the page almost instantly. His voice worked internally to trace a line around a few stable concepts, like a tailor pinning an old cloth around the body of a new customer.

The words did not come easily: occasionally he got lost in the infinite number of permutations. He had to re-shape his sentences a number of times and fit his edges to their contours. He had not set out with any specific plan but he had felt a need to fill the absence in his world with something that had the power to hold his fascination.

The arc of each hammer fell perfectly to the center as the ribbon rose to secure the page. He felt the weight of the machine as it drummed each letter home. When it felt like he had captured almost all of the complex structure; when his mind had exhausted all the permutations he could muster; when he had finally pinned the cloth down to a reasonable amount of words; he took a deep breath; looked at the page in front of him; and read the first line:

“Culture: Keep-Sake or Lingua-Franca?”

Dissociating himself slightly from the world he was inhabiting and the abstract line that was now distracting him, he sat back. A smile flashed across his lips. He noted a brief surge of arousal and a mildly uncomfortable feeling in his belly. He dismissed the feeling, like the chatter of a marketplace, and returned again to his task. The lines continued:

“The current political debate in Europe defines culture as either: a precious ‘keep-sake’, that we have inherited from God, a symbolic fragment of our past that needs to be protected and preserved against external threats. Or an amorphous language, a ‘lingua franca’, that is continually re-invented to share the experience of displaced Europeans, like a wound that has the means to heal itself. All culture has an organic basis.”

And in this moment of reflection lay the whole of his dilemma. He coughed. 'Culture'. It was just a word to him now, but outside, in the living, breathing corpus of humanity, it could mean more than one thing to more than one person. It could also mean division and hatred and war and famine and terror. He looked at his definition and found himself staring at his own internal contradiction.

Words should not contradict themselves. He admitted that much. His definition of ‘culture’ had unearthed an internal fold, a kink, interrupting what was supposed to be a seamless, beautiful, logic; a logic that should unify all the sentences ever uttered towards an eternal, internal truth. His world of order and peace and security was suddenly being undermined by this fractured seem of rock; a social stink-bomb! He briefly smiled again, sarcastically this time.

He rubbed his eyes. He was tired and exhausted and alone in the room with this conflict now starting to churn up somewhere deep inside. He reached out and raised the paper with the return a couple of times. The real world was far away, but he knew at any moment it could appear at his door or pounce upon him when he was least expecting it. This was Europe; this was his mission; this was his politics; this was his logic, after all.

As he allowed his mind to settle his contradiction began opening out along the entire expanse of his memory; it began to take in the history of his life. Yes, he knew he was magnifying the imperfect detail of a small insignificant idea; he was a small cog in a large machine; but each part of the machine must reflect its position in the whole, even if the function of the whole is, in the end, greater than the sum of its parts.

He felt his eyes begin to close. The cold blue and shining golden moment met his breath as he exhaled. His lungs filled up again with the cold damp air. The room was drawn to move within him; through his warm veins and into his overheated brain. It really was a strange magic that he enjoyed liberating; this machine was his vehicle; guided by his fingertips; enabling the morning shadows to escape into the light of the day; he briefly smiled again.

His feet settled against the wooden floor boards; his mind blended into them and out towards the walls; the walls stood silently as always, against the cold dawn. He could almost touch the wind moving the trees outside and he was suddenly aware of the random tap of swirling debris, having been caught up in the passion, testing the wet windows.

He awoke, with a start, as his head began to fall and the reflex to action took a few minutes to subside. The sun was getting bright outside. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and returned to the page in front of him. Two political interpretations were now united by a third in his mind. He inserted another sentence into his text:

“But ‘culture’ is just a way of doing things; a structural order within which ‘normal activities’ can take place. So it exists without meaning unless meaning can be found within it; it has no words or symbols unless it produces them for itself. Culture is a system of internal order and external exchange. Culture promises great rewards, in return for the suppression of the animal instincts and the sharing of mutual goals. But its goals are neither memories nor friends. Its only goal is its own survival. Compliance with a culture has rewards but the rewards are not chosen by the individuals who abide by its laws, they are chosen by God and by 'God' I mean, natural selection.”

