The Sunday Ishmael: 20/10/2024: the ethnic slur edition

As ever, Andrei Kelin, Russian Ambassador to Britain, was kind and polite in the face of Laura Kuenssberg's hard-faced, sharp-nosed, downright rude questioning this morning. He did permit himself a little chuckle at the suggestion that President Putin would present himself to the Inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018. You'll recall that she died after spraying herself with the contents of a perfume bottle that her partner had found in a bin and brought home to her as a special present. It was initially thought that she had been poisoned by contaminated illegal drugs, given her lifestyle, but analysis revealed the cause of death was Novichok. Moral of that story - if it looks too good to be true, then it is too good to be true and bin-diving as a way of saving money is not a good idea, even in Impoverished Britain. The target of the special edition Eau de Novichok was Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, who was living in retirement in Salisbury following a career of leaking Russian secrets to the British. He survived his exposure to Novichok, as did his daughter and the detective who went into their home, so the dastardly mission of Russian intelligence officers (I think that means spies) Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin was a big fail. They had popped across to Britain from Moscow on the 2nd March 2018, under false identities, in order to see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, returning on the 4th March. 

Nothing to do with spraying the handle of expatriate Skripal's door with Novichok, nor of carrying through Customs enough Novichok to kill thousands of British people.

Skripal had served 6 years of a 13 year sentence in a high security Russian prison for his traitorous activities when his release was negotiated in a prisoner exchange deal. The idea is that you then give up your spying activities and keep your head down, bloody grateful for your reprieve. Skripal, however, was actively and regularly meeting with intelligence and security officers from countries including the Czech Republic, Colombia, Estonia and Spain. He could not have been doing this without the instigation or approval of  the British secret services. Which rendered him a legitimate target for the Russian lot. We haven't heard anything of Skripal of late. I daresay his handlers have been keeping him below the radar. He won't be appearing at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, although it could be argued that it was all his fault.

Did Putin order the hit? Does it matter? There's a marvellous statement of state-craft in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra. Pompey was asked to authorise a dishonourable scheme, breaching the laws of hospitality, to murder his enemies who were currently drunk at a party on Pompey's boat. He replies:

POMPEY:   Ah, this thou shouldst have done

And not have spoke on ’t! In me ’tis villainy;

In thee ’t had been good service. Thou must know

’Tis not my profit that does lead mine honor;

Mine honor, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue

Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown,

I should have found it afterwards well done,

But must condemn it now. 

Anyway, having dismissed the risible suggestion that President Putin would attend an Inquiry into the death of a woman he had never heard of, the Ambassador really got into it. He told Laura that  the UK is waging war against Russia by supplying Ukraine with weapons, saying: ‘My government firmly believes the UK Government is waging an aggressive war against Russia by the hands of the Ukrainians. This is a proxy war led by the United Kingdom’s Government by providing lethal weapons with which the UK Government is killing Russian soldiers and civilians. I think you are aggressive and waging a proxy war against Russia.’

Well, he's got a point, hasn't he?

At the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and consistently thereafter, the BBC - Britain's state television station, has urged indignation at Russia's actions, and support for Ukraine. There has been no attempt at balanced reporting and everything Russia has said has been dismissed as propaganda. I assume that this is at the instruction of the government, who presumably act at the behest of the USA and of its own security organisations. The upshot is that Russia now regards us as an openly-declared enemy at war. Which is not a comfortable position to be in.

Talking of the BBC, I had a couple of interesting conversations over the last few days with friends. Both are widely travelled, both have lived for many years overseas, both regard the BBC as dreadfully compromised purveyors of propaganda. One friend regaled me with stories of posed footage broadcast unquestioningly by the Beeb, telling me that one "corpse" having played dead in several funerals, miraculously recovered life when a bomb exploded a little too close to his bier, and ran off; and an ululating woman was told by her handler that she was doing a very good job, keep it up, a bit louder, please, out of shot of the Beeb camera, but within mobile phone camera range. That friend's view was that the Beeb was a propaganda vehicle for Hamas. The other friend was equally convinced that the Beeb is pro Zionist and supports genocide. Mind you, she did spend three-quarters of an hour once explaining to me that 5G would give me cancer, heat my tissues, give me headaches, nausea and dizziness.

