Strangling the flow of overseas students

Just when you think the government can’t be any more stupid or racist, comes another edict from some cloned minister that shows that stupidity and racism are inexhaustible wells in England. Today we’ve had Alan “Big Nobody” Johnson, pro-tem Home Secretary and body in search of a personality, issuing a pronouncement that there’ll be a further “crackdown” on the “abuse of student visas” [1], which of course means making life harder for those, usually from well-heeled families, who hope to attend universities and colleges in the UK. This in the same week that the Higher Education Funding Councils for England (HEFCE) announced severe funding cuts for UK Higher Education [2]. The government’s response to this was to tell the universities to stop whingeing and seek other ‘income streams’, including private funding and overseas students, who pay whopping fees (up to £20k/year) and keep many universities afloat [4]. Yet visa restrictions have already constricted the flow of these highly lucrative students [4], and infamously last year there was a massive queue of students from Pakistan and India who’d been accepted on courses but were unable to start them because the immigration bureaucracy hadn’t processed their visa applications.

This shows the inexorable logic of racist immigration controls, compounded by overhyped fear of terrorism – like Pringles, once you pop, you can’t stop. There is always a finite probability of “abuse” of visas, and thus no logical end to visa restrictions until you actually ban them altogether. And of course this is highly harmful economically, as not only do overseas students prop up UKHE they also bring big bucks into those university towns and sustain local businesses. To paraphrase Mikhail Gorbachev, the subjective is overruling the objective, a situation which presaged the collapse of the stagnant soviet empire.

However, all the petit-bourgeois – Mail, Express – and neo-fascist – Super Soaraway Sun, Star – sewer Press go apeshit whenever an ‘abuse’ comes to light, and the regime jumps to their tune. A pointless exercise as you’ll never satisfy the racist blood-lust of these rags, just as you’ll never have a Laura Norda policy hard enough to satisfy the Hang ‘Em and Flog ‘Em brigade – you could hang teenage hoodies over a scorpion pit by their scrota with cheesewire and you’d still have the Mail complaining about soft liberal lefties going easy on criminals. Indeed, the more a regime tries to satisfy the endemic and virulent racism of the sewer Press, the more the sewer rats will be encouraged in their lunacy, and the more hardline they’ll get (and the more the real fascists, like the BNP, will be legitimised).

So a rational government would give a big finger to the racist Press and just do what was economically rational, which is to get as many well-heeled overseas students, undergrad and postgrad (especially lucrative, in terms of fees and research income), into the country as possible, and if a few stay on in the black economy as ‘illegal immigrants’ (not likely, given the wealthy families of most overseas students), then WTF – a small price to pay for a massive economic gain. Instead, hamstrung by its own racist logic and two decades of persecution of incomers, it must be increasingly hardline, which not unnaturally results in many possible students deciding “f*ck ‘em  – if they don’t want my money I’ll go elsewhere”. Result? Loss of income for UKHE, loss of goodwill and possible future investment and skilled labour from overseas, gain to competitor economies which are less unwelcoming. Inevitable end result? Fortress Britain, where nobody is welcome, a declining monocultural island with a decaying economy and reactionary society of White Van Men and green inkers and Colonel Tufton-Buftons.

You don’t need to be Nostradamus to see this, yet the Tory shadow Home Secretary (some inbred toff clone without the personality to deserve a name) argues that the restrictions aren’t hard enough, even whilst acknowledging the sheer illogicality of, say, demanding an ability to speak English from students coming to study English! [5] The Tories are as much, if not more, in hock to racist exclusionist logic as the NuLabor regime.

Funny, though – if the Spanish, say, were to be so strict on visas for Brit incomers, the petit-bourgeois sewer Press would be up in arms about plucky Brits being harrassed by swarthy garlic-munching donkey-killing bureaucrats, much as they’ve been up in arms about the ‘injustices’ that expat Brits have ’suffered’ when their illegally-built houses on the Costa del Crime have been demolished. The old imperialist double-standard rules – it’s ok for whitey to settle overseas in darkie countries, but not ok, not at all ok, no, no and thrice no, for darkies to come and settle in our Green and Unpleasant Land (shurely New Jerusalem? Ed).

