EU – Infinite Coincidence

On leaving Brussels

Jan 30, 2019Feb 10, 2019 Rich WillLeave a comment

map-33210_1-3403_1

Someone recently accused the writer of this blog (me) of showing little sign of having listened to those who had valid reasons to vote Leave. This post is based on notes I made on a trip last May (2018) which I never got around to typing up at the time. In it I try to relate to some of the anger directed at the EU from the left.

We’re about to depart from Brussels, but there’s a problem: the seat reservation system for the Eurostar has broken down. Fortunately, thanks to the efficiency of the effortlessly multilingual staff who quickly take to distributing the relevant cards by hand, the problem is resolved swiftly and we’re back in London within two hours. Les temps changent: when my father left his hometown in Northern Germany for good at the age of 17, it took him several days and reams of documents and stamps to get to the UK.

That’s not to suggest that the Eurostar is perfect or even unproblematic. The bins are full, not all the toilets work, and passengers are grumbling in a range of varieties of Europanto. Anyone inclined to welcome another uncritical paean to the wonders of the EU project and the freedom of movement it guarantees might want to consider a front-page article from Belgium’s leading Francophone daily about Mawda, a two year-old Kurdish girl who was shot dead last Thursday by the Belgian police. The officer claimed he was firing at the tyre of the van in which she was travelling, which is an insufficient explanation of how he came to shoot a toddler sitting on her mother’s lap in the front seat in the face. Her parents came from Ranya in Iraqi Kurdistan, a country devastated by Isis, and after several failed applications for asylum were trying to reach the UK.

Mawda’s parents would probably be astounded to be told by British liberals that the EU is the best possible guarantor of free movement. Unlike our journey, their trip involved tens of thousands of pounds, took several months, and ended in death and failure. Some of the very best people campaigning for the rights of human beings to cross borders and find safety certainly don’t see the EU flag as a symbol of civilised values.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Forensic Architecture exhibition in the ICA. One of the focuses of the bewilderingly vast and complex projects on display regards the EU’s active neglect of its humanitarian responsibilities in the Mediterranean. They detail the causes of human misery with a mindbending level of meticulousness. Their approach, which uses a combination of cellphone metadata, videos, meteorology, eyewitness accounts, and reconstructions could tell us a lot about what really happened to Mawda, and also shed light what took place in Gaza last week. We don’t have to engage in ‘Minority Report’-style future criminology to predict the human rights abuses that will result from Theresa May signing arms deals with President Erdogan of Turkey. Last week I joined the anti-Erdogan protest outside Downing Street. Among the crowd were people who had been to fight for the YPG in Kurdistan, and who divided their time between there and the Turkish/Kurdish areas of North London, near where we live. While fascists from Italy to Rome spout their bile about the need to combat Isis by tormenting its victims, they risk their lives in order to protect them. And yet, as well as collaborating with Turkey to send back refugees from Syria, the EU has also been planning to set up refugee ‘processing camps‘ in Libya, similar to the concentration camps established by the Australian government in Nauru. If we see ourselves as citizens of the EU, we are responsible for the atrocities it commits and plans in our name.

At St Pancras in the Eurostar waiting hall there was a friendly robot for children to play with. If you tell it your name it won’t rip your head off. Fluffy Robocop. Hard power as well as soft.

*****

I lost a friend over Brexit. Not, as many have experienced, one who came out as a small-minded nationalist, but rather an anti-racist activist whose family had moved to the UK from Bangladesh in the 1970s. At the time I refused to accept that someone so opposed to racism could acquiesce in a cause led by xenophobes, but on sobre reflection it’s understandable that some of those who aren’t from a European background never felt part of the EU project. Europe has a particular value for British society – as Eduardo Lourenço wrote of Portugal’s economy and the EEC, it was ‘the perfect cure for the post-imperial hangover’. Similarly, it’s inevitable that not everyone is all that concerned about what’s ‘best for Britain’. If British people don’t want to get such terrible hangovers, on pourrait dire, maybe we shouldn’t have drunk so bloody much in the first place.

