Obliged to Offend

What Christopher Hitchens left behind

2012-05-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

There is no longer any such thing as a radical left. That was what Christopher Hitchens said in an interview with the journalist Rhys Southan in 2001 on the topic of radicalism in a post-socialist world. According to Hitchens, the left was now a conservative rather than an emancipatory force, and it was this, rather than any clichéd shuffle to the right, which resulted in Hitchens no longer identifying with the political left.

While the time to pen glowing tributes or fierce denunciations of the man has probably passed, it still feels rather too early to be assessing any broad “legacy” Hitchens may (or may not) have left behind. For one thing, many of the arguments he contested remain unresolved. Iran is on the way to acquiring a nuclear weapon and the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad continues to mow-down the green shoots of democratic rebellion with AK47s. Calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan (and to hell with the consequences) reverberate around almost every “progressive” march on London; and religion continues, as always, to demand a level of “respect” undeserving of any “faith-based” doctrine.

Everything, as someone once said, is still left to play for.

There is good reason, however, to discuss one of the ideas which animated the politics of Christopher Hitchens during his final decade: his belief that the main ideological war in the 21st century would be fought between those who did and those who did not believe the citizen should be the property of religion or the state. When it came to the right of people in far-away lands to pursue happiness, it was this idea, as opposed to the tendency of portions of the left to place “anti-imperialism” above opposition to dictatorship, which led Hitchens to abandon former comrades for forces willing to support the overthrow of tyrants. Hitchens’s politics may indeed have changed as he grew older, and the parties he chose to align himself with in later years may not have been as concerned with liberating people as he once imagined; but it was the left, rather than Hitchens, whose international outlook became increasingly parochial and conservative after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this was reflected in its protests, where cries of “troops out” and “no to war” often trumped any opposition to totalitarianism.

In order to understand a little about how this happened, it’s important first of all to recognise that there is no longer a viable socialist critique of capitalism – not that is, a critique which proposes a suitable alternative economic system. This does not mean that one could not exist; rather it means there isn’t an attractive one around at this point in time. Social democratic alternatives, even radical ones, still hold weight (more by the day in fact; for basing an economy on the speculations of the stock market has proven disastrous), but any attempt at introducing more than essential planning to an economy would, as in the past, confront the insurmountable objection that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge that is unattainable to ordinary mortals. Writing about the economic disasters unleashed by Bolshevism almost 100 years ago, Ralph Raico summed things up rather well when he said: “These ‘materialists’ and ‘scientific socialists’ lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring's philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.”

As a result of its economic ideas being found out, today’s radicals are more often than not defined by what they are against, rather than what they are for. Topping that list, ahead of even capitalism itself, is the United States. Shortly after 9/11, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in the London Review of Books about the “feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming”. Further to the left, the Socialist Workers’ Party refused even to condemn the attacks, and instead launched the “Stop the War Coalition” a mere ten days after thousands of people had been murdered. The professed aims of the “coalition”, which mainly consisted of SWP rank and file under the cover of a less overtly noxious brand, were misleading, however, and disguised the fact that the movement was built not to oppose the war Al Qaeda had openly declared on free society, but rather to rally people against any potential Western response. At this point the writing should have been on the wall. However justified Western military action might be, the placards would still come out. A war was only a war if it involved the West. As Hitchens put it in an essay for The Nation at the time: “If there is now an international intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some ‘Candle in the Wind’ or ‘Strawberry Fields’ peace vigils. They did not take to the streets, or even go moist and musical, when the Administration supported the Taliban.”

There can be little doubt that to some of Hitchens’s generation 9/11 was, in their eyes, their very own Orwell moment. Just as Orwell had recognised that civilisation depended on defeating Hitler in the Second World War, many formally of the left were shaken out of any post-Cold War lethargy by the random murder that punctured the New York skyline on that clear September morning. The spectacle of many so-called progressives drawing a false equivalence between John Ashcroft and Osama Bin Laden did the rest, and again would have been all too familiar to Orwell. In a letter written to him in 1942, the poet D. S. Savage assured Orwell that Hitler required, “not condemnation, but understanding”. Similar tropes began to appear in the aftermath of 9/11 in a number of left-liberal publications, with wide-ranging appeals to “understand” the “root causes” of religiously-inspired murder. The possibility of remaining aloof from the struggle with fascism was of course only possible for those living in stable liberal democracies at a great distance from any real danger – those people usually inhabited a very comfortable position within those “democracies” (their brackets, not mine), too.

Hitchens is no longer with us and the stories of Iraq and Afghanistan remain unfinished. It is impossible to predict the post-war trajectory of either of those countries, just as it would be equally futile to try to guess at what would have befallen them had intervention not occurred. Simply reeling off the number of civilian casualties without considering the potential casualties of not going to war, however, betrays little more than a desire not to follow ones’ thoughts beyond the point at which they remain politically convenient. The real answers to questions of this sort will come not from the party-minded, but from those who, as Hitchens himself put it, “insist on thinking for themselves”.

What really illuminates the political path Christopher Hitchens took in his last decade are the struggles of those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, to name but a few, and the relative indifference those struggles summoned and continue to summon in those who once professed solidarity with the oppressed as a first principle. Apart from “no to war”, does anyone know what the left position today is on Syria is, for example? What dictators fear is military force, not chanting in drafty rooms above Islington pubs of “long live the workers”.

To have any relevance to the struggles against tyrannical authority today, the left must get over its obsession with imperialism, an idea based on the antiquated doctrines of long-dead and somewhat unendearing revolutionaries. The alternative is to risk being left behind by history and viewed by the millions who continue to languish under dictatorship as a fringe and irrelevant movement with parochial and remote concerns. It is a fitting time for the left to put the purely abstract away and look real people and their suffering in the face. That is an idea worth keeping, and it is one that was left behind in no small part by Christopher Hitchens.

Despite its popularity, the death penalty would allow the state to kill innocent people

2012-05-25T19:43:00.001+01:00

The University of Michigan law school and Northwestern University have just compiled a database of over 2,000 United States prisoners exonerated between 1999 and the present day. One of the study’s findings was that death row inmates were exonerated nine times more frequently that others convicted of murder, raising the possibility that many innocent people have been sent to their deaths by the American justice system.

The last time a person was executed in Britain was 1964, and the death penalty was formally abolished in 1965. There were originally some 220 crimes on the statute books that warranted the death penalty, most reflecting a desire to protect private property; although others were of a more eccentric nature, such as a law against being in the company of gypsies for one month.

While the death penalty was last debated in Parliament in 2008, retribution is a big thing in tabloid Britain, and a majority continue to say they would support the reintroduction of the ultimate sanction for those convicted of murder. That figure rises significantly when the victim is a child or a police officer. A campaign by the blogger Guido Fawkes last year to have a parliamentary debate on the issue failed, but it seems likely there will be further calls for the re-introduction of the death penalty the next time a particularly galling crime hits the headlines.

Contemptuously dismissing public opinion is one thing; but automatically conferring moral status on something for no other reason than popularity is quite another, and can be demagogic and dangerous. Self-professed libertarians like Staines should know this. In a representative liberal democracy, politicians are put in office to protect the individual from a potentially over-bearing majority. As the American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke put it (rather frivolously, in this context): “Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants would be stone-washed denim, [and] celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library.”

While writing little on capital punishment herself, libertarian icon Ayn Rand did publish a brief article by Nathaniel Branden in response to the question “What is the Objectivist stand on capital punishment?” The letter made the obvious point that there can rarely, if ever, be 100 per cent certainty of guilt, and exonerating a person after they have been executed is altogether too late.

“If it were possible to by fully and irrevocably certain, beyond any possibility of error, that a man were guilty, then capital punishment for murder would be appropriate and just. But men are not infallible; juries make mistakes; that is the problem. There have been instances recorded where all the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to a man’s guilt, and the man was convicted, and then subsequently discovered to be innocent. It is the possibility of executing an innocent man that raises doubts about the legal advisability of capital punishment. It is preferable to sentence ten murderers to life imprisonment, rather than sentence one innocent man to death.”

There are certain executions that modern advocates of the death penalty in Britain prefer not to talk about. One such case is that of Dereck Bentley, a British teenager who was put to death on January 28, 1953. Bentley was condemned for his part in a botched robbery in which Police Constable Sidney Miles was killed by Bentley’s friend, Christopher Craig. Due to the fact that Craig was only 16 at the time, he was sent to prison (he was released in 1963). Bentley, however, was convicted and sentenced to death, not for shooting dead the policeman, but for being party to murder under the English law principle of “joint enterprise”. A psychiatrist at Bentley’s trial stated that Bentley was illiterate, of low intelligence and borderline retarded.

Notwithstanding the dubious nature of putting someone to death for being an “accomplice” (a term open to wide interpretation), it subsequently came to light that there had been defects in the original trial process, and Dereck Bentley was pardoned. Bentley’s joy was diminished, however, by the fact that justice came 45 years after he had already been hanged.

