reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7640/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
China and America: the economic Odd Couple
Stephen Roach provides some useful, counterintuitive insights into the economic relationship between America and China, but too often uses the term ‘global imbalance’ as a euphemism for ‘US decline’.
Sean Collins

In recent years there has been much debate among economists about the so-called ‘global imbalances’, mainly between the US and East Asia, especially China.

On one side, America has been consuming more than it has been producing, importing more than it has been exporting, and borrowing rather than relying on internal savings to pay for it all. On the other side, China has been producing more than it has been consuming, exporting more than it has been importing, and lending to the US through purchases of US government debt and other means. It is certainly odd that China, a still-developing and relatively poor country, has been effectively subsidising and keeping afloat the US, the world’s largest and richest economy.

The US-China economic relationship has assumed greater salience with the financial and economic crisis. China’s capital flows to the US allowed for low interest rates in America, which underpinned the housing boom and bust and which, in turn, triggered the broader financial unravelling. The recession has reduced both America’s trade deficit and China’s surplus, but the imbalance still exists. Many wonder if the crisis will lead to an adjustment, and in particular whether China will continue to purchase American debt and other financial assets. The recent summit of the G20 nations in Pittsburgh included a call for global economic imbalances (which are wider and more complex than just US and China) to be addressed.

In 2002, Stephen Roach began to identify the significance of the global economic imbalances, making him one of the first to do so. Roach, the former chief economist at Morgan Stanley and now the head of the investment bank’s Asia subsidiary, has long argued that the arrangement is problematic and ultimately unsustainable. Now, as the global imbalances are an important topic in policy circles, Roach has published The Next Asia, a collection of articles written between 2006 and mid-2009. The book’s title is in fact somewhat misleading: it is really more about China than Asia generally, and focuses on the economic ties between China and the US.

For many years, Roach argued that the US is the main force behind the imbalance. In The Next Asia he refers to Asia’s export-led growth as ‘a second-order bubble – in effect, a derivative of the one in US consumption’. This perspective aligns him with the so-called ‘money glut’ school of thought (1). The money-glut theorists see low interest rates in the US as the driving force behind the imbalances. Roach certainly lays a large part of the blame on the Federal Reserve under its former head Alan Greenspan. The Fed, according to Roach, was ‘led by market libertarians who condoned an insidious succession of asset bubbles and ignored its regulatory responsibility in an era of unprecedented financial engineering and excess leverage’.

This understanding leads Roach to criticise US officials for seeking protectionist trade measures against China, or demanding that China make changes, such as letting the Chinese yuan increase in value versus the dollar. The US should not scapegoat China when its own house is not in order, Roach argues, citing in particular America’s low domestic savings. If anything, the US should be thanking China, for without its large purchases of dollar-based assets, US interest rates would have to be higher to attract buyers.

When the discussion of global imbalances first emerged earlier this decade, the ‘money glut’ outlook was the predominant explanation. However, in a 2005 speech, Ben Bernanke (who became chairman of the Federal Reserve) turned the issue on its head (2). Bernanke argued that the primary cause of the imbalances was excess savings in Asia – a so-called ‘savings glut’. China in particular produces more than it consumes, and surplus funds make their way into Western capital markets. China’s state policy of pegging the yuan to the dollar – which then requires China to purchase dollar-based assets – is cited as evidence that the imbalance is the result of Chinese ‘manipulation’ rather than a natural outcome of financial flows. From this point of view, the onus for reform is on China and Asia generally, not the US, which has effectively been doing the world a service by absorbing the surplus funds.

Roach’s earlier pieces in the book are critical of Bernanke and other ‘savings glut’ theorists. In a 2006 article, he says that Bernanke’s speech ‘downplayed America’s role in fostering the problem – unchecked structural budget deficits, a plunge in the income-based savings rate of US households, and a record consumer debt binge’. Moreover, according to Roach, Bernanke’s critique failed to appreciate that China is still a developing country, one that mixes both state and private ownership and has a fragmented financial system: ‘The Fed chairman is offering advice as if China was a fully functioning market-based system – perfectly capable of achieving policy traction with the traditional instruments of monetary and currency policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.’

But as we follow the development of Roach’s arguments in The Next Asia, we find a subtle shift in his views over time. He increasingly characterises the relationship between the US and China as ‘symbiosis’ rather than pinning most of the blame on the US. Instead, he sees both countries contributing to the imbalances. The Chinese economy’s reliance on exports is one-sided and unsustainable, he argues. Roach says China is desperately in need of reforms to boost internal consumption. For example, he recommends that the Chinese state overhaul welfare assistance, providing retirement and health benefits, so that households do not undertake ‘precautionary savings’ and instead spend its income.

Roach is initially optimistic about China’s ability and willingness to carry out the kind of reforms he suggests. He gains confidence from the statement made by Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, to the National People’s Congress in March 2007, that China’s economy was increasingly ‘unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, and unsustainable’. But over time, as it becomes clear that China is not implementing Roach’s favoured reforms, his frustration mounts. In near-exasperation he writes: ‘There are worrisome signs that China just doesn’t get it and that it is clinging to antiquated policy and economic growth strategies.’

Roach believes the crisis has the potential to be a ‘wake up’ call for China and Asia generally. But he despairs that China’s response to the crisis appears to be more of the same: for instance, he describes China’s massive $585billion stimulus (which at 13 per cent of its GDP is more than twice the impact of the US stimulus package) as an ‘infrastructure programme’ that bolsters the existing investment in production and exports, while ‘little is being done to stimulate the Chinese consumer’.

In an article in the Financial Times following the publication of his book, Roach evaluates the crisis responses globally and concludes: ‘Far from rebalancing, an unbalanced world again appears to be compounding existing imbalances.’ (3) The Pittsburgh summit adopted the goal of ‘sustained and balanced growth’, but Roach argues that this is an empty statement that lacks an enforcement mechanism.

Roach is an astute observer of global trends, and The Next Asia is full of insights. Today, when many economists and policymakers are focused on emergency measures and financial reforms, Roach provides a useful counterweight, stressing that there are underlying structural problems that need to be addressed. And compared to those who superficially focus on the financial sphere, and pin the blame for the crisis on greedy bankers, complex financial instruments or lax regulators, his emphasis on global imbalances gets closer to the point.

But Roach goes too far when he describes these imbalances as ‘the root cause of the current crisis and recession’; they are a symptom rather than a cause. The real issue underneath the imbalances – which Roach and most other participants in the debate overlook – is the decline of productive industry in the US. As a recent report by CrossBorderCapital found, US profitability has been falling for some time, in contrast to China and other parts of Asia (4). The discussion of ‘imbalances’ usually refers to who is borrowing (the US) and who is lending (China); or who is consuming (the US) and who is not (China). But the fundamental ‘imbalance’ is between who is creating new value in productive industries (China) and who is relying on credit to cover up for a lack of dynamism (the US). Overall, the term ‘imbalance’ is too much of a euphemism for what should really be called US decline.

Roach’s calls for China to reform are also problematic. As mentioned, he bemoans China’s lack of action on the reform front, but he never seeks to try to explain this inactivity. He displays a lack of curiosity to try to find out why China never gets around to promoting consumption. It leads to no re-evaluation of China’s interests, or the barriers to reform.

There are, in fact, a number of good reasons behind China’s reluctance to change, some of which Roach himself points to, but never fully develops. For instance, the build-up of currency reserves among Asian nations was a response to the late Nineties financial crisis in that region. Countries whose debt was denominated in dollars found that it ballooned when the value of their currencies fell; in response, many Asian nations vowed ‘never again’, and built up dollar reserves and relied more on internal savings. China was not a victim of this process, but it learned from observing what happened to its neighbours, and also began loading up on dollars.

Likewise, there is a rational basis for Chinese purchases of US Treasury securities, even though there are relatively low returns from such investments. Specifically, such purchases support China’s dollar reserves and provide a relatively liquid form of investment (as opposed to foreign direct investment, such as buying assets or investing in companies, which requires a longer commitment). Moreover, there is a geopolitical dimension, which many economists overlook or downplay. China is essentially a status quo power rather than a challenger, a country that seeks to grow within the context of a US-led world order. The Chinese government is certainly aware that a drastic withdrawal of investment in the US could upset the foundation of that order, to China’s detriment.

In a recent discussion of his book on the website of Foreign Policy magazine, Roach says ‘the shift to internal demand is really Beijing’s only option’ (5). Not really. By ‘internal demand’ Roach means consumption. If the US consumer will no longer buy imports from China, then China must create new consumers at home. But this emphasis on personal consumption is myopic. As the examples of industrialising Britain and America show, profitable growth creates its own demand; in particular, from new surplus being spent on the next round of investment, or businesses buying from other businesses. In both the British and American examples, personal consumption eventually rose, but it was secondary to business consumption. In neither case did governments adopt policies to provide special boosts to personal consumption.

Indeed, when Roach calls upon China to prop up consumer spending and shift the economy away from industry and towards services, from the ‘quantity to quality dimension of the growth experience’, he sounds like he wants China to embrace the policies that the US and other Western countries have adopted to offset industrial decline. The West may need to deploy such strategies after decades of deindustrialisation, but China is still a rising industrial power, and it would be quite understandable if it ignored the West’s calls to be more like it.

It is clear that Roach disagrees with those in the US and elsewhere who blame China solely for today’s economic problems. Perhaps the most passionate passages in The Next Asia are his testimonies before Congress, where he bluntly tells American politicians they are wrong to scapegoat China: ‘By going after China, you in the Congress are playing with fire.’ And it’s also clear that his concept of ‘symbiosis’ is meant to be even-handed. But his neutral-sounding, ‘both need to look in the mirror’ framework ultimately overstates China’s problems and underestimates America’s weakness. And his assumption that the goal of economic policy should be ‘global balance’, rather than the dynamic growth of productive industry, leads Roach down the same path as the US officials he criticises – lecturing China.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York.

Stephen Roach on the Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization, by Stephen Roach, is published by John Wiley & Son. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Daniel Ben-Ami provides a very useful discussion of the different explanations for the global imbalances. See A balancing act, Fund Strategy, 17 August 2009

(2) ‘The global savings glut and the US current account deficit,’ March 2005 speech

(3) ‘An unbalanced world is again compounding its imbalances,’ Financial Times, 7 October 2009

(4) CrossBorderCapital, ‘Re-thinking emerging markets – another look at the next twenty years,’ Emerging Markets, May 2009

(5) ‘No turning back for The Next Asia,’ foreignpolicy.com, 8 October 2009

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7643/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
The anti-smoking ‘truth regime’ that cannot be questioned
Two new books expose how epidemiology has been used as a tool of propaganda in the war on tobacco – and woe betide anyone who tries to inject some real facts into the debate.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

‘In retrospect, it is striking’, writes epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat in Hyping Health Risks ,‘how disposed the public [in the USA] was to believe that some form of environmental pollution – whether chemicals in the soil and water, radionuclides from nuclear reactors, or magnetic fields from power lines, or something else – must be involved in the development of breast cancer’.

However, to the disappointment of environmental activists, intensive local investigations (notably in Long Island, New York) of exposures to organochlorine compounds (including DDT) and combustion products – the major focus of suspicion – showed no evidence of a link with breast cancer. While in relation to breast cancer such negative findings have largely been accepted, in other areas – such as the alleged links between electromagnetic fields and childhood cancer – the strength of popular conviction has led to the distortion and misrepresentation of scientific studies.

What Kabat characterises as a ‘deliberate willingness to be careless with data’ is most apparent in the controversy over passive smoking, where he identifies ‘a political strategy of hyping an unrealistic risk in order to gain public support for tobacco control policies’. Kabat was co-author, with James Enstrom, of a paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2003 under the provocative headline ‘Passive Smoking May Not Kill’. This paper reported the results of a large, 40-year-long, rigorously conducted study of the effects of ‘environmental tobacco smoke’. It revealed a marginally increased risk of coronary heart disease (and an even smaller effect on lung cancer). The increase in relative risk was slightly smaller than in numerous similar studies, but within the same range – the sort of increase that, given the margins of error of such studies, would generally be deemed too small to be considered of significance.

Yet, as Kabat observes, anti-smoking campaigners and public health authorities have routinely manipulated the results of such studies to justify increasingly coercive policies. He details their methods of selecting positive and neglecting negative studies, overstating the significance of results and ignoring weaknesses and inconsistencies. Their key calculation is based on multiplying marginal increases in relative risk by vast population numbers to construct an estimate of the annual mortality attributable to passive smoking. Headlines proclaiming that ‘passive smoking kills’ thousands every year then provide the banners for the anti-smoking crusade.

The Kabat and Enstrom paper, published at a moment when the campaign for bans on smoking in public places had reached a critical stage in the UK, provoked a torrent of condemnation and abuse, with – (unsubstantiated) allegations of corruption and fraud. A subsequent commentary on ‘the BMJ affair’ by two sociologists, entitled ‘Silencing Science’, was based on a study of the 144 ‘rapid responses’ received by the BMJ:

‘Silencing is based on intimidation, as partisans employ a strident tone full of sarcasm and moral indignation. There are elements of an authoritarian cult involved here: uphold the truth that secondhand smoke kills or else!’

Their conclusion was that ‘public consensus about the negative effects of passive smoke is so strong that it has become part of a truth regime that cannot be intelligibly questioned’. The result of what Kabat dubs ‘the new McCarthyism in science’ is that epidemiology is reduced to propaganda.

In his fascinating history of anti-smoking, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowdon (who was previously interviewed for the spiked review of books here) provides the wider context for the witch-hunt against Kabat and Enstrom. He shows how the campaign against passive smoking took off in the 1970s, long before the first studies that claimed to show its ill-effects. An early campaigner’s statement that ‘we were just waiting for science to tell us what we already knew’ accurately reveals the subordinate role of science in the anti-tobacco cause. Snowdon also shows that the campaign against passive smoking has grown more strident and more influential in inverse proportion to the scientific evidence. Though large studies in the 1990s had shown all ‘those who had eyes to see that the passive smoking theory had unravelled’, the anti-smoking bandwagon rolled on regardless.

Snowdon provides entertaining examples of the preposterous claims of anti-smoking campaigners – some suggesting that passive smoking causes diseases (such as breast cancer) that have never been linked to active smoking. From Helena, Montana to Glasgow, Scotland, campaigners have claimed dramatic falls in mortality following the introduction of smoking bans – claims that disintegrate under the slightest scrutiny (which they rarely receive from a cravenly ‘on-message’ media). More objective reports suggest increases in levels of smoking, particularly among young people, since the introduction of bans.

Snowdon quotes a recent editorial in the New Scientist, which suggests that the anti-smoking campaign may have reached some sort of limit. Commenting on the promotion of the concept of ‘third-hand smoke’ – the notion that toxic residues in the form of particulates can be transmitted from a victim of passive smoking to a third party (and hence justifying bans on smoking in the home as well as in the workplace) – campaigners were accused of ‘distorting the facts to make their case’. The editorial concluded that ‘using bad science can never be justified, even in the pursuit of a noble cause’. Yet, as Snowdon observes, the ‘real message’ that emerges from his study is that ‘government health agencies could no longer be trusted to provide accurate medical advice and were now wilfully misleading the public in an effort to manipulate behaviour’. This is the real damage done to public health by its embrace of the cynical moralism of the anti-smoking crusaders.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author most recently of Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) He is speaking in the debate Is the NHS institutionally ageist? at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 1 November 2009.

Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology, by Geoffrey Kabat, is published by Columbia University Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking, by Christopher Snowdon, is published by Little Dice. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7641/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
Farewell, Norman Levitt
With the passing of Norman Levitt, a rigorous defender of scientific truth against the relativism and cowardice of the ‘academic left’, we have lost a modern Enlightenment hero.
Stuart Derbyshire

Norman Levitt died from complications related to heart failure this past weekend (24 October). He was professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a friend of spiked. He wrote some excellent articles and essays for spiked and some angry letters, too – which is just the kind of friend spiked welcomes.

His 1994 book, Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, co-authored with Paul Gross, caused a minor sensation (1). Levitt and Gross noted the disconcerting rise of what they called the ‘academic left’ and particularly the hatred that the academic left directed against science. They saw the hatred of the academic left as not just stemming from a distrust of how science has been abused – to justify the Holocaust, build nuclear weapons and so forth – but also from hostility towards the very structure of how science is done and communicated. Thus the academic left openly attack the content of science and question the very foundation of scientific belief.

Under the banner of feminism and anti-racism the academic left attack science for being poisoned by sexism, racism and a vicious cultural imperialism. The very pursuit of scientific knowledge is a form of aggression against minorities and other cultures, they believe. Handily, having adopted this highly dubious and negative stance against science, the academic left is liberated from the grubby and difficult task of actual scientific study. Scientific knowledge must be wrong and can thus be discarded without any further study. Any attack on the academic left for their determined self-imposed ignorance is brushed off by their presumed moral authority that guarantees the validity of their critique. As Levitt and Gross wrote:

‘Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in static; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognise, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers blood pressure.’ (Higher Superstition)

The hostility and ignorance of the academic left were an enormous irritation to Levitt because he viewed science as the crowning glory of intellectual endeavour and the only means by which we can properly interrogate and understand the world around us. Abandoning science, and maybe giving it a good hiding to boot, doesn’t just desecrate a technical exercise in understanding; it also undermines the possibility of human freedom. Science increases the scope for human action because it makes new things possible. Science gives us new options to solve problems. Of course, we may use science to create rather than solve problems, since how we use science is political not scientific – but to condemn the entire exercise is to condemn humanity. Without science we are condemned to continued ignorance and mysticism.

Most famously, the publication of Higher Superstition triggered Alan Sokal to submit his joke paper, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, to the journal Social Text. The paper was published despite, or maybe because of, its call to end ‘the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarised briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.’ (2)

The publication of Sokal’s paper – which came to be known as ‘the Sokal hoax’ – caused an international storm. More importantly, it provided a punctuation mark for Levitt’s argument regarding the sheer audacity of the academic left and their tendency to go along with any pitiful drivel so long as science was admonished. It also earned Levitt some prestigious enemies amongst the social constructionists, including Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick in England, who just happened to have an article in the same edition of Social Text as Sokal… Fuller has not forgiven Levitt even in death (3). Levitt, I’m sure, would not care less.

Levitt was brilliant at uncovering attacks on science made under the guise of ‘democratisation’. He rightly pointed to the absurdity of advocating teaching intelligent design or creationism alongside evolution in American schools. Many on the academic left, and Steve Fuller, support this campaign on ‘democratic’ grounds. Levitt correctly observed that teaching creation as science whitewashes the rigours of science and threatens to reduce science to a popularity contest about belief.

His distaste for the use and abuse of populism by the academic left possibly explains why Levitt was keen on the idea of insulating science from the influence of public opinion. That, I believe, was an error. Only by engaging schools, and the public, on the need for teaching evolution as a science can the argument against creationism in schools be won. If Levitt were alive today he would doubtless now be typing an angry letter to spiked explaining his public engagements promoting the teaching of evolution in schools. The world has lost a fierce defender of science and a modern Enlightenment hero.

Stuart Derbyshire is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Birmingham. He will be speaking in the debate Nudge Nudge, Nag Nag: the New Politics of Behaviour at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 1 November at the Royal College of Art in London.

(1) Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Paul Gross & Norman Levitt, John Hopkins University Press, 1994

(2) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,  Alan D Sokal, Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996

(3) Norman Levitt RIP, Steve Fuller, 28 October 2009

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7652/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
The drawn-out decay of the capitalist class
Richard Overy’s splendid new book on the ‘morbid age’ of the 1920s and 30s sheds light on the emergence of a profound crisis of confidence amongst the bourgeoisie – a crisis that has never quite gone away.
Tim Black

‘I’ve enough sense to see that the old life we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots’, explains the narrator of George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming up for Air. ‘There are millions of others like me’, he continues, ‘[o]rdinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run into in pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracked and collapsing under their feet’.

As historian Richard Overy shows in his splendid The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, this sense of menace, of a threat latent in the social subsoil, dominated the interwar imagination. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Overy contends, public discourse on anything from science to economics was refracted through the prism of a crisis of civilisation, a tale of grand historical decline that defined the era.

‘Is civilisation decaying?’ asked the Fabian Society in a series of public lectures in 1923. Few were capable of an optimistic response. While the author HG Wells was issuing endless jeremiads against a civilisation grown rank, last-days-of-Rome despair had found a voluble vent in the form of historian Arnold Toynbee. ‘The modern Western Civilisation’, he told a packed London School of Economics lecture hall in 1939, ‘is likely, on the showing of all the precedents… to break down and disintegrate and finally dissolve’. As critic Geoffrey West observed in 1933, the ‘collapse of civilisation’, once a ‘turnip-headed bogey phrase’, was now a matter for serious intellectuals to mull over, asking not ‘whether’ but ‘when’.

The pessimism was far from groundless. The First World War had left Britain, once the predominant global power, facing an uncertain future. Pre-1914, its empire made it the largest trading economy, and the third largest manufacturing economy, in the world. The 1920s and early 30s, however, witnessed steady economic decline, punctuated only by upheaval, including the General Strike of 1926 and the great crash of 1929. Morally, spiritually, something seemed to have broken also – society seemed bereft of purpose, of direction, other than down. The brutalising experience of the First World War, the mass unemployment of the 1920s and 30s, with no welfare to cushion the impoverishment… all of it seemed to point to a way of life and a social order that could no longer be sustained.

The First World War marked the rupture, the point after which there was no going back. Writing in 1939, Bloomsbury group patriarch Leonard Woolf reflected: ‘In those [pre-1914] days there was an ordered way of life, a law, a temple and a city – a civilisation of sorts.’ But by end of the war there was just ‘hatred, fear and self-preservation’. The poet Siegfried Sassoon echoed Woolf’s nostalgia: ‘What a peaceful world it was! And what a bullying, barbarian world it is now!’

In The Morbid Age, however, Overy refuses to take a portrait such as this at face value. This sense of a civilisation in crisis, decaying, declining, collapsing – such words littered interwar culture like statements of the self-evident – was not a passive reflection of the reality faced by politicians, intellectuals, artists, scientists and so on. Although there were problems confronting a society racked by war and recession in the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘concepts, metaphors and language’ that informed this broader sense of a civilisation imperilled, of an impending Dark Ages, had developed a ‘reality of [their] own’. The sense of an ending seemed to eclipse more sober comprehension. What Overy attempts to do, using pamphlets, books, journals, diaries and lectures, is to show how this sense of crisis permeated every aspect of public discourse from economics to science.

Yet as meticulous and well-written as it is, The Morbid Age seems almost to escape its author’s intentions. Throughout, Overy seems worried that the era he’s laying bare in all its disillusioned delusion is mainly that of the elites, that the grand obsessions of Labour MP Oswald ‘Tom’ Mosely or the we’re-all-neurotic-now musings of Freud’s least-favourite fan Ernest Jones had, in reality, little purchase on the minds of the ‘employed householder in the new suburban housing of the 1930s’ able to buy a small car and a radio, and go on holiday each year’.

To counter this suspicion, Overy stuffs his analysis with statistics: numbers of copies sold, numbers of members, numbers of subscribers, numbers of attendees. In total, it’s meant to add up to popular influence. There’s a touch a desperation to this, as if Overy is a little too keen to show that what he’s analysing are indeed the popular ideas of the time. And to an extent he’s right about the popularity, or, better still, the dominance of the end-is-nigh sentiment: a sense that change was approaching, catastrophic or otherwise, was indeed widespread. In the words of the poet James Russell, quoted at the beginning of Walter Greenwood’s bestselling 1933 novel Love on the Dole, ‘The time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for change; / then let it come…’

Yet Overy’s focus is not really on the lives and outlook of those 3.25million on the dole, nor, indeed, those millions of citizens – some demanding radical change, others keener to keep what they’ve got – beyond; for instance, the Bloomsbury group. And this is no bad thing.  For what Overy actually provides is not so much an anatomy of the popular as of the ruling ideas of the time. And this makes The Morbid Age invaluable. It provides nothing less than a portrait of the ideological crisis of the bourgeoisie, a snapshot of a ruling elite losing its ability to rule. Everything it held dear was now in question. It might not have been a crisis of civilisation per se, but it was certainly a crisis of bourgeois civilisation.

If economic crises and the emergence of workers’ movements in Britain and abroad during the nineteenth century had left the bourgeoisie’s articles of faith, from a liberal free-market ideal to accompanying notions of progress, more than a little frayed, then such things were in tatters by the 1920s and 30s. Where the free market had once promised growth and prosperity, it now produced war and unrest; where there was once civilised advance, there was now decline and barbarity. From the perspective of the British ruling elite the future did indeed look bleak. Little wonder that Toynbee’s contention that Western civilisation was decaying due to ‘a loss of spiritual certainty’ provided a rationale.

What makes Overy’s portrait so compelling, so illuminating is his ability to show how the narrative of decline played itself out in different areas of public discourse. In the sphere of economics, laissez faire, free-market capitalism was finding few champions. ‘[A] great deal of British opinion, across the class divides, believed on the evidence all around them that capitalism’s days were numbered’, he writes. From the Fabian left, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1922) found a receptive audience, selling 15,000 copies. Its focus, ‘the moral bankruptcy of capitalism’, was telling – the economic credo of laissez faire no longer provided British rulers with a sense of ‘it works!’ justification.

Elsewhere on the left, historian GDH Cole declared in The Present Confusion (1933) that the intellectual case against capitalism has become ‘overwhelmingly strong’. But liberals too, most famously John Maynard Keynes, were no longer confident in the survival of the current system. ‘I direct my mind and attention’, wrote Keynes following a 1925 trip to the Soviet Union, ‘to the development of new methods and new ideas for effecting the transition from the economic anarchy of the individualistic capitalism which rules today in Western Europe’. In a 1932 journal entry, G Lowes Dickinson, one of Keynes’ colleagues at Kings College Cambridge, was to the point: ‘The capitalistic order has broken down completely and hopelessly.’ It seemed by this point that Keynes agreed. ‘There will be no means of escape’, he wrote in 1932, ‘from prolonged and perhaps interminable depression except by direct state intervention’.

While British economic liberalism appeared bust, the Soviet Union appeared as an ideal. Economic planning was the currency of the future, a belief seemingly endorsed not just by the trade union networks but by the establishment, too. Take, for instance, the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, set up in 1924. By the 1930s its members included Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, plus over 10 peers and a few knights thrown in for good aristocratic measure. And in 1935 the Committee of Peace and Friendship with the USSR was established under the stewardship of Lord William Hare, a Labour peer; supporters included the scientist Henry Havelock Ellis, actors Sybil Thorndike and Robert Donat, economist JA Hobson, Vera Brittain, George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs. These weren’t in the main revolutionary firebrands; they were disillusioned liberals, searching for the saving idea.

Overy shows how the crisis of civilisation, capitalist, Western or otherwise, played itself out with most glee in the arena of eugenics. Here one can see how the economic and political travails of the bourgeoisie were expressed in terms of racial decline. As the first post-First World War prime minister David Lloyd George warned, how can Britain run an A1 empire with a C3 population (medical categories for army recruits).

