The only reason...

...you need concerning what NOT to vote for today.

If Clarke, John Major and Michael Heseltine are agin Diana Ditch and her Chamber of Horrors, while Tommy Robinson has cast in his lot with the monstrosities, where does that leave you?

I don't need to post much more, but where anyone with a fibre of moral integrity should vote depends on keeping the worst at bay.  It's simple in Hammersmith: our Labour MP with a large majority, Andy Slaughter, is a passionate Remainer and tireless hard worker. He helped save Charing Cross Hospital, he's campaigning against the Third Runway and working with constituent Alf Dubs (whose face can just be seen in the below photo; Andy's on the left) to do more for refugees. Ticks all the right boxes, I'd have thought, and Corbyn has campaigned decently; we'll cross the bridge of his pro-Brexit stance when and if we come to it. At least he's offering another public vote on the terms, with No Brexit as one of the options.

Meanwhile, just vote and please don't spoil your ballot paper; as I read someone else saying elsewhere, find where there is a bit of difference between what you hate and what you think could do even a tiny bit of good, and mark your cross accordingly.

I'm off tonight to hear Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony from Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra. Concert planning couldn't have known that this would be a significant date, but what could be more appropriate than an angry, dissonant work from a (left-wing) composer who cherished his roots but was also a true internationalist. Let's hope that tomorrow morning the total contrast, his radiant and mostly serene Fifth Symphony, will chime with my feelings about the results. This performance conducted by the composer in 1937 - by which time the angst expressed must have been even more extreme - is magnificent.

Where do we go from here?

It's anybody's guess, but do they think us Remainers are going away now that we're the oppostion after all the years the Tory lunatic fringe and Ukippers chipped away at democracy? Some hope has to come from Open Europe led by Streatham boy Chuka Umunna - one of the few in the Labour party who might offer charisma to match Sadiq Khan (and Nicola Sturgeon, for that  matter, the only other impressive leader), while all else implodes. By the way, I turned my Labour subscription over to Greenpeace long before the latest debacle, but only a couple of weeks ago decided to pay my subscription to the Lib Dems. No-one of great standing there at the moment, but they're the only hope in forming and leading a coalition to bring down the Tories.

Anyway, these marches to Parliament Square must go on. Saturday's was the first I've been around to part-attend, and the crowd hanging around for the speakers seemed a bit patchy by 2pm (the actual march had been scheduled for 11 to 1). Certainly the numbers were nothing like as big as they had been in July, but then that was a better-weather day and closer to the outcome.

I doubt if Parliament can vote, and a second referendum seems off the table, though the thinking behind it isn't so skewed: if a third of the nation was misled by a campaign based entirely on lies, why should we accept the result? Peter Tatchell (on the screen below) thought that result should be - well, I wish people would stop saying 'respected' and leave it at 'accepted'.

Meanwhile, I like the analogy between May's 'Brexit means Brexit' and 'Breakfast means Breakfast' - in which instance there are very many definitions of what your breakfast might be. Remainers are torn between thinking it might have been worse than that Theresa - we were heading Edinburgh-wards if Boris became PM - and remembering that she wielded some nasty false figures for her virulent anti-immigration campaign, and she hasn't changed her tune on that. And was she really playing a sly game putting Johnson, Fox and Davis in responsible positions? The first fall-out began to bite today as Davis' non-manifesto was virtually laughed out of the Commons. The only thing that so far seems certain is that any restriction of free movement means no access to the single market; that much is simple.

Well, we took some consolation on Saturday from the ever-spirited Eddie Izzard, who has long been out there and trying his best - which is formidable - in umpteen European languages. He told us that his pink beret had been snatched away by a hooded man; he gave chase, and a policeman - hurrah - wrestled the assailant to the ground. So there it was, the beret with the UK and EU flags on it.

