This is not America

© Simon Poulter 2016

It would be something of an understatement to say that I’ve visited America a lot. Indeed, the pages of my old passport were almost exclusively full of US entry stamps. I guess, then, that I am an Americanophile: I have embraced - pretty warmly, as it goes - its music, its culture, its fashions and its habits. Like many, I’ve been drawn in by aspiration and an odd mix of glamour and normality, by what I’ve seen on television and on the cinema screen.

Because everywhere here is a film set or a line from a song. New York is no exception. Almost 200 movies are shot in the city every year, and every avenue, every cross street, every square and every park has a ring of familiarity about it. The same was the case when I first visited the country 24 years ago, spending a month touring the West Coast. Unlike most new experiences of a different country, I felt perfectly at home on the very freeways I saw in CHiPs as a child, or amongst the hills and mountains which doubled for Korea in M*A*S*H or rural Georgia in The Dukes Of Hazard. Even for a city fame for its smog, the LA sky was as blue as I’d seen on all those myriad Glen A. Larson productions.

It’s this familiarity that has kept me coming back again and again. It requires no effort to fit right in. It might take a little getting used to tipping at first, but apart from that, even something as mundane as having breakfast in a diner immerses you in your own scene from a movie. There’s a convenience here, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a ‘can-do’ spirit and an energy not replicated anywhere else.

You could say, then, that America and I have enjoyed a highly addictive relationship. Until now. Last week's gold-blinged, Cheeto-tanned, bizarrely-bouffant presidential election result has called into serious question my loyalty as a tourist.

For a start, the good times are over. By that I mean being a British tourist able to take advantage of exchange rates that, at one point, meant that a single pound bought you more than two dollars. That was the sort of incentive that made buying everything from CDs to the MacBook I’m writing this on worth the splurge. But at risk of sounding mercenary, the pound’s prevailing weakness since the Brexit referendum means that you start to notice your hotel charging $25 for breakfast, or Pret-à-Manger asking almost eight dollars for a tuna baguette.

The price of a sandwich has brought this year’s dramatic political events into sharp focus. The economic impact in the UK of June’s referendum on Europe is only just being understood. Christmas will be a big test, as families come to terms with inflationary prices. Here in the US, inflation has also been on the rise, feeding into the very rhetoric that fuelled the Trump victory, as he appealed to America’s squeezed middle. The parallels with the Brexit result are brutal. Listening to chatter in coffee shops and on the subway, it’s clear how America was polarised last week in a shockingly similar way to the deep chasm June's referendum carved between the liberal values of inclusion and conservative division, but also between the so-called metropolitan elites and the fiscally challenged provinces.

New York is something of a paradox in this regard: average rent here is $3208 (£2545), with a one-bedroom apartment costing around $2829 (£2244) a month; Donald Trump’s grotesque palace and HQ is here on 5th Avenue, and yet he took just 10% of the vote in this city. In Washington DC, his soon-to-be home, he took just 4% of the vote. Head out into the middle American heartlands, however, and the reasons for his victory become blindingly obvious, as small-town sentiment warmed overwhelmingly to his Route 1 philosophy. The racism and xenophobia - both implied and overt - that coloured the British referendum were a central pillar of the Trump stump, with the added air of latent misogyny to create a cartoon-like monster out of the tangerine-tinged billionaire.

As I blogged last week, Trump’s campaign persona was largely that of a Homer Simpson-like figure, loudly bragging in a bar about what he’d do if he was president. The reality, of course, is that he will, now, become president, but time will only tell whether  as to whether Trump follows through on his campaign promises. The “beautiful wall” he said would be built along the Mexican border is more likely to be just a fence, he told the CBS TV network yesterday. Hmm… What else? The ban on Muslims entering the country? Let’s see.

The bigger fear is what threat he poses to world economics and even world peace that his critics claim he will be. As some were pointing out in the aftermath of Tuesday’s result, presidents don’t just get their own way without due political process. But you can’t help feeling that America - particularly from a liberal-minded point of view - has just commenced an era of almost helpless nightmare. The prospect of Trump forming a government - with his ultra-conservative running mate Mike Pence, the excruciating Sarah Palin, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani all being mentioned for cabinet positions - has an air of comic villainy about it. Like The Joker forming a syndicate of all the worst super criminals in Gotham City. He’s already started by appointing Stephen Bannon, head of the far-right Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Except, it’s not a joke. This is the world’s most powerful democracy. The world’s largest economy. The seat of the last global recession. If you have a mortgage, savings, even a job with an institution reliant on global trade, Trumpageddon should worry you. Because it worries me.

