Boris Johnson was not honest about the Irish border. What is he going to do about it?
Apologies make cynical history, but Boris Johnson has a big one to make, and fast. He must apologise to Northern Ireland’s unionists that he did not mean it last year when he pledged “no border” down the Irish Sea. As the Good Friday agreement negotiator, Jonathan Powell, wrote on Sunday, this was a lie. Johnson had just told the Irish government that the Good Friday deal held and there would be no border on the island of Ireland. Given Britain’s intention to leave the EU’s customs union, the two statements were incompatible, and Johnson knew it. Every truck on the Belfast ferry knows it, too.
The current Belfast riots have invoked the usual platitudes. The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, has called for calm. Joe Biden has offered concern. Everyone is outraged that children are being encouraged to attack the police. Even Prince Philip’s death has been cited as a call for restraint. Deprivation, local political grievances, poor relationships with the police – these are all factors behind the disturbances. But every act of violence alsocarries the same word: exasperation. Will someone answer the question? Johnson lied, and what is Britain going to do about it?
The writing was on the wall the moment Johnson decided his Tory leadership bid would be enhanced with a bit of macho xenophobia. He would not just leave the EU but also renounce the entire European economic zone – customs union, single market and all. This would, of necessity, put Northern Ireland in a singular position and encourage a closer economic relationship with the south. Otherwise the “peace walls” of Belfast’s Falls and ShankhillRoads would have to stretch in a Trump-like tradebarrier across the
fields of Down and Armagh.
The Good Friday agreement was a bid towards a lasting Irish rapprochement. Johnson’s Northern Ireland protocol went further. Following the logic of his version of Brexit, it accepted the necessity of the north’s increased reunion with the south. Even with last year’s no-tariff deal with the EU, trade compatibility would require a customs barrier down the Irish Sea.
As a policy towards a future Ireland this was sound. But it meant a moment of painful truth for unionists. They would have to admit that their economic future might lie with Dublin, not with London. Johnson lacked the guts to tell them this. It was the loyalist rioters who got the message.
There is only one answer to the riots, and it is not platitude. The prime minister must carry his Brexit policy to its logical conclusion. Northern Ireland must abandon its cosily antique relationship with Great Britain, still stuck in 1922, and build a lastingaccord with the south. Such an eventuality would be a true plus to Brexit.
There is, of course, an alternative. Johnson could apologise for a different mistake. He could admit that leaving the European single market was a crass error, and swiftly renegotiate trade compatibility across the board with the EU. Borders could then remain open. The unionist tail would thus wag the British dog back into a more sensible Brexit. There is no point in waffling about peace. The question is which mistake will Johnson correct.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
therapy, years of going to 12-step meetings, years of doing interviews – which can be very personal and therapeutic – I have familiarity with taking intimate things and objectifying them somehow. It wasn’t that hard.”
Perhaps the saddest moment in the documentary is when Moby recounts getting drunk and sleeping through his mother’s funeral in 1996. This takes the form of a black and white comic strip, violin music and Moby softly saying: “I’m really, really sorry.” You’re left thinking it’s about as low a moment as a person can have.
“Oh, that absolutely was not my lowest moment,” he objects. “I mean, sleeping through my mum’s funeral … yeah, I can imagine a therapist might find something they could work on there. But the actual lowest moments came later on, when the only happiness you can find is by being drunk and high, and when you wake up every afternoon disappointed and sometimes even angry that you’ve woken up. When the first thing you think upon waking is just disappointment that you’ve woken up again and you wonder: ‘What can I do to finally die?’ That’s much lower.”
Moby’s life story can be bleak, but it’s also wildly eventful. Born Richard Melville Hall in Harlem, New York, he moved to Darien in Connecticut with his mother after his father died. They were poor in an incredibly wealthy city. A permanent outsider, he found solace in punk rock, Christianity and veganism before ending up living in an abandoned warehouse in a crack-riddled neighbourhood and turning his hand to electronic music. The place had no running water, was full of cockroaches and seemed to feature a lot of murders – “a couple of people while I was living there, which considering there were only 30 or maybe 50 in this warehouse complex, is a pretty high murder rate”. But still, he says it was one of the “happier” times of his life. “I remember my cousin Ben visiting when he was four years old with my aunt and uncle. He walked into my space and said: ‘This place is terrible!’ That always makes me laugh.”
Since then his career has been a rollercoaster of highs and (often selfdestructive) lows. He found fame with his 1991 rave track Go, then alienated his entire fanbase by releasing a hardcore punk album called Animal Rights in 1996. Three years later, the followup Play made him a global star thanks to songs, such as Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? and Natural Blues, that sampled old blues and gospel records. He played huge shows and became friends with celebrities, including his new neighbour David Bowie (“Every minute we spent together I pretended to be normal, when the entire time I was a quivering teenager aware of the fact I was friends with the greatest musician of all time”). But subsequent releases saw his star wane and he spiralled into addiction, mocked in the music and gossip press during the especially cruel early 00s. Yet he won people around again with his first memoir, Porcelain, which documented his rise to fame with self-deprecating humour. His attempt to replicate that success with Then It Fell Apart – billed as a kind of spill-it-all-out therapy session – turned out disastrously, however, after Portman publicly called him out.
