More anti-Farage stuff as Brown channels Poldark

The Guardina wheels out G Brown, former PM, to attack Farage via a tired metaphor of the Battle of Britain. Brown is famous for not noticing a mic was still on and calling an anti-immigration Labour voter a 'bigoted woman': 

There’s a new battle for Britain: resistance to Nigel Farage 

After last Thursday, what is now at issue is far bigger than Brexit: it is a new battle for Britain. This is a battle against intolerance, prejudice, xenophobia and the manufacture of distrust and disunity....The new division in British politics is between the patriotic majority – tolerant, fair-minded, outward-looking and pragmatic – against the Faragists, who will follow Farage wherever he goes. The dogmatism and divisiveness of their them-versus-us nationalism has more in common with the Le Pens, the Salvinis and the Orbans, and of course the Trumps and Putins, than with the enduring values of the British people.

Farage is out to hijack British patriotism: to whip up a politics of division and hate; weaponise it by deploying the language of betrayal and treachery; and target, demonise and blame immigrants, Europeans, Muslims and anyone else who can be labelled “outsiders” or “the other”.... Farage wants to undo the very anti‑discrimination and equality legislation that protects minorities. He would set back gender equality, promising, for example, to end the right to maternity pay. And instead of honouring the Brexit campaign’s promise of £350m a week to the NHS, he would demolish it by means of US-style private insurance.

Well yes -- Farage's only role is as a token of Leave sentiment. I tactically voted Brexit Party at the local elections, but would never support him for Parliament. And it is tragic that Leave populism is being focused by right-wing groups -- soggy liberals like Brown (big fan of the EU's neo-lib Bologna reforms in HE) are to blame. Back to Farage though -- above all:

instead of calling out no deal by 31 October as a catastrophic act of economic self-harm that runs wholly counter to the national interest, it has become a Farage-driven test of patriotism that a panicked Conservative party is obliging their leadership candidates to pass....It is time to draw a line that must not be crossed and to call on the patriotic majority – which includes millions who voted leave out of understandable economic discontent, and millions, too, who last Thursday voted for Farage – to speak up against this descent into the heart of darkness.

A return to the failed project to define Britishness that Brown tried to push in 2014, although some people think it was important in staving off Scots Nattery at the Indyref. The future is a a marvellous thing of social reform (he was Chancellor and PM and he didn't do that much), and some sort of PVCV after lots of campaigning:

if we are to restore the trust Farage is undermining, we have to address the very real problems that caused the Brexit vote. We have to deal with the fears surrounding immigration, sovereignty, the state of our towns – and high streets – and Britain’s now rampant poverty and inequality. For months I have been calling for us to go outside the Westminster bubble and hold region-by-region public hearings to seek out a new country-wide consensus in advance of a final vote by the British people. If we engage honestly with each other we will, I believe, find the British people far more tolerant and fair-minded, and less inward-looking and dogmatic than those who have suborned our patriotism, turned it into petty nationalism, and today dominate our politics with such disastrous results.

I like the promises of social reform, pursuing what I call the Poldark Illusion, that surly and rebellious peasants, when offered future support by the nobs, will lay down their sickles and happily go home to starve for a few more years. The whole thing reads like something for the initial referendum, pre-2016, when people still trusted politicians to do what they promised.

Eloquent rthetoric will see off no deal

The Grudina's latest hero is M Hancock, Tory leadership contender. His latest feat of rhetoric features in the lead story on the website. It should finally turn the tide against no dealers,just as Churchill rallied us after Dunkirk.  Ready?

The Tory leadership hopeful Matt Hancock has laid into his rival Boris Johnson for dismissing business warnings against a hard Brexit, saying: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

Meanwhile, A Chakrabortty, normally a good critic, parrots at first the EU bewilderment at people in the UK actually wanting to leave the EU:

Barnier is shown briefing senior European parliamentarians. This latest breakdown is “more than weariness”, he tells them. “There is a very serious crisis in the UK which … isn’t linked to the text of Brexit and even less to the Irish backstop. It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”

Small c conservative musings precede a hope for a better analysis:

We have just been through an election that saw Labour wiped out in Scotland, trounced in Wales, and under siege in London, while the party of government trailed behind the Greens. Between them, the two main parties took less than a quarter of all votes. We can enter more caveats than in any insurance contract – low turnout, protest vote, all the rest – but it hardly changes the bottom line. We are fast approaching the third anniversary of the Brexit referendum and Westminster has still barely bothered to respond to the grievances that drove a result campaigned against by the entirety of the political and economic establishment.... [failure to convince led to ] an elite paralysis. Meanwhile, the public has worked itself up into an impotent fury in which our party democracy is a sitting target.

...the time is filled with displacement activity. [Leadership candidates]...admit to having no actual ideas of their own. Forty years after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street, her great-grandchildren are still squabbling over who can claim her ideas. 

Chakrabortty cites R. Unger, a philosopher at Harvard:

“European politicians whether centre-left or centre-right are so used to the politics of splitting the difference. They are incapable of facing up to fundamental problems,” he said. “And that leaves a vast vacuum to be filled by any passing nationalist populism.” Except they too have no ideas, apart from buying a few more years for a busted economic model....Unger wants a radical transfer of power and money to people and places far from Westminster, so they can try their own social and economic experiments that will inform and revivify national politics. The guerrilla localism of Preston, in Lancashire, fits that brief, as does the Welsh government’s new focus on the foundational economy.

