+Ridiculously Nigel Fartage still gets away with trading on some kind of reputation as an ‘outsider.’ A bit like Trump—he’s ‘one of ours’ inside the system, doing what he should, namely destroying it from the inside. What can be done about Fartage? Surely the English system has ways of neutralising his sleazy threats? Why not start by knighting him? Fartage I suspect would like nothing more (for starters) than a knighthood.  Then make him a member of the Privy Council (yes, give him a toilet seat too). The Rt. Hon. Sir Nigel Fartage has a ring to it, does it not? He really wouldn’t say no. He is a needy person, and the gongs would sit well with him. Perhaps an OM could clinch it. Then at his investiture, the King could chop his head off. (Oooppps! I think I’ve had one too many! Cheers!) Anyway, his outsider schitck needs puncturing somehow . . . he's no more an outsider than any Tory I can think of. 
 
+Some good news at last! The Chinese car company BYD has now developed a battery that can be charged in five minutes and deliver a 400 miles range. This will knock Tesla off its perch, whose batteries take a lot longer. Along with a widespread, global revulsion for Elon Musk, Tesla’s car sales are in free fall. Maybe this is one reason Trump has imposed 25% tariffs on car imports. But if other countries reciprocate their own markets will only improve and become less dependent upon the U.S. No bad thing. Ideally, Tesla will face receivership, although were that to happen I’m sure Musk would go cap in hand to the White House for a bail-out. Socialism for billionaires! 

Beverley seems to attract a certain kind of MP (i.e. Tories). Clinging on at the moment is Graham Stuart (clinging on = 124 majority last time round).  Of course, just because you’re a Tory doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad person, although it can point in that direction. But this isn’t about the rumbustious incumbent, but a  predecessor, James Cran, whom I fought in the 1992 general election. I have only just heard that Cran popped his clogs a couple of years ago. I never met him—he wasn’t interested in silly things like hustings meetings—nor even sharing a platform at the count. An invisible. arrogant man. It is only now that I have been pointed to his Wikipedia entry:
 
‘Following his death, James Cran's daughter, Dr Alexandra Walker, alleged sustained emotional (and occasionally physical) abuse at his hands, beginning in her childhood and carrying on up until she broke off contact with him shortly before he died. Dr Walker described Cran as "terrifying", a "Jekyll and Hyde character" prone to mood swings and sudden fits of rage exacerbated by  alcohol. She recounted that he once locked her in a car for "what felt like hours" for accidentally hitting him with a  skimming stone, and tied her arms down at a restaurant as a toddler for throwing a  salt shaker, among various other incidents. Walker also felt that Cran consistently belittled her as an adult, and  emotionally blackmailed her in the aftermath of her mother's death.’ (originally reported in the i.)
 
Had this been known in his term of office he may have been forced out on his ear. It makes me wonder what else MPs got away with in the day. Only in the last few weeks an MP has been forced to resign for the innocent act of physically attacking somebody.
 
I am reminded of another encounter, this with former MP for Normanton, Albert Roberts in 2000 when I was chasing the parliamentary selection in Morley and Rothwell. Albert, then 91 years old lived in his architect designed house in Rothwell. I nice old chap he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. I have to confess that at the time I hadn’t realised that he was one of corrupt architect John Poulson’s consiglieres, and also acted on behalf of a character named Francisco Franco. Albert seems to have avoided much of the bad Poulson publicity and his Wikipedia entry is surprisingly brief. It’s all distant history now, I suppose. He retired 50 years ago. Anyway, I’m sure I would have got his vote, but neither I nor any of the other candidates did: he died not that long after I visited him. Had I known his history at the time I called, would I have said ‘Albert, I don’t want your vote?’ I doubt it. The sins of the voters shouldn’t be visited on aspirants.

+Landing back in Blighty at Gatwick Airport one is treated on the way to passport control to a stand full of free newspapers, not Metro but the likes of the New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, China Daily, Financial Times, Jewish Chronicle and magazines such as The Tatler. What a choice, but there’s only so much one can carry. I picked up a few, since these days I barely ever read newspapers in print, least of all China Daily, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Horror! But actually, that’s not so different to saying that the FT or the Telegraph is owned by the British Capitalist Party. They are, in effect. Anyway one thing they’re all agreed on is that Trump is a disaster, even if such a frank appraisal is delivered in rather more emollient terms. Trump is putting a lot of noses out of joint and the markets (it is said) hate uncertainty. Actually, I think they thrive on it. It’s only going to be a question of who the losers will be. And Trump, as we all know, loves losers, i.e. those whose pockets he can filch.
 
