“My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,” sang Don Henley. So heavy and so dim, he had to stop for the night. As the sun goes down on another winter’s day, my head is growing heavy, like it does in a depressive episode and my sight is growing dim, like it does when you feel oh so tired. Today is the worst of days: Donald Trump is about to become President Trump.
The victory of Donald Trump feels every bit as bad to me as the victory of his friend Nigel Farage last June. It’s the same but different. Farage’s victory represented a lifetime ambition. He is a right wing nationalist, a xenophobe, a bigot and someone who wanted to bring up the drawbridge from his country to Europe. Trump will bring up the drawbridge to the world. Be afraid, be very afraid.
You know me, my loyal reader. My politics is of the soft, cuddly, soggy, liberal left. I reject the extremes of the left as much as I reject the extremes of the right. The left in me believes that “by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone”, as the Labour Party constitution neatly puts it. I’m a liberal by nature, I am an internationalist by birth and conviction. I believe that we should always strive to ensure that our children get the opportunity to do better and achieve more than we did. I believe that everyone is equal, regardless of colour, regardless of where they live and how they live. Only man-made distractions, like religion, can get in the way and change that. These are some of the reasons I worry for the future of our country and the world.
Neither the EU nor Barack Obama were perfect. Nothing and no one is. There was and still remains a need to reform the EU once we have left, but it will always be better than inglorious isolation. We have decided to look inward, turn our backs on the world and its peoples and plough a furrow all on our own. The election of Donald Trump, a close political ally of the architect of Brexit, will build a wall and it won’t be just the wall between the USA and Mexico. It will be an economic wall, where every single decision will be taken on the basis of America’s prosperity and nothing else. Do not fall for the Trump rhetoric that says the UK will now be at the front of the line for trade deals. No one will be more delighted than Trump to see a weakened and divided UK within a weakened and divided Europe, except his close ally Vladimir Putin. The both aim to trample over us all.
My brand of wishy-washy liberal left politics is losing. In the UK we have a right wing Tory government pursuing a hard Brexit, in the USA we have Trump. In France, Marine Le Pen gains support, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders leads in the polls. Terrifyingly, with the world in conflict, with terrorism at or near our front door, we opt for nationalism, we lurch firmly to the political right.
My head is indeed heavy. Watching the inauguration of Trump reminds me of the celebrations of Farage, the pedlars of hate winning the biggest prizes. People like me “are all just prisoners here, of our own device”, lying in the bed that our democracy made for us.
When we leave the EU, I will remember the gurning face of Nigel Farage, the pin-up boy of leavers, and feel overwhelming sadness of what we once had and what we will become. And, if the world has not been blown to smithereens by then, I’ll gaze across the pond to see what’s left of America after two years of Donald Trump in the White House. And I know, with each passing day, that in my lifetime it will never change because, as Mr Henley also sang, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
