The ‘Guardian’ Are Beginning To Feel The Winds Of Change

It's always fun when 'Guardian' staffers go out amongst the people of this fair land...

As strange as it may sound, Rugeley felt like a good place to feel the global shock waves from the inauguration of Donald Trump – dutifully attended, let’s not forget, by the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos – and to find out what people thought about his style of politics. Last summer, the result in the local constituency of Cannock Chase saw the first stirrings of a change that has since gripped national politics: Labour and the Tories finished on 36% and 29% of the vote respectively, while the Anglo-Trumpers of Reform UK took a very impressive 27%.

And if it were run right now, Labour would be lucky to get into double figures, wouldn’t they? 

As this shift has played out, there have been recent suggestions that any British appetite for Trump-style politics is bound to be limited.

Well, maybe you shouldn’t believe all you’re told.  

In Rugeley, it did not feel like that.

See? 

Our first stop was a bustling community centre, where a parent and toddler group was happening next to a weekly lunch for pensioners – and we got a sharp sense of how the quiet privations and disappointments of 21st-century English lives have opened people to the specious promises of hard-right populism.

What 'hard - right populism', John?  

We had a long conversation with Emma and Cian, a couple who had come with their baby. “This is a very, very quiet town – it always has been,” she said. “Not a lot goes on around here … and nothing lasts long.” To most people, Cian told me, the arrival and eventual winding-down of the Amazon warehouse had barely registered. He didn’t know anyone who had worked there. “It’s just a big blue building at the end of the town that’ll be gone soon.” I wondered: when the government changed last year, did it make them feel any different about the future? “No,” said Emma, wearily. “We don’t expect anything out of what we’re told.”

Not exactly the fires of revolution, but maybe those aren't too far off... 

What if a Trump-type figure promised to make Britain great again? She laughed, and glanced at her partner. “We’ve got different opinions on that,” she said. “I kind of like what he’s doing. I wish more would be put into the UK. I think we need someone with a bit more of … an oomph about them.”

Oh dear! Seizing on a brown face like a drowning man seizing a lifebelt, John tries again:

Nearby, we met Kenan, a Turkish-born Just Eat driver – forced into the world of endless delivery shifts, he said, when his IT business went bust during the pandemic. When I mentioned Trump, his face lit up.

“He’s the man,” he said. “He’s the man.” “He’s reckless,” he told me, and he was not using that word as a pejorative. “He does what he says, not like other politicians. They say they’re going to do something with the economy, and they don’t do it. But Donald Trump does.” Did it feel strange to be bigging up someone so set against immigration? “As a foreigner,” he said, “I’ve seen people only using the system. And I’m working 12 or 13 hours a day.”

Heh! And why shouldn't he be aggrieved by that, John? Why should he feel solidarity with them? 

As darkness fell, we sat in a car park, listening to the first Trump speech of inauguration day with one of the car windows down.

The locals probably thought you were dogging…. 

A white transit van pulled up next to us: inside was a father and his three kids. He began telling us the details of his life before we even asked about them. “My dad was in world war two,” he said. “When he left the navy, he had three cement wagons, and he put the concrete in Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham.” His daily existence, by contrast, was a mess of financial hardship, the impossibility of combining childcare with work, a dire shortage of mental health provision and the impossibilities of the benefits system. Four days a week, he said, he hardly ate. He was now 50: he had voted only once in his life, and it was for Reform UK. “Some of the things Trump says, some of the things Elon Musk says, some of the things Reform UK say – they sound good,” he said. “But it’s action you want in this country.”

I fear one day we'll see it, and it won't be something John will be rushing out to cover.... 

When Your Restaurant Review Comes With A Side Order...

...of diversity fawning:

Some restaurants are just a nice place to go for dinner. Yemen Heaven in York is obviously that. You will eat well there.

That's it, Jay, that's all that's needed, right? Recommendations for where to take the little ladie or genrtleman for a nice Valentines Day meal? 

But the restaurant is more than that.

Oh. Clearly not.  

Much like Arabic Flavour in Aberystwyth, which I visited last year, it is both the story of exile and an act of memory. It is the product of one woman’s determination to maintain her family’s traditions; to free the country of her birth from a single narrative of war and hardship, however overwhelming that narrative might seem right now.

*sigh* Anyone else just go to a restaurant to eat some great food and not have washing up afterwards? I do. History and current geopolitical affairs are for the telly afterwards. 

Muna Al-Maflehi was born in Taiz, a brown stone city in the highlands of southwestern Yemen, known before the current civil war for its quality coffee production and for the abundant citrus fields with which it is surrounded. When she was seven, Muna moved with her family to Saudi Arabia, where her father taught her the dishes his father had cooked for him. It was a way of keeping alive a connection to the country and culture they had left behind. In 2013, looking for a better life, she moved with her five children to live near Salzburg. There she started her first food-delivery business before, in 2017, following close relatives to York.

So she’s moved around a lot. Why? 

The plan was always to open a restaurant, but it’s never easy; harder still for those who are newly arrived. Eventually, they found an old pub, the Spread Eagle on Walmgate, in need of custodians and love. The wood-panelling and parquet is still there, and so is the bar, though beaten copper teapots now stand upon it. Otherwise, the space has been carefully papered and polished, and rubber plants strategically placed. According to the blackboard on the pavement by the front door, there is now a “secret Mediterranean garden” for smoking shisha out back.

Just what’s needed, I suppose. Say, why aren’t the usual suspects complaining about this? Why does she get a pass? 

Shortly before they were due to open, at the end of 2021, the newly decorated restaurant was broken into and ripped apart by vandals who splattered the walls with paint. “It was like a bomb had just hit it,” Muna told the York Press at the time, despairingly. “It was like being in the war in Yemen. I couldn’t believe that this had happened in the UK.”

