Chapter Five

The Spaniard, the Brazilian, the Russian and the German

The British Foreign Secretary William Hague was answering questions in the House of Commons early in September 2013 - the subject was Gibraltar. In the July, Spain had reacted to the Gibraltar government’s decision to lay seventy-four concrete blocks on the seabed off the coast, which impeded Spanish fishing. New restrictions were imposed at the border with Gibraltar. Mr Ian Paisley Jr. rose to his feet and said: ‘Can I make it abundantly clear to the Spanish that if they continue their hostility to the people of Gibraltar, that you [Mr Hague] will tell the ambassador here in London to pack his sombrero, straw donkey and sangria and go?’ Hague met the suggestion with an indulgent smile and the rejoinder, ‘I think, if you’ll forgive me, we will use slightly more diplomatic language’. The exchange was reported approvingly, but, it must be said, fairly and accurately by the Daily Express.[1]

As someone with a deep affection for Spain and the Spanish, who lived for most of two years within sight of Gibraltar, I must point out that I don’t think that Spain has the slightest moral claim to the territory. Spain has two colonies on the mainland of Morocco, Ceuta, which can be seen from Gibraltar, and Melilla. Helen Wade, a bilingual journalist who grew up in Gibraltar, published a sane and good-humoured article on the subject in the New Statesman of March/April 2014, with which I happily concur; I would only dissent from her claim that it took twenty years after Spain fully reopened the border in 1985 for Spanish-Gibraltarian relations to thaw.

When I lived in southern Spain in the early 1990s, I found that the Spanish accepted Gibraltar just as they accepted the British exiles living alongside them (including, temporarily, myself). Jealous emotions over sovereignty were for the politicians to indulge in. The significant fact is that Paisley’s choice of words caused no stir and no objection; if, on the other hand, he had used demeaning stereotypes when referring to the diplomatic representative of India or of an African country, he would have been regarded with disgust, and quite rightly so.

Forty years of membership of the community of Europe seem to have taught a large section of the British public and most British politicians nothing at all, except to be even more insular and anti-European or to defer to anti-European sentiments. Paisley’s words fell on fertile ground in a country in which the current Prime Minister promises a referendum on leaving Europe and lives in fear of the anti-European right wing of his party and of the UK Independence Party. The grotesque pressure group UKIP is able to wield power vastly beyond its size and status because of the fears of mainstream politicians that it will attract the support of disgruntled voters.

It had long been predicted that UKIP would perform extremely well in the local and European elections of 2014, and that is exactly what happened. Of course, in any foreseeable political conditions, UKIP will never be a serious electoral force; support for this party will peak (or has already peaked); the greatest imaginable UKIP success would be a handful of Westminster MPs. As I write, the total is two.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell warned of ‘a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika’. This is a partially accurate description of UKIP - the real nature of the party and its appeal was demonstrated by the incautious remarks of some of its members who were unable to keep their mouths shut and were then expelled for their lack of self-control. Sadly, the deep-seated racism of which UKIP is a symptom will prove to be far more enduring.

This anti-European group has made British xenophobia more acceptable, so that mainstream politicians who lack nerve and integrity feel that they have to compromise with these prejudices. This process is likely to accelerate if Britain leaves the European Union; in a Britain outside Europe, racism - especially anti-European and anti-Muslim - will become acceptable and normal. A Britain-for-the-British attitude may become as fundamental and expected as ‘anti-communism’ used to be in American life. Leaving the EU would be a far worse fate for the British than for most European societies. New leaders of the Thatcher and Blair type, armed with an even nastier British chauvinism, would thrive in that atmosphere.

Back in the same month of September 2013, Raquel Rolnik, a UN inspector with responsibility for the human right to housing, visited the UK to investigate the government’s ‘spare room subsidy’ or ‘bedroom tax’. Miss Rolnik recommended that the bedroom tax should be abolished as an abuse of human rights:

The right to housing is not about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without any social ties. It is not about reshuffling people according to a snapshot of the number of bedrooms at a given night. It is about enabling environments for people to maintain their family and community bonds, their local schools, work places and health services,... education, work, food and health.

