So Britain, are you ready to enter the United Kingdom of Ukip?

Marina Hyde in The Guardian


 
‘Don’t get me wrong on Nigel – he’s fine for a fag, a pint, some jolly japes on the Thames.’ Illustration: Nate Kitch

Right now, in the Ukip bunker, there is a search going on. It is urgent. It is probably desperate. It is the search for a tone. The emotional Rolodex of Nigel Farage is being riffled through in the hope it might throw up something usable. Top presentational aides have been dispatched on a vital quest to find the outer limits of his range. The journey is unlikely to detain them very long. Yet at the most recent reckoning Farage stands a few disputed percentage points away from being acclaimed – like it or not – the most extraordinarily successful British politician of a generation. Globally, he may soon be seen as reflecting us.

A man who yesterday morning was standing in front of a poster eerily similar to genuine Nazi propaganda is today in seclusion, his campaign suspended – like all the official referendum efforts - “out of respect”. And, presumably, out of uncertainty as to what the hell he does next.

Yesterday morning Farage was playing dog-whistle politics. Forgive me: he was playing whistle politics. Understanding the import of the words “BREAKING POINT” across a snaking queue of stricken brown-skinned people does not require ultrasonic capabilities. You can stand down, Lassie. You’re not needed today, girl.

Yesterday afternoon, the MP Jo Cox was killed in the street in her Batley and Spen constituency. That her alleged killer had years of mental health issues seems likely. That he is alleged to have shouted, “Britain first” – perhaps a reference to an organisation with which Ukip were last year forced to deny an electoral pact – is a matter of acute sensitivity. If the party barkers were a hundredth as careful about anything else as they are instructing everyone to be about that alleged “Britain first” cry, then they would have moderated themselves into retirement years ago.

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyse,” the great liberal supreme court justice Louis Brandeis observed, “but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.”

Character is not always destiny, but tone matters. As we head towards polling day, all eyes must be on the man himself, Nigel Farage, who did more to bring about this referendum than any other, and whose artless, divisive bait-and-switch has felt like its governing spirit. How bound up Britain’s destiny has seemed with the character of this rather small man. Where does Britain’s-most-successful-politician-in-waiting go from here? Cometh the hour, whence cometh the tone?

Farage will, of course, have to find some words that address the utter loathsomeness of where we find ourselves, and the shame and despair it makes many people feel. Like him or not, David Cameron can do this. Like him or not, Jeremy Corbyn did so on Thursday. Together in Birstall, they found the bearing. And then … Well, it ought to be noted mildly that Thursday’s repulsive poster was merely the first in a planned series. Will we see the rest? At this moment of national and personal destiny, will Farage manage to be the politician of stature he assures us he is?

Hitherto, Farage has had a tried and tested shtick for Serious Moments. I notice it all the time now, but I first saw it when I asked him with sledgehammer flippancywhether Nelson Mandela was one of his political heroes. Immediately, Farage lowered his voice and opened his eyes very wide. “He’s a human hero,” he intoned. “That day he came out of Robben Island” – it wasn’t Robben Island, but anyway – “and stood there and forgave everybody, I just thought: ‘This is Jesus.’” Hugely idiosyncratic for a man on the right of the Tory party at the time, considering most of his political soulmates had only just given up wearing “Hang Mandela” badges, but there you go. “I don’t regard him as a political hero,” Nigel went on very quietly and with his eyes still open very wide. “I think he’s on a rather higher plane than that.”

Drop the voice, widen the eyes. He’ll probably do it this weekend. He certainly does it when anyone accuses him of borderline racism. Down goes the voice, as though he is personally trying to smother their insinuation in the appalled hush it deserves. I have to confess the Farage mind trick doesn’t work on me. Instead, every time Nigel deploys it, it makes me think of a Truman Capote line from In Cold Blood. “The quietness of his tone italicised the malice of his reply.”

That the political atmosphere was febrile and fetid before Jo Cox’s death hardly needs stating. “How foul this referendum is,” wrote the novelist Robert Harris this week. “The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime. May there never be another.” Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel has since retweeted the observation.

So many of the things that have felt bizarre or even vaguely comic at one Atlantic Ocean’s remove have suddenly alighted on our shores. Lies are knowingly painted on buses; previously unsayable things have been said on platforms that lend them a hideous legitimacy; the word “expert” has become as dirty as the word “Westminster”; and the shift to post-factual political discourse feels rapidly under way. No one is more post-fact than Farage. Asked why he was back on the cigs again this week, he replied: “I think the doctors have got it wrong on smoking.”

