The Tories are ‘strong and stable’. What are Labour?

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Theresa May gave a speech a few days ago in which she used the slogan ‘Strong and Stable’ twelve times in ten minutes. As a result she is being royally ridiculed on social media, with countless memes being diffused exponentially as I write.

A further outcome of the Tories’ faultless message discipline and the responses to it is that on 8th June millions of people will go and vote on the basis of strength and stability (DECLARATION: I fucking hate The Tories and will be voting Labour in June). Satirising the message will just serve to reinforce and spread it. That’s what happened in the last two general elections and in the referendum last summer. At different points each leading representative of the Leave campaign was torn to pieces on Facebook and Twitter for ‘overusing‘ the expression ‘take back control’. The result of the referendum showed that all that repitition was actually the slogan being implemented successfully – the Leave campaign even consulted Paul McKenna to help them drill the message into people’s heads. It’s not a rational process. ‘Strong and stable’ will have been chosen from a list of potential slogans after a rigorous process of testing it on groups of potential Tory voters.

The science of this is well-known but doesn’t always find acceptance on the left and doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on the people at the top of the Labour Party. On doing some research I found out that Labour’s slogan for #GE2017 is ‘For the many, not the few’. Although I’ve been following the election the phrase didn’t spring into my head immediately as the Conservatives’ slogan will and tellingly there haven’t as yet been a furore about opposition politicians overusing it. I don’t get the impression it’s been tested – it sounds more like a phrase that our avuncular leader plucked out of thin air. On my Facebook page yesterday I saw a post on the Labour forum about John McDonnell’s 20 Pledges to Workers. Okay, twenty is a round number but it’s also a large one. As Owen Jones has repeatedly pointed out, only people who are actively interested in politics take an interest in what lies behind slogans, ie the details of policy. Each of those individual items may strike a chord with working people but in order to be effective they need to be framed into clear pithy messages whose memorability has been exhaustively put to the test. 

Nevertheless, the central slogans have been chosen and Labour leader, supporters and representatives need to put them into operation by repeating them as often as humanly possible. In the meantime we need to stop doing the Tories’ work for them by effectively advertising, whether in jest or not, what May’s Conservative Party stands for.

Here’s why I’m so angry about the French election

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A relatively apolitical visitor to this website over the past week or so might be puzzled as to why on earth someone who doesn’t even live in France is getting so worked up about something so petty as the potential election of an undisguised fascist as leader of a major European country, not to mention so angry about the role of people supposedly on the left of the spectrum in helping to bring about such an eventuality by campaigning for people to abstain*.

I suppose from an early age I’ve tended to take politics too seriously and too personally. In the place and time I grew up everyone had a private store of venom reserved for the pronunciation of words like ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Tories’. Nevertheless, over the last few years I’ve made a concerted and conscious effort to uproot my political sentiments from the fertile manure of rage and resentment in which they originally flourished and replant them in soils of empathy and compassion. Some might say that given that over the last few days I’ve written lots of sentences like ‘I’m starting to despise the so-called ‘Left”, ‘FN voters are welcome to their shitty lives’ and ‘I fucking hope that President fucking Macron fucking puts anyone who fucking abstains in a fucking death camp’** I’m not trying hard enough.

Such sentiments do tend to stand out on my timeline of mostly liberal/lefty Facebook friends, where people generally avoid giving offence and potentially upsetting valued friends, family and acquaintances. In right-wing jerk circles, by contrast – and especially on Twitter – it’s fine to give vent to one’s most violent impulses and bond around the bonfire of all accepted values (except values oddly similar to those of one’s most conservative great-great-grandparents, but still). The libidinal charge of such outbursts helps explain why social media have contributed so very much to the recent success of a politics based on fear and hatred. It’s a version of Orwell’s two-minute hate and as such it can be exhilarating. 

