Expenses as Spectacle

The ‘issue’ of MPs expenses has been dominating the media of late, with even the usually sensible and restrained C4 News devoting almost its whole 50-minute prog to the issue yesterday evening, mostly voxpopping. What is the ‘issue’, though? Some MPs have fiddled their exes – so what’s new? Being ‘creative’ with expenses claims is a national pastime which we’ve all of us indulged in at one time or another – you claim what you can within the rules laid down. So fiddling exes is no big deal. Neither is it news that some, if not most, MPs are corrupt and self-serving – this has always been the case to some degree, and since the advent of NuLabor in 1997 with its amoral neo-liberalism and ‘business-friendly’ culture there’s been strong evolutionary selection towards careerists seeking to feather their own nests and ascend through the ranks of the Westminster court to gain power. Indeed, it’s been counter-productive for a MPs career to be at all ideological or moral or just plain honest – the few (such as the old class warrior Dennis Skinner, or the posh but effective Tam Dalyell) who are find themselves languishing forever on the back benches, waiting for their 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into obscurity. If you want to get on, you need to be ambitious, self-serving, untroubled by morals or ideology, and to adopt ‘business practices’.

Of course, that everyone fiddles exes doesn’t make it right that MPs should do it, particularly on the public purse and in the public view at a time of recession, but in truth it really doesn’t matter. What the ‘crisis’ is useful for, though, is distracting attention away from the far more grievous and damaging corruption that is an everyday part of political and business life in the UK. An ex-minister rips off 16 grand? Into the stocks with him, suspend him from the Labour Party and call for him to be prosecuted. An ex-Home Secretary picks up a cushy £50k consultancy for a security company, using his insider knowledge and contacts to profit them mightily [2]? Silence. High-ranking civil servants in the Defence Ministry join arms companies – sorry, “defence contractors” – at fat salaries and bonuses[3]? Silence. Major public IT companies (eg Capita, EDS) who ’sponsor’ NuLabor events and donate to the party get contracts worth hundreds of millions? Mostly silence, other than from some right-wing papers which conveniently ignore the exact same corruption which occurred during the Thatcher years.

What the expenses “scandal” is very good at is grabbing the headlines, column inches, and TV news bulletins, and deflecting attention away from the massive, institutional corruption of UK politics and capitalism. Deals of many hundreds of millions, sometimes billions [4], of pounds, with eye-watering profit margins, are made behind closed doors on a regular basis, with close collusion between capitalists and government politicians, deals worth many orders of magnitude more than even the most extravagant MP expenses claim. We rarely hear, watch or read about these, other than in niche magazines like Private Eye (the In The Back section is a paragon of investigative journalism). If such corruption does come to light, it’s usually a long time after the fact [5] by which time the major players have made their stash and politicians involved have retired.

The UK and US are intensely corrupt nations, but because corruption is built into the institutions and indeed laws, their governments can claim publicly, with a straight face, that they’re not corrupt and that all get held to account. This is plainly a lie of quite gigantic proportions, but because, say, the ‘revolving door’ between the Ministry of Defence and arms companies is legal it’s not counted as corrupt. This is how to eliminate corruption without eliminating it – just make it legal.

So the expenses scandal is very useful for distracting attention from institutional corruption, and is a Spectacle in the Situationist sense[6] as it absorbs public attention and at the same time renders the public as impotent passive spectators. There is one possible sting in the tail, though. The essence of the “scandal” is that claiming within the rules can be, and often is, still “immoral”[7]. Apply that to the institutional corruption of the UK State, and the Defence revolving door would be seen as corrupt, even though legal. Expect some finessing by politicians, pundits and civil servants when this issue is brought up…

[1] Profile: Elliot Morley. BBC News online, 14/5/09

[2] John Reid, aka Big Bampot, joins Group 4 Security in December 2008. See Security Oracle news item announcing his engagement, and a Taxpayer’s Alliance blog article quoting in full the Daily Mail story on how G4 won a major contract just 3 months after Reid joined up.  (The DM URL for the story is currently broken. )

[3] Solomon Hughes excellent but little-known book “War on Terror, Inc” details the institutional corruption within the UK and US security and arms sectors, and their organic links with politicians and governments on both sides of The Pond. A must-read. See Socialist Review for a review of the book.

[4] The infamous Al Yamamah arms deal, enthusiastically backed by La Thatcher and enormously profitable for the UK’s largest arms manufacturer, BAe, comes immediately to mind. See Wikipedia for background.

[5] Al Yamamah again.

[6] See nice Wikipedia synopsis of the Spectacle, which is rather more readable than the insanely abstract and jargon-ridden writings of the Situationists, Debord in particular.

[7] In “Brown wants all claims reviewed“, BBC Online, 13/5/09, David Cameron, Tory leader and Little Lord Fauntelroy lookalike is quoted:

“I don’t care if they were within the rules,” he said of claims made in the past. “They were wrong.”

Real politics, please

The lead headline on BBC Radio 4’s 10 o’clock news was the ’story’ that there are calls for the resignation of Lord Myners, City Minister (’City’ minister? wtf?), over claims of “misleading parliament” (trans: telling porkies). The issue? Whether or not he knew the “full value” of the pension to be paid by RBS to fat cat retiree Fred Goodwin. This is the top ’story’ on a major national news programme, a complete non-story that illustrates:

a) the insularity and incestuousness of the English political class

b) the absence of any real political issues in the country

After all, who gives a monkeys whether or not some identikit NuLabor apparatchik will get the sack or not? Who gives a toss about whether or not he knew irrelevant fact X at time Y? Absolutely nobody outside the political class and its media fanbase. A complete irrelevance to real life.