Let's hear it for UK Autonomism! It would be useful to explore the promise and eventual fate of Italian Autonomism but few in the UK have heard of it. Chakrabortty concludes:

What Brexit has shown again is our inability to think anew about what the state and the economy are for, to sketch out what a different future might look like

So sketch it out, fer fuck's sake!

Never mind the votes --check the emotions

The GUardian admits that the Brexit Party:

has clearly come out on top in terms of votes cast, but the party’s effective anti-establishment campaign was still not quite as good as the some of the polls were suggesting....[but]... its margin of victory over the second-placed Lib Dems remained considerable.

But says:

The LibDems were the emotional winners with the final results handing the party a healthy second-place finish as almost all pro-remain parties enjoyed a buoyant night.

As for the also-rans:

 

Labour fared poorly, coming third behind the Lib Dems and losing votes to the pro-second referendum parties and the dominant Brexit party...the party’s constructive ambiguity left it a weak third, only a couple of points ahead of the Greens. A few days before the election, Labour was still polling just above 20% on average, underlining how far it had fallen in the immediate run-up to election day....The Conservatives performed even more poorly than predicted, coming behind the Greens in fifth after early results, with about 9.1% of the vote. That is the worst national election result for the party in its history.

Overall:

The other pro-second referendum parties did well, with the exception of Change UK....Most significantly, the share of the two unambiguously pro-Brexit parties – the Brexit party and Ukip – was 34.9%, markedly lower than the aggregate total of the pro-second referendum parties (the Lib Dems, Greens, Change UK, the Scottish National party and Plaid) at 40.3%.

So back to seeing the Euros as a proxy referendum after all? Except vote share in different constituencies is not the same as national vote in a referendum ( there was still quite a low turnout of about 37% for the Euros), and the Graun declines to assess pro-Brexit or anti PVCV votes in Labour and Conservative.

Z Williams is in early with the spin.Hilariously, she announces that the poltical stances in these unexpected elections (' bizarre – they were never meant to have happened, and as such, were conducted on the hoof.') were enirely negative:

The Conservative campaign launched to a near-empty room, with nothing to deliver but an abject apology. The Labour campaign, described in a withering email sent to supporters before the results by their MEP John Howarth, was “implausible rot” – defined by a single-minded determination to fight a European election without mentioning Europe...Nigel Farage’s Brexit party did not have a message either, that was in any recognisable way political: they had stopped talking about immigration, on the basis that it was no longer very salient. They had no concrete agenda for Brexit itself. [no deal surely?] For sure they had no wider political aim that you could glean from their speeches. Their agenda was pure anti-politics, anti-Westminster, anti-elites, anti-this-lot....The Lib Dems, who have also done well, spectacularly so in some areas, at least matched the Brexit party in certainty: Bollocks to Brexit. But they skirted as carefully away from domestic politics as Labour cleaved to them, and had nothing much to say on their dreams for the future of Europe, either...Change UK, it feels kinder to ignore in these terms. The Greens were alone in having an immediate aim – stay in the EU – that married to a longer-term objective – fight climate change.

So spin will ensue:

it is hard to draw wider conclusions about what people were voting for; and so begins the mad scramble to take control of the narrative. The Conservatives kicked off before the results were even in, with most of the myriad leadership candidates taking this as an invitation to head off the Brexit party by becoming more like it. The Labour leadership is essaying an absurd stance – these elections were bound to be difficult, because the country is so divided; ergo, only a party that can ignore those divisions, and appeal equally to both sides, will ever bring it back together. But the furious counter-reactions, not only from MEPs like Howarth, Seb Dance and Jude Kirton-Darling, but also from frontbenchers like Emily Thornberry, indicate that even without its logical flaws, that position is pretty fragile. The Lib Dems are cherishing their resurrection, understandably, and the Greens can congratulate themselves not just on their clarity, but also on their competent and energetic campaigning.

However, Williams feels it is all slipping away from self-styled left 'reasonable' and 'compromising' Giuardianistas like her (but not like Toynbee, Behr, Kettle and Harris for the class hate tendency):

What died, with these elections, was any realistic notion of a silent majority who just wanted a soft Brexit and be done with it. If that majority ever existed, it was so silent as to be functionally irrelevant. In its place, a surge of no-dealers and a hard-core of remainers.

However, good old S Jenkins wants to plug on regardless 

The European elections were meaningless. [silly idea to give votes to people who can't think rationally] They can be read any way we want

So: 

crashing out [still calling it that?] is now the legal default position. Even as a life-long Eurosceptic, I have seen nothing suggesting this would be remotely in the nation’s interest. The idea that crashing out “on WTO terms” will somehow win centrists or moderate Tories back to the fold is absurd...On the other hand a revocation referendum would be near impossible to get through parliament against a Tory government veto – short of some sort of Commons putsch. [El Gurand  and the others got close to advocating this recently]. It would probably require a no-confidence vote and an election, which was hardly takes matters forward...Renegotiation is impossible, as there is no Brussels to negotiate with until the autumn, let alone one with the will to budge.

