On the eve: my local MP writes

 
Andy Slaughter is one in a thousand: a politician tirelessly serving his constituency in every sphere and well beyond the call of duty. He responds to e-mails; he's out there with people every week, and reporting back in an always informative and well expressed newsletter. He's wisely concentrated on photo-opportunities in the borough with our splendid Mayor Sadiq Khan. He resigned from the Labour front bench over issues with Corbyn, and was one of the MPs who voted against the triggering of Article 50.

His latest dispatch says it all - well, about everything except the Brexit process, which sadly and reprehensibly this short campaign has not addressed, and which I know Andy thinks is as pointless as and ruinous as I do, whatever the eventual terms. I reproduce his words here and urge anyone who cares for the NHS and human rights to vote wisely tomorrow. It's no longer about left and right, it's about fair versus unjust (maybe it always was). If Corbyn were only able to carry out a fraction of what he's promised, the country would still be the better for it.

Democracy unites us - in robust debate

This has been an extraordinary election campaign.  Called by a Prime Minister who promised she would govern until 2020.  Supposed to be only about Brexit but actually about everything from the NHS to the Dementia Tax.  And disrupted by two heinous acts of terror targeted at young children in Manchester and Londoners enjoying a Saturday night out.

This was going to be a non-event election. The cynicism of calling a vote just to help your Party increase its hold on power was turning people even further away from politics.

Now I hope everyone will vote - even if it is not for me! -  to demonstrate we decide things by voicing our views not by violence.  And that terrorism cannot disrupt the way we choose who governs.

Our city and the nation have come together to reject extremism and intolerance. Mayor Sadiq Khan summed up the strength of British values in a way Donald Trump will never understand [Slaughter campaigning with Khan before the Mayor's election pictured below]

But there is no contradiction in saying that all Parties can unite in upholding democratic values while conducting a robust debate.

Indeed this is what democracy is all about - calling out your opponents on the issues that matter.

I want Charing Cross to remain a major acute hospital, providing some of the best clinical care in the country, not be demolished and replaced by a primary care and treatment centre.

I want at least a third, preferably a half, of the thousands of new homes being built in Hammersmith & Fulham to be genuinely affordable to first-time buyers and long-term renters.

I want the UK to trade freely with the EU for the good of our economy and our social and cultural mix, not to shut ourselves off, looking for trade deals with dictatorships and unstable regimes.

I want our local schools to be fairly funded and for students to leave university without unmanageable debts.

I want pensioners to be warm and well provided for, not to be fleeced by a Dementia Tax.

And I believe our police and intelligence services, properly resourced, will keep us safe, and that scrapping our human rights laws will not.

That sounds to me like a reasonable programme for government.  A generation ago it would have just been thought of as common sense.

These are the policies Labour is putting forward.  But whether we get the chance to implement them or not, they represent the values that I will fight for if re-elected as MP for Hammersmith.

I hope I have your support on 8 June.

Andy

And maybe Mrs Mayhem should have her say, too, in the immortal re-ordering of genius Cassetteboy.

UPDATE on the day: well done, Andy - you increased your majority. And as for the general, assuming it was the students wot done it:

UPDATE (30/6) I confess I didn't even know that Andy was back on the front bench, albeit in a different role (housing), and I only do now because he's been sacked by Corbyn for supporting Chuka Umunna's proposed amendment to the Queen's Speech calling for Britain to remain within the customs union and single market. Of course he did. Top Mensch.

Uplift on nightmare's eve

It was more or less coincidence that we happened to watch two similarly-themed films from 2015 on our return from the Netherlands. Unquestionably the better is Pride, distinguished director Matthew Warchus's take on the unlikely coming-together of gays and miners in the 1980s when queer- and union-bashing were rife. Stonewall, on the other hand - and it can be dismissed very quickly - is a fairly crass take on the uprising on Christopher Street that changed gay rights for ever.

The problem with Stonewall is that the cute white boy is the hero, and there seems to be some sort of condescending attitude to 'sad' trannies and drag queens. Never mind; better that it get some sort of mainstream exposure than none at all.

My point here is about connecting in the face of the most frightening political appointment - at least in terms of consequences for the world at large since the 1930s (or the 1990s, if you include Putin, as I think we must - but for Putin to carry out his plans of sowing discord in the west, he needs powerful accomplices). Whatever your reservations about the re-telling of Pride - and a well-known director with whom I shared a coffee the other day says he remembers visiting the Brixton Fairies' hangout, and that they were much less cuddly and rather more damaged as individuals than their screen embodiments - you can't deny it happened. The miners really did turn out in force to join the Gay Pride march of 1985, and their union really was instrumental in pushing for gay rights in Parliament. This article with a number of interviews is excellent on what really happened.

