November 2024

On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All the influencers back him, and he’s all over social media’ (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). ‘Harris is all over social media too,’ I said. ‘Not the same,’ he said. He was right. I should have known better.

Keir Starmer described Badenoch’s election as a ‘proud moment for our country’. He presumably meant that Black British children will see a person like them at the helm of a major political party and believe that they can do it too. Does a poor Black immigrant child look at a wealthy Black person who hates immigrants and feel a dream take shape? Wouldn’t it be a prouder moment for our country if a white man were to lift the two-child benefit cap, which disproportionately impoverishes families of colour?

‘We die! You make money!’ was one of the slogans that HIV activists chanted at the New York Stock Exchange in 1997 in protest at pharmaceutical companies whose high drug prices had barred millions of people with the virus from accessing life-saving medicines.

‘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. 

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Our first stop in east Las Vegas was drenched in ersatz gore: fake zombie limbs, scattered femurs, a plastic skull. ‘GET OUT’, screamed drippy red letters painted on a bedsheet. A second bloody bedsheet said ‘HELP’. Mixed messages. I imagine the residents kept up their leftover Halloween decorations to dissuade the likes of us: coastal canvassers begging them to vote for Kamala Harris.

On Monday, 28 October, six small book collectives, including the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), published an open letter signed by a thousand writers (I am one of them) pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’ and have ‘never publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law’. This is the boycott that Palestinian civil society began calling for twenty years ago.