This leaves May’s agreement. It is still on the table. It was never a final, only a transitional deal, but it was composed from the most rare and febrile Westminster substance, cross-party compromise.... May’s sole legacy to them was her deal. It offered the country a perfectly honourable way forward out of the EU and into a new relationship with Europe. Any fool could pick holes in it, but it was a compromise agreed by Brussels, and would see us out before the 31 October deadline....There is no alternative [even for you insensitive proles who are not persuaded by Jenkin's assertion of what is in the national interest, or the virtues of compromise and honour]

Finally, the Graun seems to support the call in some quarters for a strong man to cut through all the uncertainty and speak for Destiny:

Wanted: a modern Thomas Cromwell to mend Brexit Britain 

 Where, though, to find a contemporary Cromwell, the man who Mantel [latest book to signal] portrays as finding Machiavelli’s work a little too trite for his tastes? Certainly not, on recent evidence, in the corridors of Westminster....[who] ... resemble the characters in a Feydeau farce 

 Then a revealing bit of true Guerdiana:

“And indeed,” thinks Cromwell, “who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?” [but then some hasty backpedalling -- too late if anyone fancied raising a Twitter storm on class prejudice, which luckily, no-one in this readership will -- Guardina writer says voters are 'village idiots' and drunks?] ...Idiots and their drunken friends is not a way that any sensible person would or should characterise the electorate; and even so, the most intemperate or partisan observer ought to concede that each faction boasts its fair share of ne’er-do-wells.

It's rather like what Foster said about the need to 'educate our masters' after the 1832(?) electoral reforms:

Now, the puppet-masters must take into account a much broader political cast, one that encompasses everyone with a keyboard, a mobile device and a willingness to harangue members of parliament on College Green. In truth, we are all now subjected to infinite information and able to – indeed, keen to – broadcast our immediate responses to it. What we are, essentially, is a herd of ravenous political cats almost too numerous and various to corral.... So where is the man or woman who can discreetly manoeuvre the politicians into a space where they are able to put aside personal ambition, rivalry, vengefulness and the fear of losing face in order to find a way forward?

Let's abandon (or rather repress) politics for a final knowing jest (he 'writes on culture' for the Graun and Observer. The light humour also helps stave off any complaints of prejudice):

A few months ago, one might have suggested the England football manager, Gareth Southgate; now we’re just as likely to plump for Jodie Comer in Villanelle mode. But whoever finds themselves lapping at the poisoned chalice can comfort themselves with the fact that, unlike Cromwell, their head won’t end up on a spike on London Bridge. These days, we just [!] splash our enemies with a salted caramel drink or photograph them gently sobbing in the back of a Daimler [mixed up Mrs Thatcher and Mrs May?].

Farage and the imminent apocalypse

The Observer has a piece by a bloke who has just written a book on Farage and British populism/published a video on Sky (which may have affected his objectivity? -- pass on). It is too late to affect the Euro elections but warns against future ambitions (and preserves a bogey to rally against):

Ukip was deeply and recognisably British. The half-colonels; the angry golf-playing uncles; the rankling over “elf and safety” and political correctness. Its pound-sign logo was almost quaint: It was a Britain Orwell would have recognised. Ideologically, too, its Euroscepticism mined a deep vein in British politics, tracing back to our entry in 1973, if not before...Politics has moved on – and so has Farage. Brexit now isn’t even his principal concern, its failure the mere embodiment of a wider malaise

There is naturally some dark artery at work:

People have spoken of the fear of the Americanisation (by which they really mean the Trumpification) of British politics. I followed Farage from his first rally to the last and I can assure them, it is already here. The tenor of the rallies, the rhetoric from the stage, the way the party’s messages are communicated. The bitterness, the anger, the contempt of the crowd, the boos for journalists. The crowd, young and old (often younger than you might imagine) united in believing the establishment is out to screw them and that feeling is viscerally raw.  

We need to wake up:

as hard as it might be for readers of this newspaper to believe, Farage, like Trump, for many people, represents salvation: that someone finally listens and understands. The bewilderment I suspect you feel upon reading those words betrays our Americanisation too, the importation of a culture war where the two sides have no conception of how the other conceives the world around them.

We might decide to blame all sorts of arrogant cosmo petit bourgeois persons in the media for that, but at last this article/book/video will remedy the deficit in understanding -- no it won't. Even if Farage comes a cropper, he might have won:

For Brexit party success will surely change the alchemy of the Tory makeup. Indeed, it already has, setting the seal on the end of Theresa May’s premiership and ensuring the all-but-certain election of a no-dealer in her stead. Far from a Conservative turn to the kind of broad, centrist Christian democracy to which Theresa May once aspired, her party may follow the Republicans in becoming a hard-edged populist movement. In an age where “one-nation” seems impossible and where we are at least two, Farage and his success will force them to choose. Out of fear, they will choose him.

Guardina hopes for the best in post-May era*

They are sticking it out just like Theresa did, with the same sort of tin ear. The Graun still hopes:

Brexit is likely to dominate the leadership contest. Candidates will have to compete to show their stance is tough enough to impress the leave-leaning Conservative membership and see off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Brexit party...[no deal]...certainly looks a lot more likely than it did at the start of the week...There has not been a majority for that approach in parliament, but the hard Brexiters believe a strong showing by Farage’s party will shift the balance. Certainly, backbenchers who masterminded the last parliamentary manoeuvres to block no deal, including Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper, doubt whether they would be able to do so again.