In his 1998 essay, Scenes from an Execution, the late Christopher Hitchens alleged that politicians in the US were apt to play politics with the death penalty when it might win them votes in execution-hungry states. He also pointed out that despite executions of those with mental illness being prohibited by international law, glaring examples of unstable inmates being condemned were all too easy to find. The National Association of Mental Health has estimated that between five to ten percent of those on death row in the US have serious mental illness.

“I can’t help recalling Rick Ray Rector, the man executed by Governor Clinton during the 1992 New Hampshire primary. So gravely impaired and lobotomised was he that, when they came to take him away, he explained that he was leaving a wedge of pecan pie ‘for later.’ Laid upon the gurney, he helped them find a vein for the intravenous because he thought they were doctors come at last to cure him.”

Many people like to believe that the death penalty acts as an effective deterrent by instilling a fear that committing a crime will put you at risk of losing your own life. Most evidence, however, suggests the death penalty does not cut crime. In spite of it being one of the few advanced countries to still carry out executions, the US has the greatest number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants of any comparable country. The South, which accounts for some 80 per cent of executions, has the highest regional murder rate. The experts concur. Eighty-eight percent of the US’s top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent, according to a study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Tempting though it may be to view the death penalty as a quick, efficient form of retribution on the back of appalling crimes, one need not be a libertarian to recognise that capital punishment is the worst form of big government.

Originally published at The Independent.
(Image: The Independent)

The Olympics and the Jubilee distract from the real issues this summer

2012-05-09T21:48:00.002+01:00

Unless you have something wrong with you, you will be starting to get incredibly excited about the summer. Things will kick off a few weeks from now with the Diamond Jubilee. Soon after that the Olympics are coming to town; and if you weren’t already, you will soon be salivating at the prospect of what will be the greatest games – alas the greatest summer – ever.

That’s the official line, at least.

Personally I don’t claim to know how anyone feels about the two events because I don’t recall any of us being asked. I am fairly certain, however, that every time I open a newspaper or turn on a television a few weeks from now someone will be only too ready to tell me how delighted I am: delighted at the longevity of our Head of State and delighted at the prospect of the Games. Any suggestion that the establishment’s enthusiasm is not matched by an indifferent public will be about as welcome in the media as water in one’s shoes.

I am exaggerating perhaps, but only slightly. This summer the plastic flags will come out, protesters will face the prospect of a night in the cells for mild expressions of dissent, and London’s social problems will be swept under a giant carpet of smugness. Don’t expect much from the parliamentary opposition, either. As London’s new rich scramble to ingratiate themselves with more established privilege, most of our politicians will be too busy ‘showcasing Britain to the world’ (whatever that means) to raise a critical voice.

Away from the carefully choreographed imagery, however, things in the UK are not quite as harmonious as the Coalition would have us believe. A couple of hundred yards from the Olympic Stadium, the deprivation of Newham should undermine any sense of national ‘togetherness’ the establishment would like to foist upon us. As one of the poorest areas of the country, there is very little the residents of this ‘Olympic borough’ have in common with the future occupants of the Olympic Village, and even less with the Windsors and their accumulated hangers on. Much has been made about the “regeneration” the Olympics will bring to a place like Newham, yet as part of the Coalition’s cuts, the borough’s local authority will see its funding from central government slashed by around £75million over the next four years. As the Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson opened Stratford’s glittering Westfield shopping complex last September (with the usual bumbling get-up), libraries, swimming pools and public parks were being boarded-up or earmarked for closure.

Like Newham, the story of London is increasingly a tale of two cities: the city of the rich and the city the rest of us live and work in. And just as the Conservative Mayor’s ‘charisma’ (is that what it is?) distracts the public from his incompetency, so too the Government is hoping the events of the summer will divert attention from the growing chasm between the city’s haves and have nots.

According to the 2012 Sunday Times Rich List, Britain’s super-rich (most of whom live in London) have defied the recession and increased their wealth. The newspaper’s research found that the combined worth of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people in 2012 is £414bn – up 4.7 per cent on last year. This at a time when the rate of poverty in London is 28 per cent, according to the charity Trust for London’s Poverty Profile. The Trust also found that over one million Londoners now live in low-income families where at least one adult is working – an increase of 60 per cent in the last 10 years.

Despite the well-documented connection between deprivation, inequality and social problems, the belief that last August’s riots were a freak outbreak of “sheer criminality” has become the widely accepted view. Such complacency, however, has a tendency to come back and bite. As Dutch architectural historian Wouter Vantisphout pointed out during his visit to the capital last year, outbreaks of burning and looting have tended to occur in cities that have started to feel just a little too smug about themselves. And London, or at least the city’s establishment, appears both smug and prepared to look away when faced with the capital’s increasingly festering inequalities. As Vantisphout went on to say:

“The reality of urban riots is that they have always turned out to be the opposite of a learning experience for a city. Riots have nearly always resulted in politicians simplifying the problem even more, and citizens looking away even further.”

In difficult times politicians love a distraction. The message from on high this summer will be not to worry about the privatisation of the NHS, not to worry about increasing inequality and its accompanying social problems, but to clap your hands, smile and applaud; always applaud.

As the US author Neil Postman put it in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: “the civil libertarians and rationalists who are forever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.

By all means enjoy the Olympic Games if that’s your thing. Be in high spirits at the prospect of the Jubilee if you really must. But don’t forget that for the powerful these are welcome diversions from more serious issues. And don’t, whatever you do, let any media outlet tell you how thrilled and excited you are. That’s for you to decide.

Originally published@The Independent
(Image: The Independent)

Why do we fetishise meritocracy when most success is down to luck?

2012-04-25T18:45:00.000+01:00

Market forces are the basis of political liberty. Despite the biggest economic crisis for a generation, most of us still believe it. We might get slapped around the face by the system from time to time – by the increasing frequency of rough sleepers we encounter on the way to work, or when we read in the paper about pensioners who can no longer afford to heat their homes – but on the whole, as a society we seldom question the fundamental soundness of the free-market anymore.

A report on British social attitudes released by the National Centre for Social Research last December found that support for “individual responsibility” is also on the increase. The report found that only 35 per cent of people thought the Government should take steps to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and over half (54 per cent) believed that benefits were too high. The report also found that the public were increasingly at ease with high earners buying private education for their offspring.

In his book Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt astutely summed up the process by which fierce competition – the law of the jungle, if you like – had imperceptibly replaced empathy in our grossly unequal societies (Britain and the US) as the ultimate personal virtue (to put this into some kind of context, in 2012 the lowest-paid people in Britain have incomes less than one-third of one per cent of the highest-paid, according to the Equality Trust.):

“The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked.”

One of the things that effectively props up our continuing faith in capitalism is the idea of meritocracy; or more specifically, the notion that if a person wants something, with hard work and determination they, alas anyone, can get it. The American writer John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in the United States because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. To put it only slightly differently, the American poor had willingly swallowed the idea – the meritocratic one – that, as self-help pioneer James Allen put it, “circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him”.

A belief that you can do anything you put your mind to can, on an individual level, be incredibly empowering. Anyone who sits at home all day blaming “the rich” or “the government” for their misfortune is, in most instances, engaging in a nonsensical waste of time. Someone or something may very well be holding you back, but recognising the fact is not particularly clever or empowering if it comes with no corresponding action to try and change things.

As an idea of how capitalism works, however, meritocracy is little more than a contrivance.

Most of us, whether we like it or not, will remain in the same social class as our parents, and probably the same social class as our grandparents before them. The more unequal a society is, the more wealthy parents pass on this advantage to their offspring. The statistics spell it out clearly enough. A 2007 report by the London School of Economics (LSE) and Surrey University found that children in England and Wales from poorer backgrounds were less likely to escape their upbringing than their counterparts in any other advanced country apart from the US. As to why this happened, the study found that poor but bright children were often overtaken by less intelligent classmates from wealthier backgrounds in the early years of schooling. The impact of this initial disadvantage is magnified as children pass through the education system and become teenagers. Around 10 per cent of young people at the bottom rung of the social ladder go on to university, compared with over 80 per cent of those from professional or managerial backgrounds. And as David Willetts never tires of pointing out, graduates will earn on average £100,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates.

Broadly speaking, the idea that a child born on a council estate can “be whatever they want to be” is a bit like the assertion that a 30 stone man can out-run Usain Bolt in the 100 metres. As Karl Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.

Anyone, technically speaking, can go from “rags to riches” and make something of their life. Anyone can also, as it happens, win the lottery. The point, however, is to live in the real world, and consider how many actually do go from “rags” to “riches”. The answer is very few. The single biggest indicator of how a person will do in life is still their parents’ bank balance.

