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Friday 10 February 2012 ‘It was not a great night out.’ Kieron Smith is clearly a dab hand at understatement. For the night in question – which Smith, the father of young girl with Down syndrome, describes in painful detail in a new book – involved grim Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle, a predictably side-splitting routine about people with Down syndrome being, well, a bit simple, and then, to cap it off, a front-row confrontation between Smith, his wife, and an unrepentant Boyle. Oh, and it also made the national newspapers. The event clearly still rankles. As Smith explains to me, ‘[Boyle] shouldn’t have apologised for using the jokes, but he should have apologised for the lack of respect he showed us when he realised why we were “talking” and the way he handled the situation. Also, he made it worse by then continually referring to it in future stand-up shows.’ There was, however, something good that came out of this whole, rather unedifying, affair. And that is Smith’s book itself, The Politics of Down Syndrome, a fascinating essay that attempts to understand why this particular learning disability continues to be singled out, stigmatised and, increasingly, treated as something that the rest of society ought to segregate out of societal existence. Not that the mockery and denigration of those with Down syndrome (DS) is anything new, of course. Its history as a diagnosed condition, writes Smith, has always been shot through with prejudice. Consider the man from whom DS now takes its name: the British physician John Langdon Down. In the late 1850s, as a young superintendent at the Earlwood Asylum for Idiots, Down identified what we now know of as the physical manifestations of DS – the epicanthic folds on the eyes, the broad, flat face, and so on – with the racial characteristics of people from Mongolia. ‘A very large number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols’, he wrote in his 1866 study, Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots. ‘So marked is this’, he continued, ‘that when placed side by side, it is difficult to believe that the specimens compared are not children of the same parents’. That Down was willing to identify a congenital condition with race – to make, in effect, ‘idiocy’ a racial characteristic – was hardly a surprise. Down was writing in a period of imperial confidence abroad, and working-class agitation at home, in an era that was replete with spurious natural and biological justifications for social and political inequality. Yet his racial claims stuck. And for years, those with DS were known more often than not as ‘mongols’. Jérome Lejeune’s discovery in 1959 that those with DS were not in fact racially afflicted but rather possessed of an extra chromosome 21 (having three instead of two in each cell), did little to change matters. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, ‘mongolian idiot’, ‘mongol’ and ‘mongolism’ continued to be used as terms of classification, not to mention as terms of abuse. Incredibly, it took a complaint from the actual country of Mongolia in 1965 for the World Health Organisation to start officially phasing the terms out. Smith does refer to the ‘echoes’, the ‘legacies’, the ‘ghosts’, even, of this Victorian diagnosis. But it is when he is looking at the contemporary trends and institutional biases that have helped to sustain the stigma around DS that his book is at its best. He starts with UK public health policy. Smith’s central point here is that DS is increasingly being treated as something of which prospective parents ought to be fearful. He notes that prior to 2004, only women over 35 were given antenatal screening to check for the risk of DS. But following a New Labour white paper on the ‘potential of genetics in the NHS’, the screening process was extended to all parents. The problem, as Smith presents it, is that such a universal screening procedure sends the signal that DS is such a serious, dangerous condition that it needs testing for. This despite the fact that a condition such as cystic fibrosis, which reduces life expectancy by 50 years on average, is neither automatically nor specifically screened for. Furthermore, following significant advances in medical research, DS is not even the condition it was just 25 years ago, with statistics from the US showing that life expectancy has increased from 25 years in 1988 to about 60 years today. This is not to suggest that Smith wants to see screening for DS stopped. It ‘is a disproportionate response to DS’, he explained to me, but ‘this doesn’t mean it cannot be offered to those who want to access it’. His problem, it seems, is the fact that DS has been singled out for special treatment. And again, in education, Smith identifies a similar, albeit figurative screening-out and segregation process at work. So whereas the 1976 Education Act led to a shift in favour of ‘greater integration and improved provision in ordinary schools’, the perceived failure of this attempt to educate children with ‘special education needs’ alongside non-SEN pupils, has now prompted the Lib-Con coalition to continue where New Labour left off in trying to ‘end this bias towards inclusion’. So out with integration and in with segregation, and, with it, the sight of DS children being sequestered away in special establishments. The problem for Smith is that the failure of integrated education owes less to the idea of integration than it does to insufficient resources and inadequate teacher training – for example, DS children find it far easier to learn visually, through reading for example, than orally, through speech. However, such institutional shifts, in which both medical and educational establishments, supported by the government, have helped to further stigmatise DS, do not occur in isolation. They come against a background of profound social pessimism. ‘A society’, writes Smith, ‘struggling with a lack of faith in the human ability to change things, to successfully manage relationships and everyday life, is also likely to find it hard to cope with the perceived “risks” of having a child with Down syndrome. It’s likely to conjure up a cascade of resultant personal risks too; the risk of splitting up over the child, of being trapped, of failing to provide for the child properly, of not coping.’ The extent, then, to which DS is seen as a risk corresponds with the extent to which parents, indeed adults, are deemed unable to cope with life in general. Indeed, so suspect is adult autonomy in the eyes of the state, says Smith, ‘that parents, and adults generally, are treated as if they themselves were still children, needing to be guided on the simplest of things, from the food their children eat (“fruit good, fat bad”), to how and when to read to your child’. Add to this miserable mix the pervasive neo-Malthusian sentiment that too many people are consuming too much, and the act of bringing a DS child into the world comes to be seen as positively irresponsible. ‘I think it’s a very dangerous trend that has many different flavours’, Smith tells me. ‘I’ve highlighted two in the book: attacks on older mothers; and the idea that screening out those with disabilities is the right thing to do on a “crowded planet” – it’s scary stuff.’ (As an aside, it is worth noting, as Smith does, the eerie echo of the original Malthusian attack on the breeding habits of the lower orders in the contemporary proliferation of books and studies on the low uptake of DS tests among the working classes and the best way to remedy the situation.) Yet, despite Smith’s attack on institutions and cultural trends and the extent to which they inform people’s perception of DS, this should not be mistaken for an attack on the principle of individual freedom. Throughout The Politics of Down Syndrome, Smith is at pains to defend ‘the fundamental right for all women to have an abortion on demand’. Likewise, he is keen to stick up for parental autonomy in the face of an ever-more intrusive state. Even Frankie Boyle, whose mean-spirited riffs on DS did so much to prompt Smith into writing his book, is entitled to the freedom to continue his mean-spirited riffs. ‘I would defend comedians’ right to be offensive’, Smith tells me. Before adding, ‘I would also defend the right of others to criticise them for not being funny and for reinforcing stereotypes’. But for all Smith’s libertarianism and free thinking, there remains a not-unproductive tension. Because, while he defends the principle of autonomy, he writes and talks frequently of the ways in which our practical capacity to exercise our own judgement – to act autonomously – has been impaired. In the case of DS, this means that the decision, for example, over whether to have a child knowing that there is a risk of it having DS, has been weighted in favour of abortion. No one is pretending, least of all Smith, that raising a kid with DS is easy, or that these children will be able to achieve the same things as those without DS. But our ability to decide for ourselves whether to bring a child with DS into the world is surreptitiously being taken away from us by a state informed by some of today’s most retrograde trends. What he is calling for instead, it seems, is a society in which people with DS are simply given the opportunity to ‘realise their potential’. This, as he puts it, is ‘equality of opportunity’ and not, of course, a way of pretending as if everyone is the same. But for this to happen, we need to stop treating those with DS, much as Dr Down did all those years ago, as a breed apart. ‘I trust people’, says Smith. ‘And I feel that greater inclusion of people with learning disabilities [in education, in the workplace] is the way to overcome stigma and get through this. This is not a case of looking to the state to “provide this”; it comes about by engaging over the issues, hence I wrote the book!’ Tim Black is senior writer at spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12065/
Friday 10 February 2012 So farewell then, Fabio Capello. You will be remembered for not being as successful as your CV suggested you might be. I can’t see too many England fans mourning the Italian’s departure. Capello’s tenure as England coach was far from glorious: two successful qualifying campaigns and one dismal World Cup. England expects better. Where was the heroic quarter-final failure? Where was the heartbreak of missed penalties? But, while you could justifiably argue that Capello should have departed for footballing reasons, I don’t think he should have had to quit over the John Terry race row. Was Capello right to oppose the FA’s decision to strip John Terry of the captain’s armband? Yes, absolutely. It is alleged that Terry called Anton Ferdinand a ‘fucking black cunt’ during a match. But, as Capello argued quite reasonably, Terry hasn’t been convicted in a court of law. He is being punished on the basis of an unproven allegation. And, though the trial-by-Twittermob has condemned Terry, he should be regarded innocent until proven guilty. The recent racial abuse incidents involving John Terry and Luis Suárez have led some to question whether racism is rather more prevalent in English football than we had imagined. ‘I almost feel I have been fooled a little bit over the years’, Rio Ferdinand told BBC1’s Football Focus. ‘I have always been someone who has championed our country for making great strides, and we have, but I thought that era was gone. It seems like it was just put to one side for a while.’ Is Rio Ferdinand right? Is the English game still blighted by racism? I just don’t see that racism is still a significant problem in English football. You only have to look at the faces on the pitch. Black players are no longer viewed as exotic or unusual, as they were in the 1970s and 1980s. The old stereotypes that black footballers are skilful but don’t ‘fancy it’ in the cold weather have been debunked. Instead, black players are idolised. An estimated 30 per cent of professional footballers are black. Far from being discriminated against, compared to the demographic make-up of England, black people are over-represented in the professional game. What about the terraces, then? There are isolated incidents, of course: the lone idiot at Anfield who allegedly called Oldham’s Tom Adeyemi a ‘fucking black bastard’ during an FA Cup tie in January, or the Liverpool fan pictured apparently making a monkey gesture at Patrice Evra two weeks ago. But these bigots are the exception. Mass racist chanting has pretty much disappeared. Bananas don’t rain down on black players. You don’t hear choruses of monkey grunts. The shocking racial abuse hurled at Chelsea winger Paul Canoville by his own fans at Selhurst Park in 1982 is, thankfully, a thing of the past. If you look at the Home Office statistics for football-related arrests for the 2010/11 season, you’ll see that, while there were over 37million spectators in total, only 44 arrests were made for ‘racialist or indecent chanting’ at all games. Do the maths. It’s hardly an epidemic. What really annoys me about the sanctimonious hounding of Terry and Suárez – and indeed anyone who defends them – is the focus on name-calling. Sure, racist slurs are deeply unpleasant. Being called a ‘nigger’ or a ‘paki’ is humiliating. I had to endure this kind of hurtful casual racism on a daily basis growing up in a predominantly white London suburb in the 1970s. But name-calling isn’t racism. It’s a symptom of racism; a cruel reminder of black people’s second-class status. And that’s the point. Racism means unequal treatment – or at least that’s how it used to be understood by those of us who campaigned against it. We focused our attention on those in power – the government, the police, the immigration authorities. We marched and protested against police harassment of black and Asian youth, against the incarceration of asylum seekers in detention centres, against deportations and punitive immigration laws. Yes, white working-class people expressed racist views and hurled racial insults. But they weren’t the cause of the problem. They weren’t responsible for segregated housing. They weren’t the ones stopping and searching black youths. They didn’t have the power to deny black people jobs or strip-search immigrants at Heathrow airport – an indignity my father once suffered. The political landscape is, of course, very different now, particularly in the wake of the 1999 Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence. Racism is an issue whose meaning has been twisted beyond all recognition. Today, racism is seen as a problem of behaviour or etiquette rather than a denial of equal treatment. Today, as Mick Hume explained recently on spiked, racial prejudice is seen as a ‘secular sin’. By the same token, anti-racism has come to mean regulating, policing and censoring politically incorrect speech. Official anti-racism has become a stick with which to beat uncouth white working-class people for failing to observe the correct racial etiquette. So, no, I’m not joining in the witch-hunt against footballers who use racial slurs in the heat of battle. I can find nothing to celebrate in Luis Suárez receiving an eight-match ban or John Terry losing the England captaincy. It’s not because I condone racial abuse or think that black players should turn the other cheek. It’s because arresting or banning a footballer for name-calling has nothing whatsoever to do with fighting racism. It’s thought-policing, pure and simple. Duleep Allirajah is spiked’s sports columnist. Follow him on Twitter @DuleepOffside reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12064/
Friday 10 February 2012 Allegedly, when, in 1972, Richard Nixon asked Zhou Enlai about the impact of the French revolution, the then Chinese premier quipped: ‘It’s too early to tell’. He was referring to the 1968 unrest rather than the 1789 one. Whether or not the attribution is accurate, it was a good line and it particularly came to mind this week as BBC4’s monumental, five-hour documentary The World Against Apartheid: Have You Heard From Johannesburg? quietly passed its mid-point. Three hours into its total running time, it’s still too early to tell how comprehensive the series will be, and nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid it’s difficult to judge how significant its global impact has been. It’s certainly good to see the topic being given the serious and lengthy treatment it deserves. From economic sanctions to sporting boycotts, so many of the tactics pioneered in the international campaign against the apartheid regime have become touchstones for other political movements in the past few years – from Palestinian solidarity and Chinese human rights campaigning to environmentalism and the Occupy protests. It was helpful to return to them in their appropriate context. Director Connie Field has even divided the series into films looking at specific aspects. The opening episode, The Road to Resistance, offered an overview of the official adoption of apartheid by the National Party government in 1948, its strengthening after South Africa gained official independence from the Commonwealth following a whites-only referendum in 1961, and the election of Nelson Mandela by universal suffrage in 1994. Despite the title, The World Against Apartheid has largely eschewed Western self-congratulation in favour of meticulous research and a diverse canvas of opinion. Mandela himself seems strangely absent from the range of interviewees and political actors on display, until you remind yourself that he was imprisoned for virtually the entire span the film covers (Field began work on it back in 1996). Having been cut down for TV from an original eight and a half hours, the series feels impossibly brief given the vast overview of postwar history it covers: from the growing significance of the United Nations and the Soviet Union’s support for the ANC’s abandonment of non-violent direct action, to the South African exile movement’s absorption into a broader international human rights lobby and the fragmentation of the international Left. There is a lot to pack in. As a crash course in the struggles inherent in building a serious and organised political movement to the backdrop of Cold War realpolitik it is difficult to fault. Much of the strength of the documentary comes from how it emphasises campaigns by anti-apartheid activists outside of South Africa (often political exiles). It shows how they sought to support and complement the organised struggle of those inside the country. From the desperation of South African workers calling for consumer boycotts as part of a strategy to weaken the apartheid regime’s economic strength to the deliberate targeting of rugby union on the world stage to humiliate and neuter the white elite’s cultural standing, these actions went beyond the kind of awareness-raising stunts we see today. The third episode, The New Generation, encompassed the Soweto uprising and the growth of a militant Marxism within the townships. Rather than congratulating do-gooder Westerners for boycotting oranges, it gave a stirring account of the genuine struggle and everyday bravery of countless South Africans fighting for justice. Yet the documentary’s fragmentary style, loosely narrated by journalist Zeinab Badawi, doesn’t always suit the complexity of the topic. Field herself has attempted to discuss the film as ‘a model of how people in a country in an oppressive political situation can work with people elsewhere to move from racism and colonialism to more democratic societies’. And so, the second episode, Fair Play, painstakingly traced how campaigners deliberately targeted rugby union as the sport of the white Afrikaner elite. It showed how badly this targeted campaign affected the apartheid regime’s sense of legitimacy on the world stage (highlighted by the occasionally farcical but also chilling attempts to silence the young Peter Hain). Yet, Fair Play then seemed to extrapolate that sporting and cultural boycotts in general are inherently a good thing, which is far from the inevitable conclusion. Jump forward to the increasing politicisation and instrumentalisation of sport and culture under New Labour in the UK (for which Hain served as a cabinet minister), for example, and the case becomes arguable. It is too early to tell whether the forthcoming episode on economic sanctions will take a properly critical stance on the topic. The proud boast from one contributor, left unexamined so far, that the consumer goods boycott lasted 35 years seemed at least to imply that it was less significant to ending apartheid than the collapse of the Soviet Union and resultant restructuring of the political landscape, for example. A more probing approach to how it is that the ANC government could so swiftly go from being the darling of the international human rights movement to being one of its pariahs, under Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, would also be welcome. Still, while not effectively distancing itself from the associations of Western moral posturing typified by the likes of Live Aid, The World Against Apartheid is at least an attempt to go beyond platitudes and to pay tribute to those South Africans who fought so long and hard, often at considerable personal price, to achieve freedom and political equality. Given the initial ambivalence from some quarters of the liberal left that greeted the Arab Spring last year, it is a lesson worth serious consideration. David Bowden is spiked’s TV columnist. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12067/
Friday 10 February 2012 The middle classes have always been ripe for ridicule. From Mark Twain to Sinclair Lewis, countless artists have mocked the haughtiness and vacuity of the bourgeoisie and, in doing so, produced some indispensable pieces of social commentary. Adapted from Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning play, Roman Polanski’s latest film, Carnage, proves that the middling class are as laughable as ever. But, ultimately, this supposed satire of two well-to-do Brooklyn couples amounts to little more than a handful of cheap gags. Following a playground argument, 11-year-old Zachary Cowan hits his schoolmate, Ethan Longstreet, in the face with a stick, knocking out two of his teeth. Michael (John C Reilly) and Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster) invite Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet) to their apartment to settle the disagreement between their children, and help draft a letter to their health insurance company, detailing the attack. But what begins in the spirit of civility soon descends into, well, carnage. The film opens with the four characters going over the wording of the letter, and other than slight disagreement over the phrase ‘armed with a stick’ – which is quickly changed to the less suggestive ‘carrying a stick’ – everything seems dandy. Within the first five minutes the Cowans are already putting on their coats to leave until, realising he hasn’t offered them a cup of coffee, Michael insists they stay a while longer. In the early scenes, the couples engage in guarded small-talk, each side suspicious that the other is judging them. The women discuss their hackneyed theories about parenting while the blokes talk business, exchanging barbed remarks about each other’s professions. Their unbridled need to outdo one another is played upon brilliantly, but this fails to go any further than a few funny, but obvious, jibes at middle-class pomposity. Indeed, we are presented with little more than four bourgeois caricatures. There’s Penelope, the over-educated, luvvie mother; Nancy, the air-headed trophy wife; Alan, the detached, workaholic father; and Michael, the self-made man with a chip on his shoulder. The cast do their best with the material but, barely half an hour in, the film can find nowhere else to go with these four cartoonish characters. Although only 80 minutes long, a series of increasingly ridiculous events are needed to drag Carnage kicking and screaming to feature-length. Tensions run high and the couples begin to turn on each other. Michael and Alan reveal their cynical disdain for their wives’ sense of moral superiority and they all enter into a debate about human nature, in which they take turns making bathetic pseudo-philosophical speeches. Alan outlines his nihilistic belief in ‘The God of Carnage’, and this malevolent deity seems to descend on the scene. Before long they are questioning their marriages, turning to alcohol and declaring that this is the worst day of their lives. The frayed and absurd ending is undeniably the most engrossing scene in the film, but it nevertheless feels like a last-ditch attempt at profundity and insight. We leave the characters paralysed in a state of existential angst, staring blankly at each other, unsure how this simple meeting has caused them to question themselves so deeply. Unfortunately, this is the feeling the audience is left with as well. At its best, social satire can stage a joyous onslaught on a culture’s closest-held values, inviting us to laugh at our own pretensions and leaving us with plenty to think about. Carnage, on the other hand, is little more than a cautionary tale about how quickly a film can unravel when its characters are paper-thin. Tom Slater is spiked’s film reviewer. Visit his blog here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12066/
Thursday 9 February 2012 Why, in America, has the defence of religious freedom become primarily associated with shrill bishops and right-wing Republicans? After all, it is a liberal principle and ought to be a central tenet of any tolerant society worthy of its name. Yet in the storm caused by the Obama administration’s new rule requiring employers to provide their staff with access to free birth control as part of their healthcare packages, religious freedom has been either exploited as a political trump card or denounced as an oppressive tool. On one side, powerful Catholics and Republican presidential hopefuls are decrying Obama’s rule as an assault on religious rights, because it does not exempt Church-owned institutions from having to provide access to birth control. On the other side, liberals are denouncing misogynistic bishops and right-wingers for trying to clamp down on women’s rights to make reproductive choices. Among those opposing Obama’s mandate, many are all too willing to ignore the desires of those they supposedly represent. And among those supporting the mandate, many are all too willing to sacrifice religious freedom at the altar of right-wing bashing. As it happens, many Christians don’t seem to see the contraception coverage mandate as an infringement on their freedom of conscience. According to a poll released this week, Catholics in the US are even more likely than Americans in general (52 to 49 per cent) to support requiring religiously affiliated employers to provide contraception coverage. Among white, mainstream Protestants, 50 per cent want the coverage, though only 38 per cent of evangelical Protestants support it. Moreover, the new policy exempts houses of worship and religious non-profits that primarily employ and serve people of faith. The debate has mainly focused on the consequences for Catholic-affiliated hospitals and schools. The Roman Catholic Church, which opposes the use of contraception, has come out in vocal opposition to Obama’s mandate and Republican presidential hopefuls have denounced it as a violation of the religious conscience of Catholics. Yet, on a day-to-day level, many of these Catholic-affiliated institutions are not very different in character to their secular counterparts, and they attract large numbers of secular and non-Catholic staff, students and patients. Therefore, many have seen the bishops’ appeal to religious freedom as nonsensical and potentially damaging for the large numbers of women at these institutions who would be denied the contraceptive coverage other women benefit from. But even if the bishops are out of touch, and even if the GOP candidates are just using this issue to get one over on Obama, don’t they also have a point? After all, whether or not a religiously affiliated hospital or a university employs non-Catholics, it is still founded on religious principles that could conflict with administering, or helping women to access, contraception. Should the government really take it upon itself to force a reform of such principles? The concept of freedom of religion is tied to the idea that the state ought not to be an arbiter either of what can or cannot be believed. In other words, it should be religion-neutral. A secular state, separated from the church, is one which neither promotes one faith above others, nor dictates what is and is not permissible to believe. Freedom of religion is about the freedom to practice one’s beliefs without fear of persecution or state diktat. And so, no matter how regressive their outlooks, religious associations should be free to establish any terms of change to their religious practices for themselves. Perhaps it is high time that Catholic bishops stopped trying to deny Catholic women access to contraception, since most of them seem to want it and since it has been a crucial victory in the struggle for women’s rights. But imposing such a reform from the outside would constitute a trampling on religious people’s autonomy. If we flipped things around, and had a government that used religious arguments to deny institutions the right to help women access contraception, then that would also be an infringement on individuals’ rights and a breaching of the separation between religion and state. Although this separation is, in its foundation, a liberal principle, and was intended as a safeguard against oppression, today it has unfortunately come to be looked upon as a right-wing, conservative thing. Judging from their response to Obama’s ruling, where many of them simplistically say that all institutions must obey, it seems today’s liberals have abandoned the principle of religious freedom because they are generally unwilling to defend other people’s rights to live by their own worldview, especially if that worldview clashes with their own. Things could be very different. As one commentator points out, the issue of employers’ ‘conscience’ could be avoided if the US had a different system of health provision. As it stands, employers are required to provide basic healthcare packages for staff and the Obama administration now wants to include contraception provision in those packages. Therefore, women’s free access to contraception has been dependent upon their employers’ attitudes. It is understandable that proponents of women’s right to access birth control if they so wish (a right that ought to be universal) oppose barriers to unequal access. Yet, hard as it may be to accept it, in a genuinely tolerant society private and religiously affiliated institutions that do not want to administer contraception should not be forced by the state to do so. Nathalie Rothschild is an international correspondent for spiked. Visit her personal website here. Follow her on Twitter @n_rothschild. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12063/
Thursday 9 February 2012 Venturing on to the streets of London with a trainee camera crew is always something of a minefield. Will local council jobsworths prevent us filming? They regularly try to. Will anyone stop to have their say? Will the sound be usable against a backdrop of market traders and dub-reggae preachers? And however much you tell yourself that there are plenty of smart people out there, when preparing to interview people on the EU, you always have doubts about the reaction you’ll get. On the streets of Walthamstow in east London, our doubts faded fast. During the filming of citizen TV channel WORLDbytes’ The View On The Streets feature, we spoke to many eloquent, well-informed citizens seriously concerned about the current economic mess and the EU’s undemocratic set-up. Pro-EU sentiments were harder to find, but the few EU fans we did speak to expressed a barely concealed contempt for the public in justifying the EU’s behind-closed-doors operations. For example, when asked ‘do you think Britain and other EU member states should be given a referendum on whether they should be part of the EU or not?’, one young woman from Germany replied: ‘That’s a difficult question. It might be okay, but there’s a lot of distortion in public opinion about what the advantages and disadvantages are. I think people have to be educated and then make an educated decision.’ This elitist disdain for the ‘ill-educated’ masses was actually one of the main gripes of many of the people we interviewed. As one young man told us: ‘The issue I think lies with the politicians and their advisers who believe that their general citizens don’t have enough information or are, how shall I put it, simply too dumb to realise the decisions they should make about the economy.’ On the contrary, he argued, ‘if there are any people who know most about the economy it’s the general public who are working, running businesses and being employees. They are in the best position, more than the politicians themselves.’ ‘The View On The Streets: The European Union’, WORLDbytes. When our interviewers suggested to those critical of the EU that ‘some people argue that if you’re against the EU you’re bigoted, you’re a nationalist, and you’re a racist’, the answers we got were salutary. As one man explained: ‘We disagree with our own families, we disagree with our own governments, with our own councils, that doesn’t make us racist or anything else, does it?’ Another responded: ‘It’s nothing to do with that. This is just the opinion of some people. I’ll give you an example, the case of Greece. Their ex-prime minister, the one who resigned, he promised to give a referendum to the people and suddenly they just pushed him away and bring in another prime minister so there is no referendum. Where is the democracy here? Democracy is supposed to be the voice and choice of people. They make the law in Belgium, not in Britain, France, Germany or anywhere. There is a group of people making the law for the rest of us.’ The anger at the EU expressed by many we spoke to was clearly not fuelled by ignorance, parochialism or bigotry. Rather, as one person said, ‘It’s just become its own power, and it’s like a giant Vatican City. It’s beholden to no one; they just make up their own rules. It’s just really backwards and I don’t understand why we put up with it, to be honest.’ The EU’s contempt for democracy and the will of the people was also not lost on those we spoke to: ‘I mean Ireland had a referendum and Greece wanted to have a referendum. One of them had a referendum and the people said no, we don’t want these laws and the EU said, do it again and this time vote yes. How can they get away with that? Who decided that we should give up our rights…? It’s like a company. I wouldn’t trust a company with my rights. That’s why we have governments because they’re built for the people.’ Many of the people we spoke to mounted a defence of national sovereignty, but not for xenophobic reasons. As one person argued, ‘[the EU] has been created to strip every single country of their sovereignty. So the law is not made in every single country, the law is made in Belgium and it is part of the new world order… and they have broken all the sovereignty of all the countries like they have done in Iraq, in Libya, in too many countries. This is the idea of the EU. There is nothing good about it basically… What is democracy? Democracy is not just the voice of Tony Blair or David Cameron or Sarkozy or whoever, it is the voice of people, it is the voice of me.’ Coupled with this sense of the importance of democracy was a disgust at the hypocrisy of Western governments’ support for uprisings in the Arab world. ‘We’ve just spent a whole year celebrating all these places in Africa and the Middle East having their tyrannical governments overthrown and people getting their power back, and here we are at the same time saying let’s get back to our own issues and give more power to the EU.’ But being against the EU did not mean the people we spoke to were anti-European. One young Romanian woman explained that, to her, ‘being European means we should all have the same rights and freedom of movement to go and work in other countries… You can be a European and be against the EU at the same time because the EU imposes on governments what to do with their money and who to elect and people don’t have any say about that. That is just not democratic at all. Being a European has nothing to do with the EU anymore and that’s really sad.’ Our experiences speaking to a wide range of people on the streets of London show that opposition to the EU is not the preserve of bigoted ‘little Englanders’, as some Europhile journalists and politicians would like to have you think. Far from it, in fact. Ceri Dingle is the director of the education charity WORLDwrite. All of the WORLDbytes The View On The Streets series are available to watch here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12061/
Thursday 9 February 2012 Just under a week ago, a 29-year-old woman was banned by a UK court from having sex. Anyone caught having sexual contact with her, consenting or otherwise, could face charges of sexual assault or rape. The woman, known only as H, became subject to the ruling by the Court of Protection on the grounds that her autism, ‘mild learning difficulties’ and low IQ meant she was incapable of consenting to sexual activity. It seems bizarre that any court would be able to make such an order. But this is no ordinary court. The Court of Protection is designed to deal specifically with issues involving those deemed to lack the capacity to resolve issues for themselves. Usually, this involves allocating interests in wills where someone is deemed to have gone beserk while drafting it. However, when it comes to people with learning difficulties, the Court of Protection is given spectacular power to meddle in the name of maintaining their ‘best interests’. The judgement in H’s case, when read in full, reveals an institutional obsession with her sex life since childhood. Social services had expressed ‘concerns’ about H’s sexual behaviour since she was seven years old. Reviewing her files, Mr Justice Hedley concluded that the evidence established H was ‘deeply sexualised’. The nature of the concerns or the exact contents of the notes held by social services were not discussed in the course of the judgement, but a transcript of an interview H had given to a psychiatric hospital in 2009 was quoted, where H admitted to ‘engaging in sex with multiple partners at the same time, including a group of much older men’. Furthermore, she ‘considered that she was bisexual’ and had engaged in ‘oral and anal sex’ and ‘attempted to have sex with a dog’. The evidence led the court to decide that H needed protecting from her own behaviour to the extent that it could ban her having sexual contact with anyone at any time. But can anyone really say this is in her ‘best interests’? Bestiality aside – and I realise it is a big aside – this woman had done nothing illegal or even wildly unusual. Besides, in modern Britain, even those who have sex with animals are more likely to end up on an edgy Channel 4 documentary than in front of a judge. The real difference between H and anyone else with an unusual sexual lifestyle was that she was autistic. In the eyes of the authorities, her autism gave them carte blanche to intervene and impose a significant, legally binding restriction on her liberty on the grounds that she was ‘vulnerable’. Admittedly, we do not know all the facts. But this level of intrusion is disproportionate, hysterical and betrays a fundamental unwillingness to support the independence of people with learning difficulties. I spent four years working with autistic people in their late teens and early twenties. They would frequently display behaviour that was ‘sexually unusual’. Most of the time, it was a little more extrovert than the staff were used to. But the best homes that I worked in recognised that this behaviour, even though it took an unusual form, was an inevitable part of growing up, whether you were autistic or not. At its root was the same adolescent confusion felt by many young people. Moreover, the outcome usually involved the same sexual humiliations, mistakes and informal reprimands that most teenagers are familiar with by the time they get to university. The problem with H was that she took her curiosity too far in the eyes of the authorities. Of course her case was more extreme than others. But it is telling that none of the many institutions involved in her life, who had been charged with her care and presumably with encouraging her to live as independently as possible, had considered the possibility that she might like and enjoy sexually unusual behaviour. Instead, the assumption from all concerned was that she was incapable of forming any independent sexual preference whatsoever. This is the reason the judgement sets a dangerous precedent. The lawyers will tell you that H’s judicially endorsed chastity belt will be reviewed periodically to ensure that it remains in her best interests. But the law as it stands grants the courts a broad discretion to decide what is in someone’s ‘best interests’. What if they decide that autistic people lack the capacity to make other lifestyle choices? And what about other so-called ‘vulnerable’ groups? Perhaps people with Down’s syndrome will be deemed not ‘capable’ of deciding that they are gay or want to get married? There is an authoritarian impulse behind this judgement and the law that governs it. We should not believe the judges if they tell us it is just a one-off. At a time when informal networks of support have disintegrated, it is inevitable that people with significant learning difficulties will require a level of state support and intervention. But these interventions should always take as their starting point the assumption that people with learning difficulties are entitled to live and express themselves however they choose. The old phrase remains apposite: hard cases make bad law. This judgement represents a sad depletion of that informal space that is usually given to those working with autistic people to assist in their sexual development, and a grave intolerance for the idea that people with learning difficulties are capable of making up their own minds. Luke Samuel is a paralegal working in criminal law and convenor of the London Legal Salon. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12062/
Wednesday 8 February 2012 The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe. For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks - voting in elections this April - decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF? Imagine - and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats - if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone’s handling of the economic crisis. A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the ‘fiscal compacts’, ‘debt brakes’ and ‘golden rules’ aimed at securing the EU’s reign in de facto perpetuity. Speaking after an EU summit last week, German chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear that the new fiskalpakt for the Eurozone is aimed at making all Euro members enshrine austerity targets in their constitutions beyond the reach of popular votes. ‘The debt brakes will be binding and valid forever. Never will you be able to change them through a parliamentary majority’, she said. This fear of the electorate, of the popular will, was the underlying reason for the German chancellor’s appearance at the Élysée palace alongside the French president Nicolas Sarkozy this week. With the upcoming French presidential elections having all but turned into a referendum on a controversial German-sponsored ‘fiscal union’ pact to save the Euro, she wanted to strengthen the pro-EU Sarkozy’s mettle and to set out the ‘There Is No Alternative to the EU’ stall. There is an understandable sense of urgency to Merkel’s efforts to shore up her ally Sarkozy’s flailing presidency. In early March, Sarkozy, along with Merkel and 23 other EU countries’ leaders, will sign a ‘Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union’. Yet while it will be signed by Sarkozy, it will not be possible to get French MPs in the National Assembly to ratify it before presidential elections in April. And that presents the EU elite with a problem. For Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent François Hollande, the favourite to win the presidential election according to opinion polls, has declared his intention to tear up any treaty Sarkozy signs. Why? Because as Hollande sees it, the new treaty will effectively outlaw Socialist spending plans by writing a ‘debt brake’, limiting the size of national budgets for Euro members, into international and EU law. But what is at stake here goes beyond the budgetary concerns of a social democrat like Hollande – it goes right to the heart of European politics. After all, fiscal and economic sovereignty cannot simply be separated off from other aspects of national sovereignty. To decide how a society manages and apportions its wealth is part and parcel of a functioning democracy. This is why the EU’s attempt to insulate the economy from political debate is so worrying. ‘Surely democratic politics is nothing if not about how wealth is created and distributed’, The Economist said critically of the Euro pact this week. As Merkel herself explained two weeks ago, the new order has obliterated all boundaries between national sovereignty and external intervention, allowing all aspects of politics to be settled by the EU. ‘In this crisis we have reached a whole new level of cooperation; we have arrived at a sort of European home affairs. Europe is domestic policy’, she said. That the political climate in France is so tough for Sarkozy is largely due to the Eurozone crisis. His austerity-laden response, including a hike in VAT rates, has proved deeply unpopular in a country that only narrowly voted to kill the Franc to join the Euro in 1992 and then actually rejected the EU constitution in 2005. If the Euro is to survive in its present form, with Germany and France at its heart, then the popular opposition to Sarkozy’s austerity measures must be crushed. French agreement is particularly critical because it is the Eurozone’s second largest economy and has a track record of high public spending. Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist campaign manager, has further horrified the EU by hinting that a new French president could hold a referendum – a taboo in contemporary European politics. ‘I am convinced that we will find allies for a renegotiation aimed at a policy change to pull us out of this austerity spiral and recession. We don’t like the idea of a popular vote because we are pro-Europeans and we don’t want a “No”, but nor can we allow tensions to spill over’, he said last week. The Socialist tactics – renegotiate the treaty or else a popular vote – have provoked near hysteria in the Sarkozy administration. In an interview with Le Journal Du Dimanche last weekend, Jean Leonetti, the French Europe minister, warned that, if elected, a Socialist president could face the same fate as the Socialist Greek prime minister George Papandreou: an EU coup d’etat. (Papandreou was deposed last October by European technocrats, backed by Germany and France, for threatening to put the EU’s austerity programme in Greece to the vote.) ‘There has been a European leader who has challenged a treaty, it was George Papandreou. François Hollande [is] the French Papandreou. And we know how it ended’, said Leonetti. ‘The Europeans will give the same response to him as Papendreou: it is not the treaty that needs to be renegotiated, it is your presence at the heart of the Eurozone.’ When a French minister of state threatens the leader of the opposition with the overthrow of his potential government unless he abandons a policy, it is safe to say that politics is under pressure. The EU is effectively recasting politics as the practice of bowing to the inevitable rather than coming up with alternative visions of the possible. That even the highly attenuated, centrist and managerial politics of the past 20 years is being further depoliticised is a mark of the narrow and estranged structures of governance that the EU is seeking to impose on European societies. Six years ago, Jean-Claude Juncker, the long-serving prime minister of Luxembourg and chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, defined the plight of the pro-EU politician with characteristically pithy cynicism: ‘We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’ In a speech made in November 2010, as Ireland was forced by Germany, France and the EU to surrender its independence to an externally imposed austerity programme, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, redefined political leadership for a new European era after sovereignty. ‘I, for one, have really been impressed over the last year by the political courage of our governments. All are taking deeply unpopular measures to reform the economy and their budgets, moreover, at a time of rising populism’, he said. ‘Some heads of government do this’, he continued, ‘while being confronted with opposition in parliament, with protest in the streets, with strikes in the workplace (or all of this together!) and fully knowing they run a big risk of electoral defeat — and yet they push ahead. If this is not political courage, what is?’ It is not courage to defy voters - it is actually cowardice. Leadership is about taking people with you, about cultivating a public interest; it is not about ignoring people in favour of loyalty to the bureaucratic interests expressed by the EU. European history does not teach us that politics is better ordered without the ‘risk of electoral defeat’. Bruno Waterfield is Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and author of E-Who? Politics Behind Closed Doors, published by the Manifesto Club. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12058/
