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!

Six bests in nine days

Namely as good as it can get in theatre (Simon Stone's radical adaptation and production of Medea for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam at the Barbican); in concerts (the two London Symphony Orchestra stunners to celebrate Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday - Mozart and Bruckner on Sunday, Dvořák and Mahler on Thursday); in fiction (putting my thoughts together on Robert Menasse's polyphonic masterpiece The Capital as well as meeting him last Friday); and in opera, stupendous results at the highest level of performance in Birmingham Opera Company's site-specific Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. To which I should add the perfection of a small gallery - major collection, handsome surroundings - in the shape of the Barber Institute on Birmingham University's campus. The below is merely the atrium to the superb deco concert hall; most of the masterpieces are in the rooms on the next floor, but even here we have a famous Rodin and a Chola bronze of Natarajan.

Much to say about the Barber collection, but now now. I need to take a break and simply digest after all that writing for The Arts Desk, and as there were too many good production/concert/rehearsal pics around that would otherwise go to waste, why not use some of them? The one below by Sanne Peper, of the stupendous Marieke Heebink as Anna, a contemporary Medea of excess vitality, and Aus Greidanus Jr as Lukas (Jason) with their two sons, is one I couldn't use in the review because the boys were different. And perhaps it's a bit of a spoiler as to how the ash which starts falling on the blindingly white stage two thirds of the way through gets deployed.

Haitink was photographed at the first of the two 90th birthday concerts by Robert Allan. You'd need to watch the film formerly on the LSO website to observe his superb control and vigilance - my friend Joe Smouha beautifully described 'the architecture spun from those tiny movements at the end of the baton' - but there's a sense of that here, albeit in a more genial moment.

The Khovanskygate experience of 2014 told me that Graham Vick's Lady Macbeth would be opera at its communicative best. Sure, every production of it I've seen - Pountney's twice at ENO, followed by Tcherniakov's, Jones's twice at the Royal Opera - has hit hard; but the closeness of one's promenading self to the action, the involvement of all strands of Birmingham society in the chorus and acting group, make this an unrepeatable experience. I got there early because they'd asked if I would prep a group of young volunteers on how to blog their experience (it actually turned out to be how they'd present their enthusiasms about the project on camera, but we quickly adapted and I got something very different out of each - to be blogged about here very soon). This shot I took of a warm-up gives some idea of the venue, which they'd further deconstructed. The orchestra platform is left, the first stage for the action, the Izmailov kitchen, to the right.

And we need a couple more production photos, by Adam Fradgley/Exposure, of the amazing Chrystal E Williams as Katerina/'The Wife'. Up top, she's despatching her inopportunely arrived husband Boris (Joshua Stuart). Here she is again, first liberated,

then deserted by that shit Sergey/'The Lover' (Brenden Gunnell).

I'm more and more drawn to Birmingham, even if it did vote for Brexit by a narrow margin (would it now, I wonder?) , and however messed up the city centre. There are so many hidden delights, and each time I go I discover one or two more. It has one of our most vibrant cultural scenes, that's to be sure. Now, if only BOC could think of Prokofiev's War and Peace...problematic, I know, because Part One is largely chorus-free. Maybe that could be done in a smallish theatre and then Part Two could be theirs in another extraordinary big venue, both with the CBSO. Or perhaps The Fiery Angel with Williams, whose upper range could certainly handle the crazy role of Renata. Anything is possible with this company.

Woman of the Year: a brief commemoration

I had wanted to write more about my impressions of the toweringly great Simone Veil's autobiography, Une Vie. But perhaps a more pressing need is to salute her on International Women's Day, as a pioneer of the possible and the first President of the European Parliament 40 year ago (this July, to be precise).

A figure of unimpeachable integrity, she had survived Auschwitz and the 'death march' from there before liberation. She had seen the vital need for peace and unity in a continent which was still unsettled. In her inaugural speech, she pointed out how 

localised wars have proliferated. The situation of peace that has prevailed in Europe has been a remarkable piece of good fortune, but none of us should estimate its fragility. Need I stress that this situation is new for Europe, whose history is marked by constant fratricidal and bloody wars?

Like its predecessors, our Assembly has, whatever our differences, a fundamental responsibility to maintain this peace, which is probably the most precious asset for all Europeans. The tensions prevailing in the world today make this responsibility particularly heavy, and it is to be hoped that the legitimacy bestowed on our Assembly by its election by universal suffrage will help us to bear it and to spread this peace of ours to the outside world.

Worth quoting to those who still rabbit on about 'the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels', though I suspect they are deaf beyond help now if they still persist. Pictured below: Veil at a sitting of the European Parliament in October 1979.

Veil also acknowledged the difficulties of a federation of national voices all needing to be heard, which is the other subject of Robert Menasse's magnificent very rich new novel The Capital, just published in a beautiful English translation by Jamie Bulloch. I'll be reviewing that on The Arts Desk on Sunday. Veil, briefly, on that theme:

The new Parliament will make it possible for the views of all Community citizens to be voiced at European level, and will, at the same time, raise awareness among the different sectors of society of the need for European solidarity over and above their immediate concerns, however legitimate, for these must never mask the fundamental interests of the Community.

Economics are also a theme of the speech, but let's leave those aside since that seems to be all that's at stake right now.  You can read the rest in one of the autobiography's appendices. Meanwhile can I salute some of Veil's standard-bearers of integrity on the UK political scene: the late Jo Cox, Caroline Lucas, Anna Soubry, Tulip Saddiq, Jess Phillips, Nicola Sturgeon, to select a few at random. Today is one to forget those who disgrace Parliament, including our shameful so-called leader, so I won't give them a namecheck.