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Tony Benn was one of the best things about the UK. He will be missed. Here is a great article about him from Portside Moderator.
In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person — Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates — ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.
I just realized that there are no comments enabled on this blog any more. I think it's because, having a customized CSS template, I was using an external comment manager and they "went out of business" or something. Just went, anyway. I wanted to make a funny comment. I just realized that this post and the four preceding it are about "Four Obituaries and A Wedding".
Doris Lessing, author of The Golden Notebook and many other novels and a few non-fiction works, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, died yesterday at the age of 94. As Alexandra Schwarz noted in her wonderful New Yorker blog post ,"On Doris Lessing and Not Saying Thank You", The NYT in its obituary of her sounded "a tone of peevish, gawking reproach. (Much better to read Margaret Atwood’s wonderful tribute in the Guardian.)" It is ever thus with the boldly unconventional female.
I am so appalled at this latest turn in the saga of Great Britain's immigration policies that I can hardly find the words. You would think after the even worse incidents in France (picture above from a notorious video of French police beating women and children during a protest by immigrants there) that the UK would be keen to be seen as more humane in their treatment of "failed asylum seekers".
I have visions of the scene toward the end of my favourite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, where a British doctor comes upon a marketplace full of dead and dying Turkish soldiers and no one doing anything to help them, and he keeps shouting "Outrageous" in an impotent fury. That's how I feel about most immigration stories I read, but this one really is outrageous, not for naked aggression, as in France, but for an utter failure to do the right thing, for pandering to racist tabloid media, for treating and thinking of asylum seekers and economic migrants as less than human.
After campaigning on the "moral outrage" of children of asylum seekers being kept virtually imprisoned, the LDs as part of the coalition government have helped to hatch this cynical flash-deportation scheme, trying to circumvent both human rights rules and liberal public opinion.
The briefing paper also shows that the border agency is worried that ending the use of detention could give families facing deportation more chance to launch community protest campaigns backed by the media and MPs. It says more police may need to be involved in deportations because "significant public order problems" could follow removals. "The alternative is not to inform the family of the exact time and date of removal, so that they are not prepared. However, this has its own difficulties, which would need analysing and addressing." The document says it is undecided whether a specific time and date should be given, or a longer period of a couple of days.
Bloody Sunday.
If you had told me in the early 1970s that there would ever come a day when any government, least of all the government of the UK, would issue such an honest and devastating assessment of its own actions, I would not have believed it.
Of course, there are those who see it as a step too far in laying blame, particularly when a commanding officer is singled out for blame, while individual soldiers who shot and killed have their identities protected, and those higher up the chain are mostly let off the hook.
Families of the victims have had, for the most part, no appetite for revenge now that the innocence of their loved ones is established. One survivor says "Jail isn't something I can see happening. That wouldn't, in any way, bother me, I have no great desire to see a 60-year-old man go to jail."
 Tony Blair's intention to run for the position of first president of Europe has called a "Stop Blair" movement into being. Where do I sign up?
In his numinous and magical novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut introduced the idea of "granfalloons". These are random groupings of people who think, erroneously, that they have some shared destiny as a group, and for whom this delusion is a source of suffering and misguided action. Examples, famously, are given, thus:
Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Association of Oddfellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. I think of this statement, which has become a sort of mantra to me over the nearly 40 years since I read Cat's Cradle, literally every time I pass through an airport, see a reference to immigration or international trade, and about the half the time I am watching, listening to or reading the news. Especially when I read about things like this.
I just heard Norman Mailer, who died two days ago, in an interview with Andrew Marr in 2002, say something very profound: "The essence of totalitarianism is the perversion of language." (This is, I admit, a paraphrase, from my age-enfeebled memory.) He was talking about Bush, of course. One of my major political prophets was George Orwell, who expounded so eloquently on this in the immortal essay "Politics and the English Language", and indeed, that essay is probably the germ of Mailer's political analysis, as it is of mine. The other, closely related, concept besides "newspeak" that Orwell invented in 1984 is the idea of "thought crime". When I read 1984 in 1968, I wondered if things would ever come to such a pass that Western so-called democracies would have thought crimes. In 1984, when Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan held powerful sway, I believed we were on the brink, but still safe in the sane world where evil must be done, rather than just thought about, written about or even aesthetically appreciated (abhorrent as that idea is) before a crime had been committed. Now, in 2007, the US and the UK have had thought crime for about five years. Prisons whose existence we still do not know about are full of these mental "perpetrators".
