Where I live in outer London, 45% of us were born outside the country compared to 20% in the whole of England. Nearly half of us are South Asian, 9% are black, and over 5% are something other than white – 34% of us are white. Thinking about national identity, 22% don’t identify as any – I think the concept of Ummah may be material to that. That’s all according to the 2021 census but things change fast round here so I expect the South Asian proportion has climbed since, and everything associated with that. I was looking at this data because a local friend shared some experiences of friends and family about the Labour government’s overhaul of legal migration and I told him I’d do my homework. Here are my notes.
1.6 million people from outside the UK are expected to settle here between now and 2030, mostly low paid, low skilled people on Health and Social Care Visas, with families.
Regardless of nationality and ethnicity, in my part of town we have mixed feelings about migration, which is the most natural thing in the world. But the part of the 2025 Immigration White Paper that is causing the most distress are the plans to change indefinite leave to remain. For qualifying migrants these will double in April 2026 from five years to a baseline 10 years, and for Health and Care Visa holders in particular, the proposal is baseline 15 years with requirements to meet conditions demonstrating ‘net economic contribution’. On 20th Nov 2025, Shabana Mahmood set out the case as follows:
“As a result of the unprecedented levels of migration in recent years, 1.6 million people are now forecast to settle between 2026 and 2030, with a peak of 450,000 in 2028—around four times higher than the recent average. That will now change. As this Government announced in their immigration White Paper, the starting point for settlement will move from five years to 10. To ensure that this is earned, new criteria will be added, which will act as a disqualifying bar for those who do not meet them. First, the applicant must have a clean criminal record; secondly, they must speak English to A-level standard; thirdly, they must have made sustained national insurance contributions; and finally, they must have no debt in this country.”
The most contentious part of this is the proposal to apply the extended period retrospectively, to in-migrants who may have planned their lives around indefinite leave to remain.
“Crucially, for these people and for every other group mentioned, we propose that these changes apply to everyone in the country today who has not yet received indefinite leave to remain, although we are seeking views on whether some transitional arrangements should be available.”
Some examples of what this extended qualifying period means. You planned to start your own business and now need to wait a further 5 (or 10 Heath and Care workers) years. You want to change your employer but now you can’t because you need sponsorship to be permitted to work. You want to pursue a course of study but cannot without a Student Visa. You fall on hard times but (I think) have no recourse to public funds. You can’t have your say in local and devolved elections. You can’t start a family in the security of shared status. You can’t travel and return without needing a visa. These amount to some big limitations. If I were experiencing this sudden extension of my pathway, I’d feel unwanted. If I had any self-esteem, I’d think again about whether this country deserved my time and effort. So I think if this is applied, it should be applied from the day it becomes law, not retrospectively in ways that affect people who arrived years ago and expected to know where they stand by a date some time within the next five years. In the the government’s consultation on indefinite leave to remain, called ‘A fairer pathway to settlement’ and open until 26th February, there is a place to indicate support for “Transitional arrangements … designed to ease the impact of the new rules for those already in the UK and on an existing pathway to settlement”.
The consultation linked above focuses on lower skilled in migrants on the Health and Care Visa. They tend to bring dependants and currently qualify for benefits and council housing after 5 years. They are a large part of the so-called Boriswave. The consultation notes that much of the contribution of this low paid group is indirect, and not straightforwardly fiscal. Yes the consultation is about extending the pathway for them to achieve ILR.
A more general point about the contribution of low wage, low skill migrants. If a low wage, low skilled migrant such as a care worker is never expected to make a net fiscal contribution (see Figure 6), then isn’t it also the case that nobody working on that wage is going to make a net fiscal contribution? If so then anyone doing that job is expected to need to claim Universal Credit, child benefits, pension etc. So either there’s something wrong with the wage or there’s something wrong with the expectation that making net fiscal contribution confers value as a full member of this society (I’m taking value as conferred by a shorter default pathway to ILR). Because if a citizen does this job, nobody is asking these questions. And if we are welcoming high earning migrants but deterring low earning migrants, then obviously it will increasingly fall to citizens to do the low wage, low skill, low status jobs, and either they will claim the benefits that people doing this work are expected to claim, or they will organise and demand better pay, a lot of which will come from tax or borrowing. What am I not getting?
If you are seeking ILR, one of the ways to discount your baseline qualifying period is to volunteer. Based on my best guesses about various carers I have known or encountered (my neighbour for long enough to get to know quite a few over the years), I see arduous work with long public transport journeys there and back. If that’s typical there will be scant time and energy for volunteering. The work itself is badly paid and very demanding, emotionally – at least if you’re good at it. Many carers I’ve seen are religious or spiritual, and I think a large part of the vocation may be “to labour and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do your will”. So you could argue that it is volunteering, to some extent.
What difference does the extra 10 years make to the nation? This is addressed on p25. If you can’t support yourself and your family, you can’t stay. If you can support yourself and your family for 15 years and have met the other conditions, then you’re a safer bet in terms of not seeking benefits.
As for what I think, well, my leading light is that I want the same for humans as I want for the geese and the elephants. Because of the particulars of human society compared to geese and elephants, I don’t want social mobility to be geographic. I want custodianship of the places where people live, with redistribution between them of the means for a good livelihood wherever life exists. I’d pay well for the jobs needed in my region, and I’d connect pay to responsibility and the demands of the role rather than only skill. I’d hope that a natural consequence of that would be a reduction in global mobility for humans, unless they were in jeopardy or due to see loved ones abroad. Nobody giving due consideration to climate breakdown believes humans should be jetting through the skies so frequently, keeping a foot in far flung countries, visiting for a few days for work or touring for leisure. That’s a game for the prosperous and the damage is unconscionable, with the poorest suffering the worst consequences. I’d rather be a fun sponge now than face mopping up the consequences later. Meanwhile many people working here, who may not appear to be ‘net economic contributors’ are sending back remittances that help their families stay where they are in the face of growing insecurity from extreme heat and climate volatility, caused by the profligacy of societies like mine – caused by the brightest and richest citizens who aren’t reconciled to a responsible lifestyle, as well as the democratic governments who will not lead us to it. I know we can’t unilaterally open our borders, but rejoining the EU would be a good step. I think after this homework I also know what fair looks like and it’s not what’s proposed.
I can imagine somebody reading this 10 years from now, amazed at how middle class life proceeded right up to the point when all hell broke loose. While we were away over new year, the President of the US illegitimately raided Venezuela and came away with the illegitimate President Maduro and his wife. If Maduro is a bad tooth, then Trump is a TV personality with no business in dentistry. Now Trump’s people control Venezuela and they do not propose to hand it to Edmundo González, widely believed to have won the 2024 elections making him the legitimate president. Instead they propose to keep Maduro’s deputy Delcy Rodriguez in place and force her to cede control of the oil infrastructure Chavez previously commandeered. Trump says the oil is his. He’s paying for it, as long as Venezuela spends the money on US exports. I’d say that the oil belongs to Venezuelans. Obviously to anyone following the IPCC, that oil should not be used in ways that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions or plastic pollution. The last time somebody this nasty and bitter had this much power, a lot of people died. Ha’aretz reports that the Delcy Rodriguez blames the Jews and shut down Venezuela’s Jewish organisations, what’s left of them.
News speeds up before a way. Perhaps this is my last holiday for a while, so here it is – and it was a blinder.
On the 27th December we took a short and easy train journey to a place I liked the look of: Rye, East Sussex. My criteria are that there should be good public transport, a bustling centre with things to do inside and out, history, pubs, vegan food and good walking. I arrived home yesterday feeling that Rye is the closest place I know for a total change of scene from Ilford. Here’s how we spent our time.
We arrived at 4 Ferry Road, our one-bedroom rental in the middle of town, at around 3pm and then set out again to Rye Heritage Centre round the corner for what turned out to be the wrong ghost tour – instead of walking the town we sat looking at the allbeit impressively and dynamically lit town model and watching a film about ley lines and hauntings.
Model of Rye in Rye Heritage Centre
Then we walked the 3 minutes back to the station where the supermarket Jempsons (a partnership with Morrisons) furnished us with the week’s provisions. To conclude the days-long festive cycle of cooking and cleaning for family, we went looking for somewhere to have dinner. We managed to book the last service of the evening at The Union, giving us two hours in the meantime to look at the pubs, including the ancient Mermaid Inn which was full, and the Ypres Castle Inn, which was full of very tall people with dogs who seemed to know each other. We ended up in The Waterworks, Camra East Sussex pub of the year, where the shrewd guv makes sure every seat is taken and commands you to say hello to whomever you’re sitting with. We duly spoke to a local woman and her Belgian husband who now run a good pub south of Ghent. We had a nice chat about everything with three recent graduates. They were replaced by a local couple, I think he collected Bentleys but by then I had imbibed enough half pints of Biddendens extremely strong cider to blur the memory. The Union has a Michelin star, is good for vegans and enjoyable and probably no more pricey than it should be. We returned to 4 Ferry Road, made some guesses about the electric heating and went to bed.
I love 4 Ferry Road – Mim’s Cottage. Everything works, and everything is well chosen. We bumped into the owner and he told me he’s fussy. I love a fussy owner.
The morning of 28th was overcast but dry. Since we were in the Sussex Wine Triangle, we’d booked a vineyard tour and wine tasting at Charles Palmer vineyard about 4 miles’ walk north west of Winchelsea. Rye is surrounded by three rivers and we walked along the Brede for a while, past Henry VIII’s ruined Camber Castle, followed the defensive Royal Military Canal for a while and arrived at the farm around lunchtime. They’re very gracious at Charles Palmer, not only giving permission to trail mud into their Tasting Room but encouraging us to eat our christmas cake lunch on their sofa. We were lucky to have squeaked in before they close for a few weeks. We enjoyed learning about the grapes and the salinity of the soil, and the possibility of making decent still wine in southern England these days. In the barn we heard about how the machinery operates on the expensively smoothed floor to avoid shaking up the lees from the bottle neck. It was sobering to hear how Covid had accelerated the move away from mainly Ukrainian seasonal pickers to mechanised picking with a machine that is only used for a fortnight a year.
