Obliged to Offend

Don't give the Woolwich attacks a meaning they don't deserve

2013-05-23T14:45:00.000+01:00

Despite a few isolated incidents of thuggishness and much hot air from the online fraternity of the far-right, the aftermath of yesterday’s gruesome events in Woolwich passed off relatively peacefully.

On the whole as events unfolded most people simply looked at their television sets in shock and revulsion.

The media’s attention will now likely turn to what might have been done to prevent the atrocities. A number of questions will immediately be asked. Had the suspects already been picked up by the security services? Do they have links with foreign Jihadists? Has the UK government taken its eye off the ball when it comes to Islamic extremism?

It is important, however, to be clear on two points: the men who carried out the attacks do not represent Islam and they do not represent Muslims. Nor do the attackers have ‘legitimate grievances’ about British foreign policy.

Outside of the UK, the vast majority of those who die at the hands of terrorists are themselves Muslims. Those who see fit to carry out such brutal attacks on British service personnel are about as representative of Muslim opinion as Anders Breivik was of ‘white’ Western Europeans. Muslims should not feel pressured into collectively apologising for the horrendous acts committed by one deranged ideologue, just as the ‘white’ community isn’t obliged to grovel every time a far-right thug attacks a Mosque.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), the English Defence League (EDL) leader with a chequered history of violence and run-ins with the law, encouraging a show of aggression on the streets of Woolwich last night. It is often said that the far-right are guilty of discrimination. The truth, however, is that they are guilty of the opposite. They are cognitively incapable of discriminating between the isolated acts of an individual and the entirely separate lives of millions who simply share a religion or are part of the same ethnic group. One also suspects that in their hearts the EDL secretly long for an incident of this kind so as to puff themselves up and appear relevant to a fraternity wider than a few overweight drunks sporting football shirts.

Very little is known at this point about those who carried out the attacks. One of the suspects was caught on camera blaming British soldiers for killing Muslims, which would indicate Jihadi inspiration. The shouts of Allahu Akbar (God is Great) as the assailants carried out their crimes would appear to support this conclusion.

However blaming yesterday’s atrocities on UK foreign policy makes no more sense than does blaming them on Islam.

One of the attackers apparently called on the UK government to “bring our troops back so you can all live in peace”. Ignoring for a second the fact that bringing British troops home would contribute very little to the cause of peace in a place like Afghanistan (in fact quite the opposite for Afghani women), those words sound almost pacifistic. Delve a little deeper into Jihadist ideology, however, and historically one finds that it isn’t only troops stationed in “Muslim lands” that they have a problem with, but almost all the tenets of a modern liberal society, be that unveiled women, openly gay men and women as well as those who choose to believe in a different god or none. Like the extremists who sought to blow up the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Haymarket in 2007 with the aim of slaughtering “those slags dancing around”, the grievances of yesterday’s attackers probably aren’t reserved strictly for British troops stationed overseas, but for all the freedoms that make Britain a country worth living in.

Eight years ago another group of deranged fanatics tried to declare war on London. Despite his (to me anyway) disagreeable political views, the great English writer Samuel Johnson was right to say that “by seeing London, [he had] seen as much of life as the world can show”. It was this that so disgusted the murderers of 7/7 – the sheer diversity of life in the capital, represented by everyone from the young people partying in the Haymarket to the insufficiently pious Muslims who practiced in the capital’s Mosques. It is also this same diversity that so disgusts those who will use the attacks as an excuse for opportunistically inciting bigotry and racism. Much like the terrorists they claim to despise, it is modernity in all its variety and colour that they really have a problem with.

No doubt we will soon get a more thorough idea of the process of indoctrination the killers underwent prior to them carrying out their pointless acts. Until then, don’t give the attacks a meaning they don’t deserve, and view those who wish to use the attacks to push their own abhorrent ideology with the purest contempt.

Moving on

2013-03-16T17:30:00.000Z

If you are reading this you may have noticed that the blog hasn't been updated a great deal of late.

Since taking over at Left Foot Forward I no longer have the time to republish everything I write here, and as a consequence it has become a chore to republish anything I write here.

I may still publish pieces at Obliged to Offend from time to time - the blog isn't closing as such - but for the time being my writing will be found at:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/author/jamesbloodworth/

http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/james-bloodworth

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/Author/James.Bloodworth

I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here during the past three-odd years - if it wasn't for starting to write regularly here I very much doubt that I would have gotten the opportunities that I have, nor met some of the great people that I have.

Thanks for reading. It's been blast.

As Jay Z once said: You could've been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me. I appreciate that.

Is the seduction community promoting date rape?

2013-01-28T14:25:00.000Z

Why is it that cults so regularly collapse into scandals involving sex?

There is always the suspicion that it’s because they are invariably run by gruesome and sexless old men. The fanatical devotion they usually demand, combined with the vulnerability of those almost magnetically drawn to charismatic “gurus” who claim to be in sole possession of “the truth”, offers perhaps another explanation.

For the uninitiated, pick-up artists, as they call themselves, dedicate their lives to bedding beautiful women. They exchange ideas in online forums, arrange meet-ups, visit bars and nightclubs to hone their “skillset”, and post about their exploits online. As with most cults, there are rival ideological approaches and theoretical schools. The best known figureheads in the business – for like most other branches of the self-help industry this is first and foremost about commerce – bring in millions of pounds a year selling books, instructing students, and organising conventions resembling World of Warcraft gatherings on steroids.

I actually took a brief interest in the seduction community during my first year at university. For a young man in his late teenage years and early twenties, much excruciating time is spent trying to figure out how to make oneself attractive to the opposite sex during a period when females seemingly hold all the cards - not to mention have the ability to destroy a young man’s self-esteem with a flick of the hair or a turn of the head. The feminist canon about patriarchy holds true for the most part of course, but rarely acknowledged is the fact that women have a greater degree of sexual choice. At no time is this more apparent than during the pangs of adolescence when one’s thoughts turn incessantly to intimacy.

Like most men my age, I didn’t feel in the slightest bit privileged let alone empowered because of what was hanging between my legs.

There was always a dark side to the community, however, and this was what kept my interest in it brief. I managed to get a girlfriend too – and without any of the various wheezes recommended by the pick-up artists. This proved to me at least that I was perhaps not as repulsive as I had feared. I also noticed among friends who took an interest in “the game” that, as with most cults, once they started to feel good about themselves they rarely stuck around.

Together with the casual misogyny of the seduction community – women are regularly referred to as “targets”, “HBs” (hot babes), and “warpigs” (physically unattractive women) - the most disturbing thing I encountered was the idea that when a woman says no it doesn’t really mean “no” at all, but rather “not yet”. Assuming one has executed a successful “seduction” and persuaded a woman that your lodgings are the best place to carry on getting to know each another, the next step according to “the game” is to outflank a woman’s “anti-slut defence” – a socially conditioned response to the fact that society holds promiscuous women in low esteem – and take her to bed.

The “techniques” deployed to overcome a woman’s disinclination to have sex, arguably in some respects, have elements indistinguishable from date rape. One famous PUA known online as “Roosh V” was even placed on the Quarterly Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a long-established civil rights organization which monitors and litigates against hate groups in the United States, after promoting in books and articles the notion that what no really means is, well, yes. According to Roosh Vörek (his real name) who says that the SPLA had to “partially retract their list by stating those on it are not members of a “hate group.”, “women need to understand that men aren’t robots who can suddenly stop at the drop of a dime with all that testosterone pumping through their system”.

“Therefore”, he asserts, “it would be prudent for them not to enter situations where the average man can’t stop due to his innate weaknesses as an animal whose entire existence depends on him successfully mating”.

Bastardised evolutionary biology crops up repeatedly in this strange world. Men and woman do not apparently make decisions influenced by their surroundings as well as by their biological drives. No, the way they behave in the sex game is entirely “hard-wired” – a belief which conveniently absolves men of all responsibility when they “can’t stop” due to their “innate weaknesses as an animal”.

And there was I naively thinking self-help was about personal responsibility.

Ok, so there are weirdos out there. Internet weirdos at that, which is probably even less of a revelation. Don’t be fooled by the goofball amateurishness of it all, however. Nor by the nerdy jargon which treats mating as if it were a level in a particularly enthralling computer game, with women as “targets”, friends as “obstacles” and other men as “AFCs (average frustrated chumps)”. Every weekend in London alone, Real Social Dynamics - probably the largest company teaching pick-up in the world, and which holds bootcamps in all major Western cities - will take around half a dozen men out to the capital’s bars and nightclubs (for the eye-watering price of £1,259) and will try to instil in them the core principles of pick-up as they interact with women.

It might not be harmless chivalry that students are imbibing, however.

One delightful thread on the Real Social Dynamics forum from 2011, entitled “Lie your way inside a woman’s vagina”, advises readers that, once they have a woman back at their house, they should not be “afraid to physically force her to do anything or to tell her no or shut up”. The poster goes on to counsel readers to “ignore what she says and physically force her. You must be able to verbally and physically dominate a drunken 18 years old girl”.

Another user chimes in: “yeah, and then when you're done with her, you just like grab all her clothes and then throw ‘em at her, then shout get out you f***ing whore. Women deserve this because ofwhat they've done to us.”

Rather than banning the above posters, or even deleting their posts, which are still there for all to see, Real Social Dynamics dating coach Jeff Allen, aka “jlaix” – a published author who teaches students every week in San Francisco and London - is “Loving the responses”.

Be careful out there, won’t you.

With rates of social mobility stagnant, it’s time to admit we got it wrong on grammar schools

2013-01-14T15:41:00.001Z

One of the first political epiphanies I had occurred when I was ten years old. I was sat on the carpet in my Grandmother’s house as a speech by Mother Teresa was broadcast on the evening news. “Let us promise”, the saintly patron of Calcutta’s Convents told Ireland, “that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.”

It would be a bit much to say I had it all figured out right there and then - I had to ask my embarrassed grandmother what con-tra-sep-tives were for a start - but I do remember a flicker of recognition flashing through my brain as the meaning behind the words became clearer: many of the bad things that are done in the world – many of the very worst things – are done by people who are convinced they are doing good.

When it comes to schools, almost everyone in the political mainstream has accepted the wholesome idea that educational selection is bad. Equality is good but “elitism” is something approaching an abomination. If you understand that the debate over schools has been won by those with the best of intentions but not necessarily the best ideas, you are some way to comprehending the British school system.

Labour has been solidly against grammar schools since Harold Wilson’s government began phasing them out in 1964, but the Conservatives too have been content with the current system of comprehensives, with neither John Major nor Margaret Thatcher building more grammar schools while in office. In 2007 David Cameron reiterated his refusal to bow to calls to “bring back grammars”, and instead defined them as the “key test” of whether the Conservative Party was fit for office. He added that advocates of grammar school education were guilty of “clinging on to outdated mantras that bear no relation to the reality of life”.

Anti-grammar schools campaigner Fiona Millar (herself a former grammar school girl) summed up the attitude of those in favour of the current system when she wrote last year that “Selective education was largely abolished because middle-class parents were incensed at their children being labelled failures at 11 and forced into secondary moderns starved of the balanced intakes all schools need.”

There are two important assumptions in this sentence. The first is that school selection has been “largely abolished”. It has not. In fact the opposite holds true. The abolition of grammar schools has seen the despised “elitism” – or in other words, the recognition that some children are brighter than others – replaced with selection via the most ruthless commodity of all: cold hard cash. Access to most comprehensives today is “largely” decided by the ability of a child’s parents to pay the price of a house in a desirable catchment area. That is why premiums on houses in areas with good schools command an average price of £309,732 - 42 per cent higher than the average price of £218,114.

You do the maths.

Ms Miller is of course correct to say that many middle class parents were “incensed” by the grammar schools system. But then they were usually incensed because their children were losing out to bright working class kids. According to the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, 66 per cent of parents wanted a grammar school education for their child, meaning many middle class parents were inevitably left disappointed when their child did not make the cut.

