‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery. Then Brick Lane, with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls.’
At PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on 4 November, teams of ushers were handing out signs that said: ‘Trump will fix it.’ They didn’t allow homemade signs because it was a safety risk, they said, though it also meant they could control what appeared in photos and videos. Seating was carefully orchestrated too: teams of workers wearing T-shirts with union logos and hard hats were positioned close to the stage, behind Trump, so the cameras would show him surrounded by cheering blue-collar supporters. Empty seats were kept out of frame, though there weren’t many of them. For weeks leading up to the US election, Democratic Party superstars took aim at Trump’s ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes’, in Barack Obama’s words. But the election result suggests a harsh truth: Democrats needed to do a better job of courting Trump’s crowds rather than dismissing them.
Kamala Harris’s supporters at Howard University on election night. Photo © Jemal Countess / UPI / Alamy
The next morning, the city was silent. DC is openly hostile to Trump: more than 90 per cent of voters backed Harris. Howard was empty, save for a handful of tired campaign workers. There were two students walking by the barricades. ‘All right, so what country are we moving to?’ one asked. ‘What the fuck, Georgia?’
At the end of October, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, began an eighteen-month jail sentence, following contempt proceedings for breach of an injunction. This is the fifth time Robinson has been sentenced to prison since he began to play a leading role in the far right including his imprisonment for ten months in 2018 for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial in Leeds.
Massanassa, Valencia, Spain, 31 October 2024. Photo © Vicente Sargues / Alamy
Following last week’s floods in the city and province of Valencia in eastern Spain, a spectacular blame game began between the authorities in Madrid and the regional government of Valencia. It had to be someone else’s fault that the southern suburbs of Valencia flooded so badly.
‘Noonday Rest’ by Mohammed al-Hawajri, after Jean-François Millet
The parliamentary resolution, entitled ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’, was jointly conceived by the three governing parties and the opposition Christian Democrats. Hours after Olaf Scholz sacked his FDP finance minister, bringing an end to the governing coalition and heralding new elections, the Bundestag passed the resolution this morning by a large majority. The AfD also voted in favour. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch (a scion of the royal House of Oldenburg whose maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister), paid thanks to the parties behind the resolution, in particular the Greens, for following the AfD’s lead in linking antisemitism to immigration, the left and Islam. ‘Reality has caught up with them,’ she said. ‘The proposed solution in their motion also goes in our direction … Put Muslim antisemites on the plane and back home.’
Nabatiyeh, south Lebanon, after a night of Israeli airstrikes. Sunday, 13 October 2024. Photo © Alamy / AP / Mohammed Zaatari
The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.