Contrast this with a country like France, where there’s real news, and real politics with sharp ideological and class struggle: massive general strikes, weekly street protests across the country, factories occupied and bosses taken hostage by workers, the birth of a new radical Left party, and much, much more. Can you image what a French person in England must think when s/he watches/listens to/reads the news? Gobsmacked astonishment at the sheer triviality, irrelevance and pointlessnes of what passes for ‘news’ and ‘politics’ in the UK, or at least England. Together, perhaps, with tristesse at the loss of real politicas and real issues of ideology, principle and class, wihch in France, and indeed any normal European country, govern the news agendas. If s/he’s of a certain radical bent, s/he might even be reminded of the Situationist theory of The Spectacle.

That the UK political class and the media, locked together in unholy incestuousness, consider the ‘Lord Myners affair’ to be a news story at all shows how sterile and baroque political debate has become, and how divorced the political-media complex has become from ordinary life. The danger of this, in a country like Ingerlan where White Van Man and Warm Beer And Cricket Man rule, where the working class hasn’t recovered from the crushing defeat of the miners 25 years ago and which consequently has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised bumblebee, is that populist demagogues and parties (BNP, UKIP come immediately to mind) will exploit the gaping political vacuum and climb to power on a wave of reactionary, perhaps even fascist, ‘anti-politics’ populism, with The Scum, The Mail, and The Express cheerleading all the way. Which would have consequences only too worrying to contemplate…

Myners defends RBS pension stance. BBC Online, 3/3/09

McKillop: No RBS pension ‘ruse’. BBC Online, 31/3/09

Oh Nottingham…

is full of scabs
Oh Nottingham is full of scabs
it’s full of scabs, scabs and more scabs
Oh Nottingham is full of scabs

(To the tune of “The Saints go marching in”)

Why does this little ditty come to mind? Perhaps because Nottingham’s inglorious history as fifth column during the Miner’s Strike is always on my mind, having the misfortune to live and work in the hole. Every day I feel dirty just being here, but a job’s a job these days and us 50-somethings can’t just up sticks and expect to get work anywhere. Today it comes to mind because I’ve twice experienced the standard Nottingham aggression on the roads on my bicycle. Just going from A to B on 2 wheels does offend some, particularly white van men, and they feel that they can honk and gesture at you as they want (though I doubt they’d have the balls to get out of their metal cradle and have it out face to face), so any bike ride on a road risks abuse and aggression, not to mention the standard bad driving (a cycle doesn’t mass a tonne so can’t do you any damage and thus isn’t worth respecting).

However, the aggression on Nottingham’s roads is just an extension of the aggression that’s a default with most of its inhabitants. You just have to go into tahrn on a Saturday afternoon to do your shopping to be pushed around and walked over/through, and to hear and see aggressive behaviour as a matter of course. I’ve not come across such a base level of aggression outside London, and certainly not in the Yorkshire towns I’ve lived in for 15 years prior to (very reluctantly) moving South of Sheffield. Maybe it’s a byproduct of their ‘original sin’ of scabbing. The scabbing broke the strike and decisively defeated the whole of the working class, including the workers of Nottingham. We’re all feeling the effects of this betrayal 25 years on, as defeat has led directly to all the working class having to work longer hours for less pay in more dangerous conditions with fewer rights, and indirectly to the Security State which surveilles and controls us all 24/7, cradle to grave.

Nottingham suffered too – their reward for scabbing was for their pits to be closed as well, and for their communities to be destroyed. You just have to go up to places like Bestwood, Bilborough, and Broxtowe to see the grotty sink estates that are what once-coherent communities degenerated into once all the jobs went. Pits at Annesley, Babbington and many other places suffered the same fate as the Yorkshire pits, and the communities that had grown up around them sunk into despair, unemployment and McJobs. The difference being that the Nottingham miners brought it on themselves. The sheer grinding poverty, drug crime and rampant violence of lethal areas such as St Anns (if Nottingham is the gun capital of the UK, St Anns is the gun capital of Nottingham), Meadows and Radford also results from the destruction of the jobs and real communities that the mining industry used to provide. So whilst the scabbing miners and their communities deserved everything they got, their sin is being visited on the innocents of successor generations who are suffering mightily without having the consciousness to be able to understand their suffering or the community solidarity that would enable them to withstand it.

So perhaps the aggression that’s in the (boiling) blood of Nottinghamites is a result of the lack of community and solidarity stemming directly from the scabbing. That’s what it feels to this reluctant resident, anyway. The sooner I get away from this hole the better – I feel soiled just living here, and find it difficult to regard the denizens of Scab City with anything better than anger. Which of course makes me aggressive at times…

Oh, and it’s a shit accent too.