Were it the case that grammar schools had irreparably damaged social mobility there would be no point in having this debate. After all, the progressive ideal might just as well be defined as a state of affairs where the life chances of a child are not dictated by the bank balance of that child’s parents. That is, or at least that should be, the baseline for any social democrat or socialist worth their salt. Yet the abolition of grammar schools has had the opposite effect. The Franks Report on Oxford University, published in 1965-6, 21 years after grammar schools were opened to all according to ability, found that 40 per cent of places at Oxford went to pupils from state schools, compared to 19 per cent in 1938-9. Former President of Trinity College Michael Beloff claimed that by the early 1970s state schools supplied 70 per cent of the intake at Oxford.

Today 57 per cent of places on undergraduate courses at Oxford go to applicants from the state sector - including a disproportionately high number from the remaining grammar schools - and 42 per cent of places go to applicants from independent schools. And this is after universities have been told they risk being stripped of the right to charge higher fees if they fail to attract a wide mix of students.

The attempt by Labour education minister Tony Crosland to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland” was wrong not because his intentions were nefarious – the dissolution of grammar schools was supposed to do away with what Crosland called the “extreme social division caused by physical segregation into schools of widely divergent status” – but because the result has been a disaster for bright working class kids, who are crammed into classrooms with the uninterested, the idle and those who will simply always struggle with academic subjects. Rather than ushering in equality, comprehensives have resulted in mediocrity or worse for most children and a bonanza for wealthy families who despised the 11-plus but who can now buy their way into the best schools.

Under the Communist dictatorships of the 20th century, despite official ideology private enterprise flourished to an extent unheard of in the capitalist world. Similarly, under the UK’s comprehensive system selection is ruthlessly enforced in favour of anyone with enough cash and gumption to play the system. And like “actually existing socialism”, for many champions of comprehensives the abstract idea of equality is prized ahead of social justice. Or at least it appears that way. For what socialist would support a system where the children of the poor were condemned to bad schooling while the children of the rich were so privileged?

As benefits dry up, Wonga will prosper: 2013 could be the year of the payday lender

2013-01-07T20:33:00.002Z

People who endlessly lecture the poor about personal responsibility rarely see the bigger picture. So for instance while commentators and politicians of the Right depict those on benefits as lazy chancers who prefer to stay in bed as their neighbours go off to work, they ignore or forget to mention the fact that 60 per cent of the people hit by the government’s recent benefits squeeze have jobs.

That’s right. Many at the bottom of society who will find the coming year tougher than the last (always the sign of a failing government) are people who leave the house every day to earn their money rather than make it - a distinction most of the millionaire cabinet will probably not appreciate.

No Conservative politician will ever tell you this of course, but as a party it believes with its heart and soul that rich people will not work unless they are given money, whereas poor people will only do so if they are not. Being “tough” on benefits is also more important than being correct about benefits.

As well as being a drain on taxpayers who must subsidise miserly employers, poverty pay has also led to a boom in debt. While the government waxes lyrical about reducing the nation’s credit card bill, the chancellor’s economic policies are resulting in more of us borrowing just to keep our heads above water. Last week the consumer group Which? found that nearly half of people used credit cards, overdrafts, store cards or payday loans to pay for Christmas, with average borrowing just over £300.

And of course, there’s nothing like a good crisis to galvanize a certain type of lustrous “entrepreneur” who is always on hand to interpret the misfortunes of others as an opportunity to make a fast buck.

The payday lending industry has experienced a boom in recent years as incomes have stagnated and speedy, unsecured loans offering cash with no questions asked have replaced banks as the go-to source for credit. Today 1.75 million British adults do not have access to a bank account and a further 9 million are without accounts that grant them credit. Combine this with stagnant pay and the ever-increasing cost of utilities, and many face a brutal choice – go without the basics or take out a payday loan.

Payday lender Wonga was named the fastest growing business in Europe in 2010, and last year it made profits of £62.4m, providing almost 2.5m in unsecured loans. Its headline annual interest rate is more than 4,200 per cent, so borrowing £100 means paying back £137.76p after one month to avoid late charges or, worse still, accrue rollovers and require additional loans to settle existing debts. Of those seeking help with debts from the Citizens Advice service, in the first quarter of 2009/10 only one per cent had at least one payday loan. In the same quarter in 2011 this had risen to four per cent. In 2012, 10 per cent had a payday loan.

A new book on payday lending exposes how the looseness of the regulatory system in the UK has made the British high street a gold mine for the industry, leaving behind a trail of indebtedness as poor families pile debt upon debt to pay off various high interest lenders.

“‘Julieta’ took out a payday loan of £200 on Tuesday, and repaid the loan on Friday, plus £60 interest. Her pay packet was £290 after tax. So of course she didn’t have enough money left to last until next payday so she took another loan from the same payday company a few days later, also repaying it on the Friday with another £60 interest. Her bank statement showed her doing this every week for a month.”

Loan Sharks: The Rise and Rise of Payday Lending (2012) also claims that payday loans are not being used to “top-up an exuberant lifestyle, as some would have you believe”, but are rather being taken out to cover the basics. Just as many previously took out overdrafts and credit cards to stay afloat (or through the bargaining power of trade unions took on employers for better pay), today it is payday lenders – something akin to Robin Hood in reverse – who people increasingly go to as traditional sources of credit dry up.

The payday lending industry has grown out of a failure by government and big banking institutions to accommodate for the rise in the cost of living, declining wages and basic credit facilities for those who need them,” author of Loan Sharks Carl Packman told me.

“These are perfect conditions for an industry that profits from poverty.”

Money lenders have been portrayed in fiction by everyone from Dostoyevsky to Charles Dickens as corrosive parasites who profit from the misfortune of others. Of course, not all money lenders behave like that, and credit would factor in any conceivable economic system – investment, for one thing, relies upon credit; and borrowing is often useful when personal finances take a hit for unexpected reasons.

But the apparently unstoppable growth in payday lending represents something wholly different. As well as being the ugly face of a predatory capitalism which believes profit must always trump ethical considerations, it is the cancer at the heart of Britain’s low pay economy. To justify the inexorable cuts it is making to benefits, the Conservative Party says work must pay. And yet it shows no intention of improving workers’ pay and conditions (quite the opposite), and is instead through a combination of callousness and economic credulity leaving people increasingly in hock to poorly regulated payday lenders.

“The government needs to monitor more closely the activities of payday lending, how responsibly they lend, and evaluate how many loans individuals are taking out to ensure they don't enter a debt cycle,” Packman added.

Those who have nothing to sell but their labour do not have the same interests as the new breed of payday “entrepreneur” just as surely as those who depend on their job for their livelihood do not want the same thing as those who live off dividends and investments. If the government continues on its current path, 2013 might well be the year of the payday lender – or, as they might more accurately be described, the harbingers of debt, debt, and more debt.

Originally published at the Independent.

Three cheers for the UN: female genital mutilation is male insecurity defined

2012-12-22T11:10:00.000Z

“If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?” feminist author Germaine Greer once asked.

Greer is, of course, wrong about almost everything. She once famously refused to sign a petition defending Salmon Rushdie because he was, she said, a “megalomaniac” and “an Englishman with a dark skin” (as if there's any shame in that).

When it comes to FGM, Greer’s mistake is to confuse female genital decoration with mutilation. Surprisingly for a supposedly “feminist” author, she also ignores the blindingly obvious difference between the two “procedures”: the first is a purely aesthetic choice, whereas the second is but one weapon in a much larger and timeless attempt to police women’s chastity.

Fortunately, it’s been reported today that the UN has not listened to the council of cultural relativists like Greer, and has instead called for a ban on what it correctly refers to as the “grotesque practice” of female genital mutilation.

About time I say.

Feminist activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was put through the procedure herself, describes FGM as follows:

“As much of the clitoris as possible is removed along with the inner and outer labia. Then the inner walls of the vagina are scraped until they bleed and are then bound with pins or thorns. The tissue on either side grows together, forming a thick scar. Two small openings roughly equal to the diameter of a matchstick are left for urination and menstruation respectively.”

However in some quarters, almost every measure that’s ever been devised to control female sexuality, be it niqabs, burkas, the cult of virginity, prudishness about promiscuity and, ultimately, a procedure that literally hacks off those parts of the genitalia that respond to sexual stimulation, are viewed as no such thing, but rather as sort of benign forms of cultural expression. The historical context – i.e. male insecurity about women’s sexual choice - is seemingly redefined as an innate feminine inclination towards modesty and wholesomeness; or in Greer’s case, is ignored entirely.

Some western liberals are of course fond of comparing the way in which women are treated in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia with the apparently “sexualised” portrayal of women in the west. While it would be foolhardy to say that there isn't some way to go in terms of gender equality in the West – there is a significant pay gap and rape is vastly under-reported, to give just two examples – this sort of comparison is curious to say the least, and is especially fatuous when one considers that the “sexualisation” of women in its Page 3-esc form is far preferable to its opposite, of which FGM is just one manifestation.

For until you recognise what’s really going on – what has, in reality, always been going on – you are likely to flounder, and even, like Greer, exonerate the very mindset you ought to be combating. Many men, regardless of their country of origin, are terrified of the degree of sexual choice women have, and Martin Amis was correct to describe Islamism, the ideology of splenetic woman hatred, as male insecurity on steroids.

And that, in the end, is what FGM is: male insecurity defined. Until you recognise that, you will utterly fail to understand one of the major fronts on which the battle for sexual equality is being fought: the equal right to have sex.

Three cheers for the UN, then.

Originally published @the Independent.

The culture of offence takes aim

2012-12-21T09:32:00.001Z

This is a guest post by HegemonyOrBust.

Helen Flanagan is an actress who used to appear in Coronation Street and was lately a contestant in ITV’s ever popular “Celebrity Jungle Torture”, or whatever it’s called. She’s one of that new brand of celebrities who tweets herself (rather than having a PR tweet for her, which is often the case), and treats us to the mundane minutiae of her day.

On Monday evening, she ran into a bit of a problem. Being hungover, she posted an image of herself taken in October, showing her in lingerie, pointing what appears to be a very obvious toy gun towards her head, with the caption “headf**k”.

Cue outrage.

As everyone who casts even a vague glance at the news would know by now, there was the small matter of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre last Friday. Twitter decided, in its hundreds, that Ms Flanagan was “insensitive” and “offensive”. Several newspapers – chief amongst them the Sun and Mail – decided to follow suit (complete, of course, with the offending image, because Ms Flanagan in lingerie is, one assumes, guaranteed to sell newspapers even without the addition of a very obvious toy gun). Ms Flanagan, who states she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, ends up having to appear on Daybreak, ITV’s bland early morning snoozathon, to apologise profusely for her “crime”.

Each newspaper’s story included within it quotes from parents of children killed in the massacre. These parents were unnamed and unidentified.

Now, there’s only two interpretations one could read of this: the first, is the charitable one, which is the Sun and the Mail made up these quotes. I’ve got no idea whether they did or not, by the way, and am not accusing them of doing so. But, as I say, that’s the charitable interpretation. The uncharitable interpretation is this: a minor British celebrity posts a picture of herself on Twitter that only those stretching, reaching, aching for a connection, could actually connect to Sandy Hook and get “offended”. Ms Flanagan holds no assault rifle. Ms Flanagan is pointing the “gun” at nobody bar herself. Ms Flanagan offers no threat. Ms Flanagan, as the accompanying tweets show, is talking about having a splitting headache. Meanwhile, at the UK Cinemas, hundreds of thousands of people go and watch “Skyfall” and “Seven Psychopaths” and Tom Cruise in “Jack Reacher”, revelling in fictional guns being used violently. On BBC1 on Monday night, the late film was “Matador”, featuring a washed up hitman. On the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch “The Killing” and “Homeland”, which both feature death, violence and the threat of violence. In this context, Ms Flanagan’s tweet is a mere drop in the ocean, it’s offensiveness diluted to almost homeopathic concentrations, and it takes a reach of almost gargantuan proportions to connect it to Sandy Hook. Convinced they have been “offended” by her “insensitive” behaviour, and determined to share the genuine pain of actual victims through their posturing, hundreds of people take to Twitter to berate a woman with self-confessed mental health issues. The British tabloid press, not to be outdone, decides the best thing to do in this situation is to run with the story and contact the families of victims just days after their children had died, to ask them their opinion about “news” they would never have heard of were it not for the Sun and the Mail contacting them.

