Obliged to Offend

When did universities become such hotbeds of conservatism?

2012-02-11T20:01:00.026Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did the student Left become so conservative?

Football’s haters just don’t get it

2012-02-07T23:00:00.010Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuba: dispelling the myths

2012-02-05T20:50:00.004Z

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

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

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

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

All welcome. Plenty of time for debate and discussion.

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

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

2012-01-29T12:56:00.006Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-01-22T12:36:00.012Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moralising, filthy rich hypocrite

2012-01-14T16:07:00.008Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-01-09T15:06:00.010Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obliged to Offend top posts of 2011

2011-12-31T18:28:00.049Z

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

Keeping your head above water in London

Diary of an unemployed person

Westfield’s brave new world of stuff

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

Cuba: Change where nothing ever changes

Christopher Hitchens is no George Orwell

Libya and the peace movement

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

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

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

Some basic demands the left must start to make

2011-12-28T13:12:00.022Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A word of thanks to the BBC at a difficult time

2011-12-27T15:48:00.016Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-12-26T18:20:00.017Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-12-19T11:00:00.010Z

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught red-handed in the act of plundering his fellow countrymen, Milo enjoys evoking “the historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When the price of food in the army mess hall climbs so high due to Milo’s profiteering that enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative; and since he despises coercion and is a champion of the free-market, the alternative is the freedom of the enlisted men to starve.

Britain today is increasingly dominated by Milo Minderbinders. Rather than enjoying the flowering of freedom we were told the market would inevitably bring with it, people’s lives are more than ever dictated by forces completely outside of their control. Trapped in an endless cycle of longer working hours and greater debt; and with a political class demanding that services are mercilessly rolled back to pay for a crisis of the banks, ordinary people find themselves in a situation not unlike that prevailing in Catch 22 – that is, one in which a powerful establishment has the right to “do anything we can't stop them from doing".

I am not, as it happens, talking about the political establishment here. While the formal trappings of democracy continue to function and reassure, it is becoming increasingly clear that the political class is beholden to a much greater power than that of the ballot box alone. And yet, while there may at times be a quiet acknowledgment of this dynamic in public, we are still at a stage where the subject is hastily changed when the full consequences of the discovery are grasped. The idea that life has been sucked out of democracy by the very philosophy that was supposed to engender it is still unpalatable to a large proportion of people. To put it bluntly, during the last 30 years or so politics has been gradually reduced to a question of what is or is not acceptable to “the markets”; and to get a clearer picture of what this means, it is perhaps best to substitute mention of “the markets” for the words “the bankers”.

Of late, the growth in the unaccountable power of bankers has led increasingly to political absurdities that few people are yet ready to recognise as absurd. Only last week the Prime Minister returned from Europe to be feted for standing up for democratic accountability by the very people who most strongly believe in the unaccountable rule of bankers. Perversely, the treaty Cameron was berated so thoroughly by the Labour Party and the Lib Dems for rejecting was itself a project designed to impose continent-wide Friedmanite economics by force of state decree. What Cameron vetoed was, in other words, a treaty designed almost wholly to placate Europe’s Milo Minderbinders.

A common rebuttal used against people of the left in the past was that there was “no alternative” to the rampant free-market. This glib remark was usually framed in terms of there being no practical economic system that could equal capitalism in terms of maintaining both prosperity and freedom without explicitly compromising either. And undeniably the words did have a certain power until recently - things did not look particularly good for the left during the 1990s, however pleased many of were to see the back of the Eastern Bloc.

The autopilot no alternative response is still tossed around in the face of protest and dissent today, despite the almighty crash the “only practical” system produced in 2008. What has changed, however, is the meaning behind the words. Today when a person evokes the clause what they are actually implying is that should government implement policy change that strays too far from the interests of one group in particular all economic hell will be unleashed. In other words, there is no alternative today because no alternative will be permitted.

In Catch 22, whenever objections are raised to a state of affairs that results in ever greater hardship for the majority but increased profits for himself, Milo parrots the dictat that what is good for the company is good for all. When this leads to his own squadron being bombed and left without food, his solution is to call for an even greater marketisation of the army. “Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry,” he says.

Sound familiar?

While Catch 22 may be just a novel, and Milo Minderbinder a character dreamt up in the imagination of Joseph Heller, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation we find ourselves in today. In our own case, until we at least acknowledge where real power lies in our democracy there is no way the rule of the bankers can be repealed, undone, denounced or overthrown.

So long, Hitch

2011-12-16T15:42:00.055Z

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

I have no desire at present to write a long, drawn-out essay about Christopher Hitchens. There will appear plenty of those in the coming days - from the tedious and the jealous to the slavishly uncritical.

What Hitchens represented to me was a political journey many have made during the last 40 years - the accounting for which will not occur in a flurry of hastily written obituaries.

What I will say about Hitchens, though, is that more than anyone else it was he who inspired me as I was growing up to read, to write and to despise the totalitarian mindset.

Even when I disagreed with him, I always, always thoroughly enjoyed him.

That is why, while not writing about him, yet, I will do something else I hope he would have appreciated. I will raise a glass of Johnny Walker Black to him over the weekend and say, with a heavy heart, so long, Hitch, and thank you.

Underneath Clarkson’s bluster is a frightened little boy

2011-12-01T18:00:00.053Z

Yesterday was not the first time Jeremy Clarkson has chosen to air his unique brand of politically incorrect views in public. It almost certainly won’t be the last.

Despite the anger from well-meaning types over his latest outburst, Clarkson’s fan base will undoubtedly have found it hilarious. His trademark has long been the rejection of thought and sensitivity in favour of boorishness, and his brand, if you wish to call it that, already taps into a ready market of men (and it is mostly men) who feel the same way about the world as he does.

In other words, nothing Clarkson said on Wednesday's episode of The One Show will be too far outside anything fans of the presenter aren't already familiar with.

Personally, I’ve always found Clarkson’s rants about ‘political correctness gone mad’ to resemble a grown man tipping his food off the plate because Mummy won’t give him his favourite toy. But then, I quite like political correctness; and women, the disabled and people born in different countries don’t generally upset me or send me into a rage. Nor am I bragging when I say that I don’t feel any particular need to have a phallic symbol in my driveway.

In this respect, railing against Clarkson the individual is almost certainly pointless. Clarkson and his followers represent a more universal frustration – that of the 21st century failed adult male: uncouth, bitter and festooned with the outdated trappings of machismo.

Behind all the boorishness, if you look closely, you can at times glimpse in Clarkson and his disciples something which is actually quite interesting: a deep sense of fear and insecurity in the face of the modern world.

Understanding this is worth more than any amount of 'outrage'.

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

2011-11-28T21:27:00.008Z

Julian Petley, co-author of the book Culture Wars, once observed that the British press had ‘perfected a way of representing the ideas and personalities associated with socialism as so deranged and psychotic that they presented a danger to society.’

It’s no secret that New Labour was evolved in part to counteract Labour’s image problems in the 1980s. The order of the day became finding the centre ground and sticking to it, rather than attempting to operate outside it and running the risk of remaining ‘unelectable’.

While many of us on the left did not necessarily agree with the political trajectory taken during the New Labour years, we understood that there was no inherent shame in trying to look like a credible party of government. The political landscape in the ‘80s and ‘90s was undeniably bleak for socialists, and reflected something the outgoing Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan had said several years earlier: ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.’

As if by prophesy, 30 years later we are again at a moment of profound political change. The certainties that have shaped political discourse for so very long are again being challenged, if not by the political class then by workers and students right across Europe and beyond. Questions many of us have long been asking about our economic system are today routinely being raised by those with little history of political struggle – people whose sense of injustice has developed as they’ve seen living standards fall and prospects for the future become increasingly bleak.

The right’s response to the crisis has thus far been defined by a willingness to take the easy way out at every juncture. In place of solutions they’ve clung to ideology. Instead of compassion they’ve hacked away at living standards. Their plan for the long-term consists only of a global race to the bottom. In summing up, their response has been to dig in and entrench themselves further in the failed orthodoxy of laissez-faire capitalism.

Through it all, much of the media has portrayed murmurings of dissent not simply as illegitimate but as disorderly and threatening. They have casually dismissed the Occupy movements and thrown handfuls of mud at any figure who has evoked the most basic right every working person must have – the right to withdraw one’s labour – and, as if looking admiringly at the authoritarian capitalism of the east, called enthusiastically for further restrictions on this right at every given opportunity.

Yet, in the face of this torrent of hostility the public mood toward the economic policies of the right has hardened. The latest opinion poll published by the BBC finds 61% believe Wednesday’s public sector strike is justified, a total that includes almost four in five 18 to 24 year olds. This is on the back of a YouGov poll from a few weeks back which found that 44 per cent of Londoners supported the aims of the Occupy LSX group, with 30 per cent opposed and 25 per cent answering ‘not sure’.

Rightly or wrongly, many inside the Labour Party routinely go along with the evocation of right-wing policies when doing so brings electoral gain. As someone on the left of the party, I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that my ideas would make the party ‘unelectable’ if adopted - as if the sole purpose of politics was the abandonment of all principles in exchange for political office.

I have previously accepted, however, that at times they might have had a point: the outlook for the left was, for many years and for a number of reasons, downright depressing. Resentfully, I bunkered down and grudgingly towed the line.

Today however, things are different. If nothing else, the above-mentioned figures should make it clear that it will not be crass characterisations of the ‘looney left’ that will eat into Labour’s support at the next election, but an unwillingness to properly stand up for the rights of working people in the face of this unprecedented onslaught of austerity.

The Conservative Party rarely needs reminding that it is the party of capital; yet far too often the Labour Party seems intent on forgetting that it is the party of labour.

There has indeed been a sea change in politics. This time, however, the boot is on the other foot: it is most certainly not the left that is acting as a drag on Labour’s electoral chances.

What would British fascism look like?

2011-11-26T16:23:00.072Z

It’s been reported that the English Defence League are planning on running in the upcoming local elections, after EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka ‘Tommy Robinson’, signed a pact with the British Freedom Party to field candidates.

Presumably an alliance would capitalise on the EDL’s street-level popularity while using the British Freedom Party’s political apparatus - the BFP contains several who've previously fought elections on behalf of other parties, including its leader, Paul Weston.

Potential sectarian squabbling aside, it sounds like a fairly shrewd move on the part of both groups. Back in February, a Searchlight poll showed a potentially high level of support for the far-Right – if, and it’s obviously a big if, they gave up violence.

Straying into the realms of speculation a bit, what might a far-Right Government do in its first year of power?

Isolationism

Recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are often simplified into a Left/Right question – if you’re Left-wing you were against them, if you’re Right-wing you supported them. This is crude and misleading. In the tradition of isolationism, the British far-Right is concerned with foreigners only when they directly threaten British national interests. This includes foreigners dying at the hands of barbaric regimes.

The far-Right believes barbarism to be a product of uncivilised peoples or cultures that cannot exist in this country unless imported from outside. A far-Right Government would see its role only as the protector of the British people from this threat.

The first year in power would most likely see a withdrawal from NATO, an exit from the European Union and an end to all overseas aid spending. Foreign massacres would be dismissed as 'savagery'. Military spending, however, would be doubled.

Which leads me neatly on to…

The worship of monarchy and the armed forces

One of the problems a Government of this sort would inevitably face is that although the British people like pomp and ceremony, they don’t go in much for compulsory pomp and ceremony. People of the Left recoil at widespread enthusiasm for the Royal Family, while forgetting that a good deal of it is based on little more than a detestation of the political class. The Royals are quite obviously establishment figures – they are the establishment – but when set against politicians there is a widespread belief that they are somehow less a part of the ruling class than Parliament is. Such a dynamic only works, however, as long as the monarchy is not viewed as a part of the Government.

With regard to the military, huge hostility would be whipped-up, with the aid of the media, toward any figure who dared criticise military spending or the increasing deployment of troops to quell protest and industrial disputes at home. Such people would be branded ‘unpatriotic’, and regularly denounced as Communists.

Several military figures would probably enter the Cabinet within the first year of Government.

St George’s day would be declared a public holiday and talk of foreign casualties in the recent Afghan and Iraq wars banned on the basis of 'offending non-Muslims'.

The economy

Initial nationalisations see elements of the far-Left align themselves with the new Government in the manner of previous alliances with ‘anti-imperialist’ movements abroad. A former member of the Respect party is perhaps the most prominent Left-spokesperson for the new regime, playing up the Government’s anti-American credentials while ignoring Government suppression of minority rights.

During unrest the army is drafted in. This is incredibly popular until the children of the middle classes start protesting about the decline in living standards due to UN sanctions imposed on Britain for its treatment of religious minorities. Great fanfare is then made in the press about the ‘great British tradition of protest’.

The minimum wage is abolished along with the right to strike. State intervention in the economy increases albeit unaccompanied by any understanding, let alone indictment, of capitalism as a system.

The living standard of workers falls while foreign investment is scared away.

Immigration

All immigration from ‘culturally foreign’ countries is brought to an end. Large numbers of people leave the country, including thousands of white Britains with non-white spouses. Discrimination against non-whites is not enshrined in law but institutional racism is ignored; racial theorists are regularly given a voice in the media and an atmosphere of general hostility is whipped-up toward non-whites, Muslims in particular.

A distinction is created in the press between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minorities on an arbitrary basis; wealthy non-white businessmen line-up alongside the Government to denounce recent immigrants, who they describe as feckless and lazy.

Failed asylum seekers are deported back to their country of origin on the guarantee they will be tortured on their return.

The Government imposes quotas for white players on English Premier League football teams.

Culture

The BBC is told to impose a strict limit on the number of non-whites in its soap operas. LGBT characters are categorically banned. There is a new trend toward jingoist documentary making and revisionism about the British Empire. Most BBC programming harks back to a world that no longer exists and probably never did. The most popular TV entertainment show is Top Gear.

Widespread rioting and looting of Muslim areas breaks out when England are knocked out of the football World Cup by Iran. The Government, backed by a formerly prominent member of Ukip, labels all Arabs ‘cheats,’ not realising Iran is not in fact an Arab country.

An attempt to severely limit abortion causes a split in the Cabinet as some members see it as an effective way of controlling the poor. Homosexuality is outlawed and an attempt is made to spread so-called ‘Christian values’.

Pornography is banned but a roaring underground trade is done in sadomasochistic productions.

In London, Saturday mornings see uniformed Right-wing militias parading in Hyde Park. The militias are regularly purged due to widespread homosexual activity.

Animal rights charities report an increase in donations and the most recent census indicates a rise in the number of vegetarians.

Westfield's Brave New World of...Stuff

2011-11-25T00:06:00.033Z

Visiting Stratford’s new Westfield shopping centre on a crisp November morning, I feel, as a person, incredibly small. While an escalator transports around a dozen of us up into the glass edifice that houses the main shopping precinct, we’re dwarfed by rows of marble, artificial plants, and as we travel further up, what looks like a never-ending boulevard lined with shiny stores and mirrors.

East London’s recently-opened Westfield is vast. If Stalin had abandoned communism and become a retail magnate, this is what I imagine it would've looked like. In case I forget to mention it later on, this place also houses Britain’s largest casino.

As I make my way inside I can’t say I’m not glad to be out of the cold, which already puts Westfield in a favourable light when compared to Britain’s usual high street fare – not having to battle the elements on a cold winter morning is a bonus, for a start. What surprises me the most about Westfield, however, is the sheer number of shoppers who’ve turned out this early on a Sunday morning, many of whom are already clutching large drawstring bags containing items that will inevitably be out of fashion long before the country emerges from the current economic downturn – and there was me thinking we were all supposed to be skint.

Teenagers of course love shopping centres; or at least hanging out in them eating fast food and flirting with other teenagers. North American films such as Mall Rats depicted what adolescents did when governments sold off almost all public space to corporations. We sneered at American consumerism back then; now we’ve raised our own generation of pushy little shoppers, with nothing to do but hang around these vast cathedrals of consumption looking forward to the day when they can work the longest hours in Europe (if they’re lucky) in order to max out their own credit cards on…stuff.

Westfield shopping centre, like lots of private spaces, has an effectively functioning hierarchy. Around every corner are security guards who have no qualms about ejecting those who don't fit in – or who act as a reminder that not everything can be tossed onto the scrapheap like an out of season Gucci handbag. A consumer society is inevitably a society of excess; but it’s also a society that is, as the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman puts it, ‘one of redundancy and prodigal waste’.

Security at Westfield is quickly onto the homeless, the disorderly and the simply badly behaved, efficiently dispatching capitalism’s human debris out the doors and back onto the streets from whence it came – and more importantly, as far away as possible from those with the spending power in this whole set up.

A couple of hundred yards down the road, away from conspicuous capitalism and its privately employed heavies, one finds a quite different East End. Westfield sits in the borough of Newham, one of the most economically deprived areas in the whole of London. During the next four years, Newham local authority will see its funding from central Government cut by around £75 million. As the Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson opened Westfield back in September (with the usual bumbling get-up), libraries, swimming pools and public parks in Newham were being boarded-up or earmarked for closure. Neither the influx of poorly paid, non-unionised jobs that Westfield has brought with it, nor the increasing numbers visiting the area look likely to offset the inevitable social fallout from the huge budget cut the area is facing. There is even a suspicion that the vast wealth on display in Westfield may in fact make things worse, putting pressure on families who are already struggling to spend money on things they don’t really need.

However much I am loathe to admit it, I'm also influenced by the fashion conscious era I’ve been born into, where individual identity is intrinsically bound up with the idea of consumption. Shopping can, at times, make a person happy; it’s just that the happiness it produces never seems to last very long. The initial buzz of enjoying a new product or wearing a new item of clothing quickly wears off once the prospect of getting your hands on something newer, more glamorous, more in season appears on the horizon. It’s all a bit like eating a packet of sweets – nice, but when the sugar rush is gone you need to go back out and find some real food; failing that it’s candies ad infinitum.

The thing about Westfield - and perhaps even 21st century Britain - is the sheer level of encouragement not to worry about genuine fulfilment, to look only to commodities for satisfaction. Gratification and instant prosperity are there to be grasped at will, without thinking about the debt you may be piling up, the people who produce the goods, or the fact that increasingly the only consolation to working life seems to be endless shopping.

I remember when I first watched the film Fight Club I was young and didn’t really get it. When I watched it again a few years later, there was something Tyler Durden (the main character) said that struck a chord: ‘Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place’.

Walking around Westfield with all the other shoppers, I wondered how many of them had ever seen Fight Club – or perhaps read the book. I wanted to walk up to them and scream that, if they were not careful, the things they own would one day end up owning them. I didn’t do that, of course. Instead I walked towards the exit. Not, though, before I’d visited another shop and bought myself a new scarf. I already have two; another probably won’t hurt though.

Social class, more than generation, dictates work prospects

2011-11-15T21:19:00.017Z

It is very much in vogue at present when talking about young people to refer to them in the context of a generational stitch-up. The post-war generations - or more specifically the ‘baby boomers’ - are said to have left the rest of us high and dry, with little in the way of job prospects and less in the way of savings and assets to our names.

For lots of young people the future indeed looks decidedly bleak. There is a good chance that during the lifetimes of today’s newborns even the prospect of retirement before arthritis and incontinence set in will be considered a hopelessly utopian throwback – as out of place as cassette tapes and VHS are to today’s twenty-somethings.

All of this too comes before we even consider young people’s future access to that which their parent’s generation took for granted – education, healthcare and the prospect of stable, paid employment – making uncertainty about the future something that occupies the thoughts of many of today's youngsters.

Not all of today’s youth are faring so badly, however. The increasing unwillingness of companies to take on paid staff has seen dwindling employment opportunities for most coincide with a boom in the fortunes of the small proportion of people willing and able to live without a wage.

Despite the classless rhetoric espoused by politicians of all stripes during the last 30 years or so, it is not only in 19th century novels where one will today find privileged aristokids elbowing aside their lean-walleted peers in pursuit of desirable careers – and doing so very successfully. Newsrooms, PR departments and parliamentary offices up and down the country are increasingly dominated by horsey tones and chinless nepotism, as breeding and bank balance snare positions that were at one time dished out, at least a fraction of the time, on the basis of merit and hard work rather than the lottery of birth alone.

While the idea of post-1945 Britain as a social democratic paradise may be wide of the mark, there undoubtedly existed for a time a degree of social mobility which saw many from modest means going on to work in the professions and, shock horror, producing a standard of work comparable with that of their peers from the shires.

30 years of Thatcherism and three years of post-crisis recession have gone some way to obliterating these modest gains, and many professions are again reverting back to the mirror in which the aristocratic elite gazes at its own naval.

As a society we love to lecture those at the bottom about hard graft and sacrifice. It is the upper classes, however, who understand very well that the really top jobs have little to do with either, hence why they continue to spend such vast sums of money bypassing any pretence of meritocracy when it comes to snapping up the best positions.

Today’s youngsters may as a whole be worse off than their parents, but if you’re a working class youngster you’ve probably more in common with the downtrodden characters of Charles Dickens than you do with certain members of your generational peer group.

Portrait of a Cuban Dissident

2011-11-10T14:56:00.020Z

Inside the Revolution everything; outside the Revolution nothing.
- Fidel Castro

WHILE THE NOISIEST opponents of Communism (and those who were almost always given megaphones by the Western media) have tended to come from the political right, the dissidents feared most on the inside by totalitarian regimes were often decidedly to the left, and included many who had fallen foul of the very revolutions they had helped to create.

The list of revolutionaries in this mould reads something like a footnote to the literary left of the 20th century, drawing in figures such as Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky - all of whom fought to build a new society only to be devoured by its bureaucratic machine.

Many who suffered such twists of fate abandoned Socialism altogether. Those who remained ‘believers’ were, for much of their lives, condemned to a political no-mans-land: out of favour at home yet suspected in the eyes of Washington, which at the time was contracting-out its own brand of thuggery in the form of various third world tin-pot Generals and autocrats.

In Cuba the Revolution came to power when young, idealistic guerrillas threw out one of America’s Yes men, the gangsterish Fulgencia Batista, against a backdrop of revolutionary and nationalist fervour.

The first years of the Revolution in power were a turbulent yet stirring affair. ‘Night falls as we, the Barbudos (bearded ones), come down from the mountains looking like the saints of old,’ wrote the former guerrilla fighter Carlos Franqui in his reminiscences. ‘People rush out to meet us. They are wild; they touch us, kiss our filthy beards’.

The allure for many intellectuals at the time was obvious: this time around, the revolution really looked like it might be different.

In the aftermath of the victory in Havana, the British journalist Edwin Tetlow reported that Castro’s soldiers were ‘one of the best behaved armies you could imagine… To a man they behaved impeccably’.

In his left-wing youth, the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens was one of those who travelled to the Caribbean to test the claims of the Cuban leadership that it was forging a new road to socialism; and in his memoir, Hitch 22, Hitchens wrote that the appeal of Cuba at the time lay in its freshness when contrasted with the decaying bureaucracy in Moscow:

‘It was an opportunity to see whether Cuba’s claim to be an alternative “model” to Soviet state-socialism possessed any staying-power. It’s difficult to remember today, when Havana itself is run by a wrinkled oligarchy of old Communist gargoyles, but in the 1960s there was a dramatic contrast between the waxworks in the Kremlin and the young, informal, spontaneous, and even somewhat sexy leadership in Havana’.

