'Take That, Fritz!'

What does one do with unpleasant truths that refuse to be simply spun away? Why, have a Government report into them of course, preferably one that takes years, and produces a ton of words under which said truths may be buried.

Learning the Hard Way

 In the case of the Chilcot report on the Iraq war, the one obvious and outstanding lesson may be drawn very briefly: it is not a good idea for the UK to tag along on the coat-tails of the USA. If they really wanted to do something effective about the Middle East for instance, it would be far more likely to do so by positively taking their place with their peers in Europe; or at least they would be less likely to do harm that way.

Flowers in the Sand.

One might think the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme was another chance to remember the lessons to be learnt from war. What was the outstanding lesson of the two World Wars? Why, that competing nationalisms are highly dangerous; and eventually, after much suffering, the politicians actually got around to doing something in order to establish peace and security in Europe….

Yes, the grey voters who swung that Brexit vote have a lot to answer for. But it is amazing how the images of one’s childhood return with a new vividness in old age. How well I remember my Dinky toy tank, and armoured car with its gun turret, and the lorry with its towed gun that shot bits of matchstick and the scout car and the jeep; and the toy soldiers and the comic booklets full of our lads battling nasty Huns - Take that Fritz! - Zap, bang! Actung! Aaagh! Englisher svein!!! O yes, and there was the brave Biggles in the air, and there was the bomb site across the road to prove that it had actually happened. It was all supposed to have been the epic, archetypal struggle between Good and Evil.

The fact was that my father had just spent the first five years of his married life fighting that second war. He was extremely fortunate to have come home at all (and fathered myself), having escaped by luck from being massacred with his fellow officers in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment by the SS in a barn, while in the rearguard of Dunkirk.

It was difficult forgiveness and

peace-making, the stuff of actual Christian faith, which broke down much of the jingoistic nationalism. We have lately been rudely reminded, however, that this remains alive and well in many hearts and minds.  The huge effort that went into the political expression of that peace-making in the EU, in all those contacts, low level and high, means nothing to them. The unsettling realisation that perhaps the wars were not all the fault of the Germans, any more than it is now the fault of immigrants that the NHS is in trouble, has not been admitted by them, nor that ‘foreigners’ are human beings much like us. One doesn’t even know who ‘we’ are any more! Give us the old certainties back!

Mrs May’s "bold new positive role" for Britain in the world, along with Mr Johnson’s "intensifying our relationship with Europe", ring as hollow as her ‘one nation’ stuff.  "The government I lead will be driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives…." One does not know where to start, the rhetoric rings so hollow. Where has she been for the last ten years? How long will these people get away with standing the truth on its head?

I came across an interesting article in El Pais lately by Leonel Fernández, ex President of the Dominican Republic and founder of the Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo. He quoted figures from the World Bank showing, for instance, that in the period 1980-2014, derivative contracts went from one billion dollars’ worth to 692 billion: ‘a fabulous sum, without precedent, which means that they have come to represent nearly 70% of global financial dealings.’ ‘The excess of liquidity which we find today in the global economy is not used to invest in industrial production, that of food or energy or creating infrastructure. On the contrary, it is mostly used for financial transactions which, instead of creating some kind of material wealth which meets the needs of consumers, generates rather a kind of artificial wealth based on commercial contracts.’

This shows where we really do need to ‘get our countries back from’, and again, who has been making any shape to do something about this situation? But enough of Brexit, that extraordinary act of vandalism, self-harm and misplaced anger. The sun is shining here on Sherkin, Tony Whelan has come to help get this building up. Time to take a break from all that nonsense and look for something more sensible to write about next week!

Grand Crew.

Thanks to Tony and Fiona for the photos.

What's Coming Next?

Aaron keeps his eye on the ball!

One of the draw-backs of referenda, as has often been pointed out, is that they are generally decided by factors other than what they are actually about. Manipulation apart, they all too easily become an opportunity to slash a pie in the establishment’s face, as seems to have been a big factor in the Brexit vote. Well good luck to that! But they are also extremely divisive, especially those of the simple majority kind. Is this a good way to run a country? No, but now we had better try to imagine what may become of it!

