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This is an updated version of an article published in the August 2008 issue of the spiked review of books. View the whole issue here. Since Supercapitalism was first published a year ago, a lot has changed. Back then it seemed that the world’s economic prospects were still reasonable and the need for austerity was a remote prospect. But a few weeks of plummeting stockmarkets and huge government rescue packages for financial institutions has shifted the debate. It is being stated ever more explicitly that austerity will be necessary to pay the price for the crisis (see Against austerity, by Brendan O’Neill). In this context, the arguments in Supercapitalism have taken on an added importance. Robert Reich, a professor at Berkeley and labour secretary under President Bill Clinton, puts a coherent – although flawed – case for cuts in living standards. No doubt if he had written it more recently he would have been more explicit. In Reich’s view, there is a fundamental schism in contemporary society with big business undermining democracy. Although people have benefited enormously as consumers and investors from this trend, they are losing out in their capacity as citizens, he says. His understated conclusion is that people should be pushed into accepting a fall in their living standards in return for greater democracy. Reich’s critique of contemporary capitalism is more sophisticated than many. He eschews explanations that simply attack human greed or slate conservative politicians. He also acknowledges that the recent era of big business has brought some substantial benefits. But his confusion of basic categories leads him to serious errors and damaging political conclusions. The key development to understand is the demise of the role of humans as producers rather than the rise of consumption. To the extent that consumption has become more important, it is largely by default. The striking trend of the past 30 years is in the reduction of the importance attached to humanity’s productive role. This productive side of humanity should not be understood simply in terms of making widgets. It needs to be put more broadly in the context of what might be called ‘the human subject’: the capacity of people to make and remake the world around them. The diminished sense of human subjectivity, rather than the rise in the importance of consumption, is central to understanding the trends identified by Reich. Reich’s notion of ‘supercapitalism’ has to be set against what he calls the ‘not-quite golden age’ of 1945 to 1975. That period embodied many of the values that he holds dear: it was an era of relative equality, job security and trust. There was also a compact between labour unions and big business. Yet Reich is balanced enough to acknowledge that it was far from perfect. For example, women and minorities suffered severe discrimination. For Reich, this set-up began to break down in the second half of the 1970s. New technology increased competition between corporations. This in turn led to a new era of globalisation, new production techniques and deregulation. He acknowledges that the new era has brought enormous benefits. Thanks largely to innovations in medical science, the average American lives almost 15 years longer than in 1950. Americans are also richer and have a far wider range of consumer choices than they did in the 1970s. Other countries, too, have benefited from similar developments. However, many of the positive features of the ‘not-quite golden age’ have also disappeared. Societies have become more unequal, job security has diminished and trust in politicians is gone. Corporations, through their incessant lobbying, have, in Reich’s view, undermined the democratic process. Against those who argue that conservative politicians, such as Ronald Reagan in America or Margaret Thatcher in Britain, are to blame for this shift, Reich rightly insists that the shift predates their time in office. Reagan was president of the US from 1981 to 1989 and Thatcher was prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, yet the shift started in the 1970s. Both leaders simply intensified an attack on the consensus that followed the Second World War, particularly in relation to unions – an attack that had started before their time in power. However, in relation to this point Reich seems to be suffering from a temporary memory lapse. The attack on the consensus in America started in earnest under the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977 to 1981). And it was under Carter’s presidency that Reich himself was a political appointee at the Federal Trade Commission. Reich does not deny his position, but is shy of drawing any conclusions about the role of the Democrats in breaking the consensus. In Britain, the Labour government of 1974 to 1979 played a similar role in launching an assault on unions and destroying postwar political institutions. More broadly, the way to understand this shift is as a response to the end of the postwar boom. After the Second World War, the world economy, particularly in the developed countries, grew at record rates. But by the early 1970s, signs of economic crisis were clear. This led governments on both sides of the Atlantic to launch an assault on the unions and give much freer rein to business. This trend in turn meant that ordinary people had less of a stake in political debate. Politics was no longer about competing camps or differing visions of how to organise society. Instead the era of ‘Tina’ – as Thatcher put it: ‘There Is No Alternative’ – came to the fore. The focus of what passed for politics switched to regulating individual behaviour – including such areas as drinking, smoking and even eating – rather than battling over how to organise society. This is a much more convincing explanation for the shifts that Reich identifies than his focus on technology. Although Reich denies being a technological determinist, his explanation exaggerates the role of technology and understates the role of political defeat in creating the current climate. His outlook also leads to some deeply conservative conclusions despite his reluctance to spell them out in detail. He is in favour of ‘new rules of the game’ – read: regulation – particularly in relation to corporate lobbying. He seems to lack confidence in the capacity of others to counter the arguments of corporations. More worryingly, he advocates ‘sacrifice’ by ordinary people, by which he seems to mean an acceptance of lower living standards. He appears to take the peculiar view that reducing living standards will somehow bolster democracy. Reich argues that sacrifices would be justified in return for such measures as making it easier for employees to join unions, requiring companies to provide health insurance and pensions, and raising the minimum wage: ‘Personally, I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the benefits I get as a consumer and investor in order to achieve these social goals – as long as I knew everyone else was too.’ He makes a similar point in relation to his support for stricter environmental laws. ‘The material wellbeing of consumers or investors should not be the sole criterion. A dramatic cut in greenhouse gases seems worth the economic sacrifice if it’s necessary to save the planet.’ If it really were a choice between cuts in living standards and annihilation of the world, no doubt virtually everyone would prefer the former. But at no point does Reich justify such a sweeping assertion. If he really thought it was true that the planet needed to be ‘saved’, then it would make sense to have it as a central point in his argument. Instead, Reich seems a past master at doing what most politicians do nowadays: talking down expectations about economic growth without attacking it directly. He knows that most people are, for completely rational reasons, unlikely to welcome cuts in their living standards. So instead he resorts to attacking popular prosperity indirectly and through innuendo. Not only are such reductions in living standards undesirable in themselves; they are also unlikely to be achieved by democratic means. If people are given a choice they are likely to resist the chance to make themselves poorer. That is why politicians and pundits constantly snipe at the benefits of mass affluence in the hope of sapping its support. But ultimately, any reductions in living standards will involve a degree of coercion. It is no coincidence that the mobilisation of societies for wars, most notably the Second World War, tends to involve the imposition of austerity at home. In this sense, Reich supports a highly limited form of democracy. He is not in favour of government by the people in the true sense of the term. He simply supports procedural democracy – the empty shell of formally democratic institutions – with the ‘rules of the game’ not tilted too far in favour of business. His case is for new forms of regulation, including curbs on corporate lobbying, rather than for democracy in its truest sense. In reality, democracy can only be achieved by a revival of politics in the proper sense of the term. This means relaunching a battle of ideas over competing visions of how to organise society. It involves a struggle that is entirely consistent with raising rather than lowering the living standards of the bulk of the population. It is Reich’s demand for sacrifice that is the antithesis of democracy. In the current climate of hysteria about falling markets it is vital not to concede the argument that ordinary people should pay the price for the crisis. It is more important than ever that people demand more rather than less, and that this struggle is linked to a broader campaign for greater democracy. Daniel Ben-Ami is a journalist and author based in London. Visit his website here. An earlier version of this review appeared in Fund Strategy magazine. Supercapitalism: The Battle for Democracy in an Age of Big Business, by Robert B. Reich, is published by Icon Books Ltd. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) This is an updated version of an article published in the August 2008 issue of the spiked review of books. View the whole issue here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5802/
Given his longstanding promise never to travel anywhere that ‘cannot be reached by coracle or foot’, it is rare for spiked columnist Ethan Greenhart to make a public appearance. His humiliating experience of trying to launch his Manifesto Against Domination of Mother Earth and Nature (MADMEN) during the 2005 General Election further convinced him that engaging with the public is a waste of CO2 (breath). However, two recent earth-shattering events - the collapse of the global markets and the publication of Ethan’s own eco-advice book Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas - have convinced him to emerge from his ethical shell. On 8 October, Ethan and his Gaia Choir made an impromptu and wildly popular appearance at Ambrosia’s Vegan Cafe on the outskirts of Brighton to sing the song that they believe provides the solution to the credit crunch: ‘Why Won’t The Humans Die Out?’ Listen to it below.
 Ethan Greenhart’s book Can I Recycle my Granny? and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas is published by Hodder & Stoughton in October (for more details, visit Amazon(UK)). Ethan is here to answer all your questions about ethical living in the twenty-first century. Email him . Read his earlier columns here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5807/
That Sol Campbell chant. You know the one I mean. Is it tasteless? Yes. Is it obscene? You bet. Is it ‘cruel and vindictive’? Absolutely. Should it be banned? Of course it fucking shouldn’t. After Sol Campbell went AWOL from Arsenal with stress-related problems in 2006, fans of Spurs - the club that Campbell deserted for the Gunners - patented one of the most politically incorrect terrace chants in modern football.
