“Let my people go”

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord , the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me…” Exodus 9:13

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the Lord , the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me’.” Exodus 10:3

“Let my people go”. It’s a stirring phrase from the Bible. God tells Pharaoh, via Moses, to release the Israelites from slavery. It also appeared in the title of an anti-slavery song, “Go Down Moses – Let My People Go” in the USA before the Civil War. In typically grandiose, pompous and misleading fashion it has been picked up by Brexiters Boris Johnson and Mark Francois to refer to the EU holding the British people against their will.

I won’t dwell on the absurd implication that we are being held in bondage, or that the EU is doing anything but try to protect themselves and the UK from the folly of our government and the deranged right of the Conservative Party. I won’t even mock the moronic posturing of Francois’ threat that the UK will be “perfidious Albion on speed”. This sort of nonsense is what we expect from that crew.

What I find more unsettling is the way the Brexiters use the phrase “my people”. Moses was the appointed leader. The Israelites did not belong to Moses. The British people do not belong to the Brexiters, and it is disturbing to see these vainglorious chancers claim the “people” for themselves, using God’s words to do so.

The EU referendum and its aftermath have been deeply and bitterly divisive in the UK. Once the Leavers won the referendum the 48% who had voted Remain were shunned, unless they were prepared to become hardline Brexiters. Regardless of what had been promised during the referendum campaign the Brexit process and destination had to be settled by the internal political machinations of the Conservative Party. That required a hard Brexit, hence Theresa May’s notorious red lines, which were moderated only when they came into contact with reality, notably the border in Ireland.

Now we hear the Brexiters trumpet “let my people go”. It is a chilling phrase coming from the Conservative right wing. Who are their people? They speak only for people like them. The rest do not count. 52% of those who voted has been rounded up to 100% of those who matter. The 3 million EU citizens who were not allowed to vote? They don’t count. The roughly 2.5 million young people, overwhelmingly likely to support Remain, who have reached voting age since the referendum? They don’t count. The 13 million who didn’t vote? They blew it. They had their chance. They don’t count. And as for the 48% of those who did vote, they lost; 16 million losers have to lose and be seen to lose. There could be no compromise.

So when Johnson, Francois et al talk of “my people” they would doubtless insist they are talking about all the British people. But their words and their actions make me feel that I, and millions like me, are considered less British than they are. As a Scot my concept of Britishness is different from theirs, which is often indistinguishable from Englishness. British and English seem to be synonyms when deployed, often interchangeably, by the nationalist Brexiters of England.

Knowingly or otherwise these charlatans are heading down a dangerous path, talking of “my people”, with the subtle implication that they can legitimately define the people as being those who are like them and agree with them. Their opponents, those who would prefer to stay in the EU, or have a less damaging form of Brexit, are not the real people, not truly British. We are others, and unworthy of a noble national cause that has no time for nuance, complexity or multiple, overlapping identities. These buffoonish Brexiters are hardly fascists, but in their blind, posturing and self-serving cynicism they are creating a field in which fascism can thrive. They should be called out for what they are; dangerous, irresponsible, opportunists.

Citizen of the World

Normally I’m quite happy if I don’t get chain invitations to “the ten films that inspired me”, or whatever. However, my brain cells were stirred into action by Fiona Charles’s invitation to nominate seven books that have meaning for me.

Almost as interesting as the selection of the books was musing about how I would select them. What criteria would I use? Should I have a theme, some sort of progression, or simply go for a scatter-gun approach? In the end I chose a few books that had a great influence on me at various stages of my life, spotted a vague theme, and then refined the list to bring the pattern into clearer focus.

I presented the seven books in the order in which I read them, from the age of about nine or ten up to my forties. Five of the books came from my schooldays, and three of them were set books at school.

The first was “Winter Holiday”, by Arthur Ransome. At primary school in south London our teacher would read Ransome’s classic “Swallows and Amazons” to us in chunks and that sent me off to the local library to work my way through all his other books. I enjoyed them all, but the one that really sticks in my memory is “Winter Holiday”. I still have the mental picture I constructed of the setting, a frozen, wintry, Lake District. So engrossed was I that I raced through the book, reading it under the bedclothes with a torch, and some illicit chocolate, long after lights out.