One thing's for sure, the yellow stars and blue background have rarely been seen as merchandise, but here they are, selling like hot cakes. My Euroman thought he'd never see the day. And in an inelegant segue from Eddie's cross-dressing - though not without connection to the day of wrath, when RuPaul put across her slogan to British voters, 'And remember - don''t f**k it up' -  can I just say what terrific amusement and solace we're getting from RuPaul's Drag Race Series 7 and 8 AND Allstars 2, now that we've found how to access them at long last.

There have been some seriously inventive new catwalk looks, few more so than the 'bearded runway' sequence of Series 7. I'm not so far in to it, so please don't tell me who wins, but I have to sing the praises of two favourites - Violet Chachki as (in RuPaul's phrase) 'Peggy Sue got hairy'

and Katya Zamolodchikova, a very funny queen out of drag as well as in, giving us 'emancipation, proclamation realness' as Bab(e)raham Lincoln.

And since our great mamma hasn't appeared in this entry so far, let's feature her with a slogan that might serve all campaigns well at the moment.

Deepest shame and disgust

...on/at the 294 MPs who voted against our accepting 3,000 frightened, unaccompanied and endangered refugee children into the UK*. Whatever the arguments - 'we're doing enough to help them where they are' (still leaving them prey to traffickers), 'this sets dangerous precedents' - it's morally wrong. The list of 294, named and shamed here, needs to be posted everywhere with mugshots attached - there is more than one kind of criminality. It might also be worth finding out how many are the children or descendents of refugees: the majority, I'd imagine.

This man, Sir Nicholas Winton, honoured with a statue here in Prague (there's also one at Liverpool Street Station), would be turning in his grave.

We don't need to go back to World War II - Belgian refugee children in the UK pictured up top - for precedents (our dear friend Edward Mendelson, by the way, was on the last of the Kindertransports from Vienna which also brought the current heroic - and so far rejected - proponent of compassion, Alf Dubs, saved - as it later turned out - by Winton, who became a friend). These are Bulgarian refugee children in 1914.

And so back into history. I wish Dickens were alive today to write a savage invective.

Can't we take a leaf out of Lebanon's book? It has more refugees than it can reasonably cope with, but education programmes for Syrian children are now strong. Gordon and Sarah Brown have been doing an admirable job to ensure more funding flows for the right to school.

The moral bankruptcy currently rife in this country, or at least among its so-called leaders, seems to be coming to a head. All you have to say is 'Theresa May wants us to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights' and you know what's wrong with that. Though this film starring Patrick Stewart, with acknowledgments to Monty Python, is a good way to respond. Do watch through to the end, which had me rolling about with laughter. Doesn't seem embeddable as yet, so click on the link above to watch.

You don't need to make a parody of Jeremy Hunt (not the brightest button in the box, as this article by a former employee makes all too clear) vs junior doctors - it's way beyond satire already**, though the outcome is already looking tragic. Excellent clarity - from the medics' perspective - here. Everyone needs to know that senior doctors are to hand to make sure emergencies are handled during the current strike, so don't believe the scare stories.

What horrible people we have in power. But I know this isn't true of the UK population as a whole - unless support for Brexit proves me wrong, in which case it will just be dangerous ignorance of the facts, which IS a problem here. Let's just hope Obama, the greatest AND most lovable statesman I've ever known in my lifetime, has had the desired effect. While he was here, he went to the Globe, too, on Shakespeare's birthday, happily coinciding with the grand finale of the company's amazing Hamlet world tour. Hope this picture is 'fair use' territory.

I wish it were simple for people to decide when faced with the equation 'Obama wants us to stay in Europe; Putin, Trump and Marine Le Pen want us out'. That and the pitiful roster of damaged human beings leading, if you can use the word, the Brexit campaign, should be enough to show folk what's going on.

Incidentally, when I last looked at the Patrick Stewart film, up popped an ad: 'Canadian immigration: do you qualify?' I hope I do if it's out of the EU for the UK: already having thoughts about moving to the diplo-mate's homeland, Ireland or, when it detaches, Scotland

Rant over.