He had cultivated the small garden outside his backdoor for over a decade. He had recognised the battle between order and entropy, the theatre of war, playing itself out against the backdrop the of the solar and lunar cycles. He had struggled to maintain a non-native flower that had no economic value to recommend it apart from its beauty, against the will of the indigenous weeds, insects and diseases. He had experienced the world as an organic whole; that knew itself through constant electrochemical exchanges within and between its internal organs; he felt implicitly that this communication was a consciousness that had existed before life had organised itself around it. He had always doubted the reality of any idol who had promised material rewards in exchange for a man's obedience to its will but he had never doubted the reality of nature. Given food, water, shelter, a Sun to live by and air to breath, he could be happy. He didn't have to see his garden to know it was there. By the same token, he knew that other people's conscious experience of their lives and their Gods were very different to his own. There were other gardens, other flowers, other weeds, insects and diseases. What then, was his reality? Was there more than one? If more than one, then more than one God, or culture, or idol could claim him as one of their own: could this mean danger? He resorted to reason:

"Cultures are defined by their practices; some practices must be common to all cultures and others must be peculiar to one. Etymologies evolve in political spaces and semantic conflicts define their boundaries. We can take different positions in relation to the same practice but that doesn’t mean we have to kill each other before we can survive. That is a logical contradiction. We all see the rainbow but no-one ever sees the same rainbow. The line of sight to the Sun for each one of us is slightly different but we all see the same thing. We know each other to be there. If we can each learn to express our positions, allow our words to express our internal states, when we have shared our emotions, then we can find alternative courses of action. Our words have come to govern our spaces but we have the authority to govern our words. Compliance with the conventions is the key to understanding culture and culture is the key to understanding each other and oursleves."

The clock ticked quietly on the mantle piece. The low bright sun had now obliterated the dark; his insignificance was abandoned; he flicked off the lamp. The weight of his thoughts became more apparent. The ink had coded his thoughts; the paper had held them; the darkness had vanished, along with his discomfort. He shivered as another fact bore in upon him:

“The reward of obedience is the avoidance of anxiety; the resolution of internal conflicts created by external forces; and the maintenance of culturally specific communication channels over background noise. This is where the ‘lingua-franca’ must begin.”

In a corner of the ceiling over his right shoulder a spider had spun her web. The dawn began to dry out the moisture in the air. Her silk talons amplified her consciousness to each corner of her web and, by extension, to each corner of the room. She could feel Swen's movements and, in that way, she had shared a part of his consciousness but she could never know his thoughts. They both knew his thoughts were coded in a different language, one that she was not equipped to decode. It is true that every culture is bound together by its lexicon; a dictionary of self-defining words; like a web with its own internal code. The more complex and ambiguous things known by a culture tend to have the most culturally specific names given to them; the nodes at the nexus of many different arcs may have the least possibility of a direct translation to another web. The translations become harder, the deeper and more complex the existence of a symbol within a culture becomes. This is the theory of the 'keep sake'. This was, for Swen, the beauty and scary thing about a complex word like 'culture'. It might help him catch a thought on a piece of paper but it also led him to perceive the cleavage of his deeper consciousness. The contradictions between us are real but extinct, he thought. He reasoned further:

“But the complex expression that is the 'keep-sake' may not have a direct translation in another culture; a phenomenon may only exist within the culture that gives it its name. That means that mythological beings, and the mnemonic quality of the ‘keep-sake’, are inventions that make sense, only within a culture.”

The keys were falling like rain against the page now; the table top thundering under the force of his intellect. His words were just an epiphenomenon; they were fantasies; they expressed something that had no physical existence; they were technological devices; they did a certain amount of intellectual and emotional work; within a certain political environment; they had meaning within a lexicon that was changing at its extremities; as the territorial limits of his mind expanded and interacted with new worlds at specific points on his mental map:

“The 'keep-sake' must, therefore, provide the stability for the 'lingua-franca' to grow as an adjunct and branching structure. Archetypal images may appear in all cultures but their expressions are, of course, all different. We identify with the similarities that we recognise between these phenomena, collectively, intersubjectively, and allow them to define our cultural identities; but ultimatelty they must evolve along with the complexity of the emotions and lives that they encode.”  