My parents strongly encouraged their children to read avidly. It was obviously in their interests to see lively, potentially mischievous children wrapped up in books, broadening their minds rather than causing mayhem. In those days weekly trips to the library on a Saturday morning, with frequent ad hoc visits on the way home from school, were part of the normal routine for children. “Winter Holiday” is the book that really stands out in my memory from those days.

Book number two was PG Wodehouse’s “Right Ho Jeeves”, which I read about a year before I left primary school. We were on holiday in Pembrokeshire, and my elder brother had borrowed this book from the library. I was intrigued by his laughter, and as soon as he had finished I grabbed the book. I had never before read a book written for adults.

Not only was I entranced by the humour, and by Wodehouse’s astonishing flourishes with the English language, I was excited by the knowledge that adult books were now within my reach and there was a whole new world to explore in the adult section of the library. It was one of the major turning points in my life.

The third book takes that idea a step further.

It is “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. We studied it in the third year of secondary school in Yorkshire. By that time I had read countless adult books but this was my first exposure to a classic of English literature. To my slight surprise this didn’t feel like schoolwork, or any sort of work at all. The book was simply a pleasure, exciting even, to read. High class literature was no longer for other people, for real adults. I knew I could read the great works of my native language and enjoy them.

Number four was also a school set book, “Le Château de ma Mère” by Marcel Pagnol. I took A Level French, which entailed studying serious, heavyweight French classics; Racine, Molière and Balzac. Pagnol’s book, a charming, autobiographical story of life in the south of France before the First World War, is perhaps a French version of “Cider With Rosie”.

It was one of the easier options in the French A Level syllabus and the school used it as a gentle introduction to French literature after the relaxed, frankly easy, O Level.

I came late to the French course, having started A Level Maths and deciding to switch to French after a couple of months. By that time the course had moved on to Racine’s “Andromaque” (Greek tragedy, as interpreted by a 17th century dramatist). I had to catch up and to my surprise zipped through the couple of hundred pages of “Le Château de ma Mère” over a weekend, enjoying it as a book for its own sake, rather than as a necessary chore. When the subsequent fate of the main characters was revealed at the end of the book I was deeply moved. I still remember the phrasing Pagnol used to describe the death of one boy in the war.

In addition to French I also studied German at A Level, and that provides book number five, Theodor Storm’s “Der Schimmelreiter”. This is a dark, atmospheric tale of tragedy, ghosts and rivalry in the gloomy Frisian marshes at the edge of the North Sea.

It was ideal material for teenagers. The other authors we studied were Goethe, Brecht and Kafka. Unlike the French department, the German teachers hit us with the hardcore material right at the start. We were plunged into Goethe’s “Iphigenia auf Tauris” (more Greek tragedy, as interpreted by the pre-eminent 18th century German dramatist). The idea was to weed out the faint hearted while it was still early enough to switch courses. It worked. We lost about a third of the students.

“Der Schimmelreiter” was saved for light (or dark?) relief in between Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop, “Der Gute Mensch von Schezuan” (something of a cheerfully Communist pantomime, to be fair), and Franz Kafka’s resolutely incomprehensible short stories. As with “Le Château de ma Mère” I read “Der Schimmelreiter” for pleasure, the first book I could read in German and simply enjoy without thinking about coursework and exams.

The sixth book is Jan Morris’s “Spain”, which was written in 1964 when the country was still very much in the grip of Franco’s dictatorship. I read it some 20 years later when Spain had already changed dramatically, but I was fascinated by the evocation of the country and its insights into a troubling recent past. The book triggered a lasting love of Spain, that has lasted over the decades especially after I married Mary, who shares my love of the country.

The final book is quite different from any of the others. It is Zygmunt Bauman’s “Modernity and the Holocaust”. Bauman was a sociologist and his book is deeply troubling for those who still have the comforting illusion that modernity and sophisticated civilisation will lead to humane outcomes.