The fact that the miners failed in their quest, and that maybe things fell apart afterwards, doesn't signify. What's important is that people from completely different walks of life got to know and, to a certain extent, to understand each other. Empathy, compassion: for me, that's the point of life. Advance or retreat into apparent comfort which is really a state of fear.

Interesting, incidentally, if not exactly troubling, that the participating stars, Imelda Staunton (first-rate as ever, utterly believable) and Bill Nighy (actually playing someone else, and amazing me), get centre billing, as it were, in the UK poster.

while the folk really at the centre of it all appeared on posters in Germany, Turkey and elsewhere (where possibly Staunton and Nighy weren't exactly household names anyway)*.

Anyway, as the sun leaves the Oval Office and pitch-black moves in, I want to post the two shorter films which are worth replaying, as much in terms of a fridge-note to self as so that others can see them. Saturday Night Live's script-writers hit new heights in this parody of the infamous press conference

while Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Cloris Leachman kicked off what I hope will be the first of many re-writes of The Producers. Expect 'Springtime for Putin' soon.

As we're at the bottom of the piece, here's an appropriate cartoon from the genius that is Steve Bell.

*update: my Arts Desk pal Graham Rickson writes:  'just read your blog, which reminds me hearing about this, and how "London-based" replaced "gay and lesbian" in front of the word "activists" on the DVD sleeve'.

Why I've been overdoing it on LinkedIn

'Arguing with a fool makes two,' is one of the few motivational saws I've liked on LinkedIn. Which hasn't stopped me doing it, in the last couple of days especially, rather defeating the purpose of my not joining Facebook or Twitter (reason: I'd waste time and get into pointless spats). Why? Because I still can't get my head around the difference - which still seems to me to hang in the balance in these crucial few days - between this,

namely a truly lovable President, with an equally adorable wife and daughters, pictured above with Haben Girma, the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and this,

which I don't need to explain.

Meryl Streep had the unarguable moral high ground on that one. Anyone who defies her speech has to be a retarded school bully; and Trump's lie that he wasn't imitating the reporter's disability is negated by three seconds of horrible video evidence. I can't bring myself to watch the press-conference meltdown; am I wrong in replaying instead both Obamas' last speeches, and Michelle's best speech of the election campaign? Like so many millions, I can't believe the President-Elect will arrive in the White House.

But that's America for you. Which won't stop the fightback against Trump, Putin and Brexit, with renewed fury and focused vigour. Take confidence in the fact that America's best President - in my lifetime, at any rate - and the best of First Ladies will be there to hold the country's hand and speak out more forcefully in the eye of the storm, should it arrive.

Meanwhile, one good piece of news which doesn't seem to have made the UK press: Somalian-born refugee Ahmed Hussen has been appointed Canada's Minister of Immigration (pictured with Justin Trudeau above). What a parallel universe to that of America, Russia and the UK - though we do have our so-far impeccable Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. But we also still, unbelievably, have dangerous doofus Jeremy Hunt as Minister of Health. It bears repeating that Trudeau's cabinet of experts includes an opposite number who's a respected doctor and medical expert as well as a Minister of Education who's long been well thought of in that profession. Again, enough said.

Plots against America

That's Charles Lindbergh on the left, the famous aviator who was to lead the America First campaign and decry 'the Jewish race' for trying to lead his country into the Second World War, in the delightful company of Hermann Goering, presumably at the time of the October 1938 dinner in Berlin where Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the Golden Eagle. No such photos of Trump with Putin have come to light, prompting some amusingly creative collages which I assume are copyright so won't use here. But you can be sure that if the world's worst-case-scenario comes true and Trump is elected, he'll be holding meetings with Putin like the one Philip Roth imagines a putative President Lindbergh having with Hitler in Iceland, and later with Von Ribbentrop in the White House, in The Plot Against America.

There are probably more differences between Trump and Lindbergh than similarities - no-one sees DT as a clever operator hiding behind others, for instance. But it seemed timely to read this what-if masterpiece of a novel by a great American under present circumstances. Apart from the lethally eloquent and/or direct prose style, Roth's genius is to put himself and his family into the alternative picture, building on the anti-Semitism he experienced in New Jersey as a child.