Originally published @ The Independent
(Image: The Independent)

Vote Boris or Ken? A plague on both their houses

2012-04-18T20:18:00.009+01:00

Election time is not the most exciting time in the political calendar, but the most boring and predictable one, for it invariably requires of a party person that they leave their critical faculties at the door, else it be said that they are handing ammunition to the enemy.

Growing up in the West Country, one of the first political memories I have is of a joke my grandfather used to enjoy telling. “Next door’s cat could get elected round here,” he used to say. “So long as he wears a blue rosette.” This remains true of the area I grew up in even today. Although next door’s cat never did run for office – disappointingly in my opinion, for he was named Max (Max Shachtman, anyone?) – it still remains dispiritingly easy to get elected in that corner of the west of England simply by standing on a ticket for the Conservative Party.

While this year’s London Mayoral election is nothing like as one-sided, the inclination of commentators and party hacks to bunker down and base every utterance on a belief in my candidate right or wrong isn’t all that different. Once the coloured rosette is pinned to the lapel, the criticism from one’s own side is supposed to stop. Some have even chosen to characterise those with deep concerns about the Labour candidate for Mayor as acting “in the interests of the one per cent”, presumably putting to one side the fact that the candidate in question appears, if his accounting is anything to go by, quite keen on joining the one per cent himself.

Nor in his campaign to be elected Mayor of London has Mr Livingstone missed an opportunity to reassure this collection of hear no evil, see no evil backers. Not that it was ever going to be hard to portray Boris Johnson as an out of touch friend of the rich or anything. The current incumbent has on a number of occasions attempted to elicit sympathy for the practitioners of the City’s crony capitalism, and as if to boast of the sheer distance between members of his party and the public, he once disgustingly referred to the £250,000 he earned writing a newspaper column as “chicken feed”.

And yet it is worth remembering, in spite of the party mindedness of some, that during his previous stint in office Ken Livingstone maintained near silence as Gordon Brown turned the City into something resembling a tax haven for the super-rich. “There isn’t an ideological conflict anymore,” Mr Livingstone told Prospect magazine in April 2007. “The business community has been almost depoliticised.” One of those who lobbied vociferously for Crossrail, the rail link intended to transport City workers from the Home Counties to their gleaming offices largely at the expense of the taxpayer, Mr Livingstone also appointed as his economic adviser John Ross, a man who could be heard during “Red” Ken’s eight year term vociferously defending the profits of the City’s Hedge Fund managers.

Caving in to the prevailing orthodoxy of finance capitalism during the boom years is one thing, but there are also the statements Mr Livingstone has repeatedly made about London’s Jews. We on the left are being asked to ignore the “profound concerns” expressed by prominent Jewish Labour Party supporters at Mr Livingstone’s apparent obsession with and repeated conflation of Zionism, the Jewish people and the state of Israel. We are also told to put his refusal to apologise for embracing a fascistic cleric who supports the “right” of Islamic theocracies to murder their gay citizens down, bizarrely, to “Ken being Ken”. (To those who cite Livingstone’s record on gay rights in the 1980s, I feel compelled to ask where the man’s rainbow flag was when he took money from Press TV – a television station that is not so much a broadcasting outlet as an arm of the Iranian intelligence service. Are Iranian gays less deserving of the rights he campaigned for in London?)

Either because Mr Livingstone’s views echo those of the British intelligentsia on a handful of issues – most notably United States foreign policy, Israel and Islam – or because he is standing for election against a member of the Conservative Party, all of these concerns, and the socialist and liberal principles which make them concerning, are supposed to be set aside until after the election has finished.

It is not only London where one can at present find progressive principles being casually jettisoning in this manner. George Galloway, a man who for almost 20 years has been a fellow traveller of one despotic regime after another, was recently elected in Bradford amidst great media fanfare. Liberal newspapers and magazines have only just stopped carrying nauseating comment pieces telling those of us still in the Labour Party that we have something to learn from a man who once referred to the day the Soviet Union collapsed as the worst day of his life. If this does not sufficiently condemn Mr Galloway in his own words, we have only to look at some of the debased utterances he has made in recent years. Speaking in Syria in July 2005, Galloway called Bashir al Assad, the leader whose army is currently butchering and raping the citizens of that country, “the last Arab leader”. Galloway has also written not so much a book as a eulogy on Fidel Castro, a Stalinist autocrat who until recently presided over a country with the highest per-capita prison population in the western hemisphere.

And yet in spite of this, Mr Galloway was gushingly referred to in the latest edition of the left-liberal New Statesman as “a man who stands by his principles and tells it straight”.

Pass the sick bucket when you’re done, won’t you.

The re-emergence of men like Ken Livingstone and George Galloway has afforded us a repulsive spectacle, and it’s more than an irony that so many calling themselves leftists and liberals have been too foolish to recognise it as such. It is often said that we on the left are too idealistic. On the contrary; the idea that it is possible to line up behind individuals like Livingstone and Galloway for electoral advantage is testament to the level to which left-wing politics in Britain has sunk. If anything, a great deal more idealism would be very welcome. Oh and by the way, there are more than two candidates standing to be elected Mayor of London.

Originally published @ The Independent
(Image: The Independent)

A nuclear Iran could consign non-proliferation to the history books

2012-04-12T09:24:00.005+01:00

The prediction made by right-thinking individuals during the 20th century that proliferation would be an inevitable consequence of the existence of nuclear weapons has come to bear.

Those states with nuclear weapons are upgrading, replenishing and replacing their stocks, while those without them are increasingly weighing up the benefits of joining this elite (or I should say notorious) club of nations.

We may still occasionally kick up a fuss about the gradual subversion of the idea of a nuclear-free world, but bolstered by the fact that nuclear weapons were never used during the Cold War, realist political theorists have successfully popularised the idea that the more states that possess the bomb, the less likely war becomes. Like the car or the internet, we have come to accept nuclear weapons as an everyday part of civilisation.

And yet, if you have never felt the fear that previous generations had, that a mad man, or a mad regime, would one day acquire a nuclear weapon, you are about to. A dictatorship that held on to power three years ago by butchering and raping its citizenry is rapidly approaching the point where it will have the capability to build a bomb. According to the latest United Nations inspection, Iran has produced enough 20 per cent-enriched uranium in a single year to fuel its one nuclear research reactor for 15 years. Strange behaviour, you might think, for a regime that solemnly maintains it has no desire to build a nuclear weapon. Elsewhere, however, the regime's proxies are less concerned with keeping up appearances. In Lebanon the flags of Hezbollah are decorated with the symbol of a mushroom cloud; while the theocracy's more zealous newspapers have already begun to gloat over the potential a nuclear Iran would have to bully its Arab neighbours.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when lots of people in the West became comfortable with the prospect of an Iranian bomb. On the political left, it might even be accurate to say there is a greater clamber to condemn the prospect of the West disarming Iran than there is to argue against the theocracy being allowed to build a nuclear bomb.

Those weighing up the potential of a nuclear Iran in the hackneyed language of mutually assured destruction (MAD), however, or viewing developments only in terms of "Western hypocrisy", would do well to remember just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the so-called "balance of terror" that governed the previous century. To those who believe that nuclear war today is unlikely, I feel compelled to point out that this is not, in any sense, enough. Any one of the following "incidents" should have rid us of the glib notion, based on feeble evidence, that the potential for worldwide nuclear war is confined to the realms of science fiction:

* During a meeting with Robert McNamara to mark the 30th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, Fidel Castro told the former United States Secretary of Defence that "of course" he was aware that the Soviet missiles situated in Cuba were nuclear-armed. "That's precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them," remarked Castro. Asked what he thought the consequences for Cuba would have been had Khrushchev heeded his advice, Castro said the island would have been "totally destroyed in the exchange", and added that McNamara would have "done the same" were he in the Cuban President's position.

* On 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union's satellites over the US, intercepted a message indicating the launch of Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from American bases. Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov believed at the time that the US was preparing an all-out first strike nuclear attack, and in anticipation had implemented a "launch at warning" order, which meant Soviet retaliation no longer required the usual confirmation of an enemy attack. Upon receiving the system alert, Petrov hesitated, and after five long minutes decided that the launch reports must be false. Petrov later told journalists his decision that the US had not started an all-out nuclear war was based partly on a guess.

* In 1979, British and American computer systems malfunctioned, and indicated that the Soviets had launched a massive nuclear attack. Fighter jets across the West were scrambled and emergency preparations for retaliation were made. Six minutes later the all-clear was sounded. The error occurred after a junior Canadian military officer put a tape simulating a Soviet attack into the wrong computer.

It hardly needs pointing out that the West has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is also quite true that one cannot preach non-proliferation, nor expect it, while simultaneously building up one's own lethal nuclear arsenal. That being said, I have not heard any plausible explanation as to why an Iranian bomb would increase the likelihood of the West getting rid of its nuclear weapons. Considering the fact that a nuclear-armed Iran would have broken every undertaking it has ever made to the European Union, to the International Atomic Energy Agency and to the United Nations, a more probable outcome is that a further nail would be driven into the coffin of non-proliferation, potentially consigning the cause, along with the League of Nations, to the history books. This would not simply be bad for Israel, as some on the more extreme fringes might wish, but would be an unimaginable disaster for all of us, including millions more who have not yet been born.