Everyone on the small tour was from London, including a man from another farming family looking to diversify. He had an amazing palate. I can only tell what I’m tasting by texture and colour, so to me everything tasted of wine. But what I loved about this wine was that it wasn’t very sweet. We left in the dusk with two bottles, and a couple from north London stopped in the lane to offer us a lift. On the way back I warmed my hands inside their dog’s jacket. More leftovers for dinner, in the minute kitchen that managed to comfortably accommodate a card table and folding chairs. 4 Ferry Road is a tiny delight of ingenious furnishing.
The weather held for the 29th so we decided to take the 100 bus to Hastings and walk back over the cliffs and Winchelsea beach. We barely stopped to look at Hastings but the net huts were striking. Then we headed up past the East Cliff lift and onto East Hill, hugging the English Coast Path in biting wind through Fairlight, where we were reminded again how invading armies have targeted this part pf the coast, and Cliff End where I saw the most beautiful house, though I would fear for a thatch in these times of heat, drought and fire. It was wonderful to be on the beach for a while, and we headed up through the down to earth parts of Winchelsea, up through the salt marshes where we saw a starfish decoy bunker that ran an operation to divert the Nazis from bombing their intended targets. We stopped in the Mermaid and managed to get a seat practically in the Giant’s Fireplace. Then back to Ferry Road for dinner.
The 30th was bright and bitter and we decided to walk down the other side of the River Rother to Camber Sands. There’s a substantial industrial estate that side that’s good to see – not only tourism. We were diverted by ongoing flood prevention remodelling of the banks and mostly walked on a nice footpath by a fast road, with the marshes stretching out to our left. The climb over the dune between the road and the beach was the steepest thing we came across that week.
Over the shaggy dune onto Camber Sands
At low tide Camber and Winchelsea beaches are similarly sandy, but Rother mouth is channelled to the east by a long groin protecting the Camber side from shingle at high tide, so that east side of the beach is higher and extends further, affording lovely views east. For lunch I had vegan fish and chips at The Owl, which was warm and welcoming, and I was gently reminded that people who work on their feet all day may not go in so much for recreational walking. On the way back we passed the Discovery Centre across the Rother but from that side it gave little indication of what a lovely place it is to visit, and anyway there is no way to get to the other bank until Rye Harbour. We returned to Ferry Road, got changed, had a relax and then ate a good Turkish meal at Diamond Koz (pseudo falafel, but Turkish – Kurdish? – people will be the first to tell you that there isn’t a great tradition of falafel where they come from).
New Year’s eve was piercing cold. We went to the supermarket again to prepare for a visitor late that day, then soaked a country vegetable soup mix and assembled garlic bread. The visitor arrived and at roughly the time of a collapse or a collison in the road close to our front door. This necessitated a lot of people standing round a person on the ground covered in blankets, and no ambulance for at least 30 minutes. I hope they’re recovering. After a pot of tea we went out to lunch at The Old Bell, one of the ancient pubs. They serve a good bean stew for vegans and the wintery sun streamed in. They say the Old Bell and Mermaid are connected by a not so secret, or perhaps fabricated, tunnel from the smuggling days. Another thing about Rye is that it has two second hand record shops, numerous home clearance and antique shops, and shops for country gentlemen. This was catnip to our visitor, so we browsed for some time. From the cook shop I bought a tiny whisk and a pastry brush, both of which I’d struggled to find in any shops I pass day to day. The weather was clear and bitter. While we were in Grammar School Records a town crier sounded and down Lion Street came a bridal party mostly dressed for summer and heading from the St Mary’s church to their reception at The George.
Bridal party and town crier stride down Lion Road
I really enjoyed being out in a bustle of happy people at their leisure and also close to home. We had some more drinks in The Ypres, The Ship and The Mermaid, which we left at dusk.
The view down Mermaid Street from the Mermaid Inn
At Ferry Road we had our meal and a fair amount of wine including our Charles Palmer demi sec, which was delicious. At around 9 we headed to the Waterworks where we inevitably talked to other pub denizens and I drunk roughly half as much as anyone else. The music was at a hilarious volume where you have to listen quite hard to hear it over the talking. The local police arrived for a head count at around 10.30 which nobody seemed to take amiss, and then again after midnight. It was a bit like Early Doors. After they’d gone we got the theme tune to Z-Cars followed by the theme tune to The Bill.
Rozzers return
The bongs came and went and eventually we wove our way home and danced until about 3am in the dark in the tiny kitchen.
On the morning of the 1st I fell down the last few steps of the steep staircase that ends abruptly just before the partition wall necessitating a sharp turn at the bottom – but because I was probably still a bit drunk I flopped onto the ground with no harm done. Drink taketh away and drink giveth. We had sausages and mushrooms on toast for breakfast, and then set out for a walk through the marshes along the other side of the Rother to the Discovery Centre in Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. We lunched on vegan sausage roll, drank blackcurrant and apple juice, looked at the ribbons of gleaming water over the marshes and browsed the lovely shop. It’s a very hospitable place, and a warm haven in the bitter weather. I don’t think you have to spend money to have a sit down inside.
Not sure but this may be a different river, the Brede
There were a million people with a million dogs, but Rye seems to be a place where you always find a seat. Then we walked down past more World War 2 pillboxes and onto the shingle beach before turning back to beat the dusk home. We met a Sussex Wildlife Trust membership recruiter who told us it was too busy and nobody could concentrate for long enough to consider membership because of all the dogs and all the kids. He wasn’t sour about it. I’m already a member and donor of £50 pcm. After our friend had got on the Eastbourne train we watched the final episode of Stranger Things (a bit disappointing) and the first episode of Traitors (as engrossing as ever) before going to bed.
The 2nd was our last full day, and we were expecting a large group of friends to converge at 11.45. This transpired smoothly, and we retrod our path to the Discovery Centre, noticing on the way that there’s a zip line in the Rye Harbour play area. This time we were sitting near the binoculars cabled onto the benches along the windows, and I saw some lovely waders I knew the name of at the time. Then to the beach, over the shingle and onto the hard ridged sand. One of the kids’ faces scraped along a concrete groyne – he was very brave but the grazes bled a bit and looked very sore. The sea wall was frozen and slippery, and the mud was on the verge of freezing too. We made our way back past Camber Castle and along the River Brede, hurrying to catch Merchant & Mills the fabric shop before closing time. I bought the Celeste pattern and some buttons.
Then we gathered in The Cricketers pub on Fishmarket Road where it was happy hour with all drinks half price. It’s a friendly down to earth pub. For dinner we all went to Diamond Koz again, after which some started the car journey back to Waltham Forest and the remainder returned to The Waterworks until it was time for the penultimate train back to London, which you can get to very easily from The Waterworks via a level crossing. The Waterworks is a truly great pub. We even bought their tea towel.
We cleared out of 4 Ferry Road on the 3rd. I bought some new jeans on sale in The Golden Fleece, that has a good line in Seasalt stuff. The journey to Stratford was smooth, with a brief change at Ashford. Even the Central Line was kind. We returned to 9 degrees in the house, but by then we were acclimatised.
I’ll miss the aerated shower, the always-on towel rail, the hooks on the wall near the bed, the bedside tables with drawers, the latches, the ingenious tiny space furnishing, and living so close to a narrow winding passage that in 20 metres transports you to the centre of an impossibly delicious little town with so much of interest in it and around it.
Everything went right. Everything was lovely. We had money in our pocket. I don’t know what the future will bring but nobody can take away my lovely past.
Following the strands of analysis of the wicked problem that is Donald Trump’s presidency, as far as I can tell his success boils down to ignorance. Ignorance about the democratic process and about the policies of the candidates. To call voters ignorant is generally considered insulting, so very few pundits are grasping that nettle. So rather than focus on the details of Democratic messaging that probably won’t even reach its target audience, what’s needed is to go upstream and address the root of the problem. Less and less do citizens benefit from serious encounters with contrasting views. Highly spreadable information without oversight, algorithmically filtered to boost emotional content, is now a major way people get their news. Propaganda based on misinformation has weakened democracy, perhaps to a critical point. I canvass a lot, and it’s clear that you can’t assume anybody knows anything at all. There are time limits on what you can do while canvassing so the doorstep won’t be the upstream intervention that democracy proponents are looking for.
While cleaning the house over the past few weeks I listened to two democratic engagement methods in action, and I would love to see them mainstream.
The first is ‘The Experiment‘, second episode of the BBC Radio 4 series ‘How would we know if democracy had died?‘. The centre right think tank Onward recently found that a quarter of young people believe democracy is a bad way of governing the country, around 61% favour a strong leader who isn’t tangled up in parliament and elections, and 41% were positive about military rule. Working with Public First, nine people from the East Midlands aged 18 – 35, selected for representativeness, are recruited to role play the cabinet of a UK governance responding to a scenario of public disorder at a time of strain on emergency services and risk of financial crisis. As the scenario unfolds, the cabinet are asked questions about their decisions – should the police use force at this point, should social media misinformation be restricted, should troops be deployed – and reach consensus or vote, sometimes with individuals casting a deciding vote. Updates are given after each round of discussion. The disorder escalates, supermarkets have to ration, schools close, the police ask to use rubber bullets and to detain without charge, emergency powers are considered, the opposition pressurise the government and the army is called. The crisis intensifies and the decisions become more difficult, as the scenario seeks each participants’ red lines about democracy. Then a charismatic army colonel diffuses a flashpoint, and the cabinet debate inviting him to join the government. I won’t give spoilers. The discussion is recorded and excerpted in this 40 minute episode, and the debrief discusses the Onward findings above.
The second method is Surrounded, broadcast by US company Jubilee Media. I can’t find it on their website – maybe it’s new – but there is an edited film from the two hour session on their YouTube. Before the US election I listened to US Secretary of State for Transport Pete Buttigieg (Democrat) try to convince undecided voters in the swing state of Michigan, where he lives. The format is Buttigieg at a table for two, surrounded by a circle of 25 articulate undecided voters who lean either to Trump, a third party or not voting at all. It’s not a free-for-all; Buttigieg makes claims (to paraphrase, Trump is in it for himself while Harris is in it for the public; law and order is better pursued through a litigator than a felon; and one other I forget) and individual participants take the chair opposite him to test those claims, with each claim given 20 minutes of discussion. Each participant has a red flag and if 11 are raised then a new participant takes the chair opposite Buttigieg to pursue their own line of argument. After the discussion, there is a vote. The result wasn’t included in the video, but as with Democrat arguments in general, when engaged with directly, they are often favourably received.