They have already got rid of two of the three leaders of the Brexit campaign, who quickly proved to be men of straw, with no substantial plan or vision going forward. The third, Mr Gove, has some intellectual weight and may well eventually get to the top. A quick perusal of his pamphlet* on the Irish Peace Process tells us all we need to know about him. In fairness, it is articulate and lucid. He sets the tone in the Introduction, which concludes ‘Those who warned of the consequences of appeasement in the Thirties were derided as glamour boys, renegades and war-mongers. But if it were not for their opposition then who would there have been to rescue the nation from folly?’

Repeatedly characterising the Peace Process as appeasement, he unfortunately appears not to realise that his whole argument rests on a false premise - ‘The first flawed assumption of the “peace process” is the belief that the 1922 partition of Ireland was an historic injustice.’ No reference of course to the history prior to 1922!

Too civilised to engage in the crude rhetoric of Mr Trump, he nonetheless sings from the same chilling hymn-sheet. ‘Effective intelligence work by the RUC Special Branch and the deployment of lethal force, most notably by the SAS at Loughgall in May 1987, had given the British security forces a decisive advantage over the IRA….’ ‘Resolute security action, the use of existing antiterrorist legislation and the careful application of intelligence could reduce the IRA to operating as it did in the fifties and sixties.’ He decries ‘the slow demilitarisation of the Province’ and laments the ‘humiliation of our Army, Police and Parliament’.

He completely fails to understand that the six counties are not even the whole of Ulster, and that the border constitutes a gerrymander. He blithely states that ‘My analysis is based on the belief that a liberal democracy owes certain duties to its citizens. It has a duty to uphold the right of a majority to live in the jurisdiction they choose – the basic principle of self-determination.’ He of course fails to ask the question at the root of the problem, a majority of what? However, at least one knows pretty much what ground he stands on. It is basically a matter of ‘let’s get back to good old certainties, if not the British Empire, then something pretty like it!’

However right now we have the two ladies up for the leadership of the Conservative Party. They are more touchy-feely, more in tune with the times. Mrs May is the favourite. She will do her best to make a good British fudge-cake of the situation, and to elegantly paper over the cracks in the Party. I doubt if the Germans and French will have much of it, for there is too much at stake and more to be worrying about that ever-lasting argy-bargy with the Brits. She will end up blaming German intransigence for the fact that they will not concede the impossible, while the British economy is going from bad to worse, and the strain between the two halves of England gets worse also.

Perhaps Mrs Leadsom will come up trumps? She seems to represent another strand in the story. One might ask why should someone with a background in high finance be a fan of Brexit? One does not have to look far for clues. She, immediately through her husband and her sister’s Guernsey based husband, is up to her tonsils in off-shore funds.** It seems to me we know little about what has been going on, with the publication of the Panama Papers and so on, but clearly, some people have been seriously annoyed, especially in the Brexit camp, and they blame ‘that socialist EU’. I have referred before to their vote against measures to combat off-shore tax evasion in the European Parliament. The British upper class have evidently become heavily reliant on it! Top fund lawyers earn multiples of the Prime Minister’s salary. There are also plenty of other reasons why some in the corporate world would be delighted to get rid of all those pesky European regulations about workers' rights and the environment, but hopefully the EU will hang tough when it comes to the negociations. Unless the plutocracy in Britain is even more powerful than we suspect, she will come unstuck somewhere along the way. Mr Gove to the rescue of Great Britain?

A few more big atrocities in France, along with economic woes and complete disillusionment with mainstream politics, and Marine Le Pen could become Mme la Presidente. 'Victoire de la liberté ! Comme je le demande depuis des années, il faut maintenant le même référendum en France et dans les pays de l'UE!', she says - she will try to lead France also out of the EU. It is quite possible that, given a few more atrocities in the USA, Mr Trump will have made it to the White House. Says he,‘They took their country back, just like we will take America back.’ This lot do have momentum, it has to be recognised!

Whether Mr Gove would be so keen to ‘to uphold the right of a majority to live in the jurisdiction they choose’ in the case of Scotland is a good question. It is quite possible that he would drive the Scots to a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. No doubt he would be particularly anxious to hang on to the nuclear submarine base at Gare Loch, while renewing Trident. Possibly he might cite ‘vital national interest’ and insist on hanging onto the Clyde area and the south-west, a nice little partner area for Belfast.