[1] Tougher rules to stop abuse of student visa system. BBC News online, 7/2/10

[2] Hefce announces funding for universities and colleges in 2010-11. HEFCE website, 1/2/10

[3] Overseas students prop up university finances. The Guardian online, 14/10/09

[4] Thousands of overseas students unable to enter UK. The Guardian online, 14/10/09

[5] Chris Grayling on BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news, 7/2/10

Thought crime

The BBC today reported that the parent group of Islam4UK is to be banned under anti-terrorism laws [1]. This is the group which so outraged public sensibilities by planning a march through Wootton Bassett,  where all the dead British soldiers from Afghanistan are returned to, to protest that Afghani dead, which far outnumber casualties in the occupation forces, are ignored by the State and media [2].Why has the group, which also goes by the name al-Muhajiroun, been banned by the Home Secretary? Because of a law passed in 2000, pretty much on the nod:

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, a group can be banned if it “commits or participates in acts of terrorism, prepares for, promotes or encourages terrorism or is otherwise concerned in terrorism” Groups can also be outlawed if they “unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism”. [1]

Although Islam4UK hadn’t carried out any violent acts, or been convicted or even accused of planning violence, it’s been banned because it “promotes or encourages terrorism” by verbally supporting overseas opposition Muslim groups. Terrorism, of course, is very much in the eye of the beholder – back in the 80s, for instance, most of the world considered the Nicaraguan Contras to be terrorists, on account of their deliberately terrorising civilians through rape, murder and destruction, for political ends. Ronald Reagan, then US President, famously described them as “freedom fighters” and “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”[4], a view shared by the US’s closest allies, including the UK. The African National Congress and ZAPU, to name but two liberation movements, were dubbed ‘terrorist’ by Western powers, yet produced national governments led by the very same ‘vicious terrorists’ which had led them. See also the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the leader of which, Yasser Arafat, went from ‘international terrorist’ to ‘elder statesman’ within the space of months.

The examples are endless, but the point is simple: ‘terrorism’ is a subjective and political term. If the State supports a movement’s struggle, it’s a ‘liberation movement’; if it opposes it, it’s ‘terrorist’. There’s a good reason for this. The most obvious, and to my mind accurate, definition of ‘terrorism’ is ‘the use of terror to achieve political ends’. Simple, and does what it says on the tin. The trouble for States is that this applies to their actions, in war and peace. States are the most expert practitioners of terrorism, often on an industrial global scale. This has been the case since WWI, the first war when the industrial killing of civilians, and their deliberate targetting by armed forces, became the norm. In recent times, the ’shock and awe’ attack against Iraq in 2003 was explicitly terrorist [5]. Many more examples could be cited, but let’s be brief – States use terrorism as a routine policy to achieve their ends, so they have to redefine terrorism so that they’re not guilty of it, as they would be on the bleeding obvious definition. As a result, a ‘terrorist’ is someone or some movement which the State is violently opposed to. This applies if the State itself isn’t directly affected, but its allies are, so the UK State talks of Hamas and Hizbollah as “terrorist organisations” because Israel and its imperial sponsor, the USA, are locked in violent struggle with those movements.

Because ‘terrorist’ is redefined politically and subjectively, it can be used against political opponents, even those who are non-violent, and this is precisely what the 2000 Act provides for. If the State doesn’t like you supporting a movement it deems ‘terrorist’, you can be banned and imprisoned. No matter if the movement is law-abiding within the UK, if it “promotes terrorism” it’s beyond the pale. Of course, had this test been applied in the Cold War in the West (it certainly was applied in the Soviet Empire) hundreds of left-wing organisations would have been proscribed, from fringe revolutionary groups to socialist parties to anti-apartheid and Palestinian solidarity groups. Not to mention Troops Out and Irish Republican groups – support for Sinn Feinn or the IRA would have got you locked up in a trice.

‘Terrorism’ has been redefined as ‘we don’t like the look of your face, sunbeam’, and any person or group that supports any kind of extra-parliamentary political action can and has been defined as ‘terrorist’ – just look at the banning of animal rights groups and the draconian sentences handed down to animal rights militants. At the moment the State’s baleful gaze is concentrated on Islam and Muslims, just as in the Cold War it was on Communists, and in pre-Peace Process days Irish Republicans, and they’re copping the full force of its repression. However, just as in Orwell’s 1984 where Oceania could switch in a day from being at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia, to being at war with Eurasia and eternal allies of Eastasia, so the State’s Public Enemy No. 1 can switch suddenly from republicans or commies or animal rightists or Muslims to any other movement, and the compliant media will obediently follow and demonise the ‘new terrorists’. All it would take would be, say, some nihilist nutter setting off a bomb for anarchists and revolutionary socialists to get it in the neck (as has already happened in Italy). Any movement can be an Enemy of the State.