Reading the Jewish Chronicle is a different experience. I gleaned an impression from it that its mission in life is to stoke fears of anti-Semitism rather than dampen them. If after reading it and I were a Jew I might be afraid to step outside my front door. Still, the fear exists and given centuries of persecution it is reasonable for some fear to exist. But the JC indulges itself with columnists like that most hilarious comedienne in British life today, Maureen Lipman. She’s got it in for the BBC and thinks that Jeremy Bowen should be cancelled, not least because he keeps reminding us that journalists are denied access to Gaza by the Israeli government.  She says ’. . . in breach of yet another guideline—[he] fails to mention that Hamas keeps brutal control of reporting from Gaza and inflates casualty figures.’ What might be the solution for that, Maureen? Are you too dim to see it? The JC, including Lipman has some praise for the BBC’s handling of the war, but one misstep, in this case the Beeb’s shortlived broadcast of Gaza sympathetic feature How To Survive a War Zone upends all of that. As usual it’s a case of shoot the messenger and ignore the message, although to her very limited credit Lipman does mention one thing that was actually in the hated film, which was a reference to a family wedding. What propaganda! How dare these people have any hope for the future?!
 
Another familiar name crops up in a JC news report, regarding the demand of Starmer lackey and parachute MP, arch-Zionist Luke Akehurst to revive Tory legislation (which fell at the election) to ban public bodies from supporting BDS. Local councils he believes have a patriotic duty to fall into line with the government of the day’s foreign policy. Of course, ‘Akehurst’ written backwards and upside-down spells ‘arsehole’ and by this arsehole’s reckoning one can only assume that no local councils back in the 70s and 80s should have supported the anti-apartheid movement, named streets and squares after Mandela or for that matter declared themselves nuclear free zones. We’ll see how this one goes, but with today’s Labour Party the concept of shame seems rather outmoded.
 
After all this, what better antidote than to turn to the glossy pages of The Tatler? A fond farewell sort of an article gets to grips with the horrendous suggestion that some beloved hereditary peers of the realm (92 of them) will soon be kicked out of the old club. It seems like the big difference between the House of Lords and, e.g. Boodles or Whites is that the former gives you £362 a day for being there whereas the latter ones charge. Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy (aka Lord Strathclyde) talking of the previous Blair-era cull said ‘there is no doubt in my mind that some people died as a result of it and were horrified by what had happened to them and their family.’ I wonder how many of these families made their historic brass from pit villages (or slaves for that matter). But these great upholders of British traditions will not be short of places to go, as revealed in the pages devoted to the ‘Country House Awards.’ Congratulations should surely go to Hugo Rittson-Thomas, whose well manicured and no doubt sublimely rolled lawns at Walcot House won the Best Croquet Lawn prize (what’s that called I wonder—the Prescott Cup?). Chin chin!
  
+I may have used this quotation before, to illustrate vulture capitalism at work. This week the inevitable cuts and closures have begun:

‘Morrisons has racked up £1.5 billion of losses, a year after being bought by US private equity firm CD&R. The  grocer was acquired by CD&R in October 2021 for £7 billion, in a debt-fuelled deal led by former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy. The deal saw £6.1 billion of debt piled onto Morrisons’ balance sheet, resulting in large interest payments and high exposure to increases in borrowing rates.’ (Retail Gazette 23rd March 2023)
 

+I've been away for a few days attending a conference, which may or may not be described as 'political.' This was an event put on by the Museum Tinguely in Basel to celebrate the life and work of artist Jean Tinguely whose birth centenary it is this year. It was described as an academic conference so perhaps I was a little out of my depth. It was one of those events where you discover that a majority of the rest of the audience are there to make presentations, and where questions from said audience are framed in their background of highly developed academic knowledge. Still, I asked a couple of questions on the basis that if one goes to such an event one should. Anonymity is quite sufficient cover for naivety - if indeed my questions were naive in the absence of any deep historical knowledge. Tinguely's remarkable work doesn't demand an education in classical modernism, but a phrase which stuck in my mind was that his work had 'comic seriousness,' which to me has a Zen-like quality. Much of Tinguely's time on the planet especially back in the 60s through the 80s might have been infected by the influence of Zen. An interesting possibility which wasn't explored related his work to the concept of 'comic seriousness' which tangentially refers (in my view) to the aesthetic of 'Wabi Sabi' which can find beauty in all things, not least in unnoticed or discarded things such as a crack in the concrete or an old bit of rusty machinery (indeed a crack in the concrete was once turned into a deliberate artwork in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern). I think Tinguely found beauty in creating new forms from things we normally consider to be discarded. I doubt he was ever happier than when he was scouring a scrap yard for old new bits. The scrapyard was his palette.

