On Wednesday evening, the House of Commons voted on an amendment to the King’s Speech. The amendment, tabled by the SNP, called for an “immediate ceasefire”. It failed. It failed because the official opposition failed to oppose the Government and in so doing opposed the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, more than 70% of the British population and 87% of Labour voters. Why?

The wording of the amendment caused panic in Starmer’s office. It clearly reflected the views of the vast majority of the Labour party; even, in fact, the views of many of his front bench shadow ministers.

But it had been tabled by the SNP. And the SNP must not be allowed to take the initiative on popular opposition.

So a narrative was quickly created. The SNP were acting in bad faith. They were playing political games. Tabling the motion was a “ploy”.

Despite this, more than 50 Labour MPs voted for the ploy. Front bench spokesmen voted for the ploy and thereby lost their job.

Jess Phillips was the most high profile of them, and her decision required its own narrative. “Sources” claimed that she was acting  cynically in response to the opinions of her Muslim constituents and voting only in self-preservation.

Shock! Horror! An MP listening to his/her constituents and acting accordingly! Isn’t that what they are supposed to do?

Unfortunately, we are now talking about what Starmer calls the “changed Labour party”. Forget democracy. Substitute democratic centralism, the system of internal control which was so successful in Communist parties the world over.

And this is why the marches, the vigils, the demonstrations are so important.

Our “representatives”, our MPs, will not stand up for us as we wish to stand up for the Palestinians. In this literal and symbolic issue, Parliament and its members continue to play political games.

Parliament right now is irrelevant.

Today from the everysmith vaults: I am listening to the Boston residency of the Rough & Rowdy ways tour. His cover version on the 5th was Merle Haggard’s Footlights. Check it out.

On Saturday evening, in the front parlour of 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea, the baritone Gareth Brynmor John and harpist Alis Huws performed Dylan, the song cycle by Michael Stimpson which sets to music works by Dylan Thomas, including Ceremony After a Fire Raid, a powerful poem he wrote in 1945 after a visit to Coventry. It concerns an innocent child, in its mother’s arms and burned completely. Listening to the live stream of this piece (it is #6 in the cycle), the parallels between what Thomas describes and tries to understand with what is happening in Gaza cannot be ignored.

It is an extraordinary poem, because it is a ceremonial in itself, in its own right. I urge you to read it because it feels as if an organ is playing it, as if a prophet is proclaiming it.

It is a personal response to the death of the child but it identifies the poet as part of the whole human race: “Myselves”, a Greek chorus of grievers, a collective of sadness and despair.

The child is not named. He or she is anonymous. A symbol of sacrifice. “Myselves” grieve and the grief itself is confessional. Grief is guilt. Grievers are also “believers”. The poet is the spokesperson. The poet is the priest.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt …

It is the poet - and through the poet, the people - that can say this, that can feel this, that can act on this.

Right now, the politicians are cynically playing with words, insulting us with passionless pretension and ruthless refusal to acknowledge the truth of the actions and reactions.

Beginning crumbled back to darkness
Bare as nurseries
Of the garden of wilderness.​

Today from the everysmith vaults: I need to declare an interest. Gareth Brynmor John is my nephew. I am listening again to his interview and performance with Alis on Radio 3. It is still available on Sounds (​In Tune 5pm Friday 3rd) and I commend it to you.

What we've been seeing on our television screens in the last few days is horrific. What we've been hearing on our radios is horrendous. What we have been reading in our newspapers is harrowing. And what makes all of these so abhorrent is that we do not know whether what we are seeing, hearing, and reading is true. Something is happening but we don’t know what it is, do we?

During the last week, we have absorbed many truths and even more lies.

We know, for example, that Hamas murdered forty babies, decapitating some. Or do we know that this is yet another “big lie”?

Who knows? This truth is still being repeated a week after the events of last Saturday. And it has spawned further truths.

For example, this is a Palestinian trait - that they are not using violence to achieve a military objective, but to satisfy an innate blood lust.

That appeared on my twitter feed via a post from David Baddiel, who also told me that the Left celebrated riotously at the news last Saturday. 

Did I? I remember horror, sadness, despair. I don't recall celebrating.

And here's another. Did the Palestinian ambassador suggest/imply/state unequivocally that Israel had it coming? 

Kate Burley said all three things on Sky News and refused to apologise after it was revealed by Novara Media that, as part of a answer to a question in which he was denouncing and condemning Hamas, the ambassador said that everyone, including the Israeli government, could see this coming.

Meanwhile, on BBC News, Palestinians have 'died". Israelis have been “killed”.