Now, putting the story like that, one needs to ask, what’s really insensitive and offensive here? Because for the life of me, I can’t see that it’s Ms Flanagan.

Tax avoidance ought to be as socially unacceptable as drink driving

2012-12-18T14:20:00.002Z

A thug wearing a suit is still a thug, and a crime is no more acceptable when it is committed by a “respectable” member of society than when it is carried out by what the right-wing press like to think of as the criminal classes.

Yet the concept of one law for all, while an invaluable legal principle, is in reality something of a sham. Racial prejudice, unequal access to a costly legal team, as well as a public preference for the tough sentencing of some crimes over others, all contrive to make the idea of equality before the law an ideal rather than a reality. So while a thief who pilfers a bottle of water from a store can receive six months in prison, when it comes to white collar crime politicians have traditionally preferred to take a more, shall we say consensual approach. The phenomenon was first recorded in 1949 by the American criminologist Edwin Sutherland, who noticed that:

“There is a consistent bias involved in the administration of criminal justice under laws which apply to business and the professions and which therefore involve only the upper socio-economic group…”

The same holds true for morality, and for those things which fall under the heading of deviance rather than criminality. So while the poor supposedly need threats and sanctions to get them to behave in a civilised manner, the rich require “incentives” – and are, lest you forget that, ready to pull down the roof should it ever look like things aren’t going to keep going their way.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over tax, and more specifically in the language used by the great and the good to justify their tax arrangements. There are a variety of stock phrases that anyone who has ever discussed tax avoidance will have heard, all of which imply that we would all be doing clever things with our money if only we had the cash to pay an affective accountant. As the U2 guitarist David Evans, aka “The Edge”, once rhetorically asked (presumably during time-out from telling the Irish government to give more money to Africa): “Who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?”.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want to be tax efficient?

The answer I suppose depends very much upon what sort of efficiency it is you are aiming at. Were the question phrased more honestly – i.e. bearing some relation to what the consequences of being “tax efficient” actually are - I suspect the answer would be somewhat different. After all, lessening your tax bill through financial acumen may be satisfying from a purely self-interested point of view, but depriving cancer patients of otherwise affordable medical treatment, or preventing a dementia sufferer from getting the care they require in old age - both of which are consequences of depleted treasury coffers – hardly cover you with glory.

According to the TUC, £25billion is lost annually through tax avoidance by individuals and businesses; more than five times as much as is lost through benefit fraud and error. To put that figure into some kind of context, George Osborne’s first budget planned for cuts of £6.2 billion and public sector workers currently face a three per cent rise in their pension contributions to save the state just under two billion. A modern hospital costs in the region of £90 million, and a state-of-the-art environmentally friendly school costs between five and £10 million. Free school dinners for every primary school child in the country would cost an extra billion, if you felt that way inclined.

David Cameron, to his credit, recently informed the House of Commons that he was “not happy with the current situation”. “I think the HMRC needs to look at it [tax avoidance] very carefully. We do need to make sure we are encouraging these businesses to invest in our country, as they are, but they should be paying fair taxes as well,” he said.

And yet I don’t think it’s just me who suspects the Prime Minister’s language would have been a little more robust had such a colossal sum disappeared via the benefits system. Again, it appears that if you wear a suit and have money, it won’t only be that you sleep in a warm bed with a full stomach at night, but you will go through life playing by a completely different set of rules to your working class counterparts. If you are wealthy and don’t fancy paying tax, you might be encouraged to pay more, but that’s about as far as it’ll go.

That isn’t to say that we should leave it to politicians to tackle tax avoidance. We ought to be able to leave it to them of course, but the major political parties have in recent years demonstrated such a palpable unwillingness to do anything about the problem that a new approach is required.

At the risk of being accused of moralising, the problem is deeper than that, anyway. Politicians will only act if there is a genuine groundswell of opinion that sees tax avoidance as a major issue. At present, there isn’t. Not yet, anyway. UK Uncut has done much to change things with a number of brilliant awareness campaigns aimed at those firms which squirrel their money overseas, but more needs to be done to link in the public mind the real cost of tax avoidance – the hospital closures, the children denied otherwise affordable cancer treatment, the pensioners freezing in their homes – with the supposedly amoral act of becoming “tax efficient”. Tax avoidance, either by companies or individuals, is as anti-social as drink driving, and like getting behind the wheel in a state of inebriation, it has a devastating human cost that no amount of obfuscation and jargon should be allowed to skirt over.

Cigarette companies ordered to apologise, but is junk food the new tobacco?

2012-12-12T19:33:00.002Z

A US judge has ordered tobacco firms to fund a public health campaign detailing their "past deception" over the risks associated with tobacco use.

The move is predicated on the notion that tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking”.

The President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids described it as a "vitally important step" that would require tobacco companies to “finally tell the truth" about the "devastating consequences of their wrongdoing”.

And the judge appears to have a solid case. For years smoking was portrayed by big tobacco as an enjoyable, even glamorous habit, and the harm it was doing to customers was ignored, downplayed, and finally, when the lawsuits began to pile up, grudgingly acknowledged.

Even though the industry did finally admit that smoking was addictive and damaging to health, it continues to spend money fighting against campaigns aimed at warning people of the dangers of cigarette smoke; as well as on initiatives which seek to "counteract the ‘denormalisation’ of tobacco".

It isn’t only the tobacco industry which is looking anxiously towards the courts, however. Researchers in the US have begun to argue that corporations which produce junk food are the new big tobacco. They claim that, like the tobacco companies before them, corporate food giants are portraying themselves as reputable companies who take their social responsibilities seriously, when in reality they care little about the spiraling "obesity epidemic" they are in large part responsible for creating.

"It took five decades after the initial studies linking tobacco and cancer for effective public health policies to be put in place, with enormous cost to human health. Must we wait five decades to respond to the similar effects of Big Food?" a report published earlier this year in the influential PLOS journal asked.

In a not unrelated development, this side of the Atlantic a European consortium is investigating whether or not such a thing as food addiction exist; and if so, whether it should be recognised at a clinical level alongside addictions to drugs and alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it was also reported that researchers at King’s College London believe they have found the gene which makes people binge drink. Lead researcher Professor Gunter Schumann said people were inclined to "seek out situations which fulfill their sense of reward and make them happy, so if your brain is wired to find alcohol rewarding, you will seek it out".

If there is any message we might take from all of this it’s a reassuringly absolving one: it isn't your fault. If you happen to be overweight and if your liver is shot from too many Sambucas, not to worry, it isn’t your doing and those whose doing it is will soon be brought to task.

In the case big tobacco, those who’ve suffered a deterioration in their health because of smoking do have a strong case: the tobacco industry did lie to them, and in doing so it behaved abominably. It would take a particularly cold heart to argue that smokers who were oblivious to the harm they were doing to themselves are responsible for their later ill health. Personal responsibility is after all compromised somewhat when the choice a person makes is built on a foundation of sand.

That said, pointing the finger of blame at others for our obesity, or for the consequences of our nights out on the sauce, or because the burgers in McDonalds are a little too appetising, or because junk food is too cheap to begin with (as if that’s a bad thing!), is to hide from reality – people are aware that being overweight is unhealthy and carry on regardless. Why? Because doing unhealthy things often feels very, very good.

Were it not for the fact that the NHS is facing a looming disaster, it wouldn’t matter. But as it was reported on Monday, the NHS is facing a funding shortfall of £54 billion by 2021/22. Even if proposed efficiency savings are implemented, the health service still faces a potential financial black hole of £34 billion. Researchers predict that if current trends continue, up to 48 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women in the UK could be obese by 2030, which translates as a £2 billion per year cost to pay for obesity-related diseases.

Blaming others for our poor health is rapidly becoming a way to deflect attention from the fact that the very idea of a health service is incompatible with modern lifestyles. The NHS is rightly viewed as a national treasure, and the politicians who meddle with it do so at their peril. But we seem to have forgotten that healthcare has a cost attached, and that we are responsible to each other if not to ourselves for maintaining at least a modicum of good health.

Blaming the food industry for making you fat is a bit like blaming Hooters because your husband likes breasts. It may be comforting to curse the corporate giants as you reach for another chocolate Digestive, but attitudes like this will destroy the NHS.

Originally published @the Independent.

A minimum price for booze? That's just middle class puritanism

2012-11-30T09:30:00.000Z

David Cameron has labelled the British culture of drunkenness a “scandal”, and the Daily Mail has described binge drinking as “creating a generation of aggressive and out-of-control women”.

If the scaremongers are to be believed, Britain is sinking into a bog of alcoholism of the sort depicted by William Hogarth in the 18th century.

Not only is it apparently unsafe to walk the streets on a Saturday night without being accosted by the human debris of our binge-drinking culture, but the medical treatment of those facing the long-term consequences of hitting the sauce is said to be slowly bankrupting the NHS.

The latest plan, perhaps inspired by the approach taken to illegal drugs over the past 40 years, is to “get tough” and “crackdown” on so-called problem boozers. With this in mind, the government is considering hitting drinkers in the wallet with a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.

The idea behind the minimum price is to dissuade the public from loading up on drink before hitting the town and getting even more legless. The proposal is backed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Alcohol Health Alliance UK and the British Medical Association.

Scotland has already introduced a 50p minimum price and, this week, the Coalition announced a 10-week consultation on the issue after a Government-backed report recommended a price of 45p for a unit of alcohol.

Hyperbole aside, however, minimum pricing may not be the magic pill it’s cracked up to be. The evidence to suggest that the solution to Britain's apparent drink problem is to price people off alcohol is flimsy at best.

While no doubt appealing to those who write the familiar headlines depicting an out-of-control horde of drinkers laying waste to British high streets every Saturday night, the statistics appear to show that the country’s drink problem (if it exists at all) lies beyond the reach of mere price controls.

According to the Office for National Statistics, average weekly consumption of alcohol in 2010 was highest among those who worked in middle class professions and lowest among those in routine and manual occupations. Despite the lurid tabloid depictions of the dreaded “out of control” women, the statistics also showed that professional women drank on average 9.2 units of alcohol a week compared with those in manual occupations who drank 6.2 units a week.

When it comes to age, adults aged over 45 were three times more likely to drink alcohol every day than younger people.

You may want to go back and read the last two paragraphs again. The people that are supposed to be getting loaded on cheap Alcopops every weekend; those the tabloids and the Government want to price off the booze – you know, the working classes – aren’t, as it happens, drinking anywhere near as much as their middle class counterparts.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that, in the years to come, it may be working class folk who are footing the drink-induced health bills of, not the Vicky Pollards of this world, but those with a class background that’s closer to that of her creators – the middle classes.

In actual fact, not only are media portrayals of a descent into nationwide alcoholism an excuse to sneer at pictures of half cut women and the lower orders who apparently no longer know their place, but they’re also grossly misleading, for alcohol consumption among Britons has been decreasing – and decreasing quite significantly – for a number of years.

Between 2005 and 2010, the average weekly alcohol consumption per adult decreased by almost a third, from 14.3 units to 11.5 units. Among men, average alcohol consumption decreased from 19.9 units to 15.9 units a week and for women the figure reduced from 9.4 units to 7.6 units.

The data was released earlier this year and to the credit of certain sections of the press the socio-economic differentials were picked up on. However, the data that showed a widespread decrease in alcohol consumption, if not exactly hushed up, didn't attract anywhere near the number of headlines the lurid descriptions of binge drinkers tend to. And there were certainly no accompanying photos of a country shunning the bottle and soberly going about its business.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Britain does have a drink problem. The next step is to identify those most in need of help in controlling their alcohol intake. As the statistics show, these tend to be middle-aged people from the middle classes – hardly the people who are going to be discouraged by a few extra pounds on a bottle of wine.

Am I the only one who suspects, however, that minimum pricing is not primarily about health, but rather about “cracking down” on that which Middle England is forever fretting about cracking down on: the working classes having too much of a good time?