This week, what I consider a gross miscarriage of justice showed just how far this can be taken.
A 23-year-old Heathrow airport worker who dubbed herself the "lyrical terrorist" today became the first woman to be convicted under the government's anti-terror legislation.
Samina Malik, who burst into tears on hearing the verdict, wrote poems entitled How To Behead and The Living Martyrs and stocked a "library" of documents useful to terrorists. The article on the trial and conviction of Ms. Malik goes on to catalogue all her "crimes", e.g. the possession of books, the writing of things in a private diary and an ominous nickname she used on social networking websites. "I am not a terrorist." Malik said after her trial. She claimed to have used the nickname "lyrical terrorist" because she thought it was "cool".
My goodness, but Her Maj had a busy day today. Not only did she have the Queen's speech to deliver, making it already one of her busiest days of the year, but on the same day she opened the newly refurbished St. Pancras Station to Eurostar travel to the continent. (She doesn't have to write the speech, even though it's called the Queen's speech; the PM writes it and she just reads it, but she reads it very nicely.)
Gordon Brown having had his coming out party in America now (oh, is that not what it's called? sorry), American readers of Deborama may now be wondering what to make of the man. I really don't think you could have gleaned much from those ghastly photo-op "press conferences". So here is the official version, from the UK gov site for Number 10 and here is an even more official site, from Wikipedia. For those who want to delve a little deeper, there is this excellent article in Prospect magazine. And for those who just want to take the piss, there is Steve Bell (see picture).
Have you ever had a situation where you had two good friends, that you never saw together, and never really thought of together, and then it turns out they know each other better than they know you? That was sort of how I felt when I received today's SojoMail, the e-mailing from Jim Wallis, a left-leaning religious politics pundit well-known in the US. The segment was titled Someone You Should Know, but it turned out to be about someone I know (of) very well, and in fact had been thinking about most of the day - Gordon Brown! It was strange, because the piece was obviously aimed at Americans (real Americans, not phony ex-pats like me) and it presumed the reader had heard little or nothing about Gordon Brown; whereas I had been bemoaning the fact that I was so busy at work, I had still not found out who was on his new cabinet at 8 pm tonight.
The Observer has commissioned a poll on Tony Blair's 10 years in power, asking questions such as do you think the UK is a happier place now than it was before New Labour came into government? The results are very negative, a "damning verdict" on Blair's policies and style of governing. Blair is reportedly seen as too fond of spin (and of George Bush). He has not improved people's feelings of safety and is not judged to have improved any public services, noticeably the NHS which is seen to have declined.
Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian comment section has an article that brilliantly explains the weird sense of political doldrums that has had this country in its grip since Blair's announcement of an unspecified date for his departure from Number 10.
So this bizarre, unprecedented period is working fine for our current prime minister - but it is draining away the chances of the man, and the Labour government, who would succeed him. It would be nice to think that troubled Tony Blair. But I suspect he spoke the truth last Friday: he ain't bovvered.