With it being the 25th anniversary of the Strike there’ll be more on  its legacy, and Nottingham’s traitorous role, in future posts. Watch this space…

Let the train take the strain…

…if only! Once upon a time, before the advent of Thatcher and Parkinson and the wholesale destruction of British Rail as it was parcelled up into dysfunctional entities and flogged off for a song to the stripey-shirt-and-braces brigade in the city, I used to enjoy travelling on the railways. Sure, BR’s record on timekeeping was patchy, and trains were sometimes overcrowded, but on the whole you could get where you wanted to go in good time with a seat without mortgaging an internal organ for the fare. Now, though, it’s a real pain, and the strain has returned (remember the old Intercity slogan “Let the train take the strain”?). I travel on rail as infrequently as possible, not because I’m wedded to the car or I disdain public transport, but because it’s pretty damn crappy much of the time. In the BR days, you could rate perhaps 10% of your journeys as crap – now it’s even money whether you’ll have a crap or a decent journey.

So this weekend I drove up to my beloved in Hull (or ‘Ull, as ferk there call it), which is 90 miles away and takes between 90 and 120 (tops) minutes door to door. At, say, 35mpg that’s 180/35 ~ 5 gallons of petrol at about £4/gallon, so that’s around £20 in petrol costs, say a pony to leave margin for error. Unfortunately, my car broke down with a busted cambelt just outside of Hull so that I’ve had to had the thing towed to a local garage for repairs which won’t be done for a couple of days, meaning that I had to return to Nottingham by train and will have to train it back to ‘Ull next weekend to pick up the car (assuming I’ve not had it scrapped by then). So we go down to ‘Ull rail station and the first shock is £38 for a ‘Saver’ return, about the same as petrol costs for the round trip. Because private train companies operate monopolistically once they win their franchise and are restrained (cough!) only by the regulator, and because their primary duty, as with all other public companies, is to maximise returns for their shareholders, they can and do just about what they want on fares. In practice this means above-inflation fare rises for as many years as I can remember, always with the mantra that this is to invest in improving the service, which is frankly a bare-faced lie.

But what the hey, if it’s a half-decent journey and I can read my book and do the crossword and not have to worry about some suit in Beamer with headlights on full beam up my arse, I can live with the cost as a one-off. So I sit by platform 2 where the sign board says the Sheffield train is due to leave, and sit and sit as it approaches the departure time of 14:41, then see a uniformed guard gesturing to us to go to another platform, so up we get and tootle off to platform 5 where a sizeable crowd awaits by a dark train. Departure time is reached and still no action, until a driver gets on the train and we hear, at minute intervals, the chugging of the ignition as he vainly tries to start the old crock up. 20 minutes later an indistinct announcement booms out of the tannoy from which I can only pick up “14:41″ and “platform 2″, so back I jolly well trot. The thing eventually chugs out of the station 25 minutes late and rattles its way through the dull South Yorkshire flatlands to Sheffield. At least I had a seat, which I’d expect it being Sunday afternoon.

At Sheffield I’m after catching to 16:42 to Norwich which goes to Nottingham. This eventually pulls in and is heaving with people – not a seat to be seen. I end up with a bunch of other victims – sorry, ‘passengers’, sorry, ‘customers’ – wedged into a a tiny vestibule by the door, right by the carriage bog which sees a steady stream of traffic in and out. Chesterfield and Alfreton arrive and more punters squeeze on, such that standing room is down to half a square metre perhaps. Then to add insult to injury a geezer goes into the bog, stays there for a good 10 minutes, then when he comes out there’s such a foul-smelling miasma that we all retch and cough and reach for hankies to stop our noses from the olfactory assault. Eventually the ordeal comes to an end in Nottingham, though not before the thing’s stopped for 4 minutes just outside the station as trains so often do, at 17:35.

So, that’s 17:35 – 14:41 = 2h 54m for a mere 90 miles, for which I’ve paid the same as the petrol cost and have had a far shittier time of it than had I been in my car, old heap that it is (it even just has a cassette tape radio, which shows how old it is). Incentives to travel by train rather than car? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Niente. Bubkes. Only if you’re feeling guilty about carbon emissions will you choose such a crap experience over driving, and even then only for the hairsthirt masochism of it.

Of course, the train companies could make the ‘passenger experience’ far better by, say, providing sufficient carriages for anticipated demand. But no – instead their ‘demand management strategy’ is explicitly to raise prices so much that passengers are priced off the railways, thus solving the overcrowding problem.They’re not bothered about passenger numbers dropping because they get feather-bedded funding from the State, and their margins are the same regardless of passenger numbers. Indeed, their margins can improve with fewer passengers, because they can use less rolling stock and run less frequent trains thus cutting back on costs.

To say that this is crooked is to put it mildly, but what can you do? Nothing. Both Tories and NuLabor are committed to privatisation, so voting won’t change owt (not that it ever really did, but at least there was a degree of choice in t’past, ‘appen). You could look for someone or something to blame, but that won’t get anywhere: the train companies are just carrying out their legal duty to maximise shareholder returns, the regulator is following his political mandate, the politicians are trying to manage a situation inherited from privatisation. The only folk who can really cop the blame are Thatcher, Parkinson and the rest of the Tory cabinet that privatised British Rail to generate swingeing windfall profits for their class allies in the City. It’s they who are ultimately responsible for the worst and most expensive rail service in Europe, and more importantly for all the deaths that have been caused by rapidly falling safety standards due to privatisation. And now Thatcher is ga-ga and Bonker Parkinson is probably holed up in some mansion overseas.

What could be done is renationalisation, without compensation for the feather-bedded subsidy-fattened train company shareholders, but there’s more chance of Ian Paisley kissing the Pope’s ring than of that happening. Without that, the railways will steadily worsen and fewer of us will travel on them, which of course puts more traffic on the roads with all the human, economic and environmental collateral damage that entails. This is what passes for an ‘integrated transport policy’ these days.