The Coalition government, in which the Liberals had compliantly accepted the bedroom tax, was already highly sensitive on this issue. It must be said, in fairness, that the Mailonline article by Matt Chorley was pro-government but reasonably even-handed. The Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps was furious: ‘It is pretty outrageous... Who invited her?’ (We might wonder if UN inspectors need an invitation to look at conditions in a member state. Isn’t it only our enemies who try to keep them out in order to conceal their ill deeds?)

The Conservative MP for Peterborough, Stewart Jackson, called Miss Rolnik a ‘loopy Brazilian leftie’. No doubt the refusal by Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector in Iraq, to endorse the claims by Bush and Blair that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction had left painful memories. Clearly, the UN was only to be accorded any credibility or respect when it supported the point of view of the British establishment. All this was pretty predictable, except that it demonstrated that the fact that Miss Rolnik was a representative of the UN, a foreigner and a Brazilian was as offensive as her condemnation of the bedroom tax.[2] It was yet another ugly feature in the deepening atmosphere of xenophobia in Britain today.

The bedroom tax itself is certainly more oppressive and cruel than Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax, although it has not been met with protests on the mass scale of those directed at the poll tax. It shows vividly how irreversible Mrs Thatcher’s revolution in attitudes and outlook really is; for without that revolution it would not have been conceived, executed and found broadly acceptable; the same must also be said of the existence of ATOS and its obscene treatment of the sick and disabled during ‘work capability assessments’, although these measures do seem to have been defeated by public disgust and a handful of brave individuals.

The justification for the bedroom tax is the saving of some £500 million every year. Tenants in social housing have 14% of their housing benefit cut if they have a spare bedroom and 25% cut if they have two or more spare bedrooms; the idea is to force them out into smaller homes. The conditions on which housing benefit is paid and the checks carried out are very stringent, most of all for those paid total housing benefit to cover their entire rent; thus those affected are already defined by law as the poorest members of society; unable to make up the shortfall caused by the loss in housing benefit, they fall further into arrears and debt, risking eviction. Overwhelmingly, they live in a house with a spare bedroom because this was the size of the home originally offered to them by councils and housing associations, before the bedroom tax was envisaged, or because their children have grown up and moved out.

Quite apart from pushing people into accommodation away from their friends, families, communities and the rest of the social network that Raquel Rolnik referred to, or denying them the natural right to a spare room for a guest or for grown up children when they come to visit - we need only think of the typical size of the homes of the politicians who invented this law - the stock of available smaller homes is not large enough. Therefore, the victims often have no choice except to stay where they are in debt. On 29 March 2014, The Independent/i reported BBC research that revealed that only 6% of the tenants affected had in fact moved home. A report commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions itself, published on 15 July 2014, presented an even more damning account of debt and ‘heat or eat’ hardship for those affected.

The supporting ‘moral’ argument for the bedroom tax goes as follows. How can it be moral for some families to occupy houses too large for them and get their rent paid when some families are forced to live in accommodation that is far too small? The answer is that it is not moral at all for people to be forced to live in homes that are too small for their needs. It is also not moral to address that problem by making other disadvantaged people suffer. The Thatcherite view of the poorest members of society as an inert, undifferentiated mass to be shifted in this or that direction according to expediency and policy has reached new depths after Margaret Thatcher’s death. After the seemingly permanent advances of the decades that followed the Second World War, this development is a surprising twist of history. This is a point worth emphasizing: Britain, with its ill will directed outwards towards other nations and inwards towards its own citizens, presents the spectacle of a disagreeable society - I use the mildest possible term.

The instability in Ukraine increased as the spring and summer of 2014 advanced, perhaps with serious and unknown consequences... I wrote the previous sentence when I was completing an earlier draft of this book. I did not foresee the emotional anguish I felt when I forced myself to look at images of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, shot down over eastern Ukraine on Thursday 17 July. I have travelled by passenger jet a good deal in the last thirty years, and often with a child. And there were images of a child’s teddy bear, a t-shirt, a Lonely Planet guidebook: I had not seen such an array of the intimate possessions of slaughtered innocent people since I visited the death camp museum of Auschwitz in 1997.