Front pages of our newspapers are showing images of Palestinian children to illustrate stories of Palestinian terror against Israeli children.

There is no truth inside or outside the gates of Eden. Except this:

In Gaza and in Israel alike, listen to the child not the gun.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Once in a while, I grant iTunes carte blanche to trawl my vaults and choose on my behalf. Today, weirdly, it chose the Shostakovich settings From Jewish Folk Poetry from Michail Jurowski and the Staatskapelle Dresden. This ain’t no lie. It is the truth.

Cricket fans - and I’m one of them too - claim that their game is the more complex. It has more variables. It is more nuanced. And I would tend to agree. If I didn’t I just needed to watch an over or two bowled by Bishan Bedi, Shane Warne or Muttiah Muralitharan. All spinners who earned their wickets with guile and craft rather than pace and power. And then the Red Sox signed Tim Wakefield.

Tim was a knuckleballer, throwing slow pitches that moved erratically and unpredictably. There are few, if any, pitching knuckleballs in the majors today. 

Tim on the mound was one of a kind. What I didn’t know when I watched him was that he was one of a kind in the community, in the city.

We’re not talking about the high profile charities with celebrity gala dinners and massive media coverage. 

Tim did the hard work, visiting sick children in hospital, turning up to host small isolated events, donating large and small sums wherever and whenever he could help.

He died on the last day of the regular season and the Sox came through for him with with a win against the Orioles. 
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Throughout Boston and baseball, throughout New England and here in Warwick, in the heart of old England, he will be remembered.

Years ago, Private Eye - I think - published a clipping from a parish magazine, which included a review of a performance in a small village of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Checkhov. The reviewer concluded that the “brilliance” of the local am-dram actors was “wasted on a disappointing play”. I have this judgement in mind as I sit to report on the Loft’s production of A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee.

It was the last day of the month and the last night of the run, and a full house: a Saturday night house for a play which spans a weekend. An outing of ladies seated behind us was congratulating itself on choosing to attend this play rather than the Scottish play which is next in the season. “I’m so glad we came tonight” said one. “It’s so much lighter than Macbeth.”

Perhaps. Albee is a heavyweight playwright. His themes are weighty. On the other hand, we were promised - in the programme - "acerbic wit".

​Maybe the lightness comes from Albee’s absurdist belief that we exist in a meaningless, random universe.

In the light of the absurdism, the family - Agnes and Tobias, Claire and Julia - are required to talk a great deal in a succession of soliloquies and to drink (almost) too much throughout.

So far, so good: a drawing room comedy that has some good lines but is not that funny and is primarily signalling the deep-seated issues in what we quickly understand to be a seriously dysfunctional family. And then enter their closest and oldest friends, Edna and Harry. They have come to stay, because they were scared. Of what?

“We were frightened and there was nothing!” says Edna. (Hint! Hint!)

Edna and Harry are both invaders of the household and also the mirror-reflections of Tobias and Agnes. They are the catalyst for the disintegration of the family and their routines and rituals. This is the focus of Acts II and III, and this is where the individual crises of each character are highlighted.

I am guessing that director Sue Moore has encouraged a realistic approach to the script. It may be absurdist, abstract, prolix. But this cast ensures that there is no difficulty in suspending our disbelief.

The “fulcrum” Agnes (Lorna Middleton) delivers her long speeches with an almost gossipy eloquence. The ‘well-named” Claire (Leonie Frazier) is wholly convincing both as an observer and a deliverer of cutting-edge venom. Tobias (Craig Shelton) is memorable as a physical presence and delivers one of the most moving moments of the play in a meditative monologue after a night without sleep. Julia (Leonie Slater) manages to make the contradictions of her role - four times married and nearly 40 years old but behaving like a ranting teenager - credible. Harry (Paul Curran) has little to say, but says it well (the last scene with Tobias) and plays his silences better. Edna (Lucinda Toomey) is solid and stolid, her language and attitude, brusque and down-to-earth. Her fear is reflections in the mirror, the recognition that they would not have allowed their friends to stay had their situations been reversed.

It is to an already departed Edna that Agnes sums up the previous two and a half hours in the final line of the play:

“We sleep to let the demons out, to let the mind go raving mind, and when the daylight comes again … comes order with it.”
​
Today from the everysmith vaults: At FarmAid 2023, Bob picked up his guitar again and treated us to Maggie’s Farm, Positively 4th Street, and Ballad of a Thin Man. I’m not going to quote Dr Johnson on the topic of women preaching, but I will say it was not bad; in fact, not bad at all.
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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.