White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Brexit Equals Severe Storms in English Channel, Irish Sea

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Blimey! What a cock-up!

That is what you might say in London vernacular about the mess that Britain is dealing with as it struggles to leave the European Union by March 29, 2019.

With the deadline in clear line of sight, there is no exit plan and Britain is becoming — depending on whom in the Great British Divide you ask — either critically alarmed or hysterically impatient.

British industry and the whole import-export infrastructure are in panic. Supply lines need to be adjusted and possibly new ones established. Manufacturers are wondering whether it will be possible to continue as Britain-based or whether they should up and move to Europe. The British motor industry, which is not owned in the United Kingdom any longer, is a case in point. Jaguar and Land Rover may be iconic marques, but they are Indian-owned, and will they always be made in Coventry, England? Can London remain the financial center of Europe when Paris, Dublin and Frankfurt are scrambling for the title?

On the impatient side, Brexiteers are screaming for an end to the European linkage no matter what.

In the middle, and in a muddle, is Prime Minister Theresa May, distrusted by the extreme Brexit supporters and considered incompetent by the “Remainers,” who still hope that there will be a miraculous reprieve from the referendum vote of June 29, 2016.

Collectively, the British media is not helpful. Most of the press (especially but not exclusively those newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch) is for leaving, often vociferously so. When it appeared, in the latest development, that more time may be granted for Britain to find solutions to the thorniest issues like the Irish border question, they howled in unison for faster action.

The newspapers, representing almost the entire readership of daily newspapers in Britain, have fought for Brexit and fight against reconsideration: The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sun are adamantly and relentlessly for Britain getting out, mostly with little regard to the consequences.

You cannot consider these newspapers without understanding that they have played the same role as Fox News in the United States in inflaming nationalism and worries about sovereignty — a word that has been taken out of history’s locker for the purpose of stirring up antagonism to Europe.

The newspapers I have cited have been aggressively antagonistic to Europe for decades and were, it could be argued, decisive in the “advisory” referendum in which the British public voted to leave Europe by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent. The die was cast for the most extraordinary change of direction ever voted by a democracy.

The Brexiteers had the advantage of passion, a well-oiled disinformation campaign and the wild-card endorsement of Boris Johnson, the clownish but clever politician who wants to be prime minister beyond all else. David Cameron’s government, which called the referendum, misjudged the electorate through over-reliance on the polls.

Hopes that Parliament will finally assert itself, take charge of Brexit and call another referendum or nullify the first on the grounds that it was not constitutionally binding, are fading. There is wide acceptance in Britain that the nation is set to sail into waters uncharted — stormy but somehow having the lure of the nation’s explorer past.

Economists are not so sure, and business is looking at decampment to the European mainland.

The Brexiteers see a glowing new era for Britain, which shed its empire with little pain at home, and they may feel this will happen again. British creativity has always been one of its great strengths; for example, creativity in technology that contributed to the success of the empire, including John Harrison’s chronometer and James Watts’s steam engine.

The British will continue to create, to be sure. But how will they sell their creations if they have exempted themselves from their largest market?

The United States, if we do not choke off all immigration, can look forward to a surge of British talent coming across the Atlantic.

Rupert Murdoch, Mischief-Maker on a Global Scale

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Liberals get apoplectic at the mention of the Koch brothers and, by the same token, conservatives gag at the mention of George Soros.

Yet, it can be argued, another rich man might have had a much larger effect on the politics of this century: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is the uber publisher and broadcaster of our time, and manipulator of public opinion. In Britain, he is courted by prime ministers and in the United States by politicians, left and right. Since the emergence of Fox News as the champion of the angry white voter, he has been the comfort and the looking glass of one Donald Trump.

Murdoch is a phenomenon. He is courageous, opportunistic and blessed with an unparalleled ability to divine the often-hidden aspirations of his readers and viewers.

He also does not care what people think. That may be his greatest strength. He does what he damn well pleases and his success at doing that is played out on the world stage. He has gained the social and cultural recognition of media supremacy but has not sought them.

He loves making newspapers, making television, making money and making trouble.

His British newspapers — more than half the people who read a newspaper in Britain read one owned by a Murdoch company — backed Britain’s seemingly suicidal vote to leave the European Union.

