Bah ! Humbug !

Only two weeks to go, but nevertheless the worst two weeks of the year. Peace and goodwill to all men ? Don't make me laugh. Not out on the High Street it's not. Out there the human sheep are giving succour to the the capitalist beast in a display of selfish, atavistic consumerist consumption. And why ? Well, to celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus, of course.

Don't make me laugh. Mr. Christ himself (if he hadn't been dead for 2,000 years) would probably be watching it all wearing a "not in my name" t-shirt. And he'd have a point. After all, you can bet your last selection box those fighting over the turkey in M&S haven't been to church since they were kids.

The people who wonder if they have bought everyone enough Christmas presents are the same ones who rail against religion as the cause of war and human misery, who decry priests as paedophiles and mock those who believe in the teaching of the Bible. Hello ! Christmas is a religious festival, folks. No wonder the Christians are embarrassed by it all.

They're not the only ones made sick by the perversity and hypocrisy of it all. But the pressure to conform is often too great for those who realise what a sham it is to celebrate Christmas and not be a Christian. How can we not join in ? Think about the kids with no presents. What would the family and friends make of it all ?

Well, I bring such people good news. I have never in my adult life sent a Christmas card or felt as though I needed to give a present. I tell family and friends that they will receive no greeting or gift from me because I do not celebrate anything I don't believe in.

And their reaction to this is ? "OK, fine. We see your point." No adult has ever blackballed me for refusing to recognise them or their children in what is considered to be the appropriate way. No child I know has thought less of me because I haven't added to their mountain of gifts from Santa's sleigh.

It's as easy as that. If you don't see the point, if you think it's costing too much money, and especially if you can't afford it , just give up Christmas.

Plenty of other societies have done it. In the Soviet Union, where atheism was state policy, they didn't have Christmas. But everyone recognised that in the middle of winter the weather was shit and people felt a bit down in the dumps. So, the week before New Year (which, by the way, really is worth celebrating) people got time off , the kids got sweets and small presents, the grown-ups got booze and they had an official Winter Festival. No Wise Men, no manger, no baby, just a bit of a knees up.

And, you know, what's wrong with that ? So let's do it. Cut the spending on presents, forget the turkey, get rid of the pointless cards. Let's stop prentending and take the Christ out of Christmas. We'd be doing ourselves a favour and the true believers in the story of the birth of the infant Jesus could get their festival back too, although they'd probably have to move it to a different date !

What's It All For ?

The internet is 40, not that many of us would realise unless some wise person had told us so. For most of the human race it has only really been on the radar for the past decade; in 1994, for example, there were fewer than a thousand websites. Now there are billions.

But what is it all for ? And is it doing any of us any good ? Why do people like me do this with our time, I mean join blogger any write all types of crap like this. Personally, I blog because I'm an egomaniac, I think I can construct an argument and because I don't mind being bombarded with abuse by wierdos.

And they are out there. The one thing the internet has done is given everyone a potential voice to say anything they like. Some, by no means everyone, have taken advantage of this cyberspace democracy to spout, in the main, nonsense, abuse, vitriol and hateful bile. Just like me.

Which is fine, after all, most of us love a good rammy. But others don't and instead use blogs, photosites and all the rest to put their lives on the web in full public display. Facebook, twitter and the like flourish on the quotidian, the banal, the everyday opening up a window on the private world of jobs and family life. They lay out who we are and what we think, if anyone's interested.

The amazing thing is people do seem interested, perhaps just an extension of human curiosity that's been there since the start of time. Except that we have always been able to screen who sees the kind of thing we want to tell others and now we can tell everyone who has a computer.

That may seem marvellous, a great leap forward made possible by human ingenuity and the technology it has created. Or it could simply be a universal way for everyone in the world to embarrass and make a fool of themselves.

What Is History ?

I've been reading lots lately on the 1989 revolutions that brought down the Iron Curtain, especially accounts that were written at the time or not long after.
Looking back 20 years, it is the first bit of history I experienced as an adult and, given I had a personal interest in the outcome, it wasn't something that simply passed me by at the time. Given that, I have clear memories.
What are they ? News reports of Poland's round table and elections, although nebulous, still made an impression. Hungarian border guards out with the wire cutters opening the border with Austria is a sharper memory, as is the film of East Germans jumping through the gap.
But most of all it is the Czechs standing in Wenceslas Square jangling their car keys, Dubcek standing on the balcony while the crowds cheered. And Marta Kubisova singing. The more I read the more the song won't leave my head.


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My Dad

It's a year to the day since dad died. It's not been too stressful, low key in fact. Mother's mind has been kept off the anniversary by matters at hand and that, I think, is a good thing.

His death had been a while coming but looking back 12 months it amazed me, even though I had prepared for and maybe even rehearsed ahead of it, the event still packed the power to shock when it did arrive.

Now I look back fondly and without any of that pain. Except.

I can see him in my mind's eye and remember how he used to be and laugh, or curse, or cringe. But looking at photos of him I feel a sense of loss I don't get when simply thinking about him. He's no less real in my thoughts than he appears in the pages of a photo album, so it's not something I can even properly rationalise. It's harder to explain.

I'll go on looking, turning the pages, seeing the face and remembering the man with all his goodness and all his faults, no matter how sad the albums make me. You need all the tools at your disposal to keep memory alive and abandoning one simply because it illicits a response which surprises me and which, to be honest, I don't like would be wrong. It would be selfish to keep the albums permanently closed.

Hier Wo Ich Lebe

Strictly Come Griffin

If the BBC had wanted Nick Griffin on air simply as a ratings-winner surely it would have made more sense to have him appear on Strictly Come Dancing than Question Time ?
For once, I fear, Mark Thompson is right. He is only following the same rules that allow other small parties to go on the programme. It’s not the BBC’s fault the BNP won 6% of the vote in certain parts of the country at June’s European elections. That’s democracy, folks.
And if you don’t like it and you don’t want them either to get the lifeblood of publicity or votes, then you ban them from the airwaves a la Sinn Fein, or you stop them standing in elections like the Spanish did with Herri Batasuna.
The question that hasn’t left my head since Griffin’s Question Time appearance first came to light is, why would we want to reason with fascists anyway ? When it comes to discussions with the far right, I’m with Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan; baseball bats are a better weapon than words.
Politicians like Peter Hain, an honourable man with a genuine record of fighting racism, who say Griffin shouldn’t be on Question Time, should be hounding their leaders demanding the organisation is proscribed rather than browbeating the BBC.
And those who choose to share a platform with the BNP in the hope that people will be persuaded simply by the power of argument that British fascism is a bad idea, well, they must know they are on a hiding to nothing; preaching to the converted majority while failing to convince the minority who may be swayed by the extreme right.
Our political leaders, of all hues, should really be asking themselves how it ever came to this ? How could the BNP garner enough electoral support to even warrant the attention of David Dimbleby ? How is it possible for 1,048 people in Falkirk to go into a voting booth and put their X next to the party’s name at the Euro elections ?
They might find an unwillingness to confront these questions is in direct proportion to their complicity in creating the conditions for an increase in the BNP’s attractiveness.
Two things come to mind. The so-called ‘War On Terror’ and, secondly, the neoliberal-inspired global financial meltdown.
The pathetic attempts of our political leaders to justify imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has amounted to just one argument; if we don’t stop them at source the Muslim extremists will come here and blow us all to bits.
In the misguided eyes of some that has been twisted into young white kids in shopping centres across Britain shouting “Taliban” at any passing Muslim. The fact that a few (less than 12) Muslims living in Britain have actually carried out attacks here has not only made the UK Government’s position seem stronger, it has also negated attempts by the Muslim community to paint the picture as false.
It bears all the hallmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more we are mired in these wars the more some people will see Muslims as “others”, outsiders not to be welcomed but instead feared. For the politicians to make a strong statement against such logic would undermine their own position, so instead we get ineffective, if well-meant, platitudes that don’t address the problem.