Wednesday 8 February 2012 Imagine leaving your flat at dusk and walking through your communal garden as the first snow of the year begins to fall, and then suddenly you hear an American-accented voice saying: ‘Stop! This is a restricted area. Your photograph is being taken. It will be sent for processing if you do not leave the area now.’ You could be forgiven for thinking you had wandered on to the set of some sci-fi B-movie. Yet last Saturday evening this was a very real scenario for residents of the Walker House estate near King’s Cross station in central London. They were informed several months ago that surveillance cameras would be installed on the estate, but they hadn’t been warned that they were talking cameras. After sunset, anyone who used the estate’s garden - from smokers puffing under the gazebo to teens building snowmen - received the mechanical order to leave. Finding it ‘almost unbelievable’, 41-year-old resident Jim Jepps started asking his neighbours if they shared his anger. Many did and agreed to sign his protest petition. Jepps also made a video of the talking CCTV camera in action, uploaded it to YouTube and to his own website, The Big Smoke, and tweeted about it. It was retweeted by comedy writer Graham Linehan, who told his 150,000 followers that ‘Americans will be proud to know that their security cameras are now telling UK residents what to do’. Jepps’ website crashed, having received over 100,000 hits. The next morning the story was picked up by the national media, and Jepps’ YouTube video had been viewed tens of thousands of times. Many were incredulous. The groundswell of opposition to talking CCTV was heartening, and by Monday, Camden Council had agreed to turn off the ‘Robocop’ voice. But, as it turns out, in switching off the voice they were only sorting out a mechanical error rather than backtracking on their surveillance policy: the workman who installed the California-produced camera had inadvertently switched on the default voice warning, an optional setting that was not actually intended for use at Walker House. The mistake was fixed, but the surveillance camera remains. In a statement, Camden Council said: ‘We do not want to stop residents from enjoying their open spaces and communal areas and under no circumstances would we want voice messages to be used in areas where they may be disturbed.’ A council spokesman told spiked that the voice message was deactivated on Tuesday morning and that there were no plans to activate the voice setting on two other cameras in the borough that have the same function. Yet before it emerged that the Robocop voice had been activated in error, at least two local Labour councillors had jumped to its defence. One, Roger Robinson, told the Independent that the camera was a response to ‘harassment’ of local residents, and that it could be installed in other areas, too. ‘People have been known to smash cars and steal motorbikes. We’re entitled to do something’, he said. His comments offended local residents, who proudly pointed out that on the Walker House estate not a single case of anti-social behaviour or criminal activity was reported to the police in 2011. That it didn’t occur to locals that the voice activation could be an accident, and that councillors defended it, shows just how snugly such an initiative fits with the times. Far from being a bizarre import from mad America, as some have claimed, today’s surveillance culture and constant monitoring of public spaces is actually a very British phenomenon. Indeed, many parts of Britain already have talking CCTV cameras. The pride with which Mansfield Council representatives talk about their pioneering talking CCTV cameras in this YouTube clip makes it even more chilling than Jepps’ Robocop clip. Some Walker House residents believe the American accent added ‘insult to injury’. Yet other British councils have used even weirder voices on their CCTV cameras, in one instance using a young child’s voice to admonish adults for dropping litter, drinking alcohol, cycling on pavements, or hanging around in crowds. Jepps recognises this. He said it was ‘fantastic’ that there was such a high-profile response to his YouTube video and that many of his neighbours came together and agreed to petition the council. But ‘there is an assumption at the moment [among councils] that the state has to control everything about communities’, he says. ‘Because a council gets a couple of complaints from really vocal people about anti-social behaviour from residents, it then feels compelled to act and ends up leaving no space for us to build a community. Fearing anti-social behaviour, they’d rather no one used these spaces at all.’ Things like talking CCTV cameras create a culture where public spaces get shut down, says Jepps. They ‘work against communities and promote staying indoors and feeling frightened and helpless’. While the campaign to silence the voice of the Walker House Robocop was positive, Robocop’s eye - the camera itself - is still very much switched on. Residents may not be ordered to leave the area anymore, but they will still be watched by authorities as they play, chat or smoke in their communal space. And when they leave the estate, they, like other Brits, are watched by a total of some 4.5million CCTV cameras. Jepps hopes the furore around his video will spark a bigger debate about the use of CCTV and, more broadly, about ‘the kind of communities that we need’. He hopes councils will think twice before rolling out similar initiatives in the future. But for the tide really to start turning against the culture of surveillance in the UK, many more of us will have to make our dissatisfaction with these mechanical eyes – and mouths - known. Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12057/
Wednesday 8 February 2012 ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me three times more likely to get mouth cancer.’ Cue shocked gasps from the two plasticine characters in the new TV advert for Change4Life, a National Health Service campaign. Which is, in case you hadn’t guessed, designed to make us drink less. None of us wants to die from mouth cancer. So wouldn’t we all want to avoid something that triples our chances of getting it? But what is the risk of getting mouth cancer? Let’s see: in 2010, 1,975 people in England and Wales died of cancer of the lip, oral cavity and pharynx. Out of these, 663 were women, just like the hypothetical female plasticine drinker in the advert. So of the 31,753,620-ish women living in England & Wales in 2010, 663 died of mouth (or voicebox) cancer. That’s one in 47,894. Multiply that risk by three, and the risk goes up to three in 47,894, or a one-in-15,965 chance of dying from mouth cancer. To put that another way, the campaign is suggesting that if 48,000 women all drank two large glasses of wine every night (it doesn’t specify for how long - a year, 20 years - this is a health campaign after all, so why would we need to see proper research citations?), then out of those assiduous drinkers an extra two would die in a year because they drank more than the government guidelines suggest. It’s a classic case of RRSHS - Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome. Why bore people with a sober assessment of how likely something is to kill them when you can scream a terrifying figure at them instead? So what if they’re far more likely to die of something else? And in fact, moderate drinking offers significant protection against heart disease, which kills one in three of us. ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me half as likely to die from a heart attack’, the plasticine figure could truthfully have said. In 2010, 80,824 women died of heart and circulatory diseases. It’s true that heavy drinking damages your heart, as well as other organs, and that women don’t benefit as much as men from alcohol because our hormones also protect us against heart attacks. But still, even a 25 per cent reduction in those deaths would save over 20,000 lives. And yes, heavy drinking has other negative health effects, including a probable association with increased risk of breast cancer (which, unlike mouth cancer, is a significant cause of death for women). But even according to Cancer Research UK, alcohol causes just around 3.3 per cent of cancers in women and 4.6 per cent in men. That’s less than the cancers caused by infections, mainly HPV, in women (3.7 per cent), and by work-related cancers in men (4.9 per cent). So it’s no wonder that the government’s Change4Life campaign pulls in all the least appealing effects of drinking it can find, including the ‘spare tyre’ and the fact it makes your penis shrink and your pubic hair fall out. (I say ‘fact’, but I admit that I haven’t bothered looking for evidence on those claims.) Why didn’t they just cite the 8,790 alcohol-related deaths in 2010, mainly from liver disease and alcohol poisoning? Because the new campaign is not aimed at heavy drinkers. It’s aimed at the majority of us who drink a bit more than what is said to be the medically optimum two to four units a day. It’s not that we don’t understand the effects of that relaxing pint or two on our bodies. It’s that official health campaigners just don’t understand why we drink alcohol. We don’t drink for its medicinal effects. Drinking is a social activity that we share with friends, family, or somebody we’d be too shy to chat up sober. We may even drink because we like the taste or (whisper it) because we like the feeling of being drunk. We’re not idiots. We simply don’t organise our lives around optimising our eventual health outcomes. We have to die of something, sooner or later. These days, it’ll probably be in old age. And most of us don’t want to devote those 70, 80 or 90 years we get to being our doctors’ most perfect exhibits. So health ministers and campaigning groups, please treat us like the adults we are. If we’re hitting the booze a little more than doctors would recommend, that’s nobody’s business but ours. Timandra Harkness is a journalist and the co-writer and performer of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe smash hit Your Days Are Numbered: the maths of death, which is on tour in the UK and Australia in 2012. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12060/
Tuesday 7 February 2012 The civilised world is incensed at Russia and China for vetoing a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Assad regime in Syria. Their behaviour is ‘incomprehensible and inexcusable’, says British PM David Cameron. Yet all this China-criticising, Russia-bashing posturing amongst Western leaders tells us rather more about their own political immaturity than it does about moral turpitude in the East. For all that Russia and China have done is act according to their geopolitical interests, to take a position grounded in realpolitik and policy considerations. That Western observers find such behaviour ‘incomprehensible’ reveals how far they themselves have become dangerously estranged from rational geopolitics. You don’t have to be a supporter of Russia’s and China’s veto (spiked isn’t) to understand why they did what they did. The UN resolution condemned the Assad regime’s use of extreme force against protesters and called for a ‘Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system’. Both Russia and China have fairly deep political and business relations with Assad-ruled Syria and they clearly decided, through a process of interest-driven foreign policy-making, that it would be potentially destabilising for Syria’s rulers, and by extension for them, if international pressure were put on Syria to undergo regime change. Chinese officials have said that they don’t support Assad himself, and are critical of his recent actions, but they felt the UN resolution was rushed, with a vote being forced ‘despite serious differences’, and so they vetoed. Yet listening to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and British foreign secretary William Hague, and perusing the media coverage of Russia’s and China’s behaviour, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had invaded Syria and actually joined in the Assad regime’s bombing of Homs and other cities. Sounding like a sixth-former who has just signed up to Amnesty International, Hague accused Russia and China of having ‘blood on their hands’. ‘How many more [Syrians] need to die before Russia and China allow the UN Security Council to act?’ he cried. Clinton described Russia’s and China’s veto as a ‘travesty’ and said they now ‘bear responsibility for the horrors that are occurring on the ground in Syria’. Likewise, French foreign minister Alain Juppe said they bear ‘grave historical responsibility’ for the bloodshed in Syria. Don’t be sucked in by these grand-sounding condemnations of Russia’s and China’s alleged complicity in Assad’s war of attrition against his opponents – and not only because the condemnations are coming from the three permanent members of the Security Council who have actually used extreme force in the Middle East and north Africa in recent years and who therefore have, to use Hague’s adolescent phrase, ‘blood on their hands’. No, the real reason Russia’s and China’s actions appear so alien, so ‘incomprehensible’, to Western observers is because they are quite explicitly motored by geopolitical interests rather than by the fashion amongst Western foreign-policy departments for teenage moral bluster and highly changeable international positioning. The creeping consensus that Russia and China have inflamed instability in Syria glosses over the fact that today’s unhinged Western foreign policy-making, with its elevation of the short-term PR needs of Western leaders over any consideration of ‘the long game’, is far more destabilising than the occasional veto. The truth is that there is more logic to Russia’s and China’s actions over Syria than there is to Hague’s and Clinton’s. The behaviour of Western foreign-policy departments in relation to Syria confirms that there is now a massive disconnect, a gaping chasm if you like, between the West’s geopolitical interests and its geopolitical behaviour. So a couple of years ago, America, Britain and France were courting the Assad regime, believing, in the words of Hillary Clinton, that Assad was ‘a reformer’. Under George W Bush, Syria was described as ‘evil’, of course, but following the election of Barack Obama in 2008 America’s attitude towards Assad became more conciliatory. Former presidential candidate John Kerry was sent to meet Assad, enthusiastically describing him as someone who ‘wants to engage with the West’, and in 2009 America appointed its first ambassador to Syria in five years. Meanwhile, in 2008 French president Nicolas Sarkozy invited Assad to become a member of the European Union’s Mediterranean Union and entertained his wife in Paris. As a news report in 2010 put it, ‘Assad is now courted by the West’. Yet today, Western leaders describe Assad as ‘evil’ and anyone who refuses actively to condemn him as complicit in his crimes against humanity. This shift can’t be explained simply as a result of Assad’s brutal response to the Syrian uprising – after all, even when Kerry and Sarkozy and the rest were laying out the red carpet for Assad, while wearing what Time magazine described as ‘high-wattage smiles’, he was a ruthless ruler without a democratic bone in his body, known to lock up or beat up his political opponents. No, the West’s turnaround, its malarial leap from courting to condemning, reveals the lack of any political anchor in Western foreign policy-making today, which leads to a situation where Western foreign policy can become highly suggestible, shaped more by the short-term PR needs of people like Clinton and Hague than by anything so old-fashioned as carefully worked-out national interests. Hague is an instructive character here. In relation to Syria, he has used the British Foreign Office more like a pressure group than the international arm of a state with certain political interests and needs. Like an Amnesty-style worthy firing off press releases or doing emotive TV interviews, Hague seems to have thought very little about the potential consequences of his sabre-rattling over Syria, in terms of how it will impact on Britain’s relations with Syria (and Iran) or with Russia and China. None of that matters, it seems, in the face of getting a two-minute slot on BBC News to use phrases like ‘blood on their hands’ or getting a positive write-up in broadsheet newspapers that love it when political leaders go all moralistic and ostentatiously ‘humanitarian’, like Hugh Grant’s PM in Love, Actually. In his inability to formulate anything like a consistent or even just a serious policy on Syria, and in his courting of favourable but fleeting headlines over preserving good diplomatic relations with Russia and China, Hague personifies the startling immaturity and changeability of modern, unanchored foreign policy. And that kind of behaviour can have a far more destabilising impact than what Russia and China did, or failed to do. The West’s kneejerk transformation of Assad into a pariah could lead to a situation where, feeling even further isolated, Assad lashes out with yet more intensity against opponents whom he is now cynically depicting as ‘cronies’ of Hague and Clinton and Co. What’s more, it could intensify tensions between the West and Iran, a key backer of Syria, lead to further turbulence in Lebanon, whose political world is intimately linked with Syria’s, and cause much diplomatic fallout between Western nations and Russia and China. It is remarkable that such potential consequences are not even borne in mind by modern-day foreign policy-makers, who appear to have completely lost touch with proper geopolitical considerations. Those who claim that Russia’s and China’s veto has held back the cause of democracy in Syria should have a serious word with themselves. Why on Earth would you expect a semi-democratic regime and an undemocratic regime to help deliver democracy in Syria, any more than you would expect Hague or Clinton and the other bombers of Iraq and Afghanistan to do so? It is for the people of Syria to get rid of Assad and to try to build a new nation, not authoritarians and idiots from the East or the West. Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12054/
Tuesday 7 February 2012 As political scandals go, that which prompted the Lib Dem coalition minister Chris Huhne to resign on Friday was pretty low-rent stuff, even by today’s expense-fiddling standards. For those unfamiliar with the latest round of palace intrigue, Huhne may or may not have got someone else, who may or may not have been his then wife, to take the blame for a speeding offence in March 2003. Eat your heart out, Profumo. Perhaps the only thing more insignificant than Huhne’s alleged offence was the impact his departure has made on the public. In fact, this may be the most telling aspect to the whole tedious affair. It provides a snapshot of just how insular and isolated British party-political culture has become. So while politicos in and around parliament were fainting with excitement, the rest of us, it is fair to say, could barely contain our indifference. There is an obvious reason for this barely registering as a breeze in a teacup among non-residents of the Westminster village. From the very start, the Huhne affair has had very little to do with the public. There was never any particular anti-Huhne sentiment, despite his oh-so-green, wind power-obsessed role at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Nor was there much in the way of outcry over his alleged offence – the fact that last summer, 300,000 Brits admitted to having taken the blame for someone else’s speeding offence indicates just how seriously such a ‘crime’ is taken. No, what undid the ex-energy secretary derived its force almost entirely from within the political and media class itself. For The Humbling of Huhne was always a case of office politics mistaken by those ensconced within the environs of Westminster for politics proper. In the absence both of big ideas and the social constituencies whose interests these ideas mediated, gossip and personal enmity have come to be treated as if they signify something of profound political significance. Hence in every account of Huhne’s fall, it is Huhne’s character, his personality, that is to the fore. It almost seems that what parliamentary colleagues thought of Huhne the person provided the real underpinning for driving him from cabinet, despite ministerial code stating that a serving minister can continue in their role while a criminal investigation into his/her private affairs is ongoing. But today of course, in these still sleaze-focused times, the personal really is political. ‘Some Labour and Lib Dem MPs who respect the former energy secretary’s brains and drive (not all do) do not warm to him personally’, wrote the Guardian‘s Michael White. Likewise the Sun‘s Trevor Kavanagh focused on Huhne’s character: ‘His ruthless ambition and the compulsion to leak poison about other ministers have made Mr Huhne the object of deep distrust and dislike.’ Even the attempts to defend Huhne devolve upon his character. ‘[Huhne’s] critics (and there are a lot) acknowledge his cool under fire’, reported The Sunday Times: ‘He is a politician with balls of steel.’ All of this chatter and cod psychologising might be politically thrilling for those immersed in the office politics of Westminster, be they sat on parliamentary benches or spectating from the press gallery. For the rest of us, however, it is about as politically significant as, well, other people’s office gossip. But there is another aspect to the Huhne affair which is even more indicative of the insular nature of today’s political class than its bitchy self-obsession. And that is the way in which Huhne was effectively brought down, not by the court of public opinion, but by a prospective appearance in a court of law. Huhne’s fall almost completely bypassed the public sphere. Think back to the source of Huhne’s problems. His estranged wife Vicky Pryce was interviewed, for reasons that can only have been related to the potential embarrassment it might have caused him, in The Sunday Times in mid-May last year. To the question of whether it was true that Huhne had asked someone else to take his speeding penalty points, Pryce answered: ‘Yes… But look, there is such huge pressure on politicians to be everywhere at once, especially early in their career, so that they are visible — huge pressure — and he does drive a bit like a maniac.’ And that might have been that. Pryce had done her duty as the woman scorned, angry at her husband running off with his bisexual aide, Carina Trimingham, and proving more than capable of embarrassing him. But, a few days after the interview, a member of the opposition, Labour MP Simon Danczuk, decided that it was time Huhne was held to account. Rightly so, you might think, given that Labour is meant to be challenging the coalition government. But Danczuk didn’t criticise Huhne’s behaviour in public by, for example, challenging Huhne on his supposed actions. (Which is understandable in its own way: one suspects that criticisms of an alleged road-traffic incident nearly 10 years ago might not have had much public traction.) Instead, Danczuk called the police. And the police, desperately in need of some good PR in the light of accusations of political complicity following the original phone-hacking investigation, duly seized the opportunity to show just how politically neutral they are - by effectively helping to bring down an elected politician. So it was that between May and November, Essex’s finest proceeded to assemble a case against Huhne, a process that not only involved several protracted interviews with the alleged culprits, but an attempt to take The Sunday Times to court in order to force it to hand over relevant emails between journalists and Pryce. By January, The Sunday Times had had enough of the legal pressure, and relented. Then, its sweaty palms wrapped around the incriminating emails, the Crown Prosecution Service announced just over 10 days later that Huhne would indeed have his day in court. That left Huhne with a decision to make. And so he resigned from the cabinet. announced that Huhne would indeed have his day in court which left Huhne with a decision to make. And so he resigned from the cabinet. While nobody doubts the diligence with which the police pursued a speed-camera dodger, one is left wondering whether a decade-old traffic offence, with a spot of half-baked perjury thrown in, is worth the damage done to the sovereignty of those we actually elect to make laws. Surely it is better we hold politicians to account, through our elected representatives, than leave it up to judges - a principle to which one of our elected representatives, Danczuk, apparently remains oblivious. But in many ways it is apt that Huhne was brought down by local bobbies, aided and abetted by antagonised workmates and an embittered ex-wife. For this was in essence a village affair. Which is what you get when politics does without a public. Tim Black is senior writer at spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12055/
Tuesday 7 February 2012 Last month, Dutch teenager Laura Dekker became the youngest sailor ever to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world. This was a phenomenal achievement, requiring incredible personal courage and endurance. But marring her celebrations was the fact that the Guinness Book of Records failed to recognise her achievement on the grounds that it was deemed ‘irresponsible’. Furthermore, Dekker has claimed she may never return to her home country due to the treatment of her, and her parents, by meddling Dutch authorities. Laura Dekker began sailing alone when she was just six years old. By the age of 13, she had single-handedly completed a trip from the Netherlands to Britain and back. Her proven ability and determination convinced her parents to let her try to realise her ambition to break the record for being the youngest person to sail around the world solo. And last month, at the age of 16 years and four months, she did indeed beat the unofficial record set by Australian teenager Jessica Watson, who was days away from her seventeenth birthday when she completed her voyage in 2010. Her struggle to achieve this record almost pales in comparison to the struggle to circumnavigate officialdom in order to make the attempt. Strikingly, it was actually the interfering British authorities that caused Dekker’s troubles to begin back in 2009. Following her solo return trip to Britain, police there intervened and tipped off Dutch child welfare authorities who, as a result, began intervening in Dekker’s stated plans to circumnavigate the world. When she turned 14, the Dutch government ruled that she was too young to sail alone. The young girl and her father, who supported her trip, were brought to court six times as the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care attempted to take Dekker under guardianship. After she made an attempt to escape to the Dutch Caribbean island, Saint Maarten, she was arrested and brought back to the Netherlands. In her blog, Dekker recalls that ‘over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up… It was all a frightening and traumatic experience.’ The Dutch authorities’ reaction to Laura Dekker shows that they have become a Frankenstein of the mentality that inspired the introduction of menacing tobacco labels and countless similar policies. The doctrine that individuals need to be saved from themselves has unleashed a swarm of crusading bureaucrats who relentlessly raid our private lives. Joost Lanshage of the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care exemplified this pervasive creed as he protested, ‘If Laura had drowned we would be accused of not doing enough to protect her.’ Lanshage assumes his responsibility over both Laura and her parents with uncanny ease. More alarming, however, is Lanshage’s testimony that this is what society has come to expect from public authorities. Forfeiting judgment to a faceless state erodes the importance of personal interactions as it undermines our dependence on family, friends, and community. The state’s hijacking of the responsibility for our lives also robs us of the ability to exercise and develop our personal judgment. This crucial aspect of our development is being debilitated by the craze to squeeze individuals into the shrinking mould of acceptable citizenship. Denying us the right to take risks, enjoy successes and suffer through mistakes restricts our ability to act according to our individual values and develop purposefully. We’re sacrificing our individual autonomy for the comfort of apathetic mediocrity. As this process continues, unique approaches to life and education increasingly become unacceptable. After Dekker mentioned on her blog that she had to temporarily put schoolwork aside in the face of dangerous storms at sea, Dutch authorities mounted their high horses once again and summoned Laura’s father to court. While the 16-year-old conquered innumerable challenges that the vast majority of adults would not be capable of facing alone, authorities back in the Netherlands fretted at the idea that she would fall behind with her school work. As Dekker rightfully reflected on her blog towards the end of her journey, ‘Now, after sailing around the world, with… the full responsibility of keeping myself and [her boat] Guppy safe, I feel that the nightmares the Dutch government organisations put me through were totally unfair.’ Exhibiting the disturbing nature of our culture of conceded autonomy, Lanshage asserted, ‘I am sorry Laura is traumatised, but I have no regrets about fulfilling our responsibility to this child.’ Ultimately, the authorities’ accomplishments amounted to delaying Dekker’s trip, imposing a series of costly safety regulations, and traumatising her along the way. It is unclear what responsibility Lanshage could be claiming to have fulfilled, if not a responsibility ruthlessly to bully an individual because of her entrepreneurial attitude towards her own life. The state’s appetite for macro-managing society has metamorphosed into the self-indulgent micro-management of individuals, dangerously coupled with an ‘ends justify the means’ mentality. Personal responsibility and the informal authority of close relationships have been appropriated as sacrificial lambs fit for slaughter at the altar of public paternalism. If Laura Dekker had been harmed during her journey, Laura and her family would have been the ones to suffer. By trampling over their authority, the state disrespectfully undermines this intimate relationship. If people want to take risks with their own lives, it isn’t the role of you or me or the state to do anything about it. We should commend Laura for bravely challenging our complacency by turning off autopilot and steering her own course. Gabrielle Shiner is on the executive board of European Students For Liberty and studies English at Queen Mary, University of London. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12056/
Monday 6 February 2012 Amid the endless praise heaped on Queen Elizabeth II as royal toadies of every stripe mark the sixtieth anniversary of her ascension to the throne, the key word is ‘continuity’. During her reign so much has changed – often for the worse so far as Britain’s rulers are concerned, who began the age with an Empire, yet today are faced with the possible break-up of the United Kingdom itself. The queen provides their one remaining symbol of stability and historical authority. That is why the political and media class are all desperately clinging to her royal robes around the Diamond Jubilee, hoping that the image of timeless majestic power will reflect on the rest of the British state’s rather tarnished institutions. When the great and good sing ‘God Save the Queen’ this year they will really mean it, praying that she might be granted life everlasting, or at least go on and on for another 60 years, to postpone the trauma of change at the top. Even the alleged Scottish rebel Alex Salmond has made clear that she will still be queen of an ‘independent’ Scotland. Yet behind the appearance of stability and continuity, the monarchy, too, has been transformed over the past 60 years. And the opposition to the monarchy has also transmogrified into something else. Both sides of the debate have been emptied of their traditional meaning. Today we are left with royalty that is not very regal, facing critics who are not particularly republican. For much of the queen’s reign the British royal family has done its best to modernise its image by appearing more ‘ordinary’, or at least less aloof from its subjects. It is often claimed that a turning point was the 1969 TV documentary The Royal Family, granted unprecedented access to film the royals going about their daily business and looking ‘natural’ – sort of ‘The Only Way is ER’. The attempt to appear less peculiar and privileged, at least in public, accelerated after the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when the press accused the royal family of being ‘an alien breed which is stuck in a time-warp’. (Ironically, that was because of the queen’s entirely human reaction of wanting to remain with her bereaved grandchildren in Scotland rather than join in the theatrical displays of grief in London.) In recent years the royal family’s PR has tried to recast the royals, especially the younger Windsors, as sort-of TV celebrities in crowns rather than regal figures. This has led to such horrors as Brian May (guitarist for Queen – geddit?) marking Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee by playing the national anthem on electric guitar from the roof of Buckingham Palace. It reached its apogee around last year’s royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which was more an extension of celebrity culture than a traditional patriotic celebration. While the crowds waved plastic Union flags bearing the brands of OK! and Hello! magazines (which gave them out), the coverage emphasised the extraordinary ‘ordinariness’ of the young couple getting married in Westminster Abbey. This year’s Diamond Jubilee events will no doubt attempt to strike a similar note. It will all be in striking contrast to the 1897 celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which took place when Britain was near the peak of its imperial pomp and were turned into a global exhibition of the power and glory of Victoria, Empress of India. By contrast in 2012, while India tells the UK government that it no longer needs the ‘peanuts’ of British aid and Jamaica’s prime minister says ‘time come’ to cut the royal apron strings and declare a republic, this year’s Jubilee appears set to be graced by a special royal reunion of the Spice Girls (again). That rather neatly illustrates the point about the decline of imperial British nationalism that Brendan O’Neill made on spiked at the time of Will’n’Kate’s wedding: ‘Today the Union flag is less “The Butcher’s Apron” than “The Spice Girl’s Boob Tube”.’ These ongoing attempts to modernise and ‘normalise’ the royal family through the queen’s reign have created new tensions at the heart of the monarchy, such as that between majesty and celebrity. It is impossible to appear ordinary and imperious at the same time, to maintain the mystique of a monarchy with the God-given right to rule while courting the approval of the celeb-obsessed media. For now, these tensions and questions about the role of the monarchy can be kept in check by the presence of the old queen, who spans history back to the days of Empire and the Second World War. That is one more reason why the authorities are so keen for her to carry on as long as possible, fearing ‘After her, la deluge’. Yet the other great asset the monarchy has enjoyed through the queen’s reign has been the abject weakness of British republicanism. And that situation shows little sign of improving. Indeed, many prominent critics of the monarchy today appear to have forgotten what republicanism is meant to be about – especially the place of the ‘public’ at the heart of the republic. As the royals have attempted to become more popular, their critics have moved in the other direction, appearing more aloof from and disdainful of the British public. We are left with a bizarre spectacle of anti-monarchists who can sometimes look more snooty than the royals themselves. Anti-monarchists often seem to save their most bitter contempt not for the royals themselves but for the supposedly royalist British people, who are seen as ‘brainwashed drones’ duped by the media. Hence all of the complaints about last year’s royal wedding being deliberately plotted to ‘distract attention’ from spending cuts and war, as if the public truly were that stupid. It is ironic that at a time when most people are more indifferent to the monarchy than in living memory, many critics appear to believe that we are screaming queen-lovers. One anti-Jubilee campaign planning to protest at the big royal pageant on the Thames in June claims that these celebrations ‘go to the heart of what’s wrong with the monarchy’ and ‘represent everything we, as republicans, oppose’. Really? Call me old-fashioned, but this longstanding republican has always thought that the heart of the problem of monarchy is the anti-democratic constitutional device of the Crown Prerogative and the Crown-in-parliament, which gives the British government executive power to do much as it sees fit. The rest is just theatrical dressing-up and window-dressing. Yet some now seem to suggest that the bigger problem is the public spectacle of supposedly gullible dupes turning out to wave little flags and take pictures of the queen on their phones. While the royals are trying to use the public to give their highly undemocratic anachronistic status some legitimacy, high-profile anti-royalists tend to avoid the public, the majority of whom they see essentially as a monarchist mob. Those who have little faith in democracy prefer to take their complaints about media bias to the suits at the BBC and Ofcom, or ask judges to rule on their challenge to outdated constitutional laws. If we are going to use the Jubilee events to question the monarchy, let us at least remember what the case for a republic is supposed to be about. Not miserabilist moaning about the cost of celebrations, but putting the positive case for an expansion of democracy. Not just banging on about Them, but putting the emphasis on Us – our right to be recognised as citizens of a free society, not subjects of the Crown. But what could be the point of a republic, if you truly believe that the public are brainwashed dolts incapable of acting independently in their own interests? Little wonder the case for a republic has never taken off in modern Britain, if we have so little genuine faith in the potential of the people to take sovereignty into their own hands. It might be worth reminding ourselves that historically the fight for a republic was not just a complaint about pageants and princes’ pocket-money, but was part of the wider struggle for democratic revolution and social change. The English Revolution that decapitated King Charles I in 1649 inspired the eighteenth-century republican revolutions in America and France (and if the English bourgeoisie had not lost its nerve and invited back Charles II in 1660, we would not now need to be worrying about the accession of Charles III). During Queen Victoria’s reign there was a brief flourishing of republican clubs and sentiments in the 1870s, in which conservative critics of the then-reclusive queen vied for influence with those such as Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association, who saw the question of monarchy as part of the bigger issue of power in capitalist society. That republican moment proved shortlived, as the weakness of left-wing politics in Britain and the burgeoning power of British imperialism enabled the authorities to consolidate support for the monarchy. Ramsay McDonald, who would become the first Labour prime minister, later reflected on the rise and fall of Victorian republicanism: ‘In the seventies the throne appeared to be tottering…The Queen and the Prince of Wales had no hold upon the popular mind; there was a spirit of democratic independence abroad; the common man believed in the common man. That has gone.’ If republicanism is to have any future today it will depend on the creation of a twenty-first century version of that ‘spirit of democratic independence’, a belief in the capacity of the ‘common man’ and woman to exercise more democratic power. It could begin by recognising that the main thing maintaining any semblance of public support for the monarchy today is not public stupidity, but the discredited state of politics and politicians. That is why, when you propose having an elected head of state, the first response will often be: ‘What, President Blair or Ashdown? I wouldn’t want to vote for any of them.’ Against the background of the crisis of democratic politics and the celebritification of the royals, not everybody waving a plastic flag for the queen this year will be a mad monarchist. Meanwhile, many of those criticising the Jubilee look like plastic republicans. Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12046/
Monday 6 February 2012 In Greenwich Village, New York, a triangular lot opposite the former St Vincent’s Hospital may soon be transformed into a memorial park honouring the 100,000 New Yorkers who have died of AIDS. A Catholic hospital established more than 150 years ago, St Vincent’s closed in 2010 after years of financial and hygienic challenges. Having treated victims of the 1849 cholera epidemic, the sinking of the Titanic, the 1980s ‘AIDS plague’ and the 9/11 attack, St Vincent’s passing inspired some nostalgic tributes. Now, many apparently feel that using the lot to commemorate some of the patients it cared for will go some way towards making up for its transformation from poor man’s haven to luxury residence. St Vincent’s housed New York’s first AIDS ward at a time when there was a great deal of fearmongering about the disease and misinformation about how it could spread. In the early 1980s, a number of homosexual men were diagnosed with a new, unknown syndrome that was first thought to be a form of cancer, but was later identified as AIDS. Eventually, it became clear that the underlying problem of so-called ‘gay cancer’ was, in fact, immune deficiency and that it could affect heterosexuals and children, too. With the thirtieth anniversary of the outbreak of AIDS coming up, a coalition of urban designers and AIDS awareness activists launched the New York City AIDS Memorial Park competition. A jury, chaired by the National September 11 Memorial designer Michael Arad, has picked the winning design: ‘Infinite Forest’, by Brooklyn-based studio a+i.
