This week a member of the US government suggested that “lower quality humans” should be sterilised en masse. Ring any bells?
According to Oxford Dictionaries, fascism can be defined by its showing the following characteristics… Authoritarianism, which does not tolerate opposition. Nationalism and a belief in the supremacy of one’s own country and race. A contempt for democracy and liberalism. Belief in and obedience to a powerful leader. And demagoguery, which appeals to the public’s prejudices rather than making a rational argument.
Tick them off, one by one, so we can be clear from hereon, and not fall back on pusillanimous excuses. Dear reader, the United States of America, formerly known as the ‘Land of the Free’, is now well on its way to becoming a fascist state.
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Yet here is Keir Starmer, making up to the leader of that state.
First, let us recognise that the prime minister is the last man to choose gesture politics, and diplomacy can be a dirty business. Treating the president as a fascist was never going to be the PM’s style, and anyway there was a great deal riding on this. Thousands of Ukrainian lives. The world economy. Peace. Nobody among the world’s leaders would have thanked the PM for stirring up a hornet’s nest.
Nothing agreed by the President can be assumed as a guarantee, even if he promised it in front of millions of TV viewers. But Team Starmer will have flown home feeling pleased with themselves. For one thing, Donald Trump has shown he has no loyalty whatever by cutting out all his British sycophants on the right. Sir Keir has triumphed, and they are left with nothing.
So where does this leave us? While Mr Trump’s promised state visit should keep him sweet for a time, he still poses a mortal danger to the world. Treating with him must never include acceptance of morally and politically repugnant insanity like his threats to annexe Canada or bizarre and immoral ideas for turning Gaza into a Côte de Trump holiday resort. Nor must the PM allow his American sweet-talking to distance Britain from Europe, where our only future can lie.
Unfortunately, all evidence suggests that Keir Starmer these days is not a reluctant Brexiter, but a Brexiter at heart. Still, the platelets are moving. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
NB. This diary was filed on Friday afternoon, before the Trump/Zelenskyy meeting.
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Last week, Pecksniff suggested that as well as doom in this new and menacing world, there would be hope. For all its good intentions since the last war, the US has generally been at odds with Europe. Its reference has naturally been what is American – and politically and culturally, Europe has always been unAmerican.
What we see as nuance and subtlety, America has been tempted to interpret as weakness or prevarication. So Europe has spoken with a voice it has carefully borrowed from America. The inflection has always been American.
Now, perhaps for the first time, Europe can speak with its own voice.
Already one can sense the beginning of a new pride, whatever the hardships to be confronted. Britain can hardly not be part of that pride, whatever the fears the government still holds of the remaining aftermath of Brexit. The whole landscape of Brexit has changed and will be swept away by events.
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As the world reels in shock over the Trump presidency, Pecksniff has been listening to his intelligencers in the diplomatic world, here and across Europe. They are horrified and agog. This is a profession which, over centuries, has developed to sense every nuance of position, every zephyr of controversy. These are the people above all who are supposedly unflappable, suave for every occasion. But now they are dumbstruck. They have no words…
“Expect the worst” is more or less the message from the whispers in your diarist’s ear. That means a disintegration of all those international structures carefully put in place since the Second World War to ensure that anything such as that cannot happen again. But they all assumed the US would be at the heart of them, not the villain who would pull them down. So none of those institutions can function without them, and we may imagine the confusion consequent thereon.
Thus we might expect the collapse of NATO, at least in its present form, and a dramatic need to boost defences which would put any government’s economic strategy, as the Scots would say, “doon the cludgie”.
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The predatory and shamelessly corrupt new relationship between the United States and Russia can only end in tears. But in the meantime, this week the Financial Times neatly summed up what it means to the world: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”.
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Meanwhile, what are the other bads guys doing?
Apparently the Russians are spying on the American bases at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. East Anglia Bylines reported mysterious drones in the night sky over the airbases, and US security personnel quizzing local people for information. Are itinerant vegetable pickers really in the employ of the Kremlin?
But this seems small beer. Perhaps the reason the Russia Report has not been fully published is because it would reveal the full humiliation of the way the Kremlin has for years undermined, corrupted and schmoozed the entire incompetent and complacent British state apparatus.
In a move which will probably have no effect whatever, horses and stable doors being what they are, the Home Office has declared that it will tighten the rules to keep “Kremlin-linked elites” out of the country. The public quite reasonably wonder what they were doing here in the first place, and some might assume it was to bankroll the Conservative Party. One might have thought that a determined Labour home secretary might have seen chucking them out as an easy early hit for the new government.
