More ‘Left Out’

I read these exposés of British politics: all seek to achieve the depth that was achieved when the late Harold Evans could finance and foster those Sunday Times Insight investigations.

The latest is Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn. Readable, but don’t expect anything too original, or more than ‘once over lightly’. The difference is, with Harold Evans as an enlighted and well-resourced editor, Phillip Knightley could dig and dig at thalidomide until he got to the core. Now reporters collect their material, edit and bung it out at wholesale discount. ‘Insights’, when they emerge, do so more by luck than excavation.

So here’s an episode — a telling one — from pages 269-270 of Left Out. It is the Sunday of the Brighton Labour Conference, 2019:

… Milne’s Sunday morning went from bad to worse. Usually undemonstrative and unflappable in times of crisis, he became remote and irritable with colleagues. At 10.08 a.m., Corbyn had tweeted condemnation of an apparently anti-semitic poster on prominent display at the entrance to the conference centre. Benjamin Netanyahu, piloting a warplane labelled ‘THE LOBBY’ and decorated with a Star of David, was caricatured firing missiles at a Palestinian-flag-adorned Corbyn. ‘ANTI-SEMITE! ANTI-SEMITE! ANTI-SEMITE!’ screamed the cartoon Bibi. The point, attested to by the accompanying caption, was to implore members to oppose the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

The tweet itself had been written and sent by Jack Bond, Corbyn’s social media manager. On the face of it it seemed robust if unremarkable: ‘I’m disgusted that this banner was displayed near our #Lab19 conference centre. We asked the police to remove it and I’m glad they did. This kind of anti-Semitic poison has no place whatsoever in our society’. Yet soon afterwards Bond received a call from an edgy Milne. Angered, he asked why Bond had seen fit to put out such a message in Corbyn’s name. To Bond, there was no debate to be had. His intention had been to show Corbyn as a decisive and disgusted leader when it came to flagrant anti-Semitism. For that reason he told Milne he had no reason to explain himself, and instead returned to nailing the running order for Corbyn’s conference speech.

Milne instead took matters into his own hands. Overcoming his aversion to committing instructions to writing, he told LOTO colleagues on WhatsApp: ‘From what I’ve been able to find out, jc did not see the cartoon this tweet was about — which has now led to a conflict with pro-Palestinian groups and Mondoweiss [an anti-Zionist news website] in the US, which originally published the cartoon. Please stick to the sign off protocol re tweets/lines about AS [anti-Semitism] and similar sensitive issues, which is that I need to see them before they go out.’ Respect for his authority was in increasingly short supply.

Something there doesn’t quite add up. Why did Jeremy Corbyn, rarely the most observant of souls, notice the offending poster, let alone feel moved to denounce it? After all, Corbyn had been in-and-out of the Conference Centre several times, past the very evident poster — yet, suddenly, this Sunday morning he sees and objects —

And, at long last, the Sussex Constabulary (who had equally been unobserving) moved belatedly into action:

In a statement, Sussex Police said: “Police officers seized a banner that was being displayed outside the Labour conference at the Brighton Centre on Sunday afternoon (September 22) after a number of complaints that it was offensive.

“A man will attend a voluntary interview by appointment in due course with police who are considering whether any offences under the Public Order Act have been committed.”

Close focus

What is missing is the ‘when’ and the ‘why’.

The ‘when’ is the ritual of candidates being photographed with the Leader — the kind of image that is expected to appear in any election leaflets. The ‘why’ is, appropriately, Emma Whysall, the candidate for Chipping Barnet. Whysall had run Tory (and Secretary-of-State, no less) Theresa Villiers to a close-finish in 2017. Villiers’ thread-bare 252-majority made her Tory seat the most vulnerable across London. Chipping Barnet has a ten-per-cent Jewish vote — one of that clutch of North London constituencies.

When Whysall was ushered to be with Corbyn she instantly pointed out the offending poster, and demanded the Leader do something about it. There is — because I’ve seen them — a triptych of three images with Whysall pointing and Corbyn taking notice.

And the rest is history — though Pogrund and Maguire missed the real significance because their fascination for the egregious Milne got in the way.

Well, not quite the entire history.

Whysall did not use any image with Corbyn on her electoral material. But then the Corbyn-Momentumist constituency executive managed to go most of the campaign ignoring her. She lost by 1,212 with a 0.7% swing to the Tories.

Despite the closeness of the 2017 result, there had been minimal support and nil finance from Labour Central to her 2019 campaign (Corbyn’s wife was active in next door Finchley and Golders Green, where the Labour vote imploded by 20%).

 

Geography of tangled history

My first interest ought to come from travelling the N54-A3- N54-A3-N54 between Clones and Cavan. One goes four times from one jurisdiction to the other. The road markings change, the road signs and speed limits change, the road surface changes. And all because the Boundary Commission of the 1920s suffered from inflexibility.

And that, ladeez and gennelmen, is the Drummully Polyp, a little bit of the fine old woman‘s three green fields near-isolated in the fourth.