Then -- the unicorn is sighted:

some observers believe Johnson might soften on Brexit somewhat once the leadership election is out of the way....A general election could return a Labour, or Labour-led government, but if Jeremy Corbyn’s party entered a coalition with the anti-Brexit Scottish National party or Liberal Democrats, it would come under intense pressure to call another Brexit referendum....With parliamentary and public debate becoming ever more polarised, there is also a growing chorus of calls for article 50 simply to be revoked. That looks impossible in the current parliament, but some ministers believe MPs would prefer it to no deal and a general election could change the complexion of the Commons dramatically – or, of course, leave it all but unchanged.

Elsewhere, it's all a patriarchal plot:

 But May is not the first woman, and probably won’t be the last, to be invited to take on a leadership role in perilous circumstances. This is the classic “glass cliff” scenario [a term cited in a recent zeitgeisty book] . A glass ceiling may have been (temporarily) removed; but in a situation where the odds against success are high, there are suddenly fewer men available to take on ultimate responsibility. Time to let a plucky woman inch her way to the cliff edge....May’s decline and fall will only confirm in certain men’s eyes the thought that women just can’t cut it at the top...This image of the apparently broken, tearful female prime minister seemed to be demanded by the macho Westminster village, and now it has been granted.

In this view, May's failure is actually a Shakespearian triumph for woman-ness:

A moment of humanity makes a refreshing change. We could learn something from this. At Ophelia’s graveside, her brother Laertes apologises for shedding what he sees as shameful, embarrassing tears. “When these [tears] are gone, the woman will be out,” he says...Well, she’s out now.

By comparison, J Harris  rebukes Farage for being too energetic:

His crude messages need to be fought with urgency and passion – precisely what the remain parties lack

Harris attends a Brexit rally and begins to suspect dark artery of the old kind:

The atmosphere was roughly as I had expected: highly charged, defiant, often strangely celebratory. But what was most striking was the slickness of the presentation: brisk, elegantly structured speeches and warm-up videos, and the clear sense that everyone had been told to lay off subjects that usually buzz around Farage – immigration, chiefly.

There is always abuse to rally the Remainers:

a candidate with the face, haircut and stiff demeanour of a freshly bought Action Man... Farage appeared, grinning from ear to ear and bellowing out his super-charged version of the same messages. The chant that greeted him suggested that if some English people have embraced the politics of wild claims and demagoguery, it at least comes with a certain bathos: “Nigel! Nigel! Nigel!”

These people are just not sensitive enough! Good Lord, they offer 'a discourse full of crude binaries' (below)!:

There is something very sobering indeed about watching a handful of chancers lay in to the fragile mesh of institutions and ideas that underpin our democracy, and a head-spinning quality in the fact that they do so in the name of democracy itself. It has echoes not just of the current darkness that defines the US and much of mainland Europe, but things that go much further back.

The link refers to a piece with M Kettle linking current Britain to Weimar Germany -- one Graun journalist citing another in evidence as usual. How could I have missed the Kettle piece? It's brilliant:

The Berlin exhibition is not just about how democracy unravelled in the decade that followed the first Weimar elections in 1919. It is also about whether something like that may again be happening across Europe in 2019. It consists, indeed, of two umbilically linked shows. One is about the stormy Weimar period itself; the other is in the form of a participatory laboratory on how democracies can cope with similar challenges today. It is not a comfortable experience....The Europe of 1919 and the Europe of 2019 are massively different from each other....Yet the more you proceed around the Berlin exhibition, the more you are compelled to ask yourself difficult 21st-century questions...The Weimar parliamentary system, for instance, required political parties to cooperate to deliver publicly supported compromise....Weimar was overwhelmed by a potent narrative of national betrayal and the allure of a strong autocratic and illiberal alternative form of government rooted in racism and fear of others.... also, there is a surging narrative on the right about national betrayal, which seems likely to score heavily in the European polls next week.Here, more than half the public, according to a recent Hansard Society survey, says it supports “a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Here, racism of various kinds is on the increase. And here too we have experienced political assassination (also from the far right), public threats of violence against politicians, and official warnings that MPs are no longer safe....Contempt for parliament has become the public’s default setting. Representative democracy is on the back foot.

He's missed one parallel -- Weimar ended with the creation of a new European superstate. Inevitably,Kettle is also signalling he has read a book:

at the launch of a new book of essays called Rethinking Democracy, of which he is co-editor with Andrew Gamble, the former Labour MP Tony Wright went to the unstable nub of the matter. “We lost the referendum,” he said. “But we lost the democratic argument too. The argument for democracy was won by the leavers.” What is needed is a change of culture, says Wright.[echoes of Nazism there too?]

Back to Harris now:

Farage’s greatest asset is a discourse full of crude binaries, established by the original referendum and then deepened by the hardcore postures struck by Theresa May in its aftermath (the main reason, incidentally, why she deserves her fate). Via her moronic insistence that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, leave v remain has led inexorably on to the idea that the only meaningful choice is between total capitulation and leaving without a deal,  ...

Hedging his bets in case the Remain factions do better in the elections after all, and searching for unicorns:

Clearly, however much noise it creates, support for the Brexit party and its agenda remains a minority taste. As I wrote last week, the results of the recent local elections highlighted the fact that large swathes of England are unstoppably moving in the opposite direction. Contrary to some of the overheated stuff one hears from the media, both here and abroad, most of the country is not in a state of wound-up fury, nor baying for the economy to be pushed off the proverbial cliff. [But paranoia is more fun and there may be chances {sic} ahead]...But that does not mean Britain is not in the midst of a deeply dangerous moment.