In the meantime, with an even money chance of a journey being crap, I’ll avoid rail unless there’s absolutely no alternative to using it.

Israel: the Millwall of the Middle East

I’m sure that billions of words worldwide have been written on the latest invasion of the by the Israeli military of the Gaza Strip where 1.4m people live in just 139 sqm [1] (~10,000 people/sqm, not much less than London’s 12,000 people/sqm [2]), and although the actions of this rogue state infuriate and deeply sadden me, there’s no point adding yet more moral obloquy and outrage to what’s already out there, produced by folk who write far better than myself. Only the most die-hard fans of Israel can unequivocally defend the latest massacres – despite the Israeli embargo on journalists entering the Strip, plenty enough photos and footage of dead children are coming out of the place to fuel righteous outrage worldwide. Dead children hit a hardwired spot in the vast majority of human beings that no amount of rationalisation can overrule – military and political ‘rationality’ will never trump killed children, which is as it should be, as any society that puts military logic above human life is well on the way to being inhuman. So it’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of comment is, to put it mildly, critical of Israel’s actions.

One thing, though, is very clear indeed. The Israeli State doesn’t give a shit what the world thinks, and in the Middle East can do what it wants to who it wants when it wants, with complete impunity. Israel is the Millwall FC of the Middle East: “no-one likes us, and we don’t care”. With one very important exception: the USA. The only reason Israel can do what it does is that it has the unconditional support, nay encouragement, of the USA, which provides it with $2.4 billion in military aid every year[3], and owns half of its foreign debt [4].

The reason for US support is simple: Israel is its client, albeit an occasionally truculent one, in the most important oil-producing region in the world. Israel serves to extend US geopolitical hegemony to the Middle East, and by being smack in the middle of the region perfectly divides the region into ineffective dysfunctional States. To use a Chess analogy, Israel is a queen placed on the enemy back ranks, capable of causing absolute havoc and attacking any and all enemy pieces. Worse, the opposition’s queen was captured decades ago, after the destruction of Abdul Nasser’s Egypt and the death of pan-Arabism, and the other pieces are forever getting in each other’s way and lack any movement.

As with all analogies, of course, this one breaks down, as Israel needs constant funding and support from the US to survive, without which the queen would be demoted to a minor piece and would very rapidly have to come to terms with the ‘enemy’. US support has been constant and unwavering since 1948, and it’s arguably stronger now than ever – there’s no question that the Israeli regime ran the Gaza invasion plans past the outgoing Bush regime before acting, as not only would Israel have never dared to act so massively without at least tacit (and likely, behind closed doors, explicit) US permission [5], but the US would have made some protest, however equivocal, against the invasion given the worldwide condemnation of it.

So the question is: will the US continue to give unconditional political, military and economic backing to its client State? On the face of it, the simple answer to that question is ‘yes’, at least in the short to medium term – the US president-in-waiting Obama has already declared his strong support for Israel [6], and the US imperial adventure in Iraq shows no sign of immediate failure. In the longer term, though, two things are clear:

1. The US will fade seriously as an imperial power as its economy collapses. It’s already retreating from much of the world under competition from the EU and China, and even in its “own backyard”, South America, Left-wing governments have emerged and are giving Uncle Sam the finger, a situation inconceivable during the Cold War. US economic decline means that it’s having to pick and choose its imperial adventures, going for those that seem to deliver the most buck for bang, hence the war of plunder in Iraq which has nevertheless turned out to be rather less profitable than anticipated. This economic decline will accelerate markedly when, not if, the dollar loses its status as a reserve currency and the US trade deficit comes home to roost

2. Oil will run out. The (in)famous Peak Oil [7] is forecast variously to occur within one or more decades, with many arguing that the peak oil point has already been passed, and economically-extractable oil will surely be extremely scarce by the middle of the 21st Century. Maintaining imperial hegemony in the Middle East is very costly for the US, but up to now has been worth it because the returns outweigh outlay: put simply, imperialism in the Middle East generates a healthy profit. As oil becomes scarcer that profit margin will shrink, and must perforce reach a point where its not worth the imperial candle, particularly as the empire itself is shrinking rapidly (see 1). When that happens, Israel will cease to be a prized US asset in an oil-rich region, and will instead become an increasing liability in the desert.

It’s plain, then, that in the long term Israel will be abandoned by its sponsor and godfather, and will have to start getting on with its regional neighbours and making new friends in the world. The trouble is, memories are long and blood grievances can span generations, and there’s no question that Israel is seriously pissing off just about everybody these days. It pisses on its neighbours, it ignores the EU, and gives the finger to the UN. Now that apartheid South Africa is dead and buried, Israel has no friends in the world other than the US and its 51st State, the UK. I hope, for the sake of those living in Israel, Jew and Arab alike, that far-sighted thinkers in Israel realise this and are making plans for a kinder, gentler Israel that will be able to make friends, and not blood enemies as it’s done up to now, because come the fall of the US empire Israel will otherwise find itself hated, alone and vulnerable, and an awful revenge may be wrongfully wreaked on its citizens by those with vendetta in their hearts.

For its own sake, and the sake of its citizens, the rogue State needs to quit being a psychopathic terrorist and become a constructive social entity, and needs to do this soon. There was a time when Israel was admired by many on the Left for its kibbutzim, socialism and progressiveness, and it’s not impossible for it to return to that state.