Sol, Sol, wherever you may be,
Deeply unpleasant yes, but you’ve got to admire its vulgar economy. So few words; so much filth. Joe Kinnear take note: less is more. Campbell has long been a target for the Spurs booboys but this particular chant has prompted calls for a clampdown after a recent away game at Portsmouth, the defender’s current club. ‘We’re talking about awful abuse, some of this stuff is racist – it’s everything. It’s wrong and has no place in football’, said Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp. ‘How do you do that in front of your kids? What kind of a nutter must you be?’ Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has also branded the chants ‘racist’. Hampshire police are investigating the incident following complaints from Portsmouth fans. FA chairman Lord Triesman, himself a lifelong Spurs fan, has called for life bans for the perpetrators. ‘I hope the individuals will be identified and, if appropriate, banned from Tottenham’s ground’, said Triesman. ‘I wouldn’t have them in the ground again.’ That could mean an awful lot of empty seats at White Hart Lane. A police spokesman said that no arrests were made at the game because the ‘sheer number of people involved was just too many for us to take action against individuals’. Now let’s get one thing straight. There’s no question that the Judas chant is extremely offensive. The HIV reference is probably homophobic. But racist? I don’t think so. The ‘hanging from a tree’ line is not about lynching or monkeys, as some have argued. It’s a biblical reference to Judas Iscariot’s suicide – or at least that’s what most Spurs fans will tell you, though some argue it’s a jibe about Campbell’s fragile mental state when he ‘did a Stephen Fry’ in 2006. Either way it’s not intended as a racial slur. However, given our tendency to view everything through race-tinted spectacles, I can see how it could be misconstrued. We live in easily offended times. On the internet message boards Spurs fans hold their hands up to making anti-gay taunts but they bristle at the accusations of racism. Campbell has been vilified by Spurs fans ever since he defected to Arsenal in 2001. But, apart from the ambiguous ‘hanging from a tree’ reference, there has never been any explicit racism. In the 2006/7 season, how many arrests do you think were made at White Hart Lane for racist chanting? That’s right, none. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Sol is black and he gets booed. But he isn’t booed because he’s black. It’s because he’s seen as a Judas. Racist or not, the taunts directed at Campbell were intended to offend. Last year, Campbell complained that the abuse had got ‘out of hand’, saying: ‘We can all take the booing or light banter, but when it gets to the realms of verbal abuse it’s a bridge too far.’ But if you’re going to start arresting fans for verbal abuse, where do we draw the line? Some chants, like the Munich air crash songs or ‘Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz’, are in extremely poor taste. Lewd songs about footballers’ sex lives are ten-a-penny: remember the ubiquitous ‘Posh Spice takes it up the arse’ chant directed at David Beckham? Recently, Everton fans taunted Steven Gerrard with a chant that questioned the paternity of his child. Regional stereotypes abound: Welsh fans are ‘sheep shaggers’, Scousers are ‘hubcap thieves’, Gillingham fans are ‘pikeys’ and so on. And if you’ve never heard anti-gay slurs at football then you need your hearing tested. I could go on. The point is that abusive chants are part and parcel of terrace culture. Why is it important to defend the right of fans to hurl abuse? Well first and foremost, it’s a free speech issue. Last time I checked, Britain was a democracy and, in a democracy, we’re supposed to have stuff like, er, civil liberties. Freedom of expression ought to mean that we have the right to say – or chant – what we want, however obscene or offensive. There should be no qualifications. No strings attached. The only boundary should be where words become deeds, where abuse becomes assault. But speech itself, however hurtful, should never be curbed. ‘If this happened on the streets, you’d be arrested’, Sol Campbell argues. But there is a difference between verbal abuse at football and verbal abuse in the streets, at work, on a train, or in a restaurant. Football is exceptional. In a football stadium, conventional social etiquette is temporarily suspended. Instead, it’s acceptable for adults to sing, shout, swear and generally behave like big kids for 90 minutes. It’s a bit like a stag party (without the fancy dress) or a package holiday: a social arena in which people are allowed to go a bit mental and let off steam. As the broadcaster Nicky Campbell put it, football provides ‘a rare opportunity for thousands of people to escape the straitjacket and be their joyously expressive selves’ (1). If football grounds become abuse-free zones, if there’s nowhere left for grown men to behave badly, then our cultural life is damaged. Football, too, will be irreparably damaged if you excised verbal abuse. It’s already being damaged if you look at the anaesthetised atmosphere at our ‘family friendly’ Premiership grounds. Individual fans are regularly ejected by stewards for swearing, persistent standing or being drunk. But, as yet, there has been little action taken to curb mass chanting. Millwall were handed an FA fine after racist chanting at a Carling Cup game against Liverpool in October 2004 – a decision that was subsequently overturned on appeal. And that’s about the sum of it. If Spurs or their fans are disciplined it could prove a crucial moment in the battle for the heart and soul of football. Do we want inoffensive ‘light banter’ or do we want irreverent, unruly, X-rated insult-trading? Do we a hymnal of approved chants or do we want unscripted, unregulated vulgarity? Do we want a hushed church congregation or a seething, passionate crowd? I know which I prefer. If you don’t want sanitised football then you have to side with the Spurs fans. Duleep Allirajah is spiked‘s sports columnist. Read on: spiked-issue: Sport reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5803/
So, This Morning is 20 years old this year. As ITV1 has been reminding us constantly in recent weeks. But what is there to celebrate? This Morning has been a haven for layabout students and moronic housewives for two decades now. We should be mourning its very existence rather than heralding it. It is a celebration of mediocrity. I hate it because, like watching Loose Women (also ITV1), reading Richard Littlejohn’s newspaper columns or logging on to Facebook, watching This Morning is annoyingly addictive. This daytime programme came into existence in October 1988, initially headed by Richard ‘Alan Partridge’ Madeley and Judy Finnigan. It adopted a kind of magazine format that followers of Nationwide or That’s Life in the early 1980s will be familiar with: a bit of serious politics to begin with, then some showbiz news, a feature about erectile dysfunction, a cat that could rollerskate, some agony aunt advice that always ended with the coda ‘you must remember that it’s not your fault’, a cookery section (a feature in any programme that immediately informs you that you really should be doing something better instead), all topped off by a song by Michael Bolton or Rick Astley. And there’s the default bit about the ‘credit crunch’ thrown in somewhere for good measure. Imagine the Fox News channel digested into a two-hour resumé, and then you’ve got This Morning. It’s not quite as right-wing, I admit, but it conveys a similarly conservative message, interspersed with scare stories and mundane pieces of trivia. It’s like breakfast television. Except it’s shown in the middle of the day. In other words, This Morning has always been the televisual equivalent of the Daily Mail: trite, inconsequential, hysterical, full of psychobabble, and designed for bored women. Watching a DVD of the movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy the other night, I couldn’t but help think that Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone were dead ringers for Richard and Judy. The strange paradox is that the presenters of This Morning have been quite endearing. Madeley was self-consciously ridiculous; Finnigan a loveable nervous wreck; Phillip Schofield is simply loveable; Eamonn Holmes is the archetypal cheeky chappy Irishman who could even make you like Manchester United; agony aunt Denise Robertson is grandmaternal; doctor Chris Steele avuncular; the rotund, buxom Fern Britton has a classic maternal appeal. And as unfashionable as it is to say it, John Leslie was a good presenter, before his career was ruined by slander. But why did they and do they talk such rubbish? I think it’s because ITV is, in its essence, rubbish by nature. The BBC is today mostly rubbish because it is didactic; ITV is rubbish because it is populist, and always panders to the lowest common denominator. This Morning is the perfect exemplar of this tendency. Independent television thrives on worrying viewers and spreading fear. Again, consider Fox News: although I sympathise with its right-wing propaganda, Fox News is hysterical in the shameless manner in which it propagates it. Still, I admire its honesty, contrasted with CNN or the BBC’s surreptitiousness. So I think ITV should follow Fox’s honest example. There have been lots of stories about ITV axing its regional news output in order to cut costs, and accusations about it ‘dumbing down’ in order to chase ratings. But when has ITV ever been clever? Sure, it had a period in the 1970s when it briefly tried to be high-brow, notably with World In Action and when News At Ten was actually respected, but otherwise it has always been slave to the advertisers. It might as well give up its eternally hopeless and deceitful pretence at being on a par with the BBC. Why not just be out with it and say: ‘We’re ITV and we’re crap. And we’re good at making crap.’ This Morning has a populist appeal. It appeals to popular phobias and feeds into popular neuroses. And it does so through that most devious of means: by having nice presenters and generally being agreeable. Patrick West is spiked‘s TV columnist. Read on: spiked-issue: TV reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5806/
Tuesday 7 October: ‘It was always ridiculous for Gordon Brown to claim that the security of the UK depended on allowing police to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge. Now, as The Times reports that the 42-day plan is set to be defeated in the Lords and effectively abandoned, it is equally risible for Brown’s opponents to claim that keeping the current limit of a mere 28 days is a victory for civil liberties...’ reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5805/
‘They think they’ve finally worked the trick of extracting large amounts of cash from users of digital music without them noticing’, wrote the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Celland Jones recently, discussing the launch of two new music services. ‘If they’re right, then Omnifone and Sony Ericsson will be the toast of the music and mobile industries.’ (1) The Beeb blogger’s easy cynicism perfectly expressed several aspects of discussions about music and copyright today: it’s probably a conspiracy, and it’s most certainly a swindle. Meanwhile the citizen, apparently incapable of making rational choices of their own, will be helplessly ensnared in this nefarious plot, engineered by shadowy corporate giants. In polite company, sympathy for copyright is in short supply, while for politicians, the ‘creative economy’ is little more than a platitude. Such attitudes are most deeply held amongst people who consider themselves liberal, forward thinking or progressive. Which is deeply odd, because for 150 years liberals and progressives have embraced the artistic creator as both an ally and a pathfinder. From William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement, to the many schemes devised by postwar social democratic governments, the creator was an aesthetic rebel, a political ally and a visionary, an ethos that owed much to Shelley’s view of the poet as the ‘unacknowledged legislator’. What many of these initiatives had in common was a creator’s economic independence, typically supported through the mechanism of copyright. The progressive’s support of creator’s rights expressed an optimistic view of society and human nature. But ever since digital utopianism swept through the chattering classes in the early 1990s, this positive view has been replaced by one of misanthropy and paranoia. At a conference hosted by the utopian Oxford Internet Institute at the London School of Economics earlier this year, I watched an audience sneer and heckle two representatives of the music business. A succession of academics and ‘digital rights’ activists presented the case for weakening or even abolishing copyright (2). It’s common for such activists to express a sense of being beleaguered by ‘big media’, or ‘copyright maximalists’ and their representatives; on activist blogs, for example, one Hollywood lobby group is referred to as the MAFFIA. To sustain such a persecution fantasy takes quite a leap of imagination: while we happily download gigabytes of free movies, TV shows and CD box sets from the internet, it’s possible to imagine that we may never need to pay for a work of art again; the risk of being caught, to all intents, is zero. The persecution fantasy is also at odds with the numbers. The economic reality is that the music and movie industries are dwarfed by the technology and telecommunications giants. Five years ago, Apple’s annual revenues were a quarter of the revenues generated from sales of sound recordings globally each year. Today, Apple alone is twice the size of the entire record business. Text messaging brings home more revenue for phone companies than Hollywood generates through sales of movie tickets, DVDs and action figures. And this power is reflected in their respective lobbying muscle. Nevertheless, progressives now see the right to be remunerated from cultural production in the digital age as at best an embarrassment, and at worst an anachronism. The cure that technology utopians now propose for creative businesses is indistinguishable from suicide. For example, in Freeconomics, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson makes a plea for businesses to cross-subsidise investment in intellectual property, and then give the results away for nothing (3). Yet the misanthropy runs even deeper with many digital rights activists. Not content with challenging the economic incentives to creativity, they question the validity of the notion of creativity itself. ‘Substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them’, wrote Jonathan Latham in an essay widely cited by digital rights activists (4). Latham’s view owes much to Structuralism, the lit-crit fad that usefully blew away the romantic notion of the author as the sole font of creative expression – but replaced it with one of the author as a dumb conduit, lacking autonomy or even the most basic self-awareness. ‘Since my creative work is non-unique’, wrote one commenter, encapsulating the digital rights philosophy, ‘I can’t expect compensation for it; because anyone could have done that. I just happened to get the idea first.’ (5) From such a position of absolutism, it must be hard to see that one idea added to an existing body of work can nevertheless create something interesting and new. Today’s digital misanthropy owes much to cybernetic theory, which was borne out of the planning and design of weapons systems during the Second World War. The American physicist John Stroud, who had served in the RAF, referred to the role of an anti-aircraft gunner so: ‘Surrounded on both sides by very precisely known mechanisms and the question comes up, “What kind of machine have we put in the middle?”’ (6) To which the modern liberal may well answer: a machine not worthy of remuneration or respect. An analog of Stroud’s system is the Creative Commons licence initiative, which has become a badge of political correctness amongst digital rights activists. It seeks to decrease friction in the machinery of the internet by reducing an author’s rights to a subset of irrevocable choices, which can then be machine processed (7). Composers adopting the licence find themselves outside the artists’ traditional vehicle for collective bargaining, the performing rights societies. The message is clear: the creator must lose for the system to benefit. Reduced to such a brutal equation, digital rights, it seems, come at the expense of human rights. None of the rhetoric here excuses the many missteps made by executives at the apex of the music business. The insistence on recreating the scarcity and excludability of physical goods using digital rights management (DRM) technology was an ill-judged and antagonistic experiment; the decade-long refusal to move to a model of licensing rather than shifting physical units was short-sighted; the simultaneous pursuit of litigation against downloaders simply fuelled the activists’ persecution fantasies. Yet even the simplified view of a monolithic ‘music business’ is misleading. It’s easy to overlook the fact that publishers and independent music producers struck deals with the original Napster (8) – and the British music business devised and supports new (as yet unlaunched) services which effectively legalise P2P file-sharing (9). But once the digital rights activist has overlooked such contradictions, it becomes easier to demonise the adversary. And didn’t you know, there’s a revolution going on? With a settlement that blesses what today is unlicensed file-sharing, the era of antagonism against creators may be drawing to close. The new music services encourage the free flow of music for a small fee to the broadband provider, a result that should delight music lovers as well as creators. But the years of heated rhetoric will leave something of a puzzle for historians. How were so many well-intentioned liberals and progressives able to abandon a long tradition of advocacy for the rights and representation of labour? When the digital revolution arrived, the activist gave up real challenges to power, and found a convenient proxy in the shape of the music business. Marx’s advocacy of ‘expropriating the expropriator’ was adopted, only to be inverted, leaving the creator’s cause as collateral damage. Andrew Orlowski is executive editor of The Register This evening, Thursday 9 October, he is speaking on digital rights at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, alongside Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. For more information and to book a ticket, click here.
Previously on spiked Martyn Perks said ‘hands off our internet connections’. Rob Killick looked at the online threats to privacy and dismissed predictions of the internet’s collapse as digital Malthusianism. Tessa Mayes pleaded don’t steal this article, but please do discuss it. Sandy Starr interviewed a world expert on internet law. Norman Lewis and Neil Barrett debated privacy online. Or read more at spiked issue Privacy. (1) Mobile Music - how unlimited, how free?, Rory Clelland Jones, BBC News Online, 24 Sep 08 (2) The LSE’s Freetard Fiasco, The Register, 21 March 2008 (3) Freeconomics, The Economist (4) The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism, Jonathan Lethem, Harper’s, February 2007 (5) Comment by Mike Powers, The Register, 31 January 2008 (6) Stroud cited in How We Became Posthuman, N Katherine Hayles, Chicago University Press 1999. (7) Let’s Be Clear About Creative Commons, Sound Nation (8) U.K. & European Independent Record Industry Strikes Historic Deal With Napster, Association of Independent Music press release, June 2001 (9) see Music Service Provider Ltd reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5795/
The British government is grooming primary and secondary school teachers to become fighters against terrorism. This extreme measure is outlined in a new ‘toolkit’ which can be downloaded from the internet. In an effort to tackle violence and ‘build a stronger, safer society’, British schools are being positioned on the frontline of the government’s battle to eradicate extremism. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) believes schools can play a key role in getting young people to say ‘no’ to extremism. Its Learning Together to be Safe toolkit, unveiled by schools secretary Ed Balls yesterday, along with £4.68million of funding, is being sent out to schools across the country. Based on the government’s favourite educational interventions of the past few years, it is effectively a manual for turning schools into laboratories for social engineering. Teachers are advised, among other things, to implement ‘social and emotional aspects of learning’, to promote diversity and ‘active citizenship’, to minimise ‘hate and prejudice-based bullying’, to model ‘freedom of speech through pupil participation, while ensuring protection of vulnerable pupils’, and to ‘enforce safe behaviours in the use of the internet’ (1). In other words, the government is pushing through policies ranging from the happiness agenda to multiculturalism, from offence-avoidance to internet censorship, on the back of the war against terror. Here, the battle against terrorism is recast as a child protection policy. This is not the first time that school corridors, youth centres and university student unions have been perceived by the government as treasure troves for dangerous strangers. In 2006, the government published guidance to help universities and colleges ‘tackle violent extremism in the name of Islam’. Last year, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust announced that multi-faith academies would be built in 25 English cities and towns to combat extremism. A few months later, communities secretary Hazel Blears declared that £70million would be spent on training Muslim ‘role models’ to help counter the influence of extremist brainwashing recruiters. Some university lecturers protested against effectively being asked to spy on their own students. Now, primary and secondary school teachers are being asked to be vigilant against extremist children, and effectively to view their own pupils as potential suicide bombers and racists in the making. The expression ‘he’s a little terror’ takes on a whole new meaning. The Learning Together to be Safe toolkit focuses on ‘extremism’ rather than terrorism, perhaps so that Muslims won’t feel singled out as particularly vulnerable and dangerous – something politicians are wary of. But the document also conflates ‘violent extremism’, a term which indicates physical acts of aggression, with ‘hate-driven discrimination of all forms’, which could encompass just about anything that might make an individual feel excluded. If discussions and policies around bullying are anything to go by, in schoolyard terms ‘hate-driven discrimination’ will most likely come to mean everything from having your lunch money stolen to being called names. The Sun reports today that X-Factor hopeful Austin Drage was bullied at school for wearing ‘nerdy glasses’; in the future, such childish meanness could become the focus of anti-hate intervention. It seems this vagueness is deliberate, because the toolkit also encourages limits to free speech, more internet censorship, happiness lessons and feelgood multiculturalist activities. The emphasis seems to be on limiting young people’s access to apparently dangerous ideas and instead providing them with a mish-mash of happiness-tinged, multicultural platitudes. This is a battle of ideas without very many ideas, and not much of a battle. The toolkit shows that the fight against ‘homegrown extremism’ is not simply about preventing terrorists from planting bombs, but also preventing them from warping minds. It seems our rulers have so little faith in their own ability to shape young people’s thinking and behaviour that they believe their brains are malleable putty for any dangerous sect. Policymakers and cultural commentators are obsessed with the idea of extremists ‘winning over’ children and wielding moral and ideological power over British youth. They believe extremists, in order to ‘get ’em young’, are recruiting and ‘radicalising’ people on university campuses – so now the government is turning to schools in order to get ’em even younger. The real question is: why is mainstream society failing to inspire young people, to such an extent that nihilistic ideas can come to be seen as a national threat in schools? What is it about contemporary British society that means some young people – small numbers of them – are tempted by misanthropic, extremist thinking? Perhaps the problem is closer to home than the government thinks. In schools themselves, children are either offered a relativistic curriculum that celebrates all ideas and histories as equally valid, or are taught a revisionist view of mankind which places us as the harmer and destroyer of the planet rather than the maker of history. Could it be that this contemporary combination of relativism and anti-humanism nurtures some young people’s interest in nihilistic ideas? Under what spiked has referred to as ‘the tyranny of relevance’, education is being debased and hollowed out, as instruction and inspiration become subservient to the latest political fads. So students who want to study geography are more likely to be inundated with cautionary tales about global warming. Physical Education lessons are being turned into healthy living classes. History classes are now vehicles for transmitting the values of multiculturalism and the destructiveness of ‘ethnocentricity’. As Frank Furedi has argued, ‘increasingly, the curriculum is regarded as a vehicle for promoting political objectives and for changing the values, attitudes and sensibilities of children’ (2). If a minority of extremists really are able to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of British kids through cranky ideas spread on a few internet sites and in low budget community centres, then mainstream society should ask itself why it cannot inspire them even when it has the powerful tools of the educational establishment - and a wealth of ideas from throughout human history - to hand. Today, British schools are nurturing the very anti-elitist and anti-modernist sentiments that run through the ‘extremist movements’ that the government is so concerned about. The dominance of ‘white middle-aged men’, the consumer society, the excesses of modernity – these are pet hates of the establishment and the homegrown extremists alike. From 9/11 to 7/7, from the 2002 bombings of a Bali nightclub to the attempted attack outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London last year, despicable terrorist assaults are attacking Western symbols of modernity, and the decadent, binge-drinking, slaggish ways of the masses which polite society also frets about on a daily basis. Instead of turning teachers into social engineers and spies, maybe the powers-that-be should look long and hard at the messages they themselves are transmitting, and come up with a curriculum that enthrals and inspires the next generation.
 Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked. She is speaking in the session Immigration: the more the scarier?, and chairing the session Candid camera at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Royal College of Art, London on 1&2 November.
Previously on spiked Bill Durodié argued that deradicalisation was not the answer. Frank Furedi talked to Brendan O’Neill about his latest book Invitation to Terror. Faisal Devji said Osama bin Laden merely speaks through Western dummies. Dolan Cummings argued that radicalisation is a good thing. Or read more at spiked issue War on Terror. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5798/
Many green activists and commentators think that anyone who dares to criticise the apparent consensus on the science and politics of climate change must be in the pay of big business. In truth, as a meeting in London on Monday night powerfully illustrated, the megabucks are really on the side of those who think humanity is screwing up the planet. The event was the launch of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Like a few people, I assumed that the ‘Grantham’ bit referred to the birthplace of an earlier promoter of climate change fears, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In fact, it refers to the wealthy chairman of GMO, a large investment management company: Jeremy Grantham. Grantham has donated £12million to the London School of Economics (LSE) to fund the institute. He has also forked out another £12million to Imperial College London for the similarly named Grantham Institute for Climate Change (1) No wonder, then, that the chair of LSE, Howard Davies – once the head of the Financial Services Authority and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England – was more than a little fawning over the ‘extremely generous’ Grantham. The new LSE institute will be headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the UK government-commissioned report, The Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006. The Stern Review argued that the costs of reducing CO2 emissions to avoid climate change would be far lower than the costs of failing to take action, using assumptions that attracted considerable scorn from other economists (2). With Lord Nick at the helm, we can be sure that the institute will not be a hotbed of climate scepticism but rather will be intellectual armoury for those who want to clamp down on economic development. Stern was the main attraction at the launch on Monday, but Grantham’s introductory remarks were the most illuminating: they provided a startling insight into the pessimism of today’s super-rich. Grantham declared: ‘Climate change is far and away the most important issue in finance, in government, in life in general. I believe firmly that Malthius [sic] was right… he just got his timing wrong. We’re engaged in the third great die-off since the beginning of the earth. The first was definitely caused by a meteorite, the second one probably was, and the third one has been caused by the effect of humans hitting the earth about as powerfully as a meteorite. We’ve been around for about 500,000 years and for 99 per cent of that time, we were a pretty harmless species. We ended up with about 15million people, 5,000 years ago. Then, in the final one per cent of our lives, we went from 15million to six-and-a-half billion. Needless to say, we can’t repeat that multiplying effect.’ Grantham went on to say that most of this ‘action’ had in fact occurred over the past 300 years, with the boom in population coming about as a result of what he described as ‘the unfortunate hydrocarbon revolution’. Presumably, he was referring to the benefits of coal, gas and oil which have allowed billions of people to live in relative comfort to a ripe old age for the first time in human existence, at least in the developed world. However, such trifles are of little concern to a man whose company handles $150billion of assets. At a time when greens ask why their critics take money from big business, it is just as relevant to ask why famous universities like LSE and Imperial are tugging their institutional forelocks to a moneybag misanthrope like Grantham. (Though with the humanity-hating John Gray also on the LSE staff, Grantham must seem like a little ray of sunshine.) For Grantham, the idea of setting up the LSE institute came after ‘the penny had dropped that the hard science was slowly and finally winning an uphill struggle against what we in the US call “the deniers”, who have been a powerful and effective lobby… Now the war, the frontline, is really in the economics and the cost of all this. There, the opposition is much more formidable. There are serious, respectable, well-respected economists who disagree with the good guys. They are completely misguided, but they are respectable.’ Note the implication that those who have criticised the science of climate change are anything but respectable. There is no doubt what direction this institute will take. The Stern Review was a hugely important piece of advocacy research, precisely designed to counter all those foolish types who believe that spending a fortune dragging society towards some kind of low-carbon future might be irrational in the absence of viable technology. Now the war on the ‘misguided’ will have the backing of the LSE’s reputation, too. The notion that it is climate change sceptics who have been buying influence looks pretty shabby when viewed in the context of Grantham’s remarks. The world of climate change hysteria has numerous big political backers, like Thatcher, former US vice-president Al Gore, and current British prime minister Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern Review when he was chancellor of the exchequer. High-level figures in the upper echelons of many big firms – including fossil fuel companies such as Shell and BP that have faced so much criticism from greens – have declared that climate change is the number one issue facing humanity. Multibillionaire Richard Branson, airline boss and wannabe spaceline boss through Virgin Galactic, declared last month: ‘To my mind there is no greater or more immediate challenge than that posed by climate change.’ (3) Then there are those whose wealth is inherited, like Zac Goldsmith – worth roughly £300million – who publishes the Ecologist magazine, and David de Rothschild, a member of the super-rich banking family and author of the personal austerity guide, The Global Warming Survival Handbook (4). For a long time, the money and the influence have been on the side of the greens. Not the smelly, unwashed treehuggers, of course – posh though many of them are – but the ones walking the corridors of power in politics and business. One greenie with influence who has been in the news rather a lot lately is the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson. The man in charge of saving the US banking system has apparently spent $100million of his personal wealth on environmental causes – with the whole lot, some $700million, promised to conservation when his body decides to ‘bail out’ from this mortal coil (5). And Paulson is not only generous with his own cash: as boss of Goldman Sachs, he persuaded the board to hand over 680,000 acres of forest in Tierra del Fuego owned by the bank to the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose board of trustees includes Paulson’s son, Merritt (6). It may not come as a shock to find that those involved heavily in the unproductive, if still important, sphere of finance should believe that there is little point to the human race. When you are a member of a strand of society that is widely regarded as parasitic on the rest, the notion that the whole of humanity is parasitical on the planet is not a huge intellectual leap. But once you have ruled out suicide as an option, you need some reason to keep going. ‘Saving the planet’ has become a mission statement both for the pointlessly rich and the political class. As former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson noted in a talk at the LSE bookshop in July, people ‘want to believe there is more to life than everyday getting and spending’ – and that includes the fabulously wealthy and the politically ambitious. It’s not just a matter of finding a worldview to provide a sense of purpose. In the midst of a financial crisis, some might argue that environmental concerns should be the last thing on our minds. But along with his blunt demand that Europeans must cut their per capita CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 (for Americans, he argued for a 90 per cent cut), Lord Stern also suggested on Monday night that perhaps the way out of the financial crisis was to embrace the environmental outlook. Renewable energy and energy conservation, green manufacturing and a low-carbon infrastructure could be just the ticket, he suggested, to boost the economy. Far from being anti-growth, he said, going green could be good for our wallets as well as our conscience. It is certainly true that there are plenty of eco-entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on our fear of the future, doing everything from building windmills to trading carbon emission licences. But it seems unlikely that an emphasis on reducing the human impact on the planet, rather than expanding our capacity to generate wealth and provide for the billions of people living on next-to-nothing, could be in the interests of anyone but the new green elites. No wonder they’re splashing the cash.
Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked. He is chairing the session Can GM crops feed the world? at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Royal College of Art, London on 1&2 November.
Previously on spiked
(1) Multi-million donation for climate change at LSE, LSE, 17 April 2008 (2) For a flavour of the criticism directed at the Stern Review, see Wikipedia (3) Branson space ships to measure greenhouse gas levels, Guardian, 30 September 2008 (4) See The planet’s burning. Let’s party!, by Brendan O’Neill (5) Henry Paulson - the ‘commie capitalist’, Scotsman, 28 September 2008 (6) WCS in Tierra del Fuego, Wildlife Conservation Society (7) See ‘The only certain thing is the science is uncertain’, by Rob Lyons reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5799/
Whatever happened to the new age of European unity we were supposed to be entering, according to our leaders? Or, come to that, where is the all-powerful ‘Brussels Empire’ we have often been warned about by the shriller critics of Euro-bureaucracy? The financial crisis sweeping the continent has revealed that the European Union has no clothes. At the first sign of serious trouble, it has become every government for itself. Or to paraphrase an old British working-class saying, a case of ‘Blow you Jacques, I’m not all right’. First the Irish government broke Euro-ranks and unilaterally declared that it would guarantee all deposits in Irish banks, thus risking conflict with financial institutions elsewhere in the EU. That might have been dismissed as the desperate action of a small European economy trying to avoid becoming the next Iceland. But when the government of Germany, the biggest economy at the heart of the Euro-zone, effectively did the same thing it was clear that big shifts are afoot. Just the day before, German chancellor Angela Merkel had led an emergency summit call for European solidarity. Within 24 hours, in the face of mounting problems, Germany had torn up that paper agreement and gone its own way, to the horror of ‘close allies’ such as Britain. Amid the outbreak of confusion and consternation that followed, British chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling sought to reassure us that the German government had issued only a ‘political declaration’ of intent rather than a ‘legally binding’ guarantee for bank depositors. They had indeed, Mr Darling; it was a political declaration of the German state’s intent and determination to defend its national financial interests, regardless of what worthy EU summit statements might say. The governments of Denmark, Greece and Spain have followed suit in guaranteeing savers’ deposits, and more are expected to do so. Meanwhile further tensions have come to the surface as EU governments prepare plans to try to rescue their banking systems. The British authorities were reportedly furious with the Germans for giving the game away about the ‘secret’ plans to recapitalise the banks, and startling the UK markets, before Darling announced his £50billion bailout scheme. Even when the big four leaders of Germany, France, the UK and Italy did sort-of get their act together last weekend, it seemed that the only thing they could really agree on was the immediate need to throw EU curbs on public spending state subsidies out of the window and let each government do as it sees fit to try to hold back the financial crisis. As one headline put it, ‘EU leaders tear up rules of eurozone’. Now that’s European unity in action! In recent years, the European Union and the European Commission have proved themselves strong and tough when it comes to uniting to fight little battles of their own invention – for example, banning chemicals from plastic toys, regulating food labels, making offensive ideas illegal, and otherwise seeking to micro-manage the behaviour of the continent’s peoples. Yet confronted by a crisis in the real world beyond their control, the Euro-institutions appear frozen and flaccid. There are no EU memoranda or EC rulings that can order the global markets to submit. Remember how our rulers have lectured us all about the need for Euro-unity, and the special opprobrium they heaped upon the heads of the Irish people for daring to reject the new EU treaty/constitution? The message has been that all must do as they are told for the greater good of the European future. But as soon as the financial ordure hits the fans, they forget about Europe and take cover behind their borders. And let nobody believe that our contemptuous elites have suddenly discovered a populist concern for the public and its savings – these emergency measures are designed to protect the banking arms of each national capitalism. These events put the ‘European dream’ in more realistic perspective. From the 1950s, the European project was promoted as a way of overcoming the traditional tensions between competing national interests that had led Europe into conflict and two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. The 1957 Treaty of Rome, signed by West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, created the European Economic Community. The UK joined, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973. The organisation has since been renamed first as the European Community and then the European Union, and has expanded to include its current total of 27 members. It has also expanded its scope from the original trade organisation, becoming an increasingly political as well as economic body – a process that culminated in the failed attempt to introduce an EU constitution (rejected by the peoples of France and the Netherlands), and then to sneak it back through as an EU treaty (rejected by the Irish). Despite the misgivings of many citizens of the Continent, Europe’s national elites have enjoyed closer cooperation through an era of relative peace and prosperity. Many predicted that the old conflicts were being overcome for good, and that the EU could continue to expand and prosper. The drawback was, however, that these arrangements had not been tested in a real crisis during the relative comfort of the eurozone era. Until now. No sooner did the financial crisis shake the walls of Europe’s citadels than it exposed the chimera of EU unity and integration. In one sense this looks as if capitalism is reverting to type. The consolidation of the modern nation state began in England from the seventeenth century, and took hold elsewhere in Europe and America through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These new nation states, with clearly defined borders and centralised powers, swept away the remains of the old feudal order and helped create the conditions for the growth of modern market economies (the ‘free market’ always needed a helping hand). Capitalism expanded first within the advanced nations and then internationally, where Western states protected their national interests in the age of empire and imperialism. The European and global competition between capitalist powers helped breed the conflicts that culminated in the carnage of two world wars. During the 1980s, some of us old Marxists believed that the organic connection between capitalism and the nation state would limit how far European countries were able to subordinate their national interests and unite under the banners of the EU. The creation of the eurozone, where nations gave up their currencies and accepted both the euro and the authority of the European Central Bank, seemed to go against the grain of history. However, this apparent unity was made possible, at least temporarily, by the almost unprecedented conditions of economic, political and social stability in Europe, and the suspension of serious conflict. How quickly those halcyon days now seem to have disappeared. Confronted with their first genuine crisis in years, the European elites have reverted to the safety of their own states to try to protect their national interests. Of course, they have not abandoned the EU in which they have invested so much. But they have soon discovered that a cumbersome institution built in one era cannot cope with the demands of another, more turbulent time. The EU has no answers to the scale and speed of the financial crisis and the disruption it is causing. Moreover, tensions between the national capitals are coming more to the fore as each experiences different scales of problems in relation to the banking and property crashes. Yet as more EU states break ranks and search for national solutions to the crisis, it can only make matters worse by undermining any unified institutional response. If the surprise return of Peter Mandelson from European commissioner to UK cabinet minister symbolised the political dynamic away from Brussels this week, then the ridiculous notion that such a figure could somehow ‘save’ the British economy captured the desperate state that Europe’s states are in now. The fact that Mandelson ended up in hospital almost immediately on his return seemed a fitting metaphor for the whole sorry state of Euro-affairs. Remember, it was the economic and political limitations of the nation state in the modern world that led Europe’s elites to seek wider forms of organisation and cooperation in the first place. The shortcomings of the EU in a crisis might now drive them apart again. But they cannot easily turn the clock back to an age of dynamic national economies. Instead they are caught between paper EU initiatives and ineffective national policies. We have seen throughout the debacles over the EU constitution/treaty and the Irish referendum that the Euro-elites have nothing but contempt for the masses of Europe and popular democracy. Now, through the response to the financial crisis, we can see that, in a struggle for capitalist survival, they have little or no respect for their own institutions and golden rules either. Perhaps we should treat our leaders then with the same respect that they show others. Europe’s way out of this crisis and into the future must surely lie in cooperation between its peoples rather than national divisions. But recent dramatic events confirm that the EU will not be the answer to the hard questions now being asked. Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.