Don’t get me wrong on Nigel – he’s fine for a fag, a pint, some jolly japes on the Thames. The entire campaign’s only moment of levity came on Wednesday, as his flotilla did battle with Bob Geldof’s. In fact, it was while aboard Farage’s boat that I saw two children on one of the small remain dinghies and wondered who they were. They looked the same age as my eldest two – about five and three – and I thought how hilarious and exciting mine would have found the whole spectacle. I smiled and waved at them, because there is obviously a law stating that people in or aboard funny forms of transport should always wave at children. I only found out the next day that those children had been Jo Cox’s. Her husband Brendan had tweeted: “Kids seriously disappointed there isn’t another flotilla today.”

My God, the horror. Lying in wait, the unthinkable horror. Twenty-four hours later, Brendan Cox was issuing a statement on his wife’s murder. That he was able to find the words and tone that I am sure I never could in such unimaginable circumstances has been a thing of marvel to so many. We know the heights of humanity when we see them.

And I’m afraid we know when we don’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard humanity emanate from Nigel Farage, certainly not convincingly. On the eve of what he hopes will be his finest hour, he must rise to the challenge now. People expect. Britain expects. If you haven’t the words and the deportment for this sort of horror, and the politics that the timetable dictates will have to be conducted while it is still so fresh, then you are not fit for office or the sniff of it.

There are many people I respect and admire voting leave – there are people in my family voting leave. I understand their reasons. But they must stomach the reality that a vote for leave will be taken by Farage and countless others as a vote for him, a vote for his posters, a vote for his ideas, a vote for his quiet malice, a vote for his smallness in the face of vast horrors. Is it worth it?

Follow Mandela's example, and roar with laughter at all this rightwing fawning

Nelson Mandela not only made history, he did so in such a way that made others – from David Cameron to Elton John – want to rewrite their own 

• 
• • Marina Hyde
  • The Guardian, Friday 6 December 2013 17.05 GMT

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Asked for his feelings on meeting the Spice Girls in 1997 – shortly after Mel B had compared their "girl power quest" with the anti-apartheid movement – Nelson Mandela obliged. "I don't want to be emotional," he explained, "but this is one of the greatest moments of my life."

The twinkly-eyed gag was taken at face value by the group and plenty of dullard commentators, who were bemused, when they should simply have been amused. Mandela was a very funny man. In fact, every time I read the remark again I find myself laughing – not at Geri et al, which says something about how Mandela elevates even the cynical, but with him, who somehow contrived to tread the most elegant path through the unique absurdities of much of his later existence.

Less adroit, it must be said, are many of those lumbering to salute him in death – a global throng of Zeligs, from politicians to press, whose lifelong reverence for Mandela as a man and leader of a struggle was simply failed by the greatest superlatives. How on earth did apartheid endure so long, younger viewers may be wondering, considering everyone who was anyone seems to have been on Mandela's side?

"Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time," intoned David Cameron, who went off on a jolly to apartheid South Africa in 1989, with all expenses paid by a firm lobbying against sanctions. " President Mandela was one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time," declared George W Bush, neglecting to mention that the ANC were still on a US terror-watch list until 2008, which meant the secretary of state had to certify that Mandela was not a terrorist in order for him to visit the country.

You have to laugh – mostly because that is probably what Mandela would have done. How often photos showed him roaring with laughter next to fawning leaders or dignitaries or whoever wanted a piece of him that day. I always imagined him getting the cosmic joke of it all – here he was, feted often by people who either couldn't have given a toss in his darkest times, or had transparently wished him ill.

Sainthood can be very sanitising, of course, and the right have a vested interest in smothering the realities of Mandela's radicalism under a lead blanket of tributes. But Mandela not only made history, he also did so in such a way that he made others wish to rewrite their own histories. In some cases, they seem to have done this because the argument against apartheid – and it actually was a matter of debate for plenty of people at the time, kids – was won so totally that to retrospectively admit in public that you were on the wrong side of it, or in effect on the fence, became akin to saying you were as politically witless as you were wicked.

Others have since discovered misty-eyed pasts. Not long ago, I asked Nigel Farage if Nelson Mandela was a political hero, on the basis that he has to be everyone's these days. "He's a human hero," the Ukip leader replied reverentially. "That day he came out of Robben Island" – it wasn't Robben Island, but anyway – "and stood there and forgave everybody, I just thought: 'This is Jesus.'"

Now, Farage was a rightwing Conservative activist in 1990, and doubtless it was uncharitable of me to think it odd that he should have thought about Mandela in those terms at that time, considering it would have been bizarrely uncharacteristic of his tribe (it wasn't awfully long after the Federation of Conservative Students used to wear Hang Mandela badges, while in the US the likes of Dick Cheney were voting against resolutions calling for his release). But more importantly, my scepticism – for which there was absolutely no evidence, I should say – was irrelevant. The point was that Farage believed he had thought that, and it is part of his personal folklore.