DH's eloquent challenge to the continued existence of the Trident missile system
Today, DH wrote a long and passionate e-mail to our MP about the forthcoming vote on renewing (or not) the Trident missile programme. He sent me a copy of it, and reader, I was blowed away. I had no idea he could write, or argue, like this. He said (also something of a surprise) that he would not object to my posting it on the blog. But I decided it was too good for the ephemeral glimmer of being a Deborama post. I decided he needed his own blog, even if that was the only post he ever did, and I had to set it up AND post it for him. So that is what I have done. I hereby introduce you to The Ramage Letters, a new blog, and here is a quote from "the letter":
I would deplore Conservative support for renewal of Trident in this coming week for the main reason that the decision does not have to be taken this week, this year or this parliament. At the very least, the decision should wait for the current and discredited Prime Minister to leave office, and ideally it would form part of a manifesto commitment in the next general election, thereby giving the British people the opportunity to have say in matters in which, as I say, parliament has a dreadfully meek and compliant record. A referendum would be the ideal solution, since I imagine the average MP to be at least as clueless about the real substantive issues as the average citizen. Although my main objection to the vote is that it is needless at this time, before you – and other MPs – take a position I hope you have answered the following questions and are prepared to publish your answers after the vote: At whom are we likely to launch these weapons? What state/quasi-state or geographic area? a) I assume that Europe (including Russia), the Americas, Japan, China and the antipodes are not and are never likely to be viable targets, either because they are always likely to remain allies or are simply too powerful for us to drop a nuclear weapon inside their borders. So that leaves territory in the wider Middle East, Africa or parts of Asia as viable targets for our nuclear weapons because they are too weak to hit back. Surely the world is sick and tired of having the American Bully strutting the globe: do we want really want to have a weapon we can only deploy against the weak and defenceless (when the Americans let us)? Shame on us if we do.
Focus: Zero to hero in today's Sunday Times attempts to put George Galloway into context and answer the question is he a friend or a foe of Saddam Hussein? The answer they come up with is a little bit of both, and is best summed up by GG's own statement during an earlier phase of his besiegement by press and less radical lefties: “My opposition to American imperialism is greater than my opposition to this or that tinpot dictator with whom American imperialism from time to time falls out.”
While it is true that Galloway visited Saddam in 1994 and again in 1998, and that he made a sycophantic speech to him in 1994 and that he refused to condemn him in the harsh tones demanded by the establishment, but instead praised him with faint damns, it also true that he marched, demonstrated and spoke out harshly against Saddam from 1980 to 1993 (even though he also opposed the 1991 Gulf War.) In fact, in his own ultra-leftist way, Galloway has been quite consistent. The one thing the American people (including especially the Senate) will never understand is that there other standards of ethical public behaviour than their own, and there is a long and not yet defeated (despite what all the uber-patriots may wish) tradition of international anti-imperialist socialism which stands unashamedly in opposition to them. The British Labour party knows all about this tendency, but has no truck with it; but New Labour has no consistency or principles at all. If Galloway's actions in 1994 were so repellent, why did they wait until 2003 to expel him? I think we all know why: he has a following and he wins elections.
A Guardian comment piece, The rise of Tony Zoffis, shows just what an appallingly un-democratic thing is going on, has been going on since 1997, with New Labour's education policy. Now the naked power play is in the open, with ennobling of Andrew Adonis to be supposedly a junior minister in education, but obviously he is still calling the shots, "ensuring total obedience from his nominal boss, Ruth Kelly", as Francis Beckett says in the Guardian. Unlike in America, where the legislative and executive branches are completely separate and the President appoints the entire cabinet from non-elected citizens, in Britain all cabinet members must be members of one of the houses of Parliament. This means that non-MPs must be brought in through the Lords. The really sick thing about this, is that even if Tony B. is ousted soon from power, and Adonis's moment of cabinet glory is decently brief, he will always be Lord Adonis, and always eligible to sit in the House of Lords, exerting some power however limited over the people who never elected him and never would have done.
The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin. In preparation for the mammoth task of reviewing the mammoth literary work known as "the Barock Cycle" (Neal Stephenson) I have been browsing the Quicksilver Metaweb, where I found the sublime quote above. Slavery and the history of abolition movements is one of about a dozen major themes that run through the three weighty tomes that make up the Barock Cycle. As you may know, abolition movements, the study of, is one of my areas of passionate interest, and the Stephenson novels seem to uncannily hit upon a lot of them (cryptanalysis, metaphysical debates, religious wars and slightly unusual sexual practices also feature prominently.)
I am struck by the vast philosophical gulf between the sentiments in the quote above, from an English judge in an historic case which may have sparked the British abolitionist movement, and the beliefs (or perhaps total lack of beliefs) of the current guardians of British liberty, ironically known as the Labour Party.
Several cases in point will illustrate this:
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