Israel, Hamas, and why the conflict in Gaza needs less ideological posturing

2012-11-24T11:35:00.000Z

Almost all of those with an overtly ideological take on the conflict in Israel/Palestine come across as slightly deranged. The justification offered by supporters of each side is that it is their faction that is in the right, their faction that is acting in self-defence, and that it is the other side which is motivated by little more than cynicism, bigotry and malevolence.

Behind each side's unwillingness to understand the other side is an element of truth of course; but covering this is plastered layer upon layer of dishonest rationalisation - rationalisation which is in many instances deployed to justify the murder of wholly innocent civilians.

For much of the past 40 years, the Likudniks of the Israeli government - together with their supporters in Britain and the US - have zealously put out the lie that the only way the Israelis can be made safer is by building settlements on stolen land. It was a Christian Restorationist who first espoused the demagogic idea that a land without a people needs a people without a land. Not only has this idea subsequently been used to justify the violent eviction of Arab farmers who have worked the same land as their great-grandfathers, but the Israeli religious Right, many of whom are open backers of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, are throwing them off this land in order to bring about the fulfilment of insane religious prophesies; and they fully expect the Palestinian Arabs to accept this expropriation, as apparently do many of their supporters.

Unfortunately, for those of us who want to live in the here and now and don't long for the apocalypse, the fanatics may yet get their wish; for as the founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion warned, Israel can be a Jewish state, it can be a democratic state, and it can be a state occupying the whole of historical Israel; it cannot be all three.

"Peace" appears not to be what the Israeli leadership is primarily interested in - at least not peace for the Palestinians - if its support for the settlers, as well as the recent statements of its ministers, are anything to go by. Over the weekend, Israel's Interior Minister Eli Yishai described the goal of the current Israeli operation as to "send Gaza back to the Middle Ages".

"Only then will Israel be calm for forty years," he added.

The genocidal rhetoric has been matched by deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who said that Palestinians firing rockets from Gaza would be punished with a "bigger holocaust" from the Israeli armed forces.

Would it be so far-fetched to suggest that statements like this contribute to a cheapening of Palestinian life?

You needn't to be an apologist for the occupation, however, to note that the state of Israel has been elevated to such demonic proportions on the Left as to make many such as myself, who have an instinctive sympathy with the Palestinians, recoil in horror. The calibre of much "support" for the Palestinian cause comes perilously close to asserting that if Israel didn't commit a crime, no crime has been committed. In other words - and yet again - it is the hand of the Jews that is behind all that is wrong in the world. Confused? Then witness the laptop humanitarians, who had very little to say about the estimated 30,000 deaths caused by the conflict in Syria, spring into a fanatical internationalism at the precise moment a handful (by comparison) of Palestinians are killed by Israeli rockets.

Call me a cynic, but the value of human life among many of my comrades appears to be dictated by power politics - if you are killed by an enemy of the United States, then I'm dreadfully sorry, but your life is worth less than if you've been killed by an ally of the United States.

Some fringe supporters of the Palestinian cause already sail perilously close to the wind in terms of anti-Semitism, with the actions of Israel being compared with those of the Nazis. Inherent in such comparisons is a sinister attempt to downplay the Holocaust. As the late French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch put it:

"What if the Jews themselves were Nazis? That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got."

Any reasonable person will concede that Israel has a right to defend its citizens from attack by the homicidal maniacs of Hamas. And it's facetious to assert that Hamas's anti-Semitism is in some sense a by-product of the Israeli occupation. On his first day in Auschwitz, reaching out the window of the hut in which he was imprisoned to grab hold of a large icicle with which to quench his thirst, camp survivor Primo Levi had the icicle snatched from his hand by one of the German guards; when he asked the guard why he had done this, Levi was met with a revealing line: "there is no why here".

There are extremely important lessons in such seemingly innocuous utterances: Anti-Semitism is pathological; there is no why.

During times of war, it is often suggested - and I've already heard it applied to this latest round of bombing - that we should "pray" for one or both sides in the conflict. I would suggest that prayer is the last thing this (or probably any) conflict needs. And not only do the Israelis and Palestinians need less prayer, but the conflict between the two nations would almost certainly benefit from less teleological ideology in general; for if both sides, including their supporters, dropped the incendiary preaching, zealotry and double standards, we might have a straightforward and solvable land dispute on our hands.

Originally published at The Independent.

War is never glorious, so why do we bully those who protest against poppy culture?

2012-11-15T09:46:00.002Z

The surest way of finding oneself on the wrong side of our moral enforcers is, with words or with actions, to have caused a sacred group or individual of great national esteem “offence”.

From this starting point your fate is very much dependent upon whom it is you have had the misfortune to upset. Celebrities are generally fair game, as are politicians. Sport is a little more complicated, with footballers deemed worthy of a good proverbial kicking but Olympians for some reason beyond reproach. The police and the military, however, well – when it comes to “Bobbies” or “Our Boys” you can collectively bid adieu to every vestige of proportion, reason and restraint.

It is of little surprise, then, to learn that a furore has erupted over a decision by University of London Union (ULU) Vice-President Daniel Cooper to decline an invitation to lay a wreath at Sunday’s Remembrance Service, with fellow students and conservative commentators calling on Cooper to resign.

In his letter to the organisers, Cooper described the service as a commemoration that “doesn’t fit with” the “colossal loss of life, misery and suffering…[that] took place in WW1”.

In response, a former UCL student has described Copper as having “brought shame on himself and the 120,000 students he is supposed to represent”.

“The whole point of Remembrance Day as we know it today is to cast politics aside and pay tribute to the courage, bravery and selflessness of those in uniform both past and present,” Richard Pass writes.

An online petition has also been started to get Cooper removed from his position at the university.

I can’t say that I agree with the decision not a lay a wreath, mainly because I struggle to see how the idea of remembrance can be based selectively on “good” or “bad” wars. In most instances the argument rages over whether or not a war was just long after hostilities have ceased and troops have been brought home; therefore it’s perhaps best simply to put politics to one side and pay your respects.

That said, Sunday’s Remembrance Service, decked out as it was with royalty and establishment figures, was not in any sense apolitical, and Cooper’s refusal to lay a wreath has, if nothing else, punctured the aura of smug credence that for many years has been allowed to re-write the history of Britain at war – and more specifically the loss of life during the First World War.

Before you throw a grenade at your laptop, I’d like first of all to make one thing clear: I’m no pacifist. I believe that non-violence is an immoral position that by its very nature is reliant upon braver and more responsible individuals doing violence on one’s behalf. I believe that pacifism is, as George Orwell put it, “an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen”.

I am aware, however, that war is very often a racket. Harry Patch, who fought in World War One and died three years ago as the last surviving soldier, actually witnessed the slaughter of the “Great War”, and unlike those who wear their combat fatigues vicariously, described the conflict as nothing more than “organised murder”.

The poet Siegred Sasson also wrote penetratingly on the lacerating effect the First World War had on men who in many cases had only recently graduated from short trousers and bed wetting:

Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

An elementary truth, often buried underneath all the emotive verbiage about soldiers “defending our freedoms”, is that most of the 16 million killed in the First World War were working people killed in a sordid imperial scramble for resources. That’s it. There was nothing heroic, nor liberating, about perishing face down in a trench full of excrement in Flanders. Britain went to war as part of “a scramble for colonial possessions, markets and resources amongst the major nations”, as Cooper puts it in his letter. Those fortunate enough to survive the ensuing bloodbath were made unquestionably aware of that when they returned home to a Britain beset by misery, squalor and paupery. The pomp and jingoism, the endless processions and evocation of national pride, was little more than the smirk on the corpse, as subsequent attempts at revolution by a war-weary European working class went on to demonstrate.

The establishment likes to inform us that those who perished in the First World War died for our right to live in a free society. We may reflect, then, on whether a fitting legacy to the fallen is for subsequent generations to be bullied into conforming to a very limited notion of remembrance on behalf of those who were themselves bullied into fighting what can be described, accurately for once, as a rich man’s war.

An appropriate remembrance service truly fit for the dead might one day include a disclaimer detailing the lies those young men and women, packed off to war by a British establishment bloating and sating itself at home - and an establishment which was later to make every attempt at crawling up the backside of Hitler - were told. Until then, we should defend the right of people like Daniel Cooper to let their conscience decide the matter.

It's time to give Christopher Hitchens a statue

2012-11-01T17:59:00.002Z

During his lifetime many of the late Christopher Hitchens’s most vociferous critics were former allies from the political left. How, it was asked, could a once radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neo-conservative project to remake the world? The late American author Studs Terkel probably echoed the feelings of much of the left when he described Hitchens as having been transformed from a “witty observer of the human condition to a bloody bore, seated at the far-right end of the bar”.

In death as in life Christopher Hitchens continues to court controversy. An online petition to erect a statue to the former contrarian in Red Lion Square, Holborn, supported by the British Humanist Association (BHA), is being vociferously opposed by local Labour councillors, one of whom has unflatteringly described the late Hitchens as a “pro-war islamophobe”.

"Gift of prose doesn't excuse support for illegal wars and the destruction of Muslims", Holborn councillor Awale Olad wrote on Twitter.

Those of us who admired Christopher Hitchens are already familiar with this sort of thing. Based on the stance he took on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, during the last decade of his life Christopher Hitchens’s name was often prefaced with disclaimers like “formerly of the left” and “neo-conservative”. Unflinching support for the overthrow of dictatorship supposedly meant that Hitchens had jettisoned the left-wing principles of his youth and metamorphasised “from a butterfly into a slug”, as the Respect MP George Galloway put it.

To be fair to Hitchens’s critics, the human cost of the war in Iraq has been so high that it’s right to expect a degree of contrition from those who supported it, not to mention from those who misled Parliament in the lead up to the war. Iraqis now have a political system that is much more democratic (not to mention much less dangerous) than anything that existed under Saddam Hussein, but the cost of getting there has been nothing less than a bloodbath.

Despite the smug certainties of the anti-war crowd, however – you may have noticed that they have very little to say on the 30,000 people killed in Syria - the real question in 2003 was whether or not war would be less bad than the continuation of a criminal totalitarian state where genocide, torture, mass graves and an all-pervasive security apparatus formed the backdrop to everyday life. Hitchens took the position that it would; and therefore reducing his entire political output to the words “pro-war” makes about as much sense as describing anyone who opposed the war as pro-Saddam – and it shouldn’t be forgotten that some were of course.

Those who misrepresent the views of Christopher Hitchens may also wish to consider the words of one of the characters in Ian McEwan’s Iraq war protest book Saturday. Discussing with his daughter the potential benefits of coalition forces entering Iraq, Dr Henry Perowne hedges a bet that the chance to turn one country in the Middle East around may “plant a seed” which spreads across the region.

“My fifty pounds says three months after the invasion there’ll be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged, those Syrian and Saudi and Libyan potentates will be getting the jitters.”

Since those words were written mass protests have threatened to topple the Iranian theocracy, Colonel Gadaffi is dead and the regime of Bashir al-Assad has resorted to extreme violence to retain its grip on power. It’s quite possible to have opposed the war in Iraq yet recognise that such developments may never have occurred had Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party remained in power.

In contrast to the anti-war marchers of February 2003, who sang and danced in Hyde Park as they called for the prolongation of one of the world’s worst dictatorships, Hitchens confided to his close friend Martin Amis that in the period when the Iraq war was at its worst he was in a “world of pain”. And yet were he still with us, there can be little doubt that Hitchens would have recognised that the tragedy in Syria is that Western military intervention, if it does come, may happen altogether too late. As most of us learned as children in the school playground, inaction is often no better than intervention on the side of the aggressor and against the victim.

It may surprise some people to learn that it’s possible to be on the left and take the opposite view to Holborn’s kitsch-left Labour councillors. For some of us, Hitchens represents a break only with those parts of the left that after 9/11 didn’t feel in any sense obliged to take responsibility or make any difficult decisions, mainly because they’d given up on ever attaining power and therefore thinking about how power might be used as a force for good in the world.

Ultimately, and in spite of this lengthy throat clearing, I would like to suggest that any decision as to whether or not it is correct to put up a statue to Christopher Hitchens should be based solely on whether or not this is an appropriate way to honour England’s greatest essayist since George Orwell.