Talking of new things, whilst I was sat at a bar near a roundabout watching the cars going past, it appeared that every one of them had come straight out of a showroom. Basel, or the central bits of what I saw of it appears impossibly clean and well ordered. Even most of the cyclists, of whom there are many were showing lights and didn't feel inclined to ride on the pavements. I know Switzerland is 'well ordered' and in that respect may be an outlier but there could be lessons we could learn from it. Having said which, I spent a short time in the Kunstmuseum Zurich, where an extensive display examined the dark underbelly of Swiss society, through the lense of the Swiss art collector Emil Bürhle, who became Switzerland's richest man, making a multi-billion fortune selling arms to both sides in World War Two. His art collection developed in the 'favourable' market conditions of the period, when inevitably much Jewish owned art was sold or stolen. His art collection is thus controversial in its provenance. Many Swiss I imagine might still prefer to look away from the uglier side of their rich inheritance. At least in the art world some of the veils are being torn aside, although reading on Wikipedia about one curator’s approach to this, the absence of evidence sounds very much like evidence of absence.
 
I began by wondering whether politics was involved in the conference or not. It was, but nobody seemed quite sure how. For example, Tinguely created a series of sculptures called the Baluba series, the Baluba being a tribe in the Congo at the time of the anti-colonial movement and the Congolese fight for independence. Was Tinguely expressing his solidarity with them, or merely, a bit like Picasso discovering new sources of inspiration? I think Tinguely probably was expressing his solidarity with the anti-colonial movement, since he wasn't very keen on capitalism which his art appears to critique. An interesting intervention in this debate came from Samia Halaby, the remarkable Palestinian-born 89 year old woman who is credited with being a pioneer of computer art back in the 1980s. In a discussion about Tinguely's incendiary work Homage to New York, which self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, Halaby, who described herself as a Palestinian Marxist, suggested Tinguely had conned 200 rich Americans to pay for a sculpture which then destroyed itself. As simple as that. Perhaps Tinguely predates Banksy by 50 years in this regard, although Tinguely wasn't a 'celebrity artist' at this point. Whatever the truth of the matter, perhaps the politics in art is in the eye of the beholder, especially so in this post-modern period.
 
The breakfast experience in hotels abroad would provide plenty of food for social anthropologists. Some guests like to stand in front of the buffet looking at everything like the proverbial mule that cannot decide what to eat. But unlike the mule, these guests eventually leave with heaving plates piled high. Others insist on stuffing whole baguettes through the toaster machine. At which the queue presents no obstacle. I have noticed that there is a singular, common feature which unites all these people: they're all foreigners.

+Andy Haldene, formerly Chief Economist at the Bank of England and now Chief Executive at the Royal Society of Arts is not looking for a gong. He wrote in a recent supplement in the New Statesman 'As they entered office in mid-2024 one thing was certain about Labour's plan for growth: they did not have one. There was no recipe book, and few raw ingredients for growth were in place. Apart from a shopping list wistfully titled 'securonomics,' the kitchen at No.11 was bare.' On its industrial green strategy Haldene writes 'The government's green paper was a middling-quality undergraduate essay, and without government money as lubricant, the leap from academic words to practical action is large.' Well said. But it's not all pessimism and gloom. In another piece Liam 'there is no money' Byrne MP, seemingly an intellectual heavyweight in Starmer’s Labour, has platitudes aplenty to offer. Tackle the disjointedness of government he proclaims, 'We can't afford this any longer. Which is why the comprehensive spending review needs to deliver a revolution in reinventing government for new times so that the public sector once again becomes an enabler of change.' You guessed it - AI will vaporise disjointedness and it'll be like the UK gets new knee and hip replacements all at once! And of course 'securonomics' - a word I haven't heard Reeves use lately - will get a new relevance with a massive uplift to defence spending, a 'strong, dependable, predictable' source of exports for the UK’ according to Byrne. The reliable, dependable treadmill of austerity will no doubt put the cap on our wonderful growth agenda. It's all worthy of a 2:1 at least. And we’ll keep Israel’s genocide going to boot!