Rational argument would dictate that Trump’s presidency should not cut me off from the America I’ve enjoyed as a tourist. Unless white, middle-aged Englishmen are added to the list of people Trump wishes to keep out, all the things I come to America for should still be there for me. But something quite profound has happened. Something has changed in the last seven days about a country normally so tolerant, so beholden of The New Colossus - “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - that it somehow doesn’t feel like America anymore. Stupid, I know. But when your president-elect’s first words of congratulations come from a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier, from French and Dutch far-right politicians, and from the gurning Nigel Farage, it’s probably time to give the country a miss for a while, at least until it can elect a president who offers more than just populist bar-room jingoism, and can instead make the values of respect, dignity and tolerance central to their philosophy.

Woke up this morning with 'dem post-referendum blues

"Good luck," said the simple coverline on today's edition of Libération, the left-leaning French newspaper. This wouldn't have been so acerbic (one Twitter wag claimed that France "was now trolling the UK") had it not been accompanied by a full page image of a Union Flag-waving Boris Johnson dangling clown-like from a zip wire. Magnifique.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the man who aspires to be the next prime minister of Britain, whose de facto leadership of the Leave campaign in the EU referendum was largely to facilitate his ambition of being the next tenant of 10 Downing Street. Not much, mind, about the future of the UK's prosperity but - hey! - what's in a detail?

Of course, the picture of BoJo, taken of the former London mayor during the 2012 Olympics, could easily be excused as a good old piece of self-depreciating British fun. I'm always told by foreign friends that they love the English sense of humour. I wonder what has become of that now?

Make no mistake, as Leavers echo Margaret Thatcher's borrowing of St. Francis of Assisi's poem (you know - discord/harmony, error/truth, doubt/faith, despair/unity, etc...), the seismic outcome of Thursday's referendum has done more to spread discord than it may have sought to repel. Because if you boil down its intentions, and the intentions of those who voted, to their bare bones, two truths emerge.

The first is that the referendum was, to begin with, an act of appeasement by David Cameron to the Tory party's ever-present Eurosceptic schism, which was then seized upon by Johnson as his chance to go for No.10. Quite what he would be qualified for when he gets in there remains to be seen, but if nothing else, his reputation for buffoonery doesn't bode well for Britain's reputation abroad (though no doubt he will find a kindred spirit in a certain prospective US presidential candidate with equally manic blond hair).

The trouble is that, post-referendum, Britain is anything but amusing. The last thing it needs is a Ken Dodd figure with a mad bouffant to tickle our funny bones into feeling better about the future. Now BoJo has achieved his aim of being Britain's prime minister-elect under the banner of "taking back control", I wonder what he actually has in mind to achieve that?

What is his plan for stabilising the markets that saw millions of pounds wiped off British pension funds during yesterday's financial freefall? What will be the strategy for addressing the balance sheet, and access to borrowing now that credit rating agencies are beginning to downgrade the UK?

How does he plan to mitigate the inevitable decision of Airbus to move the skilled manufacturing of aircraft wings from Lancashire to sites in the EU, where exporting for final assembly in Hamburg and Toulouse will be easier?

What about Nissan, which employs 7000 people in Sunderland and exports to all over Europe and even back to its native Japan? How will they be persuaded that a UK with more restricted access to European trade will be worth investing in? Same with other Japanese car manufacturers, Toyota and Honda, who together with Nissan, have restored the British automotive industry to the extent that in 2014 the UK exceeded France for car manufacturing for the first time ever.

The second truth is that the referendum, David Cameron's gamble on direct democracy, can at least be cited as the British people having their say. 33 million votes - a turnout of around 75% - is impressive (by comparison, the 2015 general election saw just 66% of those eligible voting). And it is clear that the demographic divide between Leave and Remain speaks volumes: that working class people in the north of England and those over 65 expressed their frustration at austerity,  economic malaise and the influence of the metropolitan elite - and, of course, immigration - by voting Leave; and that 70% of those under 25 voted Remain, along with Scotland and London, who have somewhat different allegiances to the European ideal.

Understandably, people on both sides of Remain and Leave are calling for the UK to move on. The Leavers say that the 48% who voted to remain must accept the decision. But look at it another way: the margin between Out and In was just a million votes. A technical majority, yes, but it indicates just how divided the UK is now.

Even if the referendum can be pared down to the competition between two Old Etonians for control of the upper sixth common room, it would be impossible to ignore the extent of British sentiment - for and against - which has been expressed by the referendum. But it's this that makes the actual campaigns so disingenuous. Facts would have been helpful, and I mean actual facts, not spun half-truths and outright lies. Like the £350 million claim, which UKIP's Nigel Farage has admitted was "a mistake". Not that Farage has exactly been blameless - his entire narrative has been one of peddling fear and paranoia, underpinned by grotesque jingoism.

