Next Christmas I think I’m going to go to England for my holiday. The weather’s lovely, this time of year. Bright and sunny. Don’t care about ‘hot’. Just ‘dry’. So I’m going to see if I can fly there on my airmiles, otherwise we can’t book it. Should I check flights to Europe, or non-Europe? Ooooohhhh! I even managed to play tennis this morning. On a Monday!!!

Donald Trump has announced that ‘he’s going to clamp down on anti-semitism’ after five people were stabbed at a Chanukah party on Saturday in New York. Earlier this month 4 people were shot dead at a Jewish store in New Jersey. No similar attacks have happened in Tennessee or North Dakota. Yet.

So Donald will increase prison sentences for such acts, change the laws a bit, tweak a definition of ‘racially motivated’, all the usual crap that reactionaries love. Locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. The equivalent of ‘throwing more money at the NHS’.

Because these things are sticking plasters to cope with the effect. They don’t address the causes. Which is very symptomatic of Trump. With every incident of gunning down 35 kids at some school, Mr Prez finds some stupidly narrow and specific ‘cause’, like ‘mental illness’, like ‘right wing activists’, like anything at which to point blame that isn’t ‘guns’.

And the underlying cause of this recent wave of anti-semitism in the States is the culture of hard right winginess which has seemed to enable the extremists, to give them an acceptable basis from which to become ‘creative’. Same as Corbyn did over here. He made a culture of bullying, harassing and intimidation acceptable within his party and it spread.

So if Trump wants to really do something, he needs to reign in the right wing, he needs to label them as ‘murderers’ when they murder, rather than ‘part of a riot’. He needs to create a more tolerant, decent, centrist environment from which good things happen. He needs to stop creating ‘enemies’ and building fucking walls to keep them out.

New Year’s approaches, my main source of ‘seasonal cheer’ is that I’m not an Arsenal fan.

Happy Monday

A xxxx