Ben Aldin

Ralph Miliband died before New Labour

2012-01-30T08:03:00.000+01:00

The Marxist writer, Ralph Miliband, died in 1994 before the establishment of New Labour and his sons David and Ed’s involvement in it.

Throughout his academic career, Ralph Miliband wrote about the Labour Party from its inception up until the early 1990s with a particular focus on its role during the Post-War consensus. His thesis was invariable: the Labour Party could never bring about socialism in Britain.

He emphasised that the maintenance of capitalist rule in the West required both repression and reform. The post-war Labour prime ministers: Atlee (1945-51), Wilson (1964-70, 1974-76) and Callaghan (1976-79) for any number of reasons were loyal to the British power structure and the post-war consensus. These men did however envisage, and did to some extent did achieve, social democratic reforms.

In 1994 Ralph Miliband died and Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. Blair and New Labour inherited a completely different political landscape in 1997 and, crucially, they had no social democratic aspirations. Both Miliband’s sons, David and Ed, found leading roles inside New Labour and have no experience in, nor desire for, class or socialist politics.

The issue that Ralph Miliband confronted was the inadequacy of Labour Party reformism. He could never have envisaged a Labour Party, led by his own sons, which had deteriorated even further and had abandoned reformism and social democracy.

.

Vladimir Derer: his argument is still valid today

2012-01-26T17:42:00.000+01:00

Whether socialists should work inside the Labour Party is as relevant today as it was decades ago.

I remember in the mid eighties in Exeter a meeting in the City Library which was addressed by Vladimir Derer. It wasn’t heavily attended, with only the regular Labour left people from Exeter and south Devon, plus a couple from the non-Labour sects, communist and Trotskyist.

Derer’s thesis was both articulate and simple: in the advanced capitalist countries no new socialist parties had emerged as a significant political force since the formation of the Third International in the 1920s, and therefore effective socialist activity could only take place inside the prevailing party of the centre-left, by which he meant the Labour Party in Britain. Opportunities (not opportunism), he argued, were few and far between and had to be seized when available.

In Britain, at any rate, Derer is still right about that. No new Left Party has established itself even after Labour abandoned social democracy in 1990s. The Green Party is hardly socialist and remains fixed in niche partly of its own making. George Galloway’s ephemeral Respect Party was both a parody and betrayal of socialist values. But what of the Labour Party itself?

Since the eighties, but particularly since the arrival of Blair and New Labour in 1994, the Party structures have been de-democratised, conferences choreographed from above; meaningless forms of consultation have replaced intra-party elections. Worse still, the Left has vacated the Party leaving a membership consisting of municipal careerists and mindless hangers-on. When Labour lost office in 2010, with its lowest share of the poll since 1983, it was empty and irrelevant in face of the financial crisis.

In 2010 Labour had its first contented leadership election in sixteen years. In a feeble attempt to weaken New Labourism, its members – and particularly its trade union members - opted for Ed as opposed to David Miliband. The new leader has proved not just personally ineffective, but is also surrounded by a team of people who made their careers under New Labour’s neo-liberal years in government. Thus the Labour leadership – whether we call them today New Labour or not – are utterly hamstrung in their ability to stand up for working people.

Yet the party is far from totalitarian, and there is room for agitation at local level which undoubtedly has more impact than activity in any of the existing progressive micro-parties.

This being caught between a rock and hard place is the fate dealt to the handful of remaining socialist MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn. For what its worth, I believe work has to go into building a left party simply because New Labour is too compromised as a progressive force on account of its record in government 1997-2010.

So on balance, Derer, I believe, is no longer correct. But he still could turn out to be right in end.

.

Kettling: mass arrest for collective punishment

2012-01-19T13:32:00.002+01:00

Mass arrest is now regularly used in Britain to punish political dissent.

Traditionally, when police faced large congregations of people whose actions they wished to impede, they resorted to the selective arrest of a minority and the dispersal of the majority. However, particularly since the G20 demonstrations in April 2009, police have changed tactics and sought the mass arrest of demonstrators in an action known as kettling.

Kettling is a euphemism for the indiscriminate detention of large numbers of people in temporally-created street holding pens. Those rounded up include, of course, the demonstrators, but also journalists and unlucky bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All these unfortunate souls are detained for several hours in these street enclosures without medical facilities, food, water or access to toilets, while denied any form of meaningful contact with those who are detaining them. The boundaries of the kettle are controlled by baton-wielding police, aided on occasion by dogs, horses and temporarily erected steel fences. Demonstrators facing the police lines, often suffer kicks and punches, supplemented by blows from police batons and riot shields.

The student demonstrations in the final months of 2010 saw the development of so-called “hyper-kettling,” a further torment inflicted on the incarcerated. The amount of space available to people inside the kettle is progressively constricted until the detained are packed in like sardines in a can. In one case, demonstrators were compressed on Westminster bridge with police lines sealing both bridgeheads.

Kettling was first used in Britain in 1999 to detain anti-WTO demonstrators in London. Initially justified as an extreme measure to deal with extreme situations, the technique has now become standard police practice, particularly in London. In one notorious case on 24 November 2010, teenage children demonstrating in London were kettled. The kettle was only opened after midnight, leaving many teenagers stranded in London on a freezing night.

As a means of causing pain and discomfort to those engaged in political protest, kettling is highly effective. Those beaten at the edge of the kettle, particularly when the incarceration area is being constricted, come off worst, as one journalist covering the student demonstration on 9 December 2010 points out:

“The police started to push back then they started using their batons on protesters. I was caught then and pushed up towards the front. I ducked, my glasses were knocked off my face so I was trying to hold them. Then, basically, a baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head….blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck and matting my hair.”

Yet even for those not injured by the police, the effects of street arrest can be severe. Physically, many will suffer from exposure, dehydration and inability to use toilets, leading to people needing to defecate and urinate in their clothes. Psychological suffering centres on the inability of the incarcerated to know when they will be freed; and hence the pitiful chants of “Let Us Out.” The anxiety may be practical, for instance not being able to make an appointment to pick up a child, or it may stem from the claustrophobia of being crushed in a crowd.

Kettling is also used as a propaganda tool.Television pictures show lines of police confronting a mass of demonstrators. The impression is invariably given that it is the police who are defending a line against aggressive street protesters, when the reality is that the demonstrators are being pushed into an ever decreasing amount of space.

The police and conservative authoritarians excuse kettling by arguing that among the demonstrators there are hooligans, who cause damage; therefore the police are justified in kettling hundreds of innocent people in extremely unpleasant conditions for hours as a means of dealing of dealing with the problem. Yet In confronting other crimes the police do not have recourse to mass arrest of the innocent for their own convenience. Additionally, the practical benefits of kettling are short-lived. Some demonstrators may fear to protest in the future, but others, angered by the experience of kettling, will abandon the traditional protest march in favour of more disruptive forms of protest, which do not lend themselves to kettling.

Under closer examination, therefore, ketttling can be seen as the collective punishment of political protest and is clearly intended as a deterrent against those thinking of exercising their democratic right to demonstrate. Its use does nothing to help public policing in the long run and explodes the myth that British police are operating merely to uphold the law rather than to deter and punish political protest.

Such mass and indiscriminate arrest simultaneously violates the civil right to demonstrate and the personal right against arbitrary arrest.

Kettling and police violence against demonstrators has now become common currency; and that which is a regular, normal and an every-day occurrence ceases to be newsworthy. Yet sometimes it is precisely that which is normal which requires moral and political focus. Why can police beat demonstrators, journalists and by-standers, at least without causing serious injury, with impunity? Why can these same people be detained in kettles for hours without redress?

How long will it be before police are explaining away stampedes in a kettle in which people die and are seriously injured? How long will it be before the kettle of today becomes the concentration camp of tomorrow?

Note

In January 2012, the Court of Appeal overturned an earlier surprise decision of the High Court, which had held police action during the April 2009 G20 demonstrations to be excessive and unlawful. The Appeal Court judges in overturning the ruling exonerated the police and endorsed the violent police kettling operations deployed during the largely peaceful demonstrations.

The effect of the Appeal Court decision was to legitimise the forcible detention in street holding pens of thousands of legal non-violent protesters simply because senior police officers "honestly" believed that a “breach of the peace” by some of the demonstrators was possible. Flowing from this judgement is the precedent that any protest consisting of more than a handful of people can be lawfully kettled as a means of dealing with a possible future breach of the peace by a few demonstrators.

The decision leaves the right to demonstrate unmolested in tatters, handing the police the virtually unlimited power to incarcerate and punish demonstrators. In practice, this power will be used with discrimination: not so often that it become blatant that there is no right to protest in Britain, but sufficiently often to deter political protest on the streets.

Of course, the ruling can be challenged in the Supreme Court and in the European Court of Human Rights, but in the meantime the ruling stands.

.

Danish Cartoons: No to religious censorship

2012-01-15T13:25:00.000+01:00

In 2006 the New Labour government in London promoted a bill in Parliament to outlaw the publication of material that religious people might find offensive. The main backers of the bill were fundamentalist Muslims.

Some on the "left" felt that this bill would play a positive role in reducing anti-Muslim feeling in Britain and help integrate society. I did not agree; hence the letter below.

6 February 2006

Hi Ian,

I never thought, when we left university in 1983, that twenty-six years later we would be debating the possibility of fining and even jailing people who mocked religion, nor putting the Enlightenment on par with Islam. Times change.

Islam, like all religion which purports to command behaviour beyond that of the individual choice, makes a totalitarian claim on society. Liberalism, by contrast, aims to maximise the individual’s freedom of action, consistent with everybody else having the same freedom. The trade-off between the two is not one of reconciling two positions which are different but of the same kind (e.g. should the outside of the building be painted yellow or green), but of compromising one position which purports to give maximum choice to all with another that seeks to impose a ‘patterned’ life on everybody.

Let me take three consequences of attempting to appease fundamentalist Islam, which has become so enraged in Britain and elsewhere this week as a consequence of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that no Muslim in Britain need see these pictures, and whatever is decided in Britain is hardly likely to cause Denmark to rescind its long tradition of freedom of speech).

First, if Islam were to be protected against ridicule, then of course other religions would enjoy the same protection. ‘The Life of Brian’ and anything like it would be seen no more in the New Britain.

Second, if a cartoon published in a newspaper causes outrage, then so much greater is the outrage, for example, of women walking uncovered through Muslim areas. Once you have abandoned the individual rights as a basis of law making, where does one stop in ensuring social peace through appeasement?

Third, most people who want to attack Islam (as opposed to Muslims) are from the Muslim community itself. The veil of censorship would fall on the likes of Salmon Rushdie, and we would have the absurd position of the British State attempting to stop the secularisation of Islamic communities, and prosecuting dissidents within its ranks.

The whole debate in Britain is absurd. Last week we had the Blair government seeking to impose censorship on publications which ‘insulted’ Islam (and for form’s sake other religions too). What effrontery from these New Labour scumbags! What kind of insult is a cartoon compared with the massacre of hundreds of thousands in Iraq? Why does the government concern itself with insults against Muslims caused by scribblers, but see none in 90-day detentions without charge? The truth is that the Blair government seeks censorship for the same reason that seeks 90-day detentions and war – it wishes to expand power of the state.

I know you decided in the end to oppose the Religious Hatred Bill, so what I’m trying to do is to pull you back even more firmly into a defence of liberal positions, positions which form the bedrock, in my view, of any worthwhile socialism.

.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

2012-01-02T12:32:00.002+01:00

Nationalism conceived as an imagined community continues to be a driving force in the world today.

Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, prompted a series of investigations into nationalism that embraced several other writers such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner. Of the book itself, there is much discussion on the net, so here I only want to add a few points which were of particular interest to me.

Nation as an imagined community is a gripping idea. The members of these communities (British, Swiss, Indonesian, etc) imagine themselves as part of a family or Gemeinschaft even though it is impossible for them to know one another. The book is an attempt to account for that conception in the modern world.

Anderson traces the first steps towards the development of the nation in Europe. The Middle Ages were nation-free. Allegiance was to king, church and lord and neither language unity (except for the Latin of the elite) nor clearly defined geographical boundaries existed.

Printing changed everything. After the market had been exhausted for Latin texts, publishers sought to exploit the vernacular and in so doing put in train the process of turning some local dialects into literary languages. In parallel, the development of the absolutist state expanded the state bureaucracies, whose officials used the vernacular language which was unified, consolidated and disseminated in printed form across territories.

Anderson comments on the seeming oddity of nationalism taking off first in the New World before exploding in Europe in the French Revolution. In discussing this, the book draws not just on North but in strong measure on South America. The argument is that the colonial officials of these states resented the growing centralised power of their European masters, so the middle rank state bureaucrats in league with commerical interests in the colonies rebelled. Rebellion had nothing to do with either ethnicity or language.

In Europe by the late Nineteenth Century the key promoters of nationalism were the school teacher, civil servant and journalist. Nation increasingly became anchored in an ethnic conception of language. Royalty and aristocracy engineered a new basis for their position: their representation of nation-ness as opposed to loyalty to them through God and tradition.

By the end of the nineteenth century most of Africa and Asia were colonies of European powers. As the state apparatus and commercial organisation expanded the number of administrators grew. European colonialists had their superior position preserved through growing levels of racism. The racist aspect of nationalism expanded.

In ruling their colonies, the imperial powers also imported their own nationalisms, which became templates for the oppressed people of those lands to copy. For instance, the story of the French revolution taught in colonial schools became a ready tool for those fighting for national Independence in Indo-China. Independence movements consolidated the existence of nation states across the globe, however ethnically heterogeneous those states were.

Nationalism did not die with advent of communist regimes after 1917. Revolutionaries consolidated their power within existing state apparatuses. Indeed, Anderson begins his book by focusing on the conflict which broke out in 1979 between two communist “nation” states, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Anderson highlights two features of nationalism which traditionally are overlooked: the map and the museum. Every nation state carves out is territory on the earth and so makes a shape of itself. In fact that shape comes to represent the nation as a shape without marking for rivers, mountains, towns, etc. The museum collects together the images and artefact's of the nation.

Several other features of the book are worthy of comment.

First, Anderson’s argument is distinctive, not just in his characterisation of nationalism and his argument that it is not something which is historically finished, but in the fact that the bulk of his examples are taken not from Europe and North America, but from Latin American and Asia. While this is fully justified given the argument, some of the material calls on historical knowledge which might challenge the “educated amateur.”

The book avoids jargon, though it does overflow with metaphorical language, but it is less flowery than the writing style of his brother Perry. The text is nonetheless easy and enjoyable to read.

Finally, the book ends with a chapter on its own history and an account of its publication and translation around the globe. Against the charge of arrogance, one could certainly excuse Anderson given the influence that his book has had. And strangely, the chapter is interesting to read in its own right.

ANDERSON, Benedict,Imagined Communities, Verso: 1983, 2006.

.

Britain is no longer a free society

2012-01-01T15:14:00.001+01:00

By the end of 2007 there was a growing realisation that civil liberties in Britain were draining away. (Written December 2007)

Britain is now a society, which has departed from any normal understanding of civil liberties and personal freedom. People can be held by police for a month (and soon longer it would seem) without being subject to any charge. They may also be sent to prison and suffer other deprivations of liberty for what amounts to ‘thought crimes.’

Last month, for instance, a twenty-three year old woman, Samina Malik, received a nine month suspended prison sentence plus a community service order for writing jihad poetry on a cash till receipt and for having visited jihad websites. This was even though the jury found no intention on her part to aid or commit terrorist offences.

The current acceleration in authoritarianism consists of three interrelated process. First is the ever growing surveillance society with the ubiquitous CCTV cameras - soon to be augmented by electronic identity cards – which increase the power of the state vis-à-vis its citizenry. Second is the widening raft of illiberal legislation ranging from the banning of demonstrations outside parliament to the criminalisation of free speech and free browsing on the internet. Third is the increasing resort to prison and control orders. Britain has become the most watched state in Europe and has the highest proportion of its population in jail.

All of this has happened, of course, against a background of a genuine terrorist threat, but one that has been exaggerated and abused by government. Yet we live in an age of political passivity, sustained by a slow but real increase in the living standards of so-called "Middle England" and for many better-off workers too. Thus suverying the situation from a position of relative comfort, Mr and Mrs average are so used to believing that they live in a mostly free and tolerant society – and that any restrictions are reasonable and serve the general good – that they are not noticing that the structures that sustain that freedom, gained over centuries of struggle, have now cracked and are coming apart.

.

Why Cameron walked out on Europe

2011-12-11T00:27:00.000+01:00

The French-German initiative is about one thing: under what conditions will the richer Eurozone members act as guarantors for the debts of the Mediterranean countries and Ireland. The falling apart of the Eurozone is in nobody’s interests, hence the unity of the twenty-six.

Cameron tried to get protection for the City as the price for his consent. He failed to get any such protection and he knew he would probably fail. Cameron could have hung in there and done nothing. He deliberately chose not to. Why?

The Tory leader acted as he did for political reasons: to placate the eurosceptics in his own party, knee the LibDems in the balls and bang a chauvinist drum.

Cameron’s act is intended to diffuse growing class awareness in Britain by substituting nationalism and chauvinism. That is a terrain on which the Tories can win – today’s Falklands factor.

And for the left? A functioning European capitalist system with low levels of chauvinism cutting across working people is a better starting point than capitalist crisis and nationalism. The latter is a springboard for fascism.

Income Inequality in Britain

2011-12-05T16:24:00.003+01:00

Income inequality in Britain is growing even bigger.

A recent OECD report has provided some figures for income inequality in Britain. It is worth noting some of these.

In 1985 the income ratio between the top and bottom deciles of the population was 1:8. By 2008 that figure had grown to 1:12. In comparison, the ratio in other northern European countries (e.g. Germany, Netherlands) had deteriorated from 1:5 to 1:6 over the same time period.

Even that masks the growth of income of the very rich: i.e. the top one percent of the population. In 1970 they took home 7.1 percent of national income; by 2005 the figure stood at 14.3, with the top 0.1 percent alone taking around 5 percent of pre-tax income.

In the 1970s and 1980s taxation and benefits was able to re-distribute around half of the increases in income going to the richest. By the 2000s that figure fell to 20 percent.

Opinion polls in Britain show that around two-thirds of people believe that income inequality is too big.

Finally, it should be noted that the OECD report is based on official documentation. In reality, the rich receive more than is ever officially attributed to them through a variety of legal and illegal means.

.

Ĉu Ĝi Estas Nur Fabelo? (Is it only a fable?) by Jan Wolski

2011-12-02T12:03:00.002+01:00

This book published in 1935 weaves a fantasy of inter-war Polish children building cooperatives and planning for better future.

This is a strange fairytale – a mixture of pure fantasy and political parable. The story is set in an impoverished village in interwar Poland. The children engage in various forms of naughty behaviour which parental disapproval – shown physically and morally – fails to rectify. The local teacher (La Senjoro Instrusito) believes that the root of all naughtiness is an attempt by children to emulate adult behaviour. The cure is to set up a youth cooperative in the village in which the children can produce things for themselves – products ranging from schoolbooks to the skating shoes. The children are enthusiastic and set about the work and so become model child citizens.

The bulk of the book consists of an imaginary state of affairs in which all aspects of building a network of cooperatives, first across Poland and then across the world, are considered. The boundless optimism of the young people for the project is unreal, but somehow makes the book interesting. You know that everything will turn out well.

In the final chapter we have moved on ten years and the teacher has retired. He is invited to visit a cooperative colony in the mountains where by chance all his old pupils (now trained as doctors, cooperative administrators, etc) now live. We glance into this regimented but idyllic community of cooperative, polite and enthusiastic young people. Visitors from cooperatives Denmark, Italy and even Algeria are there. In this later edition of the book, it is emphasised that Esperanto is spoken for international communication. The last pages of this book, published just four years before Poland’s conflagration in the Second World War, express the forlorn hope that such a generation of young people will go on to build a world based on peace and cooperation.

This book is no Comintern tract. It is distinctly Polish with endless soft nationalistic references to Polishness and indirect praise for the Polish dictator Josef Pilsudski. The book espouses moral virtue, cooperation, collectivism and self-help. It is a wonderful portrait of the hopes of a forgotten age.

I picked up this book in the Esperanto bookshop in Budapest for some fifty eurocents. Its pages are yellow with age; and one thought – perhaps more interesting than the contents of the book itself – is the where the book has been, and the history it has seen, since its publication in Warsaw in 1935.

WOLSKI, Jan. Ĉu Ĝi Estas Nur Fabelo? Esperanta Eldono-Kooperativo en Varsovio 1935

The book was written in Esperanto. (La libro estas verkita esperantlingve.)

.

Empiricism: the one legged philosophy

2011-12-01T12:13:00.001+01:00

Empirical observation alone cannot provide the basis for knowledge.

The term empiricism (adjective empirical) is used in two senses. As a philosophy, it means that all knowledge is acquired by means of the senses (sight, sound, taste touch and smell). According to this view, any search for knowledge is only meaningful if it uses terms and statements which relate to things that are experienced. Put simply, the exclusive empiricist believes that all valid knowledge is reducible to the formula OBSERVATION + LOGIC BASED ON OBSERVATION.

An empirical statement on the other hand is merely a chunk of information (e.g. The cheese is on the table) which can be deemed true of false by empirical enquiry. One doesn’t need to embrace the whole philosophy of empiricism to accept that testing against the world can verify, qualify or falsify a statement. In other words, it is possible to believe – and rightly so – that the tools and methods for acquiring knowledge include, but are not limited to, empirically acquired information plus logical analysis.

Analysis

The problem with empiricism as an exclusive philosophy of knowledge is that it is incomplete. The point can be made with a simple example. Of course we cannot know in the stranger's house whether the cheese is on the table or not without looking or being informed by a reliable source. But in order to ask the question or understand the answer we must have pre-observation notions of at least three things: what cheese is, the concept of “on-ness” and an understanding of “table.” In other words, any information coming from the world to be held in the knowledge seekers head requires the observer to have pre-existing concepts in his or her head, if he or she is to understand it.

Taking a step backwards, we can also pose another problem for empiricism. True, the cheese may be on the table, but that observation is only one of thousands that we could have made when we looked at the room. The very fact that we asked that question and not another (e.g. Is the table square?) is determined by considerations which are not themselves empirical. It is foolish to think that anyone can understand something simply by amassing millions of facts without being guided in the search or by prioritising the relevance of such facts.

Anything in the world which we seek to understand does not just consist of static imagery but is in a state of movement and change. For that reason, the knowledge seeker is interested in the cause of change; e.g. why did the ball bounce when dropped. The mere fact that X is followed by Y cannot prove cause: night follows day but is not the cause of it. Theory is always required to explain causal connections because cause itself can never be observed.

It follows from what has been said above that theory must provide at least three things to supplement empirical observation. First theory must develop a network of concepts which are capable to representing things in the world; second theory must select the kind of information we need to look for, if we are to understand the world or some part of it; and thirdly, it must attribute causes to phenomena. Empirical observation on the other hand fills our conceptual categories with meaning as well as confirming, qualifying and falsifying any statements we make about the world.

Theory, then, enables empirical observation, but it is also the case that empirical observation enriches and develops our theoretical knowledge. Thus just as there is no such things as an empirical statement which does not embody theoretical ones, so every concept and theoretical statement contains elements of empirical observation.

The practical result of all this is that a proper methodology for the investigation of phenomena in the world has to get the facts and the theory right.

.

George Monbiot: no reference to Marxist classics

2011-11-18T15:46:00.001+01:00

George Monbiot must rank as Britain’s the top Left-wing popular intellectual writing today

A few years ago when I first read Monbiot’s book, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain I delved into the index to look up references to Marx. There was no such reference in the whole book.

At first sight that appears strange. The book is an excellent empirical study of corporate power within the neo-Marxist tradition, but it seems that Monbiot wants to present information within that intellectual interpretative framework, but without references to the corpus of Marxist classics. Maybe he is right to do so.

Much Marxist writing in the last three decades, if not before, has been couched in a cloud of jargon and inpenetratable theory, written by university academics for other university academics. The result is that the whole corpus has become inaccessible even for most of the university educated.

Monbiot, a trained journalist, is thus right to pen his articles and books in what amounts to a Marxian interpretive framework but without exploring its philosophical underpinnings. Those who have studied academic Marxism may be turned on by theory, but I doubt whether many of his readers have ever even heard of it.

It’s far better for people who are first coming to left-wing ideas to get a grasp of how society works with practical example – and then later, if they are interested, to delve into the theory. Monbiot gets it right on that score.

.

Metrication

2011-11-06T12:27:00.000+01:00

Metrication would be good for Britain

In 2007 the EU Competition Commissioner announced that plans to force the exclusive use of metric measurements onto Britain were being abandoned. This gives rise to two points.

First, the fact that some stubborn people in England want to buy their potatoes in pounds and ounces does little or nothing to impede competition, so there is no good reason for the matter to fall within the remit of the EU. So in that sense the decision can be welcomed.

Second, the fact that Britain, after making plans to go metric in 1965, has been unable to complete the job is absurd. Generations of school children have learned the easy-to-use and internationally recognised metric measurements only in daily life to be confronted with arcane imperial ones. What nonsense is it to buy, as I once did, 10cm wide shelves sold in lengths of 6ft?

Those who say that Britain’s national pride depends on retaining imperial measurement are demeaning Britain because surely pride in one’s country should depend on more than retaining some illogical way of doing something.

.

