Friends Don't Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Friends Don’t Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Not in a healthy relationship, anyway.

Time and memory are precious commodities in politics, made so by the fact that they are in short supply. But I invite you back to 2013 and the occasion of the G20 summit in St Petersburg.

Britain had been branded “just a small island” by Vladmir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “No one pays any attention to them.”

David Cameron saw this as the perfect time to emulate the best, most foppish and lecherous Prime Minister Britain never had. This was his Hugh Grant moment. Britain, he said, was great. Sorry, is great. We beat fascism and slavery with Dick Francis and One Direction.

Absent from his sterling riposte (aside from any retort to the comments also reportedly made by Mr. Peskov about Russia owning Kensington and Chelsea) was a very important qualification.

The qualification is an inconsistency (I do not say paradox); one that never seems to be caught in the open but is detectable by its scent and the vague sense that something is happening just out of eye-line and ear-shot. It is a dog doggedly dogging in the dark; that unsettling thing that you seldom see as you stroll through the woods but that you are quite sure exists.  

And it is unique to the Better Together tribute act. The Brexit campaign has an alternative which is at least rhetorically cogent: Britain is great and therefore capable; it is great enough to, so-to-speak, stand alone. Moreover its greatness is served best by standing alone; it is only being held down by the burdens of a failing foreign power.

Cameron’s omission of this inconsistency is also one of Remain’s biggest flaws. It seems, at best superficially and at worst seriously, incongruous to speak of the boldness, patriotism, bravery and greatness of Britain if your argument tacitly acknowledges that we are reliant upon others for our status.

I make no secret of my own partisanship. Though I could hardly be accused of patriotism, I do not think that Britain is necessarily reliant upon Europe for its status.

But David Cameron undoubtedly is. George Osborne is, too. (Not for nothing does one cultivate a cosy relationship with Christine Lagarde.) The belated concession to those clamouring for a referendum forced them to gamble on that most important of currencies in politics: legacy.

So, whilst Mr. Peskov elicited such a quaint but firm response, Barack Obama was met not only with what we are obliged to call the red carpet treatment but also the personal and absolutely slavish devotion and indebtedness of the leader of a supposedly proud nation.

We should not kid ourselves on this: Barack Obama, speaking in the nauseatingly ‘candid’ tones of a dear ‘friend’, has left us with no room to doubt the depths of esteem in which he holds the junior partner in the special relationship; a real and valuable relationship disgraced by the monarchical attitude of the President and by a Prime Minister with an expression befitting only a sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome.

The conclusion we should draw from Obama’s speech is that Britain serves American interests by acting as its 51^st state lobbying within the borders of Europe; both a prostitute and a pimp. Out of Europe, Britain ceases to perform that useful function and is then, as Mr. Peskov stated, “just a small island.” No one will pay any attention to us, not least the United States, who will happily push us to “the back of the queue.”

A friendly reminder, apparently. Well, as the old saying goes: with friends like these, who needs enemies?

We are fortunate that the political scene in the United States suggests Mr. Obama was speaking not for any future administration and barely even for his own. Even Anne Applebaum, normally as astute as a tactical nuclear weapon, has noticed the almost perfectly bipartisan move away from exactly the type of trade deal (TPP and TTIP) that Obama has chosen to weaponize.

Whether Trump or Cruz, Clinton or Sanders, the next president is not likely to accelerate any free trade deal of the type for which he is an increasingly lonely advocate. And I know for a fact that I speak for many, on both sides of the Atlantic and of the supposed political divide, when I say that I would not be sorry to see daddy confiscate those particular toys. Let us continue to be the largest single foreign investor into the United States and still register a trade surplus without signing away the future of the NHS in a bid to appease any desire for ‘harmonization’.

But seldom is it that monarchs are concerned with reality, and Barack Obama is the most monarchical President of my living memory. He seems to have given no consideration whatever to the necessary trade-offs required by our continued membership of the European Union; democracy, accountability and sovereignty were not factored into his speech.

Then again, this is a President more at home in the company of our own queen than he would ever be in the House of Commons. His rhetoric is smooth and polished, his presentation superb, but this is a man whose tenure in high office only flourished after the Democrats lost both the House and the Senate. This is a man whose astonishing hubris (he claimed of his own election that it marked the moment the oceans ceased to rise) was only ever constrained by democracy and fit only to be enacted by decree. The leader of the free world has always preferred to act by executive order, often imposing policies less extreme than those he presented to his political opponents in the certain knowledge that they would be rejected. His lasting democratic achievement is the making of democracy redundant: rendering Republican speaker John Boehner’s position all but untenable and creating the very divide he has since used to justify his royal prerogative.