Those nostalgic for the old "balance of power", or practiced in a toy-town "anti-imperialism" that trumps a consideration for the lives of actual human beings, ought to at least have an idea of the potential consequences of what it is they are so blasé about.

Touts are pricing ordinary people out of live entertainment

2012-04-09T19:10:00.004+01:00

When one thinks of tickets touts, the first image that usually comes to mind is of a wideboy or “spiv” hanging around outside a concert venue whispering in your ear. Visit any gig or football stadium today and you can still find such people, often visibly wine-soaked and almost always looking like the last person one would wish to buy anything from.

If you are a regular concert goer, the chances are you will have bought a ticket from a tout at some point. Some estimates suggest as many as 40 per cent of tickets are now being sold on the secondary market. Today, however, you will probably have bought the ticket online, rather than from a dishevelled chap in a grubby back alley.

While online touts undoubtedly provide more security for the buyer than the unregulated street sellers of old, they have also opened up professional touting to anyone with an internet connection and a bit of spare cash. Those who have sat furiously refreshing their internet browser at nine o’clock on a Friday morning – only to find that tickets have “sold out” by 9.01 – will know exactly what I am talking about. The anger tends to reach boiling point when half an hour later the same tickets appear on eBay at many times their face value. A quick look on Seatwave is all it takes to see the problem. Tickets for the upcoming shows at The O2 by boyband One Direction are currently listed for sale for hundreds of pounds. If you want one of the best seats, however, you could pay £1098 – 27 times the face value of the tickets. For those who cannot afford such prices, live music is increasingly something they see only on television.
Continue reading at The Independent.

The LGBT community must do more to challenge a culture of rape denial

2012-04-03T19:20:00.008+01:00

This is a guest post by Alexander Craven

The LGBT community has a proud history of opposing prejudice, discrimination and violence. Though it has worked hard to end domestic and sexual violence against women, it has often struggled to deal with the behaviour and prejudices of its own members.

This is no truer than when it comes to the sensitive issue of rape. Increasingly sexual abuse is a common fixture in the lives of LGBTs. Some will be victims. Most, if not all, will know victims of this cruel crime. Yet there is a huge silence surrounding this issue within the community.

Recent studies have revealed a higher rate of rape than was previously thought. It shows that gay men and lesbians are at far greater risk of rape and sexual assault than their heterosexual counterparts.

This situation is made all the more worse by the chronic underreporting of sexual abuse in the LGBT community. There are several reasons for this.

One is the fear of not being believed. Study after study has confirmed that people attribute more blame to homosexual male rape victims than to straight male victims.

Many fear making reports to the police, believing that they will not be taken seriously, or inherent institutional homophobia. There is some weight to these fears as a ‘macho’ culture persists in the police force.

There also exists a widespread perception that all gays are sadomasochistic and that rape is just the ultimate pleasure to them. This attitude is even prevalent within the LGBT community.

Such negative attitudes are not improved by a male gay porn industry that pushes and eroticises misogyny and male dominance.

Although pornography certainly does not motivate sexual abuse or rape, it has the effect of creating misconceptions and confusions about victims, which can be dangerous when there is no countervailing perspective. This has been a huge obstacle from creating a climate of intolerance to sexual aggression.

There remains fear within the LGBT community that speaking out about this issue will serve to confirm homophobic prejudices and hand ammunition to their enemies.

Sections of the Establishment, the Church, conservative think-tanks and a media dominated by Tories, make this a valid concern.

Valid as it is, homophobia cannot be used as an excuse to sweep problems within the community under the carpet.

If the LGBT community fails to challenge attitudes toward rape, they leave in place the ignorance and bias that entrenches a climate of callousness toward the rape of LGBT individuals, a population disproportionately vulnerable to rape and in need of protection.

Clever accounting has consequences

2012-03-27T18:19:00.006+01:00

“We’d all do it if we could get away with it, wouldn’t we?”. Anyone who has ever discussed tax avoidance will have heard this phrase at some point. The underlying assumption is that we would all be siphoning our money off into foreign bolt-holes if only we had the fees to pay an effective accountant. And perhaps the cynics have a point. Even supposedly left-wing politicians are turning themselves into “companies” these days, in order to pay corporation tax at 20 per cent rather than personal income tax at 50 per cent. Pop stars are feeling the urge to “go and buy a gun and randomly open fire” when they see their tax bill because “state schools are shit”, and the country’s most famous Formula One driver upped sticks and left for tax-lite Switzerland long ago (under the guise of “safeguarding his privacy”, you understand).

It would seem that those who are able to are keeping what they can. And as for the rest of us, if we could, we would all be doing exactly the same.

It is often said of Thatcherism that it encouraged us to see greed as a virtue. It would be more accurate, however, to say that it very successfully smeared altruism as at best naive and at worst foolish. In 2012, it is not the fact that you are minimising the tax you pay that requires an apologetic disclaimer attached, but the fact that you were ever happy about paying tax in the first place. As U2 guitarist David Evans, aka “The Edge”, once rhetorically asked (presumably during time-out from telling the Irish government to give more aid to Africa) “who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?”.

Continue reading at The Independent.

For attitudes towards rape to change, society needs to drop its sexual double standard

2012-03-15T21:27:00.005Z

One of the most shocking statistics to come out of a recent Mumsnet survey on rape was the astonishing number of victims who felt that society viewed them in a negative light.

Nearly three-quarters of those polled said the media was unsympathetic to women who reported rape, while more than half said the same was true of the legal system and society as a whole.

The perception is not as far from social attitudes as we may like to think. A survey of more than 1,000 Londoners in 2010, carried out to mark the 10th anniversary of the Haven service for rape victims, found that more than half of those questioned said there were circumstances when a rape victim should accept some responsibility for an attack.

Whereas social attitudes towards racial equality and homosexuality have tended to become more progressive as the younger generation has come through, attitudes towards the sexual assault of women appear to lag significantly behind. A 2008 poll of Northern Ireland university students commissioned by Amnesty International found that almost half of those polled believed a woman to be partially or totally responsible for being raped if she had behaved in a flirtatious manner. And the recent controversy over the website Unilad was perhaps most striking for the fact that the creators of the site did not consider their “banter” about rape to be anything out of the ordinary until they were pulled up on it.
Continue reading at The Independent

Trident is a colossal waste of money that will encourage further nuclear proliferation

2012-03-08T22:09:00.014Z

I have several problems with the popular notion that there’s no money left. I think the first time the absurdity of it struck me was when I heard the incredibly wealthy entrepreneur Deborah Meaden saying it on Question Time during a debate about striking teachers and dinner ladies. I recall looking round a room of friends, wondering who would be the first to guffaw at the gargantuan level of irony in the statement. No money left? Well, she seemed to be doing ok.

There are other occasions too when the language of austerity jars with reality, most notably when it comes to the renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Trident was excluded from the government's strategic defence and security review in October 2010; and despite murmurings from some Liberal Democrats (aren’t there always murmurings from Liberal Democrats?), the coalition seems intent on spending £20 billion-plus renewing a weapons system which, if ever deployed, would result in the deaths of thousands, if not millions of human beings.

Twenty billion is just a figure of course. To put it into some kind of perspective, George Osborne’s first budget planned for cuts of six billion pounds; and public sector workers currently face a three per cent rise in their pension contributions to save the state just under two billion.

Continue reading at The Independent

The prohibition of drugs has been an abject failure with a devastating human cost

2012-02-29T14:32:00.005Z

Forty years ago, on 28 January 1972, President Richard Nixon signed his “war on drugs” into law. Drugs were “public enemy number one,” said Nixon, and action was necessary because addiction to narcotics had “assumed the dimensions of a national emergency”.

Four decades on, and the global clampdown on drugs continues unabated. From London to Bogota to Kabul, the same disastrous policies are being repeated with the same destructive consequences. As a Global Commission on Drug Policy report released in June 2010 argued, the global war on drugs has resulted in “devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world”.

In the years since President Nixon’s declaration, the US government has spent trillions of dollars attempting to destroy the illegal drugs trade – both at home and abroad. The U.S. federal government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the war on drugs, at a rate of around $500 per second. The human consequences are even more troubling. Around 90 per cent of all cocaine consumed in the US comes via Mexico – a place where, since 2006, over 47,000 people have been killed in President Philip Calderon’s violent battle with the drug cartels.
Continue reading

When did looking down on others become the national pastime?

