Longing for Labour, once again

Also this week: meditations on love and loss, and the bliss of the Berlin Philarmonic.

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

My visceral longing for Labour, at last, to win again has become an obsession,” I wrote in these pages in January. And win we did, only then to leave me downcast over the Downing Street chaos, the tawdry freebies and the political insanity of the neediest pensioners losing their winter fuel allowances.

Now looming are both Donald Trump’s brutally isolationist trade wars and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast that Brexit is on course to reduce UK trade by a devastating 15 per cent. Zero prospect, therefore, of decent economic growth and total prospect of serious decline. Grovelling around Washington, begging for scraps from the Trump table, won’t work. Labour must change course, ruthlessly, and get us back into Europe.

This would not mean negotiating from scratch. In September 2023, France and Germany proposed restructuring the EU so that Britain could become an associate member of the single market, in exchange for us supporting the European Court of Justice and contributing to the EU budget. It’s there for us. And of the 90 polls published this year on Britain’s potential re-accession to the EU, every single one shows a clear majority in favour of us rejoining Europe in some form.

So, once again, I have a visceral longing for Labour – this time that they find the courage to do what has to be done and join us once more with our neighbours; still by a mile our largest trade partners, despite the trade barriers we inflicted upon ourselves with Brexit.

Singapore-on-Thames has failed. Only through Europe will growth recover. Accomplish this, and Keir Starmer will rank not as a dismal one-term failure but among our most celebrated prime ministers.

All you need is love

Politics is politics, but what is real is love. And there was plenty of that in my daughter’s beautiful wedding in Norfolk a few weeks ago.

Lucy is 31, and I am 85, and the fear and sadness we both held – always unspoken – was that I would no longer be alive by the time her wedding day came.

We finally acknowledged this to each other as we walked arm in arm down to the ceremony in the beautiful gardens below us, and to the seated ranks of the 140 or so guests. I could barely see for the tears running down my face as we went.

Resting in peace

There was love too around the funeral of my brother-in-law, who died much too early at 63, though released thereby from a devastatingly aggressive cancer. The service at the church near his home in east London was pensive, calm and lovely. Sitting there, quietly in thought, what came to my mind was a piece written some years ago by the Times journalist Emma Duncan. She is, by her own description, a full, card-carrying atheist, as too was her husband. When he died, despite their mutual atheism, she decided to bury him under formal Christian rites, in a church.

She explained why: “Religion, which has been around for so much longer than any of our other institutions, binds us to the past as nothing else does; and there’s comfort in sharing your grief with those who have sat, over hundreds of years, in the same pew that you’re sitting in, bowed by the same loss. You need transcendence, too, when somebody dies. Even if you’re convinced that there is no life hereafter, at the moment of mourning you need the poetry and the music that lift us above the dust and ashes.

“Since most of what our culture has to say about grandeur and glory has been written in praise of God, you must turn to religion for it.”

Easy listening

I remain increasingly at home these days – if it’s not my back that’s doing me in, it’s the ancient break in my right ankle. Or both. I read, of course, ceaselessly, but have also discovered the website of the incomparable Berlin Philharmonic. It provides a digital catalogue of their concerts over the past 30 or more years, and it is bliss.

This week I have devoted myself thereon to the romantics (last week it was the baroques, and next week it will be the late-romantics). I discovered thereby the Max Bruch Kol Nidrei, which is new to me, though it shouldn’t have been.

It is listed both in a full orchestral version, as Bruch composed it, and in a chamber arrangement for harp, cello and string ensemble – which, of the two, broke my heart the more.

Totally, totally lovely.

Tim Waterstone is a bookseller, businessman and author

[See also: The truth about sick note Britain]