The Meaning of Angst

Swen waited until her breathing had slowed to a deep lulling unconsciousness. He knew he had nothing left but he didn’t know how to tell her. He had tried, my God how he had tried, but something kept getting in the way. Some other emotion would swoop in and take over. Take them both away. On some mad swirling twisted tornado of feelings. She would cry and he would apologise. Eventually, yeh, but always, he smiled. She would forgive him. Immediately at times. When he told her he loved her so much it tore him up inside. She would look at him with the depth and need that he wanted to see so much. Even when she didn’t say so, he could see it in her eyes. It didn’t matter how long it took. If not immediately, then eventually. She would forgive him. Always.

He started to cry. Somewhere deep inside. His eyes welled up. But he couldn’t hear himself because he was lost to himself. He was lost and he had nothing left. He had lain there until she was asleep. Waiting until his darkness could reveal itself. Waiting for her to fall away into the deep. And then he rolled away. Heaving his great cold limb away, like a huge sodden tree trunk after a storm. Broken. Useless. Fallen. Heavy. Dead. Cold. His limb. Her limbs. She fell away and into him, through the hours of darkness, her warm breath rising and falling against his bones, in the stillness of the moon.

He told himself to go to sleep but he could not stop. History was now. How could they have forgotten the simple things so easily? He worried about his wife; he worried about his children; he worried about now. They thought they were invincible. He knew they were vulnerable. But he was growing old. So old. He was haunted by his own youthful invincibility; by his dead heroes; by his reckless valor; by his stupid mistakes; by his secret vanity; by his submerged fears. His horror of his past; and his visions for his future. He felt that no-one could see what he saw. He was unknown even to himself. How could he teach them? She knew every inch of his sullen limbed and lifeless body, but she never knew what he was thinking. His mind was a furnace, his face reflected a moon, his limbs were cold and dead. His brain raced away like a steam train through the shivering mists and lamenting thickets. Onward to infinity. But she was a thousand miles away. Sleeping silently beside him in the darkness.

He looked out into the vast black distance that opened up before him and he saw his own torment. He saw that he was inside and outside of himself. He was a torn and knotted sheet, a reflection passing in a window, a half-remembered word. He was inside and outside of himself. He wanted to be at one with the Gods; with all their spiritual gifts; their abundance of luck; their natural justice; their plurality and unity; in the light of their judgement; under their truth; within their beautiful ideas; their faith and their holy dreams; their innocence, honesty, peace, compassion and love; he wanted to be remembered by his children; and his children’s children; to be in their memories; in their words of kindness; and live within the law. But he owed his body to the Kings, with their pious gold and envied jewels; their armies and their weapons; their jealousy and their greed; their prisons and their lust for power; their taxes and their contractual bonds; their slaves and their brutal battles for survival; their murder and their deceit. He hated himself for it but with every day that passed with him in their service, he was helping them to drill into the molten core of the earth; to unleash its nuclear forces; upon a tender world; that screamed in pain and terror. The Kings alone - imperious, victorious, merciless - screamed louder than the hell, that surrendered its soul, unto their ears, in the flickering flames of the night.

Now he could make out the faint ghost of the ceiling three meters above his nose. He disliked the wallpaper that he could not see but knew was around him, and he sighed. His forehead began to twist in and upon itself. He rolled his trunk further away from her, in the twisted sheets, but unconsciously her hand fell out to touch his back instinctively. He reminded himself that he would always be an animal of the material world. He knew he was - because he had always given in to her, in the end - well didn’t he? His emotions were numb, but his blood kept returning to his brain, again and again, like the fire that drove the burning engines, that kept on pounding their fists into the sodden ground. His heart kept pumping through the night, on to the infinity, without him thinking. His spirit could not will his blood to stop churning, but it had tried, how it had tried. He knew it would keep pumping even if he tried to cut his entangled life away from his fallen broken body; his heart would keep pumping, until all the life was drained from him, out into the infinity. He knew he could not stop that at all. To the infinity: the place where the Gods are always hiding; just out of reach; always just beyond the horizon; the train of his life, always on an uphill track, to some silent destination beyond the moon; where she was now, is now, and will always be. A thousand miles away.

(A few years after the second World war existentialist philosophers in Europe were grappling with the meaning of their lives. The industrial revolution, that had signaled the end of the old Feudalist systems of production had led to a World so full of nuclear weapons it could destroy itself 10 times over. Europe was divided between the totalitarian institutions of communism in the East and the laissez-faire inequalities of capitalism in the West; socialists in the West were struggling to find a 'third way' between the humanism of the Utopian Socialists (e.g. the 'Fabians') and the materialism of the Marxists. 'Swen' is struggling with the exigencies of living in that epoch. His feelings resonate with a post-Industrial, post-Soviet, post-Modern World; the same old political and economic dialectics, re-inventing themselves today in the battle between the Nation State and the Globalised Markets. 

