The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 11 August 2019 *** 25
Tanya Gold
Millennials want a
‘strongman’ leader?
Truly, they are lost
hat is sensed at the
edges comes closer.
Evidence is here from a
report called The Politics
of Belonging by the
conservative think tank
Onward – or Backward, if you want to
be droll – and, having read the report, I
need laughter.
It is accompanied by polling – of
5,000 British people – that says the
following:
The idea that “freedom is security”
has passed out of fashion. Two thirds
of people want a society that “focuses
on giving people more security”,
rather than a society that “focuses on
giving people more freedom”.
Some 71 per cent think too many
people live in cities; 66 per cent think
that too many people – do they mean
themselves? – are over-educated; 63
per cent of people think that
marriage has fallen out of favour due
to a “decline in family commitment
and values”.
Backward did not ask the question:
“Would you, personally, like to live in
Downton Abbey if it was real?” I wish
they had.
I forecast 82 per cent wanting to live
in Downton Abbey if it was real, and
98 per cent if it wasn’t.
But people wishing to live in 1912- or rather an imagined 1912, because
1912 was not really like that – is not the
worst of it.
This is the worst of it: 58 per cent
of Britons would like “a strong leader
who does not have to bother with
parliament”. That means, although I
think they don’t know it, they would
like a leader who does not have to
bother with them.
So the fashionable quasi-tyrant
chic – those photographs of a topless
Vladimir Putin herding goats and
Donald Trump shouting about
immigrants – has had an impact. So
has the Avengers franchise. People
clearly think Iron Man is real.
Let’s name it autocracy advertorial:
steal my style – LOL – and I’ll steal
everything. They say they want
democracy – 84 per cent! – but they
think only Iron Man can deliver it.
Elsewhere in crazy-land, by which
I mean the UK, 26 per cent us would
like the Army to run the country.
The Army? Why the Army? Why
not, I don’t know, actors?
There was a clue to this touching
faith in the Army to deliver a
functional social democracy in
Backward’s report. Eighty per cent
want “experts”, not government, to
run the country. The Army are expert.
But not at governing. Not in the way
we are used to.
That wasn’t really the worst of it. I
was joking about that earlier.
This is the worst of it: among 25 to
34-year-olds – the young, the glib, the
lovely – a whopping 36 per cent seek
Army rule.
That is more than the governing
party, or the opposition, is polling. Are
they drunk?
I long for more details of how,
exactly, these 25- to 34-year-olds think
military dictatorship would impact on
them personally. Do they think they
will get to ride on tanks painted with
rainbows? Will everyone get a house
for free?
Meanwhile, 26 per cent think
that democracy is a bad way to run a
country, and 66 per cent would like
some form of “strongman” leader. I put
“strongman” in scare quotes because
they are rarely strong. What they
really are is angry.
Even so, that is what 25 to 34-year-
olds have been thinking about, when
I thought they were merely writing
novels made of emoticons while taking
selfies and ordering pizza by drone.
They were dreaming of militarydictatorship and tyrants patting
children’s heads while locking up
unfriendly journalists.
Do they know that tyranny does
not have a fair returns policy; if you do
not like it, you cannot just take it back?
They should listen to the over-75s
who, having watched their parents
die for democracy, think that,
though sometimes exhausting and
disappointing, it is rather a good thing.
Only 3 per cent dislike it, which,
considering their age, adds a new
dimension to the concept of the dying
of the light.
This, then, is the tolling of the bell;
and the only thing I can think of to
cheer me is that Jacob Rees-Mogg,
under advisement from his special
advisers, might start dressing like
Hermann Göring, and John
McDonnell like Benito Mussolini,
which will be amusing for about 15
seconds.
I know millennials are frightened –
of the housing crisis, the gig economy,
ebbing public services, the despoiling
of the planet and much else.
They are weaned on slick solutions
and the illusion of too much choice.
I give you this for tyranny: it is
decisive. Will it in, and they won’t
have to make another decision for
some time. If they feel powerlessness
now – well, wait a little. They will have
a real lesson in powerlessness.
“This research marks a break with
60 years of liberal consensus,” said
the Tory peer Lord Shaughnessy, who
advises Backward.
And I can only say, as they do in The
West Wing, the US drama that gave
viewers a liberal, Nobel Prize-winning
president in the George W Bush years
as a palliative (because we are back to
actors) – you think?Read more
telegraph.co.uk/
opinion
Twitter
@TanyaGold1V
enice asserts herself, as she used
to do when she was a mistress of
the Roman Empire, and ceased
to do after Napoleon destroyed the
republic in 1797. She has finally
decided to ban cruise ships from the
Guidecca Canal. So, if you want to see
the weirdest city on Earth, created
when people running from barbarians
got rich on a sand bank by mistake,
you must at least leave your ship.
Native Venetians, who are fleeing at
the rate of three a day, have protested
against the vast liners for 20 years.