 AGAINST AUSTERITY, by Brendan O’Neill There Is (still) No Alternative, by Mick Hume Congress bales out, by Brendan O’Neill Scapegoating the spivs, by Tim Black It’s the politics, stupid, by Phil Mullan Lehman Brothers: when confidence runs out, by Rob Lyons Five myths about the Wall Street crisis, by Daniel Ben-Ami From the politics to the economics of fear, by Mick Hume Fannie, Freddie and the ‘economics of fear’, by Sean Collins The truth about the ‘credit crunch’, by Phil Mullan
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5794/
A YouGov report has found broad public support for restrictions on smoking, such as the bans on smoking in public places (1). Given that the report was commissioned by the lobby group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), this is perhaps unsurprising; the way such surveys are framed can certainly affect the result. Nonetheless it is true that there has been far less resistance to smoking bans than one might have predicted even a few years ago. This has led YouGov president Peter Kellner to argue in a Guardian comment piece that ‘measures against smoking are no longer seen as an attack on personal liberty’ (2). This is true inasmuch as people rarely talk about smoking bans in such terms. There is a consensus that such bans are legitimate, a sometimes grudging acceptance that the inconvenience to individuals who want to smoke in public places is a trivial consideration. But perhaps this says more about changed attitudes to personal liberty than the particular merits of smoking bans. The implication of Kellner’s reading is that if people did see smoking bans as an attack on personal liberty they would be more inclined to object. An alternative reading is more provocative: what if the idea of personal liberty simply has less resonance today? Kellner himself shows a weak grasp of the concept when he asks, ‘How should the right to smoke be balanced against the right to health?’ This counterposing of two equally dubious ‘rights’ is an unwieldy and unworldly way of framing a rather more prosaic question: what happens when one person’s smoke upsets other people? The libertarian position is to negotiate this with a minimum of official interference, so as to allow everyone as much freedom as possible; ban-happy anti-smokers like ASH don’t particularly care about freedom. The wider lack of resonance for personal liberty has to do with much deeper social changes over the past generation, and arguably has more in common with political apathy and disengagement than with better education or greater social consideration, as anti-smokers might like to imagine. Indeed, Kellner and ASH mistake acquiescence for more positive support for extraordinary measures, arguing that the public is ready for even greater restrictions on smoking. For example, the survey also found that 77 per cent of the public would support a ban on smoking in cars carrying children under 18. But what does this mean? Any question combining children and smoking, with the added spectre of cars thrown in, clearly comes with a readymade ‘correct’ answer, and the survey’s respondents evidently obliged. But how far do you take this? Should parents smoke in their children’s bedrooms? Most probably avoid it, but should there be a law to prohibit it? No? What kind of monster are you? How can you possibly defend the so-called ‘right’ to smoke in a child’s bedroom? By framing the debate in terms of ‘official ban now or filthy smoke everywhere’, ASH and others have partly succeeded in removing individual agency from the picture. But there is still room for argument if the terms of debate are challenged. How about opening the car window both literally and metaphorically? How about acknowledging that people are capable of showing consideration for one another without official interference. The banal issue of smoking has been bizarrely and unhelpfully moralised in recent years, while the much more important issue of personal freedom has been sidelined and obscured. If the likes of ASH are allowed to set the terms of debate, we can expect to be discussing ‘smoke-free homes’ in the near future. It is up to the rest of us to assert the importance of real individual and collective responsibility and moral agency before the very idea of ‘personal liberty’ is stubbed out altogether. Dolan Cummings is a co-organiser of the Battle of Ideas festival and a member of the Manifesto Club, which campaigns for greater personal liberty.
Previously on spiked Rob Lyons looked at the crazy world of England’s smoking ban and accused UK health campaigners of smoking smokers out of polite society. spiked writers around the world reported on the global crusade against the ‘evil weed’. Nathalie Rothschild reported on a rare protest against the English smoking ban. Mick Hume reflected on what the ban says about today’s society. Dolan Cummings argued that freedom should not be for sale. Or read more at spiked issue Smoking. 1) See the YouGov report Beyond Smoking Kills here. 2) For once, freedom is not the issue,Guardian, 7 October 2008 reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5796/
The return to school after the summer holidays has already produced the first request from the child protection authorities for information about an overweight 15-year-old boy registered at my surgery in Hackney, London, whose family is now threatened with statutory proceedings. It is only a couple of months since David Rogers, public health spokesman for the Local Government Association (LGA), declared that ‘parents who allow their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all’ (1). The LGA’s conviction that overweight children should become the subject of child protection procedures was reported under the headline ‘Fat children “should be taken from parents” to curb obesity epidemic’. It seems that the Fat Police are already on the rampage. And we can expect more of it: yesterday the LGA published a new report arguing that ‘councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children’s health in real danger. As the obesity epidemic grows, these tricky cases will keep on cropping up.’ (2) I first encountered the facile presentation of obesity as a form of child abuse at a case conference about a teenage girl some years ago. Social workers accepted that her parents were devoted and there was no hint of neglect. Nevertheless, they cited a recent case in the USA in which authorities had been blamed over the death of a morbidly obese young woman and insisted that drastic action had to be taken.
Hear spiked‘s Rob Lyons debate Tam Fry from the National Obesity Forum on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show I pointed out the inappropriateness of the parallel between the situation of an under-nourished and neglected infant and an over-weight and pampered adolescent. In the former case, actual bodily harm is the direct result of parental abuse and is, at least in physical terms, readily susceptible to intervention. The dramatically improving growth chart of the ‘failing-to-thrive’ infant following admission to hospital can be found in every child health textbook. In the latter case, long-term risks to health are the result of a complex (and poorly understood) combination of factors, including the wider ‘obesogenic’ environment (of cheap, fast and fattening food, sedentary lifestyles and leisure activities) as well as the behaviour of both the young person and her parents. A paediatrician told the case conference that there was only weak and contradictory evidence supporting the efficacy of any particular treatment for childhood obesity (3). She argued against the proposal for coercive action, putting the view, recently restated by the Royal College of Paediatricians, that obesity is ‘a public health problem, not a child protection issue’ (4). I was concerned that imposing stigmatising statutory measures on the family would alienate them from both health and social services without providing any benefit for the child. However, it seemed that the anxieties of the child protection authorities to avert blame outweighed their concerns for the welfare of the child, who was duly placed on the ‘at risk’ register. ‘Did it do any good?’ I recently inquired of the subject of these proceedings. ‘No’ was her candid response. The only benefit of being on the register was that she was enrolled in an exercise course at the local swimming pool. But, as she recalled with some bitterness, this ceased on her sixteenth birthday when she was no longer the responsibility of the child protection authorities. However, since enrolling on a college course and joining a local gym, she had managed to lose several stones in weight. Apart from being threatened with legal action, parents will shortly be receiving official warnings if their children are overweight and instructions from the government about healthy eating and physical activity (despite the abundant evidence that such exhortations are utterly useless). In their crusade against childhood obesity, public health zealots would do well to heed the wise words of paediatric experts in this field, who recently observed that ‘it is also important to remember that obesity remains extremely difficult for professionals to treat, thus criticising parents for what professionals are frequently unable to do smacks of hypocrisy’ (5).
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is a general practitioner in east London and the author of The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) He is speaking in the session Boozy Britain at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Royal College of Art, London on 1&2 November. An edited version of this article appeared in the October edition of the British Journal of General Practice.
Previously on spiked Dr Michael Fitzpatrick said we should stop bullying fat kids. Rob Lyons was sick of the endless diet of government intervention. Patrick Basham and John Luik examined new research which taught obesity hysterics a lesson. Elsewhere, they attacked the proposals to remove children from obese households. Peter Marsh asked what’s behind the sensationalist child obesity headlines. Jennie Bristow reported the findings of a spiked poll showing that parents should be responsible for children’s diets. Or read more at spiked issue Obesity. (1) The Times (London), 16 August 2008 (2) Fat kids to be taken into care, Mirror, 8 October 2008 (3) Reilly, JJ, ‘Obesity in childhood and adolescence: evidence-based clinical and public health perspectives’, Postgrad Med J 2006; 82 (96): 429-437. (4) Child obesity ‘a form of neglect’, BBC News, 14 June 2008 (5) Viner, R., Nicholls, D. ‘Managing obesity in secondary care’, Arch.Dis.Child 2005; 90: 385-390. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5797/