The Surrounded method was a breath of fresh air to me. It avoided polarity and introduced diversity by recruiting undecided voters rather than Republican voters, so we become acquainted with different viewpoints. It takes the rich dialogue you only get in pairs or small groups and makes it go further by broadcasting it, which compared to political monologue or debate, is full of life. The questions are voters’ questions rather than focus groups’ or the pundits’. I also love what the method demands from participants by way of responsibility. The prospect of being replaced for low quality engagement is a clear motivation to bring their best arguments or otherwise take a listening role. This is underlined by continuous fact checking. I would modify the format a little for equity reasons – not everyone can race to the chair, and the diversity of the speakers could have been better given who was in the room. But the basics of this design are beautiful.
Buttigieg didn’t always succeed, incidentally, though he did significantly shift the voters. One ecologically-minded participant whose attire shouted Green insisted he address her dilemma between Harris and Jill Stein, and expressed her complete disillusionment with a two party system. He responded with what this smart voter surely already knew, that in Michigan a vote for anyone but Harris was a vote for Trump so voting Harris is what Michigan citizens who grasp the planetary polycrisis of bioversity, global heating and pollution must do. I wonder how she voted, in the end. This is a decision I have had to face in my own first-past-the-post system where overall vote share is irrelevant.
ClimateFresk is the third method, and different in that, as far as I know, it hasn’t been recorded for an audience. I paid £10 for and joined in person for three hours one evening after work. ClimateFresk teaches the causes and consequences of global heating in facilitated groups, followed by a whole-group discussion to connect knowledge, emotions and intention to take action on the climate crisis. There are other Fresks on different aspects of the polycrisis but this one is focused on climate change. Each group of six to eight gathers round a table covered by a 1x2m sheet of plain paper. A facilitator puts the Human Activity card at one end of the table, and hands out further sets of cards in rounds interspersed with discussion about how they relate to each other and where to put them on the table. One side of the card is an illustrated title. Often the illustration is a chart from a pivotal piece of research, with the group jointly interpreting these graphics. On the other side of the card is a little more information. The first set of cards is different kinds of human activities, then come sets on the kinds of consequences that scientists know about but which most of us can’t detect, and finally the consequences that we see and feel – conflict, drought, floods, fire. The aim is to have a rough flow of causes and consequences. Then we take pens and draw further inter-relationships including the kinds of feedback loops that lead to irreversible tipping points where cause and effect intensify each other. The result is the fresco-type artefact in the title. Then participants sit together and discuss how we feel. This is important because often the shorter your time engaging fully with climate damage, the more emotional upheaval you experience, and no responsible method would leave people to face that alone. And what helps with these emotions is to think about action, with emphasis on what individuals can influence rather than only our own personal consumer behaviour. That is the final part of the session.
This method is very effective at visualising the causes and consequences and seeing what connects with what. Participants learning enough climate science and systems thinking to avoid falling into the trap of thinking there is nothing humans can do, and to highlight where the effort to address global heating needs to go. Tough on drought, tough on the causes of drought, sort of thing. You can clearly trace from the consequences back to the human activities. Obviously, this method depends on people choosing to be there, and to scale it needs trained facilitators. It’s growing steadily, and you can filter this calendar to find one you can join. Expect to pay, but not much.
At short notice we decided to go. I referred to the website for this national trail and quickly booked the accommodation we could find along the way, starting on a Monday from Cresswell where the Tyne properly becomes the North Sea. Then I ordered what I assumed would be the corresponding book – but it turns out there are two, and the one I bought was different. I think this was very fortunate and I’m going to tell you about it, including notes on getting vegan food.
There was a lot – but not too much – of this
Roland Tarr, currently a Councillor in Dorset, has written one of the best guides to a national trail I’ve come across. His enthusiasm for geology, nature, history, engineering, industry and the people of the region brings the landscape to life. A solicitous guide, he manages expectations, attends to hunger, fatigue and doubt, and prompts a more appreciative look at some unpromising sections along the way. The book fit into the leg pocket of my new walking trousers and I referred to it often. It helped us interpret the landscape and took us to overlooked parts of heavily touristed places like Newcastle, Lindisfarne and Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Unlike the website, the book guides readers around Newcastle and then proceeds to the mouth of the Tyne before arriving at Cresswell to pick up the official route and beyond to St Abbs Head in Scotland. So we changed our plans to start in Newcastle, arriving by train on a Saturday evening in late July.
Day 1 Newcastle
This model of the Tyne industries was created in the ’50s to reverse decline in the region
Roland Tarr’s book includes a circular walk around Newcastle and Gateshead. In a masterstroke he specifically takes you to the model above, which is part of ‘The Story of the Tyne’ exhibition in the Discovery Museum – because, he writes,
“When you see a derelict shipyard or factory by the Tyne or a closed railway or coal mine site in one of the coastal small towns and villages, you will understand its importance in the historical order of things instead of just seeing dead and unused structures. You will be able to picture it as it was in the past.”
What a legend – and thank you Newcastle because entry to this museum hasn’t always been free. He took us to the New Castle, the Philosophical and Literary Society which catalysed the inventions of the industrial revolution, over the historical High Level Bridge, under the Tyne Bridge with its kittiwake colony, through the Sage, to the Baltic and the Gateshead Millenium Bridge which we were fortunate to watch tilt open moments after we crossed.
Newcastle that first night was a primal confluence of the races, Pride, and the wedding season. Accommodation was short and we stayed at Jury’s Inn near the station. Some youth football teams down from Scotland for a tournament were playing a stalking and pursuit game in the stairwells far into the night, sabotaging their opponents by pressing all the buttons in all the lifts. Their parents, drinking in peace in the bar, had bullied the staff into not intervening. We ate a very good Eritrean dinner at Mosob Gesana and went off for a wander through the seething streets, carpeted with broken glass just like home. One of the young race-goers I had seen earlier navigating the cobbles near the castle in four-inch heels appeared in our hotel lift and remarked (as the doors opened at empty floor after empty floor) “I wish I could tell you that it isn’t usually like this on a weekend but it totally is”.
On our first morning the streets soon filled with queasy trudging and trundle suitcases, and we saw grandad-aged men supporting each other while vomiting. We put this behind us and had an excellent vegan cooked breakfast at the Supernatural Kitchen which lasted us until dinner, picked up some supplies and followed the walking tour mentioned above. Dinner was competent veggie burgers in The Maven, preceded by a beer in the fairly spacious Split Chimp micropub (I don’t know what a micropub is, only a microbrewery). Also of note, the Jury’s Inn rooms were really quite bad – we had to swap because of a broken window. I sometimes wonder whether we get treated badly because we look like itinerants but the receptionist was enthusiastic about the coast path so maybe it’s just a run-down hotel in a country on the turn.
Day 2 Blyth to Ellington
That second night in Newcastle there was a crash or apprehension on the A1 ( the main view from our window) and the traffic stopped but the sirens and lights didn’t. The following morning we bought an early vegan sausage sandwich from Greggs (too sweet, too dry, £2) and got on the commuter bus down the Tyne through one of the largest business parks I’ve ever seen. Because of the haste in planning, we had to miss out the section between Newcastle and Blyth. Instead we picked up lunch at Morrisons and set off along the River Blyth (where M saw a leaping fish) to cross upstream at Bedlington Station where it briefly rained. No complaints from us about the weather – we’ve seen a drought, 40° and wildfires in Essex this summer – but I couldn’t help making the connection between that and this coal country. The aluminium smelting plant at Lynemouth consumed one million tonnes of coal a year in its day. But now British Volt is at Blyth making battery technology to store green energy – that’s 3000 green jobs with more in the supply chain.
We crossed the East Sleek Burn and returned to the coast and onto the dunes for the first time. We had our lunch of rolls, falafels and salad looking out to sea at the mining village of Cambois (legacy of the Norman Conquest, pronounced Kemiss).
Cambois from the dunes
Then it began to rain quite hard so we retreated to the comfortable sofas of Charltons. Then along the A189 for a while to cross the Wansbeck in steady rain, briefly lost in a friendly caravan park and wetly into Newbiggin-by-the-Sea with its enigmatic Sea Couple and Land Couple. A coal seam opens onto the beach at Newbiggin and there is sea coal on the sand. That day we stopped early at the Newbiggin Maritime Centre because M’s recovering knee had reached the end. We called a taxi for the last few miles to The Plough in Ellington and had a wide-ranging conversation with the driver including the cost of living crisis – he had converted his car to LPG and was saving 40%. Meanwhile BP recorded a £6.9bn profit between April and June this year, and Shell also had record-breaking profits – a direct result of domestic energy bills soaring to £3.5k this winter. Unless the next Prime Minister intervenes I can only guess what will happen.
The rain had cleared by the time we left our room to limp round the tidy little village and look at Ellington Pond Nature reserve. Then dinner at the Plough, a Punch Tavern with vegan stuff on the menu. Good night’s sleep.
Day 3 Cresswell to Amble
From Ellington we walked the mile to Cresswell where the official walk begins. I’m not sure why a barn owl would be hunting on Blakemoor Links on a bright morning but it was exciting to see. There we got onto the beach, shoes off, for the sunny miles of Druridge Bay. I don’t know the name for the long reach of water sloshing into a very shallow beach, but that’s the kind of sea it was. There is hardly anyone on these beaches – just enough so you don’t feel isolated. We passed East Chevington nature reserve, where the wildlife is currently persecuted by murderous vandals, stopping briefly to chat with a local gent who walked the same walk every day and admired the Montane walking t-shirt M’s mum had given him for his birthday. Nothing much for a vegan to eat at the Premier Stores in Ellington, but Matt had picked up a pasty and we still had a roll and some falafel left from yesterday so we ate those sitting on a bench looking at kayakers on the Ladyburn Lake at the Druridge Bay Country Park and talking to their grandma, followed by a coffee at the Visitors Centre. Then more dunes. We were too tired to follow Roland Tarr’s advice and look for birds at the Low Hauxley Nature Reserve and instead trudged on to Amble, a delightful town with port, River Coquet (another Norman name – pronounced caw-kit), beach and exciting wave-wracked jetty for our route into the town.