PS - but let that wonderful artist Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the 12-Star Gallery's finest exhibitors, do more of the addressing in a sequence of sparely-designed messages. They can all be found here - my thanks to Graham Rickson for e-mailing the link - but this one is especially good. The main message (albeit in small print here): register to vote before 7 June

*Yet there is one notable exception among the Conservatives - Stephen Phillips QC MP, whose speech here should be the rule rather than the exception.

**Though Frankie Boyle can always go one better, and just has in The Guardian.

Sicily '48

In Leonardo Sciascia's 1958 quartet of novellas/short stories Sicilian Uncles, the year could be 1848 or 1948. We make for ourselves the connection between a boy witnessing the advent of the Americans in Sicily, a dogged adherent of Stalin whose delusions are followed through to the Beloved Leader and Teacher's death in 1953, another boy living through the upheavals that led to Garibaldi's arrival and a poor villager going straight from the mines to fight in Spain in the name of fascism, to whom enlightenment comes as a sort of bittersweet apotheosis for the entire book.

I don't know why I didn't read Sciascia for so long. The name somehow smacked to me of a florid Italian philosopher; the style is anything but. Sciascia's writing is crisp, often ironical and so compressed that he usually leaves you wanting more. 'Forty-Eight', its title taken from a Sicilian phrase which since the events of that momentous 19th century year has become synonymous with 'to cause or profit from confusion', could have been the ideal novel-length equal of  Lampedusa's The Leopard; indeed, as it stands at 60 or so pages, it is absolutely perfect in its own right. As in The Leopard (the book, not the often inept film), most of the fighting like that outside the Duomo in Palermo pictured below takes place 'offstage'.

You just want to go on reading about the capricious, casually corrupt and chameleonic Baron Garziano as viewed through the eyes of the son of the estate gardener, about his cronies in the church and the liberals who spend their time between a local bar and prison. The essential message is that everything just goes on as normal after each upheaval, and 'normal' in Sicily isn't good, it's just a case of plus ça change (do the Italians have a similar phrase, I wonder?)

The American Aunt of the first story undergoes an alarming transformation from the magical, mythical figure over the seas to an all-controlling manipulator when she comes to Sicily. The first few pages are a magnificently etched picture of the moment in the Second World War when the Americans arrive; it's so vivid that you know Sciascia is describing from experience. Presumably he also knew a communist who held on to his rosy view of Stalin. But so vivid is the first-person narration in 'Forty-Eight' that you forget the author wasn't alive at that time.

As for Antimony, the name given by the sulphur miners of Sciascia's native Racalmuto to the substance (pictured above) which burns the protagonist's father, the description of fighting in the Spanish Civil War also feels like autobiography, but can't be. As ordinary men whose philosophy has been forged in horror, the narrator and his maverick companion Ventura, who simply yearns to join up with the Americans, do most of the summary reflection for the four stories. Our hero has already understood the nature of Sicilian faith in his village, in contrast to the death-justifying God created by the Falangists:

...in our faith, it's only the good things that count. God doesn't come into the sufferings; it's destiny which brings them. We have a good Sunday, there's soup and meat, and my mother says we must thank God. They bring my father home, burned by antimony, and my mother says it's a vile destiny that's burned him...I'd like to have my mother here, and show her that, here in Spain, God and destiny have one and the same face.

Bitter experience and injury send him home, where the villagers don't want to hear what he's had to say. But there is a kind of transcendence:

The war had condemned my body. But when a man has understood that he is an image of dignity, you can even reduce him to a stump, lacerate him all over, and he will still be the greatest thing God has created. When fresh troops arrive on a front and have been thrown into battle, the generals and journalists say, 'They've had their baptism of fire'  - one of the many solemn and stupid phrases thrown out about the bestiality of war: but from the war in Spain, and the fire of the war there, I really do feel I have had a baptism: a sign of liberation in my heart; a sign of consciousness and of justice.