Giving the sense of decline a biological twist was not a novel move. It was a view gaining traction in the best circles, something Overy captures when describing the incredibly named Malthusian Ball at the Dorchester Hotel, organised by American Margaret Sanger’s International Birth Control Movement in 1933. Zoologist Julian Huxley was there, as was Labour MP Dame Edith Summerskill, and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. Sanger was not alone in finding an audience for tales of racial decline and the necessity of eugenically progressive birth control. In 1922 Marie Stopes founded a rival Society for Progressive Birth Control and Racial Progress. At an over-attended public meeting the year before, Stopes berated the audience about the perils and expense of allowing ‘wastrels to breed’. So committed was Stopes to the cause of avoiding what biologist Ernest McBride called in a 1931 Nature magazine article ‘undesirable births’, that upon hearing her son was to marry a woman with glasses, she refused to attend his wedding and promptly disinherited him.

The belief that a vital, vigorous imperial race was in the throes of biological decay was not just a potent metaphor – it also provided justification for a whole set of government initiatives. Birth control clinics were set up under the auspices of local health authorities and government-sponsored commissions of enquiry were launched into a wide variety of issues that were ‘biological in nature – population policy, the “feeble-minded”, syphilis, alcoholism’. Overy’s achievement here is to present the development of eugenics not as it appeared in itself – that is, as a sub-Darwinian science first coined by Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s and developed towards its tragic Hitlerian conclusion in the 1930s. Rather Overy contextualises it in terms of the wider decadence of a class unable to envision a future for a society forged in its image, except in terms of a crisis of civilisation. Eugenics was the product of a sense of crisis, not a testament to imperial arrogance.

Unfortunately, because Overy seems reluctant to understand the phenomenon he analyses with such perspicacity in terms of the overarching ideological crisis of the bourgeoisie, an ebbing of economic confidence and political control, he struggles to explain why the morbid prognoses for race or the economy so gripped the public imagination. At points it’s as if he believes the sense of crisis was virtually an invention, a self-fulfilling prophecy entirely detached from reality. And in turn, the utopian imaginings of others, equally opposed to the status quo but less inclined to mourn its passing, can be too easily dismissed as similarly deluded. Yet, as his particular analyses show, the cultural climate of the interwar years was not a miasma of pessimism and nihilistic longing without a material basis. Rather it was the ideological end game, not of society as a whole, but of the old bourgeoisie, bereft of the shattered creeds of economic liberalism and imperial supremacy. And while the postwar consensus and ideological props of the Cold War might have soothed this ruling anxiety, it is something that has never quite gone away.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, by Richard Overy, is published by Allen Lane. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7644/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
Seeing Sweden through the eyes of Stieg Larsson
Larsson’s hugely popular Millennium novels are not only brilliant page-turners – they also challenge the clapped-out view of Sweden as a social paradise peopled by buxom blondes and depressives.
Nathalie Rothschild

To many outsiders, Sweden is a land of contrasts: a melancholic welfare state where bikini models brush shoulders with suicidal depressives. A country where the sun barely sets in summer and rarely rises in winter, and which has produced both ABBA and Ingmar Bergman. It is also a country that has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and one of the highest numbers of crime fiction writers.

Through the prism of violence, misogyny, murder, perversion and breaches of justice, Swedish crime writers are taking a forensic look at their society, passing a magnifying glass over the calm surface of what to many right-wingers and liberal lefties is still a socialist’s dreamland.

Perhaps it is precisely the strength of the image of Sweden as a civilised, democratic, equal and pacifist society – the nice kid just to the west of the former Eastern block – that gives its crime writers, many of whom have become international bestsellers, their allure. The calmer the surface, the more forceful the revelations of supposed sordidness simmering beneath it.

The married Marxist journalists-turned-novelists, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who are often credited as the originators of the modern Swedish crime genre, intended to ‘use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperised and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type’. Between 1965 and 1975 the couple wrote 10 crime novels featuring the gloomy Inspector Martin Beck.

Thirty years later, Stieg Larsson, another leftie Swedish journalist, turned to crime fiction writing. Author of the Millennium trilogy – or, considering its astounding success, perhaps it is more apt to call it the Millennium phenomenon – Larsson, too, intended to write a series of 10 novels. Sadly, his ambitions were cut short as he died suddenly of a heart attack in 2004 soon after submitting the three first instalments to his publisher.

In light of Larsson’s premature death, the posthumously published Millennium series’ success is rather poignant. Larsson was the world’s second best-selling author in 2008. To date 15million copies of his three books have been sold in 40 countries; in Sweden, which has a population of nine million, the sales figures are 3.5million. The books have been turned into hit movies, with the third part premiering in Sweden next month.

Each book in the Millennium series - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest - is a complete story. But the consequences of the first story become apparent in the next, and only after reading all three do you get a sense of the full picture, of where the main characters came from and what turned them into who they are. Supporting characters are introduced at regular intervals and they play key roles, lending credibility to the main plot, propelling it forward and throwing in new details and twists to the tale.

In their separate ways, the central characters – the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the anti-social, computer-hacking, apolitical feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander – are committed to punishing individuals who abuse their power and are motivated by greed.

Blomkvist, who, to his own dissatisfaction, has been nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist by the media world (after the children’s book writer Astrid Lindgren’s fictional boy detective), is an old-school investigative reporter, committed to truth and justice. He will not shy away from taking months to piece together watertight stories that run into 100 pages if necessary. Known to dig out scoops that can make or break careers, shatter multibillion corporations and shake up the bourgeois press, Blomkvist nevertheless comes across as a humble and unassuming man.

Unusually for Swedish crime novels, this hero is not a gloomy, lonesome recovering alcoholic, though he does have a neglected daughter after a failed marriage. He’s a man of principles who lives on a rather innocent diet of sandwiches, coffee and cigarettes. His exposés of corrupt businessmen, his womanising and the crusading journalism of his magazine, Millennium, has given Blomkvist a cult status in his hometown of Stockholm and beyond.

Salander is modelled on Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. She is an independent young girl, frail-looking but with nerves of steel and a photographic memory; she wears T-shirts with slogans like ‘I can be a regular bitch. Just try me’ and ‘Armageddon was yesterday - today we have a serious problem’.

Though this odd pair solves murder mysteries and exposes trafficking rings and breaches of justice, they rarely actually meet. While Blomkvist is off meticulously gathering facts and documents to back up his statements, conscientiously offering anonymity for his sources, Salander hacks into computer databases, breaks into private property and metes out violent revenge.

There are several red threads running through the books in the trilogy, but the genres also shift between each book, so that even if you read all three back-to-back they don’t feel repetitive. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (its more punchy Swedish title is ‘Men Who Hate Women’) is a locked room mystery à la Agatha Christie. The Girl Who Played With Fire is essentially a police thriller, but one which contains a complex web of cat-and-mouse chases between journalists, sex traffickers, gangster bikers, cops, private detectives and secret servicemen. The third book takes up where the second finishes and is more explicitly political. Here, Blomkvist and Salander expose breaches of justices and the shady dealings of a corrupt special unit within the Swedish secret service which had locked Salander into a psych ward at the age of 12 in order to protect her father, a Russian GRU defector, who was selling secrets to the West during the Cold War.

Despite all this, Larsson somehow manages to dispel any incredulity the reader might feel. The strength of the Millennium series is that the cliffhangers, imaginative plots and inevitable happy endings somehow seem realistic because much of the storyline is based on real places, events and people. For instance, the boxing champion Paolo Roberto has a cameo, as does Kurdo Baksi, a Swedish journalist and commentator of Kurdish origin who was Larsson’s close friend.

In light of the IB-Affair, the Cold War warriors who enter the story in the second book also seem credible. In the 1970s, Jan Guillou – also a leftist journalist and crime writer – and his colleague Peter Bratt were sentenced to 10 months in prison for espionage after writing an exposé of the secret Swedish intelligence agency Informationsbyrån (the Information Bureau, or IB). Guillou and Bratt revealed that IB had gathered information on Swedish communists and others deemed to be a ‘security risk’, placed spies abroad, and had broken into foreign embassies in Sweden.

Even Lisbeth Salander’s extraordinary ability to dig into the private lives of various dodgy individuals and to memorise numbers, texts and photographs are given a realistic explanation: Blomkvist figures that she has Asperger’s syndrome.

As a journalist, Blomkvist has little time for questioning who the good guys and bad guys of any drama might be. There are victims and abusers: child labourers in Vietnam and money-hungry multinationals; impoverished Eastern European girls and thuggish people-traffickers; headline-hungry reporters and human rights-upholding journalists. This was likely Larsson’s own attitude, too, considering his career as an investigator into far-right extremists. He co-founded the Swedish magazine Expo, which was modelled on the British anti-racist magazine Searchlight for which Larsson had been the Swedish correspondent.

But Salander is different. To her, a Colt Magnum is mightier than the pen. Despite her traumatic childhood and abuse at the hands of the authorities, she refuses to be a victim. She also has a strong sense of right and wrong, but does not bulk from taking violent revenge on anyone who messes with her or the few people she cares about. Perhaps she is living out the secret fantasies held by those whom she sees as ‘do-gooding’ journalists with a conscience, like Blomkvist.

While Larsson may have wanted to expose some of the illusions of the happy-go-lucky Swedish welfare state, his faith in decent protectors of Swedish ideals and tolerance shines through. The Millennium books depict a clueless police force, inept social services, a sleaze-hungry media industry, and a corrupt secret service, but the book also introduces us to plenty of characters from within these cherished Swedish institutions who live by their employers’ stated ideals. Mostly they are women.

While Stockholm is the weakest character in the book, figuring as a backdrop and giving the story some sense of orientation rather than colouring it in any meaningful way, many European tourists are now apparently visiting the Swedish capital to trace the footsteps of Larssons’s characters. There is even an official Stieg Larsson tour of the city.

Despite sidestepping the well-trodden path of previous Swedish writers who have littered their books with alcoholics and tales of personality-defining child abuse, Larsson’s own fate gives his work a rather sad air so that following his footsteps in Stockholm may, after all, feel rather melancholic. Still, he has left a great legacy, and today Swedish writers, thanks to the success of the Millennium trilogy, are sought after in bookshops around the world. And if this success can help challenge the stereotype that Sweden is a utopian social democratic state filed with buxom blondes and suicidal depressives, that will be a good thing.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

The Millennium trilogy, by Stieg Larsson, is published by Quercus. (Buy these books from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7642/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
Cooking up a new theory of evolution
With his smaller teeth and jaws, what separated Homo erectus from his predecessors was not just eating meat, but cooking what he caught.
Rob Lyons

What makes us human? It is a question for the ages, to be kicked about by scientists, philosophers and historians to name a few. And you can put together your own answer from a list including language, brain size, an ability to have sex pretty much all the time, love, culture, science, and so on.

Richard Wrangham, in his new book Catching Fire, asks a different, if related, question: what made us human? Most people would agree that human beings are different to other creatures (even those who would like to equate humans morally to the great apes). But why have we come to be so different? If we leave aside the religious explanation - an invisible supreme being made us this way - we are left to wonder what it is in our evolutionary past that set us on a different track from other apes.

Wrangham’s answer, while not entirely original, is still very interesting. He believes that the crucial turning point was neither controlling fire in itself (despite the book’s title) nor eating meat, but cooking. It is the change in our diets, and the improved ability to absorb nourishment that comes about through being able to cook food, that allowed ape-like creatures to evolve relatively quickly into recognisably human individuals, even if the finished product - Homo sapiens - was still a long way off.

Roughly 120,000 generations ago, the forebears of modern humans were chimpanzee-sized creatures called australopithecines. Apart from the fact that they walked upright, they were not very different to modern chimpanzees. Wrangham imagines the experience of meeting one: ‘Beneath a low forehead and big brow-ridge, bright dark eyes surmount a massive jaw. Her long, muscular arms and short legs intimate her gymnastic climbing ability.’

From at least 2.6million years ago, australopithecines were using tools in order to get at meat from dead animals, something beyond other apes, including modern chimpanzees. Around 2.3million years ago, a new species - habilines - seems to have emerged, the so-called ‘missing link’. While still the same overall size as modern, nonhuman apes, they had brains twice the size of our living ‘relatives’. Even then, the next step on the evolutionary road took hundreds of thousands of years, but somewhere around 1.9million years ago, some of these habilines evolved into Homo erectus, the first proper members of the genus Homo. Homo erectus had an anatomy, upright stance and pattern of walking similar to ours, but its brain was still smaller. Modern humans only emerged around 200,000 years ago.

The question for Wrangham is this: what changed to create Homo erectus? The common explanation is the eating of meat, the ‘Man-as-Hunter’ thesis. Australopithecines seem to have been, in dietary terms, similar to modern chimpanzees, who will eat monkeys, piglets or small antelopes when available, but who will also have a diet entirely free of meat for months on end. However, the upright australopithecines would have found chasing down prey much easier than a chimpanzee does on all fours. In turn, the development of such behaviour would itself have encouraged team work, larger bodies, increasing intelligence and cooperation.

However, Wrangham argues that the Man-as-Hunter thesis is inadequate in a number of ways. Most importantly, the thesis can’t explain why there are two forks in the evolutionary road - first habilines, then Homo erectus. How could both of these changes, hundreds of thousands of years apart, be caused by a single factor: eating meat? Meat-eating accounts for the first change well enough, but Wrangham points out that habilines looked markedly different from Homo erectus, ‘which had small jaws and small teeth that were poorly adapted for eating the tough, raw meat of game animals. These weaker mouths cannot be explained by Homo erectus‘s becoming better at hunting. Something else must have been going on.’

That something else, argues Wrangham, was cooking. Scientific research on those who choose to eat a mostly, or exclusively, raw-food diet gives us a clue as to why this might be the case. In 2006, nine volunteers took part in an experiment for BBC television where they spent 12 days eating like apes while living in a tented enclosure at Paignton Zoo in south-west England. The idea was to replicate the diet that we are supposed to have evolved to eat: mostly vegetables, with a little fish, and entirely raw. The volunteers consumed up to five kilogrammes of food per day, with nutritionists ensuring they consumed a healthy number of calories, yet they lost an average of 4.4 kilogrammes (about 10 pounds) in less than two weeks.

In another study in Germany of 513 raw-foodists, the average weight-loss over time was 12 kilogrammes (about 27 pounds) for women and 10 kilogrammes (22 pounds) for men. The researchers, quoted by Wrangham, concluded that ‘a strict raw-food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply’. Among women eating totally raw-food diets, 50 per cent stopped menstruating, while a further 10 per cent suffered irregular cycles that were hardly conducive to reproduction.

Wrangham quotes another raw-foodist, Christopher Westra, describing his changing thoughts on sex. ‘In my experience, starting on living foods brought about a change in sexuality that was dramatic and completely unexpected. In just a few weeks, the number of times per day I thought about sex decreased tremendously.’ Westra seems to think this is a good thing, but Wrangham asks how a species could flourish on such a diet when over half of the women would be unable to become pregnant and the men lose interest in sex?

The effect of cooking, however, is dramatic, making it far easier for our bodies to obtain the nourishment from food. Wrangham notes that digestion comes in two parts: the first starts in the mouth and continues in the stomach, and is completed by the small intestine. The second part is done by the 400 or more species of ‘friendly bacteria’ that take up residence in our large intestines. So, the quicker we digest food, the more of its goodness we can grab for ourselves.

Cooking makes a big difference to this, as illustrated by patients who have had their large intestines removed, so that food is removed through a bag attached to the end of their small intestine, or ileum. These ileostomy patients can easily digest cooked starch - at least 95 per cent of oats, wheat, potatoes, plantains, cornflakes. A similar figure applies to a typical European or American diet of starchy foods, dairy products and meat. On the other hand, the figures for the ‘ileal digestibility’ of raw foods are much lower: wheat starch (71 per cent); potatoes (51 per cent); plaintains (48 per cent). This differential also seems to apply to protein. Wrangham points to the example of eggs, which are much better digested cooked rather than raw.

Why does this matter? Well, if nutrients are more easily extracted from food, then we can maximise their usefulness given our current digestive systems. But over the hundreds of thousands of years that evolution takes, this externalisation of digestion changed our digestive systems substantially. Compared to apes, humans have much shorter digestive tracts. And if we our using less of the energy available to us to digest food, that can be diverted to other areas of our bodies. Essentially, argues Wrangham, cooked food is brain food.

In the transition from australopithecines to habilines, brain volume rose by one third, from about 450 cubic centimetres to 612 cubic centimetres. In the earliest examples of Homo erectus (1.8million years ago), this had reached 870 cubic centimetres and went on to around 1,400 cubic centimetres with Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago. Although we are about three times the size of australopithecines, our brains are bigger both absolutely and relatively in proportion to the rest of our bodies.

The change is not purely nutritional. Wrangham argues that it has social consequences, too. A sexual division of labour between male hunters and female gatherer/cooks only makes sense if eating is a relatively quick process. This is borne out by the fact that individuals in modern hunter-gatherer societies can spend as little as an hour per day eating, knowing that this will provide all the nutrition they need, freeing them to spend long periods finding and pursuing game. Without this free time, each individual would have to spend most of his or her time finding and consuming food for themselves, and a specialisation of labour would be impossible.

Wrangham compares this situation to the behaviour of chimpanzees and gorillas, who spend most of their time eating since they need to ingest relatively large quantities of fruit and leaves to survive. That process makes hunting, which chimpanzees will sometimes engage in for a few minutes at a time, a relatively risky business taking valuable time away from eating and digesting with no guarantee of success.

Wrangham’s ideas are fascinating and clearly have some substantial explanatory value. That said, they are often based on very small samples of fossils. Furthermore, there is no direct proof that humans began cooking 1.8million years ago. It could only be when cooking was done in well-established settings - like some kind of crude, constructed oven - that there would be any chance of evidence surviving. Such constructions clearly didn’t clearly begin until much later. As such, Wrangham must rely on indirect evidence to support his argument. There is also, as with many popular discussions of evolution, a storytelling aspect as Wrangham fills in gaps with educated speculations that provide plausible explanations for how society and anatomy develops, but are ultimately unprovable, for now at least.

One possible consequence of Wrangham’s ideas, however, is not at all academic and may be a useful avenue of research for a very modern problem: obesity. Could it be that our current, highly processed diet means that we are effectively consuming far more food than we think? Wrangham points out that the traditional method of counting calories in food, the Atwater convention, may be misleading in this regard. Wilbur Atwater was a nineteenth-century professor of chemistry in Connecticut, USA. He argued that the amount of energy in food could be calculated by completely burning it in a device called a bomb calorimeter and measuring the heat produced. It’s still, give or take a few tweaks, the way we calculate calorie content today.

However, we don’t burn food, we digest it - and digestion is a costly process. How much energy is consumed in digestion varies from one food type to another. Protein is harder to digest than carbohydrate, which is in turn harder to digest than fat. But the nature of the food also has an effect. Soft food in small particles will be easier to digest than bigger lumps of tough food - which is where cooking, and food processing, may have a significant impact. Furthermore, Atwater assumed that only about 10 per cent of food would pass all the way through, undigested. But roughly milled flour, for example, is much more likely to remain undigested than finely milled flour. Protein consumed with high-fibre foods is also less likely to be digested than if it is eaten on its own or with low-fibre foods.

Wrangham concludes, following food writer Michael Pollan, that we should choose ‘real foods’ over ‘nutrients’: ‘The less processed our food, the less intense we can expect the obesity crisis to be.’ In effect, Wrangham is arguing that - in one respect at least - processed food is actually too nutritious because we can digest it significantly more easily. It’s an interesting point, but it also seems a little throwaway, tacked on to the end of a much more developed argument about human evolution. Wrangham’s thesis would help to explain why obesity rates have shot up in recent years, despite the fact that calorie intakes appear not to have changed much: all calories are not the same. On the other hand, is our food today really very different from what we ate 50 years ago in terms of digestibility? And is eating more traditional food really the answer? A dozen pages at the end of a book on a rather different subject is not enough evidence to decide.

Nonetheless, Catching Fire is a great example of the popular science book: take a Big Idea and serve in bite-sized, easily digested portions, leaving the reader well satisfied.

Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked. He edits spiked’s What’s the Future of Food? online debate.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, is published by Basic Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7645/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
State intervention is no substitute for innovation
British industry isn’t dead by any means, but if low-carbon jobs and protectionism trump new research and development, it soon will be.
James Woudhuysen

Should governments in Britain intervene in the economy to ensure that the nation’s industrial base is preserved? That’s the question addressed in Nations Choose Prosperity: Why Britain Needs an Industrial Policy, a useful collection of essays, including substantial contributions by free-market economist Ruth Lea and by David G Green, director of the think tank Civitas.

At the outset it is worth realising that there are no easy answers to the question of industrial policy. The postwar record of government intervention in UK industry has not been a happy one, and is very much coloured by the disastrous experience of taking over car manufacturing at British Leyland in the 1970s. There is no need to be nostalgic about the past role of industry in the British economy. And, in principle, there is no reason why, in a future global division of labour, imports of manufactures from Asia should not make UK manufacturing wholly or nearly redundant.

However, while that might be true in principle, as a theoretical possibility, there will always be products, power supplies, buildings and other hard goods in Britain that will be in need of maintenance and repair. In this sense, familiarity with engineering and components will remain important to the UK even in the absence of an industrial base – unless it is imagined that immigrant engineers can be ferried in whenever needed. The loss of hardware-orientated skills indigenous to the UK is already a concern in relation to the task of building a new generation of nuclear reactors. To have everyone educated only in services in the long-term future might appear realistic, but is in fact a utopia.

Anyway, as Ruth Lea argues, manufacturing – which is only part of the wider sector termed ‘industry’ – is, even now, more than one-and-a-half times bigger than the financial sector. It accounts for 13 per cent of UK gross domestic product, 10 per cent of total employment (three million people), half of UK exports, and 75 per cent of business research and development (R&D). Between 1979 and 2008, the annual average growth in productivity in manufacturing was, at 3.4 per cent, nearly double that of the economy as a whole. It is the relative ease of raising productivity in manufacturing that, in part, accounts for the dwindling number of jobs in the sector.

In 2008, however, Britain ran a deficit in traded, visible goods approaching £100billion. As Lea points out, given the problems in UK financial services and the decline of North Sea oil, better manufacturing may be the only plausible way of redressing this balance.

As Lea notes, pharmaceuticals are a British strength. Aerospace is also relatively healthy – aided, though Lea doesn’t mention it, by the requirements of the Ministry of Defence. Lea doesn’t dwell on the UK car industry, but its weight is, in fact, quite surprising. Taking into account the service employment connected to it, it accounts for about 800,000 jobs. The UK hosts seven global volume manufacturers: Honda, Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford and GM, as well as specialists including Jaguar, Rover, Aston Martin, Lotus, and various players in trucks and buses. Output is more than a million vehicles a year, and Britain remains the world’s second largest manufacturer of engines (three million a year), and the world’s second largest manufacturer, next to Germany, of premier or luxury cars.

Known for her combative, right-wing stance on economics, Lea is forced by the facts not to uphold any Thatcherite vision of Britain as a service-based Hong Kong of Europe. It is odd, but realism dictates that industry in Britain cannot just be wished away. That, however, is a different thing from saying that government should actively intervene in industry – supposing, of course, that it had the money actually to do things there. Yet here we find the second interesting feature of this pamphlet: David Green makes what he calls ‘the free-market case for industrial policy’.

A free-market liberal backs the state

Green’s debt is to Adam Smith, the Harvard management guru and economist Michael Porter, and the Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik. First, Green argues that it was the strong pound in the 1980s and early 1990s that undid UK manufacturing, not its basic performance, which was creditable. So for him, better macroeconomic policy and deregulation (around working time, money laundering and employment tribunals) would help, along with less corporation tax and stronger capital allowances for plant, machinery and industrial buildings. The government’s role is to take care of relevant skills and infrastructure – a Smithian formula with which it is hard to disagree.

Bizarrely, however, Green agrees with the UK business secretary, Lord Mandelson, that the British government is focusing ‘too narrowly’ on supporting R&D. Instead, following Porter, Green argues that the government should take demand-side measures, insisting on high standards and creating early demand for new products, while avoiding any attempt to pick particular companies as ‘national champions’.

At the moment, UK environmentalists approve of the British state creating demand for wind turbines and other renewable sources of energy. But Green seems oblivious to the way in which New Labour’s Renewables Obligation Certificates have helped create ‘demand’ for renewables among electricity suppliers, but, in the process, massively overestimated the contribution that such sources of energy can reasonably be expected to make. Meanwhile, New Labour has let the UK’s government and business R&D base deteriorate, and sees little role for the legitimate state sponsorship of basic, long-term research.

For Green, following Rodrik, there is no big problem in ‘picking winners’, as long as the state does not pick losers. But picking losers is what the state has done with wind power, just as it has picked dodgy banks for its support. Meanwhile, efforts to make state procurement policies encourage innovation have, as Green observes, accomplished little.

Given all these failures, Green’s cavalier attitude to R&D is remarkable. But there is more. He favours an industrial policy so that ‘our’ industries are ‘not picked off one at a time by overseas rivals with more supportive governments’. He also notes that 40 per cent of UK corporate voting shares are owned overseas. Altogether, Green makes a free-market case for… protectionism. We should not be dumbfounded if, should they be elected to office, the Conservatives beat a similarly aggressive and patriotic drum.

Green concludes by invoking Porter to attack the short-termist perspective of institutional investors toward manufacturing – especially pension funds, despite the fact that, as he himself states, these bodies now own just 13 per cent of UK shares. For Green, the City is a villain for focusing on share price and corporate acquisitions, rather than management and innovation. His solution is our old friend, shareholder democracy – encouraging ‘more people to take a chance on investing in our future prosperity’, and, in free-market style, making sure that business ownership and control are more closely aligned.

Here Green misses two things. First, the old debate about short-termism needs to be re-interpreted in the light of society’s – and especially Britain’s – aversion to risk. The refusal of the financial powerhouses in the City of London to support industrial innovation, like the government’s, is not simply an economic question, but a cultural one. Neither body knows much about science or technology; both fear them as dangerous bets to make. When a whole society is suffused with a sense of foreboding about the future, if not the sense that the planet will shortly come to an end, it’s hardly surprising that the City looks at today’s share prices rather than investing in innovation.

Second, American workers’ experience of Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs) has been very negative. Millions have lost the money they thought would make up for inadequate wages. Owning shares is not about investing in future prosperity, but about mortgaging one’s future to the fortunes of capitalism – given recent events, this is a dubious strategy.

Clever energy buffs, foolish trade union types

For those familiar with Professor Ian Fells and Candida Whitmill and their excellent work on Britain’s forthcoming ‘energy gap’, their chapter in Nations Choose Prosperity makes familiar reading. They are suitably scathing about the current state of British wind-power production, rightly indict New Labour for failing to fund R&D in carbon capture and storage, put in a sensible word for tidal barrages (‘proven technology’), and appear rather too hopeful that politicians will really favour nuclear power. They are rightly worried that today’s credit squeeze will impair investment in energy supply ‘of whatever kind’ and correctly point out that the National Grid requires substantial investment.