It’s easy for the like of the BNP to fill the gap with their hate. In a clever role reversal they suggest if we didn’t have so many Asian people here, spongers some of them, then we wouldn’t have so many problems dealing with the fuzzy-wuzzies abroad. And some people buy it because the counter reasoning is not just weak but undermined by the position of those making it.
If we mix in a recession and unemployment, short-time working, financial misery then the right-wing extremists can again rub their hands with glee. Because our leaders refuse to tackle the cause of all this misery, the bankers and international capitalists.
Instead they get our money to help them make more money, while the economy shows little sign of substantive recovery. And the BNP gets a double whammy; look, they say, the Government’s doing nothing to stop this greed, and while you’re sitting on the dole some Polish guy’s coming over here getting work and claiming benefits for his wife and kids. Some will make the connection and agree with Griffin and his cohorts.
The failure lies with the mainstream parties. If we get a sensible foreign policy then one line of BNP propaganda is pulled from under them. Should we have a Government committed to economic fairness then another argument is shut off. But it doesn’t happen. And they compound their errors by mistaking diversity for equality.
Polish and Pakistani people can come here and live and work and enjoy life and, by and large, they do so. Nothing in the law stops them. They achieve it through hard work and a sense of self-fulfilment. Ask them whether they need special attention from the state to help them and they will say no. Inquire as to whether the whole raft of diversity and equal opportunities legislation makes much difference to their lives, the answer will generally be negative. Self-help, in the form of ethnic support groups, generally suffices.
And yet positive discrimination is where most politically-inspired anti-racism initiatives take shape. Equality legislation in the field of race has not ended racism nor is it likely to, at least any time soon. And yet its very existence is the rod the far right uses most effectively to beat anti-racist campaigners over the head with.
But then again, how can our main parties argue that we should treat all people who live here equally, regardless of ethnicity, when we put the rich on a pedestal ? Surely their inability to create a more equal society in terms of wealth is a breeding ground for the kind of resentment of “others” that breeds the racism they want to try and eliminate ?
If we tackle the rich, take a strong stand against bankers’ bonuses by capping them, make the very wealthy pay more tax, stop large companies avoiding their fair share of the burden, then we can pour some revenues back into the country’s coffers and strengthen the public services that are funded by all our contributions.
We might then start feeling better about ourselves and, you never know, stop worrying about the “others” in our midst, a phantom really, but an economically and socially-based one that is doing us lots of harm. It’s a better option, surely, than going on the telly to say Nick Griffin is a bad man.

Multiculturalism

A crushed, empty can of Tyskie not on the streets of Warsaw, but Falkirk. It’s sometimes the simple, mundane things that draw your attention to the connectedness of Scotland and Poland.
When we were kids in the seventies and eighties it was different, of course. Then, it was the sense of distance and separation that was the most obvious link between the two. Mr Domowski’s Saturday morning Polish language lessons and Monsignor Drobina pressing a krowka into the palm of your hand, father and mother in ‘the club’ where the Poles would gather, that was our Poland.
But it was different one from the real Poland a thousand miles away. Divided not just by difference but also by ideology. I got a real sense of that when I went there aged eight, travelling in dad’s car all the way from Falkirk to Warsaw, through a hole in the Iron Curtain where I saw Red Army soldiers for the first time.
And it all seemed so alien, not just to my little bit of Poland in the heart of Scotland, but also to my Scottish life away from the confines of the exiles, our parents. Maybe also irrelevant, to some degree. We were Polish Scots, with the latter more important to us than the former, or at least that’s how it seemed to us whose ‘Polishness’ was diluted by one of our parents’ choice of partner.
We had our heritage which was different from our day-to-day existence and that meant our ability, and desire, to in some sense be Polish was lost. Scotland, and Falkirk, was where we were meant to be, not in the Communist world where they were supposed to be our enemies. But 1989 pulled that rug from under our feet.
Two things immediately struck me about the end of the People’s Republic of Poland, that far off place which seemed to have cut me off from my heritage and family.
First, I could travel to the new Polish Republic more easily and less bureaucratically and without coming under suspicion simply because I was from an émigré group. Second, I could, if I so wanted, become a Polish citizen with a passport and everything.
As the trips to the forgotten land began, the wasted opportunity of not being able to fully legitimate your Polish identity began to strike home. For some of us it felt as though the chance “be Polish” had gone completely at exactly the moment where it should have been possible. Like Alex Haley’s Roots, it was where I was from but was not really part of the person I was. There was a sense of regret at that, maybe for the first time I wanted to be a Scottish Pole.
So I read and I learned and used the internet to increase my understanding and connections with people allowed me to seem a bit more Polish, at least to myself.
Then the EU influx opened up my eyes to how I really wasn’t that Polish at all, at least not next to those with real lived experience of the place. In one sense it was good to have your own home, and the people in it, exposed to the kind of culture you had grown up understanding you had some, often tenuous-seeming, link to. There was the ability to buy Polish food in the shops, hear it spoken on the streets, have Poland and the Poles discussed in the media.
But, deep down, it created a feeling of somehow being an outsider. The eventual realisation was having a foot in both camps left me with a sense that I didn’t really belong in either the group marked “Scottish” or the one labelled “Polish”.
I am one thing but want to be the other, knowing full well I will never be able to tie myself to one identity. Is that multiculturalism ?

Our Postie

Our postie doesn't look like one, if anyone can "look like" the job they do, that's to say ! What I really mean is that there is nothing in his appearance that says, 'I am a postman.'

He's young, has long brown hair which he ties back with a rubber band in a grunge-rock kind of way and wears jeans, a hoodie and trainers. The only way to identify his 'Royal Mailness' is the bright red bag full of letters to deliver.

I suppose I should be grateful that I recognise our postal worker because, from what I gather, many people have a different person turn up every day. He certainly may be regular but his timing isn't. He can arrive any old time.

Our block of flats is next to a traditional corner shop selling newspapers, tobacco and hot filled rolls. It is the place he delivers to prior to coming in our front door and, if his arrival coincides with lunchtime, he hands over the mail to the shop staff and buys a roll filled with sliced sausage while he's there.

He then comes out of the shop and stands in the street eating his lunch. Only then does he move on and deliver our letters. His dress and behaviour hardly deonte a public servant, but then he probably doesn't think of himself as one and his bosses have perhaps done nothing to inclucate in him any sense of that.