Originally published at the Independent.

Why the gentrification of journalism matters

2012-10-25T15:33:00.000+01:00

Newspapers are in trouble. That much is clear. The Guardian and the Observer lost £44.2 million last year as growth in online revenue failed to match Guardian News & Media’s (GNM) investment. Last week GNM was even forced to issue a denial after it was claimed that print editions of its papers would soon be scrapped altogether.

It isn’t just the nationals that are suffering. Research from Press Gazette found that at least 242 local papers had closed between 2005 and the end of 2011, compared to just 70 launches. The self-appointed king of news Rupert Murdoch may also wish to consider whether the influence a stable of newspapers gives a proprietor remains worth having. According to data collected by Bloomberg, income at News Corp’s publishing unit, which includes the Times, the Sun and the Wall Street Journal, dropped by almost a third from 2008 to 2011.

In recent years the cringeworthy claim has been doing the rounds that we are “all journalists now”. Once you strip away the fatuity of the statement there is some truth to it. Thanks to the internet we are all free to set up a blog and report or interpret the news as we see fit. That’s how I got started; and it is I suspect how many others made their first excruciating stab at writing for an audience. We’ve also in recent years seen the emergence and popularisation of Twitter, which allows anyone with a smartphone to play at journalism and “break” a news story as it happens.

Many have undoubtedly been attracted to the profession by the romantic aura that surrounds the news rooms of the 20th century, portrayed to comic effect in novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where the fiddling of expenses exists in stark contrast to the ascetic drive of today’s sharp-elbowed young upstarts:

“Mr. Salter saw he was not making his point clear. ‘Take a single example,’ he said. ‘Supposing you want to have a dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You’ve had a slap-up dinner, you’re three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied.’”

Not only are we saying goodbye to all of that, but there is general agreement that newspapers will, sooner or later, cease to exist at all in their current form - differences of opinion mainly concern how the industry will use the internet to return to profitability. In a piece for this paper in 2009, professor of journalism at the University of Kent Tim Luckhurst was forthright in his belief that professional journalism “can and must thrive in the era of the internet”. He went on to assure readers (or writers perhaps) that “an economic model to make that possible must emerge”.

What hasn’t been sufficiently discussed is the extent to which the business model newspapers have adopted during the lean years could change the face of newsrooms even when more favourable conditions return, assuming that they do. Increasingly newspapers rely on unpaid labour for their content, including interns and people who write simply for the satisfaction of a by-line. In times when revenue is scarce this is perhaps understandable. But as newspapers find a way to turn a profit from the internet there’s a good chance they won’t drop the business practices that have prevented them going under in the first place, and that means workers continuing not to get paid.

Now I’ll understand if this seems incredibly unimportant. I am a journalist after all – surely I am only bringing this issue to your attention out of self-preservation. And that’s partly true of course. But only partly. It’s not my job prospects that you be should worried about (thanks all the same). Of greater concern is the potential impact new business models could have on our daily news content. Any long-term reliance on free labour will certainly make newspaper balance sheets look better; but it will also give a labour market advantage to those from more privileged backgrounds who can afford to work six month unpaid internships or find free time to turn around articles for nothing – which in turn will mean an ever smaller section of society writing the news.

The local papers which once produced the working class hacks who made the step up to the nationals are also disappearing at an alarming rate, and with them the rung on the ladder which at one time ensured a degree of meritocracy in our newsrooms. British journalists already favour the rich, powerful and glamorous over the poor, weak and unfashionable, says journalist and author Peter Oborne; and one suspects the gulf between journalists and ordinary voters will increase as the number of working class journalists continues to fall. Having little invested in the services this government is so ruthlessly cutting, many journalists of the upper crust already slip effortlessly into narratives about the cuts being “inevitable” and austerity coming as a consequence of “runaway government spending”. As it becomes harder to break into journalism without solid financial backing, this sort of natural bias can only become more pronounced.

The collapse of print journalism is almost certainly inevitable. For a proprietor to fight against it would be the equivalent of setting fire to reams of bank notes, and they certainly aren’t going to do that. Do not, however, succumb to the delusion that the internet will bring with it a flowering of innovative citizen journalism. Most people don’t have time to be citizen journalists. Most people are too busy paying their bills, putting food on the table and going to work every day to become grassroots reporters. The people who have time to fool around for no money are the people who already have lots of it. And if they are the journalists of the future our media will probably resemble the establishment talking to itself, and if that’s the case we will all be worse off, not only us hacks.

The dark side of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

2012-10-17T07:10:00.000+01:00

When things are grim at home it can be easier to seek comfort in developments abroad. And boy, are things grim at home right now. Stagnant levels of pay, an economically incompetent government determined to erode hard-fought workers’ rights and a lacklustre opposition. And worst of all, a public that remains largely apathetic.

How tempting it is to allow one’s optimism to feed on events occurring further afield.

During the course of the last week or so nowhere has this been more apparent than in the case of Venezuela. Otherwise sober journalists and politicians have been queuing up to heap praise on newly elected President Hugo Chavez - keen to emphasise his democratic legitimacy and even keener to tell of their own favourable impression of the Latin American petro-crat.

Owen Jones described the newly-elected Chavez in these pages as someone who leads a “progressive, populist government that says no to neo-liberalism”. Praise was equally forthcoming from the Labour MP for Easington Grahame Morris, who said that anyone protesting against abuses in the Venezuelan electoral system was doing so, “not because they are a democrat, but because they do not like the result”. Ex-US President Jimmy Carter even went as far as to describe Venezuela’s electoral system as “the best in the world”.

Some of the rhetoric is understandable of course. In an age of airbrushed politicians whose every word resonates with insincerity, the personality of Hugo Chavez is superficially attractive. When I first saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - a 2003 documentary detailing the attempt to overthrow Chavez during his first term in office - I too was a convert.

For the first time Venezuela had a president that was spending the country’s vast oil wealth on generous social programmes to ensure there was a financial floor below which the poor would no longer fall. It was arguably this, rather than any real concern for political liberty, which prompted the military coup that tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002 – Venezuela’s Harvard-educated elite saw that their privileges were under threat and sought to act. Chavez had also threatened the profits of American oil companies; and as anyone versed in Latin American politics will attest, those that are brave enough to do such things are rarely left in power for long. If nothing else you had to admire the chutzpah of the man.

But it’s a funny sort of democracy (and certainly not one which can accurately be described as the best in the world) that attracts such harsh criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - organisations which can hardly be dismissed as agents of neo-liberalism.

In its 2011 annual report, Amnesty described Venezuela as a country where “those critical of the government were prosecuted on politically motivated charges in what appeared to be an attempt to silence them”.

Human Rights Watch went further, and said the “accumulation of power in Venezuela” had allowed the government “to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society”. As any good democrat knows, the strength of a democratic system is not defined solely by what happens on polling day.

Another sign of a healthy civil society is a strong trade union movement. Listening to those singing the praises of Chavez it’s easy to skirt over the fact that Venezuela is a country where, according to the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2012 annual survey, “anti-union discrimination, violations of collective bargaining rights and the non-respect of collective agreements were frequent and persistent in both the public and private sector”.

Last year prominent Venezuelan trade unionist Rubén González, a former supporter of Chavez, went to jail for having the temerity to test the fraternal claims of Bolivarian socialism.

After leading a 15-day strike at the state iron mining company in 2009, he was jailed for seven years for “crimes” that included unlawful assembly, incitement, and violating a government security zone. According to The Human Rights Foundation (HRF), González’s imprisonment had more to do with the fact that he took workers out on strike than with the trumped up official charges. “The on-going trial against González is yet another instance of the continuing criminalization of legitimate union activities in Venezuela,” said HRF general counsel Javier El-Hage.

Some like to view Venezuela as part of a larger progressive Latin American movement that’s turning away from the North American economic model towards something fairer. “Venezuela’s main allies are fellow Latin American democracies, themselves ruled by progressive governments,” wrote Owen Jones.

And yet Chavez’s main ally in the region is Cuba, a country ruled by a crew of Stalinist gargoyles who, amongst other things, prevent Cubans from travelling freely overseas. By providing Cuba with subsidised oil at a rate of roughly 105,000 cut-rate barrels a day - about half of Cuba's energy needs for petroleum - Chavez ensures that the Castro dictatorship retains its iron grip on power.

As the Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez made clear last week, the Bolivarian Revolution looks quite different from the dilapidated streets of Havana. “It was precisely the rise to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 that was the key element to the walking back of reforms,” Ms Sanchez wrote.

“With a powerful and nearby partner lavishly giving us oil, why continue to deepen the process of relaxations that resulted in a loss of power?”

In his memoirs the young Russian revolutionary Victor Serge noticed how easy it was for populist charlatans to offer easy solutions to the young and idealistic in search of a cause. “When there’s no worthwhile banner,” Serge said, “you start to march behind worthless ones”.

Those keen to defend President Hugo Chavez would do well to remember Serge’s words, for history is rarely kind to those who make excuses for autocrats because they’ve not yet found a revolution worth fighting for.

Is class politics still relevant? Well yes and no

2012-10-04T10:12:00.000+01:00

A new think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, which also goes by the appropriate acronym CLASS, was recently set-up as a left-wing alternative to the Blairite think-tank Progress, and will be holding a fringe meeting on equality at this week’s Labour Party conference. The brainchild of Unite leader Len McCluskey and GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny, the think tank’s central aim is to present a coherent alternative to the leadership of the Labour Party from a decidedly left-wing perspective.

As any lefty will recognise, an initiative like this is sorely needed. In terms of economic policy, despite what many would consider a fertile economic backdrop, there is currently no credible left-wing alternative to the free-market on the table - neither in the Labour Party nor outside it. There hasn’t been for some time either. Critiques of the excesses of capitalism continue to impress of course – the late Tony Judt’s book Ill Fares the Land was an excellent example - but applying the socialism and social democracy of the 20th century to today’s economy would make about as much sense as riding a penny farthing to work. Things have moved on; and it is probably time the left did too.

As the acronym suggests, the think tank places a heavy emphasis on class - class politics to be precise - or in the media-savvy language all think tanks like to use, “making politics more relevant to working class lives”. This is certainly on the right track. The idea that inequality no longer matters – that what is really important is meritocracy, and that policy should do little more than smooth the path for a clutch of talented individuals to rise above their background – is often a convenient excuse for the status quo. It is no accident that life expectancy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, criminality and infant mortality indexes are worse in the UK and the US than in mainland Europe. The more unequal a society is the more widespread are its social problems. And importantly for the meritocrats, the harder it is for gifted individuals to escape the circumstances into which they were born.

However the stumbling blocks for those looking to put social class back on the political agenda are many, most notably the reluctance of the working class to recognise itself for what it is. Only a quarter (24 per cent) of the British population now identifies as working class, according to a survey carried out last year by BritainThinks. This compares to 67 per cent in the late 1980s. The survey also found a breakdown in traditional forms of working class solidarity, with those identifying as middle class more likely to feel themselves part of a wider community than their working class counterparts.

Now while I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone that they must accept Tony Blair’s 1999 assertion that “the class war is over” – every time a person is sacked in order to bring about a fraction of a penny increase in a company’s share price it is clear that the class war is not over – in forging an effective message it is necessary for the left to recognise that class occupies a much smaller chunk of a working person’s identity than it did a generation ago.

And in many ways this is a positive development. The idea that a person can only find fulfilment through the participation in the communal life of an organised group can be as constricting as it can be emancipating. In much the same way that the breakdown of the traditional family has brought with it a number of social problems, it has allowed others to break free from sexual hypocrisy in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Sexual and racial identities have also become more fluid than in the past, and today people are free to reject automatic categorisation based on only one facet of their personality. For better or worse the same holds true for workers. Working people today often identify more closely with the music they listen to, the people they socialise with, what they spend their money on, and the way they look more than they do with the picket line. This is reflected in the trade union movement, where membership levels fell by a further 2.7 per cent last year to 6.5 million – down from a historic high-point of 13.2 million in 1979.

