Did you take in a movie over the weekend? Was it Barbie or Oppenheimer? Apparently this was the choice to be made over this last week. Sunak opted for Barbie but blamed it on his family. Starmer is presumably still undecided, conscious that Oppenheimer has been criticised by David Baddiel because a Jew has been portrayed by a non-Jew.

I saw neither, and was unaware until today that Barbenheimer is even a thing. But I did finally get to see the Oh, Jeremy Corbyn! The Big Lie. This is something of an achievement, because the film has been struggling to find venues and when it has, it has provoked suspensions and expulsions of Labour party members in the audience. 

According to Campaign Against Antisemitism, the film is both antisemitic and antisemitism-denying.

Having seen it, I can confirm that it is neither. In fact, there is little which has not been made public previously in The Labour Files or in Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising Antisemitism. But that won’t stop the activities of both right and left, Jew and Gentile, from joining the call for censorship.

Paul Mason believes it to be ‘a full-blown conspiracy theory about Corbyn’s opponents, conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel’.

Billy Bragg also criticised the film, but as he hadn’t seen it, paraphrased Paul Mason.

Another prominent member of the left who admitted he hadn’t seen the film but was happy to criticise it is - of all people - Novara’s Michael Walker:  “Normally, I’m very against clamping down on any open discussion about what happened in and to labour between 2015 and 2019" he said. "But calling your film ‘the big lie’ is, at best, really, really dumb”.

FYI, ‘the big lie’ is a propaganda technique used by the Nazis and, in the film, is quoted by Professor Moshé Machover, an Israeli Jew who was expelled from the Labour Party after publishing an article entitled Anti-Zionism does not equal Antisemitism.

And that statement is at the heart of this issue and this movie.

The core criticism of the CAA is that the film alleges ‘a nefarious campaign’ to oust Corbyn, orchestrated by the Jewish community. But the only way this disingenuous claim can be made is by conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel, which is what they accuse the film of doing.

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Goebbels is alleged to have first said it:

​‘Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty.’

Today from the everysmith vaults: Between the close of play in the test match and the first pitch in San Francisco last night, I watched Bomsori Kim, the sensational South Korean virtuoso, make her Proms debut, performing Bruch’s first violin concerto. It's on repeat on catch-up.

​

My apologies for absence. The plague which I had managed to avoid for a couple of years finally caught up with me on Boxing day last year. The usual stuff: high temperature, cough, sore throat, headache, loss of taste and smell. I quit nicotine and achieved dry January. Enough already, I thought.

But like the struggle, it continued. And yes, April was the cruelest month.

There have been positive blips in the long lethargy, the drowsy numbness which pains my sense. Only now, however, have I felt up to posting for the first time this year. Why now?

Not the good news - the music, the cricket and (in the last couple of weeks) the baseball, friends and grandchildren. It’s the bad news. It’s the fucking politics.

Jill won’t listen or watch.  But I feel drawn to the spectacle; to the viciousness of the Tories and the refusal of Labour to recognise and commit to repealing the ideological nastiness.

It’s the anger and the frustration that has woken me from the drowsiness, the numbness of the last few months.

I feel better for it.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob’s sensational series of shows across Europe with random covers from the Dead, Van Morrison, Merle Haggard, has been a constant. But today, Bennyboy released his Best of: In the End There’s Just a Song. Even by his standards, it is a very special compilation.

The morning after the US mid-terms, I was working with the CNN results coverage playing in the background. I looked - and perked - up when Philadelphia was called for the Democrat John Fetterman. Cut to the pundits. “Fetterman won because he was an old-fashioned Democrat” said one. “The Democrats used to be the party of the factory floor. Now, it’s more often the party of the faculty lounge.”

The parallel with the state of UK Labour is pretty clear. The majority of Labour MPs are, if not bourgeois, certainly middle-class and there is no indication that this may change any time soon. In fact, rather the reverse as Starmer and Evans tighten their authoritarian grip on every aspect of the party.

Suspensions and expulsions are multiplying, on many occasions timed to prevent their election to key constituency posts. Triggers have been called against MPs of the calibre of MP of the Year Ian Byrne, Sam Terry and Zara Sultana. The treatment of Apsana Begum in Poplar and Limehouse and Jeremy Corby offends all principles of fairness and natural justice. But that’s ok, because the new party rule book, introduced this year, contains the following sentence:

“D. Neither the principles of natural justice nor the provisions of fairness … shall apply to the termination of party membership.”