It's not just politicians, naturally. All self-respecting self-regarders jostled to touch Mandela's robe. At a 90th birthday party in London, Elton John sang a worshipful Happy Birthday to him – a track that presumably wasn't on the set list when Elton played Sun City in 1983. "My respects to an extraordinary person, probably one of the greatest humanists of our time," declared Thursday's tribute from Sepp Blatter, the man who demanded the frail elder statesman present himself at the World Cup final in South Africa, to the vocal distress of Mandela's family given he was mourning the tragic death of his 13-year-old great-granddaughter.

"Death of a colossus," was the headline in yesterday's Daily Mail, who marked his 1990 release with "The violent homecoming". "Violence and death disfigured the release of Nelson Mandela yesterday …" began that take on history.

They all came round in the end. Lesser people – minuscule folk such as myself, in fact – would occasionally have felt overwhelmed with the urge to inquire, even smilingly: "Well, where the hell were you when I was rotting in a cell for the best part of 30 years?" But in his superhuman magnanimity, Mandela never once mentioned it. So to follow his example in an infinitely smaller way, perhaps we should just roar with laughter ourselves at all the rightwing Mandela-venerators crawling out of the woodwork to weave themselves into his achievements. Such monumental progress could only be achieved by someone with the grace to understand a political reality: it is better that Johnny should come lately than not at all.

David Moyes, just like John Major, is destined to fail

Sport is no different from politics. There is a syndrome that means it's all but impossible for one star to follow another

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland 
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 December 2013 11.00 GMT

Manchester United manager David Moyes is discovering how hard it is to follow a predecessor of star quality Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

You don't have to be a football fan to understand the trouble with David Moyes. Anyone familiar with the highest reaches of politics will recognise his predicament immediately. For those who turn rarely to the back pages, Moyes is in his first season as the manager of Manchester United. He inherited a team that had just won yet another title as Premier League champions, but under him they are struggling. Now ninth in the league, they are a full 13 points off the top spot. What's more, Moyes has broken a few awkward records. Under him, the team have lost at home to Everton (his old club) for the first time in 21 years and on Saturday lost to Newcastle at Old Trafford for the first time since 1972. Tonight another unwanted feat threatens. If they lose to the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk, it will be the first time United have suffered three successive home defeats in 50 years.

Watch Moyes attempt to explain these results, or defend his performance, in a post-match interview or press conference and, if you're a political anorak, you instantly think of one man: John Major. Or, if you're an American, perhaps the first George Bush. For what you are witnessing is a classic case of a syndrome that recurs in politics: the pale successor fated to follow a charismatic leader and forever doomed by the comparison.

Major may be earning some late kudos and revision of his reputation now, but while prime minister he was in the permanent shadow of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. Bush the elder was always going to be dull after the man who went before him, Ronald Reagan. So it is with Moyes, who was given the hardest possible act to follow – inheriting from one of the footballing greats, Sir Alex Ferguson.

It's a pattern that recurs with near-universal regularity. Tony Blair was prime minister for 10 years; Gordon Brown never hit the same heights and only managed three. Same with Jean Chrétien of Canada and his luckless successor Paul Martin. Or, fitting for this day, consider the case of Thabo Mbeki whose destiny was to be the man who took over from Nelson Mandela and so was all but preordained to be a disappointment.

It's as if an almost Newtonian law applies: the charisma of a leader exists in inverse proportion to the charisma of his or her predecessor. Moyes is only the latest proof.

What could explain the syndrome? Does nature abhor one star following another in immediate succession?

One theory suggests itself, though it draws more from psychology than physics. Note the role, direct or indirect, many of these great leaders had in choosing their successors. Could it be that some part of them actually wanted a lacklustre heir, all the better to enhance their own reputation? United could have had any one of the biggest, most glamorous names in football at the helm, yet Ferguson handpicked Moyes. Did Sir Alex do that to ensure he would look even better?

For this is how it works. Once the great man or woman has gone, and everything falls apart, their apparent indispensability becomes all the harder to deny. Manchester United fans look at the same players who were champions a few months ago, now faring so badly, and conclude: Ferguson was the reason we won.

If that was his unconscious purpose in picking the former Everton boss, then Sir Alex chose very wisely. And Moyes can comfort himself that, in this regard at least – like Major, Bush, Brown and so many others before him – he's doing his job perfectly.

If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero

Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • theguardian.com, Monday 9 December 2013 10.05 GMT

‘It is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?’ Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images

In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Second, people remember the old African National Congress that promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a "new world" – but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to "play the game"? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly "punished" by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?

It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous "hymn to money" from her novel Atlas Shrugged: "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other." Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things"?

In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognised freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such. What is problematic is Rand's underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, one should nonetheless bear in mind the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was effectively that a direct abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange, lacking concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the communist organisation of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

The general rule is that when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilise large crowds with slogans that one cannot but characterise as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against corruption, for instance. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices, when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realise that what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. The ruling ideology mobilises here its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. They start to tell us that democratic freedom brings its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalist investing in our lives, deciding to put more into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed.

