Result:

Everybody lost.

‘Maytime, playtime, God has given the Maytime’, goes the refrain of the old children’s hymn. At the moment, we’re having some god-given May time in November, and there are some decidedly malevolent forces in the playground.

It’s a thoroughly weird time is May time. Just this week, another oddity of this unnatural climate was the government’s declaration that it will appeal against the High Court’s decision in favour of Parliament alone determining when to trigger the sacred Article 50.

How strange. It’s one thing for the government (considered here to mean May, T., the three Brexiteers and assorted dutiful hangers-on) to reflect on whether they could  bypass Parliament, as a matter of political game-playing – to which their attitude seemed to be ‘Yes, absolutely, if we can get away with it’. It’s quite another to suggest they should  bypass Parliament as a matter of entitlement or some kind of righteous imperative, which seems to be the substance of this brazen appeal.

What kind of ‘should’ is it anyway? It’s clearly not a moral one. It can only be because the government wants to act without hindrance, and that they feel Parliament will get in the way. Discussion in the chamber would bring things into the open and raise various options and pros and cons – as if that would be an abrogation of what Parliament is there for. It seems that only May, T., and friends can be trusted with the will of the people, not Parliament.

Which calls into question the position of May, T. For example, is she a ‘strong’ prime minister in any sense, or a ‘weak’ one, and how do we tell? Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether it’s good to have a strong leader – something that leadership cultists always promote but on which a historical perspective suggests extreme caution – and whether a PM is entitled to push through their own personal views (on, um, education, say) as policy. Let’s also keep to one side the embarrassing matter of her not being elected as leader at all. It’s more to do with how she stands in relation to her own party. What does she believe in? Is she driving or is she being driven?

As a background we have the Conservatives behaving as if they are the executive arm of Ukip and overtaken by a new-found fear of offending the ‘will of the people’ – with the ‘people’ in question being rather narrowly defined. At the same time, they pretend to a parallel Ukippian wariness of being identified with ‘the’ Elite, meaning any group, real or imagined, deemed to be an all-powerful, all-purpose conspiratorial enemy that is responsible for everything the ‘people’ don’t like about their lives. (As if anybody could regard the Conservatives themselves as representing the Elite, incidentally – good heavens, what a suggestion!)

It’s an old scapegoating trick, of course, with a fearsome history. It’s of resurgent significance in the West, and definitely the flavour of our time in Britain. Elites of various kinds have long been targeted by both right and left, but it’s the right that is most obsessed at the moment. Any disagreements with the ‘people’s’ view (in Britain this currently means relentless hatred of the EU and a demand for instant Brexit) – indeed any reasoning of any kind – are met with spittle-flecked screaming about the Elite, and out come the pitchforks and flaming torches. Anybody can find themselves assigned to Elite status merely for having a different view from, say, the ones vomited daily by Britain’s more squalid tabloids. This in itself is a reminder of how bizarre this Elite game has become when the right-wing press, a grotesquely self-important and overweening lobby in the hands of a tiny number of privileged ultra-rich, can claim to be defending the people against the Elite. It would be laughable if it were not potentially so dangerous.

And May, T.? If, as it seems, the Conservatives have undergone one of their periodic re-imaginings – as always with perpetual entitlement to power in mind – and have effectively absorbed all but the neo-Nazi end of Ukip (well, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt), how and where does she fit in? Whatever the answer, and in spite of the current Mail  May time love-in, she doesn’t emerge as strong. Instead, she offers little beyond commending the newly discovered will of a subset of the people, and appears unwilling to say anything that could offend her appointers and controllers. She is not acting as a safe moderate, even if she wants to be. (And who can say who the ‘real’ May is, or even whether there is one?) She is entirely in thrall to the substantial right in her party and the poisonous tabloid elite (with a contemptously small ‘e’).

About most things, most of the time, she appears to want to say as little as possible. The idea seems to be that silence will be taken as inscrutability and inscrutability will pass for wisdom. It doesn’t work.

(A reflection from July 2016)

The appointment of Johnson, B., to Foreign Secretary was such a revealing moment, offering a glimpse of the deep rot at the heart of the British political system, and thereby of British life.

