the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Remember how back in 2002 , the former PM, Theresa Cornfield, warned the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth that they were seen as the “nasty party? The evidence for this was, she claimed among other things, a narrow voter base, lack of sympathy for minorities, internal feuding, and public perception of being out-of-touch?

So what would she call the Greens? Because everything she claimed made the Torys ‘the nasty party’ has been magnified by the Greens. Much has been made of the rapid increase in membership since Repulsion came to power. But less though about who they are. How they all seem to be share not just an incredibly rigid set of beliefs, but also a refusal to accept that anyone has a right to disagree with them. These newer members are less concerned with saving the planet and more with saving one tiny part of it whilst erasing another one. Who are obsessed with demonising one minority, holding everyone in it to be uniquely guilty by association. Complicit in something that only exists in their fevered imaginings of their WhatsApp group chats.

And as for internal feuding? The Greens make one almost nostalgic for the interminable arguments that convulsed the Tory party over Europe during the 1990’s. They seem polite and good natured when compared to the current temper-tantrum being waged against Caroline Lucas by the Greens for Palestine faction. A well known fire-brand, she is accused of being ‘toxic’, ‘divisive and of ‘bringing the party into disrepute.’ Her crime? Not agreeing with them. Not believing that ‘Zionism is racism’. Not believing that the motion to adopt it at the recent party conference should never have been tabled let alone passed, or that the leadership didn’t show any.

The thing is, when it comes to accusations of bringing the party into ‘disrepute’, then the Greens for Palestine group are more deserving to be expelled from the party. I think that they are all too aware of this, so are busy getting their retaliation in first, hoping that she and not them will become the focus. But aside from the recent motion, which should’ve been flushed down the nearest toilet, there is the deafening silence from them about the cancelled presidential elections in Palestine. Not just from them, but from the entire leadership. This represents a more fundamental threat.

One might be forgiven for thinking that for a party whose entire political offering is predicated upon the idea that Israel is the the only reason that there isn’t a ‘Free Palestine’, such a silence might be problematic. One might then also consider why the Greens are so keen to advance the narrative of Israel being the root cause of every misfortune that befalls the Palestinian people? Could it be that their hatred of Israel blinds them to a more proximate impediment to a ‘Free Palestine’?

That the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 20th year of his 4 year term, in cancelling the elections yet again, is more of a threat to the idea of a “Free Palestine than Israel.  Or that Hamas, having won the 2006 legislative election, promptly changed the rules and have practiced a non-existent version of democracy in Gaza ever since.

Perhaps thats why the Greens lost in Holborn and St.Pancras. Because they’re not Green anymore. Because the more that they claim to represent a newer way of doing politics, the more apparent it is that they’re just repackaging the worlds oldest  hatred. That they seem incapable of championing anything beyond the ideological inconsistencies of their newer members.  To be at the mercy of the the very toxicity and divisiveness that some claim Caroline Lucas to be guilty of. To appease it, to pander and legitimise it and to eventually normalise it. Its not Caroline Lucas that is bringing the Greens into disrepute.

They’re doing it themselves.

If anyone had any doubts whatsoever that the outbreak of peace in Gaza was the ‘wrong’ kind of peace, the cover of the latest edition of ‘Time’ magazine allays them. Ostensibly, it is a photo of Tangoed captioned ‘His triumph’, recognising the most remarkable diplomatic achievement of this century, in bringing an end to the fighting in Gaza. However, out of all the photos of him that they have, they chose one of the most unflattering. No-one looks at their best when photographed from underneath, certainly not an older man, so much so that when I initially saw it, I wasn’t even sure it was even him.

There can be no question that this was an editorial choice made at a very senior level. The cover had to be repeatedly approved and passed up the chain before the magazine was even published. But management at ‘Time’ might have calculated that their readers would have correctly interpreted the cover for the back-handed compliment it was. ‘Yes’, the cover says, ‘ we acknowledge that the fighting has stopped and whilst we are overjoyed at that, did it have to be you that made it happen? 

And that, fundamentally, is the main reason why it is the ‘wrong’ kind of peace. It affects people’s business. Because if, for the last two years, lots of people had business’s that depended on the upon the war in Gaza continuing. The longer it did, the more profitable the profitable denunciation could occur, the more outrage, the more fulmination, the type of profit they were making being directly related to whom their it was that business was focused. But no matter what it was, that business has come crashing down around them. At the front of the gravy train there are the heads of governments, intergovernmental organisations and global media conglomerates. In second and third class are the NGO’s, the charities and the various domestic political opposition parties, all the way down the to those at the other end, the student protesters, the march organisers, the keyboard warriors, all of them fucked, and not in a good way. 

American politics is a prime example of what I mean by it being bad for business. If you were a Democrat politician who had constantly decried Trump as someone who was the very embodiment of Hitler, as being a very real threat to democracy itself and essentially Satan in a bad wig, then this peace deal is absolutely the worst possible news. If your whole shtick had been to make a name for yourself by castigating Israel for anything and everything, being an apologist for Hamas and suggesting that Tangoes cosying up to Notonyournelly had made the prospects for peace even more remote, then you were fucked. The profit that your business depended on, which was turning media appearances, penning opinion pieces for old and new media, visibly grandstanding at protests,  and then turning all that into votes, gone. In an instant.

The same is true for our domestic politicians. They also have the difficult task of welcoming the cessation of war whilst not wanting to acknowledge the fact of who made it possible. This is further compounded by the fact that the Americans have been explicit in critiquing the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state as making the deal more difficult than it needed. Which in itself was a very  deliberate act of diplomatic point-scoring, a chastisement of various government leaders, highlighting exactly how much their chasing of domestic electoral success had acted against the very aims they professed to want.

The media who now find themselves in a situation entirely of their own making. When he was running for President the first time around, the media first portrayed him as a joke candidate until he emerged as a corrective to the more ‘professional’ politician they were used to. When he won, in part by appealing to those who had felt ignored by the old political order, they were appalled. In the UK it was worse, given how irrelevant we are within the American political system. However if one read most of the UK’s broadsheets, visited news websites – like The Huffington Post – or subscribed to online news organisations – like Novara Media – one would be forgiven for thinking that we were integral to its smooth operation.

Because, in a weird way, it was. Tangoed is good copy. He is news, and the business of news is to attract readers, or eyeballs and keep those eyeballs or readers doing so long enough so they can sell them to advertisers. That’s why he’s has been rarely out of news for over ten years now. The media knows this, knows that its in an ever more competitive world and ‘The Guardian’ is the most blatant example of this inevitable reality. It printed at least one negative story about him seemingly every day for years, some about the war, some not and endless opinion pieces all having the same opinion The more they printed, the more money their readers gave them. It was like a weird version of payola. 

The’ll have to some proper news now, focus on events much closer to home, do the hard years that actual journalism requires and just reinforce what their readers have been duped into believing. This is equally true for our own shyster politicians, opportunistic rabble rousers and the rabbles they rouse. How can they call for a ceasefire when there is one? How can they pretend to want peace, yet when the very peace they were calling for and which they endlessly claimed was so elusive actually happens, what now for them? What of their profit, which amounted to little more  than increased visibility, name recognition and enhanced reputational  kudos now?  

Its funny that Tangoed once wrote a book called ‘The Art of the Deal’ because with this deal, which they assured us could never happen, he’s managed to call all of their bluffs.