Our regular English correspondent from Normandy, France, has penned a more hopeful article based on the results of the recent British election.  To remind American readers, the Conservative party lost seats in the House of Commons and no longer has a majority. The ‘hard Brexit’ philosophy of the Prime Minister Teresa May appears to have been discredited. - GNH

Light streams into the dreadful darkness in England

By Terry Field

I have been transfixed by the horrific sweat of nationalism playing out over the last few years. The rabble rousing from the extra parliamentary extreme nationalists has drowned out rationality.  This sweat of aggression informed the inner cabal of this mediocre uncharismatic and non-visionary Prime Ministerial incumbent (Mrs. Teresa May).

Prior to the election she parroted offensive, often vicious parochialisms designed to corral the extreme right vote.

Happily, she managed to offend the ‘greys’ (good folk, I am one of them!) and terrify the pensioners, as well as totally alienate anyone under thirty.

Now, the entire political world has changed, and SO MUCH for the better.

The Lie Exposed – or nearly so.

Until the British election last week, this dreadful woman said she would steer Britain through a hard Brexit - ably assisted by the equally socially challenged Brexit minister.

This is THE core issue. What does it mean? It means that she interprets the referendum of 2016 not as simply leaving the political and legal control of the European Union, but also cutting the connections of the customs union and the single market. Both of these things, acting together, gives up on the long-held British dream of frictionless trade in the European market of well over 400 million people.

I well recall trying to sell heavy engineering products into Europe before 1973/75 EU accession. It was all but impossible. The same for electronics, pharmaceuticals. I tried them all; the barriers to entry – mostly non-financial – were immense; insuperable.

A poor, isolated Britain in 1973 was desperate for Union; for inclusion, for connection. For a common future.  It was the dream and it still is. It is worth dying for. And living for!

A deadbeat government minister who crept up the political ladder and has done nothing else would have NO understanding of this; no comprehension of the horror of returning to such a condition for the indebted British.

Nor would Nigel Farage, a City commodities broker simply on the end of a client phone line.

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That is the trouble. NO knowledge; forgotten reality.

Yet this election returns us to sanity.

The Scottish conservatives, on whose votes Madame May depends, are not prepared to accept the lunacy of economic dislocation, and look to political changes with Europe only. And slight at that.

Glory Hallelujah! Sanity. The worst sort of south-of-England Tory lunacy is set at naught. To add to this happy event, the generally repulsive DUP (‘creationist’, gay-repressing, climate change denying flatheads from Greater Belfast) also will not countenance a Brexit that destroys their open Irish borders, continuity of trade, etc, etc

The Four Freedoms

What more beautiful thing than that Europeans can move across their own continent. That the prison bars are dissolving, that there is the chance for full personal freedom.

SO many wanted this; and so many thought it could never come. Those in the camps, those dying in armies, those shooting their fellow creatures over the Berlin wall. those living where they preferred not to. Those in secret-police organisations. SO many.

UKIP ex-leader Farage, in spite of strong opposition from the only UKIP MP – made migration and closing-off immigration to Britain a key UKIP demand. Street gutter politics has an attraction to many, and some may have voted for it BUT nobody knows if it mattered in the vote, despite May saying it was core to her – rather repulsive and self-defeating – version of Brexit.

The real vote was to simply leave the EU, not kick out people, close migration inwards, act socially in any particular way at all.

It was ONLY to leave the EU. The Parliament, the commission, the organs of political authority, and that was ALL the vote offered.

May’s absurd promise in the election was to restrict inward net migration to less than 100,000. A lunatic impossibility, short of closing down family rights, corporate needs, normal social interchange of free people, human rights legislation, the body of international law.

It was grotesque, but reflected the nationalistic-isolationist-global-laager-mentality delusional mindset of a particular sort of Tory minister.

Why is this nonsense so critical to the future of Britain?

Because it forces the denial of the primacy of the Four Freedoms that are non-negotiable within Europe.

Rejection of freedom of movement will automatically exclude Britain from the single market. Working within the single market allows for Britain to survive; exclusion will usher in poverty, unemployment, cultural and social dislocation, indeed a bitter and resentful isolation.

The young understand this and reject it. They voted in this election, in part to correct their absenteeism in the referendum vote, but in part also because the Labour Party happily said ‘vote for us and your student debt is forgiven’.

When corrupt political offers like this inadvertently produce a morally desirable result, I am persuaded there is a God in Heaven.

SO?

