Brexit, EU, disinformation: three good reads

The first is by the supreme stylist of the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole,

the second by the outstanding author of The Capital, enlarging upon his time in Brussels,

the third an alarming but by no means despairing sequel to the writer's chronicle of where it all began, during his time in Russia.

The rest of the pictures, for punctuation's sake, are drawn from our last big march in October, as jovial and inventive as the others; we missed the bout of rain, having retreated to the ICA for lunch, meeting the same folk with 'my' Tillmans T shirt as before - pictured below - after which I went down to Parliament Square and caught the last four speeches).

Meanwhile, to the books. All three give us a bigger perspective than you can glean from journal or newspaper articles. Fintan O'Toole traces the Brexit delusion to England's (note: not Great Britain's; O'Toole is careful to make the distinction) swivelling between abjection and grandiosity after the Second World War, the self-pity of winning the war but losing the peace (including resentment that Germany prospered thereafter).

 'In the English reactionary imagination dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality', and O'Toole uses an address to the anti-European Tories of the Bruges group as one example.

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefor the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope being used in the Brexit campaign. 'Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,' Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the Referendum.

O'Toole tracks Johnson's mendacity back to the beginning, too. It's why he was able to paint such a devastating portrait for the New York Review of Books, 'The Ham of Fate', last August. I learnt much more that was painful-funny here, including the absurd and slippery speech the person we must now know as Diana Ditch made for his selection as Tory candidate in the safe seat of Henley-on-Thames. All O'Toole has to do is quote the supposed sleight of hand with which he turns his selfish act of depriving his pregnant wife of toast in hospital into his attempt to buy some more, only to find that 'you can't pay for things on the NHS...we need to think of new ways of getting private money into the NHS'. Job done; Johnson replaced the retiring Michael Heseltine, irony of ironies (MH is our greatest Remain speechmaker, if you didn't know).

There's more, including some outrageous playing with facts about our not-so-easy-to-check medieval history. O'Toole refers to La Ditch's brand of absurd equations as 'Brexit camp...edgy clowning in which everything is at once very funny and highly sinister'. But I hope no-one's laughing now. Those who vote for this criminal liar, and they include Theresa May, happy to canvas for someone she has said has no 'moral integrity', have given up any moral pretence whatsoever.

It has to be admitted, though, that while Diana and co were playing with our future, successive governments did next to nothing to enlighten us about why the European Union matters. Which is why Robert Menasse's Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits should be essential reading everywhere, not least in schools. It presents as a rather dry little handbook, but Menasse's style, as translated by Craig Decker, is anything but. Arriving in Brussels for his research period, he notes his objections to the project, and how pleasantly surprised he was at both the openness and the anything-but-faceless so-called bureaucracy. But while he praises the Parliament and the Commission, 'two supranational institutions, which are truly European in their aspirations and duties', Menasse is critical of the Council, 'an institution in which national interests, national sensitivities, national fictions, etc. are defended', thwarting 'logic and rationality in a wretched game of national affectations and so-called interests'. And the power of that Council has been strengthened, not weakened.

For whoever supports nationalism - 'because that's just the way people are' - will be swept away by nationalism, because in the European Union and the globalized world, national furore can never really be satisfied. And the rage will become extreme once people realize that the 'defence of national interests' was a fraud from the get-go. The only things being defended are the interests of the national political and economic elites.

Sound familiar? One of Menasse's solutions is for the EU to abandon nations in favour of regions, the only areas in which we're truly rooted. 'Europe, in point of fact, is a Europe of regions. The task of European politics should therefore be to systematically recognise and develop what Europe, in fact, already is'. And has already been acknowledged as such through the European grants to restore deprived areas like Sunderland and Cornwall (who collectively were too stupid to realise that where their government had deserted them, the EU stepped in). Cultural diversity must be celebrated, too, and yet the EU's cultural department is, in budgetary terms, the worst off. That has to change. And I think it already is changing. Let's hope against hope that little England will not be cut off from the move.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about his time in Russia, was a work of tragicomic despair. There's more hope about This Is Not Propaganda, interweaving the present information war with the tale of Pomerantsev's dissident parents, pursued by the KGB before they made a new life in this country, in that it cites the marvellous people around the world trying to fight misinformation and tyranny with their own tools - Srdja Popovic with his worldwide training courses, courageous Alberto Escorcia in Mexico, Babar Aliev in Eastern Ukraine, to name but three. Escorcia sums it all up when he defines the Internet as 'a great battle between love, interconnectedness on the one side and fear, hate, disjointedness on the other'. It seems as if the fear and hate are winning at the moment, but all is not lost.