At a more directly political level, United States foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage control by way of rechanneling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints – as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto and elsewhere. At this precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to make the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the "totalitarian" temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn't disturb the global order of power.

Just remember what many Tories thought of Nelson Mandela in the apartheid years

Soon we will be inundated with heartfelt speeches – but we mustn't let those who opposed Mandela's struggle pretend they didn't

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 26 June 2013 19.59 BST

A smile that came from the centre of the Earth ... Nelson Mandela. Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images

As the vigil continues outside the hospital, we don't know how close to the final freedom Nelson Mandela is. But after the strange denials that this old, sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power. Before the pygmy politicians line up to pay tribute to this giant, I want to remember how he lived so much for so many. Part of my memory is that he was not a living saint to the very people whose staff will now be writing their "heartfelt" speeches.

Really, I have no desire to hear them from leaders of parties who described his organisation as terrorist, who believed that sanctions were wrong, whose jolly young members wore T-shirts demanding he be strung up. Of course, not all Tories were pro-apartheid, but I can already feel the revisionism revving up.

So we must recall how it really was. The struggle against apartheid was the one thing that unified the left. I came to it accidentally. Isn't that how politicisation happens sometimes? Via extraordinary people, unlikely meetings, chance encounters?

Like this one: in 1981 I had just come back from travelling around South America and got a job in a care home with Haringey Social Services in north London. Some of the local kids were in big trouble – the girls were on the game at 14, the boys breaking into houses and stealing cars. A large, in every sense of the word, African woman became my ally there. She was always encouraging them to be lawyers despite their constant truanting. We were an unlikely pair, but she believed in "discipline" and I believed in "manners" so we would talk late into the night. She was one of the poshest people I had ever met – she drank Perrier water, which at that time was exotic beyond belief. Sometimes she would weep after receiving calls from South Africa and talk of murders and assassinations. Sometimes she would take me out for cocktails and get diplomatic cars from embassies to take me home. Her name was Adelaide Tambo, the wife of Oliver. They were the exiled leaders of the ANC.

I began to know what this meant. How Mandela had ridden to power in 1952 in the Defiance Campaign, how he was harassed and, of course, finally taken to Robben Island. To that tiny cell. The Tambos had to leave much later. One night she called me as she was locked out of her house in Muswell Hill. "Can't you just break a window? "No Suzanne," she said. "The windows are all bullet proof glass." That's how they lived.

This personal introduction to the ANC is my story but everyone I knew opposed apartheid. Indeed, who could support such barbarism? This was more than racism – there is only one race, called the human race. Botha's regime did not regard black people as humans but as animals.

By 1984 Jerry Dammers had written Free Nelson Mandela. But apartheid continued to exist, propped up by the Tories. Some of their elder statesmen, such as Norman Tebbit, still see Thatcher's policy as a success. David Cameron denounced it in 2006, saying she had been wrong to condemn the ANC as terrorists and to have opposed sanctions. Too late for those veteran campaigners such as Peter Hain, who had seen the massacres in the townships and knew it was a life-or-death struggle.

Indeed, when I saw Mandela in later years having his garden surreally being "made over" by Alan Titchmarsh or being cuddled by random Spice Girls, I wondered if they had ever heard Gil Scott-Heron's Johannesburg (1975) or been at the anti-apartheid demos outside the South African embassy where we were all kettled.

When we hear Cameron's inevitable tribute, don't forget that in 1989, aged 23, he went on a "jolly" to South Africa paid for by a firm that did not want sanctions busted. This does not mean he supported apartheid, but by then it would have been impossible not to know of the regime's brutality. Many people knew, and boyotted South African goods.

I see Dylan Jones, a Cameron fan, has written a book on Live Aid, defining the 80s as caring: more anodyne revision. The key concert of the 80s was the more political and consciousness-raising Free Nelson Mandela one, not long after. Mandela himself was there on stage with that smile that came from the centre of the Earth. The glare of his grin made us cheer and cry. The glare of the sun, when he was breaking rocks in Robben Island, had permanently damaged his eyesight, but not his mind. When he walked to freedom he wrote, that unless he left bitterness and hatred behind, "I would still be in prison."

This is wonderful, but do not let his story be rewritten, do not let those who opposed his struggle pretend they didn't.

"There is no passion to be found playing small," he said. He told his own people to recall the past. I ask simply, before we are inundated with those who want to bask in his afterglow, that we remember our own past too. It is sad, but let him go. I just wanted to remind you of how it was before he passes and before the "official" rewrite of history begins. Forgiveness is possible. Forgetting isn't.