They stand on the Bridge of Sighs with
rude banners; they harass the ships
with punts; they consider charging
entry fees to the city.
The end point, though, was a cruise
ship called MSC Opera hitting the San
Basilio pier, and a smaller boat called
the River Countess, in June. But that’s
just the sort of thing that will happen if
you sail a 65,591-ton ship through a
150-metre channel lined with fragile
medieval buildings. It is stupid. In
footage recorded on the ship,
passengers screamed “Hold on!” at
each other, which was ludicrous.
Venice was always going to lose that
battle – on weight, on scale and by
being from the 12th century. It was
only a matter of time before a ship hit
the Doge’s Palace, and ended Venice
again. It would be an incredible
metaphor for – well, everything I can
think of. It won’t happen now.
I can’t feel too sorry for the
Venetians, even if they feel very sorry
for themselves. They blew up the
Parthenon on the Acropolis in 1687,
but to be fair, the defending Turks had
hidden their ammunition inside it.
That was pretty stupid, too.Venice had to
ban cruise
ships before
it sank for good
W
BACKGRIDT
he Holocaust Memorial
planned for Victoria
Tower Gardens may not
receive planning permission
from Westminster Council, and
this is right, even if every living
prime minister supports it. I
suppose they have to say they
want a Holocaust Memorial in
the shadow of Parliament, even
if there was no Holocaust of
British Jews. To say the
opposite would be too
complicated. It might –
considering Labour’s wretched
anti-Semitism crisis – be taken
the wrong way. Or it might be
considered opportunism.
Even so, it is the wrong
memorial in the wrong place. It
looks like a large toast-rack; the
other designs were no better.
They were too monumental in
scale, too grandiose. They
reminded me more of Nazism- did Nazis like toast? – than
pre-war Jewish life, which is
what they are supposed to
commemorate, aren’t they? I
can’t see anything Jewish in
toast racks and ornamental
shapes. They are generic and
unimaginative; monuments to
mass murder designed by rote,
pulled from a file. In Berlin and
Vienna they are largely ignored.
I do not think they
commemorate catastrophe.
They inure you to it.
I am a British Jew and I don’t
want the Holocaust to become
the universal symbol of human
wickedness, against which all
others are measured. It is
offensive to the Jew to be made
a paradigm – particularly here,
where none died, except those
from the Channel Islands – and
offensive to the sufferings of
others unmourned. I should like,for instance, to see a memorial
to the victims of slavery.
You could make the whole of
London a Holocaust memorial- or have a Holocaust memorial
in every town from Penzance to
Aberdeen – and it would do
nothing to stay the rise of
anti-Semitism, and racism more
generally. The Nazis themselves
proved that you cannot educate
people out of murderous
racism; if you could, why was it
the most cultured nation in
Europe that butchered its Jews?
Anti-Semitism is a warning that
society is fracturing; that
people are afraid. You cannot
stop that by building ugly
statuary in the West End and
compelling schoolchildren to
look at it. There is already a
Holocaust memorial in London.
It is in Hyde Park. It is a simple
stone engraved with words
from Lamentations: “For these I
weep / Streams of tears flow
from my eyes / Because of the
destruction of my people.”
What else needs to be said?
Merkel’s
holiday
read
speaks
volumes
This was the wrong
Holocaust Memorial,
in the wrong place
It looks like people
prefer Downton
Abbey to the real
world, if a new poll
is to be believed26 per cent would like
the Army to run the
country. Why not, I
don’t know, actors
David Adjaye’s
design for the
proposed
Holocaust
Memorial in
Westminster
resembles a
toast rackJAAP BUITENDIJKAngela Merkel
and Joachim
Sauer, her
husband, on a
hiking break in
Solda, ItalyAngela Merkel’s
holiday
literature is
always
fascinating. She
once read a life
of Stalin to learn
more of what he
did to a previous
chancellor of
Germany. She
once read the
libretto of
Richard Strauss’
opera The
Woman Without
a Shadow, which
tells the story of
a half-human
empress
dreaming of
unborn
children. Now, at
the dusk of her
career, she turns
to Stephen
Greenblatt’sTyrant:
Shakespeare on
Power, which
got a terrible
review on these
pages for being,
we were told,
obliquely rude
about Donald
Trump.
Either she is a
deeply serious
woman – which I
believe – or she
has a sense ofhumour, which I
also believe, or,
and I think this
most likely, she
is venting. She
has been
chancellor for 14
years, and a
parade of male
narcissist
statesmen have
crossed her path.
Silvio Berlusconi
apparently
called her “an
unf------- lard
a---”. Vladimir
Putin apparently
terrorised her
with his
labrador. So it is
natural that she
would want to
hear such men
insulted in
Shakespeare’s
prose.Zoe Strimpel is away
Cruise liners be gone: VeniceРЕЛИЗПОДГОТОВИЛАГРУППА"What's News"
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