In many ways, Infinite Forest resembles the 9/11 memorial that opened last year in time for the 10-year anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers. It resembles it not only in look, but also in the way it compels New Yorkers to remember, and to cohere around, tragedy and loss. Like the 9/11 memorial, the proposed AIDS Memorial Park invites us to experience a tragedy - not literally, of course, but through interactions with the memorial itself. And the hope is that this interaction will inspire solidarity and compassion. Now, the similarities between the 9/11 and AIDS memorials are to an extent in the eye of the beholder. Personally, the 9/11 memorial immediately sprang to mind when I saw the images of a+i’s entry - before I had read anything about the ideas behind the design, before I had seen St Vincent’s referred to as the ‘ground zero of the AIDS epidemic’, and before I knew that Arad had headed up the competition jury. Nevertheless, whether uncanny or actual, there are some striking resemblances. Studio a+i’s design uses three mirrored walls along each side of the triangular space. The mirrors enclose a park with birch trees, creating the impression of an ‘infinite forest’. A basement below the park will house a learning centre and along the sidewalks three slate-clad walls will form a mural where visitors can write messages in chalk that will only remain until the rain washes them away. The site will also have a bookstore and a café. The park is meant to honour not just victims of AIDS but also those who ‘responded heroically to the crisis’. The National September 11 Memorial, at the site where the Twin Towers stood in New York’s Financial District, is an ‘eco-friendly plaza’. Benches, strolling paths and more than 400 white oak trees surround two massive pools around which are inscribed the names of the victims. Below the plaza, there is a museum and a store with books and memorabilia. Many visitors who lost loved ones on 9/11 use paper and pencils to trace the etchings of their names. The site honours those who died in the towers and the heroic efforts of the firemen who tried to rescue people from the wreckage - many of whom died or were injured. The trees, the oasis atmosphere, the name-tracing and chalk-scrawling, the underground education facilities, the honouring of victims and heroic rescuers… There are many physical and conceptual resemblances between the two memorials. Of course, there’s nothing unusual or wrong about designers being inspired by one another. What’s more significant is that both sites are also monuments to a shifting attitude towards the past and ways to deal with it - and, in America, 9/11 has become a kind of guide for how to do that. It seems organisers of the competition acknowledge this. They seem to want to draw a direct line between the 9/11 and AIDS memorials. In a video launching the competition, co-founder Paul Kelterborn explained that the hope was to inspire the kind of ‘city-wide discussion’ that took place during the design process after 9/11 and so he was pleased to have Michael Arad on board. One of the judges, fashion designer Kenneth Cole, also mentioned 9/11 and the ‘groundswell’ of support for a memorial honouring those who died. It is only right, then, Cole suggested, that the city should have a memorial honouring those who have died from AIDS. He said New York needs an AIDS memorial. But, in fact, New York already has one - a bench in Hudson River Park that was installed in 2008, the twentieth anniversary of World AIDS Day. There is also a ‘People with AIDS Plaza’ near City Hall in lower Manhattan. So, why does New York need another, bigger memorial for the thirtieth anniversary of World AIDS Day, and one that is right by the so-called ‘ground zero’ of the AIDS outbreak? Certainly, it has to do with sympathy for AIDS victims and a desire to stop the spread of the disease. But it also has to do with a post-9/11 mentality, according to which we don’t move on despite difficult events, so much as continue living with them. As a result, we turn public spaces into formal memorial locations, rather than places of pure leisure. Today, a bench, a street name, a plaque or a statue apparently won’t do as a memorial. Instead commemorations like the 9/11 plaza and the AIDS Memorial Park take up entire public spaces at a time when, as Ron Arad points out, opportunities to design public spaces in New York are rare. We are not meant just to visit these memorial spaces, or to leave a flower or note by them. Instead, we are meant to live and interact with them. But no matter how pretty or calming, these spaces are restrictive. They are, after all, geared towards remembrance and honouring - and certain kinds of behaviour are, if not formally then at least informally, imposed in spaces dedicated to dead people. The echoes of 9/11 within the proposed AIDS Memorial Park suggest that that horrific day a decade ago has become a kind of barometer of grief and fragility and its ostentatious memorial has become a model for official commemoration. The desire to show solidarity with fellow New Yorkers is commendable. What’s worrisome about the 9/11 model of grief and commemoration, though, is that it doesn’t really favour understanding as much as emotion. Whether it’s the rapid spread of AIDS in the 1980s, the terrorist attack in 2001 or any other historical incident, what it all meant, what caused it and how to prevent it in the future become kind of blurred, as unifying around our emotional response to tragedy becomes the primary purpose of commemoration. Nathalie Rothschild is an international correspondent for spiked. Visit her personal website here. Follow her on Twitter @n_rothschild. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12047/
Monday 6 February 2012 Film director James Cameron, responsible for Terminator, Titanic and, more recently, Avatar, has been working on a considerable side-project for a few years now. Cameron film fans shouldn’t get their hopes up, however. This side-project is more political than filmic. He has been trying to prevent the Brazilian government from constructing Belo Monte, the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam, on the Xingu river which runs through the Amazonian rainforest. That a Western movie director has taken an interest in what happens in parts of the Brazilian interior is not without precedent. For some time now, be it John Boorman’s Emerald Forest (1985) or John McTiernan’s Medicine Man (1992), various movie-makers have treated Brazil’s forests as a source of locations and actors to set and populate their fairytales of environmental destruction. But Cameron is slightly different. When he made Avatar in the late 2000s, having written the screenplay 15 years prior, his tale of technological civilisation versus nature and indigenous peoples dispensed with real forests in favour of CGI. The result was an environmental morality tale presented in the most vivid, broad and simplistic of digital brushstrokes. But Cameron didn’t leave it there. Instead, he decided to depart from his CGI world and take his flimsy fantasy seriously. In April 2010, with the Brazilian government in the process of granting the Belo Monte dam project an environmental licence, Cameron seized his opportunity. One could see the appeal for Cameron: the conflict between indigenous groups and NGOs pitched against a dam that would supply energy to companies mining the Amazon forest seemed to replicate the ecological morality tale of Avatar. So it was that Cameron – followed closely by film star Sigourney Weaver, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and former US president Bill Clinton – lined up alongside the Kayapo Indigenous group to campaign against the dam. As a result of the protests, the Brazilian Federal Attorney’s Office suspended the licensing process and Cameron then made a celebratory documentary called Message from Pandora (a reference to the fictional planet in Avatar). For Cameron, his CGI morality tale had been brought to life. Following Cameron’s high-profile intervention, international pressure began to mount on the Brazilian government. The Organisation of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demanded that the dam project be suspended because of the supposed harm it would do to indigenous groups. A powerful lobby inside Brazil, inspired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘Don’t Vote’ viral campaign, decided to use television and the internet to undermine the dam project’s progress, with the TV Globo channel and its most popular soap-opera actors making a series of videos and adverts attacking the dam. Like DiCaprio and friends, stars of soaps such as Enchanted Rope, Bite and Blow, That Kiss, Macho Man and Insensitive Heart assumed a tone of feigned disbelief that anyone could support the dam or think it was good for the nation. In one particularly sneering outpouring, two actors mocked their own television audiences’ energy consumption while they feed their addiction to soap operas. But then something very curious happened. Another tribe of Brazilians, normally so fearful of being seen outside of their natural habitat, fought back. Geeky university students and their professors made a film with zero production values undermining every argument used by Cameron, the NGOs, the Kayapo and TV Globo. These are the myths they challenged:
Like the students, the Brazilian government was not prepared to tolerate such lazy and baseless attacks from Cameron and Co. It not only refused the OAS’s demand to suspend the project, but withdrew its ambassador from the OAS and stopped all payments to the organisation. This month, the dam was given the green light. Brazil’s confidence and the students’ creative indignation reflected a new self-confidence derived from the country’s extraordinary growth rates and a palpable desire to fulfil its economic potential. In the past things were different. In 1985, John Boorman made the film Emerald Forest, a frontal assault on the promise of progress presented by energy and industry in the Amazon. It tells the story of the kidnapping of an American dam engineer’s son by Amazonian Indians. Years later, the dam engineer returns and, instead of rescuing his son, joins young Tommie in fighting alongside the Indians. Three years after the Emerald Forest, Sting and green NGOs mounted an influential international campaign opposing the Belo Monte project (then known as the Kararao Dam Project) and succeeded, in alliance with the Kayapo indigenous group, in forcing the World Bank to withdraw its loan for the project. The film and campaign were part of a growing green movement that fabricated the fiction of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous peoples as symbols of a morally enchanted world, free from, and superior to, the influence of destructive modernity. Of course, back then the anti-dam campaign was able to exploit Brazil’s economic woes. In the early 1980s, foreign creditors had refused capital flows to a heavily indebted Brazil and the country was forced to accept an IMF austerity programme. After years of exponential growth, Brazil was a humiliated giant, dependent upon the World Bank for investment, particularly as regards its infrastructure. Today, however, the situation has altered. Cameron and his friends have walked into a brick wall. Unfortunately, this rebuke to James Cameron et al has come after considerable damage has already been done to the project. Although Cameron will have to restrict his anti-development fantasies to Avatar 2 and 3, Belo Monte has suffered severe reductions in scale and impact. The original project was designed over 30 years ago. In 1979, the plans had six dams rather than the two that remain today, with four more dams upstream to control river-level fluctuations, thereby maximising the productivity of the downstream turbines. After the Sting-inspired 1989 campaign against the dam, its reservoir size was cut by two thirds. The latest campaign has reduced its size and power capacity still further. Every modern economy has exploited hydropower, owing to its low cost and abundance. However Brazil, which possesses some of the largest river systems in the world, has used less than half of its economically exploitable 800TWh of hydropower. In 1979, national plans projected 279 dams to be built by 2010, but only 158 have been completed. Today, President Dilma Rousseff is determined to service her country’s growing demand for energy from industry and the domestic sector. This month, she has announced the beginning of construction of a further 61 hydroelectric dams, most of them in the Amazon region. It is part of Brazil’s second Growth Acceleration Plan, PAC2. In a poll, over half the country supported Belo Monte, yet still Brazil’s energy minister felt it necessary to offer an apologetic and costly olive branch to James Cameron: ‘This new model of hydroelectric dams is almost like a science-fiction film, it reminds us of Avatar.’ The dams will be built using enormous oil rig-like platforms to prevent any permanent human development and impact in the forest. The transmission lines will be suspended above the forest canopy and all workers will be airlifted by helicopter, making roads unnecessary. Today, Brazil is not in the mood to be stopped, but it still must go to extraordinarily defensive lengths to appease anti-development fantasists – both domestic and foreign. John Conroy is a television producer/director and a journalist. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12048/
Friday 3 February 2012 Among students of American history, it is generally recognised that American politics is much less corrupt than it was in the past. Sure, politicians on the take, like the Nucky Thompson character in the Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire, still exist: witness William Jefferson, the Louisiana congressman who was found in 2005 to have $90,000 in bribes stashed in his freezer. But examples like Jefferson stand out precisely because they are so rare. And yet, more and more today you hear claims that the money-changers are overrunning the temples of Congress and the White House. Campaign fundraising by so-called ‘Super PACs’ (or Political Action Committees), created by a recent Supreme Court ruling, are said to be distorting the 2012 contest for president. Occupy protesters suggest that the roots of our problems lie in corporations controlling politics, and a common cry from them is to ‘get money out of politics’. And it is not just a liberal-left complaint: many conservatives, including the Tea Party types, contend that ‘crony capitalism’ is alive and well in Washington, and that’s why we shouldn’t trust big government. The recent publication of two books on the role of money in American politics provides further evidence that this is a concern shared by those who come from seemingly different ideological perspectives. Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and a speechwriter for Sarah Palin, has written Throw Them All Out, an exposé of politicians’ money-grabbing activities. At the same time, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard and a self-proclaimed liberal, has published Republic, Lost, a treatise on how money corrupts Congress. Schweizer accuses American politicians of engaging in shady dealings in various forms: from trading shares on insider knowledge to making generous grants and loan guarantees to friends in the green-energy business. He recognises that the kind of corrupt politicians ‘who stuff money in their freezers’ are ‘vintage stuff’ now, but finds rampant corruption nonetheless, which he calls ‘honest graft’. While coming from a conservative background, he targets both Democrats and Republicans, often referring to a ‘political class’ as a whole. Schweizer’s book was the basis for a recent story on the CBS current-affairs show, 60 Minutes, which generated some wider publicity and put him in the limelight for a while. On the face of it, Schweizer’s points sound commonsensical and quite damning, but they really don’t hold up under scrutiny. And while his book is long on examples, he falls far short from demonstrating that ‘all’ politicians are corrupt and should be ‘thrown out’. Schweizer makes a lot of allegations, but that’s all they are – allegations. He may show that certain investments by politicians appear suspicious, but he has no proof that there is fire where there is smoke. For instance, Schweizer hauls Spencer Bachus, Republican representative from Alabama, over the coals. He finds it highly dubious that on 19 September 2008, Bachus shorted the market through the purchase of options – that is, he bet on a stock market decline – the day after he and his fellow members of the House Financial Services Committee had listened to doomsday warnings from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and US treasury secretary Hank Paulsen. In the event, Bachus profited from his trade, gaining the not-so-enormous sum of $6,000. But is this a scandal? Who didn’t know on 19 September that the economy was going to hell in a handbasket? You didn’t need Bernanke and Paulsen to tell you that – Lehman Brothers had just gone under four days earlier. In another example, Schweizer writes about how Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry supposedly made money from investments in pharmaceuticals companies while a member of a Senate Committee working on healthcare reform in 2009. But the idea that Kerry is using Congress to get rich is risible: he entered the halls already loaded, as his wife is the heiress to the Heinz fortune (net worth estimated at $1 billion). Furthermore, at the time, it was unclear if healthcare reform would pass, given the opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. And, as it happens, the trading was done by Kerry’s family trust, over which he has no control. What really undermines Schweizer’s case is how he misleads the reader about the law. The subtitle of his book says that politicians engage in deals that ‘would send the rest of us to prison’. But that is simply not true. He also writes that ‘they have legislated themselves as untouchable as a political class’, but again, that’s false. Congressmen and senators have not created a special exemption for themselves, as Schweizer contends. Over the years, they have taken the line that the laws that apply to citizens generally should apply to elected politicians, too. The standard interpretation of insider-trading law in the US is very specific: it occurs when a fiduciary of a company trades that company’s shares based on confidential information. Neither politicians nor the general citizenry are business fiduciaries. It is one thing to argue for a new law to proscribe representatives’ financial dealings (a law that hasn’t existed since the Founding); but it is quite another to imply, as Schweizer does, that the politicians have done something sneaky to get around the existing law. For all Schweizer’s puffed-up outrage, there really isn’t anything to get all that excited about. He paints a picture of an incorrigible Congress unwilling to reform itself. But, as it happens, Congress has recently taken up the issue of representatives trading on non-public information, and President Obama announced his support for legislation in the State of the Union address last week. Indeed, as we went to press, the Senate voted to pass such a law, and the House will vote on it next week. But if, as it appears likely, a new law is passed, it will not be much of a big deal. We will still be left with major problems, like the economy and a lack of political vision, that have nothing to do politicians’ alleged insider dealings. Accusations like those tossed around by Schweizer may sound quite radical, but they really represent a degraded form of political discourse. Schweizer talks about a ‘Permanent Political Class’ (in upper case) which transcends party allegiances, but he essentially argues that American politics is comprised of a bunch of corrupt individuals. There are many things that you can criticise the political class in general for, but being crooked is not one that holds up. This kind of conspiratorial thinking – which ranges from publications like Rolling Stone on the left to writers like Schweizer on the right – is not only inaccurate and overblown; it also feeds cynicism and ultimately has a demobilising effect. Like Schweizer, Lessig also acknowledges that bribery is not that prevalent today, but other forms of corruption are extensive and should be addressed. But his specific concerns differ from Schweizer’s, and he is more analytical and less sensationalist than him. Lessig argues that corruption is endemic in American politics today, primarily due to campaign financing and corporate lobbying. Rather than straightforward bribes, Lessig sees a less direct process of back-scratching going on: for example, a corporation or wealthy individual might donate to a candidate and make no immediate demands, but later, as a dependence develops, they call in a favour. What evidence does Lessig present to demonstrate that political fundraising and lobbying are inherently corrupting? He contends that the corrupting influence of money can be directly observed in the working (or lack of working) of Congress. He argues that moneyed interests have distorted the priorities of Congress, leading representatives to dodge debates over issues like unemployment and global warming in favour of lobbyists’ favoured causes. Essentially, Lessig believes that if a political issue is not being addressed by Congress, then the reason must be that representatives are unduly influenced by corporate lobbyists or some other form of money distortion. He cannot countenance the possibility that certain politicians may not share the same set of priorities as Lessig himself, or might have an honest difference of opinion. Maybe unemployment doesn’t get discussed because both parties lack a vision about how to tackle it. Maybe global warming doesn’t get discussed because other issues are more pressing. But if a politician doesn’t agree with Lessig’s priorities, he concludes that they must have been bought off. He even uses the term ‘corruption deniers’, an analogy to so-called ‘global warming deniers’, to describe those who disagree with him. Take the example of post-crisis financial reform. Lessig is dismayed that little has been accomplished in this area, and blames the ongoing influence of Wall Street on politics. But there are other possible explanations. Perhaps certain politicians (from both of the main parties) are holding back on regulating the financial sphere further because they still view finance as an important source of profits (as they did before the meltdown), and are wary of unduly stifling the sector’s competitiveness. Or perhaps some are predisposed towards free markets in principle, and don’t believe that a lack of regulation caused the crisis. Or perhaps some believe regulation might negatively impact upon banks at a time when the financial sector and the economy generally is still on shaky grounds. You may not agree with all or any of these arguments, but it is definitely possible that politicians who espouse such views honestly believe them to be true. Yet in Lessig’s world, such arguments are at best smokescreens; the real reason opponents resist reform must be because they are in the pocket of Wall Street. Lessig also exaggerates the power of money to shape American politics. While campaign funds definitely can influence the result, they are far from the whole story. Spending money will not buy an election if the candidate is unpopular. Consider former eBay CEO Meg Whitman: she ran for governor of California in 2010 and outspent Jerry Brown by a factor of 10 to one, and yet Brown won handily. Likewise, a politician or idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by advertising money. Lessig himself is honest enough to admit that the academic research cannot establish that money buy politicians’ votes in Congress either. Moreover, Lessig’s focus on the role of money in the political process misses the bigger picture. What he doesn’t ask is: why do politicians need so much money? At most, he implies it is something of an arms-race. But in reality, politicians need to raise millions because they are undertaking top-down campaigns, with TV advertisements the prominent (and most costly) method of trying to engage with electorate. Most politicians today do not have organic ties with communities via a network of supporters. They are out of touch, and therefore have to try to relate to people by means of TV messages. Campaign funds are better understood as the cost American politicians have to pay in a situation where they do not have ties with people on the ground. More often than not, the remedies proposed to fight corruption in politics make the situation worse. This would definitely be the case if Lessig’s favoured solution came to fruition. Indeed, his suggestion is bizarre: he recommends that the government provide every individual with a $50 voucher to spend on candidates, and wants to hold a constitution convention (something that hasn’t happened since the American Revolution era) to bring his idea into reality. Of course, the chances of this happening are virtually nil. His proposal is deeply anti-democratic. Seeing politicians as thoroughly compromised, he says they must be excluded from the reform process. He calls for companies to fund his reform effort (including a shameless direct appeal to Google), and for ‘credible non-politicians’ such as ‘someone who has made her mark in business’ to run as candidates for office on an anti-corruption platform. Once elected, these candidates would ‘hold the government hostage’ (somehow) until it passed reforms. It is hard to believe, but Lessig betrays no sense of irony that his proposal relies on mobilising rich people against the existing political class. Polls show that the public’s trust in government is at an all-time low. Both Schweizer and Lessig mistakenly believe that the roots of that lack of trust lie in political corruption, and that their proposed remedies will eventually restore trust. Trust in politics and other institutions is an important one today, but Schweizer and Lessig are wrong to see the roots of that mistrust in corruption. Indeed, both exaggerate the extent of corruption in their eagerness to condemn the political class. Together they highlight the disappearance of the old left-right distinctions; their shared conspiratorial mindset has them on the same side of the fence. The lack of trust we see today is a broader problem tied to the lack of political vision and an inability to articulate values - problems that have worsened over time, and cannot be reversed overnight. In particular, trust cannot be re-established through transparency rules or passing laws against corruption. Indeed, the latest bill against political insider trading, backed by Obama, will only appear to give credence to those who say we should never trust politicians. The problems in American society are much larger than relatively minor issues of insider trading, campaign financing and lobbying. And the major challenges of our time – such as the economic crisis – cannot be explained by such issues. So don’t worry so much about individual politicians acting illegally and in secret; it’s the institutions operating legally and in plain sight that we should care about. Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation, here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12041/
Friday 3 February 2012 This week’s M23 derby between Crystal Palace and Brighton was predictably tempestuous. The game itself was scrappy and ill-tempered. On the pitch there were fouls, theatrical dives, bookings and a couple of contentious penalties. Off the field, the longstanding enmity between the two sets of fans was palpable. Brighton fans taunted the home supporters that Selhurst Park was a ‘shithole’ and that the residents of Croydon had ‘burned [their] own town’. The hosts retorted with: ‘We scored three, they scored one, Brighton take it up the bum’ – a reminder of Palace’s victory at Brighton’s new Amex Stadium in September. As banter goes it was the standard abusive fare you find at football matches. Was anyone offended? Most Palace supporters would probably concur that Selhurst Park has seen better days. I’m not sure whether many Brighton fans were outraged by the ‘take it up the bum’ chant, either. However, these days you can’t be sure. In October 2011, Brighton fans’ representatives called for tougher action against homophobic chants at Brighton matches. ‘We get it everywhere we go’, complained John Hewitt, who runs the Brighton supporters club. ‘There’s a certain amount of banter between fans, but when it crosses that line and becomes offensive it’s not acceptable. The FA is not doing enough.’ Invariably, the authorities have been quick to clamp down on anti-gay terrace taunts. In November, a Southampton fan was handed a three-year banning order for anti-gay abuse, while in December, a Barnsley fan was cautioned by police for a similar offence. I’m not condoning anti-gay chants – I think they’re pretty infantile – but what is striking is the increasing incidence of fans complaining about abusive chants. Terrace banter has always been irreverent, crude and occasionally downright tasteless. But football fans were usually thick-skinned enough to withstand a bit of name-calling. Today, that is no longer the case. Fans complaining about abusive behaviour is becoming the norm. Football rivalry, which has traditionally consisted of trading taunts and threats, now expresses itself in the form of victim oneupmanship. Taking offence is the new terrace banter. Take the Luis Suarez race row, for example. The Liverpool striker was banned for eight games for making comments regarded as offensive to Manchester United’s Patrice Evra. Leaving aside the vexed question of on-field racist abuse, the Suarez case has sparked an orgy of gratuitous victim-mongery. Not only was Kenny Dalglish lambasted for backing his player, but any Liverpool fans who chanted Suarez’s name were branded racist, as were fans who booed Evra in last week’s FA Cup clash between the two teams. On Twitter, Liverpool’s stadium has been branded ‘Klanfield’ by those who interpret the defence of Suarez as de facto racism. Individual Liverpool fans – including one who racially abused a black Oldham player and the fan caught on camera apparently making a monkey gesture at Evra – are not seen as lone idiots but symptomatic of a deeper racist sentiment. Liverpool fans themselves are equally culpable of playing the victim card – some might argue they practically perfected the art form. After last week’s FA Cup fourth round tie, the Liverpool message boards were frothing with indignation at reports that some Manchester United fans had spat on the Hillsborough memorial. By the same token, United supporters have complained about rival fans – particularly supporters of Liverpool, Manchester City and Leeds United – mocking the Munich air crash. In turn, Leeds fans themselves complain about United fans celebrating the murder of two of their supporters in Turkey. And so it goes on. Recrimination, complaints and finger-pointing are now the norm. I wonder how many of the complainants are really as disgusted as they claim? How many are taking offence ‘on behalf of’ others? It’s symptomatic of a wider cultural tendency, which assumes that humans are fragile souls who need to be protected against name-calling. As I’ve argued before on spiked, deciding where banter ends and unacceptable abuse begins is inherently difficult. Who decides what is and isn’t hurtful or tasteless? These are fairly subjective and elastic concepts. In Scotland, a new law criminalising sectarian chanting was passed in December 2011. In his oral evidence to Holyrood’s Justice Committee, Mark Dingwall of the Rangers Supporters Trust warned that fans would ‘escalate the offensiveness’ by lodging complaints about all forms of insults. ‘What our fans and organisations have started to say is if we have to clean up our act, everyone else has to do the same’, said Dingwall. ‘So, therefore, everything that is offensive, by any football club, whether it’s under regional rivalry, or under sectarian rivalry, or whether it’s just winding up the opposition, then it’s all fair game because if it’s going to happen to us it’s got to happen to everybody.’ Dingwall’s intention might be to undermine the legislation, but it could just as easily help to legitimise the ‘thou shalt not offend’ culture. It’s a shame that football fans have swapped trading insults for trading complaints. A football stadium was, traditionally, an arena in which social norms were relaxed; a place where adults could drink, swear and generally let off steam for 90 minutes. Now we have to permanently mind our language in case someone in the row behind us complains. It’s the over-zealous health-and-safety culture of the spoken word: ‘You can’t say that, someone might get hurt.’ I think fans need to call a halt to complaining and rediscover the old-fashioned art of taking it on the chin. If we don’t, we’re on the slippery slope to becoming a nation of police informers. Duleep Allirajah is spiked’s sports columnist. Follow him on Twitter @DuleepOffside reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12044/
Friday 3 February 2012 There are things, dear reader, that I never thought I would see come to pass. Aurora Borealis twinkling above me in the Arctic stillness of Norwegian night; a tube train rolling into West Croydon station; the inner workings of newly pregnant friends’ uteruses via Facebook; Sir Paul McCartney releasing a concept album about rimming (the forthcoming Kisses on the Bottom). Some of these things I anticipated; others came as a bolt out of the blue, so to speak. On this scale, I am not certain how to respond to the current adaptation of Birdsong that is gracing our screens. It has been 13 years since the rights to Sebastian Faulks’ 1993 mini epic of war, peace and mud were secured, and the project has been slower to advance than the form of trench warfare it depicts. Indeed, perhaps in homage to twentieth-century military tactics, original objectives have been revised and achievements overlooked. Birdsong staggers on to the small screen just as West End smash-hit play War Horse gallops into cinemas, with a similar animal-themed take on the futile bloodshed of the Great War. Reviews have been mixed, which is a shame since there’s very little overtly wrong with the production. Brave steps have been taken to cut out huge chunks of the book (including the more contemporary storyline of the hero’s granddaughter uncovering her family history). The casting (including rising star Eddie Redmayne and delightfully named French actress Clémence Poésy) are pretty faithful to the characters. An excellent effort has been made to translate Faulks’ unusually effective lyrical prose to a different medium. Yet the sense of bad timing is inescapable. Birdsong, when originally released, tapped into a very particular fin de siècle mood. Its bloody and claustrophobic depiction of twentieth-century warfare and halcyon Anglo-French relations brutally interrupted by imperial national conflict was very much in the spirit of post-Cold War, pro-European optimism. Certainly, the upsurge in interest in tracing family history (neatly captured by the sub-plot jettisoned here) alongside the accompanying rebranding of Remembrance Sunday and the poppy into a pre-Diana symbol of public emotionalism find its early expression in the success of the book. It is fitting that it is the ubiquitous scriptwriter Abi Morgan who has finally brought the novel to the screen, at the same time as her controversial Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and her sex addiction drama Shame are in the cinema. These follow hot on the heels of 2011’s headline TV series The Hour, created by Morgan. All, in their own fashion, have felt deeply unsatisfactory in their attempts to reconcile contemporary liberal mores around feminism and identity with the distant or near past. Here, you suspect any failing in Morgan’s outlook has been exposed by the limitations of the subject matter. Nonetheless, Birdsong remains a fine example of a novel while this adaptation, however, is likely to be swiftly forgotten. On the subject of long-anticipated events, the hunt for Britain’s gay footballers remains a firm obsession. In a very modern twist, the desperation to uncover what young men are getting up to and feeling up in their private lives has a very different tenor to the homophobic prurience of the past. Come out, come out wherever you are, gay footballers, is the message, because Britain just wants to give you a big hug. The latest in a seemingly neverending series of investigations into the topic, BBC3’s Britain’s Gay Footballers, at least had an intriguing twist to it. The tragic case of Justin Fashanu - who to date is the only footballer who has dared to come out while a professional, and who committed suicide after his career fizzled out - is taken as a terrible warning to those who think of following in his footsteps. Here his niece and aspiring model, Amal, sought to expose the homophobic culture in football which brought this tragic event about. Despite the now familiar irritating trappings of a BBC3 documentary (pretty celebrity goes on journey, cries about injustice, asks heavily loaded questions to peers and assorted talking heads, demands something fatuous and attention-raising be done), this was actually a surprisingly sensitive look at the problems that emerge when attempting to police people’s private lives. Amal visited a real-life football match to see the homophobic chanting of Leeds fans at Brighton fans (‘We can see you holding hands’) only to see it met with a surprising degree of witty banter. She confronted some of her uncle’s team-mates over their perceived bullying, only to discover that he was treated with a surprising degree of tolerance given the context of professional sportsmen. Even in a tense showdown with her father, the eccentric John ‘Fash the Bash’, over his notorious lack of support for his brother, we saw a portrait of tense sibling relations laced with a very familial sense of anger and regret. Whatever the problems gay footballers may face, Britain’s Gay Footballers was a reminder that there are many things which can’t, and shouldn’t, be legislated against. It was painful and borderline voyeuristic stuff – Amal listening to an audio version of her uncle’s suicide note, written after being accused of sexual assault - but given the realities of the sad fate of Justin, it felt at least like the final word on a fraught subject that is too often reduced to a simplistic modern morality tale. The sense you were left with, as with many long-awaited events, is that when a professional footballer finally chooses to come out, it will make very little difference – either to the acceptance of gay people in society more broadly, or to the obsession with regulating and policing football fans for offending against contemporary morality. David Bowden is spiked’s TV columnist. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12043/
Friday 3 February 2012 Bombay Beach is a small, barely populated desert town in rural California. It is situated on the edge of a former dust bowl that was flooded by the Colorado river in 1905, transforming it into the Salton Sea. By the 1950s, a number of high-profile yacht clubs had appeared around its coastline and innumerable developers bought up land in the hope of building a holiday resort. Unfortunately, the project was quickly discarded and Bombay Beach became a ghost town, littered with derelict houses and dead, rotting fish, washed up on the shores of the now heavily polluted water. Today, it is a tourist destination only for a handful of hipster photographers hoping to take vaguely poignant-looking pictures of the decaying, sun-baked town. It is with a similar romantic eye that Alma Har’el sets about exploring this battered little hamlet in her debut documentary, Bombay Beach. The documentary opens with an old promotional film, urging investors to throw their money behind the Salton resort. But as two smiling holidaymakers walk joyfully into the California sunset, the celluloid runs off the reel and we are faced with the current state of the town. We are introduced to three of Bombay Beach’s residents, each with a necessarily heartbreaking backstory. There is Red, an aged cowboy who hasn’t seen his children in half a century; Cee-Jay, a black teen from the inner-city who moved to Bombay Beach to escape gang violence; and Benny, a troubled child of convicted felons who suffers from an array of behavioural disorders. Combined with Har’el’s highly stylised images, these three narratives unfurl in a way that feels oddly contrived. The residents of Bombay Beach go about their day as if the camera wasn’t there, yet many scenes feel almost too candid. We see Cee-Jay’s friends trading sordid stories about losing their virginities, and Red’s ne’er-do-well neighbours shamelessly sponging off him. Considering that all the time Har’el is standing behind the camera, it makes one start to question the film’s legitimacy as a documentary. Throughout the film there is a continual sense that Har’el’s subjects are acting like themselves rather than being themselves. Even more mystifying is the inclusion of several staged dance routines and visual montages which augment the narrative. Yet while the amount of artistic license taken by Har’el is a little troubling at first, it is central to Bombay Beach’s charm. Of course, fictive elements have been employed by documentary filmmakers since the very beginning of the genre. In the 1922 silent classic, Nanook of the North, which followed the lives of an Inuit family, Robert Flaherty purposefully directed his subjects and staged many of the scenes. While this undoubtedly compromised its factual integrity, the film remains a poetic and enjoyable depiction of a fast-disappearing culture. Like Flaherty, Har’el embraces the artificial in order to forge a compelling narrative, which comes to us from reality but is unrestrained by the need for objectivity. More than anything else, Har’el seems intent on expressing the strange beauty that she herself sees in the town, and she does so rather well. Red narrates much of the film with his homespun truisms about love, life and family and, in tandem with the desolate imagery, it is ghostly and evocative. In many ways, there’s very little substance here. At times, the stylistic gloss Har’el lays over the film can feel painfully superficial, and some of the dance routines seem to be nothing more than artsy visual non sequiturs thrown in for good measure. However, Bombay Beach remains an oddly stirring film and a veritable feast for the eyes. Last month, when the UK Mirror blasted David Attenborough’s BBC documentary, Frozen Planet, for its use of stock footage, the reaction from the public was not one of horror but nonchalance, and a slight fear that, due to this accusation, Attenborough’s lush visuals and soothing voice might be taken away from them. So it seems, we enjoy documentaries for the aesthetic pleasures they provide as well as their factual content. Bombay Beach is a film that capitalises on this to incredible effect. Tom Slater is spiked’s film reviewer. Visit his blog here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12042/
Thursday 2 February 2012 The mad pursuit of Fred Goodwin and his ill-gotten knighthood confirms that bankers are the new paedophiles. Bank bosses are to posh commentators what paedos were to hacks at the News of the World - wicked creatures one can rail against in order to feel puffed-up and Good. Yes, the broadsheet bruisers and opportunistic politicians calling for Fred the Shred’s scalp might not use foul phrases like ‘kiddie fiddler’ and they might pepper their output with serious-looking graphs and pie charts, but don’t be fooled - behind the erudite veneer there lurks the old tabloid desire to project society’s sins on to one moral misfit and cast him out of decent society. You don’t have to be a fan of Goodwin’s or a denier of the fact that he and other bankers played a role in bringing about the recession (I am neither of those things) to see that the moral crusade against him has become positively medieval. The similarity between the campaign to strip Goodwin of his knighthood and old tabloid efforts to expose and harry alleged paedos is striking. Indeed, in 2009 the Sun ran a double-page feature headlined ‘WE HUNT DOWN FRED’, announcing that it had handed the former RBS boss a petition calling on him to forego his generous pension. A few weeks later the windows of Goodwin’s home in Edinburgh were smashed in by so-called anti-capitalists who demanded that ‘bank bosses should be jailed’. Later that year, taking the medieval vibe to dizzy new heights, Goodwin’s head was put on a spike on London Bridge. Don’t worry, it wasn’t the real thing! It was just a work of art funded by the EU to raise awareness about the wickedness of bankers. Of course, the difference between the old tabloid wars against paedos and the current moralistic hounding of bankers is that the latter has been sanctioned by the influential chattering classes, giving it a reach and clout the News of the World‘s crusade against paedos never achieved. Indeed, it was fitting that Goodwin’s head metaphorically ended up on a spike, given that serious commentators had been hinting, with barely disguised bloodlust, that just such an outcome would be desirable. ‘In Tudor times, Fred Goodwin’s head would have been chopped off, parboiled and placed on a spike’, said historian David Starkey. Oh, let’s not be so backward, said Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley, writing in 2009: ‘Assuming it is out of the question to hang, draw and quarter Goodwin, pluck out his intestines while they are still warm and wriggling, stuff them into his greedy mouth and then display his severed head on a spike at the Tower of London, could we settle for shooting him instead?’ Nice. Even the News of the World never went so far as to fantasise graphically about how to kill paedos. Now, Goodwin hasn’t quite been shot; his real head hasn’t taken the place of that fake EU-funded head on any of London’s bridges. But he has had his knighthood taken away, an act gleefully described by one broadsheet paper, on its front page, in huge lettering, as ‘The final humiliation’. For all the high-faluting talk of the banker-bashers, for all their pretence of liberal concern in the face of out-of-control banker greed, the desire to humiliate Goodwin is every bit as narrowly moralistic, demented and self-serving as the older, less classy campaign against kiddie fiddlers. Both are pretty profound instances of scapegoating, in the literal meaning of that word - where an irrational community projects its sins on to a goat (or in our times a pervert or a banker) and then casts it out to wander through deserts, imagining that this puts the sins to bed and resolves all problems. One academic study describes scapegoating as ‘the ancient process of the transfer and disposal of evil’, which is an apt description of the bonkers belief that ‘HUNTING DOWN’ Goodwin, smashing his windows and de-Sirring him has helped to ‘put right a manifest wrong’, demonstrating to all the ‘dishonour of being selfishly greedy’. But if there is one thing worse than this widespread adolescent notion that the current economic downturn was brought about by a handful of immoral bankers who must now be shamed, it is the idea that the removal of Goodwin’s knighthood was an act of ‘populism’ designed to appease ‘the mob’. Some in the media are made uncomfortable by this latest instance of Fred-bashing because it has ‘a whiff of mob rule’; it is a case of the political class giving in to ‘a mob baying for vengeance’. Mob? What mob? There were no mass public protests calling for Goodwin to be unknighted. There was no torch-wielding gathering at his home demanding his head/knighthood on a spike. It isn’t mob rule but rather self-induced hysteria amongst the elite that has motored banker-bashing. It is not on for shocked editorialists to point the finger of blame at ‘the mob’ for a climate of hysteria that was actually whipped up by tiny cliques of opportunistic politicians and media men desperate to blame the recession on one man and his massive moral failings. It was top politicians who spearheaded the campaign against Fred Goodwin, with PM David Cameron even hinting at one stage that some bankers might be ‘sent to prison’. It was politicians who opportunistically made ‘bonus culture’ into the greatest evil of our times, as if the recession were a product of high wages for handfuls of bosses rather than of the serious structural disarray in modern capitalism. It was BBC reporters who told us that bankers’ greed ‘brought the economy to its knees and [caused] misery to millions’. It was some obscure committee which recommended removing Goodwin’s knighthood, it was the EU which gave the green light to putting a version of his head on a spike on a bridge, and it was well-to-do commentators who wondered out loud how best to bump him off. This isn’t ‘mob rule’ - it’s more like a cliquish epileptic fit, the spread of a sort of malarial moral fever amongst the chattering classes. And it isn’t hard to work out why politicians and Brussels bureaucrats are quite happy for bankers to be turned into modern-day paedos we can all chuck stones at (literally) and decapitate (metaphorically) - it’s because they hope that this orgy of banker-bashing will distract attention from the role played by them and their states in encouraging the growth of a flimsy, now-imploding credit-fuelled economy over the past two decades. What is more difficult to work out is why so-called radicals and anti-capitalists are so willing to aid and abet the state in its cynical creation of a scapegoat for modern capitalism, dutifully hurling insults at the likes of Fred Goodwin whenever the Sun or Ed Miliband tell them to. There’s no need to feel sorry for Fred the Shred. I’m sure life won’t be too hard for him, even if maitre d’s will now have to call him Mr Goodwin rather than Sir Fred. But we should feel bad, and also pretty shocked, about the fact that we live in a society where the intellectual classes are happier to invent and demolish ‘evil’ than they are to get to grips with serious economic, political and moral questions. As with the old tabloid war against paedos, the modern crusade against bankers reveals far more about a lack within the crusaders themselves than it does about the problems facing our society. Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12037/