Two possible scenarios, already advanced, were that May, T., simply has defective political judgement, or instead that it was an act of revenge or lesson-teaching that will see Johnson, B., eventually crash and burn after some disastrous indiscretion or mistake. If it’s the latter, then it would signify a prime minister prepared to accept all sorts of damage to the country just to get even with an individual. Either of these scenarios would show May, T., as unfit to lead. I don’t buy them.

No. I think it’s the old story, as jobs are handed out behind the scenes from one to another. It’s grace and favour, debts and promises repaid, deals and ‘understandings’ coming to fruition. It’s the Tory party, the ultimate impregnable keep within the walls of the British establishment – always there, always in power or on the edges of power, always able to come together and act in unison when power is at stake, always able to keep principle at a safe remove when there are deals to be done. And who is to stop them?

Jean-Claude Juncker has expressed surprise that Brexiting Britain doesn’t know what to do next.

‘What I don’t understand is that those who want to leave are totally unable to tell us what they want … I thought that if you wanted to leave you had a plan … they don’t have it.’ ¹

There should be no surprise at all. The vote was the whole thing – one big destructive blast for the disaffected to enjoy. Now the fun’s over.

J.-C.J. has been reminded that in Britain, people like to vote against things rather than for things. For many people, that’s all politics is – giving some politician or party or policy a good kicking. After they’ve done that? Well, that’s just boring detail.

British politics must be the most negative of its kind anywhere in Europe. No wonder we have a crude all-or-nothing electoral system and a museum of a parliament that presupposes there are only two sides to every issue. Anything else would be too subtle for the British.

Poor Jeremy. Not long ago he was elected to lead the Labour party, to see if he could rediscover a set of core beliefs for the party to bruit abroad, and to blow the dust off its conscience – that is, if he could find these things in the dusty old cupboards where they had been left years earlier. Our choice was either Jeremy, who appeared to believe in things, or a list of people who came across as knowing everything about management and marketing, but very little about anything else. (There are lots of people like that around – people suffer them in their workplaces every day.) So, though we had reservations about competence and effectiveness, we voted for him.

Then came his first big public test. Unfortunately for him, it was to front up his party’s support for the Remain campaign – something he didn’t seem to believe in. For him, the EU still seems to be that Bennite bugbear of ‘bosses’ Europe’. So how did he deal with that quandary, and what kind of leadership did he give? Well, he avoided the issue by becoming a backbencher again. Not only did he not lead, he appears to have actively worked against his own party’s policy, undermining the workers out on the streets and doorsteps and betraying the young voters who we are told are his main supporters. There was even a rumour he voted Leave himself, until the news item resurfaced of him saying he voted Remain; that in itself is a sign of the current atmosphere inside the PLP – brief and counter-brief, rumour and counter-rumour.

If a backbencher follows his or her beliefs and campaigns against their own party on an issue, or even votes against it, that’s routine. If a leader does this, it’s a fatal incoherence. If you take on the responsibility of leading a party – a great party, or a once-great party, depending on your view – you can’t simply revert to acting like a backbencher every time the going gets tough. If you can’t in all conscience lead on the party’s main issues, you have to stand aside.

Now we can only sit back and watch in horror as an unfunny farce plays out before our eyes. A constant stream of shadow office resignations is followed by a constant stream of their instant replacements. People should avoid walking around Westminster over the next few days – you may find yourself dragged off the streets and pressed to join the shadow cabinet. You could be the next shadow assistant under-secretary for allotment water supplies.

Jeremy looks to be finished as party leader – poor chap, to repeat the platitude. Some of the things being said about him are no doubt unfair and misleading and originate with his political enemies, but he’s lost the PLP and out in the country his support is ebbing. That’s the reality of it, and it’s what voters will see. Nor is it good enough to present the PLP as just a bunch of obstructive reactionaries – there is a vast range of political experience and competence in there – or say things like it’s ‘only’ the PLP that is against Jeremy as if they’re a peripheral bunch of minor significance, and one that can be replaced at any time.

That means we will probably have a leadership election very soon, which is pretty disastrous both for Labour and, potentially, for the immediate task of fighting back against the dangers of the extreme right. It will be awful: for weeks the PLP will resound to the screams of people attacking each other for being soft-brained Corbynistas or Tory-lite Blairites, demonstrating once again the grand convention that Labour people are far nastier to each other than to their political opponents.