It is a picture of the terminal decline of the post as something of geniune importance. Rember when all our postal workers had to conform to the Postman Pat stereotype ? No more, and it is so because those who run the Royal Mail no longer see any need for it. Delivering our letters, less important now because of e-mail, is just another business not a public duty. It's all about profit.

Thankfully, some who still work in the postal service see it as just that, a public service. That is the reason why they are going on strike this week, to make sure those standards are not lost completely. They believe the Royal Mail is worth saving, that it can be both modernised and retain its essential spirit. We can still move with the times and yet preserve the seriousness of duty conveyed in John Grierson's great film, Night Mail.

But politicians can only see money flowing into the Exchequer's coffers by hiving part of it off to the private sector, and can only but blindly follow their great dictum that greater choice in mail deliverly services will benefit the public. You get the feeling they believe allowing orange-jacketed TNT posties to compete with the Royal Mail is a good thing. The bosses want more profits and want staff to jump through more hoops in order to achieve it, even though that profit is not being ploughed back into making the service anything of the sort.

There is only one thing for it; if you think the post is too important to put profit first then don't complain when there are no deliveries on Thursday and Friday. Support our striking posties.

They're At It Again

Peter Hain when will you ever learn ? He's on about the BNP again in the papers and he's the latest New Labourite to blether the same old rubbish about Nick Griffin's European election success in June.

Mr Hain has a great record in fighting racism, so you would expect him to know more about identifying it than most of us. But there he is in The Guardian telling us that folk who voted BNP only did so as a protest against the big parties in the wake of the Westminster expenses farago.

What's more, he says voting BNP is, in such circumstances, not an endorsement of racism, per se.

He's not the only Labour politico to fall into the same trap of refusing to accept that some outwardly upstanding British people have some sympathies with racist thinking. If voting for a party at an election is not an endorsement of their policies then what's the point ? Is he saying the very act of voting has all the foresight of a sticking the tail on a donkey contest ? If people who voted BNP in June aren't racist then why didn't they vote Green, or Lib Dem as a protest ?

Labour have tried to come back by saying they chose BNP simply for its power to shock. Certainly they did that if that was the objective. But no person who rejects racism would ever commit such an act.

So Hain, and his friends, have to at least admit those whose X went next to the BNP on the ballot paper were at least prepared to countenance being represented by people with racist and extreme right-wing views. Don't kid yourselves, and us, that the Great British Public have clean hands when it comes to viewpoints on nationality, identity and race, irrespective of how they vote at elections. The truth says something different.

They can congratulate themselves all they want about changing attitudes everytime a TV presenter is told off for saying golliwog but that kind of gesture is not based in the reality of the everyday. Not every Briton is racist, far from it. Most are probably don't have to think about race in their daily lives. But those who are suddenly confronted with race as an issue can sometimes deliver a viewpoint which can chill you to the bone and shock you, simply because you have never heard them ever say such a thing.

Mr Hain says less than one per cent of people in Britain harbour racist opinions. He should correct that to say "admit to" racist opinions. It's the ones who keep it to themselves we should worry about because the day may come when it will rise to the surface.

God Help Latvia

You would think Latvians would have more to worry about than grandad’s wartime service record. The tsunami that is the global economic crisis washed over the Baltic country leaving devastation in its wake.
The Latvian economy is scheduled to shrink by 18% in the next year. The government’s had to slash public spending which has put doctors, nurses and teachers on the dole as schools and hospitals close. Wages have been cut by 30% or more. As it is, unemployment’s running at 17%.
And as for the property boom ? Well, it seems most mortgage payers are now in negative equity and, as those mortgages are in euros, many are facing repossession. Banks aren’t lending. The IMF is demanding Latvia reduce its national debt to 8.5% of GDP this year, thus almost certainly meaning more budget cutbacks. There have been riots on the streets of Riga and one change of Prime Minister.
And it the midst of all this chaos the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls in the British Ambassador to complain about David Milliband’s outburst that some politicians in Latvia glorify Hitler’s Waffen SS.
The Foreign Secretary’s comments were a barb thrown at the Tories for including an MEP from Latvia’s For Fatherland And Freedom Party in its rag-tag army of Brussels Eurosceptics (I’ve blogged about this mob often enough before).
The timing was pre-planned to coincide with the arrival of the Baltic party’s leader at the Tory conference fringe. Roberts Zile says he isn’t a Nazi apologist and has never glorified the SS. But their history is a murky one.
After the Germans kicked the Soviets out of Latvia in 1941 there’s no doubt some Latvians helped the Nazis kill Jews. Some of them later went onto become members of the Waffen SS when there weren’t enough Germans left to fill the divisions.
Many were just teenagers who were told they could fight in an SS uniform or become a slave labourer in Germany. Others were anti-communists who wanted to stop a Soviet re-invasion of Latvia. Some more were those guilty of war crimes. But not according to the Latvian government.
Its official policy is that grandad had no choice, he had to go off and put on a German uniform and he certainly didn’t kill any Jews. So, in its eyes, there’s nothing wrong with visiting memorials (constructed after Latvia gained its independence from the Soviet Union) honouring those who died wearing SS colours. The official line is they were only doing either what they were forced to do or what they thought was right to save Latvian independence.
Hence the ticking off for Milliband. And most ethnic Latvians agree with their government, and Zile, not the UK one, so they are not, on the whole, likely to take very well to lectures from foreigners about moral choices people in Britain didn’t have to face.
And across Nazi-occupied Europe, in almost every country Hitler invaded, locals either joined the SS because they were right-wing fanatics or were press-ganged into donning German uniforms to make up for a shortage of manpower.
While some Latvians are still in denial over their wartime past and some certainly need to admit the truth over their countrymen’s participation in the Holocaust, Milliband’s attack on For Fatherland and Freedom won’t stick.
He no doubt chose the SS subject matter because of the emotional resonance it has in Britain. But it is far too easy for Zile and others to deflect. Milliband might have had more luck had he tried homophobia and bizarre attitudes to who is, and isn’t Latvian.
For Fatherland And Freedom don’t stand out from the crowd in Latvia over attitudes to the country’s wartime record, but in matters of who actually is a Latvian then they do.
More than ten years ago they attempted to give Latvian citizenship to people who had never set foot in the country but deny it to those who were born there. Because Latvia had a huge Russian and Ukrainian immigrant population they feared the indigenous culture would be strangled.
So they proposed all the Latvians who had fled abroad to escape the Soviets in 1945, and all their descendants, should AUTOMATICALLY get a passport. But the Russians and Ukrainians who were born there shouldn’t. They lost a referendum, only narrowly, and the Russian-speakers still have to jump through hoops to get citizenship that is freely available to Latvians born in Britain, the US and Australia. (One hoop is admitting the Soviet backed influx of Russians into Latvia was illegal).