It is hard to retain any objectivity in the face of such pain and horror. It becomes difficult to ask the most basic questions. Yet an attempt at objectivity and the effort to ask questions must be made. Why was the airliner flying over eastern Ukraine, an area in which military transport planes had already been shot down? If MH17 was indeed shot down by a long range SA-11 ‘Buk’ missile, then this weapon can reach aircraft at 72,000 feet. Passenger jets were ordered to fly at above 32,000 feet over eastern Ukraine - a typical altitude would be about 35,000 feet for an airliner. Simon Calder in The Independent/i of 19 July, quoting Jock Lowe, a former BA captain, was one of the few to consider this question. Airlines are among the most competitive enterprises that exist. Perhaps Malaysia Airlines - as well as the forces on the ground in Ukraine - should have provided answers.

This terrible incident cannot exclude consideration of the Ukrainian conflict as a whole, which is surrounded by a thicket of opinions, claims and counterclaims. Those who tend to defend Putin and Russia include - surprisingly - some people of left-wing outlook, some anti-European Conservatives, opponents of the European Union and a number of neo-Nazi groups, as well as those who try to face unpalatable realities honestly. From the first, Putin’s Russia was acting upon the same ancient considerations: intense sensitivity about its status as a great power and what might be called a justified paranoia about strategic encirclement. Also, there is no evidence that the Crimean referendum was only an exercise carried out at the point of a Kalashnikov; certainly, Kalashnikovs abounded, but that does not necessarily mean that a majority of Crimeans did not want to be citizens of Russia.

In the coldest days of the Cold War, J.K. Paasikivi the President of Finland - the country that has fought the Russians longer and harder than any other - repeatedly referred to Russia’s ‘legitimate interests’. Those who point out that Russia still has such interests, nearly seventy years later, are not necessarily ‘Putin’s useful idiots’ as Michael Mosbacher called them in the magazine Standpoint in the summer of 2014. The reality of Russia’s position and Putin’s attitude can be traced back to the conveniently forgotten fact that Britain has not even been able to conduct an intelligent foreign policy for years.

Despite Blair’s desperate attempts to be a great international statesman, his actions and those of his circle look increasingly inept and silly, as does the posturing of David Cameron and William Hague and his successor Philip Hammond over Ukraine. How long will the outstanding British arms exports to Russia, embarrassingly still in place as Cameron called most loudly for a complete ban on arms sales to Moscow, be remembered? Or the ‘coincidence’ of the British government suddenly allowing a proper inquiry into the murder of the exiled Alexander Litvinenko after refusing it for seven years?

Blair’s own lack of judgement led to occasions when he was castigated by Syria’s President Assad and by Putin in public. The continuing problem of Russia has at least one specific cause. Individuals can change history when the objective conditions exist - or they can lamentably fail to do so. Lord George Robertson, Blair’s Defence Secretary, later Secretary-General of NATO, was asked by Putin: ‘When are you going to invite Russia to join NATO?’ Robertson’s answer was: ‘Well, we don’t invite countries, you apply.’ Putin shrugged and said: ‘Well, Russia isn’t going to stand in the queue with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’[3] After this snub, Putin - in his own eyes the leader of a Great World Power - never tried again.

David Cameron seemed to await hopefully the visit to the UK by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, on 27 February 2014, during which she addressed both Houses of Parliament. Presumably, he hoped for something to placate the right wing of his party and even something to help him out-manoeuvre UKIP. Such pressures had already led to the attention given to curtailing immigration. Chancellor Merkel offered some support on the idea of restrictions on how quickly new arrivals could claim benefits, but conceded nothing on the fundamental EU principle of free movement of citizens.

Cameron’s attempt to prevent Jean-Claude Juncker becoming President of the European Commission was something that - surely - he knew could never succeed. This anti-European stunt was undertaken in order to please the Tory right wing, upstage UKIP, and provide justification for Britain’s future withdrawal from Europe.

