Reasons to leave England, part 5

Part 5 in an occasional series featuring news stories that just make me want to pack my bags and escape across the Border to a civilised country.

Westminster Council proposes banning “tents and similar structures” and “noise equipment” in crackdown on political protest

Statewatch, 11/01/12

London’s Westminster Council is currently running a consultation on proposed new byelaws that seek to prohibit long-term or noisy political protests. If made law, the draft provisions would ban the erection or keeping of tents “or similar structures”, whether for sleeping in or not, as well as permitting “constables and authorised officers” to seize “noise equipment” being used to cause “annoyance”.

Kettling protesters is lawful, appeal court rules

Guardian 19/1/12

Police tactics of kettling protesters, used extensively during the G20 protests in London three years ago, have been upheld as lawful. The appeal court overturned a previous ruling by the high court on the controversial technique deployed to contain demonstrators during the climate camp sit-in.

UK riots: paratroopers are trained in riot control

Daily Telegraph, 28/1/12

Hundreds of soldiers from 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment spent last week learning how to contain and arrest “rioters” in a series of exercises mirroring last summers violence. Defence sources have confirmed that if violence were to return to British cities, especially during the Olympic Games, the Paras would be “ideally placed” to provide “short-term” support to police forces around the UK.

Sick and disabled people could be forced to work for nothing

Guardian, 17/2/12

Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions. [...] The policy could mean that those on employment and support allowance who have been placed in the work-related activity group (Wrag) could be compelled to undertake work experience for charities, public bodies and high-street retailers. The Wrag group includes those who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer but have more than six months to live; accident and stroke victims; and some of those with mental health issues.

Now, imagine that you’ve been given, say, a year to live by your doctor. What do you think you should be doing in that time? Having as good a time as you can have with your condition and making the most of what little life you have left, or working in some pointless McJob? No civilised society would make someone with terminal illness work for what remains of their living.

Gunning for Gold

Schnews, 6/1/12

The deployment of up to 13,500 military personnel, two of the navy’s largest warships, unspecified numbers of military attack helicopters staffed by snipers, typhoon fighter jets, surface to air missiles, support from the SAS and Navy Marines 12,000 police officers, 300 MI5 agents, 20,000 private security guards and up to 1000 US agents including 500 FBI. The extension of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act across the whole of Britain. All costing in the region of £6million.

So the invasion of Iran? The military contingent sent to join Arab Spring rebel groups? The recent deployment in Libya? No – it’s a just a few folk running and seeing who can throw something the furthest. In the capital city of a country that according to the Country Risk Index is one of the most stable in the world. East London is set to resemble a warzone (again) as the Olympic Games 2012 rolls into town. [...] All of this set to the background of a city crippled by the economic insanity of the last few decades. With the lottery fiasco of Olympic ticket allocation that has seen, predictably, wealthy and influential applicants cream the best of the seats and over a million ordinary families missing out on even the most obscure of events, this complete suspension of civil liberties and obscenely gross spending of millions of pounds is the final insult. The unprecedented security measures being put in place make a mockery of even the draconian Beijing Olympics in 2008 hosted by the Chinese Communist Party. These are the actions of a government that is very, very scared – not only of the ‘threat of international terrorism’ but also of its own people.

Ryanair don’t care

Here’s another reason to hate Ryanair and its CEO, Michael “Gobshite” O’Leary. Consumers already know that GobshiteAir is a cowboy firm that treats its passengers like shite with ripoff fares, airports hours from the ‘destination’ they’re supposed to serve, and flights cancelled at will leaving passengers stranded hundreds of miles from home. Now there’s a campaign from the worker’s viewpoint, highlighting the seriously dodgy GobshiteAir practice of “recruitment scamming”, and calling for a week of action starting on March 12th. A post on a radical Left blog explains the campaign:

The Ryanair Don’t Care campaign, supported by Liverpool Solidarity Federation, is calling for an international week of action against exploitation and recruitment-scamming by Ryanair starting on March 12th 2012.