Jetty at Amble in playful sea
Though the stage ends at Warkworth further along, it has less accommodation and amenities so we stayed in Amble at the Wellwood, another Punch Tavern, and ate gaspacho, quinoa salad (me) and pizza (M) in the covered outside section of the Old Boathouse. After that we took another turn around the town where we saw surfers paddling home across the river mouth at dusk to save a two-mile walk. Then back at the Wellwood we watched the women’s Euros semi-finals where England won. Nice to see so many older gents and women watching together.
Day 4 Amble to Howick (Craster)
Warkworth Castle, built around 1150 to consolidate Henry II’s rule over Northumberland
After a foray to the Co-op to pick up lunch (vegan luncheon meat, rolls, tomatoes, packet salad) we followed the river path into Warkworth and walked round the castle precinct then out to the golden sands of Alnmouth Bay. There I slipped and fell on some weedy rocks and was capsized like a beetle for some moments in fear that my pack would drag me over the edge. A mile of paddling through the flat ripples brought us to a turn in along the estuary through farmland. The long vistas made it seem as if we were approaching the bridge into Alnmouth for a lifetime. We ate our lunch in a play area built to celebrate the construction of the sea wall, then walked into the village. Alnmouth is the port for England’s breadbasket and has many historical granaries we didn’t see because we were hurrying to get to Howick early. Instead we climbed an unusually steep and wooded hill onto cliffs. I think around Seaton Point is where we saw huts and caravans scattered amongst the bracken, often with wetsuits hung outside. There were no amenities and it wasn’t marked as a caravan park, and if it was it was lovely because of the space between abodes. There was one more the next day with this sense of seclusion and peace.
The cliffs then descended into dunes and we rested on a bench at Boulmer before diverting along the parallel Cycle Route 1 track through Seahouses (a farm of limousin cows, not the famous town) to the turn into Howick, a beautiful hamlet of stone houses and cottages where we were spending the night, Craster being fully booked. After a hurried shower and change in the lovely Old Rectory B&B, we rushed (or rather lurched stiffly) out again to catch the final opening hour of Howick Hall with its gardens and arboretum. 30 minutes before last orders at the tea room we were grudgingly served drinks – in my case a pot of Russian caravan tea which I drank black and as quickly as I could, which on an empty stomach inevitably led to me nearly throwing up in the sensory garden. Sadly there was no time to properly see the arboretum but at least we dropped off our entry fee and contributed a little to reviving the place after Storm Arwen.
We walked back and then a further two miles along quiet roads to the Cottage Inn at Dunstan for dinner (potato skins and a very good chickpea curry). We walked back at dusk and I was wracked by aches (which I attributed to unfitness and falling over) and had to have a painkiller to sleep. None of these pains and aches are much bother to us as walkers – they’re to do with a sedentary lifestyle and our advancing age, we price them in and they lessen as our bodies get used to walking and carryng our packs.
The Old Rectory has three downstairs rooms that guests can use and an honesty bar which M used. You can clearly hear the sea, and see it from some windows too. Howick Hall and two pubs within walking distances make it a good location, and it was the best accommodation we had, at a comparative price to everywhere else.
Day 5 Howick to Seahouses
The Old Rectory are competent with a vegan breakfast. We took the coast path into Craster, passing a colony of kittiwakes on the hexagons of the igneous whin sill (hard, flat outcrop) of Cullernose point. As well as their rather winning calls, which resemble whining and whinging, we could also detect the vast amounts of bird crap presumably falling into each other’s nests and spreading the awful avian flu. Flu has made a graveyard of Coquet and Farne islands, where where the seabird population has fallen by over 1%, also devastating the rangers and ornithologists who have been striving to nurture their habitat and increase their numbers. The blunt truth is that intensive farming of chickens is to blame, along with the generally hostile environment that oblivious humans create. Those chickens are coming home to roost now. I sense we are going to change our ways.
Ornithologists and rangers monitor the avian flu deaths on the Farne Islands. Source: BBC linked above.
It was misty in Craster and the famous smokery hadn’t opened for the day so I didn’t get to risk their contempt by asking whether they smoke any plant foods yet. We set out along a lovely turf track towards the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle with sea shore covered in boulders at low tide. My aches were receding.
Dunstanburgh Castle: The Lilburn Tower with the Sea Beyond 1797 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/D00954
We rounded the back of the castle, noticing the interesting Grey Mare Rock, and through the Dunstanburgh Castle golf club where we stopped for a drink at the club house. Like several along the route (and in fact I have never seen so many golf clubs on one walk) it welcomes non-members in a genuinely friendly way. This was one of many places we passed which was struggling to recruit and staffed by inexperienced though well-meaning workers – we noticed along the way that we were often served by mature or grandma-aged women instead of the younger Eastern European staff we’d have expected before Brexit. I overheard a conversation in the kitchen about everybody needing to muck in with the washing up in the absence of a hoped-for young person on school holidays. At around 12.30 we arrived at the hamlet of Low Newton-by-the-Sea with its gorgeous (and short-staffed) Ship Inn in a car-free grassy square overlooking the sea. The women who staffed it, some of whom looked as if they should have been putting their feet up in life, did extremely well. A compact bar and focused menu kept the encounters brief. You queued in one line for the bar and to order food, you got served with good humour, you paid and sat down, and then before very long your food was brought (two vegan options – I had a spiced cauliflower pie). Lovely little place and we also were fortunate to find exactly the right table for two with bulky packs.
The Ship Inn, Low Newton-by-the-Sea
It became sunny as we walked along the beach towards Benthall and Beadnell. I accidentally lowered myself onto a thorny rose bush while trying to pee discreetly and in haste among the dunes. The main thing I noticed about Benthall and Beadnell was the presence of what I’d call ‘Hainault houses’ – plain three-bedroom terraced or semi-detached homes that looked as if they’d been built for people of modest means in the 50s or 60s – found all along this coast on the sea front or clifftops with uninterrupted sea views.
We were pretty tired by the time we got to Seahouses, and Seahouses didn’t much revive us. I couldn’t see the charm and the Bamburgh Castle Inn where we stayed was somehow depressing. It might have been the terrible carpets in the hallways, or the gloomy cave-like bar area snubbing the sea views, or the extremely high prices. The town itself was full of holiday makers eating and drinking or looking for places to eat or drink – huge fish and chip barns abounded. After trying all other options (including a windowless room in The Ship and failing to get served at all in the Black Swan where the inattention of the young men staffing it belied their smart uniforms) we were obliged to eat at the Bamburgh as well as stay there. They had run out of some vegan options and M’s meal was particularly awful – the chickpea patties were rehydrated badly cooked falafel mix (were they averse to the word ‘falafel’ even though all vegetarians know what they are?) dried out rice and a poorly-flavoured sauce. I should say the service was competent and the room, clean and comfortable.
Day 6 Seahouses to Belford
That morning at Seahouses we bought another Co-op lunch of Quorn chicken slices, rolls and salad and set out along another uplifting sun-drenched beach, passing in front of the magnificent Bamburgh Castle on the sea shore with the village behind it. The castle is now owned by a scion of the Newcastle engineer and ship-builder George Armstrong. The local golf course did not welcome non-members so we walked on. The official path turns inland at this point because the coast around Lindisfarne is reserved for animal life, or perhaps holiness. Roland Tarr has struggled in mud on this inland section and invites you to take the coast path as far as possible and then get a bus. But since it had been dry we decided to take the official route. We had our lunch with our backs against a hay bale looking out at Bamburgh castle and Lindisfarne.
Our lunch spot, not far from Spindlestone Heughs, Bamburgh Castle in the distance
There were two other things Roland Tarr cautioned about. The first was having to cross the fast train track between Edinburgh and London. Indeed if we hadn’t phoned the signal office as directed, we would have had a close shave at best with a speeding LNER train. So do do that.
“You must always phone the signalman before crossing” at Belford Burn
The next obstacle was the A1, which we crossed without incident. We then passed behind one of the several grain silos in the region and I thought of Ukraine. Most places we went we saw at least one flag – and it is also the colour of the sand against the sea and sky.
Belford has an intriguing calendar of cultural events. The teachers’ protest was not local trade unionism in action, but Norwegians standing up to that reliable old enemy the Nazis. This part of the country tends Conservative, English and Brexit.
Standing up to the Nazis, Tyneside history and an urgent appeal from the bridge club
The Blue Bell Inn is a historical coaching inn with a ballroom. It relieved us of nearly £130 in return for a room which was definitely not “well-appointed”. We had a badly-sprung bed, drabness, stains and and scuffs, poor upkeep and unwelcoming (perhaps demoralised) staff. Again, maybe somebody might take us for mucky itinerants with low standards who deserve poor accommodation, but if so they shouldn’t be working in hospitality. We weren’t offered vegan food and we weren’t offered breakfast in time to catch the tide and get to Lindisfarne. I hope somebody rescues this lovely old coaching inn from its current owners. For now I can say the Blue Bell was at least clean and we had a good view of the rolling hills. Things looked up after that. We took a turn round the village including the lovely old church and burial ground. The Salmon Inn is a fine pub and we got a good meal in the restaurant of the Sunnyhills Farm Shop which serves dinner and drinks to the nearby caravan site residents and is generally lovely. We got an apple pie from Belford Co-op for next day’s breakfast, along with the usual lunch.
Day 7 Belford to Lindisfarne, then Lowick
We left slightly before 8 to get the bus to a stop on the A1 for Fenwick, allowing us to walk through fields to access Lindisfarne by crossing three miles of intertidal zone. We encountered a frantic ewe calling for her lamb the other side of a barbed wire fence but also just a few metres from an open gate between the two fields. Seeing us she panicked and summoning all her strength, tried unsuccessfully to leap through the fence. It was quite hard to watch. I think we may have seen her in the same place the following day.
Arriving at the coast we had a decision to make. We hadn’t been sure whether we’d walk along the causeway road or the Pilgrim’s Way across the sand and mud. Official guidance, including Roland Tarr, cautions against the latter, but it is well marked and we took courage from some fresh footprints we could see striking out towards the first marker. I took off my sandals and went barefoot as advised in the pub. That crossing would have been the highlight of our trip even if half way across we hadn’t heard, and then seen, about 150 seals across the sands, raising their voices in a haunting song like a huge holy choir.