I know this because I used to absolutely waste my time/try to escape my self-reaffirming bubble by arguing with racists and climate liars on Twitter. In the process I repeatedly saw confirmed the wisdom of the famous advice about never wrestling pigs: you both get dirty but the pig enjoys it. Nevertheless, in these fraught times and particularly among friends, those of us who worry about rather than welcome the rise to power of forces dedicated to scapegoating and violent repression should still open our mouths and express our fear and anger rather than hiding our feelings so as not to risk unpopularity. After all, members of our great-grandparents’ generation sacrificed their and others’ lives in the fight against Nazism. Surely the occasional Facebook post or tweet is not too much of a risk. Perhaps pretending we don’t know about climate change has taught us all some very bad habits with regard to (not) talking about unpopular topics.

Regardless of the comfortably numbing effects of social media, no one with a vote in the French election (remembering both that France has a comprehensive education system and that you have to officially be an adult to vote) can claim to be unaware that Le Pen proudly represents a lineage of racial supremacism as a justification for torture and mass death. As for those elements of the puerile and petulant left actively campaigning against Le Pen’s sole remaining opponent, let’s recall that France’s proud history of righteous political violence is by no means limited to guillotines and lobster thermidors. France in 1945 established a proud tradition of dealing with collaborators, which mostly involved shaving their heads and parading them through the streets so that normal people could spit in their faces. Presuming that the forces of reason rather than hatred do win out next Sunday, it would be hard to argue against the same treatment of those supposed progressives who, knowing the dangers of fascism, did everything they could to try to descredit the only candidate who could defeat it.

Now, I’m aware that the latter part of the preceding paragraph may be legitimately used as evidence by those who’ve argued that in my diatribes about the French election I’ve exhibited a lack of empathy for the plight of those left out of globalisation, people drawn towards Le Pen because they’ve had their life chances and those of their children damaged beyond repair, and who look to the future with fear mixed with a large dollop of resentment towards a political class that throughout their whole lives has lied to their faces while robbing them sourd, muet and aveugle***. I don’t want to come across like one of those Remainers who sneered at people whose plight was ignored by society and the economy to the point where they were desperate enough to fall for cheap demagoguery and tabloid manipulation, or smug Clinton supporters looking down on the millions who fail to qualify for the Democrats’ not-so-inclusive vision of ‘middle class’ Americans and who voted for a reality show tycoon in preference to a professional politician from one of the same old establishment dynasties. In the case of France I would have some understanding of those calling for abstention if it were the truly atrocious Fillon against Le Pen. But for all that I try, I cannot help but put voting for an actual fascist in an entirely different moral and political category. This is not about being duped by cheap promises of jobs or ‘sovereignty’. Successive generations of Europeans have grown up understanding Hitler and the Nazis to be an emblem of absolute evil. There is no one in France who does not know of Le Pen’s associations with those who deny the Holocaust and the monstrous crimes of the Nazi’s French allies (not because they think they didn’t happen, but because they approve and want to achieve something similar). In a French setting the FN openly celebrate the colonial wars, which brutalised entire societies – Le Pen’s father was a proud torturer of fighters for Algerian independence. There is no excuse for voting for such repugnant characters, and I also have nothing but seething contempt for those who ‘argue’ that an aspiring centrist Presidential contender is on the same moral scale. The trade unions and political parties who are calling the choice between a liberal democrat and a fascist**** ‘the plague or the cholera’ deserve to catch both, and as for the schoolkids running around organising anti-Macron demonstrations, they are, whether they know and are amused by it or not, tools of the far-right. As such I don’t find them a particularly compelling case for empathy. Let’s use whatever meagre means we might have – let’s, at the very least, use social media to share our anger and fear of a fascist victory – to help ensure that next Sunday the spirit of anti-fascist resistance fighters prevails over the fetid ghouls of Nazi collaborators.

* They might also be inclined to think, jesus, are all the sentences going to be this long?