Historical Materialism: a short working definition

2011-11-01T06:33:00.002+01:00

Historical materialism, the theory of society developed by Karl Marx (1818-83), needs a clear practical definition.

The object of historical materialism is what it seeks to study. The field of study is human society and the history of that human society. Human beings live on the planet Earth, are part of the Earth and extract the means to life from the Earth. Human beings live socially: i.e. not as Robinson Crusoes, but in society. They produce and reproduce their lives socially. Historical materialism is a theory of technique: i.e. it asserts that how we socially produce the means to life, and how we have historically produced the means to life, determines what we are as a society.

Historical materialism is an inclusive, not an exclusive science. Aspects of life are also governed by geography, human physiology, psychology, etc. These sciences are related to and are enriched by historical materialism, but are not deducible from it. Historical materialism is a macro-sociology; i.e a study of human behaviour in the whole of society.

Historical materialism stresses history because the contemporary is the result of the historical. It stresses materialism because at root human society is the complex result of people producing the means to life from nature. Some people produce but everybody lives from what is produced. What people think they are doing and the ideas that they have in their heads are important in determining what happens, but are necessarily secondary to what actually is happening.

Historical materialism thus recognises the basis of human existence as a collective production of society from nature in a process which develops over time. This fundamental point plays two roles in the further development of historical materialism.

First, it is a core statement of meaning about what society and human existence is.

Second, it provides the first tool for viewing the world, asking research questions and developing concepts to interpret and understand the social world.

.

Ethnic Cleansing at Dale Farm

2011-10-20T09:16:00.004+02:00

The liquidation of the Dale Farm gypsy settlement is a case of localised ethnic cleansing camouflaged with the language of protecting the Green Belt.

On Wednesday 19 October 2011 after several appeals and much dithering in the courts – in which Britain’s judges prioritised planning law over human rights – the forceful eviction of gypsies from the Dale Farm settlement began.

On the first day, the settlement, weakly defended by residents and non-violent direct action activists, was attacked at day break by columns of riot police. Electric stun guns (tasers) were offensively deployed on two occasions. Once the residents and their supporters had been subdued, the bailiffs moved in to do their dirty work of demolishing homes.

The gypsies were evicted from their ten-year-old settlement, consisting of land which the settlers either owned or had been leased to them. There were no issues of trespass.

The gypsies themselves were dispersed and driven from the municipality of Basildon. Their pain is every bit as strong as that of people ethnically cleansed in Palestine or elsewhere. Eighty-six families and around one hundred children were rendered destitute, left to inhabit car parks and road lay-bys.

To carry out this piece of micro-ethnic cleansing, Basildon’s Conservative-led council and the Home office spent around twenty million pounds to make hundreds of people homeless. That amounts to some 230 000 pounds per gypsy family. Obviously Cameron and the Basildon Council leader, Tony Ball, think this is money well spent to pander to racist sentiment in Britain.

Those who say this is merely about upholding the laws of urban planning are either using this pretext to cover their racism or to absolve their consciousnesses. There is simply no meaningful parallel in preventing a property developer building for profit or a homeowner building an extension with the bulldozing of a decade old settlement. Why should planning law trump all other considerations? When the London orbital M25 motorway was built thousands of square kilometres of Green Belt land were concreted. Of course, a derogation for the M25 motorway was permitted because the road was deemed important. But why was there no derogation for the largest gypsy settlement in England?

The Dale Farm settlement is to be bulldozed in an attempt to create the pretence that it never existed.

.

Zamenhof: the forgotten philosopher

2011-10-19T16:06:00.000+02:00

Ludvik Zamenhof's humanism led to a rejection of nationalism.

Ludvik Zamenhof tends to be known, if at all, as the creator of Esperanto. As an ethical and social philosopher, his humanism is little studied outside the Esperanto community. Zamenhof’s thought had biblical origins. He was influenced by the prophet Hillel the Elder, whose Golden Rule, what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow, was developed by Zamenhof into a rejection of nationalism and religious intolerance. In their place Zamenhof promoted cosmopolitanism and universal human values. Below I provide a translation of a single passage of Zamenhof’s writing.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

The original Esperanto was:

“Mi estas profunde konvinkita, ke ĉiu nacionalismo prezentas por la homaro nur plej grandan malfeliĉon, kaj ke la celado de ĉiuj homoj devus esti: krei harmonian homaron. Estas vero, ke la nacionalismo de gentoj premataj — kiel natura sindefenda reago — estas multe pli pardoninda, ol la nacionalismo de gentoj premantaj; sed, se la nacionalismo de fortuloj estas nenobla, la nacionalismo de malfortuloj estas neprudenta; ambaŭ naskas kaj subtenas unu la alian, kaj prezentas eraran rondon de malfeliĉoj, el kiuj la homaro neniam eliros, se ĉiu el ni ne oferos sian grupan memamon kaj ne penos stariĝi sur grundo tute neŭtrala.”

Functionalism

2011-10-12T11:42:00.002+02:00

Functionalism is a sociological theory which suffers from deficiencies and can provide an underpinning for conservative world views.

Functionalism (and its resultant method of research, which leads to the comparison of institutions in different societies) is far from useless. Postulating that in order to exist an institution has to do X, Y and Z and then asking how it does it raises key questions for investigation and analysis.

The problems lie in what is NOT asked in the functionalist paradigm.

History: in Society A a function is fulfilled by activity P. In Society B the same function is fulfilled by activity Q. But why the difference? It has to be explained by the different histories of societies A and B, and not by the comparison between them.

The functionalist paradigm also ignores what political actors themselves think they are doing.

.

How Rulers Rule: Three Types of Regime

2011-10-12T11:23:00.000+02:00

Political regimes keep themselves in power by one of three methods: repression, wining the propaganda war against their opponents or by having no serious opponents.

States have repressive and ideological mechanisms at their disposal, all of which serve to put the brakes on radical social change. Indeed, given the massive discrepancies of income, wealth, status and power within all societies - and assuming people not to be inherently masochistic - one can assume radical distributional change would occur, if it were not for these mechanism of control that hold back both revolution and radical reform. In the last hundred years or so, the main threat to the ruling elites in capitalist countries was the demand for some form of socialist society, and indeed socialist writers used up an enormous amount of ink attempting to fathom out how socialism could come about. While socialism was by far the most powerful challenge both politically and ideologically to capitalist rule, opposition has also come from various forms of fascism and, more recently, from fundamentalist Islam.

In the developed world only two types of regime have existed until now: one is the capitalist system, often but not always, operating in a democratic or semi-democratic polity. The other was the rule of communist parties in Europe, Asia and a few other outposts; historical communism constituted a significant global force during what Eric Hobsbawm called the short century 1917-89. Under both capitalism and state socialism, however, there has always been a strata or class of people who possessed disproportionate wealth and power, though inequality was greatest in capitalist countries, most of which most of the time were, ironically, democracies.

Much traditional Marxist writing has sought to identify and clarify the capitalist state per se. While such an approach is not incorrect, I think it fails to capture what can be seen as three specific forms of elite rule and state formation over the last century or so.

The first is repressive rule through the authoritarian state. The elites maintain their rule by using the military and police to restrict civic rights (freedom of speech, assembly, etc) and these regimes either have no elections or else corrupt the electoral process. We can assume that the majority of the people, if they had the choice, would vote the existing political elite out of office and vote in politicians who would attempt to bring about fundamental regime change. Regimes of this kind have been present in Europe: fascist Germany and Italy until the end of the end of the Second World War, or Spain, Portugal and Greece until the 1970s are examples. All the former communist countries had political regimes of this type.

The second is ideological rule, which historically has only occurred in capitalist countries. All of these regimes have had a large measure of civil liberty and competitive elections, though of course behind the state there is still a repressive arm. The ruling elites maintain their privileges in several ways. First, they are able to convince the majority of people that they are better rulers than the leaders of left wing parties, a goal which is achieved though their dominance in the media and often by means of approving concessions, such as social welfare. Second, the leaders of left-wing parties are co-opted into the political elite and/or end up compromising their social democratic goals to acquire or keep office. Third, the power of capital as a ‘pressure group’ is so huge it can usually force left-wing governments to compromise. In Western Europe until recently this has been the pattern of politics: political elites seeing off, co-opting or compromising moderate social democracy. In every case the majority of people have been convinced not to back parties seriously contemplating radical social change.

The third is post-ideological rule. In western Europe the long-term trend in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was for the left to grow in strength and for ideological rule to replace repressive rule. However since the 1980s, and after 1989 in particular, the left – social democratic, communist, or liberal – has collapsed as a political force. The reasons for this are several, but the result is to create a society where capitalist power, and the groups which benefit from it, face no serious organised challenge at all. Working people shun politics altogether. Everyone who suffers economically individualises his or her pain; they filter their alienation through music, drugs and on-line virtual contacts. Community and shared meaning evaporate and are replaced with cults, mysticism or sheer isolation. Logic, argument and intellectual debate disappear in favour of the soundbite or the fatuous. Political competition in democracies comes more and more to focus on spin and trivia (e.g. bald leaders are never elected, etc) as the fundamental assumption of the system are increasingly unquestioned.

Of course this trichotomy is only a rough and ready one. Particular states at particular times are likely to combine elements from all three ideal types. The model is problematic in dealing with situations where ‘ideological rule’ is maintained by and within one ethnic group while another faces a repressive rule; e.g. Palestinians in Israel, or indeed the social underclass in the US or Britain today. Nonetheless I believe the trichotomy is very clear in describing the overall political model in Western Europe as regards the movement from ‘repressive’ to ‘ideological’ and then to ‘post-ideological’ rule.

The trichotomy can be clarified by mean of a joke. The devil is showing a newcomer around Hell. In the first room there are a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit. The man asks, ‘Why don’t they get out?’ ‘Ah,’ says the devil, ‘they can’t because there is a soldier there with a gun waiting to shoot anyone who tries.’ They go into the second room where there are another group sitting in a barrel of shit. The man notices, though, that the soldier is asleep, so he asks ‘why don’t they get out?’ ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘look, there’s a TV screen telling them how nice and warm it is in barrel compared with outside.’ They go into a third room and the man again sees a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit, once again the soldier is asleep, but this time the TV is just showing pop videos. ‘So why don’t they get out?’ asks the man. ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘they’re busy watching the videos and they don’t know that there’s life outside the barrel.’

Post-ideological rule came into full bloom in the mid 2000s both in Europe and North America. It was reinforced by the myth of eternal economic growth financed on credit; a boom in which all but the poorest would find fulfilment in ever-expanding private consumption. Yet, the economic base of that society shattered in the financial crisis which exploded in the autumn of 2008, leading to soaring unemployment, bankruptcy and economic despair. One feels writing today (July 2009) that the car has gone over the cliff, but not yet hit the rocks. We are seeing the end of a political era without being able to find the birth of a new one. The whole society remains limp in inactive anticipation. Politically not much has happened, even if fascist parties have won some electoral backing across Europe. We are in phoney war where the post-ideological model, in it present form at any rate, has come to an end but failed to disappear.

.

Dialectics explained simply

2011-10-04T17:10:00.001+02:00

In Marxism the concept of dialectics is often complicated and mystified. It needs stating simply.

Dialectics is perhaps the most mystical term in the Marxist canon. In the past many have used the concept to justify any number of illogical arguments and re-state dogma as science. What are dialectics? Let me look here briefly at dialectics as a conceptual tool for understanding society.

To start, we have to answer another question: what is society? For Marxists – and indeed all other sociologists - society is conceived as a system made up of a complex network of interactive causes and effects. A change in any one element in the social system affects the others. For instance a rise in unemployment causes an increase crime, which in turn changes the role of police, which has further effects, and so on.

If society is thought of as embracing all the causes of change in society, then it follows that change originates from within the social system itself. In other words, at any given point, society contains internal tensions (often called contradictions) which bring about social change. And when a new situation has established itself, there are yet again new tensions which lead to more social change, and so on.

A metaphor for understanding all of this is to see society as a huge piece of fungus, constantly changing because of developments from within.

The traditional explanation of dialectical change (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) is only a conceptual re-organisation of the points above. The argument is like this. Everything in a social system at any point in time is either a thesis or not that thesis (i.e. its antitheses). For instance on 3 March 1972 everything was either the politically organised French working class or NOT the politically organised French working class. As a result of the interaction of thesis and antithesis a new situation in society (i.e. synthesis) emerges in which the original thesis and antithesis have been transformed. That said, I actually find the use of the terms, thesis, antithesis and synthesis for analysing social change confusing rather illuminating.

Marxists in their analysis do not identify these theses and antitheses on an arbitrary basis, nor do they see the direction of historical change as entirely unpatterned or accidental, but what drives history forward is beyond the scope of this mini essay.

To sum up, dialectics in society means that social change comes from tension within the existing state of things. And when a new state of affairs has been created, then that too is subject to change. When explained like this, dialectical theory can be seen as something which is almost certainly correct, but if not linked to other theories and observations it is not very revealing.

Some Notes

1. The Ancient Greeks developed the notion of dialectics. ‘A’ advocated a proposition (thesis) and B a counter-proposition (antithesis) and as a result of debate a better approximation of the truth was developed (synthesis). The relationship of the Ancient Greek conceptions of dialectics and the modern sense is best understood as one of analogy.

2. We can see dialectics functioning at various ‘levels’ of existence:

ONTOLOGICALLY (the philosophy of being) – in terms of what exists, the universe, society, the individual and his/her environment. Human history develops in a dialectical way. (Hegel: driven by the Zeitgeist; Marx human social production; i.e. materialism).

EPISTOMOLOGICALLY (the philosophy of knowledge) – in terms of how we know things: the object of thought (a chunk of reality outside us) is out there to be perceived; and the thinking subject via his/her sense perceptions and concepts in his head, grasps that reality. Thus reality influences thought; and thought influences reality.

DISCOURSAL: the “hermeneutic circle” We can’t understand the whole of a text without understanding its parts; we can’t understand the parts of the text without understanding its whole.

In many instances the use of the term interactive will effectively substitute for dialectical.

Complement

2011-10-01T16:33:00.001+02:00

In grammar the term complement is sometimes used with different meanings. The core meaning of complement is for a word, phrase or clause which is necessary in a sentence to complete its meaning. We find complements which function as a sentence element (i.e. of equal status to subjects, verbs and objects) and complements which exist within sentence elements.

Complements which are sentence elements

subject complement
A subject complement tells more about the subject by means of the verb. In the examples below the sentence elements are (SUBJECT + VERB + COMPLEMENT)

Mr Smith is a management consultant. (a predicative nominal)
She looks ill. (a predicative adjective)

object complement
An object complement tells us more about the object by means of the verb. In the examples below the sentence elements are (SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT + COMPLEMENT). Object complements can often be removed leaving a well-formed sentence, thus the use of the term complement is slightly illogical.

We elected him chairman. (a predicative nominal)
We painted the house white. (a predicative adjective)

adverbial complement
Adverbials are usually an adjuncts (i.e. they can be removed and a well-formed sentence remains). In the following sentence both adverbial adjuncts can be removed and a properly formed sentence remains.

Yesterday I saw Anna at the station.

If, however, an adverbial is a necessary sentence element then it is correctly referred to as a complement. The structure of the sentence below is (SUBJECT + VERB + ADVERBIAL COMPLEMENT)

John put the basket in the garden. (i.e. John put the basket is not a properly formed sentence)

HAMID, Mohsin - The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2011-09-11T16:35:00.000+02:00

An atmospheric novel that gives the flavour of post 9/11 America.

The novel focuses on a young Pakistani whose family sends him to America and who succeeds in the 1990s American dream. Though different on account of his Pakistani background, he nonetheless finds a place in yuppie America as an elite management consultant. He develops a relationship with an haute bourgeois American woman who, on account of the death of an earlier boyfriend, has developed serious mental problems.

The protagonist is not personally abused by the events of 9/11, but his whole position in the US is rendered psychologically impossible. His girlfriend is institutionalised and he, after failing in his job and finally resigning, returns to his family home in Pakistan.

We learn about the story as the protagonist relates it to an unknown American in a restaurant in Pakistan We are led to believe that the listener is a CIA agent who at any moment will shoot the storyteller or have him deported to the Guantanamo gulag.

The book is an interesting insight into the post 9/11 mindset of a character, who shares two worlds – the yuppie America and an Islamic country.

Published by Penguin 2007

.

Riots in England: Summer 2011

2011-08-24T21:11:00.008+02:00

Britain’s urban rioting of August 2011 has strengthened the hand of the state, the police and the political right.

The riots were not the work of a single social group with one cause. The spark for the initial Tottenham riot was the police shooting a young black man sitting in the back of a taxi. Matters were made worse when the authorities claimed that he had fired at them when in fact he hadn’t. The situation was further inflamed by the police refusing to discuss the death with the dead man’s family, who were peacefully assembled outside the police station in a small demonstration made up of relatives, friends and community leaders.

That ethnic riot of anti-police rage in Tottenham could not have spread across the land, if several English cities, particularly London, hadn’t been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.

In parts of London and then some other British cities (Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham), the young unemployed - impoverished, and alienated, but brought up in a society in which consumer possessions were elevated to the purpose of life - revolted and sought to steal electronic goods, designer clothing and much else from High Street stores. An orgy of rioting and looting ensued.

In the mayhem criminals and criminal gangs entered the fray engaging in systematic looting, arson and mugging of passers-by – and in a couple of cases, murder. The situation was further compounded by the creation in many parts of London of a macabre carnival atmosphere as shop after shop was looted and burnt; and funseekers from all social backgrounds joined in.

Some on the political left might even feel an element of Schadenfreude in seeing the poor and the excluded taking to the streets to vent their anger. But the rioters, save for a few small contingents of anarchists, lacked any kind of conscious political purpose. The rioters and looters’ target was not just large commercial property, but also that of private individuals and small traders. The hooded youths were smashing up their own communities in which they obviously felt they had no stake.

Inevitably, the target of much of the violence was the police; for it is the police whose job it is to physically bend bodies so they cooperate with the social order, a social order which is so unfair to so many. But no society can tolerate rampant criminality; so the police with widespread public backing suppressed the riots. By the end, armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of London and permission had been given for discharge of plastic bullets, though these were not used.

After the 1981 riots – the only riots comparable in modern British history - the left still existed as a political force and Tory “wets” still present in the government were apprehensive about a full-scale junking of the post-war consensus. None of that applies today and the reaction of the state has been one of enhancing repression and eschewing any form in social understanding in favour of punishment.

The riots restored the empathy between that "moral majority" and the police. The G20 demonstrations in April 2009 and the killing of Ian Tomlinson had seriously weakened people’s perception of the police, but that has now been forgotten. Opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the police, much more so than they did for the governments handing of the crisis. The future for civil liberties is bleak. When in the future peaceful demonstrators are beaten by police, sympathy beyond small liberal circles will be slight.

Popular punophilia: public lust for punishment

The state reaction to the rioting was swift and brutal, symbolised by the police battering-ram used in dawn raids to smash in the front doors of alleged looters, all eagerly filmed by TV film crews. The police adopted a policy of arrest, detention and the denial of bail to anyone allegedly guilty of any riot-related offence, however trivial.

Magistrates’ courts sat in twenty-four hour sessions dispensing rushed summary justice for the thousand or so people (mostly young, unemployed men) who were arrested during or after the riots. The charges are various: theft, burglary, possession of stolen goods, violent disorder, assault, resisting arrest, etc.

The law was perverted in two ways in its dealing with people arrested during the riots. First, those defendants who pleaded guilty to even minor offences received custodial sentences of around six months when normally such misdoings would incur fines or community service. A penalty supplement was added for crimes committed during the riots. Below is one typical case reported by The Guardian:

At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend's house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty

The severity of sentences for offences committed during the riots was later approved by senior judges. Thus opportunist theft against commercial retailers during civil disorder was regarded as more serious than the burglary of residential property. The pro-business bias is obvious.

The severity of sentencing led to some interesting contrasts. Shortly after Nicolas Robinson was jailed for six moths for stealing a bottle of water, Rebecca Balira was jailed for the same length of time for keeping a Tanzanian woman as a slave and assaulting her.

Second, some 60% of those pleading not guilty in court were remanded in custody rather than being given bail. In normal circumstances only around 10% would be remanded. The accused were incarcerated before trial, not because they might abscond, interfere with witnesses, etc, but simply to punish them. This is contrary to to the basic rule: innocent until proved guilty.

The scenes of rioting have engendered fear and anger among ordinary people, so there is a popular demand among the public to crack down rioters and looters with 70% of the population supporting harsher sentence for offences committed during the riots. However, the behaviour of the government and magistrates is itself undermining the the independence of the judiciary as judges respond to political pressure from the state and the government. One judicial official even went as far to describe emails from civil servants requesting exemplary punishments as “directives” to impose stiffer penalties on riot-related offences.

But this kind of arbitrary severity is unlikely to be effective. In the next six months a thousand young men will emerge from prison, angry, unemployed and in many cases homeless. So the fuel is being made for yet more disorder.

Children and the riots

Among those arrested and charged during and after the riots were 269 children. Over 40 percent of these children had been held in pre-trial detention: a majority (some 60 percent) had no previous criminal record. According to Britain’s obligation under international law, the imprisonment of children should only be considered as a last resource. Instead children were used as pawns in Cameron’s law-and-order populism.

Britain has the highest rate of juvenile incarceration in Europe.

Welfare and social housing

The lust for punishment of riot-related offenders is not satisfied by long prison sentences. Government is promoting two further measures with much popular backing. Local councils are being encouraged to evict the whole family of the offender from their social or council provided housing. Thus not only is the offender to be made homeless, but his (or her) whole family. Such collective punishment (i.e. of the innocent with the perpetrator) is contrary to every principle of justice. At the time of writing, several evictions are under way, but none has so far been endorsed by the courts. The second policy is to withdraw unemployment and other social security support from offenders. To date, legislation to do this has not yet been passed.

England is thus currently caught up in a hysterical loss of proportion. Opportunist thieves who picked up looted goods from the street or entered already broken into shops face many months of imprisonment and loss of social security entitlements on their release. If they live in social housing, they and their families risk being thrown into homelessness. It is pure folly to think that such measures will improve the social fabric of so-called “broken Britain.”

Gangs

Since the riots the Cameron government has declared war on gangs and gang culture. It is true that a minority of those involved in the rioting were members of criminal gangs, but the majority were not. They were opportunistic thieves.

Suppressing gangsterism in Britain’s poverty ghetto estates is no easy task. Yet every step that has been taken so far has or will strengthen the gangs. Two thirds of those imprisoned as a result of the riots have been incarcerated for the first time in their lives. Evidence is already emerging that many young men in prison are joining gangs for their protection, a practice likely to continue after they leave jail.

On release from jail, nearly all the former prisoners will be unemployed; and if the government fulfils its plans to remove public housing and welfare benefits, many will be destitute. The only source of support for these miserable people will be by way of association with criminal gangs.

Is the Cameron government aware of these rather obvious points? They probably are, but they also know, if they want to win populist recognition for being tough on crime, there is no need to worry about rising crime rates.

And the future?

Apart from strengthening the hand of state repression, what the riots have done is to confirm the process of the Americanisation of the under-class. They become utterly impoverished; its youth violent and totally excluded from society. The “moral majority” demands and justifies ever increasing punishment against them. The idea of a “working class” as a class “for itself” has gone. The political right wins.

.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: case dropped

2011-08-24T10:13:00.002+02:00

The 23 August 2011 saw New York prosecutors drop sexual assault charges against Dominque Strauss-Kahn. Whether non-consensual sex had taken place was doubtful.

If Dominique Strauss-Kahn's relations with Nafissatou Diallo, the alleged voctim, were consensual, then they are rightly the business of nobody else. It neither reflects well nor badly on DSK as a politician.

The inability of Diallo to tell a consistent story to prosecutors was the cited reason for the collapse of the case; but it seems that there are problems even in the best version of her story.

First, why was she in his executive suite at all? Imagine a male cleaner being in the room when, say, Angela Merkel emerged naked from a shower.

Second, “hot bunny” DSK may be, but for him to come out of the bathroom, then unexpectedly to come across a middle-aged cleaner and jump on her before she had the chance to leave the room! Well this is possible, but I suggest unlikely.

Third, DSK appears to be 62 year-old in the best of health. Yet for him to force a woman in the prime of her strength to have oral sex strains the imagination. Surely Mrs Diallo could have used her jaws to defend herself, and DSK would have known that.

No-one except DSK and Diallo will ever know the truth of what happened, but certainly Mrs Diallo’s accusation seems to have several "holes."

.

Fisher and May Bowles: different laws for different people

2011-08-05T22:51:00.005+02:00

Injurious assaults by the police are exonerated: non-injurious ones by political protesters are punished.

Nicola Fisher

The first case is that of Nicola Fisher. On 2 April 2009 Nicola Fischer attended a vigil for the newspaper vendor and bystander, Ian Tomlinson, killed the day before by police during the G20 demonstrations. Apparently, Fisher was standing in a place where the police did not want her to be.

Fisher’s account, which is backed up by film of the incident, runs as follows:

"Suddenly quite a few police officers came and made a line in front of us and almost straight away the officer in front of me shouted 'get back' and pushed me before I even had a chance to move. When he did that I, as an instant reaction, pushed back, then straight away he gave me a back-hander across my left cheek."

Not content with that, police officer Delroy Smellie then calmly took out his baton and beat Fisher on the legs causing her to dance in pain and leaving her with extensive bruising.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) decided to prosecute Smellie for assault.