The most hilarious contribution to the pamphlet is by Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Brendan Barber. True to form, the labour movement carthorse slouches after Gordon Brown’s call to ‘industrial activism’, Building Britain’s Future: New Industry, New Jobs (2009). Barber wants British manufacturing to specialise, which is fair enough. But specialise in what? For him, ‘the whole development of low-carbon technology provides a massive opportunity’.

This is wonderful. Britain, renowned as the dirty man of Europe, should move out of metals and go for low carbon through composite materials, applying them in automotive, marine, aerospace, wind and wave, construction, oil and gas, medical equipment and electronics. That would be a great idea – if Britain had a wind-turbine manufacturer (it doesn’t), if wave power was a serious contender in energy supply (it isn’t), and if oil and gas were ‘low carbon’ (they aren’t).

Anyway, as Ruth Lea mentions, Britain is largely out of metals anyway (along with textiles and a lot of food and drink, she adds). Where, as in aerospace, composites make sense because of their strength-to-weight ratio and, thus, low fuel-requirements, they are already in the field to a greater or lesser degree (think car bumpers). But often composites do not make sense: they are labour-intensive in manufacture (a matter of no significance to carbonistas), and thus often prohibitive in cost.

For all his praise for manufacturing and science, Barber appears to know as little about these subjects as Gordon Brown. Perhaps that is because the TUC is really a minor subsidiary of the government: through unionlearn, Barber attests, it aims to give 250,000 ‘individual learners’ skills – alongside its campaigns for fair trade and for greening the workplace. So it’s now down not to state- or employer-led education to improve Britain’s skills base, but to union members who have their dues checked off from their monthly pay.

Barber is not alone. Ian Brinkley, director of the Knowledge Economy (the capitals are his) at the Work Foundation and previously a top economist at the TUC, tells us that ‘the UK’s non-financial knowledge-based economy will be a source of stability for jobs and investment in the recession’. He is right to say that manufacturing firms now integrate high value-added services into the production process – though this counts as what he calls a new sector, namely ‘manu-services’. But his grasp of economic categories is as firm as Barber’s understanding of technology. He defines knowledge-based intangibles as stretching from R&D to software, design, brand equity, human capital and organisational capital, going on to argue that manufacturing invests more than services in these.

It’s true that service firms worldwide have a lamentable record in R&D. But like Green, Brinkley would rather not talk up R&D too much: three quarters of modern manufacturing’s investment in knowledge-based intangibles lies outside R&D. These intangibles, for him, explain why low-tech UK sectors such as printing and publishing have withstood foreign competition.

In fact, there is nothing knowledge-based about brand equity, for example – a category that, like human capital and organisational capital, Brinkley fails to expand on. And isn’t the survival of British printing and publishing something to do with low wages in these sectors, rather than the stock of knowledge in them? Given that Britain’s world-beating banks don’t even know where their toxic assets are, we can be certain that ignorance, like low R&D spending, will delay the arrival of the much vaunted knowledge economy in Britain for some years yet.

A kulturkampf is needed!

What are we to make of the main ideas covered by these essays? Green’s debt to Porter’s Competitive Advantage of Nations, which he dates as published in 1998 when it is, in fact, 20 years old, is sad. For Porter, ‘nations choose prosperity’ in the sense that clusters of firms, and governments, determine many of a company’s competitive advantages. Here, Alfred Marshall’s familiar but diversionary focus on the externalities surrounding a firm, rather than its participation in general, society-wide rates of exploitation and profit, are what count. But the idea that nations choose prosperity is ridiculous, and particularly ridiculous coming from a free marketer. It is the unconscious action of market forces, not the muddled plans of the capitalist state, which establish prosperity or poverty. Until the TUC made greening the workplace its priority, the class struggle, which divides national populations, has played an important historical role here, too.

That said, a truly knowledgeable state, even a capitalist one, could make a difference at the margins – as already argued - in education (especially science and technology, and especially not branding), infrastructure (especially energy) and basic research. As Rob Killick has recently argued here, the state could also lead public opinion by campaigning for nuclear power, better roads, genetically modified crops and other supposedly unacceptable risks. Pharmaceuticals could also do with some public defenders, rather than always receiving the kind of abuse epitomised by John Le Carré‘s The Constant Gardener.

One does not need to be a free-marketeer to feel that large-scale state intervention in industry, like that in private life, is likely to have unhappy consequences. Protectionism is even more dangerous, and even tax regimes that favour industrial investment and R&D don’t really set my heart aflutter. How the government could make a difference is, for example, by cutting through the cacophony of voices telling us to save energy or make energy-efficient products. Instead, the state should proclaim the need for, and perhaps provide some sensible incentives for, investment in high-tech, R&D-intensive energy supply.

That is what an industrial policy should really mean: a wide-ranging political struggle in favour of valuing the risk-taking achievements, past, present and future, of industry. We need what the Germans call a kulturkampf – a cultural war in favour of industry engaging in serious innovation and R&D.

And yes, Britain’s services need to join in that war for progress, too.

James Woudhuysen is author, with Joe Kaplinsky, of Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation, published by Beautiful Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) He is speaking in the debate Abundant, Cheap, Clean… Contentious? Why is energy a battlefield today? at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 1 November 2009.

Nations Choose Prosperity: Why Britain Needs an Industrial Policy, edited by Ruth Lea, is published by Civitas. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7646/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 30 October 2009
A book to set democratic alarm bells ringing
Martin Bell’s account of the expenses scandal has insights, but his willingness to embrace infringements upon parliamentary sovereignty in the name of restoring trust denigrates democracy.
Suzy Dean

British news headlines have been dominated for months by the MPs’ expenses scandal at Westminster. A large number of politicians, including the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, have been accused of over-claiming expenses for such trivialities as cleaning and gardening. In a few cases, the behaviour of politicians has been borderline fraudulent. The whole affair has brought parliament into disrepute.

As questions are now being asked about what to do next with the politicians who claimed beyond their due, former MP and journalist Martin Bell provides a useful recap of those early summer months when the scandal first hit the headlines in A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy. But the book is more than just a blow-by-blow account of who spent what; Bell also offers a number of recommendations on how he believes we can move on from the scandal, and ‘save our democracy’.

While Bell articulates the events surrounding the expenses scandal well, he seems, however, to side-step the key problem: MPs’ long-term crisis of purpose, of vocation, something that came to the fore in the expenses scandal but which has been an issue for years.

For a start, MPs have been marginalised, with power effectively shifting from the legislature to the executive. Prime minister Gordon Brown has even gone so far as to ignore parliament and has made a virtue of the appointment of non-elected figures to ministerial positions: for example, Mervyn Davies, then the chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, became a trade minister, and Peter Mandelson was brought back from Brussels, handed a peerage and is now deputy prime minister. Then there’s Prime Minister’s Questions, traditionally the chance for MPs to call the prime minister to account. The number of opportunities to grill the PM was reduced from two sessions per week to one by former PM Tony Blair in 1997, sending out a clear signal about the low importance that Blair, and his successor Brown, have placed on being answerable to the Commons.

Yet rather than tackling the diminished and confused role of MPs, Bell opts to deal with the expenses issue alone. In doing so, he suggests technical solutions to rebuilding the reputation of MPs. The problem is that these solutions further denigrate MPs’ role in society. Bell’s thesis is that MPs should respond to the public’s cynicism towards politicians and prove that they can be trusted. According to Bell, politicians can do this by accepting checks upon the sovereignty of parliament by way of an external expenses watchdog. He also encourages the election of independent candidates who can run for parliament precisely on their anti-sleaze, penny-pinching credentials. He argues that, taken together, such changes will save our democracy as people’s trust in the political system will be restored.

Bell details the way in which the expenses scandal saw an anti-politics, anti-politician mood ‘[sweeping] through the country’ which ‘became stronger and more coherent as the further misdemeanours of the fractious crew were exposed’, until ‘the people banded together and cried “Enough!”’. Reading rather too eagerly like an account of the English revolution, with comparisons to it drawn throughout, Bell endorses this new public mood as a sign that the British public have put their foot down in relation to greedy MPs.

For Bell, the expenses scandal presents an opportunity for democratic revival, as long as politicians are better policed in the future – even if that means infringing upon parliamentary sovereignty. Bell is aware of the consequences of diminishing the role of the Commons. In the book, he refers to a speech he once made in which he noted ‘the erosion of the authority, reputation and influence of the Commons’. However, after the expenses scandal he concluded ‘that the House of Commons was incapable of regulating itself’.

Bell is critical not only of individual MPs, but of party politics in general. He suggests that parties were partly responsible for the expenses scandal and makes the point that politicians who followed the party whip the most were often the politicians who spent more: ‘there was nothing they wouldn’t claim for or, when the division bell sounded, vote for’, he says. He acknowledges that ‘the parties are no longer vehicles for class interests. The arguments between them are less about principles than policies and priorities’. But he draws the conclusion that with the collapse of left and right, there should be a loosening of the party whips so that MPs are free to vote with their conscience. He argues that this would lead to representation by the best and brightest rather than the most docile.

Bell’s support for independents is a logical conclusion of his disdain for party politics. He devotes much space to extolling the virtues of independents as opponents of parliamentary corruption, ‘drawn into politics to help clean it up’, before concluding that they would ‘set an example and help hold the rest to certain standards of honesty’. In other words, an antidote to the isolated political class, the independents can restore trust in parliament in a way that party-aligned MPs are unable to.

As for the problem of expenses itself, Bell argues that MPs should make ‘modest claims’. Yet he ignores the reason for the exorbitant use of expense claims. It was not because MPs are greedy money-grubbers (though some no doubt are), but because they were too pusillanimous to demand higher pay. Using expenses to top up pay was accepted practice within parliament because nobody wanted to make a public case for a pay rise despite the fact that there is no reason why people who run the country should be on any less than those who run companies. Moreover, it is important to remember that, historically, the payment of MPs was considered a progressive cause, preventing politics from being an occupation solely for the well-off.

By failing to distinguish between current politicians and their role in parliament, Bell misses the opportunity to defend parliamentary sovereignty, and with it the sovereignty of the people that the House of Commons represents. Admittedly, defending parliamentary sovereignty is no easy task given MPs own inability to defend their role. Still, as a one-time MP himself, one wonders why Bell didn’t encourage his peers to stand their ground and fight the arbitrary meddling of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. Instead, Bell believes that checks by this unelected, unaccountable body are necessary because politicians are simply ‘not to be trusted’, which is the same as saying that the sovereignty of the public’s representatives is not to be trusted.

While not trusting the people’s representatives, Bell is also bewitched by the largely fictional account of an angry, politically engaged public. He even goes so far as to compare Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army’s removal (and eventual beheading) of the king to the public response to the expenses scandal. This is a somewhat misleading analogy, given that the expenses scandal has resulted in more checks upon parliament, whereas the English revolution was precisely the reverse, an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty.

In supporting the plight of new independent candidates over the old tainted politicians, Bell seems to ignore the importance of partisanship. Where Bell is right to point out that the old party ideologies are defunct, he does not seem to think that we need a new type of mass politics that has the potential to change the direction of society as a whole. Instead, he embraces the consensual politics that exists between the main parties and politicians today. Disagreement and debate, the very stuff that creates political choice for the public and involves them in the direction society might take, is eschewed. Bell is content to advocate open primaries and independent candidates because then the public can choose who they like as a personality rather than what political vision they stand for.

Bell is happy to assess the worth of every politician on the basis of his stance on finances rather than political outlook. He does, however, spend one chapter, ‘The Honourable Scapegoat’, explaining why he thinks it’s awful that Labour MP Ian Gibson was ousted from parliament on the basis of his expenses. This is because Bell rates highly Gibson’s political contribution over the years. But even at this point, he does not conclude that political ability is more important than good finances.

Quick to assert that there has been a ‘British Revolution’ over the expenses scandal and that an ‘angry, united and determined’ public had reformed parliament, in his chapter ‘The Backlash’ Bell comments that ‘the great debate on the issue of the day was not between one set of politicians and another. It was between the political class and the people.’ In his introduction he goes so far as to remark that ‘the revolution will not be complete until all the rogues in the House are gone and public confidence in the MPs remaining is restored’. This account of events seems a little stretched. Far from a radical transformation, there seems to have been a further distancing of the public from politicians and politics – an evolution in public cynicism, not a revolution.

While there remains plenty of evidence for moral posturing over the expenses scandal, it is hard to find evidence of politicians who have been ‘chastened by the force of public anger’. Bell is right to point to local petitions and websites like BlearsMustGo – a reference to disgraced Labour MP and former cabinet minister Hazel Blears – as evidence of people’s frustration. But this is no public uproar. There has been no organised response to the expenses scandal by the public. There have been no demonstrations. The expenses scandal might have elicited manufactured outrage from the media class and a level of public disgust, but the idea that ‘the people will not stand for it’ blows public opinion on the matter out of proportion. In fact, there has been a greater push to reform from within parliament than outside of it.

Perhaps the anti-political, anti-sleaze conclusions of A Very British Revolution are not so very surprising. Indeed, it was Bell himself who, as a white-suited independent candidate, won the Tatton seat in the 1997 General Election from Tory MP Neil Hamilton, then embroiled in the cash-for-questions scandal. In doing so, he helped, along with his friends in the liberal media, to reframe politics in terms of sleaze, elevating the non-political issue of personal conduct over politics proper. Parliament and politics have been denigrated in the process, leaving ordinary voters not with the opportunity to vote on the parties’ political records, but on politicians’ personalities.

Bell’s book is a good account of the politicking that happened in wake of the expenses scandal and his recollections of his own experiences within parliament bring an insight to A Very British Revolution that other books on the scandal lack. The expenses scandal has created a dangerous situation, but one can’t help but think that Bell risks making it worse by endorsing anti-politics, infringements of parliamentary sovereignty and the elevation of independents. This is particularly sad because there is an opportunity, amidst the disarray of the old parties, to create a new generation of politicians with ideas that we might just be able to support.

Suzy Dean is a writer and journalist based in London. She is chairing the debate Parliament: reform or revolution, featuring Martin Bell as a panellist, at the Battle of Ideas on Saturday 31 October.

A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy, by Martin Bell, is published by Icon. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7647/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 29 October 2009
Go veggie to ‘save the planet’? Burger off!
The Stern-endorsed campaign to stop people eating meat shows that greens have no solutions for society beyond launching wars on enjoyment.
Rob Lyons

‘Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.’ (1)

In an interview with The Times (London) this week, Lord Nicholas Stern became the latest high-profile proponent of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to suggest that avoiding meat would help to ‘save the planet’. In September 2008, Rachendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), delivered a lecture in London on meat consumption and climate change, arguing that producing meat had a bigger impact on global temperatures than transport (2).

The idea of going veggie for the planet has acquired the status of common sense. People might not want to do it, but few seem to disagree that eating less or no meat would protect the environment. In June this year, ex-Beatle and long-standing vegetarian Paul McCartney helped to launch Meat-Free Mondays: ‘Having one designated meat-free day a week is actually a meaningful change that everyone can make, that goes to the heart of several important political, environmental and ethical issues all at once’, he said (3). In spiked’s current online debate, What’s the Future of Food?, animal rights philosopher Peter Singer and restaurateur Henry Dimbleby both make the case for eating less meat, or giving it up altogether, to help prevent climate change (4).

But simply replacing meat with vegetarian food isn’t the environmental good it is presented to be. The major source of greenhouse gas emissions specific to meat production is the burping of methane by ruminant animals, particularly beef cattle. This is just a normal part of their digestive process. Methane is regarded as a more ‘powerful’ greenhouse gas because each extra molecule of it in the atmosphere has 25 times the ‘heat trapping’ effect of a molecule of carbon dioxide.

Yet while cattle merrily burp methane in large quantities, chickens do not, while other meat-producing animals, such as pigs, produce some methane but not nearly as much as cows. As a handy graphic on the BBC News website shows, while beef cattle in the developed world produce 120kg of methane per animal per year, the figure is just 8kg for sheep and 1.5kg for pigs. On that basis, simply switching to different kinds of meat might have a substantial impact without any need to go veggie. As the BBC article also points out, most of the cattle in the world aren’t reared for meat anyway; they’re reared as working animals (5).

The other major source of greenhouse gases in meat production is from manure, particularly the lakes of slurry generated by industrial feedlots. But it wouldn’t take much to stick a processing plant on the side of such facilities to convert that slurry into usable ‘natural’ gas for heating. And organic farmers, who eschew artificial fertiliser, would be lost without the production of manure by grass-munching animals.

There is also the small matter of what we would do if we didn’t eat meat. We would have to produce crops to replace the food, particularly the protein, supplied by meat. But one of the advantages of meat is that it can be produced on land that isn’t suitable for growing crops. Try growing wheat on a Welsh hillside and you start to understand why sheep are so useful. Animals also eat a lot of by-products of food production that cannot be consumed by humans, like vegetable pulp, hop residues and straw. Pigs, famously, will eat anything.

If we didn’t eat meat, we would have to find substitutes for animal by-products like leather, wool and gelatine. Producing substitutes for the food and other things we currently get from farming livestock would generate substantial greenhouse gas emissions in itself. Even if people went vegetarian, they would probably start eating other animal products like cheese and eggs in greater quantities, thus reducing the alleged ‘benefits’ to the planet of rejecting meat – the animals would still be around, still producing food. Only if the world went vegan would there be a really noticeable effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

The figure that Stern, Pachauri and others rely on to illustrate the dramatic effect of meat-eating comes from a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report from 2006, which suggested that meat consumption produced 18 per cent of net global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the FAO was looking at all the emissions associated with meat production, not just ones directly from animals, and a sizeable chunk of the 18 per cent figure was from the clearing of tropical rainforest and the consequent release of carbon dioxide. A report from the University of Surrey suggested a rather lower figure, eight per cent, for meat production in the UK, where farmland was cleared of trees long ago.

So, to summarise: the claim that giving up meat will avoid huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions is almost certainly wrong. We could only know for certain if we had a firm idea of the emissions a vegetarian world would generate. If we all became vegans, we might save some emissions, but whether that would have any significant effect on global temperatures is far from certain. What is certain is that such a world would be populated by thinner, more flatulent people, pressurised by emotional and environmental blackmail into limiting their food intake for the benefit of Mother Earth despite a lack of evidence that they will have any impact. That doesn’t sound healthy to me.

What Stern’s declaration does illustrate, however, is the way in which environmentalists seem blind to the idea of solving problems in any other way than by encouraging or forcing people to change our personal habits. Eating meat is seen as a pointless luxury despoiling the planet. But it is no accident that as countries get richer, they eat more meat. Meat is highly prized as it is nutritious and flavoursome. If meat production is shown to be a problem, the answer is surely to find new ways to produce it rather than to guilt-trip people into giving up meat altogether. Already, cattle breeders are looking at producing animals that generate fewer methane emissions, and animal feed producers are experimenting with mixes that reduce all that cow burping.

Exactly the same green outlook applies in the case of travel. According to environmentalists, air travel is screwing up the planet. Their imaginative answer is to stop travelling. On this dim-witted basis, we could save the equivalent of the UK’s annual carbon dioxide emissions if the world’s population just stopped breathing (6). Yet even if we accept the argument that carbon emissions from jets are a problem, it should hardly be beyond the wit of humanity over the next few decades to find viable alternative ways to power aircraft so that we can fly with a clean conscience. Indeed, new biofuels are being developed at present using algae that have the potential to be carbon-neutral without the current problem of using valuable cropland.

But never mind innovation and problem-solving. The truth is that eating meat, jetting around the globe and so on do not fit in with the hairshirt mentality of environmentalists, either the radical ones or the ones in officialdom. For greens, humanity should be apologising for its very existence and doing everything in its power to make the smallest possible impact on the Earth. If the treehuggers want to stay at home eating lentils and composting, that’s up to them; different strokes for different folks, as they say. However, when the leading lights of the climate change industry like Stern try to tell us that we’ve got to change our wicked ways – often on the basis of flimsy or overblown evidence – there’s only one thing to say: burger off.

Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked.

(1) Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet, The Times, 27 October 2009

(2) See Why I’ve got a beef with going vegetarian, by James Panton

(3) Paul McCartney backs ‘Meat Free Monday’ to cut carbon emissions, Guardian, 15 June 2009

(4) What’s the Future of Food?

(5) The methane makers, BBC News, 28 October 2009

(6) For a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation of how much CO2 humans breathe out, see Home Planet, BBC

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7650/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 29 October 2009
Steve McQueen, without the car chase
BBC Radio 4’s brave choice to rework the ultra-visual Bullitt showed that old-school noir can still be entertaining.
Patrick West

As the bickering over Wes Anderson’s movie version of Roald Dahl’s 1970 novel Fantastic Mr Fox has illustrated, adapting stories from one medium to another is always fraught with difficulties.

Many British fans of the book are rather cross that, in the film, all the good guys have American accents and all the baddies speak with English inflections. This custom of using an English accent as a signifier of villainy is so ingrained in Hollywood that I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about it now. There’s no point grumbling anymore. It’s only a matter of time now before Hollywood remakes The Dam Busters or The Battle of Britain and gives the British pilots American accents and the Germans British ones.

There’s also no point getting rankled when one of your favourite stories is relocated from one medium to another and fails to live up to expectations. The different nature of books, radio, television and cinema demand that a narrative’s structure alters across these media. Changing times and cultural evolution also dictate that works are re-interpreted to suit different mores. A stage adaptation of Shakespeare play today will be very different to how it was performed a hundred years ago, and each new interpretation will tell you something about the era in which it was presented.

Peter Jackson’s take on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the few book-to-film adaptations of recent years that has been widely adjudged as authentic. But who’s to say that future generations won’t identify this cinematic work’s popularity as principally representative of the apocalyptic, post-9/11, financially-tumultuous, eco-worried mood of the Noughties? (The success this decade of adaptations of Philip K Dick’s paranoia-laden stories will almost certainly be regarded in this way.) The Lord of the Rings films will very possibly be remade some day, and in a different political climate they are bound to look rather different.

If turning a book into a film has its familiar pitfalls, how about transforming an iconic film into a radio play? Director Pauline Harris has taken on this challenge by adapting the 1968 film Bullitt to radio. The result was aired on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday (1). And what a bold choice it was.

That is because Bullitt is an intensely visual film, remembered chiefly today for its car chase on the streets of San Francisco (2). The radio adaptation overcame this obvious impediment by simply not including it, and instead set the story in New York, where the original book upon which the film was based, Mute Witness by Robert L Pike (1963), was set. New York does not have San Francisco’s hilly roads, which were so amenable to dramatic car-chases, but the city is more readily understood as a setting for noir detective stories.

But this presented a further problem. By the time Mute Witness was published, the golden age of detective stories and films was coming to a close, and the genre was embarking on an era of introspection and self-reference - Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film À bout de souffle (Breathless) is cited by many to herald this break. I can only assume that the decision to relocate the 1968 film to the West Coast was made not just by petrolhead location directors, but by those who realised that crime stories set in New York were becoming passé.

Certainly, by the time Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was released in 1982, self-reference in noir films had been supplanted by outright parody. Even when there are efforts to revive the genre in an authentic manner, such as in The Good German (2006), nostalgic allusions to the films of the 1940s invariably follow. Yet now even Bullitt has become a source of lampooning, as in the ‘jazz flute’ scene in 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (3).

‘New York, the city that never sleeps’ began the radio production, as Lieutenant Clancy (Jason Isaacs taking the role that Steve McQueen played in the film) embarks on an undertaking to find the underworld boss who murdered a Mafia witness under his protection. It had all the hallmarks of a classic gum-shoe detective story: Isaac’s languid, rasping ‘New Yoik’ monologue; tales of too little sleep and not enough coffee; deception, murder, betrayal, witness protection; and the race against time.

A cynic might have derided this as all clichéd nostalgia, while pointing out the holes in the radio play’s ropey storyline. In a time when we are asked not to remake classic stories, but to ‘re-imagine’ them (Shakespeare plays being a typical case: seldom are they set in Shakespearean times, but ‘re-imagined’ in Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Japan, or 1930s Hollywood) such a remake might be damned as ‘comfortable’, in an era when many demand that fiction should be ‘challenging’.

But what can you do with a genre that has been lampooned so mercilessly? There are two choices. One, parody it further. Or two, stay faithful to the original. The first option is the route taken most recently by Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds, who in seeking to make a Second World War film, felt the only fresh way to do so was to undermine simultaneously the ‘tired’ genre itself. The result was a postmodern and deliberate facsimile of war film, less a movie about history, more a movie about movies. Tarantino took the same approach to gangster films in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) by subverting received archetypes about hoodlums, portraying them instead as petty and often ridiculous characters who debated the meaning of Madonna songs or the names of hamburgers.

Or you can take an earnest and heroic approach, which, in terms of the Second World War genre, is what Steven Spielberg did in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and in the 2001 TV series, Band of Brothers. These were maligned by many critics for adhering to a safe, nostalgic and ‘sentimental’ formula - and were box-office triumphs for those very reasons.

Likewise, while Radio 4’s Bullitt will probably be swiftly forgotten, it was nevertheless an easy, enjoyable jaunt, because it didn’t try to be too clever. This is not a philistine, anti-intellectual point of view. It’s just that there’s a time and a place for everything, and on a Saturday afternoon there’s nothing wrong with a bit of innocent, comforting sincerity.

Patrick West is spiked’s TV and radio reviewer. Read his blog here.

Read on:

spiked-issue TV and radio

(1) The Saturday Play: Bullitt, BBC iPlayer

(2) Bullitt, IMDB

(2) Ron Burgundy’s ‘yazz’ flute, YouTube

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7649/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 29 October 2009
In defence of terrace abuse
The arguments that football fans have become too abusive and more inclined to violence don’t stack up.
Duleep Allirajah

Is verbal abuse of footballers by fans getting out of hand? Yes, according to Garth Crooks who presented the case for the prosecution in a BBC Radio Five Live’s Songs of Rage special this week.

Crooks interviewed Robbie Savage and Craig Bellamy, two of the most vilified men in football, who confirmed – to nobody’s surprise – that they’ve been vilified. ‘I’ve heard some of the most vile, vile things that you could imagine in football’, said Bellamy. Savage felt it was only ‘a matter of time’ before a fan assaults a player on the pitch. I also took part in the programme. It was quite good fun, even if I was cast in the Nick Griffin role of having to justify all manner of unspeakable evils. ‘Your view is – how should we put this – it’s quite an extreme one’, said presenter Dan Walker when introducing me.