+Talk about swearing at the radio. Listening this evening to Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Impoverishment and Penury being interviewed by Evan Davis about Labour’s proposed £5 billion a year cuts to welfare payments was an excruciating experience. She’s told us the figure for the financial saving (which of course is not the main driver of change) but when asked by Davis how many people would now find work as a result of their new ’incentive’ to do so she declined to answer, merely telling us that we had to wait for a ’due process’ of the Office of Budget Responsibility to look into it. Why weren’t they asked to come up with an answer before she made her statement to the House of Commons? Shades of Truss here I think. Barely a week goes by without more justification for me having torn up my Labour Party membership card. But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps we’ll just have to wait to hear how much extra the government is going to pour into the Employment Service (or whatever it’s called these days) to help people get back to work. Perhaps food banks too will get some government support. They’ll need it.
 
+Somewhat buried by today’s news of the government’s Scrooge-like impersonation was a suggestion from the leader of the opposition that perhaps the 2050 target of reaching net zero carbon emissions needs to be abandoned, lest it hurts our living standards. I’m not surprised—the Tories are fighting Reform on their hard-right flank—but this pronouncement surely must demolish any suggestion that Kemi Bad Enoch has any intellectual capacity whatsoever. On the climate change front, and with a load full of caveats, Tony Blair is beginning to look like a positive saint. I do feel a bit sorry for Ed Miliband though. He is attacked daily by the right-wing press (who obviously have Bad Enoch’s ear) and is clearly having to fight a rearguard action in government on climate change, in which Rachel Reeves’ love of new airports seems paramount.

To what extent I wonder is Donald Trump a wrecker of hallowed political theory, which is to say that in politics there is a general, widely accepted albeit slowly realised notion of ’progress?’ What is this progress and did it ever really exist? My view is that there is no linear historical progression, the sort of thing that drew a line from the ’Dark Ages’ through the Medieval period to the Enlightenment then the bliss wrought by the Industrial Revolution which heralded economic liberation and empowerment through capitalist democracy. And Twentieth Century horrors beyond imagining. Today’s globalists dwell on these themes but now they're in retreat, coming to terms with the hubris of their vision. The shock is not just down to one man. Trump is a lightning conductor, not a cause of the overloaded electrostatic storm blowing all our fuses. The thing is, we’re not heading to a Marxist revolutionary moment when people wake up and move through their scientific dialectical gears to the next stage of emancipation and what some people wistfully call ’late capitalism’ (as if the phrase signalled a new benign stage of economic development and the end of exploitation). If ’late capitalism’ has any substantial meaning at all it simply denotes the final death pangs of planetary exhaustion. These pangs will be accommodated in ever decreasing circles, until the last drop is squeezed out of our extraction of their value. Perhaps Elon Musk understands this, although his dream of creating a new clone-like civilisation on Mars is doomed to failure, not that it could happen in his lifetime anyway.  As I write this people are being murdered in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan—and in different kinds of wars all around the globe. More wars are yet to come. Who says we left the ‘Middle Ages’ behind us? Who says Trump (and his sort) is  responsible? He is merely a mirror. (OK yes, a lightning conductor as well).

​ Apparently the Dalai Lama, who is 89 is suggesting that his successor could be chosen from any country, so as to free the choice from the Chinese Tibetan dictatorship. I think I would like to see one of Trump’s offspring get the job. As things stand perhaps it’s time to give the  sheer absurdity of our earthly existence its full due.

Am I gobsmacked? Well yes, just a bit. This is the final paragraph of a Guardian editorial on the government’s latest approach to austerity (i.e hit the weak):
 
This is austerity rebranded as reform, except without the Tory bravado. George Osborne at least called it what it was. Sir Keir  echoes Conservative rhetoric, signalling an appeal to voters who view Labour as too soft on welfare. This strategy is being shaped by his chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ­self‑imposed fiscal straitjacket and the Blairite politics of his chief of staff,  Morgan McSweeney. They aren’t unlocking Britain’s economic potential – just flattering themselves that they are. The reality is that the evidence says otherwise. But when the political choice is fiscal prudence or human dignity, this government appears to have made up its mind.
 
What I wonder is the Guardian exactly for? I packed up buying it years ago. No doubt star columnist Polly Toynbee will tell us it’s all for the best, and everybody should just be patient, waiting for Rachel Reeves’ magical uplift just round the corner, brought about of course by these very decent people in charge. Who might they be? Treasury bods who know best? The Bank of England? The City? (Where’s your cigarette paper to put between them when you need it?) My recommendation is that anybody with a bit of spare cash should invest it in BAE Systems and who knows such an investment may shortly come with tax breaks. Given how long it takes to turn the latest dream defence technology into workable reality such an investment should pay dividends for the next 20 or 30 years. Most of what Labour thought it might achieve I suspect now looks doomed, and yes international circumstances play a role. But how big a role if you can’t tell whether your compass is pointing north south east or west? The last sentence of the Guardian piece, to its credit, tells us where this particular compass is really pointing.