Birch posts mark the safe way across to Holy Island. The distant structure is a refuge for anyone caught out by the tide.
The barnacles on the posts went up to around my underarms but sometimes the tides would go over my head. The most important thing is to consult advice about tides for walkers rather than for vehicles. Also important, expect to make fairly slow progress, stick close to the markers and be prepared to get wet and muddy, perhaps to the knee – we saw a wellington boot stuck in the mud nearly to the top and I’d want to do this barefoot in warm weather. Walking poles are useful here, particularly on a stretch of slippery clay close to the start – we have packs and if we fall we go down like a tonne of bricks so we pick our way carefully.
At Lindisfarne we stopped for a coffee and half a bit of cake at Pilgrims Cafe, a walled garden where the sparrows will take crumbs from your outstretched hand. We then had time to see one thing, so on Roland Tarr’s suggestion we went to the Heritage Centre. There we interacted with digital Lindisfarne Gospels and watched some awe inspiring videos of how such a book would have been constructed and illuminated. We listened to different bird calls, and there was an illustrated interactive exhibit where you could ‘meet’ some residents of the island by selecting from a menu of questions to ask them (such as ‘Have you ever been stranded?’) which would then activate the relevant recorded answer. I particularly liked that ‘Goodbye’ was on the menu – the farewells were all differently cordial and you really did feel that you’d approximately met your hosts on the island. Another great recommendation from Roland Tarr. By that time I’d come to trust him implicitly.
We had to get back and walked to the bus stop in the village carpark. A bus from Berwick arrived and a young man of perhaps 17 got off. We weren’t sure whether to get on that bus, but he authoritatively advised against it and pronounced our bus due in minutes. He kept lookout along the lane, ascertained its whereabouts and conscientiously updated us. When it arrived he photographed it and got straight on to leave the island. Being the only three passengers I was able to indulge my curiosity. It turned out he was an ardent bus spotter, having converted from trains during the Covid-19 pandemic. He used his free time to make as many journeys by bus as possible. Lindisfarne had been a diversion for him, an unforeseen chance to be on two new buses discovered only that morning after setting off on a circuit which would take in Berwick and Newcastle before returning home to County Durham that night. Definitively not a tourist, with the single-mindedness of (I am assuming) neurodiversity he wouldn’t stop off anywhere unless timetabling necessitated it – and as a bustimes.org user he had no inclination to visit London because he said his searches crashed the site.
We got off back at the A1 and had an unmemorable, expensive lunch at the Lindisfarne Inn (same chain as the not-nice Bamburgh Castle but more welcoming). Then we walked 2.5 more miles inland with views of the Cheviots to Lowick House, a very well-run airbnb accommodation a pleasant walk from the village of Lowick. This was another highlight because the place was so well-kept, the room was comfortable, and the hosts were very helpful and warm. That evening we walked through a farm and along a quiet road to the Black Bull in Lowick and had a very good vegan meal – generous filo case filled with leek, chestnuts and artichoke – in lovely surroundings. We walked back at dusk, diverting into a playground to see the beautiful skies. Night falls later up there; this was close to 10pm on the last day of July.
Late July dusk from the playground at Lowick
Day 7 Lowick to Berwick-upon-Tweed
This would be the last day of our walk. It felt like a long slog back to the Lindisfarne causeway to pick up the coast path again. I hope somebody buys the old granary with the many dovecotes at Fenwick and saves it from ruin. The fast rail crossing had been blocked for weeks or months and diverted a couple of kilometres to a bridge. There was a Samaritans notice hinting at why. On the sea shore we turned north along some of the old World War Two defences, briefly inland to cross a river, then back again. The area around Goswick was throught to be particularly vulnerable because of the nearby railway line so they did belt and braces – there are dragons teeth, pillboxes, gun emplacements, tank traps, anti-glider poles and lookout towers, and hopefully no more landmines. We had lunch in Goswick Golf Club (jacket potato and baked beans for vegans) and noticed the accents had become mostly Scottish. Then back onto dunes (I saw a little weasle) then fields and an exciting nature reserve with beach users at Cocklawburn (not Norman but don’t pronounce the ‘ck’) where we watched raptors hover for bunnies who only came out when they flew away. There were many cows and calves, including a youngster which had managed to get himself stuck between the barbed wire fence erected to protect the dry stone wall and the wall itself. We lifted the wire and nudged the calf but he seemed depressed and entirely lacking the will to save himself. As he wandered free with his head low, nobody acknowledged him and it was clear he was abandoned by his mother and a lonely outcast of the herd.
We reached Spittal with its fine promenade, then turned into Tweedmouth where swans – whose moult leaves them flightless at this time of year – watched men load trees on a ship.
Swans gather round a ship being loaded with tree trunks
Then we wearily crossed old bridge into Berwick and arrived at the splendid YHA Berwick in a rescued granary just back from the quay. We had a private room with a bunk, a toilet and separate wetroom so we showered, changed and rested briefly after 17 long miles. After a wander round the town we went to catch the Euro final in the Brown Bear and were able to see Germany’s equaliser and Chloe Kelly’s winning goal. We ate good Turkish food at Mavi, watched some of the Commonwealth games back at the youth hostel and went to bed.
A day in Berwick
After breakfast at the youth hostel we locked our bags in its bike shed and set off following Roland Tarr’s suggested circular tour round the mediaeval and Elizabethan walls, which was fascinating and brought alive with plenty of interpretation boards.
Royal Borders Bridge, Berwick-Upon-Tweed
Berwick was contested and fortified to the hilt until relatively recently, and at one time had changed hands (between the English and Scots) more than any other place in Europe. Roland Tarr recommended the museums at Berwick Barracks so we went there. First we learned about the history of soldiering through the ages in 12 curated rooms. Most of Britain’s wars were against the French and even the American war of independence was lost because the French intervened for the American rebels. Soldiers were sent to fight in stupid, impractical uniforms (an early iteration of the tommy, ‘Tommy Lobster’ refers to the red coats you read about in Jane Austen novels) which they had to pay for themselves. They had badly designed equipment like the smart-looking back pack which cut off their blood supply and some ridiculous quilted hats worn in India. When sent overseas in the 1700s and 1800s many died on the way but they liked to go to America because the prospects for desertion were good.
I hadn’t realised that barracks were a relatively recent innovation because residents and innkeepers hated being forced to billet soldiers. Almost all were illiterate and were not allowed to marry; consequently the main passtimes were drinking, brawling and gambling. A soldier’s life was certainly cheap – you signed up for life and various stoppages were deducted from your promised wage so that you had very little left for any quality of life, let alone to save up. Soldiers would frequently seek oblivion in cheap spirits rather than feed themselves and consequently were in poor health. Hardly any could read, one in four would be punished for some transgression and many were badly injured by their punishment. There’s more to say about how the British army gained its formidable reputation but my hunch is that very few readers are sticking with me by now – so I recommend going and seeing for yourself.
Also in the barracks, the Berwick Museum and the Burrell Collection are both excellent. I’d have liked to stay longer but we had to have lunch (at the Corner House Cafe which is very veggie friendly) before catching the train back to London at 3.13. The journey was peaceful as it often is at that time of day, and we had dinner at the lovely Namaste Holborn before taking the hot but relatively calm Central Line back home. There we found the aubergines, parsley, french beans, cabbages, broccoli, chillis and tomatoes alive and well and nothing burgled or burned down.
I’m publishing this for anyone who doesn’t want to share pronouns at work – which is to say, I decided fairly early not to declare a gender identity and have needed to be prepared to defend this decision ever since. To cut a long story short, I consider gender as a set of stereotypes and a social imposition I’ve spent a long time trying to get away from, and consequently I don’t have a gender identity. But even as I ungender myself, I still have a biological sex – female. Human animals tend to use the term ‘woman’ for female bloggers (girls are more likely to be found on the gram). However, unlike hens, does, cows, and mares, some human animals are also trans, which means that the meaning of ‘woman’ has expanded to allow some males.
The reason I won’t declare a gender identity is not that I don’t welcome trans people or want them to feel comfortable. It’s that adopting one myself might identify me with political positions I don’t hold, namely that gender identity should have primacy over biological sex, and that recognising biological sex as a major social determinant is essentialising and akin to or as bad as racism.
I realise that may seem a bit of a leap. You might observe that it is equally essentialising to use pronouns to denote biological sex – and in any case what place does biological sex have at work, where we’re supposed to have equal rights and professionalism dictates that we don’t hook up with each other – at least not in core hours. And I’d respond in turn that even if it were desirable to be biological-sex-blind it would be futile. But I can’t see how it is desirable, because distinguishing between equality and equity depends on recognising differences that matter, and biological sex is a major determinant in our lives – for women, menstruation, maternity and menopause are hugely influential, and those are only the most obvious. It’s also not desirable because we are being urged to do the opposite for gender, not to mention other legal equality characteristics – why should sex be excluded? And futile because biological sex is never going to stop being fundamentally important in our society. It’s no coincidence that two of the three gender identity pronouns in general use map directly onto dimorphic sex, and no coincidence that the pride flag does gender as the (I’d say stereotypical) binary pink and blue alongside the non-binary white. Biological sex is very present in trans rights movements. I’d say it’s not a problem to solve – it’s simply at the heart of our species. But we also know that high profile campaigns believe that biological sex undermines gender identity and cannot exist along side it. In many spheres they have attempted to eliminate biological sex as a relevant category, even to the extent of interfering people’s sexuality. And if you publicly objected to that, as many – mostly women – did, it would be open season on you and you’d be fortunate to keep your job.
I’d actually go further. I see the attempt to sever the links between ‘he’ and ‘she’ and biological sex as creating injustice in a number of settings. A failure of monitoring participation by sex coupled with a sharp rise in younger trans people means we have to guess representation in different study, leisure and career pursuits where women are under-represented. If you’re into sport, you’re being asked to accept male-bodied people competing against women in sports where they are likely to win. We cannot accurately monitor sex offences and where there are signs of a sharp rise in women committing them, we cannot know whether the women are biologically male (there is no centrally mandated policy on data collection) which means that we cannot feed the data into valid policy. Accommodating male sex offenders who identify as women in women’s prisons has been recognised as a risk by a judge who nodded it through anyway. I never again want to read the headline “woman accused of exposing penis”. That’s not because I’m in a state of moral panic, it’s because it only takes a few cases like that to ruin the data on female sex offenders and frame women as more likely to commit sex crimes than they are.