** To be fair I didn’t actually write that one, although I might well have thought it momentarily.

*** The French term for ‘dollop’ is apparently ‘bonne cuillerée’.

**** Le clue devrait être dans le mots, n’est-ce pas?!

My daughter the footballer

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After an almost impossible first night in a hotel with our three-month-old daughter I reassure my wife ‘we’ll get through this. We’re a team’. This analogy only goes so far, however, as one of the team members has no idea she’s part of a squad of players sharing a common objective. For one thing, she doesn’t respond to hand signals and whistles from the touchline and doesn’t even seem able to identify or even see the other players. She also, rather like certain actual footballers, responds to any potential slight, no matter how minor, as though she’s being tortured, and is in the unfortunate habit of screaming to the point of losing her voice when decisions don’t go her way. Also, unlike most professional sports people with a couple of unfortunate exceptions, she appears to exercise no control whatsoever over her bowel functions and will quite happily play on as though she did not have excrement visibly trickling down her legs. Then there’s the fact that at the end of the match she simply refuses to leave the pitch, insisting on staying in the centre circle proudly surveying the increasingly frustrated crowd despite how appallingly she’s perfomed. When she is finally persuaded to go to the changing room she embarrasses herself even more with her appetite for endless amounts of seemingly intoxicating liquid. She also has her equivalents of Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardner, although in her case the badboy mates who egg her on to even greater heights of excitability and subsequent disgrace go by the names of Mr Gweenewy and Comfy Wabbit. If you add in the fact that, as we’ve now discovered, her behaviour in hotels would shame even a Sheffield United striker, it’s pretty clear that although she may in some ways always be a valuable member of the squad, it’s certainly not her team-playing abilities that make her so. The whole thing makes me feel the deepest sympathy for David Moyes. At least given that she lives in Rome and has a British passport, we might be able to get a few quid for her out of Lazio. She could yet turn out to be the female equivalent of Ravel Morrison.

You can do something to stop Le Pen: Change your profile photo

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Probably the smallest gesture you can make in the attempt to change the world for the better (or stop it getting worse) is to change your profile picture on social media to reflect your concern about an issue. In the last couple of years people have most commonly altered their photos using a twibbon to commemorate or express solidarity with the victims of terrorist attacks such as the ones in Paris and Brussels.

Right now, all of the values that enlightened users of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are under grave threat. This time it’s not a single unpredictable act of political violence which threatens to turn our continent into a more dangerous, repressive and mistrustful place to live, but the victory of a national socialist candidate in the second round of the French elections.

For most of my own life the notion that fascism could make a comeback in Europe was unthinkable. A charismatic leader manipulating the masses into hating their neighbours so that they could gain political power and eradicate democracy? Surely people would recognise the danger and unite to ostracise such a figure. But now Marine Le Pen, the proud daughter of a man who repeatedly insisted that the Nazi Holocaust a ‘mere footnote of history’, stands a very real chance of winning the Presidency. The response of a lot of those who should be in the forefront of the fight against her has been to shrug their shoulders and talk sulkily about abstaining. Some have complained bitterly that there was no point voting against Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 only to see his daughter become even more popular, as though fifteen years of no death camps had not been worth getting out of bed and voting for.

This is not about telling French people how to vote. Or maybe it is. It doesn’t matter. Fascism is too grave a threat to pretend that borders matter. People like Le Pen have an international vision of how they want the world to be. She welcomed Brexit and the election of Trump and openly associates with (and is funded by) Vladimir Putin. 

It is not about persuading hardcore FN supporters not to vote for her. Such people are, for the moment, lost to humanity. This is about expressing publicly the very simple and ideally universally-shared belief that fascism is evil and must be opposed by any means necessary, even if that means putting a cross next to the name of a person who would not be your ideal first choice to lead your country. Over the next ten days, whenever French people who are at all inclined to abstain on May 7th go onto social media, they need to see that their foreign friends want them to go and vote against Le Pen. 

You would make this simple, tiny gesture for victims of terrorism; do it now to help prevent all of us falling victim to fascism. If you need any more persuading that it is a worthwhile thing to do, google ‘Marine Le Pen twibbon’. There are lots and lots, and they are being used and seen, including in groups that are supposedly left-wing and anti-fascist, where, as I presume elsewhere, her attacks on Macron from the left are going down very well. Unless we help to oppose Le Pen, in whatever ways we can, she will win.

The link is here.

I’m starting to despair of ‘the Left’

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I have a very bad habit: signing up to and spending time in Facebook groups. Around Brexit it was the various Remain groups, during the US election the anti-Trump ones and over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hanging out with the French Left.