Budapest December 2016: Is Nationalism the New Socialism?

We arrived at twilight; the icy black depths of the Danube were glistening under the full moon. A few naked trees stood together in pockets; some lit up along the main shopping routes. We drove through the city making small talk. Row upon row of cold Soviet era prefab concrete; block upon block of voided lives that, we guessed, were now filled with a certain brand of Swedish flat-packed furniture; the standard grid repeating itself indefinitely. Reaching the commercial centre the cubist uniformity gave way to iron and stone arches in crumbling 'belle epoch' facades. Bistro males collected in dimly lit wooden bars: wearing wire spectacles, smoking long thin cigars and sporting large bovarian moustaches. Can diversity and equality grow together like this? As long as we all dream the same dream and slumber on; the dream is good; the dream will keep us warm.

We entered the apartment. I made myself comfortable and switched on the TV. The state channel had an obligatory suit interviewing part-time footballers; video images of hostile pink nostrils flaring between local rivals began to spill onto the screen; a medieval sporting contest erupting across the floodlit terraces. The BBC World Service endlessly repeated its chant: Russian bombs are dropping in Allepo; Russian doping has cheated the Olympics; Russian hacking has corrupted the US presidential election. It seems Vladimir Putin has succeded where 100 years of Marxist-Leninism had failed? The Soviets had a dream that became a nightmare. We know. The truth afforded by victory was the first casualty of war. Whether the first truth was made of love or not, all of its offspring were condemned to die from some variation of abuse and neglect.

We saw a city at a crossroads of many different cultures; battling feelings of isolation and inequality. Shadowy figures crossing; too close to us on this path. We have felt their cold and their warmth, our hearts have been broken too. Standards kept, but conversations witholding truth, throwing only more shadows out into the dark. Behind me. Young aspirants and guilt ridden grandparents; a history of facism and secret police; silent screams from torture chambers beneath the expensive hotel; an uncertain future with no unifying direction of travel. Now we appreciate. Material wealth will only grow from the roots of emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

The old Palace houses the national gallery with nothing but Hungarian artists on display; even though they copy the styles from all the corners of continental Europe, the other artists are all nameless. The exhibition has its own internal language, meant for private Hungarian consumption, but I thought I understood 'a little'. "What did the Nazis think of Hungarian art?" I asked the custodian. "Did they steal or destroy any of the paintings?" A blank face met my gaze and stared back at me, eyes motionless searching my face for clues to meaning. I blinked first: "You know,  1945?". Finding a question he can answer, and my ignorance, he is jolted into action, "ah yes post-1945 is on the next floor". "And the nazis?" I insist. He turns mute again and walks away looking blankly at his freind. "No" he states unequivocally. His freind looks at me and can say nothing. He walks off after him.

Later after we have descended into the streets below the Palace, into the Western shops, where the new money in Budapest, is attracting the young, I look back. There is no nationalism down here. Foreign money is buying up the streets and peddling dreams to those thirsty for a globalised popular culture. Fame and fortune not history nor citizenship is being made and sold here. In the chrome and glass and marbled stone; every size and colour you could wish for; all of your pleasures are catered for. I see the Palace on the hill become a castle. Standing out in the dark, cold and alone, against an imperial capitalism, against an invasion of the infidel, against the enemies of Christendom. Is Putin's brand of Nationalism the new Socialism? The Woodsman turning the arts and crafts movement to pit its wit against the nihilism of mass production. In the epoch of post-industrial austerity; post-truth; post-modernism. Calling to the disenfranchised working class to return to waive a flag from the Palace-on-the-Hill. We know. The Russian eagle has two heads: but the icy black Danube can only flow in one direction.

Out of Touch?

So the Country has chosen to leave the EU. As I travelled on the London tube in the morning, past the City, (who got their predictions massively, entirely wrong as b##### usual) and Westminster (where Cameron was probably explaining his career prospects to his wife over a Continental breakfast) the mood seemed to be amazingly sanguine: it was a surprise, but it wasn't entirely unexpected. Of course, the sluice gates of another round of vitriolic witch-hunting were suddenly re-opened: torrents of radical revolutionary fervour were swirling amidst stoic institutional pillars of the status quo. But that was nothing unusual, those are the normal undercurrents of London life; tidal flows as old as the frothy brown sewers of the Thames.