A fundamental point remains: it is just plain wrong to lock people up for their beliefs. When the Soviet Union was locking up “dissidents” and suppressing opposition movements it was described as “tyrannical” and “totalitarian”. When the UK State does the same, it’s ‘protecting the public’. To me, this is yet another brick in the wall of fascism that’s being built in the UK (see an earlier blog post [6]), and a very dangerous and worrying development. It does make me wonder when, not if, it will become unhealthy to maintain a critical blog such as this…

Orwell had it right: all authoritarian States are the same, regardless of political complexion. Big Brother is to the State as ‘State of Grace’ is to Catholics, a consummation devoutly to be wished, a perfect state of being to aspire to.

References

[1] Islam4UK Islamist group banned under terror laws. BBC News online, 12/01/10

[2] Islamist group plans Wootton march. BBC News online, 2/01/10.

[3] A vicious grouping of right-wing counter-revolutionary paramilitaries that sowed terror in border regions of Nicaragua from their bases in neighbouring Honduras. See a fairly restrained Wikipedia article on the Contras.

[4] CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contra’s drug smuggling. The Independent, 7/11/98

[5] Analysis: US ’shock and awe’ tactic. BBC News, 21/3/03

[6] “HUNT THEM DOWN!”, This England, 24/3/07

Luton generates a neo-fascist group

It’s no surprise to me, as someone who was mostly dragged up in A Town Called Malice – sorry, Luton, ‘jewel of Bedfordshire’ (aka Crappest Town in Britain 2004 [1]) – that something like the neo-fascist streetgang called the English Defence League has come out of the place, born of the knuckledragging fans of Luton Town Football Club who, now that the club’s been relegated out of the Football League, have no ‘firms’ to fight anymore, so are looking for a scrap elsewhere, and angry jihadists are just the job.

According to the Independent on Sunday:

“The EDL, originally formed by football supporters in Luton, claims to be a non-violent group campaigning against Muslim fundamentalism but is alleged to have links to former hooligan networks and known British National Party agitators. It was formed in March in reaction to barracking by Muslim protesters at soldiers from the Royal Anglian Regiment parading through Luton on their return from Iraq.” [2]

Luton is that kind of town, where a low-level racism is so pervasive that it’s part of the miasmic atmosphere of the town, whose inhabitants have the political consciousness of jellyfish. It’s not that Lutonians are, on the whole, actively hostile to non-whites, it’s more that they take racism as such a fact of life that they really don’t understand that it’s racist to talk of, say, going down the “p*ki shop”, or carrying out a bit of “p*ki-bashing”, or getting a takeway from the “chinky”. It’s in such a fetid sea that the real racists and fascists swim so freely and occasionally, as has happened with the EDL, pop their heads above water. Not that most of the EDL will be fascists – they’ll be too stupid to understand the term. They just know that they don’t like “darkies” and “mozzies” and that they like a good ruck. They’ve probably practiced on matchdays, as they parade through Bury Park, where the Kennel – sorry, Kenilworth Road – is located, abusing and intimidating the Asian residents on the way.

As a (now armchair) Watford fan, I quite literally got it in the neck growing up in Luton, and saw first-hand genuine Loo’n ‘ooligans in their natural habitat. On a Monday at school after a Saturday’s ruck, they’d boast about making the opposition “run”, beating up some hapless kid who happened to be wearing oppo colours, doing a bit of “p@ki-bashing”, bricking houses in Bury Park, and so on. Knuckledragging scum you’d think, yet many were in the top form at school and came from ‘respectable’ middle-class backgrounds – I could name quite a few former classmates in A1 who were, frankly, violent psychopaths and virulent racists. The nature of Luton fans hasn’t changed much since those days, with Watford fans in particular getting vicious treatment at home matches, so I for one had little sympathy for the club’s rapid decline into the football conference – if, as I believe, a club is its fans, for better or worse, then LTFC deserves its demise.