Bauman argues persuasively that the Nazis’ Final Solution to exterminate the Jews required a sophisticated, bureacratic, modern society to organise and carry out industrial mass murder and that it is a huge mistake to assume that the Holocaust was a throwback to uncivilised barbarity.

What the Nazis did was certainly barbaric, but it was the product of civilisation and modernity. It might seem irrational, but only if you have a different world view from the Nazis. They rationally followed the logic of their evil philosophy through to its appalling conclusion. We have not “progressed” beyond the Nazis. They don’t belong to a state of civil development and progress we’ve left behind. Given the right circumstances it could all happen again.

As a Christian I conventionally have a bleak view of the fallibility of human nature. We are all fallen sinners. Bauman’s narrative reinforced that wariness. Technology, civil order, civilisation, intellectual sophistication are all good things, but they won’t save us from tyranny and horror, or even from ourselves. They can be turned to horrifying ends in the wrong hands. Bauman’s book is always nagging away at the back of my mind when I see in our society signs of fascism, extremism, bigotry, intolerance or indifference to the sufferings of “others”. These feel like the real political and social threats we face.

My selection of books consciously reflects my upbringing and the way that my education shaped me. I was at four schools, one in Stirling, two in London, and one in Yorkshire. Starting in Scotland, and being brought up in a Scottish family, mean I am and I feel unquestioningly Scottish. But the English education and friendships left deep and welcome marks. The way our family moved around the UK, and my immersion in French and German culture, opened my eyes and my mind.

If someone asks “what is your home town?” I shrug and can’t answer. I have no home town. Perth is my home, and I love it, but my character was set before I moved here. I knew virtually nothing of the city till I arrived in my mid 20s. My upbringing means my world is inevitably much wider than that.

Culture, art, literature are valuable because they enhance humanity – not because they represent the best from our own little patch. I am a citizen of the world. I could have been no other.

In Theresa May’s eyes I am a citizen of nowhere. When she used that phrase at the Conservative Party conference of 2016 it cut deep. I have no home town.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

May was appealing to the least attractive elements of her own party, trying to establish her credentials as a zealous convert to the Brexit faith. She probably didn’t really mean it, but that made it all the more wounding. The serving Prime Minister was prepared to sneer at people like me, to dismiss us as losers who should have no say in the future of our country, in order to strengthen her position within her own party. It was as bleak a moment as I have known watching British politics.

There are unpleasant, dark trends in western society. Populists are making common cause with nativist isolationists, xenophobes and outright racist bigots. They hate the values that underpin what is decent in our society while paying lip service to its traditions. Many of them proclaim their Christianity, but the reality is they wear their faith lightly, as a mark of the tribe rather than a sign of inner humility, love and awe.

To people like me the EU was never simply a trading relationship. Far more than that it embodied a major part of our identity. I am Scottish, British and European. Brexit not only tears away part of my identity, it trashes it. I feel rejected by what should be my own country.

My seven books range from classics of English (the nation, not the language) children’s literature, English humour and perhaps Britain’s greatest novelist, to fine books from France and Germany, a beautiful invocation of the mystery of Spain and conclude with Bauman’s terrifying warning. These are books that have shaped me and my world view. I can only look in dismay at the way that the UK is moving.

Citizen of the world? Yes, I am, and that won’t change however much damage the Brexiters do to the economy, society and our place in the world. When I was at school in London I was gripped, along with my friends and brothers, by the amazing saga of the Apollo missions that culminated in the first moon landing in 1969. Exactly 50 years ago, on Christmas Eve 1968, this photo was taken, Earthrise. It’s hard now to convey the shock and excitement of that moment, seeing our planet like this for the first time. This blue and white blob in space is our home. We are its citizens. That sense of awe, and belonging, won’t go away.

“The healthy will of the people” – a lesson from history

English has probably not imported as many words and phrases from German as it has from French, but quite a few have made the journey; kindergarten, schadenfreude, flak, zeitgeist, vorsprung durch technik. One German phrase that we haven’t adopted is “Gesundes Volksempfinden”. It might be a mouthful, but it is painfully appropriate for the current frenzy surrounding Brexit. It literally means the healthy feeling (or sentiment) of the people. A more useful translation would be the will of the people.