The tone of his anti-European ravings was summed up on Nov. 1, 1990, when Britain turned its back on European monetary union with the now famous front-page headline “Up Yours Delors!” in The Sun, Britain’s largest circulation daily newspaper. At the time, Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission.

The Sun was not content just with its headline: It advised all its readers to turn toward Europe and make an obscene gesture. Not exactly sophisticated reasoning, but good at getting the nationalistic sap up.

The same thing you can get on Fox day after day from Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham, and the thin gruel of reason served up by the breakfast team. Gruel, it must be noted, that is nourishment and justification to President Trump.

I still marvel at what amounted to Murdoch’s conquest of British newspaper publishing. It was genius: He identified a right-wing, jingoistic streak in the British working-class male and he went for it with chauvinistic fury — and naked female breasts on Page 3. Murdoch’s legendary conservatism did not extend to women in front of the camera. If raunchy sold, raunchy it would be.

It paid off and enabled Murdoch later to take over the legendary Sunday Times and daily Times and to finance his American adventure, where something of the same formula applied to cable television has been diabolically effective.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain played a key role in the Brexit vote. It is less clear whether Fox played a role in Trump’s election, but it did not hurt. The trick in publishing or broadcasting to an ideological base, a conservative strategist once told me, is to keep the faithful, not to change minds. More troubling is the effect Fox has as an enabler for Trump’s more egregious actions, and his banal but damaging attacks on the media.

Fox floats the idea the mainstream media is a kind of monolithic, left-wing conspiracy and Trump amplifies it. Between Fox and Trump, they toss the mendacities back and forth until the authorship is lost. It is awesome to think mainstream can be turned into a pejorative just through repetition.

Murdoch is a conservative, except in journalistic vulgarity and when it is advantageous to go left, as he did in Britain when he backed Tony Blair and Labor in 1997. In New York, he cultivated the Clintons — maybe as insurance, maybe just as the entitlement to know power that goes along with his own power, or he may just have liked them.

Having been curious about Murdoch and his ways — and at times lost in admiration — since he figuratively invaded Britain in 1969 and seen the good and the bad that followed, I think he toys with politicians and is amused by his ability to influence events. Not much more and not much less.

There is a British expression for stirring things up: putting a bit of stick about. No one has put more stick about than Murdoch and he is not done. Tune in to Fox tonight and just see.

 

 

Photo: David Shankbone. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump

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HELSINKI — The love affairs between nations have some of the same dynamics as those between people: When they are sundered, they do not return to where they were before one of the partners betrayed the other. Trust, once lost, is not easily restored and when it is, it is changed; it is less complete, more suspicious.

That change, that loss of trust, was on display the week of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and President Trump’s second trip to Europe. It was not restored, the doubts not assuaged by the clumsy speech Trump delivered in Poland. His speechwriter got Poland’s historical role in Europe right, but he did not get its controversial authoritarian role today right at all.

It was the wrong place for that speech; a wrong reading of the crisis in Europe today. It is not only a crisis about its survivability, but also a crisis about its relationship with the United States; what has happened to the United States, where is it going and can it be trusted?

We have lost much of the trust of our friends and allies and we have done so by our own hand. This has been greeted by those who wish us harm with a kind of diplomatic smirk.

American steadfastness in the world, once as solid as the Rockies, has crumbled; it has been traded away for a kind of desire to shock. We have abandoned friends tested by time not because we should but because we could.

The trashing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was the first act of infidelity in the steady betrayal of allies. To the 11 other potential signatories, it was a simple statement: America does not care anymore. Its abandonment also diminished U.S. leadership in Asia. The result: a distrust of our consistency that will not easily be restored, and a vacuum waiting for China to fill.

After the communist triumph, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Inc., bellowed, “Who lost China?” Today’s question: “Who is empowering China?”

In Europe, the Trump administration has strung together a series of small offenses and insults, calculated to exacerbate not to heal. Trump has chosen to be the enfant terrible of the West. Why, oh why?

Every U.S. administration since Eisenhower has supported the integration of Europe. Bit by bit, as Europe struggled to become something bigger than the sum of its parts, the United States has been its cheerleader — even when it was feared (wrongly) that a kind of Fortress Europe might result from integration.

Along comes Trump like a loud reveler in a funny hat, outdoing European fears about The Ugly American.

Trump has ruffled European feathers in all the ways imaginable, from his initial refusal to assert that the United States would honor NATO’s Article 5 and come to the aid of members if attacked.

Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate accord stung Europe. But so too did his endorsement of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and his cozying up to Nigel Farage, the British nationalist, and Marine Le Pen, the French anti-EU politician. These things rankle, so why do them?

This week in Europe, I found a resignation about Trump. People who, when I last visited or spoke to them, were expressing deep concern are now shrugging and considering the president as a dancing bear, amusing and dangerous. Europe, they tell me, is looking at a new uncertain future, but one that depends less on U.S. leadership than it has at any time since 1945.

An inadvertent gift may be that Trump has forced Europe to look again to itself and to what is right about its union: Its dream of being a bulwark against future internecine wars, with or without U.S. backing. And, of course, the “shared values” that Trump trotted out de rigueur in Warsaw.

Europe is shrinking in size with Britain’s exit and the United States is shrinking in world influence with Trump’s ascent.

Dark shadows are passing over the Western alliance and the liberal values it has promoted like free trade, human rights and accessible justice — long the best hope of the world.

Trump’s Polish speech has not reassured.

 

Photo: London, UK. 25th March 2017. EDITORIAL – Thousands gather for the UNITE FOR EUROPE rally, through central London, in protest against the British governments’ BREXIT from the European Union.

Before There Was Trump, There Was Cleon

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By Kevin Morrell

Following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president the world is anticipating a new, and potentially radically different era for the United States. The inauguration also prompts questions about this new style of politics.

Trump’s surge to leading the most powerful nation in the world was fueled by a rhetoric we associate with a new term: post-truth. The Oxford dictionary named post-truth its word of the year in 2016, and defined it as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Brexit, and Trump’s success were new lows for many of us, particularly in higher education, precisely because facts came a distant second to populist appeals.

But, as a number of people have identified, post-truth didn’t begin with Trump.

One reference point for the two campaigns 2016 will be remembered for has been the propagandism of the 1930s, and two wickedly cynical pieces of advice: repeat lies often enough until they are accepted as true, or remember if you are going to lie, tell a big lie.

But almost a century earlier, in the 1850s, there was a far dirtier U.S. election campaign where an anti-immigration party, the Know-Nothings, actively thrived on pretending to be ignorant of their own party’s activities.

Further back still, before U.S. independence, the satirist John Arbuthnot wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when Men come to be undeceived, it is too late … like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine after the patient is dead.” The title of his 1712 essay? “The Art of Political Lying.”

And way, way before Arbuthnot, in 350 BC, Aristotle’s “Constitution of Athens” describes the demagogue Cleon in a way Trump critics might recognize: “The cause of the corruption of the democracy by his wild undertakings.”

A closer look at Cleon invites several parallels with how critics see Trump. Cleon inherited his wealth from his father in the form of a tannery, a leather factory; certainly, the Athenian equivalent of blue-collar.

He rose to power in 430 BC, during a desperate time for Athens — it was at war with Sparta and was devastated by plague. Plutarch describes him as someone who “catered to the pleasure of the Athenians” with a combination of “mad vanity,” “versatile buffoonery” and “disgusting boldness.”

Cleon had a distinctive and shocking communication style, one Athenians had never seen before. While speaking, he would hitch his cloak up and slap his thighs, running and yelling at the crowds.

Aristotle says he was “the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse.” Aside from this radically new communication style, Cleon’s populism was based on attacking two enemies.

First, though wealthy himself, he was an anti-establishment figure, pursuing a “relentless persecution of the upper classes.”

Second, he was a flag-waving xenophobe, antagonistic towards Athens’ rival and (partly thanks to Cleon) bitter enemy Sparta, as well as to the city of Mytilene, who wanted independence from Athens.

The Athenian general and historian Thucydides even records a speech where Cleon expresses admiration for Mytilene’s “unassailable” walls.

Parallels don’t end there. A later Athenian writer, Lucian, suggests Cleon profited from exploiting his office as some warn Trump is set to do and that he was “venal to excess” (as Trump detractors suggest).

He was boastful, once bragging that he could win a war against some Spartans by himself. He was thin-skinned and censorious, as well as a litigious bully.

Cleon tried, unsuccessfully, to have the satirist Aristophanes prosecuted for writing “The Babylonians,” which he considered a treasonable play — in the process turning Aristophanes into a lifelong enemy.