The notion that verbal abuse by fans has crossed some kind of decency threshold and that, consequently, ’something must be done’ is an idea whose time has come. Earlier this year, 11 Spurs fans were prosecuted for directing indecent chants at Sol Campbell. This month, new FA chief executive Ian Watmore called for a crackdown on abusive chanting. ‘There are areas of chanting that go beyond what’s technically illegal, like racist or homophobic chanting, into what I think of as vile chanting’, Watmore said. ‘We in football should think about ways in which we can exorcise that from the game, but without glorifying it, because it puts the average person off.’

Rob Kelly in his Telegraph blog argues that abusive chanting should no longer be tolerated. ‘Racist chants against black players are not heard, and are anathema to the vast majority of supporters’, wrote Kelly. ‘But while racism may be on its way out, it still lingers on among a small minority and has been joined by a variety of sick and twisted chants that are arguably just as offensive, just as disgusting.’ (1)

Naturally, as the champion of terrace filth, I think that these claims are just a steaming pile of horse manure. The arguments simply don’t stack up. Let’s examine them in turn.

1. Terrace abuse is getting worse.

Is there any evidence for this? Well not very much. Some people, like Harry Redknapp, insist that ‘fings ain’t wot they used to be’. ‘When I started watching football as a kid, you just watched the game, rather than concentrating on shouting things at people on the pitch or in the opposite stand’, said Redknapp. The reality is that fans have been hurling all manner of sick and abusive insults at each other for years. If you went to football matches in the 1980s you’d hear plenty of offensive chants about the Munich air crash, the Holocaust, incest, sheep shagging, AIDS and so on. It’s certainly no worse today. What has changed are social attitudes to offensive speech. In short, we’re become a bit too easily offended.

2. Banter is acceptable but personal abuse oversteps the mark.

The distinction between banter and abuse is so subjective as to be meaningless. How would we define personal abuse? Is it any kind of personal insult or slur? Is it anything that causes offence to someone else? It’s practically impossible to draw a line. For example, while he was playing for Reading, Dave Kitson argued that ginger chants are as bad a racism. ‘Just because I am a footballer doesn’t mean someone can call me a ginger whatever’, said Kitson. Football chants can be pretty cruel. But if we started banning anything that causes offence or hurts people’s feelings we could end up outlawing an awful lot of terrace chanting.

3. Abuse inevitably leads to physical violence.

Robbie Savage plays the part of pantomime villain with good grace. He told Five Live that he expects fans to chant ‘Robbie Savage is a wanker’. Indeed, he positively thrives on it. I like his attitude. However, he says that the abuse has spilled over into his personal life. ‘I’ve had deaths threats to my home, I’ve had my house attacked, windows smashed, I was spat upon’, he told Garth Crooks. Is this acceptable? Of course not. Fans who physically attack footballers are idiots and should be prosecuted.

But is it inevitable that verbal abuse leads to physical assault? No. Every week hundreds of thousands of people go to football matches in this country. Opposing players are jeered and abused at most games. But how often are players physically attacked on the pitch? Hardly ever. The perimeter fences were torn down after Hillsborough, but pitch incursions remain extremely rare. How often are players assaulted by fans outside of football grounds? Again, it’s very rare. Most of us can control ourselves. We might hurl dog’s abuse inside the stadium, but the hostilities cease when we step outside.

So, there’s sod all evidence that abuse is getting worse or that it inevitably leads to physical violence. There’s quite a large dollop of theatricality about the abuse that fans dish out. Whisper it: we might sing songs of hate, but we don’t really mean it. If anything, it’s the gathering crusade against abusive chanting that is more dangerous. Why? Well, firstly, we live in a democracy and therefore ought to enjoy the hard-won right to free speech. And that means all speech. No qualifications. No strings attached. People should be free to say – or chant – whatever they want, however vile or abusive. Terrace chants might be tasteless and unedifying, but that’s still not a good enough reason to erode our civil liberties.

Secondly, abusive chanting is integral to the match-day experience. The passion, the noise, the banter, the crude trading of insults – these are all the essential ingredients of what we call ‘atmosphere’. Remove the abusive chanting and football will end up sanitised and soulless. In fact, the game is in grave danger of heading that way already.

Finally, I think it’s important that we have a cultural space where grown men can go a bit mental. Football provides that. It’s one of those exceptional cultural arenas in which the normal conventions of social conduct are temporarily relaxed. For 90 minutes on a Saturday we are allowed to behave like big kids. Let off a bit of steam. Scream, swear and curse to kingdom come. If we weren’t able to release our inner Malcolm Tuckers at football, then our cultural lives would be all the poorer for it.

Duleep Allirajah is spiked’s sports columnist.

Read on:

spiked-issue: Sport

(1) Harry Redknapp is right: fans’ abuse is getting worse and it turns the stomach, Telegraph, 16 October 2009

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7651/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Wednesday 28 October 2009
Why do they all want to hijack Churchill?
The ‘would Churchill have supported the BNP?’ furore says more about politics today than it does about the role of ‘our hero’ in history.
Mick Hume

Now it seems that the British National Party has committed the ultimate sin – it has upset Her Majesty. ‘Queen fury at BNP’, announced the headline in Sunday’s News of the World: ‘Outrage at Nick Griffin Churchill hijacking.’ The best-selling tabloid newspaper quoted a ‘senior royal aide’ who had apparently deigned to grubby his hands by speaking to the NotW: ‘The Queen thinks it is outrageous that the name of such a courageous leader in our hour of need has been hijacked in this way. She believes it is important the royal family doubles its efforts to stem the tide of this division. It is not British.’

Of all the things that party leader Griffin said around his appearance on BBC TV’s Question Time, none has caused more outrage than his suggestion that Churchill, Britain’s most famous prime minister and Second World War leader, would have supported the BNP today. Political leaders, pundits and the queen herself have united to condemn this offensive suggestion. They all insist that Churchill stands in history not only as a beloved national hero but a crusader against Nazism and a symbol of British unity – unlike the nasty, ‘Nazi’ and divisive Griffin and the BNP.

The Liberal Democrats’ Chris Huhne even argued that, since Churchill had been a leading member of first the Liberal and then the Tory party, and had later led a wartime national government including Labour ministers, his legacy should rightly belong to all of the mainstream parties rather than the far-right fringe (see The new divide in British politics: Us and Him, by Brendan O’Neill).

It seems that Griffin is far from the only one trying to ‘hijack’ Churchill. Almost the entire discredited British political class now wants to claim him as one of their own, in the hope that his glorious image of national leadership in a crisis might reflect on them. They are trying to stand on Churchill’s ample shoulders as a platform to reach the moral high ground, from where they can look down on the BNP.

The Churchill they all want to hijack, however, is of course the myth and the legend rather than the real man and leader.

In his life, Churchill was a British imperialist and representative of the ruling class whose determination to defend the empire and the establishment against colonial peoples and the working classes at home made him a far more divisive and unpopular figure than all this talk of national unity suggests. His career is littered with controversies too numerous to go into here.

Before the First World War, just for example, he was home secretary in the Liberal government during what became known as the 1910 Tonypandy riots in the South Wales coalfield. Churchill sent in the Metropolitan Police and the Army to crush the hungry striking miners, turning Tonypandy into an armed camp. This caused such bitterness that even after Churchill’s death in 1965, when a national appeal was launched for a hero’s memorial, few in South Wales gave a penny.

In 1926, Churchill was in the frontline of the Tory government’s war on the working class during the General Strike. He edited the government’s propaganda sheet, The British Gazette, reportedly suggested turning machine guns on the strikers, and declared that Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy had shown the world ‘a way to combat subversive forces’. In the 1930s, his disdain for the masses led him to propose abandoning universal suffrage and going back to a system where only respectable property-owners (of whom there were far fewer then) could vote.

Churchill was also an aristocrat moulded in the late Victorian-Edwardian era, whose outlook reflected the racial and imperial prejudices of those times. He often expressed views that would now be seen as irredeemably racist, anti-Semitic and even pro-fascist – he certainly saw Mussolini as a bulwark against the main enemy, the Jewish-led conspiracy of international communism, and expressed the hope in the early days of Nazi power that Hitler would lead Germany back into the ‘family’ of European powers.

Churchill’s views on most issues were already considered outdated by the 1930s – what relevance they could have to politics in 2009 is anybody’s guess. The common notion now is that he was isolated during that period because of his lone campaign for British rearmament and against the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. This is a view largely based on Churchill’s own self-serving version of events. In reality he was not the first and far from the only politician demanding rearmament. And his political isolation was due as much as anything to his anachronistic defence of imperial rule in India and demand that British forces re-occupy the sub-continent to crush Gandhi’s home rule movement. During the abdication crisis of 1936, Churchill sided firmly with Edward VIII, leading to accusations that he was trying to form a ‘King’s Party’ to subvert parliamentary democracy.

Soon after the Second World War broke out in 1939, Britain was facing a life-or-death crisis. The political class turned to Churchill to become prime minister of a national government in 1940, precisely because his qualities as an old-fashioned imperialist made him the ideal candidate as a wartime leader. Yet even then, his war record was not quite the heroic tale some would have us believe. Churchill certainly did not go to war to save the Jews or humanity from fascism, but to save the British Empire. His responsibility for such atrocities as the Dresden fire bombings remains an issue of bitter controversy.

And at home during the war, Churchill was far from the universally adored ‘Winnie’ of legend. Millions associated him with the bad old days of pre-war poverty, depression and strife. When the British electorate was finally given a choice in the May 1945 General Election, the great war leader was overwhelmingly voted out of office even before the war had ended. (Though not before he had claimed that a Labour government would require a ‘Gestapo’ of its own.)

It is a measure of how stagnant political life has become in the twenty-first century that so many should seek to revive their reputations by associating themselves with the triumphs of a reactionary statesman who was in his prime about a hundred years ago. It is ridiculous for Griffin to claim that Churchill would have supported the BNP today – he would more likely have considered them insufferable oiks, and far too feeble to give him the power he sought. Yet it is surely no less ridiculous for the mainstream parties to claim the mantle of the ultimate empire loyalist.

Worse, comparing today’s political class to Churchill can only serve to highlight the biggest contrast between them: their leadership qualities. Whatever one thinks of his politics, Churchill was a political giant who stood and fought for his beliefs and led Britain through a perilous world war. His successors are political pygmies who stand for nothing, fight one another, and get Britain bogged down in unpopular little wars in which even they don’t believe. Where Churchill made clear in the mist of the Blitz that his government would never quit London even if the Nazis were marching up Whitehall, New Labour now has plans to evacuate the city and set up a government-in-exile if a few terrorists manage to set off a big enough bomb.

There is a memorable clip of film, taken during the 1945 General Election campaign, which speaks volumes for me about how far things have changed since Churchill’s wartime heydays. The prime minister is speaking at his final rally of the campaign at Walthamstow dog track (now sadly deceased), round the corner from where I live in east London. As Churchill tries to get into his usual wartime rhetoric, the crowd – made up of local workers and servicemen in uniform – grows restless. Squaddies and sailors start chanting ‘We want Labour’ – and then some throw stones at him. Sixty-four years on, it is hard to imagine anybody in politics throwing a brickbat at the beatified Churchill. But then it is harder still to imagine any prime minister having the nerve to expose himself to the general public at a rally, or members of the public having the passion and belief to chant for a Labour, Conservative or any other government.

Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7637/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Wednesday 28 October 2009
Why they love to hate Mother Teresa
The radical-atheist assaults on the late sister of Calcutta are the intellectual equivalent of mugging an old woman.
Brendan O’Neill

You know how some cowardly muggers target little old ladies because they’re usually slow, frail and unlikely to fight back? Well, the exact same dynamic, though in intellectual rather than bag-grabbing terms, can be seen in the radical-atheist assaults on Mother Teresa. Attacking the wrinkled, hunched-over sister of Calcutta, accusing her of being a goggle-eyed fanatic and a mad and disgusting celebrator of poverty, is the atheistic equivalent of mugging an old woman. And a dead one, to boot. These anti-Teresa tirades reveal far more about the bluster of contemporary atheism than they do anything surprising about the antics of old Catholic women.

Hating Mother Teresa has become a de rigueur dinner-party prejudice. As the Vatican speeds up its canonisation of Teresa, having already beatified her in 2003, feminists, atheists and liberal commentators are engaging in games of Teresa-denouncing one-upmanship, to see who can slate her in the shrillest, most outrageous terms. She was a ‘charlatan’ and a ‘master of her own mythology’, said Ian O’Doherty in the Irish Independent last week. No, she was a ‘wicked fundamentalist’, said a feminist contributor to a BBC TV debate last weekend. In fact she was a ‘disgusting fraud and a hypocrite’, says a columnist for the UK Independent, and ‘if there is a hell, Mother Teresa is already there’.

Much of this Teresa-baiting springs from the work of arch atheist Christopher Hitchens. In his 1995 book The Missionary Position, Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a ‘religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermoniser and an accomplice of worldly secular powers’. He exposed her backward beliefs on poverty – it is ‘beautiful’, she said, and the poor should embrace it – and her shoulder-rubbing with dictators and other dodgy individuals. She should never have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Hitchens said, or granted audiences with US presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, because she is little more than an ‘untouchable in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous’.

Of course, much of the criticism is justified. I am an atheist who has no truck with Mother Teresa and her kind. Having been schooled by nuns who thought Mother Teresa was the best thing since sliced bread (and thus that her patronising pieties were a better thing for poor people to live on than actual sliced bread), I have suffered my fair share of BS about this woman’s saintly wonderfulness. But why is atheistic criticism aimed so squarely at Mother Teresa these days, rather than, say, at the Vatican itself, or at other religious leaders like the Dalai Lama or Bishop Desmond Tutu?

Mother Teresa is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only religious leader to have sipped tea with dictators or to have been more interested in promoting her self-image than in seriously helping poor people. The Dalai Lama has done adverts for Apple, for Buddha’s sake, and once guest-edited French Vogue, which I don’t think is a widely read publication in the poorer parts of his homeland of Tibet. Teresa is also not the only religious figure to have bigged-up poverty as beautiful and life-affirming. Ever since Jesus wandered around Palestine in rags and described riches as ‘thorns’ which ‘choke up the good seed’, Christians have promoted poverty as something godly. Mother Teresa’s celebration of poverty in Calcutta sprang not only from her own religious fanaticism, but also from the dire social and economic conditions in that city: like so many Christians before her, she was effectively adding a religious gloss to a social reality, which is not a nice thing to do but it doesn’t mean she was somehow to blame for poverty.

No, the reason Teresa has been elevated by radical atheists above everyone else in the League Of Evil Religious Crackpots is because she’s an easy target. Today’s New Atheists, more interested in getting their religion-hating rocks off than in actually Enlightening anyone, love crusading against Teresa because she indulged in a so-unsophisticated and foreign form of Christianity. Religion in the Third World, with its old-fashioned figureheads and its sometimes desperate adherents, makes for a far easier, and far more fun, target than the subtle religious practices of modern Western society. For today’s campaigning atheists, the sight of a little old woman in an off-white habit providing hammocks for poor, wide-eyed Indians is too bizarre and backward to let pass by. And lacking the intellectual faculties and old-style atheistic humanity to explain such practices, they merely mock them, denounce them, laugh at them over their £3 lattes.

Indeed, much of the Teresa-baiting is aimed not at the woman herself, but at her thick and gullible followers. Hitchens described his book about Mother Teresa as an argument ‘not with a deceiver but with the deceived’, her ‘credulous and uncritical’ followers. ‘In the gradual manufacture of an illusion, the conjuror is only the instrument of the audience’, he said. A favourable review of Hitchens’ book, written while Mother Teresa was still alive in 1996, said ‘one can only be appalled by the lack of intellectual sophistication of her admirers who hold her in such high esteem and who seize upon her every asinine comment as a sign of her astuteness and philosophical depth’. This is not a serious or intellectual dismantling of the meaning, impact and structures of religion; it is fundamentally fun-poking at dumb Indians.

The ongoing war on Mother Teresa reveals what lies at the heart of the New Atheism. A million miles from the humanistic atheism of Marx, Darwin and others, today’s screechy anti-God squad is more interested in hectoring the religious – those stupid believers in anything they are told – than it is in creating an Enlightened culture that might give people something else, something more profound, to think about and contribute to. Darwin, the hero of so many of today’s New Atheists, refused to partake in cheap Christianity-bashing, believing that ‘direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public – and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science’. Today, lacking any serious attachment to freedom of thought or any belief in their ability to illuminate men’s minds, gradually or otherwise, the New Atheists not only spend their whole time directly attacking Christianity, but take aim at its crudest forms.

The lack of Enlightened thinking in the mugging of Mother Teresa can be seen in the way campaigning atheists seek to replace Teresa’s backward beliefs with their own. So one critic attacks Teresa’s opposition to contraception and abortion on the basis that it inflamed one of the alleged great evils of our age: overpopulation. ‘Overpopulation is one of the factors that can lead to war, [and therefore] Mother Teresa’s opposition to any effective limitation on the growth of population [implicated] her in war rather than peace.’ This is a battle of misanthropies. Where Teresa held to the misanthropic belief that women should be forced to take every conception to term, the Teresa-bashers believe that unchecked population growth – whisper it: too many black and brown babies – gives rise to madness and mayhem. One side seeks to limit poor people’s choices, the other demonises poor people’s breeding habits as the harbinger of doom.

In their cheap assaults on Teresa and fundamentalist religion, campaigning atheists completely overlook, yet again, some of the more powerful backward trends in our society. Take the celebration of poverty. At a time when wealthy Westerners buy Fairtrade chocolate and fruit because they love the thought of eating earthy stuff produced by back-broken Africans, at a time when buzzphrases like ‘sustainable development’ are used to justify hard labour over economic progress in the Third World, and at a time when we are frequently told by greens that our greedy habits of consumption are bringing about the fiery and flood-ridden end of the world, it seems pretty clear that the Mother Teresa-style celebration of poverty has not a patch on the contemporary secular elevation of the eco-life. Today’s mainstream, insidious and grotesque justifications for non-progress in the poverty-stricken Third World make Mother Teresa’s sermons look like the silly ramblings of a daft old nun.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) This article was first published in forth magazine in Dublin.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7638/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Wednesday 28 October 2009
If comedians can’t be offensive, who can?
Jimmy Carr is only the latest public figure to fall victim to the ‘offence hounds’ who love being scandalised.
Tim Black

Another week, another depressing case of vicarious offence-taking, this time involving comedian Jimmy Carr and a joke about British servicemen amputees. And Carr won’t be the last to brush the thin skins of the nation’s moral guardians.

Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand, Prince Harry, Chris Moyles, Frankie Boyle, Carol Thatcher, Anton du Beke, Jan Moir… Over the past year, all have fallen victim to this most tedious of social constituencies: the offence hounds, or what Brendan O’Neill refers to as the offencearati. All it takes is a whiff of something that someone else might find a bit rude, and they’re off, hunting down their victims with twittering mercilessness. Complaints are fired off to Ofcom, emails are sent to the Press Complaints Commission, outraged comment pieces are published in the press, and, if the offence-hound is feeling particularly offended that day, the police might be called upon for offence-hunting assistance.

What is particularly strange about the eagerly offended is that they are very rarely at the scene of the initial offence-giving. When during a radio broadcast Ross and Brand bumbled into the private life of Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter, barely anyone who actually listened to the show noticed anything beyond the usual Brand-style anarchy. It took nearly two weeks for the offence hounds to get a sniff and it was only then that the original broadcast became significant. The same goes for Carol Thatcher, whose ‘Golliwog’ comment was made off-camera. Tipped off by someone actually there, the press seized upon it and only then did it become the object of offence-taking glee. It’s a farcical situation: offensiveness not only lies in the non-witnessing eyes of the beholder, it is almost always created in retrospect.

On Friday at the Manchester Apollo, the 2,500-strong audience responded to Jimmy Carr’s jokes much as people who like Jimmy Carr’s jokes often do. They laughed. So when Carr said, ‘Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012’, guess how those present responded? Did their jaws drop, aghast at a comedian’s insensitivity towards the British Army? Did others simply wheel themselves out in disgust? No. They laughed. And they laughed because they were at a comedy gig listening to jokes.

All it took though was for one person to decide that it was offensive, and from then on the gusts of proxy outrage keep the thing moving. The press report it, then seek out others who might be offended – parents of soldiers injured or killed in Afghanistan for instance – and get them to say it was a bit rude. Editorials are scandalised. And most important of all, not to say depressing, politicians decide that they too must take a stance. And so, right on cue, defence secretary Bob Ainsworth proclaimed he was ‘furious’ with Carr: ‘Our armed services put their lives on the line and deserve the utmost respect.’

Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox, fearful of being out-offended by a rival, said Carr had ‘gone beyond the pale’. Conservative MP Patrick Mercer went further still. Carr should retire, he demanded. ‘This man’s career should end right now’, he shook. ‘There are certain subjects you just can’t make fun of and one of those is the sacrifice of our troops – especially this close to Remembrance Sunday.’

And there’s the problem with offence-taking. It draws a line in the social sand, demarcating those things that people simply can’t say because someone somewhere else might be upset by it. That this person is almost entirely fictional does not matter, it provides the source of the offence-hounds’ self-righteousness. The effect is stifling. So stifling, in fact, that Carr apologised and then withdrew the joke from his performance.

That Carr felt fearful enough to apologise does not make Mercer right. Nothing ought to be beyond the bounds of speech, comedic or otherwise, not least because we are talking about speech here, not action. The idea that certain words and statements are too much for adults to bear restricts public life to pre-watershed discussion. ‘Not in front of the children’, runs the paternalist thinking of the elite.

As for comedy, maimed soldiers, cancer sufferers, rape and AIDS are all fair game. Even Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington ought not to be beyond the purview of comedians, despite the BBC Trust recently criticising news satire programme Mock the Week for precisely that: making fun of Adlington. Frankie Boyle described her as resembling ‘someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon’. Cruel, yes, given her long, droopy nose and small, recessive forehead, but funny too, given her long, droopy nose and small, recessive forehead.

This is a problem for those eager to inhibit speech. Jokes are invariably derisory, and sometimes cruel. They break taboos, challenge accepted manners. And they always have done. As Cicero put it in the first century BC, ‘an indecency decently put is the thing we laugh at hardest’. Offensiveness inheres within jokes. You take it out, and the joke loses something.

The right to be offensive ought to be defended at all times, but especially in the sphere of comedy. In other spheres, different judgements are informally at work. As a doctor, for instance, you probably wouldn’t choose to mock a maimed soldier in the course of treating him. That’s because, in a clinical context, it might not be deemed that helpful. But in the context of stand-up comedy, where the negotiation between the stand-up and the audience about what is appropriate and what is not is constantly under review, a different set of judgements is at work. That’s what gives it its fizz, its excitement. The best stand-up challenges you, it combats manners, upsets expectations, both in logic and in politeness. It is the mark of bad comedy if the audience is left, not challenged, but indifferent, with nothing more than their preconceptions massaged.

Yet for those viewing and monitoring our interactions from afar, whether in comedy clubs or off-camera at the BBC, it is the valuable part of comedy, and the challenging parts of speech more generally, that is being inhibited. All in the name of avoiding offence.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7639/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Tuesday 27 October 2009
Making a pig’s ear of mass vaccination
People are right to be sceptical about the swine-flu scare, but it is telling – and worrying – that they focus their scepticism on swine-flu jabs.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

In the climate of fear that has been promoted around the swine flu pandemic, the mass vaccination campaign getting underway in the UK this week is heading for trouble.

Healthcare workers in contact with patients in hospitals and surgeries have been designated a priority to receive the swine flu vaccine. Yet early soundings reveal a high degree of scepticism that is likely to lead to a substantial rate of refusal – inevitably undermining public confidence in the vaccine.

A poll conducted by the Nursing Times in August suggested that 31 per cent of nurses would reject the swine flu vaccine – a proportion that had increased to 47 per cent by October (1). Over the same period the proportion of nurses indicating that they would have the vaccine declined from over a third to less than a quarter. A propaganda barrage from the health authorities aiming to put moral pressure on National Health Service staff to receive the vaccine seems unlikely to boost uptake significantly. The lack of confidence in the vaccine among nurses and doctors will do little to reassure their anxious patients.

It is unfortunate that legitimate scepticism about the scaremongering around swine flu has come to focus on the vaccine, which is only a slightly modified version of the familiar seasonal flu vaccine. The swine flu vaccine is likely to be as effective as this vaccine (which is to say that it offers a degree of protection against one of the viruses that may cause respiratory infections over the winter months) and it is no more likely to cause serious adverse effects (which are very rare with these widely used vaccines). But healthcare workers – and the wider public – have already seen the first wave of swine flu cases. They know that in the vast majority of cases this is a fairly mild illness, often milder than seasonal flu, and they have seen that the doomsday scenarios projected in recent months have already been falsified by events.

Healthcare workers are well aware of the ways in which reports of the numbers of cases of swine flu have been inflated by unreliable helpline telephone diagnoses. They have been appalled at the politically motivated distribution of vast quantities of the marginally effective Tamiflu to many people with mild symptoms. They are not convinced by the publicity given to a small number of extreme cases that these confirm a significant risk to the wider population. Refusing the swine flu vaccine is set to become a gesture of defiance over the conduct of the pandemic scare among health workers and, more widely, an expression of public cynicism and distrust of the government.

The swine flu vaccine campaign is a gift to anti-vaccine activists, who now anticipate an upsurge in popularity. Claims of a link between vaccines and autism and efforts to discredit the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer have already given previously marginal anti-vaccination campaigns a growing public influence. These groups of disaffected scientists, cranks and conspiracy theorists are now trying to revive old vaccine scares in relation to swine flu. One issue is the use in one of the vaccines available in the UK (Pandemrix, made by GSK) of the mercury-based preservative thiomersal, which has been linked to autism by US campaigners. Though this association has been universally discredited, it is still advanced by the promoters of junk science and quack therapists who flourish around autism-parent campaigns (2).

Another issue is the use of squalene, a naturally occurring substance commercially extracted from fish oil, as an adjuvant to enhance the effectiveness of the vaccine in provoking an immunological response. Though squalene was blamed by anti-vaccine campaigners for causing the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ reported by veterans of the invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91, subsequent investigations revealed that it was not included in the vaccines given to combatants (3). It has, however, been included in seasonal flu vaccines given to more than 20million people in Europe since 1997 and has not been linked to any particular adverse reaction.

Another popular theme among anti-vaccination activists is the supposed risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a debilitating neurological condition which was associated with what has become known as the ‘swine flu fiasco’ of 1976. Following a single case of swine flu at an army base in New Jersey, US health officials declared a pandemic emergency and President Gerald Ford launched a nationwide vaccination programme. As things turned out there was no swine flu epidemic but 500 people became ill with Guillain-Barre syndrome, apparently as a result of an immunological reaction to the vaccine, and 25 died, leading to compensation claims amounting to $100million. But Guillain-Barre has never been recognised as an adverse effect of the seasonal flu vaccine, which has merely been tweaked to produce the current swine flu vaccine.