Nicola Fisher did not appear at the trial, and despite the evidence against Smellie, District Judge District Judge Daphne Wickham acquitted him of assault. She said there was no evidence that his use of the baton was not approved, correct or measured.

Jonathan May-Bowles

On 19 July 2011 Rupert Murdoch was giving evidence to the House of Commons Media Select committee. Murdoch’s company, News International, has been engaged in illegal phone tapping, paying money to police officers and has for a long time extended its influence over elected government. Its aim is to support business interests, the establishment and right wing ideas in addition to making money.

May-Bowles, sitting in the audience, threw a paper plate covered in shaving foam into Murdoch’s face.

Rupert Murdoch did not appear at the trial. The same district judge, Daphne Wickham, sentenced Jonathan May-Bowles to six weeks imprisonment (reduced on appeal to four) for assault.

Conclusion

Fisher suffered injury: her attacker was acquitted because he was a police officer. Murdoch suffered no injury: his attacker was jailed to deter protest.

.

Officer acquitted of assault on Nicola Fischer

2011-08-03T13:42:00.000+02:00

The Nicola Fisher case established the precedent that police can beat protesters with impunity.

Nicola Fisher, aged 38, was a participant in a small vigil held on 2 April 2009 to commemorate the police killing of the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, the previous day. Tomlinson had been attempting to make his way home during the G20 demonstrations when he was bitten by police dogs, truncheoned and hurled to the ground. He died from his injuries minutes later.

From a policing point of view Nicola Fisher was at most irritating and perhaps in the way. Officer Smellie saw fit to give her a back-hand across the face; he then calmly removed his baton to administer two hard strokes on her thighs before turning his attention to other things. His misfortune was that everything he did was filmed.

To dispel the view that gratuitous police violence was tolerated, and to assuage the concerns of Daily Mail readers, the authorities needed to throw a police officer to the wolves. Of the recorded police violence against demonstrators in April 2009, the Fisher incident was not the most serious, but it was the most suitable for prosecution. Officer Smellie made the ideal fall guy; he looked like a thug, and he had hit a woman.

Yet Fisher didn’t play ball and failed to turn up to the trial. But, surprisingly, despite the evidence against him Smellie was acquitted.

Thus a precedent was set: arbitrary violence against demonstrators was to be tolerated and unpunished police behaviour; this is not what the authorities had wanted. While, of course, police had often beaten left-wing and ‘alternative’ protesters, it was another matter to be seen to be giving it official sanction.

Corporal Punishment at Woolmer Hill School in the mid 1970s

2011-07-30T22:07:00.007+02:00

Woolmer Hill Secondary School in Haslemere, Surrey did not have a reputation for its widespread use of corporal punishment, but beatings administered there affected pupils for life.

In the autumn of 2009 I published a short essay on the Internet summing up my memories of the headmaster of Woolmer Hill, Leslie Anning, the man who both dominated and symbolised the school from its opening in 1956 until his retirement in 1977. I circulated the piece to a few ex-pupils whom I had contacted earlier though the social network sites Friends Reunited and Facebook; and a couple made comments. A few other ex-pupils - people I don’t actually remember - found the essay though Internet searches and made comments. What interested me most - and all those who made comments were male - was that their focus of interest was on one particular paragraph of the essay. Let me quote it in full here:

“In the Friends Reunited thread, some commentators have talked about corporal punishment with the implied suggestion that the school functioned around canes and slippers. This is not true. Corporal punishment undoubtedly played a role in creating the ambiance of fear and humiliation that intruded into every aspect of the school. Yet by the mid 1970s canings and slipperings, if not the threat of them, were rare. Only a minority of teachers ever dangled over pupils the threat of being sent to Anning for the cane. And I can honestly say that I don’t know anyone who was caned in my years at the school.”

The replies threw up three issues. The first was the claim that I had seriously underestimated the amount of corporal punishment at the school. The second was confirmation of a simple fact: the existence of school corporal punishment, whether experienced first hand or not, had impacted deeply on the psyches of former pupils - if not, why had they written to me, or commented, on the topic. And finally, it was clear to me that the meaning attributed to memories of corporal punishment varied considerably among pupils.

Corporal Punishment in the 1970s

When we look back at the past - and here we are talking about looking back at the mid 1970s from 2011 - people are apt to make two mistakes. The first error is the most obvious: people interpret the earlier period by means of the social values and perspectives of the present day. Thankfully, corporal punishment no longer exists in English schools today. The ritualised beating of children and young people is perceived as a humiliating cruelty and is usually interpreted in sexual terms; i.e. the administrator gains sexual satisfaction in carrying it out while the victim experiences a rape-like sexual humiliation and/or exhilaration. Perceived in those terms, and if for no other reason, corporal punishment is now regarded in England to be a wholly inappropriate way of dealing with children. But because that is the dominant view in 2011, it does not mean it represented the official or dominant way of thinking in the 1970s. It did not.

The second error is to unconsciously impute to people in a past period knowledge of what came after their time. Today the world necessarily feels modern and we construct our scenarios for the future in our minds out of trends we spot in our existing society, But so did people living in, say, 1977. To them the world seemed modern and they constructed what they thought was the future out of developments they saw taking place then. Nobody imagined that a decade later in 1987 corporal punishment would be outlawed in English state schools, least of all during a Conservative government enjoying a huge parliamentary majority. In the late 1970s, the Tories led in the opinion polls with their agenda of authoritarian populism and of “short sharp shock” and that seemed to ensure a safe future for school corporal punishment.

So to make sense of corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill in the mid 1970s we have to rediscover the thinking of the people of the time, which means considering the attitudes of the educational authorities, teachers, parents and pupils. Beliefs and events don’t make sense, if wrenched out of their time and context.

In the mid 1970s the majority of educational officials, parents, teachers and school pupils accepted corporal punishment in schools, though, of course, there was a significant minority who did not. In state secondary schools, the standard view was that it was a quick and efficient way of making a point and that without it the chance of a school - or at least certain pupils within it - running wild would increase. This way of thinking saw corporal punishment as transactional (If X did Y then a beating was in order) and functional (i.e. it worked). This kind of practical approach stood in contrast to the ritualistic attitudes and behaviours then still lingering in some private schools in which a beating was seen as having a salutary effect per se on the victim and acted as some kind of rite de passage. There were no official provisions in state schools for boys having their bare bottoms caned in the library during afternoon tea.

In the 1970 the degree of pain that school corporal punishment could cause was in practice regulated by opinion and consensus rather than by precise legal definition. At its most severe a cane could be applied to the clothed bottom causing considerable pain at the point of administration, subsequent bruising and discomfort for a couple of days. At the other end of the spectrum, the assault might be only a light slap.

Of course there were sadistic teachers in state secondary schools, who did want to sexually stimulate themselves through causing real pain when they could get away with it, but that was not the norm. In most cases, the pain element was intended to be moderate and ephemeral. Pain itself was not intended to bend the will of the child; it was aura of fear and humiliation engendered by a beating which was meant to be effective.

The system of corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill

So what was the situation at Woolmer Hill? Corporal punishment in schools was not uniform across the country. Its existence, extent and nature depended on three factors: first, the policy of the local education authority - in the case of Woolmer Hill Secondary School that meant Surrey County Council. Second, the head teacher could ban or regulate its deployment and finally the staff could promote or hinder its use. As Surrey - as far as I know - put no restrictions on school corporal punishment, the extent and quality of its use was determined by the school itself.

Woolmer Hill did not have a reputation of a great caning school: in fact I recall no discussion of the matter at all at primary school. It was just accepted that there would be corporal punishment, but it wouldn’t be a major part of school life. Woolmer Hill was probably representative of the average secondary schools in the south-east of England in the mid 1970s.

In the spring of 1973 there was an induction day at the school for pupils joining in September. Aged eleven, I had agreed with my Haslemere friends in our final year at Chestnut Avenue Primary School to walk up to Woolmer Hill, much to my mother’s annoyance. She was forced to make her own way there. At the main entrance to the school building, a set of doors that pupils were forbidden to use, was Headmaster Anning. Dressed in a dark suit and dark plastic rimmed glasses, he was surprisingly diminutive in stature. At first sight he seemed less terrifying than I had thought, but his artificially smooth demeanour instilled misgivings.

After a talk to pupils and parents, about which I now remember nothing, a handful of fifth year pupils (aged sixteen) guided us around the school. The parents stayed for a further briefing. And it was indirectly from this meeting that I learnt the first details of corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill.

A day or so later, a classmate, Michael W., told me about a question in the meeting. A father had asked Anning what punishments his son would receive if he misbehaved. Anning, according to this third-hand report. had replied that he used a slipper, but if the offence were very serious - and that was rare - he then used a cane. My mother must also have heard this explanation, but was too embarrassed to pass it on to me.

It was never stated, but it seemed to be the case, at least in light of my subsequent experience, that all “legitimate” corporal punishment was administered by Anning personally or perhaps by his “third-in-charge” Alex MacShane. I can recall no instance of anyone receiving formal corporal punishment from teachers in the classroom - or outside it for that matter. Informal acts of corporal punishment no doubt occurred, but I never witnessed any of them. The incidents relating to corporal punishment involving class teachers which I saw were theatrical. Let me recount a couple of these.

Mr Williams, nominally a science teacher and a self-styled eccentric, blew hot and cold in the long teacher-pupil conversations that passed for lessons. After a spout of chumminess he would suddenly pull rank, and make threats. One boy, Jonathan L., recalled an incident which I too remember. Mr Williams “... took pride in the fact that he could chalk a cross on the desk, and one on the bottom of a plimsoll and smack the plimsoll on the desk so hard that the crosses would overlap.” During this absurd demonstration the desk was supposed to represent a boy’s trousered bottom.

Steve M. recalls another incident with the same teacher when in the teacher-pupil banter a boy, Mark S.“ said something to Williams and was taken to the backroom for a beating. (Bunsen burner tube).” I don’t actually believe that Mark S. was seriously beaten - if he was beaten at all - but Williams made the point that he could set the rules and reward and humiliate at will. I never spoke to him in the class conversation and sat there with the majority bored stiff.

Steve M. also mentions another teacher who “had a cricket bat wrapped in sand paper, sandy side out. On this he had written 'WHACK!' in mirror writing, in chalk and he would whack you on the back with it. It wasn't a hard whack and was never going to do you any harm, but he was much pleased with the resultant 'WHACK' written on the black blazer.” I do not remember this latter incident myself, but have no doubt as to its veracity.

These are not, of course, instances of corporal punishment, but of teachers relishing in its symbolism. What they wished to do was highlight the topic and bring it to bear in the atmosphere of lessons. But to be fair these kinds of teachers were not in a majority.

Instances of pupils being sent to Anning for corporal punishment either directly or indirectly (e.g. “Take this note to Mr Anning saying you did X”) were also rare. The majority of believed that Anning’s use of corporal punishment would be excessive or inappropriate. I can only recall two exceptions in which teachers dangled this threat over pupils.

The first incident concerned a pupil Ian B. and a music teacher. I can’t remember what Ian B. had done, but it was some minor misdemeanour, and Mrs Grice asked him whether she should send him to Mr Anning with a request for him to be caned. Interestingly, she referred to the cane, though I have to admit in the years 1973-78 I don’t know of any incident of it being used; though, of course, it may have been, but certainly not in a case like this. Grice’s threat was almost certainly an empty one, but it was clear that she enjoyed toying with the idea. It was not surprising, therefore, that she made other gratuitous references to corporal punishment. Robert Harding was a calm taciturn boy whom one was apt to ignore, but when his name came to Mrs Grice’s attention it sparked a memory. Apparently, in her previous school there was a boy called Robert Harding who had received the cane almost every day.

The second incident involved me. One of the most uninteresting lessons of the week was the afternoon spent doing technical drawing. Ideas and concepts interested me; pointless precision did not. Mr Pavey, a retired navel officer, had two topics of conversation that I remember. One was his crumbling neck bones, hence the need to remove any obstacle from his path that he might trip over; the other was corporal punishment. He took delight in mentioning that “when Mr Anning administers it, he takes the skin off.” which was coupled with a story of a caning that Pavey had apparently witnessed in which after the first stoke the boy “was grovelling on the deck even though he had another five to go.” All that left me wondering: was the caning on the bare bottom or on the hand? Bleeding bottoms or broken hand bones at Woolmer Hill I did not believe. Pavey was bullshitting.

Then one afternoon a couple of classmates and I passed the time writing inane notes to one another. Pavey noticed it and demanded the scrap of paper be brought to him. I didn’t particularly worry because the note contained nothing defamatory or obscene. I was thus surprised when I was told to take it down to Mr Anning. Two other boys were told to join me, Michael H. and Anthony H. Pavey said he would be down shortly. Anning received us in his office although he was in the middle of a meeting with the deputy head, Mrs Hollingdale, who turned to face the window during the whole proceedings. Pavey came in and mumbled a few words about how the whole matter needed to be referred to the Headmaster. He clearly wanted to see some corporal punishment.

Anning asked the three of us whether we wanted the note to be shown to our fathers. We all gave the required negative answer, though given the innocuous nature of the note I didn’t see why not. Anning then took out a gym slipper and a cane. The slipper, he said was for minor offences, and the cane for more serious ones. Yet when I saw the cane, over a metre long and a centimetre thick - something akin to the instruments used in Singapore’s judicial canings - it seemed clear that we were only being intimidated. It was a physical impossibility to be caned in that office with that instrument - and if we had been the injuries would have been terrible. We were sent away untouched, leaving Pavey disappointed.

On another occasion, it was rainy lunchtime in my second year. We were confined to the classrooms and silliness and horseplay were in full swing. Suddenly Anning appeared in the doorway with a slipper in hand and grabbed Brian B. who was running around a desk and administered one or two whacks. I don’t think Brian B was hurt very much; but Anning’s act certainly had a dampening effect on the room, as he no doubt intended. I never saw corporal punishment used in public in that way again.

It would also be wrong to suggest that Anning responded to every disciplinary matter with corporal punishment. I committed two minor misdemeanours leading to his involvement. On one occasion, I was reported to him for a traffic violation committed the previous evening on my way home by bike; and on another for hiding my own valuables in my clothes in the changing rooms during games. In neither case did the penalties involve corporal punishment. Most breaks and lunchtimes also saw boys standing in corridors as punishment. Apart from perhaps rudeness, smoking and “going out of bounds” corporal punishment was administered for “mucking about offences” and then not always.

Reading through the accounts on Friends Reunited there is evidence that before the 1970s corporal punishment was much more in vogue. To take one example a former pupil called Roger Tanner writes: “I’m sure all the boys who were sent to stand outside his (i.e. Anning’s) study remember those mortal words (as he's about to administer the cane) "this is going to hurt me boy more than its going to hurt you" - Yea RIGHT!!” Corporal punishment may also have been more prevalent in classrooms formerly. A former pupil, Andy Pollard, writing on Friends Reunited recalls a teacher who “kept a "weapon desk," which contained the following, a ruler, a plimsoll (showing my age now) a strap and a small cane, and if you were "in trouble", you picked your chosen "weapon." But even this seems largely symbolic and theatrical.

The apparent decline in corporal punishment could be put down to two factors. First, in the 1960s criticism from some teachers and parents of corporal punishment was growing, so generally across England it was applied less often and less severely. Woolmer Hill would not be an exception to that trend. Second, a classmate, Michael W., related a story (which may or may not be true) that prior to our joining the school Anning had administered a severe caning which had been reported to the police. As a consequence, corporal punishment had become less severe and slippering had generally replaced caning.

Corporal punishment certainly existed at Woolmer Hill. For me and for most of my cohort it was something of a background menace rather than a daily fear. It was part of the mental architecture of the school rather than a regular experience. Weeks and months could go by without my being aware of anyone receiving it or being seriously threatened with it. Announcements of its infliction were never made; and it was very rare for it to happen in public. Certainly there may have been groups of boys whose defiant and boisterous misbehaviour led to their receiving it more often, but generally you had to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to get the slipper.

The meaning of corporal punishment for its victims

On Friends Reunited and in responses to my earlier essays on Woolmer Hill, nearly all the comments relate to corporal punishment. The fact is that even three or four decades after receiving corporal punishment at the school the psychological imprint is still there for many men; and these men use the net to express their feelings. Why?

A beating, however minor, impacts on and scars the psyche at three levels. First, the whole body, not just the point of impact, experiences pain and tension, which turns the consciousness inwards away from the outer world towards the injury. Nobody has the freedom to ignore pain and to carry on mentally and physically as if nothing had happened. Second, a relationship between pain-giver and pain-receiver is established which has to be processed and interpreted by the victim. Nobody can remain neutral to an abuser. Third, a beating, particularly to the bottom, is likely to produce a sexual response. In other words, taking these three points together, a beating produces severe mental anguish; it is a shock to the system.

The men who experienced corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill and who have written comments about it adopt one of two attitudes. One group remembers the event as a personality destroying humiliation. Maurice P. clearly falls into that category:

"I was given the slipper by Anning and I remember it well. Me and my friend " Jinxy " were caught smoking and marched to his office. I went in first and watched as the horrible Anning selected a slipper from the bottom of his cupboard,made me bend over a chair at the front of his desk then whacked me about 5 or 6 times. Not on my backside but above that, at the base of my spine! It hurt like hell,my face went red and tears welled up. As I left the office I looked at Jinxy, knowing what was in store for him. Nothing was learned by this experience. I didn't behave any better. In fact, for me it was a backward step, it made me more rebellious and I hated Anning with a vengeance."

Others cope with the experience differently. Instead of humiliation, the experience is interpreted as an ordeal that is survived with honour. Tim writes: “The fear of the slipper was real but also served as a badge of honour amongst a lot of the boys, I received the slipper on one occasion and so did several of my friends.” A parallel situation exists at a fairground when someone goes on a new ride: a combination of terror, exhilaration and a sense of achievement for having survived it.

For both Maurice P. and Tim corporal punishment had a profound psychological effect and remained in the memory. In neither case did it play any role in curbing delinquent behaviour.

My personal experience of receiving corporal punishment

In infant and primary school I was never hit or beaten; and any corporal punishment which did exist in those schools was rare, informal and light. In my first school, which I attended until I was seven, I can only recall one incident when a boy received a symbolic slap on his legs from an angry teacher for some misdemeanour. It frightened me though, and I can remember crying.

In the junior school which I attended until I was eleven, the normal penalty for wrong-doing was spending breaks and lunch hours standing in an otherwise teacher-only corridor called “top lobby.” At seven I did not know where top lobby was or what happened there; and when older children were sent to top lobby I was terrified. In later years I stood there myself on a couple of occasions. The only two incidents of hitting that I witnessed in the school were one where a boy, Brian Denman, had become hysterical about not wanting to go into a classroom - and another when Derick R. received a light swat on his bottom with a ping-pong bat from Headmaster Pearson during a dancing lesson. Both incidents, though, were witnessed while I was in my first year and they terrified me.

In my penultimate year at junior school, the issue of corporal punishment emerged because of the theatrics of our first male teacher. Mr Clarke would often make reference to the subject and even on one occasion went looking for “his slipper” but as far as I know no one was ever punished in that way. Such antics nevertheless led to a great deal of silly rumour and fantasy, such as kids pointing out a window which pupils were allegedly bent out of while being slippered. But for me, as for my classmates, apart from much silly chatter and rumour, we had no experience of corporal punishment.

Let me now return to the topic of this essay, corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill School. During my time there, I was only ever hit twice by teachers. The two occasions are so different that they have little in common. The first was an instance of formal corporal punishment; the second was a simple assault in rather strange circumstances.

The first incident occurred in my first year when I was aged eleven; it must have been in the autumn of 1973 because strangely I can still remember it was warm outside. One of my least favourite lessons of the week was science with the newly appointed Mr Cantan, a serious young man who insisted that his name be pronounced as if “Canton,” even though his wife, who taught at a primary school and had presumably adopted his name was happy with the pronunciation CAN-TAN. The lessons were boring, not just because they lasted all afternoon, but because Cantan made the mistake - as many young teachers often do - of endlessly trying to explain why science was interesting and relevant to practical life rather than teaching anything of any substance.

Fidgeting and the noise level in the room grew, and unfortunately Brian B. and I were singled out to be made examples of. Brian B. was sent to stand outside that room and I to another one upstairs. No doubt Cantan’s intention was to have us stand there for five minutes or so and then bring us back in. Things turned out differently.

I soon became aware that Headmaster Anning was in the small office for science teachers near where I was standing and I realised he would probably emerge before Cantan called us back into the class. Had I been more streetwise, I might have taken myself off to the toilets, but instead I just stood there and let events take their course.

As expected, Anning came out, saw me standing there and, naturally enough, asked why. In trying to explain Cantan’s decision to send us out of the classroom - I had no precise idea of what I had done - I embellished the situation by saying that Brian B. and I had been mucking around when there were dangerous chemicals in the laboratory. Anning told me to go downstairs with him; we collected Brian B en route. and went to the door of Cantan’s laboratory. What followed is a sequence of events and sensations which I chose not to confide in anyone until writing this essay thirty-eight years later.

Anning opened the door of the laboratory and told Cantan with the whole class able to hear that safety in the labs was crucial. He might just have noticed at this point that there were in fact no dangerous chemicals anywhere, but I don’t know that he did. He then said that he would give “these boys two of the slip.” It took me a second to realise that he meant two of the slipper. I hadn’t been expecting that, so I was a little stunned. Brian B and I were told to go and wait outside his office; he did not follow us immediately, so perhaps he spoke to Cantan about the incident. I don’t know.

The corridor connecting that wing of the school to the main part of the building had two steps next to which there were floor-to-ceiling windows on either side. As I took the two steps in a single leap, a shiver went down my spine to my penis. I had never received a ritualised beating in my life and was now about to experience one; my fear became sexualised.

Anning arrived and told us not to go into his office but to wait outside. He went in alone and came out with a slipper. Thinking back on events, I now suppose there was somebody else in his room. I was standing nearest so I was the one to go first. He asked me whether I denied the offence, which obviously meant he had his doubts about the facts of the affair. He told me to bend over. The look on my face and the slowness of my response led him to comment, “If you do something wrong, then you have to be punished.” Even at eleven years of age I thought of saying - though I did not of course - “well, yes, but not like this.”

Two swipes in rapid succession were delivered to my bottom. What struck me most is that they did not hurt. Of course I felt them, but they did not come anywhere near a sensation of pain. And that led me to hold the false view - never rebutted by experience because I never again received formal corporal punishment - that school corporal punishment did not hurt but was only ritualised humiliation. It was only when I was sixteen that I understood from reading that in some schools - and maybe for other pupils on other occasions at Woolmer Hill - that corporal punishment could cause serious pain.

Physically, I was left unaffected by the slippering. I watched Brian B receive his two and by the look on his face following each swipe he seemed more physically affected than I had been. I had expected to be told to go back and stand in the corridor, but we were both instructed to return immediately to Cantan’s class, so the point when I had to face the humiliation of appearing in front of my classmates was sooner than I had thought. No one commented or paid any attention; I sat down and felt over the next few minutes the sensation in my bottom fade away. Of course we were little boys guilty of very little, so Anning hadn’t intended to physically hurt us much, though he probably wanted to hurt me physically more than he did.

The anguish of my slippering was not physical; it was psychological. Something had been done to me which I felt ought not be have been done, particularly by an adult whom I might otherwise have respected. I had been violated sexually. Although Anning is dead and it is now thirty-eight years later I still resent that beating; and like so many other men who have commented on Friends Reunited and Facebook, my memory of Anning and Woolmer Hill School is coloured by corporal punishment abuse.

My humiliation was exacerbated by the fact that the slippering had been announced to the class. Walking back into that laboratory was probably one of my worst moments during my five years at Woolmer Hill. Yet nobody commented on it then or later, not out of sympathy, but because of a sheer lack of interest. What I did not realise is that my opposition to corporal punishment, for me or anybody else, was very much an individual opinion. Brian B. did comment the next day that some second-year girls had teased him about the event on the way home, but how exactly they would have found out about it remains unclear. I expect he told them.

My main fear was of my parents finding out. That my classmates knew of my humiliation was difficult to handle, but for my parents to know would be unbearable. But I don’t think my parents ever knew.

For completeness, I need to include the second incident in my life in which I was hit by a teacher. I wish to refer to the teacher concerned as Mr Z because even though the incident happened thirty-three years ago the man may still be alive. I wish to grant him anonymity not for his sake but because I want to treat the incident as history; and although it is unlikely that he would ever see this essay, I have no desire to open any line of communication with him.

The facts of the incident were straight-forward. I was sixteen and in my final year at Woolmer Hill. Following games, we had a maths lesson with a teacher I liked, Mrs Myall. She appeared to have a free period before our maths lesson, so I often hurried up in the changing rooms so I could chat to her before the start of the maths lesson. There were a couple of other pupils who did the same; however, on this occasion I was the first pupil to reach the classroom.

I suppose I knocked at the door before going into the classroom, but I might have done so in a fairly casual way. Once inside, it became obvious that Mr Z and Mrs Myall had been having a confidential conversation which I had interrupted. Had I been told by either of them to go out of the room and wait, I would have meekly accepted the situation and no doubt have forgotten about it by now. What in fact happened was quite different Mr Z loudly remonstrated with me, and at some point during his spiel decided to punch me on the side of my head.

