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Brexit Day Blues

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags BrExit, Britain, European Union, xenophobia on January 31, 2020 by telescoper

Well, here we are then. It’s January 31st 2020. This morning, Facebook reminded me that exactly seven years ago today I left Cardiff University to take up a new job at Sussex University. What a strange 7 years followed! I moved to Sussex, then back to Cardiff, and then here to Maynooth in Ireland. It seems impossible, looking back, that all that happened in just seven years.

Today’s date has a much wider significance, of course. After 11pm (Irish Time) today, the United Kingdom will no longer be a member state of the European Union. Some people seem, for some reason, to think this is a good idea. I don’t, but that’s irrelevant now. It’s happening. And I don’t live in the United Kingdom any more anyway.

It has taken three and a half years since the Brexit referendum for the UK to leave. I’ve heard it said that’s been too long, but historically it usually takes a lot longer to get the British to leave. Just ask Ireland or India, for example.

Anyway, yesterday I planned how to mark the event, and came up with the following.

Dinner will comprise Irish, Spanish, Greek, Dutch, Danish and French ingredients, with Italian wine and afterwards a glass of (Portuguese) port. That’s not all the EU countries, of course, but it’s the best I could do with the available shopping time!

Musical accompaniment will be provided by Beethoven (courtesy of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra live from the National Concert Hall in Dublin on RTÉ Lyric FM). I was hoping to go to the concert, but I left it too late to buy a ticket and it’s sold out!

And at the appointed hour I’ll raise a glass to the EU, to everyone in the UK who is being dragged out of it against their will, to my colleagues in the UK who hate what’s happening as much as I do but haven’t had the opportunity to escape, and to all the EU citizens in the UK who have been treated so shabbily by the British Government.

Living in a country that has chosen to define itself by its contempt for foreigners is not going to be easy, and is certain to get worse when Brexit fails to deliver the `sunlit uplands’ that were promised. There are very good reasons to fear for the future.

I wrote back in 2017, when it seemed that the madness of Brexit might still be halted, but I’d decided to leave Britain anyway:

The damage has already been done. The referendum campaign, followed by the callous and contemptuous attitude of the current UK Government towards EU nationals living in Britain, unleashed a sickening level of xenophobia that has made me feel like a stranger in my own country. Not everyone who voted `Leave’ is a bigot, of course, but every bigot voted for Brexit and the bigots are now calling all the shots. There are many on the far right of UK politics who won’t be satisfied until we have ethnic cleansing. Even if Brexit is stopped the genie of intolerance is out of the bottle and I don’t think it well ever be put back. Brexit will also doom the National Health Service and the UK university system, and clear the way for the destruction of workers’ rights and environmental protection. The poor and the sick will suffer, while only the rich swindlers who bought the referendum result will prosper. The country in which I was born, and in which I have lived for the best part of 54 years, is no longer something of which I want to be a part.

The Me of 2020 thinks the Me of 2017 was absolutely right.

I got this today from a friend. Posted on the front door of an EU resident.

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Lord, Let Me In The Lifeboat

Posted in Jazz, Politics with tags Bunk Johnson, Jazz, Lord Let Me In The Lifeboat, RNLI, Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Sidney Bechet, xenophobia on September 16, 2019 by telescoper

Yesterday I noticed a now-typical outburst of British mean-spirited xenophobia in that people are cancelling their donations to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution on the grounds that it spends a massive 2% of its budget saving lives abroad rather than in the UK. Or at least claim to be cancelling donations. Judging by the kind of people commenting on Twitter I’d bet than none of them has ever donated anything to anyone in their entire crab-faced existence. The face of `Global Britain’ as represented by the Daily Mail gets more umpleasant by the day.

Anyway, as a regular donor to the RNLI I have this morning increased my contribution and will be wearing my RNLI pin badge in support of the brave men and women who regularly risk their lives to save those in distress at sea.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, the RNLI also serves Ireland: there are 59 lifeboats based in 45 stations in the Republic as well as Northern Ireland.

Anyway, I don’t want to let all this get anyone down so I’m sharing this piece of music which sprang to mind. Lord Let Me In The Lifeboat was recorded in 1945 for the Blue Note label by a band led by Sidney Bechet and Bunk Johnson. The latter had just come out of retirement courtesy of Sidney Bechet’s brother Leonard, a dentist, who furnished trumpeter Johnson with a new set of false teeth to allow him to resume playing. Not a lot of people know that.

Understandably, Bunk Johnson’s chops were not in great shape on this session but Bechet’s certainly were! When I was a lad I used to spend a bit of time transcribing clarinet solos from old records, and I remember doing this one by Sidney Bechet. The notes in themselves are not hard to play, but few people could generate that heavy vibrato and rich tone!