It’s something he doesn’t mention in his documentary. So what actually happened?
“That’s a good question,” he says. “I tried to describe it to a friend of mine and I had a hard time because there were so many layers to it.”
He tries to explain things by swerving into a somewhat tangential story about the launch of the gossip websites Gawker and Gothamist in the early 00s. “They were launched at a time when I was this out of control, utterly entitled, self-involved drink and drug addict and I loved reading about myself, almost pathologically, which I know is not something we’re supposed to admit. Anyway, there was this one snarky piece where someone had commented that they hated me so much that if they ever saw me walking down the street they would stab me and watch me bleed to death. And that was the beginning of a realisation: that I had three options in terms of how I dealt with public opinion. One was to aspire to enlightenment and be able to read things that were hateful and violent and rise above them. That was not feasible; I was never going to attain that level of enlightenment. The second option was to find every single person on the planet who hated me and try to either convince them otherwise or stab them to death. I realised that was unethical and also impractical as it involved potentially millions of people. And so the third option, which was the one I landed on, was to not pay attention. And so if you talk to my managers or people I work with, I only have one iron-clad rule, which is: don’t send me press links or reviews because I don’t read any of it.”
“So,” he continues, veering ever so slightly back on track, “when the lunacy was happening a couple of years ago, I took refuge in my ignorance. Obviously it became hard to ignore, especially when I had the tabloids camped outside my door. But I guess I realised that if everyone in the world hates me I can still wake up in my same comfortable bed every morning and go hiking.”
This is a rather long-winded way of saying: “I ignored the backlash.” But he must know he has not really addressed the issues here. Why did he write about Portman? Does he regret his behaviour or at least recognise her rather less rosy description of their interaction?
“A part of me wishes I could spend the next two hours deconstructing the whole thing,” he sighs, “but there’s levels of complexity and nuance that I really can’t go into.”
Does he regret anything?
“There is a part of me in hindsight that wishes I hadn’t written the book. But then, sales figures indicate that not that many people actually read it.”
OK, let’s try it another way: is what he wrote in the book true as he recalls it?
“Er … yeah,” he says, tentatively. And then he thinks about that and says: “You know, you’re asking me to open up such a can of worms. It reminds me of my favourite chess move, which my uncle taught me, where you move your knight so that it puts the king in check but also is going to take the castle.” This is known as a fork. “There’s no good way to answer: one option is terrible, the other is really terrible. So if we were playing chess right now, this is the part where I’d pick up my phone and pretend I’ve got an emergency call.”
It’s true that Moby is often the butt of the joke in both of his books, painting himself as a somewhat pathetic figure. When Lana Del Rey comes back to his penthouse in 2006, he mistakenly takes her comment that he is “the man” as a compliment, forcing her to explain what she meant: “You’re ‘the man’, as in ‘Stick it to the man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution.” You don’t write that without a bit of selfawareness.
“In both books I basically decided the only person who will ever get thrown under the bus is me,” says Moby. And yet even before Portman’s objections, there’s something undeniably icky about his desire to include his pursuit of younger women just starting out on their careers. Portman described his behaviour as “creepy”. Would it be fair to say he acted creepily?
“I wouldn’t use that word,” he says. “But when I was an out-of-control alcoholic and drug addict I definitely acted selfish and incredibly inconsiderately towards family members and friends and girlfriends and people I worked with. But again, part of the 12-step programme is that it’s a programme of rigorous honesty. I don’t want to sound too much like a cliche ageing musician in southern California, but the idea of genuinely looking at your actions and making amends for them is a process that I believe I’ve gone through pretty thoroughly. And it does make me sad that I probably don’t do an effective enough job trying to communicate the addiction struggle and contextualise the stories that way.”
In a recent interview, Moby talked about wanting to use his new documentary to show people “the real me”. He said he wanted to counter the “misrepresentations” over who he is (a little odd, you might think, from someone who allegedly ignores all their press). But is he really just misunderstood? Towards the end of the interview we discuss another minor furore that Moby caused last month when he tweeted to say that if the world converted to veganism there would be no more pandemics. Some scientists called him out; Facebook flagged it up as part of its drive to stamp out false news. But Moby doesn’t really get why. “I wasn’t necessarily talking about how we eat, but a world in which humans do not impose their will on animals. So not encroaching upon animal habitats, not building developments in the tropics, no more wet markets. In that world, pandemics would certainly be reduced if not ended.”
Which is, of course, fair enough, when he puts it like that. “I understand one of my shortcomings is that I sometimes use language in ways that might make sense to me,” he concludes, perhaps stumbling upon a truth that has until now eluded him, “but they don’t always make 100% sense to other people.”