Thursday 2 February 2012 For all his offbeat manner, London mayor Boris Johnson is in fact a conformist carbonista. Like the Lib-Con coalition government, the mayor and his Greater London Authority (GLA) want to cut carbon-dioxide emissions at the expense of assuring a reliable, cheap supply of energy for London’s growing needs. On energy, Johnson is as dottily green as Ken Livingstone, his Labour predecessor. On 23 January, one of the main sources of fuel in London and the South East, Coryton oil refinery in Essex, closed because its Swiss owner, Petroplus, had hit financial trouble (eventually, the company went into administration). As fears grew of a shortage of petrol and diesel on London’s forecourts, it should have been obvious that maintaining a decent supply of energy for the nation’s capital is an important issue. But, instead, the GLA website lists ‘environment’ as one of its formal priorities. ‘Energy’ is not on the list. It’s a habit with Boris. His July 2011 London Plan similarly has a chapter titled ‘London’s response to climate change’, but none on energy. To track down a comprehensive statement by Johnson on fuel and power, you have to go back to 2010, when the GLA published two major consultation documents titled Delivering London’s Energy Future. Yet these, too, are mostly about carbon and how to cut it, and hardly at all about energy and how to make more of it. With an enthusiastic foreword by Johnson, the February 2010 version of Delivering London’s Energy Future brazenly lifts much of its narrative and data from a report by the audit firm, Ernst & Young (1). It mentions ‘sustainability’ 70 times, and ‘low carbon’, ‘zero carbon’ and ‘zero emission’ even more. Over 20 charts, it counts the sources of CO2 in London and details how different measures might help cut emissions. Containing, by contrast, just a handful of charts on energy, the 185-page document represents a conscious decision not to plan for a full supply of electricity and gas, but instead to audit CO2 and set reduction targets. Johnson has held this line since his election in 2008. In housing, for instance, the mayor’s mix of green un-realpolitik and Stalin-style targets means that GLA policy conforms to the approach of former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott, whose Code for Sustainable Homes set a target for obliterating CO2-emissions from all English homes by 2016. According to the mayor’s London Plan, the 2012 Olympic Games should have an ‘exemplary’ legacy of energy conservation. In fact, conserving rather than producing energy is as much Johnson’s fetish as it is Livingstone’s. During his mayoral election campaign, Livingstone poured scorn on the notion of Britain developing new supplies of nuclear and wind power, moaning instead that ‘something like a third of all the energy we consume [in London] continues to be simply wasted’. Of course, London gets its electricity, like its oil and gas, from national and international networks. As a result, fresh investment and innovation in energy should happen both inside and outside of the capital. But wherever new energy developments should take place, we don’t hear much from Johnson about mainstream power generation or the supply of fuels. In London as elsewhere, transport, homes and workplaces need continuous, uninterrupted, cheap energy. The mayor’s job is to help develop the kind of culture, expertise and funding that can assure the fulfillment of that need. With Battersea Power Station decommissioned for nearly 30 years, we might want to see more electricity produced in London than is currently put out by the Barking and Enfield power stations. Their total electric output is just 1,400 megawatts (MW). And yet we hear nothing about this. Neither Johnson nor Livingstone shows any sign of entering London’s May 2012 mayoral elections with energy in mind. Johnson’s commitment to lowering CO2 in London, and his insouciance about an adequate energy supply, are pure Livingstone. For his part, Livingstone quarrels with Johnson only because he has ‘quietly cut mayoral targets for cutting carbon emissions’ (2). Demand for energy in London will rise, not fallJohnson’s administration doesn’t just have the wrong priorities. In surreptitious style, it has also revised one unlikely target – to reduce the capital’s demand for energy – and made it still more unlikely. National energy demand over a year is often measured in terawatt-hours of energy (TWh). Just one TWh is worth a billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) - and that’s quite a lot. Over a recent winter in London, for instance, I bought just 10,000kWh of gas central heating, and a mere 2000kWh of electricity. Just one TWh is 100,000 times my main heating bill. These kinds of basics are all fairly simple, yet the GLA can’t even get the terminology right: confidence in the GLA’s projections of energy demand is not inspired by its references to ‘Terra Watt hours’, and also to ‘Trillion watt-hours’. And soon things get worse. Written for consultation with the London Assembly and ‘functional bodies’, the February 2010 Delivering London’s Energy Future opined that, over the year 2025, a quarter of London’s total energy demand, sans transport, would ‘amount to around’ 29TWh. But an October 2010 variant of this document, written for consultation with the general public, magically turned that 29 into just 23. That’s a lot of energy to go missing in eight months. This amounted to a projection of 92TWh for London’s total non-transport demand for energy over the year 2025. It compared with a DECC figure of 117TWh for final non-transport energy consumption in London in 2008. The GLA believed, then, that London could, in just 17 years, lower its demand for ‘stationary’ energy by a whopping 27 per cent. How very convenient, how easily done were these revisions! In its latest forecasts, the GLA has raised its figure for non-transport demand to nearly 110TWh for 2031 – though this is still a significant drop on 117 for 2008. But leaving aside the GLA’s continual retouching of its targets, its halcyon vision of a low-energy future for London will never arrive. How could energy savings be achieved? Given that London has only a modest industrial base, further de-industrialisation in the city is not going to bring big savings in energy. On the other hand, London’s service sector is unlikely to lower demand much more than it has already: all the way from 1970 to 2003, the UK service sector’s demand for energy was low and stayed low. Then, despite poor prospects for the UK economy, London’s GDP, which is the largest among European cities, is likely to grow a fair bit between now and 2025, even if it dips a bit in the next year or two. Last, the number of households in the capital is predicted to rise by 15.5 per cent between 2006 and 2026. In other words, there are plenty of upward pressures on energy demand. Now London’s homes use, in aggregate, more energy than its workplaces, which is the inverse of the picture for the UK as a whole. After all, the city has a relatively slender industrial base and a relatively high population density. Therefore, a rise in population for London will certainly increase demand for energy – not least because the capital had, in 2009, the lowest proportion of cavity wall insulation and loft insulation in England. Of course, the predicted 15.5 per cent rise in London’s population between 2006 and 2026 may not transpire, despite the fake precision of that decimal place. Yet there is something else to consider here. New homes in London will be less draughty and more energy efficient than its current housing stock. But the fact is that very few new houses are being built in London. We can be pretty sure, then, that right up until 2025, more and more people will cram into the capital’s tight, aging residential property and make a full and perfectly proper demand for heat and electricity. So will London be able to keep everyone warm and supplied with uninterrupted power? The issue is an immediate one, because energy capacity takes time to build. It is well known that Britain needs to invest in its electricity grid, close its old nuclear plants and close those of its coal and gas plants that don’t meet EU norms. For the GLA, these factors mean that the risk of a national energy gap emerging by 2020 remains high. The GLA notes that London’s share of the electricity demand not met by UK national supply could be about 0.576TWh – a modest, though appreciable, shortage of power. Still, the GLA reassures us that Boris Johnson’s trendily named RE:NEW programme, which promises to insulate 1.2million London homes by 2015 and every dwelling in the capital by 2030, will cut national electricity demand by 0.756TWh, so ‘plugging London’s potential energy gap and around 10 per cent of the national energy gap’. This is silly. Insulating London’s homes won’t plug electricity demand, which is what the GLA boasts about. Sillier still, the GLA estimates that, by 2015-16, Britain’s national energy gap could run to 43TWh. So even if RE:NEW achieves its saving of 0.756TWh, that is 1.34 per cent, not 10 per cent, of the national energy gap. Johnson’s energy arithmetic is riddled with errors. That does not augur well for keeping the lights on. In his belief that reducing the draughts in London’s homes will reduce the nation’s energy shortage by a tenth, Johnson doesn’t just repeat the petit-bourgeois prejudices of Margaret Thatcher, who was always obsessed with residential property. He also repeats Ken Livingstone’s delusions of metropolitan grandeur. In the 1980s, ‘Red Ken’ pompously declared London a nuclear-free zone. Now Johnson declares that cutbacks in the use of energy in London can help compensate for the collapse of UK nuclear power. The free-trade enthusiast who supports autarchy in energy supplyJohnson always presents himself as a breezy cosmopolitan. As a professed devotee of free-market capitalism, he is always out to promote the cosmopolitan merits of a new airport for London, and of foreigners investing in the City of London. Yet his vision for energy in 2025 prioritises autarchy in energy supply. By 2025, the GLA proclaims, London ‘will become its own powerhouse’, and meet more than a quarter of its demand for energy ‘from low- or zero-carbon local sources’. Given the GLA’s utopian hopes for lowering London’s future energy demand, how realistic is its hope to meet that demand from local sources? For well over a century, large pieces of civil engineering have made and brought heat and power to Britain and to London. Indeed, London has always imported most of its energy as coal, gas, oil and electricity. There is nothing strange about this. As the Digest of UK Energy Statistics notes, ‘the UK has traded fuels such as oil and gas regardless of whether it has been a net exporter or importer. In 2010 the UK imported more coal, crude oil, electricity and gas than it exported; however, the UK remained a net exporter of petroleum products.’ Shamelessly, however, the GLA raises the alarm, not about the reliability of energy supply in the sense of sufficiency, but rather about security of energy supply in the sense of geopolitics. ‘An ever-increasing number of experts’, it reports excitedly (though it does not say who these experts are) ‘are pointing to the threat of peak oil; the notion that we have reached, or will soon be reaching, the maximum rate of global oil production, to be followed by a sustained decline in future production’. As a result, ‘investing in domestic low-carbon energy solutions would therefore help to protect London’s businesses and residents from being held hostage to soaring global energy prices’. In both the UK and the US, fears of being ‘held hostage’ to overseas sources of oil have a long history (3). But for Johnson, oil and gas security are held up as a call not just for energy conservation, but also for a renewables-based energy supply that is local to London. What is forgotten is that innovation can create new, powerful, reliable and cheap sources of energy supply outside London – through a tidal barrage on the Severn Estuary, for example. Meanwhile, new oil has been found off Brazil, Africa and India; in America, the discovery of shale gas has brought gas prices down to their lowest levels in 15 years. The planet now has a world market for natural gas – something that benefited Japan after Fukushima. Globalisation cannot be wished away. So exactly why should London generate its own energy? In energy, dependency on international sources is a fact of life. London should build ‘its own’ energy supply only with the techniques, at the scales and with the costs that make sense. The GLA wants less dependency on outside energy. But it also wants London, by 2025, to have ‘the lowest carbon footprint per person of any big city in the world’, to have a lower citywide footprint, and to have neighbourhoods cut their ‘wider carbon footprint’. From one side and the other, Johnson offers the supremely generous vision of environmentalism: the city as vulnerable-but-greedy parasite on outside energy resources, and also, the city as an energy-consuming organ of pollution. Again, this is pure Ken Livingstone. Low technological ambitionsIn energy, Boris Johnson’s technological plans are modest. First, the homes programme RE:NEW is about retro-fitting, not energy innovation. It begins with a 90-minute energy survey from an advisor on how to save up to £154 a year on energy and water. The measures proposed? Using low-energy light bulbs, installing stand-by switches, insulating hot-water tanks and draught-proofing. Above all, the suggested measures about ‘how changes to your behaviour can help you stop wasting energy’. Not much technology here, then. Second, the insulation of homes and other buildings is a low-wage, but highly labour-intensive affair. Cribbing from Ernst & Young, the GLA says that investment in residential energy measures by 2025 will be less than £266million, but that it will generate more than 8,000 jobs a year. This amounts to an investment of just £2,000 per job. There’s nothing capital-intensive or technological about that. Third, when the GLA does choose to discuss energy supply, it favours above all what it calls ‘decentralised’ sources: primarily combined heat and power (CHP) systems. There are 197 mentions of the word ‘decentralised’ in the October 2010 Delivering document. What is really meant is ‘tiny’. Over 15 years, Johnson has said he will put between £5 billion and £7 billion into making sure that 25 per cent of the capital’s energy, by 2025, comes from decentralised sources. That’s less than £500million of investment a year – hardly enough to build up to a quarter of the capital’s energy supply. With which technologies will Johnson go scavenging for heat? Take the ‘Ambitious action’ and ‘Coordinated action’ scenarios. These are by far the most optimistic scenarios that GLA energy modelers have put forward – not for the Boris target year of 2025, but for 2031. In these cases, the main contributions are made by waste heat from power stations outside greater London (17.72TWh per year under the ambitious actions), by combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants fired by natural gas and rated between 50 and 100MW (16.95TWh under the coordinated actions), and by CHP plants burning biomass (5.2TWh). These are the largest quantities of decentralised heat-from-power projected by the GLA. Beside them, the ‘ambitious’ yearly outputs for 2031 from renewable energy sources in the shape of solar panels and air-source heat pumps are not ambitious at all: 4TWh and 2.8TWh, respectively. What is striking is how small, unlikely and low-tech all the options are. While a citywide heat network might make sense, the contribution from renewables will be negligible, even after the elapse of 20 years. Meanwhile, we can be sure that Johnson will not be campaigning for a new nuclear-power plant outside London, let alone inside it. Nor will the GLA bother much with a serious investment in CCGT plants. Instead, it prefers to model futures in which new-build CCGT plants are limited, in their capacity, to 500MW. Path-breaking stuff! Pie-in-the-sky plans for homes and electric vehiclesIn terms of energy output, technology and scale, the mayor lacks inspiring goals. But in terms of overall targets, the Boorish Johnson line in hyperbole must rule – especially around housing and electric vehicles. Given that gas-fired central heating generates CO2, officialdom’s obsession with carbon dictates a truly Sisyphean labour to insulate London’s homes. The labour will be endless, for London’s homes are not the worst insulated in the UK for nothing. On top of this, the GLA itself admits that:
Despite all this, London is saddled with no fewer than 30 home-insulation schemes. The idea that the city will insulate 1.2million homes by 2015 and all dwellings by 2030 is just fanciful. It would be easier to build new, intrinsically well-insulated homes rather than trying to push to the limit the policy of ‘make do and mend’. What about electric vehicles, then? In 2012, all new buses entering service will be ‘hybrid or better’. This goal is achievable. But elsewhere we understand that, by 2025, London will not only become ‘the electric-vehicle capital of Europe’ (though apparently it is that already), but will also have achieved something else altogether: it will have ‘left behind its reliance on polluting fossil fuels’. In practice, this quite ludicrous goal simply means 1,000 vehicles joining the GLA fleet by 2015 and, by 2020, new charging infrastructure being rolled out to support the introduction of 100,000 electric vehicles on London’s streets. It is added, too, that uptake of electric vehicles in London ‘is a mayoral priority’. Yet the mayor’s figures, which compare with three million cars in London at present, are pie-in-the-sky. In 2010, there were just 1,700 electric vehicles in London, and about 250 charge points. As the GLA admitted, although running costs are much less than those of conventional vehicles, hybrid, electric and hydrogen fuelled vehicles have ‘a significant upfront price premium’ over the internal-combustion engine. Electric vehicles are commendable but need immense technological development if they are to succeed. A sense of the related commercial barriers is given by the fact that, although the coalition has put aside £400million to subsidise consumer purchases of electric cars, as well as a network of charging points, just 2,500 electric cars had been bought in Britain by July 2011. And will their electricity really be the low-carbon sort? ConclusionThe nation’s capital consumes enormous quantities of gas to keep warm (especially to warm homes), electricity to power equipment (especially in industrial and commercial applications), and petrol to keep moving. But BoJo’s humbug about energy in London is also enormous. In place of genuine innovation and investment in energy supply, we find that worldwide fad, ‘showcase eco-projects’. So we’re supposed to look in wonder at charging points for electric vehicles – tall, black posts, their tops gleaming a lovely blue glow at night - but with no electric vehicles in sight. Or we’re meant, with Boris, to believe that decking out Tower Bridge with energy-efficient LED lighting will, in a serious way, ‘benefit London for decades’. London makes more than 40 per cent of the UK’s general patent applications and is relatively strong in university-based scientific research. In energy, London is HQ to the energy regulator Ofgem, engineering institutions such as the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the largest professional engineering body in Europe, with 125,000 members), energy consultants such as Arup and Wood Mackenzie, and energy utilities such as Centrica. Yet there is little public debate about London’s energy. Instead, Johnston continues with Livingstone’s old dogma that action around CO2 emissions is logically prior to action around energy supply. The problem for Johnson is that, unlike the process of financialisation, the machine production of energy has a clear material aspect to it. It is true that energy futures are traded in the City, and that energy utilities quoted on the London Stock Exchange concern themselves more with prices, business models and billing regimes than they do with keeping the lights on (4). Yet there is nothing ephemeral or fictitious about energy in the real world. One either has it, or one does not. No matter how many pounds Sterling or tonnes of CO2 are crunched, there is no way that Johnson will countenance a future of higher demand for energy in London. This is a worry. Given London’s enormous energy needs, one does not need recession, riot or war to make the machine production of energy inadequate. Just stupid policies can do that. So will there be enough energy to keep buildings heated, lights bright and internal-combustion engines working? Or will the computer screens through which the City makes a living simply flicker and die one day? There is no need to be alarmist. But a sufficiency of energy supply might properly be thought to be one of most immediate issues facing the metropolis. Johnson intends to lower CO2 emissions partly by ‘reducing energy demand on a sector-by-sector basis’, partly by decarbonising the supply of energy to London, and partly by shifting London motorists over to electric cars. Aping Ernst & Young, Johnson intends a key role for energy-efficiency measures in London’s existing residential sector, whether the measures are ‘basic’ (cavity wall insulation and draught-proofing) or ‘extra’ (efficient boilers and solid wall insulation). Indeed, ‘the long-term solution to fuel poverty is through improving the energy efficiency of London’s housing stock’. However, the equally ‘long-term’ prospect of electric cars is also the subject of appreciable Boris investment. Over the period 2011-2025, the GLA’s projected annual investments of £848million in climate-change mitigation are supposed to include £198million for residential efficiency measures, £68million for the microgeneration of energy from London’s homes, and no less than £284million on electric vehicles. In energy, Johnson knows and cares only enough about innovation to back the no-tech sort (labour-intensive home insulation) or the not-yet-tech variety (affordable electric cars). Offering a fraudulent amalgam of utopianism, autarchy and low ambitions, Johnson prefers, like Livingstone, to change not technique or economy, but Londoners’ conduct. They must, the GLA says, make ‘sustainable procurement, transport and consumption decisions’. In the home, many of their future savings in energy ‘will be enabled by smart metering and instant feedback on energy consumption’, but will, we are admonished, ‘also require a behavioural response’. In the workplace, Londoners can expect to receive ‘employee energy efficiency behaviour change advice’. On the road, there will be a push to improve driving technique on public transport vehicles, and to acquaint the general public with ‘eco-driving’ styles and environmentally conscious vehicle maintenance. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police has begun to test a system that ‘monitors individual driving styles, behaviours, vehicle performances and use. To further encourage this, Transport for London and GLA group employees who drive for work will undergo eco-driver training to both reduce emissions and develop safer driving behaviour… Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle drivers will also be eligible for this training.’ All the bluster for which Boris Johnson is famous cannot disguise the continuity that lies between his policy on energy (or, more properly, CO2) and that of Ken Livingstone. Over energy, as over other issues, the oh-so-gladiatorial contest between Boris and Ken amounts to a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. James Woudhuysen is editor of Big Potatoes: the London Manifesto for Innovation. The above is based on ‘Energy’, Chapter 11 of London After the Recession - a fictitious capital?, G Poynter, A Calcutt and I MacRury (eds), to be published by Ashgate in Spring 2012. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12038/
Thursday 2 February 2012 In December, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) and the leading mental-health charity MIND released some guidelines for employers to understand how to manage and deal with mental illness at work. The guidelines were brought out on the back of a survey that interviewed 2,000 people in employment in the UK. More than a quarter of respondents said that they had experienced some form of mental illness and that very few employers encouraged their employees to talk about mental illness. I was intrigued. I have been in personnel management for more than 20 years and I can honestly say that I have very rarely come across anyone who was mentally ill. Coming from a nursing background, I would expect to be able to detect any signs of mental illness among my staff. So what is going on? On reading the guidelines, one thing became clear to me: the definition of mental illness is very broad. It is so broad, in fact, that I am not sure why we are not all deemed to be mentally ill. Whether it is constantly feeling anxious about meeting a deadline, being depressed that you are finding it difficult to achieve your objectives at work, feeling lonely because you have no friends at work, or stressing out because everyone is relying on you to clinch that sale – these feelings could all, given this broad definition, be classified as mental illness. The expanding definition of mental illness is well expressed in the increasing girth of the mental-health professional’s ‘bible’: in 1952, 64 behaviours were listed as mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; today, there are more than 250 such behaviours listed. No wonder I have not been able to identify any sign of mental illness at work. It is not that I have failed to notice employees feeling stressed out, or having a workload that is a little heavy, or even a shy employee unable to make friends quickly. I simply had not labelled any of these experiences as ‘mentally ill’. Silly me. But for me, these experiences are what all of us have to deal with in our everyday life - either at work or at home. These are entirely normal responses to the inevitable challenges that each of us may have to face. And the truth is that most of us do succeed in dealing with them. I remember my first day as a student nurse (back in the Seventies) at a hospital ward in Brighton. I was scared, fearful of answering the hospital phone in case I misheard the person at the other end and all the time worrying if I was going to kill someone. After all, just two months before, I had flown into London on a winter night from my home in the Far East. During those two months, I had to acclimatise to the cold (as I had only known hot weather before), learn how to eat hospital food, use knives and forks (in my homeland, the norm was to eat with one’s fingers), not to mention having to mix with people who often spoke with accents that I struggled to understand. I was also terribly homesick. But I persevered. I made friends and, before I knew it, I moved on to face other new experiences. Each of those new experiences brought its own fears and anxieties that needed to be addressed and overcome. Unfortunately, classifying responses to everyday work experiences as a form of ‘mental illness’ undermines the idea that employees can deal with these fears and anxieties, either by themselves or through talking them over with their friends and colleagues. Instead, this approach encourages and seems to justify medical intervention arranged by the employer or a ‘caring professional’ who will undertake some form of therapeutic activity with you. Once this happens, you lose control of making decisions yourself, you become less of an adult and more of a child that needs help. This is not to suggest that mental illnesses like schizophrenia or severe depression are not serious problems that need to be treated. But there is a clear distinction between these serious illnesses and normal reactions to challenging experiences at work. What has been missed is the good news from the CIPD survey: while 25 per cent of respondents were relatively gloomy about their current mental health (four per cent said it was ‘poor’ and 21 per cent said it was ‘moderate’), 41 per cent described their mental health as ‘good’ and 33 per cent said it is ‘very good’. So, three quarters of respondents regarded their mental health as at least good. Surely this is a cause for celebration? Of course, many of these upbeat respondents will have felt stressed or anxious about their work from time to time. The difference is that they simply did not see this as a sign of being mentally ill. They must have gotten over these challenges by personal achievement, by relying on their colleagues at work. Or by talking through their worries with their loved ones, or perhaps even with their managers. The world of work has never been easy. Even when the UK economy was booming, work would have had its ‘highs and lows’. We are now experiencing an economic climate where unemployment is high and rising for some groups, where public-sector cuts are in progress, and where it is very much a ‘dog eats dog’ atmosphere in some workplaces. The forecast is that this will continue to get worse in 2012. In such challenging circumstances, I would argue that the last thing we need is to channel employees into the navel-gazing activity of interpreting everyday work emotions as mental illness. As someone who is in the business of people management, I would want my staff to raise any anxiety or fears they have about work with me. Some do this, while others prefer to confide in their friends. I would not assume their issues were signs of mental illness, but I would hear them out, suggest ways of coping and keep an eye on them. Often the remedies are common sense as often employees with problems are actually yearning for a listening ear. A problem explained is often a problem solved. But by medicalising these issues, we turn what is often a passing set of circumstances into a problem intrinsic to the person themselves - and that really is mad. Para Mullan is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12039/
Wednesday 1 February 2012 There was a time when it was very dangerous not to believe in God. In ancient Athens, Socrates was hounded and eventually executed for questioning the city-state’s gods. Throughout most of history, to be ‘godless’ was considered a form of moral decadence deserving punishment. In the seventeenth century, even John Locke, the great liberal philosopher who promoted the idea of religious toleration, regarded atheism as intolerable. He said atheists should not be tolerated because ‘promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist’. Paradoxically, today, when atheism enjoys unprecedented respectability, it is being turned into a new cause. Over the past decade, books celebrating atheism and denouncing belief in God have frequently appeared on bestseller lists. In Western societies, intellectual and cultural life has been very responsive to the arguments of the so-called New Atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, who have discussed at length the moral failings of organised religion. Their outlook is widely endorsed in popular culture. Dan Brown’s mega bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, recycles the dominant cultural narrative that depicts organised religion as complicit in institutional abuse, moral corruption and dishonesty. Where atheism was once depicted as a dangerous and subversive creed, today it is often portrayed as an enlightened outlook that perches on the moral highground. But what is often overlooked is that the growing cultural affirmation of atheism has been paralleled by a big transformation in its meaning. It is important to note that, historically, atheism was not a standalone philosophy. Atheism does not constitute a worldview. It simply signifies non-belief in God or gods. This rejection of the idea of a god could be based on scepticism towards the notion of a higher being, an unwillingness to follow dogma, or a commitment to rationality and science. But whatever the motive, atheism reflected an attitude towards one specific issue, not a perspective on the world. Most atheists defined themselves through an assertive identity, whether they called themselves democrats, liberals, socialists, anarchists, fascists, communists, freethinkers or rationalists. For most serious atheists, their disbelief in god was a relatively insignificant part of their self-identity. Today, in contrast, atheism takes itself very seriously indeed. With their zealous denunciation of religion, the so-called New Atheists often resemble medieval moral crusaders. They argue that the influence of religion should be fought wherever it rears its ugly head. Although they demand that religion should be countered by rational arguments, their own claims often verge on the irrational and hysterical. Of course, there has always been an honourable atheist tradition of irreverence and irreligious contempt for dogma. But today’s New Atheism often expresses itself through a doctrinaire language of its own. In a simplistic manner it equates religion with fanaticism and fundamentalism. What is striking about its denunciation of fundamentalism is that it is frequently made in the dogmatic, polemical style of those it claims to oppose. The black-and-white world of theological dogma is reproduced in the zealous polemic of the atheist moraliser. Of course, the language used by atheist moral crusaders avoids the theological vocabulary of the religious. Instead, it prefers a more scientific-sounding narrative, demonising religion through the idea of medicalisation. In this vein, Richard Dawkins has described religion as a form of child abuse in his book, The God Delusion, and in other writings. He claims that instructing children about hell damages them for life. He claims that ‘religions abuse the minds of children’ and says ‘we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them’. The claim that religion scars children for life is symptomatic of the tendency of New Atheists to express themselves through the language of victimhood and therapeutic culture. Time and again, they use the idiom of therapy to pathologise religion. Their use of terms such as ‘toxic faith’ and ‘religious virus’ are symptomatic of their medicalisation of strong religious commitment. It has even been suggested that people who have too much faith may be suffering from a condition called ‘religious addiction’. Father Leo Booth, in his book When God Becomes a Drug, warns of becoming ‘addicted to the certainty, sureness or sense of security that our faith provides’. John Bradshaw, one of the leading advocates of the American co-dependence movement, has produced a self-help video titled ‘Religious Addiction’. ‘These tapes describe how co-dependency can set up for religious addiction, and how extrinsic religion fosters co-dependency’, notes the blurb advertising the video. The New Atheism is very selective about who it targets. So although it claims to challenge irrationalism and anti-scientific prejudice, it tends to confine its anger to the dogma of the three Abrahamic religions. So it rightly criticises creationism and ‘intelligent design’, yet it rarely challenges the mystifications of deep environmentalist thinking, such as Gaia theory, or the numerous varieties of Eastern mysticism that are so fashionable in Hollywood. Since the New Atheism is culturally wedded to the contemporary therapeutic imagination, it is not surprising that it has adopted a double standard towards spiritualism. Historically, atheism has sometimes co-existed with opportunism towards religious and spiritual belief. The French philosopher Voltaire hated religious fanaticism but nevertheless believed that religion was useful for pacifying the masses. In a similar vein, in the nineteenth century, the French social theorists Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte believed that social stability required them to invent a new religion. Invariably, such attempts to construct a secular religion are really about trying to endow human experience with meaning. It was inevitable that sooner or later the New Atheist crusade would mutate into a quasi-religion. Alain de Botton’s recently published Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion is an attempt to absorb into atheism the current therapeutic and spiritual fads that influence Western elite culture. De Botton has proposed building temples for atheists through the UK. ‘It’s time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals’, he says. Unlike the New Atheists, De Botton does not adopt an aggressive approach towards religion, which means his attitude does at least contrast to that of Dawkins or Harris. Not surprisingly, many New Atheists have strongly criticised the idea of an atheist temple. The explicit formulation of ‘religion for atheists’ is abhorrent to those who have made a religion out of their disbelief. But for all that, in all but name the New Atheism has transformed itself not only into a secular religion but into an intensely intolerant and dogmatic secular religion. As a humanist, I am distressed by the corruption of the idea of atheism. Genuine humanists are critical of the influence of creationism and of religious fanaticism. Yet while attempts to reverse the separation of church and state are always a cause for concern, the real challenge facing humanists today does not emanate from organised religion. Rather, it is now often secular movements that promote the idea that human beings are powerless, vulnerable and victims of their circumstances. So instead of the religious belief in original sin, today we are confronted with the therapeutic claim that children are easily damaged and scarred for life. All the old religious sins have been recast in a secular, medical form. People are no longer condemned for lust but rather are treated for sex addiction. Gluttony has been reinvented as obesity. And envy and avarice have been rebranded as illnesses brought about by our ‘addictive consumer society’. The real question confronting us is not the status of any god but the status that we assign to humanity. And the most powerful threat to the realisation of the human potential today comes, not from religion, but from the moral disorientation of Western secular culture. Frank Furedi’s On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence is published by Continuum. (Order this book from Amazon(UK).) Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12030/
Wednesday 1 February 2012 Last week, the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson gave evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Committee on drug-law reform. The Virgin tycoon spoke as a representative of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and argued in favour of liberalising English drug laws. Branson said what most of us already know: the global war on drugs has failed. Drug supply and consumption have not varied significantly in the UK over recent years despite reams of new legislation. Branson argues that we should follow a model of decriminalisation established in other European countries, like Portugal, where it is no longer a criminal offence to possess or supply any type of drug. Decriminalisation sounds liberal. But those who campaign around drug reform today are a strange bunch. Rather than argue that we should be allowed to do what we like with our own bodies, which would represent a liberal argument in favour of decriminalisation, today’s campaigners tacitly argue for greater state interference in the guise of healthcare and regulation. Their argument is not driven by respect for freedom and autonomy, but by an impulse to micro-manage drug-users’ lives. The argument made by Branson and other contemporary reform champions is that drug use should be seen as an issue for ‘public health’ rather than the criminal law. Branson argued that this would free the police up to focus on organised crime and it would allow doctors to deal with those with drug problems. But would this actually mean more freedom for drug-users? Not if we follow the European examples that Branson is so fond of. In Portugal, those caught with drugs are summonsed - so, forced - to appear in front of a ‘dissuasion committee’ made up of a psychiatrist, a social worker and an attorney. This pseudo-judicial body has powers to ban drug-users from going to certain places, from meeting certain people, and can even compel them to attend drug therapy. Compulsory therapy would not be alien to English law. Under the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, courts are empowered to make a Treatment and Testing Order in the place of a custodial sentence. It obliges users to attend treatment centres for therapy and to take part in regular testing. The idea that drug-users should be compelled by the state to give up drugs is not new. Such therapeutic alternatives to punishment borrow from the Drugs Courts of the United States, which have existed since the early 1980s. These specialised courts are not used to find out whether someone is guilty of a criminal offence but, in the words of the United States Justice Department, to ‘compel (defendants) to enter and remain in treatment’. Having signed a waiver indicating they are ‘guilty’ of drug use, defendants undergo a year-long programme of therapy, drug testing and community work, all led and supervised by the judge. Regular hearings are held in which the defendants feed back to the court on progress, often in emotionally charged weepy testimony from defendants and their families. Dress code is significantly relaxed and, as much as possible, everyone should be kept physically on the same level. One attendee described these hearings as a ‘cross between Alcoholics Anonymous and a Revivalist meeting’. This bizarre process culminates in a ‘graduation programme’ for those who complete the treatment at the end of the year. All this will sound familiar to fans of Anthony Burgess. In his novel, A Clockwork Orange, a teenage hoodlum is exposed to an inhuman psychological treatment programme to correct his criminal character. The difference between these ‘liberalised’ drug punishments and the programme in Burgess’ novel is that, in the novel, the teenager was a violent serial rapist. The truly draconian heart of these proposed programmes is that people do not have to be guilty of anything whatsoever for the state to begin interfering in their lives. In this new ‘liberal’ approach, the court’s role is shifted from punishing criminal offences to correcting what the state sees as unconscionable behaviour - in this case, drug use. At least with traditional punishments, drug-users were treated like morally autonomous beings who had consciously decided to break the law. Today, they are treated as slaves to their addictions, who have to be cured through state-managed treatments and re-cast as proper members of society. I think drugs are a waste of time. That is to say nothing for the many people for whom they are a genuinely destructive force. But if I were a drug user, I would want the state to have as little as possible to do with my decision to take them or not. For the sake of keeping drugs fun and comparatively state free for those who want to take them, we should reject the arguments for decriminalisation put forwards by Branson and Co and instead argue for a drug culture that respects peoples’ autonomy and judgement. That means no coppers interfering with our drug use but, more importantly, no ‘chilled out’ trainer-wearing judges either. Luke Samuel is a paralegal working in criminal law and convenor of the London Legal Salon. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12031/
Wednesday 1 February 2012 In January, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) - the government body responsible for inspecting schools in the UK - published its new framework for judging standards. Since the 2010 election, the UK government has been making noises about higher standards and a more traditional and rigorous approach to education; this new framework is supposed to begin delivering on this vision. Some interesting changes do stand out, most notably the return of the words ‘subject knowledge’ as part of how standards of teaching are assessed, plus the introduction of no-notice inspections and a more streamlined, no-nonsense approach to inspection. But far from being a significant shift, the reforms are a mere tiptoe towards a more robust defence of quality education, and are highly unlikely to improve the much-maligned status of knowledge, rigour and true innovation in British schooling. First, let’s look at the long awaited return of ‘knowledge’ as a factor in assessing teaching standards. The new framework states that inspectors should focus on ‘how well teachers use their expertise, including their subject knowledge, to develop pupils’ knowledge, skills and understanding’. The very absence of this phrase from previous guidelines should be of deep embarrassment to all within Ofsted, although the fact that the word ‘including’ is used implies those who drew up the new guidance consider the expectation of high-quality subject knowledge to be vaguely controversial. This tells you a lot about the state of the educational establishment. As David Perks and others have recently argued, this Ofsted view of ‘teachers remoulded as facilitators’ has been deeply damaging to the profession and to the children in its care. Any move, however tentative, in the opposite direction is to be welcomed. However, much of the Ofsted inspection regime continues to foster the notion of schools as being the cure to all societal ills rather than places of outstanding and rigorous acquisition of knowledge. Within the section on pupil attainment, for example, we discover that schools are to be judged primarily on ‘how well gaps are narrowing between the performances of different groups of pupils in the school’, and ‘how well pupils make progress relative to their starting points’. Making such wider societal goals the responsibility of teachers and the focus of those who manage teachers is to further compartmentalise the issue of social equality to the domain of education, and absolve government and wider society of its responsibilities. This further distances teachers and schools from their central and pivotal function of teaching a high-quality curriculum. As Frank Furedi has argued, a subject-based, knowledge-driven approach is vital to provide students with ‘the cultural and intellectual capital necessary for assuming their role as active citizens’. A central focus in the slimmed-down Ofsted framework is to be ‘the standards attained by pupils by the time they leave the school, including their standards in reading, writing and mathematics’. Again, to a degree, this is some kind of an improvement. It is at least an attempt to return the focus of school leaders upon academia, rather than many of the superfluous issues deemed to require attention under the old knowledge-light, health-and-safety-obsessed regime. However, what has been downplayed in terms of focus is the quality of the curriculum. The focus, while better, is still not where it should be: on what is being taught. Instead, the obsession with outcomes - in other words, exam results - remains. The problem with this should be obvious: schools remain highly incentivised to lower academic standards in order to produce improved results. Schools often respond to poor exam results by either changing from a more rigorous exam board to an easier one, or by lowering the standard of qualifications offered to create the illusion of progress. This is a real issue in British schools, and one that has a disproportionate effect on working-class children, far too many of whom will remain subject to a weak and uninspiring curriculum because educational elites have a low regard for these pupils’ potential. The naïve belief remains that offering a range of mediocre qualifications at which working-class pupils can perform highly will raise their life chances. This brings us to what is likely to prove the most short-sighted move of all - the exemption of the ‘outstanding’ schools from inspection. On the surface, this may appear wise, allowing focus to be put on the weakest schools and giving freedom to the best. However, the policy is more likely to prove damaging to innovation and good practice. The word ‘outstanding’ is bandied around, especially in schools, without a great deal of thought as to what it really means, which is ‘standing out among others of its kind, or superior to others of its kind’. The outstanding individual or school is not necessarily, if ever, somebody who has simply achieved a top grading within a framework. It is somebody who has stepped out of the existing framework altogether, and done something completely different that may shape the future direction of the way things are done. This makes it difficult to put our finger on exactly what we mean by the term ‘outstanding’ - but we certainly know it when we see it. Everybody who has learnt or taught in a classroom has already conjured up the image of a pupil or teacher who fits the description. These individuals are not simply the top percentage of some artificially constructed group, they lead innovation and push up standards. And here’s the rub: inspectors need to see them in action in order to know what ‘outstanding’ looks like, to sustain the vibrancy of our education system. The sociologist Emile Durkheim talked of the need for people on occasion to step outside of social norms and to challenge the view of how we do things. He saw this as vital to the health of a society, and highlighted the immense dangers of stagnation if such an innovatory attitude was lost. The danger is that if inspectors aren’t exposed to cutting-edge methods, they will simply move to an ever-increased reliance on government and educational orthodoxies of what ‘good practice’ looks like. The thing you notice about schools and teachers who truly merit the term ‘outstanding’ is how far they actually stray from the orthodox framework and how much they innovate. If we remove the need for our already-flawed inspection regime from having to confront this reality, we will be putting inspectors in a bubble where no one can seriously challenge those current orthodoxies. The government and Ofsted have begun to edge in the right direction, but they are far from creating an inspection system that is likely significantly to improve British educational standards. The removal of the best schools from the inspection regime could indeed prove to be a retrograde step. Tom Finn-Kelcey is head of politics, PSHE and citizenship at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12029/
Tuesday 31 January 2012 One outraged Greek government minister described it as ‘the product of a sick imagination’. Another called it ‘absolutely laughable’. The formal title of the document in question is ‘Assurance of Compliance in the Second GRC Programme’. It is neither a joke, nor a sick fantasy. It reads more like the draft of a death warrant for democracy, first in Greece and then elsewhere in Europe. This supposedly secret document was issued by Angela Merkel’s German government to its partners in the Eurozone – and then carefully leaked, to ensure maximum impact. It sets out two extraordinary measures that the Germans want to impose to ensure that the Greek authorities comply with the swingeing budget cuts which they promised but have apparently failed to deliver to the markets’ satisfaction. First, it says Greece must ‘legally commit itself to giving absolute priority to future debt service’. All state revenues must go first to paying debts and interest due, before a cent can be spent on public services. And the Greek government will not be allowed to threaten to default on its debts in future; if it cannot pay, it must accept that ‘further cuts’ will be ‘the only possible consequence’. Second, the Germans want the Eurozone to oversee the ‘transfer of national budgetary sovereignty’ from Greece to ‘the European level’ under a ‘strict steering and control system’. The plan is for the Eurozone group to appoint a budget commissioner to oversee Greek finances, with the power ‘to veto decisions not in line with the budgetary targets’ set by European and international officials. If that was not humiliating enough, the Greeks would also have to look happy to bend the knee by ensuring that this new system of outside control ‘is fully enshrined in national law, preferably through constitutional amendment’. To get the Greeks to agree to these unprecedented conditions, the German document also offers incentives – or as we used to call it, threats. If Athens does not accept the compliance measures, then ‘the Eurozone will not be able to approve guarantees for GRC II’. That is the second huge bailout of €130 billion which Greece desperately needs if it is not to go officially bust in weeks. The ‘Assurance of Compliance’ document is a ‘secret’ blackmail note. Unsurprisingly, the publication of these proposals caused some consternation in the run-up to yet another Euro-crisis summit this week. While Greek ministers ranted about it as a sick joke, more photoshopped images of Merkel-as-Hitler appeared in Athens. British Tory MPs joined in the re-enactment of the Second World War, with one declaring that the Germans were sending a Nazi-style gauleiter to run Greece. Even other Eurozone governments appeared taken aback by the bluntness of the proposals. One senior official involved in the Greek rescue package was quoted as saying that ‘the Germans have a lot of influence, but that goes a little beyond the limits the outer member states could support’. Those states outside the Franco-German core of the Eurozone are worried that, where democracy in Greece goes today, so their democracy might follow tomorrow. And they are right to be worried. The latest plan – agreed to by the UK – to allow the judges of the European Court to punish democratic nations that fail to stick to the Franco-German rules on spending shows which way the wind is blowing across the continent. However, whether these precise punitive measures get written into the Greek constitution or (most likely) not is really beside the point. The fact is that ‘national budgetary sovereignty’ has already effectively been ‘transferred’ from Greece. The Greek economy is already being run by foreign officials – from the ‘Troika’ of the EU, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before the Germans circulated their new proposals to the Eurozone states, the Troika had already delivered its latest demands to the Greek government, which it insists must be fulfilled before the new bailout can be agreed. Its 10-page blackmail note includes demands for 150,000 public-sector job cuts, and for further big cuts in public spending this year, notably on health. It was telling that, when the leak of the ‘secret’ German proposals sparked a political furore, the German government’s reaction was not to show any embarrassment, but openly to reiterate its case. Germany’s right-wing economic minister Phillip Roesler took to the media to spell out that, if the Greeks could not make the cuts, then ‘the leadership and monitoring must come in a stronger way from outside, for example via the EU’. And the French Socialist Christine Lagarde, now head of the IMF, backed them up, with headlines declaring ‘IMF tells Greece it will lose control of budget for bailout’. Nothing secret about that. Moreover, as well as assuming authority over the national budget, the Eurozone authorities have already overthrown parliamentary democracy in Greece. We might recall what happened after prime minister George Panandreou suggested a referendum to consult the Greek people on the austerity package. The self-appointed ‘Frankfurt Group’ of the Euro-elite – comprising the heads of the German and French governments, European Commission, ECB and IMF – were appalled by this slightest whiff of democracy. They twisted Papandreou’s arm, not only to make him withdraw the referendum, but to resign from office. In his place as prime minister they installed the supposedly non-political ‘technocrat’ Lucas Papademos to force through their austerity plans for Greece. German frustration at his failure to cut quickly and deeply enough led to last week’s draconian scheme. But Papademos is still there at the bidding of the Euro-elite, not the Greek people. And we shouldn’t expect the Greek political establishment to struggle for democracy. None of the major political parties wants to be seen supporting the austerity measures in the run-up to April’s Greek elections. That is why they all took the opportunity to lay into the German government document over the weekend. But they all accept the need to satisfy the international lenders and get the next huge handout. As chief technocrat Papademos put it over the weekend, all of the parties backing his coalition are in ‘total convergence’ on the need to force through austerity measures. His rallying cry was: ‘We will put up a hard fight to guarantee the country’s place in Europe and the Eurozone. United we can succeed.’ The Greek political elite will unite to ‘fight hard’, not for its democracy, but for its subordinate place at the foot of the Frankfurt Group’s table. Even if the German government’s draft death warrant is never officially issued by the Euro-group, the reality is that democracy in Greece has long been a terminal-looking case on its death bed. And the leading political parties look less likely to fight to revive it than volunteer to assist in its euthanasia. There is a crying need for somebody to breath life into the democratic struggle. However, what nobody needs are politicians or protesters pretending this is a re-run of the German occupation of Greece during the Second World War. Such comparisons only ever denigrate history and distort the present. Merkel’s Germany is not an expansionist ‘Fourth Reich’ aggressively seeking to conquer Europe. It is a relatively strong yet slightly insecure European power, defensive about the failure of its EU dream and trying hard to hold the Euro-club together by keeping fringe members such as Greece in line. The ambivalence in German attitudes toward their own power is evident in this latest episode. They were bold enough to put in writing their demands for Greeks to surrender economic sovereignty, yet sufficiently bashful to want to hide behind the Euro-group and avoid imposing these measures in their own name. The leading candidate for the post of budget commissioner – the gauleiter, as it were – was reportedly a Finnish EU official whose main qualification for the job was that ‘he is not German’. Perhaps the only comparison between Hitler and Merkel’s Germany here is that neither wanted to invade Greece; Hitler only got sucked in to bail out his Italian fascist allies after the Greeks kicked Mussolini’s backside. But there the similarities end abruptly. Many thousands of Greeks starved to death under the Nazis, even in Athens, or were executed in mass reprisals after the Greek resistance struck at the occupying forces. It seems unlikely that the current German authorities are about to switch from writing strongly worded documents about Greece to burning down a thousand Greek villages. One other sign of how far things have changed is the British attitude to the Greek and wider Euro-crisis today. Despite Britain’s alleged ‘isolation’ from Europe, Tory chancellor George Osborne has supported calls for greater financial integration in the Eurozone – that is, more central control over the budgets of indebted states such as Greece. Osborne said at last week’s Davos economic summit that to stabilise the Euro, wealthy Germany must make ‘permanent fiscal transfers’ to the poorer peripheral states, just as the UK capital subsidised the north of England. So keen is Osborne to see the Euro survive at all costs, he wants Germany to treat Greece as a province. Not exactly Winston Churchill, is it? (Though come to think of it, Churchill’s wartime government and its Labour successor did conspire with real Nazis and the Americans to shaft Greek democracy back then.) Back in the present, meanwhile, the Greek people might be looking forward to the worst of all worlds. Not only is their political democracy being hacked up and handed over to technocrats, Eurocrats and budget commissioners, but the economic consequences will be dire. The austerity measures proposed by the bumbling Euro-authorities promise Greece nothing but misery for the foreseeable future. One leading Greek economist says that the package to be imposed could not return Greece to growth ‘even if God and his angels were to descend upon Athens and put this in place’. As it is, the Greek people are being descended upon not by the three archangels, but by another Troika. More banal than angels but still other-worldly and, the Troika would have us believe, omnipotent. Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12027/