And the UK's ties with the rest of Europe won't be broken, whatever happens. Recently took delivery of the latest Europe Day CD, and though it's a real shame that, in a convoluted chain of ever more surprising disingenuousness, Eldbjørg Hemsing refused permission for her brilliant part in the spectacular finale, Cristian Lolea's arrangement of Enescu's First Romanian Rhapsody, to appear, there's plenty of top-quality nourishment here.

Its sequel will be a 10th anniversary disc of highlights from the concerts across the years. So much to celebrate!

Flaming frauds and frivolous flibbertigibbets

Forgive the excessive alliteration, but it seemed a neat way of conjoining this week's Dante and Bach discoveries. The latter is Richard Stokes's suggested translation for 'Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister,' the title of Cantata BWV 181. The former refers to Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro, speaking as tongues of flame in, respectively, Cantos 26 and 27 of Inferno. The Eighth Circle, heading towards the bottom of the funnel, is reserved for 'Simple Fraud', and the eighth of its 11 bolgie contains these 'counsellors of fraud in war'. If we widen that definition to 'fraud in words', then it suits the three mini horror clowns I've rather crudely coloured in flame tones above - Gove, BoJob and J Rees-Mogg, the GoBoMo triplets, folk who use a rather silly form of cleverness to deceive the gullible, though God knows they're petty demons compared to Dante's heroic hell-dwellers.

Once again, following on the heels of the talking twigs, our artists are confounded by the fact that it's the flames that speak, not figures within; but you have to allow Blake and co their visual licence. What's said, as our reader Dr. Alessandro Scafi and interpreter of deeper meaning Prof. John Took underlined in Monday's Warburg session, is tauntingly selective and if you don't have the entire context - even this Ulysses/Odysseus narrative departs from the Greek sources, and Guido da Montefeltro is not as familiar to us as he was to those living shortly after his death - you need plenty of glosses even before the meaning can be plumbed.

Dante gives us Ulysses' last journey, but not as we know it from Homer. After leaving Circe, he does not head for Ithaca and the moving/violent homecoming of The Odyssey: 'neither the sweetness of a son, nor compassion for my old father, nor the love owed to Penelope, which should have made her glad, could conquer within me the ardour that I had to gain experience of the world and of human vices and worth' -

    né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né 'l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
   vince potero dentro a me l'ardore
ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi imani e del valore...

'A devenir del monde esperto' - this had been an earlier stage of what Prof. Took calls 'Dante's problematic humanity'. After the death of Beatrice, he spent time in the Florentine philosophical schools acquainting himself with Cicero, Boethius and, for him the greatest, Aristotle. His discoveries are noted in the Convivio. But this absolute enthusiasm for life-knowledge needed rethinking in the contet of his spiritual existence - 'quickened by grace and revelation' (Took) - and the Divina Commedia marks Dante's 'theological encompassing of reason'.

So did Dante see Ulysses as a dark image of his own earlier, 'recklessly self-confident' reasoning? He certainly refers to him a lot; and elsewhere he uses the idea of a physical journeying as the image of a spiritual one (the oceanic image crops up in Paradiso's Canto 2).  The below Doré illustration, by the way, is for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it fits Ulysses' last journey towards the extreme west well.

 
Here Ulysses goes beyond the boundaries, marked physically by the Pillars of Hercules, and his crime is to use his tongue to persuade his old remaining company to follow him to what turns out to be extinction: 'you were made not to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge' ('fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza'). Is this hubris? Or, more precisely, in John Took's so-eloquent phrase, how 'the word fractures communion for pure self-interest'?

The end finally comes in the whirlwind from the high mountain surmounted by Eden; it sweeps the men to destruction.