And this is a President whose promised “Change We Need” and “Change We Can Believe In” has been so remarkable by its absence that huge swathes of voters are now, apparently without self-critique, flocking to the candidate, Hillary Clinton, he once (and rightly) portrayed as the antithesis of that change. Millions more are so fed up with business as usual that they are helping to create the biggest protest movement since the Dixicrats walked out of the Democrats’ convention in ’48.

Barack Obama is popular. And, if popularity is a measure of success, then he is successful. His words and his warnings will probably resonate in the halls of the debate over Europe. But he will leave office with his legacy that of a commander by diktat; one whose actions demonstrate an absolute failure to work within the confines of democracy and to whom the notion of accountability and due process is seemingly alien. Little wonder, then, that he has many friends in the pro-EU establishment.

But, stripped (as he is soon to be) of the regalia of his esteemed office, his arguments for our continued membership are less convincing than those of even the least competent junior minister. That he used the privilege of his power to threaten the people of the United Kingdom is a repugnant abuse of his position, evidence of the vacuity of his cause, and an abuse of the friendship he affects to laud.           

Stephen Fry is Right - We Need to Grow Up

If his critics are right, and if gradation and shades of grey either do not or should not exist, then I have the same right as a victim of a brutal gang rape to be outraged by comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview with US chat show host David Rubin. The same right? No, the same obligation. If his critics are right, I should by now be writhing, crippled by anger. I should have been hurt; I should have been triggered.

For, if his critics are right, rape is rape and abuse is abuse and not only are there no questions left to be asked or answered but anyone stupid, anyone insensitive enough to doubt that inherent truth is a monster; a relic of a less progressive age; a hideous ogre.

So I should be triggered.  I should be. We are all supposed to read from the same Newspeak dictionary, that wonderful thing that frees us from the pain of difficult thoughts by depriving us of the language used to express them.

I have been abused; the victim, I bellyfeel, of sexcrime; and damn the blackwhiters and crimethinkers who duckspeak otherwise.

It – this abuse - has happened on no less than four occasions. Sex whilst one party is inebriated, intoxicated and incapable of giving proper consent, is rape, is it not? That, the exploitation of my own past-penchant for illegal and mind-altering substances, accounts for three of the four; three ‘days-after’ spent regretting to my core that I was too fucked to say no.

The fourth occurred long before. It would be more accurate to call it the first. I was twelve or thirteen, perhaps fourteen, and visiting my uncle in his care home. It was his birthday; we took him a cake and balloons (of which he was once terrified; the chance of bangs and loud noises triggers those occupying his place on the spectrum but he grew up and away from that fear). We were to spend time celebrating with him and his carers and his fellow residents.

Whilst most went into the kitchen, to cut the cake with deliberately blunted knives, I stayed in another room with two of those fellow residents. One was a woman rocking quietly and with earnest intent in the corner. I don’t mind saying that I found her disconcerting; I did. And the other was a man, huge and black. Not fat, just huge. And I found him endearing by comparison. He looked kind and friendly, smiling absent-mindedly as he turned some toy over in his hands.

I was about to leave the room and find the others when that man stood up. I assumed he’d had the same idea and I waited for him to leave first.

Except that he wasn’t leaving, was he. No, he was walking over to me and, pressed up against the wall by his bulk, I felt one large hand, warm and calloused, find its way inside the waistband of my trousers.

It didn’t last long; the hand was hurriedly withdrawn when the rocking woman screeched from the corner. “No! What have we told you about touching!”

And I left the room, nonplussed and a little breathless but otherwise unaffected. I’ve never forgotten the experience and I’d never want to. Looking back, and thankful to that rocking woman who had so alarmed me, I think it is probably the first time the old adage about appearances was made real to me. They can be deceiving. The value of that experience vastly overmatches the occasional chill I get from the memory of it.

I have a vivid imagination. I could ponder here, in writing, what might have happened had the rocking woman not been there. I could speculate as to what might have occurred had I encountered that man not in a care home with my family but in an empty house or a secluded alleyway. It would have been unpleasant. Dare I say worse?