Tuesday 31 January 2012 It has neither enlightened anyone as to the structural causes of the current economic crisis nor has it shed light on what ought to be done to engender a bit of much-needed economic growth. Yet, at every stage, politicians, backed by the commentariat, have never ceased to indulge in it. I’m talking of course about bashing bankers, or, when politicians fancy a change of moral scenery, lambasting super-salaried corporate executives. The latest opportunity to project the putative sins of society on to a single figure came in the form of Stephen Hester. In many ways, he is the perfect candidate for banker bashing. Not only is he a banker, he’s also the current chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the recipient of a £45 billion state-bailout package in 2008. So, the news that he - the bloke in charge of a still struggling, 82 per cent public-owned financial institution - was in line for a £1million bonus on top of his £1.2million a year salary for, as far as anyone can tell, simply doing his job, was always going to have the potential to cause outrage. And outrage, it did. In fact, such was the opprobrium coming Hester’s way that there was an air of inevitability about Sunday evening’s announcement, made from his weekend getaway in Switzerland, that he was to forgo this particular bonus (he’s keeping the others, mind you). There is, of course, little reason to feel sorry for Hester, or indeed for the man he replaced both as RBS chief and Poet Laureate of Banker Greed, Sir Fred Goodwin. They will neither starve nor have to lay off the domestic staff. Likewise, it is difficult to muster much in the way of tears for those highly remunerated chief executives or company directors who, thanks to the broader political obsession with high pay, are now acceptable targets for political sermonising and media heckling - indeed, as Lib-Con business secretary Vince Cable reminded us once again last week, executive pay is ‘out of control’ and shareholders need to start reining it in. But whatever your feelings towards individuals such as Hester or Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin, there is a massive problem with this lash-the-rich sentiment. For it both absolves politicians of long-term responsibility for the deep-seated problems now besetting the economy and, worse still, it suggests that the solution to our current woes is not economic at all, but psycho-cultural. That is, we need to change our mindsets, we need to stop being so grasping and so grubbing. We need, in short, to create a culture that recognises, as prime minister David Cameron said with such mock profundity a couple of years ago, that ‘there is more to life than money’. And, lo, the scales will fall from our eyes. One can understand why scapegoating the bankers or blaming the chief execs has proven so consistently appealing to politicians: it has provided a simplistic, readymade excuse-cum-explanation for the desperate economic straits in which we now find ourselves. Hester, Goodwin and the rest, greedily speculating on investments on which they could never hope to recoup, led us into the economic abyss out of sheer avarice. ‘And look’, shout (and point) the UK’s political class, ‘there they are, still trying to rake it in while the rest of us try to muddle through’. So, bankers or - weirder still - highly remunerated corporate types, cop the flak for the recession. Meanwhile, the politicians that oversaw the massive expansion of a credit-fuelled economy at the expense of one that actually produces wealth have got off relatively lightly. In fact, about the only criticism made of politicians in relation to the economy is that they didn’t regulate greedy bankers soon enough. And it is in this willingness to present the economic crisis in terms of greed, albeit mainly that of bankers, that one can glimpse the cultural and moralistic rather than economic project nestling behind the blather about bankers’ bonuses or executive pay. Because for all the talk of reducing ‘inequality’ between the 90 per cent, or indeed the 99 per cent, and the tiny percentile range of top earners, the attack on the highly remunerated has got absolutely nothing to do with raising the living standards of the lowly paid. It has nothing to do with a popular struggle for material betterment, or a political fight for a better life. Rather, it is best grasped as an elite-stoked quest for something akin to a spiritual readjustment; a way, if you like, of encouraging us to care less about stuff and more about non-material things or, to use Cameron’s happiness lingo, ‘our general wellbeing’. Hence the focus is on limiting the high earnings of bankers or other well-paid corporate types, rather than working out how to raise the living standards of everyone. The idea is that it is this relative gap between those who remain incredibly rich and the rest of us paupers that is the problem. This gap encourages envy. It encourages us both to desire to be wealthy, to want the lifestyles of the rich and sometimes not very famous, and to feel either depressed about not being to obtain that status or anxious about having to keep up the appearance of status. In the words of journalist Will Hutton, who worked with business secretary Vince Cable on the self-styled High Pay Commission, ‘the knowledge that such ostentatious consumption is possible has a shadow effect on every British citizen. Individual human beings instinctively compare themselves and are sensitive to what the whole of society values’. The point, then, of stigmatising conspicuous wealth through banker bashing, of surreptitiously encouraging shareholders to limit execs’ incomes, is to make the rest of us feel less inferior, less consumed by dreams of consumption. Because if our problem is material greed, itself fuelled by a desperation to keep up with the super-rich Joneses, then what our political class is trying to do is forcibly to bring the Joneses closer together. They are doing this not by aspiring to raise the living standards of those at the bottom, but by trying to lower the living standards of those at the top. In Unjust Rewards, her 2009 book on people who get paid too much, influential British commentator Polly Toynbee argued that something must be done to stop British society from becoming like an extended camel train, with the very wealthy at the front, miles ahead of those impoverished sorts at the back: ‘That way the stretched-out camel train can be drawn back together: bunched closer it will travel further and faster and in better spirits, safer and happier.’ This is the dispiriting intent underlying the current assault on the high paid, be they bankers or company directors. We may be living in dire economic circumstances, but we would be happy if we were all in it together. While social solidarity is desirable, it would be better if we were striving for more together, rather than reconciling ourselves to being happy with less. Tim Black is senior writer at spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12028/
Tuesday 31 January 2012 Earlier this month, a major historic landmark was reached with little fanfare. For the first time ever, the majority of the Chinese population lives in cities. This fact merited a mere sentence in a Chinese government press release. Where it was reported by Western media, it was viewed at best with indifference and at worst as a grim omen of problems ahead. So it’s about time someone sounded the horns and declared ‘three cheers for the Chinese city dwellers!’ It’s hard to overstate the pace and scale of this achievement. According to the Chinese statistics bureau, 691million people now live in cities, amounting to just over 51 per cent of the population. Compare this with 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party came to power: a mere 10 per cent of Chinese people lived in cities. Not that this marked the start of the urbanisation. Far from it. Indeed, between 1960 and 1978, China’s urbanisation rate dropped by 1.8 per cent, a result of government policy to ‘ruralise’ China, sending 16million urban students back to work in the fields. By 1980, the urban population was still less than 20 per cent. So it is even more remarkable to think that the vast majority of the urbanisation of China has taken place since the 1990s, when the Chinese government finally accepted that it was impossible to have industrialisation without urbanisation, abandoning its policy of ‘leaving the land but not the villages, entering the factories but not cities’. According to one report, this same landmark in proportion of people living in cities took about 200 years in Britain, 100 years in the US and 50 years in Japan. And there looks to be no let up in the speed of change any time soon. Many analysts predict that the number of people living in cities could reach 70 per cent – approximately one billion people – by just 2030. Indeed, according to The Economist, in terms of income per head, China is actually less urbanised than you might expect by comparison to other countries’ development historically. This landmark achievement of 51 per cent living in cities only brings it into line with the global average. In America, for example, 82 per cent of the population lives in cities. Not only has change happened faster in China than anywhere else, but the scale of rural-to-urban migration is unprecedented in human history. An estimated 300million people have moved into cities in just over a couple of decades. With 691million people living in cities, China has more city dwellers than any other country on the planet, more than the second (India, with 377million) and third countries (the US, with 256million) put together. The human implications of this are very real: over a short period of time, hundreds of millions of people have been freed from millennia of toiling on the land, farming wheat, rice and millet. They have been liberated from what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels rightly described as ‘the idiocy of rural life’, and which Engels termed the state of ‘isolation and stupor in which [humankind] has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years’. Although China’s development is undeniably uneven, with these developments have come very real increases in life expectancy and dramatic decreases in infant mortality and extreme poverty. And urbanisation in China does not mean slum dwellings either: as the UN has observed, the proportion of China’s urban population living in slums fell from 37.3 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2010, representing a relative decrease of 25 per cent. It’s revealing, then, that there has been a largely muted response to this phenomenal occurrence. Where it has been reported, it is often with an anticipation of grave problems that lie ahead. Warning that China may ‘have got old before it got rich’, The Times (London) notes that, ‘turning rural families into urban dwellers is an expensive process for the state. On the farm they grow their own food, don’t expect much in the way of schooling, are not paid a pension and have little access to expensive healthcare systems.’ The Ottawa Citizen warns that ‘rising demand for transport, energy, water, infrastructure and improved living standards is piling extra pressure on society and the environment’. There has long been media scaremongering in the Western media about the scale of the Chinese ‘mega-cities’, notably one rumoured project entitled ‘Turn the Pearl River Delta Into One’ that was to house 46million people over a land mass twice the size of Wales. While many in the West balk at the size and scale of such infrastructural projects, these are the kind that will ensure that the dynamism that has taken place in China will continue through its development. As Daniel Ben-Ami has pointed out previously on spiked, such developments are perfectly feasible: ‘The portrayal of China as a threat to the global environment, a “green peril”, is a reflection of the West’s anxieties rather than an accurate description of contemporary Chinese society.’ The slogan of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai was ‘Better City, Better Life’. From air pollution to the implementation of massive infrastructural projects, there is certainly much more to be done to ensure that the living conditions in Chinese cities get better. But the massive migration from rural poverty into cities is a major step towards the possibility of a better life for hundreds of millions of people. What could be a better cause for celebration? Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. He contributed a chapter to the book The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs, published in the UK by Pluto Press. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).) reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12023/
Monday 30 January 2012 Forty years ago today, 13 Catholics in Derry were shot dead by British paratroopers. A fourteenth man died from his gunshot wounds five months later. For years, what came to be known as Bloody Sunday was held up by many as an indictment of British rule in Ireland. Yet now it is used to justify British rule in Ireland. One of the most subtle and least-criticised coups carried out by the British state in recent years has been its moral appropriation of this atrocity, its transformation of Bloody Sunday from evidence that Britain plays only a destructive role in Ireland into an event which shows that British largesse, especially of the therapeutic variety, is still required in that apparently childish nation. The 14 men who were killed, seven of whom were teenagers, had been part of a crowd of 10,000 protesters. They were demanding equal rights for Catholics in housing, employment and voting, in a sectarian, Protestant-run statelet where Catholics were two-and-a-half times as likely as Protestants to be unemployed. In the four years before Bloody Sunday, since a fledgling Catholic civil-rights march in Derry in October 1968 was brutally broken up by the local police force, tensions had been running high in Northern Ireland. The British Army arrived in August 1969 to back up Britain’s local Protestant allies and internment without trial was introduced in August 1971. All marches were banned. It was against this backdrop that thousands of Catholics in Derry defied Britain’s emergency laws and marched for civil rights on 30 January 1972. The response of the paratroopers transformed the conflict. The belief of many Catholics that it was possible to reform Northern Ireland, to make it a more equal place, was shattered by the brutal force with which Britain seemed determined to preserve the sanctity of one of its few remaining colonies. Huge numbers of nationalists were radicalised by Bloody Sunday, coming to believe that it was only through the expulsion of British forces from Northern Ireland, and the unification of Ireland, that proper freedom could be attained. There followed a long, bloody war between the IRA and British military forces. In recent years, however, the history of Bloody Sunday has subtly yet dramatically been rewritten. Through academic revisionism and political opportunism, and particularly through the 12-year Bloody Sunday Inquiry overseen by Lord Saville of Newdigate from 1998 to 2010, Bloody Sunday has been turned from an historic event into a private tragedy, from an incident in a war that had been brewing for four years, and which continued for another 20, into a freak encounter between trigger-happy paras and innocent Catholics. Bloody Sunday has been wrenched from its historical context and transformed instead into a kind of one-off tragic drama starring evil British soldiers (who were severely chastised by the Saville Inquiry) and mostly decent Catholic protesters (the victims were exonerated by Saville and their families were apologised to by David Cameron). The impact of the rewriting of the Bloody Sunday story by the modern British state has been twofold: first, it has helped to dehistoricise that day; and second, it has helped turn it into a vehicle for therapeutic intervention into the lives of people in Northern Ireland, who apparently require a new army of British-funded experts to help them come to terms with their tragic pasts. The removal of Bloody Sunday from history can be seen most clearly in the conclusions of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. Unlike the initial inquiry into Bloody Sunday, carried out by Lord Widgery in 1972 and widely written off as a whitewash, the more recent Saville Inquiry is seen as providing the Official Version of Events. Yet the key accomplishment of Saville was its abstraction of Bloody Sunday from the historical flow, its removal of 30 January 1972 from any sense of continuity between 1921 (when Partition was enforced) and 1968 (when northern Catholics first started rising up) and the early 1970s (when the British state responded with martial law). Instead, through inviting the families of the 14 victims to express their emotions in a rarefied chamber while simultaneously slapping the wrists of the soldiers involved, Saville reduced Bloody Sunday to the super-violent equivalent of a playground fight that called for a good headmaster to intervene and make amends. Courtesy of Saville, Bloody Sunday is now understood as a day on which certain British soldiers went OTT (Saville said the paras ‘lost control’), causing great distress to certain Derry families. Of course Bloody Sunday is an occasion of private grief - but it is also an historic event with causes and consequences. All of that has been airbrushed from the record by a process of official remembering which has reduced Bloody Sunday to something like the Dunblane massacre, only involving paras and Catholics rather than a lone gunman and schoolchildren. Saville didn’t whitewash the individual paratroopers’ responsibility for the events, in the way Widgery did; no, he partook in a far more profound form of whitewashing, turning Bloody Sunday from a political quake into an out-of-control streetfight. In focusing attention on the misjudgement and moral turpitude of individual soldiers, Saville whitewashed the historical role of the British state in using force to deny democracy and equality in Ireland. Indeed, so thorough has been the lawyerly makeover of Bloody Sunday that the British state, the author of the atrocity, can now assume its moral authority in Ireland through taking an apologetic approach to such tragic historic events. In scolding some of its soldiers and offering apologies to their victims, the British state has extricated itself from the history and politics of Bloody Sunday, taking the elevated position of a dispassionate fixer of past wrongs. Today, one of the key ways Britain justifies its continuing presence in Ireland is as a moral manager of the past, a facilitator of reconciliation between hurting communities - and its moral hijacking of Bloody Sunday has been a key plank in this rehabilitation of its rule in a neighbouring nation. In response to the controversy over the fact that the Saville Inquiry cost a total of £200million, Lord Eames, the Lord Archbishop of Armagh, said no price was too high when it came to combatting the ‘psychological trauma’ inflicted by such events, because ‘this hidden consequence or legacy of The Troubles is probably just as desperate a need to meet as any of the physical’. It was a revealing statement. Bloody Sunday has become bound up in a new theory which says that certain ‘out of control’ events in the war of 1969-1994 didn’t only cause trauma to individuals and families, but also ‘national trauma’, which it is incumbent upon Britain’s lords, lawyers and psychologists to address. Indeed, Lord Eames himself is co-chairman of the Consultative Group on the Past, a vast outfit devoted to working out how to deal with the psychological ‘legacy’ of The Troubles, while untold amounts of money have been pumped into investigating the scale of ‘national trauma’ (one academic survey estimated that 22 per cent of people in Northern Ireland are still struggling to cope mentally with events from the war). The Office of the First Minister of Northern Ireland has produced a report titled Living With the Trauma of The Troubles, which implores all political actors to recognise the ‘long-term social and psychological effects of these traumatic events’. What we have here is a profound reorganisation of Britain’s political authority over the Irish people. Where once Britain justified its rule in Ireland in moral or nationalistic terms, talking about the need to protect the Protestants in the North from being swallowed by an ‘intolerant’ Irish Republic, now it justifies its presence in therapeutic terms, presenting itself as the neutral provider of psychological repair to suffering people, including those whose suffering was caused by British elements who ‘lost control’. This new approach reproduces many of the prejudices of old, only in more PC lingo: once, British propagandists presented the Irish as a fickle, childish people, not up to the serious business of controlling their own affairs; now, they depict them as a traumatised, damaged people, requiring the constant care of brain experts and bishops funded from the British purse. Both historically and today, Irish people’s political capabilities and moral robustness have been cast into doubt by outside actors keen to assume moral authority over them. Bloody Sunday was not a freak incident in which paras ‘lost control’ - it was part of a war by the British state to maintain control over its colony of Northern Ireland. And now, 40 years on, that same tragic event is used by the same British state to reassert, in therapeutic terms, its governance of Northern Ireland. Historians will surely look back in amazement at how cynically and successfully Britain took moral ownership of Bloody Sunday. Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12022/
Monday 30 January 2012 When Newt Gingrich outlined his plans for a permanent colony on the moon, commercial lunar tourism and spacecraft that can reach Mars, Ron Paul lost his position as America’s looniest presidential candidate. The crowd Gingrich addressed on Florida’s Space Coast cheered him on Wednesday, but come Thursday Mr Speaker was swiftly brought down to Earth by his fellow presidential hopefuls who, during a CNN debate, slated his plans as unrealistic. Ron Paul got a round of applause for quipping ‘we should send some politicians there’. The Twittersphere was abuzz with punchlines about Gingrich’s lunacy. But hang on, why is the suggestion that we put men and women on the moon so easily brushed off as ridiculous? Why is it seen as impractical and wacky? Why is Gingrich depicted as some kind of stoned space cadet for even thinking of including manned space travel in his campaign promises? Well, partly it’s because Gingrich’s proposals are impractical and wacky. He promised to establish a permanent lunar colony by the end of his second term - that would be in 2020. Once populated by 13,000 Americans, it would become the fifty-first state. Being unwilling to increase taxes, Gingrich would raise 90 per cent of the funding for his space programme from the corporate sector, which would help launch six to seven rockets a day. Evoking Cold War-era rhetoric, he said that the US must develop as much experience in space as soon as possible, so that the ‘Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to match[ing] it’. It does sound like something out of a patriotic sci-fi novel and it’s hard to see exactly how Gingrich envisions instituting his bold new era of interplanetary living. Will there be daily commercial space shuttles taking off from Earth; a lunar colony where corporations build roads, malls and movie theatres; thousands of people bouncing about, pioneering a bright new future of spacey living? It all seems pretty bizarre. After all, year 2020 is not the radically different era it appeared to be when a young Gingrich read sci-fi books and dreamed of outer space (he has said the fiction of Issac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke gave him a positive outlook and showed him the possibilities of the universe). Today, in a recession-hit 2012, year 2020 is a time that’s just around the corner - and most Americans are hoping they’ll get there without going broke. Yet a key reason why Gingrich would be unlikely to get approval for even a fraction of his plans is that the very idea that America should develop a bold space exploration programme is anathema to today’s anti-exploratory, risk-averse, measurable outcomes-obsessed climate. Even entertaining the thought of breaching new frontiers is seen as the height of lunacy. It’s regarded as the stuff of naive fiction and dead politicians. Yet great advances in science, expansions of human knowledge and technological developments have always happened against the odds and these have inspired wonder precisely because nobody could have imagined experiencing them. Gingrich actually had a point when he said that John F Kennedy launched his space programme back in 1961 without yet having access to the technology needed to achieve his ambitions. He had a point when he reminded viewers that Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris for a prize of $25,000; it was an astonishing feat. He had a point when he reminded crowds in Florida of the development of the airlines in the 1930s, which has led to a kind of freedom of movement and exploration that people could barely dream about before that era. Suspicion towards space exploration is not new, of course. Since the 1970s, it has variously been decried as a danger to peace and security, as a chauvinist enterprise, as a wasteful pursuit and as a threat to the environment. Yet pessimism and indifference to space discoveries are at an all-time high today. This became clear in the reaction - or lack of reaction, rather - to NASA’s announcement in December 2009 that water had been discovered on the moon. As Sean Collins pointed out on spiked at the time, this was ‘a giant leap towards fulfilling one of our collective fantasies, something only dreamed about in science fiction: humans living somewhere other than Earth’. It also made the moon a more likely base for manned missions to other parts of the solar system and NASA suggested the lunar water could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system. Yet, as Collins pointed out then, neither online pundits nor the mainstream media nor the authorities made a big deal out of the ground breaking discovery. Seen in this context it was no surprise that Gingrich’s boasts were ridiculed. His plans for a space colony might have sounded like a good idea when he touted it to Florida’s struggling Space Coast. After all, when the Obama administration cancelled George W Bush’s plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020, it prompted protests from the communities that depend on NASA for their livelihood as well as from Apollo veterans. But it was no surprise that Gingrich was met with put-downs from most other quarters and that his ideas were entirely dismissed. By and large, human achievements tend to be downplayed today. Exploring the unknown is seen as, at best, impractical and, at worst, reckless. When it comes to manned space exploration, the prevailing attitude is ‘been there, done that’. That’s why there’s been an unwillingness to separate Gingrich’s more wacky ideas - launching a new space race and establishing a permanent American outpost on the moon within eight years - from his sensible reminder that if we are to have any chance of making new discoveries and advances in the near or distant future, then we need to be willing at least to imagine that it’s possible and desirable to overcome the limits we face today. Nathalie Rothschild is an international correspondent for spiked. Visit her personal website here. Follow her on Twitter @n_rothschild. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12024/
Monday 30 January 2012 With the Leveson Inquiry currently insisting that the press bares all, campaign groups such as Turn Your Back on Page 3 have spotted an opportunity to force the tabloid’s topless ladies to cover themselves up. And all in the name of protecting girls like me from being terrorised by tits. The campaign to get bare chests banned is certainly not short of grand claims. Apparently, Page 3 and its like perpetuate sexism by, ‘at best, encouraging and endorsing negative attitudes towards us and within us, and at worst, [encouraging and endorsing] acts of violence committed against us’. According to campaigners, the government therefore has a responsibility to satiate these campaigners’ appetite for paternalism, which they believe equates to ‘stamping out sexism once and for all’. The Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaigners are right about one thing: an offensive misrepresentation of women exists in society. But it is this group of self-appointed saviours that has offended. The group parades itself as representative of women in order to justify forcing its views on the public. But if these supposed advocates of women’s rights were serious about liberties, they would not condone such bans. And it is not just that the campaigners are unjustified in speaking on behalf of women - they have also misrepresented women and men. These campaigners present women as pitiful animals teeming with self-loathing. Men are depicted as uncontrollable beasts who are so mesmerised by the breasts on Page 3 that these images, at best, define their perception of women for evermore and, at worst, turn them to violence. Whether or not the women behind this crusade succeed in banishing bewitching breasts from the news-stands, the ban-the-boobs lobby has already done more to objectify women than any male reader of the Sun to date. In the midst of its fervent outrage, Turn Your Back on Page 3 has completely disregarded the fact that the girls employed by the Sun or the Daily Star are not just breasts in the paper, but living, capable individuals who voluntarily accepted their jobs. Instead of considering that these girls might not be too bothered by flashing some flesh for the camera, the campaigners treat the Page 3 girls as mindless symbols of male domination and have no qualms about commandeering them for Turn Your Back on Page 3’s cause. This attitude disrespects women’s ability to judge for themselves whether they want to flaunt their bodies in public. The image of women that Turn Your Back on Page 3 perpetuates is of weak, fragile creatures who have to depend on the paternalistic intervention of the state in order to get anywhere in life. Apparently, pictures of tits overwhelm women with a wave of self-pity that will ‘stall our progress’ and seriously hinder our individual success. And the only way we can overcome this unbearable pain, of course, is to cry to the men in Westminster to make it all better. This depiction of women is precisely what perpetuates the sexist attitudes in society that Turn Your Back on Page 3 claims to be fighting. By trying forcefully to censor others on our behalf, Turn Your Back on Page 3 only reinforces the idea that women aren’t strong enough to speak up and prove the illegitimacy of sexist attitudes by themselves. Forcing the media to pretend that men aren’t attracted to our bodies will accomplish absolutely nothing, other than a gross infringement on our freedom. Despite the campaign’s assertion that it is the government’s responsibility to stamp out sexism once and for all, any negative attitudes towards women have to be dealt with by society, not the state. Even if Harriet Harman, the - again, self-appointed - ‘champion of press freedom’ and her posse get their way by, very fittingly, trampling over the freedom of the press, some men will still like naked women and some women are going to continue to feel empowered by their sexuality. To be honest, I don’t care if some women do like to be photographed with their clothes off. What I do care about is my ability to make my own decisions about how best to live my life. So to the women behind the Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaign: don’t pose as my salvation and don’t pretend to represent my concerns. Unlike you, I think women are capable of proving themselves to be more than a pair of tits without the help of the state. Gabrielle Shiner is on the executive board of European Students For Liberty and studies English at Queen Mary, University of London reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12025/
Friday 27 January 2012 Given the many scare stories about obesity in recent years, it would be easy to conclude that piling on the pounds is some kind of contemporary novelty. But, as Louise Foxcroft points out in Calories and Corsets, ‘Fat people are nothing new’. And for as long as there have been fat people, it seems, there has been advice about how to lose weight, ranging from the sensible through the wacky to the downright dangerous. The trouble is, as Foxcroft notes, diets are generally a failure. She quotes research from the American Psychological Association which found that two thirds of people were actually fatter two years after starting a diet than they were before they began. The authors concluded that diets ‘do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people’. Yet despite this, it is seen as perfectly reasonable to moralise about the weakness of fat people and criticise their inability to lose weight. ‘Fat is a synonym for the worthless, the slow, the inert, the unattractive, the weak, the poor and the stupid’, Foxcroft writes. ‘We have to scrutinise the way in which our culture is exploiting fat at the same time as it castigates it’, she adds. Moreover, this aversion to fat has been built far more on ‘aesthetic distaste’ than on concerns about health, though the desire to lose weight has always been driven by concerns related to both vanity and longevity. A historical sense of perspective is always invaluable in discussions like this one. Foxcroft starts right back with the ancient Greeks, who knew that ‘those who are uncommonly fat… die more quickly than the lean’, even if they also recognised that ‘in all maladies, those who are fat about the belly do best; it is bad to be thin and wasted there’. (The failure to recognise this latter point today is a reminder that progress should never be taken for granted.) Hippocrates, the father of medicine, recognised through observation that people’s constitutions were different and so were foods. Over 2,000 years ago, he was prescribing eating less and exercising more as a way to lose weight. He was also, however, prescribing vomiting as a weight-loss measure. If this seems extreme, writes Foxcroft, it was only following the fashions of the day in which vomiting was ‘popular and almost an art form’. She quotes Hippocrates when he writes that ‘fat individuals should vomit in the middle of the day, after a running or marching exercise and before taking any food’. He even offers the correct recipe for a suitable emetic. A highly influential Renaissance writer was the Venetian merchant Luigi Cornaro. His book, The Art of Living Long, is still in print. For Cornaro, the first rule is to regain self-control, something he lacked in the earlier part of his life when he engaged in ‘dissipated, gluttonous overindulgence’. Moderation is key. For starters, that meant not indulging in food that actually tasted of anything, and it certainly meant eating frugally. Cornaro was, therefore, a forerunner of today’s dietary advisers. Cornaro’s influence continued into the nineteenth century, as Foxcroft notes. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who piled on the pounds in later life, was not a fan of Cornaro, however. Cornaro’s slim frame was the result of a slow metabolism, Nietzsche wrote, not simply eating less. ‘But whoever has a rapid metabolism not only does well to eat properly, but needs to. A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would simply destroy himself on Cornaro’s diet. Crede experto - believe me, I’ve tried.’ Nietzche wasn’t the only famous writer to struggle with his weight. Samuel Johnson got fatter and fatter as he got older. Lord Byron, on the other hand, became disgusted with himself and spent his time starving and bingeing, and was accused of having an unhealthy influence on Romantic youth, rather like the celebrities of today. An American physician complained that young women were starving themselves rather than ‘incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron’. Constantly starving oneself is, one imagines, probably very effective in keeping weight down, even if it seems a good route to an early grave and a rather miserable existence. But some dietary advice has been downright bizarre. Take the ‘the Great Masticator’, Horace Fletcher, a nineteenth-century American diet guru and entrepreneur. ‘Fletcherism’ involved chewing food until it became liquid - at least 100 times for each mouthful, but as many as 700 times for a shallot, for example. The upshot may have been simply to make mealtimes so utterly laborious and time-consuming that his followers were simply too tired and bored to eat much. From the late nineteenth century onwards, rising wealth also meant a proliferation of fad diets. If it wasn’t dieting, then the answer to obesity would be weird and wonderful exercise regimes, life-threateningly restrictive garments or ‘reducing salons’ where machines would endeavour to squeeze the weight out of you. At least such fads might only last as long as the patience of the poor sucker who had put his or her faith in them. Far worse were the variety of harmful chemicals being marketed as weight-loss remedies. Brand names, writes Foxcroft, ‘hid basic ingredients: arsenic, which speeds up the system, was an ingredient in some slimming drugs, often mixed with strychnine, caffeine and phytolacca or pokeberry (a common emetic and purgative)’. Other concoctions were less harmful, but with no more scientific basis. So what, if anything, does help us lose weight? Foxcroft does express some sympathy for the idea that carbohydrates are a problem. The apparently faddy idea of cutting out carbohydrates has almost as long a history as the eat-less-move-more school of thought. In 1825, the French author of The Physiology of Taste, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, was advising his readers to avoid ‘starches, sugars and farinaceous foods’. William Banting had great popular success in the 1860s with his pamphlet, A Letter on Corpulence, to the extent that ‘banting’ and ‘to bant’ were the original verbs for dieting. Foxcroft notes how the British diet-book author and physician, Richard Mackarness - whose book Eat Fat and Grow Slim ran to six editions - explained the amazing nature of the Banting diet: eating as much as he liked while avoiding certain foods, Banting was consuming 2,800 calories per day and still losing weight. If the eat-less model of dieting were correct, this should have been impossible. Mackarness, who promoted a ‘Stone Age’ diet, was blunt in his explanation of obesity: ‘A DEFECTIVE CAPACITY FOR DEALING WITH CARBOHYDRATES.’ While Foxcroft thinks there is something in this theory, she also seems sold on the idea of ‘sensible’ eating habits, as propounded by the likes of Ancel Keys - the American doctor who popularised the idea that cholesterol is deadly - and his idea of a ‘Mediterranean diet’. The trouble is that it was Keys and his obsession with dietary fat that helped to turn low-carb diets from common sense into dangerous fads in the eyes of the medical profession. Calories and Corsets concludes with the idea of ‘industrial dieting’. As long as there are fat people who want to be thin, there will be companies willing to sell them services, eating plans, ready meals and snack bars, potions and gadgets that it is claimed will provide a quick and easy means to lose that spare tyre. The result is rarely sustained weight loss, however, and Foxcroft rails against this weight-loss industry. Foxcroft is right to argue that this obsession with weight is a recipe for misery. But that obsession does not simply come from corporations intent on making a fast buck or charlatans preying on the desperate, though both share some guilt. Rather, alongside the age-old moralisation against the corpulent, we now have a medical establishment desperate to tell us how to live, too. There is also the real, lived experience of those who would like to exercise some control over their bodies, which expand despite their best efforts to prevent it. At a time when exercising control over anything in our lives seems harder than ever, there is a tendency to focus on our bodies as objects to shape, to exercise our will upon. A major problem is that the eat-less-move-more mantra - which is the basis of both fad diets and official advice - does not produce lasting weight loss. The one diet that does seem to work for those who are prone to obesity - to eat less carbohydrate - is officially frowned upon as a harmful ‘fad’. That leaves those who want to lose weight in a constant cycle of semi-starvation, relapse, weight gain and depression, while all the while being berated for their lack of willpower. No wonder that obese people are routinely assumed to have psychological problems when they are in a constant turmoil of hunger and self-flagellation. Foxcroft’s book, if a little bit too much of a whistlestop tour at times, is a useful corrective to many of the themes in the modern debate about obesity. Her righteous anger at the pressures on people - particularly women - to aspire to a certain body shape is understandable, too, even if it sometimes misses the real culprits. Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked. His new book, Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, is published by Societas. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).) Read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here: @paniconaplate. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12017/
Friday 27 January 2012 From its foundation in 1921 to its dissolution in 1991, the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) was the largest and most influential of all Communist parties outside of the Communist bloc, with nearly two million members and a popular vote as high as a third of all votes cast in the country. Lucio Magri, who died last November, spent his adult life as a Communist, first in the party, then breaking away to found a more militant group (il manifesto) in the 1960s, then rejoining in the 1980s in time to see General Secretary Achille Occhetto wind it up as its inspiration, the Soviet Union, collapsed. When outraged party loyalists formed a Communist Refoundation Party that won seats in parliament in the 1990s, Magri was among them. ‘The Tailor of Ulm’, from which Magri takes the title for his history of Italian Communism, is a story by Bertolt Brecht about a man who invents a flying machine in the eighteenth century and, challenged to prove it, falls to his death from a church tower. This was the parable that Magri was told by a senior official to explain the dissolution of the party, with Brecht’s ironic moral: the tailor was not wrong; he was ahead of his time. The history of Communism in Italy’s struggles in the twentieth century has been well told in Paul Ginsborg’s two books, in Joan Urban’s study of Moscow’s influence on the PCI, and by writers among the many PCI spin-offs on the Italian far left (1). Magri’s settling of accounts/memoir of the PCI does a lot to give a flavour of the arguments from the point of view of a participant – it is a lively and intelligent account. Still, the unavoidable conclusion is that the idea put about by many radical writers and endorsed by Magri - that the PCI was unusually inventive and, in contrast to other Communist parties, relatively independent of the deadening influence of the ‘leadership’ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - is a painful and foolish myth. What is exceptional in the history of Italy and of the PCI is that at the crucial points when the country’s ruling elite had lost all authority, it was, weirdly, the Communists who saved capitalism from working-class revolt. In the 1920s, when the one-time-socialist-turned-fascist Mussolini had swept aside parliament and parties, the Communists were paralysed with indecision and driven underground (2). When in 1943, in the face of popular protests and strikes, the Fascist Grand Council took fright and deposed Mussolini, it was PCI chairman Palmiro Togliatti who persuaded the Allies that the Fascist Pietro Badoglio’s government should be recognised. Then when the Italian ruling class’s authority collapsed with the partisans’ victories over German forces, the leadership of the party persuaded its militants to install a government of ‘national unity’, even going so far as to help to invent an anti-fascist Christian Democrat party (DC) with which to share power (3). An irritable Lucio Magri refuses to look at this spectacular own-goal, dismissing the ‘theory of the blocked revolution’. The DC would, with a massive injection of cash and arm-twisting by the United States, do all in its power to keep the PCI out of office, effectively ruling Italy for the next 46 years. In the turbulent years of the late Sixties, the PCI did all it could to undermine the radical student revolt and to stop its militant mood spreading to the working class. (It was at this point that even a loyal Communist like Magri found it impossible to stay in the party.) In the 1970s, when economic crisis was met with working-class militancy which threatened at last to wreck the DC regime, it was the PCI under Enrico Berlinguer that saved them, by supporting Andreotti’s minority government with a promise of ‘no “no-confidence” vote’. Lucio Magri makes much of the indigenous Italian Communist tradition and the basis it gave for an outlook independent of the dominant Russian party in the Communist movement. Antonio Gramsci, party secretary and a noted political writer who died, thrown in jail by Mussolini, in 1937, is known for his distinction between the ‘war of position’ – consolidating the left’s influence – and outright struggle for power, or the ‘war of manoeuvre’. Gramsci’s categories were meant to get the party used to periods of patient work building up support after the dramatic struggles of the Russian Revolution (4). It was a formula that would lend itself to endless compromises, while mocking those militants who wanted to rush ahead to take on the enemy. Enrico Berlinguer, PCI secretary general from 1972 to 1984, developed the theory of the ‘historic compromise’, a bad analogy referring to the way in which the early capitalist class had compromised with the old order to remake society in its own image while keeping the symbols of kings and nobility as a safety blanket. So too, thought Berlinguer, would the Communists share power with the capitalist leaders of the DC to ease their way into power. In election after election, the PCI offered to share power only to be rebuffed by the DC (whose only real policy, to keep the Communists out, formed the basis of its appeal to its American and European allies). No matter how degrading the terms the PCI offered, the DC gave them nothing, until in the end Berlinguer was reduced to supporting the minority DC government without any ministerial posts or policy changes, even though the Communists had won more votes. As Magri does admit, the Communists not only supported a government that would have collapsed without them, they pushed the trade unions to accept wage limits to prove their moderation. Magri’s criticisms of the party, though, are not substantial. He criticises as if to hold them to account to an ideal version of their own politics, not understanding that the sorry denouement is the obvious outcome of this ideal. He baulks at Berlinguer’s austerity wage policy, but still hopes that there is a redeeming feature in its philosophical reworking as a critique of consumerism. Magri makes much of Berlinguer’s courage standing up to Moscow, but it is hardly earth-shattering to say, in 1981, a quarter of a century after the invasion of Hungary, that ‘the impetus that showed itself over long periods going back to the greatest revolutionary event of our epoch, the October Revolution, is now exhausted’. More to the point, Berlinguer was not criticising the Soviet Union; he was acknowledging that the Communist movement had run out of steam. Yet when Berlinguer’s successor Occhetto wound up the party, Magri claims that this was a betrayal of the party, and of Berlinguer. Magri notes that Berlinguer played an important role in laying the ground for the campaign against the corruption of the political party system, but shows no understanding that the clean-hands campaign was dangerously anti-political, and authoritarian, taking power out of the hands of elected politicians and giving it up to unelected judges. Similarly, it was the PCI that pushed hardest for Italy to submit to the guidance of the European Union. It is a shame that Magri’s book does not deal with the trends in Italian politics after the dissolution of the PCI, when his own midget Communist organisation won some support and even got further than the original in sharing power. More surprising perhaps is that the ex-Communist Giorgio Napolitano was made president – a reward for winding up the party. The weaknesses of the Italian left, its pathological inability to claim the power that was resting in its lap and the preference for the stability of the old order, was a real influence on Italian society. Italy’s feckless capitalist class has always been able to rely on the left to keep it in power. To the left’s amazement, the party that swept up in the anti-corruption drive was not its own, but Silvio Berlusconi’s joke Forza Italia. Even when Berlusconi was finally taken down, it was not by the left, but by the technocrats of the European Union, who put a government of unelected experts in place to run the country. The EU apparatchik running that administration, Mario Monti, was made a life senator by Napolitano. Another parable of the Communist era, an apocryphal story, says that after Nikita Khrushchev made his extraordinary ‘secret speech’ in 1956, outlining his predecessor Joseph Stalin’s errors and crimes at great length, a voice called out from the hall: ‘And what were you doing all that time?’ Khrushchev jumped to his feet and demands ‘Who said that?’. All the delegates are silent, staring hard at their feet. ‘That’s what I was doing’, explains Khrushchev. Too often in Lucio Magri’s account he is silent, staring at his feet: ‘I was a silent participant’ who ‘did not want to appear a busybody’; ‘I… was convinced of the opposite, but I resigned myself to acquiescent silence’. Having summed up his life here, at a loss as to what to do with himself, Magri called his close friends to one last dinner party and then took the trip to Zurich to end his own life with the help of doctors. James Heartfield‘s most recent book is The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909, published by Hurst and Columbia University Press. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).) reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12019/
Friday 27 January 2012 Love. We all need it, want it, strive for it and hate it. Love works in all areas of life, from families and friends to tumultuous paramours and quiet unrequited dedication. It makes us happy, it makes us sick. But most of us can live life and find love as it comes along. Jeanette Winterson cannot love. The author - still most famous for her 1985 debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - attributes her lack of feeling to the hard upbringing consistently and relentlessly referred to in all of her works. Adopted at six weeks old, living in a northern mining town under the fear of The Apocalypse and with a grotesque caricature of a mother, she never had much, either materially or emotionally. This is made painfully clear in the first 80 pages of misery-porn in her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. But past those 80 pages is a dawning realisation that she can love, and be loved, and that life is not all here to be wasted away. Loving women at a time when it was certainly not ‘appropriate’ to do so must have been difficult. Loving women when your mother believes it is such a sin that you must be possessed and need exorcisms must be even harder. But it is not until much later in the book that it becomes clear that Winterson’s obsession with love is simply the overriding factor in her attempts to find an identity. Once this is revealed, the story of her life gets far more intriguing. Her identity, despite feeling at ease with her body and never questioning her sexuality, is cast against the shadow of the ‘other’. From a young child, Winterson was always told that her parents had been ‘drawn to the wrong crib’ by Satan himself, and that the ‘good’ baby - Paul - who would have been in her place had they found the right crib, would never do the naughty things she did. She recalls being told off for dropping her doll in the pond; Paul would never have dropped his doll in the pond. The gender assumptions of whether he would even have a doll were not questioned. Winterson touches so briefly on this, it is almost a throwaway comment. But later, when thinking about how she identifies with the world and sexuality, it is crucial to understanding her. Winterson is an orphaned/non-orphaned, religious/irreligious lesbian schizophrenic who openly discusses her periods of madness. Throughout the dichotomy of the search for her true identity, to find some cohesion with reality, and her deliberate self-maligning separation from the world, there are tiny slivers of information fed through the overwhelming prose. Perhaps reflecting her own mental – and sometimes physical - dysphoria, there is the feeling of grasping for something in desperation, but not knowing what that is: an abstract description for a predominantly abstract writer. This is reflected in the way images drawn from seemingly nowhere are thrown into previously coherent sentences, jolting the reader from any comfort zone they may have been clinging to thus far. While these passages sometimes work, Winterson’s best moments are those of sheer clarity, of short sentences and direct language. These parts are raw and engaging, and are often the only times you feel empathy with her. Even if you cannot personally relate to a manic episode, or have never tried to gas yourself in a car while your cat scratches at your face, the connection between reader and writer is at its strongest in these passages of open, honest writing. The trouble is that Winterson herself questions the truth of anything she writes. So whether any, some, or all of the autobiography actually happened is a constant question hanging over the book. The truth, she says, is a version of events: another version may be equally true, but have alternate consequences. Oranges was supposed to be semi-autobiographical. Compared to Why Be Happy, it seems that most of it was just plain autobiographical. Written at the age of 23, it followed her life to then. Why Be Happy goes up to 23, jumps to her late twenties, and finally skips out an entire quarter century to current times. This is irritating to the reader who wants to follow her journey into and out of madness, to understand the processes and experiences she had in those times which shaped her works and defined her identity. After spending so much of the book focusing on the development of Oranges, it feels lazy for Winterson to ignore many of her other works as they developed, especially as they clearly follow her preoccupations with love, the body and identity. Winterson’s split personality features heavily in the latter half of the book as she struggles to find the truth of herself within herself. Having worked in a mental institution - for which she does not miss the irony - she chose to take her madness and cope by herself rather than spend time locked away and drugged up. The resulting tales she recounts of dreams, moments of clarity and weeks of depression, of clinging on to furniture and waking in night sweats calling for her mother(s), are the most true and most real accounts throughout the book. And yet, as they are derived from madness, their objective truth remains questionable. It seems Winterson identifies more with her split other, the other that never really existed, than with her bodily self. She loves and accepts the voice that harasses her, refuses to get in the car and join her at therapy sessions, reminds her of long hours in the coal hole and consistently remarks how she was never wanted. She does not accept the voices of real people around her who love her. Brief descriptions of volatile relationships cast glimpses of the discontented violence in her own mind broadcast on others, and it makes for uncomfortable reading. Jeanette Winterson cannot love, because she cannot love herself. At least that is her excuse. Rather than an autobiography, this is an account of a disturbed woman trying to find her place in the world. It resonates strongly with the continuing breakdown of society, where the family is no longer a nuclear unit, communities are spread globally, a career is not for life. Winterson’s disjointed sense of self and inability to love are consistently reasoned to her upbringing; given the myriad problems of her early life, there may be logic in this. But it just feels like an explanation – an apology, even – for her unusual style and controversial literature, and this makes the book more disappointing, depressing and less of a revelation than it promises to be. Lexy Barber is a freelance writer based in London. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/11913/
