Jo Harper draws no cosmic links between these three apparently disparate events, no catastrophe scenarios held together by the looming collapse of civilisation as we know it. But there’s no harm in eeking out some meaning from this all.
Perhaps the glue that binds them all together is the sense that something has to give. Or someone. Or perhaps something has already given.
At Poland’s Davos the overwhelming sense was one of many words and little action. The rhetoric has been fine-tuned for many years: Poland is a believer in freedom, openness, solidarity (a word so over-used it should be publicly banned), and that embraces – nay personifies – all that Europe holds dear. It was - after all - at the forefront of the defeat of the evil Soviet empire.
But what a tawdry, drab, ugly scene we saw in Warsaw on Saturday. Small, but bigger than the Welcome demo, the anti-refugee takers spoke eloquently about not wanting Muslims.
I was reminded of my naïve questions 20 years ago when I first came to Poland asking why Poles had this odd relationship with Jews. I asked on one occasion at the British Council in Gdańsk and was met with sighs. Doesn’t he know anything? Then, one self-appointed ‘leader’ stood up and spoke on behalf of the class, telling me that all Jews were communists and had betrayed Poland. No discussion, he sat down. Thanks for that then.
On the subject, Polish-US historian Jan Tomasz Gross again gave his penny’s worth this week also, when he told Die Welt that Poles had killed more Jews than Germans during the war. Seems a rather odd thing to say, but the anger it evoked in Poland again seemed to open up the tat-for-tat discourse familiar to us all. The war goes on and on it seems.
The second point, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Corbyn follows Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, and others in Germany in a growing sense that existing democratic structures in Europe don’t work. Corbyn looks and sounds like a throwback to the 1980s, but his view that democracy is in the lure of big business and nation states, now so closely intertwined that they have become the same thing, rings true in many ears. Perhaps more so now than in the 1980s.
Corbyn will probably never be elected. He is too “Islington” - a term for a trendy leftie North Londoner who sings the Red Flag and doesn’t really have any working class roots. But he feels your pain. Of course he does.
His election resoundingly ends the Blairite New Labour era of aping the neo-liberals in the Tory party. It says: we start again, from the roots up, we will talk about ordinary peoples’ problems, not how to fix a system that doesn’t really work in everyone’s interest.
The era in which Labour thought of itself as a party of government or the main party of opposition could be ending. If so, it will open the door to nationalists, populists, and others on the right-wing fringes. But it will also expose the absurdity of the voting system, which has to change. An elected upper chamber and abolition of the monarchy would be a welcome change too. In Poland there is no Corbyn, only Szydło and Kopacz, offering basically more of the same. For a flavor of change see Paweł Kukiz, heaven forbid.
The third element, bear with me, is Krynica. Polish capitalism in awe to some mantras of the past that have here it seems actually worked. The economy is rattling along at a pace of knots that is the envy of the world, not just Poland's western neighbours, and while EU funds and UK emigration last, there is little chance of a slowdown, unless Germany gets a nasty cold.
But as President Andrzej Duda calls this week on Poles to stay in the UK as Poland offers no hope for them, while Poland stubbornly refuses to take in more refugees, the sense is that elite rhetoric is pretty cheap when there is no real political alternative.
Last year at Krynica I sat next to Geoff Hoon, the former British defence minister who had been accused while still in office under Tony Blair of selling of ministerial time for cash, in hand. Now he sits on the board of some large arms maker doing deals with Poland.
What goes around comes around.