Royal Mail is putting up the price of posting a letter again. This won’t matter to most people, who rarely write letters (when was the last time?) But it’s the old story, when a service isn’t being used very much the bosses always resort to price (or fare) increases, thus further reducing the demand for their service. That’s the alternative to fresh thinking. Haven’t the top dogs at Royal Mail noticed that vinyl is back—big style? How did that happen? And the government too might look again at what a thriving Royal Mail might mean for the country, and with a bit of creative thinking, children’s education. Instead, all we get is another company sold off to foreign ownership. So a first class stamp will be £1.70 and second class 87p. In 1840 the first stamp the Penny Black, as the name suggests cost one (old) penny. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, that penny would now be 33p. Even if that were the price of a stamp today, if pitted against social media nobody would pay it. But social media is virtual and snail mail is physical. I can’t see that it would be too difficult to build a successful marketing campaign on that basis. But it would take more than the new owners of Royal Mail or the government to make a campaign of it. I don’t suppose either side has identified any shared interest in the matter. Consequently the service will continue to deteriorate with the supine regulator’s approval.

+I accidentally caught a bit of a Church of England Ash Wednesday service from Truro cathedral yesterday on the car radio. Thankfully I was nearly home so wasn’t subjected to much of it. But being the start of Lent and 40 days of abstention I wondered how this might be observed by that devout Christian, Donald Trump. What is he going to give up? All the stuff at the beginning of the service was about us miserable sinners, which almost sounded like sin is our natural condition and we can be redeemed with a bit of prayer. This kind of talk I think explains why so much child abuse has taken place in the church and perhaps religion more widely. It’s natural. Be sorry afterwards, or at least make out that you are. A source of morality indeed.
 
+Another old, if not ancient institution is the Imperial War Museum. In today’s culture wars a museum with this name is surely an anomaly. If Jeremy Corbyn had been Prime Minister I’m sure it would have been renamed the Peace Museum. But it is now the subject of the culture wars as so-called ‘the Lord’ Ashcroft’s collection of VC and other medals is to be removed as his 15 year loan of them to the museum expires. This is causing some confected outrage. One right-wing propaganda outfit which doesn’t need to be named is upset that families won’t be able to see their ancestors’ medals. If they were going to be so upset one wonders how the great military man 'Lord' Ashcroft got his sticky mitts on them in the first place. Ashcroft himself needn’t moan either. I can’t remember what he did in say the Falklands war to acquire so many medals. But I can see the attraction to him of having them—I can imagine him hoping some of their memory will rub off on him with his name plastered all over the place. As regards this new right-wing front opened up against the museum, the trustees need to see it off. They’ll need new space for the wars Col. Starmer would have us join. Mind you, I would have no objection to the ‘imperial’ being removed. It’s clearly anachronistic.

+The ‘resource curse’ is that which stems from a developing country’s mineral wealth being exploited by corrupt local oligarchs and usually multinational corporations, to the exclusion of the local populace who have to suffer the absence of any reward and indeed whose lives can be further impoverished. I wonder if the resource curse will now afflict Ukraine, as Trump bullies Zelensky into what will almost certainly be a poor deal for Ukrainians at large. The corrupt deals that have enriched oligarchs around the globe are not I understand anathema to the Ukrainian subset of that ilk. Now that his father has pardoned him, perhaps the expertise of Hunter Biden could be called upon to help smooth the path of American corporates into this new resource nirvana? Let’s make Ukrainian oligarchs great again! (Protected by British troops if Col. Sir Keir Starmer has his way.)
 
+Talking of Col. Starmer, whose poll ratings have shot up apparently because he has projected his Alpha male self is now it seems about to launch a new round of austerity, with welfare recipients in his sights. Why doesn’t he crack two nuts with one stone and bring back conscription? Turn all those workshy people feigning illness into highly trained killing machines. Perhaps extend it to prison inmates too and solve prison overcrowding at the same time. If Starmer doesn’t do it, I’m sure our next PM, Nigel Farage may be up for such a radical approach. You read it first here. . . . 

​CORRECTION: At the moment Farage doesn't support conscription (Co-Pilot tells me) but wants 30,000 extra full-time troops recruited. But that could change at any time, of course.