He accused Athenian generals of incompetence and, in establishment-bashing mode tried, unsuccessfully, to prosecute one of them, Laches.

Cleon was held responsible for the eventual exile of another, Thucydides, who as well as being a general is sometimes described as the founder of history.

Indeed, Thucydides’ contribution was to found a tradition of historians as being concerned with facts and the truth.

Throughout this period Cleon was the biggest obstacle to normal relations with Sparta and within a year of his death a peace treaty was agreed.

History was certainly not kind to Cleon, and perhaps Trump will not be showered in praise either.

In Cleon’s case this was no surprise perhaps given that he exiled the most eminent Athenian historian and tried to silence the most eminent Athenian satirist.

Nowadays Cleon is most well-known through Aristophanes’ play, “The Knights” (far ruder than “Saturday Night Live”).

This has an unusually small cast because it is essentially a relentless assault on the character Paphlagon, who is obviously based on Cleon: “the leather-seller” with a “gaping arse,” “a perfect glutton for beans” who loudly “farts and snores,” an “arrant rogue” and “mud-stirrer” with a “pig’s education” and the “stink of leather” — “this villain, this villain, this villain! I cannot say the word too often, for he is a villain a thousand times a day.”

Cleon may well have had a front-row seat for “The Knights,” where he would have seen Aristophanes playing Paphlagon/Cleon, presumably because no one else dared to.

Characters in these plays were masked, but no prop-maker dared make a mask resembling Cleon.

We might imagine Cleon later reviewing “The Knights” as: “A totally one-sided, biased show — overrated! The theater must always be a safe and special place. Apologize!”

What matters is that Aristophanes’ contemporaries awarded “The Knights” first prize at the Lenaia festival (something like Athens’ Cannes Festival).

Cleon’s brand of post-truth politics flourished because when life is extremely hard, facts are not as novel or distracting as sensationalism.

Some Athenians were won over by the novel spectacle of yelling, coarse abuse and thigh-slapping — and distracted by diversionary ranting against Sparta.

Critics of Brexit and Trump might say voters were won over by bus-sized gimmicks or tweet-sized slogans — where both camps painted “enemy” over an anonymous other.

Last year was a bad year in which millions were desperate for change, but perhaps what we saw was an age-old spectacle. Populism and appeals to emotion always work on some people. When times are bad enough they work on enough people.

One consolation for Trump’s opponents and Remainers is that the Athenians kept Cleon partly in check using existing governance mechanisms: the courts.

They can also take comfort that contemporary culture remembers Cleon through the eyes of his bitter enemy Aristophanes. Cleon’s era was horrific yet it also became a golden age for satire and saw the birth of the discipline of history.

The worst fears for the Trump presidency are bleak, but civilization survived Cleon. Shortly after his death, we saw another kind of Athenian golden age — with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laying down the basis for Western philosophy and civilization.

They taught the importance of skepticism and scrutiny, and of virtue. They placed the ultimate premium on the search for knowledge and truth.

In the “Rhetoric” Aristotle gave us all the tools we need to see through a Cleon. Indeed, he wanted rhetoric to be widely understood so politicians’ arguments were evaluated on their merits rather than the wrapper (or bus) they arrived in.

Kevin Morrell is professor of strategy at the Warwick Business School, part of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He researches rhetoric in politics.

 

Ireland Diary: Dublin and Kilkenny

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By Linda Gasparello

“But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.” — James Joyce, “Dubliners”

Ireland is always an adventure.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have traveled there frequently since the early 1980s. Our first trip, on which we drove with friends from Dublin to Dingle, gave us some of our most memorable impressions of the country.

Nearly every summer from 1989-2010, we traveled to Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland, to participate in the Humbert Summer School (named after one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert), founded by journalist John Cooney for “the study of Ireland and Europe.” It was a Brigadoon-like event, attracting academics, politicians, musicians, writers and many faithful regulars – who Cooney called “Hubertians” — from all over Ireland and abroad.

The school’s sessions took place in many Mayo venues, from Moyne College and Murphy Brothers Bar & Restaurant in Ballina to the Golden Acres pub in Kilalla and Bessie’s Bar in Kilcummin — a beachead on the county’s northern coast, where a French expedition commanded by Gen. Humbert landed on Aug. 22, 1798, in an attempt to assist Irish rebels during the 1798 Rebellion.