The Ryanair Don’t Care Campaign was started by John Foley when his daughter was sacked as a flight attendant mid-flight and abandoned abroad, penniless. This would lead to the exposure of a cynical and highly exploitative recruitment scam by the airline.

Ryanair’s current policy of recruitment-for-termination is part of the massive exploitation of people who apply to work for the company. As it stands potential cabin crew have to pay a fee of 3000 Euro through an agency to undergo training for Ryanair. As many as 60 people are sacked at any one time after this initial training period, up to 200 people a month. Those who survive are put on a 12 month probationary period on a lower rate of pay than normal cabin crew and Ryanair pocket the difference, as much as £20m a year.

Anyone who’s travelled on GobshiteAir, including this author, can see plainly how the cabin crew are treated like the dirt under O’Leary’s shoe, and it’s time punters and workers stood together in solidarity. And the next time you’re on GobshiteAir, be nice to the crew and bear in mind that they have to put up with O’Leary’s exploitation every working day, not just for a flight or two as you’re doing. For those who say vote with your feet and fly another airline, remember that GobshiteAir have monopolies on many routes so you don’t have any choice but to fly with them.

For further information on the campaign, see the RyanAirDontCare blog, and follow it on Facebook and Twitter. For a bit of fun, and a serious, and seriously funny, dig at GobshiteAir, watch “Cheap Flights” by the Irish singing group Fascinating Aida.

Criminal classes and their sponsors

It’s a bit late in the day, I know, but I’ve just now watched the documentary Inside Job on video. There are scads of reviews of it around, ever since it premièred at Cannes last year, and I’m no film critic. It is, though, the most powerful condemnation of Finance Capital that I’ve ever seen, and all the more powerful because of its understated approach, its liberal pro-capitalist viewpoint, and its forensic attention to detail. It’s all well, and justifiable and true, to say that the recession/depression is man-made [1] and to castigate the 1%, but rhetoric, though necessary, is nothing without evidence, and this film provides evidence aplenty that the criminal classes wear suits, and are fully supported by the State. Had Michael Moore or Ken Loach made this as a polemic it would have preached to the anti-capitalist converted but been written off by everyone else; made by a capitalist liberal, Charles H Ferguson, with unimpeachable establishment credentials, and featuring big noises like George Soros and IMF bigwigs such as Christine Lagarde, it can’t be summarily dismissed as socialist agitprop. It goes to show that, sometimes, the deadliest attacks on ‘the system’ can come from within [3].

The very clear points to come out of the film are:

• Suits are criminal scum. They’re filthy, rise to the top, block light from those of us beneath them in the pond, and consume the lion’s share of the nutrients. The only differences between Suits and the Mafia are:
  • Suits have State backing and are ‘legal’, and have effective immunity from prosecution [4]. Indeed, Finance Capital uses the US and UK States as enforcers.
  • Suits cause suffering many orders of magnitudes greater than the Mob
• corrupt and fraudulent politicians made tens, hundreds of millions in personal gain, then used trillions of public funds to bail themselves and their Suit sponsors out
• corrupt and fraudulent Suits gambled on a staggering, mind-boggling scale using non-existent money, to the extent of selling ‘products’ which they not only knew were ‘crap’ but on the failure of which they actively wagered.
• corrupt and compliant credit ratings agencies (yes, those same ones who are deciding the fates of national economies) stoked the bubble with fictitious ratings for which they were paid enormously. And still are.
• corrupt and compliant media took the Finance Capital shilling and shilled beautifully in return
• corrupt, fraudulent, compliant and thieving States stole trillions from their publics in order to bail out their capi
• everyone in the criminal classes gets away with it, and many even have the chutzpah to demand ‘freedom from regulation’ and ginormous bonuses for the ‘national interest’

The simple, overall lesson is that Finance Capital and its State sponsors are profoundly criminal and destructively anti-social. Parasitic is too gentle a term as a successful parasite doesn’t kill off its host. Wilfully, amorally destructive is the only way to describe how this criminal class operates. Ok, in a way this is old news, though on a massively greater scale, with enormously more damage, than in the past when capitalism was primarily concerned with making things and providing services, but the bleedin’ obvious needs to be restated time and again for new generations and to counter compliant and complicit media that root for the Suits and make unemployment, poverty and economic crisis out to be natural disasters that we just have to put up with as a forces of nature, rather than deliberately man-made evils to feed profit margins.