There's fabulous drama in Guido's speech. The man of arms became a Franciscan, 'believing, so girt, to make amends; and surely my belief would have been fulfilled, had it not been for the high priest, may evil take him! who put me back into my first sins' -

   Io fui uom d'arme, e poi fu cordigliero,
credendomi, sì cinto, fare ammenda;
e certo il creder mio venìa intero,
   se non fosse il gran prete, a cui mal prenda!
che mi rimise ne le prime colpe...

This is Pope Boniface VIII, Dante's deadly enemy, who asked Guido's advice in subduing the Colonna family in Praeneste/Palestrina.

I love the dark humour of the black cherubim who seizes Guido's soul (depicted above by Joseph Anton Koch in a drawing in the Thorvaldsen Museum - he is also the artist below), saying, 'Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!' ('Forse tu non pensavi ch'io löico fossi!'). Then he drags Guido off to Minos, who twists his tail furiously eight times in judgment on the sinner destined for 'the thieving fire'.

 Next week we descend to the very bottom to meet Judas, Brutus, Cassius - and Satan. Io tremo.

Bach's BWV 181 takes us from the threat of hell to heavenly consolation via the New Testament reading for Sexagesima Sunday, the Parable of the Sower in Luke 8.4-15. The sower in question casts seed on four types of ground which image the varying types of receptivity to Christ's word, from stony to fertile. 'Leichgesinnte Flattergeister' is unusual in beginning with a bass aria in which some have detected the pecking of the birds who gather up the seed on the worst soil.

There's a helpful connection to Dante and Milton with the appearance of Belial in the aria's central section.

It feels to me more like an operatic number by Handel, strengthening the notion of theatricality in the cantatas. The recitatives are highly expressive, and in the short tenor aria, I love Rilling's choice of vivid harpsichord, mirroring the thorns of the text, against the bassline - throbbing at 'höllischen Qual' ('hellish torment'). The second recitative turns us to comfort, and a chorus at last, bright with trumpet and a soprano/alto duet in the middle. Gardiner praises its 'madrigalian lightness', a good way of putting it. This is a short cantata, but as original as any.

Citizens of this mad, mad world

...unite! Give 'em hell, fellow Remoaners, Bremoaners, whatever the ghastly falsifying right-wing press which was largely responsible for getting us into this mess cares to call us today: it's our turn to be the gadflies now that the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, having waged a war of attrition for years, has got what it wanted.

Of course the Conservative Party Conference was just an orgy of self-congratulation and puffery, destined to smash against the rock of reality this week. No way was Amber Rudd's 'policy' for getting companies to register their 'domiciled foreigners' going to pass muster in the outside world. But still they managed to alienate a whole raft of doctors and nurses without whom the NHS couldn't function* - and who have been helping it to function at least since I was a child - as well as 'loony lefty' human rights lawyers ('hands off our boys!'), the 48 per cent who voted Remain as a sneering metropolitan elite and, indeed, all those who had previously thought of themselves as citizens contributing in so many ways more than just the mere financial to a society that's still worth fighting for. I've already heard of the personal impact from Brexit's licence to hate - which this Conference will only have stoked - from my Polish friend Magda, as reported here. The current leadership must now be held to account for this.

As for Bray (= Brexit May), good luck all those people around the country whom she encouraged to 'take back control' at a local level when at around the same time the government overruled Lancashire Council's rejection of local fracking. Reports on the subject are helpfully rounded up here.

Like many of her colleagues, this woman with her 'Born Again' credentials no longer passes muster as a politician of conviction. Say what you will about Corbyn - like many, I left the Labour Party in consternation at his deliberately poor show during and after the referendum - but he seems consistent. Of course it sticks most in the craw of us liberals (not neoliberals, please) to be told by our unelected Prime Minister that we're actually 'citizens of nowhere'. I was reminded shortly after spluttering that the negation is even more offensive to those who've crossed half the world under impossible conditions now that there's no home for them in the country of their birth.

Alongside typically firm statements emerging from Sadiq Khan and Nicola Sturgeon - how I breathed more freely up in Edinburgh last Thursday - less familiar champions have emerged, too. LBC chat-hosts never used to be as articulate, in my experience, as a new hero of the day, James O'Brien. Having caught us all out by claiming to read out a couple of lines from Rudd's speech, only to tell us that they were from Mein Kampf Chapter Three, he was on top form pursuing Ashley, an amiable enough sounding electrician from Plymouth, on which EU law he didn't like. Couldn't name one, of course. And what didn't he like? Packs of immigrants wandering around the centre of Plymouth. But then packs of Englishmen were just as bad. Of course it was an unequal match; I'd like to see O'Brien's relentless logic versus the Three Blind Mice aka Brexiteers Johnson, Davis and Fox. But nailing the total lack of facts behind the average entirely delusional Outer's vote to leave is just as useful. Not on YouTube yet, but here it is on LBC in the meantime.