Harris also attended a ChangeUKrally, despite being in danger of offering a crude binary opposition:

attended by no more than 60 people, and addressed by just about all the party’s leading figures, including Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry. On Brexit, they had arguments that sounded both passionate and convincing. They also had a video presentation that didn’t work, so some of the speakers were given the backdrop of either a PC desktop or the Google homepage.

And, as he paces the mean streets:

Four miles down the road in the bustling neighbourhood of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, just about everyone I met had voted remain, but responded to questions about Brexit with a sighing fatalism. “I’ve stopped following it,” said one woman; “I try not to pay too much attention,” offered another...whereas Farage’s messages have flowed, molten hot, out of social media and big events into the national conversation, here there was a sense of the righteous paroxysms of so-called ultra-remainers as something from another world.

Harris nearly stumbles across the problem with petit bourgeois oppositional distancing cultural politics:

As he tries to terrify the ruling party into doing his bidding, Farage has discipline, media nous and the clearest of messages. By contrast, even as they tremble at the prospect of no deal and cling to a vision of an open, modern country, what have his opponents got? Milkshakes?

Let's hear it from the Younge

Gdurnai columnist G Younge has a go at explaining the 'far right' triumph which he expects:

The seeds of Trump, Brexit and Modi’s success were sown by endemic racism and unfairness. Tackling that is the answer 

Sooner or later progressives are going to have to stop being stunned by these electoral defeats. The first time, it is plausible to ask, “How could this possibly happen?” But when that possibility recurs in relatively short order, what once presented itself as a shock has now curdled into self-deception. It turns out that the country you woke up in is the precisely the one you went to bed in. If you still don’t recognise it then you are going to have real problems changing it....There are any number of lessons we might draw from this moment – for instance, the fact that our capacity to stage marches has outpaced our ability to build effective movements or the media’s efforts to maintain credibility. 

But then the main theme:

the countries which keep producing these shocks are every bit as racist, xenophobic and discriminatory as their voting habits suggest [bit circular here but never mind] ...not because everyone who voted for them was racist, but because all the racists who did go to the polls voted for them.

There is some evidence:

In January 2016, [an Opinium poll of just over 1000 people 'from ethnic minorities'] 64% of people from an ethnic minority said they had been targeted by a stranger. That’s before Brexit, and already terrible. That proportion rose to 76% this year. Things were bad. They are getting worse.[ Other 'evidence' includes]  headlines about racism in Britain, from the BBC’s sacking of Danny Baker for tweeting a picture of a couple with a chimp following the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby, to growing anger from professional footballers at racism online and in stadiums.[Curiously 'There were small falls in the number of people who felt they were victims of more tacit forms of discrimination such as being treated with suspicion by police or security guards, being turned down for promotion at work or suffering workplace bullying'].

It was all a nasty right-wing conspiracy:

Racism was the wedge the enemies of cosmopolitanism and plurality used to prise open a broader cleavage that is dividing us all....These rivers run deep – winding through empire, imperialism, caste, settlement, colonialism, white supremacy and beyond. That’s not all these countries are. Wherever there is bigotry you will find an impressive tradition opposing it and a potential audience willing to be weaned off it [so why has racism triumphed?]

It is also the fault of the gestural anti-racists:

It’s not clear this lesson has been learned. Most, but by no means all, remain devotees I have encountered are far more fluent in the language of race accusation (pointing out the bigotry of the Brexiters) than in the anti-racist activism that would put a racially diverse and plural Britain at the heart of their worldview. Some would be happy if we went back to the way we were before we voted to leave. But that would mean returning to a place where two-thirds of ethnic minority people faced racial abuse. No wonder these second referendum marches are so white....There is no denying that bigotry, once embedded in a political culture, is difficult to excise. But it cannot be avoided for reasons of expediency and complicity either. That is in no small part how we got here: people who knew better eschewing “difficult conversations” because it would cost them votes....There is precious little value in pointing out, once every four or five years, that racism is a problem if you are not advocating an agenda in the intervening time that posits anti-racism as a solution. 

Thing is, though, that gestures are easy, but it is hard work to grasp and then tackle racism, as Younge himself sees:

Concerns about high class sizes and over-stretched welfare services are obviously legitimate; blaming ethnic minorities for them is obviously not. 

Not that long ago,this might have led to a debate in the Graun about the best way to tackle racism -- 'colour-blindness',anti-racism, equality programmes etc. It has been much easier for the Graun to stand on the grounds of 'cosmopolitanism and plurality' and to use racism as a convenient stick to beat Brexiteers with. I insist that the middle and upper classes are every bit as racist as the working classes and for similar ideological reasons -- racism is a proxy.

Guardina does some reporting!

The Guadina has a rare article indeed, actually trying to ask Brexiteers about their views, prompted,no doubt, by the expected success of the Brexit Party at the Euro elections yesterday. To add to the turmoil,May has finally announced her resignation date too, so the ground might be shifting a bit --so the Graun might be shifting a bit too if its own long campaign to bang on and on seems equally tattered

It's not a bad article, although it must puzzle lots of loyal Garduinaistas: 

Supporters look to Nigel Farage to unite nation and introduce ‘down-to-earth’ politics

Margaret West was feeling happier than she had for months. The Blackpool rock‘n’roll dancer and former education worker had been so angry and stressed over Brexit she’d lost sleep over it, felt ignored by politicians and unfairly insulted online for voting to leave....she is one of more than 100,000 Brexit party supporters who donated online, put stickers in their windows and went to Farage’s roadshow rallies...