[1] Wikipedia entry on the Gaza Strip, Demographics section.

[2] Wikipedia entry on London, Demography section.

[3] Bush pledges to increase US funding to Israel, ynetnews.com, 20/6/07

[4] CIA World Factbook: Israel, Economy section.

[5] “US tacitly backs Israeli offensive”, BBC News online, 29/12/08

[6] “Obama pledges support for Israel”, BBC News online, 4/6/08

[7] There’s a very detailed analysis of the Peak Oil issue in “Peak Oil Overview” on The Oil Drum, a website devoted to energy issues. Written in June 2008, the analysis doesn’t come up with a date for ‘peak oil’, which is a slippery concept depending on many factors, including price, affordability, extraction technologies, reserve estimates, environmental impact, and more, but does show that liquid oil production in the major oil-producing nations has already peaked.

Psst! Got any fags under the counter? (take 2)

As signalled back in May of this year, the regime has today announced that the public display of cigarettes will be banned [1]. The reason? For the sake of the children, think of the children (cue South Park sketch):

Alan Johnson [Health Secretary for England] said: “They see the point of sale display and as a result of seeing it, it encourages them to take up smoking. This is the key evidence as to why we have 200,000 11 to 15-year-olds smoking.”

So that’s why kids smoke, because all those shiny packets are right there in front of them so near yet so close, like jars of sweeties. What kid can resist the magpie allure of a packet of Embassy Regal or Superkings, with their cool ‘Smoke and you die horribly’ messages plastered artfully across their covers? Surely a temptation too far, any Right-minded person would agree.

Of course, this is bollocks. Kids and teens smoke for all sorts of reasons, the visibility of fag packets being a long, long way down the list. You want to look like a hard nut, you want to look cool, you want to hang out with the ’smoking crowd’ under the science block, you want to be rebellious - those were all reasons why I and my schoolmates smoked. Add to that these days a future of unemployment punctuated by spells of casual labour in McJobs and you’ve got depression and lack of self-respect to add to the list. If the regime really wanted to tackle smoking, binge-drinking, and drug-taking amongst young people, it would address the causes of these problems, but that would mean directly criticising the capitalism and obscene wealth inequalities (such that a CEO can ‘earn’ 400 times more than an ordinary worker) that NuLabor and its Thatcherite predecessors have worked so hard to create. After decades of privatisation and neo-liberal ‘economics’ with domestic manufacturing industry mostly destroyed, there are piss-all jobs for the working class to do. The chattering classes whitter endlessly about ‘dependency culture’ and ‘dysfunctional families’ without having the brains to realise that it’s their consumption, and their votes, which have been crucial to the emergence of such a savage form of capitalism.

But no, we can’t be doing with criticising capitalism and pointing the finger to it as the cause of societal ills, perish the thort. Instead, you blame the victims and take cosmetic measures that assuage the consciences of the chattering classes and single-issue lobby groups like ASH and, laughably, the BMA. (Doctors telling us to be responsible in our drug-taking? That’s like Peter Stringfellow preaching sexual abstinence (see Physician Heal Thyself).)

The purpose of this latest wheeze is the same as that of all the other anti-smoking measures: stigmatisation. Turn people who smoke into either passive pitiable suffering victims or evil subhuman scum. Turn them, indeed, into ’smokers’, whose life and character is defined by burning the evil weed. (See Psst! Got any fags under the counter? earlier this year.) This tactic is working, not surprisingly in a society of minimal political consciousness that blames others for its misfortunes. Crap housing and McJobs? Blame all the feckless immigrants and asylum seekers. Child poverty? Blame ‘dysfunctional families’ and ‘welfare dependency’. High public spending? Blame fatties, smokers and druggies for putting a “burden on the NHS” (and certainly don’t blame the billions spent on ‘defence’ and Trident, that would be unpatriotic).

Blame everyone else but yourself, or, more importantly, the very economic and political system that we labour under. Once upon a time, when there was such a thing as political and class consciousness, we’d have ‘left-wing firebrands’ pointing the finger at capitalism and calling for concerted worker action, but the destruction of the Labour Movement after the defeat of the miner’s strike [2] put paid to that. Now the Great British Public ^[TM] has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised flea and is literally incapable of seeing systemic problems, so that such problems come almost literally like a bolt from the blue, as acts of a capricious god. In an atomised society without community or solidarity, we can only see individuals and groups as the problem, and can only lash out wildly at them as we seek scapegoats for ills which are structural, an integral and inevitable part of  modern capitalism.

Which of course suits the rulers very nicely indeed, thankuverymuch. Keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves and they’ll not even notice the Suits and Nobs, let alone unite against them.

[1] Ban on tobacco displays announced. BBC News, 9/12/08

[2] Thanks a bundle, Nottingham. See “The Miner’s Strike and its legacy: thanks a bundle, Nottinghamshire” on Harry’s Happy Hamster Home.

Anonymous mobile phones to end?