A more appropriate historical parallel is with the smallpox bioterrorism scare launched by President George W Bush in December 2002. At a time of heightened national anxieties following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets, US authorities raised the spectre of biological attack using the smallpox virus (though there was no evidence that such an attack was imminent, or even feasible). Bush announced a programme to vaccinate 10million ‘frontline’ public service workers, including police and health staff, with the smallpox vaccine (which had not been used since smallpox had been declared extinct 30 years earlier). But few believed that smallpox was a real threat and, though the politicians succeeded in bullying the public health authorities into endorsing the programme, fewer than 40,000 of the eligible staff came forward to have the vaccine and within a year the whole campaign sputtered out.

According to journalist Arthur Allen in his authoritative study of vaccination and anti-vaccination campaigns in the US, in the smallpox scare ‘the Bush administration had seemingly distorted the truth and manipulated public fears to achieve its goals’ (4). As an advocate of the benefits of immunisation, Allen regretted the effect of the smallpox bioterrorism vaccine programme in undermining public trust for health authorities and in damaging the reputation of vaccination. He noted that this episode contributed to a shift in popular attitudes towards immunisation from the prevailing enthusiasm of the postwar years (resulting from the success of vaccination against polio, smallpox and other diseases) to the more ambivalent climate that now prevails (as a result of the vaccine/autism and other scares).

The distortion of truth and the manipulation of public fears are key features of the official promotion of the swine flu pandemic. The very concept of a pandemic, which formerly required ‘large numbers of deaths and illness’ as well as intercontinental dissemination, was changed to allow the World Health Organisation to raise the global profile of the relatively mild H1N1 swine flu outbreak (5). Health authorities have presented worst case scenarios as realistic projections, basing ‘pandemic planning’ on the anticipation of a rerun of the catastrophic 1918 pandemic. But as Peter Doshi observes, ‘strategies that anticipate only “type 1” epidemics [those that cause severe infections among many people, as in 1918] carry the risk of doing more harm than they prevent when epidemiologically limited and clinically mild epidemics or pandemics occur’ (6).

Who benefits from the swine flu scare? No doubt the pharmaceutical companies making vaccines and anti-viral drugs have made substantial profits, nurturing familiar theories about conspiracies among Big Pharma, the government and the media. But for society as a whole the costs are high – in terms of the disruption of economic activity and employment, of the education system, of people’s lives. The scare has also been disruptive of primary healthcare, leading to an upsurge in telephone and surgery consultations – mostly by people with minor symptoms but high levels of anxiety. But the most damaging aspect is likely to be the further corrosion of trust in medical authority. In relation to the swine flu vaccine, which can be expected to result in an unprecedented wave of adverse reactions (enthusiastically anticipated by the anti-vaccine campaigns and their associated lawyers), the outcome may well be a wider loss of confidence in vaccination, with unfortunate consequences for childhood immunisation programmes.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author most recently of Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, published by Routledge (buy this book from Amazon(UK). He is speaking in the debate Is the NHS institutionally ageist? at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 1 November 2009.

The fearmongers preying on pregnant women, by Frank Furedi

This politicisation of swine flu is bad for our health, by Tim Black

When public health becomes a public nuisance, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

What swine flu reveals about the culture of fear, by Frank Furedi

Putting Mexico in an isolation unit, by Tessa Mayes

Avian history repeated as porcine farce, by Tim Black

Swine flu and the dramatisation of disease, by Frank Furedi

The day I was tested for swine flu, by Tessa Mayes

Swine flu: official panic is making things worse, by Rob Lyons

Read more at spiked issue Pandemic fears.

 

(1) Swine flu fears grow as NHS staff shun vaccine, Guardian, 11 October 2009

(2) Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, Routledge 2009

(3) Squalene-based adjuvants in vaccines, WHO

(4) Vaccine: the controversial story of medicine’s greatest lifesaver, by Arthur Allen, Norton (New York), 2007

(5)  ‘How should we plan for pandemics?’, by Peter Doshi, British Medical Journal 2009; 339:b3471

(6) ‘How should we plan for pandemics?’, by Peter Doshi, British Medical Journal 2009; 339:b3471

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7628/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Tuesday 27 October 2009
Artists: resist this propagandist agenda
In a speech for the Battle of Ideas, Tiffany Jenkins argued that cultural diplomacy leads to bad art and bad politics.
Tiffany Jenkins

The relationship between culture and politics has never been straightforward. The arts have been used by leaders throughout history to bolster their status and authority, and to lend weight to concepts such as ‘the nation’. Artists, in turn, have used their talents to promote different agendas and to take sides in conflicts and revolutions. But, in recent times, this relationship has been formalised, made more explicit and prescriptive.

After the failures of the ‘war on terror’, politicians are now elevating the role of culture in international policymaking. And far from rejecting these advances, many cultural leaders – eager for affirmation and purpose – have embraced them, arguing that it is about time the positive impact of the arts on foreign relations was recognised.

In 2006, with the enthusiastic embrace of many cultural institutions, the British Council, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport developed an International Cultural Policy. The intention is not simply to collaborate and to share works of art between different countries, which would be a good thing. Instead, the aim is to employ the arts as propaganda and, in the words of Labour peer Lord Carter of Coles, to promote ‘behaviour change’. The Carter Review argues that the arts should not just create positive perceptions, but also change the way people act (1).

As a consequence of this review, a Public Diplomacy Board has been established, comprising representatives of the British Council, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the BBC World Service. The cultural sector has been directed to develop international partnerships in areas of specific cultural and government priority, and to use cultural activity for development, diplomacy and as part of post-conflict resolution.

This means that arts organisations and artists now have an extra bunch of boxes to tick when they apply for funding: will the artwork improve gender relations, stop terrorism or prevent regime change?

The cultural sector is astonishingly uncritical about this sorry picture even though artists are being instructed to act as propagandists. There are several problems with these developments, which have not been addressed but should be - because, as far as I’m concerned, culture should never be diplomatic.

Cold War cultural diplomacy

President Woodrow Wilson once argued that popular culture ‘speaks a universal language [that] lends itself importantly to the presentation of America’s plans and purposes’. For Wilson, exporting culture was good diplomacy and would promote the right values.

America pioneered cultural diplomacy to combat Nazi propaganda prior to the Second World War, but this strategy became more important during the Cold War. In this period, US cultural efforts were funded by the CIA as well as the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations. Policymakers identified a link between an engagement with foreign audiences and victory over their ideological enemies.

The United States thus armed itself with jazz, abstract expressionism and modern literature, and promoted them abroad as part of a strategy to win people over to American values. In the late 1950s, more than 100 acts were sent to 89 countries. The idea was that artists, including Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, would bring to life concepts of liberty.

The primary job of the Office of War Information during this period was to promote and explain America’s purposes and objectives to the world. You might ask ‘what is wrong with that?’. Wouldn’t anyone like to hear Louise Armstrong, after all? But, even if there were artistic benefits with this relationship, there were also problems.

Firstly, it promoted the formalisation of a subservient relationship of the arts to government, where the arts were considered the instrument of foreign policy. Apart from the first problem with this relationship – that politics shouldn’t direct culture – it also assumed that artists had the same interests as the government. But at times, indeed often, their interests are at odds.

It was a contradiction to use black artists to represent a particular notion of freedom when the US was still living under formal segregation. The civil rights movement subsequently had to take on the US state to fight for freedom at home. In the promotion of freedom abroad, we often ignore the lack of liberty on our doorstep.

In a similar vein, if British artists and cultural professionals are concerned about art and politics today, they should mount a greater critique of immigration policies that keep artists from coming over to work in the UK, and fight for the free movement of practitioners, as recently advocated in the report UK Arts and Culture: Cancelled, by Order of the Home Office. This would involve, not cosying up to government and its restrictive immigration policies, but criticising it. Such criticism, however, would not be considered ‘good cultural diplomacy’.

Cultural diplomacy encourages art to be aligned with government and politics, when the relationship is always more complicated. The danger is that art is used as propaganda, which both dictates the message and reduces the complexity of artists’ work, minimising the more interesting ambiguities and limiting creativity. Even when art is political, it is usually at its most powerful when it is nuanced.

Under senator Joseph McCarthy we saw the flipside of art as propaganda: its repression. Once artists agree that they can and should play a positive role for government they give away their independence. In turn, their work can easily be classified as negative or dangerous, and thus find itself censored.

Post-modern cultural diplomacy

In the past decade in Britain, cultural foreign policy has moved up the agenda, with interesting differences to the way it was used in the past. Firstly, there is the broader context for policymakers in embracing this agenda: the reaction to 9/11 and the failure of subsequent Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This new context is important as it has contributed to a profound discrediting of foreign policy.

The interest policymakers have shown in culture since 9/11 can be partly explained by the growing illegitimacy of Western forces abroad. Involving the arts in their work can help to legitimise their role, the logic goes. And that is one good reason to be critical of this agenda.

The second difference to the cultural diplomacy of the past is the presentation of today’s promotional artworks as consciously post-imperialist, and its distancing from the concept of universal culture. Previously, the development of cultural diplomacy assumed the existence of cultural authority. The notion of universal cultural value was the criteria of ‘excellence’ to be appreciated by everyone. Today, however, in line with postmodern thinking, the definition of culture refers not to that once described by the Victorian paternalist, Matthew Arnold, as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, but the quotidian habits, customs and traditions of wider society.

Thirdly, cultural value is no longer regarded unequivocally as durable and transcendent, but as relative to each society or community that produces it. The multicultural argument in cultural policy, which has gained ground since the late 1990s, brought not just a challenge to the universalist approach, but also placed increased emphasis on culture as an essential reflection and expression of particular identities. It reflects a re-imagining of the subject at the heart of policy where, for advocates of identity politics, people’s differences are no longer something to be overcome but are the basis of their social solidarity and their shared experience of social problems.

Theorist Stuart Hall, for example, argues that identity is formed through cultural representation. It is ‘formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways in which we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us’.

Identity is increasingly invoked as a factor in the analysis of social problems and proposed solutions. Policymakers are interested in how nurturing identities might lead to an increased sense of community and improved relations.

In this context, the field of culture in an increasingly broad anthropological sense – with its attributed potential to nurture a sense of identity - has become regarded as way to improve relations between people and tackle social problems at home and abroad. So, for example, in its report on cultural diplomacy, the think tank Demos argues that: ‘As identity politics exert an increasing influence on domestic and international exchanges, culture is therefore a critical forum for negotiation and a medium of exchange in finding shared solutions.’ (2)

Similarly, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, suggests that the role of the museum today is far more about ‘listening’ than promoting British views and values. He argues that museums can encourage a broad understanding and appreciation of the interrelatedness of the world’s cultures and thus promote ‘tolerance’, branding the institution as a museum of different cultures for world peace.

Whereas in the past cultural foreign policy had a robust concept of universal standards and values of the work promoted abroad, today such an attitude is understood to be imperialist. Instead, culture in its broad sense is credited as being a source of, and solution to, conflict, and the promotion of culture can, it is thought, build nation states and affirm identities.

Instead of beaming jazz to the Soviet bloc, today’s cultural diplomats are using museums and galleries to promote tolerance and the concept of different identities working together and thus contributing to conflict resolution. As Demos argues, ‘More than ever before, culture has a vital role to play in international relations. This stems from the wider, connective and human values that culture has: culture is both the means by which we come to understand others, and an aspect of life with innate worth that we enjoy and seek out. Culture enables us to appreciate points of commonality and, where there are differences, to understand the motivations and humanity that underlie them.’ (3) According to Demos, the power of culture in international relations should be recognised and unlocked.

The denigration of art and politics

If the cultural diplomacy of the past was a flawed strategy, severely limiting and compromising those interested in both politics and the arts, then what about the cultural diplomacy of today?

Today, cultural diplomacy involves different but equally problematic assumptions and consequences, both in relation to how the arts are regarded and to the character of collections, as well with regards to how we understand ourselves and political conflicts. There is a real danger that conflict will be understood as something that is simply caused by cultural differences. This simplistic explanation of war and conflict comes at the expense of a more structural analysis, which examines the different state interests and why leaders may take their people to war. Instead, we are told that people need to realise that ‘we’re all different’, that we should be more ‘understanding’ and learn to ‘get along’.

This naive approach to international relations not only obscures political analysis; it also situates blame in peoples’ identities, which are essentialised. Contemporary cultural diplomacy reifies difference, and leads to a depoliticised understanding of conflict.

In turn, while the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, cannot be solved or understood through a display of historical artefacts in museums and galleries, cultural institutions are burdened with the responsibility of cultural diplomacy.

In 2004, for example, the British Museum exhibition Sudan: Ancient Treasures surveyed the archaeology of Africa’s biggest country over the past 200,000 years. Initially the idea was to underline the overlooked cultural significance of Sudan, but when Darfur hit the headlines the museum decided to relate what was happening in the news with the exhibition. Like many contemporary exhibitions at the British Museum, explicit links were made to understanding the present-day conflict through the region’s past.

But those links were, at best, highly simplistic. Worse, by compressing history to link the distant past to the troubles in the present, the chief impression left by the exhibition was that the Sudanese are a violent bunch. The exhibition suggested that there is something intrinsic to the Sudanese that lends them to fighting. And it avoided putting present-day Africa today and international relations under any scrutiny. The ancient treasures of Sudan were pushed aside in the interests of a greater narrative. The objects, and the lives of their creators and users, were obscured.

By asking collections to be diplomatic, we lose what is interesting about them. We ignore the accomplishments, the ways of life and the meanings of the rituals of peoples from past civilisations, because we are too interested in what they can purportedly do for us now.

Cultural diplomacy will only politicise objects further, making them the focus of more controversy and claims-making. In the past 10 years there have been several brilliant exhibitions about Islamic art, at times in the name of improving cultural relations. This hasn’t helped to get the troops to withdraw from Iraq or improved life for Afghans, but it has been a feast of artistic riches. At the same time, however, there have been increased calls for censorship in the name of avoiding offence, often expressed by arts professionals worried about the impact of culture on communities.

Tate Britain, for example, cancelled plans to display John Latham’s work ‘God Is Great’ as part of the 2005 British Art Displays exhibition because they were worried it could upset Muslims after London’s 7 July bombings. ‘God Is Great’ consists of a large sheet of glass and copies of the Koran, the Bible and the Talmud that have been cut apart.

The museum directors explained: ‘Having sought wide-ranging advice, Tate feels that to exhibit the work in London in the current sensitive climate, post-7 July, would not be appropriate.’ They were worried that this work of art might damage community relations. This illustrates that the flipside of cultural diplomacy: work that is seen to be ‘dangerous’ will not be shown.

In response, the Muslim Council of Britain commented: ‘We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork… We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham’s piece… Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counterproductive.’

They are quite right: the concept of cultural diplomacy is full of misconceptions about culture. But with the increased attention given to artwork as agents of cultural diplomacy, it is likely that collections will become more and more politicised. By taking the path of cultural diplomacy, museum collections will be the focus of increased concern and claims-making, rather than enlightenment.

Tiffany Jenkins is an academic and cultural commentator. Visit her website here. This article is based on a talk at the Battle of Ideas satellite event Museums for World Peace. She is also speaking in the debates Can the arts save the economy? and The art of criticism: judgement in crisis at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 1 November 2009.

(1) Lord Carter of Coles’ Public Diplomacy Review, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2005

(2) Department for Culture, Media & Sport International Strategy 2006 (PDF)

(3) Cultural Diplomacy, Demos (London), 2007

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7629/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Tuesday 27 October 2009
The cheap thrill of global warming
Ed Miliband’s ‘climate map’ confirms that climate change is the only thing providing New Labour with a sense of mission.
Tim Black

You’ve probably seen the advert by now. A little girl is resting in her dad’s arms as he reads her a bedtime story. As the portentous music indicates, something is not right about this story and its rather sad illustrations. One picture shows a dog drowning as water floods the town, another shows bunny rabbits weeping upon the parched earth.

This, the father says, is because of CO2 emissions. The girl looks a bit nonplussed, as would many eight-year-olds expecting Chicken Little and getting the horror version. But all is not lost, according to the story: ‘The adults discovered that over 40 per cent of CO2 was coming from ordinary everyday things like keeping houses warm or driving cars, which meant if they made less CO2 [ominous pause] maybe they could save the land for the children’.

Not content with spending £6million on this bit of kiddie dread-spreading, last week the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched a Met Office-produced climate map showing the impact of a global temperature rise of four degrees Celsius between 2060 and 2100 (see the climate map here). Click here to read of flooding in the Netherlands and south eastern UK. Click here to read of the near complete disappearance of permafrost in northern Siberia. Click here to read of drought in Mediterranean basin. Don’t be fooled by its point-and-click gimmicks – because while it lacks the creepy tone of the climate advert, its purpose is similar: to scare people into supporting whatever it is the government thinks is necessary to avoid catastrophe. If that means using less energy to heat your home, or not driving your car so much, then so be it.

That the map was launched as part of the Science Museum’s latest exhibition is telling. Entitled Prove It – Everything You Needed to Know to Believe in Climate Change, and sounding like the climate-change equivalent of those Alpha courses that churches run to convince you that God exists, UK foreign secretary David Miliband seemed assured of the educational-cum-propagandistic potential of the map: ‘If government campaigns can persuade people to make changes in their own lives, become part of the campaign and be more knowledgeable about the problem, we will have served our purpose.’

But beyond the change-your-lives-or-the-planet-gets-it hectoring, the government’s increasingly intense call to reduced-energy arms meets a political need, too. It provides a fading New Labour administration with an urgent purpose, an objective, no matter how doom-infused, around which they can rally an anxious citizenry. And with international climate talks due in Copenhagen in December, there is a prime opportunity to posture as warriors in the good fight. Little wonder that energy minister Ed Miliband sounded almost proud when speaking at the climate map’s launch: ‘With less than 50 days left before agreement must be reached, the UK is going all out to persuade the world of its need to raise its ambitions so we get a deal that protects us from a four-degree-celsius world.’

The more heightened the threat, the grander the posture. This logic was also at work when prime minister Gordon Brown addressed the Major Economies Forum in London recently. Enthusiastically talking up the prospect of droughts and a rising wave of floods, he stated: ‘If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.’

Despite the catastrophe-friendly content, there is a sense that when it comes to climate change, New Labour is enjoying itself. Where fighting the ‘war on terror’ lost its purpose-giving, moral-authority-providing function in Iraq, and now on the demoralising plains of Afghanistan, the good war is still there to be fought, but this time on the field of climate change. At every opportunity ministers trumpet this historic moment, and their own historic role. At the Science Museum, Ed Miliband was proclaiming Britain’s ‘historic responsibility’ to reduce carbon emissions, and, at the Major Economies forum, Gordon Brown was keen to play the world statesman: ‘In every era there are only one or two moments when nations come together and reach agreements that make history, because they change the course of history’. If we were in any doubt, that day of reckoning arrives in December in Copenhagen.

The problem with all the bluster, its catastrophism and its hope is what we, as a society, are being asked to do is so limited and limiting. It amounts, as the father (New Labour) said to his little girl (the public), to not using so much energy to heat homes or move around. This miserable vision of the low-wattage good life is presented as the national mission in which we are begged to believe. ‘To tackle the problem of climate change’, boomed Ed Miliband, ‘all of us, foreign ministries, environment ministries, treasuries, departments of defence, and all parts of government and societies, must work together to keep global temperatures to two degrees Celsius’.

There we have it. If ever a vision captured the bankruptcy of the today’s rulers it’s one based around temperature. They have given up on development, on all the gains of modernity, and on all the aspirations towards a better future; instead they just want to turn the heat down.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7630/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Monday 26 October 2009
‘Rescue’: a new PC term for repatriation
As the sex-trafficking scare is exposed as a tissue of lies, Nathalie Rothschild spells out the need for full freedom of movement for migrants.
Nathalie Rothschild

It must be tough discovering that an issue you have invested money, column inches or even a career in is no more than a delusion. In the face of such a realisation, some accept their mistakes, while others react with denial. Some choose to keep shtum in order to avoid embarrassment, while others pretend to have known all along that it was a non-issue.

All these reactions have manifested themselves in the week since the UK Guardian revealed that a major inquiry into sex trafficking has failed to find a single person in the UK who has forced anybody into prostitution against their will, ‘in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country’ (1).

The Guardian got hold of an internal police analysis of the six-month campaign, Operation Pentameter Two. It showed that after extensive intelligence-gathering and raids on 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours across Britain, only 96 people were arrested for trafficking, and out of these only 15 men and women were convicted. For 10 of them, police found no evidence of their having coerced prostitutes. In the end, only five men were found to be genuine traffickers – that is, they had imported women and forced them into prostitution – but they had been detected before the Pentameter investigation started (2).

In other words, Pentameter, an operation heralded as ‘the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking’, was a waste of time. How did the discussion about trafficking become so dislocated from facts and evidence? This is the story of a modern-day scare, in which liberal broadsheets, feminist campaigners and New Labour politicians pretty much invented a ‘trafficking epidemic’ in order to justify their roles in the world and to clamp down on immigration in a new, PC way.

Seeing victims everywhere

Two weeks before the Guardian’s revelations, the Metropolitan Police had announced that it was considering disbanding its specialist human trafficking team, though it claimed that this was due to a lack of funding rather than a gaping hole in trafficking statistics. The proposed disbandment was criticised by several major charities, including Amnesty International, the NSPCC and the Poppy Project, which is funded by the Office for Criminal Justice Reform to support women who have been trafficked into prostitution (3).

Mary Honeyball MEP launched a petition to stop the Met from closing its trafficking unit, a decision she defended even after last week’s revelations of the shambolic Pentameter operation (4). ‘To demote the issue of human trafficking, when it is recognised by Interpol as the third largest crime after drugs and arms trafficking, shows not only contempt for the victims of this horrific crime but also for the members of this police unit who are internationally regarded as an example of good practice’, she said (5). For abolitionists intent on criminalising the sex industry and saving women from falling into disrepute, there need not be any perpetrators in order for there to be victims.

In a letter to the Guardian, Fiona Mactaggart, the Labour MP who earlier this year claimed that 80 per cent of prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking (6), said: ‘I have always been of the view that anyone coerced into selling their body experiences unacceptable abuse of their human rights’ (7).

Just like her fellow state feminists Jacqui Smith (who as home secretary sought to penalise men who visit prostitutes) and minister for women and equality Harriet Harman (who has described sex trafficking as a ‘modern-day slave trade’), Mactaggart sees any woman working in the sex industry as, by definition, exploited and abused (8). For these caring feminists, any woman who claims to have chosen to enter the sex industry, or who regards sex work as preferable to other work, is simply deluded or in the pay of some pimp. So Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters argued that the Guardian’s assessment of the police’s Pentameter analysis was flawed because it ‘suggests that prostitution is generally a voluntary activity’ (9).

This is the starting point to the trafficking scare: the idea that women who work in the sex industry cannot think for themselves; that they are victims even if they do not consider themselves as such.

Self-styled ‘abolitionists’ and anti-trafficking activists tend to claim that only a small minority of privileged, Western sex workers are against the criminalisation of sex work. Yet, as I have reported previously on spiked, around the world thousands of sex workers – rich and poor, young and old, from the developed and developing world – have organised to campaign for their working rights (10). I have met sex workers and sex workers’ rights activists from the UK, Europe, the US, Latin America and South East Asia who, while acknowledging that there is nothing romantic about sex work and that exploitation and abuse does occur, also vehemently assert their agency and refuse to be tagged as victims by definition.

For abolitionists, however, it is inconceivable that some women choose to sell sex because they enjoy it or because they prefer it to the less lucrative job alternatives available to them. It is strange that self-proclaimed feminists should regard millions of women around the world as morally compromised, as hapless victims without agency.

The ‘lack of credible data’

As for the debate on trafficking, Gupta acknowledges that it is ‘bedevilled by the lack of credible data’ just like ‘other subterranean issues’, such as domestic violence or rape, where ‘numbers are unknowable’. Yet for all that, Gupta is certain that trafficking is a widespread problem – it’s just that it’s difficult to prove it (11).

Similarly, the New Labour MP Dennis MacShane, who has campaigned against the ‘sex slave trade’, agrees that a lack of proof around forced prostitution does not invalidate campaigns against it. Criticised in the Guardian and in a BBC Newsnight report last week for once claiming in a Commons debate that 25,000 women had been trafficked into Britain – a ‘fact’ he had grabbed from a Daily Mirror headline – MacShane now acknowledges that ‘I honestly don’t know how many girls are trafficked into Britain’. But curiously, having relied on a shocking figure to lend credibility to his campaign, MacShane also dismissed the new revelations around trafficking as ‘a futile war of statistics’ (12).

It is disingenuous for anti-trafficking activists and sex-industry abolitionists to dismiss the lack of real evidence around trafficking as irrelevant when they themselves have relied so heavily on figures to lend weight to their moralistic and emotive campaigns. The second component of the trafficking panic has been imaginary statistics; the great ‘slavery scare’ is underpinned by claims that human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar industry affecting millions of men, women and children around the world (13).

Although trafficking refers to the illegal transportation of people for the purposes of exploitation in a wide range of industries, it is primarily when migrants enter the sex industry that they tend to become objects of concern for anti-trafficking campaigners. As Dr Nick Mai, a senior research fellow in Migrations and Immigrations at London Metropolitan University, pointed out at an event this summer marking the publication of his research into migrant sex workers in the UK, some migrants choose to work in the sex industry in order to avoid exploitation in other industries, where there is frequently low pay and long working hours.

Despite the fact that migrants can earn significantly more in the sex industry than they would as domestic workers or seasonal agricultural workers, migrant sex workers are regarded as the most exploited and abused just because they are selling sex or erotic services. Ultimately, ‘trafficking’ has become a powerful and emotive tool for prostitution abolitionists to win wider public support for their efforts to clamp down on the sex industry as a whole.

Now, in the face of stark evidence that police, policymakers and various non-governmental organisations have failed to lock up a single person in the UK for enforced prostitution, abolitionists simply point out, in Rumsfeldian fashion, that there are a great deal of ‘hidden victims’ in whose name rescue operations must continue.

A broadsheet panic about immigrants

Much of the debate around the sex industry is infused with a sense of panic; women working in the sex industry are regarded as a threat to the moral fabric. Last week, in revealing the failure of Pentameter to find a single sex trafficker in the UK, the Guardian’s Nick Davies outlined ‘the anatomy of a moral panic’ around prostitution and trafficking. He criticised the ‘tide of misinformation’ around the subject of sex trafficking in the UK and said alarmist stories in the media have been treated as reliable sources by politicians, informing misguided policymaking (14).

Looking at headlines of stories about trafficking and migrant sex workers from the past five years, it seems Davies has a point. Here are some examples:

‘Migrant women forced into cheap sex trade’; ‘We must help end the sex slave trade’; ‘Sex slaves to be offered “safe houses”’; ‘Lap-dancing clubs are not cafés. They are the sex industry on the high street’; ‘Trafficked, prostituted, raped: the kite who flew away’; ‘Fifth of Britons unknowingly aid child trafficking, according to survey’; ‘Nightmare world of suburban sex slaves’; ‘Raped, beaten and helpless: UK’s sex slaves’; ‘The teenagers traded for slave labour and sex’.