Today there are hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking "non-citizens" who won't jump to the Latvian tune and who can't get a passport to travel abroad. Some have undergone "naturalisation" but Zile's party stood in the 2006 elections on the ticket of stopping the Russians gaining any kind of Latvian citizenship.
Even today Zile told the newspaper “Latvijas Avizei” that the country should be “very cautious” about who is Latvian, citing the example of his French teacher in Brussels who “might have been from one of the Indochinese countries” who declared themselves to be French.
In Zile’s view, then, to be Latvian you have to speak the language, be “a patriot” and, it would appear the case that you have to look Latvian as well. Anything which seems foreign has to be guarded against. And he gets away with this in an EU country ?
His attitude to the Russian-speaking minority is barely contemptuous. “I see Latvia as a country dominated by the Latvian language and culture and by the political determination of the Latvians,” he told Latvijas Avizei. Of ethnic minorities there is no mention. He dismisses co-operation with the main party that represents Russians.
And this guy is in government. He is one of the main “experts” that is supposed to lead Latvia out of the economic morass it finds itself in.
Maybe Milliband should have been highlighting this as the kind of European partner Dave wants to encourage ; a near-miss xenophobe with extreme right-wing and anti-gay ideas. Imagine a member of the UK cabinet going around shouting 'Britain for the British'. And they want him to lead the economy back on the straight and narrow ?
There is a blogger who calls his site “Failed State Latvia ?” Maybe soon he can drop the question mark.

One Day

One day I will find more things to say. The words will flow, one after another, and take shape on the page, making some kind of sense, forming some kind of an opinion or maybe a statement of fact. But now ? Now I am struggling, not with the time to write things down, not with thoughts in my head, but struggling nevertheless.

Struggling, perhaps, with the pointlessness of it all. Of scribbling and creating things hardly anyone will read and even fewer will agree with. Strange, the internet has made the world a tower of babel, but the more people speak, or write, does it mean the fewer there are to listen or read ?

At the moment I will listen, read, watch, observe. And then, at the moment when it feels right, I will write.

Rome Burns, Nero Fiddles

I’m having a little difficulty looking out of the window, splattered as it is with a random pattern of countless raindrops. But I can see enough to be aware that the streets are wet, the rain is falling and the trees are being bent double by a strong wind. It looks like January.
I go out to the newsagent to get my morning paper and it is only then it becomes apparent that it’s not January, but September. Because the air temperature is mild, the wind bending the trees is warm. You might need a waterproof but you won’t need a winter coat.
At the newsagent the stack of papers is full of, “The Lucozade Bombers”; British Islamic militants who have been jailed after being caught planning to blow up passenger planes heading to America from Heathrow airport. Their justification is Britain and America’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Much is made of the potential to kill more than a thousand innocent people and how police and security services stopped this happening.
I read intently of their suicide videos and their apparently ordinary backgrounds. But when the paper is folded back into place and put to one side I look at the rain in September and wonder who is doing more damage to the world ? Islamic fundamentalists or the rest of us, who are first to complain about the weird weather but fail to recognise we are its cause.
David Milliband’s so concerned about climate change he is to tour Europe warning of rising flood tides, disappearing coastal towns and cities and, apparently, alligators basking on the shores of Sweden.
Guardian readers are worried too. They are pledging to cut their environmental footprint by ten per cent in a year. Which is nice. But the world does not consist of David Millibands or Guardian readers alone. It is mainly populated by people who see it as essential to life to burn fossil fuels, to relentlessly consume things they don’t need, who cannot make changes to their lives that involve restraint and self-sacrifice in order to stop damaging the planet for future generations.
And today’s democratic politicians have to pander to that great mass in order to retain their power. The Greenland ice melts, Kenya’s arable land is left without water turning it into worthless scrub where farmers can no longer make a living and we moan about 50 days consecutive rainfall on Skye.
But that cannot be allowed to disturb our ability to drive cars, fly in planes, turn the heating up full blast and oppose an increasing number of windfarms because they spoil the view. Our politicians cannot confront climate change, they have to work out ways to mitigate it without upsetting the people who vote for them. And that, at the moment, is proving impossible.
They will all meet up in Copenhagen in December to thrash out a new agreement which some will refuse to accept and others will fail to implement. And in 50 or a hundred years time people will pay; millions will starve because of drought-induced famine as farmland becomes desert, and millions more will have to move their homes away from coastlines.
Someone once asked me what I thought people should do to reduce the impact. I said, stop driving cars and use the bus and train. I said stop drilling for oil and gas and instead generate the world’s entire power needs from re-newable sources. They said that will never happen. And they are right.
Bans on private vehicles and stopping fossil fuel extraction is too difficult, it damages too many vested interests and it underlines just how powerless democratic politicians are to make changes that will benefit everyone in the long term. Instead they will introduce half-measures which already are not working.
It is far easier to tell us how they are looking after our safety by jailing would-be suicide bombers and fighting the Taliban. And we can go on believing that lie, while making sure we don’t leave the telly on standby, safe that the world is a better place.