Reuters

His 'breaking point' poster was not only a low point for the Brexit debate, it was a low point for British politics, and a tacit encouragement of the racism becoming ever more prevalent (increasing stories of people of various ethnic and national backgrounds being abused on buses, trains and in high streets - chilling echoes of the American segregation era and 1930s Germany).

Even if one of the central points of the Leave campaign was to free Britain of the overbearing bureaucratic nature of the EU machine, the bid to escape it unleashed an unpleasant tone to the Leave narrative. The soft version of this has been the pro-Leave, Middle England-representing newspapers, The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express, peddling (and swallowing) jingoistic references to Spitfires, green fields, Elgar and pints of ale, as if "taking back control" means restoring Britain to some anachronistic ideal.  

Everyone has their right to an opinion, but we've been left with a Britain less "great" as fractured and angry. And still somewhat at the mercy of Farage, a politician who makes Boris Johnson look credible, and whose first comment after the result came in yesterday morning was to crassly declare a bloodless victory, "without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired". Tell that to Jo Cox's children.

Farage can, easily be depicted as the bogeyman of the referendum, and while he might appear to invoke popular support, he has so far failed on several occasions to be elected to any major political institution other than the European Parliament, which he loathes. Johnson might be a clown, but Farage is a joke, flip-flopping on everything, from his own party leadership (resigning after the General Election, having failed to be elected for the seat of Thanet South, only to be reinstated almost immediately) to the actual outcome of the referendum itself. For him to declare yesterday morning that the result was a victory for "ordinary people" and "decent people" both underlined his opportunism and his insensitivity. Were the near-half of all voters not ordinary and indecent then? Probably, in UKIP's eyes, given the affiliations of some of their number with the dehumanisation narrative of the extreme far right.

That said, if those who voted Leave on Thursday truly believe the campaign's Trumpist rhetoric about  taking back their country and making Britain great again, they should now wonder what they've reacquired. On top of the financial and business instability, the political landscape is about to grow ever more fractious.

Just 150,000 Tory party members will choose the next British prime minister, as opposed to the 33 million voters who took part in the actual referendum that led to David Cameron's resignation.

So much for his message that the country had just taken part in perhaps the biggest democratic history in its history and that "We should be proud of the fact that in these islands we trust the people for these big decisions."

Maybe, but what will it mean? What will be the impact of Scotland choosing, decisively, to exit the United Kingdom and re-attach itself to the EU? What will happen to the peace process in Northern Ireland if republicans agitate - and succeed - in securing a referendum on unification with Ireland? How will Wales respond, given that it is already conflicted over whether EU subsidies have been of any help, as the principality's industrial base has been eroded by declines in mining and the steel industry.

The British are famous for their stiff upper lips and stoicism. The sentiment on social media, at least, is, in some places, one of resignation and 'let's just get on with it, shall we?'. Wales and Ireland play each other this afternoon in Euro 2016 so, after a 72-hour hiatus from the football, our summer opiate will provide some relief from the doom, gloom and division of the last couple of days. But after today, after tomorrow, after next week, next month, reality will sink in.

The Tories will tear themselves apart, as usual, as they elect a new prime minister, without anyone else in the country having a say. And the Labour party will do much the same, as it implodes over Jeremy "lukewarm" Corbyn's dismal performance in the Remain campaign, his thinly-veiled euroscepticism diluting any opportunity to convince Labour voters of what they actually stand to lose by voting with their hearts rather than their heads.

Libération's front page gesture may have been in some jest, but the reality is that Great Britain - or what's left of it as a result of the referendum - will need more than just luck in the future. And the hard work begins now. I never thought I'd ever find myself invoking Thatcher, but the job now for whomever runs the country next will indeed be to bring harmony to discord, repair errors with truth, replace doubt with faith, and resolve despair with unity. If there is any left.

I don't know how she did it

So, barely a day after Twitter turned 10, and not long, either, after this very blog had examined how beneath the surface of its piano-playing cats, corporate puffs and celebrity updates, lurks a primordial ooze of hate, that this happens:

Allison Pearson, a 'star' columnist for the Daily Telegraph and author of novels such as I Don't Know How She Does It (made into a movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker, apparently), tweeted what, I suspect, absolutely no one else was thinking as news was still coming in this morning from the apparent suicide bombings at Brussels' Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station.