On a broader canvas:

Viewed from abroad, there has been growing interest at the Brexit party’s well-run European election campaign, because until recently Britain had been seen as an exception to the rise in parties styled on a model of the people v the corrupt elite...people respected political institutions and the traditional party system. The Brexit crisis has appeared to blow that trust apart.

There are hints of dark artery:

the professionalism of local party organisation and the slick online campaign that stood out...With its model of online activism, the Italian movement had quickly leapt from populist protest group to government coalition partner. Farage, the former Ukip leader, has notably set up his new party like a business, ensuring tight control without the internal wrangling that has made traditional parties seem ungovernable during the Brexit crisis....Campaigners said the party deliberately pushed an optimistic message during the European election campaign. It talked about protecting democracy and the Brexit referendum result. There was little talk of immigration and more focus on disgust at Westminster than the EU, deliberately appealing across old left-right divides....French geographer Christophe Guilluy has likened Brexit supporters to France’s yellow vest anti-government movement – a disaffection with the political class that is likely to last. He said political powers in the UK would not be able to address Britain’s political crisis if they haughtily dismissed leave voters as “xenophobic old people from Yorkshire”.

One of the more extraordinary converts (for Guardina folk at least who have never understood anti-elitist solidarity):

Claire Fox, the long-time Communist Revolutionary party activist who led the Brexit party campaign in the north-west, sipped her pint and addressed her pub audience: “Politics has come alive!” she said, likening the party to Manchester’s pro-democracy Peterloo massacre. “Let’s get organised and launch a new kind of down-to-earth politics!”...As for the “racism stuff”, opponents were levelling at the party, Fox said: “One third of ethnic minorities voted leave. The idea of calling us bigots – how dare they?”...Many in the room said they felt under attack in a polarised political landscape....Nadine Mason, a student nurse who wants to run for Westminster for the Brexit party, said there was bullying. “Every single person in this room has had someone calling them racist, Nazi, bigoted, or that they hadn’t known what they voted for when they chose to leave the EU,” she said. “Women died for us to have the right to vote – us working-class people – but now we’re being told that we’re not bright enough to vote.”

In the name of balance, of course, the Graun also discusses ChangeUK:

At the finish line of Manchester’s half-marathon [shows they are nicepoeople] , the north-west candidates for the new pro-EU party, Change UK, stressed that they were political newcomers... “I don’t need much persuading, I’m politically homeless,” said Ian Carnegie, 65, a pro-remain Labour voter from Yorkshire....David Shimwell, a businessman and former Conservative, campaigning for Change UK with his two poodles, said: “Disaffection with politicians started with the MPs’ expenses scandal. Politicians have had a bunker mentality ever since. That allows Farage to say the system is broken and how corrupt they are. Politicians have to get out of the bunker and sell politics back to the people.”... Change UK candidates have echoed Macron’s initial message of offering “hope” and “listening”. But Macron’s party was built around a charismatic leader...Natasha Correia, 23, who worked for the NHS, said: “Being a British-born person of colour after the Brexit vote, you could feel a kind of tension, people asking you where you were from. It was quite upsetting.” Describing herself as conflicted over party politics, she said she liked Change UK because it was something new.

And there is a last Gurediansit paragraph:

Graystone [a former community worker] said many emotions were at play. “Both Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson had fathers who left them when they were young. Both of them are in some ways desperately looking for attention. I’d love to sit with them to talk about that.” [No doubt in a political correction facility].

Toynbee regrets Tory problems

P Toynee in the Grudian is letting things get on top of her again, ruing the imminent departure of T May and maybe deep misfortune for the Party (which she has never supported, but anyone other than Brexiteers...)

Welcome to an extraordinarily bizarre election day. Pause on the way to the polling station to wonder at the astounding mayhem within our “ruling” party, soliciting votes even while wrenching its leader from Downing Street. We may be so used to the Tory party in meltdown that we forget to be amazed at what is unfolding before our eyes – on election day.

Toynbee seems unable these days to offer much more than abuse:

Andrea Leadsom’s fantastical ambitious absurdities, ...astonishing it is to see the leader of the house, no less, resigning on election eve just to steal a march on all her improbable leadership competitors. Jeremy Hunt is marching in to see the prime minister in publicly threatening mode – on election day. Forget any sense of decorum towards their party or their country, or the electoral process...now, Brexit fever has seized its core, its cabinet, its members and its grey suits. The initial handful of Europe-hating Typhoid Marys have infected a large part of the country with this mortal disease. [Beginning to sound a bit like a betrayal narrative] The few trying to cling to a modicum of sanity are cast as rebels – Philip Hammond warning what no deal will mean; Amber Rudd and Nicky Morgan striving to revive a rose-tinted false memory of one nation Toryism. In its Brexit delirium, the party will choose Boris Johnson, the sociopathic chameleon who is reported to be claiming the one nation ticket even as he spews out crude, membership-pleasing law-and-order columns in the Telegraph.

