My Log 672 Dec 6 2018: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 108; Like Horatius at the bridge, Ms. May, gripped by an heroic, blind courage, valiantly defends the survival of her nation; but others desperately wish for some other outcome

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I have found it quite impossible not to be continually absorbed by the   British argument over leaving the European Union.

An elderly French-Canadian man who sits every morning in the coffee shop I frequent in Montreal has been convinced from the start that the British will find a way to finagle their way through to a successful conclusion.  “The English are very skilled at that kind of thing, you know,” he told me on Friday,  “…keeping at it, obscuring the issue, until somehow they sneak through to a solution.”

I am not so sure he is right on this one. Theresa May has been doggedly sticking at it with a stubbornness that has begun to seem almost fanatical, insisting that only she is serving the national interest with the “only” deal available from the Europeans, a deal that unfortunately is unacceptable to the majority of British members of Parliament. She spent Friday touring the capitals of Europe seeking “clarifications” to the confusing issue of the “backstop” on the Northern Irish border, clarifications which were not forthcoming.  However, back home, she refused to give in, insisting that clarifications were still possible, and she would return for another round of rebuffs (alhough she didn’t describe it exactly in those terms).

She seemed to be appealing to every English schoolboy to remember the story of Horatius at the bridge:

… the Consul’s brow was sad,
And the Consul’s speech was low,	210
And darkly looked he at the wall,
And darkly at the foe;
“Their van will be upon us
Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge,	215
What hope to save the town?”
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.	220
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.

Before her weekend trip to save the bridge, as it were, the chairpersons of six select Parliamentary committees issued a statement warning that the “long-drawn-out arguments over Brexit, and delays in reaching an agreement on our future relationship with the EU, are having a serious detrimental effect on the conduct of wider domestic policy.”

In fact, important issues to do with a new ten-year plan for the health service, and a long awaited green paper dealing with social care, have simply been forgotten, and appeals to the Prime Minister that she pay attention to them have elicited no response.

According to an article in The Guardian on Saturday, one of the  many former Tory ministers (four or five of whom, and a passle of junior office-holders  have recently resigned from the government, unable any longer to support Ms. May’s deal), was quoted as saying:  “It is hopeless, brick wall after brick wall…. My worry is not just about the deal and the fact that she won’t get it through and the EU won’t change it. It is about the country and the economy. We can’t do anything because she just insists on pushing on with something parliament will never agree to, so everything else we should be doing doesn’t happen. The country is being deprived of a decent government.”

The Labour party would dearly love to vote her out of office by a no-confidence vote, but the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, which provides Ms. May’s slender majority, has said that while it will vote against the deal, it would support her in a no-confidence motion, so Labour simply would not have the votes to win, unless some Tory MPs joined them in protest, an event that seems  entirely unlikely. In addition to which Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has been lukewarm to the European connection all his political life.

John Crace, a Guardian reporter who makes fun of most politicians, wrote last week:

‘Let me be very nebulous.’ If only Theresa May could manage that then the UK might be in with a shout of surviving Brexit. Just a hint of a hint of certainty amid an ocean of vagueness might offer the faintest glimmer of hope. But all the prime minister can run to now is complete and utter despair. She has finally reached peak futility. Truly she is a leader for our times.

He says it can’t go on like this for much longer.

She is now experiencing a total systems overload… and  more and more resembles the lone, almost silent hero of a spaghetti western, armed only with a water pistol. We all know it will end in a slow-motion finale…. And what makes it even more weird is that everyone will be rooting for her. It’s a bewildering irony that the entire country can empathize with a leader whose most striking feature is her lack of empathy.

Some of the incidents reported by the eagle-eyed reporters are highly comic. For example, after Ms. May had pleaded with her caucus for support, her Attorney-general Geoffrey Cox 

strode out of the room and said over and over again in his booming voice that it had been a ‘strong prime ministerial performance, a strong prime ministerial performance’. He kept saying it all the way down the long committee corridor until he turned a corner and went out of earshot.