SFW?

So what’s this issue to do with Ingerlan? Everything. Finance Capital, which was made dominant in the 80s by the Thatcher regime’s plundering of public resources (sorry, ‘privatisation’), has roundly defeated Industrial Capital and is now the dominant economic force in the UK, such that it can tell the Prime Minister what to do, as Cameron so aptly demonstrated with his EU veto which was explicitly on behalf of the “Financial Services industry”. Though the Mail and Express readerships, and the Colonel Bufton-Tuftons and White Van Men, want to believe that he was ‘standing up for Britain’, he was no more than a little boy obeying his masters’ orders. The UK is, economically and politically, a semi-detached State of the USA, as discussed in an earlier blog entry [2], such that what happens across the Pond happens here, often on a more damaging scale. And, of course, we are ruled by a bunch of Atlanticist toffs who are implementing Thatcherism Phase II, intent on privatising what little is left of public service and industry, on driving down wages,  on pursuing a class war in Spades, and on rendering the already enfeebled English working class into a barely skilled, unconscious casual labour pool of McWorkers. All so as to further boost the coffers of City Suits.

References

[1] And I mean “man”. All the prime actors in the ‘crisis’ were male, and a telling section of the film is about traders being testosterone junkies who were plied with coke and prostitutes on expenses.

[2] Europhobia on the rise

[3] On a tangent, John le Carré’s Smiley novels are a blistering critique of the English haute bourgeoisie and ruling class because the author is a part of that very class and knows it intimately.

[4] As the film points out, not one Suit has even been investigated, let alone stood trial, for criminal offences.

Links

Inside Job: movie website

Wikipedia: Inside Job (film)

Wikipedia: Charles H Ferguson

Reasons to leave England, part 4

Part 4 in an occasional series featuring news stories that just make me want to pack my bags and escape across the Border to a civilised country.

Cameron should forget about compassion – what people clearly want is the nasty party back

Alexander Chancellor, The Guardian, 8/12/11

David Cameron once preached “compassionate conservatism” to make his party seem nicer, but that’s not what people want at all. What they actually want is “the nasty party”; and the nastier, the better. The latest report on British Social Attitudes, published annually by the National Centre for Social Research, reveals a sharp lurch to the right in public opinion. Most Britons, it finds, believe that the unemployed are deterred by excessive state benefits from looking for jobs, child poverty is the fault of parental indolence, and global warming is a myth. The amount of people willing to pay higher taxes to spend on health and education has fallen in nine years from 63% to 31%. And while people agree that Britain needs more housing, 45% don’t want any new houses built near them (and the percentage is higher – for example, 58% in outer London – in areas where the housing shortage is greatest).

The full, and highly detailed, report is available to download from the NCSR website, and makes depressing reading for liberals and socialists, or indeed anyone who values compassion and solidarity over hatred and self-interest.

Bubble trouble at South Coast derby

Football Supporters Federation, 15/12/11

Fans of Portsmouth and Southampton are unhappy with Hampshire Police thanks to their decision to force a so-called “bubble match” onto supporters this Sunday. Bubble matches place severe restrictions on fans’ freedom of movement and supporters of both sides say the move is unnecessary. [...] Bubble matches are games where ALL away fans must travel on designated transport – usually club coaches – from specific pick-up points. No independent travel is allowed and fans are usually given match tickets en route to the game, which guarantees compliance. It is a tactic that police forces around the UK have used – fans from Bristol City, Burnley, Cardiff City, and Wolves have all been on the receiving end in recent years.