I was determined to leave that dump, and after a false start I finally escaped in ‘84 oop North. The best thing to come out of Luton is the M1 going Northbound.

References

[1] Luton was famously voted Crap Town of 2004, and with good reason. See Luton voted Britain’s worst town. BBC News Online, 27/9/04

[2] Anti-islamists target Palestinian rally in central London. Independent on Sunday, 13/9/09

Links

Wikipedia: English Defence League

Megrahi release: a lot of sound and fury…

…signifying nothing but another Spectacle designed to distract attention from the real issue of the Lockerbie bombing, namely the realpolitik behind the stitch-up of Megrahi as a convenient patsy. Whenever you hear loud howls of outrage from politicians ‘across the political spectrum’ (which in UK terms is centre-right to far right) you can be sure that the louder the howls and more fervent the outrage, the more important the issue(s) attention is being diverted from. In the case of the “Lockerbie bomber”, released from jail on compassionate grounds on account of him being due to croak any day now, the howls have become louder and more fervent with every passing hour, with even the Yanks joining in, the Director of the US political police – sorry, ‘FBI’ – declaring that the decision “gave comfort to terrorists” [1] and St Obama saying the decision to release was “a mistake”.

It was quite handy that Gheddafi gave Megrahi a “hero’s welcome” as that gave the various rent-a-rants (sorry, ‘commentators’) and MPs an excellent focus for their outrage. So convenient, indeed, that the mischievously minded might wonder if Gheddafi hadn’t been tipped the unofficial wink to play up the reception for public consumption both in Libya and over here, despite the official line that Brown had written to him asking for a quiet homecoming. The “triumphalism” of the reception gave the rent-a-rants an easy target to rage against safe in the knowledge that whatever they said would have zero practical effect on the fait accompli and so there’d be no comeback [2], which allowed them to puff, preen and posture as they wanted. NuLabor hacks North of the Border also used the release as a convenient stick to beat the Scotnats with, safe in the knowledge that the stick couldn’t be turned against them. A win-win for the ranters and gobshites that represent the “consensus” of the UK, and particularly the English, political class – the Megrahi release was the equivalent of a free ball in snooker, an opportunity which costs nothing and can gain much.

What all the bluster and thunder conveniently distracts attention from is that the conviction of Megrahi was, even if you’re charitable and naive and gullible, pretty damned iffy. All the initial leads pointed towards a Syrian-backed group as the perps in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US warship Vincennes (an event that’s been successfully airbrushed out of public history), but with the US turning against their former puppet Saddam Hussein Syria suddenly became a valuable ‘regional ally’ so there was a sharp switch in the investigation’s focus to another ’state sponsor of terrorism’, Libya. Suddenly a dodgy witness is found in Malta, who after being wined and dined and treated to goodies by investigators, and after being shown photos of Megrahi, identified him many years after the ‘fact’ [3]. As Private Eye, for all its faults one of the few remaining bastions of investigative reporting in the UK, and which has doggedly pursued the “travesty” of Megrahi’s conviction since 2001, wrote in an article in the recent edition:

Megrahi’s trial was a travesty. There were the testimonies of two witnesses who were paid huge sums by the CIA – one a notorious liar and paid informer, Abdul Giaka, who first put Megrahi in the frame; the other the Maltese shopkeeper who identified him as the man who bought clothes said to have been packed round the bomb. He had been shown photographs of Megrahi. [4]

The only material evidence linking Megrahi and Libya to the bombing was a tiny bit of circuit board ‘re-found’ amongst the crash debris some years later. All in all a pretty thin case, and there were strong grounds for believing that Megrahi’s appeal against the conviction would have not only discredited this evidence but would have also brought the realpolitik of US and UK governments into the frame and opened a can of worms which both States were keen to see remain closed and buried. The Eye again:

News last week that Megrahi was to be returned on ‘compassionate grounds’, because he was dying of cancer, briefly raised hopes that his appeal could continue in his absence. But that was never going to be allowed to happen, and Megrahi, who had always said he would never return to Libya until his name was cleared, duly dropped his appeal.