During those summers Humbertians did a lot of thinking, heightened by a lot of drinking.

Shortly before the election, Llewellyn and I traveled to Ireland to attend the Association of European Journalists’ (AEJ) annual meeting, held in Kilkenny this year. The association skirts the high cost of holding meetings in Europe’s big cities by holding their annual in small ones, like Maastricht, Netherlands, Burgenland, Austria and Sibiu, Romania.

In addition to its serious purpose, the AEJ annual meeting has much of the fun and good fellowship as did the Humbert School. A few of its members were also Humbert regulars, including our friends David Haworth, who lives in Brussels and writes for The Irish Daily Mail, and Joe Carroll, who covered Washington and the Clinton White House for The Irish Times.

“There’s no friends like the old friends,” Joyce also wrote in “Dubliners.”

Two Celebrations in Dublin

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The 12th-century Kilkenny Castle from the porch of the Rivercourt Hotel. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Christmas is nearing in Ireland. The shops on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare — and one of the widest in Europe — are brimming with decorations and merchandise. But even as the Irish start celebrating the holidays, they have not yet finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on the path to its independence in 1922.

The holiday light vines on the lamp posts in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street illuminate banners that say, “Dublin Remembers 1916.” Walk down the street to Eason and you’ll see the bookstore’s front display tables laden with 1916-23 histories, from Fearghal McGarry’s “The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916 to Tim Pat Coogan’s “DeValera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow.”

Abeba, an Ethopian woman visiting Dublin, leafed through Sinead McCoole’s “Easter Widows: Seven Irish Women Who Lived in the Shadow of the 1916 Rising.” She told me, “ I took the 1916 bus tour. Now I want to read about women of the time.”

She had taken Dublin Bus’s “The 1916 Tour — Beyond Barricades,” in which on-board actors and film immerse passengers in the rebellion. “Dublin was in flames, and you really felt like you were there,” Abeba said.

The previous day, a bank holiday, my husband and I had taken the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. One loop included Kilmainham Jail, where the seven signatories to the declaration of The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic were executed from May 3-12, 1916.

Our driver told us that he had named his daughter Grace, after Grace Gifford, a gifted artist and cartoonist who was active in the Republican movement. Gifford married her fiance Joseph Mary Plunkett in the jail’s chapel only a few hours before he was executed for being a leader of the rebellion.

As we neared the jail, our driver sang a refrain from “Grace,” often sung by the late Jim McCann of The Dubliners folk band fame:

Oh, Grace just hold me in your arms, and let this moment linger,
They take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love, so we must say good-bye.

Our driver told us that Kilmainham is a very busy site, and prebooking tickets is essential, especially during this centenary year. However, he said, there is easy access to the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where our tour ended and where the Rising began.

“It came under heavy bombardment for a week. You can still see the bullet holes on the pillars and walls. Gutted by fire, it did not reopen until 1929,” he said.

The Rising began on April 24, 1916, and lasted six days. Early Easter Monday, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, under the command of Patrick Pearse, a Gaelic scholar, schoolteacher and poet, and James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, with others seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now called O’Connell). On the building’s front steps, Pearse read the declaration, addressed to “The People of Ireland” and signed by himself, Connolly, Plunkett and four others.

Almost 500 people were killed in the Rising, more than half were civilians. More than 2,600 were wounded during heavy British machine-gun fire, shelling and fires that left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, amid much strife and bloodshed. But the Irish state has retained close ties with Britain and is the only European Union country that it shares a border with.

It is sad and ironic that Ireland is not only celebrating the start of the British exit from their country in 1916, but it is also concerned about the start of the British exit from the EU – Brexit — next year.

Kilkenny’s ‘Medieval Mile’

If you’ve ever been daunted by a walking tour of a medieval European city, say Prague, then Kilkenny’s “Medieval Mile” will delight you.

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The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 and named after the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. Photo/Linda Gasparello

“Good goods sometimes come in small parcels,” Colette Byrne, CEO of the Kilkenny County Council, told the Association of European Journalists.

Just a mile-long, circular walk in Kilkenny (Ireland’s capital in the Middle Ages), Byrne said, will take you past a number of its marvels, including the 13th-century St. Mary’s Church, whose graveyard has a rare and significant collection of tombs, and The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. The abbey is famous for its five-gabled, stained glass Rosary Window.