In the meantime, Blind Mice One, bumbling Boris, showed his usual diplomacy by recommending protests outside the Russian Embassy against the destruction of Aleppo. Protesters are not, in our democracy at least, liable to follow instructions from government, though God knows something has to be happen as the Russians ruthlessly target hospitals. Which is indeed a new depravity which the UK and America cannot be blamed for in Syria (what's Stop the War up to, making equivalence between the two?) It was not widely reported that at the weekend Russia again vetoed halting the attacks and returning to talks in the UN. Obscene. I want to hear from our valiant doctor in Aleppo again, and hope he's still able to function in some way.

As for the cesspit into which a man not fit to be called a politician - though still supported here by several extreme Tories who should know better - has tried to drag American politics, the entertainment aspect has vanished and all but the most diehard Trump supporters who steeled themselves to watch the second debate with Hillary saw the fangs and the male space-invading monster, not Farage's fine silverback. Still, though, there can be some innocent relief and of all the creative responses, this one I adore:

Preserving the link/embedding as much for myself as for anyone reading, since these are tonics to which I'll be happy to return in the future. And please, America, though a Trump presidency now begins to seem as unlikely as it has always been incredible, don't make a mistake which would be on an even more colossal scale than the UK's.

 Rant over. Not checking for grammar - let it be a spontaneous snapshot from this very strange time.

14/10 From the worst to the very best: here's the lady I hope will be the next President-but-one of the United States at her emotive best, remarkable not so much for her attack on Trump as for the way she uses it to follow her reactions to participating in Day of the Girl, for young women's education all over the world. I love that couple, even if Obama failed in one grave area - acting strongly enough when he could on Assad's use of chemical weapons. On the home front, I have nothing but praise. This speech is impressive for the way the whooping crowd goes silent with intense listening in the middle - something unthinkable at a Trump rally. Make sure to watch it all.

*Update - 13/10:  I met and chatted to quite a few, the salt of the earth, when I had my stent removed this morning at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. No need to ask if they're UK citizens or not, but the entirely delightful and friendly nurses were, inter alia, from the Middle East and what I guess to be Indonesia and my doctor told me he goes to North Kurdistan a lot. I'd like to have talked to him more but then the procedure - quick, weird and only briefly painful - went ahead.  This is the good side of our International Health Service, and there's no way we could do without these people.

They f*****d it up

That admirable human being RuPaul - to whom I've tried to apply something approximating to the colours of the EU flag - sent out a Referendum Day message with his/her famous catchphrase for the standoff at the end of each episode of RuPaul's Drag Race: 'And remember - don't f**k it up'. Sadly, the 52 per cent who wanted out were not in lipsynch with the r(R, Ru)emaining 48 per cent of us. Anyway, a good deal fewer of those want out now that the consequences have begun to hit so very quickly.

I'm told I should pity the disenfranchised working classes of the north and understand that they lashed out at the government, at a political elite which was bad but, for God's sake, not nearly as bad as the ones who manipulated them. Should they have been guided better? Certainly, but I still ask if it was too much for any of them to check the facts since one side failed to spoonfeed them sufficiently and the other constructed a campaign entirely out of lies.

The few Brexiters I've spoken to in recent days - anything but working class, like so many who voted for Brexit in areas with few or no immigrants - just parrot the lies and look startled when you tell them the truth. 'I had no idea' now becomes a refrain along with 'I didn't think my vote would count'. Sunderland 'had no idea' that £35 million from the EU kept their part of the world from collapsing completely once the government left them to rot. You couldn't make up the black comedy of the Cornish, having voted out, wanting the money the EU gave them to be continued by the Brexit regime.