Friday 27 January 2012 It’s a worrying sign of the times when the first large-scale study of the make-up of the English Defence League (EDL) – a right-wing group that is fiercely opposed to radical Islam – has to top its policy recommendations with ‘Do not ban the group’. While he doesn’t think that the police or government are planning to impose such a ban, Jamie Bartlett – head of the violence and extremism programme at UK think-tank Demos and co-author, with colleague Mark Littler, of the report Inside the EDL: Populist Politics in a Digital Age – recognises that there are groups lobbying for the right-wing organisation to be added to the government’s list of proscribed organisations. Indeed, UK home secretary Theresa May did ban the EDL from marching through the London borough of Tower Hamlets in September last year. (Perhaps out of a warped sense of fairness, May then banned all other groups from marching there, too.) Following the riots in London in August, UK prime minister David Cameron appeared more disgusted by the EDL’s involvement in so-called ‘vigilante’ groups, which aimed to defend local areas, than with the rioters themselves. Cameron declared that in the ‘sick’ Britain that he’d diagnosed following the riots, there is no group ‘sicker than the EDL’. ‘I think that the government sometimes feels under pressure from advocacy groups to ban the EDL’, Bartlett tells spiked. ‘They make these bizarre moral equivalents between the EDL and al-Qaeda and Muslims Against Crusades.’ Bartlett considers that the recommendation in his report is necessary to act as ‘a counter-balance against those groups saying that they should be banned. Not many people have written in a report that the EDL should not be banned; it’s always “let’s get rid of them, let’s get rid of them”, so it feels a bit unbalanced.’ Such a ban would be tricky to implement anyway, given the nature of the EDL. One of the most striking aspects of Bartlett’s report is the finding that a high proportion of EDL supporters are in fact ‘clicktivists’, keyboard warriors raging against Islamic extremists from the safety of their own armchairs. As Bartlett points out, ‘It’s extremely difficult to know who the EDL is. If you ban the EDL, who are you banning? People who clicked “like” on a Facebook page?’ The EDL was founded in 2009 as a reaction against a Luton-based Islamist group protesting against the Royal Anglian Regiment’s return from duty in Afghanistan. The EDL has no centralised membership and relies upon the ‘likes’ on its Facebook page to keep tally of how many people support it. From the research carried out by Demos, employing an ingenious technique of using targeted Facebook advertising to get respondents to their survey, we know that approximately 76 per cent of the people who ‘like’ the EDL Facebook page consider themselves to be ‘members’ of the group. Only 52 per cent, however, claimed they had engaged in ‘online activism’ for the group, and less than a quarter (24 per cent) said they’d attended a national demonstration in the past six months. This nebulous sense of what it is to be an EDL supporter means that its significance can be massively inflated using online statistics. Despite official claims that their numbers are very high, Demos estimates that the EDL has between 25,000 and 35,000 supporters nationwide. However, the EDL has never been able to mobilise more than about 3,000 people to attend a single demonstration. The inflated online figures are one of the reasons the police presence is so high at EDL demonstrations: the police use Facebook estimates of attendees to estimate how many officers they need. As protests in Luton and Tower Hamlets last year illustrated, this can often lead to a bizarre situation where the vast numbers of police officers present make it look as though they are demonstrating rather than the EDL. Bartlett rightly calls for realism on behalf of the risk-averse police: ‘It’s risk management. They don’t want to be seen to have ignored possible intelligence. People will say, “why haven’t you gotten the police [numbers]? It was written all over Facebook for goodness sake.” So they constantly set up to fail.’ Equally, the loose sense of membership can backfire and cause serious problems for the EDL. When its Facebook page crashed and restarted, the group lost tens of thousands of ‘supporters’ who have never rejoined. And when Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik was revealed to have ‘liked’ the EDL Facebook page last year, this was reported by the UK media as evidence of ‘EDL links’, resulting in some rapid backtracking on the part of the EDL that ‘liking’ their the Facebook page was sufficient to constitute membership. ‘It’s absolutely unfair to vilify the EDL on the basis that Anders Breivik may have been a Facebook fan’, says Bartlett. ‘It’s impossible for them to know who he was. He may have been on a demo. He may have just messaged them saying “well done EDL from your Norwegian fan”. But the EDL want to have it both ways: they want to distance themselves from Breivik but then use their [Facebook] numbers to say “this is how big we are”.’ The nature of Facebook also means that media and campaign groups can pick and choose the comments on the threads of EDL Facebook walls and attribute them to ‘EDL supporters’. This, worryingly, led to the police preemptively arresting 179 EDL members who were drinking outside a pub in Westminster on Remembrance Sunday last year, at least in part on the basis of screen grabs from Facebook group pages that had been sent to the police by left-wing groups. The EDL has claimed these posts were the work of ‘trolls’ unaffiliated with the organisation, and it’s almost impossible to know for sure whether this is true or not. As Bartlett points out, ‘You could set up a fake profile, post something, screen grab it yourself and send it off the police. It’s ridiculous.’ It also speaks to the lack of a sense of what it is to be a member of a political organisation that well over 1,200 EDL ‘supporters’ on Facebook were prepared to provide intimate details about their politics and their relationship to the organisation through an online survey. (While it’s true that this was a self-selecting sample of individuals – some supporters may well have been concerned about divulging such information – criticisms by academics and the EDL themselves that the survey overlooks the many members of the EDL not on Facebook don’t seem to hold water given that the vast majority of under-30s in the UK are on Facebook.) Equally, it’s indicative of the nature of the movement that a survey is necessary in order really to understand the concerns and profile of members. So who are EDL members? Much of the demographic profile is unsurprising. Although Demos believes ‘supporters are older and better educated than many assume’, they are predominantly male (81 per cent), only 28 per cent are aged 30 or over and just 30 per cent have a university or college qualification. However, 20 per cent are currently students. They are also far more likely to be unemployed than the UK population as a whole, especially when it comes to older supporters aged between 25 and 64 years old (28 per cent are unemployed, compared to six per cent of that age group as a whole). The Demos report authors emphasise that EDL members are broadly democrats, who have as much belief in the importance of voting as the rest of the population. They are more jaded with institutions compared with the public as whole, but not by much. As the report’s authors point out, the treatment of EDL members by these institutions may have contributed to cynicism. Bartlett bemoans the actions of the police as exacerbating the problem: ‘That tactic of preemptive arrests [on Remembrance Sunday] was very, very stupid and I think it’s going to backfire. Trust in the police by the EDL is already pretty low. It’s now going to absolutely plummet. And it’s really important the police aren’t seen as tools of government, but as protecting people’s right to march, rather than stopping them from marching. They’ve made a real mistake with this.’ Interestingly, despite the EDL’s claims to be a single-issue organisation opposing the rise of radical Islam, immigration (42 per cent) is cited as one of their two highest concerns by significantly more EDL supporters than Islam (31 per cent). This doesn’t surprise Bartlett, who claims that ‘on aggregate, immigration probably did benefit the country – but there are huge pockets who think that it didn’t benefit them whatsoever’. While acknowledging immigration was once seen to be a taboo subject, Bartlett observes the situation is changing: ‘People are now saying “it’s important that we actually debate this subject”. But what does that even mean? When anyone actually voices an opinion… everyone just jumps out and calls them bigots and racists as well. What does having a frank, open debate about immigration actually entail? Because everyone’s saying that we need one, but no one seems to be willing to have one.’ Bartlett finds the reluctance to engage with the EDL dispiriting: ‘They are talking about politics. I prefer that’, he says. ‘I’ve had members of the EDL talk to me about details of what Theresa May did and Charles Clarke did. I thought, “how do you know any of this stuff?” They’re really into it. We talk about the problems of apathy and then these guys get involved in politics and we shit ourselves. We don’t want them to do it. Actually I prefer that they’re engaged.’ Contrary to scaremongering from some quarters, Bartlett doesn’t think EDL membership is going to be on the rise, despite their new partnership with the British Freedom Party, which could see EDL leader Tommy Robinson and other supporters enter party politics. Bartlett points out that it’s important to observe the differences between the rise of the far right in Europe and Britain, which has - relatively speaking - ‘done a really good job of avoiding it’. He believes the fragmented nature of the EDL will mean that the group will not rise in numbers, but won’t fall either. It will remain ‘a constant, small and irritating presence’. ‘I think a lot of people do share some similar sentiments when they are reasonably and rationally voiced, but they never are. So they’re never going to do well’, Bartlett says. ‘Every report about the EDL says they’re a bunch of “fascists”, which means they’re going to find it very difficult to shake the tag no matter how good Tommy Robinson is.’ Having spoken to Robinson, Bartlett finds him ‘refreshing’ compared to many politicians due to ‘the way that he just speaks his mind. People in the coalition don’t dare say boo to a goose. That’s why I think people were impressed by his Paxman performance [on the BBC’s Newsnight].’ The Demos report pours cold water on the hysteria regarding the EDL and rightly calls for the police, government and other campaign groups to get a sense of perspective, to engage with members rather than banning them, and to stop inflating the group’s significance. Whether this advice will be heeded by such groups - which often use the spectre of the ‘fascist’ EDL to suit their own ends - is another matter. Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12016/
Friday 27 January 2012 If, as Sonia Purnell asserts in her biography of Aryan-lite London mayor Boris Johnson, ‘you cross or criticise - or worse still, mock [the Johnson clan] at your peril’, then she could probably do with giving Securicor a ring. For Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity is an intensely gossipy and ultimately eviscerating volume. And it comes not from an avowed enemy, but from his one-time number two at the Telegraph’s Brussels bureau. By the book’s end, the popular idea of Boris as a blundering but charming free spirit, ever ready with a quip and a knowing smirk, is demolished. In its place stands a very different looking figure, a heartless egotist, in fact, intent above all on self-advancement with a bit of fluff-fiddling, hanky-panky along the way. Indeed, the mock-heroic image of Johnson as an unlikely philanderer, an accidental Casanova, is one of the principal plinths of the Johnson myth to take a battering. Not that Johnson is in reality a model of monogamy. Far from it. Throughout both his high-society marriages, first to Allegra Mostyn-Owen and, subsequently, to his then-pregnant mistress, Marina Wheeler, Johnson’s attitude to the conjugal pact has been positively French. What Purnell seems intent on denuding us of is the impression that Johnson’s horizontal fun and frolics is, well, just that, fun and frolics, an endearing testament to his bracingly liberal attitude to life and love, not to mention a triumph of charisma over his ‘frequent habit of forgetting to shower’ and his slightly ‘whiffy jackets’. For instance, the chapter ‘Busting with spunk’ dishes the dirt with sanctimonious glee. Dealing with his time as the editor of the Spectator - or the Sextator, as Purnell calls it - she brings the bonk-and-booze atmosphere of the magazine to rather sordid life. Purnell even has one unnamed object of Johnson’s amour explain his seduction technique at the time: ‘He invades your personal space, gets really close up to you, and then with those slightly popping blue eyes of his says intently in a deep voice: “you really must come and write for me at the Spectator”.’ Creepy, maybe, but it seems there was no shortage of young women eager to file copy. Worse still, Purnell relays Johnson’s affair with randy socialite Petronella Wyatt in cruel, unnecessary Technicolor, complete with tales of abortion and, ultimately, Wyatt’s abandonment. Johnson’s extra-marital commissioning has come at a cost, of course. It was his refusal to come clean about his affair with Wyatt after newspapers exposed it that forced the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, to dismiss the blonde swordsman from his front bench. But while Johnson’s determination to keep his pecker up has caused him some professional discomfort, Purnell clearly does not think he has suffered enough. She finger wags: ‘No one should doubt that there are casualties in a jolly Johnson jape - and they are usually women (or children).’ In many ways, however, it is the view that emerges of Johnson, or better still ‘Boris’, as the carefully manufactured conceit of an arch egotist that is most damaging. Nothing is quite what it appears. His first name is actually Alexander, not Boris, or ‘Al’ as his family calls him; his famous bouffant is not artlessly unkempt, but deliberately messed up prior to public appearances; and his achingly quintessential English eccentricity was, according to Purnell, a persona initially forged while he was a scholarship boy at Eton. What Purnell seems keen to emphasise throughout is that Johnson is always manipulating, always trying to bend those around him to his will - others in Purnell’s telling are always means, not ends, to Johnson. He appears as he thinks those he wants and needs desire him to appear. It is calculated, not spontaneous; his poshness and his bumbling are affectations. Even his membership of the notorious Bullingdon club, alongside current prime minister David Cameron, was instrumental rather than full-hearted, Purnell argues. She quotes the late Anthony Howard: ‘Boris was a first-generation Etonian. The way he adapted to the ways of the rich and grand, including people like Charlie Spencer [Princess Diana’s brother] and Darius Guppy, and the members of the Bullingdon was astounding. It was not in his background at all.’ Indeed. Attending the same Primrose Hill state primary school as the Labour Party’s dead-beat combo, the Miliband brothers, Johnson’s background was more bohemian middle-class, with a touch of Tory shire aspiration thrown in, than unadulterated, entitlement-rich aristocracy. Purnell certainly seems in little doubt that it was while he was studying at Oxford that Johnson took the almost Nietzschean self-mythologising to a new level. He was determined to win the attention of his largely New Romantic or Smiths-loving peers. Hence the ‘sagging cords, ragged tweeds and [a] haystack coiffeur’, atop a mouth full of plummy vowels and ridiculous ‘grrrs’, ‘errs’ and ‘aaaghhs’. ‘Boris’ was well and truly born. But what was the point to this display, this work of art known as Boris, is the question Purnell is always raising but never answering. Recalling Johnson at the time, current Lib Dem politico Neil Sherlock, who beat Johnson to the Oxford Union presidency at his first attempt, seems similarly unsure. Purnell writes: ‘Wannabe politicians have a burning mission that drives them - whether it is to reform the NHS, take Britain out of the EU or renew a political party. Boris did not seem to have one then - when politics was considerably more ideological and cause-driven - and does not appear to have one now. As Sherlock observes, “without those passions, it’s not obvious why he would pursue a political career”.’ What was clear back then, especially after Johnson did finally become Union president, was that what he lacked in politics he more than made up for in politicking. This was certainly the view of an unnamed journalist who knew Johnson at Oxford: ‘After his election as president, he became known as someone who will do what he needs to do, say what he needs to say. People came to know that they could like him, but not trust him.’ Yet for all Johnson’s careerism and vaunting ambition, Purnell’s portrait of him in parliament (2001-2008) as Conservative MP for Henley suggests anything but an effortless networker. Late for committee meetings and determined to keep his editorship at the Spectator, plus his columns at the Telegraph and GQ, he was, reports a contemporary, ‘like a fish out of water’. Just to stick the knife into somewhere fleshy, she notes that his weight gain, and subsequent love of jogging, meant he was never going to ‘work the tearooms and bars of Westminister’ for fear of further expanding his girth. She then adds, just for spiteful measure: ‘In any case, Boris finds making genuine conversation with people and particularly women on an equal professional footing difficult… He is better talking at people in performance-mode than talking to them over a coffee table.’ But it is the portrait of Johnson’s performance within parliament from columnist and sketch-writer Quentin Letts that is perhaps most damning. ‘He was terrible in the chamber, an echoing parody of himself… he was trying to ventilate false anxieties about matters in which he really wasn’t very interested. The reaction was quite often silence. You see, Boris isn’t angry. You’ve got to be angry: you’ve got to feel things as an MP, but there’s no soul, no church in him. No belief. Most people don’t go into politics out of vanity, but maybe he has.’ Despite his underwhelming performance in parliament, that has not impeded Johnson’s political rise. Yet it is in his current role, as London mayor, that the real nature of this political soullessness becomes clear. That is, beyond the bon mots and cheekiness, Johnson in office is utterly unremarkable. Purnell notes that after a year, ‘his regime had not become the laboratory for Conservative policy wonkery many had expected’. ‘Boris is a captive of City Hall’, observes one former colleague. ‘The place is a monument to Ken Livingstone.’ Quite. And this, perhaps, is the real twist. It is not that loveable, randy old Boris is a veneer, beneath which an empty, all-consuming vanity rages. The real twist is that behind this meticulous performance, which at points suggests a free-thinking liberal, his politics are drenched in the same prejudices and practice as those of his political peers. He didn’t so much reverse his predecessor Ken Livingstone’s miserable, illiberal policies as continue them. Hence his first, signal act upon becoming mayor was, incredibly, to ban drinking on public transport. He then proved just how willing he really was to challenge the environmentalist consensus - which he’d been doing in print for years - by publishing the London Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, a report that matched the most green-hearted environmentalist in fearmongering and morally coercive hellfire. ‘When the facts change, you change your mind’, he said at the time to justify his change in views. And just to make sure he didn’t upset anyone at all, he sacked his adviser, John McGrath, for responding to a question about Johnson driving black votes out of London with ‘Let them go if they don’t like it here’. When push came to political shove, Johnson - a self-styled free spirit - proved a little too keen for people not to speak their minds. So yes, the bluster and bonhomie may well be artifice, the dissimulation of a deeply ambitious but heartless man. But what is truly dispiriting about the Boris phenomenon is the deadening conformism of his politics. His, after all, is effectively a political practice every bit as neck deep in petty authoritarianism, opportunist ‘greenwash’ and politically correct etiquette as his immediate predecessor. He did not break the mould; he refashioned himself (once again) to fit within it. Once asked in an interview if he had any convictions, Boris responded: ‘Only one - for speeding, but a very long time ago.’ Although he could never say it openly, there is a truth to Bozza’s jest. As spectacular a personality as he may still be, as a politician he is just as unwilling to sail against the prevailing wind as his bland, consensus-loving peers. And that is the real story being played out behind the irresistible rise of Boris Johnson. Tim Black is editor of the spiked review of books. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12015/
Friday 27 January 2012 No sooner had the New York Times published a 3,300-word excerpt from Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas than the White House declared the book an ‘overdramatisation of old news’. The first couple would not be reading it, apparently. Cue tweeting, newspaper headlines, talkshow segments, error lists circulating online, rebuttals – and the book had barely even hit the stores. The Obamas chronicles the ups and downs of the pair’s presidency and first ladyhood. Kantor, a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, wanted to examine not just how America’s top power couple has grappled ‘politically and psychologically’ with their mission, but also how the American people have been affected by it. She set out to explore the impact of ‘their partnership - their debates and differences, shared ideas about themselves, and deep hesitation about politics - on the presidency, the job of first lady, and the nation’. To achieve this, Kantor relied on 200 interviews, which included talking with 33 White House aides. Although she met the Obamas in September 2009 for a New York Times Magazine piece about their marriage, Kantor did not interview them for her book. Understandably, Michelle Obama has questioned Kantor’s ability to get inside her head (although it’s hardly unusual for biographers to try to do so). In a CBS interview with her friend Gayle King, the first lady asked: ‘What third person can tell me what I feel?’. She also downplayed some of the biggest talking points of the book - such as the alleged tensions between her and the president’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel (Kantor describes them as the president’s ‘first and second spouses’, with different visions of what kind of leader Obama should be). She wouldn’t read Kantor’s book, Michelle Obama said, but still complained that it presents her as ‘some kind of angry black woman’. The White House’s aggressive reaction to the book has surprised many of those who have actually read it. Because, ultimately, it is a largely forgiving account of Obama’s presidency and a largely sympathetic portrait of the first lady and the marriage of the ‘POTUS’ and ‘FLOTUS’. Yes, the image of Michelle Obama firing off emails to the president’s advisers during her morning workout sessions could rub people up the wrong way. After all, the American people elected Barack Obama, not his wife. Yet Michelle Obama is also described here as a key political asset, with approval ratings that have been a lot higher and more stable than her husband’s, and as someone who, time and again, rescues his career. Yes, she comes across as strict and demanding, but also as an aspirational, inspirational, ambitious and strong-minded woman who cares greatly about her image, her family and her country. The book is chock-full of inferences about the Obamas’ feelings and states of mind. Often these passages are at least as cringeworthy as that moment when the first lady told a group of English schoolgirls, ‘I do hugs’, and then embraced them one by one. For instance, Kantor describes Michelle Obama’s reactions to an emotional speech that her husband delivered in honour of the victims of a shooting in Arizona, an incident which left congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a coma. The president spoke about Giffords’ recovery - she had opened her eyes for the first time that day. ‘Michelle closed her own eyes briefly, pantomiming her husband’s speech a little. She did that sometimes, acting out the words he was saying during his speeches, as if she could give them some of her animation and propel his message across.’ At the end, ‘the expression on Michelle’s face was one of deep satisfaction. He had given the kind of speech she knew he could give. The look on her face said: This is the president I wanted you to be.’ You can almost hear the dramatic strings and pounding drums setting in. Unsurprisingly, though, it is the gossipy titbits of The Obamas that have drawn most attention. There are recaps here of some well-known outcries - like that time when Michelle wore a pair of $540 sneakers to a Feeding America event. There are also some new revelations about White House conflicts - like the time when former press secretary Robert Gibbs cursed adviser Valerie Jarrett. Carla Bruni had claimed that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was ‘hell’. Jarrett told Gibbs, falsely, that the first lady was unhappy with the way he handled the situation. Gibbs bandied the f-word around and then stormed out. Then there are the anecdotes about the Obamas’ reluctance to move to Washington, about how they feel like outsiders there and have isolated themselves socially, all the while missing their more laid-back pre-presidency life. Apparently, after the election in 2008, Michelle Obama considered staying behind in Chicago with her children until the end of the school year. Kantor also relays stories of White House extravagances - like a lavish Alice in Wonderland-themed Halloween party in 2009, organised by Tim Burton. At this time, 10 per cent of Americans were jobless and Tea Partiers were going on about Washington’s excesses. Inside the White House, children of administration officials and military servicemen mingled with Chewbacca, who had been personally dispatched by George Lucas, and dined with Johnny Depp, who was dressed as the Mad Hatter. So, yes, there is plenty to satisfy exposé-hungry readers as well as those who see the president and his wife as aloof and out of touch. There is a voyeuristic feel to the book, too - the inside covers have plans of the White House, showing the layout of the private and public quarters. Yet, overall, The Obamas comes across as a feelgood counterweight to Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men (reviewed here), which described Obama’s inner circle as highly dysfunctional and claimed that turmoil in the White House hampered his response to the economic crisis. That account avenged those who warned of Obama’s inexperience and said his insistence on uniting Washington through non-partisan politics was naive. Kantor, however, is a lot more generous. In many ways, she salvages the image of the Obamas as a harmonious couple, as progressive, grounded and too principled to succumb to the wheeling and dealing Washington ways. Yes, The Obamas is a reminder of the disappointments and failures of the current administration, which held out such big promises in 2008 but was already in a shambles by the time of the disastrous midterm elections of 2010. Yet the book also strikes some apologetic and positive notes, reinforcing the image of Obama as an embattled leader whose every attempt to unify Washington, eradicate inequality and defend liberty has been shot down by hostile Republicans. The book also gives the impression that the Obamas are on a rebound, that they are more experienced now, have accepted the White House as their home and realise they must be prepared to schmooze and cut deals now and then. With the administration re-shuffled, tensions between the East and West wings have been smoothed out, apparently. Michelle Obama has found a satisfying mission in her Let’s Move campaign to eradicate childhood obesity. Barack Obama has started listening to the public rather than seeing himself as a misunderstood lone ranger. Instead of being so defensive about the book, the White House would have done better keeping schtum and being grateful that some people are still happy to be matter-of-fact about, or even gloss over, the administration’s failings. There are two instances, in particular, in The Obamas which reveal just how anti-climactic the current presidency has been. The first is the description of the president and first lady’s trip to Oslo where Barack Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, he was facing great obstacles to his proposed healthcare reforms, on which he had staked the success of his presidency, and he had bitterly disappointed those on the left who had hoped his presidency would herald a new dawn of liberty and tolerance. The trip to Oslo, however, was like ‘a brief, happy fantasy for the president’, Kantor writes, ‘a Nordic alternate reality where citizens were learned and pensive, discussions were thoughtful, and everyone was a fan… For one day, the Obamas lived the dream version of his presidency instead of the depressing reality.’ The Scandinavian members of the Royal Academy ‘asked the same question the president had asked Congress: how could a country as rich as the United States not provide healthcare for its citizens?’ Outside, thousands of Norwegians took part in a torchlight parade in Obama’s honour. In other words, not a year into his presidency, Obama had to travel abroad to get the kind of reception and evoke the kind of excitement that had electrified the air on his inauguration day. In Europe - where he wasn’t putting anybody’s personal health, finances or liberty at stake - his saviour image was still pretty much intact. But far from leading him to try to reignite this excitement in the US, judging from the comments of advisers cited in Kantor’s book, all this just confirmed to Obama that America was too unsophisticated for him. The second revealing instance in The Obamas gives a clue as to the kind of message we can expect from the administration during the 2012 elections, at a time when public confidence in the president has been deflated and Democrats seem to want a second term for Obama mostly because the Republican candidates freak them out. Kantor describes Michelle Obama’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on the day before the midterm elections. ‘“I know change has not come fast enough”, she said. “It takes a lot longer than any of us would like.” But together they had come too far to stop, she told the audience, shaking her head no, almost as if she were rejecting her own impulse to give up.’ Two years into the presidency, then, at a key event, the first lady of the United States was not speaking of hope and sweeping change, but acknowledging defeats and urging supporters to be patient. Kantor writes: ‘My husband could not do it alone, she declared, speaking for herself and for them. Like her, the audience had no choice. “Yes we must”, she said…’ It is no secret that the Obama administration has suffered from a loss of confidence - even the White House’s strong reaction to the publication of The Obamas shows that they are lashing out from a position of weakness. To a strong administration with great support, a book that is mainly a gossipy, melodramatic and empathetic summary of the Obamas’ stay in the White House would not be a big deal. Yet, surely, replacing old, boisterous and vague slogans with new, humbled and vague ones won’t get the Obamas very far? Nathalie Rothschild is an international correspondent for spiked. Visit her personal website here. Follow her on Twitter @n_rothschild. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12014/
Friday 27 January 2012 ‘Never like today has Venice spoken to historians and men in general in a language more real and universal, offering experience of a microcosm that goes along a path full of dilemmas, of a relationship that is risky and perennially precarious with nature.’ Piero Bevilacqua, Italian historian, La Sapienza University of Rome Piero Bevilacqua’s book Venezia e Le Acque: Una Metafora Planetaria (Venice and the Waters. A Planetary Metaphor), published in 2000, explores how the city’s risky environment speaks to us all in modern times. Here, I discuss the contemporary international meaning of the Venetian metaphor: Venice as an environmentally threatened retreat from modernity. The Reconstitution of the Venetian MetaphorOther authors have concluded that the Venetian political metaphor died with the fall of the Republic in 1797, and that the Venetian metaphor subsequently became more salient culturally than politically. As the twentieth century progressed, intellectuals frequently declared that Venice had lost any metaphorical significance, as indicated by Georg Simmel’s declaration, in 1922, that Venice could only regurgitate motifs and was no longer a creator of meaning. For historian Manfredo Tafuri, writing in 1978, the city lingered as ‘an allegory of a general condition’ in which the metaphorical mask must be worn to save one’s soul. Former Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari draws on Simmel and Friedrich Nietzsche to argue that Venice has lost its metaphorical signification, with the carnival mask emblematic of the loss of direction. ‘All appearance exists in itself and for itself – a perfect mask that hides being, or rather, reveals the loss, the absence of being’, Cacciari wrote in 1995. Similarly, the French journalist and political commentator Régis Debray has signalled his belief that Venice no longer provides vision, offering little more than narcissistic ‘confirmations’ - though he held out the possibility that the city could continue its tradition of anticipating the future: ‘It seems to me that the relic is not sufficiently out of fashion to take a holiday; the graceful, the delightful carries too much weight. Perhaps this egocentric microcosm, which has always been a few centuries ahead of the rest – which invented the ghetto long before the camps, a department for monitoring correspondence long before telephone tapping and the letter of credit long before cashflow – is in the process of inventing before our unseeing eyes the insular Europe of tomorrow, reduced to picturesque features like half-timbering, wrought iron and inns but dead to space exploration, the planet and its century: a monocultural peninsula set in its lagoon, forgetting the open sea, suffocated by memory, and in which the tertiary sector will have eclipsed the primary and the secondary.’ (Debray, 2002) I take issue with Debray’s presentation of Venice as a post-industrial model for an insular Europe. While it is true that Venice’s petrochemical industry has declined and tourism is growing, the expansion of the port for cruise ships and goods-handling indicates that it is still open to the sea. But the suggestions that Venice has lost its meaning as a cultural centre do seem to be describing real changes. Undoubtedly, the cultural importance of Venice at the beginning of the twenty-first century has diminished in comparison with the nineteenth century and the first 60 years of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, the Lido has only attracted members of the international cultural elite occasionally, for specific exhibitions or the Venice film festival. There have been recent attempts to revive Venice as a cultural centre: the Lido is being reconstructed as a prime vacation destination and new cultural establishments have opened. In 2009, the renovated Punta della Dogana, the former customs house, was opened to display art from the collection of French billionaire François Pinault for 30 years, and a renovated warehouse in Venice’s salt docks was opened as a museum dedicated to the postwar artist Emilio Vedova. Now Venice needs an exhibition and storage facility on the mainland to support museums and libraries within the city. A bid to be the European Capital of Culture in 2019 is an opportunity to extend Venice’s cultural facilities. These initiatives are welcome, although Venice has not yet regenerated its past cultural magnetism. I concur with Debray that Venice has not yet retired as a creator of meaning. Although death became the dominant Venetian motif in the twentieth century, the city has retained a potent impact. ‘The ruin of Venice was a given for the Romantics, but it was the death of Venice that was perpetrated in the twentieth century. Venice had become the very allegory for history, decay and the threat of the elements, powerful still at the onset of the twenty-first century’, writes Margaret Plant (emphasis in original). These comments identify environmental dangers lurking within the Venetian metaphor. Likewise, John Eglin acknowledges the role of environmental issues for interpretations of Venice, and recognises the potential for the reconstitution of the Venetian metaphor through environmental criticism: ‘The Venetian metaphor – the transfiguration of the myth of Venice – occasionally manifests itself even today. The Prince of Wales’s 1989 jeremiad against modern and post-modern architecture approvingly cited John Simpson’s “Venetian” design for London Bridge City, and nostalgically evoked the Canalettian London, “one of the architectural wonders of the world, a city built on the water like the centre of another great trading empire, Venice”.’ (Eglin 2001). So, environmental activists have assisted the reconstitution of the Venetian political metaphor, especially through the campaign against the mobile dams that reached its height in 2005. Such campaigns have helped Venice become synonymous with an environmentally threatened retreat from modernity. I have identified two long-term themes that have contributed to the symbolic revival of the city: Venice as the expression of decadence, death and degradation of humanity; and Venice as representing the dominance of conservationism over modernisation. In the twenty-first century, these themes have become central to Venice’s association with a threatened watery environment. Venice’s environment is a reference point for cities worldwide: other cities are often referred to as ‘the Venice of the North’, or of the East, Asia, the America. As Robert Davis and Garry Marvin have remarked, nobody refers to Venice as ‘the Amsterdam of the Adriatic’. Robert Browning coined the term ‘Little Venice’ for the network of canals in the London Paddington area, which is currently being redeveloped. Venice in California has its own replica canal and neo-Classical buildings. And how many other cities have been reproduced as a hotel? The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, with its gondola rides along clean canals, may be a perverse reproduction of Venice, but it demonstrates how the Venetian metaphor has been stretched. ‘Venice’s image has been appropriated and replicated by cities from Las Vegas to Macau’, notes a report in 2010 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Venice expresses international metaphorical meaning for watery environments and increasingly for threatened environments, too. Rinaldo (2009) describes Venice as a ‘planetary metaphor’ with ‘global resonance’. Why is the contemporary Venetian metaphor so influential? Venice as the Crisis of Human CivilisationAndré Chastel, the French art historian, refers to ‘the Venetian challenge: the central episode of the crisis of modern civilisation’. Venice has come to represent an escape from the human-created modern world. This is largely due to the historical legacy of the Venetian Republic. Venice has a long history as a symbol of Western civilisation, dating back to its days as the gateway to the Orient. The pessimism that followed the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797 weighed heavily on the minds of influential thinkers about the city. As the nineteenth century progressed, human intervention in nature was frequently interpreted as problematic. Culturally, Venice was depicted as a haven for conservationism against modernity. During the twentieth century, cultural associations with Venice as a place of death, decadence and human degradation were consolidated into Venice’s representation of the fall of man, as depicted by John Berendt’s 2005 book The City of Falling Angels. By the early twenty-first century, the sinking of Venice came to be seen as an allegory on human failure. ‘It will be submerged. It will descend into the water silently and permanently. It is the image of the city as the final end of all human achievement and aspiration’, writes Peter Ackroyd. Such profound pessimism about human intervention in nature became a vital component of conservationism, as Rinaldo describes: ‘Venice, as the epitome of the global environmental challenge between natural environment and constructed environment and the central episode of modernity, gives authority to worries and hopes. For this subject, pessimism, indeed, has been the norm for centuries. Lord Byron already heard the screaming of nations about the sinking palaces, however from Ruskin until Braudel, Chastel and Indro Montanelli a lot has been done for the conservation of the city and its environment.’ (Andrea Rinaldo, 2009) I have discussed how the transformation of conservationism into environmentalism required overcoming the modernist dichotomy between man and nature, which was central to conservationist protection of the natural world. Dissolving this dichotomy has been perceived as an essential part of rediscovering a past equilibrium in Venice. ‘Establishing a modern environmental culture must begin with a change in direction which leads from the current anthropic conception of nature to a biocentric attitude, by recovering the concept that man is part of nature. Furthermore, man is a conscious part of nature, and therefore one which must become active in order to recover the equilibriums lost’, write Mauro Bon, Danilo Mainardi, Luca Mizzan and Patrizia Torricelli. These observations depend more on Venice’s ancient myths about political equilibrium and harmony than on environmental reality. The existence of a past natural equilibrium in Venice or anywhere has been questioned: ‘The concept of natural equilibrium, in the static sense of maintenance which the notion suggests, does not feature at all in any natural evolutionary phenomena. However, if such a statement is true in general it is even more evident in the case of the Venice environment (its lagoon and drainage basin), which has been the object of much intervention for centuries. It has been maintained completely artificially only at the price of decisive transformations carried out by man.’ (Rinaldo, 2001) For Rinaldo: ‘Venice, like Gaia, teaches that there cannot exist, in the life of complex systems like lagoons, a general notion of equilibrium.’ Notwithstanding the popularity of Gaia theory in green thinking, the re-establishment of equilibrium in Venice has been a key demand of Venetian environmentalists. Campaigners have claimed that the mobile-dam project is violating natural equilibrium, while UNESCO has suggested that it will re-establish equilibrium: ‘MOSE will also help restore the equilibrium of the ecosystem of the lagoon; it will protect the surrounding marshes and help keep the canal banks in Venice’s inner city and on the nearby islands from further harm.’ (UNESCO 2009). The mobile-dam project is only one point of tension in many drawn-out battles between modernisers and conservationists in Venice. The city built on the architectural and engineering pioneering that developed during the Venetian Republic to experiment with many innovative projects. Yet conservationism prevailed by the early twentieth century and, by that century’s end, Venice had become an emblem of the struggle between environmentalism and modernity. Environmental claims drew on a pervasive cultural unease with modernisation and reticence about human intervention in nature. Defending Venice from sinking has become a specific focus for debating the perceived crisis of modern civilisation. For some, the creation and maintenance of Venice represents the triumph of human civilisation. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos) describes how Venice ‘symbolises the victorious struggle of mankind against the elements, and the mastery men and women have imposed upon hostile nature’ (UNESCO, 2009). While this was true during the Venetian Republic, the observation feels dated when every attempt to construct in Venice is subject to conservationist resistance. Numerous contributors to an article in the 27 June 2009 edition of the daily newspaper Il Gazzettino di Venezia bemoaned Venice’s condition as a conservationist city. ‘To conserve can also mean to leave degrading, and the Costa-Cacciari “reign” has registered a worsening of Venice’, wrote Riccardo Calimani. For Antonio Alberto Semi, president of the scientific and cultural institution Ateneo Veneto, Venetian conservationism is merely representative of a wider climate: ‘It is true that there is resistance to change, but everywhere is like this.’ Venice has become synonymous with conserving the past against modern change: as John Julius Norwich comments, ‘[no] city in the world has changed less over the last 200 years’. However, the contemporary Venetian metaphor is not free of contradictions. Current Venetian ParadoxesThe belief that human intervention should be restrained against nature has created a sense of vulnerability. In Venice, this has become focused on the sea as a threat, which is fundamental to the contemporary Venetian metaphor. But the first Venetian paradox is that the sea is interpreted as threatening the city, when in fact it is a source of wealth and attraction. The ancient Venetians celebrated their relationship with the seas, especially during the Marriage to the Sea ceremony, which expressed their dominance over the sea and wider sense of power. Dominating the seas enabled Venice to become Europe’s financial and trading centre. By the end of the fourteenth century there was scarcely a single major commodity that was not largely transported in Venetian ships (as shown by Norwich). Venice became necessary to all European lands active in trade during the fifteenth century. The city was at the heart of Christian Europe, with its Rialto commercial district relying heavily on overseas connections. ‘The Venetians had made themselves masters of “the gold of the Christians” because all of Europe was directly or indirectly supplied from there’, writes Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan (2002). Given the importance of the sea for ancient Venetian power, the overriding concern was its retreat. Fears that rivers into the lagoon would fill it with sediments plagued the ancient Venetians, and huge projects to divert the rivers Piave, Sile and Brenta away from the lagoon began in 1324, to be largely concluded by 1683. The loss of the lagoon would have made the city highly vulnerable to direct attack from the sea. Despite these mammoth efforts to maintain Venice’s lagoon, Venetians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries feared that the sea would retreat as it had at Pisa (as shown by John Eglin), and that this would unite the city with the mainland, threatening its island identity. Since the fall of the Venetian Republic, fears about sinking and flooding have proliferated. Nineteenth-century thinkers including Ruskin, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Rogers and Moore popularised the idea that Venice was heading for a watery grave: a fear that seemed to be confirmed by the collapse of the bell tower on St Mark’s Square in 1902, and the high floods of November 1966. As Cesare Scarpa discerned, these floods were caused by a very rare combination of factors: ‘What happened in 1966 was extraordinary and will not happen again. Then there were two big sea tides that went on top of each other and they were pushed by the wind. Together with this, it rained a lot and the water inside the lagoon increased. So there were these extraordinary conditions in 1966. We have never had another condition like that. It was atypical.’ (Scarpa, 2005) Despite these well-documented ‘atypical’ causes, John Keahey has called the events of November 1966 ‘inevitable’ and predicted that they will be repeated: ‘While subsequent storm surges have not yet equaled that 1966 ferocity, scientists believe it is only a matter of time, wrote Keahey in 2002. His negative assessments were not caused by consulting poor scientific forecasts, but by a more general environmental pessimism. Flooding in Venice has indeed increased over the past century, but its impact was much worse during the Venetian Republic than it has been over the past 200 years. Whereas the ancient Venetians celebrated their dominance over the sea in defiance of devastating floods, the contemporary tendency is to cower to the threatening waters. When the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre visited Venice he reflected on the decline of the city ‘castrated’ by the Adriatic Sea. Fragile, vulnerable humanity is well-established within the modern Venetian metaphor, as indicated by the titles and principal themes of recent books about the city, like Keahey’s Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged (2002) and Plant’s Venice: Fragile City, 1797-1997, both from 2002. Modern depictions of Venice tend to perceive the sea and lagoon as problems to be avoided: ‘[T]he vast, shallow and placid water surface of the lagoon is today considered more as an obstacle, that can be criss-crossed by fast, and often huge, destructive motorboats racing from land to sea and back. Or maybe bypassed with rapid underground connections, as some local planners propose’ (Caniato, 2005). The attitude of the ancient Venetians was that the sea and lagoon were resources to be celebrated. Waters were a means of transport to trade, to prosper and for exploration, as well as a source of salt, fish and protection. Today, the sea and lagoon continue to function as resources providing wealth for Venice, as container traffic connecting with China, India and Eastern Europe has supported the port’s economy. Nonetheless, celebrations of Venice’s revival as a gateway to the East have been conspicuous by their absence since writings by the celebrated Italian author Italo Calvino. A similar pessimism is attached to tourism. The sea, lagoon and its canals provide Venice with its unique environment, attracting numerous tourists: they are now fundamental for the city’s economy. Venice is one of the busiest ports and tourist destinations in the world. Yet the second paradox in the contemporary Venetian metaphor is that tourists have been depicted as causing the death of Venice. The current paradoxes are not due to fundamental changes between the city and its physical environment; nor are they caused by the city being swamped by tourists. These paradoxes have been created because human resilience has been replaced by vulnerability. When the ancient Venetians were faced with environmental hazards, they typically responded with resilience. Likewise, the ancient Venetians realised that visitors to the city were resources and devised festivals to attract them. The spirit of resilience that prevailed during the Venetian Republic until the seventeenth century contrasts with the contemporary stress on human vulnerability. To address Venice’s contemporary environmental challenges, we need to revive this spirit of resilience. For Venice and the surrounding territory, the OECD also recommends resilience, which it defines by the following features:
Venice needs to embrace tourists and to see its surrounding waters as resources rather than threats. It must urgently move away from a redundant model of development on its outskirts and conservation in the city centre. To achieve this end requires a critical challenge to the three key components of the contemporary Venetian metaphor: sustainability, climate change and the risks of tourism. Dominic Standish lectures for the University of Iowa (USA)/CIMBA in Veneto, Italy. The above is an edited extract from his new book, Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and Reality published by University Press of America. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).) Visit Dominic’s website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12018/