I was attending a conference at the Tavistock. Nearly every speaker commented on the previous night's events. This was an interesting vantage point, from which to view the unfolding drama. But my attention was drawn to one important theme that was close to my heart. How could the Labour Party have got its 'traditional voters' so wrong? So I would like to try and answer that question. But I want to try and avoid rehashing the same old worn out rhetoric about 'young Oxbridge career politicians who have never worked a day in their life.....'. They are not going anywhere and they are still in need of an education. So let us look at some of the rhetoric from the Leave campaign that seems to have 'won the day' and try and explain that.    

First up: "it's all about immigrants coming over here and taking our jobs" comes from the sort of protectionism that has characterised both sides of American politics for decades. Protectionism is considered to be the default position for the American consumer, even if the rest of the world sees America as an imperialist power. Looking at the official statistics for the UK, the number of immigrants who are working in this country is almost exactly equal to the number of British workers who are actively looking for work. So there is a political argument here. However, this is not a reason to leave the EU because during the campaign it was revealed that 70% of immigrant workers are from the Commonwealth countries, the old British Empire. Thus, if the Leave campaign were serious about reducing immigration they would have been trying to undo our links with the Commonwealth, not the EU.

Second: "it's not racist to want to discuss immigration". No, it's not, but it is xenophobic to blame immigration for your child not getting into the school of your choice, you getting stuck in traffic on the way to work, the price of milk in the shops, and your grand-daughter not being able to afford a mortgage. And it is narcissistic to believe that you have a right to something that should be denied to others based on their place of origin. Taken together, xenophobia and narcissism are powerful emotional tools that can be used to overcome the intellect during a democratic campaign. People who study the history of conflict in Europe, and I assume there are a few of them who have passed through the doors of the Tavistock in their time, have written about how xenophobia and narcissism were important parts of the racist ideology of National Socialists of 1930s Germany, aka the "Nazi" Party. What makes Farage's rhetoric different to Hitler's is the absence of fascism, the belief that power comes from military power not the exercise of democratic choice; I suspect Farage, like the rest of us, does not want to repeat the mistakes of history; but others, like Boris, are much more aware of what a dangerous game he is playing.    

Third: "I don't want the EU controlling our country and telling us what to do all the time". This issue is generally referred to as nationalism. Fair play - the British have an honourable and noble tradition in deposing foreign dictators and promoting 'liberal free market democracies' across the British Empire, I'm sorry, I mean, across the known World, including the rest of Europe. As a citizen of the UK you are bound to feel a certain loss, or a massive gain, of sovereignty, if you have moved from a democracy of 60 million to a democracy of 500 million in the last few years, depending on who was in charge in your own country previously. What I think amazes Corbyn and the rest of International Socialism, is that the Leavers blamed the EU for all the things that have gone wrong with this country rather than those in charge, i.e. the Conservative Party. The Old Etonians must be laughing all the way to the bank as their mates in the City reap the rewards of the post-war Austerity Agenda. It wasn't the EU that caused the credit crunch, it wasn't even New Labour, it was the greedy psychopaths who rule the international money markets through Machiavellian subterfuge and a forensic mastery of the detail. It wasn't the Bullingdon Boys who had to go to the Food Banks, it was us; in the same way that the Polish, the Romanians, the Syrians, etc, came to this country to escape the poverty and terror that had been caused by our honourable and noble pursuit of our own "national interests".

So here we are, alongside the Thames in an old Roman settlement, with its French nobility and German monarchy, trying to vote our way out of, what has the potential to be, one of the most powerful democracies this world has ever seen. Perhaps it is the madness of the British that gives us our humanity, our humour, our freedom. I hope that, just like the Thames, it never stops, only that its rolling thunder will respect the stone monuments that our ancestors erected in its honour.

The European Union: To Leave and/or Remain?

The political rhetoric over the UK referendum on EU membership is reaching its peak. For anyone who has any kind of interest in politics it is fascinating to see how the different institutions and individuals are aligning themselves with the Leave or Remain campaigns. With the party political allegiances put on the back burner it is a good time to test one's Marxist assumptions about how power is distributed and maintained in the UK social system.