Along the mile, there are plenty of non-medieval buildings, notably the limestone Thosel Town Hall which dominates the High Street. Its name comes from two old English words “toll” meaning tax, and “sael” meaning hall. Built in 1761, it served as a custom house and guildhall – today, it’s where Kilkennians pay their taxes.

Across the street from the town hall, there is the Hole in the Wall: a tiny tavern in the inner house of a Tudor mansion built in 1582, and Ireland’s oldest surviving townhouse. Around 1660, in order to gain access from the High Street to the rear of the inner house, a hole was punctured in a wall.

“It was a favored haunt of Captain Arthur Wesley, who was stationed at Kilkenny barracks before being seconded to the British army in Spain and India, and eventually becoming the Duke of Wellington and British prime minister. Later it developed a reputation of ill renown due to duels, arguments, highwaymen, etc., and this led to its eventual demise,” a Hole in the Wall brochure says.

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Standing in front of a pair of ghoulish murals, a visitor asks a local woman for directions to the High Street. Photo/Linda Gasparello

On St. Kiernan Street, behind the High Street on the circular walk, there is an inn with a notorious past: Kyteler’s. Ireland’s only witch trials took place in Kilkenny in 1324 – supposedly, they were Europe’s first witchcraft trials. Dame Alice Kyteler, an innkeeper and moneylender, was accused of using poison and sorcery against her four husbands, having amassed a fortune from them. Before she could be tried, Alice pulled strings and fled to England, but her maid was flogged and burned at the stake.

Down the street from Kyteler’s, there is long mural, commissioned by the Keep Kilkenny Beautiful Committee in 2013, with ghoulish images: ghosts, black cats with bared teeth, and a warning that “witches are amongst us.” Behind it, another is in the works: a blue-faced woman in a white dress, lying on her back, either asleep or dead. This mural seems to float above the one in front of it.

Kilkenny is a haven for muralists. Cast your eyes up on the High Street, and you’ll see a cheery pink wall of the Smithwick’s Brewery. Cast them down, on a corner of Friary Street, and you’ll see a black cat with a curled tail, waiting to cross your path.

On all our trips to Ireland over the years, Llewellyn and I don’t know how we missed this magical little city.

→ See more photos from Kilkenny in our photo gallery here.

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A man pushes a stroller down the High Street, as a painted black cat waits to cross their path on the corner. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Britain’s Woes and England’s Fears

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By Llewellyn King

England’s problem is English: the language it gave to the world.

In particular, it’s a problem because so many people in the world speak English and would like to live in England, maybe hundreds of millions of them. “We are here because you were there,” says a sign held by an India-born woman at a demonstration. The British Empire isn’t all wound up.

The immigrant stream into England has two principal sources. One stream is from former British possessions, like India, Nigeria and Pakistan. These immigrants are English speakers. In England, they’ll have medical care, welfare, and law and order — and it’s where they feel entitled by history.

The other immigrant stream is from Eastern Europe. These immigrants enter England under the terms of the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union. They want to live and work in England for economic reasons. Once there, they tend to stay and live in expatriate communities.

London, the great sprawling metropolis along the Thames River, is now home to 50 expatriate communities, each with more than 10,000 members. More than 300 languages are spoken in London. According to the 2011 census, 37 percent of the city’s population wasn’t born in Britain. If the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a melting pot, London is that and even more so today.

The UK immigration problem is primarily an English problem. It’s not a Scottish, nor a Welsh, nor a Northern Irish one. England and London are where the immigrants head. Accommodation is at a premium in London, and the situation is getting worse with property speculation an industry in itself.

But immigrants nesting in London isn’t just a problem of migration. It’s also a problem of population density for England. The capital bursts at the seams as the north of the country languishes. Think booming Washington D.C. and hurting West Virginia, so close and so faraway.

The immigration problem is one of two issues that dominate the run-up to a June 23 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU. The second issue is of sovereignty, and the belief in Britain — mostly England – that Brussels, the seat of the European administration, is setting up rules and regulations that are untenable.

British Prime Minister David Cameron favors Britain staying in Europe with greater control of its borders and freedom from some Europe-wide mandates. Many members of his Conservative Party want out, including about half of his cabinet. Industry wants in by and large, as do professional groups and the important financial sector.

But the desire to leave Europe, known as “Brexit,” may be gaining with the support of Boris Johnson, London’s popular mayor. Polls have “in” just ahead of “out” and closing.