It is clear that the membership and the local parties are, de facto, subordinate - even submissive - to the party machine. And this is a party machine which believes that Ken Loach of all people is unfit to be a member.

I’m raising this issue again not merely as a member of the Labour party, but as a citizen. These facts and other allegations are of concern to everyone.

It is not paranoid to fear that this machine, when part of a government, could utilise the resources of the state to cull a major element of the broad church which the party is intended to represent. It will no longer be necessary to suspend members on the grounds that they ‘liked’ a tweet from another party leader announcing that she didn’t have COVID. The STASI-esque trawling of social media and compilation of spurious dossiers full of gossip and rumour will become the responsibility of real professionals; not the amateur factionalists such as McNicol, Oldknow, Matthews and Stolliday.

And if I am paranoid, I am not alone. Michael Crick describes himself as right wing Labour / Liberal Democrat in his politics. Peter Oborne is a conservative, maybe even a Conservative - certainly he could not have been Political Editor of the Torygraph if he had espoused my politics.

Both, however, have published and broadcast extensively on the authoritarian trend within the Labour machine. Both have warned about its implications if Labour became the party of government.

There are still many good people within Labour. I don’t always agree with all their politics but I would still vote for them because I recognise their integrity, intelligence, honesty and humanity. My own MP (at least until the Boundary Commission’s recommendations are made law) is one of them.

But be clear: my vote for Matt Western will not be a vote for Keir Starmer.

​Today from the everysmith vaults: I went last week to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Warwick Arts Centre. A  wonderful show which previewed some of the Songs of Recollection which is their latest album. That’s what’s playing now and it’s brilliant.

For fifty years, I have earned my living as a writer. A wordsmith you might say.

I’ve written ads and commercials, books and book reviews, blogs and brochures, articles and essays, songs, scripts and speeches. It must amount to many hundreds of thousands of words. More likely millions.

But to express the love and admiration I feel for my mother, I have no words. 

Many times, I tried to tell her. Many times, I failed. What came out of my mouth were the banalities and platitudes that we use to describe or reflect those strong incomprehensible emotions that overwhelm us at times like this.

But those commonplace words are true. They are real.

She was beautiful. She was caring. She was wise. She was forgiving. And she was giving of herself, surrendering a career in banking for the life of an RAF officer’s wife. 

It was a role she played brilliantly, almost as well as she fulfilled her role as mother of five children. 

Each of us have our own personal memories of times when she helped us, advised us, encouraged us, saved us from ourselves.

So too will many of Mum and Dad’s friends. So too will local charities. So too will her nine grandchildren and - at the last count - 18 great grandchildren.

In the story of her life which she left for us, this was her final line: “I wish to be remembered as a wife and mother” she wrote.

It is simple, succinct, poignant and profound. And it evokes an emotional maelstrom with which I have yet come to terms and cannot express in words.

What we all seek - and what today is for - is to arrive at the point when emotion is recollected in tranquillity.

That of course was Wordsworth’s definition of poetry. And it takes a poet to find the words we need, to provide for us that heightened language which helps us to understand and contextualise our grief, and thus to achieve a catharsis of sorts.

So here are a few short, succinct, poignant and profound stanzas from a poem, an ode, which resonated with me during her last illness and haunts me now.

The poet is William Empson. He wrote these lines in 1927, the year Mum was born. 

It is entitled To An Old Lady.

Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile, plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.

No, to your telescope; spy out the land;
Watch while her ritual is still to see,
Still stand her temples emptying in the sand
Whose waves o’erthrew their crumbled tracery;

Fears her precession do not throw from gear.
She reads a compass certain of her pole;
Confident, finds no confines on her sphere,
Whose failing crops are in her sole control.
​
Stars how much further from me fill my night.
Strange that she too should be inaccessible,
Who shares my sun. He curtains her from sight,
And but in darkness is she visible.

​The package was pushed through the letterbox. Gently. A dull thud as it hit the floor. Just enough to alert the reader.

He was nursing a black coffee, but was on his feet in seconds.

​It was a book. Hardback. Portrait. Maybe eight inches tall by five wide. With a moody dusky dust-jacket.