The government’s own fiscal watchdog, The Office for Budget Responsibility, had already warned of the need for more migrant workers, not less, in order to keep public finances stable, because of the good effect of an influx of productive, working age migrants upon growth and on keeping down the national debt over the next fifty years. The argument is not difficult to grasp, and was spelt out in the OBR’s annual long-term analysis in July 2013. Internally, Britain has an increasingly ageing and decreasingly productive population; migrant workers earn, spend and pay taxes, thus contributing to paying the public sector’s debt and having ‘a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances’.[4] And yet one of the few reasonably reliable guides to the British view of Europe is the British Social Attitudes 30 report published by Natcen Social Research in 2013: ‘Euroscepticism is firmly in the ascendancy, with a record 67% wanting either to leave or for Britain to remain but the EU to become less powerful.’ The strength of that anti-Europeanism may well take Britain out of the European Union in the likely event that a referendum is held on membership.

Leaving aside the array of social, medical, commercial and economic advantages of European membership, we come to the bedrock fact that the European Union is the only one of the world’s huge economic blocs to which we can belong on the basis of any kind of equality and partnership. Sentimental talk about the Commonwealth is nonsensical: the countries of the Commonwealth have long ago gone their own way. To remain part of Europe culturally and psychologically as well as politically and economically, or to leave it, will be the crucial question in the future of Britain in as far as that can in any way be foreseen. Very little in British society today gives cause for belief in a happy outcome. All too soon we are almost certain to see a President in Washington who is once again eager to make war on the enemies of the dwindling American empire. An isolated, impoverished Britain outside Europe will inevitably be dragged in America’s wake as an even more despised underling state than it was made by Tony Blair during the War on Terror. The British also face the need to survive in a world in which global capitalism can never work properly and must repeatedly break down.

Following the treatment of the Chagossians by the Wilson government, the use of torture in Northern Ireland, the MI5 campaign against Scargill and the miners, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the allegations of child abuse at Westminster should have come as no surprise: were they not inevitable? The bare facts are worth recording here because of the way in which such information is lost and distorted.

An MP called Geoffrey Dickens handed the Home Secretary Leon Brittan a dossier on the abuse of children by members of the establishment and senior politicians in 1983. On 3 July 2014 it was announced that the dossier had disappeared; and Brittan changed his story regarding it twice. The Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill revealed that 114 files relating to child sex abuse had also disappeared. Simon Danczuk MP was warned by a senior Conservative MP not to name Leon Brittan. Perhaps most hideously of all, Tim Fortescue, a government whip when Heath was Prime Minister, had boasted in a BBC documentary in 1995 that whips could cover up ‘scandals involving small boys’ for MPs.

On Tuesday 8 July 2014, the British government appointed a retired senior judge, Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, aged eighty, as head of an inquiry into child abuse; this woman’s brother, Sir Michael Havers, was Attorney General in the 1980s. Under pressure from MPs, the Baroness stepped down one week after her appointment. These events speak for themselves. If such things had happened in another country or in some earlier historical period, what conclusions would any sensible person draw? How warmly some members of the British establishment and some senior politicians must have welcomed the distracting events in Ukraine! How relieved they must have been to reach the long summer recess of Parliament!

Orwell said in 1941 that the ‘real England’ is ‘still kept under by a generation of ghosts’. When we consider the permanent, unelected government from the Privy Council to the senior civil servants to the secret intelligence service inhabiting society like a tumour, we might want to change that to ‘a generation of spooks’. We can only hope that some of the energies of the country that invented capitalism, socialism, industrialism and feminism and defied Hitler still remain.

1 ‘Hague urged to tell Spain ambassador to “pack his straw donkey and go” over Gibraltar row’ (http://www.express.co.uk, last accessed on 02 February 2014).

2 Matt Chorley, Mailonline Political Editor, ‘Tory fury at “loopy Brazilian leftie” United Nations official who launched “political” attack on government welfare reforms’, 11 September 2013 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk, last accessed 09 September 2013).

3 This notorious exchange was most recently quoted in the BBC Radio 4 Profile documentary broadcast on 09 March 2014.

4 Ben Chu, economics editor, ‘“Working-age” migrants needed to stem debt’, The Independent/i, 18 July 2013.