Where did all these headlines appear? They are all from Nick Davies’s own newspaper, the Guardian, except for one that appeared in the Guardian’s sister publication, the Observer. The Guardian has described human trafficking as a ‘trade in misery and abuse’ and according to the article about teenage slaves, published in 2003, Britain has become ‘an easy target for child trafficking gangs’ where hundreds of children are forced into domestic servitude or sexual exploitation, ‘trapped in rooms with no papers, no identity, where they are nothing but a commodity traded for slave labour or tawdry sex, and living under the fear of voodoo’. Voodoo? Even tabloid attacks on migrants haven’t gone so far as to claim that black magic is used in immigrant circles to enslave women. This is the third key aspect of the trafficking scare – it was lent authority, given its impact, by unquestioning journalism in authoritative broadsheet newspapers.

Unsubstantiated figures, borderline racist claims and unquestioning ‘churnalism’, a phrase coined by Davies himself, is not the preserve of the Guardian, of course. Other broadsheets have helped stir up a moral panic around trafficking and sex work by reporting fantastical tales or extrapolating from individual testimonies of horrific abuse the occurrence of systematic enslavement, rape and abuse of women and children at the hands of foreign thugs. Independent columnist Johann Hari, for instance, has claimed that the developed world is beset by an ‘epidemic of human trafficking (in effect, sex slavery)’. Hari says that ‘usually, they [sex workers] are tricked into coming here with promises of jobs as nannies or secretaries, and then trapped into lives of unspeakable degradation’ (15).

In the run-up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, some British journalists reported that thousands of women from across the world were going to be trafficked into Germany to work as sex slaves for football fans. The Independent reported that Germany was about to experience a ‘sex explosion’ (16). In the Guardian, Julie Bindel said ‘Germany’s pimps are casting their eyes on poverty-stricken countries… in their search for women for the Cup’ (17). As it turned out, German police uncovered just five cases of ‘human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation’ during the World Cup – and one of the victims was a German (18). This did not stop Mary Honeyball from claiming two weeks ago that ‘thousands of prostitutes were drawn to Germany during the last World Cup’ and that ‘trafficking is on the rise in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, which like all other international sporting events is predicted to effect a steep rise in prostitution’ (19).

Anyone who dares to challenge the statistics and assumptions around trafficking – as spiked has been doing for the past five years – is accused of being a ‘denier’ serving some hidden interest. Yet last week’s revelations in the Guardian demonstrate, yet again, what some of us have claimed for a long time: that ‘trafficking’ is an invalid, confusing concept which does more harm than good – and, ultimately, anti-trafficking campaigns are anti-migrant campaigns.

A PC clampdown on free movement

Of course, many migrant men, women and children are exploited and sometimes forced into prostitution. Some sex workers would not have imagined, at the start of their journeys across the world, that they would end up working in the sex industry. So what’s the problem with the media’s focus on abused and victimised migrants and with anti-trafficking operations designed to ‘rescue’ such individuals?

Firstly, as we have seen, many sex workers dismiss the idea that they are slaves in need of rescue. They simply want to get on with their jobs so they can provide for themselves and their families. For some working in the sex industry – which by the way covers everything from charging for sex to providing attentive dinner company, pole dancing and selling sex toys, erotic DVDs and lingerie – is enjoyable, while for others it is simply a better option than other lines of work available to them.

Of course, women often enter the sex industry because of a lack of choice; few girls dream of becoming prostitutes and few women are under any illusion that they will be the next Pretty Woman, whisked off into a life of luxury by some Richard Gere lookalike. Yet many workers in various jobs and sectors, especially poorly paid migrant workers, similarly feel that they have limited options.

As Mai, who interviewed 100 migrant sex workers in the UK from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, has pointed out: ‘Working in the sex industry is often a way… to avoid the unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they [migrants] meet in non-sexual jobs.’ He argued that, by working in the sex industry, some migrants ‘are able to maintain dignified living standards in the UK while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families’ (20).

Secondly, clampdowns on the sex industry can actually make sex workers more vulnerable. All the activists and sex workers I have met and interviewed have acknowledged that some within their line of work have experienced assault and can find themselves in vulnerable situations, but they have also said that decriminalisation is the best way of ensuring that sex workers avoid harm. All of Mai’s interviewees ‘underlined how restrictive migration policies and the criminalisation of clients and (indirectly) of sex workers would make them more likely to take risks and accept undignified and dangerous conditions’ (21). For many migrant sex workers, interference by authorities and NGO-led rescue-missions are a bigger threat to their livelihoods and wellbeing than punters.

Thirdly, as I and others have pointed out numerous times on spiked, it is anti-trafficking campaigns and legislation that pose the greatest threats to migrant workers, restricting their choices and making them vulnerable to exploitation. Undoubtedly there are genuine cases of kidnapping and many migrants end up being exploited and doing work they had not expected to do. But today, more and more forms of migration are being redefined as ‘trafficking’ that must be restricted for the migrants’ own good. This is making life difficult for those who must, or who want to, move across borders for work.

Most foreigners who wish to come to the UK cannot do so legally and so they end up paying strangers to transport them over borders. Once here, they have no access to legal work and end up in the ‘shadow economy’ – thus they qualify as figures in the confused and inflated trafficking statistics that ‘rescuers’ rely on in their fight against ‘the modern-day slave trade’. In other words, anti-traffickers are campaigning against movement instead of fighting for more liberal migration policies so that foreigners don’t have to take risky, expensive journeys to the UK and seek work in the shadow economy once they get here.

Fourthly, ‘anti-trafficking’ is now a PC term for repatriation. Instead of showing solidarity with migrant workers, arguing for the right of foreigners in the UK to earn decent wages and to enjoy good working conditions, feminists, human rights campaigners and religious groups have joined forces with the police to clamp down on migration, helping to criminalise migrant workers, to rob women of agency and portray those working in the sex industry as rape victims. In their view, migration is too risky and disruptive and women should be kept in their place instead of moving to a new country and potentially ending up in the sex industry. Anti-trafficking measures are little more than a new form of repatriation where migrants must be kept at bay or ‘rescued’ and sent back to their home countries ‘for their own good’.

Instead of ‘protecting’ migrants, anti-traffickers and abolitionists are using made-up statistics to fuel self-righteous campaigns that actually make migrants more vulnerable to exploitation. And for this reason, the hysterical war on trafficking must be urgently brought to an end.

Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of spiked.

(1) Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution, Guardian, 20 October 2009

(2) Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution, Guardian, 20 October 2009

(3) Keep trafficking unit, Met urged, BBC News, 7 October 2009

(4) A law which will protect women from exploitation, Guardian letters, 22 October 2009

(5) Don’t shut down the trafficking unit, by Mary Honeyball, Guardian Comment is Free blog, 7 October 2009

(6) Fiona Mactaggart and the dodgy prostitution statistics, Telegraph, 9 January 2009

(7) A law which will protect women from exploitation, Guardian letters, 22 October 2009

(8) See Prostituting women’s solidarity, by Nathalie Rothschild

(9) Sex trafficking is no illusion, by Rahila Gupta, Guardian Comment is Free blog, 20 October 2009

(10) See More evidence that trafficking is a myth, by Nathalie Rothschild

(11) Sex trafficking is no illusion, by Rahila Gupta, Guardian Comment is Free blog, 20 October 2009

(12) Sex trafficking: a futile war of statistic, by Denis MacShane, Guardian Comment is Free blog, 21 October 2009

(13) See We’re all traffickers now, by Nathalie Rothschild

(14) Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic, by Nick Davies, Guardian, 20 October 2009

(15) At last - an opportunity to legalise prostitution, Independent, 2 January 2004

(16) Germany backs bigger brothels to fight World Cup sex explosion, Independent, 9 December 2005

(17) Foul play, by Julie Bindel, Guardian, 30 May 2006

(18) See Exposed: the myth of the World Cup ‘sex slaves’, by Bruno Waterfield

(19) Don’t shut down the trafficking unit, by Mary Honeyball, Guardian Comment is Free blog, 7 October 2009

(20) Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry: First Findings, Dr Nick Mai, July 2009

(21) Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry: First Findings, Dr Nick Mai, July 2009

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7625/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Monday 26 October 2009
NYC: the city that never smokes
A proposal to ban lighting up in New York’s parks has exposed the puritanical agenda behind the crusade against smoking.
Basham and Luik

The truth about second-hand smoking is finally out.

Thanks to some unusual candour on the part of the anti-tobacco brigade in New York City, we now have official confirmation that banning smoking in public has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the health of non-smokers from second-hand smoke, but everything to do with stigmatising both smoking and smokers. Closer to home, new evidence from the National Health Service (NHS) shows that the public smoking ban in England has made absolutely no positive difference in smoking rates, despite claims made by its champions that it would.

In September, Dr Thomas Farley, New York City’s Health Commissioner, proposed banning smoking at all of the city’s parks and beaches (1). Dr Farley’s rationale for the ban has nothing to do with the risks that outdoor smoking pose to non-smokers, but rather with preventing people, particularly children, from having to see anyone smoking in public. Farley says, ‘We don’t think children should have to watch someone smoking’. Farley also defends the extension of the smoking ban to outdoor areas by arguing that it is ‘part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates’. New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, confirmed earlier this month that he would implement Farley’s proposal, arguing that the public is ‘overwhelmingly in favour’ (2).

Why have the champions of banning smoking everywhere, even in private accommodation, suddenly come clean about the driving force behind their crusade? The answer is that they have essentially won the war over public smoking. But why is this the case? The answer, sadly, is that for the past 15 to 20 years, the public has been bombarded with a carefully orchestrated government-funded anti-tobacco campaign to convince them – in contradiction of the scientific evidence – that smokers pose a deadly health risk to non-smokers, particularly children.

The scientific evidence has never supported the case against public smoking. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s seminal early 1990s report on second-hand smoke was severely flawed. Its critique of second-hand smoke was only sustained through a careful exclusion of non-confirming evidence and a non-traditional application of the statistical test known as confidence limits. The report was subjected to a scathing analysis by a US federal court, which rejected its scientific claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, a finding that even on appeal was not reversed (3).

Moreover, a scientific study conducted by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that there was no statistically significant association between smoking in the workplace and social settings and lung cancer in non-smokers. Indeed, the majority of studies about second-hand smoke and lung cancer in non-smokers have found non-statistically significant associations both in workplace and domestic settings.

Of course, none of this startling lack of scientific evidence has moved beyond the scientific journals and into the public domain, which means that the debate about public smoking is a non-scientific debate. And this means that it can proceed on virtually any grounds, unchecked by the need for careful and verifiable scientific evidence. The anti-smoking movement has always known that the evidence about the risks of public smoking, or private smoking for that matter, to non-smokers was marginal, at best, and nonexistent, at worst. But this was fundamentally unimportant.

Preventing people from smoking in public was never about real health risks - that is, it was never about protecting non-smokers so much as it was about stigmatising smoking and smokers and making it difficult for them to smoke. So with the science of second-hand smoke now never discussed, the anti-tobacco movement feels confident in moving the argument forward and revealing the starkness of its real agenda.

There is no compelling evidence that second-hand smoke poses a health risk to anyone in open spaces like public parks and beaches, but that is beside the point. The new push seeks, first, to demonise smoking and, second, to exert a brazen paternalism in which it is made virtually impossible for smokers – for their own good, of course – to light up in any public space.

There are profound difficulties with both of these objectives. For one thing, where is the justification for banning unhealthy behaviours from the public square simply on the grounds that someone might see them? Or, indeed, what is the justification for banning unhealthy behaviours from public viewing full stop? This opens up substantial room for prohibiting an enormous range of other behaviours which are neither immoral nor illegal, but simply unhealthy.

For example, by parity of reasoning it could be argued that children should never have to see anyone eating unhealthy foods in public, or indeed see anyone who is fat in public. Surely, there must be some evidence that seeing someone engaged in unhealthy behaviour puts others at risk. But where is this evidence?

For another thing, there is the issue of whether such measures actually work. For example, the NHS recently released a study on the effectiveness of the public smoking ban (4). The fact is that certain groups, such as young males, are smoking more after the smoking ban than before it. So, not only are such bans not supported by science, they are also not supported by the evidence on their practical effect in changing behaviour.

Finally, any policy by which the government engages in stigmatising the legal behaviour of its adult citizens is repugnant in a democratic society. Fundamental to democratic government is the respect that it owes to its adult citizens’ choices about legal behaviour and, more fundamentally, how they choose to live their lives. Paternalistic interventions, whether through stigmatising or other means, can only be justified in the rarest of instances.

What the evolution of the debate over public smoking shows is how little science has to do with the anti-tobacco crusade, how disingenuous that crusade is about its real motives and goals, how easily the crusade on tobacco can be extended to other causes (most notably the war on obesity), and how fundamentally dangerous it is to a society both free and democratic.

Patrick Basham directs the Democracy Institute and is a Cato Institute adjunct scholar. John Luik is a Democracy Institute senior fellow. They are co-authors of Hidden in Plain Sight: Why Tobacco Display Bans Fail.

(1) New York Eyes ‘No Smoking’ Outdoors, Too, New York Times, 15 September 2009 (2) Mayor Bloomberg vows to snuff out smoking in parks, beaches, New York Daily News, 1 October 2009 (3) For more on the EPA study, see An epidemic of epidemiology, by Rob Lyons (4) See Statistics on smoking, NHS, 29 September 2009 [pdf]

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7626/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Monday 26 October 2009
The calm before the immigration storm?
The lack of hysteria at a new influx of refugee boats to Australia has disappointed pro- and anti-refugee groups alike.
Guy Rundle

‘Look, it’s not impossible that these boats may contain terrorists.’ Giving an impromptu press conference outside Australia’s centre of government, Parliament House, maverick conservative politician Wilson Tuckey was at it again.

Four days earlier, a boat containing 255 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers had been on its way through the Indonesian archipelago, towards the outlying Australian-owned Christmas Island, where its passengers could make a claim for asylum. In an unusual move, prime minister Kevin Rudd had arranged for the Indonesian navy to pick them up, and transport them to Java. The boat, still being shuffled round Indonesian ports, was the second in as many days to hove into view, and the forty-fifth this year. The issue of boat-borne refugees had energised the Howard government and given it the image of defender of the nation. In doing so, it had licensed the most appalling dehumanisation of refugees. Tuckey’s suggestion that these leaky boats might be bristling with Tamil Tigers was in the spirit of those days. A nation held its breath. Was it about to be open season on refugees all over again?

No, as it turned out. Rudd used the statement as a chance to beat his hapless opponent, Liberal opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, about the head and demand he expel or discipline Tuckey. Labor was pursuing a tough strategy, Rudd said, ‘but we don’t lock up children behind razor wire’. Turnbull, a man of liberal instincts loathed by much of his party, squirmed and repudiated Tuckey’s comments.

This exchange and Tuckey’s marginalisation suggested that the attitudes to refugees had moved on in Australia. The 1999-2001 arrival of boats – mostly containing Afghan refugees from first the Taliban, and then the war – had been greeted with alarm, rising to panic following its relentless exploitation by the then government of John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition. The upsurge of raw xenophobia had surprised many who thought that the country had made a seamless transition to global-cafe multiculturalism over the previous two decades, and reaffirmed a belief that there were deep currents of violent racism running just below the surface. This conviction, which tended to go hand in hand with an elite disdain for suburban Australia, was met with an equally polarised response: Australia was uniquely colour blind. The only issue Australians were actually concerned with, they argued, was whether or not boat-borne refugees were ‘queue jumpers’, transgressing the Australian notion of the ‘fair go’.

The failure of the issue to spark up a similar clash this time around has thrown everyone into confusion. On talkback radio, and in the bars and taxis, there is simply not the level of obsession or angst exhibited in 2001. The ‘indefinite mandatory detention’ system developed by the Howard government has been all but wholly abolished with little protest – even though we were assured that this was all that was keeping most Australians from rioting over out-of-control immigration. This has been bewildering to right-wing pundits, who have been using the notion of harsh-but-fair refugee policies as a way to parade their populist credentials and fuse their relationship with readers they have no real connection with.

But it has also been confusing and even a little disappointing to some on the liberal-left, who had assumed that the Australian public were a lumpen mass, capable of being provoked to a torchlight parade at a moment’s notice. As the Rudd government purses a double-strategy of emphasising firmness, while repeatedly berating the opposition for their cruelty, the political press gallery has been left perplexed. Are they being soft? Are they being hard? Are they confused? Anything but the possibility that the government might be giving out a message that is as complex as the situation itself. What, everyone wanted to know, was going on? Who among the old political formations was actually winning?

The Tampa crisis

The answer was no one. It is nearly a decade since the refugee issue came to a head with the Tampa crisis. The Tampa was a Norwegian tanker that had picked up a 100 or so refugees from a sinking boat in the Indian ocean. It had then continued on course for Indonesian ports. When the refugees, some of them seriously ill, pleaded and desperately threatened the captain, he put into Christmas Island. Refused entry he anchored offshore for a day or two. When he finally put into port, Australian troops boarded the ship.

The whole incident then became grotesque political theatre. The refugees were kept on board, even the very ill, as the government tried to find a way to avoid bringing them on to Australian soil. As lawyers attempted to get a habeas corpus writ to bring them into the country, the government announced that they would be transferred to the independent nation of Nauru (which was bankrupt and dependant on Australian funds). All this occurred in the first week of September 2001, a situation interrupted by the World Trade Center attacks.

Yet the events also called out a large pro-refugee public movement, centred around action groups run by the internationalist left, together with churches and liberal ‘concerned’ middle-classes. Particularly important was a group called Rural Australians for Refugees, which drew together many people from areas presumed to be reactionary rednecks. Though mandatory detention remained a policy with mass appeal, its obvious cruelties were wearing many people down consciously or otherwise. But by 2005, the boats had largely stopped coming for various reasons, and the Howard government had mounted a new push against working conditions and unionisation. Politics had returned to far more immediate questions.

By the time the boats began to return early this year, prompted by the Sri Lankan government’s push to exterminate the Tamil separatist movement, the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric of the heady days of 2001 no longer worked. The Rudd government had long since withdrawn from Iraq, which had never been a popular war, and, although it had nominated Afghanistan as ‘the good war’, the low-level of Australian involvement kept it off the front pages, save for the farcical antics of the Karzai government. Australia was also economically well-placed given its good performance in the global financial crisis; a low debt burden, coupled with ongoing mining sales to China had seen its economy actually grow during the financial crisis. This good fortune has given many Australians a sense of calm, even of a slightly charmed existence, a mood which taps into an older, more generous sense of Australia – that of the ‘lucky country’, stood apart from the swirling chaos of a dangerous world.

But the mood was also indicative of the further emptying out of existing political positions and formations. In 2001, Labor had been led by Kim Beazley, a leader who embodied old modern Labor, a coalition of the labour movement and a left-liberal knowledge class, fusing civil liberties and social democracy. The Liberal party, meanwhile, presented itself as the national security party, and prevailed.

By the 2007 election, Labor had developed a substantially different way of framing political debates. The new leader Kevin Rudd was an uncompromising egghead, a former diplomat, who spoke fluent Mandarin, and wrote long essays for commentary magazines detailing his ethical politics and the influence upon him of the German theologian/activist/martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In contrast, he painted the opposing centre-right Liberal party as a group of Hayekian ideologues intent on constructing a free market ‘brutopia’.

The readership of the essays was small, but Rudd and Labor used the ideas within them as a template for sustained missives within the mainstream media. They offered a notion of calm, technical management as an alternative to their predecessor Howard’s increasingly obsessive wars, cultural and actual. Howard had presented himself to voters in 2001 as someone who wanted to make Australia more ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about itself; Rudd had gone one better by absolving the public of the need to think about politics at all, advocating instead a combination of managerial competency and rarefied ethics.

It is always calm before the storm of course, but it is also always calm before more calm. Rudd’s Labor government has successfully reframed the debate so that boats arriving in our waters - even when they look virtually identical to the fabled Tampa – simply do not have the same meaning as they did in 2001. But the debate has also failed to make – or participants have deliberately omitted – any substantial positive argument about the absolute obligation to treat refugees as human beings. The humanity of refugees is conveyed as a consideration after border security has been guaranteed, and the image of ‘children behind barbed wire’ is used as a deliberate attempt to maximise notions of pity and vulnerability, not reciprocity and equality.

Still, though there appears to be widespread public calm about the boat arrivals, members of old political formations remain poised, waiting for the explosion of national pride/racism they are sure will happen. In the meantime nations that in the early 2000s were boasting about adopting ‘the Australian solution’ – Italy foremost – have now surpassed it in the cruelty and absurdity with which they apply it, a further indication that looking for the roots of mandatory detention in Australia’s white settler past, or alleged deep-seated racism, is to look in the wrong place. Rather, such regimes are coming from generalised cultures of fear, projected into a world whose territorial institutions are straining to cope with its ever-increasing fluidity.

Wilson Tuckey’s pious hope that a conjunction of those two great old stand-bys – refugees and terrorism – might shake the fear factor back into politics has proved largely fruitless. The media were interested, of course, playing on it for a full 48 hours. But even they dropped the story with the same vague sense of disappointment as someone endlessly waiting on the pier for a boat to come in.

Guy Rundle is a former editor of Arena (Australia). He is the author of Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 Presidential Election published by Penguin. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).)

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7627/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 23 October 2009
The new divide in British politics: Us and Him
Question Time was no victory for rigorous and free debate – it merely confirmed Nick Griffin’s elevation as the voodoo doll of public life.
Brendan O’Neill

The BBC, Jack Straw and others have tried to present last night’s Question Time, which featured Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP), as a victory for free and grown-up debate. It was no such thing.

It was a cultural lynching of Griffin by members of a political elite bereft of ideas and lost for words. It was a cynical performance by politicians and BBC bigwigs, designed to demonstrate their inherent goodness and sense of mission against the easy target of a bumbling buffoon with backward ideas. It was a calculated act of moral distancing, an attempt to conjure up two moral universes – Us and Him – at a time when British political life has little else going for it. And it involved, not open, adult debate, but its opposite: the suppression of discussion, analysis and nuance, all buried beneath the theatrical display of the new Non-Nick consensus.

The show confirmed what Griffin has become for the political elite: a voodoo doll they can stick pins in to try to ward off their own political misfortunes. New Labour justice secretary Straw got the ball rolling in response to a question about whether it is right for the BNP to use Second World War and Churchillian imagery in its campaigning literature. No, he said, because it is a racial party and is thus different to all other parties in Britain. ‘What is common about every other political party, regardless of their differences, is that they each have a moral compass, a recognisable moral compass based on longstanding cultural, philosophical and religious values of Western society’, he said, to wild cheers from the audience – surely the first time in months, if not years, a Labour minister has been publicly whooped rather than whipped.

For Straw, a leading figure in a party that struggles to define modern British values and which is fast losing support amongst the public, winning a mere 7.5 per cent of the whole electorate’s support in the local elections in June, posturing against Nasty Nick is the only way he can assume some moral authority and outline the decency of the political class. It is striking that he sought to suppress the political differences (such as they are) between Britain’s main parties and instead bigged up the whole political elite’s ‘recognisable moral compass’ and ‘cultural, philosophical and religious values’. He instinctively recognises that the contemporary crisis of legitimacy and authority, the widespread distrust of politicians, is a problem not only for New Labour but for the political class more broadly. Straw signalled that this was not to be a debate, a spat over issues and visions, but rather an apolitical performance of superiority, a televised attempt to rescue the reputation of the political class by contrasting it to the weaselness of Nick Griffin.

Chris Huhne of the Liberal Democrats went one better than Straw, seeking to recreate the Blitz Spirit of the Second World War, only in response to Griffin’s bluster rather than German bombs. He said the BNP went ‘completely against the traditions of this country’. ‘Churchill would be frankly rolling in his grave’, he said, to find himself associated with the BNP. (Really? The same Churchill who described Indians in eastern Africa as a ‘very low class of coolies’? Who said ‘the continuing increase of the number of coloured people coming to Britain… would sooner or later come be resented’? Who described the Soviet Union as ‘a worldwide communistic state under Jewish domination’?)

Huhne’s aim was to trace the moral lineage of today’s three mainstream parties back to Churchill, anti-fascism and the last ‘good war’. ‘There are three parties here that can say something about Churchill’s legacy’, he said. ‘Churchill was a Liberal for many years, he was a Conservative for many years, and he led a government that was composed of Labour ministers.’ In short, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are the moral spawn of Churchill while the BNP is the immoral spawn of Hitler. Huhne was desperately trying to recreate, around the Question Time table, the historic stand-off between Britain and Germany, the divide between liberty and fascism, with him and Straw and Sayeeda Warsi of the Conservative Party playing the role of Churchillian warriors for goodness and Griffin playing the role of the jackbooted threat to the British way of life. It is an indictment of the modern discombobulation of the political class that it remains so reliant on a largely mythologised version of the 1940s for its moral authority.

The impact of this pantomime performance of superiority was to suppress debate rather than enable it. Political differences were brushed aside, pressing issues were sidelined in favour of re-enacting a cartoon version of the war against Hitler. This became clear on the issue of immigration, where there was some disagreement between the three mainstream party representatives, but only over who is doing a better job of capping the number of immigrants into Britain and streamlining the removal of ‘illegals’. As part of their chest-puffing posturing against Nasty Nick, each of the politicians sought to demonstrate that they had a handle on the ‘immigration problem’, that they would ‘fix it’, and that this important job of keeping the wrong people out of Britain was being made harder by unnecessary scaremongering by the BNP and others.

So one of the key issues of our time – which raises important questions about liberty, equality and elite insecurity about the unpredictable movements of unknowable people – was turned into a technical issue over which there were only mild, managerial disagreements. The cynical desire to demonstrate superiority at the expense of the gurning Griffin meant that even when disagreement reared its ugly and unnecessary head, it was only in terms of whether the cap should be 20,000 migrants a year, 50,000, or 100,000, etczzz. No one put the case for freedom of movement. No one challenged the political class’s bizarre notion that migrants damage ‘social cohesion’ both by their own behaviour and by the resentment they allegedly provoke in ‘white enclaves’ (1).

Indeed, so surreal was the Question Time debate, so geared was it to allowing mainstream politicians to get their rocks off against Griffin, that Straw, Huhne and Warsi could even present their anti-immigration policies in the name of freedom and fairness, arguing that only their ‘responsible’ (read restrictive and mean-spirited) management of migration flows could counter the BNP’s attempt to exploit people’s fears of uncontrolled migration. The apolitical nature of the whole performance of fear, concern, decency and moral bluster was best summed by the other panellist, writer Bonnie Greer. ‘I know nothing about politics’, she said, with a peculiar sense of pride. But then, why should she know anything about politics? This was not a political discussion; it was cheap moral theatre.