Meanwhile our Irish Republic will be most horribly torn apart. While our links with England are too strong to be ignored, by any cultural stretch of the imagination, we will have an obligation to support the Scots, quite apart from our allegiance to the EU, by now a rump that Germany is struggling to hold together. Mr Gove no doubt will be supported by Mr Trump, and they will both be getting on fine with Presidente Le Pen, and come to think of it, with old President Putin too.

O Lord, just when we needed a good strong Opposition! Look, sorry, Mr Corbyn, mate, ‘you were right, dead right as you sailed along, but you’re just as dead as if you were wrong!’ Now the stakes are very high indeed, and we need to get a Labour/Libdem Government elected as soon as possible, on a firm platform to stay in the EU. Someone must be found, quickly, who can soothe the British electorate, and make them see they have been conned. I do not think there is any other way to secure peace and prosperity for our children and grandchildren.

Here I am, never imagining that I would be so deeply affected by British politics, let alone that this blog would find itself getting so involved; but I find it impossible to maintain my former attitude of detached amusement. Perhaps the voice of an old seadog on an island off Ireland may at least boast of some objectivity. I may not have the vote, but at least I shall have my say! But how are we going to stop that lot? It's a good job I have the flowers of Sherkin to help me keep sane -

Thanks to Tony Whelan, who took these photos here on Sherkin yesterday.




* https://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/111220142628-thepriceofpeace2000MichaelGove.pdf

** http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/08/andrea-leadsom-family-links-offshore-bank-donations-tories

O U T Spells Out!

Well that was a jolly jape, wasn’t it Boris! Got everyone rightly worked up! But the sooner you doddle off to your farm in Cornwall, the better, and I should think you will do well to stay there a long time. If I had my way, you would be in court for deceiving the electorate, along with your mate Mr Farage; though I fear you are only front men for the really sinister movers. But it looks like between you you have succeeded in ruining your country and a lot of people in it, so there has to be some kind of pay-off.

As for the mess that not just the UK, but Ireland and the rest of Europe are left with, let’s try getting a handle on some of the basic principles involved. A difficult thing to do, in this age of nearly infinite sound-bites from folk who have precious little idea what a principle might look like. However, here’s one: nobody seems to have troubled to explain to the British electorate that you cannot have a common market without the free movement of labour.

A common market, especially coupled with modern methods of production, will naturally generate losers as well as winners. Some areas will thrive, while others will decline. A first necessity, if one is to address such imbalances, is to ensure that the unemployed from the declining, peripheral areas can get on their bikes and go where employment is available.

It is also necessary for the successful areas to recycle some of their wealth in the direction of the less successful. Besides maintaining a balanced society, this will also improve the demand for their products. Apparently Mr Farage and his likes, and even some of those in high places in Germany for instance, cannot see this!

There is another thing that they refuse to see. In a highly interdependent world, cooperation between states actually improves and underpins the sovereignty of individual nations. As part of Europe, Great Britain, the traditional counterweight, is able to punch way above its weight. It has huge advantages in the lines of language, English being the lingua franca, and financial and global networks. By itself, it is frankly more of a sad joke.

The leavers do not seem to have progressed much beyond playing King of the Castle! Unfortunately it is a game the English are particularly fond of; it suited the imperial narrative very well. One sucked the world’s resources into one’s castle and told the dirty rascals, starving Irish for instance, to get lost. On the other hand, Europe should beware of treating the English as dirty rascals now. Plenty of them voted to Remain, and of those who didn’t, plenty either did not really know what they were doing or did not really mean it. They just wanted to give the establishment a kick up the backside. It is true that this crisis can be a great occasion for growth and heightened awareness.

Meanwhile, if drawbridges are to be pulled up and main roads blocked, it is all the more important to keep the byways open. I believe one should establish whatever little zones of openness, communication and contemplation that one can, but it’s no use trying to do this in total isolation. I am very glad that we have our own little link with the Continent floating in front of our house! And with, please God, a new Celtic axis being established, with Scotland and Ireland keeping a high-road to the Continent open, perhaps the Gannetsway will find it takes on a whole new significance….