Now police can shoot rioters

Daily Express, 21/12/11

POLICE should be prepared to shoot arsonists during riots to save innocent lives, one of the UK’s senior officers has said. An official review of police tactics during the shocking summer disturbances has found that officers should be ready to use “extraordinary measures” if yobs endanger lives by attacking homes and businesses.

The Super Soaraway Scum also led on this ‘story’:

COPS could shoot rioters who start fires that threaten life, a watchdog said yesterday. Water cannon and rubber bullets could also be used to stop a repeat of the summer disturbances. Live rounds could be used by gun cops against arsonists who torch businesses and homes with people inside, reported HM Inspectorate of Constabulary. It stated: “In extreme circumstances, where life is threatened, (police) commanders must also be able to use extraordinary measures.”

Shooting unarmed people is ‘oppression’ when it happens in Egypt or Syria, but just an ‘extraordinary measure’ to safeguard ‘life and property’ when it happens in the UK. Same old, same old – when under threat on the streets, all States are the same. You might say that the rioters in the UK were just ‘criminals’ and ‘yobs’ with no political aim, whereas ‘protesters’ in Egypt are revolutionaries aiming at removing dictatorship, and many (especially in the chattering classes) said precisely that during the 3 nights of rioting across England. Perhaps we now have two types of rioters, as we now (again) have two types of poor these days: deserving and undeserving.

London Olympics security to be boosted by 13,500 troops

The Guardian, 15/12/11

Up to 13,500 military personnel will be on duty in London and across the country during the Olympic Games next summer, the government has revealed, including 7,500 to boost the number of security staff inside Olympic venues. The number is greater than the 9,500 deployed in Afghanistan, although the defence secretary, Phillip Hammond, insisted the large call on the armed forces would not affect operational capabilities elsewhere. Hammond also revealed that the Royal Navy’s largest ship, 22,500-tonne helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, would be based in Greenwich for the duration of the Games, while assault vessel HMS Bulwark would be moored in Weymouth, where the sailing events will take place. An “appropriate and scaleable” air security plan includes Typhoon aircraft at RAF Northolt, helicopters operating from HMS Ocean and “appropriate” surface to air missile systems.

A song for radical patriots

I was listening to the CD “No rest for the wicked” from the radical folk/punk/rock group New Model Army in the car yesterday. NMA were a very angry and politically radical and active band back in the 80s, and indeed they’re still going. I’ve a soft spot for them on account of them coming from Bradford, where I spent many happy if skint years, and I’ve always admired their righteous and no-nonsense anger.

The wrote much of their best stuff during the time when the Thatcher regime was cynically fomenting a nasty little colonial war in the South Atlantic and whipping up reactionary patriotic fervour to distract attention from their real and continuing class war, and from their wholesale looting of the UK economy to enrich their neo-liberal friends and an army of freebooting yuppies growing fat off privatisation. This virulently nostalgic patriotism, harking back to Empire when Britannia Waived The Rules – sorry, Ruled the Waves – was invoked, after the rather lucky victory over the Argentine forces, against the “enemy within” during the Miner’s Strike of 1984, indicating whom the capitalist classes saw as their true enemy. These were days when class war was a daily, in-yer-face reality, and folk in Yorkshire and Lancashire manufacturing centres, including Bradford, were suffering the economic and social destruction of their communities and livelihoods. Add to that the nuclear colonialism of the Reagan regime, treating the UK as its missile carrier, and you had a political and social fervour not seen since the defeat of the Miners (as ever, thanks a fecking bundle for the scabbing, Nottingham).

So the NMA had plenty to be angry about, but theirs was a constructive, radical anger, and the words of My Country would serve, I think, as an anthem for those, such as Billy Bragg, fighting for a radical, inclusive Englishness.

