On the other stage...

While the Graun waits and hopes that the Supreme Court will declare Johnson's prorogation illegal, it keeps faith with its readership with reminders of another cause dear to their hearts and thrilling predictions of another drastic shortage of fresh food:

A fifth of UK fresh food imports from areas at risk of climate chaos, MPs warn 

Of course,there is a chance to connect these issues up:

In the very near future, people would be at risk from sudden lurches in food prices if a no-deal Brexit resulted in trouble with imports, including higher costs, delays and shortages.

And the usual folk kept their eye on the main chance:

“[We need] good farmers to be paid to produce more diverse and better food and to reduce reliance on vulnerable overseas suppliers,” Hird [a 'farming campaigner'] said. 

Elsewhere, there is some amusing wriggling over the Guardian Reading Group's choice of a book of the month:

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is charming, but it is also racist 

Several frightful passages are then quoted. Presumably, Graun people did not read the book that carefully in the first place? Luckily, there is a liberal option in this case, if not in others:

[It is] a book that is, for most of its 233 pages, a light, frothy delight and widely loved as a feelgood read

Shorn of context, it’s easy to see why these quotes cause offence. Even with context, they’re hard to forgive, and I don’t want to. This book was published in 1938. That kind of talk wasn’t just morally poisonous. Jewish people were already being murdered and losing their rights in Nazi Germany, and refugees were being turned away at international borders....There’s no point in pretending that antisemitism was not common in genteel prewar Britain, or in denying that the characters in a delightful novel would share those opinions. (The characters’ beliefs as distinct from the author’s.) These snatches of dialogue may upset us but also be accurate to their world. What are we to make of the fact that Watson was prepared to disfigure her otherwise beautiful creation with those lines quoted above? Should our political and moral objections to those passages alter our reading of the rest of the book?

My general conclusion is that you can call out racism in a book without consigning it to history. We don’t have to like these things being said, but we should know about them....if you start blacklisting writers such as Winifred Watson for letting her characters say reprehensible things, where do you stop?...Such abstract arguments are very distant from the real hurt that those lines I’ve quoted can cause. I still find them repulsive. But to accept that a book has imperfections is not the same as endorsing them. The world is complicated and so is literature – even when it’s supposed to be fun.

Perfectly reasonable arguments but I don't think we usually hear them in the Graun except to sneer at them as pathetic justifications for irredeemable flaws. Outraged virtue signalling is so much more fun.