Still, given their close links, we must assume that among those likely to be sanctioned for supporting and conniving with potential Russian agents are any number of Tory MPs, the grateful recipients of oodles of roubles. If any of them have committed any wrongdoing, there seems little chance they would be expelled, though throwing them in the slammer would be a start.
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Mind you, if things go on as they are, very soon those Russian spies will have little to spy on. The St Valentine’s Day speech by the US vice president in Munich appears to have spelt the end of NATO, in which case it will also spell the end of US air force bases across East Anglia. So among all the rest of the fall-out, the regional economy will be dramatically hit by their removal.
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Keir Starmer brought his artillery to bear on Nigel Farage (Clacton) this week, accusing him of: “Fawning over Putin”. Certainly, as Pecksniff has recently pointed out, Mr Farage’s position has become more vulnerable. He finds himself sucking up to the two international ogres who the British public perhaps most despise: an unhappy position in which the country’s most shameless populist should find himself. While the PM was denouncing him, Mr Farage was in America, mocking his own country: “talking down Britain”, as the press would normally call it (if it were anybody but Mr Farage).
One of his complaints to his Republican audience was that, in this country, people are imprisoned for saying what they think. It was perhaps unfortunate that, also this week, a former Reform candidate was arrested by police for just that: saying what he thinks: in this case that somebody should assassinate the prime minister.
Until these godless times, insulting one’s country abroad was a strict no-no. Perhaps Mr Farage was drawn by the intoxicating aroma of money, though it could be the lure of vulgarity. He has always been a vulgarian, my dears, his natural home being among the brashness and bright lights of the Trump Republicans. He calls the Trump presidency the “new golden age”, though we might prefer to know it as the Fellowship of the Bling.
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But Nigel Farage is not the only of our region’s politicians to suck up to President Trump and his ideas, of course. There are also Liz Truss and Rupert Lowe (Gt Yarmouth). Already, their support of the Trump regime has left them in difficulties (though they are both possessed of the self-awareness of the average cheese and pickle sandwich). They are out on a precarious limb in denouncing this country in order to win approval from a tyrant who hardly knows they exist.
The last time a political party was on the wrong side of history was the populist Oswald Moseley’s. He courted publicity and approval in many quarters during the 1930s, but when the die was eventually cast against what was happening in Germany, public outrage killed his movement overnight.
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“Let’s send an email to the entire British civil service with the question: what did you do last week?” suggests Rupert Lowe, in what one must see as a typical contribution to contemporary thought. “The answer for thousands? Sod all. Brutal cuts are required.”
Quite reasonably, Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) asks him: “Is this how you normally talk about people who are working for you? You do know that the government can’t deliver anything without the civil service, don’t you?”
But then, Mr Lowe undoubtedly believes the government delivers far too much as it is, a sentiment which curiously is unlikely to find much accord among those who voted for him.
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Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) only becomes more bizarre in her confusion. This week in a speech, she declared that “in a world of the strong and the weak, we must not be weak”, then went on to declare counter-intuitively that this meant isolation and abandoning “internationalism”.
Also this week, her spokesperson called upon a “foreign power” – predictably the United States – to intervene in Britain’s sovereign interests in the Chagos islands.
But would it not be an admission of weakness to invite a foreign power to intervene on Britain’s behalf? And in doing so, would we not be appealing to internationalism?
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Readers may recall the fascinating experiment called Mass Observation, for which thousands of ordinary people kept diaries during the war. Some of them were brought together in a book by Simon Garfield called We Are At War, through which your diarist was browsing this week. One entry in particular caught the eye, by Pam Ashford, who worked at a shipping office in Glasgow. She records a conversation between workmates one morning in December 1939:
“Miss Bousie, leaving for the bank and looking at the fog: ‘Mr Hitler will not come today’.
Miss Carswell: ‘You say that, yet you carry your mask.”
Miss Bousie: ‘I always carry my mask. I hate it. That is why I carry it. It is a punishment. It is my cross. I did not work hard enough to prevent the war.’
This sentiment produced profound astonishment, everyone pointing how much she had done for the League of Nations Union.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I did not do enough. When the peace comes I shall work harder.’
The English are a profoundly unserious race. For some, the loss of our democracy and our freedom would matter less than the end of a favourite TV soap opera. Miss Bousie has a lesson for us all, perhaps.
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With thanks to Liz Crosbie, Celina Błędowska and Kate Moore.
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