I recognise that rounds of gender identity declarations are also intended as a gesture of welcome for trans and non-binary people. Our places of work are supposed to be spaces for people of different beliefs and none to come together and get things done, and one way we do that is not to impose one group’s set of beliefs on groups who object to them – unless it’s a battle for rights where the group being imposed upon is responsible for the injustice. It’s not like that in this case, and moreover here we need to avoid a zero sum game battle of rights between gender identity rights and biological sex rights. There are many kinds of marginalisation that I would like to acknowledge and bring in at work, so If I’m running the introductions I’ll invite people to share anything they want the group to know about them. Then, if anyone wanted to express their personal gender identity, I would observe the pronouns they requested. I might forget sometimes, and I hope that everyone would treat that with the same tolerance I extend to people who, say, refer to me as ‘he’ on social media or forget how to pronounce my name.
Early February 2020, in Covent Garden each evening more and more of the tourists – especially the ones who looked like they were from East Asia – were wearing serious masks. I remember one man on the Central Line wearing a black N95 which looked like a double-D bra cup. Smirking is now regulated.
A former boss recently told me that when she saw me this time last year I was under the weather and wondering aloud if I had Covid. It seems deeply shocking to me now that I carried on as normal, but back then there was no framework to isolate and we were also on strike which made it even harder to stay away on the days we were supposed to work. And that week I had even been summoned to the surgery to queue in close proximity with people older than me for half an hour waiting for a blood pressure check. The norms were strongly to carry on as normal unless you had a fever, a cough or shortness of breath. Months later my borough would become one of those known as the Covid triangle – who knows how many caught it that day. As far as I can tell we’re still on our first wave – it never went away. The only other person at work I know of who lives near me lost his dad.
Between that and working in a massive cosmopolitan organisation with crowds funnelling through corridors on the hour, I’m not surprised I caught it early. On the tube into central London to meet my mum that week I started to feel very ill. Again, I didn’t know what to do – she’s not very mobile and would already be on the train from a town two counties away. The WHO had not yet declared a pandemic (though it turned out they would do so the following day). So I pressed on, breathing shallowly through my nose and touching as little as possible, including my mum whom I put next to me as far as possible away at a large table. I washed carefully and tried not to touch anything. I found it hard to find the energy to cut up the pizza. Fortunately a future study found that Covid is not associated with the Central Line, which though incredibly filthy is also incredibly turbulent.
That night I could barely lift a fork for aches. I crawled up to bed groaning – even took a painkiller – and rose in the morning determined. I only felt slightly ill until evening when the neuralgia struck again. The next morning I felt better, and the aches didn’t return. Then a week later in the shower I ritually raised my cupped hands to my nose to inhale the guilty pleasures of Superdrug B Men charcoal facial scrub (non-recyclable packaging) and smelt… Nothing.
Out of the shower, into bed and onto the net. Only the Daily Express reported the first small German study in which a small sample of Covid convalescents had lost their sense of smell and taste. Today it’s one of the three symptoms recognised by the government, but back then the evidence was embryonic.
This time I took the proper course of action: straight out of bed and into the spare room – that was 18th March 2020. That was the beginning of a long spell of meals being made for me – partly because I was polluted but even weeks later because I couldn’t season anything to taste. Without its aromatics, food became a series of rather unpleasant lumpy, sludgy sensations on the palate. For nights I wept alone with the essential oils you’re supposed to use to train your scent. If you’d asked me would I rather lose my sense of smell or hearing I’d have struggled to decide. My sense of smell is everything to me – and it was Spring for heaven’s sake. Spring is the best it gets. I sent out desperate social media calls hashtagged anosmia.
A rhinologist on Twitter warned me that smell might never come back but must have realised he’d overstepped since he protected his account the next day. He got infected a few weeks later, temporarily lost his smell, but recovered. Back in April 2020 the otorhinolaryngologists were among the first to raise the alarm about Covid-related anosmia, since they were encountering a spike in patients reporting loss of smell and taste, were peering into their throats and consequently were falling sick and dying in higher numbers than other health practitioners. My sense of smell began to return on 25th March, just as I was losing hope.
For this reason I made our reusable face coverings back in April from Matt’s old shirts with a two-layer pattern with a filter pocket and nose wire out of the garage (at this time there were the beginnings of craft supply shortages) even though the evidence supporting community use was and still is thin in contrast with the scale of the plastic waste, which is appalling. Imagine if every person in the UK used one disposable surgical mask each day for a year. It’s over 128,000 tonnes of un-recyclable plastic waste (66,000 tonnes of contaminated waste and 57,000 tonnes of plastic packaging. It’s unconscionable. Yet that summer the Covid waste was everywhere – on verges, in gutters, in hedges, stuffed between tree roots. The UK government waited until 24th July to make face coverings mandatory inside in public places, and for some reason disposable masks are still widely available at a price that doesn’t reflect the environmental cost at all.
Sleeping alone was upsetting but with a silver lining of peace and uninterrupted sleep at what felt like the most precipitous time in our longish lives. My other half has risk factors and we were afraid. We also had a strong hunch that this particular government would fuck things up, and Brexit was rolling onward and would soon be past. Food security experts were worried, though thanks to the logistics people the country got fed. I’ve always been a stockpiler – for me it’s only prudent, equivalent to saving money in the bank or putting into a pension – it allows you to avoid panic buying and I’m surprised that most don’t seem to agree. By the time panic buying arrived, we were only really short of compost and fresh food. The first big ticket item I bought was a dehydrator – I dried many apples, oranges and, when the time came, soft fruit and tomatoes.
I used to walk in the local woods and grassland hardly anybody used because, back then, most of the borough avoided recreational walking unless there was full sun. That dramatically changed – by summer I had to litter pick gas capsules, cans and wrappers, and by mid-winter when it hardly ever wasn’t raining parts of it looked like the Somme and I stopped going because it was too depressing. Now there are desire lines all through the nesting sites because, as many will now admit, humans have a massive sense of entitlement and consider themselves outside and above nature. I began to hand-feed squirrels at the back door, but stopped when Chris Packham brought me to my senses – humans are dangerous and it is important that wild animals maintain a healthy mistrust of humans in general (he was more diplomatic). Now I feed at a distance. I think there are four individuals – Original Squirrel, Nosey, Angry and Skinny.
I had to go out of my way to get enough exercise. We’d go out alone, together or in groups of up to six, but I had been used to marching extra miles on my commute, climbing every escalator and stair and carrying heavy loads of shopping. Sat in back to back Teams Meetings day after day I didn’t develop a bad neck, shoulders or back – instead I developed one painful buttock. In late summer during surprisingly protracted negotiations for work to purchase me a gel cushion since I didn’t want to buy one of those bulky plastic computer chairs, I diagnosed myself with muscle wastage and started NHS Couch To 5k. I never in my life expected to be able to run non-stop for 30 minutes, but Couch to 5k is a great scheme. But as the rain started to fall that winter it became clear I couldn’t continue – I couldn’t leave the path and run in the mire, and I couldn’t be breathing heavily in such proximity to the walkers. The second big ticket item I purchased was a rowing machine – a good one from Waterrower, which arrived before the Christmas break. I haven’t run since. I hate both running and rowing but my buttock is cured.
An eight-day walk from Poppit Sands in Ceredigion to Broadhaven near St Davids, on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. After around 15 years of long distance walking, this is the first where I phoned ahead to arrange vegan food and found that the majority of places had dedicated vegan menus or were otherwise apprised and prepared. Thanks to Eat Out Vegan Wales for signposting us to those places.
Day 0 23rd July – Poppit Sands
Sunday travel by public transport took us out of our way. We travelled the entire day and after a brief sojourn in Haverfordwest (huge potential, needs some love – like a better riverbank and picnic tables which can’t melt) arrived at YHA Poppit Sands, a clifftop hostel with superb views over the Teifi estuary.
We then quickly walked the two miles to St Dogmaels down along the coast road for dinner at the Ferry Inn, St Dogmael’s, the first of several dedicated vegan menus. We sat in the corner, with this view, and I watched the tide crawl in over the mud. Then we walked the two miles back and watched it some more.
Salt marsh at St Dogmaels, dusk
Day 1 24th July – YHA Poppit Sands to Newport (14.5 miles)
YHA Poppit Sands is self-catering only (the kitchen is gorgeous), so we had brought a breakfast of flapjack (plus some bread I saved from dinner).
Well put-together kitchen at YHA Poppit Sands
On the first day the weather was cool and cloudy. Unaccustomed to the gradient, we huffed and puffed our way up through the bracken to Cemaes Head where we turned out of the estuary onto the rolling high cliff promenades of that corner of the country. At Ceibwr Bay we stopped for a break and I walked into the crystal water and skimmed stones. I forget where we ate our Uncle Ben’s rice but I remember the rice. The Mexican one is very good.
Four bounces
Newport is one of those places where the beach is the other side of the estuary from the town. We were booked into a spacious, comfortable room in the roof of the friendly Castle Inn and after a shower and a change we went for a walk round the village. There were curlews on the mudflats and a Kiwi hiker in the youth hostel who had knackered his feet. We hadn’t stayed in the Youth Hostel because there were only single sex dorms, and I’m done with dorms until after Brexit when I expect the dorms will come to me.
You can’t tell from the website at the moment but The Castle Inn has a vegan menu too – there’s plenty to choose from and the onion rings are fantastic.
Day 2 25th July – Newport to Fishguard (12.5 miles)
From the health food shop in Newport we bought big sausage rolls and tomatoes for our lunch boxes. We walked out of Newport through Parrog in bright warm sun under a sky full of plump little clouds. On Dinas Head we met a older woman whose companion was urging her on – she wasn’t really making progress and told us she had never walked anywhere this rough before. Just as you come off Dinas to the west is Pwllgwaelod Beach and the Jolly Sailor, with this view from the beer garden.
Pwllgwaelod
It’s a lovely spot – we drank orange and soda and watched the bathers. The pub had run out of ice, which was disappointing since at that time I had solved my sensitive teeth but not my iron deficiency and was counting on it. Then we carried on for a bit and ate our sausage rolls in a far quieter cwm opening a little further along.London was roasted by record-breaking temperatures that week, but on the Pembs coast refreshing sea breezes disguised our developing sunburn.