But that was only the start of it.

Soon after I came across Campione d’Italia, a bit of Lombardy surrounded on three sides by Ticino and Switzerland. Its main function was a casino, to which the less-prudent Swiss could boat across Lago Lugano. The fire and emergency services are Swiss, but there are Italian police (both local and the Carabinieri). The sick of Campione are likely to be carted off to a Swiss hospital. Officially the currency is the Euro: in practice everyone uses Swiss francs and gets salaries in Swissers.  Cars are registered as Swiss. Letters and mail now need Italian postage. Weird!

The biggest weirdness of Campione was in wartime: Italy was an Axis combatant, while Switzerland was neutral. Campione was left out of it. Allan Dulles of OSS in Berne had an out-station and listening-post in Campione, which everyone tried to ignore.

So, like others, I began a mental collection of such eccentricities.

There are no fewer than twenty-two bits of Belgium in the Netherlands. And seven bits of the Netherlands inside Belgium. Correction: those Dutch bits are inside Belgian bits which are inside … oh, you get it.

The island of Cyprus is as mad as a bucket of frogs. Not only with snarling Turks versus spitting Greeks, there’s a bit of the Turkish lot inside the predominately Greek area. There are British ‘sovereign bases’ (apart from the air bases, and places from which to launch drones, now largely spy holes from the British and Americans to keep eye and ears on the Middle East). There’s even Greek Cypriot enclaves inside the British enclaves. And the whole lot is kept from each others’ throats by the barbed wire and border zones of the United Nations.

I have no intention here of trying to explain the oddities of central America, or the former Soviet republics, or the bits of New Zealand territory which aren’t.

Here’s a new one, though

Anyone wondering where this Magical Mystery Tour might lead, can be content. It’s Point Roberts, Washington State, but cut off in British Columbia. To which I was introduced, just this week, in a New York Times article:

Marooned in Paradise: ‘I Am Stuck Until That Border Opens’

An isolated patch of Washington is virus free, but at a rising cost.

A five-square-mile drop of land clinging to the southern end of British Columbia with views of snow-capped Mt. Baker to the east and the San Juan Islands to the south, Point Roberts is detached from the rest of Washington State. Not far south of Vancouver, it is a relic of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, which set the northern border of what was then the Oregon Territory at the 49th parallel. To reach the rest of the United States from Point Roberts requires two international border crossings with a 24-mile drive in between.

The more I read of Point Roberts, the more I liked it.

I once had to teach David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, which, apart from Jack London and Robert Service, completed my awareness of the Pacific North-West. So we had a few days in Seattle and the ferries out to the islands. The San Juan Islands are a reminder of just how far up the Pacific Coast Spanish interest once went: they were named by Francisco de Eliza, exploring for the Viceroy of Mexico. The mapping was a collaboration between the Spanish and the expedition of George Vancouver (that other Norfolk seaman) — but the place-names indicate just who ended up doing which bit. Point Roberts was once, briefly, Punta Cepeda, but Vancouver changed that to commemorate his (and James Cook’s) first lieutenant, Henry Roberts.

Next to the squabbles of the 1840s. The 1844 US Presidential Election was won on the slogan Fifty-Four Forty or Fight. The issue of where the US Oregon Territory should extend had festered since the War of 1812. The British had to resist expansion up to 54°40′. The Americans, faced with the simultaneous Mexican border issue, decided to settle on 48°, which left the Point Roberts anomalously in the Oregon Territory. The British negotiator, almost goes without saying, was an Anglo-Irish diplomat and TCD man, Richard Packenham.

Let’s quickly by-pass the Pig War of 1859, raise an eye that the whole shebang rumbled on until 1872, and was settled by a commission headed by Kaiser Wilhelm. Indeed.

Isolationism

On 21 March Canada closed its border, because of Covid-19, which left the thirteen hundred inhabitants of Point Roberts alone and unloved:

Parks anchor the region’s four corners. Children wander among cedar trees along the Enchanted Forest Trail, decorated with figures of gnomes and fairies. Whales can be seen from the shore and deer roam past cottages edged by flowers and protected by thorny blackberry bushes. People wave to each other as they drive past and catch up in the only supermarket.

For generations, Canadians have traveled south to their seaside homes. They dock their boats in the marina, golf at the public course and dine in the restaurants. Others cross the border for cheaper gas and milk. They pick up parcels that are delivered to one of the seven shipping stores, avoiding costly international fees.

For Port Roberts the Border closure meant kids could no longer get to school, trade and visitors stopped dead, jobs were under threat. But no Covid-19.

Out of cussedness I opened Google Maps and Google Earth to get as close a look as that allowed.

Sure enough, there’s the neat dividing line: the loyal Americans have named the road that marks the frontier, Roosevelt Way. Which leaves the Canadians in Wallace Avenue able to peer over the fences at the bottom of their gardens, and see foreign parts. Zoom in as tightly as Google Maps allow, and you may spot little unofficial paths.

Perhaps, if only for the exploring young, the frontier is not hermetically sealed.