When I say ‘Left’, it’s an odd melange, in that there aren’t at present many contributors who define themselves in opposition to the right. In such groups supporters of the growing movement for abstention increasingly rubs shoulders with open supporters of the Nazi candidate Le Pen.

I saw something similar late last year with so-called ‘Bernie’ supporters who were far too busy propagandising against Hillary to even mention Trump. It has recently turned out that some of the groups are actually orchestrated by the far-right, which partly explains why they are happy to host posts in favour of far-right causes, including Le Pen. Although I’ve always found the cliché that the two ends of the political spectrum meet up contemptible, on social media it is often very difficult to tell who is what.

As someone whose knowledge of French politics is limited (I’ve never lived in France), I respect the opinions of friends who insist that some of the anti-Macron stuff being shared is a healthy letting-off of steam and that most of those disappointed with Méchelon’s failure to get through to the second round will do the sensible thing in ten days’ time. It’s also possible that the Facebook groups of France Insoumise Ici, the inappropriately-named 100% Anti-Facho and others are not representative of the debate in society at large. Espérons-le. It’s worth acknowledging are also sections of the Left (notably Ensemble) who have actually taken an anti-fascist position on the election – shamefully, that doesn’t include the once-prominent Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste  (NPA).

However, what I’m seeing repeated exponentially more often is the argument ‘there’s no difference between Macron’s neoliberalism and Le Pen’s fascism’. The hashtag #sansmoi is being used by those who will proudly refuse to exercise their democratic responsibilities on May 7th and will presumably wash their hands of the consequences of the result.

That’s what a lot of ‘Bernie supporters’ did. They campaigned against Clinton to the point where millions who clearly should have voted for her were unmotivated to do so, and now they happily blame others for the outcome. The far-right is now tearing up the rights and protections of ordinary citizens at a ferocious rate, held back only by the courts. Trump is trying to bomb his way to popularity but the consciences of those who helped him into power are clear. It’s apparently all the fault of the Democrats who treated Bernie unfairly, the diddums.

It’s distinctly possible that the memes and tropes being shared against Macron right now on the ‘Left’ will help to elect Le Pen. They will depress Macron’s vote, increase abstention, put his campaign on the back foot and let a Holocaust revisionist and open racist into power in one of the world’s most emblematic democratic and powerful countries. In the process they will jeopardise the future of Europe and encourage the exponential growth of the far-right across the world. There may well be death camps; no one can pretend they don’t know what Le Pen stands for.

But what will the consequences be for those who let it happen? As so often on the ‘Left’, the ultimate prize is a pure, unsullied pair of hands and a smug sense that although there may be massive injustice in the world, I have played no part in its perpetuation. In the justifications of anti-Clinton leftists, pro-‘Lexit’ voters and French abstentionists, the key words are me and my: my beliefs, ma conscience… I know this because for years I was involved in leftwing organisations (although presently unaffiliated, I still hold basically socialist values and principles) and with some honourable exceptions those who were or aspired to be at the top of such groupuscules were far more concerned with promoting their egos and the name of their parties than with actually achieving meaningful change, except in some never-to-be-achieved wonderland.

I don’t know if Jean-Luc Mélenchon falls into that category. I’m reliably assured that he has in the past shown himself to be an admirable and consistent anti-fascist. It may be that his ego was damaged by his failure to get into the second round; he may just be sulking. He may, like Jeremy Corbyn, be tragically incompetent when it comes to strategy and leadership. Of course I would rather have seen him in the second round against Macron or Fillon. The support he built up in a few short weeks before the election is an encouraging sign that there is a huge appetite for a radical egalitarian alternative to neoliberalism. But there is no way that he is unaware that Le Pen is harvesting similar sentiments, that a key part of her strategy is to position herself right where he stood. For his supporters to be repeating this arrant nonsense that there is no difference between a banker and a Nazi AND NOT BE CONTRADICTED indicates an absolute abdication of moral and political leadership at the most critical point in the history of post-war Europe.

