Starmer (apparently a Human Rights Lawyer and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) is under pressure because of his weakness in being forced to appoint Mandelson as Ambassador to the court of king Don, who is now threatening the status of the Falkland Islands. Is the PM hoping CIII can charm a charmless fat man who falls asleep in front of the world’s press in his own office?

In the delightful fable “Love Actually”, Hugh Grant’s PM stands up to Billy-Bob Thornton’s bullying President - and the film plays on television here every Christmas. Reality is, and always has been, very different. The USA has been hostile to England ever since it sent the Red Coats a-running, and especially since 1812. English arrogance resulted in Bessemer’s process making American steel dominant. English arrogance triggered a war that destroyed its, and its European competitors’, empires. English arrogance is now evident in the belief that England still matters.

I would respect Starmer and the Westminster élite if CIII told the fat man in Washington to remove all his military and quasi-military assets from our territory. No US military, NSA or CIA aeroplane, ship or boot allowed here until after the trials at the Hague are completed and the perpetrators of genocide hung. It would help if others did the same - no more intel from Cyprus or Pine Gap, Diego Garcia or the Azores…

Won’t happen though. It is not the same Washington that Mr Smith went to. President Trump is the image of the new amerika doing in plain sight what the old fictional version, that Norman Rockwell captured so comfortingly, kept well out of view.

The power of propaganda is such that I grew up happily believing that the USA was a generous democracy founded on peace and goodwill to all men. The Americans that I knew were all friendly, comfortable people. They were better educated than me, they lived in a detached five bedroom house on a big green lot in a university city. They believed in all the virtues we are told the USA was founded on. I loved American films, especially frothy romantic comedies, the Wizard of Oz, 1930s gangster films with Cagney atop an exploding gas tank, 1950s noir with Dick Powell, Greg Peck in ‘Twelve o’clock High’ and ‘Roman Holiday’.

The film that really stopped me in my tracks was ‘Mississippi Burning’. That one film forced me to realise that I had always been aware of this dark side of the American psyche - it is there in plain sight in Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Mocking Bird and every literary and filmic occasion where the servants are not the same colour as the masters. Twenty years before seeing that film I had been told about a race riot in our sleepy little market town. It occurred outside the ‘The Chequers Inn’ in Bridge Street in 1943. The man who told me had been there at the time but I thought he was probably exaggerating. Pubs, even in my experience, could be unruly at chucking-out time.

I later revisited that memory and sought to verify it. A racial disturbance had occurred at that time and place. The Chequers was a popular place for American servicemen from the ammunition handling depot in the malthouses by the railway on the other side of the river. The trouble was caused by US airmen from the base on the other side of town being unwilling to share their drinking space with the ammunition handlers from the malthouses. It was only then that I discovered that the airmen were white, and the ammunition handlers black, Americans. The townspeople liked both lots of Americans and resented the airmen’s prejudice. Twenty-five years later local people still remembered how different reality was from the celluloid version.

I was brought up to believe that America saved us from the Germans. The Lend-Lease deals of 1940/41 certainly ensured a bankrupt Britain didn’t sink. What saved us was the German’s Napoleonic invasion of Russia in June 1941. It was the USSR that defeated Germany. The American contribution was to stop the Red Army from reaching the Atlantic, and then help them in the partition and subjugation of Europe.

It is a couple of weeks short of eighty-one years since Germany surrendered. Russia has been forced back beyond the high-water mark of its Imperial ambitions but Putin seems to want to push forward again - the only question is ‘how far?’ As long as Russia presents no direct threat to the global ambitions of the USA it seems very unlikely that any President would risk forcing Russia into a nuclear exchange.

How important is Europe to Washington? Spain already refuses to support US military ambitions being launched from its territory. Even spineless Starmer is beginning to quake as the fact that the UK has actively supported attacks on Iran cannot be hidden. Does USrael need the active support of UK involvement? Probably it does, logistically. especially runways and continuing intelligence feeds.

