After Brexit, Desperate Tories Needed a New Crusade. They Think Dumping ‘Human Rights’ Could Be It

THE GUARDIAN: Rightwingers want a nasty debate about the European convention on human rights to revive nativist passions

The drumbeats get louder as the call of the wild pulses through the blood of the Conservative party again. The front page of the Telegraph on Thursday splashes, “Cabinet call on PM to ditch ECHR”. On their headcount, a third of the British cabinet want to join Russia and Belarus as pariah states outside the European convention on human rights.

Downing Street says no, but others report the prime minister wavering. This is exactly how Brexit happened – and that’s the spirit the Braverman tendency hopes to reprise, with all the nativism, the xenophobia, the British “sovereignty” phantasm and even talk of another referendum, which could slice the country into two broken halves. They imagine this could save their party, or at least their own seats, at the next election. » | Polly Toynbee | Thursday, August 10, 2023

Trump Revealed His Presidential Dream to Me in 1988. Now the Nightmare Begins

THE GUARDIAN: Back then I wrote that Donald Trump becoming US president would be seen as a bad joke. Yet it’s about to come true

At war with the US intelligence agencies he compares to Nazi Germany, damning them for leaking an unverified dossier on his alleged links with Moscow, Donald Trump’s bizarre press conference left the world agog. What if the Russians have so well destabilised America that no sooner inaugurated, their chosen president has to be impeached? Don’t count on it. Ordinary rules don’t apply to the man who is the raw spirit of the lawless wild west.

And Trump’s nature was never a secret. He has never dissembled, he can’t dissemble. Why would he when he worships every aspect of himself, each hair on his head, each word he tweets? Greater self-love hath no man. » | Polly Toynbee | Thursday, January 12, 2017

The Toynbee Take: No 10 Curses, But Britain's Illusion of Empire Is Over

THE GUARDIAN: The Syria debate has exposed the fact that, while Cameron wasn't looking, both his country and his party changed

Last night in the Commons a great switch was thrown in the national psyche and nothing may ever be quite the same again. This is not a left-right shift, but a long-delayed acceptance that Britain is less powerful and poorer than it was, weary of wars and no longer proud to punch above its weight. No more pretending, no more posturing.

Next week Rule Britannia will belt out loud as ever at the Proms in that partly ironic parade of cheerful patriotism. But the great game is over. Poor David Cameron has been the one left stranded when the music stopped, still singing as everyone else falls silent. From Number 10 came effing and blinding at Ed Miliband, calling him, as reported in the Times, a "f****** c*** and a copper-bottomed s***". But it wasn't Labour, it was Cameron's whole country who had changed while he wasn't looking. Cue last-minute key change in Downing Street's unconditional promise to the US, but he's still out of tune with a country that doesn't want to go to war.

As the true meaning of end of empire sinks in, great questions follow. Why continue to spend more than comparable countries on defence? Why do we (and France) still squat in UN security council seats? What is the point of Trident, dependent entirely on the closest allegiance to America?

Consider the breadth of opposition to a Syrian intervention. First come the British people, two to one against war, with YouGov finding opinion hardening. Outside the gates of Downing Street stand Stop the War demonstrators. Biting at the heels of anxious Tory MPs comes Ukip's Nigel Farage accusing Cameron of "his greatest misjudgment yet" and gloating that his anti-war stance is "the single most popular thing Ukip's ever said". Now add in warnings from the assemblage of military top brass (retd). » | Polly Toynbee | Thursday, August 29, 2013

Viewpoint from the Left: Queen's Diamond Jubilee: A Vapid Family and a Mirage of Nationhood. What's to Celebrate?

THE GUARDIAN: If the very idea of monarchy diminishes us, the living reality is much more humiliating and damaging to our country

The mighty royal jubilee bells will toll their way down the Thames on Sunday on a floating belfry leading a thousand boats, echoed by pealing church bells all down the riverside. Who could miss the spectacle of a hundred tall ships serenaded with Handel's Water Music played by a floating orchestra?

The more outrageously glorious the performance, the more preposterous its purpose. There at the heart, in the dead centre of all this pomp and circumstance, is the great emptiness, the nothingness, the Wizard of Oz in emperor's clothes. The louder the bells, the more gaping the grand vacuity. What are we celebrating? A singularly undistinguished family's hold on the nation, a mirage of nationhood, a majestic delusion.

How close to religion it is, with all the same feudal imagery, God as Lord and sovereign, sovereign anointed by God, knelt before in a divine hierarchy of power ordained by laws too ineffable to explain. The tyranny of the monarchy lies not in its residual temporal power but in its spiritual power. It subjugates the national imagination, infantilising us with false imaginings and a bogus heritage of our island story. For as long as they rule over us, we are obedient servants, worshipping an ermine-wrapped fantasy of Englishness. (Despite the kilts, the monarchy was never really British.) Read on and comment » | Polly Toynbee | Thursday, May 31, 2012

Polly Toynbee: My Christmas Message? There's Probably No God
THE GUARDIAN: It is neither emotionally nor spiritually deficient to reject religions that seek to infantilise us with impossible beliefs

Antidisestablishmentarianism is on the march. Which is odd, considering there is only the faintest whiff of disestablishmentarianism to fight. The Archbishop of Canterbury set this hare running with his usual confused mumbling into his beard. To disestablish the church would be "by no means the end of the world", he said bravely. He hastened to add that he did not want the church sundered from the state right now. And he would oppose "secularists [boo, hiss] trying to push religion into the private sphere". This sent the Telegraph and Mail into a spin, claiming a devilish distestablishment plot on the Labour backbenches - though they could find only three usual suspects. These MPs say the likely move to end the 1701 Act of Settlement that bars Catholics from the throne will make an established church impossible.

How likely is this? Look at how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have promoted faith and religiosity as "community", and ask yourself if there is the faintest chance that Labour spends untold parliamentary time unpicking the cat's cradle of a relationship between church, Lords and crown? Frankly, if Labour had the inclination for constitutional reform, first priority should be ending our disastrous first-past-the-post voting system.

True, it is embarrassing to be the only western democracy that has theocracy built into its legislature. The 26 bishops in the Lords interfere regularly: they are a threat on abortion, and their campaign sank the Joffe bill, giving the terminally ill the right to die in dignity. Of course they should not be there, when only 16% of people will grace the pews on Christmas Day, and Christian Research forecasts church attendance falling by 90%. But a dying faith clings hard to its inexplicable influence on public life.

Labour has encouraged the power of the religions to a remarkable degree, consulting them on endless committees. To be an atheist is now unacceptable in a political leader: when Nick Clegg confessed his non-belief, he had to recant and re-define himself as an "agnostic". The BBC is increasing religious broadcasting; Radio 4 already does 200 hours. Is this by popular demand? No. An Ofcom survey put religion last in the public's interests. Expect a worsening clash in the new Equality Commission between religious rights and gay and women's rights. The Islington registrar who refused to conduct civil partnerships for religious reasons was an ominous landmark case.

This has been the year of religion's fightback against secularism - a word made almost synonymous with the spiritual and moral decadence of materialism. Angered by the runaway success of anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, AC Grayling and others, the different faiths - though each believes it has the one and only divinely revealed truth and often fights to the death to prove it - combine in curious harmony against secularists. >>> Polly Toynbee | Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback & Hardback) – Free delivery >>>