This is what I feel like screaming in the street right now (instead, I’m writing it on my website, which is sort of similar): IF LE PEN WINS, IT WILL BE THANKS TO THE CONNIVANCE OF THE ‘LEFT’. Any and all anti-fascists worthy of the name need to learn a very important lesson from the US and and STOP telling the world that Macron and Le Pen are indistiguishable. Doing so may involve a self-sacrifice of one’s impeccable anti-neoliberal credentials and necessitates a measure of humility. For me it’s another test of whether or not today’s ‘Left’ is anything other than a long-running vanity project, a puerile or senile delusion, a shiny accoutrement which looks nice but refers to nothing but itself. The dominance of the notion that the market and finance should control every aspect of our lives is a catastrophe for the human species, but if you think it’s as bad as what Le Pen stands for, you’re a cretin and a connard. Grow up, vote Macron. C’est tout.

PS: Bonus quiz question: does the follow clip depict fascism or neoliberalism?

Rome: The Coming Community

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In ‘The Coming Community’ the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that community nowadays is less about shared identities and more about contingent experience. Or at least I think he does, I’ve only really read the title and a couple of synopses which made my head hurt slightly. I’m not going to read any more about it this morning as I’m feeling a little tired, the result of a poor night’s sleep.

The area where we live could be classified as quiet, and has even been described as anonymous. There are cafés and shops we all occasionally frequent but my wife and I don’t know or recognise many of the neighbours who share our street. There are a couple of local characters: the guy who drinks Peroni on a bench and snarls at anyone else who tries to sit there, the ebullient beauticians downstairs who always say hello and coo over the baby, the reliably cheerful Bangladeshi guy who runs the local grocer’s. In the cafés (of which there are three or four) people nod at acquaintances, gulp down their cappuccini and scoff their cornetti standing at the bar in that Italian way, but don’t stick around to chat. It’s by no means a hostile area but most interactions seem to be largely transactional in nature.

Sometimes it takes a single visionary human being to create a sense of shared experience out of seemingly unpromising material, to produce a spirit of communality by connecting elements of otherwise atomised lives, like all religion, art and politics aspires to do. Last night one man took it upon himself to unite people on our street. It’s not even clear whether he himself lives locally. Maybe it was the selfless gesture of a Christ-like outsider figure offering himself up for society’s approbation or crucifixion: a wandering prophet, a drifting shaman, a perambulating teller of universal truths unpalatable in the light of day. It’s not clear what the content of his speech was. The language that he’d chosen for his testimony was one unknown by the overwhelming majority of his audience. (It may even have been Aramaic.) It was the force of his sermon which was so compelling, the relentlessness and particularly the volume of whatever it was he was he was bellowing over the course of at least an hour.

In response, a community emerged from nothing, an implicit understanding of our commonality spread through the souls of those anonymous men and women in the surrounding buildings. Hundreds of rudely-awoken residents who had previously shared little more than the occasional pavement glance were united in what was at first mild annoyance and then, as the minutes wore on, under-the-breath curses, muffled complaints about punishing work schedules, he’ll-wake-the-bloody-baby and some-people-have-NO-consideration, developing gradually into fantasies of picking up non-existent airguns, marching purposefully to the window, taking aim and, to the silent cheers of the entire neighbourhood (one which until that moment had never thought of itself as such), as the local birds just started to chirp in the local trees, neutralising the irksome threat to our peaceful coexistence.

Is Alex Jones a good dad? As a parent myself I’d say it’s pretty unlikely

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I’ve been a father now for all of three months, and like all parents have found it both absolutely exhilarating and hugely demanding in terms of tolerance and patience. My love for my daughter grows exponentially every day and if anyone deliberately hurt her I’d probably try to kill them, although obviously I don’t think that such personal vengeance should be the basis of a legal system. I’m not a prick.

Someone who clearly is a prick, and an asshole, and a c*nt, is the US radio hate preacher Alex Jones. How do I know this? Well, I’m judging him on his words and actions, and as a parent I’m now in a position to see how damaging they must be. In Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 a 20-year-old man murdered twenty children and then shot himself in the head. This led to renewed calls for gun control, which provoked a malicious internet conspiracy theory among those who don’t mind the odd school shooting (shucks, they might even do one themselves one day!) that the massacre was a ‘false flag’. Jones picked up on this and told his gullible and resentful disciples, primed as they are on a heady cocktail of skunk and misinformation, that not just the terrorist attack but also the children themselves were fake, (‘child actors’) and directed them to harrass the families of the dead children (because they’re ‘actors’ too, right?).