Gesundes Volksempfinden is a highly loaded and sensitive phrase and would not be used lightly by German papers. It is a Nazi legal concept. When the Nazis came to power they had a problem. They had inherited a working legal system. Judges tried cases according to the law and could acquit, or find in favour of, the wrong people; Jews, Social Democrats, dissidents. Sure, there was an ample supply of uniformed thugs willing to break windows, beat up undesirables, and even kill them, but that was a tad vulgar. It was hardly an efficient way to run a modern state and earn a nod of approval from the 1930s Daily Mail.

The problem was resolved simply. First, in 1934 the Nazi regime issued a decree that civil claims should be settled according to Gesundes Volksempfinden, the healthy feeling of the people, regardless of what the law actually stated. In 1935 the German Criminal Code was amended in the same way.

Where the written law was in conflict with the “healthy feeling of the people” (as interpreted by the Nazis, and ultimately Hitler himself) judges were required to convict, regardless of what the statute actually said, even if the law did not cover the actions of the accused. The phrase was picked up as “the healthy will of the people” by an approving Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, and poster boy of the Daily Mail.

After the war US Army legal officers took a close look at how the Nazi legal system had operated. Their report described a case that illustrated how Gesundes Volksempfinden worked. In the days when it was still possible for Jews to seek redress through the courts a group of Jews had contested a decision that stopped them receiving rations. They won, only for the decision to be overturned for the following reason.

The judge should have asked himself, ‘What is the reaction of the Jew to a decision which, without devoting one word to the healthy folk attitude [i.e. Gesundes Volksempfinden, the will of the people] toward this insolent and arrogant Jewish conduct, takes 20 pages to prove that he and 500 other Jews are right and victorious over a German authority?’

Even if the judge was convinced that the Food Office had arrived at an incorrect judgment he should have chosen a form for his ruling which avoided at all costs harming the prestige of the Food Office and thus putting the Jew expressly in the right toward it.

This is reminiscent of a famous English legal case I will come to in a moment. But first I will turn to the press hysteria that followed the decision of the High Court in London finding that Article 50, starting the UK’s exit from the EU, could not be initiated without the approval of Parliament. The central reason for the court’s decision was that the Prime Minister cannot use the Royal Prerogative to remove our rights. Only Parliament can do that. This point was widely ignored in the right wing press, which instead accused the judges of defying the will of the people and taking a pro-EU, anti-Brexit, political stance.

The Daily Express indulged in laughably hysterical hyperbole. The Daily Telegraph was rather more subtle, printing photographs of the three judges with a sinister blue filter, under the headline “The judges versus the people”.

It was the Daily Mail, however, which launched the most offensive attack on the judges. The headline was “Enemies of the people” and invited us to disapprove of utterly irrelevant and harmless details about their private lives. The front page was compared with an edition of the Nazi paper, the Illustrierter Beobachter, depicting a group of Social Democrats as “Traitors to the people” and reporting that they had been deprived of their German citizenship. They were usually identified incorrectly as judges on Twitter but there was a valid underlying point; opposition to “the people” had put them beyond the pale, beyond the law.

In an editorial the Mail called the judges “an out of touch clique” who were guilty of “an outrageous betrayal of democracy”. The Mail then went on to make an intriguing argument, that deserves more discussion.

On a blinkered reading of statutes… it is possible to argue that the Government lacks the authority to trigger Brexit without the go-ahead of the Lords and Commons. But from every other viewpoint, the ruling flies in the face of justice and common sense. Wouldn’t any judge of real stature (the late Lord Denning springs to mind) have picked a way through the dust-encrusted legal textbooks to see the wood for the trees and come down on the side of reason? … The High Court yesterday betrayed common sense and the people.