It is common now for people to say that this year’s American presidential election has generated more interest than others in recent history. Millions more have voted in primaries, registered to vote, attended rallies and watched debates on TV. It’s also been the major topic of conversation in the culture, from late-night TV comedians to workers around the proverbial water-coolers. To this list we can also now add last week’s vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, which drew a record 70million TV viewers. But the Palin-Biden debate also revealed a deeper truth about this year’s election: that the greater attention paid does not represent an increase in political engagement. In fact, for the most part the interest in the contest is apolitical rather than political in nature. A circus-like atmosphere has surrounded Palin since John McCain selected her to be the Republican VP candidate. And following embarrassing interviews with Katie Couric, millions tuned into last week’s debate just to see if Palin would self-destruct on primetime. It was the chance to see a possible train-wreck, rather than learn about her and Biden’s policies, which led to record viewing figures. In the event, Palin did not run off the stage in tears – to the disappointment of Democrats and the relief of Republicans. But she survived only by sticking to talking points that were only occasionally applicable to the question asked (at one point she admitted as much, saying ‘I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you [Biden] want to hear’). Biden, for his part, did not directly address Palin, for fear of appearing condescending or sexist. According to polls conducted afterwards, Biden had ‘won’ decisively, but the real point was that, with neither candidate really addressing one another, it was more like alternating infomercials than a debate. As the New York Times put it, ‘Rarely has a vice-presidential showdown been packed with such political importance’ (1). But the anti-climatic debate led many to see that the vice-presidents were not going to alter dramatically the presidential election outcome. In fact, historically VPs have been only minor subplots in elections. The real question is: why did both sides invest so much importance in this year’s VP candidates, especially Palin? When she first emerged, Republicans were desperate to boost the lacklustre McCain campaign, and Palin was seen as its saviour – and, according to some, even as the future of the GOP. But, like a one-hit wonder, Palin’s rapid rise has been followed by an equally fast decline. In a matter of weeks she was exposed as an uninformed lightweight, and prominent Republicans ditched her by the day. Palin was supposed to bring white women over to McCain’s side, but the opposite happened, as polls showed white women moving towards Obama (2). Palin, governor of the state of Alaska, has preferred to talk more about her ordinary ‘hockey mom’ roots than her record, and her debate speech was filled with more folksy, Fargo-esque colloquialisms (‘darn right’, ‘doggone’, the ‘shout out’ to schoolchildren) than ever heard from a candidate before. But her populist shtick appeals only to a minority, and can equally come across as patronising (real ‘Joe Sixpacks’ do not call themselves that). When you push lifestyle politics, as the McCain campaign has done with Palin, you have a good chance of winning over those with the same lifestyle concerns, but at the same time you’re also likely to alienate as many people who don’t share that lifestyle. Palin’s praise for rural small towns – and accompanying attacks on other areas (including, during the TV debate, the entire East Coast) – means that she has written off Americans who live in cities and suburbs, which represents a large majority of the country. If Palin ever did become the Republicans’ leader, the party would become a rump. For their part, the Democrats have devoted as much energy to attacking Palin as the Republicans have done to promoting her. Many Democrats see her as an easy target, and they repeat the same criticisms they levelled at George W Bush (essentially: stupid hick). For these Democrats, Palin is evil incarnate, and the most common adjective they use to describe her is ‘scary’. Yet their obsessive focus on Palin has had the result of inflating her importance, and has come at the expense of putting forward a positive message about their election campaign. Moreover, their attacks have played right into the Republicans’ hands: Palin, with her in-your-face red-state image, was perfect bait, and many liberals couldn’t resist taking it. In criticising her for backward reasons (like her accent, Alaskan lifestyle, and her kids), the Democrats came across, once again, as the party of snobs, and increased distrust amongst at least a section of the working classes. All of the discussion around Palin is really a way to avoid talking about politics. After the TV debate, liberals cracked jokes about her accent, while conservatives delighted in retelling her one-line zingers. Both felt comforted in a way, and to some appeared to be engaging in ‘politics’ – but neither side was talking about difficult political issues (and certainly not with someone from the other side). In the aftermath of the debate, many commentators came around, belatedly, to the view that the vice-presidential debate was a ‘sideshow’, and they now turned their attention to the ‘main event’ – that is, the Obama-McCain contest. What these commentators don’t realise is that the entire presidential election battle has become a sideshow in relation to developments in the real world, such as the financial crisis. Indeed, the candidates did not distinguish themselves as Congress sought to agree a bailout bill, which was approved and signed into law last Friday. Many criticised the House representatives who voted against the bill earlier in the week, but in fact all sections of the political class, including Obama and McCain, looked out of control in the face of the financial unravelling. McCain suspended his campaign and parachuted into Washington to save the day, but was ignored by most of his party. Obama took the strong position of ‘call me if you need me’. During this episode, President Bush has looked like a lame duck, but, based on the candidates’ responses to the crisis, don’t be surprised if November’s winner looks as ineffectual in the face of challenges shortly after taking office. In the ‘main event’, Obama has pulled ahead of McCain. Real Clear Politics’ poll of polls finds Obama leading McCain by a 50 per cent to 44 per cent margin, and Obama is currently on top in many states that Bush carried in 2004, including Ohio and Florida, the deciding states in the past two elections (3). According to conventional wisdom, Obama is winning because of his response to the financial crisis and his approach to the economy. It is true that Obama has benefited from the latest developments, but it is not because of his specific economic policies are on-point in dealing with worsening economic problems. As noted, he has had little to add regarding the bailout. And when asked to explain how his approach would change in the face of likely high deficits following the bailout, Obama dodges the question, saying only that his proposals will be ‘delayed’. Instead, Obama has taken advantage of the current situation by stoking up fears of economic meltdown, and then presenting himself as a safer pair of hands than his Republican opponent. McCain’s ‘cancel the debate’ stunt two weeks ago and other unpredictable gestures has provided Obama with material for his latest TV ad, in which he calls McCain ‘erratic in crisis’. Conservative newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer writes that McCain’s ‘frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favourably as calm, steady and cool’. Krauthammer adds that Obama has ‘both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament’ that will ‘likely be enough to make him president’ (4). This ‘vote for me, I’m safe’ approach infuses Obama’s criticisms of McCain’s healthcare policies, which his campaign says will become the focus of their attacks in the upcoming weeks. After the vice-presidential debate, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe revealed that his candidate campaign’s will use fear as a motivator when he said: ‘I think Senator Biden did a terrific job today of describing why middle-class families should fear John McCain’s health plan.’ Furthermore, the Obama campaign will criticise McCain’s healthcare plan – which includes a $5,000 tax credit and treats employers’ healthcare payments as taxable – as ‘radical’ (5). Note that the problem they identify with McCain’s proposal is that it is extreme; not expensive or impractical, but ‘radical’. Obama’s argument may be helping him to win, but it is essentially a conservative one. On the back foot, the McCain campaign appears to want to change the focus of the election discussion towards Obama’s qualifications to lead. The Republican National Committee’s press secretary, Alex Conant, said the Palin debate performance and the signing of the bailout bill will allow the Republicans to ‘turn the page’, and ‘Barack Obama’s readiness will return to being the central subject of debate’ (6). And on the weekend, Palin indicated where such campaigning might go when she accused Obama of being ‘someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists’ (7). Palin was referring to Bill Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground organisation that claimed responsibility for about a dozen bombings in the US, and who appears to be a peripheral acquaintance of Obama’s in Chicago. If the McCain campaign does move into this ‘guilt by association’ territory, it will further take the election away from real problems. Such an attack approach could have some impact on voters, but it is likely to be limited. Obama has already been challenged on his questionable associations with his pastor Jeremiah Wright and others, and came out without too much damage. But as some Obama supporters will tell you in private, they are worried about the prospect of a personal-attacks campaign on their candidate. What his supporters’ anxieties reveal is a fear that they can’t trust working-class support for Obama – that the people are stupid enough to fall for an ‘October surprise’, race-baiting, or some other type of negative attack from Republicans. In last week’s debate, Joe Biden said: ‘This is the most important election you will ever, ever have voted in, any of you, since 1932.’ It’s a sentiment that is widely expressed this year. But is it really ‘the most important election’? True, the country faces significant challenges, but it has in the past, too. Yet what really makes the claim of ‘the most important election’ seem so out of sync to my ears is the fact that the candidates’ campaigns are so removed from the pressing issues of the day. As their responses to the financial crisis showed, Obama and McCain seem small in relation to the tasks at hand. Sean Collins is a writer based in New York.
(1) Cordial but pointed, Palin and Biden Face Off, New York Times, 3 October 2008 (2) McCain seen as less likely to bring change, poll finds, New York Times, 18 September 2008 (3) See Real Clear Politics‘s poll of polls here. (4) Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry, Washington Post, 3 October 2008 (5) Campaign trajectory remains unchanged, Politico, 3 October 2008 (6) Campaign trajectory remains unchanged, Politico, 3 October 2008 (7) Palin seizes on Obama’s Ayers ties, Washington Post, 5 October 2008 reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5791/
On Friday, Tata Motors, the company behind the much-discussed ‘people’s car’, the Nano, announced that it was pulling out of its plant in Singur, near Kolkata in West Bengal. The factory had been hit by protests about compensation payments to farmers, on whose land the factory would be developed and built. But behind the local protests lies an anti-development trend that threatens India’s economic growth and the hope of increasing prosperity for the majority of the population that remains desperately poor. The Nano - which Tata still plans to build elsewhere - was subject to considerable hypocrital and doom-mongering criticism from the Western media when it was unveiled in January. The Nano may not be particularly sexy to Western eyes, but for many Indians it holds out the possibility of affordable personal transport. A simple, rear-engine, four-seater, lightweight vehicle, it is the cheapest car in the world - it will retail for £1,200 (around $2,500 or €2,200). This means that, finally, driving will become affordable to India’s growing middle classes. Now, however, Tata’s departure from the West Bengal plant will delay production for months, and possibly years. Who is opposing Tata’s plans? Certainly not the 82 per cent of farmers who have already sold over 691 acres to the state government, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). A further 300 acres have been acquired from farmers by the government’s use of an archaic law introduced by the British during the Raj. Figures vary, but clearly some farmers have not yet received, or are refusing to accept, compensation deals. They are, however, a minority (around 17 per cent of Singur farmers). No doubt some of these farmers will have been involved in the roadblocks and site occupations which prompted the deployment of 5,000 riot police in the area. But most of the opposition to Tata has come from various political groups and non-governmental organisations, all of which claim to represent the interests of the small farmer holding out against politicians and industrialists. Medha Patkar, earlier a leading opponent of the Narmada Dam Project, has paid a supportive visit to the Singur site (perhaps seeking a new cause after the courts gave the go-ahead for the dam to be built). Novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has hoofed her way from Delhi to lend her support. And taking her cue, perhaps, from Medha Patkar, Mamata Banerjee, leader of the opposition Trinamool Congress Party (TCP), has been on hunger strike in protest against the Tata factory development. The opponents of the plant have demanded that between 300 and 400 acres of land be returned to the farmers. Tata has refused to return this amount as it would mean not being able to build ancilliary units for suppliers next to the factory (which will help to cut the cost of production).
