Keir Starmer has demanded a “swift, agile and visible response” to this week’s racist attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green. Last Saturday, by sheer chance, I found myself lost on my bike in east London, and cycling along Cable Street, the scene of the 1936 rout of Oswald Mosley’s antisemitic fascist thugs by local Jews and communists. I was looking for the pub Ian Gandalf McKellen had bought in partnership with Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian oligarch given a peerage by Boris Johnson two years after the prime minister gave his own security detail the slip, turning up unaccompanied in Italy to meet Lebedev’s ex-KGB-officer father at a lavish party; a month after a Russian novichok nerve agent attack left a British mother of three dead in Salisbury; and five years after Johnson had blamed the EU for Putin’s annexation of the Crimea.
Despite requests from opposition parties, the security vetting procedures relating to the KGB officer’s son’s Boris-bestowed peerage were suppressed by the Boris Johnson Conservative government in order to “protect national security”. Remember that? No. Thought not. Perhaps if Keir Starmer had been cynical enough to invoke that same excuse regarding Peter Mandelson he, like Boris Johnson, would have been able to flit equally easily away from scandal, untouched as usual, and lionised by the rightwing press for his charmingly reckless behaviour. As usual, there seem to be different standards for politicians on the right who, not being expected to have any morals or ethics, can hardly be criticised for not displaying any. It’s like blaming a tapeworm for not being a butterfly.
But it’s quite hard now to remember any details of the collective fever dream of the prime-ministership of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson. Were we all drunk?
Anyway, I was hoping to find Ian Gandalf McKellen’s pub and see the Lord of the Rings film prop of Gandalf’s staff, which Ian Gandalf McKellen has had mounted behind the bar. About a quarter of a century ago now, Ian Gandalf McKellen slagged me off really loudly in a West End theatre green room without knowing I was there, so once a year I like to go to his and the KGB officer’s son’s pub and try to involve random strangers in the bar in a discussion of how bad an actor, and a person, I think he is, and how rubbish his rubbish Gandalf staff is.
My aim is always to get a member of the public to agree that only an idiot would want to display Ian Gandalf McKellen’s rubbish Gandalf staff in their pub because Ian Gandalf McKellen’s rubbish Gandalf staff looks like a human turd that has been flattened and elongated with a rolling pin, and then frozen and lacquered. And once someone has finally agreed with this, a process which can take many hours, I slam down my unfinished pint of ‘Igginbottom’s Wrench, shout “Fly, you fools!” at the assembled drinkers, and leave. Revenge is a dish best served cold. In that respect, it is the same as a gala pie.
But this year’s ritual of repressed rage will have to wait. Because I got lost. Like a hobbit in a mine. And instead I ended up on Cable Street staring, for the first time, at Dave Binnington and colleagues’ amazing three-dimensional mural of the Battle of Cable Street, which rivals Diego Rivera in the powerful political painting stakes. A superb management of vertiginous perspective puts the viewer almost in the Cable Street gutter, looking up as Oswald Mosley’s fascists try to storm the barricades the Jewish and trade union protesters have erected in the deliberately provocative march’s progress. Top right, you can even see a local householder emptying a pot of urine over the fascists, and the policemen protecting them. Now that’s what I call a swift, visible and agile response.
Ironically, the grandson of Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists’ leader, is Louis Mosley, the CEO of the British division of Palantir, the Trump-loyalist tech company currently being handed all our data by the Labour government, in a deal initially encouraged by the now disgraced Peter Mandelson. It shouldn’t matter that both Louis Mosley’s grandfather, and father as a younger man, were both famous fascists. It only matters because one could deduce that Palantir’s co-founder Alex Karp, who is Jewish, admittedly, was fascinated enough by Oswald Mosley to headhunt Louis Mosley in the first place.
Where is Starmer’s ‘swift, agile and visible’ response to X? To Farage’s failure to apologise for antisemitism? To Nick Timothy?
According to the New York Post, “As soon as [Louis] Mosley sat down, Karp began reciting from memory, for several minutes, one of Oswald’s 1939 speeches demanding Britain seek peace with Nazi Germany. When finished, Karp executed tai chi moves and walked out without saying goodbye. Mosley sat stunned, convinced his family’s past had torpedoed him. Instead, he was hired and now runs Palantir’s UK business.”
One could be forgiven for thinking Karp’s quoting of Oswald Mosley was an interview mind game. But the recent publication of his Palantir manifesto, “The Technological Republic”, makes his admiration for fascist values clear. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive … Certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.”
The Golders Green attacks do not happen in a vacuum. They take place against the background of a normalisation of racist and fascist rhetoric, algorithmically amplified by Elon Musk and social media, ignored when verifiably attributed by dozens of witnesses to the young Nigel Farage, and actively praised by party leader Kemi Badenoch when her shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, called for a different religious group, in this case Muslims, to be banned from public prayer. Where is Starmer’s “swift, agile and visible” response to Musk’s X? To Farage’s failure to apologise for his antisemitism? To Nick Timothy and the Tories? And, most of all, where is our collective rebuke to the monstrous ghost-faced Sharon Osbourne, declaring she will march alongside the sunbed fraudster Tommy Robinson?
(Osbourne betrays the legacy of her late husband Ozzy’s proto-metal protest song War Pigs, and I speak as the man who wrote the programme notes for the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Black Sabbath ballet. As a professional virtue-signaller, it’s not a commission I would have accepted had I known any royalties from the piece would have found their way into the pockets of a supporter of fascism. “Death and hatred to mankind! Poisoning their brainwashed minds! Oh Lord, yeah!”)
The rocks burn. The seas boil. Oswald Mosley’s fascists tried to swarm over physical barricades where they could be easily seen and beaten back. But Louis Mosley’s fascist company seeps into our lives silently like an odourless gas, oozing into every aspect of our day-to-day being, even after Alex Karp’s at-times-nakedly-supremacist Palantir manifesto was put out there for everyone to read. And soon all our data will be at his disposal, and thus at the disposal of a fellow traveller like Nigel Farage when he becomes our next prime minister, just as it currently is for the American military in Iran and Trump’s Ice stormtroopers. And what is Starmer’s response to this? Is it swift, visible and agile? Is it fuck. It is to bend over and ask for another king-size serving of Palantir sausage, chopped up into convenient 12-inch sections at a very reasonable price of £750m a slice.
Peter Thiel’s evil all-seeing Palantir company takes its name, brilliantly, from the necromancer Saruman’s evil all-seeing orb in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Perhaps if I get Gandalf’s magic stick from that pub and whack it with it, it will break. And we’re back where we came in! Peace!! I’m outta here!!! You shoulda killed me last year!!!!
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. He is co-hosting a screening of the rockumentary King Rocker, with director Michael Cumming and star Robert Lloyd, and launching his new podcast, Joking Apart, at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival tomorrow, Saturday 2 May. And he 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.