In the early days, developments in Cuba when set-against the festering dictatorships plaguing much of the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean were impressive. The new Government in Havana had implemented an impressive literacy campaign and was well on the way to ensuring that no Cuban with any illness had any longer to live in fear. There was a real enthusiasm for the new Government amongst the Cuban people, and Castro himself was incredibly popular.

There were others, of course, who saw Cuban self-determination as a boil which needed to be lacerated, before its infection spread throughout America’s ‘backyard’. Within a year of the triumph of the Revolution, the Eisenhower administration was giving serious thought to physically eliminating Castro. Economic measures were also discussed, as the US came to the realisation that Castro was unlike previous, compliant Cuban leaders .

There was, however, another dynamic at work. Since the early days of the Revolution the Stalinist Popular Socialist Party (PSP) had been manoeuvring behind the scenes - to the point where it was now in a position to achieve much of its political agenda on the back of Castro’s revolution. With the break in relations with the United States and the entrance onto the scene of the Soviet Union as the only possible benefactor for the struggling Cuban economy, the Communist position was secured, and the cadres dutifully set about constructing a system based upon that existing at the time in much of Eastern Europe.

In an attempt to bring the cultural realm under their control, the Communists set their sights on Cuba’s intellectuals. After an initial period of good relations with the Government, artists, independent journalists and writers were increasingly frozen out, with the Government declaring in 1971 that such writers would no longer have ‘anything to do in Cuba’. Many of those who had initially embraced the revolution now began to live in fear.

One of those was Carlos Franqui, a Cuban journalist, writer and friend of Fidel Castro who fought against Fulgencia Batista in the 26 July Movement. Born in 1921 into a poor rural family, Franqui was a Communist in his youth but moved away from the Cuban Communist party in 1946 (ironically perhaps, considering his future travails), because in his view it had ‘deviated from the socialist line’.

Several years later, Franqui entered the Sierra Maestra to join up with Castro’s Guerrilla forces, putting his journalistic talents to good use producing propaganda for the rebels and setting up a guerrilla radio station, Radio Rebelde.

It was not long after the triumph of the Revolution, however, that Franqui began to attract the displeasure of the hardliners in Havana, who targeted Franqui’s newspaper Revolucion and accused it of publishing ‘deviant’ forms of art and literature. The paper's cultural supplement, Lunes de Revolución, then edited by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, another writer who went into exile in the mid-1960s, came in for severe criticism and was eventually repressed.

After moving abroad in 1963 as a cultural envoy for the Revolution, Franqui broke definitively with Cuba in 1968 as Castro moved decisively into the Soviet embrace. This was the year that the Cuban leader went on television and made a lengthy speech in defence of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; Che Guevara had been killed in a Bolivian jungle the year before, and the Revolution had added its own measure of folly by outlawing all private enterprise.

Franqui’s final act in Cuba was in 1967, when he held the Salon de Mai exhibition of surrealist art (the very opposite of orthodox Soviet realism) in Havana. This was a triumph of sorts for Franqui who, years later in exile, said that he had wanted to create a ‘cultural revolution, not a bureaucratic one’. ‘Culture is liberty and the Revolution is the negation of liberty’, Franqui was reported as saying in a 2006 interview with Mexican magazine Letras Libres.

After Franqui had left, the Cuban government branded him a traitor and, predictably, an ‘agent of the CIA’, and began erasing his image from the country's revolutionary history. The jacket of Franqui’s subsequent memoir, A Family Portrait with Fidel, featured one of the doctored images, of which Franqui, with his legendary self-effacing humour, wrote:

I discover my photographic death.
Do I exist?
I am a little black,
I am a little white,
I am a little shit,
On Fidel's vest.

Nearing the tail-end of his trip to Cuba in 1967, Christopher Hitchens was attending an audience with Cuban director Santiago Alvarez when, upon being told by Alvarez that artistic and intellectual liberty was untrammelled in Cuba, Hitchens asked whether there were any exceptions to this. Laughing at the naivety of the question, Alvarez said that it would not be possible or advisable to attempt any attacks or satires on the leader of the Revolution himself. But otherwise, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute.

Not satisfied with this response, Hitchens continued to press Alvarez: ‘I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail’. The hostile response of the Cubans, however, put a dampener on any previous camaraderie. ‘I don’t think I have ever been so richly rewarded for saying the self-evident… When I pretended to ask what was up, one of my Scottish comrades informed me: “The Cuban brothers thought what you said and did was so obviously counter-revolutionary…”. ‘You do not forget… the first time that you are with unsmiling seriousness called a “counter-revolutionary” to your face’.

Today, Fidel Castro is a much more reclusive figure; yet rarely will you find a Cuban foolhardy enough to give air to their grievances with El Máximo Líder publically, let alone in unfamiliar company. Almost 45 years after Carlos Franqui left for Europe, it is still, as Guillermo Cabrera Infante once said, not only Big Brother who is watching you in Cuba, but his little brother, Raul Castro, too.

2011-11-07T21:37:00.007Z

http://www.charliehebdo.fr/

While women’s rights have a long way to go in the west, please, don’t let’s be silly

2011-11-03T15:17:00.030Z

I recently noticed a cartoon on Facebook which could be said to represent the relativist view of women’s rights. While the cartoon is quite possibly a joke, the implied message in it is unambiguous. The picture, which I have included above, draws a false equivalence between an item of clothing that women wear freely with one that is in many instances forced upon the wearer by men.

To point this out to most people would be uncontroversial. No woman has yet been beaten up, imprisoned or raped for not wearing a bikini to the beach. A woman walking around in a niqab in the UK may regrettably be subjected at times to verbal abuse, but a woman dressed in revealing clothing runs a far greater risk of harassment, unwanted sexual advances and assaults due to the same attitudes that in other circumstances seek to shroud female flesh in niqabs and burkas - that is, a desire to assert control over female sexuality or repress it. Both women in the cartoon are more likely to suffer violence when they wear less, rather than when they cover up.

Hatred towards female sexuality is often directed at beautiful women precisely because they have the confidence to dress in a way that unapologetically expresses their sexuality. As one Iranian protester put it in the aftermath of the killing by state security of Neda Agha-Soltan in 2009, 'they always go for the beautiful ones first'.

Such jealous hatreds can also, at times, be directed at men. Anyone who has ever attended a football match will have witnessed the overweight, balding middle-aged men hysterically shrieking 'poofta' at virile young athletes in their prime. Again, the Ronaldos, Beckhams and Torres’s of the game almost always come in for the very worst of it.

What the cartoon demonstrates is that underneath a certain kind of supposedly emancipatory equivalence lies more sordid motivations. If the message in the above cartoon were really about the objectification of women, there would be little need to use a picture of an attractive, confident woman in a bikini. Why not instead use a picture of a woman suffering from an eating disorder? There must be a suspicion that the idea of an attractive woman being secretly repressed because of her beauty is vaguely gratifying for those who consider looks to be insufficiently egalitarian. Women only dress in such and such a manner, so it goes, to impress men, because beauty itself, or our concept of it, is a social construct enforced on women by men.

Now while I am not suggesting that the objectification of women does not occur – it does, and is in large part dictated by what men consume – the underlying assumption here is that women couldn't possibly be the sex hungry mammals us men are, as eager to lure a potential mate into the bedroom as the other half of humanity and very often enjoying the validation they get from men finding them attractive. The ‘progressive’ attitude in such matters views women as blithely floating through life being told what to say, do and wear by us men. This is, as always, down to the notion of ‘false consciousness’, which dictates that only a few are really enlightened enough to see what’s really going on.

Objectification of women (and increasingly men) in the west is real. However the problem is not one of women dressing ‘provocatively’ (to use a disturbing word with disturbing connotations), or that women are ‘dressing to impress men’ (we all try to impress the opposite sex, we simply have different ways of going about it). The problem arises when such objectification leads to a view of women which says that all that matters is her looks, rather than her intelligence, integrity and humanity.

Female sexuality can at times be subversive and powerful. It is for this reason that many men feel threatened by the presence of a woman expressing it. They feel that she has the greater degree of sexual choice and power so they try to control or dominate her. This is not, as some believe, confined strictly to the remnants of old-fashioned male sexism or the devout followers of monotheistic religion. Beauty and sexuality are a threat to orthodoxies of all stripes because they are an expression of our animalistic ancestry which cannot be levelled out or extinguished by force. Political creeds, however emancipatory their rhetoric, are also very often rationalisations of emotional problems.

Homelessness is never fun

2011-10-27T18:33:00.048+01:00

Centrepoint, a charity set up to help young homeless people, undoubtedly does good work. By providing temporary accommodation and food to those who sleep rough, the charity gives a lifeline that might otherwise be unavailable to Britain’s many rough sleepers.

Understanding exactly how many people sleep rough in Britain is notoriously difficult, since most homeless people fall outside any formal record-keeping system. However, in 2007-08 teams from CHAIN, London’s most comprehensive database on rough sleeping, counted 3,017 different individuals sleeping rough on the streets of London alone, giving some idea of the scale of the problem.

None of this is helped by complex benefit rules, which mean that a person can be in temporary accommodation and entitled under law to permanent housing from the state, whilst someone on the street sleeping rough is not entitled to housing under the same rules.

Centrepoint’s latest initiative is a so-called ‘Sleep Out’, whereby volunteers are asked to sleep rough on the evening of November 7 in order to raise money and get a feel for what it's like, as Centrepoint puts it, to ‘sleep on boxes on a hard, cold floor among the bright lights of the city.’

It might seem extraordinarily harsh to criticise such an initiative. Centrepoint are a charity, after all, and the £250,000 they are hoping to raise through sponsorship during Sleep Out is undoubtedly vital to maintaining the many important services they provide to young homeless people.

A closer look at the event, however, left me feeling uneasy. I put this down at first to my own charity induced cynicism - ingrained by the legions of perky people with clipboards jumping in my path every time I leave the house - but a closer inspection of Centrepoint’s website did little to allay my concerns.

Naively perhaps, I assumed Sleep Out would be about developing an understanding of the realities of rough sleeping. There would, after all, be a certain logic to that – by sleeping rough yourself you would invariably put yourself in the shoes of other, less fortunate people, thereby gaining an insight into how they feel on a day to day basis. In other words, you would learn empathy.

With this in mind I did not expect to stumble across the following sentence in the promotional material:

'Sleep Out is not just about sleeping. There will be plenty of entertainment in the evening, and even a bedtime story from Christopher Biggins!’

Now I’ve nothing against bedtime stories with Christopher Biggins, nor am I a believer in a strictly dour, Victorian form of altruism. There is nothing inherently wrong with being cheerful; and while wackiness can be incredibly annoying, I can see its purpose when it comes to hectoring otherwise busy individuals into giving money.

Were it only the above sentence I would probably let it slide, but further browsing of Centrepoint’s website led to the picture I had in my mind of a solidarity exercise being replaced by a sense that the whole thing was little more than a gimmick – and a fairly offensive gimmick at that.

I found the following in the FAQ section:

‘You will be sleeping in a secure area and we will have security guards to protect you and your belongings.’

‘There will be a canopy overhead, so you will be protected from the elements too.’

‘Refreshments [will be] provided throughout the night.’

‘Goody bags for all participants.’

‘A best fundraiser prize for the person or team who raise the most.’

‘Breakfast served from 6am.’

Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds almost like an improvement on the sleeping arrangements of many working class people, let alone rough sleepers. Presumably the security guards who watch over Sleep Out’s participants are also under strict orders not to allow genuine rough sleepers into the encampment, despite the fact they could probably do with the free refreshments and hot breakfasts on offer.

You might wonder if any of this matters if the end result is a lot of money being raised for a good cause. Yet being homeless is not something that can be sanitised, and reducing it to an outdoor jolly where people huddle together and laugh at Christopher Biggins with tea and breakfast on demand - while actual rough sleepers gawk through security fences at the people pretending to be them - is in bad taste to say the least.

It would perhaps be nice if, as a bare minimum, we evolved a kind of charitable giving whereby we treated those on the receiving end of our good fortune as actual human beings, rather than locked them out of the process behind security guards and fences.

It would also be nice if we did away with the cynical notion that ‘fun’ is the only way we can get people to give a second thought to those less fortunate than ourselves.

Homophobia exacts a chilling price as hate crimes climb

2011-10-24T11:33:00.007+01:00

People having sex changes are the new targets

By Emily Dugan and James Bloodworth

Hate crime towards gay and transgender people is on the rise across Britain, with thousands of people suffering abuse for their sexuality every year. Crimes against transgender people went up by 14 per cent during 2010 and, in some cities, attacks motivated by sexual prejudice are up by as much as 170 per cent annually.

Continue reading

Occupy London Stock Exchange: Revolution as play?

2011-10-20T15:02:00.027+01:00

If there is one thing that has become apparent in recent years it is that protest in the West is no longer the preserve of tightly organised, left-wing groupuscules. Much of the discourse emanating from recent protests has even carried with it an explicit rejection of, and at times hostility toward, left parties of all stripes – parliamentary as well as revolutionary.

Ignoring for a second the unappealing nature of many left groups, in part this may be down to a fear of being turned into an easy target for the establishment; for while today’s protesters have little time for conventional politics, they do appear to have adopted from 21st century social democratic parties the belief that to win popular support one must hide one’s beliefs under a covering of platitudes and vagaries.

It’s probably also correct to say that at present the protests are not all that left wing, for there is no getting away from the suspicion that a generation which has incorporated modern technology into its protest movements has probably in the process absorbed at least some of the commitmentless individualism that characterises modern capitalism.

Structurelessness and spontaneity are very much the buzzwords of the movement; and narcissistic figures such as Michael Moore and Julian Assange have become its media darlings. Both are feted by the movement because both are defined by what they are against – the corporations, shadowy financiers, America - rather than what they are for. In this respect, when the right asks the protesters what they would do with power they have a point – there comes a time when the carnival atmosphere is not enough and you must get down to the business of making proactive demands. If you wish to be taken seriously, that is.

Outside of a hodgepodge of people stood around in city squares, there appears to be little willingness to attend to the boring formalities that come with democracy in practice, which involves more than the direct democracy of the town square; and some of which may be a tad boring.

Going by the conversations I had with protesters many only had a vague idea of what they were against: a ‘rogue one per cent’, the bankers, big business. Others placed their faith in the possibility of workers and bosses joining forces, the interests of the exploiters and the exploited becoming one to confront a tiny minority who are accused of running off with the loot. Others echoed right-wing journalists like Peter Oborne, who refuse to see a crisis of capitalism and instead blame moral failures for the crash.

While the occupy protests are encouraging in a whole host of ways, one of the problems the occupiers face is that at every juncture they are stuffed with ‘revolution as play’ types – many of whom don’t wish to see any radical change at all. For them the whole thing is about posture, feelings and ‘making a statement’ – as if the purpose of the movement itself should be about making a lot of noise and then going home.

All of that being said, the occupy movements are at least something; and there is no reason why the platitudes of middle class narcissist activism will not be drowned out by something better as the crisis develops.

*I am currently writing for the Independent on Sunday, but will be back blogging as normal next week.

The complex legacy of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T18:48:00.030+01:00

When a celebrity passes away, there is invariably a small but noisy crowd for whom any attempt at critical reflection is akin to urinating on the grave of the deceased.

The Latin phrase, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum este, which translates as ‘Speak no ill of the dead’, demonstrates that hyper-sentimentality is nothing new, whether superstitious or otherwise. The idea of offending the relatives of the departed before every smidgen of grief has subsided is something that is, and always has been, frowned upon.

One objection for those of us who do not take this sentimental view is that if it is off limits to criticise those who have recently passed away, then it must inevitably be off limits to criticise even the most reprehensible characters posthumously, for it's rarely justified for one’s family members to be tormented for one’s own conduct in life.

In the case of the Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO who died yesterday, other factors override such sentimentality, such as how to react when the deceased did his utmost in life to avoid, ignore or downplay the sufferings of those for whom he had ultimate responsibility.

Jobs was undoubtedly a fantastic innovator. He helped to revolutionise computing and telecommunications to a previously unimaginable extent.

He was also in charge of, and according to the BBC, exerted an ‘unheard of level of influence’ over, a company that was responsible for labour practices that left Chinese workers sick, injured and in some cases driven to suicide.

Jobs was made aware repeatedly of what was going on, but apparently did very little about it.

According to the Global Post:

Six months ago, factory workers in Suzhou poisoned two years ago by toxic chemicals at the factory wrote to [Steve] Jobs directly, asking for his help in getting medical care and compensation for their illnesses and lost work time.

They never got an answer… Two years after the chemical exposure and many months of medical treatment later, they still say they’ve never heard from anyone at Apple directly.

I am inclined to agree with Liam Mcnulty of The Great Unrest, when he says: ‘It's a shame that the way society is currently organised makes tragedy the condition for actualizing a genuinely creative vision’.

I also feel that neither Jobs nor his ‘legacy’ should be let off the hook simply because he was part of a system that inevitably worked in his favour. Jobs had a personal responsibility to ensure that his workers were treated decently, and in this respect he failed dismally.

Celebrating his death would be silly and extreme. That does not, however, stop me from reserving my sympathy for the labourers whose lives were made unbearable by the practices of this man’s cult-like corporation.

Watching the BBC may seriously damage your insight

2011-10-04T13:28:00.022+01:00

To get an idea of just how many people there are currently protesting in New York one would do better than to watch the BBC.

Despite the fact that thousands have rallied in recent weeks against what has become known in the popular lexicon as the ‘feral rich’, the Corporation has dedicated little time to a mass protest that in recent US history is completely unprecedented.

The BBC is often held up in right-wing mythology as a kind of Marxist propaganda outlet staffed by ageing lefties who still think that they are still living in 1968.

In reality, the Corporation is anchored far more to the prevailing orthodoxy of laissez-faire economics than either its opponents or devotees would care to admit.

The Corporation’s minimal coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest begs the question as to whether there can ever be such a thing as an objective media. Nick Davies, in his book Flat Earth News, thinks not:

‘The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection.’

While the idea of the BBC as a counterweight to the inherent bias of the commercial sector is worth defending, it is naive to think that the BBC is not itself influenced by the virulent anti-worker agenda of its nearest competitors. This should be apparent to all thinking people every time a BBC journalist fails to challenge yet another assertion that British business is being buried under ‘red-tape’ or ‘over regulation’, despite the fact that British workers have some of the worst labour rights in the western world.

Selection also influences the language that is employed to report the news. Yesterday’s announcement by George Osborne (and supported by ‘nice’ Vince Cable), that he is planning to deter with large fee increases workers who wish to take their employers to a tribunal, was reported by the BBC mostly for the fact that it will apparently save British business some £6m a year.

That the change in the law will make holding bigoted or law-breaking bosses accountable indomitably more difficult was hardly factored into the equation, despite the fact that it could negatively impact on the lives of the 90% of British people who make their living working for somebody else.

Defend the BBC against self-interested accusations of left-wing bias and elitism, by all means; but let us not suffer under any illusions as to the conformity of the Corporation, which is inevitably influenced by the power of those with more than an axe to grind when it comes to the relationship between the exploiters and exploited.

A day at the dole office

2011-09-28T20:30:00.102+01:00

‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birth right for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.’

– Oscar Wilde

I suspect the chorus of ‘captains of industry’ gracing the news are perfectly aware that Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday was not a move to the left.

More than likely the attempt to define it as such has the purpose of encouraging the Labour leader, running scared of the media echo-chamber, to propose a set of capital-friendly policies more to their own liking.

Rather than the British people being intrinsically conservative, it has often been the ability of the right to get the Labour Party on to the back foot that has in the past allowed it to define the political landscape so effectively.

It is also why, when attacking the culture of greed at the top, Ed Miliband feels obliged to dedicate equal air-time to the denunciation of ‘benefit scroungers’, as if they and the bankers constituted a similar problem with comparable consequences.

On Monday morning I went down to my local Job Centre, ostensibly to look for jobs but also to examine the claim that many of those on benefits simply don’t share the same ‘values’ as the rest of us. This was never going to be an empirical study of course, and mainly involved a number of off-the-cuff conversations with claimants; but if there really are a significant number of people who are cheating the benefits system, it seemed reasonable to assume that a small proportion of them would be at the job centre on a Monday morning signing on.

I arrived at my local job centre branch in Bridgwater at about a quarter past nine. Walking past the row of tightly partitioned staff sat at their desks beckoning people over for their weekly sign-on, I noticed a young man having an argument with a female member of staff. The problem, as I understood it, was that he had signed on a day late several weeks ago for his benefit. The man was told at the time to do something called a rapid re-sign - which took two weeks - and was subsequently asked to repay the month’s Jobseekers Allowance he had claimed, due to the fact that he had been automatically signed off during the two week period and was therefore not eligible for it. He was now being pursued by debt collectors for the return of the money, which he said he no longer had.

After he had finished arguing with the female member of staff, we talked, and he told me that he had a baby at home and a girlfriend who is three months pregnant with their second child.

Looking over the people in the job centre you suddenly realise what different universes some people inhabit. My own job search (I am also unemployed) showed up a number of manual jobs and a few clerical positions, receptionist work mainly. I printed the more tolerable of these and made my way outside to smoke a cigarette, in the process starting a conversation with a man who had been claiming jobseekers allowance for the past two years.

He was non-committal in response to my questions at first, but began to talk more freely when I opened up my cigarette packet and pointed it in his direction:

‘I had a few interviews, ya’ know, factories and that, but ain’t got nuffin lately; they never calling me back. I did get a job for a couple a days last year, like, but the boss was a real prick, ya’know, and the work was boring as fuck, so I got myself fired’.

When I asked the man how he managed to get himself fired all he would say was that he ‘gave lip’ to the manager. This, he admitted, was an act of provocation to intentionally lose him his job. That way he could re-sign on for Job Seekers Allowance, something he could not have done had he simply left the position of his own accord.

The job was as a ‘Production Operative’ – a glorified term for repetitive unskilled work that involves packing food on a production line for around 10 hours a shift. The pay was £7.75 an hour and, as he pointed out to me several times, was a considerable improvement on the weekly £51.85 he was receiving on Jobseekers.

He informed me that the real problem was the nature of the work itself, rather than the fact that Jobseekers Allowance was, as the tabloids like to put it, ‘free money’: ‘Why should I do that sorta work, ya’know? I don’t wanna be stood in some factory packing yogurts all my life; I wanna be doin somefin worthwhile’. When I asked him what was wrong with the work he became somewhat aggressive: ‘It’s meaningless, you don’t get no respect doin that, ya know? No-one respects a fucking yogurt packer’.

The funny thing is that I also do not feel cut out, if I can put it like that, for repetitive, manual work. I don't know anyone who really does. On the other hand, most people appear to be automatically of the belief that there is an imaginary group of people who will be very happy with such work, and are baffled to learn that in most cases the so-called ‘underclass’ subscribe to exactly the same set of ‘aspirational’ values as they do.

When I asked some of the people I spoke with why they had not worked - for several years in many cases - they gave the impression that they were willing to do so only if the job was a relatively good one; good being defined by what they saw on television, in magazines and on the radio.

The long-term unemployed certainly appear to share the values and aspirations of modern Britain. The difference is that they grasp aspirational politics in the context of their own lives, which are filled only with the prospect of mundane and unglamorous drudgery.

