Toxic All Round

Southwark Crown Court was the place not to be yesterday, with Chris Brown, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Russell Brand all on the bill. If, as one strongly suspects, someone with the same convictions in the United Kingdom as Brown had in the United States would be denied a United States visa, then the reverse ought also to apply.

Yaxley-Lennon is noted for the Israeli flag beloved of every Far Right operation in the world this century, which would cause centrists to reconsider their own position if they were really any different. Israel has hosted Yaxley-Lennon as its honoured guest, all expenses paid. 70 years to the month after Suez, Aneurin Bevan’s assessment of Anthony Eden is no less true of Benjamin Netanyahu in relation to the Israeli security failing on 7 October 2023. Either he knew and he is too wicked to be Prime Minister, or he did not know and he is too stupid to be Prime Minister. Either way, Netanyahu is Yaxley-Lennon’s patron.

If the Arab parties held the balance of power after today’s Knesset elections, then heaven knows what Yaxley-Lennon and his ilk would find to say, since being a white settler redoubt was exactly what they liked about Israel. Nor does enfranchisement preclude being a victim of apartheid. Coloureds and Indians had the vote for the last 10 years of apartheid South Africa, but it was still apartheid South Africa.

And while Brand may or may not turn out to be guilty of any criminal offence, I first called him “Toxic Brand” as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation’s cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday.

In 2014, I was as critical of Brand’s book Revolution as everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star. We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand, a fact gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. Calling him “Ayn Brand”, I offered to pay Brand’s rail fare to the Durham Miners’ Gala, to see how it would have received him.

Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all. That was how he was treated when, aged 40, he encouraged the young not to vote in 2015, leading Ed Miliband to give what was presented as an immensely important interview to Brand on YouTube. By then, Brand had been favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and he had guest edited the New Statesman, on the back of holding the same views as he held now, views to which his undisputed sexual behaviour was and is fundamental.