No gravitas, no dignity – the Conservative party is no longer the British establishment [Ludicrous support for the EU has really found them out --Offe couldn't be better illustrated by the contradiction between universal and sectional appeal] ...its grassroots rampaging off into the Farage wildwoods. The Brexit project is revolutionary: the “real Brexit” Leadsom claimed last night is an autonomous utopia of “sovereignty”, a self-propelling spinning star of an idea no longer claiming real-world benefits and consequences. 

On a broader canvas:

Conservatism as the British default is so deep-dyed in the national psyche [bollocks] it’s hard to think this is the end. This generation of Conservatives has brought us so low in this decade: in austerity, in stagnant incomes, in devastated public services, catastrophic productivity, lost social security and lost respect abroad.

Then, to business on Euro election day:

For today, all that matters is the final tally of remain v Brexit votes.[No more wriggling?]  Will the total of remain votes prove beyond doubt that any Brexit deal without the consent of the people would be a democratic disgrace? [Er no] That will depend on how the face-both-ways, we’re-not-a-remain-party Labour votes are counted....History will show the Labour leadership has made a dreadful error – when virtually all its members and the great majority of supporters are remainers. Most Labour people will, rightly, register their vote for a true remain party.

But -- if Labour vacillations have meant even Remain Labour people will vote for another party, what remains of the dilemma about how to count Labour votes [and any safe ambiguity]? If Brexit Party votes outnumber all the others, end of story, surely? However, there is a possible wriggle in the stories that European citizens are finding it hard to vote in the UK.

Graundian goes negative (or fanciful) to guide its choices

Who to vote for now? Who to support in Tory leadership contests?  Rather, in terms of petit-bourgeois politics -- who to oppose? The Graun simplifies the issue to some extent -- oppose Brexit, of course, and attack accordingly. Thus

P Toynbee rebukes B Johnson and D Raab:

The ultras have sworn to hold candidates’ feet to the fire, binding them to vote against Theresa May’s deal and for no deal. As Dominic Raab tries to out-Brexit Johnson, watch the two vie to make the most extreme pledges. The party will opt for a no-dealer because that’s what the grassroots want. They think only a no-deal stand can stop Nigel Farage’s tanks rampaging on to Tory constituency lawns. They’re wrong, because whatever Brexit they deliver, nothing will stop Farage claiming a “betrayal by the elites”. It’s a revolutionary cry of shatteringly effective simplicity. [ could be spot on too, but leave that to one side]...[Johnsom] uses his Telegraph column for crude grassroots rabble-rousing, on Sunday attacking “cock-eyed crook-coddling”, with criminals “cosseted in spas” and “murderers let out to murder again”.

Surely, say people yearning for reassurance, wiser Tory MPs will prevent Johnson’s name reaching the last two for the party to select? No, that would take exceptional bravery, and there are only a handful of principled moderates left: three of the best skipped off to Change UK just when they were most needed in their former home.... the moderate One Nation caucus [prop N Morgan] would “work to stop any leadership candidate who endorses a ‘Nigel Farage No-Deal Brexit’”. Good, but she can only muster 60 MPs to block Johnson, while he has powerful backers: “It would be monstrous if Tory MPs deny Johnson his shot at Downing Street,” threatened the Mail on Sunday. Grassroots constituency chairs have fists at the ready and sleeves rolled if MPs fail to put their favourite on the ballot paper.

Toynbee examines the tea leaves and gets even more paranoid:

...at Halloween the UK is due to crash out [still an abrupt 'crash out', even after a 6 month delay] willy-nilly, without some deal agreed. The Calais border would clang shut [meaning what exactly -- no trade at all?] and so would the Irish border, firing up demands for a united Ireland referendum, with the Scots likely to follow suit with Indyref2 [more borders to clang shut then]  ...Before 31 October, Labour would table a vote of no confidence and Tory One Nation MPs would back it to bring down their own government, and call an election. Seeing that inevitability, Johnson will surely call an election himself, shortly after reaching No 10. At risk of becoming the shortest serving prime minister of all time, he will be tanked up with vaunting hubris.. [and perhaps some good intelligence about voters?] Farage will bid to strip off Tory votes and seats (and some Labour ones too), [even after an allegedly Brexiteer Tory as PM?] while the Liberal Democrats syphon away remain and moderate voters. In the best scenario, the Armageddon that awaits may turn out to be the fate of Johnson and the Tory party for years to come, but not of the country as a whole....Expect an almighty row about an entirely avoidable setback when Labour’s bad results come in. Will the lesson be learned that facing both ways fails? With a general election likely, Labour cannot fight Johnson and Farage with a miserable semi-Brexit offer of renegotiation plus confirmatory vote

So what should Labour do? Something really positive? No -- get nasty and go negative to win back the petit-bourgeois: 'The Tories will slaughter themselves by electing Johnson. But Labour can only beat him by confronting all the lies he has told all his life about Europe.' Johnson is a liar -- so back Labour?

Z Williams tries to distract herself by researching whether or not any symbol will do to indicate a preference on the ballot paper:

Why, you might ask, in the lead-up to elections that the far right is already visualising as a famous victory, did I fritter my energy away in such idle research? [when you could have been doing -- what?] Utter frustration had a lot to do with it. [indeed]. Because imagine what the European elections would look like if you could signal – whichever party you voted for – that yours was a remain vote. Maybe it could be done through placing a star instead of a cross on the ballot paper. Or “a B with a cross through it”, as someone suggested to me, on the grounds that “nobody knows how to draw a star” [nobody knows how to draw a star -- things are really bad in Islington. Good job some Bolsheviks knew how to draw a hammer and sickle or the whole thing would have fizzled out!].