That the appeal won’t go ahead has dismayed many UK relatives of victims of the atrocity, including the courageous and redoubtable Jim Swires, but has undoubtedly led to huge sighs of relief being breathed in the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster. With Megrahi dead and the appeal buried, the chances are that the truth of the bombing, who carried it out and, more importantly, why and on whose orders, will never come out in our lifetimes, unless investigative journalists keep digging (oh for a Seymour Hearsh over here). Which will happily suit the gobshites and rent-a-rants who can continue to foam at the mouth in parliaments and newspapers, and more importantly the senior figures in the UK and US States who know the truth.

Whenever you see the English political class united in ‘outrage’ at something or other, you can lay good odds that there’s something needing covering up. Instead, as the Eye puts it, the “outrage would be better focused on the governments and justice systems that have ensured we have all been denied the full truth about Lockerbie.”

As a ’side-dish’ to this story, it was interesting to compare and contrast the public view North and South of the Border. I was up in the Highlands on holiday these last two weeks, and in the week running up to the release the Herald, and BBC Radio Scotland (I didn’t watch any TV – hey, I was on holiday!), continuously ran stories on the impending release. The Herald carried many letters on the issue, and it was interesting to see from them, and from the radio reports, that the prevailing public opinion was that a) the conviction was dodgy and should be examined, and b) the guy should be released to spend his last days at home even if he was guilty, with politicial commentators declaring that showing mercy was a “strength” of which Scotland should be proud, and which reflected well on the nation. I don’t know what the reactionary English press wrote during this time, but it was clear from the newsstand headlines on the release that compassion was not top of the agenda. Another illustration, to my mind, of the increasingly civilised discourse and culture in Scotland, compared to the reactionary, and often neo-fascist, barbarism to the South. The contrast between civilisation and barbarism becomes, it seems, starker and more glaring each time I venture North. With luck one time I’ll stay up there and not return…

Postscript

A good letter on this topic appeared in the Herald last Saturday which is worth quoting in full in case the link ‘goes off’:

Hypocritical for Americans to voice anger

The USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus on July 3, 1988, killing 290 innocent civilians. When the Vincennes returned to its home port of San Diego, it was given a hero’s welcome. The crew members of the Vincennes were awarded combat action ribbons.

Commander Scott Lustig won the Commendation medal for “heroic achievement” for the ability to “maintain his poise and confidence under fire” that allowed him to “quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure”. To top it all, the citizens of Indiana raised money not for the dead Iranians but to the very ship that destroyed their lives.

Now, as Megrahi is allowed to go home to die in Libya, most Americans as well as our Foreign Secretary David Miliband, express disgust at the scenes of flag-waving. Mr Miliband said: “Obviously the sight of a mass murderer getting a hero’s welcome in Tripoli is deeply upsetting, deeply distressing.” I wonder how the Iranians felt when they heard of the Vincennes arrival back in San Diego.

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It is not often we have the opportunity to be proud to be Scottish but I, for one, am deeply relieved that our small nation stood up to the political heavyweights who tried to interfere with the Scottish legal system which chose to show that, even after a heinous crimes had been perpetrated, we are capable of granting a dying man compassion.

Even if Megrahi did commit the terrible act of bombing Pan Am 103, who ordered it? Colonel Gaddafi? The very same Gaddafi who is now treated to private audiences with our own leaders?

Martin Walsh, Paisley.

Another article worth reading is The Framing of Al-Megrahi by the respected human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce which looks at Megrahi’s fit-up in forensic detail, and reveals some quite disturbing facts about US and UK geopolitical and secret service interventions in the case, right from the night of the crash when unidentified US spooks were trawling the crash site.

[1] Megrahi release ‘right decision’. BBC News online, 23/8/09

[2] Unlike, say, the liberal warmonger Aaronovitch whose fervent support for the Iraq war helped shore up support for the war of plunder and thus indirectly made him complicit in the immense death and destruction caused by it, a complicity for which he could, though sadly likely won’t, be held personally accountable

[3] Megrahi: a ‘convenient scapegoat’? BBC News online, 20/8/09

[4] Private Eye, No. 1243, p28. See also the Private Eye website where you can buy copies of the late and much-missed Paul Foot’s investigations into the Megrahi fit-up.

[5] The Herald, Letters page 22/8/09, also on the newspaper website.

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.