The Upper Class Leaves seem mainly to be from the old aristocracy who have been in power since William the Conqueror crushed the Anglo-Saxons. They are the traditional power in the South of England: Canterbury, Oxford, Cambridge, London, Windsor. You name it, they hold all the main strategic political and economic high ground. The idea that we give too much money to the EU is their favourite argument but it is a bit of a red herring. They will always complain about the redistribution of wealth from rich people to poor people, whether its through the EU or elsewhere. What they really fear is a loss of power that comes from a federal Europe with a broader democratic base with a greater mandate for social and economic justice.

The Upper Class Remains are akin to the industrial capitalists who grew rich in the provincial cities of the UK during the Victorian era. They need to maintain their access to the massive EU markets that come with the broader democratic base. Greater federalism as a political model is not really a threat to them; but only so long as they can keep their financial interests safe, and that means keeping the pound. This is their main area of weakness because the pound is obviously the property of the old aristocracy, not the new. The main problem here is that whereas UK exports are heavily affected by strength of the pound against the euro; the people who own the money don't care about that. The financial services in the City of London are just as happy if UK exports are falling as they are if they are rising; they make their money out of variations in the market, they are not bothered which way that variation goes.

The UK Middle Classes are net gainers from Europe and they tend to want to Remain. The UK Middle Classes can be portrayed as professional people (i.e. anyone who needs a qualification to do their job, which I agree, in the UK, is a very broad constituency indeed) who have had to borrow most of their money from the Upper Classes to 'get on in life'. These loans are used to fund their education, finance their homes, and keep the wheels of capitalism turning through various credit-worthy addictions including holidays, cars, clothes and digital technologies.

This UK Middle Classes' capital assets are mainly its knowledge, skills and abilities, i.e. its human resources. They gain from having a wider market to sell their assets to because this increases demand for their specialist skills; with English as the main language for business in the EU at the moment, they would appear to have everything to lose. As a group they were probably hit the hardest by the recent 'credit crunch' so they may have a fear of a more federal Europe. But they were also the group upon who most of the responsibility fell for sorting out the mess; for most of them this meant more cooperation with their partners in Europe rather than less. Thus, they have a considerable amount of political capital to spend and it is probably their vote who will count the most in any UK election/ referendum.  

The UK Working Classes are net losers from Europe and as such they tend to want to Leave. As a group they do not attract the same sort of investment in their knowledge, skills and abilities that the Middle Classes do. Thus, the bigger market tends to drive their net value to the economy down. Their own need for cheaper products is going to keep their potential wages down. The only way for them to protect their interests is to maintain trading tariffs with external markets. The EU does offer them the potential to do this, but so did the Old British Commonwealth, so there is some uncertainty here about the relationship between these two markets.

The UK Working Class Leavers fall into two main social groups: the traditional indigenous workers, who tend to want all the benefits of global capitalism (such as low cost commodities) and none of its costs (such as full economic migrancy); and the first generation immigrant workers who's jobs and living conditions are most at threat from the cheaper labour coming in from abroad. These groups can easily become divided along racial, ethnic and/or religious lines, and this complicates the competition for scarce resources. The issues of organised crime across international borders, slavery and terrorism are clearly important here. But so is the extended family and traditional versus progressive models of the welfare state.

After having reviewed the scene across all the UK Classes another issue looms large in my mind. The UK's relationship has and always will be a paradox. We are part of Europe but we are also isolated from it. We can never exist fully in Europe and we can never exist fully outside of it. This might seem like an irrational conclusion but actually it is a more accurate representation of the geographic, economic, and political facts than either the Leave or Remain camps can muster. If this referendum is about the National Identity then the country will need to decide what its identity actually is.            

Labour's Crisis Over Anti-Semitism

Anti-semitism is not anti-Judaism. I am no expert, but I believe that the semitic language was used by Jews and Arabs. However, most people use the term to mean anti-Judaism. Contests over the meaning of language become political conflicts when people invest emotions in a narrative. Rather than being able to decide on the validity of a narrative based on its congruence to external events, its internal logic, or the authenticity of its author, the validity becomes decided upon which opponent can raise the greatest emotional force to back their argument, e.g. which opponent has 'God on their side'.