Standing on a podium and trying to fool them into identifying their interests with those of their would-be exploiters, as Ed Miliband did yesterday, is more delusional than spiteful. Those who earn several hundred thousand pounds a year often sincerely believe that anyone can make it if only they exhaust enough sweat and work hard enough. Let's be clear though, those at the top only believe in aspirational politics up to the point when they have to send their own children off to the factory.

Christopher Hitchens is no George Orwell

2011-09-19T20:07:00.105+01:00

A review of Christopher Hitchens's Arguably

In 1947 George Orwell wrote "every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Today, many right across the political spectrum like to pick and choose from Orwell according to taste, stressing either the democratic, socialist or anti-totalitarian current in his work at the expense of the whole – the resulting "legacy" depending very much upon the political persuasion of who is doing the accounting.

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time darling of the left, has in recent years skirted this same political dividing-line: at once attracting the scorn of former comrades for his alleged shuffle to the right, while in the process gathering a substantial number of followers whose admiration rests almost entirely on the premise of him having "come to his senses". On the surface the nature of Hitchens’s politics depends, in a similar fashion to Orwell's, upon who one is talking to.

Hitchens's latest effort is a collection of essays spanning the last decade on politics, literature and religion. The book comes with an added element of tragedy due to the fact that Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer before he wrote a substantial proportion of it. This may, in fact, be his very last book.

Hitchens's reputation as controversialist par excellence has been cemented in recent years with his repudiation of the left and his articulate opposition to monotheism. Importantly, were Hitchens alone in rejecting conventional left/liberal, post-9/11 politics, his bravado and bluster would likely be much less potent. (Hitchens’s politics were never about posture alone; but one should not underestimate the importance of showmanship to the Hitchens brand). As it happened, there were others on the left who also viewed the attempt on the back of 9/11 to conflate John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden as crass moral equivalence; or as Orwell put it 70 years ago, "the argument that half a loaf is no different from no bread at all".

The problem with the notion that Hitchens did the obligatory shuffle to the right, or as David Horowitz puts it (underwhelmingly, considering his own political trajectory), had "second thoughts", is that a substantial proportion of the left really did climb into bed with reaction during this period, and continue to do so whenever a group points AK47s in the direction of the United States and its allies.

This was not confined to the debased remnants of Stalinism, either. The editorial of the liberal-left New Statesman of 17 September, 2001, written by then-editor Peter Wilby, appeared to blame Americans themselves for the 9/11 attacks - for "preferring George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader". A few weeks later, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in the London Review of Books about the "feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming".

Arguably, however, also shows Hitchens at his dogmatic worst, and at times he resembles Isaac Deutscher's description of the ex-Communist who, having recanted on his previous belief system, is "haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society," and who "tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness". In Hitchens’s essays on Iraq, as Jonathan Freedland points out, "the absence [of WMD] is deemed not to be evidence of absence but, on the contrary, evidence of the presence of WMDs in the immediate past".

Simply writing Hitchens off as a "Neo Con" would be simplistic and crude, and would fail to do justice to the considerable contribution made by him to the critique of totalitarianism. That being said, he has very little to say on traditional left-wing domestic concerns these days, and it seems increasingly clear, if only by omission, that interventionism is not the only consensus he now uncritically accepts.

In a 2008 interview with Prospect, Hitchens, a man who lives in extremely comfortable surroundings in Washington, showed a thinly-disguised contempt for those whose lives are made bearable by the British benefits system, dismissing it as "little more than Christian charity". In an article for Slate in the aftermath of the UK riots, Hitchens took the establishment line that the unrest was "sheer criminality" (as one Tweeter put it at the time – "yes, we know it is sheer criminality; the question is why are our youngsters sheer criminals?"). While much of the British left is right now mobilising against the greatest cut in living standards in a generation, in the same article Hitchens glibly put "the cuts" in brackets and ridiculed the term as an "all-purpose expression...used for all-purpose purposes".

Without embracing the denunciations of Hitchens that prevail on the far-left, it is perhaps necessary to acknowledge that he no longer much notices the struggles of the working class. If it is not part of the dramatic fight against totalitarianism (which I have no wish to downplay), then it doesn't seem to appear on his radar.

Orwell, in a reply dated 15 November 1943 to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, rejected the invitation on the basis that he didn't agree with their objectives. Acknowledging that what they said was "more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press", he added that he could "not associate himself with an essentially conservative body", that claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say about British imperialism". His closing paragraph stated: "I belong to the left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."

Hitchens, like many British journalists of his generation, has spent much of his career in the shadow of Orwell. He has also spent perhaps a small proportion of it waiting for his very own Orwell moment - a moment when he could take on his own side in the way Orwell took on the left over the appeasement of Stalin. The problem for Hitchens, however, is that despite the bluster and fear-mongering (not-to-mention the genuinely repulsive politics of the Jihadi movement), Islamism is not Nazism or Stalinism; and Hitchens, however good his prose may be, is no Orwell. In defending the gains of liberal democracy against its totalitarian enemies, Orwell never dumped his politics.

So what is it exactly that you’re proud of, Liam?

2011-09-13T18:13:00.029+01:00

Today in a speech to the DSEI exhibition - otherwise known as the world's biggest arms fair -, Defence Secretary Liam Fox is expected to say that he is “proud” Britain is ranked as the world’s second largest arms exporter.

Arms fairs unsurprisingly attract their fair share of authoritarian regimes, and this one is no exception, with representatives from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kazakhstan expected to be in attendance.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010, he promised less of the previous government’s gung-ho attitude to foreign policy and a more pragmatic, mercantilist approach, even if he did refrain from putting it explicitly in those terms.

Cameron’s modus operandi was quickly exposed, however, by the fact that he adopted it precisely at a time when the peoples of the Middle East were feeling at their most idealistic.

This climate of revolution forced Cameron to dress up his crude “trade, trade, trade” foreign policy in the clothes of liberation. Most people seem to have forgotten that Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, was calling for a “return to law and order” when protests first erupted in Tunisia back in January. Hardly the words of an uncompromising democrat.

This is not of course to say that the liberal interventionism of the past 10 years has been vindicated - that the peoples of the Middle East are throwing off the yoke of tyranny with and without Western intervention suggests a more complex picture.

In respect to Cameron, however, actions speak louder than words: a few months back, while speaking in the Kuwaiti parliament on the need for Arab rulers to meet their people’s legitimate aspirations for freedom, Cameron’s Minister for International Security Strategy, Gerald Howarth, was attending an arms fair in Abu Dhabi, where 100 UK companies were exhibiting their vendibles. Elsewhere at the time, ammunition and tear gas were being sold to Libya, sniper rifles, British sub-machine guns and CS grenades were making their way to Bahrain, and parts for armoured vehicles and weapons were going to Egypt.

To have “Made in the UK” tear gas used upon you while David Cameron ventriloquizes your aspirations and speaks of you and he in terms of a “we”and “us” is probably somewhat insulting; at home, however, it keeps both of Cameron’s friends happy - he can sound-off about democracy to the interventionists in his cabinet whilst simultaneously filling the coffers of some of his most powerful supporters, all the while pretending that the two positions are completely compatible.

On the Arab street - where all of this really matters - I suspect the con-trick is wearing rather thin.

The argument one encounters when pointing out that arms are often sold to repressive regimes is always one of hindsight, usually along the lines of no one being aware that the weapons would actually be used - “oh, we know now that it was a dreadful idea to sell weapons to so and so’s dictatorship”.

This excuse is used time and time again, with all subsequent sales of arms being buttressed with weak assurances that, in future, they will be used “responsibly”.

Reading through the reports of today’s exhibition, I stumbled upon an interesting comment made by Endre Lunde, a defence consultant at HIS Janes:

"The industry is bracing itself”, he said, “It's already feeling the impact of the financial crisis and it's going to feel it even stronger soon - and that's before the whole drop related to the end of operations in Afghanistan really hits."

In other words, when the war in Afghanistan finally comes to an end we should not celebrate (we probably shouldn’t anyway - what is there to celebrate about war?), but rather worry about the profits of Britain’s arms industry.

Were there not a seemingly revolving door between the Ministry of Defence and the arms industry such self-interested rationalisation could perhaps be ignored. (Which brings to mind the darkly ironic joke about the man who worked in the factory building nuclear weapons. When asked how he could do such a terrible thing, he replied that he had to, because “a man’s got to live”).

The British government, for its part, will no doubt parrot that it is working in the “national interest”. It is well known, however, if not by us then by those on whom these "exports" are routinely used, that the profits of the defence industry will always come before the lives of those human beings unfortunate enough to be born into a certain type of despotism. To them, the knowledge that to the West some corpses are worth less than others is about as obvious as the sky is blue.

Diary of an unemployed person

2011-09-07T20:47:00.079+01:00

In June of this year I became unemployed. Nine weeks and six days later and I am still without work. To date I have submitted something like 50 job applications - of those I have received around five rejection emails; of the other 45 I have heard nothing. In the last week or so I have started to slack a bit on this front – for practical reasons as I have university work to finish (I have not yet officially graduated), but also because a job application can take an hour or so to complete, leading one to question the very effort it takes when it brings so little in the way of a return.

To save money, instead of buying a newspaper I make the short trip each day to my local library and read the papers there. An increasing number of unemployed men have had the same idea of late, and have begun congregating in the seated area each morning sipping pale cups of tea. This has increased to such an extent that the librarians have had to enforce a strict time limit on how long a person may spend with the Daily Mail - 15 minutes they agreed upon - there being only one copy and it being very much in demand amongst the town’s out of work men-folk.

Early morning argument in the library often breaks out over the newspapers - a popular topic of discussion being “spongers” and “asylum seekers”, whom everyone professes to dislike immensely. A man whom I regularly bump into - an unemployed butcher with an incredibly small head - draws huge pleasure from reciting a story about his family who, he insists, “couldn’t get a house because it was earmarked for an illegal immigrant. Fact.” I have heard him repeat this story on a number of occasions, always with a ferocious emphasis on the word “fact” at the end. Paedophiles are also a popular subject, the ensuing discussion revolving mainly around what each of the men would like to do if ever they caught one messing with their kids, or if such a person were to move close to where they live. Favoured methods of torture for the perpetrators of such crimes are often discussed, with general agreement that the death penalty would be “too soft”.

At around midday I sometimes visit the shop where I used to work, to pick up groceries on a tight budget. The thing I remember about this job, which I did for four years before going to university - and something which I think is familiar to any job in which one must deal with the general public on a regular basis - is that it led me at the time to a place where I began to detest the public in a very liberal sort of a way. I think in my own case this was due to the mixture of appalling and repetitive jokes customers would insist on telling me, the creepy celebrity fixation, and the fact that people would lap-up the Sun and the Daily Mail in such huge quantities, taking each hairbrain story and repeating it ad nauseum until it became “common sense” - whether that meant the MMR jab was responsible for autism or that foreigners were unapologetically weeding English genes out of existence in their conquest of “our jobs and our women”.

For those of us on the political left, much mental energy is often spent expunging this side of the public from our minds in an attempt to mentally align ourselves with the majority in the on-going class struggle. I think it was John Steinbeck who once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Because British pessimism has always prevented such an attitude taking root, the front pages of our most popular tabloids operate more effectively along the lines of divide and rule – while the US press has the American dream, ours has a policy of distracting with the left hand while the right makes off with the family silver.

Five years since leaving my menial job in the convenience store, I find myself a member of the bourgeoisified youth without the bourgeois career ladder on which to clamber on to. My parents’ generation appear to have kicked that away. I went to university and paid my fees (“you will make lots more as a graduate”), worked hard (ok, drank hard) got my grades, did my MA (accumulated more debt for that, too), and now, like Gordon Comstock, I appear to have sunk to the bottom rungs of society - only with no attempt on my part to actively try and do so.

I’m not alone in this respect of course. As the rich sail away on their gold-plated yachts, we are rapidly discovering that they’ve left more than a few of us behind with little more to do than sit at home and stare at what we will never have on endless television property shows.

The worst part of all this is that, rather than the descent of increasing numbers into the underclass (for want of a better term) empowering the left, it has instead energised and invigorated the populist and anti-intellect right. All of the people I met in my local library disliked the bankers, some even called for them to be punished for what they did; but their overwhelming anger was saved for those at the bottom of society - the people on the benefits of £50 a week, the asylum seekers, the immigrants, the Muslims - not Vodafone and other tax avoiders, or the bosses who lobby for the destruction of what remains of workers’ rights, but the men who "incited a riot" on Twitter, or the woman who fiddled her child tax credits for an extra tenner.

The most depressing trend amongst those I spoke was their lack of sympathy for the people they called “chavs” – the undeserving poor by another name. I encountered not one positive attitude towards this group of people; instead the debate was conducted very much in the vein of them being in some way sub-human.

It did dawn on me as I was walking home from the library, however, that if you create an underclass, the most effective thing you can do as a politician is to run against it, because it doesn’t take people long to work out that what you've created is actually quite scary. Perhaps I will say that the next time I bump into the butcher with the tiny head, that is unless I get a job first of course, which seems unlikely.

The war on drugs – the bodies continue to pile up

2011-08-31T11:41:00.037+01:00

Almost 40 years ago, on 28 January 1972, United States President Richard Nixon signed his war on drugs into law. Drugs are “public enemy number one”, said Nixon, and drug addiction had “assumed the dimensions of a national emergency”.

In the 40 intervening years, the US government has spent some £2.5 trillion attempting to destroy the illegal drugs trade at a horrendous human cost – both at home and abroad.

In Mexico 34,612 people have been killed since December 2006 when President Philip Calderon initiated the country’s war against the drug cartels. According to the BBC, the US/Mexico cross-border drugs trade is worth an estimated $13bn (£9bn) a year. A US state department report estimated that as much as 90% of all cocaine consumed in the US comes via Mexico.

Around the world a “clampdown” on drugs continues unabated - from Russia to the US to Columbia to Afghanistan. The same failed policies are being repeated time and again, flying in the face of all the evidence and leaving behind a trail of devastation and a pile of bodies.

In Britain, Professor David Nutt was sacked in 2009 as chief drugs advisor by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for scientifically challenging the hysterical culture of current drugs debate. In the US, the discourse around prohibition is equally mired in falsehood, with attitudes unlikely to change unless there is a spread of the violence that plagues Mexico across the border and into the US.

In June of this year, a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argued that the “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world”. Previously a 2006 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) noted that, “the total number of drug users in the world is now estimated at some 200 million people, equivalent to about 5 per cent of the global population age 15-64.” The report went on to say that “In…North America [and] Western Europe, abuse levels remained constant for opiates…In Europe…cocaine use continues to expand.”

Globally, the illegal drug trade supports a worldwide crime empire second only in value to oil. Yet while Latin America functions as a violent narcotics sweatshop for the nouveau riche of London and New York, more visible consequences of prohibition in Britain can be seen on the pallid faces trying to catch the eyes of shoppers on many of London’s most famous streets. Brushing them aside as they ask for spare change is easy enough of course, but you won’t get rid of them that easily. Nick Davies, in his excellent book Flat Earth News cites a confidential Downing Street report which was leaked to the press in 2005 claiming that black market drug users were responsible for 85% of shoplifting, between 70 and 80% of burglaries and 54% of robberies.

Many of Britain’s 300,000 heroin users suffer health problems such as septicaemia, hepatitis, ruptured veins and, occasionally, overdose. What much of the public discourse around drug addiction ignores, however, is that almost all of the harmful effects of heroin are caused not by the drug itself, but by toxic contaminants which are added by unregulated and unscrupulous street sellers. In the respected Merck health journal they are clear about the effect prohibition has on drug content and quality:

"Long-term effects of the opioids themselves are minimal; even decades of methadone use appear to be well tolerated physiologically, although some long-term opioid users experience chronic constipation, excessive sweating, peripheral edema, drowsiness, and decreased libido. However, many long-term users who inject opioids have adverse effects from contaminants (eg, talc) and adulterants (eg, non-prescription stimulant drugs); cardiac, pulmonary, and hepatic damage from infections such as HIV infection and hepatitis B or C, which are spread by needle sharing and nonsterile injection techniques."

Opponents of legalisation will evoke the possibility of increased drug use as a consequence of the legal availability of hard drugs. The likelihood of this happening, however, must be set against a backdrop of worsening drug conflict in the developing world and increasingly dangerous substances being peddled on British streets; not to mention the fact that drug-fuelled crime shows little sign of abating any time soon.

Legalisation is not necessarily the solution, but may be the least bad option. The other option, if you can call it that, is to let the bodies continue to pile up for another 40 years.

Can atheists believe in ghosts?

2011-08-30T00:21:00.061+01:00

Last Sunday at around two o'clock in the morning, me and my girlfriend were watching television in my grandmother’s house when we decided we would go outside to smoke a cigarette. It was somewhat cold so we decided that we would go out to the car and smoke our cigarettes there.

In the car I drove about half a mile down the road to a car park just off the village church. The church itself (pictured above) is fairly small and dates back to the thirteenth century. On its grounds there is a graveyard of a little more than 40 square meters in size.

We got out of the car and stood around smoking our cigarettes when, looking over the wall of the car park and into the graveyard, I noticed a pale blue light glowing gently from behind one of the large gravestones at the back of the cemetery. I pointed this out to my girlfriend who then noticed the light herself. We assumed at first that it was some sort of graveyard light which was on the blink. There was no rhyme or reason to the flicker of the light - it would glow for a few seconds before fading away almost to nothing. Then the glow would reappear, the brighter it got the stronger the colour blue was within the light itself. It would continue glowing for a time before fading to nothing – sometimes going straight out, other times slowly fading away. It was coming from a spot about 25 meters away from where we where standing.

After what was probably several minutes the light went out and didn’t reappear. We didn’t stick around as we were both somewhat unnerved. We had also finished our cigarettes and it was turning into quite a cold night.

I visited the church and its burial ground this afternoon to try and get an idea as to what we might have seen. I thought it may have been a light on a tombstone; perhaps a lamp that was on its last legs, the resulting inconsistent glow being the bulb in its death throes.

Looking around, however, I saw nothing apart from headstones in varying degrees of ruin. I came to the conclusion that the light had been coming from behind a group of gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery where the graves are fairly recent – from the year 2000 onwards.

As I looked around the area where we had seen the light, however, there was no sign of anything that might have omitted a glowing blue light. (I would also add that these were normal, run of the mill cigarettes we were smoking).

As a proud sceptic when it comes to all things "supernatural", I'm completely baffled as to what we saw.

CUBA: A 'paradise of sexual tourism'*

2011-08-26T19:12:00.133+01:00

“There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily, and without any need for it. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest numbers of AIDS cases…Therefore, there is truly no prostitution healthier than Cuba’s”.

- Fidel Castro in a speech to the Cuban National Assembly, 1992.

Since the early years of the Cuban revolution, the government claimed as one of its shining achievements the elimination of prostitution. In reality of course, it lingered on; but through the provision of job opportunities and training for former prostitutes, the revolution did go a substantial way to eliminating the sex trade relative to its documented abundance during the pre-revolutionary era.

Spending time in Cuba in 2011, one cannot but be alarmed by the frequency one notices young Cubans, often no more than 14 or 15 years old, fraternising with European and Canadian tourists of a certain age. Disturbingly, this hustling or "jineterismo" of foreigners often camouflages a more basic sex-for-cash transaction.

Some of these "relationships" turn into longer-lasting affairs, going all the way from the bedroom to the Consultaria Juridica (the Cuban Registry Office). Back in Britain, a quick internet search is all it takes to find the sprawling Internet forums, filled with those who have had their hearts broken by Cuban spouses. A frequent poster on one of the largest sites, a Canadian based web-forum called Cuba Amor, described to me how he fell for a Cuban woman only to have his heart broken five years down the line. “What you have to understand is that when a Cuban gets involved with a foreigner he/she will first and foremost see it as an opportunity to leave Cuba and make life better for themselves and their family in Cuba…I have some great friends in Cuba, people who have never done me wrong, but even they will tell you the same”.

Tonight I am in Havana, and as I sip my weak Havana Club Mojito (Bacardi moved out long ago), I'm surrounded by budding Western sugar daddies, footing the bar-tab and dolling out spending money to their Cuban "girlfriends". The latter for their part appear to be dressed as caricatures of what they think capitalism might look like - all smutty disco garb and gold chains.

Many middle-aged western men, and increasingly women, are travelling to destinations such as Cuba in search of affordable liasons with exotic, dark-skinned young men and women. Jeannette Belliveau, author of the book Romance On The Road, says that since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of western women have had affairs with much younger foreign men in places including Cuba, Jamaica and Gambia. "These are respectable women. Not all of them are unwitting victims to these sexual conmen", she says. "I have spoken to many women who fly to the Gambia or Jamaica specifically for the purpose of recreational sex".

In a play called Stuff, Latina artists Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante dramatised the way in which first-world travellers have taken to viewing their third-world counterparts as exotic products there to be “consumed”. Cuba, so long discouraging of tourism, today actively welcomes those from the capitalist countries out of economic necessity; and the line between promotion of the country as a holiday destination and as a haven for sex tourists has become increasingly blurred. Cuban tourist materials in the 1990s would often picture scantily clad women fraternising with first-world tourists (a taste of what to expect should one visit, perhaps?);and author Michael Clancy, in his book, The Globalization of Sex Tourism and Cuba, remarked that the Cuban government's attitude towards the “consumers” of this “profession” was "to send a message to the global sex tourist community that Cuba was open for business”.

The Cuban Federation of Communist Women predictably tries to downplay the issue, arguing that “jineteras” - a term used to denote everything from flat-out prostitution to a “friendship” struck-up for material gain - engage in sex work simply out of materialistic impulse and a desire for luxury items, with no mention of Cuba’s economic failure playing it’s part.

The government’s response on the street has been to veer erratically between toleration and repression. Many young girls are stopped by the police when accompanied by a foreign tourist and asked to produce their identity cards; should the police discover that the girl in question has been stopped with another tourist at a different time, she will be arrested; the first arrest as a warning, subsequent arrests resulting in a possible prison sentence. This policy, however, is accompanied by one of toleration for those who solicit for prostitutes, reminiscent of the traditional harshness towards women involved in this type of interaction throughout the world.

Young Cubans are not the only victims in all of this. Nor is the dynamic simply one of westerners travelling to poorer countries in order to exploit the economic position of the locals. As David from Cuba Amor put it to me: “I’ve spent thousands of dollars on trips to Cuba, gifts for my ex-wife’s family and getting married. Since then I’ve been through hell. It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden — was it a lie? You’re struggling because it wasn’t real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn’t kill me”.

While Western holidayers continue flocking to Cuba, so stories of broken hearts and financial ruin go on dominating the internet forums at Cuba Amor, with several new posters joining every week. David has decided not to return to Cuba since his divorce in 2010, due in part to too many painful memories. “It’s just the casual deceit of it all. You understand why it can happen, because the people there are poor, but that doesn’t stop it hurting”.

Back in Havana, a newly-wed tourist/Cubana couple are entering the lobby of the Hotel National as I saunter into the bar for a pre-lunch drink. Despite the chaotic manner in which they make their entrance (the bride’s dress appears to snag on the revolving door on the way in), they look a picture of happiness. I managed to catch the groom and offer him my congratulations later that afternoon, as he came into the bar. He was a Canadian engineer, and met his wife, 25 years his junior, while she was working as a waitress in the resort of Varadero. “I’ve been very careful”, he told me, “but at the same time, I’m getting on for 50; I’ve got to take the risk. It’s now or never”.