Contemplating Blocks.

Out On the Streets!

O Lord, it’s true after all: too many of the English are still trying to live in the nineteenth century. Too much of that Postman Pat and Mr Oldcastle and Gumdrop stuff? The trouble is the old lights were not thoroughly extinguished in England, the way they were on the Continent. The Empire does not exist any more, but the mentality of many people, especially the elderly ones who won this vote, has not moved on.

The rhetoric of Empire has been replaced by vague talk of British Values and Democracy, as beloved by Mr Cameron. The British Constitution, insofar as it exists, in fact envisages rule by a sovereign whose authority is vested in Parliament. Where referendums come into it is by no means clear: a matter of good British fudge. Likewise the famous British Values are all over the place. Indeed more so than ever there is no proper respect for that which does not suit one's empire: for the other, for what is, irrespective of one's own interests, or for what has happened beyond one's control and its fruits. In fact where people let money rule their lives, you will end up with plutocracy; and Britain is now more of a plutocracy than at any time since the nineteenth century.

One ends up with a great deal of manipulation. That clown Mr Johnson with his jolly game and the rather seedy Mr Farage have ridden a campaign that (largely foreign) press magnates have been mounting for years, and it has been full of lies like the one on the battlebus. If one genuinely aspires to rule by the people, one first of all needs a People, a reasonable and coherent demos, with a genuine respect for truth; and then it does help if those who make decisions know what they are talking about, rather than merely shouting slogans at each other.

What exactly is this touted ‘independence’ anyway? The EU is but a (very inadequate) attempt to get a political handle on the many-layered interdependence of the modern world, both within Europe and beyond. For all its inadequacies, it is by far the most successful such attempt in the world. It was born of the painful realisation that there was no future in attempting to do so by knocking the **** out of each other, and it has achieved unparalleled peace and prosperity.

However, the times are getting difficult. It seems to me that the Brexit  vote was mainly an outburst of inchoate rage and misery. It is not surprising. Not alone have they lost an empire, but also they have largely lost both religion and a sound family structure to their lives. They feel they are being governed by forces utterly beyond their control, which is largely true; they are alienated exiles in what they took to be their own country. They have lashed out at the EU because it is in some people’s interest that they should identify it with these alien forces, rather than actually tracking them down and doing something about them.

Some very rich people are worried that the EU might even be going to succeed in making them pay their share of tax; however maybe now they will get to play golf with Mr Trump! But the battle is hotting up all the time. There are millions of unemployed, and more millions dying and displaced, beyond the borders of Europe. Thousands are drowning while trying to get here. Governments, including the UK, are being kept afloat by printing vast sums of money, and there is an end in sight for that. In Britain there is also a serious shortage of electricity coming down the tracks, which will have to be met by importing more power from the Continent. Then who is going to seriously address climate change? Our world presents a mass of problems that can only be addressed by building on the institutions, using the lines of communication, that have been so laboriously built up over the last sixty years.

The fantasy of ‘independence’ can only possibly be indulged at a very high price, which will have to be paid also by a lot of people who had no vote, in Ireland for example. One of the lies that I noticed from a Brexiter in the Spectator was that it would be a great blow for parliamentary democracy. Has the British Parliament voted for this? Would it have done so? No! This is a recipe for mob rule. It is also unjust, for the oldies who swung the balance will die soon enough, but the young who voted Remain have their lives to lead.

Well, people discover their brotherhood, their power and dignity, by facing problems together, in as honest and passionate a way as possible. It is up to the young to get out and show that they are not going to have their future toyed with. Let them get out and demonstrate. They could make it possible to hold a second referendum before this famous article is invoked. I think the result could be different. Many of those older voters had little idea what they were voting for, and might change their minds if they start listening to the youth rather than those Eurosceptic rags, and realised they had just voted for a reduction in the value of their pensions too.