2012-02-21T14:03:00.006Z

I don’t know about you, but before I tuned into the Channel Four show I had no idea what a big fat gypsy wedding was. I assumed it must be something to do with gypsies and weddings, obviously, but I failed to grasp why such a program would ever make it on to television. Lots of people get married, I reasoned, so why should a gypsy wedding be more deserving of airtime than anything else.

So I did it. I tuned in. And now everything has become a little clearer. Despite the assurances of Channel Four that the program is about combating the negative tabloid portrayal of gypsies, the whole thing stuck to the script more comprehensively than a Daily Mail editorial. Smashing stereotypes? Hardly. More like hammering them home with a sledgehammer and a stick of dynamite.

While I am arguably too young to delve deep into the archives of television history (I am 29), I struggle to recall a time when so much of the weekly schedule was filled with programmes designed to allow us, the public, to look down with disdain on other, more marginal groups; and usually under a pseudo-progressive guise of empathising with those on the receiving end of our spiteful laughter.

I do not wish to single out Channel Four here. They are, after all, only commissioning programs they believe (and correctly, in the case of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings) will be popular. Look elsewhere if you prefer. Turn on the Jeremy Kyle show; watch one of Ricky Gervais’s recent offerings; listen to a Frankie Boyle joke; dig out the Little Britain DVDs. Wherever you look this type of “entertainment” has gradually taken over our television screens, pumping up the self-esteem of the middle classes by giving a sly kick to those clinging on to the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Oh it’s just a joke, I can hear you say. Lighten up. You’re taking things too seriously.

So why the pretence of empathy then? Why not simply make television that unapologetically mocks the poor, the deformed, the degenerate and the non-conformist?

For one thing that would require an admission that under all the politically correct plumage, we are perhaps not the welcoming and tolerant a society we smugly and repeatedly profess to be. There are political implications, too. Is popular support for David Cameron’s welfare reforms really about fair play and “common sense”, or have we become so used to viewing those less fortunate than ourselves as the equivalent of another species that we no longer even care what happens to them? The London riots? “Sheer criminality”; the teenagers on Jeremy Kyle? “Chavs”. Travellers? “Gypos”. Simple, comforting, and most importantly perhaps, a way to feel better about ourselves in an era where fatalism has replaced the idea that a better world is possible.

The thing which seems to provoke the heartiest laughter and the greatest mirth of all, I am gradually discovering, is any attempt by the disenfranchised to emulate those more fortunate than themselves. The mock-celebrity names the council estate Mothers give to their children; the scantily clad gypsy girls copying the provocative dance moves of their favourite pop stars; the transsexuals expressing outwardly what they feel inside; the overweight people trying desperately to look how they’ve been told they are supposed to look. How dare they? we collectively seem to ask. Don’t they know their station?

Laughing in the face of the vulnerable seems to have caught on at about the time we finally lost all control over what happens at the other end of society. The global rich no longer listen to us, so instead we spend our time looking downwards and sneering at easier targets. Perhaps we recognise something of ourselves in the powerless, and giving them a good kicking is a sort of masochistic exercise, not unlike electing politicians such Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Whatever the reason, it seems the television equivalent of the freak show is here to stay.

The riots of August 2011 should have put paid to the idea that we could go on laughing at the underclass forever. It didn’t though; and if you want a picture of the future, you could do worse than imagine a Vicky Pollard-type figure being hurt and humiliated publicly – forever.

Malvinas or Falklands?

2012-02-16T22:55:00.003Z

Nobody needs to ask where conservatives stand on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. They don’t exactly hide behind the fact that they want the territory to remain staunchly British. Not necessarily because most Falkland islanders want to be British, which they do of course, but for reasons similar to that which led many of them to oppose the end of colonialism last century. In other words, the more territory that belongs to the crown, the better.

As for the Left, I hardly think I am putting my neck on the line if I say that majority opinion would be very much opposed to any military action to defend British control of the islands. Sean Penn probably echoed the sentiment of most left-liberal types when he said this week that Britain was “colonialist” for refusing to hand over what he called “the Malvinas Islands of Argentina”.

The attitude of Penn is not new of course; and the instinct – that of a deep suspicion of the motivations of the British state – is a sound one. British colonialism’s record of ceding power to the demands of popular movements seeking self-determination is not exactly a beacon of enlightened thinking, by any stretch of the imagination.

That being said, an over-heightened suspicion of “imperialism” has also been known to lead a person down a political dead end from time to time. In 1982, despite the fact that the Labour leadership supported Margaret Thatcher’s intervention in the Falklands and the Argentinian invasion was signed-off by the thuggish military junta of General Galtieri, the majority of the Left enthusiastically denounced military action on the basis that Britain was an “imperialist” country. Little was said about Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands, itself based on a few years of formal possession a century and a half ago, and less was said about the attitude of the islanders themselves – one might think the most important consideration in the whole affair.

Today in progressive circles, there is a strong emotional attachment to the idea that Argentina, rather than Britain, has the only claim over the islands deserving of support. This belief is not based on any evidence of historical injustice towards Argentina – that country’s claim is even more flimsy than Britain’s – but rather on an emotional exchange in the mind of the progressive of one chauvinism for another. The superior virtue of the oppressed, it was once called; or in this case, the superior virtue of any nation that isn’t their own.

This sort of thing highlights another problem the contemporary Left has – outside of opposition to intervention, what does it actually stand for overseas? Democratic self-determination of small peoples, or theorising about which country is the most “imperialist” based on a particular reading of a 100-year-old dog-eared text?

It hardly needs reiterating that British interest in the Falkland Islands is almost certainly not based on altruism – there is increasing talk of an oil windfall from the seas surrounding the islands – but what on earth gives a person the impression that Argentina’s motivations are any less grubby?

The sensible option, it would seem, would be to ignore politicians on both sides of the squabble and ask the islanders what they want. If they reply with the same answer they have been giving for many years - that they would like to remain British – people such as Sean Penn are more than entitled not to like that answer, but they must, at the very least, come up with a good reason as to why the islands belong to Argentina instead. And I’m afraid romanticism just won’t do.

When did universities become such hotbeds of conservatism?

2012-02-11T20:01:00.028Z

Aside from the drinking, experimentation with drugs and casual sex, university life has traditionally been a place where young people have cut their teeth amidst a wealth of new and exciting ideas. Not every university student is lucky in this respect, of course – at the former poly I attended the closest I ever got to political activism was throwing rotten vegetables over the garden wall at our affluent neighbours – but as a rule, university students tend to leave with a better understanding of a number of political trains of thought than they had before they went.

The latest idea to be popularised at university, however, is not really a political idea at all, but rather a sensibility. It is not taught in lectures, nor as far as I am aware does it have any social societies to its name. It is backed, however, by a great number of the political activists universities up and down the country are famous for.

I am talking, of course, about the idea that students require protection against being “offended”.

Lots of things, such as racism, homophobia and sexism, really are offensive. No one should be in any doubt about that. Nor am I in any sense trying to downplay the feelings of offense people feel from time to time about a wide range of things. Who, apart from an ice-cold sociopath, could never feel offended?

What I am referring to, rather, is the increasingly popular notion that a person has some sort of right not to be offended; to have their ears stuffed with cotton wool whenever anyone says anything that might bring their worldview crashing to the floor like a house of playing cards.

There have always been those who have sought to use force to silence those they perceive as blasphemers and critics, of course. Fortunately, our relatively free society has for the most part pushed such people to the margins, and it is no longer possible to be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night over a poorly timed joke about a beardy chap (secular or religious).

It seems to have been learnt in some quarters, however, that if your feelings are hurt you again no longer have to actually bother challenging the argument of a rival at all, but can instead cling to the irrefutable and subjective notion of “deeply held belief” to silence your critics.

An example of this made the news recently when the President of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society at the prestigious University College London (UCL) had to step down after a furore erupted over the publication of a cartoon featuring Jesus and Mohammed having a beer.

The strangest thing about the whole affair was not the behaviour of the devout, which was depressingly predictable, but rather the reaction of much of the student political left – historically the very people supposed to be the defenders of free expression. The only Left group that put out anything defending free expression was the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, of which I am a member.

In response to the “incident” (or the publication of a couple of scribbled pictures, whichever you think most appropriate), the LSESU Socialist Workers Society put up posters around campus that included the following pitiful statement:

“The Atheist Society’s efforts to publish inflammatory “satirical” cartoons in a deliberate attempt to offend Muslims serve to highlight a festering undercurrent of racism.”

You may notice that they could not bring themselves to say outright that the cartoons were racist (because they were not), but instead sought deliberately to confuse the matter by saying the pictures "highlighted a festering undercurrent of racism".

What was it Orwell once said about the use of this sort of language? "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

When did the student Left become so conservative?

Football’s haters just don’t get it

2012-02-07T23:00:00.010Z

Football has come in for a lot of stick of late. Successive racism scandals, followed by a harrowing documentary reminding us that only one professional footballer has ever come out as gay have, to cut a long story short, dragged the game’s reputation through the mud somewhat.