Remember, Remember

It sometimes feels as though my life began in 1st September 1939, even though it is not my birthday and I am nowhere near 70 years old. But there’s no doubt it shaped my life in ways I, and my parents, could not have imagined.
The Nazi invasion of Poland which began that day started the Second World War and led to 50 million direct deaths. My father was an almost 13 year old schoolboy in Warsaw on the day the war broke out. He once said, even then, he had been taught about the existence of a country called Great Britain but thought no more of it. Nine years later he was living there with scant chance of going back to his homeland.
The war uprooted him, and millions of others, tossed them from their previously secure lives in places they knew well and let them land in unfamiliar countries where they were forced to build a new existence. That is why 1st September 1939 means so much to me.
They call Poles, ‘The History Men’, and for good reason. It matters a lot to them in ways that British people find hard to imagine. Perhaps that’s because Britain, as a state, has a good record of victory in wars and, as an island, is less prone to neighbour disputes.
Poland, caught between Germany and Russia is a victim of its own geography, which has made its history tumultuous. And because through all those upheavals its neighbours have remained unchanged, history still helps define its present.
And that is especially true of its relationship with Russia. As the Americans would say, they ‘have a bit of history.’ Imperial Russia colluded with the other great powers to wipe Poland from the map in the 18th and 19th centuries.
It was only back as an independent country for a year when Poland and Soviet Russia went to war in 1920.
Then came 1st September 1939, which within three weeks saw Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union split Poland between them. The Poles who found themselves in the Russian part were persecuted, many of the intellectuals, politicians and military chiefs were shot by Stalin’s secret police. After the two unlikely allies went to war with each other, the Red Army invaded German-occupied Poland.
But the Soviets blotted their ‘great liberator’ copybook by refusing to help nationalist Poles kick the Germans out of Warsaw in 1944, causing thousands of people to die and thousands more (among them my dad) to be taken prisoner of war.
And if all that wasn’t enough, with the German defeat, Stalin decided he wanted Poland to be part of his communist empire even if that’s not what the natives wanted. That lasted until 1989.
So the enmities are long lasting. But modern politicians on both sides recognise things have to move on. Today, on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war, Vladimir Putin is in Poland. The Russian Prime Minister has, in his own way, been trying to make amends.
His attempts have been rather mixed. “Our country’s parliament unambiguously stressed the immorality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” he wrote earlier this week. A good start, saying the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939 was wrong.
“The people of Russia, whose destiny was crippled by the totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitivities of Poles about Katyn where thousands of Polish servicemen lie.” So, official recognition that Russians murdered Polish soldiers who were caught up in the 1939 partition. Things, you would think were moving in the right direction.
Wrong. Poles accept the steps towards conciliation but, being Poles, want more. Why won’t the Russian government release top secret files on why the soliders were killed at Katyn ? And they are further angered by Putin’s parallel drawn between their fate and the thousands of Russian prisoners who died in Polish hands at the end of the 1920 war.
It’s not the same, says Solidarity veteran, historian and newspaper editor, Adam Michnik. “”Let’s be serious,” he says. “We should disclose what happened to the Soviet prisoners. But whatever was their fate we can be sure it wasn’t a bullet in the back of the head.”
Putin’s moral equivalence runs all the way through his words in Poland. Yes, we did some bad stuff, but, hey, so did a lot of other folk and they got away with it. Hence, the Munich Agreement between France, Britain and the Nazis in 1938 which surrendered Czechoslovakia to Germany gave the Poles the chance to grab small bits of Czech and Slovak lands, as well as making Stalin’s pact with Hitler more likely.
Yes, says Michnik, Munich was “cowardly”. But he says, quite acidly, it can’t be compared to the carve up of 17th September 1939 with Germans invading western Poland while Russia got the east.
“It is difficult to put an equals sign between a cowardly, opportunistic agreement to Nazi expansion and the Nazi-Stalinist aggression against Poland. English and French armies didn’t jointly invade Czechoslovakia.
“The Polish government’s actions were reprehensible,” says the Polish intellectual. “But it doesn’t compare with the events of 17th September. The Poles didn’t deport anyone, and committed no crimes like Katyn.”
And it’s not just unofficial voices who are suspicious of Putin’s history lesson. An official Polish government spokesman says his “interpretation is not entirely consistent with Polish traditions.”
On the other hand, Polish President Lech Kaczynski created his own ‘ouch!’ moment by drawing parallels between the murder of the nation’s soliders by Russians at Katyn and the Holocaust.
The historical interpretations are of an intensity that would surprise many British people. Imagine a visit here by Angela Merkel dominated by the rights and wrongs of the Blitz, the bombings of Coventry and Dresden and you only have a small part of it.
But amid all the talk of the past, the 70th anniversary commemorations are also a time to discuss the future. Putin’s brought several members of the Russian government with him. They are talking trade with the Poles.
Relations between the two countries are, as Michnik recognises, far better than they were twenty years ago. But from the Polish side at least they want openness about the past alongside co-operation and understanding in the present and the future.
But suspicions exist still. Poles are outraged with Russian TV documentaries that claim Hitler was ready to sign an agreement with Poland to jointly invade the Soviet Union. Russians can’t understand why Poles don’t see the Red Army’s arrival in their country in 1945, thus ridding them of the Nazis, as something well worth celebrating.
Realpolitik may well rise above the hubbub of historical interpretations as both see each other as an increasingly important trading partner. But for many the history will still matter and the sooner Russians accept Polish points of view, and Poles stop seeing Russia as a threat, the better.

Hooray For The Nanny State

Falkirk MP, Eric Joyce, recently hit out at something he called, “The New Paternalism.” He was writing about Scotland’s proposed new licensing laws, minimum pricing, tackling binge drinking and the like. The point (I think) he was trying to make is that by restricting choice in order to help cure our love affair with drink, there were some silly, catch-all prohibitions on the sale of alcohol, in petrol stations, for example.
The core of his argument seems to be that the less-well-off (who tend to be the ones who drink too much White Lightning) are being forced to reduce the amount they drink by Government edict rather than persuaded to give it up by power of argument, explanation of the risks involved and the offer of help to see the error of their ways.
In other words, too much control is being exercised over people lives in order to help the poor help themselves. So, in order for Buckfast to become prohibitively expensive for a sixteen year old, some nice wee middle class auntie from Kippen or Inverkip has to be penalised by not being able to buy a bottle of wine from her local fishmonger.
And, says Mr Joyce, that’s just not right. Now maybe the Government’s new laws won’t have the desired effect. Perhaps there will be just as much drunkenness in Falkirk of a weekend and all the anti-social behaviour, vandalism and violence, both public and domestic, that goes with it. Mr. Joyce seems to be of the view that a lighter regulatory touch with more emphasis on education and persuasion will work better.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the new American book that’s been all the rage among the chattering London classes this summer. It’s called Nudge, and was written by two academics.
They say you don’t need loads of laws to stop people making all the wrong choices that do them harm. All you need to do is start schemes that will point them in the right direction. Ultimately, you leave it up to them. You say, “Here’s something that will allow you to make a better decision about this type of behaviour”, and leave them to make their own mind up.
I don’t think Mr Joyce is a roll-back-the-state libertarian (at least that’s not my impression from reading his musings) but he does seem to think that we can interfere in people’s lives too much. Hence, he writes :
“The central definition of the new paternalism is that it’s patronising. It says some folk aren’t open to change so we’ll target them and make life difficult for them. This seems to me the apotheosis of bad legislation.”
But the argument comes down to decision-making. Even the authors of Nudge realise that people are hopeless at arriving at the best choice. But, they would claim, it’s better to guide than force.
The trouble is, it’s the poorest who have the biggest problem in breaking their cycle of behaviour in anything that’s remotely bad for them. It’s the poorest who have the least chance of giving up smoking. It’s those at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale who have the worst dietary habits, although, experts say there is less of a gap between how much money you have and how pished you get.
And anyway how much guiding do people need ? It’s been going on for years and hasn’t worked. Surely, and I think Kenny McAskill would agree (although maybe not publicly), that the time has come to stop pussyfooting around and start proscribing things.
Look at the new fag packets (if you dare) and look at the groups of kids hanging round the off-licence on a Friday night and wonder to yourself if the encouraging, friendliness of “please don’t to that” has had the desired effect ?
What our American friends in their nice book say (without actually saying it) is that people are too stupid to make the right decision about what’s right for them. So who’s going to do it ? Who will grab the bull by the horns to make real inroads into improving not just people’s health but society ?
The only answer is the state. Take one look down Falkirk High Street and you will see people who are crying out to be told what to do. A succession of political leaders are to blame for this as much as anyone.
The post-war generation has been sold a dream of endless consumption and they have bought it. The pursuit of money in the hope that buying things will make them happy has been state policy in what’s laughingly called “the developed world” for too long. Its beauty is it doesn’t require the long arm of the state to make it work. People have, therefore, become used to governmental non-interference in their lives, although they have quite happily allowed multi-national corporations to shape their desires and spending habits with the minimum of fuss.
And it’s all turned out to be a house of cards. It’s created unsustainable development which threatens the future of the planet and every living thing on it. At a more micro-level, people are unhealthy, their lives are full of stress and unrewarding. They have no beliefs to help them cope. Their familial relationships are floundering in a sea of amorality. They have no friends. They are sad.
Who is going to fix this ? New age economic gurus with buzzwords ? Or do we need a benign, strong force for good to regulate what we do, so it’s better for the majority ? The next one knocking the Nanny State gets it, alright ?