Quite obviously, this was not an act of formal corporal punishment in the sense understood in the 1970s; it was a simple assault. The pain in my ear and at the side of my face was severe enough, so without asking for permission I went over to a desk and sat down. Despite the pain, thoughts were running through my head about how to deal with the incident. I rightly made the decisions not to hit back and not to disguise how much pain I was in. The look on Mrs Myall’s face showed that, however much she might have wished to show solidarity with Mr Z, she was horrified at what had happened. Mr Z, now reduced to some speechless zombie, left the room.

The punch had the potential to disrupt the rather safe orderly life that I was having at Woolmer Hill in my final year. I could have complained to my parents, but like many victims of abuse I saw that the easiest way of dealing with it was to behave as if it had never happened. Some other pupils arrived, knowing nothing about the incident, and the lesson took its normal course. Mrs Myall asked me during the lesson whether I was all right, and I answered that I was. In the thirty-three years since that happened I have never told anyone else about the incident.

Why did Mr Z hit me in that way? To be fair to him he was neither a psychopath nor a a sadist. In retrospect, I believe that there was an immediate and background cause. The immediate impulse was his understandable annoyance at what he saw as my barging into the room when he was in the middle of a private and perhaps sensitive conversation with Mrs Myall. But why wasn’t telling me to go and wait outside enough?

Mr Z was not a clever man. He tended to teach remedial classes; and in so far as he could be regarded as a teacher his ability lay in building a give-and-take modus operandi with his pupils. I had never crossed him, but I preferred to ignore and sideline him whenever possible because I found his endless diatribes about respect and discipline rather tedious and pointless. What angered him the most, I believe, was the enthusiasm I showed for talking to the much more intellectually able, Mrs Myall. And like a jealous delinquent, he lashed out. He resorted to violence, not because he regarded it as the right thing to do, but because he rightly knew that he could get away with it - if only once.

To some extent my position was a strong one because what Mr Z had done was against the rules. I nonetheless took even more care to avoid him. For his part, he attempted to befriend me by the pettiest of means: e.g. finding some fault - for instance in my clothing - and then “generously” letting me off. He was on a losing streak and had little recourse against my cold politeness and mechanical obedience. In the end he left me alone.

In continuing this discussion I wish to ignore the incident with Mr Z. It was isolated; it had nothing to do with normal school corporal punishment and, curiously enough,it had very little impact on me psychologically. I tended to look at it in the same way as I might as if I had painfully stubbed my toe. In fact when I came to write this piece I had to drag the details from the recess of my mind. Four years earlier, by contrast, the painless slippering - and its public announcement - had punctured my eleven-year-old soul. In my outward speech and behaviour I pretended that it had never happened: inwardly it caused turmoil.

The slippering had no effect on my classroom behaviour, nor could it have done. I hadn’t done anything in particular and I was only slippered on account of an unfortunate combination of circumstances. I never saw my slippering as something that ought to have been and as I grew up and progressed through the school I increasingly saw Anning and his regime as illegitimate. That is a feeling which has stayed with me until the present day.

My internal rage had only one direct consequence as far as I can remember. Soon after my slippering, I chose to insult the young Mr Cantan, when provided with an easy opportunity to do so. Cantan, like most beginner teachers in the mid 1970s, did not have a car and needed to suffer the indignity of travelling to the centre of Haslemere by bus with a crowd of school children. But unlike some other teachers - the elderly spinster Miss Savage comes to mind - he sometimes chose not to pile into the crowded 13B bus, the terminus of which was couple of hundred metres from the school gate, but instead he plodded down Woolmer Hill and up to the Hindhead Road to catch another bus. One evening, knowing nothing of Cantan’s plans, I decided to travel by the same route.

The Hindhead Road bus stop was a small strip of concrete cut into the bank on the far side of the road. Waiting for the bus, he and I were brought into close proximity. I don’t know what gave me the nerve to start insulting him, but I tried to provoke him with any number of trivial and disrespectful questions about his life. He just glared forward across the road without replying. I later regretted my actions, if only because it was never Cantan’s intention for me to be slippered during his class.

One grows up at secondary school. I entered Woolmer Hill as a prepubescent boy of eleven and left as a youth of sixteen, so it would be nonsense to think that my thoughts and feeling about events and issues did not change in those years. In considering corporal punishment - and so much else - I can broadly distinguish two periods: my first two years in the school and my last two. My middle year when I was fourteen was one of transition.

My sole experience of corporal punishment (excluding the incident with Mr Z) occurred in my first year. Although I clearly believed that what had happened was wrong, I was not able to explain or articulate that belief. I accepted that corporal punishment existed for children as an aspect of life which was as certain as the fact that it rained. Had I been slippered again, I would have accepted it with very much the same feeling as the first incident. It never happened; as far as I know none of my immediate circle were ever slippered and I did not think about the subject much.

My attitude did change in my fourth and fifth year at Woolmer Hill. On the one hand it was highly unlikely that I or my friends would now ever receive a formal beating. I didn’t smoke; I was polite and orderly; and leaving school without permission never occurred to me. And in the fifth year - after Anning’s retirement - incidents of corporal punishment became even less common. But on the other hand, I had to contend with the background fact that such an indignity was a possibility. I increasingly felt that if such an incident arose, I would have to refuse the punishment which would have meant suspension from the school, an outcome which in practical terms would have been much worse.

Looking back I can only think of one misdeed of mine that might have led to corporal punishment. My illicit conduct occurred in my fourth year during the last year of the reign of Headmaster Anning. Mark W. from time to time brought “girlie mags” into the school. These magazine containing pictures of naked woman were readily available outside school and raised little interest other than the “dare value” of having them at school. One day, however, he turned up with a German pornographic magazine which his brother who was serving in the British army had apparently brought back and had given to him. At that time (and perhaps still today for all I know) the sale of magazines with actual, i.e. non-simulated sex portraying erections, ejaculations, fellatio and penetration was unlawful. The magazine was passed from one boy to another and handed on like a hot potato. Left alone for a moment with the magazine, I decided to keep it, take it home and read it in more detail. I hid it in my bag, but claimed that I had handed on to someone else. Mark W. was glad to be rid of it.

I took the magazine home without detection and that was the end of the matter. If I had been caught with it, I might well have received corporal punishment; though of course I might not have done because my misdoing, even if regarded as serious, was of a sexual nature. But thinking back now I might well have thought at the time that a private slippering would have been preferable to a suspension or the involvement of may parents. But thankfully the issue never arose.

My slippering at the age of eleven was a source of shame. I felt that when it happened and I continued to feel the same way afterwards. I never spoke about it to anybody and later in life when surrounded by people who could not have known about it, I denied that I had ever received corporal punishment in school. It would be foolish to exaggerate and say that I was traumatised in life by the slippering; I was not, but the incident still called forth emotions of shame and denial over several decades.

I recall another sunny morning: one in September 1978 when I walked down my home street towards Haslemere railway station. I was starting Godalming Sixth-Form College. I was not just happy to be wearing clothes of entirely my own choosing, but appreciating the feeling of dignity that came with the knowledge that I would be attending an educational establishment with no corporal punishment.

Girls and corporal punishment

Throughout this essay I have spoken about corporal punishment in terms of how it affected boys at Woolmer Hill School, and I think I was right to do so. The cane was either not used or used so rarely that I know nothing about it. The slipper, the only remaining approved instrument of applying corporal punishment was used exclusively on boys. Cultural norms did not permit girls to be slippered on their bottoms.

That said, it did not mean girls were exempt from corporal punishment. This had always been understood in the school; and a clear statement to that effect was made after Mr Anning’s retirement in 1977, when he was succeeded by the former deputy head, Mrs Hollingdale. In response to an outbreak of disorderly behaviour, she informed a morning assembly that culprits risked a slippering from Mr McShane or Mr Jimpson (who had now apparently been delegated the task), or if a girl, “a good slapping”. All I can imagine is that such slaps, if they were administered at all by senior female teachers, were applied to the arms or thighs. It is a close call on the scale of humiliation whether it is worse to bend over and be hit on the bottom or to face someone who is hitting you on your limbs.

There are no accounts on the net of girls receiving corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill. I know of no instance of it taking place; and girls’ reactions to its existence are not known.

The issue did not figure largely in my own consciousness at the time, mainly because corporal punishment for boys, at least in my cohort, was not that prevalent either. Moreover, most of the corporal punishment which did take place seems to have resulted from cases of boisterous messing around which tended to be a male crime. Major breaches of discipline which might have affected both sexes were swearing, rudeness, smoking and walking out of school. My guess is that if the group of offenders were of mixed sex, the same penalty (e.g. a special detention) would be applied to all of them; only if they were small in number and exclusively male might the slipper be applied.

It was certainly not true that girls had an easy ride compared with the boys. Most of the incidents of public dressing downs that I can remember were of girls. They were particularly humiliating because they often concerned sulkiness, breaches of school uniform or the wearing of make-up.

Conclusion

Though this essay contains objective information, it is largely a subjective response based on what I can personally remember. I have written it to try to put the record straight and for all those men (and maybe a few women) who experienced the humiliation of corporal punishment at Woolmer Hill 1973-78. Headmaster Leslie Anning lived until 1990, long enough to see the abolition of corporal punishment in state schools.

Links to related posts

Woolmer Hill School, Haslemere 1973-78

Mr Anning remembered (1973-77)

Woolmer Hill Teachers 1973-78

Going home and the Little Chef

.

Crises: the thirty year rule

2011-07-25T12:04:00.006+02:00

By strange coincidence system-changing crises tend to happen every thirty years.

A crisis in a social system is when the practices, behaviour and structures that have allowed it to be reproduced are no long able to reproduce it. The tricky thing is that we are usually only able to identify crises in history after the event.

I think the only real crisis we have lived though in our lives in the West is 1973-80 when the Keynesian political, economic and social consensus - the so-called thirty post-war golden years of growing prosperity - gave way to market fundamentalism in the US, Britain and less dramatically and more slowly in continental Europe.

Are the thirty years of market fundamentalism (1980-2010) coming to an end? Well, if they are, what does the next epoch look like? It's very hard to tell.

Is it merely coincidence that these historical periodisations last thirty years. For instance the years of catastrophe in the mid twentieth century (1914-1945) also lasted thirty odd years, as did, roughly, the age of imperial monopoly capitalism (1880s-1914).

Hackgate - corruption in Britain

2011-07-19T16:23:00.010+02:00

Hackgate throws light on the British State.

The Hackgate Scandal is still unravelling, although many aspects almost certainly remain hidden. Nevertheless, a chink of light is illuminating the inner workings of the British state. What has been shown is that politicians, their advisers and leading police officers at the very heart of the British state are entangled in a web of dishonesty and corruption. Further details are spewing into the public domain every day.

The nucleus of the scandal is a web of people connected to the company News International, headed by the eighty-year-old Rupert Murdoch. In recent decades this media organisation has been a powerful peddler of the basest form of right-wing news propaganda, the aim of which has always been to defend those with power and wealth while trashing left-wing-wing and progressive ideas. Not content with being just a media conglomerate, the company forged an alliance based on reactionary ideology, financial interests and political blackmail with governing British political parties; i.e. the Tories and New Labour (1997-2010). News International, though ‘gifts’ and appointments, also extended its grip over London’s Metropolitan police so they were hamstrung in tackling News International’s criminality.

The company's wrongdoing that is currently the focus of attention was the hacking of mobile telephones of celebrities, politicians and crime victims, an act of criminality carried out by gangster-like crooks employed by News International. The accusation against leading politicians and the police is that they turned a blind eye and continued to cuddle up to characters from New International even after they knew of this criminality.

Even though the spotlight has fallen on this corruption, public expectations of government, police and media are now so low, it is questionable whether a large public reaction will result.

Charlie Kunz: a personal reflection

2011-07-04T17:04:00.005+02:00

Charlie Kunz (1896-1958) was the greatest popular piano medley player of all time.

A taste for Charlie Kunz was one of the few things that my father (born 1908) and my maternal grandmother (born 1904) shared. And though as a child I professed to prefer pop music, I always hung around on the stairs to listen to Charlie’s medleys when they were played on the gramophone in the sitting-room.

Before the Second World War Kunz featured in several ball-room bands, but it was in the more egalitarian atmosphere of post-war Britain that Kunz rose to superstar status, apparently, being the first music performer to need police protection to keep him unmolested from his fans.

Anyone interested in hearing Kunz today only has to go to You Tube to get the flavour, but I will describe how his music seems to me. His piano playing has a light up-beat bounce and flow which is entirely distinctive to him; attempts to reproduce it have failed miserably.

Piano and light music, taken mostly from popular songs, musicals and operetta, acquired status for me in my childhood, precisely because such music was held up to be something meaningful by my parents and grandmother. In their view (or at least for my mother and grandmother), the music of Charlie Kunz represented the “old world” - an indeterminate past which ran from the the 1930s through war-time Britain before collapsing at the end of the 1950s. That world was held up in contrast to the “nowadays” of the 1970s when loud disrespectful drugged-up pop stars held sway.

Though I became attached to some 1970s pop music in my teenage years, and then became a follower of the pop charts, I never rejected the senior members of my family’s predilection for Kunz and his medleys. Too much of his influence was embedded in my life.

In the 1970s an odd feature of our family was that we did not have a television set. However, once a month there was a showing of old silent films in a scout hut at the other end of the town. My father, mother, sister and I walked there on winter evenings to meet up with the other ten to fifteen regulars to see the old films projected onto a screen. There was a small charge but money was also raised by a sales table and a raffle, which inevitably the same people always won.

The late middle-aged bachelor, Laurie, who organised the event with his spinster sister, also had an interest in Kunz, so invariably we would watch the old reels of film with a tape-recorder playing his medleys. Though Laurie possessed several cassettes, we tended to hear the same Kunz medleys over and over again. I began to anticipate the tunes.

In 1975 in the latter weeks of August my parents booked a week in a guest house in Bognor Regis, a seaside town on the southern English coast. My mother’s intention was that the whole family should spend the day together, almost irrespective of the weather, huddled up on the beach near a wave-breaker. As a thirteen-year-old boy I was keen to wander off and explore. One port of call in the later afternoon was the park where an organ player gave a rendition of Gershwin and other popular songs - not Kunz, but very much the same thing.

At university and in early adult life Charlie Kunz disappeared from my life. I never went out myself to purchase Kunz, but I did once in the 1980s pick up a second-hand cassette, which is still with me today. Then, with the advent of the net, I was able to re-discover him with a few clicks and could bring back the music of my childhood.

The ready availability of music on You Tube and elsewhere on the net has enabled me not just to re-acquaint myself with Kunz, but to hear him against the background of his contemporaries in Britain, the US and Germany. Though I am largely ignorant of music, the ability to follow links on You Tube has enriched my understanding and enjoyment of Kunz.

In 2009 my younger sister, aged forty-three, died of breast cancer. Some months before her death, I put together some scanned old photos of our family and set it to the music of Charlie Kunz. She could cope with the pictures and enjoyed them, but the Kunz’s music was too overwhelming for her. I switched it off.

I do not think Kunz is outdated in the way that Winifred Atwell’s or Mrs Mills’ honky-tonk knees-up piano certainly is; those popular pianists are firmly tied to an era of post-war Britain. Kunz’ music, by contrast, has a certain timeless gentle sophistication which will keep it going.

.

Europe after socialism and social democracy

2011-06-15T14:51:00.001+02:00

With the demise of socialism and social democracy in Europe a new politics is coming into existence.

Is a new pattern of political alignment appearing in Europe? On 31 May Peter Spiegel wrote in The Financial Times:

“We may be witnessing a generational change in European political dynamics. Traditional left-right divisions have narrowed… In its place, we are seeing a new division, between globalisers and localisers. The urban elites on both the left (intellectuals, liberal internationalists) and the right (free traders, global business leaders) face a challenge to their postwar consensus from a new group of revanchists. This political force also comes from both the left (trade unionists, working-class whites) and the right (rural nationalists, far-right xenophobes).”

How does an observation such as Spiegel's fit with a Marxist conception of society? I think it must be something like this:

While a particular system of class relations (i.e. owners of capital versus people who can only acquire the means to live by selling their labour power) is a concomitant of any kind of capitalism, political ideologies and identities within and across social classes under capitalism vary over time and from place to place. In other words, in different capitalist societies or in one society at different times, the politics can be markedly different.

That said, in Europe at least in the twentieth century, the major political division that ran though society tended to mirror class relations. Large numbers of working class people identified with the parties of the left, communist and social democratic, while non-socialist parties, liberal or conservative, had their base among capitalists, managers and professional people. This political division based on social class grew and became sharper, at least until the mid 1970s.

The strength of the left across Europe in post war Europe tended to force all non-socialist factions into an electoral alliance against the left. With the demise of the left since the end of the twentieth century, the raison d’etre for that anti-socialist unity has attenuated, so different currents of non-socialist opinion can again compete against each other in the political sphere.

How then is the right dividing? We can see nationalistic elements breaking away from the main parties of the right. The mainstream right remains attached to running a globalised capitalism within a liberal democratic framework, while the nationalist right attempts to rally "the people" against outsiders, immigrants, the EU, etc.. In Britain, this phenomenon is to some extent straitjacketed by the first-past-the-post electoral system, which favours a duopoly of political parties. Nonetheless, the continued electoral existence of the UK Independence Party, UKIP, shows the trend.

The left, once a coalition between socialism and progressive liberalism, is splitting along the same lines as the right. Political liberalism, internationalist in outlook, retains its hold within much of the intelligentsia, but this cosmopolitan movement is ever more at odds with illiberal and parochialising tendencies, now masquerading as the British left. I will mention two here: so-called Blue Labour and multiculturalism.

Following New Labour’s 2010 election defeat, a movement has developed within the Labour Party to shift the party’s image from urbanite Middle England to a kind of political “Chavism” – or what is increasingly called Blue Labour. In essence, this an attempt to steal some of the clothes of the fascistic right and incorporate them in Labour’s image; e.g. promoting nationalism, scapegoating immigrants, being tough on crime, etc. Authoritarian populism of this kind is epitomised by the New Labour ex-Communist former Home Secretary John Reid.

Multiculturalism, meaning the use of the state to facilitate and maintain separate cultural identities, may run counter to the ideas of Blue Labour, but it has nothing to do with either political liberalism or socialism. Under multiculturalism, just as under a mono-cultural system, the rights of individuals are trumped by the demands of traditional cultural groups and their governing hierarchies. In a mono-cultural society one culture supposedly binds everybody within a state; in multiculturalism your ethnic origin determines which community norms bind you. One only has to look at the growth of faith schools in Britain to see this in action.

That the leading dynamic on the “left” has become a battle between two parochial and illiberal currents, Blue Labour and multiculturalism, is itself proof the demise of socialism and social democracy.

The main conclusion to arise from the short essay is that the heart of the left, the symbiosis of political liberalism and the struggle for socio-economic equality, seems to have fallen off the agenda. Socialists can today only choose the least worst option from what remains.

Questioning the finding offence brigade

2011-06-14T16:42:00.002+02:00

Dismissing arguments of others simply because they are "offensive" demonstrates only bigotry.

It is becoming increasingly common to find commentators both on the web and in face-to-face discussion arguing in the following way. A point is made with which they disagree – for instance one critical of religious belief or concerning the definition of rape – and the commentator feels that it can be dismissed simply by labelling it offensive.

What the commentator is de facto saying is that the “offensive” argument simply shouldn’t exist; and of course without any legitimate counter argument his or her views hold sway.

The following point should be made clearly. No argument can be deemed illogical, incorrect or morally wrong simply because somebody else finds it offensive. Labelling an argument “offensive” only says something about the people using that label, namely that they don’t like it.

At one time people found it offensive to suggest that the world was round or that the earth circulated the sun; their feeling of offence couldn’t change a fact. At one time a majority of people found homosexuality offensive, but their bigotry couldn’t prevent the development of the idea that human beings, whether gay or not, had rights.

Nobody should be prevented from saying something simply because someone else finds it offensive.

Sex: behaviour and fantasy

2011-06-09T12:08:00.002+02:00

The distinction between sexual deeds and sexual fantasy needs to be maintained

Yes, actual sexual behaviour and sexual fantasy are two distinct things; and the vast majority of people know that. For the most part, sexual behaviour is under the control of the individual; sexual fantasy never is.

The psychopath and the puritan both make the same mistake of conflating the two. The psychopath allows his fantasies to govern his behaviour; while the puritan tries to force his/her fantasies (and often those of other people though censorship) to conform to acceptable behaviour.

A sensible social policy would not be to deny and punish fantasy when it is expressed, but to stress the difference between it and acceptable behaviour.

Issues Involved in Rape

2011-05-26T15:02:00.004+02:00

In May 2011 remarks by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and the Conservative MEP Roger Helmer threw the issue of rape into the headlines.

Behind the sloganising, allegations and denials, there two issues of substance. First, are some rapes more serious than others? Second, can a woman be responsible for her own rape?

The definition of rape varies between jurisdictions, but the essence of the crime is something like this: the offence of rape is committed when a man uses his penis to penetrate another person when he has no reasonable grounds for believing that his victim has consented. Though men can of course be raped, the main focus of discussion is on female victims.

The issue of whether some rapes are more serious than others contains a confusion in the way the question is posed; i.e serious for whom? If, however, we are talking in terms of the severity of legal sanctions that ought to be imposed on the rapist, then the focus must be on the degree of his wrong-doing.

The slogan “rape is rape” does not provide an answer. In the same way one could say “theft is theft” or “assault is an assault” without becoming any the wiser. Measuring the degree of wrong-doing by the perpetrator of a crime is in every case dependent on the circumstances in which the crime was committed. That is not to suggest there are circumstances in which a rape is committed, but that there is no crime.

One further confusion needs to cleared up. Some want to argue that violence, kidnapping, drugging, etc of the victim are aggravating factors. But this is a red herring because these are additional crimes occurring in conjunction with the rape; they are not intrinsic to the crime of rape.

The question then is this: do some acts of penetrative sex, when the perpetrator has no reasonable grounds for believing that his victim has consented, amount to a lesser or greater degree of wrong-doing depending on the circumstances in which they occur?

There is a strong feminist voice which says no, but I disagree. There are any number of factors (e.g. the age of rapist) which could aggravate or mitigate the crime, but I want here to mention the most important. I believe the degree of wrong-doing is still great but less when a rape occurs after the parties have started intimate sexual activity.

Turning now to the second issue of whether a woman (or indeed a man) can be held responsible for her own rape, my answer is emphatic, no. Rape occurs when when the perpetrator has no reasonable grounds for believing that his victim has consented to penetrative sex. The prior behaviour of the victim is irrelevant.

Confusion arises in discussions about victims causing their own rape because some people mix up a factual cause with an act of wrong-doing. Quite clearly if I leave my wallet on a seat in a station waiting room and it is stolen, my action was a cause of the theft, but there is no element in wrong-doing in my action. A woman can dress and act in a certain way which may be a factual cause of her rape (i.e. if she hadn’t done so, the rape would not have occurred), but there is no act of wrong-doing on her part.

I believe the points above are obvious and should be acceptable to most people. A great disservice is committed by those feminists who respond to any discussion on the issue of rape - apart from those parroting slogans such as “rape is rape” - with the response that the commentator is excusing rape. That is simply not true.

The Guardian restricted in publishing Wikileaks

2011-05-12T14:11:00.000+02:00

The Guardian was afraid to publish and sought the protection of the New York Times.

The idea that the press in Britain is subject to state censorship and intimidation is hardly a revelation, but seldom has the point is been demonstrated so clearly.

When Julian Assange and Wikileaks handed over the US Embassy cables to The Guardian in London, the paper was afraid to publish them. In the first place, The Guardian feared publication would be prevented by court action.

In a lecture on 10 May 2011, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, spelled out the point:

We suspected that, if we went it alone under the framework of laws governing newspapers in this country, we simply wouldn't be allowed to get away with it. We would be sued, or injuncted,"

Such legal threats of prior restraint were not all. Rusbridger was also given “some bloodcurdling learned opinions" about what might happen to him personally and to the newspaper if he published the material.

The solution was to publish in partnership with the New York Times - in other words, to hide behind the US constitutional protections of American media. The Guardian would be safe because there would be no point in attacking it as the New York Times was simultaneously publishing the same material.

Rusbridger made the point like this: "It seemed a good idea to harness the whole exercise to a country with extremely robust media laws rather than risk it all on the quicksands of the British legal system."

I am not saying that the decision was wrong, but it is interesting to ponder on what Rusbridger might have done, had the New York Times not agreed to assist in the publication.

Most of the discussion about the control and bias of the press centres on issues of ownership and finance. Yet it is still the case that the British state retains powers to gag and intimidate the press. The Left often seek to criticise liberal democracy, but it is often more to the point to criticise the limitation on liberal democracy in Britain.

Islamophobia is not a modern day Anti-Semitism

2011-05-02T21:43:00.008+02:00

More than once I have heard it said, “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism” It is not: the two phenomena are characterised to a far greater extent by their differences than by their similarities.

What is meant by the two terms? Islamophobia can be defined as political disproval of Islam; and anti-Semitism as political disapproval of Jews. In political discourse both terms are used pejoratively, i.e. as negative labels to apply to attitudes or behaviour, but for the purpose of this piece of writing, I will use them simply as descriptive concepts.

Disapproval of Islam is opposition to a religion. A religion is a set of alleged facts about how the world is and a system of beliefs about how it ought to be. Opposing Islam is not of itself racist as Muslims may be of any racial background. People labelled as Islamophobic are from both the left and right.

The left criticise Islam because many of it adherents make demands for changes in the rules that govern society. These demands typically entail the subordination of women and imposing restrictions on the freedom of expression. The political right, on the other hand, attack Islam for entirely different reasons: they dislike a separate unintergrated group living in "their" society.