Tell all the people who believe what they read in the press
Tell all the folk who stare from behind suburban walls
The enemy is not some nation far across the sea
The enemy is with us every single breathing day

So yes, I will fight for my country
The land that I love so well
Yes, for justice, a land fit for all our futures
Yes, I will fight for my country
The land that I love so well
Hear the voices of our history echo all around

Fight all the ones who divide us rich against poor
Fight all the ones who divide us white against black
Fight all the ones who want their missiles in our earth
Fight all the powers who would lead us into war
No rights were ever given to us by the grace of God
No rights were ever given by some United Nations clause
No rights were ever given by some nice guy at the top
Our rights they were bought by all the blood
And all the tears of all our
Grandmothers, grandfathers before
For all the folk who gave their lives for us
For all the folk who spit out – never say die
For all the fires burning on our highest hills
For all the people spinning tales tonight
Fight all the powers who would abuse our Common Laws
Fight all the powers who think they only owe themselves . . .

This is even more powerful when sung – the album version is available on YouTube.

Rioting: simple explanation

An awful lot of spleen and verbiage has erupted into print and on the airwaves since the recent riots kicked off. A true volcano of hot air that’s grounded all rational discussion. Nearly all of it tells you more about the ranter than the riots, and is easily discountable as the English bourgeois and petit-bourgeois letting its hair down in a 2-minute hate of the ‘lower orders’. WTF, let them have their fun, and with luck the rising blood pressure will bring a few to an earlier demise than would have otherwise been the case (or, more ironically, will bring them into the arms of the NHS they so want to slash and burn).

The explanation for the rioting is simple: when the rich get richer at the expense of the poor who get poorer, then you’ll get social tensions that will occasionally explode. The State knows this only too well, and has spent the last two decades increasing its social control through surveillance, interception, detention without trial, laws creating thought crime, and ratcheting up repression of Left and radical opposition. Whilst the State’s been steadily withdrawing from the public sphere through spending cuts (driven by income and corporate tax cuts) and privatisation, it’s been spending like crazy on the Security State for the time when the lid comes off.

And the lid has come off, if only for a short time, so the Security State kicks into action and arrests and jails everyone it can get its mitts on, even for just nicking a packet of fags or a bottle of water [1], pour encourager les autres. So add to spending cuts and the rapidly increasing wealth gap between haves and have-nots indiscriminate repression, and you get a vicious (or, for the Security State, a virtuous) circle: more folk criminalised with even less to lose will be more likely to riot again, leading to further repression leading to further hatred and rioting.

It’s bleedin’ obvious for any of us who’ve been on the dole and skint (unlike most of the pundits and pontificators and moralists). The skinter you are, the fewer prospects of becoming not skint, and the richer the feckers above you get, the more likely you are to eventually shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” and to lash out, and if possible cop a few desirable goodies through looting. It’s no coincidence that less unequal societies, such as Norway, are more stable and settled.

Unequal societies in history, including this one, have regularly suffered riots and insurrections as the inequalities worsened. Cause and effect: simple, no? No need to invoke ‘loss of community’ or ‘moral decline’ or ‘mindlessness’ or ‘greed’ or any other moralist hobbyhorse. The more unequal a society, the more violent it is.

There are more than a few ironies in the moralist’s rants. Posh boy Cameron bangs on about the loss of community blithely ignoring what his predecessors did in the 80s, when the Thatcher regime deliberately and systematically destroyed manufacturing and extraction industries around which communities had evolved since the Industrial Revolution (mining, shipbuilding, car manufacturing, steel making, etc), and actively and gleefully dismantled those communities in the process.

As for ‘greed’ being a motivating factor of rioters, that really does bring out the darkest belly-laughs. Whose greed started this feckin’ economic recession in the first place? The answer’s bleedin’ obvious. The damage that the City Suits did to economy and society through their greed for massive bonuses and profits dwarfs any physical damage that rioters have done by several orders of magnitude, but when a Suit shows greed it’s ‘enterprise’, when a hoodie shows it it’s ‘sheer criminality’. As has always been the case going back centuries.