Whatever anyone says, there is no time to lose; but oh, I do pity the people having to cope with all this nonsense, with the year on the turn and the month of July coming in. And after all effective action has to be rooted in quiet. It’s lovely here in Sherkin, but there is a lot to be done. If anyone out there fancies a bit of peace here, as well as doing some building and gardening and a bit of sailing, email me at:-

<gannetsway@gmail.com>

Flying the flag...

on a sombre morning.

Stand Up Fathers!

This Fathers’ Day stuff is all very well, but let’s face it, it doesn’t carry quite the conviction of Mothers’ Day. We pretty much all love our Mammies, but Daddies are perhaps more problematic. Some of the very greatest works of literature concern delinquent fathers, witness King Lear (again) and The Brothers Karamazov. Christ famously advised us to ‘call no man Father’, urging us to focus rather on Our Father in Heaven. While considering fatherhood, one should always bear this in mind. Now as a Grandad I’m getting a kind of double dose of it in one way, and a chance to view the business in a more detached fashion too. May I at last get the right balance between too much and too little fathering? But the bottom line is simply this: we have to figure out what is best for our families, and do our best to provide it and set them on the way of it....

A sudden eerie peace has descended on the house. The four grandchildren who have been staying here for the last few days, have departed. On the whole they coped with the computer game/video free life which we lead here very well. But then they were able to play on a little rocky shore below the house, and learn to row, and to sail out to witness a massive congregation of dolphins and whales, set off with the excited screeches of diving gannets, some 7 miles to the Southwest of here.

The display out-lasted the children’s attention span, and instead of relaxing as I would have them into the dream as the Anna M sailed gently along in such company, they had to go below and eat and draw pictures of whales. But, I reflected, that itself is some kind of victory. Images and food are after all two basic necessities for human beings. The problem is that humanity tends to get so interested in spinning stories, creating images, that we cease to focus on the thing itself!

Images are indeed the tools, the vehicles that we require to situate ourselves in the midst of life’s confusing complexity, to find our way. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ But the first priority is to really get in touch with our own imagination and to remain rooted there, or else we must settle for second-hand images, fed us according to the interests of one mass image producer or another. At this stage it seems to be an even bigger industry than producing food! Meanwhile a good father does not attempt to merely impose his own preferred images, but to help his children to acquire their own.

Of course, the great Protestant and North American Dream was fashioned of just such an aspiration. Away with all your bishops and kings, with their dogmas and their enforced loyalties! Down with your scheming statesmen and their Empires! Down with decrepit Spain and bankrupt old Europe! We will even improve on old England, living free, relying on our own resources, according to our own lights!...  But where is the American Dream now? It seems that no people could be more obsessed with their images and stories, but less satisfied with them!

Then again what, in the aftermath of that brilliant Enlightenment, did old Catholic Europe fall back on? It may seem that about the only thing they vaguely remembered was that the well-springs of imagination were in a sense communal property; the individual imagination, to be activated, must paradoxically tap into a level of consciousness that transcends the individual; ‘No man is an island.’ Yet where was the ability to ‘plug in’ to the divine, that alone is able to reconcile the individual and social dimensions? Many fell back on a renewed tribalism, in the form of nationalism, with its male and female faces, namely fascism and communism.

One might have thought that all that stuff lay buried under the rubble of the mid 20th century. We have enjoyed in Europe nearly a full life-time of relative peace and prosperity, but the fabric has become frayed again, and the old primordial problems are forcing their way into our consciousness with renewed vigour. Who has been using the relatively peaceful times to access anew those well-springs of truth, deep within us? Well, says I, some of them at least were sailors!

The politicians and the media, the image masters and story-tellers, would on the whole rather we did not attempt to do so ourselves. They like to think it’s their prerogative to set the agenda, but since they are more interested in power and perks than in that dreadful business of taking responsibility, the agenda they set tends to be that which they calculate will deliver the power and perks. So we all tend to get caught up in a false loop that is sold as ‘democracy’. It takes a massive crisis to bring out leaders of real integrity, such as Churchill and de Gaulle.

The current craze for referenda illustrates such false loops. Your real leader would not say - this is a most important decision, almost a matter of life and death, but I’ll go along with whatever you choose - the democratic will shall prevail! Imagine such an attitude in the skipper of a boat!