May is wounded, dependent, stripped of low-grade fascistic isolationist certainties. She faces a House of Commons dominated by those who hated the Brexit vote, and will accept only a political divorce – and that watered down if possible – but they will NOT accept economic nationalism and dislocation.

That is dead as a doornail.

Farage has said he will enter the political fray to stop Brexit ‘backsliding’

A joke. And offensive at the same time.

We now have a House of Commons that will re-commence behaving like a representative democracy; it is there that decisions will be made. It is there this distorted version of a British Prime Minister must present herself, deploy arguments, face scrutiny, reckon on rejection and modification of this most significant political decision since Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.

For that is what Brexit is.

The primacy of truth. The horror of lies. Our beautiful Representative Democracy.

Before writing this, I have been looking at pictures of Belsen and remembering my visit to Dachau, re-acquainting myself with the accounts of Treblinka, of the Polish ghetto, of Auschwitz, of the destroyed cities of Germany and so much of Europe, Britain and poor Russia. I have recalled the audience attending a Shostakovich concert under the very great Mravinsky in Leningrad, where some of these cornered, starving, sweet people froze to death listening; no fuel, no heating, no food, just the consolation of the honesty of musical truth; of the musical mirror of their terminal suffering turned towards them as they died.

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I have re-read my uncle’s letters before his Lancaster bomber crashed, killing him and all but one other young fellow in 1944. I have reread the accounts of the unbelievable suffering of our peoples in all countries.

I have whilst living in France visited the graves and ossuaries of dear German boys slaughtered across France, of dear American boys killed on the beaches and elsewhere, of English boys, and Polish boys, of French boys.

I recall a gentle French ladies’ description of her dead father, lying on a lane a few hundred metres from my house. How they lived in poverty for many years afterwards. Killed in the cross-fire between German and British troops. Whilst caring for his Percheron horses. Gentle horses, just as people are, given the chance.

Victims one and all.

In all truth, the SS camp guard was as much a victim of fear and poverty, lies, false hopes, political fantasies. Corrupted governments, venal chancers.

Why this revisit to history?

Because as a result of these all-but unparalleled horrors, I am mindful that the politicians of the West in Europe and Britain engaged in relative honesty during the decades following the slaughters.

There was no place for lies, local selfishness, spiteful abuse, miss-characterisation of the actions and beliefs of others. In Europe, for a period, even anti-semitism all but disappeared.

But all that has withered in Britain in recent years. And with it, British prosperity, decency, position in the world, self-respect and social cohesion has been greatly damaged.

The reflex action of a shift to the worst sort of right wing politics as a result of the 2007/8 crises is inexcusable. In truth there is little suffering, public spending grew only at a slower rate. To take on the mantle of the petty fascist as a result of this is shameful. The Tory Party under May is the point at which this vile sectarianism was promoted.

TO HER ETERNAL SHAME, MAY HAS BEEN ACTING OUT A PARTICULARLY DISGUSTING SOFT-FASCIST POLITY SINCE SHE BECAME HEAD OF THE JUNTA.

And like a good fascist, she sought to undermine, to sideline Parliament.

When she, May, said at the Tory Party conference, that “a ‘citizen of the world’ is a citizen of nowhere,” I saw all the doors of civilisation that have just begun to creak open in Britain and Europe begin to slam shut.

Tribes. There is no place for tribes any more…….

If we have not learned that, then we have learned little.  It is lies and tribal hate that enables these evils to flourish.

The British experiment with tribal excess is now irretrievably holed below the water line. As a result of this election, I hope that social and economic violence was defeated by a newly empowered electorate.

This is a joy if it is so.

Like the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Few seem to get this, but it will dawn over the next few weeks, as the EU negotiations commence.

I was and am a natural Conservative voter. But not for this latest, defeated fantasy – for it was and is simple fascism.

The word should be used.  And it is defeated by goodness.

Not by Jeremy Corbyn (head of the Labour Party) He is a dull unwitting assistant in the process of re-establishing the primacy of Parliament, and ensuring that Farage – and others who would-be like him - outside the House of Commons, are tedious irrelevances and rabble rousers.

The time of the street in British politics is over. 

May’s incompetence, inability to lead, lack of vision, and indecent attacks on so many achieved this.

Thank you Madame May.  Nobody else could have done it.

Now let us devoutly hope for full continuity of European trading relationships, and rational behaviour over the quite free transit of our dear – and I do mean dear – European neighbours.

European soil is drenched in blood.

We owe it to ourselves to let grass finally grow over it and benefit from the iron fertiliser. - Terry Field