Pulling out has ramifications for the very integrity of the United Kingdom. Feeling against Europe is very much an English phenomenon and isn’t shared in Scotland, where calls for new referendum on its future as part of the United Kingdom will surely follow a vote for Britain to quit Europe. The last vote in September 2014 went against Scottish independence, 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent. Since then, the nationalistic feeling in Scotland has grown, and Scottish nationalists favor membership in Europe. Wales seems to want in.

Britain’s immigrant problem is more severe than ours in the United States. The population stands at 64.9 million and is rising. The island is 600-miles-long and 271-miles-long at its widest point.

It is one small island that has always left a large imprint on the world, and left its language as its lingua franca. It’s troublesome in today’s world of shifting populations, when hundreds of millions think of you as the mother country. — For InsideSources



The Future of Britain is on the Ballot

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By Llewellyn King

Long before our election in November, a much greater upheaval may hit Britain. Probably in late June, the country will vote on whether to stay in the European Union. Leaving is called “Brexit” in the British press.

While polls have consistently shown that voters favor Britain remaining a member of the 28-nation bloc, there are signs that things are changing. British business, which has until now seen its future as being in the EU, is beginning to rethink its support for British membership. A recent poll shows industry believing it could prosper out of the EU.

This is a big problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has promised dramatic changes in Britain’s membership, which will be announced at the European summit next month.

Britain wants less-oppressive regulations and a change in immigration policy. It wants an end to what has been a fundamental part of the European structure: the freedom of movement between countries. In short: no more immigration to Britain from Europe.

It is a complex negotiation which Cameron believes he can win; particularly when Europe is in shaky shape after the economic crisis in Greece and from the surge of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Although Europe’s political elites may have to hold their refined noses, the chances are better today than ever that they would rather their unruly island neighbors stay in than further damage the European project by withdrawing.

Predictably some economists say that Britain will do just fine without Europe, while others see dire economic consequences.

When the referendum comes, it will be a free vote with about half of Cameron’s Conservative Party voting to withdraw. These are the rambunctious “Euroskeptics” that have bedeviled British elections for generations and have made the role of Conservative prime ministers particularly trying.

The opposition Labor Party is divided on a Brexit. But Labor has so imploded under the extreme leftist Jeremy Corbyn that it is likely to go along and lend its support — feeble though it is — to the forces wishing to stay in the EU.

The Scottish Nationalists will also support continued membership. They hope that if they break away from the United Kingdom, they will get succor from the EU.

But the forces for exiting the EU are powerful and articulate. They are emboldened by Europe’s problems and the fact that they will no longer be bound by the dictates of, as they say, “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.”

The wild card in the referendum may be England’s wild man: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Now finishing his term as mayor of London, Boris Johnson is a lovable version of Donald Trump. He has gone from scrape to scrape and has come out ahead of the game. For instance, three years after having won a seat in Parliament in 2001, Johnson was sacked by the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, for allegedly lying over an affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson called newspaper stories about the affair “an inverted pyramid of piffle.” He was also sacked from his editorship of The Spectator, where the piffle took place.

But being elected to higher office is such a compensation, so Johnson, a bicycle-riding, tradition-loving maverick got himself elected mayor of London. In this office he saved the iconic double-decker buses, presided over the 2012 Summer Olympics, and endeared himself to an even wider audience.

The British revere Johnson’s eccentricity and voted him back into Parliament in the last election. Now people talk openly of him being Cameron’s successor after the referendum.

Johnson has hedged his bets on British membership in the EU. Just this week he declared that he will not lead the “Out” forces, but he does not totally endorse the “In” forces.

Here is the possible scenario: Cameron has to produce a deal that satisfies some of the Euroskeptics and set a date for referendum. Then the vote. Then the hangover, one way or another. Then Johnson makes his move – unless some schemer, like the current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has not outmaneuvered the charming and brilliant Boris.

Cleverly Johnson has written a long political treatise comparing London to Athens, and leaving room for people to believe he has the qualities of Pericles, without actually claiming the great Greek’s mantle. Then, just to be safe, he has knocked off a highly laudatory biography of Churchill, which invites the idea that Johnson shares some of his hero’s traits.

This kind of effrontery makes British politics a perpetual night in the pub. Cheers! — For Inside Sources