So the Daily Mail grudgingly conceded that the ruling might have been correct in law, but that it offended the will of the people. They argued this even though the judges explicitly stated that the law allows the courts to recognise the will of the people only as it is reflected in laws passed by Parliament. Nevertheless, the Mail used language, and an argument, that is entirely consistent with the Nazi ruling I referred to above. To hammer home their point they invoked Lord Denning, who acquired an unfortunate reputation for being too inclined to favour the executive arm of the state over the liberties of the individual. He is now chiefly remembered, by non-lawyers, for his remarkable conduct in the case of McIlkenny v. Chief Constable of the West Midlands in 1980. This was a case brought by the Birmingham Six, alleging police brutality at the time of their arrests in 1974. Denning dismissed the case.

Just consider the course of events if this action were to go to trial… If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence: and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would have either to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal… This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right that these actions should go any further. They should be struck out.

All these dreadful allegations about police misconduct turned out to be true, but they could not even be considered by the court. In 1980 Lord Denning was very much in touch with the public mood. Following a succession of terrorist attacks there was an ugly anti-Irish mood in Britain. The case of the Birmingham Six was just one of a series of miscarriages of justice in which the state acted illegally, but in line with the will of the people. This is the justice that the Daily Mail is calling for; their argument and that of Lord Denning is exactly the same in principle as that of the Nazi judgment on food rations for Jews. Call it the will of the people, or Gesundes Volksempfinden, it is the same thing.

What sets free and prosperous societies apart is reliance on the rule of law. Without that nobody can be confident about anything. No-one has an incentive to work and build for the future. State power is arbitrary. People keep their heads down and don’t take chances.

When Mikhail Gorbachev was planning the reform of the USSR his adviser Alexander Yakovlev wrote to him.

For a thousand years we have been ruled by people and not by laws… What we are talking about is not the dismantling of Stalinism but a replacement of a 1,000-year old model of statehood.

Throughout the 1990s Russia struggled to introduce the rule of law. When he came to power Vladimir Putin reversed the process. Russia today is a land ruled by Putin, not by law. Putin is an autocrat, admired by aspirational demagogues such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.

Needless to say the ineffably gormless Farage has led the assault on the rule of law, insulting the judges, calling for street protests, and bizarrely saying the judges’ rejection of the government’s case caused him to doubt their independence.

Farage, the Mail and the Express are not Nazis, but they have scant regard for, or even understanding of, the forces they could unleash. Once the rule of law is undermined we will not be ruled by the consensus of sensible chaps discussing politics over a gin and tonic at the golf club. We will be subject to the vagaries and rages of the mob, which can be manipulated by an autocratic leader. That mob includes violent extremists who have picked up the message from the right wing press and UKIP politicians that their views are no longer peripheral, but are now mainstream. Farage is so lacking in sensitivity and awareness that little more than a week after the MP Jo Cox was murdered by a gunman, who called her a traitor, he could crow, during a referendum victory speech, that Brexit was a victory for decent people who had won “without a bullet being fired”.

What, meanwhile, has the UK government done to shore up the rule of law, and the independence of the judicial system? Liz Truss, the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, has merely issued a bland defence of the principle of independence, without commenting on the campaign of intimidation. The Prime Minister has defended the press despite its appalling behaviour and government ministers have been queueing up to attack the High Court.

The rule of law and an independent judiciary protects us from violent mobs and from arbitrary state power. When the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage use language like “enemies of the people”, and argue that “the will of the people” should take precedence over the law we should reflect on history. We should remember Gesundes Volksempfinden, the healthy feeling of the people, and we should shudder.

Boris Johnson; not offensive, just wrong – and foolish

You’d think experienced politicians would know that you don’t use analogies involving Hitler or the Nazis to make a political point unless you’ve got a clear, relevant and closely argued line of reasoning. Even in those cases the consequences of going nuclear by pressing the Hitler button can backfire badly. The debate can switch away from the controversy in question as the media focus on the Nazi jibe. Usually it’s a simple choice. You can keep some measure of control over the debate, or you can invoke the Nazis.