 CARTOON: Click on the image above for Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee’s take on the Nano The compensation deal recently offered by Tata and the CPI-M is impressive. It includes the guarantee of a government job for one person per household within a year; special status for Singur farmers with government welfare agencies; and financial remuneration for farmers and sharecroppers. Most importantly, Tata will develop the infrastructure in and around Singur. If Tata is to proceed with production, it will have to build roads, telecommunications, and public and private buildings. It is no wonder that now supporters of the plant are protesting, calling on Tata to stay and continue with its plans. They are concerned that they will lose jobs, money and new amenities if Tata is effectively forced out. A 10-hour bandh (civic shutdown) was observed last weekend in reaction to the behaviour of the groups that oppose Tata. One farmer, who had willingly given up land for the plant, told the Hindu newspaper: ‘Can any of the opposition leaders tell us what we will do now? People of Singur have been the worst sufferers in this dirty political game.’ (1) However, with all the arrogance of the reactionary environmental arguments already so familiar here in the West, the TCP dismisses the Tata compensation schemes as manipulative pay-offs, which amount to nothing compared with the importance of farmers holding on to their small patches of land and continuing to live in the traditional, rural manner. This really is the crux of the matter. As Indian business columnist Gucharan Das writes ‘[T]he real question is whether Indians want to remain starving peasants or become part of an urban proletariat.’ (2) Romanticised images of Indian rural life are familiar to us now, as are the demonising images of poverty in urban slums. Translation: rural, good; urban, bad. Taking the train from Kolkata to Jamshedpur (home of Tata Steel), one can see how these stereotypes have credibility. Despite the growth and dynamism in Kolkata, there are still horrendous levels of poverty and deprivation. And as the train crosses the Howrah and glides through seemingly endless green paddy fields dotted with a few clean-looking huts and slender women in brightly coloured saris, you can imagine rural life being far more calm and pleasant than in the noisy chaos of the city. I myself saw that rural idyll through a train window. The only noise was that of the train and its passengers. Arundhati Roy could no doubt write a poetic piece based on such a vision. But it is not the reality. The hardship and deprivation of rural life is filtered out. In underdeveloped rural areas there can be as few as two healthcare workers per 3,000 people - or one primary health centre with two doctors per 20,000 (3). Here, the sick may die through lack of access to healthcare. Though undeniably hard, in Kolkata there is at least some possibility for the poor to improve their lot, to move on from one job or career to another; in rural areas, families are expected to live on the same farm and do the same work for generations. Back in Britain, I had a conversation with a woman whose husband works for Massey Ferguson. He works on the computer systems fitted into tractors which have no human driver. These systems can read the productivity of a square metre of land, compute how much fertiliser is needed in any given area, and calculate the optimal depth in which to sow. Not being familiar with either tractors or computers, my mind boggled. What possibilities! I bet there are a few farmers in India who could do with this equipment. They will never get it by remaining vulnerable, small land-holding farmers. The best chance of increasing the productivity of land (and not remaining as little more than beasts of burden themselves) is to do what every developed nation has done: embrace industrialisation. It is the only way a country like India will be able to develop and improve life for its population - rural and urban. The anti-Tata protesters are kidding themselves if they imagine they are radical anti-capitalists or progressives taking a stand against an evil corporation. In truth, they are romanticising rural life and, if the civic shutdown is a good barometer, they are going against the wishes of vast numbers of farmers who want a better life. Like Gucharan Das, I hope those who choose the urban proletariat option win the day, and that Tata can get on with producing its ‘people’s car’. Alka Sehgal is reading for a PhD in the disappearance of British identity.
Previously on spiked Brendan O’Neill celebrated the arrival of ‘The People’s Car’. He asked what’s behind the campaign against 4x4s and SUVs and criticised the desire for a stay-at-home society. Daniel Ben-Ami described how pity for Indians has becomea fashion trend. Or read more at spiked issues Transport and Asia. (1) Sindh observes bandh, the Hindu, 5 October 2008 (2) Quoted in Indian protests: Violent protests threaten to delay Tata’s plan for world’s cheapest car, Guardian, 23 August 2008 (3) Abhahy T Bang, Rani A Bang, Sanjay B Baitule, M Hanimi Reddy, Mahesh D Deshmukha in The Lancet, vol.354, December 4 1999, p 1955 reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5792/
If there’s one thing the resignation of Sir Ian Blair has proved, it’s that London mayor Boris Johnson, far from bringing respite from the neurotic control-freakery of New Labour, seems intent on replicating its worst excesses. Although some have seen fit to praise him as a ‘champion of diversity’, Blair, the copper who put the PC into police work, has never been less than ‘controversial’. And it’s not hard to see why: his three-and-a-half-year tenure as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London has encompassed, amongst other things, the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes (plus an abortive cover-up), accusations of racial discrimination within the Met, and alleged favouring of a friend’s company in the awarding of a £3million communications strategy contract. But despite a litany of cock-ups and cop-outs sufficient to shame lesser men, Blair’s resignation was no act of conscience. Rather, it was the result of a sustained blunderbuss of criticism from the mayor Johnson, resulting in Blair being told ‘in a very pleasant but determined way, that he [Johnson] wished there to be a change of leadership at the Met’. ‘Without the mayor’s backing’, Blair said as part of his resignation statement, ‘I do not think I can continue in the job’. The problem with this, as many have noted, is that Johnson has no formal power to choose the Metropolitan Police chief. As it currently stands, this decision is the sole prerogative of the home secretary (and the Queen). No such protocol was adhered to in this case: if Johnson didn’t quite push Blair on to his sword, he certainly provided the guiding hand. As Jenny Jones of the Metropolitan Police Authority sardonically remarked: ‘We know you [Johnson] have no constitutional powers, but we are not sure you know that you haven’t.’ Johnson’s disregard for official procedure, or ‘bureaucratic piffle’ he no doubt calls it, has at least been brazen. At the Conservative Party conference last week he declared: ‘I’m not proposing to intervene in day-to-day operations, but if the mayor is to hold the police to account and if the mayor is to be held accountable for crime in London as he or she must be, then that means having proper power of appointment over the commissioner.’ As it turned out, any power of appointment will do, proper or not. Critics have been quick to round on Johnson for ‘politicising’ the commissioner’s role: ex-mayor Ken Livingstone argued, without irony, that the precedent set makes the role of commissioner ‘much more political’; Observer columnist Henry Porter noted that Blair had been treated as a politician, not a public servant; and the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Ken Jones, argued that the commissioner ought to be ‘allowed to operate according to his or her judgement and ultimately [their] accountability will be to the law’. But there’s a major drawback to such a vein of critique: Johnson is not embarking upon a new era of political interference, he’s simply crowning New Labour’s glory; that is, the overt political colonisation of state machinery. Indeed, from the ill-judged advocacy of government policies such as 90-day detention without charge for terrorism suspects, to his palliness both with Livingstone and the other, less popular Blair, Sir Ian was a triumph of the elision of state and party-political allegiance. From this perspective, Johnson simply wants his own man in situ, not one of Tony’s tarnished cronies. This has prompted some to long for the halcyon days of the British Establishment, when the line between public service and political allegiance was far more strictly drawn. Unfortunately, for those indulging in nostalgia for an age of deference, the police, despite the pretensions towards an ideology of public service, have never been un-politicised, even before the Two Blairs. Firstly, insofar as the police enforce the rule of law, they enforce a politically informed conception of the public order, one in which the formal universality reproduces the iniquities of the social whole. To paraphrase Anatole France, everybody is forbidden to steal, both those with and those without. And secondly, from the high watermark of the Dixon of Dock Green image of policing during the 1950s, public trust in the police’s political neutrality has constantly been challenged. Be it the protests and industrial disputes of the 1970s, the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s, or the accusation of ‘institutionalised racism’ in the Macpherson report in 2001, the veil of impartiality has been consistently rent. Moreover, while the ruling elite might once have felt confident enough in their vision for the whole of society, as indeed it did during the 1950s, to ride out the conflicts in their midst, such self-certainty has long since ebbed. Each miscarriage of justice, each allegation of racism always seems to hit the police with disproportionate force. Not that such insecurity is surprising. Just as every other pillar of the state is afflicted by a crisis of confidence, from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, so too the law enforcers. But what ought properly speaking to be grasped as the crisis of the police as an institution, Johnson approaches as a problem of its leader: ‘There comes a time in any organisation when it becomes clear it would benefit from new leadership and clarity of purpose. I believe that time is now.’ Johnson’s longed-for ‘clarity of purpose’ could be applied to various institutions of the British State. This is the real meaning of what is termed ‘politicisation’. These deracinated institutions of the British State, long deprived of their traditional roles, their raison d’être as part of the soundless if slow machinery of governance, have altered in function. They have become vessels for politicians desperately in search of the vocation their public position demands. When Johnson talks of restoring a ‘clarity of purpose’ to the Metropolitan Police, he gives voice to the lament of the political class as a whole. Unfortunately for the capital’s citizenry, such a determination to get stuck into the police force, to infuse and galvanise it with a ‘clarity of purpose’, will no doubt lead to a whole new raft of policy wheezes and ‘bloody good ideas’. Certainly, if Johnson’s idea of purpose consists of banning booze on Tube trains, and introducing knife arches, the capital’s inhabitants can look forward to a combination of the arbitrary and the authoritarian. Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.
Previously on spiked Neil Davenport criticised the modern police for skewing crime reporting. Josie Appleton and others asked What kind of London do we want?. Nathalie Rothschild described Boris Johnson as London’s new PC crusader. Brendan O’Neill discussed the London booze ban and the politics of behaviour, condemned London’s new rulers as intolerant and exposed the real Boris Johnson. Or read more at spiked issue: |