The entire elite in Britain – the political class, the church, the military – now seeks to define its ‘moral compass’ through posturing against the BNP. Straw tried to rescue the political world’s flagging reputation by seizing with relish the opportunity to share a stage with evil Griffin. The Church of England voted earlier this year to ban BNP members from becoming vicars on the grounds that they have committed ‘the sin of racial prejudice’. At a time of profound crisis for mainstream Christianity – when it finds defining good and evil, never mind God and the devil, to be increasingly difficult – the Church has turned the BNP into a secular stand-in for Satan, hoping that denouncing it from the pulpit will provide vicars with a sense of moral direction. Even the military, bogged down by a disastrous war in Afghanistan and finding that political correctness at home is hampering its ability to create soldiers and maintain fighting spirit, hopes that rescuing Churchillian imagery from the BNP will restore its reputation as a Good Institution which once, a long time ago, fought against fascism.

And now the BBC does it, too. Last night’s show exposed the utter disingenuousness of the BBC’s claim merely to be providing an ordinary platform for the BNP because it has won a certain amount of electoral support. In fact the entire programme was about the BNP; even the one question that wasn’t about the BNP was turned by presenter David Dimbleby into a discussion of the BNP’s attitude towards homosexuality. The BBC did not stage a serious political debate so that ‘viewers could make up their own minds’, as director-general Mark Thompson claimed – it staged a moralistic shared national experience to allow itself and politicians to look good and to allow the studio audience to shout and cheer and jeer.

I have always thought that the only way to challenge backward thinking is to have unfettered freedom of speech and open debate. spiked opposes every form of censorship. But the BBC did not stage this Question Time in the name of free and serious debate, but rather as an opportunity for various sections of the political class to partake in a ritualised performance of purpose. The only disagreement between someone like Peter Hain, who wants the BNP banned, and Jack Straw, who debated with the BNP, is that Hain believes he can demonstrate his moral superiority and ‘save the public’ through censoring Griffin, while Straw believes he can do those things by entering into a carefully staged clash with Griffin. Both sides are driven by a desperate need to discover their moral compass and by a primal urge to save the public from itself, either by covering our ears or allowing us only to hear carefully constructed denunciations of evil. It’s better to let Griffin speak than not, but this cultural lynching sprang not from liberty, openness and political maturity, but from the narrow needs of a disorientated elite.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Hating Nick: a shared national experience, by Alex Hochuli

‘Would the BBC give a platform to Hitler?’, by Patrick Hayes

‘Voltaire never saw concentration camps’, by Tim Black

State-enforced ‘equality’ is damaging democracy, by Brendan O’Neill

The myth of a far-right surge, by Rob Lyons

When all else fails, bash the BNP, by Mick Hume

Read more at spiked issue British politics.

 

(1) See The fight to re-enfranchise the electorate starts here, by Brendan O’Neill

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7611/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 23 October 2009
Hating Nick: a shared national experience
Alex Hochuli reports from a London university that showed Question Time on a big screen in a bar, football-style.
Alex Hochuli

Word came from an acquaintance yesterday evening that the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) students’ union would be showing Question Time live on a big screen in the student bar. With protests outside BBC Television Centre already causing a fuss, and a feeling that the world and its mother was on the sofa ready to watch ‘Nazi Nick’ say something racist (we hoped!), a couple of colleagues and I decided to make this national viewing event truly communal and attend SOAS’s viewing party.

Arriving at SOAS, we were unsure whether we would be allowed in, none of us being enrolled at that university. The thought occurred that if we were unsuccessful, we could always head off to a nearby pub and catch the programme there… except we couldn’t. This wasn’t a World Cup match and pubs wouldn’t be showing it, we discovered. But such was the strength of feeling about Griffin’s appearance on the show (‘the nation expects’?) that we could be forgiven for thinking, albeit briefly, that this was something more than just a weekly – and often very dull – current affairs show.

We got in. Waiting in the slowly filling-up bar, a young female student confessed to me that she didn’t really ‘do’ politics and never watched Question Time. But this time was different because, in the words of her friend, ‘it’s an event, isn’t it?’. By the time the ‘event’ was due to begin, SOAS’s messy, poster-flyered student bar was near full, with around 160 students occupying every seat and a good deal of floor space.

As the lights dimmed and all turned to face the big projector screen, there was a genuine sense of expectation in the room. People chatting in a corner were shushed, others were asked to sit down and stop blocking the screen. Clearly, this was not a moment to be missed. The panto-politics on screen delivered and the gallery duly responded, as everyone in the bar booed at the first mention of Griffin’s name.

As justice secretary Jack Straw launched into an attack on Griffin, using the idea of Britain’s glorious war against the Nazis as a stick with which to beat the BNP leader, the SOAS audience cheered him on. Here was the supposedly radical, anti-imperialist SOAS student body applauding as a sitting cabinet member channelled Churchill and the spirit of the ‘good war’, in which Britain’s multi-ethnic army drawn from the colonies were sent to the slaughter.

Presenter David Dimbleby then tried to draw Griffin into admitting to taking a revisionist view of the Holocaust. Again the students cheered. With Griffin tying himself in knots so as not to appear anti-Semitic, the cheers turned to laughs. These funny moments were widely shared. Asked later what was his favourite moment, one student said: ‘It was funny when Griffin disavowed his past – no one believed that!’

After a while, the audience settled down a little bit as the discussion on Question Time turned from explicit Griffin-baiting to immigration. As the main political parties locked horns in a game of immigration control Top Trumps, my own frustration got the best of me and I began to heckle about Jack Straw being the real authoritarian on the panel. ‘Open the borders!’, I shouted. Some of the students took up the chant (SOAS having recently been at the centre of rows over deportations of immigrant cleaners) but eventually I was told to shut up. Maybe I was ruining the SOAS’s version of the QT Shared National Experience.

The yah-boo viewing died down further once the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne went into more detail about his party’s immigration policy (in a nutshell, he argued that the Lib Dem’s system of immigration control would be more effective than Labour’s). The curious fact was that, for all the barely suppressed excitement about this shared moment, every time the TV conversation veered slightly away from the event’s apparent raison d’être – BNP-baiting – people seemed to become bored. Some started chatting; others sloped off for a fag and a pint; others took the opportunity to text their mates. ‘When’s the pantomime coming back?’ they seemed to wonder.

With the cheers, boos and laughs delivered with decreasing gusto, Griffin’s argument that Britain should not be intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan was met with silence by the SOAS students; they couldn’t possibly be seen to agree with the leader of the BNP. Ten minutes from the end, a technical problem meant we were left with only audio. We listened to the remaining part of the programme and then the lights went on. ‘See you next time in Llandudno’, Dimbleby said to a rapidly emptying bar.

Outside, the students chatted in large groups, the vibe much like that after a moderately satisfying football match. ‘Yeah, it was good: Griffin got dicked on!’ ‘Oh?’, I asked a first year politics student. ‘Yeah, I guess, though that Tory woman wasn’t very interesting… actually none of it was.’ Okay, ‘we’ didn’t win, seemed to be the message, but at least Argentina got owned in the final. There was a bit of to-ing and a bit of fro-ing – a game of two halves as they say – but once it was over, people couldn’t quite remember what the excitement was about in the first place.

A multi-ethnic group of female students said they were glad it happened and that Griffin had been exposed as either an outright nasty racist or a slippery politician able to conceal his true views. Like many of the other students briefly hanging around before going home (or more likely, heading to another bar), they were all smiles. They had enjoyed themselves. But once it was over, all the collective sense of meaning that was gained from booing Griffin seemed to evaporate.

When I pressed some students on the principles of free speech, they responded ambivalently. ‘Maybe it was okay that Griffin was there to be shown up for being a facsist, but, um… um… I don’t remember what the point was.’ But by this stage, I wasn’t sure either. As I left, I was informed via text message that the social networks were abuzz with discussion about the ‘event’, people receiving more comments on their Facebook ‘status updates’ than ever before. Eager not to miss out on a second of this still ongoing Shared National Experience, I rushed home.

Alex Hochuli is an MPhil student at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and co-founder of the Institute of Ideas Current Affairs Forum. He is chairing the debate ‘It’s not fair! The Battle for Equality’ at at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 31 October 2009.

The new divide in British politics: Us and Him, by Brendan O’Neill

‘Would the BBC give a platform to Hitler?’, by Patrick Hayes

‘Voltaire never saw concentration camps’, by Tim Black

State-enforced ‘equality’ is damaging democracy, by Brendan O’Neill

The myth of a far-right surge, by Rob Lyons

When all else fails, bash the BNP, by Mick Hume

Read more at spiked issue British politics.

 

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7612/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 23 October 2009
‘Would the BBC give a platform to Hitler?’
Patrick Hayes joined the rabble of censors protesting outside BBC Television Centre in the run-up to Question Time.
Patrick Hayes

‘Of course I believe in free speech’, said Samantha, a student from Camden in London, protesting outside the BBC studios in White City where Nick Griffin was due shortly to join the Question Time panel. ‘But in the same way we have no platform for fascists at university, there should definitely be no platform for fascists at the BBC.’

In fact, the everyday TV-viewing public is even more ‘vulnerable’ than students when it comes to dangerous ideas, Samantha claimed. ‘They sadly don’t have the level of education and, especially during the recession, might vote for the BNP out of fear or desperation.’

Such patronising, illiberal views were widespread at yesterday’s anti-BNP demo. Protesters from various left-wing and anti-fascist groups had been outside the BBC studios all day, chanting ‘Nasty Nazi Nick, off our streets!’, ‘Six million dead, never again’ and ‘We are all black, white, Asian and Jews’. Banners declared ‘No Platform for fascists’, ‘The BNP is a Nazi party’ and ‘It’s not that kind of White City, Nick!’. One woman held a banner that said ‘Gay Muslims against Nazi Scum’. On the outer walls of the BBC studio a protester had plastered posters of gay men kissing, with the slogan: ‘This is Britain.’

Poster outside BBC Television Centre

Many of the protesters were students, mobilised by Unite Against Fascism. Some wore fancy dress. One man wore a Hitler mask and BNP armbands. A young woman masked her face with a collage of newspaper headlines about the BNP to highlight the dangerous role the media played in giving them publicity (although she argued that the media presence at this protest was a ‘necessary evil’ to raise awareness). The number of protesters peaked at 600 at around 5pm when there were various skirmishes with the police.

Several protesters cited Ken Livingstone’s claim on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that wherever Griffin and his colleagues speak or stand in elections there is an inevitable spike in racist attacks, reflecting their deeply censorious view of the public as Pavlovian dogs who hear something and act on it. But the protesters’ primary concern was that the ‘newly suited and booted’ Nick Griffin would be lent ‘a veneer of respectability by being on Question Time’.

Many seemed to believe Griffin is extraordinarily clever and cunning. A veteran anti-war protester told me: ‘He’s like any other politician, but extremely intelligent. He listens to people and promises exactly what people want in order to get into power. People are completely desperate so they’ll take the apple. They will vote for a dog if they think a dog will deliver.’ Another charming view of the electorate; these protesters really wanted censorship because they don’t trust ‘ordinary people’ to weigh up ideas on their merits.

However, very few of the protesters thought that they themselves, or anyone they know, would be persuaded by Griffin’s seductive arguments (although one woman said she knew ‘one or two guys who might be’). No, it is always ‘the other’ – the working classes, the underclasses, the uneducated – who are seen as needing protection from Griffin’s words by caring, censorious protesters. The main argument here was that we should ‘learn the lessons of history’, as if the masses are predetermined to act in a certain way and to repeat tragic mistakes of the past unless their awareness is raised. ‘It’s like Germany during the time of depression when Hitler came in’, said one young man. A middle-aged woman echoed this sentiment: ‘The BBC wouldn’t have let Hitler debate on Question Time two years before he took power. They seem to be in denial about the size of the problem here. Why can’t they learn from history?’

A protester dressed as Hitler

The protesters’ combination of hysterical scaremongering about the return of fascism and disdain for the intellectual capabilities of the electorate (not their mates, of course, but everyone else) means they can see only one solution to the BNP: censorship. Afraid of the public, panicked about the future and clearly unconvinced about their own ability to win an argument, left-wing campaigners instead hope that the authorities, in particular the BBC, will exercise moral judgement on the nation’s behalf and deny Griffin a platform.

‘I’m hoping the audience won’t allow this debate to happen and shout him down’, said a student protester, before rejoining a crowd of protesters who were chanting in their scuffles with the police: ‘This is what democracy looks like!’

But the intention of the demonstration was to curb one of the most fundamental democratic freedoms: free speech. They were lobbying the BBC to prevent the leader of a political party from having his views broadcast. Yet, as Griffin’s appearance on Question Time demonstrated, he is hardly the charismatic, clever and manipulative orator that the protesters hyped him up to be; instead he’s a rather sad, inarticulate man with outdated views. The audience are more than capable of spotting that. It is not Griffin appearing on Question Time that poses a threat to democracy, but rather the censorious campaign to prevent him from appearing on Question Time on the basis that the fickle public will turn wild and violent if they are exposed to his views.

Patrick Hayes is volunteer co-ordinator for education charity WORLDwrite and one of the organisers of the Battle of Ideas festival, which features an ‘Activism Zone’ on Saturday 31st October.

The new divide in British politics: Us and Him, by Brendan O’Neill

Hating Nick: a shared national experience, by Alex Hochuli

‘Voltaire never saw concentration camps’, by Tim Black

State-enforced ‘equality’ is damaging democracy, by Brendan O’Neill

The myth of a far-right surge, by Rob Lyons

When all else fails, bash the BNP, by Mick Hume

Read more at spiked issue British politics.

 

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7608/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 23 October 2009
‘My name’s Josie…and I have a penis’
Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change took an unusually empathic look at ‘gender dysphoria’ amongst children.
Patrick West

The issue of sex-change has the tendency to bring out the cynical side in people. There is sometimes the unfortunate temptation to assume that transgendered people are somehow wrong in the head, or frauds, or just freaks.

Thanks to highly dubious methods employed by Stalinist countries during the Cold War, in an effort to cheat at Olympic Games, some of the most high-profile transgendered people in living memory have simultaneously been disreputable impostors. The caricature of the grotesque, butch East German ‘female’ athlete was parodied in the 1984 film Top Secret! (1). Yes, that was a quarter of a century ago, but as the case of Caster Semenya - the South African athlete who was just this summer accused of being a man - showed, there remains a suspicion that some change their sex principally for deceitful purposes. Ergo, the transgendered are subconsciously associated with charlatanism.

Elsewhere, the transgendered are deemed to be mere fantasists, or a bit mental. This caricature, to use another cinematic example, was illustrated in a scene from the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When Stan (Eric Idle) from the People’s Front of Judea declares that he wants to be a woman, his comrade, Reg (John Cleese), admonishes him and asks why.

Stan: I want to have babies
Reg: You want to have babies?
Stan: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can’t have babies!
Stan: Don’t you oppress me!
Reg: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?

Stan insists that he wants to be called Loretta because it would be symbolic of the PFJ’s struggle against the Romans. Reg retorts that it merely symbolised his struggle against reality.

Then there’s a third reaction: to regard sex-changes as symptomatic of a culture in decay, as proof that we are living in an over-sexualised, dysfunctional, modern-day Weimar republic in which we ‘meddle with nature’, are obsessed with bodily self-gratification and blur the pre-ordained boundaries established by the Creator. Sex-changes are the kind of thing that occur ‘in America’, a routine code for ‘ghastly, weird things that happen today in the United States and will be coming to the UK tomorrow’. To use a further cinematic allusion, in the beginning of the 1987 film Withnail and I, Marwood (Paul McGann) feels he must get out of a degraded, putrefying London. The final straw is when he views a headline in the News of the World reading ‘Why I HAD to become a woman’.

Considering its title, I suspect I wasn’t alone in fearing that this week’s Channel 4 Monday documentary, Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change, would fall into the third category (2). The fact that the documentary was filmed in America further aroused the suspicion that it would conform to the ‘in America’ approach, and that it would basically be a salacious and prurient programme implying that the US is so utterly screwed up because now even its children are seeking gender re-alignment.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change was a very sober, serious, sometimes moving, often depressing, documentary. If The Crying Game (1992) proved that the matter of transgender can be addressed in a sincere, sympathetic manner on the big screen, this doc showed that on the small screen the freak show, faux-serious, Louis Theroux technique needn’t be the default approach.

‘Hello. My name’s Josie. I’m aged eight and I have a penis’, the film began, bluntly. Josie was born a biological male and he used to be called Joseph until the age of six. Despite, by scientific definition, being a boy, and being dressed and raised in a conventional ‘male’ manner, Joseph was adamant that he was a girl inside. Joseph’s parents didn’t react well to his condition, which was later diagnosed as gender dysphoria, but eventually, if reluctantly, came to respect their child’s wishes.

Josie’s father remembers thinking ‘I lost my son’, while her mother recalls feeling ‘devastated’. But they made their difficult decision after the mother discovered Joseph in the bathroom, his penis exposed, clutching a sharp instrument. The boy’s intentions were obvious. So the parents were faced with a horrible dilemma. As the programme reminded us, for most children (alas, we weren’t told what percentage) gender dysphoria passes away with puberty, and the desire to change sex dissipates. But could a caring parent gamble on the few, potentially suicidal, years when young Joseph felt so utterly wretched in the hope that he would, literally, grow out of it? I don’t have children, so I can’t accurately empathise, but if I did, I probably wouldn’t have taken that risk either.

Another biological boy named Kie now calls himself Kyla. Like Josie, he would ask his parents ‘why was I born a boy?’. Kie’s mum and dad thought he might be gay (homosexuality ran in the family, the mother informed us), but when gender dysphoria was diagnosed, they were more accepting than Josie’s mum and dad had been. Kyla is currently undergoing hormone treatment to offset male puberty, a programme that seemed to work well with another transgender, Chris (formerly Julia), who is now a very happy 16-year-old young man. But there were no fairytale endings in this documentary. Chris’s father still can’t come to terms with the fact that his daughter is now his son; he had wanted a son, but didn’t want a daughter who acted like a son.

Was Chris’s gender dysphoria a subconscious reaction to the young Julia’s knowledge that her father had wished she had been born a he? The programme hinted as much, but didn’t pursue the point. This was the only, but major, flaw in the programme. Fascinating as it was in explaining the emotional turmoil that this condition engenders, it didn’t seek to explain what causes it. It did little to dispel the myth that all transgendered people have psychological problems, and didn’t explore whether gender dysphoria may principally itself be a symptom of hermaphroditism. Family upbringing may indeed also be a factor, but so can culture.

Josie kept talking about her main desire: ‘to get boobies.’ Might our sexualised society, and indeed a culture in which the boundary between childhood and adulthood is less clear, be a compounding influence? There was the insinuation that gender dysphoria and homosexuality are linked. Is this really the case, or it is based on lazy, old prejudice? I don’t know myself, but I’d like someone to try and tell me.

Cultural feminists might also take issue with one particular segment of the documentary in which we were told that Kyla, despite now being a girl, ‘still’ liked to play with ‘boyish’ toys such as plastic dinosaurs and toy trucks. Anne and Bill Moir did persuasively argue in their 1998 book Why Men Don’t Iron (3) that boys will invariably gravitate towards toy guns, soldiers and cars, while girls will be drawn to dolls and more creative and aesthetically-orientated pastimes, no matter how much parents try to de-programme their biological impulses. But it’s not very scientific to use the boys toys/girls toys dichotomy as a rule-of-thumb signifier of gender orientation. The programme can only have left the impression among some viewers that, if they saw their daughter playing with an Action Man or GI Joe figure, she must be gender dysphoric, or a lesbian.

Still, it was nice to see Channel 4 attempting to take an adult approach to an issue that can, for some children, be very distressing.

Patrick West is spiked’s TV and radio reviewer. Read his blog here.

Read on:

spiked-issue TV and radio

(1) Top Secret!, YouTube (at 2.43 minutes)

(2) Bodyshock, Channel 4

(3) Why Men Don’t Iron, by Anne and Bill Moir

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7606/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Friday 23 October 2009
Life’s a beachball, and then you die
Eight weeks in and Liverpool’s season might already be over – thanks, in part, to a little comedy intervention.
Rob Lyons

Things are not looking good. Four defeats on the trot and the suspicion among Liverpool fans that last season was Our Big Chance to win the league for the first time in decades and we blew it is getting stronger by the day. You start to get the distinct impression that it’s not going to be your year when you lose a game to a goal scored by a beach ball.

For those of you who don’t follow English football, or have been holidaying on Mars for the past few days, Liverpool lost 1-0 at Sunderland on Saturday. The only goal of the game came about when a young Reds fan punched a Liverpool novelty beach ball on to the pitch before kick-off. Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina spotted it and put it inside the goal netting out of harm’s way. Or so he thought.

By the time Sunderland launched an attack, the wind had blown the ball a few yards out in front of Reina’s goal. When the ball was played across the penalty area, Sunderland’s Darren Bent took a shot which was heading directly for Reina, only for the football to hit the beach ball. The beach ball went harmlessly wide of the goal, with Reina making an instinctive momentary move towards it, while the match ball passed the goalkeeper on the other side. Despite Reina’s protestations, the goal was allowed to stand.

Watch the goal below:

Reina will no doubt know in future to deflate passing beach balls, and not to entrust them to the whim of goal netting. But the real debate after the game was: Did the ref get it right? A queue of former officials lined up to say he had blundered. Former Premier League referee Jeff Winter said that, on the evidence available to him, the goal should not have stood. ‘By the letter of the law, it is outside interference’, said Winter, ‘and a drop-ball should have been where the incident occurred’. Winter added, ‘you have to wonder how the referee and his assistants missed it’. Presumably they had Arsene Wenger’s old specs on.

The beach ball was quickly becoming the most controversial ‘outside agent’ since Carlos Tevez’s former owner, Kia Joorabchian. Yet the Premier League defended the match referee, Mike Jones: ‘The beach ball was an inanimate object so the referee should have stopped the game as soon as he was aware it was on the field of play. However, the difficulty would be if he didn’t see it until it was struck by the match ball.’ This is a rather bizarre justification. Jones must have seen the beach ball before the goal was scored. So the excuse for allowing the goal would appear to be his inability to get his whistle to his lips before the match ball went in.

I wonder if that could be extended to everyday life, so that stuff would only be illegal if a policeman had specifically told you not to do it. ‘Sorry, officer, but you’re too late. I had clearly smashed the car window and removed the sat nav before you shouted “Stop, thief!” and therefore my ownership of the aforementioned navigational device cannot now be questioned. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to dash if I’m going to get to Cash Converters before it closes.’ Or maybe I’m just bitter.

Whatever the laws may say, this was a bad result for Liverpool. Every disaster deserves a conspiracy theory. One, apparently serious, suggestion was that the young lad concerned had been handed the Beach ball of Death by a Sunderland ballboy. Others suggested the malign influence of Liverpool’s title rivals:

It is clear, however, watching that clip over and over again - as you are wont to if you’re writing an article about the subject - that the boy in question is really very pleased with himself after punching that beach ball, little knowing the calamity that was about to befall his team due to his senseless actions. The only wonder is that a lynchmob of fellow supporters hasn’t been formed. But perhaps the reason it hasn’t is because Liverpool fans know their team has only got itself to blame.

To his credit, Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez didn’t moan about his team’s misfortune. ‘It was a special situation, but we didn’t play well and so I don’t want to talk about that - we made some mistakes, we gave the ball away and we couldn’t take our chances. These things happen.’ Without his star players, Gerrard and Torres, Liverpool lack quality while Benitez’s major summer signing, Italian midfielder Alberto Aquilani, has still to kick a ball for the first team since undergoing ankle surgery. Meanwhile, the team’s normally sturdy defence has been far more vulnerable than usual, with the usually reliable Jamie Carragher looking out of sorts.

There’s also the transfer budget. Benitez might have forked out a combined £40million for Aquilani and Glen Johnson, but he almost matched that by selling Xabi Alonso to Réal Madrid. While Benitez is trying to balance the books, rubbish teams like Manchester City and Spurs have been spending money like they’re running some kind of football-led economic stimulus package. That said, even John Maynard Keynes would have balked at £24million for Joleon Lescott, no matter how much ‘effective demand’ it was creating in the Goodison Park area.

Still, it’s only October and the season isn’t over yet. United were crap at the start of last season, but then went on a good run to win the title while everyone else faltered. And the recent defeats have, individually, not been too terrible. Losing at Stamford Bridge is no great crime, while losing to Fiorentina, or any Italian team away from home in the Champions League, is understandable enough, even if Benitez described it as the team’s worst performance since he took charge. Sunderland were very unlucky not to beat United the week before, suggesting they’re not that bad a team. It’s just that four defeats on the trot looks a bit, well, crap.

As for beach ball boy, I’m starting to know how he feels. On Tuesday night, Liverpool threw away a lead against Olympique Lyonnais in the Champions League. The next day I had to sit on the train into work looking at headlines like ‘Liverpool left reeling by Lyons knockout blow’. For the record, I don’t know the town - different side of the family, it’s nothing to do with me, guv…

Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked.

Duleep Allirajah is away.

Read on:

spiked-issue: Sport

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7607/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 22 October 2009
This isn’t a recovery. It’s an Obama Bubble
Just because the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently reached 10,000, that doesn’t mean the US economy is springing back to life.
Sean Collins

Last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached the symbolic 10,000 mark, capping a 50 per cent increase since March. Confetti fell in the New York Stock Exchange, and traders took to the streets of the Big Apple wearing ‘Dow 10,000’ baseball caps. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, economist Brian Wesbury says the rise in the financial markets like the Dow suggests ‘investors are confident the crisis has ended’, and is a sign that ‘the economic recovery is well underway’ (1).

The most common retort to those rejoicing the Dow milestone is to point out that it is in bad taste for Wall Street to celebrate while Main Street is still suffering. ‘There are no champagne corks being popped on Main Street’, says the New York Times (2). Quite rightly, the Times and others point out that unemployment remains at a high 9.8 per cent rate and the economy has not fully recovered.

But there is more going on than Wall Street’s detractors see. The Times says ‘the stock market usually recovers before the economy does’, but the latest rise in the stock market is more of an indication that the finance bubble is returning rather than a harbinger of broader economic recovery. And rather than blame greedy Wall Street types for starting the party before others have arrived, this reinflated bubble has been made in Washington, DC – led by liberal Democrats in the Obama administration, who many Wall Street critics praise for saving the economy from another Great Depression.

There is, in fact, something of a recovery happening. Retail sales, for example, have increased since the beginning of the year, after substantial declines last year. According to the National Associations of Business Economics, more than 80 per cent of economists believe the recovery has begun and anticipate growth of about three per cent in the second half of 2009 and for all of 2010 (3).

The fact that output is growing again is not that surprising. Any downturn leads to mechanisms which restore conditions for an upturn – companies cut costs, the weakest go bankrupt, inventories get depleted and eventually need to be restored – and these factors have been in play during this recession, which started in December 2007. In addition, the financial crisis led the US government to provide massive support in various ways, which was bound to have an effect on the output statistics. In monetary terms, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to nearly zero, and found new ways to provide liquidity. In fiscal terms, the Obama administration convinced Congress to pass a $787billion stimulus package, and has bailed out banks, insurers and other companies, among other actions.