​He rifled through the pristine pages. 464 of them.

Short chapters.

Short paragraphs.

Short sentences. 

The reader smiled. Excitement growing. This was it. The new Reacher. The 27th. 

He had cleared his diary for publication day. He had No Plan B. 

“Fuck business!” Boris Johnson is reported as saying at some point during the Brexit negotiations. He was wrong on the specifics, but probably right on the general point. Business is as business does and its agenda is seldom aligned with that of the country at large.

Nor of course was Johnson’s. But he had the advantage of having been elected. The dangerous ones are those who hide behind spurious and misleading titles such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Tax Payers Alliance, and other Tufton Street think-tanks and pressure groups. The influence they hold over Truss and Quasi-Kwarteng is out of all proportion to their numbers and intelligence.

One business magnate who doesn’t hide behind these faux institutions is Mark Zuckerberg, who has managed to make his corporate motto the basis of the government’s modus operandi in the UK.

“Move fast and break things” he said. Truss and Kwarteng moved very fast indeed to break the UK economy, and thus reward those hedge-fund managers who shorted the pound and provide Starmer with a lead in the polls which will not easily be overturned.

We should note, however, that - potential spoiler alert - both Kinnock and Miliband had 28 point leads and managed to lose. Starmer will be aware of this and, despite intimations at Conference that he thinks enough is enough, I suspect he will continue his policy of don’t-rock-the-boat.

Let the Tories lose it, rather than Labour win it. Move slowly and don’t break anything. Not even the Tory hegemony, with its two key elements: hard right ideology and total incompetence.

Yes, Labour will tinker with the detail. But the signs are that it will not make the fundamental changes that are necessary for sustainable growth.

Remember. Zuckerberg has re-named his empire. It is now Meta. It means two things. The first is after or beyond. The second is self-referential.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob’s Uk tour is imminent, but others are available. In my neighbourhood, the Hallé is performing the Shostakovich 5th Symphony, followed by the Unthanks, followed by the Cowboy Junkies. Playing today as I write is that amazing debut Cowboy Junkies album, The Trinity Sessions.

My recent absence from this blog is not a mark of faux respect for the death of the queen. But I have used the hiatus in normal life to immerse myself in the poetry of Ed Dorn, for which I am grateful to the poet Roy Kelly. A few weeks back, he posted a tweet:


The rain came down softly
a soaking thing,
a line from a book read
54 years ago, a line remembered
these 54 years, and still
to be found in pages now
tanned and brittle, pages
appropriately water-stained,
the rain still falling there,
falling forever, there and
in my word memory.


That opening couplet resonated, and stuck with me for a couple of weeks during which I Googled the lines, the final phrase, and various beat poets I thought might be responsible. Eventually I contacted Roy. Had he remembered the forgotten poem and/or the forgotten poet? Well, yes and no.

It’s a long story. He had tracked down the poet, finding a review of a public reading in which the lines were quoted. It was Ed Dorn, a poet with whom I had a brief obsession in the early ‘70s following the publication of Gunslinger. He was a prolific poet and a purchase of his Collected Poems failed to locate the lines.

Roy however has access to The Poetry Library and had a sense that the source was to be found in an ancient volume entitled New Writing in the USA. They found the publication for him and he  turned to the Ed Dorn section and read the poems. It wasn’t there.

But all was not lost. The Poetry Library offers a Find-a-Poem service, which is a kind of Apple Genius Bar for forgetful lovers of poetry. He registered his enquiry and returned New Writing in the USA. He was turning away when the Genius called him. “I’ve found it” he said.

And there it was. Not a poem. Two sentences from a prose-piece entitled 1st Avenue.

The rain comes down softly. A soaking thing.

It is prose but a reader would be forgiven for remembering it as poetry. It is poetry, isn’t it? Or is it a prose poem? Or prose which has a poetic flavour?

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But I’m glad I now know it. And I’m grateful to Roy Kelly for recalling it, tracking it down and using it as the impetus for the exquisite poem above.


Today from the everysmith vaults: Only connect. The synapses function in this manner: from Ed Dorn to Jack Kerouac to his prose poem October in the Railroad Earth to the band Railroad Earth and Elko. That’s what’s playing as I post this.