So I cry shame on the whole pack of them, and have only one word, J's favourite as it happens (what a prophet!) - deluded. And I have no qualms about calling all, cynical leaders and misled populace alike, 'idiots' because the original word in classical Greek, ἰδιώτης, has the literal meaning of a person preoccupied with self-interest and just not concerned with the democratic good (the Athenians knew something about that). Don't forget - the one on the right is just as unprincipled and immoral, if not quite as stupid, as the one on the left, and not funny any more, if he ever was. 

No way can he allowed to become Prime Minister (Theresa May and George Osborne aren't vastly better alternatives, either). Instead, the chance of a general election early next year should force the opposition to join forces and make sure we don't get another government even worse than this one. Just a reminder of one of the many things BJ wrote before flipping a coin.

And let's lay responsibility at tragic Cameron's door for thinking he could stifle the rabid fringes of his party.

I fear that the world will lump us Brits together as many of us did the Americans when George Dubbya became President. And yet we will protest that 48 per cent of us voters don't deserve that. I am proud to be a Londoner under Sadiq Khan's (so far) wise leadership. Guess on which side the person was here who turned his back when Khan was elected.

I'm especially proud that our borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, led by our superb Labour MP Andy Slaughter, voted 70 per cent to remain (56, 188 to Brexit's 24,054 - a 40 per cent majority, and again around 70 per cent for the turnout)*. I'm proud of my godchildren's generation, who voted 73 per cent to remain, and apologise to them from the bottom of my heart that a lot of selfish old people who are going to die soon did them over yet again** as if the last two governments haven't done enough. My 85-year-old, Daily Mail reading mum, I'm proud to say, wasn't one of them, and was heading that way anyway.

After the walking-on-air after ENO's electrifying Jenůfa (the mob versus Laura Wilde's desperate heroine pictured above by Donald Cooper) on Thursday night, Friday was one of the worst days I can remember. Went to bed at 1.30am in despair at the Sunderland result, had only the most superficial of sleeps, woke up again at 5am to worse. The physical nausea I felt, part ascribable to tiredness, seems to have been shared by everyone I know who's been in touch. There were two points of catharsis - one finally catching up with the most impassioned speech of the campaign, Sheila Hancock's, which maddeningly can't be shown on YouTube but is at the bottom of the page here. The other was meeting Claudia Pritchard after an indifferent Royal Opera Werther - diverting, no more - and having a cleansing rant and hug together.

But with the brighter dawn of Saturday morning came the realisation that the fight is back on, whatever happens in the forthcoming week. J, who has been remarkably phlegmatic throughout, took me for a belated birthday lunch at Pizarro on Bermondsey Street - perfect food in an unpretentious setting, with pork to die for. Fine Spanish wines, too.

The area is yet another which merits exploring - this is the row of houses and the Strawberry-Hill-Gothic church opposite the restaurant.

and I was wondering when someone would have the chutzpah to call a cafe this.

Storm building over the City and St Paul's as I crossed London Bridge

to reclaim my bike, left at Covent Garden the previous night because I was too exhausted to cycle home.

And then I got caught up, to my delight, in the Pride march.

Hadn't planned to go this year - copped out when the whistleblowing got too loud and a BBC producer I know got tinnitus when an ex-boyfriend blew one in his ear - but it was just the tonic. How far we've come since the police used to glare at us - one stepped out of line to propose to his man this year.

Plenty of displays of solidarity with immigrants, who are already having a hideous time, at least outside London which will always welcome them* (OK, so it's the Socialist Worker, but good on them).

and Euroflags, not least the one by this woman - J says he knows her - who was yelling furiously 'six million Jews murdered' over and over.

And yes, I see that the path to extermination camps and guns and violence starts here. We can't let it happen. Half the world doesn't want anything like this, let's bear that in mind - and fight to the very best of our abilities. More flags by way of hopeful finale.

*Yet I just read of a graffiti attack on the Polish Cultural Centre just down the road in King Street, Hammersmith, something that hasn't happened in its 50 years until now. And racist tweets are being catalogued diligently by the Polish community. All should be reported to the police as hate crime.

**Yet a great many didn't. One of my students just reminded me of this before today's class, when Linda Esther Gray came to talk about Isolde and Goodall. Linda, as a Scottish socialist, is passionate on the referendum fallout, and so were the students who joined us at lunch. They have so much energy and indignation, it feels as if we're of the same generation - I've had this sensation before when sharing lunch with my (then) 94 year old friend Elaine Bromwich and her American pal Tom Cullen, who left America because he was, like her, one of the communists when the name denoted noble ideals.