If CIII’s visit is greeted with the full Barnum and Bailey ceremony of parades and marching bands and overflights of a thousand warplanes trailing streamers of the red, white and blue then USrael really needs us (though maybe not the rest of Europe quite so much). If the US President falls asleep or waddles off for a comfort break in the middle of a State Dinner, then we are nothing more than a convenient piece of real estate - a small island off Europe with a few useful outposts with runways and arrays of antennas forever listening…

The UN, like its predecessor has failed in its primary task. It is moribund and there appears to be no enthusiasm to revive it…

As children on United Nations Day we listened to our teacher explaining how our lives would be peaceful because the bad people in the world would be brought to task by the decisions of the General Assembly and the rightful might of the Blue Helmets. UN peacekeepers did their best - but they have not stopped the bad people from doing what bad people do.

Why?

As a child, my parents told me to trust my teachers just as I trusted them. And I did. I remember cinema newsreels of the Korean War and believed that it was all about stopping the bad people from doing nasty things to good people. When we couldn’t sail home through the Suez canal because it was blocked by sunken ships and the collapsed El Ferdan railway bridge, I didn’t question the propaganda about why that had happened. My conditioning had been effective: I believed the propaganda presented to me as news via the mass media all the way through the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and right up to 2003…

Tony Blair had such a warm smile, even if his eyes were cold, and one wanted to believe him. And the junior Bush seemed a rather nice, if a bit stupid, American. But I knew enough from open sources that however bad a man Saddam might have been (heavens! Thatcher liked him, so he had to be really bad) he did not have the capabilities to threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. His eight year war with Iran had ended in stalemate in 1988 with over one million dead and his defeat by the USA three years later created further carnage.

It has taken twenty years to claw the scales from my eyes. I was brought up to believe that horrible people, like the Kaiser and Hitler and Mussolini, had to be stopped and if it took world wars and fifty or a hundred million dead, then that was a price worth paying. If the League of Nations had been ineffective then, of course, we needed something better - the United Nations. Why did no-one act against Franco? Why did it take the Vietnamese to stop Pol Pot? Why will those United Nations not act to stop Russia’s naked aggression? Why are democratically elected politicians like Mohammad Mosaddegh or Salvador Allende replaced in coups by violent autocrats? Why will no-one act to stop the destruction of the Sudanese people? Why cannot the United Nations stop genocide in Palestine? Why cannot the International Criminal Court exercise the warrants of arrest for the well-documented alleged war criminals? Why is the United States allowed to abduct the leader of a sovereign country and murder the head of another?

Why? Why? Why?

Today I have come to a point where I refuse to accept the pronouncements of others unless they are substantiated with acceptable proofs. That is a sad position to hold. It means I trust no-one unless they have proven their loyalty to me. Maybe I am alone, an untrusting sheep in a world of wolves. Or maybe this is how more and more and more of the eight billion of us are beginning to feel…

Civilisation is built on trust. Trust is the necessary glue that holds families and communities together. Without trust there is only conflict, dissolution and chaos…

.

Yesterday’s outcome looks like this:

It should be noted that of the 77,495 registered voters over just half (40,592) chose not to exercise their democratic right.

At the General Election in 2024 the picture was:

There were 76,524 persons registered to vote in 2024, of whom just over half (39,964) chose not to vote.

The Green Party has increased its number of votes by 10,170, tripling their share of the 2024 vote. By any stretch of the imagination this is a significant improvement - but does it justify the Party’s boast today that this means every seat could become Green?

I don’t know and there will be many political scientists better informed than I who will be dissecting that as I write. What interests me is the fact that the Non-voting Party remains at just over half the electorate. The real change is in how the politically active share their vote, which could be indication that plural (well, three-party) politics could be emerging from the failing two-party system. My own view is that a pluralistic system might be an improvement… but then only if the decision making process is returned to the House of Commons (and making the other place democratically elected rather than appointed - or else abolished).

Some people argue that we should follow Australia and make failure to vote vote a punishable (if not actually criminal) offence. My own view is that is no more in the spirit of democracy that assuming the share of non-voters will mirror that of the voters. In the case of this election that is to give each voter the power of very slightly over two votes - or, in radical democratic terms, a voter is twice as valuable as a non-voter.