Beginnings And Endings

Politicians from across the world are getting ready to gather in Poland to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents, Prime Ministers and even our own David Milliband will be at Westerplatte on September 1st to remember where the first shots were fired on 1st September 1939, 70 years on.
Wait a minute, you might ask, didn’t the war start two days later on 3rd September ? If you are British then you would be right, in a sense, because that was the day the UK declared war on Germany. But it doesn’t alter the fact that fighting began two days earlier.
And as Poland gears up to host the centrepiece of events looking at the beginning of the war, it becomes evident that not only do we have a different starting point, Poland and Britain feel the greatest event in the 20th century also ended at different times.
We were taught at school that hostilities ended on 8th May 1945. The conventional histories say so, although the Russians celebrate Victory Day on 9th August because the ceasefire came after midnight Moscow time.
But consider this from Poland’s Culture Minister, Bogdan Zdrojewski. “In this year there are three important commemorations, two taking place in Poland,” he said. “The 1st September 1939, the Polish elections of 4th June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ultimate end of World War Two was the June elections and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.”
So, for Poles, he says, the War did not end with the shooting in 1945. It continued right the way through the period of the People’s Republic of Poland and came to a conclusion only with the election of a Solidarity government and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
To many Poles this matters. It went to war in September 1939 to protect itself from foreign invasion. The Germans were eventually repulsed six years later but that only brought the arrival of Soviet forces, who stayed for more than forty years.
They argue, therefore, that Poland was only returned to its pre-1939 conditions of a free, independent, liberal parliamentary democracy at the point at which the Soviet influence over the country ended. Only then, they say, were their war aims of 1939 truly satisfied.
And this view seems to mean a lot to lots of Poles, even today. A nationwide survey was carried out to mark the 70th anniversary investigating the feelings of ordinary Poles about the war. The greatest pride was taken in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, organised by members of the London government and left to flounder by Stalin.
The greatest shame was bestowed on those who collaborated with the enemy. And that doesn’t mean just those few Poles who were forced to work for the Germans.
“Only 17 per cent of those questioned said there were events that brought shame on Poland,” historian Paul Machcewicz told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “But so few Poles collaborated (with the Germans) that people can’t identify individuals by name who were involved. Interestingly, the first name that appears on the black list is Boleslaw Beirut (the first leader of Communist Poland). So, collaboration and treason in wartime is today primarily associated with those Poles involved in Polish subordination to the USSR.”
This public perception is very important because it shows just how effective politicians have been in using history for their own ends. If the history taught to young Poles since 1989 paints the Soviet Union as the bad guys of World War Two, it’s much easier to present Putin and Medvedev as people to be generally wary of. And, therefore, to see Poland’s current EU and NATO role as a natural continuation of a long historical process of positive engagement with the west and hostility to the east.
But is the picture it paints an abuse of history itself ? To ask that question leads us back to the debate that has, and still, causes rancour among historians; who was worse Hitler or Stalin ?
Revisionist academics claim that one was just as bad as the other and, therefore, the crimes of each can be roughly equated. Taken over the course of each of their reigns, and in all their actions at home and abroad, you could argue the toss. But what about Poland specifically ?
Hitler’s division of the country with Stalin unleashed different terrors on different places; the westernmost parts of the country were incorporated into Germany and the locals either Germanised or expelled. If they were thrown out they ended up in the General Government, a dumping ground for the racially inferior where you ran the risk of arbitrary execution or death through starvation. In the east you either were Sovietised or deported to the Gulag.
But that changed with Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. All of Poland became a German domain and almost all of Poland’s Jews were murdered. And had the Soviet Union been defeated and German hegemony established permanently across Europe ?
It’s a ‘what if ?’ scenario perhaps but there is enough written evidence, and you don’t have to go far to find it, to suggest we know what would have happened. Poland would have become virgin land for the Germans, the Poles simply uneducated slaves doing their masters’ bidding. They would have been expendable and, given the Nazi’s predilection for extermination, probably wiped out as a nation before long.
But that didn’t happen. The Soviet Union fought back and used its might to rid Poland of the German menace. Geopolitical demands, Stalin’s paranoia over an attack from the west, and the Allies’ grateful recognition of his contribution meant he had all the cards and could do as he liked with the parts of Europe where is troops remained when the Nazi’s surrendered. No other option was possible without another war, which the big powers did not want.
And he chose to make Poland communist. That’s not what the majority of Poles wanted, but what they got was a series of Governments subservient to Moscow, implementing ideas that felt alien to their way of life. Oppositionists were locked up, people’s lives were dictated to by authorities they hated. However,everyone had a job, some food to eat, somewhere small and inadequate to live. But unless you did something serious you did not live in fear of your life. Millions of others chose a long and painful exile abroad where they left a lasting, and positive, legacy.
This was a tragedy. But it was not catastrophic for the Polish nation. Had Germany been able to carry out its murderous plans then there may not have been a Poland left. Maybe those who say the Communists were the country’s greatest shame of the Second World War should use the 70th anniversary of its start mulling that thought over in their minds.

What Makes You Happy ?

It seems no-one can answer that question. The strange thing is we certainly know what makes us unhappy. For me it was work, that’s why I’ve decided to give it up.
Now, for most people quitting a job in the middle of a recession with no alternative source of employment to jump into seems a bit of a nightmare. And, I will admit, it needs a bit of finance to make the move. I don’t even know if not having a job will actually make me happier, but I might as well give it a try.
Happiness anyway is a strange thing. I find it weird that almost all the analyses of whether we are happy or unhappy are psychological; it seems to make much more sense to look at it from an economic, political and sociological perspective.
Money does seem to buy some people happiness but it is also “the root of all evil.” Is that a circle we can square? Any economic and political investigation into happiness probably depends on your own world perspective. Do you buy the whole idea of individualism, making something of your life and reflecting your status in consumption? Then it’s pretty much taken that the modern world as it stands is a perfect fit for the way you want to live.
But if you are primarily social, on the left and understand Marx’s theory of alienated labour? Then doubts will start to appear, and after that cracks and before you know it you are not only questioning the whole edifice but taking a sledgehammer to it.
That’s where I’m at. Feeling the pressure to perform in the rat race simply to make profits for capitalists no longer fits. And as more and more (although not nearly enough) of us start to question big profits and big bonuses it is certain there must be a better way. Especially as capitalism is directly responsible for climate change and the possible long-term end of the planet and humanity.
I have laughed at all the self-help guides for improving our own lives for too long to think I have the answers. But these are my solutions, just for me.
I will only to earn enough money to survive. I will exchange my labour for cash only to the extent that it allows me to pay my bills and feed myself and my dependents.
I will offer more of my talents on a barter basis, exchanging work for skills, or possessions, that other people have and which may be of use to me.
I aim to reduce cash spending to an absolute minimum. Consumption for me, from now on, will be based only on need and not on desire (apart from my daily newspaper, two pints of beer in my weekly visit to the pub and occasional book purchases).
I want to reduce the damage I do to the environment. I will look for way to lower the amount of electricity I use and cut the amount of waste I produce.
When I read them back these seem like wooly-liberal aims. People will laugh and mock, I know, but I do want to disengage with a world I feel alienated from, full of daft consumerism, pointless desires and, dare I say it, unhappiness.
Sadly, too many people seem to know no other way. The world, it seems, has to exist on the circulation of money. People have to invest to create jobs, those workers have to be paid so they can spend money on things they don’t need so that other people can have jobs making the things they don’t need, so that they can have money, and on and on it goes.
And who benefits? Rich people. And how do they benefit? They go and consume, buying more and more things they don’t need to show off to others how wealthy they are in the hope they will gain more respect and status.
And who suffers? Poor people who can’t get jobs because economic priorities dictate that rich people can’t afford more luxuries if they employ them. Everyone, because all this madness just ends up creating demands on us that we can’t fulfil and desires that we can’t afford. Society, which goes up the spout because the pressure to succeed means we have no interest in helping others or time to see how we might need other people to make life better. And the environment. The world’s taking a pounding. The raw materials which are essential to drive forward our lifestyles get scarcer and people go to even more insane levels to find them, bringing destruction in the short term and environmental chaos in the years ahead.
What makes me unhappy ? Modern life. I’m vowing to give up as much of it as I can. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Afghanistan