Is someone who thinks other people’s kids don’t exist a fit person to have custody over their own? (Presuming his own kids aren’t themselves ‘child actors’, of course.) A court is currently (and hilariously) trying to decide. Of course, it’s possible that Jones is the best parent in the world, but given the evidence so far permitted in court and that excluded by the judge, it’s pretty unlikely. His life story is a litany of drink, drugs, and megalomaniac narcissism, to the extent where he can’t remember basic information about his kids and also fills their heads with hateful internet nonsense. Jones is now married to a former prostitute. He denies her past (whereas she, notably, doesn’t), just like he and his naive followers deny climate change, 9/11 and the Holocaust.

Regardless of the custody battle, it’s very clear that such a person should be nowhere near political power. Yet Trump praises him and has repeated his syphillitic screeds word for word. They thus have an impact in the real world, giving the lie to his claim inside court that he’s merely a performance artist – he made a video on the way to court in which he himself made clear that it’s not true. His success, after all, depends on his audience believing he’s more than just a clown.

Over the years celebrity refuseniks like Russell Brand have appeared on his Infowars show, granting him radical credibility despite his affiliations with white supremacists and antisemites. He’s also been defended by the British investigative journalist and author Jon Ronson. Ronson’s schtik, which can be charactersised as fey muscular liberalism, can be very effective and great fun. His modus operandi, like that of Louis Theroux, uses a very softly-spoken gonzo approach of befriending people who provoke the ire of liberals: Katie Hopkins, that God Hates Fags family, Islamic terrorists. He has been described as a ‘semi-friend’ of Jones. But humanising those who dedicate their lives to dehumanising others is risky and morally questionable. What about the effects of what they do, and what they represent, notwithstanding their inner psychological battles? As Žižek points out in ‘Violence’, no one is consciously evil. We all have private narratives which explain our behaviour towards others. But the truth of a human being lies not in what they think, but what they say and do.

I don’t know Jones personally. I only know what he does and what he proudly represents. I also know the effect that people like him and his aspiring UK counterpart Katie Hopkins had in Rwanda. Now he’s asked for respect and responsibility in reports of his case. Fine. If he apologises to the people whose lives he’s ruined with his (ahem) ‘performance art’ and tries to make amends, then he’ll be deserving of respect. While he continues to propagate dangerous lies in a way which is absolutely irresponsible and disrespectful, anyone who’s not a complete prick will continue to see him as someone who should be kept securely away from contact with human beings in general and children in particular.

Is voting for the far-right a form of gambling?

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Voting-slot-machine-598x833

On the 31st of December 1998 I walked, drunk, into a betting shop in Central London to enquire about the odds of global economic meltdown as a result of the Millennium Bug. They demurred and directed me to head office.

That addled prank remains my only visit to a betting shop. I’ve never been desperate enough. Living in London for a decade or so I saw them spread like cancer cells across the less salubrious parts of the city. I found it useful to point out to my international students that you can tell how poor an area is by the number of betting shops and fried chicken outlets. They usually spread in malignant clusters, often three or four gathered on the same street corner, particularly in areas like Stratford and Haringey where I lived for several years.

Anyone who, like me, doesn’t frequent such places may be puzzled about their prevalence until they learn about the phenomenon of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs). These have long been known as the crack cocaine of gambling, and in several countries (for example in Ireland) they are banned. FOBTs allow users to stake £100 every 20 seconds, and are largely responsible for bizarre but by no means anomalous statistics: Rochdale, a town in Greater Manchester, staked £72m on gambling machines in 2012; this figure equates to every man, woman and child staking £340 each. There have been campaigns to prohibit FOBTs in the UK, culminating in a parliamentary policy review in 2016, in the run-up to which gambling companies quadrupled the amounts of money and gifts they gave to MPs (including ministers).