Meantime, those who insist on taking it seriously appear to be losing their sense of being in a TV reality show, and according to one report

in the Commons tea room a huge row broke out between Remainer Anna Soubry and Brexiter Boris Johnson that onlookers described as one of the most ferocious they had ever witnessed. ‘Where we are now is no good for anyone,’ said another Conservative MP. “We are back in the first circle of Dante’s hell – purgatory.’

The only new item this morning was that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had apparently turned up in Brussels to urge that the only solution was a second referendum, to which Ms. May --- or Maybot  as she is regularly styled by Mr. Crace --- responded with a notable sense of not seeing any humour n any of  this: “

For Tony Blair to go to Brussels and seek to undermine our negotiations by advocating for a second referendum is an insult to the office he once held and the people he once served.

It is said to be unusual for a Prime Minister to attack personally one of his or her predecessors in office, but Ms. May seems to have convinced herself that only she, and she alone, is defending the national interest.

But then, these are far from usual times at the Palace of Westminster.

I eagerly await the next episode.

My Log 671 Dec 13 2018: Chronicles from My Tenth Decade: 107; Well, said my old editor, at least you can spell; he should see me now, littering my pieces with mistakes that even a schoolchild should avoid. My apologies to Emilie, Emelie, or Emily, or all three

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One of the most memorable events of my fairly brief apprenticeship to the craft of journalism back in the 1940s, was a mistake I made for which I received a severe bollocking from an enraged editor. Covering the criminal courts on that day, I had filed my piece on a murder trial and retired to the attic where I was happily playing table tennis, cheerfully defeating my colleague, as I usually did, when a stentorian voice echoed up the stairs, summoning me from below. I entered the editor’s office, where I had seldom been before, and was gruffly asked how the accused in the case I had just covered had pleaded. I had no doubt of the answer.  “He pleaded not guilty,” I said.

“Then why did you report that he pleaded guilty?”

His outraged  lawyer had just been on the phone, they had already checked the copy, and the fault was mine. By one of those aberrations that overcome everyone from time to time, I had failed on my final read-over of the piece, to notice the omission of the all-important word “not.”

He gave it to me on all barrels, emphasising the humiliation for the paper having to issue a correction on the following day, not to mention the severe possible legal penalties they could suffer if the aggrieved party so desired, and then, when all was done, he dismissed me with the final words, “Oh, well, at least you can spell.”

Indeed, I always have been able to spell. It is something I have rather prided myself on, and it is something that I always tried to insist that my own children should master as an essential item in the armoury behind which they are equipped to defend themselves in their passage through life. At the very least, I have always argued, they don't want to give the impression through making glaring spelling errors, that they are only half-educated.

As far as I can remember, there is only one word that I habitually spelled incorrectly until my mistake was pointed out to me by a meticulous book editor when I was in middle age. That word was “minuscule,” which I had habitually spelled “miniscule.” Self-evident, said my learned editing friend, it derives from “minute”, that’s all you need if you are to remember the correct spelling.

I’ve always felt slightly ashamed of my ignorance in relation to this word until today, when, on looking up the word, I was told by oxforddictionaries.com, whom I take to be the leading authority on English words, that the incorrect spelling is such a pervasive mistake, so often used, that it has almost become, and indeed is in processing of becoming, equally acceptable as the correct spelling, “although,” they added, “at the moment, ‘minuscule’ is still the correct spelling.”

(I have recently noticed that when I am engaged, as I am once or twice a week, in revising my French vocabulary through use of a flash-word exercise left over from the online course I took a few years ago, even in French my spelling is good; I have only to get a quick flash look at a word to remember how to spell it accurately, except --- as in English --- for one pesky, bothersome word that I am damned if I can ever remember --- that is, the French word for rubber --- ‘caoutchouc’ --- such an ostentatious, hateful  jumble of vowels with the occasional consonant thrown in, as to  escape almost any memory. What a feeble excuse !)