Two entries in the recent No2ID newsletter caught my eye:

*+ Govt ponders proof-of-ID law for future phone purchases – The
Register 20/10/08 +*
The bother of choosing between an 18-month contract or a high up-front
price may soon be the least of your worries when buying a new mobile
phone, because you may soon be required to prove your identity before
you’re allowed a new handset.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/20/passport_phone/

*+ Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones – The Sunday Times
19/10/08 +*
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their
identity on a national database under government plans to extend
massively the powers of state surveillance.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

The recent proposals from Jacqui “Big Sister” Smith to monitor every email, website visit, Facebook post, or indeed anything that anyone does online got lots of media attention, and rightly so (as did her unintentionally humorous rider that if the State couldn’t monitor all online activity it would have “no alternative” but to “massively increase surveillance” – who needs satirists with lines like that?). These measures, though, seemed to have mostly slipped under the media radar. At the moment, you can buy pay-as-you-go phones and SIM cards with cash over the counter, though the shops try to twist your arm into registering your name and address, and that gives you a small measure of privacy, pretty much needed seeing as the State routinely monitors mobile traffic and requires operators to keep logs for its perusal. Naturally, this is just too much of a liberty loophole for the State to allow, so soon you’ll have to ID yourself just to get a phone account. The rationale is the usual, terrorism and crime, but it’s obvious that even the doziest terr or crim will be capable of getting hold of an untraceable phone, so plainly this is another social control measure to keep tabs on Joe and Jane Public.

So, if you want a private mobile phone account, best get your skates on.

Nice to see, BTW, that Geoff “Warmonger” Hoon is back to his contentious and provocative worst. Defending the proposed Communications Data Bill on BBC’s Question Time, he said:

If they are going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don’t have the power to deal with that, then you are giving a licence to terrorists to kill people. (”Hoon defends giant database plans“, BBC News online, 17/10/08)

So if you’re opposed to the Bill you must necessarily be in favour of terrorists killing people. And this guy’s supposed to be an intelligent lawyer? Even White Van Man down the local would be ashamed to use such a stupid ‘argument’. Well, Geoff baby, some of us haven’t forgotten your cheerleading for the Iraq war, when your bland but sinister mug was popping up all over the TV warning us that Saddam was going to blow smithereens out of us if he wasn’t deposed, and labelling all opponents of the war as Saddam sympathisers. You’ve gone pretty quiet on that lately, but memories are long, and with luck you’ll be held to public account for your warmongering. In the meantime, your Manichean ‘either with us or against us’ line might appeal to your mates in the NuLabor regime and win you Brownie (geddit?) points, but even the most idiotic in the Great British Public ^[TM], and there are plenty enough of them, aren’t going to fall for that old cobblers again. Back to Chambers, matey. Even better, it would be lovely to see you standing outside Sainsbury’s on a wet Saturday afternoon selling the Big Issue…

‘Terror’ comes to Nottingham

The tentacles of the Security State reached into Nottingham University last week, when a postgraduate student and a staff member at the university were arrested and held without charge under the Terrorism Act 2006 [1], until their release six days later, when one was re-arrested in connection with immigration matters. They were accused of possessing “extremist material” by downloading an “Al Qaeda terror manual”. The plain facts of the case are now known:

1. The “terror manual” was, and still is, a document openly available on a US Government website and contained no ‘terror techniques’. The document is available on the US Military’s Air War College website as a translated and edited version of a training manual found in Manchester during a search of an Al Qaeda member’s home.

2. The postgrad student who downloaded it is undertaking a PhD in Islamic terrorism. According to a Times Higher article:

“Mr Sabir’s lawyer, Tayab Ali of McCormacks solicitors in London, told Times Higher Education that as preparation for a PhD on radical Islamic groups, Mr Sabir had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaeda handbook from a US government website. It is understood that Mr Sabir sent the 1,500-page document to the staff member – who was subsequently arrested – because he had access to a printer. Mr Ali said: “The two members of the university were treated as though they were part of an al-Qaeda cell. They were detained for 48 hours, and a warrant for further detention was granted on the basis that the police had mobile phones and evidence taken from computers to justify this.” [2]

3. The cops were alerted by a member of clerical staff:

“A spokesman for Nottingham confirmed that the police had been called after material was found on the computer used by a junior clerical member of staff. “There was no reasonable rationale for this person to have that information,” he said. “The police were called in on the basis of reasonable anxiety and concern. In response to that, the police made a connection with a student who, we understand, was impeding the investigation and arrested that person.”” [2]

4. When the arrests took place, the cops stormed the campus mob-handed, stopped and searched students, and were still at it the day after the arrests:

“Secondly, Dr. Greatrix [University Registrar] claims that this was a low-level investigation. This claim, however, does not stand up to scrutiny. Students had their bags searched by uniformed police before entering the Trent Building the day after the arrests. The student and member of staff that was arrested was held from Wednesday May 14 until Tuesday, May 20 without charge, in spite of the fact that Rizwaan Sabir’s supervisor and personal tutor both confirmed to the police that the document they had downloaded and printed was legitimate research material on Friday, May 16. The homes of the two men were raided; they had their computers impounded and they have still not been returned; the family of Rizwaan Sabir was ejected from their home during the police’s search; several colleagues in the School of politics were interviewed for hours by the police. A low-key investigation would have resolved this matter within hours by contacting the relevant members of staff at the School of Politics and International Relations; indeed, a low-key investigation, to use Dr. Greatrix’s term, would have been conducted by the university itself, without any police involvement at all.” [3]

5. The document was passed by the postgrad student, Rizwaan Sabir, to the staff member, Hicham Yezza (an ex-postgrad student) because Sabir wanted to print it out and didn’t have enough print credits to do so on his own account, whereas Yezza, as a staff member, would have easy access to a printer.