No, I dare not say worse, because that would imply that there are different forms of abuse or severities of rape. And that would be inconceivable, unconscionable in this enlightened day and this progressive age where we are all survivors; where there is no acknowledgeable qualitative difference between an unwanted hand on your cock and a rape at the hands of Jimmy Savile or an entire Somali militia.

It is as if we now live in a culture dedicated to the propagation of trauma. Whereas once we would have looked for ways to overcome what has happened to us, we are now encouraged to feel it as keenly as we can and for as long as we can; to let it define us; to adopt it as an integral part of our identity. We are encouraged to free associate with feeling and to expand our own to encompass the pain and sadness of others.

I say that what happened to me was bad but that it does not begin to compare with what has happened to others. But this new movement would have me say that it does compare, moreover that is the same and so I should feel worse about it. When there is no gradation, when we do not consider relativity in these matters or discriminate between cases, we are forced to elevate the banal and the moderate in order that we not exclude the extreme from this single, unified standard we now operate by. It is all a case, as Fry decries, of black and white, Good and Evil, with all moral nuance dispensed with.

I don’t doubt that this movement, and related cases like #Rhodesmustfall which encourages black students to inherit offences against their ancestors, is sincere in its belief that such conflations are in our best interests and that they serve the common good. It takes a sincere belief in good to breed the most sinister and harmful thoughts and ideologies. As Voltaire is thought to have said “l meglio è l'inimico del bene;” They make the best the enemy of the good.

But to understand that is to understand the need to fight against it, to know that the sacrifice of nuance and of good sense and intellectual rigour contributes only to the conflagration of the crimes these movements rail against. Seldom is it a commitment to harm and to evil that drives authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent; they do it because they know that they are right and the dissenters just don’t get it!

But which of the two most resembles the Ogre? It is not Stephen Fry, who argues against the trivialisation of rape that his opponents accuse him of and is undoubtedly better equipped than they of the moral arsenal needed to condemn it. No, the Ogres are the reactionary forces that believe that they are right regardless of their ability to justify it, and who prefer to fall for the easy temptation of censorship than take the difficult path to enlightenment.

As Auden said:

“The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plane,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.”

Cry Me A River, Barbra.

Cry Me a River, Barbra.

A reply to Barbra Streisand's piece, published in The Huffington Post, entitled "The Sexism in American Politics.

I am not quite old enough to remember the career of Ms. Barbra Streisand. I’m told it was once rather impressive; she boasts a resume that glitters with the accumulated stardust of decades.

I’m sure she has achieved much that is worthy of respect. Gandhi probably did not say, of Western civilization, “I think it would be a good idea,” but one would be justified in saying the same of meritocracy. It is more concept than truth. Still, success is success and sustained success is a feat of its own.

But it is an unfortunate foible of our over-the-counter culture that a placement on the Billboard Top 100 grants, as an unofficial award, a platform from which celebrity may pronounce and pontificate and hold court in the real world; an arena from which celebrities are by definition removed.

So it is that I have long been aware of Ms Streisand not as a singer and an actress but in her role as a moonlighting political activist; a friend and supporter of the Clintons and a donor to their Foundation.

All three roles were merged in a paltry and patronizing piece in the Huffington Post, penned by Ms. Streisand, under the title The Sexism in American Politics.

The argument, for those who’ve hitherto avoided exposure to it, can be fairly summarised as follows: Hillary Clinton is disliked, sometimes viscerally so, because her critics are sexist and cannot stomach the thought of a woman having power.

To quote Ms. Streisand directly: “There is no one in this country who would deny the competence, intellect, stamina, warmth and courage of Hillary Rodham Clinton... But the criticism of Hillary Clinton has again demonstrated that the strong, competent woman is still a threatening figure in our culture.”

That is a challenge I intend to meet in due course. But first: I have never found this excuse to be anything other than facetious. If I were a woman, living in the United States, I think I would be fed up with the likes of Streisand, and the odious Madeleine Albright, speaking at me in this tone of voice.  (Hillary Clinton’s dire performance amongst millennial women in particular suggests that I would not be alone.) I think I would be fed up with being told that policy and record and character are to be considered irrelevant by presumption of merit earned and that Ms. Clinton deserves my vote because we happen share a gender.