Of course justice cannot thrive in Sicily, or it couldn't when Sciascia was writing (born in 1912, he died in 1989, before any kind of true dawn); I wonder how far the campaign to resist paying protection money, its stickers all over shops in Palermo, has got. I wrote about it here, but no harm in displaying the 'addiopizzo' sticker again.

Sciascia's short thrillers tend to be about cases which can't be solved, even when you have the evidence, because of the Mafia's tentacles reaching to the highest echelons of the government in Rome (as we now know from the true history of 'Il Divo' Andreotti), despite big businessmen and local worthies' insistence that no such thing exists.

In The Day of the Owl, written shortly after Sicilian Uncles, the honest, just Captain Bellodi from Emilia Romagna is determined to do the right thing in Sicily. He knows how it works when he talks to a group under suspicion:

Now let's say that nine out of ten contractors accept or ask for protection. It would be a poor sort of association - and you know what association I refer to - if it were to limit itself to the functions and pay of night watchmen. The protection offered by the association is on a much vaster scale. It obtains private contracts for you, I mean for the firms which toe the line and accept protection. It gives you valuable tips if you want to submit a tender for public works, it supports you when the final inspection comes up, it saves trouble with your workmen...Obviously, if nine companies out of ten have accepted protection thus forming a kind of union, the tenth which refuses is the black sheep. It can't do much harm, of course, but its very existence is a challenge and a bad example. So, by fair means or foul, it must be forced to come into the fold or be wiped out once and for all.

He knows, too, the approach of the big cheese:

One fine day, a person 'worthy of respect', as you would say, comes to have a little talk...what he says might mean anything and nothing, allusive, blurred as the back of a piece of embroidery, a tangle of knots and threads with the pattern on the other side...

Nor is The Day of the Owl a merely schematic exposure of how things work, or don't, in Sicily. There's a brilliant piece of characterisation when the informer of the piece - no major spoiler here, since Sciascia anticipates it almost from the moment the personage is introduced - is shot on his doorstep:

The man had left this life with one final denunciation, the most accurate and explosive one he had ever made...It was not the importance of the denunciation which made such an impression on the captain, but the agony, the despair which had provoked it. Those 'regards' made him feel brotherly compassion and anguished distress, the compassion and distress of one who under appearances classified, defined and rejected, suddenly discovers the naked human heart. By his death, by his last farewell, the informer had come into a closer, more human relationship; this might be unpleasant, vexatious; but in the feelings and thoughts of the man who shared them they brought a response of sympathy, of spiritual sympathy. 

Suddenly this state of mind gave way to rage. The captain felt a wave of resentment at the narrow limits in which the law compelled him to act...

Bellodi thinks that one through too, and dismisses it. The standard Sciascian paradigm is one of unearthing, then being forced to shovel the earth back over the discovery.

How Sciascia would enjoy, albeit grimly, targeting the plans of the present government. Within a week we've had auguries of tyranny: worst, the rewriting of the European Human Rights Act to suit the 'British constitution' (opting out would make us pariahs alongside Belarus. Well, exactly). We'll see what that entails, but an act so laboured over, not least by Churchill, should not be open to negotiation - and a healthy response, from the cause-fighting 38 Degrees, is pictured below.

We've had threats of a petty vendetta with the BBC. We've had the delightful Theresa May - the only MP to insist on being driven up to No. 10 Downing Street on the first day in her limo and the one who first raised the spectre of the rights rewrite, now taken over by her even lovelier arch-enemy Michael Gove - saying that the immigrants, thousands of whom have drowned on perilous boat journeys from Africa to Europe (first point of entry, dead or alive, usually Sicily or one of the islands off it) should be sent back home and that we won't join the European agreement to take some in; and on a small scale, the ridiculous move to reinstate fox-hunting.

Fortunately there's a healthy opposition to most of the measures threatened, and the new SNP members are already making themselves felt (Scotland and Northern Ireland too, it seems, have the constitutional right to block the scrapping of the Human Rights Act as it stands, and many Tory backbenchers are against it, too). It's still a democracy, even if sometimes one wonders.