Not that football set any kind of gold moral standard to begin with or anything. Were you to ask the sort of person who avoids the pub like the plague on match day to sum up their attitude towards the game, they would probably characterise it as 22 overpaid and preening primadonnas who believe underhandedness to be the ultimate virtue – so long of course, as the end result is in favour of one’s own side.

This perception is compounded by the attitude of the fans, who regularly defend the sporting equivalent of two plus two equals five. More often than not, not only will they firmly insist that two plus two equals five, but they will genuinely believe it with every fibre of their being.

Getting the unconverted to comprehend this catalogue of devotion, hatred and ill-will, then, is always going to be something of an uphill struggle. I will endear to give it my best shot, all the same.

In order to understand football it is, first of all I think, necessary to recognise the tedium and uniformity of modern life for a large proportion of people. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to listen to someone from a well-to-do background lambast those who, in their view, live through the exhilarating exploits of others – be that on the football pitch or in the glossy pages of Heat magazine. It may be a surprise for those people to hear this, but many if not most people spend the vast majority of their time doing routine jobs they would chuck-in in an instant were their lottery numbers to come in on a Saturday night. Should you ever feel tempted to speak disparagingly of a fan’s “irrational concerns,” it is worth taking this into consideration.

Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that a system which pays bankers more than nurses, teachers and fire-fighters is fairly irrational to begin with. Is it really such a great surprise to find lots of people engaging in a bit of escapism at the weekend? No, it really isn’t.

The apparent “irrationality” of football is a particular bugbear amongst haters of the game. “It’s just a piece of leather they’re kicking around,” they will smugly tell you as if they’ve just discovered the molecular structure of DNA. These are the people who can never understand the games’ reluctance to add technology to the proceedings. I must admit, introducing a degree of certainty to a game littered with the glaring mistakes of officialdom does seem, at first, like a no-brainer. Isn’t Match of the Day, the weekly highlight of the television schedule for those of us who cannot afford Sky Sports, characterised by bitter complaints about allegedly incompetent refereeing?

Again, I will be the first to admit that this is all quite true. No argument to be had here. What I would say, though, is that it misses the point entirely. The sheer sense of being robbed when a result doesn’t go a particular way is, counterintuitive as it may seem, an intrinsic part of football’s unique appeal. It is the back and forth of emotions that fans crave, not one emotion in particular. Is that irrational? Of course. But so are lots of things like, I don’t know, falling in love, or complaining about other people’s enjoyment of sports you are not yourself forced to watch.

Why, though, I am often asked, does there exist such passionate hatred of the other team? And in particular, the followers of the other team?

To put it succinctly, in an age of individuality and autonomy football gives its followers a sense of belonging and identity. All of us, whether we like it or not, have an identity we adhere to – a picture in our heads of who we are and where we belong (even those apparently too “civilised” for competitive sport often cling to an identity which sets them apart from fans; usually that of the cultured “highbrow”). There is no doubt of course that identity can, at times, be problematic, and can be harnessed to contrast one’s own imagined virtues with the negative qualities of the “other”. But it is also something people find it rather difficult to do without, as time spent in the company of teenagers, music fans and even those with a slight interest in politics will attest.

Football has a special appeal for so many because it is war-like. It involves strategy and the exertion of herculean energy to accomplish a common goal: the figurative grinding into dust of an opponent, bound up in the notion of the local club. One’s team does whatever it can to win; and to achieve its goal it must break the rules when necessary. Victory is rarely final, either, and there is always the possibility of redemption at some date in the not-too-distant future.

George Orwell, who once dismissed football as “a continuation of war by other means” – which, as I said, it is - hit the nail on the head when he said, speaking in a quite different context, that “on the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.”

I am as unhappy as the next lefty about racism and homophobia in the game. I am also aware that football does not matter one jot in the grand scheme of things. I will still be at the bar on the weekend, though, getting genuinely angry at a television screen for no other reason than I took a liking to a particular club when I was about five years old. Irrational and pointless? You bet. I am human though. And in the end, that is what football is.

Cuba: dispelling the myths

2012-02-05T20:50:00.004Z

When: Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Time: 19:30 until 21:30
Where: The Lucas Arms, (near King's Cross) 245a Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8JR

Much of the organised left, in Britain and worldwide, regards Cuba's government and society, created by the revolution of 1959, as socialist - not without flaws, but qualitatively different from the bureaucratic regimes which existed in the Soviet Union and still exist in states like China and North Korea.

Workers' Liberty disagrees. Cuba is not a flawed workers' regime in a difficult situation, but a consolidated system of class exploitation.

James Bloodworth (author of the Obliged to Offend blog) and Paul Hampton will lead a discussion on the character of the Cuban revolution and the state it created, and explain why from a Marxist point of view the regime led by Raul Castro can only be considered the exploiter and oppressor of the Cuban working class and people.

All welcome. Plenty of time for debate and discussion.

https://www.facebook.com/events/363424143685086/?ref=ts

When it comes to social justice, trade unions are the only show in town

2012-01-29T12:56:00.006Z

Workers at Primark in Northern Ireland have voted overwhelmingly for strike action after the company attempted to impose a pay freeze on its shop staff for the second consecutive year. Primark’s staff are paid just £6.84 an hour, yet in the past two years the company has seen its profits soar to an estimated £644 million. Union reps are meeting next week with strike action in February looking increasingly likely.

The fact that a call for industrial action by staff at Primark has made the news at all is testament to how organised workers’ struggle has become something of a rarity in recent times. This is reflected in the trade unions themselves, where there has been a steady decline in members in the last 30 years. Six-and-a-half million people were in a trade union in 2010, down from a peak of around 13 million in the late 1970s. These figures also conceal a large discrepancy between public and private sector membership, with only 14 per cent of private sector employees being members of a union compared with 56 per cent of those in the public sector.

Media superficiality would have it that trade unions are little more than a quaint irrelevancy to 21st century life. The economic downturn has added to the scorn heaped on anyone viewed as rocking the boat by popularising the notion that the burden of the financial crisis is being shared equally. “Get on with it” perhaps best describes the attitude of most of the print media to discontented workers; and in the case of the Primark dispute bosses see nothing wrong with telling staff to meekly accept their lot - despite the fact that there undeniably is a great deal of money swilling around.

This attitude is not confined to the bosses of Primark, either. In Britain’s lightly regulated labour market employers increasingly have the power to do what they want to a degree unthinkable since the First World War. A recent report by the Fair Pay Network (FPN) – a coalition of charities and non-governmental organisations including Oxfam and the Trades Union Congress – and published by the Independent revealed that Britain’s largest supermarket chains are paying their staff poverty wages while making huge profits and raising executives' salaries.

Not only has years of anti-union rhetoric affected how large companies treat their workers, but it has also had a discernible impact on the Left, which increasingly spurns trade union activity in favour of occupations, protests and flash mobs. The idea of autonomy is at the heart of the tactical switch; and the sacrifice and solidarity of the strike feels grey and outdated compared to the free-for-all of the tent city and the high-octane exertions of the Black Bloc. Little do they realise it, but even today’s protesters have adopted some of the commitmentless individualism of Thatcher-Blairism.

The political assault on trade union activity has been reignited recently, with Boris Johnson, a Mayor elected with the first preferences of just 19 per cent of his electorate, calling for a minimum turnout threshold on industrial action ballots. Others fantasise about going further, openly musing on whether “we” (meaning in reality society’s top 1 per cent) should permit strikes to happen at all.

Scratch an anti-trade union politician, however, and you will find the same contempt for democracy that has in the past lobbied against everything from the right of working people to vote to the right of the poor to receive medical treatment. For many the workplace already remains one of the few areas of life completely untouched by democratic accountability. A recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development(CIPD) found that only a third of British workers were engaged in any form of dialogue with their bosses at their place of work, another third were largely “disengaged”, while the remaining third were indifferent.

It is not as if the law as it stands comes down in favour of those democratically withdrawing their labour, either. There is in reality no such thing as the right to strike in law in Britain. Walk-outs are only possible because unions have immunity from any subsequent claims for damages.

Extending democracy beyond the confines of 19th century liberalism will not be done by erecting a tent in one of capitalism’s bustling metropolises, nor by inconveniencing shoppers in Regent Street. It will come through the tireless and unglamorous struggle of those, like the workers at Primark, who realise that by standing together they can claw a little back from those who would make off with everything given half the chance.

Trade unions are by no means perfect, but if the left is to become relevant again it must rediscover the notion that social justice begins at work.

No one should mourn the loss of Press TV, especially not the left

2012-01-22T12:36:00.012Z

The propaganda outlet of an ultra-reactionary theocracy that executes homosexuals, represses woman and locks up democrats has had its broadcasting licence revoked by Ofcom.

It’s television channel was removed from Sky on 20 January.

The station had a well-known partiality for crackpot conspiracy theories, open anti-Semitism and the whitewashing of the appalling human rights record of its state backer.