I suspect that for some people firms like Ladbrokes play much the same role in their economic life as loan sharks. Given the considerable odds of getting into serious trouble if you borrow money from companies like Wonga, why not combine such risk-taking with a bit of ‘fun’ in a place where they at least give you a free cup of tea?

That’s why I was heartened in 2011 to see the footage above. Although the riots that summer were inchoate, incoherent and altogether regrettable, I can’t avoid the feeling that that particular target got what was coming to it. Just as it’s hard to argue against vigilantes in economically devastated areas who physically attack crack dens and dealers, it cheers me up to see a Paddy Power’s or Ladbrokes with its windows cracked or smashed. At least someone is putting up some resistance.

Anyone spending more than a couple of days in Italy nowadays would start wondering what the ubiquitous phrase scomesse sportive means. Over the last five years of visiting regularly and now living here I’ve seen the number of betting places surge. Here they either take the form of ordinary cafes with a couple of terminals (as on my street corner) or dedicated negozi with blacked out windows. The cafes are generally locally and independently owned places so sports gambling seems more integrated into the social fabric.

As in the UK, it seems that thanks to relentless marketing and team sponsorship being a football fan has become linked with betting on your club’s fortunes. I don’t think that the Fixed Odds machines have been legalised yet but clearly these mini-casinos are sucking up a great deal of very hard-earned cash from a lot of extremely desperate people who have little to lose.

Risk plays an increasing role in our daily lives and we are encouraged to blame ourselves for failure rather than to share that responsibility with the society and its politico-economic order.

If we draw back and think about Europe as a whole, it’s apparent that this form of parasitism has an effect on the general mood. In societies where risk plays an increasing role in our daily lives and we are encouraged to blame ourselves for failure rather than to share that responsibility with the society and its politico-economic order, gambling has become one of the key metaphors for how we conduct our lives. The advertising of gambling companies plays on this very cleverly, and the growth of online gambling means that when we play games like Candy Crush Saga we are betting (or being primed to bet), without being aware of it, often from a very early age.

What results is unmanageable levels of spiralling debt with no way to pay it off but taking more risks. If we’re looking for a reason for the stupid actions of young people in Croydon and Tottenham in August 2011 seeing their behaviour as a form of gambling helps. The social sanctioning of absolutely irresponsible activity led huge numbers of young people to gamble that taking a TV from a looted shop would have no consequences other than better quality film nights. The debt they paid as a result was very punitive custodial sentences and ruined life chances. Crime is, after all, a form of gambling.

The terrible odds of ‘taking back control’

No wonder people want to ‘take back control’. The chance that the Brexiteers’ promises and threats (£350,000,000 on the NHS, millions of marauding Turks) would turn out to be true were clearly minimal, but for many people it was better to bet on that than to continue in the certainty of ongoing economic annihilation. Humans take terrible odds when they’re desperate. As Daniel Kahneman points out, that’s what we do in relation to the climate: the odds of catastrophe are so overwhelming that we gamble that that mythical 3% of scientists are right, and we ignore scientific fact and the evidence of our own senses. The possibility of finding meaning through dedication to jihadism is pretty small, but nihilistic young men take that chance rather than betting on continuing monotony and irrelevance. When buying food we gamble that one more kebab or piece of fried chicken will give us the energy we crave without damaging our physical selves beyond repair. Gambling may well be written into the way social media works – as this terrifying article explains in depth, liking a post or retweeting quite possibly triggers the same emotions as sticking more coins in a slot machine.

Then, of course, there’s voting. The odds that Donald Trump, Marine le Pen or Beppe Grillo will be able to resolve the multiple crises that engulf us are practically zero. The same goes for Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. However, given that so many are locked into spiralling debt and staring social and economic oblivion in the face, betting on the chances of political change, not matter how remote, must feel like one more desperate jerk of the lever – or least a way to give the machine a big hefty kick, just in case it pays out when you’re standing nearby. Modern gambling mechanisms work entirely on that emotional tug, the rush of endorphins that comes from taking a heart-stopping risk.

Let’s hope that when French voters step into the booth this week and next month they’re able to exercise rational control over their actions rather than acting upon the impulses that cause so many to gamble their futures away online