The left and the right differ on another point. The left criticises Islam, not because it is Islam per se, but because its supporters seek to diminish political and social freedom. The left levels the same opposition against against similar illiberal and intolerant social demands by other religions, particularly fundamental Christianity. The right however endorses the demands made on society by the Christian religion, but reject those of Islam.

Anti-Semitism, a movement of Europe's political right, is hostility to Jews on account their ethnic origin. The attack on Jews in the 1930s in Western Europe was not based on the contents of Judaism or any demands that Judaism made on society (the majority of Jews were atheistic, non-observant or had converted to Christianity), but on the "threat" of an "alien" element that had “infiltrated” into society and was “polluting” it from within. Anti-Semitism was a rejection of assimilation by Jews into gentile society.

In other words, the attack by the right on Jews was for successful assimilation into society, while the attack on Islam is for separateness. The common thread in right-wing thinking is dislike of sharing living space with ethnic groups other than their own, whether those groups be assimilated or not.

In conclusion, we can say that apart from notions of hatred, disapproval and/or criticism, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism have nothing in common. To conflate the two is simply wrong.

Does socialist consciousness originate in the working class?

2011-04-28T16:29:00.002+02:00

The axiomatic claim that socialist consciousness has and will emerge in the working class is a dogma without evidence behind it.

If by socialist consciousness one means a relatively well worked out theory of how society is and how it should be, then socialist consciousness does not originate or indeed even flourish in the working class. Thinking that it ought to is another matter.

Socialist ideas originated in the minds of intellectuals (e.g. Marx, Methodist reformers). In the case of Karl Marx his discovery of historical materialism was based on borrowings from haut-bourgeois intellectuals, especially Hegel (history as a totality and all-embracing) and Feuerbach (being determines thinking and not vice versa). Of course, while intellectuals discovered and articulated historical materialism the socio-material conditions had to be right for the emergence of the theory. The generation of ideas, even Marxist ones, are grounded in social-material reality.

Once in the world, socialist ideas were then adopted by the leaders of political parties for largely opportunistic reasons. In the last century, large numbers of workers and others voted for these parties in many developed countries because ordinary people felt left-wing parties better represented their practical interests than did non-socialist parties.

Only a tiny fraction of people in manual jobs ever concerned themselves with ideological issues, probably fewer than were involved in religious sects. Remember George Orwell entering Catholic workers houses in the 1930s: Daily Worker on the table and a crucifix on the wall. There are exceptions of course.

One such exception in the twentieth century was an interest in socialist theory among a minority of skilled workers, particularly those working alone. We could mention the watchmakers of Jena, but also the role of cobblers, tailors and more recently left-wing train drivers in the ASLEF trade union in Britain.

Socialists were also likely to be found among upwardly mobile families whose members had left the manual working class. The connection between socialist belief, education and upward social mobility was well established in the twentieth century. This linkage is now very much something of the past.

Nevertheless the bulk of those interested in socialist and Marxist ideas are – and historically have been – found among the intelligentsia. It is here among teachers and other professionals that discussions of what socialism is and how it can be realised have always been a fascinating topic for a minority.

Whether and how a socialist consciousness could emerge today are difficult questions to answer.

Clegg-phobia is based on two hard facts

2011-04-22T12:50:00.002+02:00

The deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats is hated by many across the political spectrum.

Why is Nick Clegg the focus of so much hate? There are two reasons.

First, he campaigned against tuition fees, VAT rise, etc and adopted the façade of someone who would bring integrity to dishonest politics. He sold out to the Tories and reneged on his promises.

Second, at least since Thatcher, the Liberal Democrats have presented themselves as a liberal-minded party of the centre left – and with Labour the centre-left had a majority in Britain. Clegg betrayed that tradition by turning the Liberal Democrats into the Tories junior and subordinate partner.

Many want the cane to bite deep into Clegg’s backside and so will now vote no to AV.

The Royal Wedding

2011-04-21T16:09:00.002+02:00

The wedding of Price William and Kate Middleton is a combination of absurd entertainment and a slap in the face to democracy.

To my aesthetic taste the sight of Regent Street decked out in Union flags is grotesque. This kind of omnipresent display of symbols works at the same psychological level as the Nuremberg rallies, even if the political context is different.

However, we should not forget that the monarchy today is mainly a source of entertainment, rather than an institution of deference which cements together a political community. If some people want enjoy the fanfare of the wedding, then stand back and let them get on with it.

Of course, as a democrat I object to the selection of the future head of state being determined by the sexual organs of these two privileged people. A hereditary head of state makes no more sense than a hereditary dentist. I object to public money being spent on their wedding; and I object to either of them having any legal status in Britain, other than that enjoyed by other British citizens

Yet that said, I won’t lose sleep over the wedding because when set against all the other inequalities and injustices in Britain, this one ranks as not very important. At least one can laugh at it – or better still ignore it.

Using the Alternative Vote to cane Nick Clegg

2011-04-19T17:34:00.009+02:00

Voting no to AV just to hurt Nick Clegg is cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

On 5 May 2011 Britain will have its first referendum on electoral reform. On offer is to replace the current simple majority system (aka. first-past-the-post) for electing the House of Commons with the alternative vote. According to opinion polls, the “No to AV" campaigners have a 16% point lead in a referendum campaign which has generated little enthusiasm among the electorate. It seems that those planning to vote are more intent on having the cane bite deep into Nick Clegg’s backside, than they are on marginally improving the effectiveness of their votes in general elections.

AV, if introduced, would have two noticeable effects. The first would be to permit some voters a first preference vote for candidates who can’t win (Green, BNP, etc) and after those candidates are eliminated to transfer their votes to the big parties. This is a sop to gesture politics, nothing more.

Second, in those constituencies in which the winning Tory or Labour candidate had less than half the votes and the Liberal Dems were in a strong second place, transfers would give some of these seats to Clegg’s party. The result would be to boost the possibility of the hung parliaments – and hence Clegg’s bargaining power. It is exactly to prevent that latter possibility that many will vote no to AV – even if it is cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

AV, however, need not always increase the chance of hung parliaments. In 1997, for instance, AV would have increased New Labour’s massive overall majority because votes for eliminated Liberal Democrat candidates would have disproportionately transferred to Labour candidates leading to more Tories losing their seats to Labour.

While AV does lessen the amount of wasted votes in elections, it is not a system of proportional representation. Only full fledged PR can realise the principle of one person, one vote, one value – and Cameron has made sure that is not on offer.

Humanitarian bombing in Libya

2011-04-13T14:57:00.004+02:00

Under the pretext of a humanitarian agenda the US, Britain and France are bombing government targets in Libya. Socialists should not support this.

Aerial bombing in Libya in support of the weaker side in a civil war increases the humanitarian agony in the country. The left could urge the US, Britain and France to do one of the following.

One, support a rapid military intervention and the establishment of a pro-Western regime in Libya on the grounds that this action would end the civil war; and – even if non-democratic and non-socialist – such a regime would perhaps be more humanitarian than Gaddafi’s personal dictatorship.

Two, leave Libya to its own devices on the grounds that it is not for the capitalist countries to deny Libya its sovereignty by determining what happens there.

The third idea that the West can partially intervene to promote a left-leaning democracy is nonsense. You only have to look at Western support for the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to see that pro-capitalist orientation is the purpose of Western foreign policy, not the promotion of democracy which may end up questioning imperialist domination of the region.

Note

When we talk about intervention in Libya we are not talking about something akin to socialists going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. For all practical purposes, the left has a simple binary choice: back Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy in their use of state military might against Gaddafi, or not back it.

The purpose of the Western powers is to topple Gaddafi and establish a pro-Western regime in Libya. They wish to do this without “putting boots on the ground,” so they reply on aerial bombing. The effect is to prolong the conflict. The well-being of Libyans stuck in a prolonged civil war hardly matters beyond the realms of spin and false pretext for their action.

Perhaps when/if the Gaddafi regime is toppled a more human will emerge, but it may not. Libyans should determine Libya’s future not the US, Britain and France.

Therefore, stop the bombing.

Ian Tomlinson - the meaning of his death

2011-04-04T23:56:00.003+02:00

The death of a street newspaper vendor follwoing a vicious assault by police shows how Britain's repressive state operates.

On 1 April 2009 a diverse crowd of people gathered in the centre of London to protest at the G20 summit meeting of world leaders. Most were peaceful if noisy; a tiny minority were there to commit acts of vandalism. But overall, the commercial district of London came to resemble a street carnival of clowns, jugglers, hippies and ordinary people taking to the street to make a point.

Sometime after seven in the evening news filtered through of a death. The police soon made it clear what had happened: a newspaper vendor in his late forties, Ian Tomlinson, uninvolved in the demonstration but surrounded by black-clad anarchists, had collapsed: a heart attack was suspected. Police medics rushed to his aid but were met with a barrage of bottles hindering their efforts. News outlets aired the story.

In the following days several witnesses challenged the police account, but the police complaints authority (IPCC) felt safe in dismissing them and endorsed the police version of events. A post mortem revealed that Tomlinson had indeed died of a heart attack.

A week later conclusive evidence of what had really happened emerged from an unlikely source: the mobile phone footage of a New York hedge fund manager. The film showed Tomlinson walking along, hands in his pockets away from a line of police. Suddenly one of them, Officer Simon Harwood, dressed in a black balaclava partially obscuring his face and with his police identification number removed from his clothing, stepped forward. He truncheoned Tomlinson on the legs and then pushed him to the ground. Stunned, Tomlinson struggled into a sitting position and was assisted to his feet by a demonstrator. Far from helping, the line of police looked on or through Tomlinson as if he were not a person in distress at all. A dazed Tomlinson stumbled out of sight of the camera and minutes later he collapsed and died.

Two further post mortems by independent doctors established that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding consistent with being thrown to the ground. The first was made public immediately; the second only months later.

The police behaviour on the 1 April 2009 against largely peaceful civilian demonstrators was almost certainly the most gratuitously violent in modern times. Little, if any, attempt was made to distinguish between people committing crimes and those simply attending and protesting, or in Tomlinson’s case by-standers caught up in the event. Forced into street holding pens (popularly called ‘kettles’) with no means of escape, men and women were punched, kicked, hit with batons and shields and bitten by police dogs. In attacking Tomlinson Officer Harwood’s behaviour was probably no worse than that of many of his colleagues. Harwood was unlucky for two reasons: Tomlinson died and the assault was filmed.

Some argue that the police went berserk in London on 1 April 2009. That is not the case: had they done so many tens of people would have died; in fact neither Harwood nor the police in general wanted to kill anyone. The police operation, led by a Commander Broadbent, certainly allowed officers to humiliate lawful protesters and beat them in a non life-threatening way. And to ensure that individual officers were not accountable for their actions, they were permitted to wear balaclavas and a blind eye was turned to their removal of identification badges on their uniforms. Broadbent felt, not without good reason, that the government, courts and media would side with him and his officers even when their actions constituted illegal assaults on innocent people.

The Tomlinson death presented a problem. State disregard for police violence at public order events normally depends on two conditions: first, that the police don’t kill or seriously injure people and second that the details of who was at fault in any particular confrontation remained murky. Tomlinson’s death broke both these conditions. Justice in a state supposedly governed by the rule of law now demanded that charges of assault and (given that Tomlinson had died as a consequence of a serious assault) manslaughter should be pressed against Harwood.

The Crown Prosecution Service took fifteen months to come a decision; it decided in the end not to prosecute Officer Harwood. It’s reasons were transparently dishonest. Manslaughter charges could not be brought, it said, because of the conflicting post mortem results. Yet the results of the first police-instigated post mortem had been rejected by two independent doctors; and even if Tomlinson had died from a heart attack, it was impossible to argue that his experience at the hands of Officer Harwood had not contributed to his death. In addition it was by now apparent that the police had summoned the first pathologist, Dr Freddy Patel, because he could be relied on to give the police the results they wanted at the time (i.e. that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack brought on by being surrounded by black clad anarchists). And to finally demolish the credibility of the police-instigated post mortem it was revealed that Dr Patel was later stuck off the list of approved Home Office pathologists on account of other incidents of misconduct undertaken in support of the police.

And what of the assault charge? Well, it was time-barred because it had to brought within six months and the prosecution service had taken fifteen to reach its decision.

Some have argued that the institutions of the state (prosecution service, courts, etc.) will always support the police when they are in conflict with ordinary people, so the decision not to prosecute Harwood is no surprise. There is much precedent to support this argument, but it should be pointed out that by not prosecuting Harwood, the police and prosecution services suffered a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of all those who cared to look - not just people on the left. It would have been far more beneficial to the police in the long run to have claimed Harwood was a ‘bad apple in the barrel’ and to have sent him to court.

The refusal of the prosecution service to charge Harwood seems to have its cause elsewhere. The evidence against Harwood was rock solid and a majority of people wanted and expected him to be charged with at least assault. What the Crown Prosecution Service was saying in its decision is that WE the state decide prosecutions, irrespective of the evidence and the demands of justice. You, the people, can collect all the evidence you like and argue as logically as you want, but is WE who retain the power.

The meaning of the Tomlinson case

The meaning of all this is not, as some have suggested, that the police have been given a carte blanche to assault and kill at random. Officer Harwood, even if he never faces a criminal trial, has not been given a pat on the back but faced interrogation and a possible charges for manslaughter for over a year. No police officer could be sure that if these events were repeated in the future he would be treated so leniently. The meaning of the Tomlinson case is more subtle.

Tomlinson demonstrates that the institutions of force and law (police, police complaints authority, prosecution service) cannot be held to popular legal account. They are corrupt, not in the sense that the people working in those institutions take money to mis-perform their duties, but that they brazenly disregard the purpose for which they exist and citizens have little or no form of address against their maladministration. The police lie and organise ‘bent’ autopsies; the police complaints authority act as puppets of the police. The prosecution service obstructs and drags its feet and gives wholly dishonest reasons for failing to prosecute. Such is the nature of the institutions of the British state today.

Also noticeable is the near total silence of British politicians; they seem quite relaxed with a society in which a police officer truncheons a passer-by, hurls him to the ground and to his death, but then goes unpunished. The maladministration of the police, the police complaints authority and the prosecution service leave them equally untroubled.

Tomlinson has divided effects on state power. On the one hand the case has undoubtedly undermined trust in the police; the misconduct is too clear-cut for anyone who cares to notice. On the other, the state has reinforced its unaccountable power over the people in that even when there is rock-solid evidence of state misconduct, citizens have no right to remedy. People are subject to the state; the state is not accountable to the people who live within it.

The Fortnum and Mason Affair

2011-04-01T12:57:00.001+02:00

The British state is doing all it can to shut down the popular UNCUT movement

Uncut is a grass roots activist organisation, consisting mainly of the educated young. The movement is opposed to tax avoidance by retailers and other companies, particularly at a time when sadistic spending cuts are being inflicted on the services required by ordinary working people. Uncut tactics involve non-violent direct action without vandalism, typically noisy sit-down protests in the department stores owned by tax avoiding companies.

On 26 March 2011, in an action separate from the TUC sponsored demonstration, Uncut staged a sitdown protest in London’s upmarket Fortnum and Mason department store. The facts of what happened are not disputed.

The police arrived and informed the protesters that they could leave unmolested. Once outside every protester – in excess of one hundred persons – was arrested. The young people were distributed to police stations around London and held overnight. Their mobile phones and clothes were confiscated and they were charged with the offence of aggravated trespass and banned from entering the centre of London. Charges of criminal damage were imposed and then, at least for most of them, dropped. Whether they are later found guilty of a criminal offence or not, their names will entered on the police lists of "domestic extremists" for life.

The decision to make a mass arrest and then detain Uncut activists overnight – a wholly disproportionate action given the minor nature of the offence - was a political one. By contrast, far fewer anarchist vandals were arrested. Quite clearly, the police wished to intimidate young people from engaging in effective peaceful protest against tax avoidance, rather than arrest anarchists engaged in property damage.

In their propaganda after the event the government and police sought to associate the Uncut activists with anarchist hooliganism and violence. Yet among the left and the informed, nobody believes that. The barefaced lying by the police to the activists has also further undermined the credibility of the police both in the eyes of Uncut and the public.

Uncut alone is no substitute for organised political opposition, but in terms of raising consciousness and involving people in constructive protest action, there is nothing better in Britain today. Socialists should support it with their voices, money and bodies.

Note

Two views are circulating on the internet about the police prioritising Uncut and not the Black Bloc anarchists in the London protests of 26 March 2011.

One view holds that the police targeted the peaceful Uncut activists out of frustration because they were unable to arrest the anarchists. The other view maintains that the anarchists, who are at least in part infiltrated by police agents, were not stopped in their street rampage in order to bolster public support for harder policing. The arrest of the Uncut activists was then undertaken to associate them in the public mind with the anarchists.

I do not know which view is correct. However whichever alternative is the case, the police are shown to be acting improperly.

New proposed restrictions on protest in Britain

2011-03-29T14:01:00.004+02:00

Anarchist disorder and vandalism in London on 26 March 2011 has given cover to the government's proposal to ban named people from participating in political protest.

The Home Secretary Teresa May, says she is considering introducing a ban on “known troublemakers” attending political protests. Government propaganda is clearly attempting to equate political disorder with football hooliganism.

Such a law would be a gift from heaven for the police. No longer would they have to prove to a court that a particular person had committed an offence; it would enough to show that a banned person was present at a political protest.

Whatever one feels about anarchist hooligans having their political rights taken away, it surely would not be long before such bans were extended to practitioners of non-violent direct action (e.g. Uncut) and others attending political events of which the police disapproved.

While this pernicious provision may fail thanks to the Human Rights Act – or be stymied on practicalities; e.g. what counts as political protest? – it nonetheless needs to be opposed with everything we have got to oppose it.

Contemporary Anarchism

2011-03-28T17:30:00.000+02:00

Today’s anarchism is an infantile disorder; a pathology which manifests itself in the desire to destroy the symbols of state authority, property and social order as an end in itself. Anarchism offers nothing in terms of how society could be beneficially reformed, but takes refuge in an incoherent romanticism of returning people to some kind of state-of-nature without law or technology. To most people these ideas are as repugnant as they are ridiculous.

However, I would also borrow the term “primitive rebellion” in this context. Today capitalist market fundamentalism is hegemonic and many suffer under that system. That some youngsters could be bothered to get up and to do something politically is not to be condemned.

TUC demonstration: Saturday 26 March 2011

2011-03-25T14:00:00.001+01:00

On Saturday 26 March 2011 there will a TUC organised march through London to protest against the cuts in public services which are promoted by the coalition government.

The immediate aims of the demonstration are twofold. First, a large demonstration will send a message to the government, indicating the level of organised opposition to Tory/Lib Dem policy. This pressure will hopefully push the government into mitigating the effects of some of the measures. Second, the protest will provide an opportunity for ordinary working people to organise and through their organisation become stronger and more confident in their opposition to the government.

One issue of contention is the high level of TUC cooperation with the police, perhaps even to extent that the police are organising the march with the TUC as a junior partner. The merits of this are unclear. On the one hand, cooperation with the police may prevent the demonstration descending into mayhem. Chaos and widescale damage do little to advance the arguments of the left; and the acrimony resulting from such an outcome would deepen rifts in the left.

Yet full compliance with the police also carries dangers. There can be little doubt that the default position of the police is to oppose the demonstrators and to perceive themselves as serving the will of government, corporate power and authority. To that extent, everything that they do will be to frustrate and mitigate the purposes of the demonstrators. FIT officers will be collecting data on everyone, and the stage will be set for even more repressive policing in the future.

That be as it may, the main point is to have a large and successful demonstration on Saturday.

Police and anarchist strategy

The police do indeed face a dilemma with this march.

In the case of the student demonstrators the main aim of policing was to kettle and beat protesters with the purpose of intimidating people against protesting.

This cannot be the strategy tomorrow. The police will wish to keep their legitimacy in the eyes of the many ordinary trade unionists and working people, who will be demonstrating. Therefore, they will go to some lengths to avoid heavy repressive policing.

One strategy of the anarchists will be to provoke the police into heavy-handed behaviour with the very purpose of discrediting them. I think this strategy is mistaken: first because it will fail, and second because, in so far as it is successful, it will only deter ordinary people from taking to the streets in the future.

Going home and the Little Chef

2011-03-19T10:28:00.009+01:00

In 1977-78 a Little Chef restaurant became a refuge for two young people going home from Woolmer Hill School in Haslemere.

School rules were supposed to grip all pupil behaviour between the home and school gates, a point about which Headmaster Anning never tired of reminding us in morning assemblies. The most severe injunction was against cycling down the undeniably steep Woolmer Hill; cyclists were required to detour on the roads though a small housing settlement. Peddling up Woolmer Hill was never discussed, as it was almost impossible. From time to time, issues arose over rowdy behaviour on the 13B bus, which ran the few kilometres from Woolmer Hill through the centre of the town and on to High Lane, the housing estate which provided much of the school intake. Occasionally, issues of smoking and disorder raised their head, but leaving school did, for most practical purposes, signal an end to Mr Anning’s authority; and, of course, the further from the school one went, the weaker that authority became.

Even today it surprises me that no regulations were in place for the Little Chef restaurant. It was never discussed; and until I was fifteen I didn’t even know of its existence. Its obscurity lay in its location. Most of the pupils going home by bus, on foot or by bike made their way eastwards into the town. But there was another direction. Leaving the school and travelling west on the small road that gave access to Woolmer Hill School, one came to a junction after a few hundred metres. One arm ran downhill to the small settlement of Hammer, which lay in the adjacent county of West Sussex. Another, taken by a few students with bikes, headed north and met the main road, the A3, running to Hindhead and then on to Guildford and London. The remaining option was to continue straight ahead for a few hundred metres along a little used piece of road with heathland on either side before intersecting with the A3 a little further south. It was at this junction that one found the Little Chef restaurant.

In the 1970s roadside restaurants were dire: tea, biscuits, chocolate, cheap coffee and fried breakfasts served on formica tables. Little would have attracted me to such a place had it not been a warm refuge. It was a solution to a geographical problem.

I lived in the centre of Haslemere. When I first started at the school, I had made use of the crowded 13B bus, then for a short period I had cycled and finally, after I was about fourteen, I saved my bus fare by walking home. In my last year at school - we remained at Woolmer Hill until we were sixteen - Rosemary, whom I wanted to be with as much as possible, lived in Hindhead and cycled to school. That gave rise to a major difficulty: the further I walked home with her after school - our intimacy always impeded by the need to push a bike - the greater the distance I had to walk home myself. Occasionally, I did walk all the way to Hindhead and then home, which was a journey of some six or seven kilometres. Such is young love.

In the autumn of 1977, Rosemary and I could wander onto the heathland, but as the nights drew in and the cold encroached, our options decreased. And that was how the Little Chef restaurant became important to us. Earning at that time around three pounds a week from delivering morning newspapers, I had a hole burnt in my pocket from purchasing even our two cups of low quality coffee, but it was worth it. Nobody could disturb us; we were our own masters; and we could stay as long as we wished. Why no other other couple from school found this peaceful hideaway remains a mystery. And, in so much as it mattered, we were breaking no school rule.

From the spring of 1978 the Little Chef restaurant became less relevant, except perhaps when it rained. In June we left school, so Woolmer Hill, its environs and the Little Chef were forgotten. My affair with Rosemary, upset by lack of routine daily contact, took me on an emotional helter skelter journey throughout the long summer of 1978 before withering in the autumn. Times moved on.

A quarter of a century later in 2003, I spent my last Christmas in Haslemere. An urge took me to walk to Woolmer Hill School, quiet and abandoned in the winter holiday. I headed onwards to the Little Chef restaurant which was then still in existence. How strange it was to go in alone and order a coffee; I think I had a latte. The girl who served me would not even have been born, when Rosemary and I had last sat there. Yet, something else impressed itself upon me on this sentimental re-visitation: the sufferer of nostalgia feigns homesickness and desires to return to a place, but it is not a place that he really seeks, it is a time - and that can never be revisited.

At some point towards the end of that decade, the Little Chef restaurant was abandoned and then pulled down to make way for the widening of the A3.

Links to related posts

Woolmer Hill School, Haslemere 1973-78

Mr Anning remembered (1973-77)

Woolmer Hill Teachers 1973-78

Corporal Punishment at Woolmer Hill School in the mid 1970s

.

Assumptions of super injunctions

2011-03-11T18:18:00.001+01:00

A so-called super injunction has one aspect which is seldom spelled out: the role of obedience.

In essence a super injunction has two parts: one prevents the facts pertaining to an affair being stated; the other prevents disclosure of the fact that the courts are censoring the press on the matter. In other words if the media covers the topic in any way, they must not tell the whole truth and must not say that they are only telling part of the truth.

No press organisation can be restricted by an injunction unless it is informed of its existence. And for any injunction to make sense to those who are required to act as censors, at least the key facts of what is to be censored need to be communicated. For instance, the recent Goodwin injunction would have to be a little more specific than ordering, “Don’t publish anything on Fred Goodwin.”

If then the recent Fred Goodwin injunction (and at the time of writing I don’t know what it covers exactly) was communicated to all the main media outlets, it means that there are tens of people who know the key facts of the matter, but are sufficiently law abiding to keep stumm. For once information spills onto the web – and particularly on sites hosted in free speech jurisdictions – it is secret no longer.

Nonetheless, information does seep onto the web and increasingly we read The Guardian in combination with Google.