I imagine the initial reaction of any ardent socialist to this sort of thing will be to scoff and claim that it is all a distraction from the class struggle. They would have a point too. Class is as important as ever in terms of whom in our society gets rich and who flounders around at the bottom. But in order to make political inroads the left needs to figure out a way to connect with people for whom social class is only one fragment of a much more fluid social identity. As well as getting to grips with a global economy that is seemingly incompatible with the realisation of social justice, anyone looking for some kind of redistributive change, whether in the form of a more cuddly kind of capitalism or democratic Socialism, needs to start talking in a language that people understand, and unfortunately class politics just isn’t one of them.

Originally published at The Independent.

Today everyone wants to defend Salman Rushdie. It wasn't always like that

2012-09-25T20:30:00.001+01:00

For obvious reasons almost every political person believes that in the past his or her faction was correct on the major questions of the day. Obvious because this is at least part of the reason why they subscribe to that political affiliation in the first place – they believe their side will be right again in the future. So for conservatives while empire was unquestionably brutal, historically it was responsible for the establishment of democracy amongst the people it ruled over. On the Left a major source of pride was the struggle against Hitlerian fascism, which, were to you listen to today’s socialists and social democrats, united the Left around a common purpose and against a universal foe.

The problem in looking at history through this lens, however, is that it often glosses over divisions which plagued each side at the time. Not all conservatives were supporters of empire for example. Some opposed it vociferously. Nor in reality was the political Left united against Fascism. In his expansive essay The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell lambasted the silly-clever arguments trotted out by certain fellow leftists, who sneered at the prospect of lining up alongside their countrymen even if it meant losing the war to the Nazis:

“They will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism. There is not much freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience; therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-chambers of the Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.”

Today Salman Rushdie is the cause célèbre. An argument repeated in recent weeks has been one which talks up the virtue of The Satanic Verses in comparison to the controversial film Innocence of Muslims. While the film is a “provocation” that “goes too far”, The Satanic Verses was different. Of course, in aesthetic terms anything by Salman Rushdie is invariably better than Innocence of Muslims - a film which, were it not for the manufactured “outrage” that has brought it so much publicity, would fail even to make the low grade of a passable YouTube production. However liberals were not as united in 1989 as many retrospective accounts make out.

While many writers (and many Muslims) at the time publically defended Salman Rushdie’s right to free expression, some in the West were unwilling to offer Rushdie their solidarity out of a misguided attempt to “understand” the sorts of people who do not need to read books to burn them. One of those was feminist author Germaine Greer, who refused to sign a petition supporting The Satanic Verses because she said it was “about his [Rushdie’s] own troubles”. She added that Rushdie was “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with a dark skin” (no shame in that, you might think). In a March 1989 Op-Ed for The New York Times entitled “Rushdie's Book is an Insult,” former US President Jimmy Carter argued that, while Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms were “important”, “ we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated”. Others such as Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain who was later knighted by the Blair government for services to community relations, went further, and said that death was “perhaps a bit too easy” for Rushdie.

There were countless other examples too, most not as extreme as Sacranie (although the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper came close), but all implying that Rushdie himself was in some way to blame for his predicament.

Since the Fatwa, protecting the sensitivities of religious believers has become more appealing to progressives in Britain as we have become an increasingly multicultural society. And the sentiment is a laudable one. As the editor of Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Easterman, himself a former lecturer in Islamic Studies, puts it: “[A blasphemy law] is superficially attractive, carrying as it does heavy overtones of liberalisation, a promise of widening tolerance in a multicultural but divided society.”

Yet all too often those who reject the premise of an open society get a hearing as soon as they utter the words “I am offended”. As well as it being reasonable for the West to demand that its democratic traditions are respected by other nations, extending tolerance to the point where free expression is corroded does a disservice to the many immigrants who come here out of admiration for such ideas. One of the most depressing things about the struggle between absolutism and democracy, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, is that “so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation”.

Today everyone wants to flatter Salman Rushdie. It was not always like that. In 1989 many who had enjoyed the fruits of free expression more than most could not bring themselves to assuredly defend it. Oh how much easier it is to be on the correct side of history when events are in the distant past. Much harder to recognise that the struggle for free expression is an ongoing one, and that to stand up for it is to stand firm even when it is buffoons like Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, rather than literary men and women, who are testing its limits.

Porn for women is here to stay

2012-09-18T22:26:00.000+01:00

Fifty Shades author E.L. James last week released a companion album of classical music to go with her incredibly successful trilogy. Speculative plans are also in the pipeline for a film adaptation of the books, with arguments raging among excited fans over which Hollywood name is most suited to role of the dashing and, more importantly, sexually dominant lead, a young business magnate named Christian Grey.

Until last week I hadn’t actually taken much notice of the Fifty Shades trilogy. I was a man the last time I checked, and apart from the fact that my gender is conditioned (biologically or socially, you tell me) to sexually respond to images more than to the written word, my own “to read” list is sufficiently cramped already. Last week I was on holiday in Spain, however, and away from the gruelling myopia of the London nine to five I started to notice the sheer extent to which the Fifty Shades books were being read by women, vast swathes of women: on planes, aboard buses, and in one instance even on a moving bicycle.

Initially surprised at the sheer number of people actually reading - reading real, paper books that is, as opposed to staring endlessly into the void of wires and circuit boards commonly known as smartphones - I began to recall all the times I’d ever heard the Fifty Shades series contemptuously (and a little too enthusiastically) dismissed by men. “Silly airheads” was how a friend described to me the demographic that has so enthusiastically bought into the phenomenon of Mr Grey and the compliant recipient of his charms, Anastasia Steele. “Badly written”, was how another acquaintance cut the book down to size, apparently forgetting that a small proportion of his own income regularly goes on astonishingly un-erotic lad’s mags whose writers, I must say, are hardly banging down the door of the Orwell Prize.

But then there’s always been something slightly subversive about the idea of women enjoying sex, hasn’t there? In Stephen Fry’s book The Hippopotamus, the central character boldly claims that women “ put up with sex as the price they pay for having a man, for being part of what they like to call a relationship.” The main character in one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s greatest novels is at it too (and no, I don’t mean that). Bemoaning the fact that his wife does not want to have sex with him, the protagonist in Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, concludes bitterly that women can at time have their periods “as often as three times a week”.

The popularity of the Fifty Shades series is, as Laurie Penny has deftly pointed out, based on the fact that the books are cleverly crafted porn for women. Populist porn with shiny edges and a fluffy centre, but porn all the same. Of greater interest is the wave of publicity on the back of which the trilogy has ridden. Women consuming porn is still news; and that is, I suspect, because it is still deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche that men like sex and women, well, lie back and think of the Magna Carta.

The only evidence that has ever been produced to support this assertion is anecdotal of course, and mainly revolves around the fact that women are a good degree coyer than men about their appetite for sexual activity. Well quelle bloody surprise. Did anybody expect the separation of women from an early age into good and bad human beings based on how many people they have gone to bed with not to have had an impact? As the American feminist author Jessica Valenti puts it in her aptly entitled book, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut:

“I was called a slut when my boobs grew faster than others. I was called a slut when I had a boyfriend (even though we weren’t having sex.) I was called a slut when I didn’t have a boyfriend and kissed a random boy at a party. I was called a slut when I had the nerve to talk about sex. I was called a slut when I wore a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends. It seems the word slut can be applied to any activity that doesn’t include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest any sudden movements be deemed whorish.”

A study last year by researchers at the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University in the US found evidence that painted a different picture. As part of a study into relationship satisfaction, researchers at the university spoke to 1,000 couples from Brazil, the US, Spain, Germany and Japan who’d been in relationships for a variety of years from one to 51. The white coats asked participants how many times in the past month they had kissed, cuddled, caressed and had sex. And the result? Men's overall happiness in a relationship was based on how much hugging and kissing there was, whereas women were more likely to say that their sex life determined the quality of the relationship.

Women will almost certainly stop reading Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels eventually. It’s starting to seem a bit like old hat already. However expect many more authors, film makers and artists to tread where E.L. James has beaten a path, because thanks to the author the proverbial stereotype of the uncorrupted female gender is increasingly flanked on either side by debauched biological reality. For many men the idea that women secretly yearn for sex as much as they do is an alarming thought. But then revolutionary ideas usually begin life in that way, only later to be defended by all and sundry as common sense.

Originally published @the Independent.

Socialism and blasphemy: all authority should be ridiculed

2012-09-14T15:09:00.002+01:00

Violent protests have spread across the Middle East and North Africa in response to an anti-Islamic film, The Innocence of Muslims, that was posted on YouTube.

To call the film a piece of third-rate dross would be too lenient. Aesthetically the film is patently awful, and features a cast who can’t act and a set that jumps and bumps around the screen when it most definitely shouldn’t. The film also mocks and insults Islam. It portrays the prophet Muhammad as a philanderer and a child molester who gets a kick out of massacring non-believers. The fact that it’s badly acted seems to make it even viler, for some reason.

The content of the film is beside the point, however. If you believe in free expression you must defend the rights of filmmakers to make such films. Unfortunately a small minority of extremists in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have used the film as a pretext for assaulting American and Israeli embassies and a number of people have been killed, proving that the apparent sanctity of divine revelation trumps any concern for human life for a small number of the pious.

Instead of unreservedly condemning the violence and defending free expression, however, a number of Western commentators have sunk into a swamp of half-baked liberalism that appears to believe only in the necessity of committing cultural suicide as hastily as possible. One example was Robert Fisk who, writing in the Independent, claimed the people who “set the Middle East on fire” were those who produced the film, rather than those who lit the matches. As well as disenfranchising the vast majority of Muslims who, when they learned that Islam had been ridiculed in this way, didn’t go out and violently assault the first American they came across, this line of argument sidesteps the fact that monotheism has historically responded violently when it has encountered criticism. All the more reason to criticise, comrades!

It also gives ammunition to the forces of the far-right, who will gleefully welcome the proposition that Muslims are too thin-skinned to live alongside free expression, when in reality this applies only to a small number of fanatics.

In a society where ideas are exchanged freely, anyone who is not a sociopath will at times take offense. The idea that people can ever be sheltered from hurt feelings is, I hope to everyone reading this, an absurdity that only makes sense if one wants to live in a society resembling that of Nineteen Eighty Four. Bullies who use violence to silence critics of religion should never be appeased by socialists. The idea that free speech is being “abused” whenever someone actually tests it should also be seen for the idiotic fallacy that it is. The freedom of religious and political groups to proselytise is intrinsically connected to the right of the apolitical and non-religious to blaspheme.

In much of the region affected by the protests religion has historically propped up some of the most misogynistic, homophobic and reactionary forces. Take away the right to ridicule and mock authority, textual authority in this instance, and everything else is detail, including the right of the Muslim working class to satirise and ridicule its rulers.

Don’t be fooled by his West Coast Main Line pleas, Richard Branson is no people’s capitalist

2012-08-31T23:56:00.000+01:00

Sir Richard Branson has long been Britain’s favourite capitalist. Unlike the fat cat tycoons of left-wing caricatures, sat atop their shiny towers counting wads of cash, Branson is considered one of a new breed of entrepreneurs that emerged at the turn of the century. Usually engaged in some sort of philanthropic work in the developing world, these touchy-feely industrialists presented the public with a softer side of commerce as they “tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being,” as Terry Eagleton puts it.

Nor does his popularity appear to have abated with the passage of time. Branson was reportedly “furious” at what he called the “insane choice” of rival FirstGroup to run the profitable West Coast Main Line and an e-Petitionwas launched by a completely unconnected party calling for the award of the £5.5 billion West Coast franchise to FirstGroup to be changed in favour of Virgin. Thus far the petition has attracted 160,000 signatures, which Branson has pointed to as evidence of “the strong British instinct for fairness, common sense and democracy”.

Despite his vast fortune (estimated at £3.4bn by the 2012 Sunday Times Rich List), if the petition is anything to go by Branson maintains an almost impenetrable aura of the everyman David fighting the corporate Goliath. In a 2011 poll by the Aspire Global Network (AGN), Branson was voted the leader most people said they would most like to work for. Elsewhere he’s even been voted the people’s ideal choice for the next Prime Minister.

