In the wake of last weekend’s Unite the Kingdom festival of al fresco cocaine consumption, competitive street urination and unambiguous amplified Islamophobia, students of social history were reminded of where all this began, with Enoch Powell’s prophecy of rivers of blood. Powell was half right about the rivers. Because racism is riding in on rivers of piss.
Surveying the turning yellow tide of British public opinion from America, the US vice-president, JD Vance-Neatbeard, urged anti-immigration activists in the UK to “keep on going”. Keep on going what, Neatbeard? Keep on going to the toilet in the street? That’s all very well for Neatbeard to say. He doesn’t have to mop down all the alleyways.
But Neatbeard’s comments are a reminder that it isn’t just Trump that is the problem. The US administration has stated explicitly that it wants European liberal democracies to fail (because they are a breeding ground for those familiar bedfellows of Islam, anarchy and trans people), and its creeping Christian nationalist ethos is intended to outlive the wobbling orange-faced sex offender that currently simply facilitates it, as a fatal African riverborne virus hollows out the body of a host hippo and then moves on, leaving its bloated corpse to float downstream unmissed.
The internet is currently obsessed with Donald Trump’s right hand. At best it appears bruised, though this could just be the logical end result of pressure caused by a kind of nuclear escalation of extremely firm handshakes with foreign dignitaries for which Trump has only himself to blame. The inevitable end point of this process is Trump meeting the disrespectful head of some developing-world autocracy who simply feeds the president’s hand directly into mangle and flattens it, meaning Trump would always be match-ready for a game of table tennis or a spot of air traffic control overtime.
At worst, the visible makeup on Trump’s tiny paw appears to conceal a bruising, or a wound even, as if all the toxicity of his horrible history is leaking out into the world through the back of his hand, a Picture of Dorian Gray in fist form. American commentators in the growing community of Trump Hand Watchers can be forgiven for hoping that Trump is ill – and let’s not forget Trump himself declared “Good! I’m glad he’s dead!” when told of the passing of former FBI head Robert Mueller, a statesmanlike eulogy to rival Senator Mike Mansfield’s for John F Kennedy: “A piece of each of us died at that moment.”
If Five Million Pound Farage were to die, it’s clear the ragbag of fantasists and losers arranged around him would collapse like a badly mixed cake of racism and avarice. Nadhim Zahawi isn’t about to become a beacon around which the British far right can coalesce, and will have to find yet another way of making enough money to heat his horses’ stables.
But if Trump were to pass away, would Neatbeard simply ooze into the vacated mould, like Unite the Kingdom urine trickling into cracks between the Westminster cobblestones? Would it make any difference? People close to Trump have probably already placed bets on the precise hour of his passing with prediction markets, with the benefit of a little insider knowledge.
When Trump sneezes, Farage catches the mucus mid-flight in a jiffy bag, and puts it in the fridge to have later with a Carr’s water biscuit
But do American Democrats, and American law enforcers, and American journalists, observing the demonstrable death of their democracy at high speed, regret all the times they could have pushed harder on the convicted fraudster and, for any number of different reasons, seen him impeached or even imprisoned? Did they just believe that the apparently impregnable structures of their democracy would hold fast whatever? Do they regret what now looks like complacency? And what lessons are there here for us? Because when Donald Trump sneezes, Nigel Farage jumps up in the air, catches the mucus mid-flight in a jiffy bag, and puts it in the fridge to have later with a Carr’s water biscuit.
The tragedy is that, over the last week, when Labour should have pressed their advantage on Farage’s £5m cryptocurrency bung, and begun the process of saving Britain from sliding into the same future fascist hell Donald Trump has already road-tested Stateside on Reform’s behalf, they instead decided to engage in a massive, credibility-sapping public spat about who should lead the doomed party, a bunch of dickhead Titanic deckhands involved in a complicated dispute about organising a rota for who gets to rearrange the deckchairs, while a rioting group of incontinent passengers set fire to any non-whites also aboard and throw their charred bodies over the safety rails in the hope that will make the situation better somehow.
We are at a crossroads. Andy Burnham’s Reform opponent in Makerfield, Robert Kenyon, has swiftly purged his social media pages of likes and links to some very unpleasant extremist far-right figures, trying to hide who he obviously is. Raise the Colours activists’ own social media posts reveal them in Birmingham last week actively provoking local people with taunts and insults, their leader Ryan Bridge taking a night off from his usual alleged business of carrying out food poisoning complaint scams on Spanish hotels. Raw and naked racism was platformed by the far right on a stage in Trafalgar Square last Saturday, and no one has been prosecuted, which doesn’t square up especially well with Keir “Island of Strangers” Starmer’s speech the day before about his belated support for the same tolerant British values he threw under the bus in pursuit of the elusive mass public urination vote.
Meanwhile, in America, it transpires that Trump is building a nuclear-proof six-storey supervillain military fortress complex underneath his White House “ballroom” at a speed that significantly dwarfs the progress of our own HS2 project. And here at home, the UK Climate Change Committee has announced that the percentage of the country that qualifies as farmable land will have decreased from 40% in 1990 to 10% by 2050. So the important thing, clearly, is to make everyone concentrate on whether the Labour party is run by a pocket-Machiavelli Mandelson protégé wrist-deep in the business of Palantir’s catastrophic acquisition of the nation’s data, or a bloke your sister fancies. Idiots.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.