Ken Livingstone has said that it is a historical fact that when Hitler came to power in 1932 he wanted to relocate Germany's Jews to Israel. Is that true? I don't know. However, by his own logic Naz Shah was therefore on decidedly dodgy territory suggesting that the Israeli State should be relocated anywhere. The most charitable position on her comments that the State of Israel should be relocated to America suggest that she was only making the point that the US should stay out of Middle Eastern politics. This sort of statement is typical of the pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, left-wing militants that Jeremy Corbyn has been assumed to be attracting into the Labour Party: Hence its political interest and its potential for division within the party.

As I understand it the pro-Israeli lobby would not necessarily have a problem with the US keeping out of Middle Eastern politics. But what they do object to is the political assumption that the US is only involved in Israeli politics, and not Egyptian, Libyian, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. politics; or that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has a problem with external influence of its internal democratic power structures. That's a fair enough point and an argument that has value in terms of laying a pathway towards peace within the region and away from 'tribal' conflicts. Within this context it is perhaps fairer to say that Ken and Naz's statements were condemnable because they were 'anti-Peace' rather than being 'pro-Nazi'. Portraying them as 'pro-Nazi' could, in itself, also be deemed as inflammatory. Such condemnation could also be construed as attempting to influence the internal democratic power structures of the UK Labour Party. It is probably no coincidence that Tony Blair was the UN's Middle East Peace Envoy from 2007-2015. So perhaps the position he has now vacated has become something of a political battleground within (and outside of?) the Party.

In the end I don't believe anyone seriously believes anyone in the Labour Party is actually intending to try and relocate the Israeli State to down-town USA. But I think plenty of people are trying to relocate the reasons for the current crisis in the Middle East intellectually to some other place in space-time. From my reading of history I can see a clear historical link between the current wars in the Middle East and turn of the century political life in Vienna (involving Hitler, Marx, Freud and the then Mayor of Vienna, apparently); the First and Second World Wars; the subsequent Cold War; and the eventual creation of the European Union. Thus, in this context the current 'crisis' is actually just another aftershock of the 'Arab Spring'. That it should erupt on the streets of London at a time when the country is trying to decide its role in Europe through the referendum is probably to be expected. But it is not a conflict that is restricted to the Labour Party. The Labour Party has been debating these problems for years; it has been a significant part of many difficult peace processes, in many different regions in the world, for many years. That it has the honesty to face these challenges is to be commended. In the end, "jaw-jaw is better than war-war" as Winston Churchill, one of the founding fathers of the European Union once said.  

           

Election 2015

No-one could have predicted last nights results and fewer people will be able to predict the future after it. I was hearing a lot of people undecided and unsure how they were going to vote; there was a promise of much tactical voting; the number of parties involved meant that the normal pendulum and predictions based on swing were basically redundant; and this election attracted a large number of people voting who had never voted before even though the turnout was down on previous years. So, with the benefit of hindsight, nobody could have predicted the result, at least statistically speaking.

A post hoc analysis is needed now the fog of war that clouded the respective campaigns has cleared. Simply put, it seems to me: the SNP wiped out Labour in Scotland; the Tories wiped out the Lib Dems in the South; and the two main parties made very little ground on each other, apart from the odd marginal. I doubt any previous UK election could have provided a template for that outcome. And of course there has been one unknown now becoming known, that UKIP have managed to steal the working class nationalist vote from all their rivals, including the BNP. Although it looks like they may have also soaked up the LibDem vote in some places, espcecially Essex.

The government will have to listen to the voice of the electorate and answer some major constitutional questions. This is probably not before time. Cameron will have to balance the demand for an independent Scotland with the demands to have the entire UK withdraw from the European Union. The monopoly of the NHS in the UK healthcare market depends on that referendum. The UK will have to look again at the fairness of its polarising first-past-the-post system against the more multi-party EU style of proportional representation. And the English Parliament issue is unlikely to go away.

As for Labour, I think the less tears spilt over Scotland the better. We need to shine a light on the unholy alliance between the energy industry, military equipment, and financial services that has propped up the Tories for the last two hundred years; appeal to the working and business classes in the northern metropolitan areas with a nessage of hope and multicultural values; develop a narrative linking overseas aid with sponsorship in the scientific and techinical industries; and attract the disenfranchised Lib Dem voters in the South during the next local government elections.

We have not been defeated but we have been contained. We must use this result as a mandate for change and progress.