This would have prevented :

the threat of their vote being interpreted, post hoc, as a call to “get on with Brexit”. It could have galvanised the not insignificant body of Conservatives who are pragmatic remainers, and have thus been denounced as traitors by the suddenly dominant extremists within their party.

Assuming the spoiled papers would have been analysed of course. But now?

In the absence of that, what is to be done? A month ago I wrote that remainers had nothing to fear from voting Labour. Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s MEPs belonged to the party of European Socialists, and were therefore already signed up to the most visionary, transformative and radical manifesto the EU had seen since the earliest ambitions of its founders. Fourteen of Labour’s MEPs were allied to the campaign group Love Socialism Hate Brexit, and committed to a confirmatory referendum. ..But I had reckoned without the power of the “Lexit” faction, stuck in a fantasy world where the archetypal leaver is a working-class Labour voter of the north whose unchangeable and righteous wrath is more important and “authentic” than that of any remainer.

Williams listens to her inner voices [and maybe some outer ones over an agreeable dinner?]

The Labour candidates are the kind of representatives I would like to see populate the coming era of politics. They are pluralistic, imaginative, radical, ambitious, patriotic [patriotic and pluralist] . There are Greens I’d say the same about (Molly Scott-Cato, for instance), but to live in London [!] and not vote for a slate I think should be at the heart of the party’s future seems absurd. [Also] someone needs to oppose Nigel Farage, and that will come much more convincingly from somebody with a track history of fighting racism – Clive Lewis, say – than it does from a clubbable Lib Dem....the [Labour] party is moving [towards CV/Remain]...Voting Labour will be an act of faith, trusting it to resolve itself as the natural party of remain. But there are voices within the party who justify what is, essentially, a Tinkerbell manoeuvre [!]: they’ll only prevail if you believe in them. 

And the sketch writer, J Crace covers the more remote possibilities with some early card-marking:

Esther McVey’s 15-min launch was hopefully the last we’ll hear from her leadership bid

Meanwhile, el Graun is not one to let the really vital issues slip unnoticed:

Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future

An advert featuring the human and virtual models is late-capitalist hell, ‘queerbait’ and digisexuality all at once

The struggle for our souls

S Khan says today in the Observer:

We are in the middle of a battle for Britain’s soul. On one side are those who want our country to continue to be forward looking, open to the world, tolerant, inclusive and progressive. On the other, those who want to pit our communities against each other, undo the social progress painstakingly made over decades, and who advocate a politics of division.

 Across the globe, the far right is on the rise...Picking on minority communities and the marginalised in order to manufacture an enemy. Fabricating lies in order to stoke up fear. And promoting hatred of immigrants, sympathy for white nationalism, attacks on women’s reproductive rights and rolling back the progress made on LGBT rights...Take Donald Trump...Viktor Orbán...Matteo Salvini,...Marine Le Pen.

Then:

Think about Boris Johnson describing Muslim women as “letterboxes”, Sajid Javid singling out “Asian” child-grooming gangs, Zac Goldsmith’s campaign in the last London mayoral election – widely condemned as Islamophobic... Nigel Farage embodies a strain of destructive far-right politics – masquerading as anti-establishment populism – which has poisoned our national discourse and unleashed a torrent of lies, division and hatred within our society. He promises impossibly simple solutions to incredibly complex problems and, rather than addressing people’s concerns, he preys on their fears...Voting for the Brexit party will not heal our divisions, it will only widen them. We must stand united in our opposition to the far right and reject their dystopian vision of our future.  

More parochial now: 

Labour is the only party that can beat them. ..Only Labour is capable of ...sending the uncompromising message that we are a tolerant, inclusive and forward-looking nation, which rejects the politics of fear, hatred and division.  

Racism among Brexit voters resurfaces with this:

Tone down speeches to avoid hate crime, MEP candidates told 

 

[A senior copper says] “Tensions are being stoked on a national level around our relationship with Europe, about cultural identity and about immigration more broadly. In any scenario like this it’s incumbent on people with a public voice to think carefully about how they express views so they don’t incite hatred....“Regular regurgitation of populist racist tropes in mainstream media and political speech are significantly more likely to impact on society than the rantings in an extremist’s chat room,” he added.

 But oddly normal business in this edition sees N Cohen, scourge of Brexiteers and anti-semites,using his column on the eve of European elections to write about ...Game of Thrones:

Without George RR Martin, the last seasons of the TV spectacular lost their way, says the Observer columnist and GoT enthusiast  

The Observer/Guardin adds, in a puff at the bottom of the Khan column:

The UK might be leaving Europe…but The Guardian definitely isn’t. In the current climate of uncertainty and tension, we remain deeply committed to our European coverage. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue our mission to look outwards rather than inwards, to stay connected and inclusive.
As the EU elections approach, we will hear daily from our correspondents across Europe, explore and investigate the themes that divide and unite the continent, with all its imperfections, challenges and strengths. The Guardian aims to offer its readers a global perspective on these important events. More people are reading and supporting our independent, investigative reporting than ever before.