6. Both men are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and have zero to do with terrorism.

This has led to an understandable and righteous furore at the University, with staff getting up tight about academic freedom, students getting uptight about personal freedom and political repression, and foreign students getting very uptight about being targetted by the spooks on account of having dusky skins, as there certainly seems to be a strong ethnic element to the treatment by the cops of the detainees. A demonstration by students and staff will be taking place tomorrow (28th May) by the main campus library to protest against the arrests, in favour of academic freedom, and against the threatened deportation of Hicham Yezza.

That Yezza is being threatened with deportation smells of an act of spite by the cops, who have come out of this looking like complete idiots. They’ve held two guys for six days – imagine yourself in that position! – without charge, turned their homes and their lives upside-down, on sod-all evidence other than the download which even thick cops should have been able to track to a US government website – er, you do know what server logs are, don’t you, boys? It really feels like they’re trying to pin something on them just to give their bungling a fig-leaf of respectability. That Yezza would be deported to Algeria, a country not known for its tolerant attitude to political dissent, but well known for its love of torture and killing political opponents, plainly doesn’t bother the cops one little bit – the point seems to be to save face.

Students also feel that the arrests were part of a campaign against student activism:

“During questioning, the police regularly attempted to collate information about student activism and peaceful campaigning. They asked numerous questions about the student peace magazine ‘Ceasefire’, and other political student activities. The overt police presence on campus, combined with increased and intimidating police presence at peaceful demonstrations, has created a climate of fear amongst some students. Many saw the operation as a message from the police that they are likely to arrest those who have been engaged in peaceful political activities. There is widespread concern in the community that the police are criminalising peaceful activists using terrorism legislation, such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.” [4]

The university has signally failed to support either man, and has covered itself in dishonour by its craven acceptance of the police line. Its only comment has been an email to staff, which accuses the THE article [2] of inaccuracy but otherwise says very little using a lot of words (reference [3] is a response to this statement). The main campus union, UCU (nèe AUT) has come out in support of the detainees, but only reluctantly and tepidly, saying that it wants to work “constructively” with the university to safeguard academic freedom, and maintaining that it has to support both the arrested staff member and the clerical staff member who shopped him so can’t stick its neck out in public comment. It’s been students and academic staff who’ve really been enraged by the whole affair and have brought it to public attention, and thanks to them the business is rapidly becoming a national cause cèlèbre – had it been up to UoN and the UCU the whole thing would have been quietly swept under the carpet.

As for the University, even if all questions of morality and ethics are put to one side, this story is going to hurt the institution financially. The university is absolutely dependent on overseas students from outside the EU, and in particular from SE Asia and China – it even has campuses in Malaysia and China. If word gets around that foreign students are being narked to the cops then they may well choose to go elsewhere, taking their very lucrative course fees with them. The uni has a lot of PR to do to repair the damage that this incident will cause.

Postscript

The demo on campus was well-attended, maybe around 300 at a guess despite it pouring with rain, and although mostly students there were a significant number of staff present. Wisely, the cops stayed away, though undoubtedly there were spooks in the crowd. An amusing fact that came up is that the ‘training manual’ is openly available on Amazon, a snip at $15. So much for illicit “extremist material”…

References:

[1] Two Nottingham terror arrests. Nottingham Evening Post, 16/5/08

[2] Research into Islamic terrorism led to police response. Times Higher Education, 22/5/08. See also the comments on the THE story which, for a change, are enlightening and reasoned.

[3] Comment on university communication on recent events. Statement by 3 academic members of staff, published on Nottingham Indymedia on 27/5/08.

[4] Terror law arrests at Nottingham: Statement by students and staff. Published on SACC website, 21/5/08.

Further reading:

Nottingham Uni detainee innocent but still facing deportation. Nottingham Indymedia, 23/5/08.

Al Qaeda download sparked my arrest. Nottingham Evening Post, 23/5/08

Terror arrest ‘cock up’ – MP. Nottingham Evening Post, 26/5/08

Student tells of his despair in ‘terror’ inquiry. Nottingham Evening Post, 23/5/08. The comments on this story from locals really show how stupid, ignorant and bigoted some Notts people are. No change since the days of the 83-84 Miner’s Strike, then… ;-\

Psst! Got any fags under the counter?

Another day, another ‘control measure’ to ’safeguard the nations health’. This time the State is going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops in England in order to “stop children from taking up smoking” [1], so soon fags will become ‘under the counter’ goods with all the accompanying sleazy connotations. This follows on from a similar recently-announced ban in Scotland [2].

The State and politicians should have the courage to state openly that their intention is to stop smoking altogether, rather than lie that these measures are taken to benefit non-smokers or to save the children (shades of South Park and “think of the children!”). The ban on smoking in public places was always about public health and NHS expenditure, and it was a blatant and shameless lie that it was intended to protect non-smokers from passive smoking – had that been the real issue, then it would have been simple enough to work out ways, such as airlocked rooms, to allow people to smoke indoors.

The forthcoming ban on cigs being on display such that smokers have to ask for them to be brought out from under the counter is plainly aimed at stigmatising them and has nothing at all to do with children picking up the habit – under-18s can’t buy fags legally anyway, and the idea that an adolescent would be subject to hypnotic allure simply by seeing cig packets in the newsagents is the stuff of absurdist satire.