A more ‘intellectual’ outlook on the recent events will follow in due course, if I can be arsed.

References & Notes

[1] Fears grow over excessive sentencing as cases pile up. Independent, 14/8/11. “On Thursday a 23-year-old was sent to prison for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from Lidl. A 43-year-old is still being held in prison for stealing items worth £1 from a newsagent”

These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting. Seumas Milne, The Guardian, 10/8/11

E-petitions

The Tory regime’s new ‘e-petition‘ scheme got under way today, and it was immediately reported that the most popular petition by far was that calling for “restoration of the death penalty” [1], with other reactionary beauts not far behind, such as “that prisoners’ diets be restricted to bread and water” [2], EU withdrawal, and repeal of the Human Rights Act. Of the top 10 petitions by numbers of signatures [3], only two could be considered vaguely progressive.

There could be all sorts of reasons for the majority of petitions being barkingly right-wing, but without analysis of the socio-economic backgrounds of those who’ve signed them any speculation would just be whistling in the dark. What is clear, and has been for some time, is that a major part of the population of Ingerlan is backward and regressive, and this backwardness and reaction has only got worse as the economy’s gone down the tubes. In a country with a bit of political consciousness and an active worker’s movement, economic decline goes hand in hand with class struggle as people get the rough end of the economic pineapple. In Ingerlan, though, it’s the immigrants and the shirkers and the scroungers and the ‘liberal elite’ in the media that are to blame for all our ills, and we need the firm smack of strong government, retributive eye-for-an-eye ‘justice’, and a retreat to inglorious isolationism by leaving the EU [4] to restore Ingerlan to its ‘rightful place’ in the world (as the USA’s 51st State and aircraft carrier, say).

As the blogging White Van Man podger Guido Fawkes said on C4 news this evening: “There is a regressive majority in this country” [5]. He may well be right. What’s clear from the last quarter century since the defeat of the Miner’s Strike in 1984 is that the Great English Public has become irredeemably stupid and backward. Individually, or even in small groups, many English folk are rational and reasonable and occasionally progressive, but en masse the GEP is as thick as a lorryload of two by fours and has the morality of a witch-hunting mob.

Here’s an idea, though. I’m sure that all those who’ve backed the petition for the restoration of State killing would agree that with power should come responsibility.  If judicial execution does become law, it would only be ‘right and proper’ that, when there’s to be an execution, the executioner is drawn at random from all those who’ve voted for the ‘death penalty’. He or she would have to throw the switch or press the button or pull the handle to kill the alleged perp, and would have to look them in the eyes whilst they do it. Seems fair enough to me – wodger reckon, Guido?

References and notes

[1] I’ve never understood why judicial killing is called the “death penalty”. A punishment can only be meaningful if the perp understands and suffers it. A long stretch certainly fulfils that purpose – the perp understands why s/he’s locked up and is suffering for it. Kill the perp, and there’s no suffering and thus no punishment. I think that folk who support State murder ought to be clear and honest about the “death penalty” – it’s not a punishment, it’s revenge. Nothing more. Any other ‘justification’ is rationalisation of the basic retributive urge to kill a killer or, these days, anyone who pisses off the petit-bourgeois and White Van Man – remember The Execution of Gary Glitter on C4 in November 2009? The ‘debate’ on the C4 website is as instructive as it is chilling, with many contributors willing to kill “people who commit crimes against children”. So much for the ‘death penalty’ being restricted to ‘capital crimes’, eh?