It was at this point that I thought about warning my companion that love in Cuba is a game where the stakes are high and the house often wins, if you can forgive the dreadful metaphor. Instead though, I decided to slip back to the crowded bar and observe the happy couple from a distance. My flight was in four hours, and I was about to order another drink when I noticed a Cuban girl of around 18 or 19 making her way towards me. Better for everybody, I thought, if I saved the next one for the flight home.

*In 1995, Italian travel magazine Viaggiare awarded Cuba five stars for its “general erotic level”, calling it a “paradise of sexual tourism”.

The Daily Mail wants your stories - unless you're black.

2011-08-24T22:43:00.040+01:00

While reading Nick Davies's Flat Earth News, which I have reviewed here, I came across several paragraphs about the Daily Mail which I found particularly interesting (and of course disgusting):

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: 'They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." "I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."'

I talked to another journalist who has spent many years working for the Mail. She said: 'I did a thing about an American couple who were living as crofters in Scotland...They were white, but the woman had got children from a former marriage, and they were mixed race, so that story was dropped by the features editor. It happens once or twice - you write a story and it doesn't go in because the people are black, then you realise.'

A district reporter told me he would call up from Manchester to tell the news desk a story, 'and they would always ask: "Are they our kind of people?" i.e. "Are they white, middle class?" 'Or more often it would be: "Are they of a dusky hue?" And if they were of a dusky hue, then they didn't want the story.'

The feature writer who had had the problem with the homeless person's vet told me she had heard a very senior, rather famous Mail journalist on the phone to the West Indies...She said he was having trouble booking a hotel room and resorted to addressing the receptionist as a slave, shouting down the phone: 'Who's your owner?' Yet another Mail reporter, a young man who worked there for a year, told me he had been amazed at the openness of the racism in the office: 'You'd often hear people using the word "nigger" or "nig-nog" - really shocking...There is definitely a racist environment.'

Book review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

2011-08-23T10:20:00.024+01:00

Nick Davies’s last book, Dark Heart, offered a brilliant exposé of the impact of Thatcherism on the lives of working people and their communities across Britain. Researching the book, Davies spent time with those whose lives were ravaged by the 1980s privatisation drive; people who, for all the aspirational rhetoric of the Thatcher-era, were brutally pushed aside by the culture of “greed is good” and thrown on the scrapheap.

In his latest book, which was actually first published in 2008, Davies has taken on another cosy consensus – that of his own profession, journalism. Important and necessary in light of the on-going hacking scandal, Flat Earth News is scathing over the way changing media ownership patterns have led to the news-media becoming little more than a cash-cow for ruthless, free-market capitalists. The result of this change has, according to Davies, seen a once proud profession descend into banal ‘churnalism,' where the regurgitation of press releases supplants the search for real stories by dedicated and passionate reporters. As journalists attempt to turnover as much material as possible at minimal cost to their new bosses, the quality of their output is invariably suffering to the point where much of what we read is little more than Flat Earth news. In other words, it is a largely fictional account of reality.

From a critical perspective, Davies is somewhat apt to romanticise the journalistic profession of old. Rather than proposing genuinely democratic solutions, he harks back to an imaginary golden-era when the media was owned by those who were interested in little more than quality reporting in the name of the public interest. This is of course naive, not to mention ahistorical. The press barons of old may have been more concerned with the principles of good copy than today’s crop of capitalist proprietors, whose only interest is the bottom line, but as Hannen Swaffer, one of the early 20th-century pioneers of British tabloid journalism put it long-before the era of Murdoch and Co, ‘freedom of the press in Britain is the freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.’ In other words, the capitalist press has long had other things in mind than straightforward truth telling, aristocratic or free-market proprietors notwithstanding.

It is a simplification, of course, to assume that media barons set the political agenda and journalists jump into line; and Davies correctly points this out. For a start, there are many journalists who would refuse to do such a thing, however handsomely they were paid to do so. What newspapers and television stations do very effectively, however, is reinforce orthodoxy organically through the reproduction of their own economic interests. Should the media accurately report voices of dissent, it may in theory cannibalize itself through a transformation in society’s economic structure. A genuine plurality of ideas is simply not in the economic interests of a heavily concentrated mass media. The subsequent narrowing of political debate to the ‘centre ground,’ with most other ideas portrayed not simply as illegitimate, but as disorderly and threatening, reflects economic trends that have become increasingly concentrated in the West over the past 30 years . The resulting ‘common sense’ assumptions of the media can be understood using a metaphor of a plant: the news may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface, but it does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground. It may tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed underground. It does not, however, serve to explain the germination process of the seed itself.

Davies does touch on the influence of ‘common sense’ assumptions in his critique of supposedly ‘impartial’ media outlets:

‘The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection.’

The point here is that there is a difference between, say, Fox News and the BBC; but the idea that a ‘neutral’ media provides a completely unvarnished picture of the world is itself problematic.

While for socialists Davies’s book may seem relatively timid in proposing democratic solutions to the crisis of journalism, he nonetheless produces an enjoyable and enlightening read. The book is worth a look for anyone interested in a competent critique of the modern media, even if, at times, it makes you want to grab Davies by the shoulders and shake him out of his nostalgia for a bygone-era that never really existed.

Because slavery is sexy

2011-08-22T10:21:00.036+01:00

Vogue Slave Earrings

'Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops.

If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.'

The Cult of Che Guevara

2011-08-18T19:46:00.060+01:00

It's like he is alive and with us, like a friend. He is kind of like a Virgin Mary for us. We say, 'Che, help us with our work or with this planting,' and it always goes well.

- Manuel Cortez, a campesino who lives next to the schoolhouse where Ernesto Guevara was executed.

I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ...I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.

- Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as we punish other crimes.

- Extract from the diary of N.S. Rubashov, on the fifth day of imprisonment, Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

The face of Ernesto “Che” Guevara adorns student bedrooms the world over as a symbol of justice and non-conformity. The famous image, the Guerrillero Heroica, is supposed to represent the possibility of a better world, free from injustice, racism and poverty. At the end of a decade of forceful American imperialism, the handsome face of Che stands as a timeless reminder of a new, selfless human being; the man willing to fight and die for the cause.

In the post-Cold War age, the image of the man who, in another era, called for “one, two, many Vietnams”, has also become the acceptable face of subversion, co-opted by the mainstream to sell everything from vodka to zippo lighters. At times, the idealism wrapped up in the myth of Che can seem completely at odds with his posthumous persona - a lock of hair that was cut from Guevara’s head shortly before his execution in 1967 was recently sold at auction for $100,000.

Ernesto Guevara was born into a radical yet middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina on June 14, 1928. The word Che itself is a Guarani word that Argentinians use, which translates as “Hey, you”; but it was the Cubans who gave Ernesto his recognisable nickname. Today it is the island of Cuba where his image has been adopted most enthusiastically. Children are taught from an early age to “be like Che”; and rather than being a symbol of rebellion, the Christ-like photograph taken by Alberto Korda in 1960 is a symbol of authority, the establishment and the repression.

Che’s enduring legacy also feeds on the cult of defeat. This he shares with the memory of another 20th-century revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, although with none of Trotsky’s enduring contribution to revolutionary thought. In his introduction to a re-publication of Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, Slavoj Zizek contrasts the fortunes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara - one, the ageing leader of a decaying bureaucracy whom history has left behind rather than absolved; the other, the eternally young and handsome revolutionary for whom a single country was never enough – with those of Stalin and Trotsky:

“Imagine if, in the middle of the 1920s, Trotsky had emigrated and renounced Soviet citizenship in order to instigate permanent revolution around the world, and then died soon afterwards – after his death, Stalin would have dutifully elevated him into a cult.”

After Stalin’s death, a copy of Terrorism and Communism was found among his private papers, full of handwritten notes, apparently signalling Stalin’s wholehearted approval. Anti-communists opportunistically jumped on this, of course, as final proof that Trotsky was the precursor of Stalin and the totalitarian dystopia he built. With the troublemaker Guevara lying dead in Bolivia, Castro dutifully elevated the cult of Che to new heights in an attempt to re-assert his own revolutionary authority.

Ernesto Guevara was 26 years-old when the US backed a coup to the overthrow Guatemalan president Jacabo Arbenz, whose government was attempting to implement a modest program of nationalisation in Washington’s backyard. A covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program, codenamed “Operation Success”, was hatched to crush Guatemala’s brief flirtation with social democracy. Spearheaded by an ex-army colonel and furniture salesman named Castillo Armas, the paramilitary force was armed and trained in Nicaragua, and along with the CIA, planned to create a climate of tension inside Guatemala, weakening Arbenz’s resolve and provoking a coup d’etat.

Having travelled there with two friends, Gualo Garcia and Andro Herrero, Guevara wished to see at first-hand the fledgling Guatemalan revolution. However, witnessing the failure of the Arbenz regime to secure itself against US intervention, Guevara concluded that the only way to break free from the United States was through violent struggle. “The subject [of debate] was always the same,” wrote Hilda Gadea, Guevara’s future wife and a companion in Guatemala, “The only way, said Ernesto, was a violent revolution; the struggle had to be against Yankee imperialism and any other solutions…were betrayals.”

It was here that Guevara, in his own words, became a communist, or more specifically, a believer in the quasi-religious doctrine of Stalinism: “At which moment I left the path of reason and took on something akin to faith I can’t tell you even approximately because the path was very long and with a lot of backward steps.” Jorge Castañeda, in Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, describes how Che, writing to his aunt back in Argentina, had "sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated," signing-off his letters as "Stalin II."

Soon after Guevara’s death, a large, stylised outline of his face with the phrase “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (English): “Until Everlasting Victory Always” written underneath, was added to the front of the building of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior in Havana. As if marking the transition from defiant revolutionary to cult of personality, Che’s image was fitted to the ugly obelisk just as the current of Sovietisation was engulfing Cuban society. In the year after Che’s death, while non-conformity and rebellion were breaking out across Western Europe, Castro went on television to give a long-winded speech defending the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. During the same year, the revolution summarily banned all small businesses, including the paladares, Havana’s bustling bars and restaurants.

Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, well known for his biting irony, captured the mood of the late 1960s in a piece called “Instructions for Joining a New Society:”

One: Be optimistic.
Two: Be well turned out, courteous, obedient.
(Must have made the grade in sports.)
And finally, walk
As every member does;
One step forward
and two or three back:
but always applauding, applauding.

The type of functionaries who prospered in the Cuba of the late 1960s, according to comrades from the Eastern bloc, reported for duty with the words: “Commandante en Jefe, ordene!” (Commander-in-chief, give us your orders!).

The myth of Che Guevara’s virtue set against the decline of the Cuban revolution, however, is false. The romanticism surrounding Che skirts over the unpalatable truths about the revolutionary’s life and conduct. Upon the victory of Fidel Castro’s 26 July movement and the overthrow of Fulgencia Batista, Che’s entourage took charge of the La Cabaña fortress in Havana. In the foreign press, Che was the feared “international communist;” and away from the limelight at La Cabaña Guevara was given the responsibility of dealing with the henchmen of the former regime. The walls of the fortress rang out most nights with the sound of the firing squads. According to the journalist and associate of Che, Luis Ortega, Guevara sent 1,897 men to their deaths in the early years of the Cuban revolution, and is widely reported to have pronounced at the time that "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." Despite the number of summary executions presided over by Guevara, the most notorious incident of the time occurred in Santiago de Cuba at the hands of Raul Castro. Soon after occupying the city, Raul presided over the mass execution of 70 captured soldiers by “bulldozing a trench, standing the condemned men in front of it, and mowing them down with machine guns." (Anderson, 1997)

When it came to Guevara’s big idea, that of the “New Man,” he was among those who held the belief that gay Cubans be excluded. Viewing them as the “the scum of society,” Guevara founded the forced-labour camp system that held homosexuals, dissidents and later, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, those with Aids. As Castro himself chillingly put it several years later: “We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist must be.”

In an article Guevara wrote during the Cuban Missile Crisis but published posthumously, he revealed his indignation at Nikita Khrushchev for his “treachery” in refusing to start a thermo-nuclear war over the presence of a military base: “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.” Castro had also been prepared to avenge the destruction of his revolution with the end of the world. It was the veteran of the Second World War, Nikita Khrushchev, who recoiled in the face of Castro’s demands, writing: “In your telex message, you suggested that we should be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s country. Naturally you must realise what that would have led to. It would have been not just a strike but a prelude to a thermonuclear world war...”

In the aftermath of the crisis, Guevara played a leading role as Cuban anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their printing presses closed down and militants thrown in prison. Cuban Trotskyists, who had argued for freedom of expression and an alliance of all revolutionary, working class tendencies, were also persecuted, their printing press smashed and their newspapers driven underground. In a letter to Armando Hart, Che wrote later that "Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." Towards the end of his life, Trotsky had begun to move towards the proposition that the USSR was itself a new form of oppression, the bureaucracy usurping the Russian working-class and ruling in its place – in the process creating a new form of tyranny, neither capitalist nor socialist. Guevara’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union led him instead to embrace a more hardline stance – that of Maoism, which he interpreted as truer to the legacy of Stalin.

Considering all of this material is widely available, Che Guevara’s enduring popularity on the left appears both shallow and disturbing. Oscar Wilde said somewhere that a map of the world without a Utopia on it isn't worth looking at; and that perhaps explains Che's longevity to some extent. Undoubtedly his charisma and willingness to live out his idealism are part of the attraction; as is his death at a relatively young age – would an elderly Che working in one of Castro’s grim bureaucracies attract such uncritical devotion?

The fanaticism embodied by the man, however, is ultimately the same fanaticism that has, at other times and in other places, led to those who have sought to remould humanity burning large proportions of it. Despite his continued popularity in consumer culture, the left should really know better by now.

That need not mean, of course, that hope is lost entirely. Basil Davidson, a former British officer and a leftist who fought in the Second World War with the European resistance in the Balkans, once wrote that having seen what had happened in Europe under the Nazis, he no longer believed the old argument that you couldn’t change human nature. From what he had seen with his own eyes, you could change it for the worse quite easily. He concluded that if you could change it for the worse, why then, do we give up on the idea you can change it for the better?

The posibility remains, as it always has; but only if we drop the idea that millions need to perish in the process. Oh, and can we please leave Che Guevara in his grave.

The 'liberal' response to rioting

2011-08-16T10:28:00.129+01:00

Few of the British commentariat predicted last week’s riots. Some even dismissed the prospect of unrest the very day Tottenham and Enfield kicked-off.

Politicians and journalists ceased paying attention to those living in Britain’s inner-cities some time ago. They were not “Middle England”, after all, nor did they possess even a single newspaper or television station to sing their tune – or to browbeat politicians who threatened their interests.

For several decades now an attempt has been made in Britain to pretend that a significant proportion of people do not really exist. When the existence of the so-called underclass has been acknowledged, it has served primarily to allow moralising authority figures to demand they “sort themselves out”. The only time they have been allowed on our television screens has been in the form of comedy sketches where uncouth mannerisms and clothes visibly purchased on a tight budget provided laughs for those with substantially thicker wallets.

For all the classless rhetoric espoused by politicians wishing to emphasise “aspiration” over solidarity – itself a form of exclusion in that cleaners and street-sweepers will always be with us, - the underclass in recent years has been firmly placed in the role of society’s invisible bogeyman, lurking in the shadows and ready, should we let our guard down, to jump out and turn “decent” society on its head.

In the aftermath of last week’s unrest, there has been a predictable clammer to explain the riots in terms of morality. Journalists have turned-up en-masse in poorer areas of London in an attempt to "understand” the unrest in the language of “good” and “bad” people, or comforting simplifications of right and wrong.

One thing which has provoked little comment, however, is the extent to which so-called liberals scampered behind the arms of the state when it all kicked-off, with 33% of Brits apparently ready to embrace what can only be described as proto-fascist authoritarianism in defence of their property rights.

Fascism is of course a term which should not be used lightly, and while I do not suppose the 33% who called for live ammunition to be used on rioters are adherents of all the doctrinal specifities of Il Duce, they are essentially calling for the mass murder of what in other circumstances could conceivably be political protesters.

In the same poll, three-quarters of those quizzed said troops should be called in, curfews were backed by 82 per cent, using tear gas got 78 per cent and Tasers 72 per cent.

Friends of mine who would normally describe themselves as liberals and social democrats were in many instances the most bloodthirsty, repeatedly Tweeting and updating Facebook with their own calls for the use of "any means necessary" to "restore the social order".

If taken at their word, this would have meant the use of any means necessary to disperse what in many instances were children.

The zoological obsession with calling subversives vermin’s names: rats, worms, cockroaches, also resurfaced. Many rioters did not warrant even that, however, and instead were simply referred to comfortingly as “scum”.

This week of course, things have calmed down somewhat, and the armchair generals have put away their toy soldiers and again left the execution of subversives to the Syrian and Libyan dictatorships. It has indeed become almost impossible to find anybody who was calling for the most extreme measures this time last week.

I don’t often quote Slavoj Zizek, although I think he makes a valid point when he says: “While democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on constitutive violence.” In other words, despite the self-questioning way in which liberal democracy likes to portray itself, even the most "free" citizens cannot put into question the very structures that legitimize and organize them.

We’ve seen what can happen when relatively small-scale, albeit terrifying, rioting breaks out in London and other major cities for several days. A much bigger question remains: what would the public reaction be in the face of social unrest on a much larger scale?

As Hari Kunzru points out in his excellent article:

“The smug sense of disconnection (this is nothing to do with me, or my comfortable middle-class life – it is an affair of the poor, in places I choose not to go) was soon replaced by panic. "WHERE IS THE ARMY?" Screw civil liberties, time to declare martial law. How easy it would be to install fascism in this creaky little country! No need to torch the Reichstag – all you'd have to do would be to burn a few more sports shops.”

The establishment thought they could go on laughing at the poor on Jeremy Kyle forever. It turns out they couldn't.

2011-08-09T14:45:00.053+01:00

The political reaction to the riots has already begun, with Cameron flying back from his holidays amidst increasingly enthusiastic talk of the military being deployed on British streets. Last night the rioting spread out of London and erupted in Birmingham, Nottingham, and if reports are to be believed, Bradford. The reaction of the media and politicians thus far has been a demonstrable sense of not knowing how to react. As one Tweeter put it: “Simply repeating that the looting is ‘pure criminality’ is like telling us the sky's blue. We know that. Why are our youngsters pure criminals?”.

It is a thoroughly dispiriting sight to see large swathes of London engulfed in flames. Widespread looting is taking place and the police everywhere appear overwhelmed by the sheer numbers involved. To make a slightly fatuous comparison, it brings back memories of the school playground on those once-a-year occasions when a sort of mass disobedience erupted, the very psychological stability of the crowd disintegrating as events unfolded.

Jody McIntyre has been sacked from his position on the Independent for allegedly “inciting violence,” after a Tweet encouraging the rioters; calls are being made to shut down London’s mobile phone networks and target those using social networking sites to plan more unrest; and the Etonions leading the country have been forced to fly back from their European villas. I think I failed to mention that the stock market is in freefall, too.

The response of the establishment thus far has been to close ranks. Both Labour and the Conservatives are speaking in a unified voice in a desire to attach themselves to the groundswell of reaction that is surely on its way. Old Labourites who have accepted the “inevitability” of the free-market can be heard dismissing the grievances of the rioters as “not genuine,” rendering true the cliché that what was in the past "a response to injustice" is always in the present "totally unacceptable".

The reaction of most comfortably-off people has been to dismiss the violent scenes as the result of an over-indulged poor, giddy on benefits, feral and spoiling for violence. This impression of the underclass, if you wish to call it that, is acquired from television shows such as Jeremy Kyle and the reactionary press. In reality, most people rarely come in to contact with those languishing on Britain’s inner city estates.

One ex-police officer on television today remarked that the rioters appeared to be motivated by, not so much a cause, as sheer, naked greed. The “greed is good” mantra is about the only thing that has trickled down to the very bottom of society in recent years. As Sean Matgamma points out:

“The deprived young people...have come out on the streets to fight those they see as their enemy, the police, and to grab a little instant prosperity...They live in a society where great robbers and swindlers are admired whether or not they are legal, semi-legal or downright criminal. Where they enrich themselves without any regard for other people.”

It seems quite likely that within a few days the talk will move from reaction to offensive, spurred on, if I can say it without causing confusion, by the forces of reaction. The law-and-order brigade is already making itself visible in the guise of talking heads on the evening news. The rioting will give them the excuse to offer simplistic yet satisfying solutions to the more complex problems of widespread poverty and the resulting hopelessness. There are already reports of black people in London who are wearing new trainers being stopped and asked for receipts, with the threat of arrest hanging over their heads if they don’t provide them.

There is a lot of class hatred swilling around right now; and however unpleasant the looting and destruction of livelihoods is, the truth is that the hatred and spite directed for many years at the underclass is being reflected back at so-called civilised society in the crooked mirror of deprived estates up and down the country.

And therein lies the establishment’s mistake: They thought they could simply write-off the poor and laugh at them on Jeremy Kyle and Little Britain indefinitely. It turns out they couldn't.

Working class uprising or rampant consumerism?

2011-08-08T12:53:00.026+01:00

Some on the Left are interpreting the riots in Tottenham and Enfield as a sort of awakening. After the student protests and anti-cuts marches, the underclass has entered the arena, bringing to the television screens of Middle England the realities of life in Britain’s inner cities they had up to now forgotten or ignored.

Indeed, until a few days ago, the only time those rioting would have made it onto television was as comedy material for the sketch writers of Little Britain or as fodder for patronising reality shows.

It is true of course that if governments refuse to distribute wealth it will be done using force. After all, the rich have been "looting" the country for years in the guise of clever accounting, only to be given knighthoods and lionised by the media in the process. When disenfranchised youth do the same, the mainstream predictably sound-off like a Telegraph editorial about “violent thugs” and “feral youth,” ignoring the underlying deprivation at the heart of the matter.

What seems to have passed some by, however, is that disenfranchised youth burning and looting sports gear has far more in common with the "greed is good” mantra than it does with the cooperative control of the means of production; and when the cameras are switched off, it is the lives of the poor which will be blighted by these riots, not the gated communities of Kensington and Chelsea.

What large-scale looting demonstrates is that it is the battle of ideas where the Left is playing catch-up in Britain’s poorest areas. While middle class universities are hotbeds of youth radicalism, for the poor it is often the language of neo-liberalism that motivates. Aspirational rhetoric sounds different on the council estates of Woolwich or Peckham, but it is widespread and accepted all the same. Popular hip-hop music promotes not solidarity, but a desire to escape “the ghetto” – often by any means necessary. “Get rich or die tryin” was how American rapper 50 cent put it; and while “Fiddy” is very much out of fashion these days, the narrative of getting rich at all costs is still conspicuous, to say the least.

If you live in one of the above mentioned areas, the only realistic way to achieve celebrity or get rich – what actually matters if you watch television or turn on the radio – is to “loot” in one way or another. If that means breaking into shops, burning houses or selling drugs then so be it. The difference between this and those who deny funds to services through tax evasion is that when young black men “loot” the BBC will call it "totally unacceptable"; in the case of the former it will be put down to an individual becoming "tax efficient".