The friends we stay and meet with in Brussels mostly work for the Commission but come from Italy and divide their time between the two countries. The political situation in Rome (where we ourselves lived until the start of this year, and where actual fascists are angling to share power with a semi-cult of internet conspiracy-addled morons) is a reminder that EU membership may soon come to seem less attractive to those of us with a progressive mindset. Elections in May 2019 look set to be characterised by the victory of (ahem) “populists” from across the continent, and may result in a European Parliament dominated who both decry and embody the rebirth of fascism under the EU flag. Ukip won’t be there (not that their MEPs were ever the most assiduous of attenders, although apparently the owners of Irish bars near the Parliament were disappointed by Brexit) but others of their ilk will take their place. After all, those who ‘hate Brussels’ are still drawn to the place. Last week a proud ally of Farage was stalking the “no go” area of Molenbeek, sneering at the (mostly North African) locals because she, a white British woman in a hooded garment who hates the EU, nonetheless somehow regards Brussels as her own territory. The similarities in worldview between Islamic extremists and anti-Muslim bigots are striking. Hopkins is like a dog joyously sniffing out another of its species. Violence is a form of heat, canine libido set on fire. The mentality of Incels and other disciples of Jordan Peterson et al is so similar to Isis it can be no coincidence: psychopathic misanthropy and violent misogyny are impossible to disentangle. Isis’ principal victims are other Muslims, particularly female ones; thus do those who bully veiled women in the street continue their work in different forms. My compatriot once called (in a national newspaper owned by our nearest equivalent to Robert Mugabe) for boats to blow up those who manage to escape. Perhaps she knew what the EU’s up to the Med her attitude to Brexit might change. Meanwhile Salvini tells his followers and their fellow travellers that boats of newcomers may contain men bent on indiscriminate violence, while praising the far-right terrorist who shot randomly at groups of African women in Macerata.

My favourite citizen of nowhere, Momus, was also in Molenbeek recently, showing off some natty ethnic dreads snapped up in local shops which don’t generally cater for tourists. The area where we’re staying (Ixelles) is more upmarket, or at least it is now. Like Broadway Market, it’s lovely if you can afford it. Gentrification here is driven not by finance, like in London, or tech, as in San Francisco, but by EU personnel. Liberal values come at a high price, in more than one sense. All the perpetrators of the airport bombings in 2016 and those who murdered dozens on the streets of Paris grew up in Molenbeek; cultural relativism alone offers little in terms of addressing a very real problem. In the park where I read about Mawda we’re surrounded by Italians, making themselves at home. Brussels is an emblematic city for transnationals, those with a foot in each country. Is Brussels really Belgium? Is London really part of the UK? Arriving in Rome, we were too busy working and preparing to bring up a child to really engage with the struggle to welcome those whose trajectories were more tortured and who would have loved to be able to pop over to the UK whenever they wanted, just as we could. This blog was born not just out of rage but also out of privilege. There are so many stories to tell, why should mine matter to anyone else? I don’t have an adequate answer to that question.

Brussels’ melange of official identities reminds me of China Mieville’s sci-fi detective novel The City and the City, recently dramatised by the BBC. One senses that there are portals leading from one version of the city to the next. This is also where identities are imposed, prescribed, geannuleerd, where policies are enacted to determine who qualifies as European and who is to remain a non-person, pace Agamben. Is abjectification a word? Injustice is administered from here; but the same is true of London. To those who ‘hate Brussels’ for all it represents: what about Whitehall? Do the city or Canary Wharf, those torture centres ever devising new implements of debt, make you feel patriotic?

I read later in The Guardian (where else?) that Mawda’s family may be deported back to Germany. She was considered a German national, having been born there. My father wasn’t a German national, having held a UK passport from the age of 25 or so, when he applied for citizenship and was called up to do military service. Had he lived he wouldn’t have been among those who had to pay £65. He regularly declared himself to be a proud European, one who only felt he belonged here once the UK joined the EEC in 1973; he died in the early hours of May 1st 2018.

I’m sure Mawda’s parents would have been more than happy for her to take his place. Ukip-style anti-immigrant sentiment is so puerile and reductive that the idea of one-in-one-out might appeal. Of course European citizens in the UK should be allowed to stay and come and go as they please. Of course those who promote a basically far-right agenda by cynically instrumentalising the plight of non-Europeans denied the chance to live here are scum. But the EU routinely makes life and death exclusions on a racist basis. I dearly want the UK to remain part of the European Union – at this point, it feels like the only other option is some or other form of nationalist authoritarianism and a level of austerity which will make the Troika’s treatment of Greece look like rampant munificence – but I can’t say I’ll ever call myself a proud citizen of the EU.

europeans-only

A two-year-old child explains why we can’t “just leave”

Jan 17, 2019Jan 19, 2019 Rich WillLeave a comment

This week we begin a new series in which guest bloggers, representing a range of voices less commonly heard in the mainstream media, give their opinions on the issues of the day. Today Maya, aged two, considers a “no deal” Brexit.

As a toddler, I understand the impulse to, as many British people have put it, just leave the EU without arrangements in place that might serve to ensure the country’s survival. However, I’d like to offer an analogy which will explain why I think it may not be the best available option. Leaving, it turns out, is often a mite more complex than one may at first assume.