Well, I was somewhat wrong in this regard. To compound Pearson's incompassionate folly, UKIP's suburban golf club captain masquerading as a politician, Nigel Farage, then retweeted her ridiculous missive. Farage, however, was not alone amongst his swivel-eyed brethren, as UKIP's defence spokesperson in the European Parliament then issued the following hastily-written, typo-ridden statement:

The smoldering corpses near the American Airlines desk at Zaventem and the mangled remains of commuters at Maelbeek station had barely been attended to when already an admittedly tiny section of the political elite started seeking to exploit the abhorrant attacks for their own narrow agenda about the UK's membership of the European Union.

As a British citizen living abroad for almost the last 17 years - 15 of them in two EU-member countries - I have my views on Britain's part in the "European project". But regardless of which way I would vote, most of my experience of living in the Netherlands and France has been positive.

Being in the Eurozone has allowed me to be paid in a currency that I can then spend easily elsewhere in the region; I've been able to drive on a Dutch driving licence in the UK, France, Italy and Spain without it bothering anyone; and I've been able to move from EU member country to another, and then another to work, live and benefit culturally from the experience, and hopefully make a positive contribution locally.

When the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985 by Belgium, France, the-then West Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Islamist terrorism was something that happened elsewhere. It was something you heard about on the news happening in Lebanon, the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East. The UK was more concerned with Irish terrorism in 1985 than jihad. Even the attempt by a nascent Al-Qaeda to blow up the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993 didn't seem to be placed by the media or the political world as coming from a wider, global terrorist agenda.

But that all changed on September 11, 2001. Because the world changed forever on that day. A chain of events that can be traced back to the British and French carve-up of the Arab lands after World War I, through World War II, the depths of the Cold War and Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, had all led, in one form or another, to 9/11. And in the decade and a half since, we have existed in an almost perpetual state of war in one region. Children have become teenagers in the belief that their country's soldiers only wear desert camouflage, that their armies only need one colour of paint for their vehicles.

However, that "region" soon became exported: to Madrid on March 11, 2004 and London on July 7, 2005. Just as terror was brought to New York and Washington in 2001, the war on and with terror was no longer 'just' a regional problem. For the last decade it has been an Indonesian problem, a Philippino problem, an Australian problem, a Turkish problem, a French problem, a German problem, a Swiss problem, an Italian problem, a Spanish problem, a British problem.

In Madrid in 2004, blame was eventually placed on an imported cell comprising Moroccans, Syrians and Algerians, but in London in 2005 the culprits were home-grown: three British-born sons of Pakistani origin and a fourth born in Jamaica but had been living in the UK since the age of five.

Ease of movement throughout Europe had had nothing to do with them. They'd come down from the north of England to deliver their gruesome carnage. Indeed in many subsequent plots in the UK since 7/7, terrorism and cells in other parts of continental Europe had barely been mentioned, though it would be foolish in the extreme to expect that jihadists in Belgium, Germany and elsewhere were not completely unconnected, more so with the rise of ISIS and the exodus of disaffected youths from these countries to join the murderous death cult in Iraq and Syria.

Events in Paris last November, and again in Brussels today, have underlined the ease of movement with which terrorists have in continental Europe, especially the example of Salah Abdeslam, who managed to evaid capture for four months only to be apprehended running out of an apartment just a couple of blocks from his family home in Molenbeek.

But to believe that locking down Britain and removing it politically and structurally from the European Union will in some how make the UK safe from all this is about as naive as it is possible to be. In 1997 Britain imposed one of the world's strictest firearms bans, but that hasn't stopped the flood of guns coming into the country and into the hands of criminals. And with the murder of Lee Rigby, we saw in bloodthirsty detail that a terrorist needs only a kitchen knife to create the desired effect. And very little passport control at all.

To politicise attacks like those this morning in Brussels, merely to drive the discussion about Britain's EU membership, is wholly wrong. And, anyway, if the UK wishes to be safe, better coordination and intelligence sharing amongst Europe's security services can only improve the chances of preventing the next attack. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the political and financial union of 28 states.

Just because you can acquire a Kalishnakov rifle in France and Belgium as easily as a daily newspaper doesn't make Britain any more or any less vulnerable. Just ask those who were on the Circle Line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate on July 7, 2005, or just outside Edgware Road station, or the Piccadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square, or on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square.

More importantly, if you want to make a case for the UK leaving the European Union, don't be such an inconsiderate ghoul that you do so while the blood and scattered body parts of another bombing are still where they were cast by a suicide attacker. And, secondly, try and apply some fact-based reasoning: terrorism doesn't hold a passport.