Memory and Reason

When I grow up, I want to be Ian Jack:

One of the smaller puzzles of modern British politics was Douglas Carswell’s decision to join Ukip.

What kind of party did the Clacton MP think he was embracing? Did he, to borrow Polly Toynbee’s advice to the Labour ditherer, put a clothes peg on his nose before he made the leap?

I ask mainly because of his remarkable fondness for the phrase “angry nativism”. Talking about immigration last summer, he said that “the one thing more ugly than nativism is angry nativism”. 

Over Christmas, he wrote in the Mail on Sunday that he wanted an immigration system “capable of saying a cheery, welcoming ‘yes’ to doctors from Singapore or scientists from south Asia, and a polite ‘no, thank you’ to someone with a criminal record or an inclination towards welfare dependence”, adding: “Angry nativism must have no part to play in it.”

Nativism is a lofty word for the phenomenon defined by the Shorter Oxford as a prejudice in favour of natives against strangers; xenophobia, the morbid dread or dislike of foreigners, is its more bigoted cousin.

Behaviour that could fit either definition might be a man telling a local radio station that if you lived in London you’d be concerned if “a group of Romanian men” moved in next door.

Or the same man “feeling awkward” that he travelled for 20 minutes through south London on a crowded suburban train before he heard a word of English spoken inside his carriage, to prove his point that parts of England had become like “a foreign land”.

The speaker, of course, is Nigel Farage, and only the most obtuse observer could fail to recognise angry nativism as the fuel that has powered Ukip’s rise, rather than Carswell’s neoliberal dream of the “optimistic, internationalist and inclusive” country that will blossom once we leave the EU.

Nose-peg, then, is possibly too weak a metaphor. If Carswell finds nativism so disturbing, he must have joined Ukip wearing a gas mask, earplugs and a blindfold, after a career as a Tory MP that had somehow cut him off from popular opinion in Clacton-on-Sea.

For people, I think, are more nativist than he supposes, and not only if they happen to live among the migrant populations of eastern England without whom the agricultural economy would collapse.

I find it in myself – a slightly anxious rather than an angry nativism, without any real justification: no children denied access to full-up schools, no wage rate undermined, just that dim mixture of regret and alarm that can accompany change of almost any kind.

Perhaps a little bit of Farage exists inside many of us, just waiting to be fed.

His train ride, for example. Over the Christmas holidays, London was crowded with tourists; it seemed to me there were more than ever before at this season, eroding the welcome sense of emptiness that I’ve come to enjoy in the days before the New Year.

Especially, there were Italians: in the shops and the theatres, on the pavements and the Tube. On more than one trip, the Victoria line sounded like a Milanese tramcar. What accounted for their number, given that Italy is now one of the eurozone’s most broken economies?

We speculated on the strength of the pound against the euro, and whether Finsbury Park hotels had irresistible Christmas offers, but not once did we say, “Oh good, lots of Italians”, even though Italy was the first foreign country I got to know a little and liked a lot, and only partly because the little of its language I learned – binario, treno, ritardo – allowed full play to my Scottish “r”.

In fact, for a few years, it became a cult – regular visits, tours of churches with an old Baedeker in hand, almost as though my friends and I were auditioning for parts in A Room with a View or Where Angels Fear to Tread.

To this day, one of my favourite shopping trips is to buy pasta at Camisa’s in Soho and hear the assistants behind the counter josh each other and their customers in Italian, caro mio and so on.

So, how for even a minute could I resent, however mildly, the presence of so many Italians in London Memory and reason told me it was impossible. Yet, for a minute, I unreasonably did.

The limits of the power of satire

Featuring strongly among the reactions to the Charlie Hebdo massacre is one that says the satirist will win in the long run.

“Grieve for the slaughtered, but know Kalashnikovs can never murder laughter and richly merited ridicule,” said a tweet from the historian Simon Schama; “The best thing that can happen is to laugh these barbarians back into the dustbin of history,” the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson told the BBC. “They cannot bear the idea of being laughed at.”

It would be good to think that my friend Rowson is right, and that mockery will dump the murderers into Trotsky’s capacious receptacle, but this is to ask a lot of satire, and perhaps overinflates its effects.

In his famous essay, A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift proposes that the poor people of Ireland sell their babies as food to the rich.

We admire Swift’s conscience, and his daring and skill; we study his essay’s form and its literary influence; what we don’t ask (at least so far as I know) is whether the calorific intake of the Irish poor increased as a consequence.

That the powerful and barbaric hate to be laughed at (but then who doesn’t?) is easier to demonstrate.

David Low was probably 20th-century Britain’s finest political cartoonist, and a firm opponent of German appeasement in the 1930s.

His caricature of Hitler as a strutting figure with a toothbrush moustache and a diagonal forelock became a defining image and got his paper, the Evening Standard, banned in Germany.

Later, he discovered that his name was on the Gestapo’s list of subversives who were to be arrested after the invasion.

This is a fine record: who wouldn’t be proud to think of themselves as part of the same tradition, as cartoonists such as Rowson and Steve Bell undoubtedly are?

But it was a gunshot, after many other gunshots and many millions of dead, that finally did the deed.

Footballers as role models? Not likely

Arguments in the Ched Evans affair persist with the idea that footballers are role models. I find it hard to believe that their off-pitch behaviour has ever been held up as exemplary.

Before drink ruined him, the late Jim Baxter of Rangers was undoubtedly among Scotland’s very finest players – a national figure. In 2001, Gordon Brown spoke at his funeral.

Nearly 40 years before, a young reporter friend of mine went to a party where Baxter and a famous Celtic player were present.

“They were having a contest in the bedroom,” my friend said, “seeing how far they could piss across it.”

We had never imagined that footballers behaved any better than we did; now we knew they could behave worse.