Phew! Enough of this Building for Now.

 The sun-room is substantially built and closed up. It was a consuming effort, with little time or energy left for anything else, such as writing blogs. Good fun though, and it’s great to cool the mind now and again with physical work, especially if it is fun work, like sailing! It may be hard, but the creativity, the engagement, the involvement with physical reality are therapeutic. Life is good after all, despite our best efforts to make it miserable.

De la cooperation Franco-Irlandaise a Sherkin....

I’m not going into the details of building though, the way I might with sailing; it doesn’t quite go with the intentions of this blog, the way that sailing does. But in writing it, I am also interested in developing a kind of post-national identity: something along the lines of what the Brexiteers hate!

I needed the rest from writing indeed to digest this Brexit thing. Was I unreasonable in my rejection of it? What will it mean anyway? Well after all, we are only a very little nearer to knowing that, with this statement of Mrs May’s at the Tory conference.  However, she has stated that the process will be triggered by the end of March next year, though Parliament will only get a say in the new session, which begins in May next year.

So this appears to have been a successful coup by various media barons and clever manipulators of opinion, who have managed to overthrow the Government which was actually elected and to radically change the course of the ship of state without the elected Parliament getting so much as a chance to give its opinion on the matter! All dressed up in a lot of blarney about ‘democracy’.

The Parliamentarians look like rolling over and doing as they are bid, but I’m afraid this is worse than a sad mistake. Mr Boris Johnson said recently in New York that the connection between free trade and the free movement of people was ‘balderdash’. Now one might think he was just being stupid. One might invite him to consider how it would have been, back when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, if Irish people were not allowed to travel freely to Britain and work there. One might point out that the free movement of people is essentially bound up with the sharing of wealth, etc. The trouble is, he already knows it, for Mr Johnson is not stupid.

Mr Johnson is blustering because he knows very well that he is trying to sell a lie. Anyway, the very idea of ‘free trade’ is dodgy, as indeed is the liberal notion of freedom. Trade is constricted in all kinds of ways, and in the modern world, all one can do is choose, from among a variety of regulatory frameworks that which will afford us the most freedom. It’s like the much-vaunted ‘independence’.

How independent is this famous modern Britain really going to be, so completely bound up as it is with and dependent upon both people and goods from elsewhere? Anyway, the truth is that Liberalism itself is on the way out, buried in the rubble of the World Trade Centre, of Iraq and Syria and Lehman’s Bank. But it will die hard, for people are very fond of their illusions, and modern media very good at manipulating them.

Meanwhile, those who deliberately peddle lies in the pursuit of their own power have to be confronted, sooner rather than later. This is difficult, when a persuasive illusion is being peddled; but before the likes of Messrs Farrage and Trump come up with a full-blown kind of modern fascism, they will have to be faced down.

Who by? One might have looked to Socialists, but the Socialist Parties in England and in Spain and other countries are in serious disarray, and do not look like providing an alternative anytime soon; anyway, can they be relied upon not to fall back on their own version of the same thing? Such doubts attach to the old-fashioned socialism of Mr Corbyn for instance, though I quite like him, but as for Mrs Clinton.... Is there any sign of an alternative politics?

I think there might be, and if there is a glimmer of hope, politically speaking, I would think it lies with such as S. Matteo Renzi, the young prime minister of Italy. He came up as a politician as Mayor of Florence, where no doubt he had to grapple and cooperate with all kinds of people. I like his pragmatic approach, taking people as they come, and not pretending that he has all the answers. It’s not that he is without principles, but he does not approach politics from the stand-point of an ideology; rejecting a politics of fear, he builds on the common ground of people of hope and good will. You can see an interview with him at <https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/09/conversation-matteo-renzi/>

It comes back to engagement, which breeds hope. As with building or sailing, that is what makes us happy, while being shut or bombed out does the opposite. So Europe, and all people of good will, have to work a lot harder at getting people engaged. That will be the essence of a successful new politics. Meanwhile, we can work to establish the framework we prefer.

Mine involves sailing to Spain shortly! How I would hate to go back to having to get customs’ clearance when one goes from country to country, and when I am in Spain or Portugal, being merely one of the sad tribe of tourists or ex-pats! Much better to be there as of right, as a member of the same community; and of course the people who come to Britain to work must feel something like this too.  

....results in a tea-room for Fiona.