It is all a question of perspective: of which tribe you support - probably the ones who look and smell most like yourself. It's an evolutionary thing - we had to be good at recognising enemies. I have recently discovered that I have a goodly smattering of European Neanderthal in my DNA. Ah - that explains a lot, mrs ishmael. Shut up. I will have you know that Neanderthals were very intelligent, with sophisticated tools, weapons and art, but became extinct around 40,000 years ago, out-competed by Cro-Magnons, who were more successful breeders, and therefore had larger numbers to network and work together toward survival. I've always been crap at networking - you know, those dreadful corporate events where you have to wear a badge with your name on it and make small talk with complete strangers. I have no small talk. Once I get past the weather - always a source of fascinating conversation here in the Bracing Isles, I head for the snack table. Or if it is really bad, go to the loo to fix my make-up for an hour or so. That's the Neanderthal in me. 

Having faced up to, and lost, the resource war with you Cro-Magnons back in the day, the squabblings between different human tribes fades into insignificance. That really was an existential crisis - using existential in the non-philosophical sense that they use it nowadays, meaning a threat to continued existence. Unless you are a Uyghur or a Tutsi. 

So I read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race with appalled fascination. Reni Eddo-Lodge published it through Bloomsbury Publishing in 2017, so it is hardly cutting-edge, but I hadn't paid it no never-mind, until being entranced in Kirkwall Library by its tricksy cover - the text "to White People" appears in white text on the white background, making it invisible from a distance. The rest of the text is black. Renni Eddo-Lodge is a black Londoner, a graduate of the University of Central Lancashire, and a writer. Her book was generally well-received at the time, although Trevor Phillips claimed that it probed "delicately knotted issues with all the subtlety of a blunderbuss". I'm with Trevor on this. The book explores the links between gender, class and race in Britain and other countries, summarising the experience of Black and Asian people in the UK, institutional racism and definitions of class.

Eddo-Lodge uses the BBC's (yes, them again) definition of not 3, but 7, British classes, and measured economic capital - income, savings, house value; social capital - the number and status of people someone knows; and cultural capital, defined as the extent and nature of cultural interests and activities.

1. Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth. This group has the highest levels of all three capitals
2. Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals. The largest and most gregarious group, scoring second highest for cultural capital.
3. Technical middle class - a small, distinctive new class group which is prosperous but scores low for social and cultural capital. Distinguished by its social isolation and cultural apathy
4. New affluent workers - a young class group which is socially and culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital
5. Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived. Its members have reasonably high house values, explained by this group having the oldest average age at 66
6. Emergent service workers - a new, young, urban group which is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital
7. Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class, scoring low for social and cultural capital. 

How helpful is this new class definition to an understanding of Britain's ossified, class-ridden society and its class wars? If you have been  prevented from having the goods of society, access to a breeding partner, income, housing, well-paying job, nice car, respect of one's fellows, success in one's profession -  then it is pleasanter to ascribe this failure to fattism, misogyny, disablism, anti-Irish sentiment, xenophobia or racism, rather than just not being good enough to succeed in meritocratic Britain. I would argue, however, that Britain is no more a meritocracy than was pre-Revolutionary France, and that rather than blaming white people for black people's disadvantage, make common cause against the establishment, which has all the apparatus of state and law to maintain its privilege against both white people and black. 

Here's a few thoughts by mr ishmael on race, money, politics and power:

I have known for a while that the US had or was about to become a white minority nation and that the figures on property and land occupancy reflect that.

The U.S. demographics analysis is comparable with our own. Who, but the poor and state-dependant would live in densely populated sub-standard inner city Diane Abbott realms of bitterness and disappointment - and would they vote for Codger McCain or David Cameron whilst an alternative promised them jam today?

This is the elephant in the corner of the right-wing bloggers, they expect, insist that the poor vote for the rich, almost, bizarrely, on the grounds that It Is The Right Thing To Do. The tiny percentage on more than a hundred and fifty grand are deemed to be Middle England, and the tens of millions in poverty or relative poverty, the enemy within.  Go Figure.

I think that nationally and globally, the sheer weight of numbers involved who are hungry, dispossessed and desperate kind of invalidate the differences between twentieth century left and right wing dinosaur political parties. Who gives a fuck, a few pence on tax here, a few off there but pre-eminently the right of a self-selecting elite to sit on the same latrine and shit in our faces whilst pretending they differ from one another. The disappointment is that so many, claiming a fresh approach, shriek so loudly for more of the same. The big political parties got us here, innit; one of a minutely differing hue will not get us out.

Which brings me, neatly, to the strangest thing I've heard this week. The Labour Party is sending strategic advisers to assist Kamala Harris to win the US Presidential election. You'd think that would be illegal. The Democrats certainly complained loudly enough about the Russians helping out Trump. And Labour can no longer be seen as the party representing the working class if it aligns itself with the wealthy, elitist, internationally corrupt and corrupting, Democratic Party. Or have I got something wrong?

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

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Prince of Wales aircraft carrier - currently on training manoeuvres with NATO in Scapa Flow.