Get rid of the royal family

2011-03-09T16:49:00.002+01:00

The very existence of the British royal family contradicts everything that a liberal democracy is supposed to be about. At its most benign the family serves as entertainment akin to a soap opera; but they also pollute governance with their nepotistic corruption, as is amply demonstrated by the current revelations concerning Prince Andrew’s trade promotion role with dictators.

Ridding ourselves of these royal parasites will not be easy. New Labour brown-nosed to them as much as the current coalition. But simply ignoring the upcoming royal wedding would be a start.

Don't write a premature obituary for Marxism

2011-03-09T16:47:00.000+01:00

I wouldn’t write the obituary of Marxism too soon. The thoughts of the old man and his successors have a stubborn habit of re-appearing. In our age when class inequality is soaring and the future of the young has been trashed in education and employment, the allure of Marxian analysis should not be underestimated.

The peak sales of Eric Hobsbawm’s recent offering “How to Change the World, Marx and Marxism, 1840-2011” plus the recent gobbling up of re-issued Marxist tracts in Germany must at least demonstrate a growing interest outside a sclerotic academia.

Of course the younger generation will adapt Marxism in new ways. In the 60s and 70s Freudianism, libertarianism and linguistic structuralism was interweaved into historical materialism to embed the theory into academia. The young today will make new syntheses – and all the older generation can do is watch and perhaps try to prevent the repetition of old mistakes.

Girl Rioters

2011-03-08T15:47:00.001+01:00

The Daily Mail has branded female protesters in Britain as “Girl Rioters.”

If on 26 March 2011 fifty percent of the people demonstrating against the current economic onslaught on ordinary working people are women, we should welcome the fact. We should also insist that fifty percent of the organisers are women.

The Daily Mail - in deploying language like Girl Rioters - is disparaging protest; they will always try to divide working people along ethnic and gender lines. The hope of these reactionaries is to appeal to sexist working class men and to encourage them to keep “their” women at home. They will not succeed.

George Lichtheim on Imperialism

2011-03-08T15:39:00.004+01:00

Imperialism subordinates one set of people to another by economic, political or ideological means.

Last week I took down another dusty Penguin paperback from my bookshelf, George Lichtheim’s slender volume “Imperialism” published in 1971. I must have bought it in the early 1980s, though I don’t remember doing so.

As its name suggests, the book is an attempt to define the concept of imperialism and Lichtheim does so historically from an independent Marxist perspective. His main thesis is that imperialism has had different features in different epochs: antiquity, medieval Europe, the mercantile age, industrial capitalism and the new imperialisms following the Second World War. With independent insight, he weaves his way through the claims of Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, Mao, etc.

Lichtheim writes in a clear accessible English and displays encyclopaedic erudition in his writing. His is a style and approach much lacking in the current era. The only drawback to the book is that the initial chapters deal with his topic in antiquity and medieval Europe which are not matters of gripping interest to many.

Lichtheim himself committed suicide in 1973.

LICHTHEIM, George - Imperialism, Penguin 1971

Note
Many people have sought out this entry for an in-depth analysis of the book. I am sorry to disappoint them with this brief comment.

.

Assange and interrogation dates in Sweden

2011-03-04T14:33:00.004+01:00

The Assange legal case shows bias and imbalance.

The Swedish Association of Lawyers is enquiring into the conduct of Julian Assange's Swedish lawyer, Björn Hurtig, after London magistrate, Howard Riddle, condemned Hurtig as an unreliable witness for giving false testimony during Assange's extradition hearings.

Hurtig falsely claimed in the hearing that Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, had made no attempt to interview Assange before he left Sweden on 15 September 2010. She had in fact given Hurtig one proposed date.

Not content with attacking Hurtig, Riddle went on to say:

"It would be a reasonable assumption from the facts that Mr Assange was deliberately avoiding interrogation before he left Sweden."

Hurtig’s “mistake” has indeed been very damaging to Julian Assange, but Riddle’s assertion that Assange was “avoiding interrogation” seems unproved on the facts.

First, Hurtig had made several previous attempts to arrange an interview for Assange with Ny; and it was Ny who had turned down the earlier opportunities.

Second, it is unclear whether Hurtig passed on Ny’s proposed date to Assange.

The disingenuous behaviour of Ny is apparent. Hurtig, in a letter to Assange’s London solicitors dated 14 November 2010, claims that on 14 September Ny told him that Assange was free to leave Sweden. If that is so, and there is no reason to disbelieve it, Ny seems to have facilitated Assange leaving Sweden prior to her questioning him. Why?

There is another aspect to the undermining of the credibility of Hurtig. He is the only person outside the Swedish state to have seen the text messages between Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen, messages which apparently undermine their allegations against Assange.

More generally, there is a total imbalance in the case. Any fault or oversight on the Assange side is picked on and the worst inferences are drawn from it, while a myriad of irregularities from the prosecution are passed over.

Disproving Marxism: is it possible?

2011-03-03T16:58:00.005+01:00

If I had to pose the hardest question to Marxist theory it would be this rather simple one: What events could take place in the future which would refute Marxism?

If Marxists don’t come up with an answer, but say instead that anything that happens is compatible with Marxist theory, then surely Marxist theory cannot explain anything at all. It would be as meaningful as a weather forecast that said it would either rain or not rain within the next twenty-four hours.

To say the same thing in philosophical terms, Marxism must surely give rise to potentially falsifiable synthetic a postiori propositions and not simply consist of a priori ones.

The microscope conception of Marxism

Some have argued that Marxism cannot the refuted by events in the world for the following reason. Propositions, it is argued, are of two kinds: empirical ones which can be refuted by testing against reality and philosophical ones which cannot. The latter would include propositions of mathematics, formal logic and Marxism. One way of illustrating Marxism when seen like this is to compare it with a microscope. A microscope enables us to see an object which otherwise would remain unknown to us, but nothing that we see “invalidates” the working of the microscope.

This view, though, seems to lead to an uncomfortable conclusion. Social sciences (sociology, politics, economics, etc) do give rise to falsifiable hypotheses. Marxism can’t give us any statements on these matters because if it did they would be refutable, and if they were refutable then the Marxism that gave rise to them would also be refutable.

This kind of formulation, if left here, seems to imprison Marxism into a closed metaphysical system.

Marxism conceived only as history

Some argue that Marxism is only about history, so the theory cannot be refuted by events in the future. Many people do in fact see Marxism as primarily a tool for understanding the past, as a theory of “postdiction” as opposed to prediction. And indeed, Marxism conceived as a narrative on human history is easy to understand. It’s not necessary to comprehend what caused what, but merely what happened. And what did happen was written down by Marx, Engels and later Marxist writers.

This kind of historicism is extremely flexible. If we discover new information about the past, we simply slot it in somehow with what we have already been told in the Marxist narrative. If we find something that is false in that narrative, we take it out without our conception of history collapsing. Such an approach is not wholly without merit, but I would contend that it too easily lends itself to propaganda and can neither verify nor falsify Marxism.

How Marxism is done

How does Marxism work? It is about selecting phenomena from the gamut available, expressing those facts in Marxian concepts and then integrating the facts into the Marxian meta-narrative.

Marxism could be contradicted not by facts in the world – because after all we make history even if not in conditions of our making, so anything is possible in the future – but by finding that the facts that underpin the Marxist paradigm are wrong.

Some discoveries would seriously undermine the Marxian paradigm. Three examples:

The existence of God

Human social behaviour was changing because of developments in the brain independent of social conditions.

Any area of society (e.g. politics,) was explicable without reference to the whole of society.

Marxists can and do come up with specific theories which can be falsified without damaging Marxism. (E.g. the immiseration thesis)

The Alternative Vote: a minor reform

2011-03-02T15:30:00.002+01:00

In May 2011 a referendum will be held on the replacement of Britain’s First-Past-The-Post electoral system with the Alternative Vote.

The Alternative Vote (AV) allows voters to rank their choices 1,2,3, etc, instead of placing a simple cross against only one candidate. In the first round of counting, votes are awarded to candidates according to each voter’s first preference. If no candidate has 50% of the votes, the lowest placed candidate is eliminated and the candidate’s votes are re-allocated according to the eliminated candidate’s second preferences. In each successive round, the lowest placed candidate is eliminated and the votes for that candidate are transferred until one candidate exceeds 50% of the votes.

AV does indeed mean that the successful candidate in the single member constituency is more representative than under First-Past-The-Post, but AV is not proportional representation. The Greens, for instance, could chalk up a double digit percentage of the vote across the country, but still fail to win a single seat.

According to current opinion polls, in the majority of British parliamentary constituencies the first and second candidates will be Tory or Labour. Thus the only voting decision of any importance would be whether the voter ranked higher the Labour or Tory candidate. The two-party system would be mostly preserved.

In a minority of constituencies the Liberal Democrats could expect to occupy the first or second position after the first count. Since they could expect to receive Tory or Labour transfer votes, their chance of winning these seats would be boosted.

AV is still capable of leading to perverse results; e.g. Labour pushing the Liberal Democrats into third place in the penultimate count and then losing to a Tory, whereas had Labour tactical voters got the LibDem into second place the LibDem would have defeated the Tory in the final count.

In fact, this voting reform is so minor, so easy to introduce and is so obviously a fairer way of voting in single member constituencies, a referendum to introduce it seems unnecessary.

Facts and Opinions: some basic points

2011-03-02T15:23:00.002+01:00

It is worth making a simple basic distinction between facts and opinions.

A fact is a proposition which is constituted by socially agreed terms (i.e. the words in the sentence)and verified by socially agreed means: e.g. Sweden is seeking Julian Assange’s extradition.

Opinion is of two kinds.

First, opinion can pertain to a proposition asserted by someone which cannot be either verified or falsified: e.g. Julian Assange has engaged only in consenting sexual acts. The weight of an opinion which alleges a fact is dependent on the likelihood of the alleged fact being true.

Second, opinion can consist of an “ought premise” e.g. All those who engage only in consenting sexual acts ought not be punished. Ought premises cannot be deemed true or false; they can only be judged consistent or inconsistent with other ought premises.

Ought premises, if universal, can be combined with facts or “opinion facts” to produce new ought premises. For example:

All those who engage only in consenting sexual acts ought not be punished.
Julian Assange has engaged only in consenting sexual acts
Therefore, Julian Assange ought not be punished

All this is very formalistic, but it does provide a means for decoding texts which mix, fact, alleged fact and opinion.

ECJ outlaws sex discrimination in financial services

2011-03-01T16:29:00.001+01:00

On 1 March the European Court of Justice outlawed sexual discrimination in the provision of financial services from December 2012 affecting car insurance, pensions and life assurance.

I agree strongly with the ruling. It is not right that a person should benefit and or suffer disadvantage simply because of his or her sex.

The comparison with sex discrimination in employment is an interesting one. If it were proved that in a certain occupation that woman as a class were less productive than men, would it justify gender-based differential pay. Of course not.

The same logic should apply to motor insurance, and thanks to this ruling it will.

Why Britain's conservatives oppose the Alternative Vote

2011-03-01T16:23:00.000+01:00

In opposing the alternative vote, Britain’s Conservatives are trying to cheat history.

If you look at the start of every period of Tory-dominated government (i.e. 1931, 1951, 1970, 1979, 2010.), the percentage of the electorate voting Tory is always lower than on the previous occasion.

Today, the Tories can only hope to form a majority government by being the single largest party under a simple majoritarian electoral system. Under AV in most of those constituencies where the Liberal Democrats can get into the second place the Tory would be doomed. Parliaments are more likely to be hung.

AV is not about proportional representation (one person, one vote, one value) but merely a step to make the individual MP more representative of the voters in his or her constituency. But that is not to Tory advantage.

Blair asks Gadaffi not to kill protesters

2011-02-28T17:38:00.001+01:00

Blair has phoned Gaddafi and asked him not kill protesters.

If you want to sum up Blair’s politics in a single sentence it would be this: he sought to strengthen capitalist power in Britain and imperialist capitalist power in the world. In partnership with George Bush he promoted the Iraq War with those ends in mind.

In aligning himself with US power, Blair had no problem embracing dictatorships in Saudi Arablia, Egypt and elsewhere. If Gadaffi was prepared to bring his dictatorship on board, that was fine with Blair.

For Blair now to be phoning Gaddafi and asking him not to kill protesters is about as nauseous a piece of hypocrisy as is his professed religious beliefs.

Can Assange receive a fair trial in Sweden?

2011-02-26T14:37:00.003+01:00

It is impossible for any impartial court to convict Julian Assange on the evidence.

On 25 February 2010, the day after Julian Assange lost his case against extradition to Sweden in a London magistrate’s court, his solicitor, Mark Stephens, wrote an article in The Guardian arguing that Assange could not receive a fair trial in Sweden.

Stephens correctly emphasised that Assange, if extradited, would be held in solitary confinement pending interrogation and trial, and that the hearing of evidence would be in camera with no opportunity for Assange’s lawyers to cross-examine witnesses. Moreover, instead of a jury, assessors appointed by Swedish political parties would determine guilt.

All this amounts to a deficiency in justice, particularly as the evidence against Assange appears unreliable and there are suggestions of political manipulation. Justice in this case which is not seen to be done cannot ever be done.

Yet in his article Assange’s solicitor fails to mention the fundamental reason for Assange not being able to receive a fair trial in Sweden, with Stephen’s reticence presumably due to the fact that the argument is inadmissible in the British courts. Quite simply, it is impossible for any impartial court to convict Julian Assange on the evidence, all of which is now in the public domain and subject to public scrutiny.

The complainants, Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen, have made allegations which Assange has denied, but the circumstantial evidence in the case all piles up to suggest that the women’s allegations are not true.

One of two situations must therefore apply. Either the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, is pursuing Assange with no hope of a successful prosecution; or there is indeed a court in Sweden which could convict on the basis of this unreliable evidence. In either situation it would be wrong to extradite Assange.

Julian Assange is appealing the decision of the magistrate’s court. A successful challenge to the issuing of the European Arrest Warrant on technicalities may or may not be possible – though I wouldn’t hold my breath. Nevertheless, we should not forget the key reason, even if is never argued in a British court.

Photo: Mark Stephens

The Assange case: some comments

2011-02-24T14:43:00.001+01:00

The Assange case is multifaceted and still evolving. The mainstream media have failed to collate the factual material which is available and still less to draw reasoned conclusions from it. Here are a few isolated points and comments.

How should the case be seen in overview?

The case against Assange has been handled improperly by Swedish prosecutors. The allegations against him are unprovable. The circumstantial evidence points to the allegations being untrue. So unless Assange incriminates himself, no unbiased court could convict him.

Assange has been snookered by the combination of four factors: his own arrogance and stupidly; the confused spitefulness of two women, a prosecutor who wants to make an example of a prominent but vulnerable man and three governments out to make life as difficult as possible for Assange.

What is the key point to make in opposing Assange’s extradition from Britain?

The best way to fight this case is to pose the big question: does Marianne Ny have sufficient evidence to prove in a court that Assange committed sexual offences?

As the answer is no, and it clearly is no, then this EAW is being sought for persecution and not for legitimate prosecution.

How could Assange best defend himself as an individual?

Assange’s best defence would be to write an honest and humble account of exactly what happened in bed with the two women and publish it.

What situation are the women in?

why, if these sexual assaults happened at all, were the women so happy to continue friendly relations with Assange after the event? The most convincing explanation is that the alleged sexual offences did not happen and the women are liars.

But let us suppose for a moment that the women merely exaggerated and had no intention of being pawns in this train of events that they set in motion. And perhaps the whole prosecution is chugging along without their will or desire. We don’t know.

Evidence given in camera in Sweden will never answer these questions. These issues will haunt these women, whose identities are widely known, until they die. How much simpler it would be if they chose to speak out publicly now

Why are the middle-aged middle class so apathetic in the crisis?

2011-02-23T17:41:00.001+01:00

The Cameron Government is pursuing an economic policy which will impoverish and wreck the lives of huge numbers of people. The pain is every bit as bad as that inflicted by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. But contrasting now with then reveals two political differences.

First, the Cameron-led coalition of millionaires has avoided the public gloating sadism associated with men like Norman Tebbit, who were so prominent under Thatcher. While “Tebbitism” no doubt appealed to the ranks of Daily Mail readers (then and now), opposing his brand of narrow-mindedness and authoritarianism united the left at a cultural level in the 1980s.

Second, in the 1980s – even as it moved to the right – the Labour Party provided a rallying point through its propagation of a social democratic alternative for Britain. Today the Labour Party is hogtied in its opposition, for on nearly every issue from rampant inequality to tuition fees, the coalition government is proceeding further along a track previous trodden by New Labour.

Yet the middle-aged middle class left which was so anti-Thatcher two decades ago has not just lost a discernable enemy icon and a friend in the Labour Party, it has also been hobbled by its own experience. Let me explain how.

In the 1970s and early 1980s the educated young reacted in horror at the demise of the achievements of the Post War consensus. As politics polarised, much of the educated young attached itself to the left with more ardour than did those in their adulthood in the 1960s. Yet history played a trick. Although the young middle-class left lost politically, at the person level it prospered – and this bred in many a political cynicism and disengagement from politics. That cynicism was fed further as the generation passively witnessed the immorality and betrayals of New Labour; so when the economic turn came at the end of the 2000s, it could respond with nothing but sarcasm and jokes.

One can just hope that the younger generation can do better.

Cameron plays to the gallery on sex crime

2011-02-18T15:02:00.002+01:00

A right to appeal for sex offenders can't generate genuine outrage

David Cameron says he is outraged that the Supreme Court, using powers under the Human Rights Act, has allowed the right of appeal to those placed on the Sexual Offences Register for Life.

Proclaiming outrage merely on account of the idea that someone can appeal against a judicial measure is nothing more than playing to the gallery. Cameron is manipulating the issue to court the Daily Mail and to discredit the Human Rights Act.

That politicians misrepresent events to their advantage is their trade. But people should note that Cameron is stepping into the gutter by wanting to deny even the most basic procedural rights to these modern-day social lepers.

Female students earning money lap dancing

2011-02-15T17:57:00.003+01:00

Higher tuition fees in Britain mean that increasing numbers of female students seek employment as lap dancers

That young women choose to work as lap dancers is not of itself wrong, but there are two things which are not as they should be:

First, many women are forced into this line of work because it is the only way they can fund their education. If they had other ways of funding their studies and only opted for lap dancing to earn addition sums, then there would be no problem.

Second, employment conditions in lap top clubs are almost unregulated. Rather than try to limit or close these clubs (and thereby deny the women the income), the emphasis should be on employment protection rights (e.g. preventing employers imposing “fines”).

No to EDL, Radical Islam and David Cameron

2011-02-10T12:49:00.001+01:00

The English Defence League are fascists: they wish to impose by threats and violence the "cultural values" of what they see as Englishness on everybody - or, in so far as that is impossible, to exclude Muslims from British society.

Radical Islam is similar: its supporters wish to impose a separate and illiberal creed, if not on the whole of British society, at least on their nominally defined co-religionists.

Cameron is a junk politician, who wishes to deflect attention from the economic plight of people by subtly aligning himself with the philosophy of English Defence League, and thus stirring up inter-ethnic tension, while claiming the opposite.

I believe that if we start from these three theses we will understand the situation far more clearly.

Liberal & Fundamentalist Feminism

2011-02-09T15:15:00.002+01:00

The distinction between liberal and fundamentalist feminists is at root no different from that existing in the politics of other oppressed social groups.

The purpose of the feminist is to secure equal rights, outcomes and treatment to men, while the purpose of the radical feminist is to advance the position of women. In a majority of areas, such as employment, both currents share the same agenda. Differences emerge in those few areas of society where women have a privileged position, such as criminal punishment. In these cases, radical feminists will break ranks, and will defend the privileges of women against equality, and in so doing will often join forces with conservatives.

What is History? - E. H. Carr (1961)

2011-02-09T15:13:00.003+01:00

The best book on the theory of history

Sometimes we come across a book which is so powerful that we feel we should have read it years ago. On other occasions we come back to a book which we did not make much of at the time, but on a re-reading wish we had. Such is the case with E. H. Carr’s short book “What is History?”

I took down the dusty volume from my shelf and re-read it last week. I had first attempted to read it at sixteen when an angry history teacher had thrust it into my hands after my writing in a student essay that all major historical events were inevitable. If they weren’t, I had argued, then Marx’s theory of progressive historical development couldn’t be necessarily true.

Carr’s book is a write-up of lectures given in 1961 at Cambridge. Its great strength is that it confronts the fundamental problems of historical theory and by implication those of other social sciences: the role of facts, the individual, causality, objectivity, etc. The language is sharp and clear and Carr produces well-argued answers to all the issues he raises. And though half a century has elapsed since the publication of the work, little in it has dated, save, ironically, the last chapter where Carr attempts to bring his conclusions up-to date.

Much incomprehensible waffle is written about dialectics. But without using obscurantist terminology Carr guides the reader through the interaction of facts and interpretation, the individual and society, accident and pattern in history.

It’s worth a read; and if you’ve read it a re-read.

Links

The Two Faces of E.H. Carr by Professor Richard J. Evans

.

Rules relating to police spies: a couple of common sense suggestions

2011-02-07T16:28:00.000+01:00

Orde has egg all over his face, so he is forced to recommend some compromises. But no-one should hold his or her breath and think that somehow Britain’s secret police state will be checked or held to account as a result. If the police commanders can lie with impunity to Parliament, they can do the same to the judiciary.

Sending police agents as spies into civic organisations is rarely justifiable. But in those cases when it is, the police should have to present convincing evidence to a judge that activists in that organisation are planning specified illegal acts which would cause intended personal injury or major damage to property. Infiltration for general surveillance is never justifiable.

Any such order should stipulate the rules of operation for the agent and the length of time the order is in force. Twelve months after the expiry of the order, the order and its contents should be made public.

Attempted expulsion of editors of Devon Labour Briefing

2011-02-07T14:16:00.000+01:00

Twenty-five years ago tonight, the General Management committee of Exeter Labour Party was due to meet. Before that esteemed body was a recommendation from the Executive Committee of the Party calling for the expulsion of three men in their early twenties. The catch-all charge was engaging in “a sustained course of conduct prejudicial to the party.”

The facts behind the charge were that the three had edited a magazine, Devon Labour Briefing, which had argued for socialist politics and reported facts that the leadership of the party did not like.

The expulsion, though, was never to be. Mr Justice Evans granted them an injunction restraining Exeter Labour Party from interfering with their membership rights. Why? Because the party leadership in its enthusiasm to rid the party of dissident elements had set itself up a judge, jury and executioner without ever clarifying the charge or the evidence against them.

Never ignore police violence

2011-02-02T15:31:00.002+01:00

Anyone who is assaulted by the police should take the following steps:

Report the incident to the police complaints authority (however ineffective)

Visit the doctor (however minor the injury)

Write-up the incident in full and publicise it (however time-consuming and boring)

The campaign against police violence should have number one priority on the left. If the freedom to organise and protest is undermined, no political movement for change is possible.

There are some on the left who box themselves in like this. “Ah,” they say, “we have already analysed the role of the police as elements in the state’s repressive apparatus, so what you are telling us about police violence is nothing new. Next question please” But that's just paralytic intellectualism.

Every case of police assault needs recording.

Police violence is now police policy

2011-01-31T15:30:00.005+01:00

In Britain the policing of demonstrations is increasingly about the punishment of protest. The latest step: CS gas spray.

In medieval times the penalty for anyone who protested against the existing way of things was death.

In Britain in 2011 the police don’t kill peaceful protesters – or at least they don’t do so on purpose. But an old understanding has now gone. It was once thought that if protesters weren’t violent, the police would not cause personal injury to protesters. Now punishing protest has become the purpose of much public order policing. The latest tool is the misuse of CS gas sprays.

In public utterances British police pride themselves in not following the practice of their continental cousins and firing canisters of CS gas into groups of demonstrators. Yet in January 2011, a police officer saw fit to spray CS gas into the eyes of several people passively blocking the entrance to a store in Oxford Street belonging to the tax-avoiding Boots Pharmacy chain. Anyone waiting for this officer to be charged with a serious assault should not hold his or her breath.

The CS gas incident comes against a background of a recent upswing in punishing policing. Most notable has been the use of so-called hyper-kettling involving mass street arrest. Demonstrators are incarcerated in street holding pens for hours in often in sardine-can like conditions without food, water, shelter or medical attention. Those trapped at the edge of the kettle often suffer random beatings from batons and police shields as well as kicks and punches.

The purpose of this policing is the punishment of protesters.

Police everywhere and always identify with the established order and attempt to increase their powers and remit unless checked by political and judicial authorities. The default position of both New Labour and now the Coalition has been near unconditional support for punishment policing. That British politicians and much of the public have failed to oppose this police attack on personal and civil liberties is an outrage that needs addressing.

Note

The Guardian film of the incident brings more details to light. The demonstrators were noisy, but entirely peaceful. A woman pushed a leaflet between the locked doors of Boots and was arrested for criminal damage. Amid the booing and pushing arising from this illegitimate arrest, a male police officer sprayed CS gas at a group of demonstrators. Why he did so is not clear. I tend to suspect he felt threatened, not by the demonstrators, but his own embarrassment at the illegitimate arrest of the woman. A bull whose pride is hurt is a dangerous animal.

The political point remains. Will the police draw back from this escalation of police violence against peaceful protesters? Or will they de facto allow CS gas to become an available tool of punishment, which is what will happen if they fail to prosecute the officer.