Obviously the war in Yemen was a fairly tame affair!

But the community wanted the restaurant. A crowdfunder was launched. More than £21,000 was raised. Yemen Heaven opened and it remains very much a family affair.

Well, if 'the community' wanted it, they got it. But which 'community' was it, I wonder? 

Oh, Polly, Labour Never Saw A Policy Disaster They Didn’t Love…

WFH is now coming under accelerating attack. JP Morgan will now require employees to spend five days a week in the office and other big companies may soon follow suit. A perverse strain of rightwing thought opposes almost any social progress that improves other people’s lives. This Scrooge-like instinct yearns to make work as grindingly hard and low-paid as possible. Recall Jacob Rees-Mogg pacing civil service offices like the Child Catcher, leaving “sorry you were out when I visited” notes on employees’ desks in 2022. The same age-old sentiment prompted the CBI chair, Rupert Soames, to savage Labour’s flagship anti-gig economy employment rights bill on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, warning that the new bill would force businesses to let people go.

Now, I'm in favour of WFH, but I'm aware it's within the gift of my employer. At the moment, it's considered a benefit to the workforce - one the greedy bastards in the Treasury haven't figured out how to tax yet - so it's likely to stay. And if it didn't, well, there are other firms... 

When Whatton in Nottinghamshire was severely flooded on Tuesday, villagers criticised the Environment Agency for removing its flood warning prematurely, leaving them unprepared. That may be so, but the Telegraph chose to convert an apparent failure into WFH warfare, claiming the agency’s flood resilience team in Nottingham “appears to have shifted to a working from home culture in recent years”. Evidence? “A job advert from last month said members of the team could ‘blend home working’ with time in the Nottingham Trentside office.” The agency bristled with indignation, and confirmed that the floods had nothing to do with anyone working from home.

Public sector workers are hopelessly incompetent whether in the office or at home.  

WFH battle lines seemed, until recently, clearly drawn. Last year, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said it was “bizarre” that Rees-Mogg, one of his predecessors, had been “declaring war on people working from home” and praised the “real economic benefits” of Labour’s flexible working policies.

To whom? 

Much evidence suggests that WFH benefits employees and employers alike.

Glad to hear it, but I notice you don't offer any evidence.  

The government needs to get a grip on its mixed messages. Does it want to be nice to employees, or nasty?

Why does it decide to be either? 

It should ignore the Tories’ accusations that it is kowtowing to union paymasters, and emphasise how new employment rights will help civilise working life. Growth-boosting plans to get “economically inactive” people with disabilities or caring responsibilities into jobs will only succeed with maximum flexibility. And WFH, remember, is free, which makes it look like a very sensible policy in a year when large pay rises seem unlikely. It’s time to count effectiveness, not desk hours.

Spoken like someone who knows her own effectiveness will never be judged... 

This Is Just Insider Language…

For me, becoming a mother was an experience as disorienting and confusing as moving to a new country. I had to learn new behaviours and customs as well as which brands of nappy and baby food to buy. And little did I know that moving to the Netherlands after the birth of my first child would entail having to learn a whole new tongue besides Dutch.

Which one? 

I’m not talking about motherese, the high-pitched singsong ways parents speak to their children, but about the highly specific language mothers and fathers around the world now use to talk about being parents.

Eh? 

Unsure of myself, I started reading parenting books and spent a lot of time on online forums, where I tried to find answers to my questions – or, when there weren’t any, then at least some support or understanding.

Not the place I'd choose to go to for that, but you do you, eh? 

It was on BabyCenter that I first discovered this new parenting language. I often found myself resorting to Google to understand what people were saying. I had to familiarise myself with acronyms such as DS and DD (dear son and dear daughter), CS (caesarean section), EB (extended breastfeeding) and CIO (cry it out).

All groups evolve their own language, didn't you learn that on the internet?  

It didn’t take me long to notice that even the things I read in Polish were translations of books by English-speaking authors such as Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, which I suffered through just to try to understand why my daughter would not stop crying. Spoiler alert: it did not help.

Well, since you're supposedly multilingual, what does it matter? 

My copy of American parenting expert Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was in English – despite being translated into 50 languages, including Polish – and after a while so was everything else I was reading.

And why is that an issue? I cannot wrap my head around what this column is really about...

And, of course, books and articles about the way parents in Europe and other places raise their children are extremely popular in the US and the UK. However, from my experience, US and UK parenting ideas have a bigger sway in Europe than the other way around. What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?

I don't know, and you don't advance a theory, so why is it concerning you?  

So, You're Liars?

The 'Guardian' prints another sob-story by illegal immigrants:

There were 39 of us on the barge, from different countries. We are people escaping torture, persecution and imprisonment.

What, in France? Oh, please! 

We were forced to leave our homes, our jobs and our families, and we hoped to find safety in the UK.

You had safety in France. You left it.  

When we were told we would be moved to the Bibby Stockholm, we became worried, not least because we were warned it was dangerous. However, we are law-abiding and wanted to respect the decision of the authorities.

If you were law abiding, you'd have followed our immigration laws. But you didn't, did you? 

On board, although none of us are criminals, we were constrained by the tight security, and we felt far removed from normal life.

You are all criminal. That's the reason for your removal from normal life.  

The government is putting us against the public, by saying this is your taxpayers’ money being wasted on asylum seekers.

I think you'll find that the public is fully in agreement with the government, for once. 

We feel as if we are being hunted by the Home Office, when all we want now is a system that treats us fairly, a swift interview, a stable future and a voice.

And if that 'swift interview' doesn't grant you the future you want? What then? You'll give up trying to enter the UK illegally? 

Yeah, sure.