What someone does in a business suit however does not become ok simply because it is repeated by a person wearing a tracksuit. Neither is to be celebrated; and unthinkingly doing so does little to help those living in Enfield and Tottenham who aren't rioting, such as the elderly, terrified and barricaded inside their homes. Forgetting such people is one of the luxuries of the academic left, who can at times cling on to trendy terms such as “uprising” and “revolt” in a desire to attach themselves to youth and their attractive and dangerous anger.

In this vein, the riots demonstrate not only the consequences of the rampant free market, but the retreat of the Left from the council estate to the ivory tower.

Death requires no advocates

2011-08-02T19:09:00.108+01:00

Once described by a High Court judge as a man who "plays fast and loose" with the truth, Paul Staines has gained prominence in recent years writing under the pseudonym of Guido Fawkes, becoming in the process “one of the most feared and influential forces in British public life.”

Inspired by Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun of the 1980s, his blog uses the moniker of his hero, “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions," and adopts tabloid news-values and a distinctly “anti-politics” tone.

A self-proclaimed admirer of the Tea Party and long-time associate of the Libertarian Alliance, Staines is a former member of the Committee for a Free Britain (CFB,) a shadowy 1980s right-wing organisation which was funded by Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch and David Hart. CFB leaders spent the Thatcher years campaigning for the Poll Tax, inviting members of the Nicaraguan Contras to Britain and speaking against talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which they branded “appeasement”.

Nowadays portraying himself as a respectable libertarian, one would assume Staines harboured a wish to roll-back the state and strip-away much of its power. The libertarian or "classical liberal" perspective is, after all, that individual well-being, prosperity, and social harmony are fostered by "as much liberty as possible" and "as little government as necessary”.

In reality, however, Staines would like to see the state exercise the ultimate right – that of life and death - over its citizens. His latest campaign is to bring back hanging, which he claims a majority of British people support.

The last time a person was executed by the state in Britain was 1964. There were originally some 220 crimes punishable by death, most reflecting a desire to protect private property (although there were others of a more eccentric nature, such as a law against "being in the company of Gypsies for one month"). A working gallows remained at HMP Wandsworth until 1994, a macabre reminder of a bygone era, rolled out and tested every six months until 1992.

Retribution, however, is a big thing in tabloid Britain; and as Staines readily admits, he deliberately adopted tabloid values to increase the popularity of his blog.

When it comes to criminal justice, tabloid values also increasingly hold sway, browbeating politicians into letting the victim decide when dealing with lawbreakers. We are in a "feeling" epoch, after all, and those in a raw emotional state understandably emote the loudest.

Whether penal policy is best served by emotion or cold, hard logic is another matter entirely of course, and a debate which probably wouldn't sell nearly as much copy as the shrill demand to "get tough." Contemptuously dismissing public opinion is one thing; but automatically conferring moral status upon something for no other reason than popularity is quite another; and not simply frivolous, but demagogic and dangerous. Being a self-proclaimed libertarian, Staines should know this.

While writing little on capital punishment herself, libertarian icon Ayn Rand did publish a brief article by Nathaniel Branden in response to the question "What is the Objectivist stand on capital punishment?":

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

A notorious case in this mould was that of Dereck Bentley, a British teenager who had what today would be described as severe learning difficulties. Bentley was executed on the 28 January, 1953.

During a botched robbery, Police Constable Sidney Miles was killed by Bentley’s friend, Christopher Craig. Due to the fact that he was only 16 at the time, Craig was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (he was released in 1963). Bentley, however, was convicted and sentenced to death, not for shooting dead a policeman, but for being party to murder under the English law principle of “joint enterprise”. A psychiatrist at Bentley’s trial stated that Bentley was illiterate, of low intelligence and borderline retarded.

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

Christopher Hitchens’s 1998 essay, Scenes from an Execution, noted how in the US politicians are apt to play politics with the “ultimate sanction” in execution-hungry states. It also drew attention to the large number of those on death row suffering from mental health problems:

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

In spite of it being one of the few “advanced” countries to still employ the death penalty, the United States has by far-and-away the greatest number of murders of any comparable country. The South, which accounts for 80% of U.S. executions, also has the highest regional murder rate.

I don’t, in actual fact, think Staines really is a libertarian, or really sees himself as such. What he is is a very affective rabble-rouser in the mould of the very gutter journalism so recently discredited in its printed form. That being said, one need not be a libertarian to recognise that capital punishment really is big government at its worst.

Sir Richard Branson - the people’s capitalist

2011-07-28T16:37:00.042+01:00

Sir Richard Branson is widely held up as an example of entrepreneurial success. Not in the mould of the ruthless tycoon sat atop a shiny tower counting piles of cash, but as the face of a new breed of capitalist who, at the end of the 20th-century, “tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being," as Terry Eagleton puts it.

Richard Branson is essentially a man of the “Cool Britannia” era. "We are seriously relaxed about people becoming very, very rich," Peter Madelson said at the time; and this was reflected in people like Branson. It was no longer a source of shame to have “loadsamoney”. Class, that old chestnut of 20th-century politics, was no more, or so the establishment liked to think. Still lingering here and there like a bad smell, but on the way out, nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it didn’t take long before the rich began to view the payment of tax as something they could be seriously relaxed about, too. What would at one time have been shameful became over the course of 30 years something like a badge of honour. This did not restrict itself to those at the top of society, either. Even members of the working class - those on the receiving end of today’s government cuts - can at times be heard referring disparagingly to the “tax man”, implying a dark, shadowy figure in it simply for what they can get. Perhaps it is indeed language that is of greatest importance in this respect, for one can hardly boast of “asset maximisation” when well-aware they are depriving not an anonymous and shadowy “tax man”, but terminally ill children of otherwise affordable cancer treatment, or pensioners of the ability to heat their homes for more than a few hours a day.

Recently I wrote an article highlighting the behaviour of Bono and U2 when it came to the payment of tax. In it I quoted Jim Aiken, a music promoter who helped stage U2 concerts in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. What he said epitomised Bono and the new breed of ego-driven capitalist in a sentence: “U2 are arch-capitalists - arch-capitalists - but it looks as if they're not.”

Looking beyond the self-glorification and ferocious publicity campaigns that characterise Bono’s “charitable giving,” U2 were simultaneously cutting the feet from under their own government’s ability to provide for the very poorest in the world – the very people Bono feigned the greatest concern for.

A similar thing could be said of Branson, whose first company, Virgin Music, started amid a sophisticated purchase-tax fraud that Branson himself admitted in 1971. The company was sold in 1992 for £560m and Branson went on to build his business empire from there. Despite a public persona as the amiable People’s Capitalist, Branson, according to Tom Bower, author of the book Branson, has spent “a lifetime building a fortune on hype, misrepresentations and...a criminal conviction for tax evasion”.

Branson’s business interests would always come ahead of any notion of the public good. For years Branson campaigned in Westminster for the privatisation of the rail network, one of the most disastrous sell-offs of public assets during the Thatcher era. Today Virgin Rail remains dependent on state money, aggressively protects its monopoly, and is subject to an exorbitant number of passenger complaints. (Bower, 2005)

Another of Branson's obsessions, his “lifetime ambition,” according to a millennium lecture he gave at Oxford, was to take over the running of the National Lottery. As Bower points out, “possessing the lottery would bequeath a vast cash flow in management fees and endless free publicity to Virgin by association while Branson anointed the lottery’s millionaires. By controlling the lottery, Branson would never again need to bother with dicey enterprises like cola, clothes, cosmetics or even mobile phones. Most important, he would reverse the crushing humiliation he suffered by two rejections”.

News surfaced today that Branson is planning to move Virgin’s brand division to Switzerland in a switch that is likely to save the company millions in tax revenue. The move is being undertaken, in the words of Virgin, “to co-ordinate... international growth and brand management,” whatever that means.

Commenting on Virgin’s historical tax record in Britain before the latest move was announced, Richard Murphy from Tax Research was already less-than complimentary, saying: “I didn’t think Virgin paid any tax here, let’s be blunt about it. It’s been remarkably poor at doing so.”

Whatever the case, the British treasury – and by that I mean hospitals, schools and care homes, to name but a few - is about to become several million pounds lighter, and no amount of rolling-up the shirtsleeves, hairspray or aspirational rhetoric is going to change that.

Provincial life

2011-07-18T20:12:00.095+01:00

After living in London, life in a small, seaside town can come as something of a culture shock. For one thing, the evenings are extremely quiet; and when you do go out, to the pub say, it is quite unlike going to the pub in London. One thing I’ve noticed since being here is the sheer number of fights that occur on a Friday or Saturday night, usually over some trivial thing such as a person’s eye lingering a fraction too long on another drinker’s girlfriend. It seems fair to say that this is not helped by the fact that everyone consumes a tremendous amount of alcohol in this neck of the woods.

Being from a small town myself I always assumed the city was where the real violence took place; and when it comes to murders I have no doubt that it is. If it’s good old fashioned beatings you are after, however, small towns win hands down. In the last two weeks I’ve already heard around half-a-dozen stories of X hitting Y because he was disrespecting Z; not to mention the three or four men I noticed in the pub on Saturday evening with bruises and cuts to a large proportion of their faces.

This may all sound incredibly like snobbery on my part. “Look at those imbeciles fighting”, you might be hearing me say. There is, after all, a page on Chavtowns, the nasty spin-off of the cult hate-site Chav Scum, dedicated to this corner of the west of England, which it unendearingly describes as “the northern chavs’ number one holiday destination”. The creators of such sights are deep down probably quite jealous of the fun their working-class counterparts appear to be having. For while the middle-classes suck up to the boss for less and less money, those they write-off as “chavs” spend their time smoking, drinking and fucking like rabbits. All-in-all far more pleasurable and productive ways of spending one’s time.

There appears to be an unhealthy obsession at Chavtowns with what the working classes spend their money on. The affluent of course love to tell the poor what they should and should not be buying, as you will soon discover if ever in the company of someone giving money to a beggar. “Well I don’t mind, so long as they don’t spend it on drugs”, you will hear them say, ignoring the fact that sleeping on freezing cobblestones is probably quite difficult without the aid of at least some narcotics. The less affluent are inevitably written-off as feckless and lazy when they stay at home too; and with their love of “Burberry, Von Dutch and animal print" labelled hyper-materialists when they have the temerity to visit the shops. Some would say they can’t win.

One thing life does revolve around in the countryside is the Sunday newspaper. Unsurprisingly it is not the hedonistic youth of the night before but their parents who awake at six thirty in the morning to stand outside the local newsagents for their copy of the Mail on Sunday. The strangest aspect of all of this is that if you visit the shop later on in the morning, at 11 say, there continues to be a large pile of newspapers, including the Mail on Sunday, sat on top of the counter. Situated very much in Tory heartland, I can’t help but feel that the competitive society also extends to who can be the first out of the newsagents in the morning clutching their right-wing tabloid. After spending at least 20 of my 28-years living here this strange phenomenon continues to be something I am unable to fully understand.

Just down the road from Burnham is Weston-Super-Mare, a slightly bigger seaside town of comparable shabbiness. It was here the Kaiser Chiefs had in mind when they penned their hit single “I predict a riot”, due to the willingness of the locals to fight at the drop of a hat. Passing up on the opportunity of a duel and heading out of town and into the countryside highlights the contradictory nature of provincial life. Living in these small, seaside towns can be mind-numbingly awful at times; but it is right beside exactly the sort of scenery you don’t get in London.

It is often assumed that the poor in Britain live in the inner cities or on the outskirts in sprawling council estates. In fact there are thousands of small towns like Burnham where many inhabitants live incredibly downtrodden existences without the prospect of “regeneration”, nor the corresponding influx of jobs many cities receive. Even McDonald's is unlikely to set-up shop in Burnham. If you are lucky and have qualifications you may get a job as an estate agent or go into sales of some kind, hawking junk over the telephone to naive pensioners. Failing that it’s work in a residential care home or one of the local factories on the minimum wage.

The class system, along with a full complement of social ills, exists probably more strongly in the countryside than in the city. The myth of rural virtue and urban vice is an old one; but just as there are aristocrats in government awkwardly dropping consonants there are similar folk in the countryside whose snobbery is not quite so carefully calibrated. Those who, to quote Terence Blacker, “will judge you not on who you are, or what you say, do or believe, but on the things you happen to have in your house and whether they conform...”.

Being surrounded by all of this again feels, for me anyway, something like the return of an old friend.

Stopping Murdoch is not enough

2011-07-13T16:41:00.036+01:00

In a matter of weeks the political class has gone from cap-doffing servitude to outright hostility to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It feels almost surreal watching Ed Miliband and David Cameron publically attacking Murdoch when until recently they would have stopped at nothing to curry favour with his newspapers. Tony Blair's former special advisor Lance Price even said in his memoirs that Mr Murdoch was the “third person to be consulted on every major decision” during Blair’s time in office. Asking who voted for this – after all, the most obvious question for any serious democrat – was apparently off-limits for our politicians until last week. Now they are asking nothing else.

Anyone who has ever read a copy of Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper, if read is the correct term, would be hard-pressed to find any worthwhile contribution to British cultural life within its pages. Those who have felt the wrath of the Sun in recent years have ranged from asylum seekers to benefit claimants to the straightforwardly eccentric. The Sun and the NOTW also tap very successfully into a layer of public veneration of the military and a proud hatred of anything remotely French or German. This mentality can be seen most visibly during football World Cups or on the eve of a war, when a failure to applaud or cheer at the correct volume is treated as high-treason or a sign of closeted homosexuality.

The problem for the left - and it is a real problem - is that the public buys this sort of thing in droves. Several years ago the then-editor of the Mirror Piers Morgan tried to include more “serious” news in his paper, only to see circulation decline dramatically as a result. Going by the sales figures at least, if it’s a contest between hard news and peado-bashing the latter tends to shift more copies.

Some on the left are celebrating Murdoch’s setbacks as if the destruction of one man will solve the problem of a biased, corporate media and usher in a new, progressive era. In reality, the problem is not so much Murdoch but a notion of “freedom” that allows wealthy barons to use the media as their business propaganda-wing. As Hannen Swaffer, one of the early 20th century pioneers of British tabloid journalism, put it, “freedom of the press in Britain is the freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to”.

The resulting copy often brings to mind the description given of the Cuban Communist newspaper, Granma, by the late Argentinean editor and dissident Jacobo Timerman, who described his morning encounter with the newspaper as "a degradation of the act of reading".

It is of course a simplification to say that media barons set the political agenda and journalists jump into line. For a start there are many journalists who would refuse to do such a thing. What newspapers and television stations do very effectively is reinforce orthodoxy organically through the reproduction of their own economic interests. Should the media accurately report voices of dissent it may in theory cannibalize itself through a transformation in society’s economic structure. According to Gramsci, we may judge ideology to be effective if it is able to blend with the “common sense” of the people.

Despite what the political right will inevitably say, the call for a democratisation of the media to prevent a few wealthy barons controlling the entire political and cultural information-gateway is not a call for the destruction of freedom of the press, but a demand for a genuinely free and democratic mass-media.

In the clamour to get rid of Murdoch, though, let us on the left not forget the real issue here: media plurality. When Murdoch is gone, it could quite easily be someone else.

Keeping your head above water in London

2011-07-07T21:39:00.036+01:00

Dedicated to those who lost their lives to religious fascism on this day six years ago

Yesterday I moved from London to a place called Burnham-on-sea, a banal coastal town in the South West of England where they still sell Donald McGill-style postcards in the summertime. I moved because my family live here; and with family comes a degree of financial security. I still intend to spend much of my time in London, but I cannot afford to live there any longer. Not that is, until I find gainful, paid employment.

Getting a job is notoriously difficult for the unemployed at present. A man I recently sat next to at a recruitment fair told me and others he had applied for 10,000 jobs in the past two years. He was almost certainly exaggerating – overdoing one’s own misfortune seems to be a particularly British characteristic - or perhaps disastrous at writing job applications, but nonetheless, the fact that many present were prepared to believe him speaks volumes about the state of the job market.

As it happened, I was able to land a job with my previous employer, Royal Mail. Getting the job proved to be the easy part. More difficult was getting sufficient hours to pay the rent as well as buy enough to eat. Being a Postman today is a very different job to what it used to be. Almost all new contracts are temporary and based on 25-30 hour weeks; and the amount of junk a postman is required to carry around on his back in the form of advertising is rising exponentially year-on-year. That was my impression at least. Unable to eke out anything other than an extremely meagre existence in London on £200 a week, I left the position after only two weeks in the job.

The part of London life that is perhaps the biggest burden is the cost of rent. Being shown around dingy, mould-infested bedsits only to be told you must pay £100 a week for the pleasure of living there is soul destroying, especially when it comes with the prospect of giving half your weekly pay to someone whose “portfolio” ensures they will never have to sleep in mould infested dwellings, nor break their back for £200 a week. With very little chance of ever owning a house, those with inadequate living quarters must instead navigate the rental free-market, where at the end of every tenancy getting your deposit back can be like trying to extract teeth from a bad tempered dog. Life in London can be hugely enjoyable, but it can also leave you feeling a little like Gordon Comstock, the character in George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, his living conditions grim, his job boring, and his impecuniousness a frequent source of humiliation. The difference in my case is that I am not actively trying to sink to the lowest levels of society.

London famously attracts its fair share of those attempting to “make it” in one sense or another. As someone who has recently completed a course in journalism at City University, I am fairly sure I fit into this category of person myself. Although fully aware that moving to London would not open some golden path into the journalistic profession, I did view it as the correct place to be, which it undeniably is, most of all perhaps because of the opportunities to meet people you only get in the capital.

One thing you soon start to notice in London is the extraordinary extent to which everything is about “connections”, not least in journalism. The major newspaper titles no longer advertise positions, instead preferring to find employees who are in the loop, so to speak. Most graduates instead pursue internship placements, working anything up to a year for free on a major title, performing menial tasks such as tea-making in the almost millenarian hope that one day they may get the chance to contribute something worthwhile to the paper.

National journalism has always been something of a middle and upper-class pursuit of course. The term “BBC accent” was coined during the 20th century to describe a recognisable Home Counties diction the corporation now likes to pretend most of its employees do not in fact possess. What certainly has changed is that most of those successfully entering the profession today have postgraduate qualifications and lengthy internships under their belts, affordable only to the relatively affluent; and unlike a Home Counties accent, something which cannot be faked. The resulting journalism that invades my own cramped bedroom every night via the television could perhaps most aptly be described as the political establishment talking to itself.

If you can handle all of this and come out of it with your sanity you may be rewarded with a job, or you may not be. What will almost certainly be the case is there will be less in the boss's pot with which to pay you, the worker, whether in the newspaper business or elsewhere. In hard times employee’s wages inevitably take the hit before chief executive final salary pension schemes; and if that means newsrooms becoming increasingly stuffed with wealthy individuals who can partake in journalism as a leisure activity, then so be it.

The days always seem to go by at a faster pace in London. What I mean to say is that the time actually feels like it is moving faster. I think because so much of each day is spent under the ground scuttling along, I would say at great speed, but often at a crawl, on an overcrowded tube train. The conditions often bring out the worst in people, myself included. Just the other day I got into a quarrel with a man over some trivial thing (he bumped into me as I was walking round a corner), resulting in a situation that could quite easily have resulted in a physical confrontation, foolish on my part though that would have been.

It was of course in Keep the Aspidistra Flying that Gordon Comstock declared his own personal war on affluence. Riding on the Docklands Light Railway first thing in the morning having practically embalmed my liver the night before, sat next to the businessmen with calculators working out their cash flows on the way to Canary Wharf, I have gotten, I like to think, a small insight into Gordon Comstock’s disdain for the capitalist vulgarities he sees around him, oscillating between self-admiration and self-loathing.

Six years ago today a group of deranged fanatics declared not a war on affluence, but a war on London. Without dragging up tired clichés about “never forgetting” (although you shouldn’t) and lionising the “spirit of the blitz”, remembering that 52 innocent people were murdered for a fascistic ideology puts my own London-induced neuroticism into perspective. Despite his (to me anyway) disagreeable political views, Samuel Johnson was right to say that “by seeing London, [he had] seen as much of life as the world can show”, and it was this that so disgusted the murderers of 7/7 – the sheer diversity of life in the capital, whether represented by “those slags dancing around” (as some other would-be murderers called them), or the insufficiently pious Muslims who practiced at their local Mosques.

Returning to Orwell, Gordon Comstock always had to share his room with aspidistras which continued to thrive despite his mistreatment of them. Despite what happened on that day in July 2005, London continues to thrive, and is a place I will return to live soon, I hope.

"The road to Jerusalem lies through Cairo."

2011-07-04T12:32:00.023+01:00

"The road to Jerusalem passes through Cairo." - Ayman al Zawahiri, the current leader of Al Qa'ida (1995)

Program for Marxism 2011, the annual get-together of the Socialist Workers' Party:

Is the Daily Mail blaming the unions for the death of Sophie Howard?

2011-07-01T14:20:00.034+01:00

Girl, 13, crushed to death by a falling branch as she sat on park bench because her teachers were out on strike

Not content with portraying striking teachers as militants “holding the country to ransom”, the Daily Mail has published a story implying teachers and their union are to blame for the death of 13-year-old Sophie Howard, who died yesterday while playing in a park in Yaxley, Peterborough.

The incident happened when a large branch fell from a high tree and hit her. She was rushed to hospital but died of her injuries.

While unconsoling to the young girl’s family, this tragedy appears to be just (if that word can ever appropriately be used to describe the death of a child) one of those things. It happened after a horribly unfortunate coming together of factors that left Sophie Howard in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anyone, and it could have happened at any time.

Not satisfied with straightforwardly reporting the incident, however, the Daily Mail has tried to blame the young girl’s death on striking teachers. The logic, if you can call it that, runs that if Sophie Howard had been in school, and not sat on the park bench, she would not have been killed by the falling branch. Sophie’s school was closed yesterday due to industrial action. It is therefore the fault of striking teachers that she was killed.

In reality of course, the girl died because she was hit by a falling tree branch. She was not at school yesterday, just like she was not at school on the day of the Royal Wedding. She had instead gone to play in the park with her friends. Blaming striking teachers for her death is akin to blaming headmasters for opening schools when pupils are killed by speeding motorists on their way to the classroom – a far more common occurrence (and the prevention of which the Mail actively opposes).

Not satisfied with a straightforward write-up, though, the Mail decided to insult the bereaved family of Sophie Howard by using the death of their little girl in a sad attempt to smear striking teachers. Some hack, probably an unpaid intern, had to sit there and think of a way to use the death of a child to push the newspaper’s anti-union agenda.

How fucking pathetic.

P.S. The Mail has not always showed the same level of concern for accidents caused by falling trees.

Bono: A very 21st-century philanthropist

2011-06-26T19:22:00.047+01:00

Bono, as you were probably aware, is the lead singer of the band U2. His real name is Paul David Hewson. Aside from being the frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, Mr Hewson also fancies himself as something of an activist, and can often be seen hobnobbing with world leaders and entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, encouraging them to "give generously" to some worthy cause or another. He has even been given a knighthood and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times.

U2 performed on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival on Friday evening. During the band’s set, Art Uncut, an offshoot of UK Uncut, unveiled a 20ft balloon with "U Pay Your Tax 2" emblazoned on it in huge letters. Scuffles between security goons and protesters ensued before the balloon was eventually pulled down.

Art Uncut’s criticism of U2 is essentially this: Bono, the rich Irish rock star and campaigner against Third World debt, is asking the Irish government to contribute more to Africa. At the same time, he and his band have reduced tax payments that could help fund that aid.