The problem is, this government support seems to be a crutch rather than a ‘stimulus’ to private industry. In its recent report on the impact of the stimulus package, the Council of Economic Advisers writes: ‘There is broad agreement that the ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] has added between two and three percentage points to baseline real GDP in the second quarter of 2009 and around three percentage points in the third quarter.’ (4) Recall that economists are predicting three per cent growth in the second half of 2009 – in which case, government spending via the stimulus package is accounting for all of that growth. Also, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that the stimulus is saving or creating between 200,000 and 250,000 jobs a month. In other words, September’s bad 263,000 job losses would have been twice as bad if not for government spending (5).

The unemployment picture is bleak today, but, as many are quick to point out, it is a ‘lagging indicator’ and may only improve after other signs have turned positive. What is arguably a more disturbing symptom than unemployment is the lack of investment – the force that would create jobs in the future. In the second quarter of 2009, net private investment fell off the cliff to a nearly non-existent 0.1 per cent of the total economy (gross domestic product or GDP), the lowest level since modern records started in 1947. And although this figure includes residential (housing) investment which we know has been hit hard, all major categories are significantly lower, including structures, equipment and software (6).

Stock markets are said to be higher on the back of companies reporting better-than-expected profits. Yet share prices relative to earnings look frothy: the shares of the large companies listed in the S&P 500 index are trading at about 20 times earnings, compared to an average of 14 times over the past century. Moreover, these profits are mainly the result of cost-cutting, including cutting investment, rather than growing revenues. For example, minerals giant Alcoa reported $77million in profits, but slashed research and development (R&D) by $39million (36 per cent) at the same time. And there are few signs that companies are planning to invest anytime soon. As the Wall Street Journal reports: ‘Executives say they are hesitant to reinvest such profits into their businesses. With large portions of their factories, fleets and warehouses sitting idle, some say they probably won’t see reason to do so for a year or more.’ (7)

It is not for a lack of cash that companies are failing to invest; it is because profitable conditions do not exist. The biggest corporations have found it easier to borrow money than during the earlier credit squeezes, but those that have raised funds are not investing them. According to Dealogic, only six of the 100 largest US bond issues in 2009 gave investment, capital expenditure or R&D as the reason for obtaining additional money. Instead, companies are mainly seeking to shore up their balance sheets and possibly hoard to weather another downturn. Or, they plan to use the money for acquisitions – which are more likely to reduce rather than add to overall investment (8).

It is the lack of investment in the real economy that is behind the rise in the Dow and other financial markets. Liquidity created by the Federal Reserve and other money pumped into the economy by the government does not have profitable investment outlets. The cheaper money is instead flowing into stocks, bonds and commodities, pushing speculative gains higher and re-starting an asset bubble.

The results for JPMorgan Chase, which pushed the Dow over the 10,000 level, highlight how money is being made today. It is not from traditional lending: the banking giant’s consumer-related business has been poor, with credit cards losing $700million in the past three months, and retail banking barely breaking even. Instead, JPMorgan’s much-improved profits derived from investment banking and in particular from trading in stocks and bonds (9). Results for other big investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, have told a similar story.

And as investment banks’ profits increase, so will bankers’ bonuses: Goldman Sachs alone has set aside $5.3billion for its compensation, almost half of its revenues. As the Financial Times says, ‘Stay tuned for another swell of public outrage’ (10). Right on cue, Obama’s aides appeared on Sunday’s political TV programmes to denounce the bankers. Rahm Emmanuel, White House chief of staff, said Americans ‘have a right to be frustrated and angry’, while adviser David Axelrod called the bonuses ‘offensive’ (11).

Yet administration officials ought to look closer to home rather than blame Wall Street. Investment bankers are doing what they have always done: share out a high percentage of their profits. And where are those profits coming from? The government-inflated bubble. Zero interest rates and Federal Reserve money pumped into the economy have lifted stocks, and in turn the big banks have benefited. More specifically, the investment banks have been helped by Washington’s bailout moves in the sector: Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) direct support; covering losses from trading with insurance giant AIG; allowing investment banks like Goldman and Morgan Stanley to become holding companies, which then gave them access to inexpensive Federal Reserve funding and allowed them to issue bonds guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – a status traditionally reserved only for banks that provide general financial services (12).

Beyond the stock market, other areas suggest that the bubble is re-inflating. In a recent speech, White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers pointed to stabilisation in the housing market (13). New home sales are 58 per cent higher on an annual basis, and the S&P/Case Shiller index finds that home prices have risen in 15 of 20 cities in the past three months (14). But house prices are starting to rise in some regions again before they have been restored to historical (and more affordable) levels as a multiple of people’s incomes – again suggesting overvaluation. Furthermore, the housing sector is hardly out of the woods. The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that there will be 2.4million foreclosures in 2009, and projects that, for most states, foreclosures will more than triple to over eight million over the next four years (15).

In the same speech, Summers also cited signs of normalisation of credit flows, which had seized up at the onset of the crisis. But the main area where the thawing is occurring is in ‘securitisation’ – the packaging of loans for re-sale, and the site of the so-called ‘toxic assets’ that set off the credit crunch. JPMorgan, Citibank and others have, for the first time, made significant ‘write up’ gains on their leveraged loans and mortgage-backed assets. Again, government schemes – such as the Public-Private Partnership Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) – are what have excited investors. However, these assets remain as ‘toxic’ as before. As the Financial Times reports: ‘Some of the debt market’s riskiest assets have found buyers, though many of the assets remain hard to value. Information is scarce about the likely performance of some mortgages, making predictions of cashflows and values difficult.’ (16) In other words, the investors still don’t have a clue, but since trading in these assets is rallying again, why not jump on the bandwagon?

In contrast to the busy action in toxic assets, overall credit levels, in particular for business purposes, remain subdued. On the one hand, banks are reluctant to lend to businesses because of ongoing losses, tighter underwriting standards and because they anticipate higher required capital reserves in the future. On the other hand, companies are not seeking loans, as they are not investing (17).

President Obama recognises that a true recovery has not arrived yet. In a recent speech he said: ‘Our goal is not just to rebound from this recession, but to start building an economy that works for all Americans; where everyone who’s looking for work can find a job – and not just a temporary job, but a permanent job that lasts from season to season; where our stock market isn’t only rising again but our businesses are hiring again.’ (18) He and his administration are no doubt hoping ‘green shoots’ will gradually emerge. They also know the economy will get another boost from the stimulus package, most of which has yet to come into play: as of the end of September, only 20 to 25 percent of the total $787billion had been spent or gone to people in the form of tax reductions (19).

But unless the underlying conditions for investment are restored, government money is likely just to pump up further the re-emerging bubbles. Even if the Obama administration recognises this trend, it is likely that lacklustre economic growth and high unemployment will render them reluctant to tighten monetary and fiscal conditions too much.

The unspoken issue at the root of Obama’s dilemma is that the economy’s engine – private non-financial industry - is not investing and innovating. And his response so far is part of the problem, not the solution.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York.

Read on: spiked-issue Financial crisis.

(1) The economic recovery is well underway, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2009

(2) Dow 10,000: Then and now, New York Times, 16 October 2009

(3) Summers outlines risks to recovery, Wall Street Journal, 13 October 2009

(4) Cited in The $800 billion deception, Slate, 12 October 2009

(5) Cited in The truth about jobs that no one wants to tell you, Huffington Post, 2 October 2009

(6) Cost cuts lift profits but hinder economy, Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2009

(7) Cost cuts lift profits but hinder economy, Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2009

(8) Too cash-strapped to brag, companies aren’t using borrowing to spend, Wall Street Journal, 13 October 2009

(9) JPMorgan profits lift Dow above 10,000, Financial Times, 15 October 2009

(10) ‘Public needs more bang for its buck’, Financial Times, 16 October 2009

(11) Obama aides go on TV to criticize Wall Street, New York Times, 19 October 2009
(12) ‘Bailout helps revive banks, and bonuses’, New York Times, 17 October 2009

(13) Summers outlines risks to recovery, Wall Street Journal, 13 October 2009

(14) Cited in The economic recovery is well underway, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2009

(15) Cited in The stock market has never been this (intermediate-term) overbought, Hussman Funds – Weekly Market Comment, 19 October 2009

(16) US banks book gains from rally in toxic assets, Financial Times, 19 October 2009
(17) Credit in America: Slim pickings, no appetite, The Economist, 17 October 2009

(18) Obama’s remarks on the stimulus package, Fairfax County Parkway Extension, 14 October 2009, published by realclearpolitics.com

(19) Cited in The $800 billion deception, Slate, 12 October 2009

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7603/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 22 October 2009
‘Voltaire never saw concentration camps’
Tim Black reports from a radical-left anti-BNP rally at which free speech was denounced as ‘nonsense’.
Tim Black

To misquote that old reactionary Edmund Burke’s famous line (I might as well, given it’s used to the point of cliché in relation to Nazism), all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men, or better still those in charge of programming at the BBC, do nothing to stop a racist inadequate from appearing on a televised debate.

This at least was the logic employed throughout last night’s public rally at London’s Conway Hall in protest at the appearance of British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s flagship political debate show, Question Time. Given the rally was organised by Unite Against Fascism (UAF), the consensus among the 200 or so present was predictable: ‘swine-fascist’ Griffin should definitely not be allowed to appear on the BBC, let alone something as prestigious as Question Time. It will give the BNP – and this was the refrain of the night – legitimacy. ‘The BBC is giving the message that it is legitimate to spout racist views’, stormed Hugh Lanning, deputy general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.

If Griffin appears on national TV, the speakers were clear about what would happen. According to Weyman Bennett of UAF: ‘There is going to be violence. More mosques will be attacked, there’ll be more racist violence on the street.’ Former London mayor Ken Livingstone, in a message read out to the meeting, agreed. ‘Hate attacks on the street will increase.’ The only way to stop the march of fascism is, as Lanning put it, to stop the BNP from getting ‘their views over to millions of people…  The BBC say they can’t ban anything, but they have a watershed for F-words. So why not one for fascists, 24-7.’

What about free speech? What about that hoary old Voltairean dictum, I disapprove of what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it? The chair Sabby Dhalu seemed almost annoyed by the idea. ‘This freedom of speech argument is nonsense’, she complained, ‘it’s the BNP who are against free speech, not the UAF. The first thing fascists do when they get power is to smash freedom of speech.’ Or as Bennett put it, ‘Voltaire did not see the concentration camps being built’.

So there you have it. Griffin’s appearance on the BBC will transform the viewing public into mosque-attacking racists. Which, given that the speakers also constantly complained that Griffin would try to conceal his fascism, is more than a little perplexing. ‘The very way in which fascists approach the electorate, as history shows, is duplicitous’, said the poet Michael Rosen. They are very clever, he continued: they use acceptable, slippery words like security, identity
and democracy, while under their pillows there are heavily annotated editions of Mein Kampf.

Griffin is of course duplicitous. His child-like desperation to be a proper, adult politician has seen him talk like one, employing whatever is the mainstream political argot of the day, be it environmentalist or multicultural, and sprinkling it with a bit of MPs’ expenses-style cynicism. All of which does raise a question: by not saying what he allegedly means, how will he create a cauldron of race hate? Will he frustrate racists into action? Is the public, seemingly deemed too stupid to resist open racist arguments, simultaneously deemed too clever not to indulge in incredible feats of fascist cryptography?

Yet this is the problem with the call to ban Griffin from Question Time. It implies that we the public are not capable of dealing with freedom of speech and open debate. We need to be protected from certain arguments and points of view, the merest hints of which will send us racist. The public here is viewed as a child-like mass, incapable of resisting the sinister adult advances of people like Griffin. Could we be more condescended to? The idea that the two million people watching Question Time will suddenly go Nazi because some whites-only crank is on the panel is as absurd as Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg hoping two million people will suddenly go Lib Dem because Chris Huhne is sat there too. Monkey see, monkey do, goes the thinking.

Except we the public aren’t monkeys unthinkingly responding to external stimuli. As members of a putatively democratic society, we’re active subjects, citizens, capable of rationally assessing arguments, of rejecting some parts and agreeing with others. That so many, from the UAF to Welsh secretary Peter Hain, are investing Griffin with such miraculous powers of persuasion says more about a lack of confidence in their own arguments than it does about Nick ‘Cicero’ Griffin.

Giving the public a little credit, however, is the last thing UAF and their friends in high places are capable of doing. For contemporary anti-fascism is not really anything to do with struggling against fascism. Rather, the recourse to the popular front against the Nazis of the 1930s and 40s draws upon that period’s aura, its Good War ambience, as a way of providing today’s ruling elite with a semblance of legitimacy, a readymade moral authority to be donned in these politically uncertain times. While they don’t know what they’re for, they know what they’re against: fascism. Being against alleged fascism, and especially the BNP, has become a central prop for the British state.

Every institution, no matter how hollowed out, finds some purpose in being opposed to racists and fascists, whether it’s the police or, even more absurdly, the army. Hence this week we’ve witnessed the ridiculous spectacle of the British Army attacking the BNP for using images of the Spitfires and Winston Churchill in its campaign material for the European elections: ‘We call on all those who seek to hijack the good name of the British military for their own advantage to cease and desist.’ Yes, this is the same British Army, a body of armed men employed by the British state to defend and assert British interests, that is currently shooting ‘rag heads’ in Afghanistan. News satire magazine The Daily Mash captured the absurdity well: ‘RACISTS UNDERMINING ARMY’S MISSION TO KILL BROWN PEOPLE.’

Is it any surprise that the BNP has been raiding the Second World War, the Good War, for iconography, given the whole anti-fascist, anti-Nazi mission of the British establishment uses the same resource to bolster its flagging authority? Little wonder that the UAF rally seemed marked by a desperate nostalgia. While people from the floor stood up to proclaim their lineage stretched back to Cable Street, Rosen cut to the chase, arguing that Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 30s was ‘not dissimilar to Britain now’.

So let’s take a look at the contemporary fascist behemoth that is the BNP, bestriding the UK like a jack-booted colossus. Such is their strength, that, according to a leaked membership list, in certain parliamentary constituencies membership figures stray easily into double figures. There they are in the North West strongholds of Halifax (76), Pendle (92). And down in the south of England, they’ve 67 in Epping Forest and 71 in Ropchford and Southend East. In total, they’ve about 11,000 members, about the same number of people who turn up to support Queens Park Rangers each week.

Just as the BNP do not herald a new wave of 1930s fascism, so Britain in 2009 is not a country ravaged by 1930s anti-Semitism or indeed racism more broadly. But so desperate are today’s rulers – and radicals – to find a purpose and authority that they need the BNP to be the fascist spectre of their wet-nightmares. Being anti-, just being against, is increasingly important for a state that struggles to say what it’s for.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7604/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Thursday 22 October 2009
A tragi-comic censorship campaign
Cartoonist Sarnath Banerjee illustrates how a website about a sexy Indian sister-in-law got the censors hot under the collar.
Sarnath Banerjee

Ahead of the Battle of Ideas’ satellite event, Drawing the line: political cartooning in an inoffensive age, read Sarnath Banerjee’s comic about shadowy censorship commissions and an Indian soft porn cartoon website featuring a sexy sister-in-law.

Click on the image below to open the comic in a new window.

Sarnath Banerjee is the author of India’s first graphic novel, Corridor, and later Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, on the scandals of eighteenth-century Calcutta. Both books are published by Penguin (India). Sarnath will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas’ satellite event, Drawing the line: political cartooning in an inoffensive age, this evening, Thursday 22 October. For more information and tickets, click here.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7600/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Wednesday 21 October 2009
They couldn’t manage a mail service in a post office
Behind the UK postal dispute is the spectre of privatisation and the authorities’ inability to take responsibility for basic state services.
Mick Hume

Oh what a sight is the New Labour establishment in a hissy fit at the working classes! Lord Mandelson, our prime-minister-in-the-wings, has let it be known that he is in a place ‘beyond anger’ at Britain’s postal workers. Adam Crozier, the New Labour-appointed Royal Mail chief executive, has managed to out-shrill Mandelson by accusing the postal workers of launching an ‘appalling and unjustified attack on customers’. Much of the media, meanwhile, has accused the postal workers’ union of holding Britain to ransom and putting the economic recovery at risk in the ‘run-up to Christmas’ (ie, mid-October).

What have these terrible posties been doing to warrant such emotional invective in high places? Have they cancelled Christmas, perhaps, or taken to shoving excrement through the customers’ letter boxes? Not exactly. They have exercised their right and voted overwhelmingly for industrial action in their dispute with management over working conditions. Their union, the Communications Workers Union, has planned two days of partial strike action for Thursday and Friday this week – one day involving sorters and drivers, the next day delivery staff.

Once, such a modest display of industrial militancy might have been seen as a token protest. Nowadays it is condemned as an act of national sabotage and a crime against Christmas.

An executive jobsworth such as the Royal Mail’s managing director might think that the decision to take even such limited industrial action ‘beggars belief’. However, others among us might conclude that, at a time when a national strike is as rare as a Penny Black stamp and about as popular as a late-delivered birthday card, the fact that some 120,000 postal workers have opted to face the abuse and take action together shows they must have a serious grievance.

Contrary to the impression the New Labour coterie might like to give, the issue underlying the dispute is not the state of mind of rank and file postal workers, most of whom are neither mad nor malicious. It is the management that has lost it. The Royal Mail has not only lost a few million letters. Like just about every other arm of the British state, it has lost any real sense of what it is supposed to be for and whose interests it is meant to uphold.

However the continuing talks turn out and whatever happens this week, it is clear that they really could not organise a mail service in a post office.

‘Modernisation’ has been the watchword of the Royal Mail management in recent years – a slogan that might have been taken straight from the book of Mandelson. In the name of modernisation, mechanisation and making the mail fit to compete in the internet/email age, they have cut jobs – up to 60,000 gone through ‘natural wastage’ since 2005 – and intensified the working conditions of those workers who remain.

The results of this modern miracle? The abolition of the second daily post (in fact in most places it is the early first post that has disappeared), the end of Sunday collections, and a general deterioration in services and reliability alongside a rise in prices. We are left with the worst of all worlds – a disgruntled workforce and dissatisfied customers. Royal Mail may have finally managed to achieve a relatively small profit on its huge turnover last year, which was enough to ‘earn’ Mr Crozier and his cronies their handsome bonuses. But his overall impact on postal services seems to match his previous disastrous achievements as head of the Football Association.

Now management and Mandelson want to go further and prepare the Royal Mail for partial privatisation to ‘save’ it. (The Conservatives would like to go further still.) The government has previously made it clear that the union’s agreement to part privatisation is the price it would expect in return for bailing out the Royal Mail’s multi-billion pound hole in its pension fund.

Why do they want to privatise the post office? Many of my old friends on the left think it is about an ideological belief in Blairite neo-liberalism. In fact it looks more like another product of the authorities’ collapse of belief in anything, including themselves, and the desire to dodge responsibility by outsourcing the state’s authority to others.

After all, just about every backward state and banana republic around the world manages to run a centralised postal service. Britain established the first modern mass postal service with its penny stamps as far back as 1840, and has always been proud of its post office traditions. Yet now, 169 years later, the British authorities have decided that they really cannot continue to deliver the post without the overpaid assistance of a Dutch corporation.

‘The Royal Mail cannot be profitable without private involvement’, they warn us. But why does a postal service need to make a profit? It has long been one of the basic infrastructural services for which the state has taken on responsibility, on behalf of capitalism as a whole. Today, however, when the state seems to want to intervene in many places where it has no business, interfering in everything from our liberties to our children’s lunchboxes, it simultaneously wants to shy away from fulfilling its basic responsibilities, such as delivering the mail on time.

New Labour’s reluctant nationalisation of big banks to keep capitalism stable was a desperate stopgap measure. But the general trend is for more and more ‘public’ services to be run by consultants or through private finance initiatives. (They even brought in bankers to run the nationalised banks.) This drift towards privatising or farming out control is not primarily driven by money – indeed it generally ends up costing the state far more to do things this way. It is more about those at the top abdicating responsibility and bottling out, while hoping that the demand for making a profit can somehow act as a substitute for the lost public work ethic and keep public services together. It cannot.

The current postal dispute shows up the dire state of affairs to which this has brought the postal service. It is a stand-off between a management that cannot manage, and a trade union that cannot really stand up for the collective interests of its members.

The Royal Mail executives are now trying to carry off a poor imitation of the hard man union-bashing bosses of past industrial conflicts – threatening to carry on its modernisation programme without union consultation or cooperation, and taking on 30 000 casual workers – double its normal Christmas staff – to ‘cope with the backlog’. They are at pains to point out that they are not of course hiring strike-breakers, aka scabs, since that would be illegal.

On the union side, too, we are witnessing an attempt to recapture the spirit of the militant past, with CWU general secretary Bill Hayes assuring the media that he is in a stronger position than the National Union of Miners leader Arthur Scargill was at the start of the 1984 national miners’ strike. Others may think calling a two-day partial protest is not exactly comparable with a year-long national strike to defend jobs and communities, but never mind.

In fact the CWU is not even officially striking over jobs and pay. The union leadership is at pains to point out that, since the last postal dispute ended a couple of years ago, it has cooperated fully with the first three phases of the management’s modernisation plan, leading to thousands of job cuts, working practice changes and pay restraint. The union officials’ complaint now is largely that the management has stopped talking to them about stage four of the modernisation drive, and has instead resorted to ‘harassment and bullying’ in the workplace. It sounds less like a demand to defend jobs, pay and conditions than an appeal for the bosses to be a bit nicer about how they shaft their staff, with the threat of strike action used to try to persuade management to talk to them.

This stand-off looks like a ghost of the postal strikes of the past. Perhaps the clearest sign of how far things have changed comes in the wider public reaction. Postal workers are certainly being subjected to abuse from the government, management and the media – although many in the latter camp have also had a go at the Royal Mail. But whereas in the past major industrial disputes might have sharply polarised public opinion for and against the strikers, in the anti-political mood of today there is widespread indifference, a shrug of resignation, the strike seen as just another glitch in the generally maligned postal services. The thousands of people reportedly applying for those extra casual post office jobs might once have been widely condemned as scabs attacking fellow workers – now the Daily Mail complains that they might be criminals who will nick our Christmas post.

Despite all this, there are good reasons why we should show solidarity with the postal workers and support them fighting as hard as they can. Contrary to the impression given by some, posties are hardly underworked or overpaid. It is already a hard enough job to do. I know something about it, because I was that postal worker. Thirty years ago I spent nine months working in a Surrey sorting office. It was long on hours and short on rewards, where postmen needed to work plenty of overtime just to pay the bills and the grind was broken only by graveyard humour, dirty stories and the occasional outbreak of violence. Many British workers will recognise the sentiment of Los Angeles post worker-turned novelist Charles Bukowski, who in his forties decided he had had two choices – to ‘stay in the post office and go crazy’ or leave and starve: ‘I have decided to starve.’

When I worked there the union – in the shape of ex-military shop stewards – ran the sorting office. It appears those days are well and truly gone. The drastic changes in working practices mean that postal workers are doing longer rounds and hours with less chance of being paid that crucial overtime. The Royal Mail’s claims about the decline of post in the age of electronic communication might contain some truth, but they are exaggerated to date and more than made up for by the slashing of postal staff numbers.

The reported basic starting salary of a postman delivering the mail on foot is now £16,266, rising to an average of £18,200 after a year. The reported average income of all postal workers – including allowances and overtime – is around £23,000 nationally and about £28,000 in inner London. Writing in a recent edition of the London Review of Books, one postman revealed they are paid a princely 1.67 pence per item of junk mail delivered – a figure which, he said, had not altered for 10 years.

Postal workers deserve better than that. And we should be on their side. The public support exhibited in defence of ‘our post offices’ should also come out for ‘our’ posties. You do not need to indulge (as some have done) in nostalgia for the village postman as a symbol of Olde England in order to see that, despite all of the changes, local postmen and women can still play an important part in communities. The post is more than a business model.

So, Victory to the Posties! They seem unlikely to win, with the way things are. But we can still send a message to the management that we do not buy their bullshit. And let the politicians know what we think of governments which cannot even deliver the mail, never mind the future.

Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7596/

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked | get spiked by email

Wednesday 21 October 2009
What do family courts have to hide?
Opening up UK family courts to the public will not lead to social worker witch-hunts, but to greater public trust.
Thomas McMahon

UK justice secretary Jack Straw has recently announced plans to open up the notoriously secretive family justice system to the public gaze. The Schools and Safeguarding Children Bill, due to come before parliament in November, will include provisions to allow the social workers involved in court cases to be named by the press, and to allow more substantial reporting of the substance of the case, rather than merely being permitted to report a case’s gist.

Straw has managed to provoke howls of outrage from those with vested interests in the current system, from the Family Justice Council to the judges, lawyers, social workers and academics who work in the relative obscurity of the family courts. They protested that revealing the identities of social workers involved in cases would potentially see them ‘named and shamed’, while fears have been raised that media intrusion would stop expert witnesses from coming forward or speaking their minds in full view of the public.

Let’s hope these fears are well-founded. It would certainly be beneficial if social workers began to think about how the public at large would react to their actions. And ensuring that experts are only prepared to present evidence for which they are happy to be held accountable is surely a positive.

It is precisely because the issues dealt with by the family courts are so personal and so sensitive that they should be subject to public scrutiny. We do not allow professionals to deal with other sensitive matters in private so why should we allow it in the case of family cases? We do not allow criminal courts to convict and sentence murderers and rapists in private, and those issues cause at least as much distress as those dealt with in the family courts. People can have their children taken away from them for good in the family courts. It is not right that the public is currently forbidden from scrutinising the evidence and rationale for family court decisions.

The consequence of keeping such decisions private is to drive a wedge between the public and the legal system, producing a deep sense of mistrust. There can be no doubt that the public support for Fathers 4 Justice, a fathers’ rights campaign group, was magnified by the widespread doubts raised about the opacity of the system that apportions custody of kids. It takes a fairly rare, and fairly strange, person to trust authority that operates behind closed doors. ‘What do they have to hide?’ is our reflex response.

The main argument against the new proposals is that giving the press greater access and reporting rights may produce witch-hunts and biased reporting against the professionals and witnesses. The case of Sharon Shoesmith, the ex-director of children services at Haringey council in London, is a prime example of this. Following the conviction of three carers for the gruesome death of 17-month-old Baby P in November 2008, Haringey children services came under fierce scrutiny for not spotting the many tell-tale signs of child abuse. It was Shoesmith in particular, with her face and salary plastered all over the newspapers, who bore the brunt of public revulsion.

However, what prompted people’s anger was not the failings of her department so much as her response to the media’s questioning. Her attitude was that she and her employees had simply followed guidelines, and therefore they had no need to apologise. This is the same attitude that lies behind the desire to keep family courts’