Contrary to the cries of “censorship” coming from those usually so quick to argue for a “no platform” policy for home-grown fascists, the disappearance from the air of Press TV is not a free speech concern in any sense. As Maryam Namazie has pointed out, the station is not press in any way, shape or form, but is rather an arm of the Iranian intelligence service. (If that isn’t clear enough, the Ofcom investigation into the channel found that editorial decisions governing it were taken in Tehran.)

There are some, out of sheer naivety perhaps, who foolishly believe Press TV to be in some sense radical due to the fact that it hosts a number of high profile “left-wing” commentators. Others have again taken the by now predictable stance that anything and anyone that opposes the United States must be, in some small part at least, progressive.

If anything, the reaction of the latter illustrates how easily communism can become support for outright fascism when one’s primary motivation is hatred of the west, rather than solidarity with the oppressed. Since moving to London I have seen this type of “socialism” quite often, usually in drafty halls where a prolix speaker harangues an audience with a geographic make-up not dissimilar to a Leonid Brezhnev politburo.

Not only is it almost entirely an abstraction, it is an unreal movement with unreal demands that sits atop a platform looking down with contempt on genuine people’s struggles throughout the world. Its main thrust, and the main ideological thrust of those lionising Press TV, is an “anti-imperialism” espoused from the comfort of a warm bed with a full stomach in a liberal democracy.

The question as to which side one is on in Iran should be a straightforward one for any socialist – it should be, without question, with the workers, the gays, the women, the democrats: with any person oppressed under the jackboot of this thuggish regime.

It can be said by no serious person today that they are unaware of the Iranian regime's human rights abuses and its brutal persecution of homosexuals. This is a regime that likes to boast of causing as much suffering as possible to those found guilty of “sodomy”.

I certainly won’t be shedding any tears at the disappearance of Press TV, the mouthpiece of this vile dictatorship, and nor should you.

The moralising, filthy rich hypocrite

2012-01-14T16:07:00.008Z

The benefits of being rich are numerous, and probably don’t need a great deal of explanation from me. The ability to travel the world at the drop of a hat is, I imagine, one of the many advantages great wealth brings, as is the possibility of doing away with a number of the banal inconveniences that plague everyday life. Not having to get out of bed at the crack of dawn for work has its appeal, as does eating the best food and never having to cook any of the damn stuff.

Just as important as jet-setting and attending “exclusive” parties these days, however, is the obligatory portfolio of charity work that comes with being incredibly rich. One is far more likely to turn on the television today and hear a member of the global elite talking about a project for clean water in Africa than about their recent purchase of a mock-Tudor mansion in Hertfordshire. And rarely does a week go by without the appearance of a member of the super-rich in a distressed part of the world with their shirt sleeves rolled up - if not actually trying to save the world, then usually throwing a great deal of money at a small proportion of it.

There is no doubt of course that some of those fortunate enough to be wealthy are genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. Just as there are conservatives with nothing to be conservative about, so there are aristocrats, “entrepreneurs” and those that are simply swimming in cash who do have a well-developed and genuine social conscience.

Another type among the super-rich, however - some would say the dominant type - is the wealthy individual who very publically gives generously with one hand while ruthlessly seeking to minimise what they pay in tax with the other. The moralising hypocrite, you might call this lot.

Perhaps the most well-known figure in this mould is Bono, the lead singer of U2. As well as being the frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, Bono fancies himself as something of an anti-poverty activist, and can often be heard urging people to give generously to a number of causes. Bono has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times for his charity work.

In 2006, however, on the back of the massive Live 8 concert the year before – which U2 played a large part in organising and which was supposed to “make poverty history” – Bono’s band moved their tax liability from Ireland to the Netherlands. The move came after Ireland scrapped tax breaks that allowed musicians and artists to avoid paying taxes on royalties. When asked about the decision, U2’s lead guitarist David Evans, aka "The Edge", said that of course the band were trying to be tax-efficient, because “who doesn't want to be tax-efficient?”

The answer, at a guess, would be those who spend a great deal of time moralising about the world’s poor. Away from the self-congratulatory press conferences where Bono smugly demanded we send our money to the dispossessed, U2 were simultaneously cutting the feet from under their own government’s ability to help the world’s most desperate people–the same people Bono was feigning such grave concern for.

The hypocrisy of the super-rich is nothing new of course. What is astonishing is that they are so consistently let off the hook for it. Nobody bats an eyelid today at a campaign against homelessness featuring a politician who would sooner sell his own mother than interfere in the exploitative buy-to-let market; or a coffee chain publicising its fair trade credentials while preventing its own workers from joining a union. Both will stand on a soap box and espouse their unflinching dedication to the downtrodden – and both will be given an extraordinarily easy-ride by the media when doing so.

It is quite possible that we have the late Princess of Wales to thank for at least a portion of this fetishisation of charity above all other virtues. Her death at a young age saw perhaps the closest thing Britain has ever seen to mass hysteria; and with it the passing into folklore of the belief that her goodness was tied up to a large extent with the notion that she “did a lot for charity” - despite the fact that she left her entire estate to her own super-rich family.

It feels like all of this has been preparing the ground in some way for David Cameron; for if there is one thing which seamlessly gels Cameron’s conservatism together, it is the belief that poverty is best left to wealthy individuals to remedy, rather than government. His “Big Society” approach to social provision can perhaps best be summed up with the phrase: do it yourself, because we don’t care.

It would be an extremely brave or stupid person who said there was not a long way to go in terms of democratising the way public funds are spent by governments and treasuries. Government spending does, however, at least give us, the public, a degree of a control over where money is spent. Certainly a great deal more than when we rely for the solving of our social problems on the mood swings of a global financial elite – the same elite who threaten to pull down the roof whenever the prospect of paying a few extra pence in the pound in income tax is proposed.

As Clement Atlee pointed out some half a century ago, "charity is a cold, grey, loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."

Thatcher’s democratic legacy is as content-free as the film about her

2012-01-09T15:06:00.010Z

Predictably, the biopic of Margaret Thatcher released in cinemas last week overwhelmingly focused on the personal, rather than the political side of her tenure in office. This was no doubt to be expected, for Hollywood blockbusters rarely “do politics” in the conventional sense. Big budget films instead rely upon a well-rehearsed cinematic formula, churning out identikit plots that look, sound and feel as if they’ve come straight from the factory production line.

The result in the case of The Iron Lady is a film about the longest serving post-war Prime Minister that is astonishingly devoid of any political content whatsoever.

It is not only film, however, where there exists an unwillingness to do politics today. A commonly heard rebuttal any active citizen will be confronted with at some point is that they are “too political” - the implication being that they are too switched on, too engaged, and as a result, too burdened with a cumbersome and unnecessary chip on the shoulder. Most confusing in all of this is the notion that it would be career suicide even for a politician to be too ideological – and again, by definition, too political.

Since the invention of Margaret Thatcher almost 40 years ago, politics itself has become increasingly defined by a convergence of political thought around a narrow understanding of “what works” - with alternative ideas consigned approvingly to the historic record. It would be unfair to attribute this to Mrs Thatcher alone; developments right across the West have seen democracy similarly hollowed out. However the perm, the handbag and the affected tones represent our own, albeit eccentric, embodiment of the phenomenon.

In the run-up to The Iron Lady, it was reiterated almost constantly by the great and the good that Mrs Thatcher was a politician of “strong convictions”. It is unsurprising perhaps that the rich and the powerful should admire her for this, for the obvious reason that her convictions were, and remain, their own. For many years, however, the wider political class acted as if these convictions were of huge benefit to the population at large; and whenever the need to explain why large numbers of people regularly failed to turn out to vote arose, it was said simply that we were disinclined to exercise our democratic right because it was no longer all that important to us who was in office. We were so happy, fulfilled and content that we could afford to be apathetic.

Like the world of Thatcherite celluloid today, this picture was undoubtedly a comforting one for some. Even now many self-proclaimed liberals, usually cocooned in their own bubbles of wealth, remain persuaded by the notion that we live in something akin to the world of The Iron Lady; a world in which the decisive political arguments were done, dusted and put away a long time ago.

Away from the exultation of the cinema screen, however, the health of the 30-year experiment is looking about as frail right now as its most famous exponent. People today are turning away from the ballot box not out of smugness, but out of an understanding that it no longer matters all that much who one casts a vote for; whatever happens the result will invariably mean adherence to the unquestionable prescriptions set out in the stone tablets handed down by Lady Thatcher, regardless of the increasingly disastrous consequences.

How appropriate then, at a time when the disciples of Thatcher look increasingly powerless to control the economic forces unleashed by her, that a film about her life should be as devoid of political content as those enthusiastically following in her path. For the rest of us, left with the failing legacy of her ideas, the notion of nostalgia for the woman seems more peculiar by the day.