Moby’s Reprise is out via Decca/ Deutsche Grammophon on 28 May, accompanied by a documentary available online.
•In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or emailjo@samaritans.orgorjo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found atwww.befrienders.org.
Pacific Islanders (AAPI) causes.
For many historians and advocates, this mobilization feels like the first time in decades when Asian American activism has been seen at such a widespread scale. The rise in hate-related incidents and crimes, along with the racial reckoning provoked by the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, has caused a broad coalition to form within a diverse racial group.
Asian Americans make up 20 million of the US population and have backgrounds in more than 20 countries in Asia, each with distinct languages, cultures and history. No single ethnic origin dominates the group, and about 60% of Asian Americans were born in another country, according to the Pew Research Center.
Despite their vast ethnic, generational and cultural differences, Asian Americans have found common ground over the discrimination.
“In this moment, you see Asian Americans coming together because we all recognize that shared pain and that shared sense of being othered,” said John Yang, president and executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “We understand what it’s like to be labeled as a foreigner, regardless of whether we were born in this country.”
This experience of racism and xenophobia is something that Asians in America have shared since the 1800s, when immigrants from Asia started coming to the US. The racist “yellow peril” phenomenon is used to describe the fear Americans had concerning Asian immigrants, who were believed to be dirty and ridden with diseases, and their potential stain on the western world. No matter whether a person was Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino, they were regarded as “yellow peril”.
“They were different, but they were merged together” in the US, said Linda Trinh Vo, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Irvine. The phenomenon worked “to prevent them from being integrated into this country”.
Up until the late 1960s, people of Asian descent identified themselves by their ethnicity and were broadly referred to as “Oriental”, “Asiatic” or “Mongolian”, Vo said, with some frequently called racial slurs.
But in 1968, a group of graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, inspired by the Black Power Movement, wanted to band together to join the broader fight for racial equality.
Looking to emphasize that they were American even as people of Asian descent, they chose to name their political alliance under a new umbrella term for themselves: Asian American. This creation of the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968 was the first time the term Asian American was documented.
By creating the term Asian American, the students marked a desire for multi-ethnic, self-identified unity that would emphasize their belonging in a country that, for nearly a hundred years, has always treated them as foreigners.
“Uniting under the banner of Asian American was really a recognition in which the US system of racial domination lumped together people of many different Asian ancestries in the US and treated them alike, even though we have profound differences,” said Daryl Maeda, professor of ethnic studies at University of Colorado Boulder.
Many Asian Americans are more likely to align themselves with their ethnic identity, and the shared language and culture that comes with it, over the broader Asian American identity, Maeda noted. Thus, “it’s a political commitment to embrace the term Asian American,” he said.
Activists say they have been encouraged by the number of Asian Americans who have not only started to become vocal about their experiences with hate-related incidents, but also are starting to grapple with broader conversations about how race plays a role in their lives.
“The kinds of conversations we’re having now were unthinkable even two years ago … getting at questions of being perpetual foreigners, being told you speak English well,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council and a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate. Asian Americans have been talking about the experience of changing their names to ones that are more palatable to Americans and being hypersexualized as women.
“It’s critical for us to understand and vocalize our experience, to say it’s not OK to be treated as a foreigner when we’re just like everybody else,” Kalkurni said.
Lily Li, who grew up in New York and now works in the city as a social strategy and content coordinator, was encouraged by the turnout at a recent Black and Asian solidarity march in New York.
“I was so proud to be there just walking through the streets. There were people from the older generation that were walking with canes, there were people from the younger generation who brought their kids. I saw kids as young as six years old marching with their signs,” Li said. “I felt like we were raising a generation that is becoming accustomed to seeing the Asian American community activated like this and walking amongst their allies.”
Attention around anti-Asian discrimination has also put a renewed focus on Asian-run businesses. Li is a volunteer with Send Chinatown Love, a not-for-profit supporting mom-andpop Asian businesses throughout New York, including her parents’ restaurant in Queens. The organization has raised over $500,000 to help restaurants facilitate online ordering and recently installed hundreds of paper lanterns over Chinatown to attract people to the business district, which has been badly hit by the pandemic and anti-Asian sentiment.
In response to pressure to address the growing number of racist incidents against Asian Americans, the White House unrolled a series of measures, including $49.5m of funding dedicated to community programs that help victims of attacks, and called on the justice department to make new efforts to enforce hate crime laws and collect data.
Advocates praised Biden’s actions, but have emphasized that attention to the issue needs to continue and ultimately go below the surface to address the root causes of discrimination.
“Racism preceded the pandemic, [and] racism will continue after the pandemic ends,” Kulkarni said. “The pandemic is just the latest iteration of this racism, but it could have been something else that prompted it. The ‘something else’ will prompt it once again unless we’re able to take really decisive action against white supremacy.”
It’s still all new to me, activism, and I think that’s what a lot of Asian Americans are starting to feel too
Natty Jumreornvong