As it is, I am a man living in the United Kingdom. But I am morally certain that my opposition to the likely Democratic nominee stems from something a little more substantive than my feelings toward, shall we say, the female form and visage.

I am quite willing to concede the broader, non-specific point about sexism in political discourse, but I was surprised at the relatively innocuous nature of the examples cited by Streisand.

“When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted she should, “Smile. You just had a big night,” should we have been surprised? Hillary Clinton has a great smile and smiles often. So does Barack Obama. So does Bill Clinton. But no one would tell those two men to smile.”

This strikes me as ill-treatment of an important issue. There are tropes and visualizations and dog-whistle innuendos reserved exclusively for women in public life, to be sure. Donald Trump’s spat with Megyn Kelly is perhaps the most prominent case (though Ms. Streisand would have served her own purposes better had she cited his far more overt and reprehensible response to Clinton’s late return to the ABC debate stage in December). But to claim that something so innocuous as an injunction to smile ranks amongst the worst cases of sexism in American life is to invite the charge of over-sensitivity. Facile it may be, but it is no more severe or degrading than Rubio’s ‘small hands’ quip against Trump, or the talk of John McCain’s senility in ’08, or Hillary Clinton’s own suggestion (in the same campaign year) that Barack Obama was too black to be president.

But these remarks, when made about or against Clinton, are evidence of what Streisand believes to be “a pernicious double standard” to which Ms. Clinton alone is subject. That may or may not be true, but if Streisand believes that making women the subject of special standards is a bad thing then perhaps she will consider advising her friend to avoid playing to that same disparity in future. For it is not just Clinton’s allegedly sexist critics who define her candidacy in terms of gender but also Clinton herself: it was Clinton, not her critics, who deemed her womanhood to be more important than policy during ABC’s Las Vegas debate.

“How,” asked Anderson Cooper, “would you not be a third term of President Obama?”

“Well,” Clinton replied, grinning with arms outspread and a confident twinkle in the eye, “I think that’s pretty obvious.” Whoops and cheers all around the room for that remark. Clinton went on to say that “Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had up until this point, including President Obama.”

Clinton is no stranger to this sort of pandering to identity over policy and substance. Let no one claim she is not a quick and studious learner: prolonged proximity to loathsome manipulators like Dick Morris, friend of both Bill and Hillary and an infamous race-baiter who exploited the identity-related fears of the white working class during the first Clinton administration, has surely rubbed off. 

But either women are different, and thus subject to different standards, or they are not. Either Ms. Streisand believes gender disparity to be a bad thing (in which case she disagrees with the candidate she is supporting) or she does not. I should like to know which view she intends to adopt.

If identity is to be treated as the first of all issues then I should also like to ask Ms. Streisand how it is that she finds herself defending someone who both defended and enabled what we might charitably call the imposition – on Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky and others - of Bill Clinton’s services to women. If we are permitted indignation by association, I should like to know how she can support a candidate who supported DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and who claimed that the Reagans were good for LGBT citizens. If identity is important, I should like to know how Ms. Streisand can support a candidate who played the race card against Barrack Obama and whose husband, not to mention many of her associates and employees and advisors, is a Dixiecrat.

If, on the other hand, Ms. Clinton is to be judged by the same standards as her peers and on, as Streisand herself puts it, “the substance of what a candidate has to offer: his/her policies, his/her agenda, his/her experience, knowledge and demeanor in dealing with world leaders,” then surely she cannot complain about the sexism of Clinton’s critics when they point out her compromising connections to Wall Street, when they point to her botched healthcare reforms (and the fact that hundreds if not thousands of lives in Bosnia were spent on securing it coverage in the American media); when they question her links to Big Pharma and Big Oil; when they look into the murky world of her financiers and tremble with rage, and when they question her conduct and competency in the office of Secretary of State and conclude that her oft vaunted experience is a fortress built on sand. Surely Ms. Streisand would then understand our non-sexist aversion to any candidate on good terms with Henry Kissinger, would then appreciate our doubts about Ms. Clinton’s principles given that she behaves as though she has none, would then share our ire at a candidate who cynically exploits identity for personal gain.

Streisand says “We should stop being afraid of women, and meet them on a level playing field without resorting to name calling and sexist condescension.”  Rest assured: We are more than happy to oblige. But Ms. Streisand should be aware that a level playing field does not free her preferred candidate from criticism. Far from it.