Across the road from our flat in London there’s a park. An amazing park. With a bendy slide, literal swings and actual roundabouts, parents speaking what sounds like quite a variety of grown-up languages, fellow toddlers babbling away incoherently as we are wont to do, the odd individual adult gulping down a delicious-looking beverage apparently called K Cider, and what seems to be an endless abundance of flowers and grass and pigeons and trees and mud and bins and leaves and twigs and stones to put in those bins. There are also DOGS! Doggies!! Woof-woofs!!! And a dinosaur! (I am not making this up. There is a dinosaur!) Sometimes I look out of the window and the sight of the outside world triggers thoughts of the park’s bountiful and tantalising treasures. Seized by the impulse to be OUTSIDE, I rush to the door, but unfortunately, I’m too tiny to reach the door handle*. This turns out to be just the first of very many complications.

Leaving the house to go to the park is no, as it were, walk in the park. One issue is that I am, how can I put this, linguistically challenged. I have the verbal sophistication of, well, a two-year-old. Further complicating matters is that (shock! horror!) one of my parents (I think it’s the female one) comes from another language background, so I’m often struggling when it comes to expressing my wants and needs. For example, if I decide on a bit of a whim that I don’t actually want to wear THAT hat, not the one with the dinosaur on it that sometimes makes my head feel a bit hot, but another one that I vaguely remember that might on proper reflection belong to another child at nursery, or maybe one that I definitely possess but which, following my own peculiar proclivities, I have chosen to put in the washing machine or the oven, I can’t put my wishes into words and sentences. Or I can, but sometimes my thoughts and feelings come out all convoluted and lacking in coherence**. Babbling, as I mentioned earlier. Added to this is the fact that I’m not yet totally expert at regulating my emotional state, which leads to impatience and frustration on my part and, as a consequence, on that of my parents. In such a state I’m prone to repeating at increasing pitch and volume the word ‘pak! PAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!’ to little avail. For there are always parental precautions that have to be taken before we leave. This being the “winter” period***, it’s not just a matter of needing to wear a coat, hat, appropriate footwear (i.e. not that of my parents), and a scarf (I HATE scarfs); there are also mittens to be located, suitable parental garments to be selected and donned (with, I have to say, a measure of assistance from yrs truly), plus often a debate as to whether not I get to bring my scooter, because my passion for putting leaves and twigs and stones in the bin means I haven’t always got a hand free to carry it with, which means that someone else (but who??) needs to do so on my behalf.

So something that might seem straightforward turns out not just to be complex but actually complicated. It’s never just a case of opening the door and merrily toddling my way to the lift. The whole process takes time, patience and energy and demands careful preparation and supervision. It is often intensely frustrating and sometimes, for example if one of the parental people happens to notice that it’s actually raining outside, it may not actually result in success.

Now, I’m aware this might be seen as a poor analogy. Getting a child ready for a trip to the park is not nearly as involved a procedure as preparing a country to leave an economic and political union after several decades. But that’s kinda my point. In evaluating the need to make careful preparations, it’s essential to give proper consideration to the consequences of not doing so, in all their potential horror. Allowing a very young child to charge out of the house straight into driving winter rains and traffic coming from all directions, with no coat or shoes, no means of getting back home, lost and helpless in a world suddenly become infinitely more terrifying and lonely, would be something only a true psychopath would do. Especially if they knew there to be child snatchers in the vicinity.

Here, then, we might be able to divine a connection with the dilemma currently faced by the UK. After all, the grown-up world is immensely complex. It operates in ways that would not only befuddle your average nursery-age infant, but would also place incalculable demands on huge teams of experts working to tight schedules over a period of very many years. Just as I struggle to make sense of the complex procedures involved in nipping out to the local playground for 20 minutes or so, the average beflagged twitternaut is underequipped to understand the delicate ins and outs of the EU withdrawal process, and may not have thought through the impact that leaving the EU in any form will have on the future provision of things like well-equipped and safe parks for children to play in, basic regulations to make sure external doors are child-safe, and essential foodstuffs like bananas, tomatoes and cans of K Cider for kids to enjoy in those parks when they get a little bit older.

As I say, I can certainly relate to the impulse to kick and scream and (let’s be frank) poo oneself in the messiest of ways in order to realise one’s immediate life goals. But I’m also acutely aware that my own vision of events is limited to a considerable extent by my puerile desire for immediate gratification without regard for the wider consequences and my infantile apprehension of the scale and complexity of any given set of circumstances. Put simply, I get tantrums. But even as a two-year-old child, I can see pretty clearly that leaving the EU without a deal would not be in the interest of me, my generation or indeed anyone but those whose mentality and worldview are considerably more selfish and less well-informed than your average toddler’s.