To honour Jo Cox

Only four days now to a referendum which may change our lives more profoundly than any general election has. With one of the most sickening murders I can remember symbolising the outcome of Brexit's more toxic side - for, regardless of the fact that the killer was obviously mentally ill, that movement's representatives may have smiled and smiled and yet been villains all along - the unease I've been feeling for weeks turned to physical nausea. And here I am in Aldeburgh, where despite the applause that greeted the sign of the European Union's Culture Programme supporting the Euro-opera I saw on Wednesday at Snape, Vote Leave and Give Us Our Country Back signs are everywhere*. In London we're living in a bubble. Much of the rest of the country thinks otherwise - and if it's Out on Thursday, sposo and I are out of Little England too, sooner or later, moving either to Scotland or Ireland.

Just a few reminders, then, of what's at stake. It's a unique case where negative campaigning is essential. In the short term, we'll get a Tory government that's more right wing and even less concerned with statesmanship than this one. Click on any of the photos for a larger image if the text is too small.

 It's worth ramming home who some of the other spokesfolk are

and who in Europe would like us to leave, for no honourable statesperson in the entire world does.

Not to mention the two biggest bogeymen, Putin and Trump. This, the excellent Wolfgang Tillmans' poster campaign, has also been positive

and so, too, funnily enough, was one Boris Johnson in his book The Churchill Factor (including the fact that, yes, much DOES still need to change about the institution of the EU, though one can quote plenty of facts to gainsay the 'inflated bureaucracy' charge).

Unelected officials? Try Nigel Farage, the Royal Family and the House of Lords, for a start.

Dark moments along the way, one loosely connected and, thank God, that hurdle overcome,

the second just vile from a supposedly intelligent journalist at the time of the Brussels bombings

 and the third magnificent timing from UKIP on the day of the killing

with its unequivocal links to a Nazi propaganda film. Update: someone recently pointed out that the band on the right above is plastered over the one obviously white face in the procession.

Among about a hundred things that are good about the EU, let's emphasis the human rights

not to mention clean beaches and, more generally, the best environmental rights programme in the world.

Jessica Duchen has a very eloquent piece on her blog about what Brexit might mean to musicians. I'm disappointed that so few voices in the classical and opera world have made their feelings felt - especially in the light of their being ignored by the Remain campaign's very selective list of artists and writers. Anyhow, lest I weigh you down with too many cut-and-pasted facts here, go across to 'Elgar the European' on the blog for further links lower down that page.

And remember - though I fear that, like The Guardian, I'm preaching mostly to the converted here  - 'not everyone who wants to leave the EU is a racist, but all racists want to leave the EU'. Please let's not wake up to the possibility of a bunch of liars, careerists and psychopaths running the country on Friday morning.

Those of us whose natural home is not professional comedy, and who feel it's all beyond remedy now, should leave it to the superb Stewart Lee to inject some wit filled with savage indignation here. For anyone who can't be bothered to read the whole thing, this will do:

Leave had no arguments or facts, just pornographically arousing soundbites and lies they knew were lies, but which they calculated might stick to a wall in a depressed town somewhere, if flung with enough force, like compacted pellets of Priti Patel's shit.

Now I'm back to more Messiaenic birdsong at Snape. Good luck to all those kissing for Europe in London and other capitals: I'm with you in spirit.

Oh, and one good thing has just happened which I never thought I would live to see: our affable Prince Wills appearing on Attitude magazine's cover to stand up against bullying of young gay people. Kudos.

STOP PRESS (21/6) Amnesty has just announced an event to celebrate Jo Cox's life in Trafalgar Square tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday 22 June) at 4pm. More details here.

*I have no idea on which side the owners of the Wentworth Hotel, where I stayed in Aldeburgh, might be, but it's worth noting that this very comfortable hotel priding itself on traditional values overlaid with modern conveniences employed the most delightful Eastern European lady on reception, who could not have been more attentive. What would happen to the hotel trade without the Poles and other workers moving freely between EU countries who staff the establishments and usually turn out to be the most polite of people?