The accusation refers to the 2006 decision by U2 to move their tax liability from Ireland to the Netherlands. The move came after Ireland scrapped tax breaks that allowed musicians and artists to avoid paying taxes on royalties.

When asked about the move, U2’s lead guitarist, David Evans, aka "The Edge", said "Of course we're trying to be tax-efficient. Who doesn't want to be tax-efficient?"

The answer to that question is of course those asking for more government revenue to be diverted to the world’s poor. The term "tax-efficient" is little more than cover for the denial of money earmarked for the exchequer – and in effect hospitals, schools and, importantly in this case, the international aid budget.

This is not the first time U2 have been in the spotlight for their self-interested financial projects. In 2006 Bono helped found a venture capital firm called Elevation, named after the U2 song of the same name. In August 2006 Elevation announced it had made an investment in Forbes Media, the parent company of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com. Sources stated that the deal gave Elevation a stake of more than 40 percent of the company. After Elevation invested in Forbes, while U2 raked in the money, the employee pension plan was frozen. In the years that followed, there were numerous rounds of layoffs worldwide.

"U2 are arch-capitalists - arch-capitalists - but it looks as if they're not", says Jim Aiken, a music promoter who helped stage U2 concerts in Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s.

Journalists Richard Tomlinson and Fergal O’Brien have also written that Bono used the band's 2006 Vertigo world tour to promote his ONE Campaign while at the same time "U2 was racking up $389 million in gross ticket receipts, making Vertigo the second-most lucrative tour of all time, according to Billboard magazine. . . . Revenue from the Vertigo tour [was then] funnelled through companies that are mostly...structured to minimise taxes."

On 15 December 2005, Paul Theroux published an op-ed in the New York Times called The Rock Star's Burden that criticised stars such as Bono, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie, labelling them "mythomaniacs" and "people who wish to convince the world of their worth."

Bono and Bob Geldof’s attempts to "save" Africa during the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts were notoriously short of actual African faces; and the latest Hollywood fashion accessory – a fly-speckled African baby – smacks of a patronising colonial attitude. As Theroux went on to say: "[When] Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie [were] recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane."

The Dragon’s Den entrepreneur James Caan even went so far as to offer an impoverished family 100,000 rupees – about £745 – for a baby on a recent trip to Pakistan.

On the outside, Bono and his ilk smell of the soft and cuddly capitalism of the noughties. The capitalist elite at the time liked to think it was presenting a new face to the masses. They tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and, as Terry Eagleton put it, "fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being."

What did not change was the substance behind the feel-good rhetoric. Espousing megalomaniacal platitudes is perfectly well and good, but when it comes down to it, if you are simultaneously cutting the feet from under your own government’s ability to provide for the very poorest in the developing world, then your stance is worse than meaningless: it is rank hypocrisy.

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

Cuba's revolutionaries cash in their chips

2011-06-20T19:55:00.031+01:00

In Cuba the weather is changing. Saying goodbye to the sultry spring and welcoming the searing summer heat is something Cubans do every year. In the better, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say less bad government buildings, battered air conditioning units rattle and hum away, making it uncomfortably cold for visitors. Spending time in the midday sun is inadvisable. The only people doing so are the tourists in the resorts and the increasing number of Cubans who make a “living” walking the streets selling peanuts and hustling tourists. The heat in the case of the latter is offset by the desire to fill an empty stomach.

Things in Cuba are beginning to change. Not only in rhetoric, but also on the street. Politically, however, the regime is as sclerotic as ever. The biggest surprise (although it should not have been) at the recent Cuban Communist Party congress was the selection of 80-year-old Jose Machado Ventura as second secretary and 78-year-old Ramiro Valdes as the party's number three. Many Cuba watchers were hoping a younger man would have been promoted, synchronising a degree of political change with the economic changes that are taking place. What they got instead was a heavy dose of free-market reform with little political reform. In way of political change only term limits for those in office was proposed – something which won’t affect the current generation and loses much of its credibility when those proposing it have been in office for five decades.

In practice many of the “reforms” agreed to at the congress will result in Cubans being pushed towards the free-market with no say as to whether they approve of this direction of travel or not. As in China, they will be forced to accept capitalist exploitation in the same way they have been forced to live with the exploitation of the Stalinist system for so many years. The Miami Herald even admitted harbouring a “great hope that the economic moves will finally be the shock therapy Cuba has long awaited.” Considering the grinding poverty and dramatic drop in life expectancy “shock therapy” brought to Eastern Europe and Russia in the early 1990s, it seems fair to say this is not what the Cuban people are waiting for, regardless of how attractive the proposition sounds from an office block in Miami.

When Fidel Castro was still President one used to hear it said that his brother was an admirer of the Chinese model. One no longer needs to speculate. Raúl Castro’s politics appear to have followed the transition of the Chinese line from tyrannical statism to ruthless imposition of the free-market with little deviation. When visiting China in April of 2005 he told his Chinese hosts that “it was truly encouraging everything that you have done here…there are some people around who are preoccupied by China’s development; however, we feel happy and reassured, because you have confirmed something that we say over there, and that is that a better world is possible.”

An unsettling proposition is that Raúl would also look to the Chinese method of dealing with dissent should unrest become widespread in Cuba. With the United States on its doorstep, however, this would be an extremely foolish course to take.

What the Cuban leadership has perhaps learned from the collapse of communism in Europe is the ability of well-placed individuals to profit from the transition to the market. What I mean by this is the ability of well-placed bureaucrats to make spectacular profits from the privatisation of state industries.

Until 2006 Raúl Castro was Cuba’s armed forces Minister. The military currently controls 60 per cent of the economy through the management of hundreds of enterprises in key economic sectors. Since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006 military personnel have increasingly been promoted to prominent leadership roles. With Fidel increasingly marginalised the less idealistic of the Revolution’s original generation are positioning themselves, it would seem, to cash in on the spoils of soon-to-be privatised industries – with the military replacing the communist party as the guiding hand of the state.

The Soviet-era economic system is undoubtedly approaching its end. It has been on life support for some time but simply needed someone to kill it. Corruption is endemic and double-think is a way of life. It resembles, not only the situation in the 1980s in the Soviet Union, but the description given of that era at the time by Mikhail Gorbachev's Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov:

"[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this - from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”

What the Cuban Communist Party, at the recent congress, called the older generation’s “final service to the Revolution” is in reality a form of positioning that will ensure those who have maintained an iron grip on the economy during the Stalinist era will be the ones reaping the benefits when privatisation comes. It will also mean, more importantly, that those who have born the brunt of Cuban communism for 50 years will be at the forefront of exploitation during coming capitalist restoration: Cuban workers.

Will the Defence Secretary’s links with Sri Lanka compromise British calls for an enquiry?

2011-06-16T14:38:00.041+01:00

On the back of the Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, the UK Government has renewed its calls for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes in the country.

Anyone watching the program, broadcast on Tuesday evening, could not but be appalled by the footage of summary executions and unarmed Tamil civilians being shelled during the final days of the conflict in Sri Lanka two years ago.

South African law professor, Christof Heyns, who the UN has been consulting on matters of extra-judicial killings in Sri Lanka, has said "What is reflected in the extended video are crimes of the highest order, definitive war crimes."

In London, Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt has issued a statement warning the Sri Lankan Government that if it does not respond to calls for an inquiry “we will support the international community in revisiting all options available to press the Sri Lankan Government to fulfil its obligations."

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won a second term in January last year following the military victory over the separatists, has repeatedly denied any involvement in or knowledge of human rights abuses.

Defence Secretary Liam Fox met with President Rajapaksa and the Sri Lankan leadership in London last year, soon after the atrocities are alleged to have taken place. According to the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence, Fox assured the Sri Lankan delegation that “the role of the international community at this stage [is] not to keep raising question[s], but to see how best to help in bringing the communities in Sri Lanka together.”

Fox also visited President Rajapaksa three times in 2009. His visit in March of that year, paid for by the Sri Lankan Government, came amid reports of the killings of up to 2,000 Tamil civilians in Vanni, as documented by Human Rights Watch, and weeks after the then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had condemned Sri Lanka’s systematic shelling of civilian safe zones and medical facilities.

Furthermore, a week after his visit in November of that year, paid for by the Sri Lankan Development Trust, Fox said in a speech to parliament that:

“As members of the European Union, we have to be careful not to lecture too much or give too few incentives in a country that is beginning to move very much in the right direction.”

There was no mention in the speech of the fact that he was at the Sri Lankan President’s party convention the week before.

In all Liam Fox travelled to Sri Lanka three times in 2009 to meet the country’s President in a personal capacity. Fox also received a £50,000 donation from a UK Defence Industry owner selling arms to Sri Lanka on the 26th of January 2010.

Are British calls for an inquiry into alleged atrocities not undermined by a Defence Secretary with a history of freelancing and “private” meetings with the Sri Lankan President?

Orwell was one of us

2011-06-13T15:06:00.069+01:00

George Orwell is often evoked as a figure of exemplary moral character. Name-dropping Orwell, or attaching the “Orwellian” label to some policy or method of speech, implies an awareness of an attempt at control and an opposition to authority. Cutting through the doublespeak and distortions of power, Orwell is said to represent the conscience of the bourgeois liberal – deeply suspicious of big ideas and the state as well as instinctively hostile to totalitarianism.

Orwell’s genuine political ideas are often lost in the clamour to evoke his name and tailor the ideas he espoused to fit a respectable political posture.

Today Orwell is best remembered for his anti-totalitarian tracts Animal Farm and 1984. Respectable discourse often neglects to mention much of the other work Orwell produced during the course of his life - work that was scathing in its attacks on British imperialism and capitalism in general.

Orwell’s most famous works are not in fact an abandonment of socialism at all. George Orwell remained until his death in 1950 an adherent to the socialist cause, stating that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” Attempting to write off socialism by equating the idea with Soviet communism is nothing new of course, as anyone who has ever had an argument with a simple-minded conservative will be aware. “It didn’t work” or “you didn’t learn anything from Russia” they will say, as if there was ever a prolonged period in the former USSR when the workers really were in control.

What is lost in the clamour to turn Orwell into an "End of History" propagandist – "socialism will inevitably turn into totalitarianism etc" - are the nuanced positions he held during his life, represented by a consistent opposition to totalitarianism and tyranny as well as a hostility to capitalist imperialism.

Conveniently, much of what is forgotten or ignored in Orwell’s politics is that which is most valuable and worth listening to today: i.e. it is no good indulging crass second-campism because tyranny is pointing AK47s in the direction of the United States; but it’s not much better demanding hostile regimes adhere to human rights while ignoring the flagrant abuses of Western capital or the suspension of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza.

A proper examination of Orwell’s work reveals not only a firm commitment to socialism, but a disdain for any attempt to propagandise against the USSR and communism when accompanied by silence on the crimes of Western imperialism. Today of course, it is not British imperialism of the 20th century which is whitewashed, so much as there is a widespread adoption of the notion that behaviour of this sort by Western powers is consigned only to historical record.

Viewing the attempt at moral equivalence between totalitarianism and parliamentary democracy as "the argument that half a loaf is no different from no bread at all”, Orwell instinctively recognised the double standards of those who behaved as Thomas Paine’s abroad but Edmund Burke’s at home. In his reply (dated 15 November 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, he stated that he didn't agree with their objectives. Acknowledging that what they said was "more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press" he added that he could "not associate himself with an essentially Conservative body" that claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say about British imperialism". His closing paragraph stated: "I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."

The argument retains much of its force today for those who seemingly view British and American power in the 21st century as transformed and benign. One need not be an anti-American lunatic to see capitalism as having lost none of its ruthlessness – either at home or abroad; or the willingness of the British establishment to compromise with the “right sort” of tyranny, as David Cameron’s recent sojourn around the Middle-East with a contingent of arms dealers in-toe demonstrates.

In this vein, when fighting for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) in Spain, Orwell felt uneasy about the clamour for war by many journalists who themselves were living comfortably at a safe distance from the Front. “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming lies and hatreds, come from people who are not fighting....The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home...hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud...the tub thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy – all this was done as usual by people...who in many cases would have run 100 miles sooner than fight”.

It was the daily realities of the Spanish Civil War which dragged Orwell’s politics to the left. As the late Peter Sedgewick wrote, “Orwell was pre-conditioned by his entire experience as a Socialist to see the Spanish Revolution in a proletarian rather than Popular-Frontist terms. Undeveloped and eccentric as his politics were, they retained enough basic class-sense to collide against Stalinism’s attempt (abetted by the ‘liberal’ Left like Gollancz and the New Statesman) to crush the Spanish workers’ own revolution...once Orwell came up against the reality of the CP’s counter-revolutionary terror, he was inevitably pushed further to the Left. And his experience of human fraternity, in revolutionary Barcelona and at the front with POUM, dissolved the waverings of gentility: ‘I have seen wonderful things,’ he wrote back to Cyril Connolly from Spain, ‘and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’”

When he returned from Spain, Orwell warned those Western intellectuals who lionised the Soviet Union to "remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore."

There are some today who would do well to remember these wise words when excusing no-end-of hideous barbarism in the name of “anti-imperialism”.

Selling sex to kids

2011-06-04T12:53:00.038+01:00

The problem is not simply the sexualisation of children; the problem is a society which treats women as sexual objects because it sells.

A furore has erupted over the apparent "sexualisation of children". The Daily Mail is calling for a “real watershed” and “a return to the days when parents could be confident that programmes broadcast before 9pm would be suitable for the whole family.” David Cameron meanwhile has weighed in with an attack on the “creepy sexualisation of children”.

Leaving aside for a moment the suspicion that the Mail secretly wants a return to Saturday nights with Alf Garnet and Bernard Manning; not to mention the absurdity of David Cameron claiming he’s “never believed that we can leave everything to market forces” while essentially privatising the NHS, they sort of have a point. The fact that so many teenage girls today harbour ambitions to become glamour models and WAGS is testament to the dumbing down of female aspiration that begins in childhood. Whereas last century women fought to be educated, work and forge relationships on an equal basis with men (and many still do, despite being ignored by the media), the message saturating the mainstream today is one of young women doing whatever it takes to please men – whether through learning to pole dance or by obsessive dieting and cosmetic surgery.

Neither David Cameron nor the Mail however makes the link between the objectification of adult women and the increasing sexualisation of young girls. The latest moral panic about sexualised children contains no discourse on the obvious point that a society increasingly treating women as sexual objects because that is what sells will inevitably treat young girls in a similar fashion when it becomes profitable to do so.

Alongside endless moralising about raunchy iconography on shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, the Mail carries in its own pages a supplement called Femail Today which calculates on every page the value of a woman based on how many wrinkles she has, how much weight she is carrying and which male celebrity she is currently dating. That this is delivered with bilious insinuations directed at any remotely promiscuous woman gives the impression that the Mail has no problem with the objectification of women per se, but rather only with a certain kind of sexually liberated, independent woman whose main concern is not behaving as a trophy for a high-powered husband. It is important to bear this in mind the next time the Mail gets hysterical over a young and attractive woman acting provocatively on a stage.

It is of course desirable that children be kept away from certain types of sexual imagery. Much sexualised entertainment today however is shallow and degrading to both adults and children. Moralising about the sexualisation of children without tackling the sexualisation of adult women (and increasingly men) is a dead end. It is unrealistic to think children can be kept in isolation from popular culture and the commercialisation of anything that can viably generate a profit.

The debate also combines the patriarchal absurdity of labelling any woman who expresses sexuality a “slut” with a free-market that uses the scantily-clad female form to sell everything from deodorant to pop-songs to mascara. In the end, much of the hand-wringing is little-more than right-wing ideologues discovering they don’t much like some aspects of the free-market after all.

Censoring and clamping down on the kids will always be easier than challenging big business, Lad’s mag culture and the casual misogyny of the mainstream. The latter would involve a confrontation with both the market and the Tory back-benches, something neither the Mail nor David Cameron has any appetite for.

Isn't it time for an apology, Mr Chomsky?

2011-05-31T14:50:00.115+01:00

When telling truth to power morphs into attributing blame for every event to one power in particular.

Judges today rejected an appeal by Ratko Mladic to prevent his extradition to a U.N. tribunal, paving the way after almost 20 years on the run for Mladic to face charges for the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War.

The political geeks among us (of which I include myself) are perhaps wondering what Noam Chomsky has to say on the subject, considering the content of much of what the man has previously said on the issue over the years. (One would of course be forgiven for not wondering, insomuch as one has the justifiable feeling that none of what Mr Chomsky says any longer matters all that much.)

For a long time there has been ample evidence detailing the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the summer of 1995. There is, in fact, more detailed evidence of this particular genocide than most other crimes against humanity that occurred during the 20th century. An international tribunal, established by the UN, has already convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica - and looks set to convict another.

Some works released in the years following the genocide attempted to play down Serb atrocities, one of which was Diana Johnstone’s revisionist tract Fools’ Crusade. The work itself has since been thoroughly discredited. Marko Attila Hoare described the book as “little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s – and an ill-informed one at that...In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.”

Chomsky, though, together with a clutch of others including Tariq Ali, signed an open letter to the Swedish magazine Ordfront defending Johnstone’s dubious works, after the magazine was hit with a flurry of complaints following their publication of an interview with Johnstone in which she again downplayed the genocide in Bosnia. The letter, signed by Chomsky, read: “We regard Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.”

The behaviour of Chomsky in this instance should be put into the context of the wider reaction of certain sections of the left to all Western intervention – no matter that intervention in this case happened altogether too late. The method of Chomsky and his acolytes is straightforward: select an action taken by the West - whether in Kosovo, Rwanda, or Libya (or in this case belatedly in Bosnia and Herzegovina) – invert the role of perpetrator and victim, before forming a conclusion which lays the blame for every atrocity at the door of Western intervention or a Western ally in the region. If this means denying or downplaying genocide committed by those opposed to Western forces, then so be it.

Chomsky himself even went as far as to say of Johnstone’s book that she “...argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged [in Srebrenica] has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.”

Asked later whether he regretted supporting those who said the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, Chomsky said “My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.”

In this vein was the response of the American academic and other long-time Noam Chomsky associate Edward Herman. On Kosovo Herman, wrote John Feffer in Foreign Policy in Focus, "manages to construct an alternative universe in which Serbian military forces only acted in defence, Slobodan Milosevic was a benevolent Gorbachev figure, and the international legal community functioned as some kind of adjunct to NATO".

Chomsky, however, was as reluctant to distance himself from Herman as he had been from Johnstone. Instead, not only did he defend Herman’s right to deny genocide, but he consistently praised Herman’s body of work – including that which explicitly denied the Srebrenica massacre. It begins to appear then as if it is not Herman and Johnstone’s right to free speech that Chomsky is defending, but rather their dubious and disgusting views.

It is not only Chomsky's friends who implicate him however. Chomsky himself, when referring to the Srebrenica massacre, continues to place the word genocide in quotes, despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier, an international tribunal has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide.

Now that another of Slobodan Milosevic's murderous generals is about to face trial, it seems a good time to ask: Isn’t it time for an apology Mr Chomsky?

Credit to Marko Attila Hoare, whose blog material proved extremely helpful in putting together my modest contribution to the critique of the cult of Chomsky.

The limits of Spanish protest

2011-05-30T20:16:00.016+01:00

The Genuine Democracy Now movement began in Spain two weeks ago as a public outcry against political corruption and unemployment that has soared to unprecedented levels. Spain has a 21.3% unemployment rate - the highest in the EU - and many of the unemployed are young people. Some Spaniards who do have jobs are going months without pay due to their employees hanging the threat of unemployment over their heads. Protesters have come together against what they see as an outrageous carve-up between bankers and politicians, who are making ordinary people pay for the financial crisis of the rich.

Ironically perhaps, on the back of the protests it is the socialist party (PSOE), one of Europe’s more economically progressive governments, that has suffered one of its worst results in recent history. The PSOE lost around 2 million votes while the People's Party, an economically right-wing party, obtained unprecedented support from the electorate in many key provinces of the state.

While the protesters say they wish to see radical changes to the Spanish political model, their lack of concrete demands appear to be harming the movement as a whole. Ignacio Molina, associate professor in the department of politics and international relations at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, believes that the movement is too limited and narrow in focus.
"In other words, protesters are naive enough to think that changing the political model on institutional issues such as the republican form of government, participatory democracy or the proportional electoral system can help resolve the crisis and improve the life prospects of young people or the unemployed," he said.

This highlights the harm be-all-and-end-all adherence to “autonomy” and “spontaneity” is doing to mass-movements right across Europe. Because there is no alternative program to be argued for, movements are struggling to win the majority over to ideas different to that of the status quo. The manifesto of the protesters fails for example to make any concrete proposals regarding the Spanish economy - the root cause of much of the disenfranchisement felt by ordinary people.

When the protesters do return to their homes, whether in the next few days or several weeks from now, there are no organisational structures in place nor transitional demands for people to take home with them. As we saw with the British student movement, when this happens a movement can quickly lose much of its momentum and force. As one Spanish commentator remarked, “the saddest thing about the Spanish revolts is that, in the end, most of these youngster's parents and elders turned out to vote for the People’s Party instead of joining the protesters.”

That being said, with no end to the economic crisis in sight there is a chance this protest will not simply fizzle out – there is the potential for this to be the start of something much bigger. What is required, though, is a bridging of the gap between undirected discontent and ideas about a different sort of society, a society where people really would exercise democratic control over their economic lives.

The timidity of Labour is harming the anti-cuts movement

2011-05-26T15:25:00.008+01:00

Where is Ed Miliband? In the House of Commons, through fear of being defined as the “Red Ed” caricature beloved by the tabloids, the Labour leader looks across the dispatch box at David Cameron like a schoolboy asking for the return of his appropriated dinner money. Meanwhile, genuine ideologues sat opposite cheer and wave order papers as the sick and disabled are thrown on the scrap heap.

Blairites will of course wave a finger at you if you mention Ed’s mediocre performance thus far as Labour leader, reminding you that this is what they said would happen if Labour failed to elect his brother David. The older Miliband would, they claim, have tackled his Tory opposite number far more robustly than Ed ever could.

There is some truth to this too; but it largely misses the real problem with Ed’s leadership, which is not dissimilar to the problem Labour had when it was in office: nobody knows quite what the party stands for anymore.

It’s very well talking of shared values and espousing no-content progressivism, but when people look at their incomes declining in real terms while the incomes of many of those responsible for the financial crash continue to soar into the stratosphere, they are more than justified in asking what the point of the Labour Party is at all these days.

An example of Labour’s timidity is the unwillingness of the leadership to even propose that the rich should pay higher taxes. The deficit can, after all, be paid-off by tax increases as much as it can by cuts. The wealthy of course will tell us their hard work and talent need to be generously rewarded. Fewer of them will be willing to admit that their profit-making is almost always reliant upon less-privileged workers being paid the minimum wage and spending a life pinching the pennies.

A case in point is the Chief Executive of Tesco, who was paid £5 million in 2005 (under a Labour government, I should add). In the same year the average Tesco employee was paid £12,713. Is it credible to assert that the Chief Executive is 430 times more industrious and productive than the average Tesco employee? If this really is the case the country needs only to put 85,000 of these super-industrious executives to work across the board on average wages – freeing the rest of us from ever having to work again!