Right, that’s the word count met, I’m off to watch me some Teletubbies.

*I am now able to reach the alarm button in the lift, though. Yay!
**I suspect I may have inherited this characteristic from my male parent.
***By the way, those who claim that the climate is getting warmer might like to consider that just a few short months ago we were on something called a beach and it was warm. Now most days we don’t even walk to nursery. You do the math.

Is Tony Blair the right person to lead the anti-Brexit campaign?

Feb 20, 2017Dec 4, 2017 Rich Will6 Comments

Tony Blair gave an excellent speech last week in which he laid out clearly the reasons why Brexit will be an absolute catastrophe for the British economy and called for people to rise up to stop it happening.

This has led members of several online pro-Remain groups to accept and promote him as leader of the campaign. They have argued that despite his lack of popularity on the left, he was a popular Prime Minister who is associated with a happier and more stable time in national life and is also able to make a coherent and convincing case that Britain should not jump off the cliff into economic oblivion, as Theresa May is proposing.

Here’s an alternative point of view. It’s not an opinion I share; I think that on this issue Blair is right and that Brexit will be an absolute disaster (although not as much as a catastrophe for the UK as his war was for Iraq). Nevertheless this is the narrative that will dominate the debate should Blair continue to play a prominent role in the anti-Brexit campaign:

In 2003 we, the British people, made our will absolutely clear. We marched in our millions against Blair’s proposal that we participate in an illegal war in Iraq. We made abundantly clear that we saw through the dodgy dossier and the machinations of the government spin doctors. We rose up throughout the country to say very clearly: no. We don’t believe you and we don’t want your war.

In 2016 we, the British people, took part in a referendum over our continued membership of the European Union. The outcome was tight, but clear: the will of the British people is that Britain must leave the EU.

In both cases an out-of-touch and arrogant political elite with no respect for democracy has sought to deny the will of the British people. The first time they were successful. As a consequence, the Middle East was plunged into an abyss of violence which led directly to the refugee crisis and the rise of Isis. We sacrificed the lives of thousands of our own soldiers. We saw bombs on the London tube and bullets on the streets of Paris and Brussels. All because our leaders refused to listen to our voice.

Now Tony Blair, whose lies led us to this point, tells us we should rise up. Against whom? Against ourselves. Against our own will, as expressed peacefully at the ballot box. We are told warned of disaster by a man who we know for certain we cannot, must not trust ever again.

This is a sovereign and democratic country. We have to respect the will of the people, and that means we should have nothing but contempt for leaders who flout it and do not lead the country but instead seek continually to mislead it.

As I say, I don’t share this perspective. Should Blair continue to be associated with the pro-EU forces, however, and if his arguments start to have an impact, it will be the line pushed by Nigel Farage, who has spoken out several times against Blair’s war, and the central point hammered home by the Tory Party and their newspapers. After all, we have a wilfully amnesiac media which will happily let those members of the current Government who supported the war off the hook. The current impasse with regard to Brexit, in which no one who understands it is seriously in favour – and I would put Theresa May in that category, notwithstanding her inopportune political ambitions – is thus partly a consequence of the war in Iraq. Many who voted to leave will have had that historic insult to democracy foremost in their minds.

The above argument must also be a factor in Jeremy Corbyn’s conservative strategy with regard to Brexit. He knows that Labour is connected in the public mind with a lack of concern for the national mood, and therefore has made no attempt to shift it. His lack of leadership acumen has been made very apparent. He could, last June, have rejected the terms and conduct of the referendum in the first place and attempted to use his principled leadership – recalling explicitly his opposition to the war – to lead the country in a different direction. It’s also shameful that he’s not open to the kinds of suggestions made by Caroline Lucas (that progressive forces should push for a radically different kind of Brexit that prioritises our values). It would be very ironic if one consequence of Corbyn’s failure to provide leadership with regard to Brexit would be his replacement by someone who represents everything that he (supposedly) opposes. And if we know one thing about Blair and the Blairites, it’s that they will seize any opportunity to regain power over The Labour Party.

Instead of letting Blair forward his own agenda, then, those opposed to Britain leaving the EU would be much better advised to look to figures like Caroline Lucas and Nicola Sturgeon to lead the way. Tony Blair must not play any significant role in the campaign. Those of us who both oppose Brexit and marched against the Iraq War cannot allow the Tories and Ukip to get away with using one grievous and obnoxious insult to democracy as a reason for supporting another.