[Robin McAlpine Blog] The farce, the futility, the horror

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The farce, the futility, the horror

Different moments in time, different sets of circumstances, don’t just create facts on the ground, they generate a kind of mood, of tone. It’s almost an aesthetic. Note how the excesses of the rich seem to look the same over time – the Bezos wedding or a Great Gatsby party.

I’ve been trying to work out what Starmer and his awful crew of foreign policy advisers twisting and turning to try and not be on the wrong side of history over Gaza reminds me of. It came to me last night. It’s Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. There is something wistful, soft focus and almost Kodachrome about their silly bumbling. It is so petty you need to focus a bit to remind yourself of what is happening in the background.

That is the point about Catch 22. In Franz Kafka’s world it is all farcical and futile, from the very top to the very bottom. The point is that nothing means anything other than the meanings imposed on them for what appear arbitrary reasons. The farce and futility in Catch 22 has a background. It’s grinding, mind-numbing bureaucratic idiocy only happens in the foreground.

In the background, if you look, there you will find atrocity and horror. It is the contrast between the laughable, nonsensical bureaucratic stupidity of what is happening in the foreground and the awful atrocity of what is happening in the background that gives it its poignancy.

In the background are those images of starving children, their bones on display but not yet dead. It is enough to move even the Daily Express to tears. In the foreground is Starmer trying to find a way to do fuck all and yet by doing fuck all still somehow try and make us forget that he has supported the starvation of children from the beginning.

I want to be really, really clear about this because all the bumbling around might have distracted you. Keir Starmer has done everything he possibly can to not do anything to help a single child in Gaza. I am writing this at teatime on Wednesday and as of just now there is still not a single action he has taken which is designed to help a single Palestinian child.

All of it, everything, is about protecting Israel

In fact what he is really doing – with extreme effort – is trying to make sure that he protects Israel at all costs. All of it, everything, is about protecting Israel. That was why he gave his stamp of approval to the siege of Gaza on day one. That is why it took him more than a week to pathetically claim that he didn’t say what we all heard him say. He said to starve them.

So Israel starved them, and Starmer very clearly couldn’t have cared less. Atrocity after atrocity and what we got from him was an army of techniques to not do anything. For the longest time you could say ‘clear war crimes, probably genocide, definite UK complicity’ and he would reply ‘gotcha – you didn’t mention refugees’ (or sausages, depending which chapter of the book you’re on). Then he would sit down and get straight back to doing fuck all.

Well, not quite fuck all. He kept trying to negotiate an Israel-friendly trade deal. He greatly accelerated the amount of weapons exported to Israel. He gave them almost constant political cover. He suppressed all dissent in his party. He approved hundreds of spy flights over Gaza (he claims they didn’t provide targetting information to Israel but if there is one thing we know about Starmer is that he lies with great ease). He banned Palestine Action.

But the worse it looked for him (it looks shit for him and he is already one of history’s villains) the more creative he was in his efforts to do fuck all. He sanctioned two settlers or something. Two. Just individuals, not organisations. Which is to say fuck all. He eventually suspended the fewest arms shipments he possibly could while fighting in court to let the important sales go through.

Yet worse and worse it got. He started using words to express what we are supposed to believe is his personal view. The one that got me most was ‘intolerable’ – another Starmer lie, because he has clearly tolerated it all with great ease.

Meanwhile he came under increased pressure to ‘do something’. I personally doubt Starmer will shed a tear when the last Palestinian in Gaza is deported. He’s an extreme Zionist. But I believe Macron is sincere in his disgust. So when he came up with a way to do fuck all that signalled what seems to be his genuine anger, this got Labour backbenchers thinking.

What if Labour did fuck all too, the same fuck all as Macron? What if they recognised a Palestinian state diplomatically? They tried this on Starmer but he went full Joseph Heller. Here’s the not-made-up official position a per last week.

Britain is 100 per cent committed to recognising Palestine just as soon as Israel has, which Israel is not going to do, so blah blah. This will be the moment of maximum impact, the moment when Israel has already conceded a Palestinian state which it is never going to concede. Then once there is literally no point in the UK recognising Palestine, then we’ll gain our maximum impact.

So as of last week Starmer’s solution to Gaza was to wait until Israel unilaterally agreed to a two-state solution and began peace negotiations to that effect and then do the very, very minimum possible – recognise a state which its main opponent had already recognised.

He should sanction the living bejesus out of every single Israeli interest, the oligarchs who walk among us, the spies and the lobbyists, the business interests, the cultural figures, its financial institutions, its politicians

This version of fuck all lasted for weeks with no-one pointing out that it was a totally fucking lie. But then everything changed. Keir Starmer’s base turned on him – the Daily Express couldn’t take any more of what Starmer was taking with ease. Even the Daily Express couldn’t watch children starve, and hard right tabloids are Keir’s base.

Which mean he had to increase the adjectives he was attaching to his repeated announcements that he was doing fuck all. Now he was doing fuck all passionately. His dignified humanity now absolutely demanded he did fuck all and he wanted you to know that the reason he was doing fuck all was his humanity.

Which was fine because by doing fuck all it opened the path to Israel doing the right thing, doing a full U-turn and recognising Palestine. Remember, zero is a mathematical concept which renders everything you multiply it by as zero. Fuck all with cherries on top is literally just fuck all.

As the pressure grew he got on with doing fuck all by promising to organise a phone chat with his pals. For two days, suddenly, Keir was doing something. He briefed and briefed that he was organising a phone call. He did the phone call and he and his pals all collectively agreed to do fuck all. Which was a triumph for Starmer because now he’d taken an action which still resulted in fuck all.

That’s Keir Starmer – a man of action. What did you do during the war? I organised a phone call. What came of that? Two days of media coverage about me organising a phone call. No, what came of the call? Eh, I just explained it.

From here this moral vacuum, this meat puppet faking basic humanity, this void of decency, this war criminal, ran straight to Trump and asked Trump if Trump would mind if Keir did fuck all. Trump said to fire in.

So Keir did fuck all. I mean, he said words about something he might do in the future if sixteen caveats are met. You know the type, standing outside Auschwitz promising to free the captives subject to a non-disclosure agreement and them assigning all publish rights about their experience to EMI Sony in perpetuity, and a check to see none of them have ever supported Palestine Action. He’s that kind of guy.

So he promised to one day recognise a state that doesn’t exist and can’t exist because it’s being bombed out of existence with help from Keir. And he did all of this to protect Israel. He is recognising Palestine because he knows it is meaningless. He knows it is the definition of fuck all. He is doing it because it stops people calling for what he should do.

He should sanction the living bejesus out of every single Israeli interest, the oligarchs who walk among us, the spies and the lobbyists, the business interests, the cultural figures, its financial institutions, its politicians. Like we did with Russia in 30 seconds.

But it has taken Keir Starmer two years to transition from full personal support for a starvation blockade to the point where he is willing to do fuck all about it. The stomach churning thing is that he’s been talking all the way through this like he’s a fucking human or something.

Yeah, like I say, if it looks like an episode of the Thick of It set in the middle of the Rwandan genocide then you’re about there. Just keep those bombing patterns tight Yosarian and we’ll get back to you with further instructions at a later date. But don’t look behind you. It’s awful.

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