Friday 27 January 2012 The basic premise of Pinker’s book is this: humanity is less violent and more tolerant than at any previous point in our history. In short, human history is a process of civilisation - and by that I do not mean quite the same thing as the sudden rash of apologists for imperialism do. Moreover, the book asserts that this has come about as a result of what is fundamentally a political process: that through the centuries, progressive ideas and institutions have made us, well, better. That’s a thought that runs counter to the fashionable doom-mongering that Susan Sontag once mocked as ‘not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On”’. Certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support such a proposition. As Patrick Hayes pointed out late last year, the reason so many people were recently up in arms about a drunk and possibly mentally ill woman’s racist diatribe on a tram is because racist diatribes are no longer commonplace. Going back somewhat further in time, whatever one makes of modern city life, few think it worse than the world presented in Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’. But are things really getting better? And, if they are, is it because we are developing socially or because we are simply hiding the darker sides of our nature? Starting with the Stone Age, Pinker hits the fast-forward button on human history to get us to the present day. Given its scope, the fact that the book is just 800-pages long is something of an achievement in itself. Perhaps the most depressing sentence in the book, however, is in the preface: ‘A large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit there is anything good about civilisation, modernity and Western society.’ Unfortunately, it rings true. Today, there is a demonstrable heightening of the perception of risk, even as life has become longer and safer than ever. Just as critics on the right have looked backward to golden eras that never existed, critics on the left have been keen to deny the very real advances in democracy, freedom and even wealth that have marked the course of human history. True, the state of the world still leaves much to be desired and the benefits of civilisation are hardly evenly spread. But noting, say, the absence of industrial development in Africa is rather different to saying technology is inherently bad because it consumes resources for the benefit of the few. Naturally enough, war is one of the thorniest topics in the book, given we have not long emerged from a very bloody century that saw millions killed in two world wars. Despite this, Pinker makes the case for a decline in relative death rates in war and also charcterises the post-Cold War era as the ‘New Peace’, not because war has come to an end — clearly it has not — but because, taken as a whole, the scale of violence has declined massively. While inter-state conflicts have declined, civil wars have risen. Nonetheless, the figures indicate that however bloody and unnecessary these civil wars are, they pale into insignificance when compared to the colonial, imperial and inter-state wars of the past. And it’s not just state violence that is on the decline, either. All violence is. Pinker’s treatment of rape is particularly interesting, noting as he does that we recognise it as the heinous crime it is because it is a direct assault on the principle of autonomy: that individuals alone have a right to control of their bodies and persons. Pinker notes that this principle was responsible for the actions that overthrew ‘slavery, despotism, debt bondage and cruel punishments during the Enlightenment’. And yet, there is little if any celebration of autonomy today. If anything, this very concept that underpins our objection to violence is itself considered suspect. We are encouraged to look at ourselves and others with a Manichean, victim-aggressor mindset and seek mediation through external bodies and forces. Citing US statistics, Pinker notes not only a massive decrease in rapes, but a more rapid decline than other forms of violent crime. Between 1973 and the early 2000s, rapes fell by over 75 per cent in the US. Pinker notes that not only is this not recognised, it is fundamentally fought against. Contrasting with homicide rates, Pinker notes the two are not even: not only does murder remain more common, murder rates declined dramatically over a seven-year period whereas rapes declined more gradually over 30 years. As a result, says Pinker, the decline of the two cannot simply be put down to a general decline in crime between the 1970s and 2000s, going on to bemoan that no-one has taken the bull by the horns and attempted to explain precisely what factors have been at work. ‘Rather than celebrating their success, anti-rape organisations convey an impression that women are in more danger than ever.’ This heightened perception of the likelihood of rape despite its decline can, and probably should, be read in two ways. Firstly, society rightly cares more about rape than it did in the past and, as a result, is more keenly aware of it. Secondly, and rather more darkly, it speaks to a heightened sense of human frailty and our capacity both for harming others and being harmed. Recognising the paradox only partially, Pinker says: ‘Though feminist agitation deserves credit for the measures that led to the American rape decline, the country was clearly ready for them. It was not as if anyone argued that women ought to be humiliated at police stations and courtrooms, that husbands did have the right to rape their wives, or rapists should prey on women in apartment stairwells and parking garages. The victories came quickly, did not require boycotts or martyrs, and did not face police dogs or angry mobs.’ This is undoubtedly true, but this is also a chicken-and-egg situation. While claims that we live in a ‘rape culture’ and so on are self-evidently themselves part of a cultural project, it is similarly self-evident that without the initial feminist agitation any change that may have come about by other means would have been much more gradual, if indeed it would have come at all. The role of women in the civilising process Pinker describes cannot be overstated. Clearly any society that routinely ignores or suppresses the will of half of its population is hardly going to be an ideal one. Despite our dark, postmodern view, women’s struggle to escape prehistoric ties that saw them defined solely by biological function cannot but have been a factor in the creation of a more cosmopolitan society. More troubling is Pinker’s drawing of rape into a continuum with ‘male sexuality’, even if he says it is ‘not exactly a normal part’. Pinker sees this as part of an unbridgeable gulf between the sexes that expresses itself in, for instance, the difference between pornography and erotic fiction. This is all very well, but just a page prior Pinker notes the centrality of the universal human subject in the liberation of humanity. ‘We are all feminists now: Western culture’s default point of view has become increasingly unisex. The universalising of the generic citizen’s vantage point, driven by reason and analogy, was an engine of moral progress during the Humanitarian Revolution of the eighteenth century, and it resumed that impetus during the Rights Revolution of the twentieth.’ So, Pinker seems to want to have it both ways, being particularist one minute and universal the next. As a result, his attempts to show that we live in the best times ever, he does so in quite unconvincing terms. Enter the media. Pinker notes that press reporting of events has a tendency to focus on the negative. As a journalist, I make no apology for this. In fact, I would look askance at those who would not. For example, in the past year I have reported on riots in Ireland, disputes over internet domain-name ownership in the courts and arguments on what to do about the crisis in the eurozone. What this diverse group of events has in common is that they are all centred on disputes. That, to my knowledge, no one has ever tried to settle domain-name problems by taking lumps out of anyone else does not minimise the fact that it remains a conflict, however minor and unimportant. Reporting is primarily the action of recording human actions. Even in cases like natural disasters, a reporter is focused on the effect they have on people and what those people do about it. A reporter’s primary job is to nail a story, not to eke out every microscopic fact. But in doing so, reporters are attempting to contextualise events and help readers make sense of the world they live in. That we are recording human actions makes it inevitable that the bulk of our time will be spent writing down examples of how one person’s agency butts up against that of another. It may be unfortunate that this, according to Pinker, predisposes us to take a dim view of those around us, but it also provides us with the basis for action: taking sides. The idea that intelligence and liberalism go hand-in-hand is one that will delight or infuriate according to one’s outlook, but Pinker is careful to point out that this is not an endorsement of ‘populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the green movement’. What he is actually saying is that reason and autonomy are the result of a specific mode of thought that derives from the Enlightenment and Pinker has the honesty to point out that the contemporary liberal-left can often be hostile to these very things. In an interview about the book, Pinker equates Marxism with violence. On one level, this is an uncontroversial claim. Nothing much good came out of the twentieth-century experience of Stalinism. But Pinker goes further than this, though. He says that Marxism’s key flaw is in its attempt to short-circuit social progress, achieving it more rapidly than is possible and often using violent means to do so. This is not an entirely unfair criticism. Certainly apologists for the Soviet Union tend to gloss over its monstrous record, wishing the repression, brutality and murder away with fairy tales about state capitalism or invoking the Great Man theory of history by blaming Stalin alone. Nonetheless, in Pinker’s book there is a serious misunderstanding of Marx’s conception of class conflict. Marx argued that class struggle has existed since the days of primitive accumulation, that the democratic revolutions were themselves the struggle of one class, the bourgeoisie, rising up against its feudal overlords. Open class struggle, at least from the bottom-up, has been at an all time low for at least three decades now, but that does not mean that class antagonism, which is fundamentally an economic struggle, has gone away. In fact, capitalism’s capacity for creating abundance is only matched by its capacity for creating artificial scarcity. This contradiction is what plays itself out in politics today. The problem with Pinker’s argument is not that he criticises Marx. He’s welcome to do so and, frankly, there are few things more tedious than people droning-on about Marxism despite the fact that the agent of change Marx wrote about, the organised working class, has all but disappeared. The problem is that arguments over just who gets what in society are surely one of the driving forces in society. These disputes are often bloody and unpleasant, but they need not be so, and to remove the desire for economic betterment, a bigger slice of the pie, is to remove one of the major motors that drives us down the very road Pinker celebrates. When interviewed recently, Pinker said: ‘However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants iPods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.’ Without wanting to be flippant, everyone wanting iPods, or at least access to goods of their choice, is a major component of the economic tug-of-war between the masses and the elites. It is precisely this that has become distorted in recent years with self-declared leftists arguing not for more, but merely a more equitable share of less. If ‘really existing capitalism’ proves itself capable of delivering universal prosperity then great, but right here, right now it seems to be doing all it can to back away from its promises of liberation from toil and a high standard of living for all. Pinker is expressly hostile to ideology of any stripe, seeing it as a destructive force. Undoubtedly many crimes have been committed in the name of ideology and it would be childish to dismiss the role of ideology in conditioning those involved to view this as acceptable, but to dismiss ideology altogether is to entirely dismiss human activity on a grand scale. Moreover, not all ideologies are equal: political reductionism, for instance, equates Communism and Nazism but this simplistic morality tale view of history is not only ignorant, it also disguises the fact that the crimes committed in the name of Communism were a betrayal of the Enlightenment heritage on which Marxism, as much as capitalism, drew. No doubt orthodox Marxism came to be inevitablist under the baleful influence of the Soviet Union and, later, dreadful theorists like Louis Althusser (no stranger to a bit of violence, himself), who did all they could to bury Marx’s fundamental belief in human agency and free will. But lumping it in with the counter-Enlightenment is just a plain factual error. Similarly, the nostalgic romanticism of today’s far left stems not from their reading of Marx, but precisely from their misreading — or non-reading — of him. To blame ideology — any ideology — for today’s incoherent critiques of capitalism would be to put the cart before the horse. There is also the matter of whether violence can ever be justified. Clearly it can. We may tell our children that violence never solves anything in the hope of raising them as caring, thinking, rational beings, but violence is not necessarily a bad thing. Few would argue that Libyans were wrong to overthrow the Gaddafi regime because they did so violently. What was the alternative? To continue to be passive and accepting in the face of state violence? Life brings many challenges and just as there are times when we must suck it up and times when we must argue our case, surely there are also times when we must fight back? Working out which response to take at any given time seems to me a more pressing issue than issuing Gandhi-esque condemnations of violence. The principle difficulty with Better Angels of Our Nature is much more fundamental: Pinker has the clarity of mind to see history as a process unfolding, but he sees it primarily as a biological one. Which is not to say he is peddling a crude biological determinism - he does accept human beings have agency and will. But in describing a political process Pinker also goes some way toward dismissing it. Pinker’s book is at its strongest when making a statistical argument that all forms of violence are demonstrably in decline, even if in the case of wars, for instance, this is relative to population size. That this is obvious to anyone with an understanding of history does nothing to undermine the book because, not only is such a circumspect view of history rare today, but also facts and figures making the case for humanity’s capacity for growth are always welcome. It’s a shame he does not give people more credit for the marvellous developments he so meticulously charts. Jason Walsh is a journalist based in Dublin. Visit his website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12020/
Thursday 26 January 2012 It is well over 200 years since that radical old democrat Thomas Paine damned the House of Lords as the ‘remains of aristocratical tyranny’. But there the Lords still sits, high above the common people, purporting to know better and know best. More worrying still, it seems that it is not just old reactionaries who like this antediluvian check on people power. Increasingly, it seems, those who might think of themselves as progressive are giving the Lords a lot of love, too. The ostensible reason for the upper chamber’s burgeoning left-leaning fanclub rests on the series of defeats that peers have meted out to the Lib-Con government’s Welfare Reform Bill. So, earlier this month the Lords rejected government plans to make cuts to the employment and support allowance (a reworked form of incapacity benefit) which would have affected those too young and too ill to have made sufficient National Insurance contributions. Then, at the beginning of this week, the Lords, led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, rejected the proposal to cap total household benefits (including housing benefit, child benefit and child tax credit) at £26,000 - this apparently is the national average household income. But they were not done yet: yesterday they roundly rejected coalition plans to charge single parents to use the Child Support Agency, if single parents couldn’t sort out maintenance payments from estranged partners themselves. The sound of lords, be they bishops or the sickly residue of hereditary peerage, rejecting parts of the government’s attempts at welfare reform has been music to ears of those who, in short, are opposed to the Tory-led coalition. In fact, so strong is such people’s disagreement with coalition policies that they are prepared to overlook the fact the will of the elected is being overturned by the arbitrary will of the unelected. ‘The House of Lords’ deeply problematic lack of a democratic mandate was in the news again’, admitted the Guardian in a recent editorial. ‘But’, the paper continued, ‘this eccentric chamber of experience and expertise is at its best when confronting abject paucity of argument, which is what it has been doing with the [benefits] cap.’ Even that avowedly socialist publication, the The Morning Star, found itself overlooking its ‘principled positions’ on ‘democratically elected government’ to observe: ‘It is noteworthy that effective opposition to much of the conservative coalition’s legislative programme stems from the House of Lords, especially the Church of England bishops.’ So it seems that the House of Lords may be considered an affront to democracy. It may even be correctly grasped as a check on the will of politicians people have actually supported and voted for. But, because it is currently criticising and amending legislation along what are seen as agreeable lines, then all the stuff about democracy or what people might actually want can be conveniently forgotten. All that matters is that the Lords is doing what a particular set of activists and commentators thinks is right. The upper house may no longer be the remains of aristocratical tyranny, stuffed as it is with political appointees plus a few bishops, but it is no less corrosive for that: it now imposes the tyranny of the righteous, a despotism of the self-proclaimed right-thinking. And to hell with what the rest of us might want. Whatever you think about the government’s benefits policies, the blasé attitude to democracy by those cheering on the Lords is pretty reprehensible. It doesn’t stop at welfare reform, of course. Another left-leaning commentator writes hopefully of the possible failure of the government’s NHS reforms when those lovely lords get their hands on them. ‘[They] could yet be defanged in the House of Lords’ he trills excitedly, ‘where the unlikely former Social Democratic Party duo of Shirley Williams and David Owen have been waging guerrilla war against it for months. Or, given the scale of multiple Lords rebellions, there’s a chance the NHS bill could run out of time.’ While such lordly defeats of government legislation might be fantastic news for those who don’t agree with the government, what of those who actually support it - you know, the little people who voted for either the Lib Dems or the Conservatives at the last election? That’s the problem. The praise heading the Lords’ way comes from those who, feeling unable to influence political affairs democratically, in the court of public opinion, have decided instead to pursue their objectives undemocratically, through the House of Lords. Having lost the ear of the public, they are now whispering what they believe to be right into the ears of our supposed betters. With regards to the various amendments being made to the welfare bill, the lobbying of assorted charities, campaigners and interest groups, many of whom have since issued Lords-licking statements, is palpable. Indeed, as the journalist Andrew Brown notes of the Children’s Society’s relationship with the Church of England, ‘the influence of the Children’s Society is clear in this [House of Lords] revolt: it is obvious that the bishops have been entirely influenced by the idea that they must protect children from sliding further into poverty.’ Elsewhere, as Patrick Hayes previously reported on spiked, the Trades Union Congress has been busy urging its multi-million members to write to various lords and baronesses in an attempt to get them to block the government’s healthcare reforms. If you can’t win an argument in the public sphere, it seems it is now okay for self-styled progressive, right-thinking types to have a word with a lord behind the democratic scenes. Not that the latest bout of upper-house revolt has passed uncriticised. Sadly, however, the criticisms have largely focused on the fact that the benefits-cap revolt was led by the Lords Spiritual - that is, representatives of the Church of England. ‘We have the scandal of bishops of one particular denomination (a very small and shrinking one at that) who can directly interfere with law making’, thunders the president of the National Secular Society. What about ‘rabbis, or Seventh-Level Thetans’? Or ‘Quaker leaders, or humanist or atheist leaders?’, wonders a Telegraph columnist. Yet the problem with the House of Lords is not that it is not inclusive enough, or that a few bishops can pore (and snore) over government legislation, rejecting this, amending that, while militant atheists cannot. The problem is far simpler than that. It is that the House of Lords, an insult to the democratic impulse every bit as rude as a monarch, continues to exist at all. Tim Black is senior writer at spiked reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12009/
Thursday 26 January 2012 Given the increasing domination on screens both big and small by all things Scandinavian – with the US remake of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Danish political thriller Borgen following in the footsteps of such phenomenal successes as Wallander and The Killing – it feels like a failure to have spent several days there without getting horribly murdered or seeing something nice on the telly. Since the seemingly placid population of Tromsø - Norway’s most northern city - balances an absence of notable homicidal tendencies with a quite understandable refusal to provide English subtitles for their own TV dramas, neither came to pass. Even their standout visual feast, the Northern Lights, was visible to much of the UK this week. Still, perhaps they avoided confrontation because they’ve seen what’s on British TV, in which young men aren’t coming off very well at present. Perhaps aware that London’s Burning - a dramatic reconstruction of last summer’s London riots - wasn’t best placed in the middle of the Christmas TV schedule, Channel 4 sensibly repeated it in the middle of January. One wonders whether it would have been better to let them have the extra month to work on content, given the obviously tight filming strictures the project must have been under. This toothless portrayal of Britain’s capital city collapsing under the menace of a handful of angry teenagers and opportunist thieves could have been written after a quick survey of the morning papers. Following a cast of characters – based on eyewitness reports – in Clapham as they fought for their safety while disorganised police commanders squabbled over how best to manage their officers and the media, this was the cream of British socially aware drama (the cast featured David Morrissey and Samantha Bond) at its most futile. Clunking dialogue, as characters argued over racist policing, consumerist society and government cuts, just avoided cliché, but only at the expense of saying something incisive, original or persuasive. There is a place for drama attempting rapidly to reflect on real-life events through the critical distance that fiction affords. For instance, the new film version of Barrie Keefe’s 1979 play Sus, which premiered on BBC1, at least offered a grim depiction of the police racism which pre-empted the Brixton and Toxteth riots. But London’s Burning - with its intermingling of reportage and hand-wringing - offered few meaningful insights. If you wanted drama, the astonishing images of London on fire offered it. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but this drama-doc didn’t quite have the gumption to go for either truth or fiction. A similar failing was at work in Channel 4’s Gypsy Blood, which explored violence and masculinity in Britain’s Traveller community. Aiming for the kind of serious documentary ethos that many complained was lacking from the smash-hit My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, Leo Maguire spent two years filming men and boys as they learned how to fight, either as part of community ritual or simply for the hell of it. Nonetheless, despite being superficially shot in a grittier fashion with shaky hand-held camerawork and an absence of jaunty voiceover, this did not necessarily offer much more insight than its televisual fellow Traveller. We learned that fighting is brutal and bloody but makes young men feel good (if they win) and that fathers are proud of their children if they grow up to be tough fighters so they encourage them. This is undoubtedly true, and confirms what many people would know from watching Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, but little analysis was offered in this first episode, perhaps for fear of upsetting sensibilities. It wasn’t just the less-successful fighters who were toothless. In fact, a more penetrating insight into the events of last summer came from my Scandinavian adventures. Ruben Östlund’s feature Play, one of the heralded films of the Tromsø International Film Festival, has generated some fierce debate in its native Sweden for its controversial depiction of black immigrant teenagers targeting and mugging wealthy white kids in and around Gothenburg. Yet, at its heart, it is a film less concerned with race relations than with the breakdown of community solidarity and adult authority: its depiction of the blind panic which descends when one tougher group of kids outnumbers a smaller one is neatly treated as a universal one, bringing to mind Dennis Potter’s chilling TV film Blue Remembered Hills. What is more contemporary is the absence of adults, who are largely disinterested passers-by to the menacing and unnerving (but never schlocky) events going on around them. When they do occasionally intervene they are hamstrung for fear of accusations of racism or inappropriate behaviour, or explode in bursts of retributive violence (pointlessly, as the one thing street kids don’t fear is a beating). Evading much of the hyperbole seen in the aftermath of the riots here in London, Östlund delicately reminds the viewer that the line between teenagers being friends and being in a gang is their ability to win fights and stick up for each other. It manages what London’s Burning and Gypsy Blood do not: asking probing questions about how adult authority is undermined and how public space becomes lawless without a community to back it up. And it does so without feeling the need to come up with easy answers. Unlike recent urban dramas such as Top Boy, it doesn’t need to paint a horrifying picture of gun-toting gangsters and extreme violence to unsettle. More importantly it keeps matters in perspective: why is a modern, wealthy European society so scared of confronting a group of misbehaving kids to the point they’d rather not even discuss them? Although perhaps slow and ponderous – and a little quick to fall back on pointing the finger at consumerist society - it was difficult not to walk away from Play feeling as though it had more to say about life and violence in contemporary Croydon, Clapham or Tottenham than anything British TV has offered to date. It won’t be the next Big Scandinavian Thing, but hopefully someone will consider it a worthwhile import. David Bowden is spiked’s TV columnist. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12010/
Thursday 26 January 2012 The recent flurry of Dickens TV adaptations was accompanied by discussions concerning the relevance that the Victorian novelist’s work bears in these hard times of economic strife. For some commentators, it seems, the quality of his prose simply isn’t enough to justify another outing. In similar fashion, Ralph Fiennes’ film version of Shakespeare’s lesser known tragedy, Coriolanus, has been mercilessly interpreted as a commentary upon our own political climate. The play’s eponymous hero, played by Fiennes himself, is a decorated Roman general whose transition into politics spells his undoing. Following another successful military campaign, Coriolanus is urged by his friend Menenius (Brian Cox) and his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) to take up the role of consul. He reluctantly accepts and his campaign is built on the image of him as a guardian of Rome. However, using his evident distaste for the common man against him, Plebian detractors insist upon Coriolanus’ expulsion from the city. Feeling lost and betrayed, the despondent soldier decides to take up with an old enemy in order to exact his revenge on the republic. And right from the off, many have jumped to comment on what this seventeenth-century drama has to say about contemporary politics. Critics, bloggers and even the actors themselves have suggested the piece has great resonance with everything from England’s August riots to the Arab Spring. Even the decision to film in Serbia - which Fiennes has since admitted was for purely financial reasons – has been interpreted as a nod to parallels between the Kosovo War and the clashes between Rome and the Volscian rebels that the play dramatises. Of course, the scenes which denote urban warfare and political demonstration will inescapably put one in mind of the conflicts of today, yet this film doesn’t waste time making tenuous comparisons. Virginia Woolf once wrote that ‘fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly… to life at all four corners’, and Fiennes reinterprets his source material without sacrificing the ethereal uniqueness of the text. Shakespeare’s plays, as Woolf put it, ‘seem to hang there complete by themselves’ and, while he leaves room for a political reading of Coriolanus, Fiennes allows the words to stand alone and unmediated. Fiennes himself is sinister, if occasionally hammy, in the lead role, while Redgrave’s Volumnia is stern and astute. This being Fiennes directorial debut, he takes few stylistic risks, but the no-frills hand-held camera work is effective in bringing the performances to life. Coriolanus saw Shakespeare eschew lengthy soliloquies, yet the few which are included here are stunningly captured, with plain, blurry close-ups. The overall look is gritty, washed out, and lends well to the smouldering intensity of the play. The use of a modern setting is a pretty familiar technique in most contemporary film adaptations of Shakespeare, and in many ways this speaks to the self-contained richness of the Bard’s work. Fiennes, along with many directors before him, recognises that period costume and authentic historical details can often only distract us from the drama itself, and the setting of this adaptation is rather ambiguous. Described in the titles as ‘A place calling itself Rome’, it is a city in which Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen and Siberians smoke cigarettes, wear jeans and converse in iambic pentameter. Yet this only adds to the otherworldly and timeless aura of the film. Indeed, the few moments in which the modern world as we know it creeps in, such as when high-profile British newsreader Jon Snow cameos as a news reporter, are difficult, out of place and break the spell of it all. Coriolanus is far from a seamless adaptation but it at least understands the timeless power of the Bard. Shakespeare undoubtedly looked to comment upon his own times and he may well have something to say about our own, but any attempt forcefully to align his narratives with modern concerns will only obscure his insight. Fiennes takes a few liberties, and necessarily reduces the action to a lean two hours, but his refusal shamelessly to appropriate the material is to be applauded. Tom Slater is spiked’s film reviewer. Visit his blog here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12012/
Wednesday 25 January 2012 The Leveson Inquiry into the UK press, we can now see, is a two-ring circus. Out front is the showbiz tent, where high-profile victims of phone-hacking, self-righteous/obsessed celebrities and every type of attention-seeker and me-too bandwagon-chaser can be paraded before the media. Behind all this heat and noise, there is the more serious forum, where some of the issues at the heart of the inquiry are now being clarified by Lord Justice Leveson and his advisors. And as they clarify the issues, one thing is becoming very clear. This is more than a polite exchange of views. It is a war for the future of a free press in Britain. And in that war, the good Lord Justice and his army of lawyers and media lackeys are the enemy, not potential allies. The Leveson Inquiry is not a neutral body to be persuaded. It is an imposition that must be opposed. Since the Inquiry returned this month, Leveson’s key focus has been on framing the actual terms of a future system of press regulation. A succession of newspaper editors and leading media figures have filed in to tell the Inquiry that they are fundamentally opposed to state intervention and political interference in a free press. In response, a rather defensive Lord Justice assured us a fortnight ago that he, too, believes a free press to be ‘a fundamental bedrock of our society’. Leveson insisted he would not call for political control of the press. ‘I would be very surprised if government regulation ever even entered my mind’, he said. However, Leveson made clear, he is not interested in simply altering the current system of self-regulation through the Press Complaints Commission: ‘It won’t do just to tinker around the edges.’ Instead, Leveson indicated for the first time, what had entered his mind was the creation of ‘an independent mechanism that deals with complaints, regulation and resolution of disputes’. At the centre of this would be a new, powerful ‘independent’ watchdog of the press. Since then, Leveson has repeatedly raised during Inquiry sessions the idea of having a ‘statutory backdrop’ to reform of the press. That is, passing a law to give the new watchdog muscle, in particular to force all newspapers to sign up to the regulatory body. Much debate in the past few days has focused on to what extent such a ‘statutory backdrop’ would represent the thin of the wedge for politicians to step up state interference in the press. No doubt that is an important issue. But it misses a more important prior point. The Leveson Inquiry is not just a forum to debate state intervention. The Leveson Inquiry itself is state intervention in the media. The Inquiry was announced in parliament by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, not simply to look into the phone-hacking scandal but to examine the entire ‘culture, practice and ethics’ of the media. It has the full support of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is headed by a senior judge, Lord Justice Brian Leveson. It sits in the Royal Courts of Justice. The government made clear from the start that it would seek to implement whatever system of press regulation Leveson proposed. A body set up by the head of Her Majesty’s Government, fronted by a leading law officer of the Crown, deploying the resources of the judicial machinery and with the power of the legislature behind it is no ‘independent’ talking shop. It is a politico-judicial intervention and a state attack on a free press, by any other name. Whatever final wording Leveson might come up with months down the line, he has already set the parameters for the future of the press. Of course the state will not intervene directly to tell newspapers and other publications what they can write. That never entered anybody’s head as a serious idea. The state will, however, seek to impose measures in law to force the press to comply with the orders of its new toothy watchdog – a form of indirect state regulation and licensing of the press. This is not only Leveson’s pet scheme for rewriting the ‘culture and ethics’ of the UK newspapers. The Coalition government has already made clear that it endorses the Lord Justice’s plan. Alongside the Leveson Inquiry, MPs are currently holding a parliamentary select committee on privacy and injunctions. Jeremy Hunt, the Tory secretary of state for culture and the media, gave some little-noticed but far-reaching evidence to it last week. Hunt made clear that ‘the prime minister and I’ are seeking a system of press regulation that has ‘proper sanction-making powers’. He spelt out that they were not talking about ‘statutory regulation of content – which no one wants and which parliament would resist’. Instead the government wanted to give ‘statutory underpinning’ to an ‘independent body’ which could discipline the press, in the same way that the General Medical Council does with the medical profession. The secretary of state suggested that only those publications which agreed to the new rules would be legally defined as newspapers and thus entitled to zero rating for VAT. Newspapers required by government law – sorry, ‘statutory underpinning’ or, if you prefer, ‘statutory backdrop’ - to obey a body with ‘proper sanction-making powers’, and those that object punished by being made to pay an extra tax? That sounds something like an indirect twenty-first century version of the old system of state licensing of the press. This is what Lord Justice Leveson wants to propose, and the secretary of state for culture and the media promises to impose. Everything else about the Inquiry seems to be, if not exactly piss and wind, then largely talk and small print. So what do the top media figures who have declared their fundamental opposition to political interference have to say about Leveson’s suggestions for indirect state regulation - or ‘co-regulation’ as it has been disingenuously called? In a breathtaking display of subservience to the regulators, the alleged liberal press have largely come out in favour of it. Indeed, Hunt credited the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, with thinking up the idea of imposing VAT on dissident papers. In his evidence before Leveson last week, Rusbridger declared that the British press had been ‘under-regulated and over-legislated’. (Little wonder he got such an easy ride from the lawyers.) Well, Rusbridger was half-right; the press has indeed been weighed down by libel laws, injunctions and all the rest. But it would be a naive newspaper that imagined it was going to get less onerous legislation in return for inviting tighter regulation. The more likely result of kissing the hem of Lord Justice Leveson’s robes in that way is that we will end up with more of both. Other editors and senior figures have taken a more robust attitude against any suggestion of a ‘Leveson’s Law’ to back up a stricter system of press regulation. Yet most of them still feel obliged to play the Leveson game, paying lip service to the notion that the Inquiry is a very important event that could have a positive impact on the future of a better press etc, etc. And then, just when you think things could not get much worse for the cause of a free press, up pops New Labour’s priggish head girl, new shadow culture and media secretary Harriet Harman, to announce that she is going to be ‘a champion of press freedom’. Harman says she ‘balk[s] at the notion of press regulation’, because her experience in government has taught her to fear the power of the state. Err, yes indeed, no doubt we all recall how hard she and other New Labour ministers fought to stop the state interfering in people’s private lives and imposing new limits on free speech. Today she is ‘full of praise’ for Leveson, and only wants newspaper editors to volunteer ideas to the law lord for a new ‘solution’ (that is, independent system of regulation) ‘rather than have one imposed on them’. So Labour’s alternative is for the press to avoid unpleasantness by going like lambs to the slaughter. That’s the sort of ‘champion’ we need. Oh, and her other priority is to campaign against the big issue facing the media today - Page 3 pictures. Free press, anybody? It would be far better now if those of us who want to make a stand for a free press faced up to the fact that Leveson is a central part of the problem, and can be no part of the solution. The phone-hacking scandal is a matter for the police to investigate and journalists to deliberate over. It should never have been turned into a pretext for tighter policing of the press. Nothing good can come of allowing a law lord the power to prescribe the limits of press freedom. The Leveson Inquiry into ‘media ethics’ is itself founded on an untruth about the British media. The press does not have too much freedom today, but too little. There is not too little regulation and control of what we can write and read, but far too much already. The shortfall of freedom in the UK press is not only about the law and quasi-state regulation. It is also crucially about the sort of dullard conformism that normally makes censorship unnecessary. Such conformism is again on show in the general public acceptance by the media that Leveson’s inquisition of the press can somehow be a ‘good thing’ or an ‘opportunity’. It is clear in the acceptance of Leveson’s divide between the Good and the Bad in the British press, aka the respectable and the tabloid papers. As I wrote on spiked at the very start of the Inquiry, the press is on trial for its freedom and the tabloids have been found guilty in advance. And too many others in the media seem happy to see them hanged. Those who dream of helping Leveson create a sanitised media world where Guardian-style conformism holds a monopoly should be reminded again that a free press is indivisible. What we need, to pinch one of their favourite words, is more diversity in the media. Instead of lining up tamely for interrogation before Lord Justice Leveson and his legal henchmen, why not put some questions to them. Such as, what business is it of a judge to lay down the law on how a free media must manage its affairs? By what authority do lords, lawyers and ministers take it upon themselves to define what sort of reporting might or might not be in the ‘public interest’ in a society where the public are free to choose for themselves? And when did Newspeak become the official language of the British state, so that judges and governments can use talk of press freedom to justify enforcing its opposite? Time to accept that there is little point trying to persuade Leveson and Co to punish the miscreant press with a lighter hand. No more canoodling with the enemy. If it is a war for a free press, let us at least try to fight to win. Telling the good Lord Justice where he can stick his statutory backdrop would be a start. Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked. His book, There Is No Such Thing As A Free Press - and we need one more than ever will be published later in 2012. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12004/
Wednesday 25 January 2012 Everybody likes bees. Okay, they can be a bit alarming when you think they might sting you, but otherwise they’re out there, buzzing away, pollinating our crops and making honey (you know, sugar for posh people). God bless them. Sadly, however, an evil German corporation is not only killing them, probably cackling away as the money rolls in, but is also running rings around feeble-minded government departments to ensure it can carry on this war on our little stripy friends. That, it seems, just about sums up the recent coverage of the problem of ‘colony collapse disorder’ (CCD), a phenomenon that seems to have caused beekeepers to suffer substantial losses in bee numbers. According to the US Department of Agriculture, from October 2006 ‘some beekeepers began reporting losses of 30-90 per cent of their hives. While colony losses are not unexpected during winter weather, the magnitude of loss suffered by some beekeepers was highly unusual.’ The article continues: ‘The main symptom of CCD is simply no or a low number of adult honey bees present but with a live queen and no dead honey bees in the hive. Often there is still honey in the hive, and immature bees (brood) are present.’ Why does this matter, apart from making honey more expensive? Because bees are crucial in pollinating many food crops. So the USDA website notes: ‘Bee pollination is responsible for $15 billion in added crop value, particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. About one mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination. While there are native pollinators (honey bees came from the Old World with European colonists), honey bees are more prolific and the easiest to manage for the large-scale pollination that US agriculture requires.’ The immediate impact of CCD is to make the pollination of food crops more expensive because more hives are required to pollinate the same amount of crops. But some green activists think this is all a portent of something much worse, namely massive die-offs of honey bees that threaten important chunks of our food supply. And campaigners are pointing the finger at pesticides as the chief culprit. This mood was reinforced by a study published last week in PLoS One - a peer-reviewed, open-access research source - by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana. The study showed how bees might be exposed to a particular class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids, at higher levels than previously thought. Neonicotinoids are a relatively new class of pesticides and have a similar action to nicotine - itself a popular pesticide in the past. (Apparently, you can make your own pesticide by soaking tobacco or cigarette butts in water, then spraying the liquid on to your plants.) In recent years, the seeds of major crops like maize and soya have been coated in neonicotinoid pesticides before being planted. As Christian Krupke, one of the authors of the Purdue report, explained to me, neonicotinoids have a number of advantages: ‘They have relatively low mammalian toxicity - which is good for worker safety - they’re systemic and they’re persistent. So, you have a material that you can put on the seed but that is also expressed in the growing plant. So, you get protection from the very early days of the plant, which is very desirable from the pest-management point of view.’ But Krupke adds that ‘no one has ever disputed that they are extremely toxic to honey bees and other pollinators’. If they are so deadly to bees, however, then why were they granted a license? Indeed, in some European countries, neonicotinoid use has been suspended for periods of time because of fears about the impact on bees. However, there must have seemed little reason to expect that bees would ever receive a large dose of these insecticides because they are coated on the seeds and inserted directly into the ground. Regulators, says Krupke, no doubt assumed that bees were safe from direct contact. ‘It goes from the planter into the ground and gets covered up. Why would the bee ever come into contact with it? Bees aren’t interested in cornfields, certainly not unplanted ones. Where would the intersection happen?’ That still leaves the possibility that bees may be exposed to sub-lethal doses as they forage around the fully grown plants. What effect, if any, such lower doses have is still a matter of debate. The interesting twist in the Purdue research is the possibility of another mechanism by which bees may get exposed to larger doses of pesticide. Krupke summarises what they found: ‘Our planters here are what are called “vacuum” or “air” planters. These planters rely on air to move the seeds around. To prevent treated seeds from sticking together, it’s recommended that something – usually talc, though it can be graphite – be added to the mix.’ He continues: ‘That talc comes into contact with the treated seed and then it basically takes some of the seed-coating off.’ Then, when air leaves the machine, it takes the talc with it, blowing it out into the surrounding air and land. ‘That talc has become an insecticide because it becomes so highly toxic. So you have something that is very light, like baby powder, and very mobile and very toxic to insects on a windy, flat, Midwestern plain.’ In short, the machinery is blowing out a fine insecticide power which is ending up on other plants and flowers that bees are interested in, and in large enough quantities to kill those bees. What we have here is an unintended consequence. In theory, the pesticide should get nowhere near bees. In practice, because of the way it is applied to seeds and the way those seeds are planted, it is being transmitted into the environment in larger quantities than intended. For Krupke, this is part of the learning process in agriculture: ‘We run into this very often in large-scale agriculture: “We didn’t think of that, did we?” And then we have to make a correction. Sometimes the corrections are inconvenient and cost someone money, but I think it’s important to take the long view.’ This problem of toxic talc could be reduced easily enough if the planters were modified or a different, heavier material was used to keep the seeds separate. So is that it? Is that what has been causing the great honey bee die-off? Pesticides are, in fact, just one possible factor in CCD - if the term CCD is even appropriate. Krupke’s colleague Greg Hunt, the bee expert on the research team, is more forthright. He tells me that the problem of CCD is overblown. ‘It is not clear that the syndrome called “colony collapse disorder” is anything new and whatever it is, it was probably over-reported. Very few honey bee researchers have ever seen these particular symptoms, including myself.’ In fact, the dominant factor in the relatively high rate of bee mortality is likely to be something else entirely: the way in which some parasites that are deadly to bees have switched to attacking honey bees. ‘The annual hive mortality rate has been around 30 per cent nationwide since a time that corresponds roughly to the first finding of Varroa mites and tracheal mites in the US’, Hunt tells me. ‘Before that it was about 10 per cent. Varroa mites switched hosts from Asian honey bees (Apis cerana) to the species we use, Apis mellifera. Now, most bees have sufficient resistance to tracheal mites, but not to Varroa mites. So for the past 20 years we have had high losses, before and after the CCD reports.’ It is the Varroa mites that Hunt describes as ‘public enemy no.1’, a view he thinks most other bee researchers would concur with. This problem may be exacerbated by migratory beekeeping, where beekeepers move their hives to another part of the country in winter to boost productivity and to earn money from pollinating crops. Unfortunately, moving bees around like that has probably aided the spread of Varroa mites, too. That said, Hunt asks if we really need these pesticides when other anti-pest measures are already in use. ‘Considering that virtually every corn seed in the Midwest is coated with enough clothianidin [a neonicotinide] to kill a colony of tens of thousands of bees, there is a lot of this going into the environment. It is probably impacting insect populations in the Midwest near corn and soybean.’ Given that these crops already have genetic modifications to protect them against pests, Hunt wonders if the additional protection of the pesticide is really necessary. In short: we have pesticides that are useful in protecting crops, but those pesticides appear to be a factor - but by no means the most important factor - in a significant loss of bees, too. This problem could be mitigated in a number of ways. Modifying the planting machines to produce less toxic talc would be one method. And a more concerted effort to tackle the various bee parasites would help, too. There is no simple, black-and-white answer to this problem. One thing that definitely won’t help, however, is trying to use this as a morality tale to beat up Big Agriculture. These bee losses are not going to devastate our food supply. They do mean that, until the problem is solved, more bees are going to be needed to allow for such losses, which will make the pollination process more expensive for farmers (and, ultimately, consumers). It’s not the end of the world, but a solution to these bee losses would be very welcome. Yet this is just the latest problem to be turned into a tale of feeble regulators and rapacious corporations. So, writing for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott argues that German biotech company Bayer essentially managed to sneak its product past the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) thanks to some dubious research and a great deal of regulatory inertia. There’s a lot at stake: these pesticides are so ubiquitous that they represent an important market for Bayer. However, in Europe, there have been restrictions placed on neonicotinoids - but many of those restrictions have since been lifted, suggesting that the problem was not as important as first thought or that solutions have been found. If risk-averse Europe, which has run a mile from allowing genetically modified crops to be grown, can still allow most of these compounds to be used, it suggests that the problem is not as significant as Philpott and others would have us believe. In any event, the EPA has already committed to reviewing this entire class of pesticides in 2012. Rather than this childish view of evil capitalists, murdered bees, downtrodden beekeepers and threatened consumers, it would be far better to do something greens aren’t very keen on: find solutions that give us the advantages of large-scale agriculture without the occasional, unexpected side effects. Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked. His new book, Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, is published by Societas. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).) Read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here: @paniconaplate. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12006/