The debate over British troop involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of nothing more than the bit in Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters where Max Von Sydow watches the TV show on the Holocaust.
“They can never answer the question ‘How could it all happen?’ because it’s the wrong question,” he says. Quite.
For several weeks we have had the chance to become experts in troop deployment and the necessity of helicopters as a way of limiting casualities on the ground. The question has been “Why are there not more helicopters in Afghanistan ?” It’s the wrong question.
The right question is “Why are we in Afghanistan in the first place?” Answers to that are not to the fore although, to be fair, people have had a go at supplying some in the past. Lord George Robertson’s is the most often trotted out. You may, or may not recall, his line about Afghanistan coming to us if we don’t go to it; in other words if we don’t nip the Taleban in the bud then they, and the disciples of Osama Bin Laden, will be on our doorstep trying to bomb us all into goodness-knows-where.
But does that line stand up ? So far, Britain has had the July 7th attacks on the London transport system and Smeato’s Big Day Out at Glasgow Airport. And that, pretty much, is that.
The Security services, who have had their budgets massively increased and have created an employment boom in the middle of a recession will say that’s because of their increased operations. Is that so ? Or is it just that carrying out widespread terrorist attacks in mainland Britain is beyond the resources of a few deluded Islamists ?
When you think of it the IRA was much more successful in creating a sustained reign of terror here than the Wahhabist lunatic fringe. Oh, and another thing, how many of them came directly from Afghanistan ? Leeds, yes, even Renfrew, but no-one’s caught a plane from Kabul to Britain to set off a bomb yet.
And is it just coincidence that this terror threat that has necessitated MI5 going on a huge recruitment drive started as soon as Britain sent its first troops into Afghanistan ?
Meanwhile, British soldiers are dying and more are ending up in field hospitals in Helmand than the army surgeons can cope with. And strangely, as we try to justify Britain’s current position, the security services are downgrading the threat of a terrorist attack here.
Of course, it can be easily argued that the combination of our troops valiant efforts in the desert and the increased work for the spooks is starting to show real benefits to the point where a response to a potential terror threat at home can be reduced.
Perhaps the Taleban are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Jaap De Hoop Schaefer alluded to that in his appearance at Chatham House. Yes they are the bad guys there and, yes, a resurgence internally will be bad news for some poor people in Afghanistan and Pakistan too.
But if we go is there a chance we will be safer, even if ordinary Afghans might not be ? It is a choice between staying and watching soldiers die and running a tiny risk of some explosions in Britain’s cities.
Terror attacks on Britain’s streets are few and far between. British military deaths in Helmand are almost an everyday happening. And to defeat the Islamists there will have to be many more soldiers killed and wounded in the months and years ahead.
General Dannatt is right; if Britain stays it’s not just about helicopters but about a massive increase in troop numbers as well. Thirty years ago the Soviet Union decided to send its troops to support its political proxies in Afghanistan. It took ten years of returning body bags to convince the leadership that it wasn’t worth it. Britain has been there eight years during which time 186 troops have been killed. How long before we start asking the right question ?

Man On The Moon ?

A quarter of Americans do not believe man landed on the moon. So what do they think NASA and the US Government spent $24 billion on ? Where did the money go ? Was it all spent on a massive deception, on TV mock-ups, on keeping politicians and the media quiet and complicit ?

Of course, it's not what they believe that's important, it's what they don't want to believe. Space travel and the further exploration of the universe asks important questions about the existence of God and many Americans simply don't want to have anything to do with doubting deity.

They are the same people who refuse to believe Darwin, reject theories of evolution and, not only that, think that their alternative explanation for dinosaurs deserves equal attention to the point where they should be taught in school.

It is interesting to note that one of the things Aldrin and Armstrong did on the surface of the Moon was conduct a religious ceremony of sorts, proving that science and reason are not always incompatible with faith and nor should they be.

But it will always be the case that people will not want to believe their own eyes because to do so would be to accept a truth that is so uncomfortable their whole belief system would be threatened and, perhaps, become unsustainable.

However, belief is important; we should all believe in something because to reject belief is to turn inward and reject society and humanity. A lack of belief is perhaps why so many people are greedy, self-absorbed, unhappy, alienated.

It doesn't help that as a social trend it has been growing, perhaps since the end of the Second World War when all the beliefs, all the -isms of the inter-war period, were crushed into ruins by bombs and guns and people en-masse seemed to decide it was better to retreat into a personal world whose bounds were one's own family. They left society to the politicians and instead rejected ideas ike mutual assistance and co-operation for a new car and a washing machine.

Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" was the high water mark of such thinking but it has not left us despite outrage over MP's expenses and fat cat capitalist bonuses. Although at least now people say things like , "I wish I could believe in something" which may represent progress.

The lesson of the man on the moon is to look at what you see, think about what it represents, analyse the implications and form a view from there. But don't just reject, there are times when you have to believe and alter those beliefs as necessary.

The People's Policeman

Let's start the week with a bit of gentle irony.

Celebrity Stasi

“Hello, and welcome to another edition of Celebrity Stasi. On tonight’s show, we illegally bugged and tapped several celebrities, followed their every movement to show you what they are really like. See stars like Gwyneth Paltrow as you’ve never seen them before, and find out what Sir Alex Ferguson thinks of football’s top brass. All that, after this break.”