I see the non-voter as a self-disempowering actor in the democratic process. For reasons known only to them they choose not to vote. Why? Do they not care about decisions (including going to war or aiding and abetting genocide) being made in their name? I really wish I knew…

My feeling is that this is a reflection of tens of centuries of disempowerment that really only ended 98 years ago with full emancipation. Many of us, no matter where we have ended up in the social ant-heap, are rooted in the soil of that inequitable vassalage. One reads now about 16 to 24 year olds being unable to find work, of university graduates with crushing debts of student loans unable to find employment appropriate to their talents, of older people ‘let go’ because age outweighs experience, of women forced to forgo childbearing simply to be able to afford a roof over her head - and so on and on and on.

Our representatives are supported by people who do not want to risk that spark. Hence the steadily-increasing authoritarianism of the gubernatorial class. While I don’t believe the Greens are in any respect revolutionary and all other parties are shackled to historical fictions, what they all share is a very clear intention not to excite the political ambitions of the non-voting class - who are the gunpowder waiting for the spark of genuine leadership…

Churchill and the Chamberlains bestride England’s descent from Imperial power to America’s lackey. Joe had real radical vision and is behind many key social reforms of the late Victorian period. He was also, perhaps of necessity, a backer of the imperialists in their attempts to sequester the mineral wealth of Southern Africa and oppose the steadily increasing industrial power of Germany and the greedy economic appetites of the Americans. Churchill, a thorough-going imperialist and creative writer, wanted war. He wrote about his role as a cavalry subaltern at Omdurman and went off to get captured by the Boers in South Africa. He quickly scaled political heights and was captain of the Navy just in time to begin the destruction of the British Empire, a process successfully concluded in 1945.

We, the people, have our leaders wished upon us. Electoral reform in old Joe’s time led eventually to full adult emancipation not long before his son moved into Downing Street. Young Chamberlain believed in jaw-jaw but it was war-war that won - as it always does. In Britain the ‘khaki election’ of 1945 expelled Churchill and ushered in a welfare state where health, education and shelter were basic rights. Five years later the Labour Party was returned to power with an unworkable plurality and the year after that Churchill was returned. Since 1945 we have had five periods of Labour government and four of Conservative government. The duration of the periods vary, Labour’s tending to be shorter. Regardless of which Party is in power the common factor is the decline in power and influence.

The world of today could not have been imagined by old Joe but industrialisation and economic imperialism remain the drivers of progress. I doubt that when Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Yalta any of them could imagine what lay just a few years ahead. The world’s leading economic power now is Communist China. India, the worlds largest democracy is moving towards autocracy but it’s industrialists own much of British car- and steel-making. Russia is a struggling autocratic oligarchy. Europe is technically a quasi-confederal state comprising twenty-seven broken parts under an all-powerful bureaucracy operating without parliamentary oversight.

The United Nations, emblem of the post-1945 world order, is moribund, slowly dying. None of the actual powerbrokers in the world is interested in sustaining the UN and may even be willing to collude in its streamlined death.

The USA, a rebellious colony and never really a true democracy, has a properly-elected President whom educated persons of a liberal persuasion vilify cruelly. So far as I, an outsider, can tell the institutions of state are functioning within the tenuous constraints of their operating procedures, the legality of which are being challenged, unsuccessfully at present. It appears to me that the US Administration is operating pretty much as have all its predecessors, the only difference being they no longer feel any need to be polite. The US President is, to me, just a self-identifying bully in the world’s playground surrounded by sycophantic acolytes - but there is nothing I can do about it (other than not going or buying anything made there).

The UK, my country, is broken. It may still be a Kingdom (though for how much longer?) but it is not united. Although supposedly more of a democracy than the USA (on the grounds of age and experience) it clearly isn’t as gerrymandering and even electoral fraud is rife. The PM has had to abandon plans to cancel some elections he was likely to lose, but I suspect he doesn’t care very much - every single one of his election promises has failed or been reneged upon.

Does it matter? To an educated liberal, yes, of course it does. But the people who are funding the functionaries who govern us, thereby directing them, don’t care. They are secretive self-obsessed narcissists with no moral compass and extremely deep pockets. Nothing will change…

Not in the short term, maybe. But history has a long memory. All we can do now is protest the immorality of our masters and ensure that their names and the detail of their support for genocide and obscene suffering is faithfully recorded so that they and their descendants can be pursued to the Nth generation to obtain restitution…