Obliged to Offend top posts of 2011

2011-12-31T18:28:00.049Z

Rather than write up a list of the most popular posts of 2011, I've instead chosen 10 of my favourites from this year. Thanks for reading and a happy new year to you all. James.

Keeping your head above water in London

Diary of an unemployed person

Westfield’s brave new world of stuff

It’s banks, rather than citizens, who now shape a country’s destiny

Cuba: Change where nothing ever changes

Christopher Hitchens is no George Orwell

Libya and the peace movement

It’s not the Labour left that’s stuck in a time warp

Instead of celebrating when Thatcher dies, the left should reflect on a missed chance

Were the riots a working class uprising or inspired by rampant consumerism?

Some basic demands the left must start to make

2011-12-28T13:12:00.022Z

Ever since the inception of New Labour, the left in Britain has been characterised by timidity when faced with an electorate ready to embrace change. The reluctance to break with a right-wing status quo has not been confined solely to the British labour movement either, but has become a commonplace right across the contemporary European left. This is at least partly why on the back of the biggest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s the left is in the doldrums almost everywhere, despite the fact that it was the failure of right-wing orthodoxy that got us into the mess we find ourselves in today.

The timidity of the left in espousing its principles has led to a widespread belief that all we do is oppose things, rather than present an alternative. Often, when someone of the left appears in the media, no-content progressivism fills the space where policy proposal might be, warm-sounding buzzwords standing in for anything that might possibly upset a vested interest or two.

Is this because, as Peter Mandelson once put it, we are “all Thatcherites now”? I don’t think so somehow. The super-rich lording it over those of us who have nothing to sell but our labour has not become palatable simply because a perma-tanned cliché around the ex-Prime Minister said it had – coincidently, at about the time their own bank balances began to disappear off into the stratosphere.

People’s lives are today more than ever dictated by forces completely outside of their control. There is widespread acknowledgment that we are being ripped-off by banks, transport companies, the energy industry, and a political class which parrots whatever it thinks a handful of voters in marginal constituencies wants to hear. If there was ever a time to let go of the timidity that has characterised the movement for so long and to start making a few basic demands, it's now; and in this vein I’ve compiled a short list of five practical things the left should start arguing for right away.

The list is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome further contributions. It has also been written based on where we are politically now, rather than where many of us would no doubt like us to be.

1. Higher taxes for the rich
Perhaps the most basic demand but one the left is far too hesitant to make. While combatting tax evasion and introducing “Robin Hood” taxes are all well and good, what about the white elephant in the room: making the rich pay more tax? I wholeheartedly support attempts to make the rich pay what they already owe; but I also want to close the gap between the rich and poor, as you probably also do, if like me you believe gross inequality leads to a dysfunctional society.

2. The public release of official records showing the annual income of every British taxpayer who earns over £100,000 a year
They do it in Sweden, and there is as yet no sign of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia. As well as safeguarding transparency, this would also force employers and CEOs to justify their exorbitant wage packets to their employees. The Chief Executive of Tesco was paid £5 million in 2005. In the same year the average Tesco employee was paid £12,713. Is it credible to assert that the Chief Executive is 430 times more industrious and productive than the average Tesco employee? Let’s hear that argument, then.

3. The right to recall MPs who break manifesto pledges
How can something be called democracy in any way, shape or form when a person has little idea of what they are voting for? While it might be reasonable to grant politicians a degree of leeway based on the practicalities of government, it should be possible to recall any MP elected on a platform which they subsequently dump once in government. The prospect of a ministerial car and a pat on the back from a Lord should no longer be allowed to turn our politicians into pledge-breakers.

Not unrelated to this, but touching on a much bigger subject, one of the first tasks of a modern socialist movement should be to redefine the word “democracy” beyond the confines of 19th century liberalism. By that I do not mean less democracy, but more, much more.

4. Return the utilities to public ownership
The market engenders freedom, so it is said, and nowhere is this more apparent than the utilities, where consumers are “free” to pay as much as companies require them to for services they cannot do without. The alternative (there is always an alternative, because champions of the market despise coercion) is the freedom to go and live in a cardboard box in the forest.

Most people are angry about the price of electricity, gas and train fares, but the left does not at present make the connection in the public mind between huge price rises and the collections of sports cars the bosses of the utilities have in their driveways. None of us can do without these things, so how about we start to run them for the benefit of all of us, rather than a tiny elite.

It might also be useful if we let go of a fear of being labelled “left-wing”, and instead start making David Cameron afraid that his toleration of this racket will leave him out in the political cold.

5. Tackle the exploitative buy-to-let housing market
Again this relates to a modern distortion of the notion of freedom. We all need somewhere to live, but today the freedom to make a large amount of money out of this need seems to trump the need itself. As a first step, adequate social housing should be built with controlled and sensible rents which undercut the private sector. This in itself would bring down the price of rent substantially.

Most people below the age of about 30 will never own property, let alone a “portfolio” to exploit. It’s time the left spoke up for these people, rather than parasitic accumulators masquerading as respectable businesspeople.

A word of thanks to the BBC at a difficult time

2011-12-27T15:48:00.016Z

Almost all of us will at some point receive the phone call to say that an older member of the family has been taken ill. The nagging and perpetual worry about the sheer inevitability of it seems for some reason to occupy the mind more at this time of year.

The fact that death has been in the news a lot recently - as interesting historical figures and simply interesting figures have passed away (perhaps purposefully timing their departures for the writers of jokes about men walking into bars) - has not helped matters, and has led many of us to look around in anticipation of who might be next: Fidel Castro, Mrs T, next door’s cat?

We do know one thing, however. It’s not going to be Prince Philip. Not yet, anyway.

For this we have the BBC to thank, for telling us everything from the exact details of the hospital procedures carried out on the Duke to the fact that he apparently ‘smiled and waved to reporters’ on leaving hospital.

The more perceptive among us are also probably now able to pick out the exact colour used on the outside walls of the Cambridgeshire hospital he was staying in on a Homebase paint chart.

For all of this I wanted to thank the corporation. The nice thing about monarchy is that it means you don’t need to think anymore. It’s like dictatorship or monotheism – the decision of how unreservedly and uniformly delighted you are is left to others.

It is the holidays, after all. So thank you.

Instead of celebrating when Thatcher dies, the left should reflect on what a pig's ear it’s made of the past 30 years

2011-12-26T18:20:00.017Z

Ever since Margaret Thatcher stopped appearing in public due to poor health, the fit and proper reaction to her eventual exit from the earthly realm has been discussed with increasing regularity by the left.

That rolling news will gloss over her legacy with the empty platitudes of the obsequious is entirely predictable. Nor will it surprise many to see the leading lights of the Labour Party queuing up to shower the former Prime Minister with praise.

There are, however, plenty of us who haven’t forgotten the lives she destroyed, the dictators she championed or the unmitigated social disaster set in motion by her particular brand of finance capitalism. We do not feel the need to do what many formerly of the left now do, and parrot the dictum that we are ‘all Thatcherites now’ (just a hint, but when a person says neo-liberal capitalism is ‘inevitable’ what they really mean is that it is desirable). Many of us are not, and never will be Thatcherites, and we will continue to feel no shame in believing that there is more to life than the winner-takes-all capitalism she so unapologetically championed during her lifetime.

There are of course also those, on the other side of the fence, who view Thatcher’s eventual demise as an opportunity to get one over on her family, her friends, and her supporters in a way that was not possible in an era when her ideas triumphed so emphatically. In this regard, Margaret Thatcher’s death is not only to be greeted with sullen contempt, but is to be actively celebrated.

The idea of getting back at this almost mythical figure for the numerous defeats she inflicted on the left is strong motivation for those planning to crack open the Champers on learning of her passing. Considering that during her reign she trounced us at every opportunity, revelled in her victories, and then did it again, the desire to see the back of the woman is perhaps understandable, even if the outright celebration of her passing is, to my mind at least, taking things a bit far.

What we on the left would do well to remember, however, is that the ideas embodied by Mrs Thatcher are not going to be dented, let alone killed-off by the departure of their most famous living embodiment. ‘All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come,’ Victor Hugo once said, and if the left is to recover from the tremendous setbacks it has suffered during the past 30 years, it is the ideas embodied by Mrs Thatcher that must be replaced, not the worn-out figure of an elderly lady.

Rather than celebrating the death of a human being, even a not particularly endearing one, the left should instead examine with clear-sightedness where it has gone wrong, how it has behaved and how it can do better – and boy, can it do better. Considering the complete failure to make any political inroads since the 2008 banking crash, this should be clearer today than ever.

Time and energy spent celebrating the deaths of those who popularise ideas we dislike is time that would be better spent popularising our own ideas. With this in mind, morbid celebrations are better left to the psychologically unhinged. The media already does an effective job in portraying us as morally detached from the values of the average person; they certainly don’t need us serving up ammunition on a plate for them.