There is a considerable danger of electing somebody who will be equally ineffective, or that we will only be presented with a list of the corporate/marketer types again, or both. Poisonous tabloids and their UKIP soulmates will have a field day, and the Conservatives – currently riven by arguments about which species of swivel-eyed dogmatic nastiness should prevail – will revel in the continuing absence of opposition.

So far, Jeremy is standing firm. His main allies are standing round him in an inner phalanx like Harold’s housecarls at the Battle of Hastings. For example, there is John McD., old-fashioned political heavy, brandishing his great sword; and there is Diane A., railing against the Blairite conspirators whom she has always seen lying in wait around every corner, seeming to imply that criticism of Jeremy could only ever come from them and hence can be ignored. Fortunately for Jeremy, his supporters have come up with one great idea – Corbyn buttons with your face on them. That will appeal particularly to voters in the key 11-14 age group.

A leadership election would be an awful thing to have to do at an awful time to have to do it, but there isn’t ever going to be a good time for this. Let’s hope to god that if there is to be change that somebody emerges who can lead the whole party against the gathering darkness.

A few polite but lukewarm messsages have come across the Atlantic assuring us that the special relationship will remain. Yes, of course it will – the UK is the USA’s key link with the EU.

Oh.

Meanwhile, Trump expresses his delight with the Brexit vote. That should be a strong clue about how intelligent it was.

Americans of good will should be concerned. They may have consoled themselves that, armed with better educations and political understanding than their forebears, enough citizens of a modern, civilised land will always come together at elections and other crisis points to ensure their country never falls into the hands of extreme politicians and extreme ideas.

They should look across the Atlantic. A concatenation of circumstances and events, dear boy, together with weak politicians and a widespread and widely encouraged contempt for politics in general, have produced a void that is constantly filled and refilled with endless dissatisfactions and febrile scapegoating – the favoured tool of the right.

In Britain, it has resulted in the country’s most astoundingly reckless and destructive political decision of the postwar era – and that even includes things like Suez. In the States, something similar could yet result in the accession of Emperor Trump.

It’s always difficult to recall a dream. Some parts float away the minute you wake, as soon as you try and remember them, whereas some other elements stick in the memory and can even haunt you later. Here is Igor’s dream, anyway, or at least the gist of it. Some bits I have forgotten – perhaps they were too horrific and the brain blanked them out – but other parts remain with strange clarity.  If you’re of a nervous disposition, look away now.

In the dream I was living in some tinpot island kingdom – a small country, I think it was, but I do know it had once been powerful and hugely influential and had never recovered from that period. Indeed, it was still obsessed with this past era and its various wars, and was unable to move forward. Political ideas and institutions alike were frozen in time, but many of the country’s people worked hard to make a virtue out of this stagnation. They were proud of it.

The people of one of the kingdom’s four constituent countries – the one that contained the vast capital city – felt that they were by far the most important part of the kingdom. They often forgot that the other three countries existed, and casually talked about their country as if it were the same thing as the whole kingdom.

The kingdom had a monarch with a nice shiny hat, I think, but it appears the real government was drawn from one of two tribes who conducted their business in some kind of fairytale castle, or it might have been a museum or a theatre or something. It was difficult to tell, but whatever it was it seemed to have a bewitching effect on the inmates. There was a kind of voting system to put people in the museum. I don’t know how it worked precisely, but it was clearly primitive. As far as I could tell, it gave the keys of the kingdom to the winning tribe for five years, and it looked like they often did whatever they wanted during that time. However, lots of people had left the tribes since the olden days and lost interest, and other smaller tribes had come and gone.

Many said the system should change to give everybody an equal voice and keep them interested, but the people in the castle didn’t want to change things and just smiled beneficently. They liked to pretend there were still only two tribes, and they really loved having the keys of the kingdom for so many years at a time, even when not many people had voted for them. Besides, life in the magic theatre place was so beguiling.