I can't tell which of the friends and relatives gathered around the Roths are real - would love to read a biography or an alternative study which sheds light on this - but the portraits of his honest ma and pa break the heart. It isn't easy to make ordinary decency that interesting, but put it up against its opposite and you have some powerful situations. If you don't think you want to work your way through the whole book - amazing how people keep on saying 'I don't have the time to read'; there is ALWAYS time to read - then the second chapter. 'Loudmouth Jew (November 1940-June 1941)', about the Roth family visit to Washington and the anti-Semitism they experience there, is a locus classicus of vivid writing. Roth also makes some powerful statements throughout the book about the kind of man his father was, both as an American Jew and as a Mensch. More often he highlights what he was not:

It went without saying that Mr Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hardworking Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it - generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to - while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Roth (pictured above) makes the distinction between his father and other Jews they knew, though:

For good or bad, the exalted egoism of an Abe Steinheim or an Uncle Monty or a Rabbi Bengelsdorf - conspicuously dynamic Jews, all seemingly propelled by their embattled status as the offspring of greenhorns to play the biggest role that they could commandeer as American men - was not in the makeup of my father, nor was there the slightest longing for supremacy, and so though personal pride was a driving force and his blend of fortitude and combativeness was heavily fueled, like theirs, by the grievances attending his origins as an impoverished kid other kids called a kike, it was enough for him to  make something (rather than everything) of himself and to do so without wrecking the lives around him.

As for the Jews who in Roth's dystopia kowtow to Lindbergh (pictured above before the 1941 speech which in reality toppled him), there is a devastating portrait in the shape of Aunt Evelyn who marries the self-satisfied, self-compromised Rabbi Bengelsdorf.

As always with Aunt Evelyn, there was something very winning about her enthusiasm, though in the context of my household's confusion, I couldn't miss what was diabolical about it as well. Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult - not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty - nor had I understood until then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

One can't take it for granted, unfortunately, that more than half of voting Americans come to understand the same thing before it's too late. If they don't, the world will sufer from a regime that might be longer-lived than the fictional presidency of Lindbergh. In the meantime, here's hope

and here may be a greater part of the reason why Donald behaves as he does - behold The Mother.

More black than orange

Any evening at home between Proms and summer jaunts usually includes one episode of Orange is the New Black, Series 4. Netflix's ever-surprising drama about a women's prison is too rich for binge watching. Not only are so many characters and strands involved in each episode, but often their treatment goes so deep that you need time to digest it. So we go one at a time.

Episode 7, which we watched yesterday afternoon, seemed especially layered. Usually there's one 'back story', and this time it belonged to Lolly Whitehill, the mentally unstable character whose past was plumbed so painfully that it raised questions many must ask in America - and actually here too: how can conditions like schizophrenia and paranoia pass undiagnosed, and why should that person end up in prison without proper mental health care? Actor Lorin Petty is carrying a difficult burden here, but she executes it brilliantly, on a high wire between pathos, scariness and humour.

Interestingly the younger Lolly is played (though I'd never have guessed it) by another actress, Christina Brucato (pictured above), and though I haven't looked back to check I presume Petty has taken over by the time we see Lolly on the streets, selling coffee to willing buyers and giving some of it away. You fear something dreadful's going to happen in the prison, but scriptwriter Nick Jones settles for a quiet coda - hope this isn't too much of a spoiler - as Lolly shares a moment inside her 'time machine' with the intermittently touching, flawed inmate counsellor Sam Healey (Michael Harney). Full marks to Jones for giving her so many good and strong lines about the voices in her head.

The terror of the episode belongs to the ongoing story of initial protagonist Piper Chapman (Taylor Schelling) and the upshot of her opportunism in selecting a gang of white racists to be her bodyguard. We love the return of the terrifically sympathetic, big-eyed Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), while our favourite group including Uzo Aduba (Suzanne 'Crazy Eyes' Warren), Adrienne C Moore (Cindy) and Tasha Johnson (Danielle Brooks) are part of a semi-amusing thread involving the exposure of Marth Stewart-alike Judy King (Blair Brown) as the one-time manipulator of a tinted-tainted puppet on TV. Brown is one of the latest additions to a flawless team of actors, any one of whom could garner a special award*. And the main thing is that Orange is the New Black doesn't seem to be falling into the formulaic trap of so many American series, however well they start out. And I always found House of Cards phoney anyway... Now, how the HELL I gonna catch up on RuPaul's Drag Race?

Meanwhile, American 'real' life continues to be as scary as it is comic-grotesque. To learn the extent to which Trump is just one of many Republican fruitcakes, read this brilliant article by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books**. And to plumb the seriousness of Trump's connection to Putin - much of which has yet to come properly to light - this is good (and good on Vilnius, which has every right to feel very scared about Trump's election, for the above; my thanks to Sue Scheid for drawing my attention to the report). Fine coverage, as always, on how it's playing in Russia from The Interpreter. Anything positive to shout about our side of the pond? Only the speechifying of Nicola Sturgeon, the one limelight politician who calls a spade a spade.

* 4/8 Having finished the series, I can say that the last three episodes are well up to the standard of this one. There's a heart-wrenching flashback sequence for Suzanne within a tense lock-down strand and another for the adorable Poussey (Samira Wiley).

**Postscript - and this LRB article, which I've only just discovered, is the best long read on Brexit of any I've come across.

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.