Well, this brings me on to why I am bothering to write this at all : in the last couple of years I find I am having more and more trouble remembering the spelling of words. This especially applies to words with double consonants. Does ‘appearance’ have two p’s ?  and how about those words with two double consonants ? Does ‘occurrence’  have two of both c and r ?   How about its n ? occurrennce…no that can’t be right. I am getting plenty of practice at revising the spelling of words because I make so many typos nowadays because of the narrow 13-inch keyboard on my laptop, after having spent my entire life on broader keyboards,  that the only solution would be to slow up my typing, which has so far proven to be beyond my achievement. Nevertheless, there is hardly a piece that I write nowadays for which  I do not have to look up the correct spelling of some word or other, usually some simple word whose spelling I have always known. When I mention it to anyone, they always say they have the same problem, something I can hardly believe.

But then, nowadays younger people have a careless insouciance in relation to their failure to spell : just turn on the spell checker, they say. A year or so ago, checking out the books they jettison from time to time as I was passing the McGill library,  I noticed three beautiful dictionaries which so seized my imagination that I picked them all up and manhandled them home, telling myself how pleased my children would be to have them. Oh yeah?  They looked at me as if I had lost my marbles. Why would I want a dictionary, they asked? I already have one on my computer. Not a whiff of pride in knowing how to spell, or of shame in not knowing how to spell. The machine has taken over that part of their lives, and they are quite content with it.

I cannot settle to such an insouciance myself.  I have a friend called Emily, who, because she speaks perfect  English, I assumed would have her name spelled in the English way.  So I entered her in my list of contacts, but when she replied to my first email, I discovered she was called Emilie, not Emily.  I was always meticulous in addressing her thereafter, but I have so far been unable to correct the spelling in my data base because Google improved their system, since when I have been unable to find my contacts that, under the old system were available at the mere touch of a button. These goddamned technical improvements !

Emilie disappeared some months ago into the caverns of the University of Montreal to study philosophy, and understandably I didn’t hear from her until last week when, mistakenly assuming the scholastic year must be over --- all days are beginning to seem alike to me ---  I  emailed her to find out how things were going. I had forgotten how she spelled her name exactly, and, being unable to access my contact list,  I committed the embarrassing and unforgivable error of addressing her as Emelie.  Shades of my old editor and his belief in my spelling prowess. What has happened to me? I can’t even remember a simple given name!

Emilie replied that she is just embarking on her exams. I imagine it will probably be the last time I  ever hear from her. My humiliation, my not-being-able-to-spell  humiliation, will then be complete.

I can’t spell at last. And the soothing response given by my acquaintances, not wanting to offend me,  that maybe it is only because I am 90, do not serve to rescue me. My shame is complete, and, I fear, irrevocable.

My Log 670 Dec 2 2018: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 106; One of America’s priceless political radicals has died; William Blum was a trenchant critic, especially of his nation’s aim to govern the world, who leavened his criticism with humour

For the last few years I have been a recipient of William Blum’s amusing, pointed and usually devastating “Anti-Empire Report.”

It has always reminded me of that great tradition of the American radical, carrying on the fight against all odds, facing up to the crushing power of the American political-military-industrial complex, keeping the faith alive. That tradition is described in detail in Howard Zinn’s superb People’s History of the United States, which explains how, from the very beginning of the American state, everything was set up to ensure that neither the freed blacks (if there should be any),  nor the poor whites should have any say in he affairs of the nation, a  heritage the nation has been exteremely slow to overcome.

Unfortunately, I will receive no more of these revealing monthly reports, because William Blum died this week at the age of 85, thus ending the string of books and  articles with which he has excoriated the American capitalist machine.  There was always an air of mischief about the way he approached things, as the full title of his book indicates: America’s Deadliest Export, Democracy. The truth about US foreign Policy, and everything else.

The obituary published by the CovertAction Magazine  noted that in the mid-sixties he worked in a comuter-related position in the US State Department, when he was an anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign service officer, but “he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War, left the State Department in 1967 and became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first ‘alternative’ newspaper in the capital.” From 1969 he worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America, reporting from, samong other places, chile, where the overthrow of Allende’s government by the CIA solidified his distrust of the spying agency. Thereafter he never

shrank from controversial actions: in the mid-1970s in London he exposed the CIA and in doing so published the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees, and later he collaborated with Philip Agee’s project --- as CovertAction Magazine described it --- “to expose CIA personnel and their misdeeds.”