Note

1. In matters of police violence, it is important to distinguish between the behaviour of individual police officers and police policy. The police contain a higher proportion of sadists than the general population, and these men and women will take every opportunity to hurt and humiliate. Though the degree of control by superiors may vary from event to event and from time to time, violence of this kind remains fairly constant.

2. The “understanding” of non-violent protest requiring police not to injure protesters has indeed often been honoured in the breach, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet, I believe that Kingsnorth, and more so the G20 demonstrations, revealed a police policy to use violence against public protest as a means of punishing and deterring it. That in my view is a qualitative change.

Woolmer Hill Teachers 1973-78

2011-01-26T16:05:00.018+01:00

This essay contains memory portraits of teachers from Woolmer Hill Secondary School in Haslemere, Surrey from 1973 to 1978.

(Photo: taken in 1967. In the line of six teachers, left to right, No.2: Mr Anning, No.5 Mr Glover, No.6: Mr Sellars. The others are unknown to me)

When we attempt to think back to the past, the flashes of memory which come into our minds resemble photo-stills rather than pieces of moving film. Our minds can summon up any number of these mental snapshots. If we concentrate long enough, the images overflow with detail and trigger powerful emotional responses within us. But rather like stray photographs, these images – whether presented through word or text -make little sense to anyone else without commentary and context. If we wish to transform our memories into coherent narrative, we need to explore the logic of the events which gave rise to the images and tie the events themselves into a wider historical setting.

The focus in this piece of writing is on one particular group of people in an institutional setting, Woolmer Hill school teachers from the years 1973-78. Their personalities are illustrated though events, which I either participated in or else witnessed. But to give meaning to the teachers, the events and my reactions, I often need to make reference to my wider experience of growing up in a small town in the south-east of England in the 1970s.

A word about my subject matter is in order. Schools, like rivers, are never the same at any two moments. They change in three major ways: first, there is turnover of pupils, with new children arriving and adolescents leaving each year; second, teachers themselves often come and go; and finally, and perhaps most significantly, the perspective of the observer changes. The impressions and feelings of a prepubescent eleven-year old are very different from those of the sixteen year-old adolescent.

I have organised my comments on teachers in alphabetic order of surnames. The headmaster until 1977, Mr Anning, does not have an entry here, as he is the subject of a separate essay written in the autumn of 2009. I have also added a date beside each account. The choice of date is influenced by two factors. First, if relevant, by the date of the teacher’s arrival or departure from the school; and second by the year or years in which that particular teacher imposed him or herself most powerfully on my memory.

This essay is a work in progress.

List of teachers in alphabetical order

The following list of Woolmer Hill staff (1973-78) has been compiled from memory, so no doubt it omits some teachers. I have also accredited the teacher with the subject that I remember him or her teaching, but the teacher may have taught other subjects. The initials PT indicate a part time teacher. Teachers who are discussed below are in bold script; the exception is Mr Anning where a hyperlink is provided to his written portrait.

Mr Leslie Anning (Geography, head), Mrs Ashworth (Biology), Mr Chris Baker (Metalwork), Mr E. Baker (PT anything), Miss Catharine Bishop (Biology), Mrs Odile Blewett (English), Miss Britnell (Geography), Cdr. Campbell (Maths), Miss Campbell, (Physics), Mr Robert Cantan (Chemistry), Mrs Cash (English), Mrs Chaney (Biology), Mrs Christopher (Geography), Mr Gabriel Cohen (Music), Mr Gordon Glover (Maths), Mrs Gray (English), Mrs Green (German), Mr Greenwood (French & German), Mrs Grice (Music), Mr Heslop (English), Mrs Kay Hollingdale (Maths), Mr Howell (Religious Education), Mrs James (PT German), Mr Jimpson (anything), Mr King (Religious Education), Mr Nicolas Kite (French & Spanish), Mr Alex MacShane (German), Mr McNally (Maths), Mr Metcalf (PT anything). Mrs Morgan nee Davis (English), Mr Murffit (Woodwork), Mrs Myall (Maths), Mr Pavey (Technical Drawing). Mrs Iris Prizeman (Geography), Mrs Sampson (History), Mrs Scales (Physical Education), Miss Margaret Savage (History), Mr Sellars (Physical Education), Mrs Stevens (English), Mrs Thackeray (Current Affairs), Miss Topliss (French), Mr Godfrey Trench aka Chenevix-Trench (History), Mr Williams (Science), Mr Andrew Winter (Physical Education)

Interestingly, there seems no pattern to whether I ever knew or can remember the teachers’ first names.

The mind tends to remember a person as looking as he or she did on the last occasion that we saw him or her. Of course we know that the person has aged, but we cannot know what the person looks like now. It was 1978 or earlier when I last saw any of these teachers, except for brief momentary street meetings in the couple of years after I left Woolmer Hill with Anning, Jimpson and Kyte. If we say that in 1978 their maximum age range was 25-65, then now in 2011the range would be 58-98. In other words, these teachers are now nearly all retirees or in many cases dead. The only two whom I actually know are dead are Mr Anning (1990) and Mr Trench (2005).

One further point should be brought out here. The organisation of this essay could be seen to suggest that Woolmer Hill Secondary School can be understood simply by a summation of the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of these teachers. I don’t believe that such a methodology would be correct. Of course these teachers brought their personalities into the school, but how they behaved was as members of a social group, even if not a homogenous one. It was not personalities but the wider society and the closed institution of Woolmer Hill School that gave meaning to and ordered the behaviour of the teachers – and not just the teachers, but also the school management and pupils. Life at the school was certainly influenced by the combined effects of the idiosyncrasies of individual teachers, but it cannot be adequately explained in that way. Understanding the social structures which caused the school to be as it was would be necessary for a comprehensive explanation, but it is not the topic of this essay. These structures will only be mentioned peripherally in the sketches below, rather than have centre stage as they deserve.

Mr Jimpson: “a little Hitler” (remembered from 1978)

He was one of those ex-military teachers for whom the instillation in the young of what he would regard as “respect” trumped the acquisition of skills and knowledge. His view of youth, it seemed to me, was unreservedly pessimistic: only the constant intervention of a raised voice and sometimes worse would coral the young onto the right path.

His favourite milieu was the realm of discipline. If the colour of your pullover fell on the margins of school uniform rules, he was the one who would make an issue of it, while the majority of teachers would fail to notice it. When you walked arm-in-arm along a path with your girlfriend, it was he who would threaten you with the bucket of cold water.

Given his predispositions, he gravitated towards being the jack-of-all-trades teacher who occupied himself with the lower streamed classes. Yet for those who looked up to him and saw him as “Jimbo” he granted licence; he would reward the respect he craved so much.

As he played out the role of school policeman, he needed a mate. I remember clearly his ganging up with the young teacher, Miss Davis, who soon became a Mrs Morgan. The two formed a cross generational alliance in favour of this conservative respect agenda, patrolling the school together with their noses trained for trouble. She left but he remained until I left the school in 1978.

He rode a high horse, and was sustained in the saddle only by his institutional position. So when I left school in the summer of 1978 his authority wilted; if I had met him a year or so later I could not have distinguished him from any other middle-aged man in the supermarket queue.

Mr Kyte (remembered 1973-78)

School students always have a special affinity with teachers who joined the school at the same time as they do. In September 1973 Mr Kyte and I shared that experience at Woolmer Hill.

I liked him. Small but flamboyant, he strode around with his jacket over his shoulders. True, he radiated a sense of arrogance, but that was not solely directed towards the pupils, but also towards the absurdities of headmaster Anning’s ossified authoritarian regime then running the school.

Mr Kyte taught French. Several times a week we poured into his disorderly class. Never did we hear a French tape or speak the language, but instead we were given exciting tasks like writing ten sentences in the past tense using a selected set of verbs. Yet, I learnt French to O level standard under him, when most in the class did not. Why?

By allowing chaos to prevail unhindered, he had time on his hands to deal with those who wanted to learn. I, with a couple of others, asked him what we wanted to know and he helped us. For us at least he was a good teacher.

In my second year he was my class teacher. His ease of manner and non-intrusive approach to dealing with students was much appreciated after the Victorian governess approach of Miss Savage in our first year.

As to his so-called scandalous behaviour, I cannot now remember whether I didn’t know about it at the time – or whether I knew about it, but simply didn’t consider scandalous and worth remembering.

Mrs Myall (remembered 1974-78)

Mrs Myall joined the school in my second year and became our new maths teacher. At the time I was a little put out as I had taken to my previous teacher, Mr McNally. Tiny in stature, Mrs Myall pumped out from the very first a stream of anger and sarcasm, which rather missed its mark because we actually wanted to learn maths.

In those dying days of Headmaster Anning’s ossified authoritarian regime, I never saw her as one of his stalwarts. There was something too individualistic in her approach to discipline. One moment she would pounce on some petty rule violation and the next let something else pass with a smile.

One severe fault running through her, though, was her favouritism manifesting itself in a licence given to some boys. I remember coming in from swimming with wet hair and in response to a sarcastic remark shaking the droplets from my still wet hair all over her with total impunity. Yet there were limits; she imposed them though often unfairly, which was why many feared her.

Only on one point did I become silently angry with her. She decided to tell Rosemary, from who I was inseparable in our final year, that our relationship was not psychologically good for us. I disagreed then, and even though the relationship is now only a distant memory, I still do today.

She taught maths with enthusiasm and was willing to be sought out for additional help when needed, and for that I give credit. Yet by my fifth year I was becoming tired of her idiosyncratic discipline and sought to be free of an institution in which you were so readily subject to the whim of others.

Mr Trench: remembered 1973-78

Mr Trench taught history. In my first year at the school 1973-74, he did not teach us eleven-year-olds, so he became one of those teachers you knew by name and passed in the corridor. He was then in his mid-fifties. Wearing a jacket that had seen better days, he strode manically along the corridors between lessons, his head strangely skewed to one side clutching in each hand a cloth carrier bag filled with papers. The fact that he never pulled you up for inappropriate behaviour, but looked on with a slight grin, strangely made him a little frightening. I always wondered what he would be like, if he really did lose his temper. But I never found out.

I first encountered him in lessons in my second year. His methods were traditional. He talked and asked questions; we copied from books and from the blackboard; and we wrote things up for homework. Yet, he tried to make everything we did as interesting as possible and was never averse to jokes and funny stories. Rarely for Woolmer Hill, he showed respect to his pupils. That endowed Mr Trench with an authority which engendered a respect that I and my classmates valued to the extent that we didn’t muck around in his lessons.

He took the time to rent films for his history lessons, which brightened up the subject. If there were time at the end of the lessons, we were allowed to see them backwards for a laugh. Invariably, before Christmas he showed us the Pickwick Papers and from time to time even read us stories.

His influence on me extended outside the classroom. Physical education was always a bore for me, and I made no effort during games such as football, attempting to avoid the ball and not caring who won. On one occasion, Mr Trench was sent outside to supervise football and I remember my attitude changing. I wanted to impress him by playing my best, a best which in fact was not very good.

His attitude to authority was askew. The never said anything that suggested criticism of authority, but he was no sycophant for Headmaster Anning’s suffocating regime in the school. I always remember during a break, when we were meant to be outside, taking refuge in the toilets during one of Mr Anning’s corridor patrols. Mr Trench was asked check the toilets; he saw us but went out, telling Mr Anning that there was nobody there. Even more, I remember the heavy grin on Mr Trench’s face after sixteen-year-old Gayle Weingartner, in the school swimming gala in 1975, managed to topple Mr Anning into the swimming pool.

I came to know Mr Trench most in my fourth and fifth years when I studied twentieth century world history with him. We were a small group of five or six pupils. Though Maths and French had also engaged my interest, there was no doubt that history was my favourite subject. Mr Trench recommended and lent out books and I read them avidly. I began to better plan and structure my writing.

For me, aged fourteen to sixteen, history was still understood only as an interconnected narrative. Though I held liberal views on matters, I had no access to social theory of any kind; and Mr Trench never presented me with any. Yet within that space, Mr Trench was remarkably tolerant and respectful of differing opinions. I had learnt that from him in my second year in the school when he had asked us to evaluate laissez faire philosophy. Everybody got top marks irrespective of our views.

To this day, I do not know whether Mr Trench was a wet aristocratic Tory who believed that kindness and tolerance brought out the best in the lower orders - or whether he had deliberately taken up state school teaching to further progressive ends. Whichever it was, he influenced my academic life.

When I came to select my A-level subject, my first choice was history, and I selected sociology and economics because these subjects were the closest to history. As it turned out, I found A-level history, requiring study of the sixteenth century, relatively uninteresting. Mr Trench was also left behind in another sense: with my discovery of Marxism, a new light was shed on the twentieth century and a mental re-organisation of events took place. Yet I retained a clear picture of people, events, dates and places, 1914-78, thanks to Mr Trench.

I never saw Mr Trench again after I left Woolmer Hill in June 1978, so I don’t know when he retired, nor when he left Haslemere. My re-discovery of him only occurred in the late 2000s when by chance I decided to google his name and found biographical information - something not possible for other former teachers. Mr Trench stands apart in that his family has a publicly available history. A few points drawn from it may serve to shed further light on the man.

The first point is that the surname “Trench” was only the second part of a double-barrelled aristocratic name “Chenevix-Trench.” He had obviously chosen to be known by the name “Trench” either to conceal his aristocratic past or to hide references to his notorious brother - or both. Mr Trench was decorated in the Second World War and rose to the rank of Commander in the British Navy, but unlike the maths teacher at Woolmer Hill, Commander Campbell, he used the simple title, “Mr Trench.” His modesty enhanced his authority.

So what of his brother? His younger brother Anthony (1919-79) was also a school teacher but one of a very different kind. As a public school housemaster at Shrewsbury and later headmaster of Eton (1964-70), he gave full expression to his flagellomania, applying belts and canes to bare bottoms with glee, as former pupil testimony amply details. Against a brother with this reputation, Mr Trench did well to conceal his rather conspicuous surname. Yet no man should be judged by the behaviour of his brother.

In conclusion, the underlying beliefs and motives of Mr Trench must remain unknown. Yet for me he was a rare beacon of kindness at Woolmer Hill: one of the few teachers who would always try to make your life easier. I recall fondly how he sent me a personal letter of congratulation when I obtained a Grade A in my O level history exam. Though I never visited it, I remember his house on the outskirts of Haslemere and I always thought of him whenever I passed it, even long after he had ceased to live there. He was a good man and a good teacher, who should not be forgotten.

Commander Godfrey Maxwell Chenevix-Trench (1917-2005)

Other former pupils have commented on Mr Trench:

I read about Mr Trench with interest I remember him well as he did teach me and was a tutor at one point and would always say on wet days "nice weather for ducks today".

Karen B.

Ah Mr Trench. I too really enjoyed his lessons. Remember how he used to hang onto the top of the blackboard with one hand while writing with the other? And of course Pickwick EVERY Christmas. He wrote a very nice letter to me (& I assume all his class) congratulating me on my O level. He once described the conditions his grandmother lived through in Paris whilst it was beseiged by the Russian army - that would tie in with what you say about his family history.

David R.

Links to related posts

Woolmer Hill School, Haslemere 1973-78

Mr Anning remembered (1973-77)

Corporal Punishment at Woolmer Hill School in the mid 1970s

Going home and the Little Chef

.

Stalinism: its meaning and role

2011-01-21T13:10:00.003+01:00

It is unhelpful to use the term “Stalinism” to discuss contemporary British politics.

In nearly every case, it is much better to use: authoritarian, illiberal, intolerant, bureaucratic, arbitrary, etc., depending on the exact meaning one wants to convey. Comprehension is always aided by choosing precise language to represent social phenomena. But what is Stalinism? And when is it correct to use the term?

I think it is possible to distinguish two valid uses of Stalinism. In a narrow usage, we can talk about the politics of Stalin in the Soviet Union, and by extension in the world communist movement, from the late 1920s through to Stalin’s death in 1953. In discussions of British politics that usage is only relevant for reflecting on the history of the British Labour movement.

In a broader sense, however, we can use Stalinism to refer to Stalin and his henchmen’s poisonous bequest to the worker’s movement across the world. Stalinism has the following characteristics:

- The party is committed in name to realising the interests of the working class and bringing about social progress.
- A hierarchical top-down managed party is desired in which members are required to obey the leadership.
- Party policy has the form of a directive which is binding on all members; dissent amounts to treason.
- Intellectual and cultural matters are subordinate to party policy and thinking.
- All other organisations should be brought into line with party policy.
- Maintaining the leading role of the party is the first priority of all activity and trumps all moral and other political principles.

When parties of this kind come into power the whole of society is organised around these principles. These ideas formed the backbone of communist rule in Eastern Europe 1948-89; though often in practice some of these principles were compromised.

In the first three quarters of the twentieth century, Stalinism cast its dark shadow, not just within communist parties, but also as a pathology which came to plague many people on the wider left. Let me give one extreme example to indicate the pathology.

Artur London, a Czech communist, suffered the show trials of the early fifties, and despite his wife calling for the severest penalties to be inflicted on her husband, he was merely sentenced to life imprisonment. On rehabilitation in the early sixties, he was asked whether his confession had resulted from torture. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but had I insisted upon my own innocence, some people would have believed me and that would have undermined people’s faith in the Party.’

The Artur London syndrome, namely total personal identification with a political movement, functioned effectively because it drew on two sources. One was to summon up a subconscious desire for religion and submission to a God, though in this case a secular one, the Party. The other was the practical idea (but in my view a false one) that a monolithic body of people acting always in unison could achieve the Promised Land whereas an assembly of free individuals never could.

Today, the influence of Stalinism in Britain remains in two locations, both quite marginal. One is the tiny groups of people who run political parties, which resemble sects or political museums. The other is a generation of older New Labour politicians who were themselves once members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, e.g. John Reid, Kim Howells, who carry their Stalinist political baggage like a prisoner with a ball and chain.

A police spy in Exeter in the late 1980s

2011-01-20T15:01:00.003+01:00

In the late 1980s the socialist group, Devon Labour Briefing, was briefly infiltrated by a police spy.

In the second half of the 1980s, Briefing met regularly in our house in Culverland Road in Exeter. There was plenty of planning to do preparing for Labour Party meetings; attempts to expel me and two of my colleagues from the Labour Party had required court action; and there was a perennial need to discuss politics. Into one such meeting came a new alleged supporter of Briefing, a young man in his late twenties, fit but prematurely balding and overflowing with enthusiasm. My clearest memory of him was his squatting under the window in our front room and trying to chat with everybody present.

Before the start of the meeting, I had a short chat with him. Where had he heard of Devon Labour Briefing? Well, he had bought our magazine in a town bookshop, had become overwhelmed with interest, and so had decided to come along. Great! No, he was not a member of the Labour Party yet, but was very interested in joining. How exactly he had got hold of my address was left unsaid, but of course he was welcome to come in and meet the group.

I did not denounce him to the meeting because, although I thought he was a police spy, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure at that point. I went out into the kitchen with a senior Briefing colleague and I discovered that we both had the same opinion. The last thing we wanted to do was insult someone who might join us and boost the strength of the group. My knowing that he was probably a police spy allowed the tables to be turned at least half way: we could observe him, too.

I can’t now recall the flow of discussion in the meeting, but I do remember thinking about him during the meeting. In fact there was very little reason for concern: nothing that we did was illegal and most of our actions and pronouncements were in the public domain anyway. He could report what he liked to his superiors; and I supposed that he had only been sent along because there was little worthwhile undercover work to do in the south-west of England. How long would his infiltration last? What would happen if he were denounced? The danger, it seemed to me, was not what he would do in the group, but how to handle the fact that he was there. Should we state publicly the fact that Briefing had been infiltrated. What were the dangers involved in doing so?

If we published the information in Briefing, the news would spread immediately to Exeter Labour Party. For the right-wing Labourites who were tyring to expel Briefing from the party the fact that the police were interested in Briefing would be a publicity coup. “Ah,” they would say, “Look, these Briefing people don’t just cause us problems, but they are criminals. Why else would the police worry about them?” I didn’t see any advantage in letting that happen. The news would hardly help Briefing internally, either. By the mid 1980s Briefing had recruited supporters among Exeter University staff and other professionals, mostly in the education sector. I had always detected in many of them a desire for respectability, and telling them about police infiltrators might give them grounds for moving away from Briefing.

But there was another reason, too, for keeping all this quiet. Discussion of police infiltration, spying and surveillance in small close-knit groups often becomes a fascinating topic for its members and can lead to all types of paranoia and silliness. The focus of Briefing had to be our own survival in the Labour Party and our continued promotion of the issues that mattered. Getting excited about spying and police infiltration was a distraction.

A few years earlier a supporter of Briefing, who was not in Exeter Labour Party on the grounds that he was a member of the Party elsewhere, had offered to arrange to put one particular right-wing Labour opponent of ours in hospital “if it was useful.” I had heard first-hand accounts of his work with violence and disapproved strongly. We stuck firmly to the view that in the struggle inside Exeter Labour Party, we would not be the first to use violence.

Now it occurred to me that if anyone associated with Briefing in the past had been a police agent, it would have been that practitioner of violence. Had we accepted his poisoned ‘invitation,’ we might well have been entrapped. Additionally, if we had possessed a department which concerned itself with violence and other forms of illegality, this current infiltration by police would have caused a problem. The end result would have been that everything we did became concerned with undercover activities and our political purposes would have suffered under the weight of such distractions.

At the end of the meeting the police spy expressed his continued interest in Briefing and asked whether we had any political literature for him to read. Genuine new recruits need it pushed down their throats. I had duplicates of nearly everything we had published and I handed them to him. He offered to pay for them, but I refused the money, telling him he could return them at a future meeting. Surely, he saw the importance of saving trees! Quite obviously, he had been told to pay for anything he took away, so was quite put out by my refusal to accept money.

A few days later the postman delivered a large A4 envelope containing all the propaganda material I had given him. Everything was in order and neatly clipped together. Inside the envelope was a scribbled note saying that he was no longer interested in Briefing. I have to admit that I felt a little let down because we didn’t warrant a more serious police investigation.

A week or so afterwards, I was walking down Exeter High Street when coming towards me was the young police spy. I put on my friendliest smile and greeted in him the warmest terms, giving every indication that I wanted to speak to him. He abruptly told me that he was in a hurry and almost ran away.

The 1980s were a time when the Thatcher government were interested in curtailing the rights of trades unions and restricting the powers of left-leaning local councils. They had little interest in attempting to control and repress the rest of civil society; that had to wait for the arrival of New Labour. No doubt, had that meeting in my house taken place twenty years later, FIT police officers would be openly filming everybody attending. But in those days we didn’t see ahead to what our right-wing opponents in the Labour Party would do when in office.

The media and information

2011-01-14T14:08:00.005+01:00

Among the Left there is little doubt that the mass-access media functions for the most part to reinforce the capitalist order.

The analyses of how that is precisely brought about are well known and I won’t rehearse the arguments here. What I would like to do in this post is to introduce a distinction, which also throws up a contradiction in the present age.

On the one hand, we have the ability with the aid of the new electronic media (embracing blogs, internet forums, etc) to access hitherto unprecedented amounts of information in the form of raw material relating to social and political matters. By actively seeking out such information, I am better informed today than ever before. And if further proof of this point is needed, people need only look at the Wikileaks exposures, the wider Assange case or the more recent infiltration of environmental groups by police spies to see that key facts (or alleged facts)can be exchanged directly between citizens.

When socialists talk about media bias what they are referring to is how information is synthesised in newsprint, on radio and on TV. The creation of digestible meaning out of the raw material of information by news organisations involves selection, omission, choice of terminology and comparison, etc. In fact any attempt to provide information to others involves synthesis. For example in a recent post I juxtaposed the Woollard and Tomlinson cases in a single contribution to produce a particular meaning: I did not introduce any information which was new to most readers.

The complaint is that the media corporation synthesise information in a particular way to convey pro-capitalist and conservative meanings. The vast majority of ordinary people never get beyond the reception of this pre-packed synthesised information in the mass media, all of which has been put together by commercial and state bodies.

Edward Woollard: the meaning of his harsh sentence

2011-01-13T13:43:00.004+01:00

Britain treats illegal violence against the state very differently from illegal violence committed by state officials.

In January 2011 Edward Woollard (18), who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of Tory HQ at lines of police, was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail for violent disorder. Apparently, the harsh sentence handed out to the youngster was intended to send a message to the British people. But what is the message?

Woollard is undoubtedly a stupid youth who almost certainly didn't intend to hurt anyone in his irresponsible act, and he didn't. Yet, every institution of the state has been quickly lined up to punish him and make an example of him.

It is interesting, then, to compare Woollard’s case with that of PC Simon Harwood, the police officer who fatally assaulted the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, during the G20 demonstrations in April 2009. Harwood, a trained police office, certainly did intend to hurt and injure Ian Tomlinson by tuncheoning him and hurling him to the ground; but in his case every institution of the state was lined up to prevent him from being held to account for his actions.

These two examples taken together show the real message sent by the British state to the people. Violence by people against the state is given exemplary punishment; illegal violence by police against the people is brushed under the carpet.

Is the undercover cop, Mark Kennedy, guilty of rape?

2011-01-12T13:45:00.003+01:00

In Britain an undercover police officer, Mark Kennedy, infiltrated the environmental movement and became a leading "activist" from 2003 to 2010. His job involved information gathering and acting as an agent provocateur.

During that time he had sexual relations with several women in the environmental movement. Whether his prime motivation was to have sex or to gain information, it is clear that his relationships must have provided him with information for his police handlers.