Wednesday 25 January 2012 The first question asked about anyone making a non-conforming argument in the climate debate is ‘who funds them?’ And so it is with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) - a three-man, cross-party, independent think tank with charitable status, which dared to challenge climate orthodoxy. The Charities Commission rejected an Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding to know who gave the GWPF its first cheque of £50,000. Several climate scientists have backed the call for the Charities Commission to reveal who backs the GWPF. The GWPF’s charitable status allows its donors to be protected from the FOIA. This has angered climate activists, who are determined to connect climate-change ‘denial’ with oil interests. Accordingly, Brendan Montague of the Request Initiative submitted the FOIA request on the basis that ‘the public has a right to know if any donor is related in any way to the oil industry’. The Commission refused the request, and Montague took his complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which also rejected the claim. This crusade for honesty and transparency is confounded, however, by two huge problems for the GWPF’s critics. The first is that it is transparently the case that, whatever the GWPF has said about climate change, it has enjoyed no influence over policy whatsoever. Neither the present nor the previous governments have taken the slightest notice of any sceptics, other than to condemn them. Far-reaching national and international climate policies have been enacted with minimal opposition or scrutiny within Parliament, and in spite of sceptics’ arguments and public opinion. Second, whether or not it was honestly given (and I find it hard to give a stuff, either way), the £50,000 donation at the centre of this absurd story is a fantastically small amount. Even the £500,000 that the GWPF received from donors in its first year of operations fades into insignificance when put in perspective. For example, it would take the combined resources of 25 GWPFs to produce an equivalent of the UK government’s extraordinarily patronising Act on CO2 campaign. The Committee on Climate Change spends more than eight times that much each year on its own operations. In 2010, the quasi-independent Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust received government grants worth £156million and £70million respectively. That’s a total of 452 times as much public money as the GWPF took from donors. The billionaire Jeremy Grantham - who has around $1.5 billion worth of stock in oil companies - is the benefactor of the influential Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, who wrote The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and WWF enjoy gifts of millions of pounds from the UK and EU governments. And the EU funds associations of renewable energy companies to lobby politicians to the tune of millions of euros per year. It would be an astronomical understatement to say that the environmental activists banging on about the GWPF lack a sense of proportion and have incredible double standards. The GWPF’s resources are far less than even a thousandth of what is available to the government for research and PR - through its departments, the quangos and NGOs that are recruited into its green agenda, and firms and other associations that will profit by it. And yet this tiny operation has seemingly achieved such reach, to punch far above its weight, against the collective force of all the above. The Guardian‘s environmental ethicist, Leo Hickman, has covered the latest turn in the progress of Montague’s crusade against the GWPF - an appeal against the ICO’s decision, which will be heard at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday. Hickman, clearly entirely credulous towards this information-seeking hero, recites the complaints against the think tank - generally limp and petty criticism which takes more liberties with the facts than they accuse the GWPF of. One such critic is James Hansen, the NASA climate-scientist-turned-amateur-dramatist who suggests that future generations will find the GWPF ‘guilty of crimes against humanity and nature’. With such a high-profile scientist expressing such shrill and irrational opinions, it becomes hard to take his scientific claims seriously. But perhaps the most remarkable claim is Hickman’s complaint that ‘Last November, a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which analysed climate coverage in the UK media, concluded that the GWPF had been “particularly successful” at courting media attention and that Lawson and the foundation’s director Benny Peiser were “by far” the most quoted climate sceptics.’ The Guardian‘s ethicist must be scratching his head over why the organisation he writes so many articles about enjoys such attention in the media. But anyone even barely acquainted with common sense will know that the vast majority of the public have never even heard of the GWPF, let alone seen its efforts, and so will be left wondering what all the fuss is about. There are several answers. The first is that both establishment and street-level environmentalists are far better at losing friends and alienating people than their critics are at winning influence. Yet environmentalists like to believe it is sceptics who are preventing them from saving the planet. The GWPF, being among the few critics, serves as a convenient villain in such moral pantomimes. Second, as is obvious from Hansen and Hickman’s verbiage, there is little attention paid to anything the GWPF actually says. The mythological ‘denier’ precedes a view of the debate, yet it is hard to find anything radical within the GWPF’s output. This leads to a third answer, which is that a preoccupation with who-is-funded-by-whom epitomises the vacuity of contemporary politics. It is a way of avoiding criticism, rather than engaging with it. Montague’s reckoning appears to be that the criticism offered by the GWPF is answered, just so long as he can tie the name on the cheque to the fossil-fuel sector. This he-who-pays-the-piper-calls-the-tune nonsense is a familiar motif in the climate-change debate, but it is not unique to it. The wider phenomenon of increased emphasis on ‘evidence’ in public policy inevitably leads to claims that others are ‘denying’ scientific fact. The irony of evidence-based policy-making, then, is that it locates the debate, not on the ground of evidence, but on who is the least impeachable provider of it. Thus, environmentalists are preoccupied with the follow-the-money argument, oblivious to the financial interests stacked up in favour of green energy. A further irony is that Montague’s outfit sells itself with these words: ‘Request Initiative uses information law to deliver government data into your hands, enhancing your organisation’s media, research and campaigns work. We work exclusively for the third sector.’ It is remarkable, then, to note that the GWPF is one of just a few critics of government policy, yet has earned the wrath of the third sector. Indeed, Request and Montague are doing the establishment’s work here, with NGOs, environmental activists and the Guardian all nodding in approval at the attempt to use state apparatus to quash unorthodox opinion, rather than facing it in public debate. In conclusion: there should be more GWPFs. Ben Pile is the convenor of the Oxford Salon. He blogs at Climate Resistance. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12005/
Wednesday 25 January 2012 Back in November last year, anti-smoking campaigners scored something of an own goal in their attempt to purge UK cars of smokers. Lifestyle lecturers-in-chief, the British Medical Association, claimed that smoking in cars generates 23 times more toxins than you would have found in a smoky bar. This certainly sounded impressively frightening. And well it might, because as the BMA was subsequently forced to admit, it was also wrong. The anti-smoking lobby is back, however, and this time it is using kids to promote its message. So it was that this week the British Lung Foundation launched an online pledge in which adults across the UK are asked to commit to keeping their cars smoke-free when children are passengers. According to the BLF’s campaign material: ‘Children have sent a strong message to their parents that they no longer want to endure a smoky car ride. Parents can listen to their children’s concerns and take this pledge to protect young lungs from the damage caused by cigarette fumes in the car.’ Putting aside the fact that the BLF have seen fit once again to quote the contested evidence that ‘one cigarette in a car, even with the window open, creates a greater concentration of second-hand smoke than a whole evening’s smoking in a pub’, the campaign raises an important question: why exactly are children sending this now press-released message to their parents? As a parent who smokes - shock horror! - I am well aware of the messages that children now pass on to their parents about smoking. It is not surprising that they do. After all, as soon as children start at nursery, they are taught about the evils of smoking and are coached to tell adults that we shouldn’t smoke because it will ‘make you die’. Throw into this hectoring mix the advertising campaigns and the anti-smoking messages within children’s TV programmes, and the British Lung Foundation probably wouldn’t have to ask too many children to find several who want to send a ‘strong message’ that they don’t like smoking in cars. The long-term use of children in this way is telling. It shows that the anti-smoking lobby, having failed to convince us as adults that smoking should be banned, have instead resorted to using our children to guilt-trip us into accepting ever-creeping restrictions on smoking. And it certainly seems to be working. While I know a lot of parents who smoke (despite the copious health warnings), I don’t know of any who do so in their own homes, and certainly not in the car. This shows that despite the lack of evidence in relation to secondary smoking, we have already guiltily succumbed to our children’s state-sponsored campaign of persuasion. We, as adults, tend to stand out in the garden or on the street to have our crafty, secret, but still pleasurable cigarette. Perhaps it is now even more pleasurable because we know we are breaking one of the many rules of being a parent. But it is surely a sad state of affairs when, as adults, we have to sneak around behind the bike shed to have a cigarette, just like we used to when we ourselves were children. Back then, of course, I thought being a ‘grown-up’ would mean that I could decide for myself what I did, as long as I didn’t break the law. And smoking itself is not against the law (yet). Using our children to wage campaigns against how we, as adults, choose to act does neither us nor our children any favours. By encouraging children to take the moral highground over how their parents behave, the British Lung Foundation is joining schools and other institutions in undermining parental authority over our children as well as questioning our independence as adults. When I was a child my mum used to tell me, ‘do as I say, not as I do’. This little saying held an important message. It meant that my mum was in charge, and that she could hold the line over what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. But I also understood that as an adult she had the independence and authority to make decisions about her own life that were nothing to do with me. This made growing up into an exciting prospect because it meant that one day I, too, would have the freedom to make my own choices. Today, this has been turned on its head. When the British Lung Foundation tells parents to listen to our ‘children’s concerns’ about smoking in cars, they are turning us into children who must ‘do as they say’. All of which raises an important question: what will make our children want to grow up today if all they can expect in return is to be told off as if they were children? Sally Millard is a founder member of the Institute of Ideas Parents Forum. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12007/
Tuesday 24 January 2012 In the contest to see who will be the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States, Newt Gingrich upset Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary at the weekend. Gingrich’s startling win overturned the conventional wisdom that Romney was on the verge of locking up the nomination. Romney’s collapse was striking: he held a decent lead in polls the week before the vote, and ended up losing by 12 percentage points. What’s probably more worrying for the Romney camp than losing the state of South Carolina is the fact that his national ratings plummeted, too. Romney’s image was certainly damaged by poor debate performances last week and his response to certain issues, such as how much he pays in taxes. Now the nomination seems much more up for grabs. If Romney loses the Florida primary on 31 January – and the first polls show he is trailing Gingrich – the party elite are likely to hit the panic button and search for a last-minute substitute to take on Gingrich, a man they see as deeply flawed. But even if Romney prevails, his troubles have revealed deeper fault lines in the party. In the aftermath of South Carolina, the Romney-Gingrich face-off is being widely understood as a battle between the Republican Party’s establishment (who back Romney) and its insurgent base (who back Gingrich). There is some truth in this – the establishment’s disconnect with the party’s base is real. But all the talk about intra-party fighting understates the scale of the problem facing all Republicans. The nomination process has revealed that the Republican Party as a whole is facing a fiasco of historic proportions. The presidential election in November should be the Republicans’ to lose. The US economy is mired in stagnation, and no president since FDR has been re-elected with unemployment as high as it is today (8.5 per cent). President Obama appears unable to do anything about the situation. He has done virtually nothing of substance regarding the economy since getting a stimulus package passed shortly after entering office. A majority of people disapprove of Obama’s performance and say the country is on the wrong track. At the same time, since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, all the talk was about a re-energised Republican Party. Bolstered by the Tea Party activists, the Republicans were said to be on a path to roll over the Democrats in 2012. But here we are in 2012, and just look at the state of the Republican candidates. It is hard to imagine a weaker field of political misfits. Take Gingrich. The establishment is right to be panicked, given who Gingrich is: the former speaker of the house who had to resign after an ethics scandal; the lobbyist who received $1.6million from Freddie Mac, the mortgage agency at the centre of the housing collapse, plus another $37million from related activities; the moralist who is on his third wife; and the most well-known and disliked of all of the Republican candidates nationally (his 60 per cent disapproval rating is unheard of for a leading candidate). Gingrich’s flaws may be obvious, but Romney is also inadequate. Before South Carolina, his credentials were presented as ‘perfect’: a business background (at a time when the economy needs repair); a professional organisation and endorsements; happily married (once) and, most of all, he looks the part. But the idea of Romney as the ‘perfect’ candidate is laughable. Lacking any strong proposals, Romney is an empty suit. He lacks passion for politics – at best, he comes across as a dull manager. Indeed, one reason for Gingrich upsetting the odds at the weekend is that at least he brings some passion. For all of his supposed professionalism, Romney has an amateurish tendency to put his foot in his mouth, as when he recently said ‘I like to fire people’. Last week’s mini-storm over his unwillingness to release his tax returns sums him up. It was not the issue itself, but how badly he handled it. Romney responded like a deer in the headlights, acting totally surprised that someone would raise the subject. He blurted out his effective tax rate while on the campaign trail, and awkwardly hummed and hawed in response to questions in two debates. Romney lives a contradiction that makes him appear uncomfortable in his own skin: he hinges his campaign on his business background, and yet he is apologetic about his wealth. It is painful to watch him go out of his way to eat fast food, fly budget airlines and dress down. Romney’s weaknesses are reflected in his inability to win over Republican voters. Indeed, the one consistency during the contest so far has been the desire to find another candidate, indeed, anyone but Romney. Hence the cast of eccentrics that have come and gone: Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry. The atmosphere has been circus-like (even by American standards): just in the past week, you had a former wife accusing Gingrich of wanting an open marriage, a reverse of the Iowa results and a slew of personal attacks. But it’s not just about Romney. Whether Romney recovers, or the party finds another standard-bearer, this nomination process has revealed fundamental problems with the Republican Party itself. For a start, it is worth pointing out how weak support for Republicans is, a fact that doesn’t get much attention. According to Gallup, only 27 per cent of Americans identify with the Republican Party. Democrats do not fare much better: 31 per cent support them. The real ‘insurgent’ force in American politics is none-of-the-above, otherwise classified as ‘independent’: 41 per cent of Americans now say they are unaffiliated with a party. When you hear all the hyped-up noise about the Republican primaries, just remember that fewer than a quarter of the voting population is involved. The Republican Party no longer operates like a traditional political party. There are few organic ties linking politicians with activists and communities. Campaigns today are ‘media-led’, focusing on TV adverts rather than ground troops. Even the politicians themselves are not well connected. The candidates for president are lone individuals, not products of political machines. We know that the American political system is not like a parliamentary one, but still, today’s candidates have virtually no connection with elected politicians. Three of the four candidates who are left standing - Gingrich, Romney and Santorum – are not currently employed in an elected office. They are failed politicians, trounced in defeat (or, in Gingrich’s case, run out office by colleagues), who just decided they had enough money and ego to take a shot at the presidency. The party’s ideological confusion was revealed by a remarkable attack – led by Gingrich and echoed by other contenders – on Romney for his investment and restructuring activities while at Bain Capital. The party elders must have choked on their cornflakes when they read about Republicans criticising fellow party members for making a profit and earning money. There was a logic of sorts to Gingrich’s line of attack. The largest segment of the Republican Party is now the white working class without college education (indeed, that section of the working class is far more allied to the Republicans than the Democrats, despite the Democrats’ pretensions that they represent the common man). Gingrich’s attack on Romney’s work at Bain was an attempt by Gingrich to adopt a populist and anti-elitist stance, in the hope of appealing to that group. But it was a transparently opportunistic ploy that doesn’t really address workers’ concerns about the economy. Moreover, it raises a more fundamental issue about the party’s lack of coherence. One minute Gingrich is telling the Occupy protesters that they need to take a bath; the next he steals Occupy’s arguments and uses them against Romney. Confused or what. Of course, it remains possible that the Republicans could take the White House come November. The electorate at large remains undecided, unimpressed with both Obama and his would-be Republican challengers. But the process of picking a Republican candidate has shown that the party is a pale imitation of its former self, and it is in big trouble. If the party can’t find a decent candidate in today’s conditions, what hope do they have? Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation, here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/11998/
Tuesday 24 January 2012 Last Wednesday, hundreds of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, shut down their services for 24 hours in protest at the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). The bills, which were introduced by the US House of Congress and Senate respectively, have now been put on hold. Designed to crack down on copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods, the bills’ main targets are foreign ‘rogue websites’, piracy sites that are hosted abroad and are therefore currently outside the reach of US law. Serious concerns have been raised that the SOPA bill would authorise the US Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside US jurisdiction. Yet amid the loud protests that led to SOPA and PIPA being put on the back burner, the US Department of Justice seized the domain names of online company Megaupload, which is registered in Hong Kong, and shut down its sites. The very day after the blackout protests, the FBI shut down the file-sharing site - one of the largest sites on the web with over 50million users a day - claiming its founder, Kim Dotcom (formerly Kim Schmitz), and his associates were entangled in a ‘Mega Conspiracy’ of racketeering, money laundering and infringing US copyright to the tune of US$820million. Like a dramatic Sopranos episode, 76 officers from the FBI and the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) swooped down in helicopters in a dawn raid of Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion. Armed officers found Dotcom in a panic room, where there reportedly was a shotgun (although it transpired in other reports that the gun was in a safe). For added drama, the raid was timed for Dotcom’s thirty-eighth birthday celebration, so his party guests could also be rounded up. Authorities seized artwork, computers, documents and 18 luxury cars, reportedly affixed with number plates such as ‘GOD’, ‘MAFIA’ and ‘EVIL’. Three men were arrested along with Dotcom and two others sought by the FBI were located at a later point. One more man is still wanted by the police. The four arrested in the raid have been remanded in custody until Wednesday. They could face extradition to the US and five to 20 years in prison for racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. The indictment states that the owners of Megaupload used a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of copyrighted works and make them available for many millions of users to download. The FBI claims Megaupload offered a rewards programme that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site. It paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded pirated content and publicised their links to users throughout the world. Megaupload has been charged with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the illegal content. Most importantly, it is claimed that Megaupload failed to terminate accounts of users who had committed copyright infringement breaches, selectively complying with obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresenting to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. Megaupload has denied any wrongdoing in regard to copyright violation and the company’s attorney has said its sites were wrongly shut down before the owners were allowed to address the charges against them. Megaupload says the site featured a tool to report ‘abuse’, gave copyright holders the ability to hunt for illegal content, and was registered with the US government under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - a law aimed at fighting piracy. The DMCA provides safe harbour for sites that promptly take down infringing content. However, safe harbour does not exist if a site has actual knowledge and does nothing about it. And this is what the case against Megaupload is based on. The FBI claims that the anti-theft efforts were just a façade, that the parties involved openly discussed their infringing activities, and that the DMCA provisions were used to give the appearance of legitimacy only, while the actual material was never removed (only some links to it were). Megaupload is just one of several popular services known as ‘cyberlockers’ that allow users to upload files and access them from wherever they want. Sites like Dropbox, YouSendIt, RapidShare and Hotfile take little or no responsibility for the material their users upload. In its defence, Megaupload said it was impossible for it to check everything it hosted. Other storage sites have now disabled its sharing functions in order to protect themselves from legal action. Under current legislation, websites are not liable for damages as long as they remove pirated content when they are notified by the copyright holder. On many user-generated content sites, like Wikipedia, Twitter and YouTube, users are responsible for their own content and not the company. The business model of these sites rests on the fact that they do not control what users post as moderating the sites would require the employment of thousands of lawyers around the clock. It would be an impossible challenge to prosecute several thousand people, particularly when a huge proportion of them are anonymous or pseudonymous. While Megaupload probably hosted illegal content, the site was also used legitimately by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to upload software for collaborative working or to share files that were too large to send by email. Because no distinction was made between legal and illegal content when the site was seized, many users are now in limbo, not knowing what is happening to their content that is stored in ‘the cloud’. So far the FBI has given no indication when, or even if, they will be able to access their files again. So what has the shutting down of Megaupload achieved? We should be clear that it will not stop other uploading sites from appearing. Such sites thrive because they feed into a certain juvenile sense of entitlement that exists today. The people behind these upload sites are primarily driven by a childish, demanding outlook that says ‘I want this movie and I want it now!’ That attitude will not cease because of this case. Nor will online piracy be stopped by the FBI’s actions. Europe’s Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes put the case well when she stated: ‘Piracy won’t be minimised until the amount of legally available content is increased. Piracy will always remain, but if the entertainment industries are smart enough they’ll eventually deliver services that make unauthorised downloading obsolete for most people.’ The internet grew out of a culture of sharing knowledge and information. Rather than spending billions in fighting online piracy, maybe the entertainment industry should use those resources to reinvent their services for the digital age and work towards adapting the existing copyright laws to align with the new digital environment. There are good reasons to be critical of the demonisation of Megaupload or any other sites the US authorities deem as ‘rogue’. Yet there is also a problematic element in the attitude of some upload sites and their backers towards the notion of copyright and intellectual property. More often than not, these concepts are seen as something simply to ignore and override rather than debate and reform. Whatever you think of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload or of the pros and cons of online piracy, the actions of the US and New Zealand authorities should be strongly opposed. Based on the fact that some of Megaupload’s servers were leased in the US, and the website was deemed to be targeted at its citizens, the US government has shut down and seized the assets of a business based in a different continent without a trial or going before a court. Megaupload has been presumed guilty before any evidence has been considered or any jury asked to review the case. And this has been allowed without SOPA and PIPA even being in place. This is a very worrying trend for the future of the web and justice as a whole and it should be challenged as forcefully as possible to ensure that governments are not allowed to curb our rights and freedoms, either online and offline, in the name of fighting online piracy. Theresa Clifford is a digital strategist and writer based in Auckland. Visit her personal website here. Follow her on Twitter @TheresaClifford. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/11999/
Tuesday 24 January 2012 At the end of last year, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill was interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the phone-hacking scandal and anti-tabloid campaigning. An edited transcript of the interview is published below. Jian Ghomeshi: As the Leveson Inquiry continues its investigations into the British press in the wake of the tabloid phone-hacking scandals there, an unusual event has occurred at one of the UK’s most respected papers. [In December] the Guardian newspaper issued a retraction for 37 of its stories relating to the inquiry, each containing the claim that journalists for the now-shattered News of the World newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International deleted voicemail messages on the phone belonging to Milly Dowler in order to make room for new ones. She was a 13-year-old British girl who went missing in 2002 and was later found to have been murdered. Since the deletion of Milly Dowler’s voicemails gave rise to the hope that she was still alive, the allegation that phone-hacking journalists were to blame galvanised opinion against the tabloids in the UK. Except the Metropolitan Police say it’s now unlikely that the News of the World was responsible for deleting Dowler’s voicemail messages. That’s got at least one journalist speaking out against the Guardian’s reporting about the tabloids and questioning what the Leveson Inquiry’s investigation into journalistic practices could ultimately mean for press freedom in the UK. Brendan O’Neill is an outspoken journalist who has in the past written for the Guardian, as well as other British and American publications. He’s the editor of the online publication spiked and has written a piece for spiked about the news coverage of the News of the World affair. We’ve reached Brendan O’Neill in Dublin today. Hello sir. Brendan O’Neill: Hello. Jian Ghomeshi: The Guardian has been a go-to source about the hacking scandal and went forward in July last year with the story about the News of the World being responsible for deleting Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages. Why was this a case of misreporting? Brendan O’Neill: Because, according to the Metropolitan Police, it now is probably not true that the News of the World deleted those messages. It seems to be the case that they hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and listened to the messages. But one of the key parts of the Guardian exposé was the idea that they also deleted those messages. And the reason that’s an important part of the story is because it was that which gave false hope to Milly Dowler’s parents. It was the deletion of messages which made her parents think she might still be alive when in fact she had already been murdered. So it was a real turning-point revelation in really upping public fury with the News of the World. The fact that it now seems to be untrue is an embarrassment for the Guardian and really calls into question a lot of the claims that are being made about hacking at the tabloid newspapers. JG: What led the Guardian to report that first version of events? BON: I think that something quite ironic is happening, which is that in the name of exposing unethical practices at the tabloids, lots of broadsheets are now engaging in some unethical journalism of their own. They are rushing to report things that haven’t been fully fact-checked, which haven’t been thoroughly interrogated and proven. And they’re putting these kinds of stories on their front pages. The revelations about Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages - this is the third time that the Guardian has had to apologise for something it said about the News of the World and which turned out not to be true. So if you include the 37 articles that they’ve had to apologise for in relation to Milly’s voicemails, and you add to it the other articles they’ve had to apologise for, there are now 39 articles published by the Guardian which it has had to either retract, correct or clarify. I think there’s a great irony here where we’re talking about how scummy and irresponsible and stupid the tabloids are, but at the same time some journalists in the respectable broadsheets are indulging in some pretty dodgy journalism of their own. JG: Exposing a respectable broadsheet, as you call the Guardian, or taking it to task, is one thing. But why are you defending the tabloids? Let’s get to your article for spiked. It’s called ‘The truth about anti-tabloid hysteria’ and it takes the mainstream British press to task for attacking the tabloid press. It’s a rare journalist who will stand up for the tabloids. Tell me why you’re doing so. BON: I’m no great defender of the News of the World; I’m certainly not a defender of their phone-hacking tactics, most of which were just pointless and a waste of time and very intrusive. However, there are two problems with what I call the ‘witch hunting’ of the tabloids. The first is that it is driven by an age-old British snobbery against mass newspapers. For the past 100 years, since mass newspapers were first introduced, there have always been elements of the aristocracy and the respectable classes who have hated the tabloids, who look upon them as poisonous and blame them for making the public stupid. There has been a really sneering attitude towards tabloid newspapers. And that’s coming through again very strongly in the phone-hacking debate. And the second reason I’m worried is just because of press freedom. It seems to me that the Leveson Inquiry is going to give rise to a situation where we have more regulations and more controls on what newspapers can do and what they can report. Even though it will be aimed primarily at the tabloid newspapers, and everyone will think ‘oh it doesn’t matter because they just report tittle tattle anyway’, the fact is that it’s going to have a wider impact than that and it could impact upon the standing of journalism itself and the freedom of journalists to report and uncover what they believe to be important. JG: Let me take the first half of what you just said, about the ‘witch hunting of the tabloids’. You do, in your piece, compare the Leveson Inquiry to the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials. Are those comparisons appropriate in your view? BON: They are appropriate on the level that unfounded accusations are being made. Of course there is a massive difference in scale between Salem and McCarthyism; and there is also a massive difference in scale between McCarthyism and the anti-Murdoch obsession. But what is similar is that when you have a climate which is fuelled by disgust and a desire to expose people and a hunt for ‘evil’... when you get caught up in that kind of climate, it becomes quite easy to start making unfounded accusations. To start buying into rumours. To start believing that people are actually more wicked than they really are. I think what this has in common with earlier witch hunts is that it has become a slightly unhinged, irresponsible pointing of the finger at anyone we deem to be evil and wicked. JG: Do you see the Leveson Inquiry uncovering anything of value? Shouldn’t these actions be investigated? BON: To the extent that some News of the World journalists – and it was a minority – broke the law, they ought to be investigated by the police. But I think the problem with the Leveson Inquiry is that everything is being lumped together. So we’ve had discussions about the problem of ‘blagging’, where journalists phone up an institution and blag someone’s records or blag some information. The Leveson Inquiry has also talked about the problem of journalists following people and keeping an eye on people and monitoring people. So what’s happening is that actually quite respectable forms of journalism - the pursuit of a story, blagging, keeping a tab on someone in the public eye - all these things are perfectly respectable in my view and yet they are all being demonised as part of this process of exposing phone-hacking. So the danger is they are going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we’re going to criminalise respectable forms of journalism in the name of shutting down Murdoch’s newspapers and everyone is going to suffer as a result of that. JG: Should there be no inquiry? BON: I believe the inquiry should be scrapped. I don’t think it’s particularly useful. In fact, it’s ending up as a showtrial of the tabloids, cleverly disguised as a year-long legal inquiry. What we have here are celebrities and broadsheet journalists and other people with an axe to grind coming to tell their stories, to explain how horrible the tabloids are and to call for more regulation of them. The judgement has already been made. The tabloids have already been found guilty and this is just a drawn-out process where we’re going to have expressions of public hysteria about tabloid culture which is going to end up with a proposal for more regulation of press freedom. JG: You’ve talked about the fact that there are other ‘dubious’ claims – as you’ve called them – by the Guardian, for which they’ve had to issue apologies. I should mention that we did go to the Guardian for comment on your opinions and they have declined to speak to us today. We spoke to Thais Portilho-Shrimpton who works for the group Hacked Off, which campaigned for this inquiry. Here’s a bit of what she had to say to us: Thais Portilho-Shrimpton: Some people are saying these are all lies because that line in the Guardian story was wrong but people should still remember that Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked and that’s a fact confirmed by the police and by the Metropolitan Police at the Leveson Inquiry. It is a fact that her phone was hacked by a News of the World journalist – or journalists – and that some messages were deleted but not the ones that caused the false hope; they couldn’t say either yes or no to that. That is a point that needs to be clarified. JG: So, Brendan, how do you respond to what you just heard? Are you being too quick to condemn the Guardian for a simple reporting error when there are clearly many other parts of the story that do seem accurate. The phone was hacked by the News of the World. BON: It’s definitely true, as I said earlier, that Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked and that was wrong and bad and anyone who is found to have done that could be charged with an offence. But it’s more than a simple reporting error on the part of the Guardian, and also this isn’t just about the Guardian - the other broadsheets are running with the phone-hacking story with great relish and so is the BBC. That it’s more than a simple reporting error is demonstrated by the fact that the Guardian has had to clarify 37 articles. If this was a simple error, why was it repeated in 37 articles? The reason it was repeated in 37 articles is that it was actually a key part of the accusations made against the News of the World. It was a key thing that stirred up public antagonism against Murdoch’s papers because people were shocked that journalists may actually have deleted a murdered girl’s voicemail messages. That’s why it was repeated so often and so frequently. So it’s more than simple reporting, it’s become bound up with a kind of crusade against what’s seen as evil tabloid journalists. And once you cross the line from journalism and rational objective reporting into crusading against evil, you are going to start making unfounded accusations. JG: Thais Portilho-Shrimpton also made the point to us that the Guardian did immediately apologise and correct all of the stories relating to the News of the World journalists deleting emails. What more do you want them to do? What more should the Guardian be doing? BON: It’s not for me to say what the Guardian should do! They should do whatever they want to do. But I think it would be worth all journalists in Britain, all broadsheet journalists and respectable journalists, asking themselves what is behind this campaign against tabloid journalists which is now being joined by politicians, by reporters, by activists, by celebrities. There is a huge group of very influential people with clout who are campaigning tooth-and-nail against tabloid culture and for the closing down of the News of the World, which they successfully achieved. Ask yourself why is this happening, what’s going on here? Is it really straightforward reporting of a problematic story, or has it become a bizarre kind of crusade against what are seen as ‘lower’ forms of journalism? JG: You’re not the only one criticising the Guardian for its reporting error; many of the Guardian’s critics are from rival newspapers. Is it possible some of these critics have an agenda as well? BON: Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. For example the Sun, which is a daily tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, has been quite happy with the fact that the Guardian has been embarrassed and has been exposed. So there are a lot of special interests and agendas flying around in this discussion. There’s no doubt about that. What I’m saying is we should realise that the campaign against Murdoch’s newspapers is also driven by its own agendas - whether it’s by celebrities who have been waiting a very long time to get their own back on the tabloids that exposed them in the past, or whether it’s the BBC which is eternally worried by Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB institution and his move into television. There are lots of agendas in the anti-hacking scandal as well and we shouldn’t take that at face value as being a pure and moral and virtuous campaign. JG: On that note, towards the end of your piece you write ‘the line between their job as reporters and their emotions as despisers of mass newspapers has become dangerously blurred’. Are you not playing into the same emotional tone here by assuming that the mainstream newspapers are out for tabloid blood? BON: There is a lot of evidence to suggest that they are. If you read a lot of the coverage of the tabloids in the broadsheets over the past year, you will see that there has been a lot of intemperate, sometimes quite hysterical, coverage of how Rupert Murdoch runs British politics, for example, which I think is a vast exaggeration of his influence. How newspapers warp people’s brains and make them vote for parties that don’t really represent their interests. How these newspapers have dumbed down public culture, made Britain more stupid. There has been a real sense in some of the coverage that you have this strange, swaggering Australian man coming to Britain, buying up these tabloid newspapers and The Times, turning them into horrible rags and poisoning our previously pristine culture with his backward Australian values. That is the underlying tone to lots of the coverage. So, I do think it’s safe to say that there are lots of people in Britain who hate the tabloids. Now, as it happens, I’m not a massive fan of the tabloids – although I like one or two of the columnists in the Sun. But what I’m saying is that if you believe in press freedom, true press freedom, then you have to accept that there should be space not only for respectable, decent journalism but also for tittle tattle, for gossip, for newspapers that people enjoy reading on the bus ride to work. What I’m saying is that press freedom must encompass all publications and not just those that the chattering classes find agreeable. JG: Brendan O’Neill, I thank you very much for this today. The above is a transcript of an interview with Brendan O’Neill, aired on the Q show on CBC radio on 22 December 2011. Listen to the interview here. Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/12000/
Monday 23 January 2012 Thirty or 40 years ago, the way that the EU and the IMF are behaving towards Hungary would have been described as a classic example of neo-colonial pressure. Unlike Greece, Hungary is not simply being lectured about the need to sort out its economy - it has also been subjected to a veritable culture war. As far as the EU and the Western media are concerned, the real crime of the Hungarian government is not so much its inept economic strategy as its promotion of cultural and political values that run counter to what is deemed correct in Brussels. The Brussels bureaucracy has long regarded Hungary as a society in danger of being engulfed by white savages. In 2006, when people in Budapest rioted against their corrupt government, the EU and sections of the Western media described the demonstrators as right-wing mobs posing a threat to democratic values. At the time, Brussels weighed in to support its man in Budapest, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Socialist prime minister. The fact that Gyurcsany had lied to cover up the scale of Hungary’s massive budget deficit, and that he had admitted his dishonesty to some of his close colleagues, did not stop his mates in the EU from singing his praises. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the Party of European Socialists, was quick to rush to Gyurcsany’s defence, claiming he was the ‘best man to make the reforms that Hungary needs’. What the Western media overlooked was that the corrupt Gyurcsany government was complicit in creating the conditions for mass demoralisation and cynicism. It was this EU-backed regime that did much to unravel and damage public life in Hungary. Gyurcsany’s humiliating electoral defeat in 2010, and the triumph of Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, meant that the EU’s placeman was replaced by an autocratic nationalist and populist prime minister. As has been widely noted by the media, the legislative programme of the Orban government is a product of autocratic ambition. Its economic programme is a confused mix of pragmatism and nonsense – privatisation of industry, slashing welfare benefits while nationalising people’s pension schemes, and so on. In the domain of politics, the Orban government’s key impulse is to centralise control over the key institutions of public life, including the media and the judiciary. The Orban government has also passed new electoral laws that seem designed to entrench its power for years to come. This authoritarian approach is justified by the government in the name of upholding traditional Hungarian values. The new constitution reads like a caricature of a 1930s Balkan autocracy. It is thoroughly anti-liberal (in the classical sense of that term) and appeals to the Christian heritage of Hungary, the family and the nation. Critics of this illiberal constitution rarely acknowledge that, for all its flaws, it is the first Hungarian constitution to be enacted within a parliamentary framework after a free election. In other words, this constitution has been put together by a government with a massive democratic mandate. Moreover, the Western media overlook the democratic deficit that preceded the Orban regime - namely that the earlier constitution of Hungary lacked any democratic mandate. The pre-Orban constitution was enacted on 20 August 1949 as part of the consolidation of the Moscow-dominated Stalinist regime in Hungary. No one in the EU appears to think it odd that an undemocratically enacted constitution imposed on Hungary by a former superpower should be considered morally superior to one based on a democratic mandate. But then, the EU itself has no inhibitions about imposing its values on to its target audiences. It, too, does not want its constitutional proposals held up to public scrutiny. Sometimes it rules by decree and refuses people’s requests to hold any referenda on EU-related matters, on the basis that the issues are far too complex for ordinary people to understand. Evidently, the EU commissioners have read their Voltaire. To recall – it was Voltaire who praised the Russian absolute monarch Catherine the Great’s invasion of Poland and celebrated her ability ‘to make fifty thousand men march into Poland to establish there toleration and liberty of conscience’. The EU does not have 50,000 men but it does have many other resources for executing its culture war. Voltaire was tragically mistaken in his belief that deploying coercion was a legitimate tool for forcing people to change their beliefs – but at least he actually believed in tolerance and freedom of conscience. In contrast, the EU technocracy has little time for genuine tolerance. Moreover, a genuine democratic ethos is not something that the European Commission is particularly passionate about. Its offensive against the Hungarian government has little to do with defending democratic rights. When it finally decided to match its threats of sanction with action, Brussels appeared to be most concerned about the fate, not of Hungary’s electorate, but of its unelected central bankers, unelected judges and the technocrats who run the data-protection agency. On 17 January, Brussels dispatched three letters of formal notice, warning the Orban regime to alter or get rid of recently enacted laws which failed to guarantee the independence of these three institutions. It seems that Brussels technocrats, who cherish their independence from the electorate, are annoyed by the Orban government’s self-serving attempt to cut their colleagues down to size. What’s next for Hungary?Faced with enormous economic and political pressure from the EU and the IMF, it appears the Hungarian government is ready to compromise and is likely to alter legislation that undermines the independence of the central bank, the data-protection agency and the judiciary. However, such a compromise will neither solve Hungary’s domestic problems nor restrain the EU from continuing to wage its culture war against this nation. The Hungarian economy is in dire straits and the Orban regime faces growing hostility from an increasingly desperate electorate. Numerous commentators have pointed out that as a result of the massive scale of economic dislocation and disquiet about the new draconian laws, the Orban government has lost some of its electoral support. The large anti-government demonstration held in Budapest in early January was presented as proof that the base of support for Orban has eroded. The reality is that, at present, there is no credible democratic alternative to Orban. Opposition to the new constitution, and to the Fidesz regime more broadly, has been both opportunistic and incoherent. A placard on the January demonstration summed up the problem. Written in English, it said: ‘Hey Europe, sorry about my prime minister.’ Clearly, the author of this placard was not addressing the people of Hungary but rather the Western media. Similarly, a statement written by 13 former dissidents protesting against the Orban government’s actions was clearly intended for foreign consumption. It ended with the line: ‘The desperate situation of present-day Hungary should be a warning for all of us: if Europe is prepared to help Hungary, it will also help itself.’ Sadly, imploring Europe to help opponents of the Orban regime is really a statement of irresponsible impotence. Brussels has no political role to play in Hungary other than to use undemocratic coercive pressure against a freely elected government. Worse, by appealing to foreign institutions to sort out Hungary’s domestic problems, the opposition betrays the same democratic deficit that it claims to see in the Orban government. The most likely result of this call for help from Europe will be to reinforce nationalist resentment at external interference. At a time when a sense of national victimhood has widespread resonance, the opposition’s plea for external intervention is likely only to confirm this prejudice. In the present circumstances, the main beneficiary of the Orban government’s difficulties is not the Socialist opposition but the very unpleasant xenophobic Jobbik Party. It is likely that Jobbik – ‘the movement for a better Hungary’ – now enjoys greater electoral support than the Socialist Party. Jobbik has succeeded in mobilising a significant section of the people who have lost out in the process of transition from the former Stalinist regime to the corrupt post-Communist one. Unlike the ageing constituency of the Socialist Party, many of the supporters of Jobbik are young and relatively energetic. Jobbik’s platform consists of a mixture of populist xenophobia - against Roma people and Jews - with a nineteenth-century reactionary embrace of parochialism and national self-sufficiency. However, when I talked to a group of Jobbik voters last October, what struck me was not their nationalist fervour but their powerful conviction that they had ‘lost out’, had been forgotten and treated with contempt by institutions they could not trust. They support Jobbik because this movement reminds them that they exist. To a significant extent, the relative success of Jobbik is a legacy of the wasted years of the post-Communist era. During this time, successive governments refused to settle scores with Hungary’s Stalinist past. The new elite – which had strong links with the previous nomenklatura – had one priority: securing its self-interest. Its alliance with the EU technocracy helped to foster an illusion of a reforming prosperous liberal democracy… but as we now know, the reality was far more complicated. The most useful contribution that Europeans can make to help Hungary is to resist the temptation to ‘help’. It is up to the people of Hungary to determine their political future and hopefully to embrace the values of an open society. Most important of all is the need to recognise the right of people to work out for themselves the norms and values they wish to live by. That’s why the advocates of EU cultural correctness need to be told: ‘Hands off Hungary!’ Frank Furedi’s On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence is published by Continuum. (Order this book from Amazon(UK).) Visit his personal website here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/11995/
Monday 23 January 2012 At the end of a week dominated by the Costa Concordia accident, Italy’s Council of Ministers debated an emergency government decree to ban cruise ships and oil tankers from passing near sensitive areas, including protected marine zones and waters around small islands. It was agreed that over the next two years the passage of cruise ships through St Mark’s Basin in Venice (the waters in front of St Mark’s Square) would be phased out. In addition, many campaigners, citing what happened to the Costa Concordia, argue that this decree should result in preventing cruise ships from navigating anywhere in the Venetian lagoon. What campaigners seem to be ignoring is that the Costa Concordia accident was a tragic but exceptional event. It tells us little about cruise ships in general. After all, investigations so far into the capsizing, which occurred near the island of Giglio off the coast of Tuscany, have suggested the ship’s captain Francesco Schettino was responsible. Indeed, Schettino has admitted he ‘ordered the turn too late’ before the ship hit rocks. The company that owns the Costa Concordia, Costa Cruises, has maintained the cruise ship had taken an unauthorised route. The evidence presented so far points to specific navigational errors leading to this accident. Such cruise ship errors and accidents are thankfully rare. Despite approximately 15million people enjoying cruise trips each year worldwide, only 20 people had died as a result of cruise-ship accidents in the two decades prior to Costa Concordia. But instead of concentrating on learning from the errors that caused the Costa Concordia accident, attention has focused on re-regulating cruise ships that pass within the European Union and banning them from Venice’s lagoon. Such measures could limit the enjoyment of cruise passengers and harm the cruise-ship industry, not to mention economies benefiting from tourism. So how are such measure |