The only honest thing for a true democratic leader to say, if he knows something to be of crucial importance, is this is what I believe. Now you can vote for me and I will act on that belief, or you can find someone else to lead you! The problem is actually one of the integrity of fatherhood, and it is reflected in the widespread failure of us fathers to take the responsibility of our role. People must be feeling the desperate lack….

The degree of success of the likes of Messrs Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in picking up such a mantle should be a wake-up call. But do we really want to be led by such people? In frustration, people turn to false fathers. I have been shocked by friends and family members who have bought into their stories. But having taken a good look down that hole, I hope they will yet turn away from it, rather as Ireland looked into the abyss back at the time of Bobby Sands’ funeral, and turned away.

For Europe, and Britain’s involvement in it, will not go away. There is no going back to some mythical state of independence. One has seen that bundle of lies trundling down the tracks of the great British media for years. It is a joy of the new media that, when one has the time, one can keep an eye on the various strands of opinion without actually buying their newspapers! Of course, like all successful lies, they proceed by distorting big truths.

I believe the vote will be to Remain, but it’s a close call. If Remain does prevail, I think that it will be in no small part thanks to Mrs Jo Cox. Her murder has given a crucial pause to think more deeply, a reality check, and lifted a corner of the mask of the Leave crowd. As usual, there’s a woman challenging us men to be true fathers! But now I have said all I am going to say about the British referendum, at least until there is a result. They must decide what they believe to be true, and stand up for it.

Home from the Sea

I raced Fiona home in the end, though I had left her over a month previously in Vila Real de Sao Antonio, on the train to Faro. She has been helping family while I've been sailing up. We came home to a very overgrown garden, and have spent most of the last two weeks taming the wilderness and getting some production going again. Quite a few dear people have tried to tell us that we cannot expect to both live the sailing life and keep a house and garden going, all on a small pension, and sometimes I am inclined to agree.

Taming the wilderness.

Of course it is Fiona who is most committed to the house and garden, and myself to the sailing. Some have suggested that the solution is simple - we each do our own thing, just getting together now and again; one might call it the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ solution. They miss the point that we each value the other’s predilections, that we actually like living with the tension. Fiona does not want to be a cabbage, and I do not want to be a rootless drifter upon the ocean. So far, by some kind of a miracle, we have managed to keep our balance between the two, and long may it last, I say!

Hajib weather!

It’s an ancient issue, and reminds me of the old tension between what might be called the monk principle, with its commitment to stability within a community, and the friars and missionaries and pilgrims who get out into the world. The Catholic Church managed to keep her balance between the two impulses. Again, much effort has gone into trying to achieve the right balance between the nation states and the EU.

The English like to see their country as a little garden, an enclosure of security and order in a dangerous world that is always threatening to invade and overwhelm it. One sees the point. The call to community with the rest of Europe has generally fallen back on pointing to material advantages, in trying to make itself heard. Now we see the inadequacy of this approach. Even Catholics have generally held back from expressing it in terms of basic concepts of what life is all about.

You might even ask why do I say ‘even Catholics’? Because the call to community is fundamental to our Faith. In Christ, we build the Kingdom of God with that basic rhythm, that balance and harmony of what is within and what is without. If one settles for the cabbage patch only, one is left with a stagnant pool in a river that has gone dry. Mr Boris Johnson tries to counter such thinking with talk about ‘going global’. What kind of global presence would he have in mind? He wouldn’t have the British Empire at the back of his mind, I suppose? Certainly one does not hear from his type of much repentance for its very considerable failings.* Judging by their stance on, for instance, tax avoidance, we may assume what they have in mind is a buccaneering presence in the fine tradition of the likes of Sir Francis Drake!

If anyone is serious about his own community, he also must be serious about global community, about tackling the big problems like climate change, environmental degradation of all kinds, world poverty and war. It should be very obvious that we can do so far more effectively by giving the world a lead in living in active community with our neighbours, and please, do not try to tell me we can do this while walking away from all that has so far been achieved, with much effort….  

Now I had better get back to the garden, hoping to look forward to lots more lovely fresh salad with my grilled mackerel, while not leaving the Anna M too long with her strange company!

*  * http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524