The reality is that while tuition fees are rising, while the EMA is cut, while benefits are driven down and hundreds of thousands thrown out of work, the wealthy continue to pull away from the rest of us. The only encouragement for those who maintain that we are all in this together is that, according to the Times Rich List, the wealthiest 1,000 individuals in Britain increased their wealth by “only” £60 billion this year, down from £77 billion last year.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Labour's performance is that a majority appear ready to believe it was the state, rather than the market, that was to blame for the economic crisis and its aftermath.

Two-and-a-half years on from the crash and it is the centre-left that is apologetically searching for its backbone, rather than the free-marketeers whose utopian doctrine was, after all, what got the country into this whole sorry mess in the first place. Ed Miliband must take his share of the blame for that.

A protest they will never understand - "Genuine Democracy Now"

2011-05-19T13:26:00.106+01:00

"This is a protest they will never understand" said one youth, as he, along with around 2000 other young people camped out in Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, defying a ban on pre-election demonstrations.

Despite the obvious differences between Spanish democracy and the deposed Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak, comparisons are already being made with Tahrir Square.

The protests began on Sunday. The police dispersed demonstrators initially, but since then sheer numbers have forced the authorities to take a softer approach. One chant heard reverberating around the square has been "violence is earning 600 euros", refreshingly counteracting predictable bourgeois sentimentality about broken windows whenever protests start to make an impact.

Spain has a 21.3% unemployment rate - the highest in the EU - and many of the unemployed are young people. As in Britain, the major Spanish political parties are attempting to make ordinary people pay for a financial crisis they played no part in. Some Spaniards who do have jobs are going months without pay due to their employees hanging the threat of unemployment over their heads. There are slim prospects for an improvement in the situation any time soon.

The protests, though, have not simply been about the economy. One of the most popular slogans has been “Genuine Democracy Now”; and stalls have been set-up urging people not to vote for the two major political parties.

Most politicians and political commentators simply do not understand this call for greater democracy. As in Britain the US and the rest of Europe, this is not supposed to happen any more, not since we arrived at the End of History. The establishment sees free-market capitalism as sitting at the end of a visible thread running through every epoch of human history. When a mass of people appear who do not share in this grand utopian project, the establishment's response is total bewilderment - what could these people possibly be rebelling against?

Even liberal organs such as the Guardian struggle to know what to make of it all - when the protest swelled to around 2000 people on Wednesday night their online headline story was instead about a man who had eaten 25,000 Big Macs!

Outside of the mainstream narrative that ordinary people should bear the burden of the follies of European financial and political elites, a section of the Spanish populace is demanding an altogether different course, even if the details are at present sketchy. That in itself is something.

Why it matters that the media is so damned middle-class

2011-05-17T19:19:00.004+01:00

The difficulty when involved in any kind of radical politics is getting the message to a wider audience. It is possible for the radical to come into contact with the student on campus or the worker on the picket-line, but getting ideas to the ordinary man (or woman) in the street can be more difficult. (By this I mean the sort of person who gets little out of the status quo but who rarely mixes in radical circles or goes on strike.)

Getting alternative ideas out there is becoming, paradoxically, both easier and more difficult – easier on the Internet but harder in the traditional media. There is an increasingly dominant group of media barons, most recognisably Rupert Murdoch, who are tightening their grip on both print and broadcast media. Most politicians tend to accept this and interpret any attempt to limit private ownership as a slide towards totalitarianism. It is at the same time increasingly difficult for a person of modest means to become a journalist. As well as an undergraduate degree, most of those going into the profession today have postgraduate qualifications and lengthy “internships” under their belts, affordable only to the wealthy.

Professional journalism has always been something of a middle and upper-class pursuit. The term “BBC accent” was coined during the 20th century to describe a recognisable Home Counties diction. Nowadays many of those behind similar accents are women and ethnic minorities; but as is so often the case, the issue of class is ignored when it comes to identity politics.

This may all seem terribly unimportant, but having nothing invested in the services being cut by the current Government has left an indelible mark on journalistic discourse, helping to foster a media narrative where Government cuts are almost always "inevitable". In interviews journalists ask opposition politicians what they would cut – never why they are cutting at all when billions in uncollected taxes are swilling around or being spent on NHS privatisation and “free” schools. They aggressively demand anti-cuts activists “condemn the violence” when a few shop windows are smashed, yet will never refer to the violence of the political class when privatisations and cuts destroy more than a few window panes.

Alternative messages can be found on the internet of course - to blog one needs only an ability to construct eligible sentences and something worthwhile to say - but the blogosphere is overrated as a popular medium, finding its audience mostly among fellow journalists and politicians rather than ordinary people, who do not have time to sift through endless opinion to find what is reliable.

You can, after all, simply turn on Sky News or read your mate’s copy of The Sun. Lots of other people do, so it must be reliable.

The entrenchment of the middle-classes in journalism has turned the profession into what could be aptly described as the political establishment talking to itself. Away from the news, most entertainment shows are today as much a variant of laughing at the poor and passing cold judgment on lower-class types as they ever were.

Tories step-up attack on workers' rights

2011-05-13T20:52:00.030+01:00

Not content with making working people pay for a crisis caused by “socially useless” bankers, George Osborne has announced plans to cut workplace “regulation” – the politician’s term for workers’ rights – in a speech to the Institute of Directors' annual convention in London. Osborne's proposals will in practice leave employees with even less protection against redundancy, dismissal and workplace discrimination.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has recently been mooting the idea of even tighter trade union laws – despite the fact that current Thatcher-era laws have left the UK in a position where it is perceived by international human rights agencies as failing to comply with minimum international standards.

All of these attacks on working people sit rather uncomfortably with the idea that we are “all in it together”, the phrase itself having been quietly dropped by Cameron himself of late - the grotesque and profligate spending of the Royal wedding perhaps finally burying the idea, despite the exultations and hysteria of our compliant mass-media.

To the British ruling class, the 21st-century was supposed to be about a flowering of liberal democracy and the spread of unfettered markets. Barely 10 years after the turn of the millennium, however, and this doctrine looks, to most ordinary people at least, increasingly discredited. Politicians, though, continue to act “as if” – as if the assumptions they grew up on are still the only show in town. “Communism”, Marx said, “is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." Our current crop of politicians see liberal capitalism sitting similarly at the end of a visible thread running through every epoch of human history.

As we look back on the financial crisis of 2008, it may be the ideologues of neo-liberalism who eventually come to most regret not learning the lessons of the capitalist crisis; and if existing attacks on workers are anything to go by, they have not yet seen through the transparent racket of Thatcherism, with its workplace “flexibility” and unlimited excess for the rich.

These developments should make any person of the left despair; yet as long as our politicians remain trapped in a narrative that has dominated British politics ever since the late 1970s, there is an increasing risk that the crash of 2008 will be repeated. And next time, perhaps, a whole generation of politicians will fall along with their beloved markets, clearing the way for quite new ideas.

Fair education access, the Tory way

2011-05-10T13:28:00.030+01:00

According to the BBC, “Universities in England may be allowed to make extra places available for wealthy UK students...”

On Radio 4’s Today programme, Universities Minister David Willetts spelled out the Government’s proposal, saying the changes would apply to "people who wish to go to university, but who sadly are being turned away just because there aren't enough places."

He went on to say that the changes would “allow companies or charities to sponsor additional places - without any cost to the taxpayer.”

What he failed to mention is that there is nothing to stop private individuals doing the same for their sprogs – paying for additional places, and with it access to a university degree.

It is of course possible that this policy of reverse social-engineering has been proposed as a straw man to appease angry Liberal Democrats after their loss of the Alternative Vote Referendum. If the policy is subsequently dropped it could be made to look like a Lib Dem “victory”.

It is also possible however that the austerity agenda has gone to the heads of some in the Conservative Party, and Dickensian notions of welfare provision are set to go hand-in-hand with a two-tier education system - for the benefit of the few, rather than the many.

Personally, I have always thought universities should distribute a finite number of places based solely upon the achievement of a specific set of grades. The policy being mooted however seems to suggest that if you have 10 students who narrowly miss out on a university place, the wealthy amongst them will perhaps still be able to go to university based on the financial position of their parents.

I think I’m just going to go and be sick.

Trotskyists and the State of Israel

2011-05-05T16:02:00.082+01:00

What immediately springs to mind when one thinks of the British left and its relationship with the state of Israel? Boycotts maybe, or rhetoric verging on the anti-Semitic? Or perhaps a veneration of reactionaries and clerical fascists, just so long as they see Israel as public enemy number one?

As Sean Matgamma points out:

“Most ‘Trotskyists’ today are, everywhere, agitators and propagandists against the Jewish state of Israel. Not agitators for the view that Israel should change its relationship with the Palestinians, or that it should help set up an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. No. The agitation and propaganda centres on the ‘demand’ that Israel should cease to exist...In war [these ‘Trotskyists’] have sided with the Arab states - Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan - in the hope and expectation that, victorious, they would put an end to Israel. At the start of the 21st-century they back the medieval-minded forces of Arab and Islamic clerical fascism - the Muslim Brotherhood and its off-shoots, and Hezbollah, Hamas and the jihadists in Iraq. Rejecting a two-state solution, these mystics of ‘anti-Imperialism’ back the Muslim mystics who would recreate the Caliphate - the pre-World War I Turkish Empire, against Israel.”

What is less well-known to some who see themselves as modern day carriers of the Trotskyist flame is that many of their ideas about Israel actually come from a Stalinist section of the Marxist movement in the 1920s. Most of the Trotskyist left at the time argued for Arab-Jewish reconciliation and solidarity in anti-imperialist struggle - along working class lines against the Zionist bourgeoisie as well as against reactionary Arab clerics; and together against US and UK imperialism.

One thing that stands out in the Statement of the Fourth International on the Jewish Question is the call for united Jewish and Arab trade unions. Contrast this with those today who wish to write-off Israeli trade unionists entirely in their clammer for boycotts. Interestingly, the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unionists continues to oppose boycotting its Israeli counterpart. Which Palestinians do the modern-day so-called “Trotskyists” listen to however? The pious clerical fascists who call for an immediate severing of all ties with the Jewish state.

While we see some on the left today who would consider themselves opposed to Stalinism embracing the likes of Hamas, in the past it was the Stalinists themselves who felt compelled to make every event occurring anywhere in the world fit into their “anti-imperialist” blueprint. In Palestine this meant refusing to distinguish between the genuine aspirations of the Arab working-class and the corrupt, anti-Semitic agenda of the Mufti. In response, American Trotskyists of the time put out an article entitled Pogrom or revolution?, highlighting the sordid compromises being made by the Stalinists in their support for reactionary Arab leaderships, at the expense of the Arab working classes: “The Arab leaders have curbed the genuine movement of the masses, they have stunted its growth and prevented the development of its natural courses of struggle; they have repeatedly misled and devitalised it. They are still the only spokesmen of the movement, and they speak for reactionary aims. They fight for an ‘Arab Empire’. They have compromised with imperialism and are willing to do it again. They are against all Jews as Jews...They promise the peasant no land and the worker no social improvement. They are vehement enemies not only of Bolshevism, but of the mildest kind of labour movement. In this respect, they far ‘excel’ their Zionist competitors...”

There is the same failure on the left today, seen most vividly in groups like the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP,) who fail to distinguish between the Arab working masses and their reactionary, clerical rulers. This is perhaps the symptom of a loss of faith in the emancipatory potential of the working class as a whole. Equally crass opportunism prevails at home in the UK, where the SWP play a game of crude identity politics, opportunistically supplanting any oppressed minority for the working class as a whole, even if in doing so they act against the interests of the workers’ movement.

In the 1920s and 1930s Trotskyists called for Jews and Arabs to transform the war between themselves, which served the ends of imperialism, into a war of both nations against imperialism. To oppose the reactionary rulers of both sides, whether right-wing Israeli Zionists, or Arab clerical fascists. It's worth remembering this the next time a person on the kitsch-left starts lazily proclaiming their "anti-imperialist" credentials.

Nadine Dorries and the crackpot Christians

2011-05-04T14:22:00.056+01:00

Earlier this afternoon, a bill proposing the teaching of abstinence to girls in sex and relationship education lessons passed a first vote in the House of Commons.

Proposed by the moralising anti-abortion Tory MP Nadine Dorries, (the same Nadine Dorries who had an affair with her best friend’s husband) the motion reads:

"That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require schools to provide certain additional sex education to girls aged between 13 and 16; to provide that such education must include information and advice on the benefits of abstinence from sexual activity; and for connected purposes."

The motion talks only about girls, reflecting the conservative view that it’s female sexuality that is the real problem, while unknowingly insulting boys, who apparently know no better.

The American Academy of Paediatrics has this to say on abstinence related teaching:

“Abstinence-only programs are not only ineffective but may cause harm by providing inadequate and inaccurate information and resulting in participants’ failure to use safer sex practices once intercourse is initiated.”

Backing the motion is the Conservative Christian Fellowship, a group of Tory MPs dedicated to rolling back the right of women to control their own reproduction.

Thanks largely to our lazy MPs not bothering to turn up, the motion passed by 67-61 votes.

On the back of winning this vote Dorries will likely get the publicity she craves – the real objective of the motion, for a change in the law at this point is extremely unlikely.

Together with Frank Field and a grouping of socially conservative MPs, Dories has already been attempting to get Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill amended so as to give "independent information, advice and counselling services for women requesting termination of pregnancy to the extent that the consortium considers they will choose to use them."

"Independent" information in this instance means information given by bodies who do not themselves provide abortions. As pointed out at Liberal Conspiracy, the aim of the amendment is to "exclude some of the most knowledgeable providers of information to women on abortions."

Nadine Dorries' bill should be seen as part of a wider effort to push back women's rights and foister fundamentalist, crackpot beliefs on the rest of us.

Police kidnap anti-monarchists to prevent protest

2011-04-29T18:58:00.009+01:00

Author: Sacha Ismail and Esther Townsend

12.50pm, Friday 29 April: This morning about ten anti-monarchy protesters, students and young workers who are mostly socialists and anarchists, were stopped by the police outside Charing Cross station, searched and handcuffed. When we left to write this report, they had been held outside the station for about an hour.

Trafalgar Square was tightly controlled, with the help of the police, and it was not actually possible to protest. The group of comrades were preparing to leave to attend the Republic street party in Holborn when the police stopped and searched them. Another thirty police were then called in, arriving in four vans, and surrounded them.

This paranoid, over the top action by the police is part of a wider assault on civil liberties in the run up to the royal wedding.

Update, 5.30pm: The comrades were arrested for 'breach of the peace', even though there was no possible way this could be justified. They were then taken to Sutton police station, in deep south London, where they were eventually released - of course - without charge. This was essentially an act of kidnapping by the state to prevent a protest.

Thanks to everyone who got in touch to express solidarity or offer support

A depressing week for democrats

2011-04-25T20:20:00.051+01:00

The hype around the Royal wedding will reach fever pitch this week, culminating in the nuptials on Friday. Every broadcasting outlet will act as the ventriloquist’s dummy for the public at large, informing us that we are unreservedly and uniformly delighted for the happy couple.

There will be little in the way of dissent in the printed press either. Without irony they will superimpose images of Prince William and Kate Middleton a few pages from photos of “our boys” fighting for “democracy” in the Middle East.

Those of us who see a contradiction in such sentiments will barely be worth a mention.

A straightforward comparison with the ruling elite of, say, North Korea - a country where millions starve to death - would of course be preposterous. For several consecutive days, however, aesthetically at least, it will feel a little like living in the "People's Republic".

This week will also see the climax of the Alternative Vote debate, leading up to polling day on May 5. Initially utterly disinterested in this referendum, I’ve developed a palpable disgust at the parameters in which the debate has been conducted. Not the various tactics both sides have used to smear the other, which have indeed been disgusting, but the fact that the entire narrative has been along the lines of who a change in the voting system might “help” - as if the purpose of an electoral system were to give an advantage to a specific political party, rather than simply to count the votes of the electorate.

The debate over which system sufficiently disenfranchises smaller parties is equally fatuous, and not simply undemocratic, but profoundly anti-democratic. It also makes the unwarranted assumption that it is centrist politics (which is, in reality, deeply subservient to right-wing free-market ideology) that has served us well in recent times. The huge financial crisis, now being paid for by ordinary voters, who played no part in causing it, makes that assumption look rather foolish. That certain social classes increasingly don’t even bother turning out to vote is hardy an advert for good representation, either.

In the case of the monarchy and AV, proponents of real democratic change will be written-off this week as “spoilsports” and “unrealistic” respectively. It is worth remembering for those of us who wish to see a flowering of genuine democracy that at one time almost all radical change was considered “unrealistic”. As for the “miserable little compromise” that is AV, as Nye Bevan once said, "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."

Cuba: Change where nothing ever changes

2011-04-21T19:50:00.081+01:00

The Casa Grande Hotel sits on the corner of Parque Cespedes in the very centre of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's second largest city. The hotel was built in 1914 to cater to wealthier Cubans from Havana and visitors from the United States. It is also rumoured to have hosted its fair share of Mafioso in its 1950s heyday; until, that is, Fidel Castro came down from the mountains and drove them out at the barrel of a gun.

Fifty years of Communist revolution having passed, and aside from what would once have been American accents today being distinctly European – ‘Ein Cerveza por favor’ - the dynamic is very much the same: one marked by a distinct separation between those who have and those who have not.

For a society that supposedly abolished racial discrimination some half a century ago, the patrons of Cuba's hotels are overwhelmingly white and foreign, even if the ‘tourism apartheid’ that previously prevented Cubans from sleeping in them was recently abolished. While I sit in the Casa Grande's balcony restaurant and digest my meagre lunch, I notice several thin and mawkish faces looking up at the terrace begging for change. I also notice that almost all of those begging are black.

Blacks and people of mixed-race officially make up a third of Cuba’s total population of 11 million, according to the latest census carried out in 2002. Cuban academics, however, estimate that between 60 and 70 per cent of the population is black or ‘mulatto’ (mixed race). The Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the Government's Anthropology Centre in 2006 which showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad, and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism. White Cubans of Spanish descent also often have relatives in Miami from whom they receive remittances (the vast majority of the wealthy who fled Cuba in the early 1960s to Miami were white), leaving, as during Batista's day, the Cuban blacks and Mulattos to cut the sugar cane and roll the cigars.

All over Cuba right now there is very much a sense that people are waiting. Waiting for what exactly, nobody seems to know; but everywhere you go people seem certain of one thing: things cannot go on as they are. In the early 1990s the Cuban economy was in trouble. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw a 35% decline in the country’s GDP almost overnight. Shops were increasingly bare and food was scarce. Stories abounded of cats and dogs being cooked and eaten in central Havana. Rolling blackouts became the norm and many factories were closed through want of raw materials. Onlookers spoke of the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro and his Communist regime, not least the Miami exiles, many of whom were salivating at the prospect of their nemesis finally being swept from power in a popular uprising.

At the time of the last Communist Party congress some 14 years ago, the Government grudgingly introduced a series of market reforms in an attempt to stave-off economic collapse. New hotels financed by Canadian and European companies went up, and Cubans were granted licenses to rent rooms to foreign tourists. People were also for the first time permitted to turn their homes into Paladares (small private restaurants). The reforms were modest, but gave the country the necessary economic breathing space the Communist system simply could not provide.

A decade on, and coming on the back of reports that Cuba is in dire economic straits after the global financial crisis, President Raul Castro is attempting to free up Cuba's sclerotic economy once more, with plans released by the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) - Cuba's only legal trade union - detailing the lay-off of up to a million workers from the state payroll.

Since taking power in 2008, Raul has implemented modest reforms at a typically Cuban pace. A recent well publicised change has been the hand-over of a number of state barbers to their employees. Not everyone in Havana has jumped at the chance to embrace the private sector, however. Socrates Barrero, a 65-year-old barber, decided to remain on the state payroll at his shop in Havana Vieja, remarking: 'I'm too old and have been around too long to want to go to bed every night worrying about where the next meal is going to come from.' Others, such as Migdalia, a 50-year-old resident of Havana Vieja, were more enthusiastic: ‘I would like to begin a restaurant business in my home’, she said, ‘I have four grown-up children who are just hanging around the house most of the time, and together we could really make it work.’

While Raul Castro is reportedly an admirer of the Chinese model, the Cuban leadership are said to view Chinese and Vietnamese reforms as having gone too far; and like Gorbachev some 25 years earlier, are looking to tweak and improve Socialism, rather than do away with it. Reform, however, has brought with it its own share of problems. During the ‘special period’ in the 1990s when the country modestly opened up to the market, corruption became endemic. Anyone who has visited Havana in recent years will tell you that this is a city where everybody is on the take. The legal economy barely functions; improvisation is how people survive. ‘No es facil’, you will often hear Cubans saying; it’s not easy. Prostitution has also resurfaced on a disturbing level; and the economic lifeline provided by the tourist industry has considerably increased domestic resentment, as ordinary Cubans come into contact with westerners whose ostentatious wealth has created new and visible inequalities on the island.

The modest economic opening led to an improvement in the situation as the country entered the new millennium. Towards the end of the decade, however, the global economic crisis and the damage wrought by hurricanes Gustav and Ike contributed to a worsening economic picture once more. Wikileaks cables sent by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, in February 2009, detailing discussions between some of Cuba's main trading partners, including China, Spain, Canada, Brazil and Italy, as well as France and Japan, said diplomats agreed that ‘the [Cuban] financial situation could become fatal within 2-3 years’, with the country becoming ‘insolvent as early as 2011.'

On the back of last week’s Party Congress, the first since the mid-1990s, the Government announced that it is planning to lay-off around 500,000 state employees and open up the economy further to private enterprise. There are also plans to make cuts to the social safety net, eventually eliminating the ration card and large food subsidies altogether. The question now is whether economic transformation will bring with it a degree of political change. Cuban labour rights are virtually non-existent. There are no independent unions; and aside from the mention of co-operatives in some areas of the economy, there is little talk by the regime of an increased role for workers in the running of their enterprises - even less about the right of workers to organise independently of the state. Nor are there any plans to open up the media, its printed organs being most accurately described by the late Argentinean editor and dissident Jacobo Timerman as ‘a degradation of the act of reading’.

Judging by the two million tourists who flock to Cuba every year, the allure of the island to outsiders appears not to have worn off. Many visitors are indeed attracted by the time-warped element of the place, summing up their desire to visit with the phrase ‘before it changes’, as if talking about a laboratory experiment. Havana itself has become a virtual living museum, its citizens being at times little more than artefacts with almost no chance of interfering in their own internal affairs until the Curator kicks the bucket. Real change would probably bring with it a trashy and course influx of fast food and consumerism. Right now, however, Cubans would probably very much like a McDonalds in Havana. After all, plastic food is better than no food.

Time to grow up and do away with this childish institution

2011-04-18T14:14:00.054+01:00

Anyone perusing a British newspaper or turning on a television a couple of weeks from now will be encouraged to leave one’s critical faculties at the door. For several consecutive days, aesthetically at least, it will feel a little like living in North Korea. We will be greeted with infantilized, wall-to-wall coverage of the wedding of two individuals none of us has ever met, none of us elected, and (if a recent poll in the Independent is anything to go by), most of us could not give a damn about.