Considering some of the causes he has previously championed, the longevity of the cult of Branson is as baffling as it is impressive. The privatisation of the rail network was one of the most disastrous sell-offs of public assets during John Major’s government, yet Branson, unlike the majority of the British people, has done extremely well out of it. Virgin Rail has in the pastdepended heavily on state money and been the subject of a large number of passenger complaints. The pre-tax profits for Virgin Rail Group Holdings Ltd in 2011 were £102.7 million, with profits per employee reaching a staggering £33,713. Those who believe in a classless alliance between the exploited and the exploiters may also be disappointed with Virgin’s record on workers’ rights. In April, Branson pleaded with employees at his Virgin America Airlines not to vote in favour of joining the Transport Workers Union (TWU) after staff had filed a petitionwith the National Mediation Board (NMB) for representation with the union. According to TWU organising director Frank MacCann, while flying Virgin can be enjoyable for passengers, flight attendants have a “very different experience”. “Work rules are inconsistently enforced, promises regarding rest, vacation and benefits are often broken, and discipline for minor violations can be unnecessarily harsh and inconsistently applied,” McCann said.

“Flight attendants realise that the only way they can improve their working conditions is to form a union,” he added.

It is a little known fact that Branson’s first company started amid a purchase-tax fraud that landed him a night in prison in 1971. Only last year we also learned of plans by Branson to move a slice of his business to Switzerland to reduce his company’s tax bill. According to Virgin, the move was undertaken to “accelerate [Virgin’s] expansion” and “develop the Virgin brand internationally”. It isn’t hard to discern why large corporations make announcements about their tax affairs in language like this. They are often trying either to conceal something from their workers or sell something to the rest of us. In this case Virgin appeared to prefer gobbledygook to an admission that they wanted to reduce their payments to the UK exchequer. Depriving the treasury of funds – funds that pay, amongst other things, for the treatment of terminally ill children– is hardly something to boast about, after all. That isn’t to say the bar was set particularly high to begin with or anything. Commenting on Virgin’s historical tax record before the move was announced, Richard Murphy from Tax Research said: “I didn’t think Virgin paid any tax here, let’s be blunt about it. It’s been remarkably poor at doing so.”

What is it then that accounts for Branson’s enduring popularity? In trying to understand the hype it’s worth remembering a remark once made by Mark Twain: if you give a man a reputation as an early riser, that man can sleep till noon. In recession-hit Britain people also need reassurance: reassurance against a backdrop of collapsing financial scenery that it isn’t all just one big racket. Through sheer force of personality Branson gives us this, while at the same time managing to convince people that the interests of billionaires and workers are one and the same. Branson has that all-important X-factor, too; and the ability to glide seamlessly through the world of celebrity is one of the most valuable assets a modern politician or captain of industry can possess. It’s how Princess Diana became the “people’s princess” despite leaving her entire estate to her own super-rich family. It’s how Tony Blair was able to turn up at Labour conferences year after year, mouth a few platitudes and all would be forgiven. It may also explain how it was that Sir Richard Branson came to be anointed as the exemplary peoples’ capitalist. The main objection his admirers face is a substantial one, however: peoples’ capitalists, like unicorns, do not really exist.

There are those who are appalled by George Galloway now, and those who have always been appalled by George Galloway

2012-08-26T11:10:00.002+01:00

The most striking thing about George Galloway’s latest outburst was not what he said so much as the fact that there were still people willing to take him seriously. This is heartening in a way of course, for such people will learn everything they need to know about George Galloway simply by listening to George Galloway. But for those of us who believed the end of Mr Galloway’s credibility had come many years ago, it was also something of a surprise.

The Respect MP’s latest remarks, made on his Goodnight with George Galloway programme, began by describing Julian Assange’s sex life as “sordid and disgusting”. You could have been forgiven for thinking this a good start. However this was less a condemnation of the alleged improper sexual conduct Mr Assange is wanted by the Swedish authorities for questioning over, and more a judgement on Mr Assange’s sexual promiscuity – as was rapidly intuited as Mr Galloway went on to talk in detail about the actual allegations:
“I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you’re already in the sex game with them.”

Unfortunately Mr Galloway is not the first man whose reactionary attitude towards promiscuity bleeds into an unwillingness to grant a woman the right to say no once she has climbed between the sheets. More interesting has been some of the response to Mr Galloway’s comments. Some have asked whether, this time at least, the “maverick” MP for Bradford West hasn’t “gone too far”. Mr Galloway has even lost his column at Holyrood for this particular outburst of the unpalatable.

All in all one gets the distinct impression that people expected more from the man.

However while Mr Galloway’s latest remarks undoubtedly stink, his previous record is no less pestiferous. Is it really such a shock to discover that a man who once embraced the leader of Hamas has a lousy attitude towards women? One would have thought the two positions complimented each other excellently. While I still experience feelings of outrage related to Mr Galloway, that outrage pre-dates this week and is nowadays reserved mainly for those who keep up the pretence that Mr Galloway is some sort of radical.

As recently as April, Salma Yaqoob, who says she finds Mr Galloway’s latest remarks “deeply disappointing and wrong”, described Mr Galloway in the New Statesman as “a man who stands by his principles and tells it straight”. Writing in the Independent around the same time, Patrick Cockburn put the “ferocity” of the attacks on Mr Galloway down to nothing more than the “comatose nature of British politics”. News presenters were launching “a shower of insulting and unproven accusations,” Mr Cockburn added. As if to prove that many on the left still held a torch for Mr Galloway, he was pencilled in to speak at the Marxism 2012 festival on a bill that included Tony Benn and Owen Jones.

All of this came before his now infamous remarks about rape. However it all came after the Respect MP had described the President of Syria Bashar al-Assad as the “last Arab leader”, after he had heaped praise on Saddam Hussein for his “indefatigability”, and after he had claimed that a gay man was executed in Iran for “sex crimes against young men”. It also came after Mr Galloway had published not so much a book as a eulogy to Fidel Castro; and after, on his Talksport radio show, he said that “not a single photograph of a single dead person” had ever been “adduced” as proof that the Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place.

Staying true to one’s original political beliefs is as much a sign of the rigid dogmatist as it is of the committed idealist. The measure of a person of the left can also very often be taken by their attitude towards George Orwell. In an edition of the late Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish civil war, Mr Galloway repeated the Stalinist lie that Orwell had smeared the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to fight fascism. Their memory had been “sullied by Orwell’s slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom,” Mr Galloway said. The reality of course was that Orwell had documented the vile role of the Stalinists in suppressing the Spanish revolution. Considering the worst day of Mr Galloway’s life was the day the Soviet Union collapsed, his distaste for the man who saw through Stalinism before the majority of the intelligentsia is perhaps unsurprising.

If anything, the longevity of George Galloway goes to show that you can believe in practically anything on the political left these days so long as you profess a dislike for the United States of America and Israel. It is often said that the political left is too idealistic. That individuals like George Galloway are still in the ranks is testament to the contrary. A good deal more idealism would be very welcome at this point.

Originally published @the Independent
(Image: the Independent)

Railways are too important to run on greed

2012-08-21T09:41:00.002+01:00

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught swindling his fellow countrymen, Milo likes to evoke the “historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When Milo’s profiteering results in the price of food in the army mess hall climbing so high that the enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative. And since he is an unapologetic champion of the free-market, the alternative is for the enlisted men to exercise their freedom of choice and “choose” starvation.

The twisted logic of Milo Minderbinder reached the summit of political power in Britain under the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s. Public services were given away at knock down prices to a private sector which, it was assumed as a matter of course, could run things better than workers or the state. The last significant privatisation before the Conservatives lost power to New Labour in 1997 was British Rail, which was split up and sold off in 1994. The logic of the market dictated, after all, that if you didn’t like how a company ran a service you could choose, of your own free will, not to use it. Privatisation engendered choice, so it was said. And like the men in Milo Minderbinder’s mess hall, if you didn’t like it you could always take your money, exercise your freedom of choice and, well, go and live in the woods or something.

Only on the pages of Atlas Shrugged could life be that simple. The real-world consequences of rail privatisation were huge profits for fat cat bosses, large dividends for shareholders and enormous price hikes for passengers. Today in Britain some of the highest train fares in Europe co-exist alongside some extremely low rates of electrification and embarrassingly shoddy services. Despite ten years of above-inflation rail price increases, which have left some in the south-east spending 15 per cent of their salary on rail travel (usually, perversely, on trains to get them to and from the place where they earn that salary), the cost of supporting the rail network is much greater today than it was before the dissolution of British Rail. In 2010/11, Network Rail was subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £3.96 billion. This compares with an average of £1.4billion over the 10 years leading up to privatisation. In light of the expected 6 per cent increase in fares, 10 per cent of commuters say they will no longer be able to afford to travel by train when new prices kick in.

Sir Richard Branson is apparently “furious” at what he called the “insane choice” of rival FirstGroup to run the profitable West Coast Main line. FirstGroup bid £5.5bn, more than double Virgin’s existing payments, leading to fears that FirstGroup will cut staff, scrap services and push up fares to meet its obligations when it takes over in December. Squabbling over who the contract was awarded to misses the point, however. And Mr Branson would say that, wouldn’t he? Happy to move Virgin’s brand division to Switzerland to save the company millions in tax revenue, Virgin Rail has in the past depended heavily on state money and been the subject of a large number of passenger complaints.

The rail network epitomises the grotesque idea of private gain and public loss that only a few years ago left taxpayers picking up the bill when the banks crashed. Just as the government could not let banks that were “too big to fail” go under, so it cannot permit the companies that run our trains to fail because the consequences would be too severe. For obvious reasons the rail network cannot be turned off for a few days based on the crackpot idea of letting the market run its course. And so the train companies resemble a compulsive gambler placing bets with somebody else’s money. The result is a grotesque parody where profits go to fat cats while the tab for bad business practice will always be picked up by the taxpayer.

If recent opinion polls are anything to go by, over half the British public would support full nationalisation of the railways. Even Conservative supporters appear to have abandoned at least a small portion of the failed dogma of the 1980s, with a majority saying they would prefer nationalisation to the current shambles. The only thing that appears to be stopping the political class taking action and bringing the railways back under public ownership is blind faith in an ideology which looks increasingly incompatible with a civilised way of life: public bad, private good. Karl Marx once wrote that the tradition of all dead generations “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Whatever you think of the man, it doesn't take a communist to recognise that a capitalist rail network is both tragedy and farce mixed with an unmistakable stench of greed.

Originally published @the Independent
(Picture: the Independent)

The developing world’s latest export: adoptable children

2012-08-14T10:09:00.001+01:00

Many bad things that are done in the world are done by people who are convinced that what they are doing is unquestionably good. In 1992 at an open air mass in Knock, Ireland, Mother Teresa, no doubt under the apprehension that what she was saying was divinely warranted, called for contraceptives to be driven out of the republic. “Let us promise…that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.”

Sticking (slightly at least) with the divine theme, Madonna (not the appellation of Mary the supposed mother of Jesus but the pop singer) made her own, more benign intervention in the African continent a decade later to adopt a one-year-old child. Racial, geographical and financial barriers were seemingly broken down and a child with, let’s be honest, little hope of a decent future was given a chance – a real chance – at a better life. One might even call it an act of internationalism. And if there is anything the world needs more of these days, it is internationalism.

It isn’t only Madonna who appears ready to overlook domestic kids in favour of sprogs from overseas, however. The eight agencies that undertake inter-country adoption in the UK received 895 enquiries in 2010-11, which equates to almost 11 per cent of all enquiries about adoption (domestic and inter-country). According to the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA), it now receives more enquiries through its website relating to inter-country than to domestic adoption. (Interestingly, the number of enquiries it received spiked in 2007 which, coincidentally, was the year Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopted a three-year-old boy from an orphanage in Ho Chi Min City. We are all celebrities now.)