So the people grew less and less interested in what went on in the castle, which they saw as completely ignoring them except when the keys were up for grabs. They even began to think the inmates were corrupt and unimportant to their own lives. Besides, many years ago the loathsome dragon that was the emblem of the richer tribe invoked her god Mar Ket and told the people that the really important thing was money, money, money. Later, a gleaming young knight of the grail used magic to make his tribe appear the same as the richer tribe, and he too called upon the dragon and Mar Ket. After that, nearly all of the people in the castle/theatre worshipped Mar Ket, and allowed no other god. All judgements and decisions throughout the kingdom were referred to Mar Ket. Some people had become hideously rich and could do what they liked throughout the land. The castle inmates even made it easy for them to do that. This island kingdom was a very strange place.

Beyond its borders, the kingdom was an embittered member of an important group of nearby nations, but its people knew little about those other nations and their cultures and languages, and cared even less. The nations were just places to visit, or perhaps to live in if the weather was nice (which is the main thing about other countries). Other than that, many of the islanders saw people from other nations as a threat as well as inferior; they didn’t like them at all.

The kingdom had joined this group late but was nevertheless convinced it was better and more important than the other nations and thus deserved special treatment. Its representatives constantly harried the group’s leaders and the other nations, and whined endlessly at home and abroad about how badly they were treated and how much more they were entitled to have than everybody else.

Now, this is where it gets really hazy and even more bizarre, I’m afraid. The dream detail starts to break up. It seems some weak leader in the museum had promised a general vote to the people – he did it to settle a gambling debt or something. I can’t really visualise him now as he sort of had no face. For this vote, he told all the unhappy people in the kingdom that they should be contemptuous of foreign people to make up for everything they didn’t like about their own lives, and somehow find a way to punish them for generally being inferior. There were a couple of evil clowns there too, doing something or other, and a group of particularly evil heralds trying to whip the people into a frenzy of hate.

Apparently, the faceless gambler told the unhappy people that if they won the vote they could best punish the foreigners by making the kingdom leave the group of nations – no, I can’t see how that makes sense either, but we all know that dreams are just weird. It all seemed very dangerous. But the unhappy people didn’t seem to care and just wanted to break things – you know, like the mob with burning torches in all the Frankenstein films. It wouldn’t do them any good but they’d enjoy it for a little while.

Then it was the day of the vote. For some reason, one of the evil clowns was travelling up and down a river of blood while standing on the prow of a royal barge wearing a black shirt and waving a beer stein, and the other was incessantly spouting garbled quiz questions, taking selfies and claiming to be everybody’s friend.

And then they were ready to announce the result. Everybody was suddenly now at Tyburn, wearing pointed hats, and the clowns and the heralds and some other castle inmates were grinning from ear to ear – though one of the clowns was starting to look nervous. There was a huge mass of angry people waving burning torches. And the result of the vote was . . .

I don’t know, because at that point I woke up in a cold sweat. But what a strange and frightening dream. What could it mean? These dreams are so lifelike aren’t they.

Goodness. Igor (that’s Anlotti’s forename) had long ago fallen asleep, mainly as a result of the seeming futility of writing about politics in the UK – where nothing seems to make any difference, where the same few people hold all the power and money and steadily amass more of each without hindrance. It might as well be the 1950s, except that inequalities weren’t as pronounced then. Although something called the ‘government’ continually trashes, withdraws and undermines public services and public sector workers, the wider public does nothing to stop this; for the most part, the wider public regards politics as a tedious irrelevance that distracts from the core business of life – shopping and social media. So, what is the point?

Igor’s last waking memory was from May 2015, of something called the Labour leadership election. Somebody called Jeremy won it. Not Clarkson or Kyle or Hunt, but another Jeremy. Lots of Labour insiders who had believed that Labour had been changed for All Time by a Messiah were horrified, whereas lots of young people (apparently they were young) were galvanised and energised and joined the party in droves. Well, they paid three quid and sort of supported it, in a way that only the commitment of three whole pounds could engender.

We couldn’t decide, and neither could Labour insiders, whether this would introduce a familiar exclusive opposition – either Labour has strong principles or it gets elected – or signal a change to something else – Labour has to declare strong principles in order to get elected. Well, it was all very interesting, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But Igor’s woken up with a start. He’s had an unbelievably horrible dream.