Baron Lebedev of Hampton (in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames) and Siberia (in the Russian Federation) is engaging in a war of (so far) words with my MP. I’m on the side of my MP, Matt Western (of Warwick and Leamington) who is the underdog in this fight - not least because he is not the son of an oligarch KGB agent, nor does he own a number of major news outlets, and nor is he a friend of Boris Johnson.

Lebedev is all these things, of course. But his prominent role in British government has not been widely acknowledged. Nor has it been investigated to any significant degree by those who claim to speak truth to power.

Identifying truth was the purpose of Matt Western’s question to the prime minister back in March. He asked Boris Johnson about his attendance at a lavish party thrown by Evgeny Lebedev and the concerns reportedly expressed by MI6.

In the Commons, his question was answered (or rather not answered) with characteristic Johnsonian bluster. The real response came the following day when the Speaker received complaints about the question from both Johnson and Lebedev. Matt was called before the Speaker. Subsequently, he received a text from Lebedev.

Now you may think that this is a storm in a tea cup, or - as Johnson put it in a culinary illiterate metaphor - ‘not a crouton of substance in a minestrone of nonsense’.

In fact, it is neither. It is more serious than the party culture in Downing Street, the wallpaper stuff, the instinctive, gut-reaction untruths for which Johnson will be remembered. Nor is it merely cronyism and corruption.

It is about the security of the country.

When a psychologically disturbed man is being charged with treason for breaking into Buckingham palace, it is appropriate to consider the potentially treasonous activities of a more prominent psychologically disturbed man who happens to be prime minister but managed to evade his minders to make a solo visit to a castle in Italy.

For months, Johnson had refused to answer questions about the trip. But, eventually, in July this year, he ‘fessed up. Yes, he “probably” did attend the occasion. But “as far as I am aware, no government business was discussed”.

Did he he report the meeting to Foreign Office officials? “I think I did mention it, yes.”

So why the concerted complaints to the Speaker after Matt Western’s question?

He has “probably” got something to hide. But he hasn’t yet mentioned it. Yet.

Keep going, Matt.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Sollima LB Files  - another great recommendation from Georgia Mann on Radio 3.

 
It’s not only holiday-makers who are suffering from the recent discharges of effluent. Remember when Rees-Mogg claimed that fish were ‘better and happier now they are British”? I wonder how they are feeling now, as they swim in waters which are full of shit.

There was a Twitter shit storm over the weekend, and it continues today. My feed was taken over by pictures of Tory MPs, each of whom had voted to allow the discharge of effluent into our waterways, posted by constituents. I devoted an hour or so to re-tweeting these name-and-shame posts, particularly those who had posed for their portrait in front of beautiful beaches or river banks which contribute significantly to the economy of their constituencies.

Just two weeks before Britain hosted COP26, the environment summit, the Lords - bless them - proposed an amendment to the Environment Bill which would have placed legal restraints on the discharge of effluent. But back in the Commons, 265 Tories voted against.

Few of them had any specific reason for their vote. They were merely lobby fodder. They had been whipped to vote the way they did, and they are still keeping quiet about their vote.

But some knew what they were doing. When questioned, they justified their action in a number of ways.

Some, including Maria Caulfield, claimed that the amendment called for “an immediate end to sewage outflows” which would have “led to sewage leaking into people’s homes”.

The majority talked about the cost, which is too much for the hard-pressed water companies. There is some truth in this. Water companies have already been forced to pay out billions to investors and millions each year to their CEOs.

But that was then. Now, when the predictions of those who supported the amendment have proved frighteningly and disgustingly accurate, some are taking to Twitter to claim that the actions of water companies are “appalling”. As someone on my Twitter feed pointed out, if you are a member of the face-eating weasel party, you can’t complain when face-eating weasels do what they do.

What is appalling is that the actions of the water companies were enabled by a Government majority. What is appalling is that we no longer have the protection of the EU regulations.

The Twitter storm had an effect. Those named-and-shamed are apparently asking Tory HQ how they can defend themselves. And on the opposite side, the Labour front bench has so far made no official statement. Thirty odd Labour MPs abstained on the night, and although abstention has become commonplace from Labour, they must have had some reason for letting the Tories and the water companies off the hook.

Who knows what that might be?

Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday’s Radio 4 programme, How to Play, featured Marin Alsop and Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. So that’s what’s playin’ today.