A new English lockdown, a new US President, a new French war on terror?
(Illustration by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)
England is on the eve of a new lockdown. America is probably on the eve of a new President. France may be on the eve of a new war on terror. A year ago, none of these events was predicted. If we had been able to look into the future then, the world we are now living in would have seemed almost unrecognisable. A year from now, the same may be true. Just about the only thing of which we can be certain is that the earth will continue to turn on its axis and Boris Johnson’s hair will still defy gravity.
The unpredictability of events has itself proved to be unpredictable. We used to suppose that the unknowns were mostly known, or at least in principle knowable. We know, for example, that Presidents of the United States can lose elections after only one term of office. It just doesn’t happen very often. (The last time was 28 years ago.) What was not only unknown but unknowable was that Donald Trump would be swept out of office by a coronavirus pandemic . Even more surprising for those who treat the past as a guide to the future, Trump — at 70, the oldest US President ever to take office — is about to be replaced by an even older one. A year ago it was far from certain that Joe Biden would even win the Democratic nomination. Now he is poised to take the White House by storm.
Likewise, we have known for years that relations between France and the Muslim world were on a knife edge, ever since the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan massacres in Paris five years ago. There have been murders and arson attacks on the Catholic Church before. What could not have been foreseen, however, was that Emmanuel Macron’s declaration of war on Islamist terror in reaction to the beheading of a French teacher for showing his class the cartoons that were the pretext for the 2015 massacres would then lead by a chain reaction to the condemnation and boycott of France by the leaders of nominally friendly Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Egypt and especially Turkey.
The ferocity of President Erdogan’s denunciation of his French counterpart has astonished Western diplomats and alarmed the intelligence community. Erdogan used every inflammatory comparison in the book, from Crusaders to Nazis. Infuriated by Macron’s threat to cut off foreign funding of French Islam, he is deliberately whipping up paranoia in France by evoking a non-existent threat: a persecution of French Muslims. With France already facing violent protests against lockdown, the prospect now looms of what has been described as a “low-level civil war” in the banlieues, the desolate housing estates that ring French cities. As Marx and Engels might have said, a spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Islamist revolution.
And what of Britain? Battered but not broken by Covid-19, the country is preparing to enter a tunnel with only a flicker of light at the end. When asked if this month-long lockdown might be extended until the new year, Michael Gove was honest enough to reply: “Yes.”
In response, the political landscape is already shifting. Nigel Farage, as quick to dump Trump as he once was to embrace him, is rebranding himself as the leader of an anti-lockdown “Reform Party”. The last time Farage did this, conjuring the Brexit Party out of thin air, the Conservatives finally pressed Theresa May’s ejector button.
Boris Johnson was supposed to be the new James Bond: licensed to kill the new threat from the hard Right, while seeing off Jeremy Corbyn and the hard Left. All this came to pass, less than a year ago. Now, however, Boris Johnson is looking less like the late Sir Sean Connery as 007 and more like Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring. After all the tumult of the last 12 months, who could say with confidence that the Prime Minister will still be in his job a year from now?
One thing, however, is certain: the West is not done for yet. If the United States could survive four years of Trumpery, it will surely survive Uncle Joe, too. (Although it is, of course, by no means certain that Biden will last four years.) If France could survive five republics, four revolutions, three monarchies, two empires and one dictatorship since 1789, she can surely survive the fury of a Turkish demagogue.
What of the people of England? Nigel Farage may claim that they never have spoken yet, but when in fact they did speak last December, they rejected his brand of populist demagogy, just as they rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of anti-social and anti-Semitic socialism. Provided that the PM can offer consistent and coherent leadership in the coming weeks of maximum uncertainty, there is no reason why confidence in the Government should collapse.
We now know from the recently published Home Intelligence reports during the grim years of 1940-41 (The Spirit of the Blitz, edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang, OUP £30) that morale fluctuated, rumours abounded and some groups — including Jews and Catholics — were scapegoated by many. Yet the Blitz spirit was more than a myth: the British really did rally round Churchill and endured the almost unendurable because they believed that they would ultimately triumph over Hitler. The finest hour was made possible by faith in final victory.
Today’s ordeal is of an entirely different order from that of 1940-41, because the enemy is unseen and still largely unknown — hence the unpredictability of the pandemic. Yet one key aspect of the future can be predicted: that a Covid spirit is indeed emerging to match the Blitz spirit of fourscore years ago. This people — not only the English, but the British people — will pull through. And TheArticle will continue to give voice to a wide spectrum of opinion for as long as our growing army of members permits us to do so.
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