Forgive me for being weirdly delighted if horrified by this picture that's been making the rounds, since it is essentially the ending of my 2014 novel, A MAN LIES DREAMING https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B086PL33XR/ So, a miniature thread on British fascism...

Firstly, maybe a few more fucking people should have fucking read my fucking book so we wouldn't end up with THE EXACT SAME SCENE I wrote as fiction in 2013 or so.

You'd notice the new e-book edition has a little BUF (British Union of Fascists) lightning-strike logo at the bottom as a joke (it's a parody of a Penguin Classic, in the absence of an actual Penguin Classic edition of my book).

But basically (read my fucking book), British fascism has always been, well, really shit at it. Even their uniforms were shit. The Italian Fascists had fashion and the Nazis had Hugo Boss. The BUF had... black jumpsuits with silver belts.

They looked like a doomed Star Trek landing party about to meet a salt monster.

Secondly, they were marginal, and made up of pretty useless dickheads like William Joyce aka Lord Haw-Haw, who was hanged for treason in '46.

Oswald Mosley, who spent the war years in Holloway Prison...

and of course Unity Mitford, Hitler's one-time girlfriend, who shot herself (as most women who spent time with Hitler kind of did, to be fair).

They were, in other words, a joke.

They were also, of course, as their... spiritual heirs are, pretty awful people.

and what I noticed, and what I tried to flag in my novel, is that somehow, that spirit of the 1930s was coming back, not just to England but around the world. The ridiculous turns horrifying on a spin, as, indeed, my family found out under Nazi occupation in the 1940s.

And somehow these clowns's legacy became domestic policy (though the British attitude to migrants/refugees has always been appalling, to be fair) and foreign (Brexit).

which might explain why no one wanted to read my book, though I still think the book's pretty funny.

So two years after my book was published Brexit and Trump both happened, and six years later the BUF flag is flying in Trafalgar Square.

which frankly, really ruined all the good jokes in my book.

So there we are. I realise I don't really have anything to say after all, other than that these people are STILL clowns, even if they're in power now, I just wish my book remained firmly in the Fiction section, but there we are.

and that flag's fucking ridiculous.

anyway, these trumps and johnsons and etc are nothing more (as my adolf hitler actually says in the book) than cheap copies. there is nothing new about them, just an old hatred dressed up and ultimately they are, as arendt might have said, banal.

i don't know what's to come but i was born because the nazis didn't succeed. my grandparents survived and my mother was born (in a refugee camp), despite the untold death and suffering.

it might be a weird condition of being jewish, that you're aware of both the horribleness of history and the fact that it does, in fact, continue despite the horror.

so, weirdly for anyone who's ever met me, i'm strangely hopeful. at least they're out in the open now. at least we can still say, this should not go on. at least we can still say, let the refugees in. at least we can still say, black lives matter. At least we can still SAY.

and, you know, being a writer and all, saying is pretty much all i have.

i did go on a demonstration once back in 1994 or so to try and meet girls, but didn't. so now i just write books. and tweet from time to time.

otherwise, you end up with this

(poster designed by me and produced by Sarah Anne Langton back in 2014 for an alternate history that isn't so alternate anymore).

and now, instead of wasting any more of time on these fucking idiots, i am going to go eat.

oh, and i totally should have got the booker for it btw