His last speaking engagement was last summer and his subject was American Exceptionalism: the Naked Truth. He said: “We can all agree I think that US foreign policy must be changed and that to achieve that the mind – not to mention the heart and soul – of the American public must be changed.” And his  humour is obvious in this passage:

 “Consciously or unconsciously, [the American people] have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy…The most basic of these basic beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well.” 

He became the leading radical author in the field of exposing US government actions in the overthron of other governments, and his 1995 book on the subject Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II– was revived in 2004.

He is the second sterling American radical we have lost in the last few months. Ed Schultz, who, like Blum, had started life as a straight-up American conservative, but whose views were changed by what he observed of American life in his work as a reporter, had greatly enlivened the news broadcasts of RT, the Russian government-owned TV station that anyone can subscribe to for $2.50.  He had this habit of introducing a subject in his newscast, and then calling up two  people with differing views of the subject and asking  them in hs loud, challenging tones,  “What about that?”, often adding, “I can’t go along with that,” and introducing a lively debate on the subject right in the middle of the newscast. He died unexpectedly when still in harness, and one result of his death is that I watch RT much less than I used to do. Not everybody can be replaced, after all.

Bill Blum will be irreplacable too. And I will especially miss his wry humour.

My Log 669 Dec 10 2018: Chronicles from My Tenth Decade: 106 The five-day British vote is cut off at the knees: faced with a massive defeat, Ms.May offered to go to Brussels for more negotiations

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As an almost lifelong political junky, I have to confess that for the last week I have been riveted, mouth open in amazement, in the proceedings of the House of Commons in London, as they agonizingly struggle to find a way of passing Britain out of the European Union.

As I am writing this, the debate drones on, with commentators saying that nothing like this has ever been heard of before in British Parliamentary memory. I have to admit it is unusual, because my experience with Parliaments has convinced me that invariably the result of any debate, on no matter how serious a subject, is known in advance.  I cannot remember any vote in which I took an interest that violated that rule: essentially, the debate turned out to be fire and brimstone, signifying in itself, little enough. I even remember a debate in the House of Lords on one of those intense social policies of the 1960s in Britain, abortion or capital punishment ---I tend to think it was the latter, but am not sure of it --- in which the Archbishop of Canterbury, a member of the Lords, spoke in favour of the proposed policy and then voted against it. A sort of reducio ad absurdum of democratic politics.

For years I was able to say that the only political vote I ever witnessed in which the result was not known in advance, took place within the British Labour party, at their annual conference at the beginning of the 1960s, and concerned the effort made by supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, to have the Labour party accept their aim “to ban the bomb”, as party policy. They succeeded, in a manner of speaking: they won the vote taken following the debate, but it made no difference to party policy. When Labour was elected to government in 1964, they never implemented their avowed anti-nuclear weapons policy, but continued to use imported American nuclear  weapons, which they have to this day. So, is Parliamentary democracy just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Good question….

Today’s debate is a good test of that question. Britain’s Conservative government held a referendum on whether the country should continue to be a member of the European Community, or leave it. They expected to win, but lost it. Prime Minister David Cameron scuttled off with his tail between his legs, and the party elevated the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who  set about the arduous task of negotiating the terms of quitting the grand European project. 

At first she was hoping to be able to achieve the withdrawal without having to seek Parliamentary approval, but eventually it was forced on her, and this week’s debate has been billed as the moment of decision ---  a five-day debate on a deal May has achieved with the European bureaucrats and politicians that she has presented as not only the best deal on offer, but also the only deal available.

Having watched, so far as I could,  the first three days of the debate with a certain admiration as to its tone, quality and politeness, I was looking forward to the last two days building to an exciting vote --- which would have been the first occasion to my knowledge that the result of a Parliamentary vote would have been uncertain until the vote was counted.  But when I turned on the TV in the morning I was greeted with the news that Ms. May was expected to cancel the vote. All was confusion: some of her staff were still telling reporters no cancellation was in prospect, but others were claiming they had it on good authority….etc….