Ken Livingstone blundered into this particular rhetorical mantrap the other week with his assertion that Hitler was at one point a Zionist. The left’s rather uncomfortable history regarding Israel, Zionism and Jews isn’t my concern here, however. That is just one of the issues Labour needs to sort out on its long march back to power.

What prompted this blog was Boris Johnson’s much trumpeted comparison between Hitler’s ambitions for Europe and the 21st century European Union. In fairness to Johnson he wasn’t saying the EU is in any way similar to the Nazi regime, merely that the EU’s vision of Europe is consistent with a long and sorry history of failed attempts to recreate a European state.

“The whole thing began with the Roman Empire,” he says. “I wrote a book on this subject, and I think it’s probably right. The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions – in a Freudian way – to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” he says.

Well, so far so reckless. It’s a point of view with which I’d disagree, but I don’t find it offensive, just silly. Dragging Hitler into the debate over our EU membership is rather like flinging a decomposing rat onto the table during a meeting. Whatever point is being made is rather lost while people recoil. Debate ends and disgust takes over.

Aside from the obvious objection that the EU’s vision of a closer Europe isn’t merely a difference in tone, but is a radically different vision of the destination, Johnson’s analogy disintegrates when it is picked apart in the context of the UK’s referendum on EU membership. That becomes clear when you consider Johnson’s follow up to the quote above.

While Mr Johnson is not arguing that the bureaucrats of Brussels are Nazis attempting to bring back Hitler’s Reich, his comparison is startling. Clearly, he sees parallels between the choices that confronted his beloved Churchill, and Britain, during the Second World War and the decision facing voters next month.

“This is a chance for the British people to be the heroes of Europe and to act as a voice of moderation and common sense, and to stop something getting in my view out of control,” he says.

“It is time for someone – it’s almost always the British in European history – to say, ‘we think a different approach is called for’.”

Johnson sees the Brexit campaign as analogous to the UK fighting for the soul of civilised Europe in the Second World War. I can see why he thinks that is an attractive picture, but he has got the argument exactly the wrong way round.

Hitler’s vision for Europe wasn’t a superstate running from the Hebrides to the Urals in which Britain was a western province. Hitler looked east, and he expected Britain to remain a maritime nation, with its non-European empire. Hitler’s navy was a tiny force compared to the Royal Navy and, pre-war, was never seriously intended to challenge Britain. Hitler’s admired the British Empire and, uncomfortably for modern Britons, saw it as a model for German rule of eastern Europe. German would dominate mainland Europe, and Britain would withdraw from any involvement, or interference in that German sphere of influence.

It was only Britain’s determination to remain involved in mainland Europe by declaring war in 1939 then refusing to negotiate peace in 1940 that turned the war into a fight to the finish and persuaded Hitler that Britain must be invaded and crushed. The comparison between the Nazis’ European vision and that of the EU fails most obviously because invasion and mass murder are fundamentally different from peaceful union and co-operation, rather than alternative means to the same end, as argued by Johnson. But the comparison fails even on its own narrow terms; the vision of the Brexit campaigners would result in a Britain detached from mainland Europe, lacking influence in a structure increasingly dominated by Germany. Such a Europe, with Britain isolated and irrelevant to the big events on the mainland, has more in common with the Nazis’ European vision than the current EU of which Britain is a member with considerable, if erratic, influence.

The British Empire is long gone, thank goodness. This is not the 18th century. A Britain outside the EU and isolated from the European mainstream wouldn’t be a maritime nation swashbuckling around the high seas. Britain would be a confused, more insular place, unsure of its role in the world, having antagonised and irritated its friends and erstwhile partners, while the USA is increasingly looking to its west, across the Pacific.

The Brexiters have no clear and credible vision for the future, only a yearning for a past that can never return. Does Johnson know this? I’m not sure he cares. His vision for the future is one that will enrich and empower one Boris Johnson. Everything is subordinate to that vision. His invocation of the Nazis was politically inept and, I fervently hope, will fatally undermine his personal and political campaign. I want to see a Britain committed to Europe. That is our future, and it is consistent with our past to a far greater extent than Boris Johnson is prepared to concede.