By the time we reached lower Fishguard we were tired. It’s a place with fast driving holiday makers and no pavements, followed by a final slog to the upper town and our bed for the night which was Manor Townhouse on Main Street. We explored a little before eating at Jeera as recommended for vegans by the B&B. It was a very good meal, except we forgot that coconut rice from Bangladeshi restaurants is full of jaggery. I ate most of it anyway. The outside of the toilet door was very strangely painted, like a sort of 3D pure white Jackson Pollack.
We moved on to the Royal Oak where a folk band was in full swing, but a bad sinus migraine forced Matt home and I went too. It cleared with painkillers, and I got to sit in the window and look at dusk merging where the sea met the sky.
From upper Fishguard
Hundreds of jackdaws live in Fishguard, and they had a lot to say to each other all night.
There’s no fishmonger in Fishguard, or anywhere else nearby. The fish are gone – just farmed ones with lice now, fed on soy beans.
Day 3 26th July – Fishguard to Pwll Deri (10 miles)
The vegan cooked breakfast at the Manor Townhouse was a cut above. We left Fishguard with provisions for two days, since we wouldn’t see anywhere selling food until Trefin. From the Coop we had rolls, avocado and tomato for that day’s lunch, then Uncle Ben’s for dinner, and more for the next day’s lunch. And I think we bought more flapjack for breakfast. Then some smokey tofu from the health food shop. I also indulged myself with ground coffee for the youth hostel mornings.
Next morning the weather was still good, and then suddenly it wasn’t. The path up onto the cliffs and around the bay had a distinctly suburban feel. Fishguard Bay is said to have a rainy microclimate, and so it proved. By the time we dropped down to the harbour it was raining fairly hard. In our coats we sweated up an irritating zig zag wooded path up to the road through Goodwick and onto the cliffs again with no visibility. In the fog we met a small party and idiscovered they were the family of that week’s volunteer managers of our destination, YHA Pwll Deri. This cluster of Youth Hostels is staffed by volunteers, working a week each.
By the time the weather cleared, my Teva’d feet had blisters and the New Skin dressing wouldn’t stay on. I changed into my cursed boots, and walked the final miles with maddeningly hot feet, and hot booted feet are painful feet. I couldn’t enjoy the tumble of Strumble Head and was miserable until I got those boots off at YHA Pwll Deri.
It had only been 10 miles, if rough ones, and we had time to sit around in the hostel with its stunning views from the dining area and terrace outside. It’s remote, with only cliff between it and the sea. Strumble Head is back to the north and to the south is the strikingly straight edge of land you can see in the picture – not a finger but an upturned edge which we would walk along the next morning. After our dinner of Uncle Ben’s rice and tofu, I talked to a nice art teacher from St Albans and we watched the sun set over the sea.
From the dining room at YHA Pwll Deri
Day 4 27th July – Pwll Deri to Trefin
Next morning after flapjack and ground coffee we set out along that pictured edge in strong wind and bright sun lighting up the purple bell heather and yellow gorse. I had expected this from the expressionist crayon sketches the art teacher had shown me, but somehow through scribbling she had really captured its essence. A scramble down the rocks took us to another secluded little cwm opening, accessible only from the coast path, which I think was called Pwllstrodur. We ate our rolls, paddled and watched young cows graze improbably far down the edge of a cliff, while a lone seal watched us in turn from the water. When the one other couple there left, they said the seal is on good terms with their B&B owner, and swims with her and her dogs.
At Abercastle the beach was quite busy, with blowy, dusty sand. We sat on a sort of mini sea wall until a man parked on the beach right in front of our view and drove off in a small motorboat with a couple of kids. Then on to Trefin, where the road to the sea ends at a ruined chapel at the head of a narrow, rocky, wave-lashed opening into the sea. We didn’t particularly enjoy a pint at the Ship, which though empty had a bar tender who couldn’t be bothered. Then through to Torbant Farmhouse where the kind host can’t do enough for you and the place is an elegy to the 1980s. But along the road is the good Square and Compass Inn where the chef is vegan and so consequently is half the menu. Welsh is spoken in that pub, which isn’t so usual in Pembs. A wildly good burger. Later three farmers came in and talked about everything under the sun.
Days 5 to 7 – St David’s, Solva and Broadhaven – coming soon.
Two programmes I really admire are Money for Nothing and The Repair Shop, both on BBC One. I’m not sure how to apportion credit, but Field Kean Films produces Money for Nothing and Ricochet produces The Repair Shop.
Leanne reveals a transformed armchair to EJ in Money for Nothing
Money for Nothing is a about upcycling as social entrepreneurship. It always begins with Sarah Moore (sometimes Jay Blades or EJ Osborne) waylaying people at the boot of their car, intercepting objects they’re about to dispose of at their municipal tip. They can be lengths of fabric, old filing cabinets, chairs, sewage pipe, old wooden bowling balls – you name it. We find out the object’s story before she takes it away to a specialist artisan in her network, including Zoe Murphy who designs patterns in Margate, Jay Blades who makes furniture and may still be based in Wolverhampton, Bex Simon who’s a Guildford blacksmith, Rob Shaer who works with wood in Walthamstow, Chinelo who designs garments in Canning Town, and Anthony Devine who upholsters in Manchester. After negotiating a budget (materials and labour) for transforming the object into something saleable, she goes away again leaving the artisan with creative licence. Sarah works on one of the objects herself. Arthur Smith narrates satirically.
Each programme follows the decisions and subsequent work on three objects, nicely paced so by the time the last is intercepted at the tip we’re half way through the tranformation of the first. When each is completed, Sarah arrives with her van and there’s a dramatic reveal. She pays the artisan, takes the object away and markets it to vendors with premises or web shops. Then she returns to the original owner with an iPad to show them the transformation and, if the object has sold, she gives them all the profit which I’ve see range from a fiver to £200.
I find this format absolutely ingenious. All of the money seems to come from and go to the right places. Viewers see a demonstration of entrepreneurship (another word for initiative in one’s livelihood) as Sarah coordinates adding value to what was going to be landfilled or dismembered. While she is presumably paid by the BBC licence fee, the artisans’ work is paid for by people with the income to freely buy valuable bespoke pieces. Viewers watch respect and creative vision shown to junk everyone else had given up on. The original owner is delighted to be doorstepped with money conjured from nothing, and and more often than not a charity is the ultimate beneficiary. By intercepting objects from the tip the programme is saving local authorities (that’s tax payers) money on landfill tax and recycling. Viewers learn that almost nothing needs to go to the tip if you have access to skilled labour. And in a society which increasingly valorises science, technology, engineering and maths and diminishes the arts, viewers learn how inspiring and valuable the livelihoods of artisans can be.
On a similar theme but with a different perspective, The Repair Shop begins with people bringing broken family treasures to a spacious workshop in the Weald and Downland Living Museum where Jay Blades triages them on a table and interviews their owners about the object’s history – this part is a combination of Antique’s Roadshow and Supervet. Each object is then allocated to one or more specialists for conservation and restoration. Steven Fletcher is a clockmaker, Suzie Fletcher works with leather. Lucia Scalisi conserves paintings, Kirstin Ramsay specialises in ceramics, William Kirk restores heirlooms, and Brenton West is a silversmith. They each work in sight of each other at their own station in the workshop. Like Money for Nothing there are three items, ranging from broken plates with grandparents’ portraits, an old aviator jacket from a relative gunned down in World War II, a battered silver purse owned by a beloved grandmother, a pouffe, and all manner of old clockwork including a copper rain gauge and a barometer that inks the air pressure onto a roll of graph paper. We follow the dilemmas and progress of the artisans as they dunk gunky clockwork in vats of cleaner, stabilise and repair fragile materials, steam clean ceramics, conserve flaking leather, create missing wheatsheafs for porcelain clock cases, and painstakingly match paint. As with Money for Nothing, the objects are staggered so each is at a different stage. Finally the owner returns, sometimes with their kids, and the restored object is unveiled for the next generation to inherit.
This programme moves me deeply. Like Money for Nothing it’s a format that rescues objects that appear to be beyond salvage, and lays bare the painstaking work of artisans past and present. The exquisite acts of restoration surface the intense love people have for their deceased family members; their yearning to save these pieces brings a generation-spanning perspective to every episode which is unfailingly moving. Unlike Money for Nothing there is no discussion of the value of these items, because they are destined to be treasured in the family and not be sold. The BBC has funded the restoration so that viewers can learn British history, and how things used to be made, and how they can be made anew. We learn the history of amateur climate science, world wars, and how everyday lives were led. We also learn techniques – that you need to apply shellac with a soft brush, what kind of stitch you need for which fabric, how to mix the right glue for the job, and how to apply it, test it, and what to do when it’s dried. You can see how to clean anything, stabilise anything, and that it’s fine to wear two pairs of spectacles at once.
Before I finish this, I want to talk about Brexit, a hugely divisive era which threatens to impoverish this society and throw us back on our reserves. Right wing Brexit supporters look forward to this because they believe that younger people today lack grit and initiative. They think they are in need of a salutary dose of adversity to bring out their mettle. Necessity is the mother of invention, they think. I don’t see things that way, but I see these two programmes appeal across the political spectrum for reasons which transcend politics. In Money for Nothing there is no moralising at all, but I see the inheritance of a financial crisis expressed as a sort of providential scavenging (environmentalists bring their own subtexts). In the enormous popular appeal of the The Repair Shop I see another sort of prudence embraced by a society that has become interested, late in the day, in conserving the last relics of the British Empire – its science, the glory it took in its victories, the artefacts it manufactured with its spending power.
I find it poignant that these objects are usually deposited by people whose families had a long enough history in this country to have benefited – if by default – from its extractive capitalism in other lands, and were able to accrue a few treasures to pass on. I can’t help noticing that all the energy in this programme is dedicated to easing their pain. And yet those objects may be restored by an artisan whose forebears could conceivably have experienced the degradations of the Empire.
Money for Nothing deploys vision, skill and graft to convert junk discarded by older people into profit which it then returns to them – which I find symbolic of austerity and perhaps of a gentle education. In the Repair Shop, heirlooms of immense emotional significance become labours of love carried out by sensitive and empathetic strangers. Very deftly and tacitly, these programmes look to me like social cohesion.