It’s an interesting point that if a woman is used to carry out a honey trap against a male the issue would rightly surround whether using a honey traps was justified in the circumstances. If the aim were merely to gather information about protest groups, it would not be.

I cannot imagine the male arguing that he was subject to non-consensual sex because he did not know the woman was a police agent.

I understand that the women is rightly angry, and if the woman met Kennedy again she might be forgiven for spitting in his face. But is is guilty or rape - or even a sexual assault - definitely not.

The Kennedy case reveals, I believe, criminal behaviour on the part of the police, but talk of rape and non-consensual sex is an irrelevant diversion.

Distance & Deference

2011-01-12T13:43:00.000+01:00

Konrad has written an interesting post about how ‘distance’ has increased in society. He related John Cole’s anecdote about the journalist’s chance meeting out on the road with Clement Atlee, and his obtaining an impromptu interview with him. Or there is the story about Harold Wilson as a child being photographed on the steps of 10 Downing Street.

In 2011 every interaction between the unknown is clothed in security considerations. Walk up to David Cameron and security agents will jump on you; Downing Street is gated off to the public. No-one lets his or her child walk to school unaccompanied.

Violence today is probably less than it was in the immediate post-war years, but the private angst of the isolated individual has undoubtedly increased. And on another plain, deference to authority has declined; the legitimacy of the royals, bankers, policemen, politicians, etc. has crashed.

In the 1950s the assault on the royal car would have produced universal outcry with the only issue of debate being the whether birching should be re-introduced. Today beside the humbug of outrage are the wry smiles of those who appreciate the humiliation of these royal parasites.

As the ideological grip on society slips, so the repressive arm assumes greater prominence. We see this today with the growth of an ever more repressive state apparatus. It is a sad truth that the existing capitalist order can be de-legitimised and stand on the brink of more serious crisis without socialism standing in the wings as an alternative.

Police spies, agent provocateurs and rape in Britain

2011-01-10T17:36:00.005+01:00

British police have infiltrated civic organisations with agents, who operate undercover for years as spies and agent provocateurs.

The police infiltration of environmental organisations in Britain is an attack on the civic right of freedom of assembly in a country which is supposed to be a liberal democracy. It undermines the very fabric of civil society when at any public protest meeting what you say is fed by spies into police records and any protest you suggest, however legal, is interfered with by police agent provocateurs.

British environmental groups either act within the law or engage in non-violent direct action (NVDA), which in practice means that they eschew acts of violence and engage from time to time in minor or symbolic acts of vandalism. Lawbreaking is no more of feature of their activities than it is of any average business in Britain. In that context, the infiltration of police agents, costing some quarter of a million pounds per head, is not only disproportionate and inappropriate, but a squander of resources driven by police and government paranoia.

But there is another aspect to this. Long term spies, in the case of Mark Kennedy working undercover for seven years, violate the personal rights of all those whose lives are interfered with by these agents. The worst violation is obviously against the women, and perhaps some men, who were wooed into bed by the agents. But wrong was also done to all the activists who befriended the police spies, trusted them and shared their personal lives with them. Every single environmental activist affected in this way has a legitimate claim against this disproportionate stasi-style form of policing.

The case against this kind of repressive, disproportionate and manipulative policing is so strong that it would be a pity to deflect the argument, as some insist on doing, into one about whether the male agents committed rape. They did not; the fact that the women did not know the backgrounds of the men with whom they freely consented to sex does not mean that there was no consent to the act of penetrative sex.

These women, and maybe some men, were, nonetheless, violated by the state, which set out to entrap them, and they deserve an apology and compensation. The police officers, both the agents themselves but more particularly their commanders, deserve prosecution, although we know that will never happen. The claim of rape, however, will just deflect the argument away from its true strength.

Notes

1. Some say we shouldn’t be surprised that the state infiltrates civic organisations. I agree; I am not so naïve as to be surprised. Yet, it still remains the case that according to the norms of liberal democracy much of what the police have done is wrong. Socialists are on the strongest ground, not when they decry the limitations of liberal democracy, but when they point out that the existing state is far from liberal and far from democratic.

2. Some are surprised that the environmental movement was specifically targeted for infiltration. (Strictly speaking we don’t know, as any number of other organisations may be infiltrated and we don’t know about it). I am less surprised, though. By the mid-2000s, save for the ephemeral anti-Iraq demonstrations, all progressive opposition to Blair’s status quo had withered away, except the anti-globalisation/environmental protesters. New Labour was an authoritarian totalising project, so it is no surprise that these political activists should be re-branded ‘domestic extremists’ and subject to infiltration, surveillance and repression.

David Chaytor, guilty yes, but a fall guy

2011-01-09T12:38:00.005+01:00

Every time a chink of light falls on the British establishment, be it Iraq or parliamentarians expenses, mendacity and corruption are revealed.

We can debate whether imprisoning David Chaytor at great public expense is necessary. Learning about his humiliation in Wandsworth prison as his anus is searched for contraband can indeed gratify the revenge lust, but much better would be to have him do several years of community service, so he would contribute something to society rather than becoming a further drain on it.

That said, it is clear to me that the man is a fall guy. He, and perhaps later a couple of others, are to be thrown to the lions in an attempt to prove that wrong-doing is being taken seriously when overall it is not.

We should be careful to avoid the situation in which savouring the humiliation of Chaytor, the petty cheat, serves to divert public attention away from those who have done far worse.

FIDESZ is no solution

2011-01-05T14:43:00.000+01:00

In April 2010 FIDESZ won 53% of the vote and a two-thirds majority of seats in Parliament.

Since then they have taken several steps to weaken Hungarian democracy, involving emasculating the constitutional court, filling every state position with FIDESZ appointees - and finally taking the power to censor the media.

In economic affairs they have seized workers' privately invested pension funds and imposed windfall taxes on large foreign investors in Hungary. Recent tax changes massively favour the well-off. All of these measures delay the crisis of, rather than solve, Hungary's desperate economic situation.

Only a fool would consider these measures as left-wing: they are a nationalist-populist-authoritarian assault on democracy and liberal values. For a time nationalist drum banging satisfies the ignorant, but it will not put bread on table; and it certainly won't be the first time that Hungarians have been burnt by the fires of nationalism that they themselves have stoked.

Against gender segregation in education

2011-01-04T17:05:00.000+01:00

I think Mrs Low can only have written this book to generate controversy and laughs.

Schools are about preparing children and young people to function in life. Real life consists of a symbiotic relationship between males and females. The education of girls apart from boys and vice versa is highly detrimental to both sexes. The only other institutions that separate the sexes in this way is prisons.

If girls suffer discrimination in mixed schools, then that is a matter that needs addressing in the mixed schools; it is not solved by segregation.

As for the advice to parents, it is little more than condescending twaddle.

Education is not employment skills

2011-01-04T17:02:00.000+01:00

"There is no difference between academic skills and employment skills,"

This is such utter nonsense it is hard to take seriously a person who would say it. Why? A person with good employment skill is someone (rightly or wrongly) who can prostitute him or herself to those with money and power. A good academic is someone who can discover the truth despite money and power.

With the corruption of university academic life in Britain, it will soon be the case that serious academic work can only done outside universities.

Some of those with money and power have worked hard for it others not.

I am not making any moral evaluation about seeking employment. We all do it. When I am at work I carry out tasks according to the instructions of someone else. I execute those tasks irrespective of whether I think what I am doing is effective or not, right or wrong.

When I study my state of mind is quite different. I am concerned with what is true. I answer to nobody. Money and power has no purchase. My state of mind is quite different

Asking for a kiss

2010-12-23T17:12:00.000+01:00

There is something wrong in my mind with the response the author is advocating - at least where the situation does not threaten violence.

Man: "Hey, give me a kiss it’s Christmas." And the woman calls the police to report a crime.

I would like to see a society in which young women felt empowered rather than be treated as helpless victims of male predation who need state support to walk down the street.

Unless an interaction comes to direct physical assault, the inferior position of the woman is purely psycho-social. It can be overcome. She can choose what to do: a relatively mild but firm, “Leave me alone.” to a stronger “Fuck off!”

That works with most men. And for those who continue to hassle the woman, yes then involve the police.

After all, few want a society in which men can’t flirt with women because of fear of prosecution and because of gender equality considerations woman couldn’t flirt with men either. The good intentions of the article writer pave the road to Hell.

The student protesters are not just yobs

2010-12-14T17:53:00.002+01:00

It is true that among the demonstrators there are yobs who disfigure the movement and cause pointless pain and damage. But in facing the destruction of their education and accelerated levels of police violence, many young people are not inclined to receive pain without payback. And that payback, mostly in the form of petty and symbolic vandalism, is dwarfed by the level of state violence deployed against them.

2010-12-14T17:49:00.001+01:00

What leaves me wondering is why a prominent Swedish lawyer and politician, Claes Borgstrom, and then a state persecutor, Marianne Ny, should go to so much trouble to re-open a case which, as far a sex crimes go, is a relatively minor one, even if true – and more than that is almost impossible to prove.

The facts of the case suggest little chance of a successful prosecution if only because the case can only revolve around his word against hers about events occurring during what started out as consensual sex in bed in a private place. Moreover, the subsequent behaviour of the two women point in the direction of malicious accusations.

Some might argue that Claes Borgstrom and his compliant prosecutor want to score points for gender politics by focussing on a prominent but vulnerable individual like Assange. But that hardly makes sense. Across the world the charges levelled against Assange make Sweden look ridiculous.

Added to that, it needs to be explained why Sweden issued a “most wanted” notice to Interpol for the arrest of Assange. Higher authority than Ny must have been involved.

In short, it seems as if the women are not honey-trap agents, but became somebody’s useful idiots after the event. What needs explanation is why the case is pursued by Sweden with such vigour, when Sweden’s best interest would seemly be served by being rid of the man

The nonsense in Sweden's case against Assange

2010-12-14T17:21:00.001+01:00

The Swedes say they haven’t charged him, and they just want to question him. Assange says he is prepared to answer their questions; and Swedish prosecutors are in the court hearing today.

Why are Swedish prosecutors prepared to travel to Britain to attempt to get him extradited to Sweden but not to question him in Britain?

Why is it so important that these questions can only be answered in Sweden?

Kettling: what it means

2010-12-11T16:49:00.000+01:00

What we are a seeing is the normalisation of police brutality; and police brutality being used as an instrument of public policy.

Kettling is the process of mass arbitrary arrest by means of detention in street holding pens; incarceration lasts for several hours without food, water, shelter, toilet facilities or medical attention. Often those subject to detention suffer baton beatings and other assaults.

Precisely because this assault on personal and civic liberty has become normal, it is no longer newsworthy.

Kettling is a form of collective punishment in order to intimidate demonstrators and anybody else thinking of protesting in the future. Police now prefer collective punishment through kettling to attempting to apprehend wrong-doers.

Can the state wither away?

2010-12-09T16:45:00.000+01:00

The nation is an imagined community; the state is not illusory at all.

I agree that both Stalinism and social-democracy seek to enhance the role of the state: the former wishes to replace the market and build up state repression; the latter wishes to substitute the market to some degree and expand social welfare. In both cases the instrument is the state.

Marx’s notion of the “withering away of the state” is largely nonsensical. The state, an entity confined by history and geography, is an amalgam of law, administration and coercive violence in which each element is dependent on the other two. To imagine society in the absence of these institutions is fanciful.

The question is not whether the state, but what kind of state.

For flat rate universal entitlements

2010-12-08T16:11:00.001+01:00

Welfare benefits for those with no income should be based on flat rate universal entitlements.

The problem of once better-off workers falling on hard times when they lose their jobs should be dealt with differently. While in work, a proportion of salary should be held in compulsory savings, which becomes available to supplement other benefits in the event of unemployment, sickness or old age. (Sums left in the pot on death would be inheritable).

Some may argue, not without justification, that British salaries are not enough to sustain compulsory savings. That is an argument for higher salaries which would make it possible for people to sustain themselves throughout their working lives.

Is the British state a threat to socialists?

2010-12-07T17:49:00.002+01:00

To what extent could the British state become a threat to socialists? The simple answer is that I don’t know.

My rough guess would be this: the security apparatus monitors anybody who either in opinion or deed questions the existing power structure in Britain. Monitoring of the internet is ubiquitous; and no doubt all our names along with other details are logged.

Yet the number of people who roughly agree with what we say could be counted in the millions, but only very occasionally do they articulate their thoughts on the net or elsewhere. But that still leaves a few thousands of people who do comment or act regularly and who also urge others to do so. It is these people who are identified on security lists.

Britain, though, is not about to throw liberal democracy overboard wholesale and cull its left-wing critics, as per Indonesia 1965 or Chile 1973. Therefore, I see little personal danger. The only adverse consequence might occur in the unlikely event of anybody getting near a ‘sensitive’ position in the British state; they would be blacklisted immediately. I for one can live with that.

The Internet: Influence and Limitations

2010-12-06T18:15:00.002+01:00

The internet has brought about the single biggest expansion in freedom of communication in the age of market fundamentalism. This is exceptional because in the last three decades nearly every other indicator of social progress has gone into reverse: the size and influence of civic organisations, moves to advance social equality and security, traditional civic freedoms, etc.

Of course the internet has facilitated not just left-wing political communication but also other hitherto restricted topics of communication, particularly minority sexual interests. The main channels of internet communication are email messages, discussion boards and internet sites. The ability to find information has multiplied a thousand-fold.

Some people say that the internet is the cause of a decline in face-to-face political contacts. I don’t think so. I know of no socialist who prefers writing facebook messages to having the discussion face-to-face. The fact is the internet substitutes when face-to-face contact is impossible, as letters and telephone calls did in an earlier age.

For me the three main dangers of politics on the internet are these:

First, the internet not only allows political communication widely and relatively freely but also facilitates near total state surveillance of the correspondence of activists. Yet in the liberal democracies if one is already known as a left-wing activist, this hardly makes a difference. For instance I would be quite happy to make this post public and attach my name to it.

Second, there is always the danger of the internet being made unavailable in whole or in part, as the recent attempted suppression of FitWatch and WikiLeaks has shown. Common sense dictates that people should prepare for that eventuality, though I doubt whether many people actually do that.

Third, there is something more subtle and insidious. When we communicated more in printed articles, reading a five thousand word article was a normal occurrence. Who does that easily or willingly on the net? We have become accustomed to reading no more than a few hundred words in an on-line post or article, before clicking and moving on. That attention-span deficiency has affected the whole way in which we acquire and structure information.

The Meaning of the Wikileaks leaks

2010-12-04T13:59:00.001+01:00

The US embassy cables put into the public domain by Wikileaks do not contain any top secret intelligence and hardly tell us anything that we did not already suspect. Nevertheless, they are important in two ways: first, they are highly embarrassing to the US, so those who oppose US imperial power around the world can enjoy the Schadenfreude; and second – and more importantly – they provide evidence for much of what the left has previously believed to be true.

For me the most interesting is the confirmation of the utter subservience of the British government (both New Labour and the Coalition) to US interests. The constant and repeated mendacity of Blair-Brown government is well illustrated; for instance in deceiving the electorate and parliament on matters such as the outlawing of cluster bombs for PR purposes while clandestinely allowing the US to continue to hold them on British soil.

That Liam Fox gave full details of planned military procurement to the US Embassy hardly raises as eyebrow. Yet it is interesting to note that when the cables revealed that a FDP official had given details of the coalition negotiations in Germany to US diplomats, he lost his job within hours.

Will the publication of these cables do long term harm to the US? I don’t think so. If three million Americans with security clearance had access to this data base, we can be sure the information therein was already common knowledge in Paris, Moscow and Peking. Certainly, publication will force those wanting to cooperate with the US to think twice before opening their mouths to US diplomats, but overall the cables prove something very favourable to the US: for the most part US embassies function properly and orderly in promoting US interests around the world.

Be careful with nationalism and patriotism

2010-11-26T17:42:00.001+01:00

In his post, Walter extols the virtues of patriotism. Walter’s loved one is the nation state as opposed to political identification with one’s town or region. The reason is hard-nosed: only the institutions of the nation state can achieve socialism and a majority for socialism can only be achieved through love of the nation state.

In an earlier post, I dealt with the role of the national state in the developed capitalist countries in the age of market fundamentalism. Here I want to look briefly at the meaning of Walter’s patriotism.

Walter’s use of patriotism in this context is indistinguishable from the notion of nationalism, i.e. the belief in the promotion of the “values of the nation” which Walter believes could and should contain socialist values. After all who does not become a little nationalistic when arguing with Americans about the virtues of the NHS?

The problem for me lies in the construct of nationalism. If one means, in the tradition of the French Revolution, the notion of “citizenship nationalism” – i.e. everybody with a British passport (plus long-term residents in the UK), then that is acceptable, so long as we don’t deny other levels of identification: municipal, regional, pan-European, and of course universalistic ones. In fact citizenship nationalism is not only desirable it is inevitable.

Yet nationalism in many people’s minds is not citizenship nationalism at all, but ethic nationalism: a group of people defined by origins, race, religion, language, etc. This is pernicious because what it is about is “taking possession and excluding the other” When the English flag is raised it summons up notions of ethnic, not citizenship nationalism.

To back up my argument against ethnic nationalism I will give the wonderful quotation of Ludvik Zamenhof.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self-defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

In conclusion I could say this. If the citizens of Britain value socialism and struggle for it in Britain, fine. If the fires of ethnic nationalism are fanned by talk of patriotism and nationalism, then that’s bad. I fear that in highlighting the notion of patriotism, one will cause the latter rather than the former.

Is the nation state weakening?

2010-11-25T17:43:00.000+01:00

In the developed capitalist world the nation state remains the key political organisational unit with its monopoly of legitimate violence over its territory, supported by its legal system, bureaucracy and its control of the vast bulk of public funds.

The nation state is the target of most political activity, particularly that of the left. Political consciousness is mostly national.

Nonetheless, the central position of the nation state is weakening on account of globalism and, in several states, the growth of separatist nationalism.

Socialist struggle by necessity targets the nation state, but could benefit from building international, and in particular pan-European, structures.

In so far as the nation state is diminishing we could ask whether there a need for the creation of a pan-European state which has the ability to regulate capital in the way that the nation state did in the Golden Years (1940s to 1970s)? Inherent here is the idea that, though the state is an instrument of capitalist power, it also has the ability to regulate capitalism in such ways that enable reformism to continue. Quite clearly if the state lacks the ability to meaningfully regulate capitalism, then reformism is impossible, a state of affairs only welcomed by market fundamentalists and the ultra-left.

Several West European states (e.g. Britain, Belgium, Spain) contain nationalist and separatist tendencies. While I don’t deny the political importance of this, nonetheless it should be noted that not one state in Western Europe has been broken up in this way since 1945. The devolved units, Scotland and Catalonia, remain very much secondary to the old political states of which they are still part.

The left is parochial not internationalist

2010-11-24T17:47:00.000+01:00

Sam’s contribution is not, at least in my eyes, politically incorrect, but he is blinded by the left’s own self-image rather than the reality.

Since the French Revolution and the First World war in particular the nation state (with the state attempting to create the nation rather than vice versa) has become the main political organisational unit in society in terms of legal sovereignty, monopoly of violence, taxation, cultural identification, prescribing language (but not religion any more), etc.

Reaching its zenith in the years following the Second World War, nation-statism has since been undermined to some degree by globalisation; yet it remains the focal point of organisation for political activity.

The focus of all socialist and progressive activity in Britain is national. I don’t even know of a political movement in Britain which has its HQ outside the UK. British political organisations may affiliate to pan-European organisations, but the key unit of organisation remains national.

Corporations are indeed international in their scope: the left, trade unions and left-leaning political parties are stubbornly national.

While pan-European identity remains non-existent and while the nation state remains the key unit of legal, political and financial power, there is no option other than social progress (or socialism) in one country. And obviously larger countries such as France, Britain, and Germany are better placed to dance to their own tune than are smaller ones, for instance, Luxemburg. Yet left-wing pan-European activity would strengthen even the strongest.

Interestingly, many left-wing people in Britain have said that they are unwilling or unable to learn a foreign language and believe that internationalism should be built around a national language, English. That kind of nationalism is eschewed by multi-national corporations who may use English in their head office but in their field offices and marketing use the national language.

I know what Sam is saying, but I think in his article he is fighting windmills. The problem is not that the British left is being suffocated by internationalism – on the contrary, it is stifled by excessive parochialism.

(PS On terminology, if nationalism is the wrong term for what Sam is promoting, so too is patriotism (love of ones country - the last refuge of the scoundrel). His key point is the existence and use of the nation states for progressive purposes. And on that point, with one of two qualifications, I agree.)

Owning your own home

2010-11-15T13:14:00.001+01:00

The myth of the advantages of home ownership, like all good myths, has an element of truth in it. It is an advantage to own your place of dwelling.

The problem arises not so much because people in Britain are daft and plagued with a false consciousness on the issue, but because political power has rigged things so people have an interest in buying their home on mortgages, whether they can afford to do so or not.

A nation is debt is a servile one.

Attacks on the unemployed

2010-11-11T14:39:00.000+01:00

It is utterly perverse that the unemployed are most heavily persecuted for their unemployment at just that time when joblessness is expanding.

This is scapegoating at its worst: abetting a lynch-mob (who themselves are being battered by the cuts) to turn on those who are even worse-off, rather than on those responsible for the crisis. For the unemployed, it's like being imprisoned in a cage and then being beaten for being there.

Mechanical responses: Exeter Labour Party

2010-11-10T13:29:00.002+01:00

The world may have changed from the 1980s but there is something static in the mentality of Exeter Labour Party.

Thirty years ago when another Tory government was in the throws of destroying the lives of working people and there was, then as now, a “Devon against the Cuts”, we heard the same language from these gentlemen: an opposition to “tokenism” and “gesture politics.” Anything anybody wanted them to do was dismissed with the same words; these are rote phrases first taught to them while sitting on Chester’s knee, phrases as meaningful as a set chess move played in each game irrespective of the configuration of pieces on the board.

The dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party would be on stronger ground if they said the following: “We will do what we can within the law inside the council to limit the cuts and their effects. That will amount to very little, but that is all we will do.”

Of course that is a pessimistic message, but after the Blair/Brown governments, such a Labour response would be almost revolutionary.

Labour has spent the years since 1994 promoting market fundamentalism so it is utterly ill-equipped now in 2010 to be an effective vehicle in opposing its intensification under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

Add into that the dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party, whose political goals do not extend beyond being seat-warmers on the benches of Exeter City Council, and we see just how little one can expect from them – not even token gestures it would seem.

The main job is to mobilise people and fight the attacks on working people. The second task – either from inside the Labour party or out – is to investigate the facts and then show to people the shortcomings of these Labour leaders.

Phil Woolas and Harriet Harman

2010-11-09T16:10:00.001+01:00

Woolas lied and conjured up inter-ethnic prejudice to win his seat.

In office he was one of the New Labour's bootboys who enjoyed his roles in the whip's office and as minister for deportations. He famously attacked lawyers who defended defenceless immigrants; yet now he calls on such services to try to save him from deportation from the Commons.

For once I salute Harriet Harman in her proclamation that Woolas has no future with Labour. What weakness on the part of Ed Miliband to have appointed him to the immigration portfolio in the shadow cabinet in the first place.

Socialists, Economics & Inequality

2010-11-04T16:51:00.000+01:00

“What makes capitalism intolerable is the rise of relative poverty and increased levels of insecurity and exploitation.” (22-Oct-2010)

This quotation from Geoff has worried me for some time, if only because it poses more questions than it answers. To echo John Rawls, would an economic system be more justifiable if everyone were worse off, but the society were more equal?

I would argue that it is the goal of socialists to increase the material well-being of ordinary working people both absolutely and vis-à-vis the wealthy beneficiaries of capitalism.

Geoff is right to stress that capitalism provides working people with little security. Indeed, well-being consists of two parts wealth/income AND the security of that income and wealth. In periods of upswing (e.g. early 2000s, despite credit financing) the well-being of all but the poorest sections of the working class do rise, but long-term financial security does not outlast the boom.

Geoff writes:

“Overall, the UK and western societies in general have become richer over the long term. This can be seen in part in National Income statistics. In addition to the figures there are the many technical changes that have made our lives easier.” (22-Oct-2010)

Here I would qualify Geoff. Yes, capitalism is not entirely useless; in cycles it expands wealth by technological development and reducing production costs. Today we can all in the West benefit from agro-engineering for our food and have mobile phones.

Yet how well-off one is and can expect to be is determined by what we can reasonably expect from an equitable distribution of the fruit of the productive forces given their level of development.

In these terms we can speak of real poverty in Britain: a day’s work at the minimum wage to purchase a 100km ticket into London before ten; several days work for simple dental treatment – or several lifetimes of work to purchase a terraced house. For the growing numbers who are sick or without work the situation is far worse.

Why social cleansing will happen

2010-11-02T15:44:00.000+01:00

Social cleansing will occur; only its extent is uncertain.

In the private sector, there will be cases where the diminishing ability of tenants to pay (unemployment, cuts in housing benefit) will cause the landowners to decrease rent; this will be particularly so in bedsit-land and in the junk estates. Alternative tenants with more money simply don’t exist.

In those areas, especially London, where there are potential tenants who can afford the existing rent levels, only philanthropic landlords will reject the route of attempting to dump their existing tenants and seek out higher paying ones.

Forcing people out of their homes is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a person. Expect incidents of family breakdown and suicide to increase.