[2] E-petitions urge MPs to debate return of death penalty, BBC News 4/11/08

[3] You can view petitions by numbers of signatures on the e-petition site. At the time of writing, the top 10 petitions by signatures are:

Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment View	3,455	04/02/2012
Keep Formula 1 Free To Air in the UK View	1,674	04/08/2012
Restore Capital Punishment View	1,538	04/02/2012
Britain wants referendum to leave EU View	636	04/08/2012
Legalise cannabis View	636	04/08/2012
Absolute right to self-defence within ones home View	397	04/02/2012
Return of Hanging for Serious Crimes View	345	04/08/2012
Decriminalise recreational drugs View	283	04/08/2012
Remove the ban on gay blood donation View	246	04/08/2012
withdraw from the european human rights act View	229	04/08/2012

[4] When presumably we’ll feed ourselves on Churchillian rhetoric and Vera Lynn songs (“we’ll eat again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but we’ll eat again some lucky, lucky day”).

[5] Guido Fawkes, C4 News, 4/8/11. Emphasis in original.

“Our country, right or wrong!”

I came across the following quote on a web forum today – does it remind you of any recent events? Go on, try to guess who it’s from and when it was written:

“Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object — robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician’s trick — a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor — none but those others were patriots.”

It could have been written about any of the ‘imperialist adventures’ undertaken by the US and UK in recent years, from the Falklands/Malvinas war to Iraq and Afghanistan, and how they’ve been propagandised by compliant and complicit media. In fact, it was written back in the early 20th century by Mark Twain, author, journalist, and latterly anti-imperialist. The quote continues:

“To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, “Our Country, right or wrong,” and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

For in a republic, who is “the Country”? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is “the country?” Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn’t.” [1]

Bear that in mind the next time the Mail or Express or Super Soaraway Neo-Fascist Sun claims to represent ‘true England’, and slags all us bothersome Lefties off as ‘traitors’ to that ‘England’.  It’s quite simple really: there is no one ‘England’ with a common culture which unites queen and commoner, suit and chav, black and white.  There’s a whole heap of Englands, and it’s cynical arrogance for those in the dominant culture to claim to speak for all of them, and to declare those that don’t fit into their reactionary mythology as traitors.

I also liked another of his quotes, which is very apposite given the various revolutions under way in the Arab world:

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.

Is that the bleedin’ obvious, or what?

References

[1] Mark Twain in Wikiquotes, accessed 3/8/11

[2] Wikipedia entry on Mark Twain, accessed 3/8/11

Reasons to leave England, part 2

Part 2 in an occasional series featuring news stories that just make me want to pack my bags and escape across the Border to a civilised country.

UK: New “anti-extremism” strategy

Statewatch News Online, No 1 of 2: 13 June 2011 (15/11)

Updated anti-extremism strategy published (BBC News, link):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13679360

“The new strategy also puts a renewed focus on the use of the internet and says the government will consider a “national blocking list” of violent and unlawful websites. Under the plans, computers in schools, libraries and colleges will also be barred from accessing unlawful material on the internet.”

See also: Doctors asked to identify potential terrorists under government plans (Guardian, links):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/06/doctors-identify-potential-terrorists-plans/print

and Official review finds scant evidence of state funds going to extremists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/07/review-state-funding-extremism/print

“It will also introduce a new definition of extremism as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs.”

SICK BENEFITS: 75% ARE FAKING

Daily Express, 27/7/11

THREE in four people on sickness benefits are fit for work or drop their claim before facing strict new tests, shock figures revealed yesterday.

This from a newspaper run by a porn baron (Richard “Dirty” Desmond) and thus hardly a paragon of middle-class probity. Mind you, the figures can’t be that much of a “shock” as the reactionary rag ‘reported’ back in January that “75% ON SICK ARE SKIVING“. Not to be outdone, the neo-fascist (a label I don’t used lightly) Daily Mail’s lead story the same day screamed “The shirking classes: Just 1 in 14 incapacity claimants is unfit to work“, which works out at 93% of claimants being ‘shirkers’. It says a lot for the state of Ingerlan, this green and pleasant land whose inhabitants are so proud of their “tradition of tolerance” ^[TM] when the leading petit-bourgeois papers are putting the boot into folk with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses and causing real damage to real people in real situations. Aren’t they the brave and tough guys, eh? It would be nice to see the ‘journalists’ and editors who publish such stories being held directly and personally to account by those whom the stories damage. Back in the ‘heyday of union power’, the 70s and early 80s, the barking Press always accused union leaders of having power without responsibility. Now there’s the pot calling the kettle black.

Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police

Guardian, 1/8/11

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door? Dust off your old Sex Pistols albums and hang out a black and red flag to make them feel at home? Invite them round to debate the merits of Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist communism versus the individualist anarchism of Emile Armand? No – the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.

I can’t help paraphrasing the famous saying of Pastor Martin Niemöller from some decades ago, as it looks like anarchists might become the new bogeyman for the Security State now that Islam is just soooooo noughties, darling:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the muslims,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a muslim.

Then they came for the anarchists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an anarchist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The English working class put to the test

Tomorrow’s strikes by public sector workers, including teachers, university staff, and civil servants, will be the start of a major test of the English working class. The Tory government has declared open class war through devastating spending cuts and privatisation. This is the most blatant and aggressive class offensive since the Thatcher regime, seriously degrading workers rights and conditions whilst at the same time enriching the financial capitalist class that single-handedly brought about the economic depression that we’re now in. The government is run by and for public schoolboys, with no pretence of commonality with ordinary people other than the token, oft-ridiculed mantra of “We’re all in this together”.

The cuts and privatisations – in universities, public services, the NHS, to mention but a few – are materially affecting working people, worsening their life chances, physical and mental health, and lifespans. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer and sicker. You don’t have to be a class warrior to see the stark, unvarnished reality – it stares you in the face every day. It’s the bleedin’ obvious, made as bleedin’ obvious as it could possibly be. [1]

The big question is: will the English working class meekly suffer and doff its collective cap to the toffs, or will it fight back and develop some sort of political consciousness? That question will be answered by the strike turnouts, and by the level of sympathy and solidarity offered to the strikers by the rest of the working class. The regime is trying to divide and rule by painting the strikers as “feather-bedded” public sector workers who enjoy “gold-plated” and “generous” pensions courtesy of the hard-pressed taxpayer, unlike private sector workers who’re lucky to get a fish supper when they eventually retire. This is an old ‘argument’ and easily countered, and it’s obvious what the regime is playing at, but much of the middle class has already fallen for it [2].

However, will the English working class fall for it and turn against the strikers? It would have to be terminally stupid and unconscious to do so in the face of the bleedin’ obvious class war launched upon it, but then the last two decades at least have seen the English working class develop a numbing collective stupidity, with the political consciousness of a lobotomised bee. The defeat of the NUM in the last major class battle of 1984 (in which Nottingham played such a sterling role on behalf of the bosses – thanks a bundle, guys), the ideological victory of Thatcherism, and the deliberate economic and social destruction of working-class communities, has seriously enfeebled traditions of solidarity and wrecked what little political consciousness the working class possessed. Maybe, though, in the face of such a determined onslaught from the Tory regime and the classes it represents, English workers will finally awaken from their thrall to the individualist Thatcherite ideology of The Sun and White Van Man, and will wipe the rheum from their eyes and see what’s really happening, and do something about it.

That’s being optimistic. The evidence of recent decades is not encouraging, and if the working class can’t rebel even when it’s being beaten around the head by public schoolboys and suits with a nailed stick then it’s doomed as a force. We’ll have to see what happens tomorrow and in the next few weeks.

Notes

[1] As a for instance of the bleedin’ obvious, see yesterday’s report on the greatest fall in UK disposable income since the 20s.

[2] See the comments on a Nottingham Evening Post story about the teacher’s strike to get a glimpse of the thought processes, if that’s what such knee-jerk reaction can be called, of the East Midlands petit-bourgeoisie. This shouldn’t be nationally-representative as Notts is especially backward and scabby, going back to its inglorious scabbing role in the Miners Strike (see this blog passim), and of course web fora bring out the green inkers in droves, but it’s still depressing to see how people swallow the regime’s propaganda whole.