Salut!

Getting Brexit Done: how to be nice to gloating Leavers, and them to us

Guess who came to the celebratory Brexit dinner? Credit to my friend and confrere Gervase Webb for what he calls a damning indictment of the state of political journalism, a'list of liars and charlatans troughing triumphantly in Brown's Hotel'. Oops, I know and like at least a few of those named and shamed!

On this gloomy day in British history, with no reasons to be cheerful, it seems appropriate to update the list of things we can all do to repair all the damage done by the divisive, snarling debate on leaving the EU

Olive branches must naturally be offered both ways. Please feel free to add suggestions either camp might usefully adopt in a spirit of national reconciliation. And read, if you like, my farewell to Europe at this link.

Prepare for a bleak new Brexit age, starting now. But hey, Leavers 'love Europe'

Let us not descend to the nastiness of many, though I accept not most, Leavers.

There should be no talk of stench from Friday night's Brexit celebrations polluting everything for miles around.

It remains - great word - unbecoming to describe those left of the 17.4m (not the 17.4m or 67 per cent who voted Remain in 1975, but 2016's 52 per cent) as racist, xenophobic, far right or economically illiterate. Still less should we call them gammon, actually a key ingredient - with egg(s) and chips - of one of my favourite comfort food dishes..

We know that anyone fitting one or more of those descriptions will have voted Leave on 23/6/16, but we also know that not everyone voting Leave is any such thing. Try not to doubt it - hard, I know - when Brexiters declare "I love Europe but ..." and try even harder not to tell them they are from now on restricted in their EU travel to Magaluf. Not that a certain kind of Brexiter would mind that much.

Macron, Muslims and a forlorn search for le vivre ensemble

 

Picture courtesy of Nanda Gonzague, the photographer who worked  with me on a 2015 report on Muslim mothers campaigning for an end to the ghettoisation of education in Montpellier. See more of his photography at http://www.nanda-gonzague.com/

In case you wondered why news reports about France often contain no obvious official input, this may help.

 

The article that follows, an updated look at France’s perpetual struggle to understand and assimilate its large Muslim minority, cried out for a comment from the Élysée. There is none.
 
When I think of President Emmanuel Macron’s service presse - the first of those two words being a little Parisian joke - I imagine a bustling team of earnest, educated young fonctionnaires or perhaps graduates of the sort of grand public relations colleges you see in the smarter arrondissements. I don’t know for sure, though, because I have so rarely managed to have a meaningful exchange or conversation with anybody there. What, I keep wondering, do they actually do?

In 16 years on (mostly) and off,  I can recall a few invitations to the Élysée (merci), lots of requests to put my questions in e-mails and not a single response or hint of guidance. For this article, I got as close as an exasperated ´je suis complètement débordée (I’m swamped)’ and, miraculously, a returned phone call when I followed la débordée’s instructions to write. Unfortunately the line went dead immediately when I answered and, despite my follow-up  call and e-mail, that was that ....

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Islam, the West and the right to offend - but also to take offence

I have a new outlet for my work, Arab Weekly. It is a serious newspaper with some fine regular contributors and its editorial team includes a valued friend and colleague from my Abu Dhabi days, Richard Pretorious. This is the fifth item of mine to be published so far; all can be seen at this link. My thanks to the editor for his permission to reproduce these articles here ...

A trawl through history for evidence of countries permitting unqualified freedom of expression would be long and, almost certainly, fruitless.

The common cry on Western lips, more shrill than ever in an age of keyboard antagonists on social media, is: “It’s a free country. I’m entitled to speak my mind.”

The reality is that there always have been limits on what may be said, written and published. Obvious needs to protect national and individual security make it easy to work out why that should be the case.