As recriminations from disappointed Yes campaigners become louder, I’m acutely relieved about the No. I also recognise that the No was not a socialist democratic No but a status quo No.
As time went on I warmed slightly to the official No campaign with its resolute rejection of nationalist passion, patriotism, empire or jingoism and focus on material issues. State realism facing off against romantic nationalism is never a nice choice. Up to near the end anyway, which is when the heavy passion artillery got wheeled out. I realise part of the reason that paid off for them is that they and their predecessors have incrementally dismantled the state to the point that any destabilisation looks terrifying. Talat Yaqoob was my favourite activist – she fought a sunny, respectful No campaign which rejected the politics of fear. There was the very impressive, very cogent Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, whom I didn’t see put a foot wrong in terms of campaigning. Towards the very end, the Labour-led Better Together campaign dusted off an old labour movement discourse of collectivism, solidarity, public good and shared class interests. This was surprising to some – New Labour abandoned this kind of chat when it jettisoned Clause 4 and the militant. Allan Little is good on how nationalism came to fill this void in Scotland. I am steeling myself for collectivism, solidarity and class to evaporate in the run-up to GE2015. Sometimes it’s hard to keep your chin up.
Whereas there were non-SNP socialist Yes campaigns such as Radical Independence and Common Weal, there was no coordinated socialist or far left No campaign. Greens fell in with the Scottish Green Party which easily plumped for the inevitably petro-fuelled independence (though to be fair the alternative was a petro-fuelled union). They’ve whipped down Green Yes Scotland so you won’t be able to look back on that, but they were voting for their best chance to influence a society which could be a proof of concept for other regions. They yearned to get involved in a brand new constitution for a fresh new country. Then there was the radical left who couldn’t resist the prospect of sticking it to the Tories and/or Westminster politics. I have trouble even contemplating Billy ‘there is power in a union’ Bragg without something like disgust.
One of the most profoundly shocking moments of the campaign realising that for the first time in my life I agreed with virtually everything George Galloway was saying. Towards the end, though, there were socialist and radical left No voices. They weren’t organised but Bob has collected them.
Predictably enough this post-election poll from Lord Ashcroft reveals a stark difference between the youngest and oldest voters, overwhelmingly Yes and No respectively. I’m assuming this is about material insecurity of people with little prospect of earning power. The fact that pensions came into this at all is a travesty of privatisation. I don’t at all care for the way some are spinning this difference as the old dashing the hopes of the young. Also troubling and predictable is the fact that No voters tended to be more rural and better off, and that turnout remained lower in the disadvantaged, urban Yes heartlands. Yes was the preferred option for disadvantaged voters – we know from the English UKIP proble that this has got to be addressed.There’s a gender difference too, to do with risk-taking. When those Yes voters on the telly are haranguing people for being feart, it’s women and older people they’re slagging off.
All the raptures about democratic process need to be taken with a pinch of salt. When the SNP threatened No voters that the NHS was at stake, there seemed to be a lack of awareness that health care is wholly devolved to Scotland and even if rUK were to axe the NHS, this need not affect Scotland. Nevertheless the polling data showed that the NHS was a major factor in the Yes vote, so I’m doubtful there’s much grasp what Scotland controls, what the UK controls, and what the EU controls. Moreover this was a single vote on a single issue and that single issue happened to be the emotive and highly exercising issue of nationalism. Don’t assume this would generalise to wider democratic processes, which demand discipline, subtlety, compromise and sustained hard work.
On the bright side, there doesn’t seem to have been as big a problem of intimidation as some claimed – according to that poll at least 85% were prepared to disclose which way they voted to colleagues, friends and family.
There was a big swing to Yes. I’ve been so tense about the nationalism that I was unable to write anything before the referendum but now as we say goodbye to #indyref there is even more nationalism to come. The West Lothian question will be settled soon. We expect the Tories to try to appease UKIP-leaning voters in marginalised English towns. There’s talk of an English parliament, votes for English laws. While Scotland claims so much of the same, the logic of this is hard to deny. But it should be denied. There is no money, no economic plan, no jobs, great environmental stress – water, pollution, greenhouse gases – which know no borders and which demand cooperation. They also demand a redistributive approach to wealth. We are very close to being fucked. We need to nationalise things and invite the devolved countries to share a stake. We need cooperative enterprises across borders. We need to join supranational environmental movements. If there is to be devolution to the constituent regions and countries of the UK, then what the left needs to do now is build collective institutions and organisations of shared interest which cross all the borders.
This is a side issue to the much-needed 999 Call for the NHS march and rally yesterday (about which more shortly) but when Andy Slaughter casually inserted a reference to Palestine solidarity into his speech about how Imperial NHS Trust are closing services in Hammersmith, I flinched.
My impression is that it’s rarely OK for single issue campaigns to insert themselves into other totally unrelated single issue campaigns. Certainly, Palestine had not been ushered into the NHS demo by the organisers, nor could Palestine activism be said to characterise the rally. But I could sense it hovering nearby, and I want to confront it before moving onto other things.
First of all, the Palestinian flag is red, white, green and black. So is the People’s Assembly logo – and Left Unity is even more overt.
Coincidence?
Perhaps so. Most flags in the Arab world have red, white, green and black. And on the left it’s green for environmentalism, red for socialism, black for anarchism, on a white background. If the similarity is incidental, then I wouldn’t want to make too much of it. That said, there’s a certain pointy-ness to the left logos which is reminiscent. And the timbre of the colours. Which is why – and any marketer would understand this – I find it the resemblance unconsciously and now consciously off-putting. Even as somebody who is pro-Palestinian and generally anti-nationalist (or weakly civic nationalist).
Because the left has tried to make Israel central. This is in no way far fetched. Both Islamists and pan-Arabists have done the same. Israel is a useful diversion from what is actually wrong with an economy / society / body politic. There’s a name for constructing something else, something other, as the culprit. I hoped we’d seen the back of it with the Arab Spring. But then authoritarianism mostly beat pluralism and with it democracy. Really, I can’t stand scapegoating.
For these reasons I wasn’t surprised that the first #march4nhs tweets I saw on the day were from a few accounts with Palestine flags or Palestine-related names. They were very quick out of the blocks before the thing started in earnest. I remembered how much bigger last month’s anti-Israel rally had been than yesterday’s broad and inclusive NHS rally, which has done far more to promote and unify. For example I have never seen such a diversity of age, sex, religion, ethnicity, political leaning, and background on a single platform as I did at the NHS rally. So the fact that so many more turned out the anti-Israel demo, I take to be reflection of priorities on the left. Weggis66 thinks that since people turned up all the way along, this would have led to lower numbers on the day, but I’m not convinced. I don’t think that privatised services is as thrilling as Israelis doing what other countries routinely do – try to destroy their enemies and hurt a lot of people in the process. Remember the LTTE? No, probably not – there was very little fuss from the quarters that evince such horror when Gaza is beaten up.
I’m fully aware that sections of the left, noticing that the issue of Palestine can unify usually-disparate groups in society, have long tried hard to attach it to other left wing causes. For example, I travelled overnight in a coach to the G8 summit in Edinburgh (a decade ago?) to discover that the War On Want debt cancellation demo whose ranks I was swelling often resembled an anti-Israel demo. I remember various trade unions made it a core issue to exclude Israelis and only Israelis, how Avaaz, which never sends out opinion pieces, sent one from Tutu urging a boycott of Israel, how the Israel is the only country, really, targeted for exclusion from our high streets, and how anti-Israel sentiment always hurts Jews (and the activists so often miss – remember the paediatricians?). The list goes on. God, if only the world’s conflicts had as dedicated, concerned, activism. Only, hang on – it isn’t working. It’s wide of the mark.
I still think the loudest Palestine solidarity activism in this country is antisemitic. Perhaps stop reading here, because I’m about to resurrect an old theme.
Typically, pro-Palestine campaigning proposes double standards against Israel. It seeks a single state for a region hostile to Jews (incidentally often voting Yes for Scottish separatism). It usually fronts the Socialist Worker Party with its antisemitic proclivities. It annoints Hamas (will not recognise Israel, very authoritarian) and condemns democratic, progressive, secular Israelis who are, despite the catastrophising, numerous, and who need and deserve the support of the British left. Its identity politics spits ‘Zionist’ as a cuss word (again, while many of the same people coo over Scottish nationalism) when it has always been a simple Jewish liberation / defence movement supported by almost all Jews. It seeks to position the only Jewish state at the centre of the world’s problems the way antisemites held Jews culpable throughout history. It usually scoffs or bristles – or, chillingly, glows with pride – when anybody raises the possibility that it might be antisemitic.
Better Palestine activism would support Palestinian state-building and political transformation. I don’t know where to find Palestinian grassroots civil society organisations to work with (Palestine is not at the centre of my world) but a genuinely dedicated pro-Palestine activist (rather than a centrally anti-Israel one) would be motivated to. I know they exist, and that their government does not grasp that they should be autonomous, that they are destabilised by the conflict and the occupation, and that they have a role in policy i.e. beyond service. I know they get a hell of a lot of aid which is inefficiently spent, and that they risk losing their constituencies. On the joint Israeli and Palestinian side, there is Friends of the Earth Middle East, Children of Peace, OneVoice, and on the Israeli side, BTselem, Gisha, The New Israel Fund, these others, and not to mention the small, beset organised political left who, with international networks of concerned supporters, are trying to keep alive the two state prospect because – surely it’s obvious – the respective societies are so split that right now the only alternative to two states is destructive violence, a zero-sum game to the bitter end, after which segregation, ethnic cleansing, possibly genocide. And that part of the world is crazy enough at the moment, thanks.On the Palestinian side, if Palestinian trade unions call for a boycott of stuff produced in the occupied territories, then we can boycott it in good conscience, I’d say. With due care.
There’s plenty more. I have other things to do – neither Israelis nor Palestinians are at the centre of my world. But you can recognise campaigners who are using pro-Palestinian as a mask for anti-Israel because they do not care to investigate.
And meanwhile Palestine solidarity has virtually nothing – nothing – to do with our well-being in the UK. If Palestine solidarity activism unifies an eddying left, that means the left is disorientated and parts of it are rotten. Put Palestine solidarity activism in its place.
Flesh is Grass 