Those of us who do not subscribe to the innate superiority of the House of Hanover already stoically put up with a lot; and we have done considerable mental preparation in readiness for endless “Royal correspondents” telling us we are delighted and thrilled - not to mention glad of our servitude - when proceedings kick-off on April 29. While we quietly ask for a Republic, we readily accept we will be on the receiving end of this barrage of unapologetic monarchist triumphalism without abandoning the notion that one day a flowering of genuine democracy and equality may come about – the very concept anathema to hereditary succession and monarchy.

The groom may not be the buffoon-like figure his prematurely-aged father has become - talking to plants and blaming humanity’s problems on the enlightenment – but this rather misses the point, and is akin to evoking the benevolence of a dictator to justify dictatorship itself. The tabloids continually attempt to negate this rather obvious glitch in the hereditary principle – you cannot simply pick and choose. Thomas Paine put it best when he said “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”

“Wills”, as the gossip-sheets refer to him, (I can’t bring myself to, for I do not know the man) is, if not exactly a lion, certainly not your archetypal aristocratic ass. His courteous and charming manner brings to mind his late mother, Diana, the aftermath of whose death saw the nearest thing to mass hysteria Britain has ever seen. The public memory of Diana is that she was generally a good egg, driven to despair by the Prince of Wales' infidelity and the paparazzi. “She did a lot for charity” is a commonly heard refrain, ignoring the fact that she left almost all of her vast estate to two of Britain’s wealthiest families.

There can be little doubt that for the Coalition the Royal wedding is a God-send, offering a dose of feel-good exultation and patriotism just as austerity begins to bite. We know how the Tories feel about monarchy; and apart from a few honourable exceptions, the middle-class Lib Dems embody a soft-subservience to the crown that talks-up the economic benefits of the monarch while dismissing republicans as spoil-sports.

The thing about monarchy, though, is that like dictatorship and religion it demands you stop thinking. There will be no comment on the BBC or Sky news as to the contrast between the vast wealth on display on April 29 and the services being cut because they are “no longer affordable”. Nor will the media report on the large number of us who feel completely alienated from the cartoonish spectacle of this childish institution and its big day out.

Prince William will one day become the head of the church as well as head of state. As an atheist I don’t often find myself quoting from the Bible; but if there are words that sum up just how I feel about this carnaval of the irational they are these: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - Corinthians 13:11

The dirty secrets of the pro-cuts march

2011-04-07T15:17:00.128+01:00

The British political right is preparing for a pro-cuts rally in central London next month in response to the anti-cuts March for the Alternative that took place on 26 March. The “Rally Against Debt” is being organised by the Taxpayers Alliance and has attracted celebrity-backing in the form of Toby Young. Annabelle Fuller, a former adviser to the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, is also a leading organiser. Fuller said: "It will be a major demonstration highlighting the importance of tackling the huge public sector deficit, and the need for substantial spending cuts."

Not only are the organisers of the rally calling for the deficit to be reduced, but the wording of their various statements suggests they wish to see "substantial spending cuts" regardless of Government debt. A case in point is their website, which features no calls for an increase in taxes for the rich, no calls for a collection of unpaid taxes and no mention of the bankers who caused Britain's financial crisis. What they do in fact is trot-out the well-worn myth that "public spending got out of control" – implying that spending at least a proportion of working people's taxes on working people (rather than blowing it on "free schools" and other luxuries for the rich) is akin to a “loss of control”.

The section of society that really did lose control – the rich, with their profligate gambling of other people’s money – are unworthy of even a mention.

The March Against Debt is in reality nothing more than an opportunity for a gloat by right-wing ideologues at the slash-and-burn cuts about to hit public services. Their website even goes as far as to praise Vodafone, whose infamous billion-pound tax-avoidance schemes are apparently unrelated to the gap in public finances. This sort of brazen hypocrisy confirms what many of us have long known - that while the state compels working people to abide by laws protecting the rich and powerful, when the idea of compulsion is evoked to collect the taxes of the wealthy, the trend is increasingly towards a form of volunteerism. Mention to one of the motley collection of oddballs organising the march that a person on the dole gets £50.95 a week however, and you will be met fairly quickly with white-noise about “making work pay”.

Do not suffer under the illusion that you are listening to a call for higher wages.

Toby Young sees no problem in using Government cash to indulge his ego-driven “free school” project; and one of the directors of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Alexander Heath, does not even pay tax in the UK – he lives in a farmhouse in France. When the cuts really begin to bite, the preposterous sight of Young and his ilk parading around London may actually boost the anti-cuts movement more than we might at-present imagine – and more than any Thatcherite caricature perched on the Tory back-benches ever could.

Public opinion is already turning against the Coalition, and the sight of the wealthy celebrating job losses and benefit cuts will be too much for many to stomach. That being said, it would be highly pleasurable to see Toby Young hit with an egg, regardless of the subsequent publicity.

Clegg criticises unearned privilege. Millionaire cabinet looks on.

2011-04-05T12:01:00.114+01:00

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says he wants to stop people getting on in life purely because of "who they know".

A worthy aim but one that is, along with rhetoric about "fairness" and "progress", devoid of meaningful content. We all want people to be able to pursue their talents, regardless of who they know or their family background - but what concrete measures are being proposed to achieve this? None of course. When it comes to policies which may put the brakes on unearned privilege even members of the Labour Party are loath to challenge the vested interests of the rich and powerful.

No mention either by Clegg of banning unpaid internships, which would in-reality not be a ban at all, but a lifting of a ban on those from poorer backgrounds following their dreams too (if of course you ignore for a minute the existence of private schools and educational-selection by house price, to name but a few).

All talk of "social mobility" and "getting more kids from poorer backgrounds into university", while admirable in the latter instance, misses the point entirely, in that society still needs people to do traditional, working-class jobs. To live in a country which treats those in low-skilled occupations shoddily because they should, in the eyes of some, "work harder" so as to "get on" is to accept a permanent and entrenched class-system, based on the fact that nurses, cleaners, carers and refuse collectors will always be needed. The same of course could not be said of bankers.

I tend to agree with Owen Jones that social mobility is a dead end, and a distraction from narrowing income inequality - which might require genuine political courage. If Clegg wants some indication of how un-meritocratic Britain actually is then he should take a look at his cabinet colleagues. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who once said that "The surface of society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through."

British universities and their less-than benevolent patrons

2011-03-28T10:27:00.019+01:00

According to the Guardian, Mutassim Gaddafi, who has been described as a "war criminal" by Libyan anti-government protesters, was given private lessons at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the summer of 2006.

This is one of many sordid revelations that have come to light about British universities and their relationship with the dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. It has also been revealed that universities not only profited from ties with the Libyan regime, but actively trained many who were earmarked for roles in Gaddafi’s feared security network. In total British universities registered 2,880 students from Libya last year, while official figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show 112 universities had Libyan students on their books.

Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, resigned several weeks ago after it was found he had accepted a £1.5 million donation from the “Gaddafi Foundation”, the charity run by Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. It was Saif al-Islam of course who appeared on Libyan state television after the outbreak of anti-Government protests to warn rebels that the dictatorship would "fight to the last minute, until the last bullet".

The cuts in funding British universities currently face make wealthy patrons like the Gaddafi family highly attractive propositions. Raheem Kassam, director of the group Student Rights, said: "LSE has the most market-driven fund-raising model there is in the UK. Has that model reduced them into a simple gun for hire?"

The relationship between Libya and British universities could be said to mirror the amicable ties that developed in recent years between the Libyan regime and the British establishment. Not only did Tony Blair famously hug the Colonel, but British arms flowed freely to the country and British companies were up to their necks in Libyan oil money - while the Libyan people continued to languish under terror and dictatorship.

Sue Yates, then Soas's director of business development, described Mutassim Gaddafi as a "young man [who] was just there for four weeks maximum...This is not unusual at all for members of prominent families. It was special tuition for someone from a high profile background." There is of course a long and deplorable history of dictators sending their children to rich nations to get the privileged education denied to the people of their countries. Those allowed by the Libyan government to study in Britain were themselves carefully hand-picked by the dictatorship.

After 41 years in charge of a regime that brought down an American passenger plane, pitilessly exterminated many political opponents, expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians from the country for being insufficiently willing to immolate themselves for the cause, as well as plundered the Libyan economy for the benefit of Western corporations, to define the Gaddafi regime as suitable patrons for British universities is to leave many in the British establishment up to their necks in shame.

Libya and the peace movement

2011-03-22T14:32:00.418Z

Before the notion of Western intervention in Libya had even been mooted, there were those in the "peace" movement who were already suggesting an imperialist smash-and-grab operation was about to seize control of Libyan oil fields at the barrel of a gun.

While predictable and by now rather tedious, this reflex is not an altogether baseless one. When United States military action is entertained one should always engage one's critical faculties and remember the numerous governments deposed with the help of the US military during the 20th century - governments whose only crimes were having the temerity to implement modest social-democratic reforms in often impoverished conditions.

Anti-interventionism, however, has taken a more sinister turn of late. Anyone familiar with the conflict in Kosovo will already be acquainted with the sordid apologetics and outright denials deployed by those who could see nothing wrong in what Slobodan Milosevic was doing - so long that is, as he remained antagonistic towards the US. In this vein was the response of the American academic and Noam Chomsky associate Edward Herman. On Kosovo, Herman, wrote John Feffer in Foreign Policy in Focus, "manages to construct an alternative universe in which Serbian military forces only acted in defence, Slobodan Milosevic was a benevolent Gorbachev figure, and the international legal community functioned as some kind of adjunct to NATO".

Christopher Hitchens was equally lucid is picking up on this tendency in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, remarking that "if there is now an international intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some ‘Candle in the Wind’ or ‘Strawberry Fields’ peace vigils. They did not take to the streets, or even go moist and musical, when the administration supported the Taliban."

For the anti-war movement, any action taken by the West - whether in Kosovo, Rwanda, or Afghanistan – could, and did in some instances, lead to a complete inversion of the role of perpetrator and victim.

To go into the rights and wrongs of specific wars would be to miss the point. Principled advocates and opponents of both conflicts can be found with ease. Based on their record of absolute opposition to intervention of any kind, however, it is the anti-war movement who should perhaps be a little more modest when pulling out the “Hands off Libya” placards. Were it to have got its way over the course of the last 20 years, Saddam Hussain would have annexed Kuwait, Slobodan Milosevic would have made Bosnia part of a Greater Serbia, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan.

It might be argued that what resulted from the subsequent interventions was worse than what would have befallen the peoples of those countries had no action been taken; and in certain cases I might agree. But not having to deal with the consequences of inaction is one of the luxuries of not being in power and never being likely to hold any office of power. It is also worth remembering that it is not any particular intervention that is opposed by the anti-war faction, but the very concept of intervention itself – unrelated to circumstances on the ground. However bad things get, the placards will still come out.

In Libya, one need not see America as a disinterested superpower to acknowledge that without the No-Fly-Zone Gaddafi will probably triumph and cling on to power. “Peace”, as the Stop the War Coalition defines it, is an easy objective to achieve, and in reality means the immediate rebel capitulation to Libyan Government forces.

The word peace, however, is misleading, for it is not the overriding concern of the anti-interventionist crowd. For that we need look no further than an anti-imperialism which trumps any consideration for the lives of other human beings. As long as one never, ever gives an ounce of support to Western foreign policy one can willingly sit by while comrades in far-away lands are massacred. Whether that means giving “critical support” to tyrants like Gaddafi or the Iraqi “resistance” is unimportant. Masturbating in that fashion is never likely to have any real consequences for those espousing it; and in contrast to the struggles being waged in Libya, contradicting the “anti-imperialism” of your peers on the far-left may get you shouted down at a meeting or two.

It is not peace, but justice - by which I mean the removal of Gaddafi from power by the rebels with any necessary help - that will admittedly be the more difficult but infinitely more rewarding outcome in all of this.

That the Libyan rebels appear to be demanding more, not less in the way of air strikes is unimportant to the peace crowd, however. To them it is the posture that matters. The cost falls on those they will never have to face and never have to address. And of course, why would they? They themselves uniformly live in liberal democracies.

The British press and the rise of the far-right

2011-03-01T14:32:00.285Z

"Searchlight poll finds huge support for far right 'if they gave up violence'"

The British press have been dirtying themselves for quite some time in the mucky sewer of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dave Osler believes the influence of the Daily Mail, the Sun and their ilk is exaggerated in this respect by the left, and not as influential as many like to believe; the media in-fact caters-to and feeds-off an ample amount of already-existing prejudice.

For reasons other than the fact that I find such thoughts incredibly depressing, I disagree.

What the media do very effectively in their coverage of immigrants and asylum seekers is create a climate of crisis, whereby there is seemingly a constant immigrant and asylum seeker "problem" about to engulf British society. In featuring stories about immigrants and fatuously linking them with crime and social problems over many, many years, the narrative of immigrants is unhesitatingly linked in the popular mind with deviance and, more recently in the case of Muslims, a hostile group attempting to impose their "alien values" on a country which is, predictably, too much of a "soft touch" to defend itself.

Question enough people about immigrants and asylum seekers and you will readily hear things like "all you see is the immigrants coming ere and gettin handouts", and "they tellin us to help them integrate while they tear down churches to create mosques". This and inane stories of councils banning England flags and forcing children to eat Halal meat so as not to "offend Muslims".

The expounders of such views are not simply to be written-off as deranged bigots; they genuinely believe these things to be true.

Do tall-tales of an impending immigrant takeover simply appear out of thin air then, in a kind of vacuum? I mean, if concerns like this are illegitimate, which they are (unless of course you believe churches really have been demolished in order to make way for mosques, and England flags are being banned from pubs; in which case I suggest you start reading again from the top,) then why the prevalence of misinformation on such a massive scale?

It may be impossible, or at least very difficult, to discern which comes first, a person's prejudices, or their exposure to prejudicial propaganda; but it is much harder to dismiss the link between fatuous and entirely made-up stories about primary schools being bulldozed to make way for mosques when an exponent of such absurdity is the copy that is distributed up and down the country every day of the year (bar of course Christmas; but don't worry, that will probably be banned soon, if this lot are to be believed).

The Daily Star has recently even gone as far as to openly back the English Defence League, a far-right, racist, street-fighting outlet where one can be as racist as one wishes so long as the proxy of "Muslim" rather than "Paki" is used. Muslims are not a race they will tell you, therefore hating them cannot possibly be described as racist.

As far as my attitude to the corporate press and its barely concealed racism goes, I stand by what I said in an article at Christmas:

"Anyone who meekly suggests that the ownership of the mass media as it stands is "a price worth paying" when compared to the worst imaginable alternative must take responsibility for this "price", not only in terms of the rampant prejudice, homophobia and sexism pumped out by the British press, but also the consequences of such prejudices on government policy and every-day attitudes and their expression, rather than simply imagining the corporate media to operate in a cultural void, detached from real-life implications."

The pathetic admiration of the Latin American left for Colonel Gaddafi

2011-02-23T10:25:00.233Z

While events in Libya are greeted with shock and indignation across the world, there are some who's instinctive reaction to such barbarism is not to condemn the perpetrators, nor to ask how those responsible can be brought to justice, but to add the massacre to their relativist soup, a repugnant dish served with an ample side-helping of condemnation of United States foreign policy - only United States foreign policy. Selecting an item on this menu that doesn't include a Michelin Star-like denunciation of the US (and I for one am no opponent of dining on this hearty dish from time to time,) is as good as an open admission of being a "lackey of imperialism" to what remains of the 20th-century Stalinist left.

84 year old Fidel Castro, the elderly parody of the vicious young hero of the unreconstructed left who ordered the makeshift boats of those fleeing his socialist paradise capsized, and the former leader who locked up independent journalists in the name of a Stalinist experiment that has proven time and again to have utterly failed the Cuban people, has made a timely intervention in his Reflections of Fidel column to say that it is "too early to criticise Gaddafi". Too early!

After 41 years in charge of a regime that brought down an American passenger plane, pitilessly exterminated an unknown number of political opponents, expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians for being insufficiently willing to immolate themselves for the cause, as well as plundered the Libyan economy for the benefit of Western corporations, many things can be said of Gaddafi's regime. Too early to be deserving of criticism is not one of them.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega sickeningly said he has telephoned the Libyan leader to express his "solidarity". The Sandinista leader says he has called several times this week because Gaddafi "is again waging a great battle" to defend the unity of his nation. Bizarrely, the main problem the former Marxist guerrilla has with the protesters appears to be that "there is looting of businesses now...that is terrible".

Perhaps along with Raul Castro he is looking admiringly at the Chinese model of bosses' communism.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, meanwhile, has stayed mute, his foreign policy spokesperson simply warning of the dangers of "imperialism". Chavez and Gaddafi have in the past had such warm ties that on Monday rumors swept the world that Gaddafi was fleeing to Venezuela. Gaddafi however appeared on television to deny such speculation. Bizarrely, Chavez has previously said that "what Simon Bolívar (the Great Liberator of South American independence against the Spanish) is to the Venezuelan people, Gaddafi is to the Libyan people." Chavez has also awarded Gaddafi the "Orden del Libertador," Venezuela's highest civilian decoration, and presented the Libyan leader with a replica of Simon Bolívar's sword.

In Libya, there is a football stadium in the city of Benghazi named after Chavez.

Bolivia came closest to criticizing the government in Tripoli, issuing a statement expressing concern over "the regrettable loss of many lives" and urging both sides to find a peaceful solution. Still no outright condemnation of Gaddafi however from the supposedly "revolutionary" government.

Gaddafi has in the past awarded the absurd Moammar al-Gaddafi International Human Rights Prize to Castro, Ortega, Chavez and Evo Morales.

Perhaps this proves you can get away with anything on the Stalinoid left, as long as you proclaim an opposition to United States foreign policy.

Citizens UK and the myth of consensus politics

2011-02-15T17:58:00.694Z

According to its website, Citizens UK is “the primary broad-based organising movement in Britain and Ireland", enabling "communities to work together for the common good.”

Inspired by Chicago thinker Saul Alinsky, the group has a solid achievement to its name in the form of the Living Wage Campaign, which has to-date pulled over 6,500 families out of working poverty. In the UK over 13 million people live in poverty - around one in five. The campaign calls for every worker in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life. An important part of the campaign has been to highlight the fact that it's not simply those on benefits who are poor, but that there are hundreds of thousands of people in paid work languishing in poverty due to low wages. Such a campaign should be applauded by the left, not least for raising awareness of an issue ignored by successive governments in their reluctance to confront powerful employer's organisations.

Having recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk by an enthusiastic member of Citizens UK at City University, I came away feeling both encouraged and uneasy. Encouraged by the stories of people at the bottom of society getting involved in politics - they do care, they just feel alienated from the parliamentary process - but uneasy at what appeared to be yet another attempt at non-confrontational, no-content progressivism. Citizens UK's raison d'être is ostensibly the "common good" of the local community. While rhetorically music to the ears of most people, this style of politics shies away from asking the really difficult questions. Outside of 19th-century religious notions of welfare, nor do they propose any genuine solutions.

There is a well-founded suspicion on the left that behind such rhetoric about consensual politics are the poor being told they should not demand too much in the way of help from the powerful. Unfortunately for the Citizens UK model there are groups in society who's interests are directly and irreconcilably opposed; and it is only through confrontation that such conflicts of interest may be resolved. It is simply not enough to say the wealthy can be persuaded their best interests lie in paying out higher wages or increased taxes - much of the time, they don't.

However good the intentions of Citizens UK may be they also unwittingly accept the proposal of the right that the state has somehow failed the poor, when in reality much of the state's inability to provide adequately for those at the bottom is due to the rich being increasingly permitted to contribute as little as possible in taxes. The state compels poor people to abide by laws protecting the property of the rich, but when the idea of compulsion is evoked to collect the taxes of the wealthy, the trend is increasingly moving towards a form of volunteerism. No mention of this on the Citizens UK website of course. Their approach seems to be to take Alinsky, strip out any radical Marxist content, add religion to the mix and repackage it as an antidote to the ills of the poor - an oxymoron of change at the bottom without threatening the interests of the top.

It comes as little surprise then to find on the Citizens UK website an endorsement of the big society. After all, they fit very nicely within the big society narrative - that of do it yourselves, because we don't care. Rather than challenge this outdated 19th-century dogma, Citizens UK are attempting to work within it. That should not sit comfortably with anybody opposed to the notion of consensual politics and the idea of community empowerment as detached from society as a whole.

Forgotten Haiti

2011-02-07T14:14:00.113Z

On Tuesday 12 January 2010, Haiti was rocked by a tragic and terrible earthquake which killed 230,000 people. One year on, and in the capital Port-au-Prince between 1.3 and 1.7 million people continue to live in increasingly squalid tents with little hope of moving to transitional shelters.

Despite the huge sums of money charities and aid organisations received in a show of international solidarity following the earthquake, less than 30,000 of those displaced have since found permanent homes; a recent cholera outbreak has killed more than 3,300 people; and of the 20 million cubic metres of rubble created by the disaster, less than 5 per cent has been cleared. Already the poorest country in the Western hemisphere before the earthquake, Haiti has over the past year fallen five points in the world's poverty league from 140 to 145 out of 182.

While the ‘international community' jostled to send its humanitarian aid to Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, barely anybody thought it proper to acknowledge that it was the ‘international community' which was largely responsible for the squalor and suffering Haiti found itself languishing in. The United States first invaded and occupied the country in 1915; and every subsequent attempt by the Haitian people to move ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ (in the words of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide) has been stubbornly (and often violently) blocked by the US government and its allies. As the Guardian noted:

‘Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country... Proposals to divert some of this ‘investment' towards poverty reduction or agrarian development [however] have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ¬distribution of international “aid”.’

In fact, Haiti's tragedy served as an opportunity to enrich corporate interests still further. Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the US Agency for International Development (US AID), was named US special coordinator for reconstruction in the aftermath of the earthquake. After a short period in the job he moved to the private sector, where he could sell his 'connections' to the highest bidder. He subsequently landed a $30,000-a-month contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG). HRG is founded by AshBritt, Inc., a Miami-based contractor which received considerable bad press for its’ post-Hurricane Katrina contracting work. AshBritt's partner in HRG is Gilbert Bigio, a wealthy Haitian businessman. Bigio made his money during the tyrannical Duvalier regime and was a supporter of the coup against president Aristide. Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, also exposed evidence that, within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already making plans to use the disaster as a means to further privatise the Haitian economy.

International aid alone however will not solve Haiti's problems. Even the capitalist class acknowledge as much. Regine Barjon, a member of the Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing pro-business organisation based in Florida, called the billions of aid donated to Haiti ‘the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a cancer patient’. Aside from the fact that Haiti itself is a deeply unequal society (Haiti's richest 1% own nearly half of the country's wealth), the stability of world-markets depends on countries like Haiti remaining poor. The commitment of the US government is not to building a sustainable road to development for Haitians but is geared toward subsidies for US farmers, which, by their very nature, undermine the ability of Haitian farmers to themselves make a living. In Britain we would not allow our pets to live in the conditions currently endured by the Haitian people. The ‘international community’, however, believes a certain degree of misery and squalor to be acceptable for people in the developing world. The poverty of Haitians and many others is ‘a price worth paying’ for the profits of large multinationals, which undermine the economies of poorer nations by swamping their internal markets with cheap products. It is in the interests of these companies, rather than the interests of people, whom the capitalist world has in mind first and foremost when it deals with countries like Haiti – even in times of unimaginable disaster.