There is something very modern about inter-country adoption. No longer are potential adopters confined to the selection of a child – a baby, very often – from a finite domestic pool, but they can, as in the modern supermarket, sample a blend of exotic variations from far and wide. Money also talks louder on the international stage. Taking a more direct route, the former Dragon’s Den star James Caan, whose estimated wealth is in excess of £100million, offered an impoverished family 100,000 rupees – about £745 – to buy a baby on a trip to Pakistan in 2010, an impulse he later apologised for.

The boom in inter-country adoption has no doubt been encouraged in part by strict rules governing UK adoption: the average time for an adoption to go through is two years and seven months. The rules on inter-country adoption have gotten considerably tighter since the notorious case of the Kilshaws, however, whom the tabloids dubbed “the most hated couple in Britain” after the pair “bought” two American babies over the internet in 2000.

The growing number of inter-country adoptions has unfortunately also brought with it instances of adopters getting “buyers’ remorse” when the fairytale has not been forthcoming. In April 2010, Torry-Ann Hansen of Tennessee sent her seven-year-old adopted son back to Russia together with a note addressed to the Russian authorities saying she no longer wanted him. Citing behavioural problems, she returned the child, together with his one-way Aeroflot ticket, like an unwanted purchase.

Most of those looking to adopt abroad have, I imagine, the same motivation for doing so as those hoping to adopt domestically: a desire to give a child the best possible start in life. And yet the disparities in power and wealth (as with all disparities in power and wealth) inevitably set up a grossly unequal relationship between budding parents in the west and those who “produce” the adoptees of the future in the developing world. Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the US in 2010, second only to China. Adoption is fast becoming Ethiopia’s new export, perhaps soon to overtake coffee. Yet not everybody is happy with the way things are going. “We want people to invest in Ethiopia rather than take our children,” Dr Bulti Gutema, head of the government’s adoption authority, has said. Media investigations have also found evidence to suggest that some adoption agencies have recruited children from intact families.

Without wishing to sound too much like a dyed-in-the-wool nativist, one also need not go all the way to Africa or China to find deprived children. The number of kids in care in the UK has increased by 4,510 – a rise of almost eight per cent – since 2006, when there were 59,890. Yet there were 500 fewer adoptions last year, down from 3,700. Research has shown that children in care are more likely to have no educational qualifications, to become homeless, to commit crime and, in the case of girls, to become teenage mothers. We also know that for every year that a child in care is not adopted, his or her chances of finding parents decreases by 20 per cent. Do not, whatever you do, accept the idea that the “deserving poor” (if you really must use such definitions) exist only overseas.

I have listened to young women in my peer group say on a number of occasions that they have no plans to get pregnant because it will “ruin” their bodies. “Why have a baby yourself, and put yourself through all that, when you can adopt?” as a female friend rhetorically put it to me. As a man I am in no position to judge the pros and cons of pregnancy. How could I possibly make a judgement on that? All the same: how very modern. If the statistics are correct, and if these young women follow through on their plans, there is a good chance one or two of them will look to the developing world for children. Which leads me to a thought I’m not sure that I wanted: would we then, as a society, have arrived at a place where childbirth, like so many other unpleasant things, was being contracted out to the women of the developing world?

Originally published @the Independent (Image: the Independent)

Twitter crime: The state should not have the power to punish people for being offensive

2012-08-01T09:30:00.000+01:00

Several years ago, in a conversation with a fellow student on my university’s online debating forum, I encountered a mentality I have long since grown familiar with. The dialogue had started amiably enough. On the question of whether or not religion was a force for good in the world, I had taken the position that it was not. My opponent posited that it had. Not much of interest so far, you might say. The cordial atmosphere got decidedly chilly, however, as the conversation progressed.

Student: “Those blowing themselves up and committing atrocities are using religion as an excuse for what they are doing.”

Me: “But you can find justification for all sorts of atrocities against non-believers, apostates and others in the Holy texts.”

Student: “How dare you say that! That is deeply offensive. Lots of us have faith and don’t go around doing the things you say that religious people do.”

Me: “No, I wasn’t saying that….”

Student: “I can’t believe you are being so insensitive!”

Soon afterwards the fledgling online forum where the debate had taken place was pulled down and I was dragged before the head of faculty and admonished for my “insensitivity”. Fifteen minutes of our subsequent politics lecture was also given over to a muddled talk on how it wasn’t kosher to “disrespect” the beliefs of other students. At the time something occurred to me that the late Christopher Hitchens had written in a reflection on the student rebellions of 1968. “We didn’t want the dean telling us what we could smoke or who we could sleep with or what we could wear, or anything of this sort,” Hitchens wrote. “Now you go to campus and student activists are continuously demanding more supervision, of themselves and of others, in order to assure proper behaviour and in order to ensure that nobody gets upset.”

This mentality has taken on a life of its own in recent years as it has become increasingly unexceptional to hear of individuals who have been carted off by the police for saying things which have in some way caused “offense”. A recent example was that of Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old university student who sent a flurry of offensive tweets into cyberspace as Fabrice Muamba lay in a critical condition on a football pitch. It started when Stacey posted “LOL, F*** Muamba. He’s dead” on Twitter. After this had earned him the considerable wrath of other Twitter users, who re-tweeted Stacey’s vile message en masse, he lashed out with a volley of guttersnipe racist abuse. Stacey was subsequently given a 56-day jail term. In a separate incident last month another man was arrested for “malicious communication” after allegedly sending Newcastle United defender Danny Simpson abuse via Twitter. And yesterday a teenager from Weymouth was arrested after tweeting Olympic diver Tom Daley saying: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” (Daley’s father passed away last year after a long battle with brain cancer).

A throat-clearing is required to make myself absolutely clear: to defend a person’s right to use vile language is not to defend the sentiment behind the words. Nor is it to defend those instances of sustained abuse that constitute harassment. But as George Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. To point out that the language used by Stacey and others was abhorrent would be an understatement. It would also be to miss the point, for once you start to argue over which words a person should or should not go to jail for using you may as well be quibbling over whether or not a sick man should be turned over in bed.

One of the arguments put forward by those who believe in prohibitive speech laws is that while it might be ok to criticise ideologies and religions, insulting things which are innate, such as a person’s race, sexuality or gender, must be strictly off limits. At first this sounds entirely reasonable. You cannot help the way you were born and therefore you should not have to put up with abuse for it. And yet if you believe the law should get involved at this point you must set down some definitions of those characteristics which are “innate” and therefore off limits. Doing so in many cases is almost impossible.

Take sexism for example. Certain things are quite obviously sexist and accepted as such. Informing a woman that she deserves to be treated differently for no other reason than her gender is sexist. Most people would agree on that. Things get trickier, however, as you reach more contentious ground. What about the person who claims that some of the behavioural differences between men and women may be hard-wired biologically as opposed to being the result of differences in how male and female children are socialised? Would such a person be considered beyond the pale? Would it be acceptable to drag them through the courts on charges related to hate speech? After all, I’m quite sure a statement like this would upset someone. Alternatively we might settle on a definition of hate speech that includes only racial insults. But by what objective standard are insults based on a person’s skin colour more hurtful than abuse suffered because of a disability, or because a person is overweight? And how do you quantify hurt feelings without making them the exclusive preserve of a few arbitrarily selected groups?

This is in no way an attempt to play down the suffering of those on the receiving end of abuse, online or otherwise. Nor is it to make excuses for those who use the anonymity of the internet to blight the lives of others. But racism and prejudice are combated most effectively when the public reaction to those airing vile views is punishment in and of itself. The disgust shown by a large number of Twitter users to the comments of Liam Stacey demonstrates that as a society we are getting to that point, slowly but surely, without needing to hand the power to sanction people with unpalatable (and even repulsive) opinions to the state. After all, what makes us think it will be easy to take those powers back?

Originally published @the Independent. (Image: the Independent)

Dennis Skinner MP: Incorruptible and Unapologetic

2012-07-30T22:16:00.000+01:00

Dennis Skinner, the veteran 79-year-old backbench Labour MP, was in trademark form as he was overheard talking about plans to publish members' expenses online. "I'm not going to be putting my expenses on the internet," he complained emphatically to friends. "I wouldn't know how. I've never sent an email and don't intend to start now."

A member of parliament since 1970, the so-called "Beast of Bolsover" is one of a dying breed of working-class MPs. Born in 1932 to a Derbyshire mining family, Skinner was the third of nine children and an exceptionally bright youngster. Passing the 11-plus at nine-and-a-half, he went to grammar school aged 10 before turning down the chance of a university education to work down the pit - first at the Parkhouse colliery near Clay Cross then at Glapwell colliery near Chesterfield.

Dennis Skinner's upbringing is the stuff of a Ken Loach novel: a childhood spent playing on the coal heaps of Derbyshire while at home his trade-unionist father Edward versed him in the politics of the class struggle. Skinner senior, a miner, was sacked during the strike of 1926 before being re-employed in the late Thirties when war was in the offing. He was sacked again in the Fifties when, as the miners' delegate, he told the manager "a few things" the workers felt about his stewardship of the pit. He was issued an ultimatum to apologise or face the sack. "Apologise?" Edward Skinner replied, "It would be like putting me head in t'oven."

Not long afterwards Dennis was elected miners' delegate in place of his father. In 1964, aged 33, he became the youngest ever president of Derbyshire National Union of Miners. Had things turned out differently it could have been Skinner, rather than Author Scargill, who led the miners' strike against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Instead, in 1969 the miners decided they wanted Skinner as Labour Party candidate for the rock solid seat of Bolsover. "I never put my name forward," Skinner says, making it clear it was them who made the decision and not him. On being elected to parliament in 1970, however, Skinner continued turning up every morning to work at the pit. "I didn't know when Parliament started to pay my wages," he was later reported as saying.

One of Dennis Skinner's defining characteristics is his abrasive manner with those on the opposite side of the House. Never one to pull punches, he has a reputation among some MPs as a showman or "a knockabout turn," as one Labour MP disparagingly put it. He has also been known to overstep the mark at times with his jibes - resulting in several expulsions from the House; in 2005 he was asked to leave the chamber after accusing George Osborne of doing cocaine.

Many MPs like to drink and socialise together in the House of Commons bar after debates. Skinner has little time for such niceties with the Tories and their "pathetic liberal" allies. He makes the irrefutable point that if a miner can't drink and work, nor should an MP. Skinner himself has an assiduous attendance record in the House of Commons. The only time he has failed to attend in all his years as an MP was when he was in hospital having triple heart bypass surgery in 2003.

Regularly referred to as "incorruptible", Skinner was accused by the Sunday Telegraph in 2009 of making false expenses claims. Recalling how he got a call from the Telegraph's office asking probing questions, he explained. "I told them I had the lowest expenses in the House and the best voting record, but they wanted to know about £3,500 for alterations to my bathroom and kitchen and £800 for a sofa bed." Dennis was cleared of any wrong doing after it emerged that alterations to his flat had been carried out on doctor's orders after his heart bypass. "I've bought my flat myself and never charged a penny of it to the taxpayers," he said. "I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford."

Still a crowd puller, like Tony Benn before him Dennis Skinner is one of the few MPs people will still bother turning out to see. The problem is that like Benn he also risks becoming something of a national treasure - and being liked was never something his politics were about. Unapologetic about his treatment of Tories in the Commons, he once told a reporter to "forget it" when asked if he would ever change his abrasive ways. "There are only so many things you can do in life," he said. "And if you think I'm going to spend my waking hours thinking about some decency in some Tory or other, you can forget it."

Visiting a corner shop in a quiet suburb of Bolsover about six months ago, I asked some local workmen on their lunch break what they thought of the veteran MP. "I disagree with Skinner on virtually everything under the sun," said one of the men. "But politics is a better place with people like him involved". The shop's owner also piped in. "He's very popular in Bolsover. I've lived here for 20-odd years and he will only stop being MP for the area when he steps down or dies," he said. "There is absolutely no chance of him ever losing an election."

When he does eventually leave the House of Commons the entire chamber will be worse off without this worker's son made good - perched in his trademark tweed jacket on the front corner of the Labour benches, belligerently arguing a point when others have long given up the ghost. In an age when the integrity of MPs is repeatedly called into question, even those who loathe the politics of Dennis Skinner will admit, grudgingly of course, that he possesses the stuff in droves.