As I had experienced so many times in the 1960s, a big occasion in the House of Commons usually manages to live up to its billing, When the chamber had to be rebuilt after the war, Winston Churchill advised there should be fewer seats than Members, so that on the great occasions the excitement would be heightened by the corridors being full of standing Members who were not able to find a seat.

He was right: the chamber was filled to capacity, with Members coming and going, forcing themselves through the standing phalanx just inside the entrance, as ordinary business was being conducted while waiting for the Prime Minister.  A moment or two after she took her seat, the Speaker rose and called on the “Rt Honourable the Prime Minister, a statement.”  She said she had carefully listened ---- loud groans from the Opposite benches --- to honourable Members, both inside and outside the House, and it had become clear to her that if the preferred deal were to be put to the vote, it would be lost by a considerable margin.  (More groans and shouts of agreement). Mr. Speaker rose to his feet: he said his intention was to call every person who wished to question the Prime Minister, “but she must be heard.” And asked them to quieten down.

She said she had decided to postpone the vote, and to return to Brussels to attempt to get further clarification about the so-called Northern Irish backstop, the most important item to which so many members took exception.   She said this in spite of the fact that she had spent weeks telling them all that no further changes were possible to the proffered deal.

From the beginning I have found this concept of the “backstop” --- a saying from the cricket field --- confusing and puzzling. A short explanation of it is that it is a position of last resort, designed to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland in the event that the UK leaves the EU without securing an all-encompassing deal. At present, goods and services are traded between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland with few restrictions. The UK and Ireland are currently part of the EU single market and customs union, so products do not need to be inspected for customs and standards.

Even more bewildering is the fact that both sides would hope that the backstop  need never be used, and on the British side, they want to be clear that it is a temporary measure; otherwise, it would amount to their having to stay within the EU indefinitely.  The backstop has been described as an insurance policy, but --- I am now quoting The Guardian explanation --- “The EU still requires a ‘backstop to the backstop’ – effectively an insurance policy for the insurance policy. And they want this to be the Northern Ireland-only solution that they had previously proposed,” May told MPs. Raising the stakes, the prime minister said the EU’s insistence amounted to a threat to the constitution of the UK: “We have been clear that we cannot agree to anything that threatens the integrity of our United Kingdom,” she added. Maybe readers will be more perspicacious than am I, and will understand what the above two paragraphs mean.

When she finished, the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn rose to say the government had lost control, and was in an absolute shambles.  If she couldn’t do better than she had done, she should give way to allow someone else to try.

This debate has held a number of surprises for me, not the least of which is that Ms. May was on her feet, or at least up and down on and off them, for more than three hours, answering the comments made to her by Members.  The first person called after Corbyn was a young woman, from the Scottish National Party, Kirsty Blackman. She looked like a teenager, and made such a brilliant three or four minutes demolition of the government’s position that I couldn’t help but wish we had some like her in our own House of Commons.

After a couple more intervenors,  Mr. Speaker Bercow rose to say that after 164 Members had already spoken in a debate that promised to come to a conclusion with a vote, it was discourteous to them that the  vote should be cancelled.  The best way to deal with it, he said, would be  for a Member of the government to move a motion to  adjourn the debate, so that the motion could be debated and the House could decide whether it wished to have the vote ending the debate as planned, or not..   “I would be happy to accept such a motion,” he said.  But the government was not listening to him: Ms. May carried on answering objectors just as if Mr. Speaker had not spoken.  Soon the BBC cut away to give one of their veteran reporters the chance to say that he had never heard a Speaker condemning a government so strongly on the matter of how it was handling Commons business.

When I turned it on later in the day, the Chamber had only a scattering of Members present, but they were still fulfilling Mr. Speaker’s promise to hear everyone who wanted to speak, and most of them did.

An expert interviewed by the BBC gave it as his opinion that had she allowed the vote to go ahead, she could have counted on roughly 200 Members, of the more than 600 in the Chamber.  He had never heard of a government being defeated by such a huge majority.

The leaders of the European Community, in response to these surprising events, reinforced what they had said before: that hey were not prepared to negotiate any changes in the deal they had already signed off on.

As some said today, “we shall see.”