People who smoke have been subject to a systematic (quite literally) long-term project to demonise and dehumanise them, such that they’re not only seen as prey to a ‘filthy habit’ but, worse, are portrayed as threatening other’s health through exposure to cigarette smoke and imposing a “burden” on the NHS. It’s a matter of time before smoking parents with children are forced to smoke outside their houses, for fear of child abuse. Another inevitable measure is smokers being forced to pay for health treatment, or threatened with the withholding of treatment until they give up smoking (though that has its own ramifications – see Physician, heal thyself) . You can even see pet owners who smoke being investigated by the RSPCA for animal abuse. Ludicrous? No, just a logical extension of current policies and principles.

Many would say “serves them right”, and would support any measure, however draconian, to eradicate smoking and smokers. That such an attitude is gaining ground in society, and that smokers are seen by many as being on a par with child abusers, is an indication of the success of the stigmatisation project.

It would be far more honest for the State to ban smoking altogether. it would fail, of course, and would lead to the criminalisation of millions of people, but that doesn’t stop it banning other recreational drugs, such as cannabis  and E, which turns millions of citizens who just want to chill out into criminals who can be locked up.

Oh, and you non-smoking drinkers who raised a glass to the pub smoking ban? You’re next, you smug gits. Already the regime is making noises about “binge drinking”, banning outdoor drinking, ‘alcohol awareness’ advertising campaigns (such as are appearing on TV already), and raising taxes to punitive levels, and with good reason as the arguments used to stigmatise smoking – the damage to society and public health – apply in Spades to alcohol, which is demonstrably more damaging to personal (liver failure, heart disease) and societal (violence, alcoholism, work absenteeism) health than smoking. Now that the anti-smoking argument has been enthusiastically accepted by the State and its cheerleaders, the chattering classes, anti-drinking will follow as surely as night follows day.

[1] Cigarette ban proposals welcomed. BBC News Scotland, 25/5/08

[2] Tobacco display ban plan unveiled. BBC News Scotland, 21/5/08

[3] The last gasp: Health Secretary signals new smoking curbs. Independent, 26/5/08

Exploiting murder

It’s predictable, I suppose, but no sooner had two serial killers (Steve Wright, Mark Dixie) been convicted than the top cops’ ‘executive committee’ in Scotland (i capi dei tutti capi), ACPOS, called for DNA samples to be taken from everyone arrested, not just those convicted, and kept on the national DNA database for ever [1]. This is currently the law in England, which is handy as cops can arrest you for anything – ‘obstruction’ is a useful catch-all used regularly against political protesters – then drag you to the copshop, take your DNA for the database, then shove you out of the door again uncharged. Result. In Scotland, though, samples taken from arrestees can only be stored if the person is subsequently charged with a crime. That’s not great, from a freedom viewpoint, but was a measure passed by the McNewLabour administration back in 2007[2]. Still, at least the cops have to go through the legal aggro of filling out paperwork and launching a formal prosecution before they can keep your DNA on file, which is a disincentive if their mighty and continual whingeing about “paperwork” is to be believed. Of course, ACPOS argues that a DNA database would enable such serial killers to be caught earlier, because both Dixie and Wright were nabbed after DNA matching of samples taken from them when they were previously arrested for unrelated crimes. This argument begs two points, one minor, one major:

1. DNA matching is not the only, or even the main way, of catching and convicting perps. As numerous crime novels, TV series, true crime stories, and TV crime programmes, make plain time and again, most perps are nicked through ‘old-fashioned’ policing. Cops managed to nick killers long before DNA matching came along, and often the only reason they didn’t nick them in time (such as in the Yorkshire Ripper case) was sheer bloody incompetence and stupidity.
2. There is no item of information about a person that a cop would not consider to be ‘relevant to the investigation’.

The second is more disturbing. Yesterday it was mass fingerprinting, today it’s DNA, tomorrow it’ll be retinal scans, the day after it’ll be real-time 24/7 information on your whereabouts. The gathering of any item of personal information can be justified on the grounds of helping to prevent and/or solve crimes, and in the case of murder to save victims’ lives. This emotional blackmail is obvious and crude, and crudely exploitative of those who have been murder victims and their families and friends. It taps into people’s fears and insecurity, and if the ‘nothing to fear, nothing to hide’ principle is widely accepted, as seems to be the case in England, the blackmail is hard to argue against. The logical conclusion of the principle, though, is a world of ‘Total Information Awareness’, which is currently vividly and frighteningly illustrated in the near-future drama The Last Enemy on BBC1, where the State has complete knowledge of all individuals in real time. Or, if you want to be really dystopian and fascistic, a Judge Dredd world where cops are the law, and can search your home and ransack your life at will.

The Scottish government, to its credit, has resisted some of the more authoritarian measures being implemented in the nascent police state south of the Border, and polls of the Scottish population regularly show a greater concern for civil freedoms, and cynicism towards the Security State, than is to be found amongst the Sasannaich. It would be depressing if it were to accede to ACPOS demands as that would set a highly unwelcome precedent, that any information about anyone, crime suspect or innocent, is fair game to gather and keep. Accepting that principle would be highly dangerous for freedom in Ingerlan’s civilised neighbour.

[1] Call for DNA retention law change, BBC News Scotland, 23/2/08

[2] New powers to store suspects’ DNA, BBC News Scotland, 1/1/07