You can see Endemol coming up with a format already to turn the secret surveillance of the great and good, as practised by tabloid journalists, into a Saturday night TV ratings winner.
The shock of the Guardian revelations this week about the News of the World isn’t so much what the journalists and private eyes did, but the fact that the bosses paid out to keep the dirty tricks hush-hush.
They had to because they couldn’t have their tactics exposed again, especially after one of their number had already been sent down by M’Lud only a couple of years before.
But equally, because laying bare the techniques used would only alert the suspicions of their rich and famous targets and potentially cut off the source of all their exclusives, meaning less salacious title-tattle and, perhaps, a mini-slump in sales.
Well, it’s all too late for that now. But will it end ? Will it heck, and the strange and necessarily secretive world of monitoring other people will survive and continue.
We are all used to the idea of spies. But our main notion of them centres around espionage where states try to hold a competitive advantage over others in order to neutralise any potential threats.
Spying for the sake of finding out what people say and do belongs more to the world of control freaks like Erich Mielke, the now notorious head of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
There is no real point to the News of the World’s spying other than to find out any information that might be worth publishing in its pages. It’s a feeling former citizens of the German Democratic Republic will be only to familiar; finding out things just so you know the thoughts and interests of people started out as a way of controlling a paternalistic state but ended up becoming a mania of its own.
The links between the two grow stronger the longer you look at them analytically. Especially when it comes to defending the tactic. The Stasi always claimed its spying on its own citizens was to defend the country and Socialism. The News of the World claims it’s all in the public interest. Both defences are quite spurious.
And the high ups denial that they knew anything about what was going on runs true whether it’s News International of the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
“No, we never knew they were bugging people’s houses. We just told them to go out and get scoops/defend the values of our Socialist republic”, (delete as appropriate.)
The fact that it goes on underlines more than anything a rank hypocrisy about our supposed free society. There’s no doubt, come November, there will be plenty on TV about the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and how that act delivered the repressed citizens of the GDR into a world of untrammelled freedoms.
There will be more reminders of what those bad Commies did. Spying on their own people, finding out what they ate for dinner, when they went to bed, and who they were having sex with. And the lengths they went to, as well; the smell jars will be brought out at this point. Look at that, they will say, and compare their lives then to our wonderful lives where we are free to do and say as we please just when we like.
You wonder whether Sir Alex and Gwyneth feel the same way. If they feel violated in much the same manner as those spied upon by the Stasi do they not have some justification ?
Their recourse will not come through the state either. Just as East Germans who were allowed to open their Stasi files in the 1990’s found out there was little they could do about seeking redress for the impact of all the spying, so the celebrities whose mobile phones were hacked are being told not enough evidence exists to suggest crimes have been committed.
Perhaps it is because the intrusion is not by, or on behalf of, the state that such tactics are considered less serious. And maybe there is also a very strong feeling that public figures are “owned” by us and therefore this kind of thing, “goes with the territory.”
But maybe, just maybe, people will ask if it is right for the News of the World, and others, to use these tactics. And if those same people think about it long enough they might get down to asking, “Who might be watching me ?”

Nationalisation

The majority of people in a new poll think the railways should be fully nationalised. Great. Even 31% of Tory voters think it’s a good idea. By jings, we’ll reach a Socialist utopia yet at this rate, although you have to wonder about the value of opinion polls.
The last one out claimed people thought the Tories would make the best job of running the economy. The same party, it should be noted, that gave us rail privatisation in the first place.
There is little doubt, though, that putting private companies in charge of public services has been an expensive con. In Falkirk we had schools built under the tragic PFI scheme that will cost people an arm and a leg locally while delivering a profit for the construction firms involved.
These schools created luxurious facilities which should have been of enormous social benefit to the communities that surrounded them. Except that the profit-driven firms that owned them put them out of the reach of the people who should have been hiring them.
And then there’s energy. A whole industry has grown up around creating a market for gas and electricity supplies. And what has happened ? Instead of competition driving prices down we have seen companies put the cost to the consumer up. And they say they are simply at the liberty of the global price of the raw commodities.
Whereas, if we had a unified system of energy supply we could have a national policy giving the country a bigger say in the control of wholesale supplies. In theory, that could have kept the cost in check and people would not have faced quite so hard a time paying to heat and light their homes.
Oh, and while we’re at it, banks. Yes, banks in Britain have never been state-owned, but hell, they are now. Capitalist greed once again, paying billions for assets that turned out to be worth hee-haw and putting the savings of ordinary people very close to the bottom of the toilet bowl. But for the intervention of the state.
And now the state’s got cold feet about the whole thing. It wants to hive off Northern Rock to Tesco and has been very un-interventionist with the Royal Bank of Scotland by meekly agreeing Stephen Hester can have a £10 million salary.
People are queueing up to tell ministers to be more hands on. Get more involved in the running of our services, not for private gain, but public benefit. And the best we might end up with is The Postbank.
It’s a farce. While we demand certain functions returned to their proper place, the state, politicians worry about the effect on public borrowing and national debt. Spending has to be cut, all they argue about is by how much and where the axe will fall.
And it looks increasingly like mainstream politics will not be shaken from its mantra of low taxation and minimal, light-touch, intervention despite those calls.
Surely if a majority of Tory voters think rail nationalisation is OK now is the time to be getting more stateist. Maybe not East Germany, but perhaps Sweden circa 1975 ? Listen to Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Darling and weep. Not a chance.

You Are A Terriorist

Don't you just love it when the left starts squealing about freedom and individual liberty ?
Typical, though, of how the left has come to accept capitalism as a system that can be modified rather than one that should be brought to a conclusion. It's a tough choice, I suppose, and hard on radical left-wingers who can't bring themselves to accept that their own vision of a "perfect society" may be unobtainable without the same kind of measures they complain about under liberal democracy.
As Engels himself said, "Peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism."

Are Racists Racist ?

The British National Party is to be investigated because its membership and employment policies may break the Race Relations Act. Well, there’s a surprise.
But even more surprising is the reaction of that nice Mr Peter Tatchell. Asked for his view by The Guardian, he said if only people had known beforehand that non-whites can’t become members then maybe some would have thought twice about voting for them at the European Parliament elections.
How often are we going to have to put up with elements of the left in denial about the casual racism of our society ? Last week, Romanian people living in Belfast were hounded out of their homes by an admittedly very tiny minority of racist thugs. Sky News spoke to locals about it. They blamed the credit crunch.

Now it seems everyone is unwilling to face up to facts. A large section of people in parts of England vote for the BNP and the reason ? Ignorance ? Kind of, but not the ignorance the chattering classes have in mind.
We have to be open about it. Lets just say it. They voted BNP because they don’t like black people, they don’t want foreigners in “their” country and because anything that is “other” is automatically suspicious.
They are not voting BNP because they don’t understand what the party represents or because Nick Griffin tries to disguise their overt racism in cleverly mendacious ways. They are not voting BNP to protect British jobs or any such tosh that fails to stand up to the fact that we need immigrants to maintain skills levels.
And here’s another shock for the hand-wringers. The number of people who share the views of those who voted BNP but didn’t dare put their X in the party’s box is a lot higher than those who did.
How many times have we seen supposedly respectable people, men and women who would never in a million years consider themselves fascists or potential BNP voters, say they are cancelling a doctors’ appointment rather than face an Asian in the consulting room ? A minority, yes, but a significant one harbour these opinions. And if a political party can tap into that, then what?
It’s not just a British phenomenon, of course. I have seen “English Go Home” daubed in paint on walls in Scotland. Hungarians talk of a “final solution” for their gypsies; Poles whip up anti-German sentiment over post-World War Two borders; Romanians tell Hungarians living in “their” country to go home.
It’s a challenge to us all. But we can’t hide from it by pretending that those who vote for the extreme right are somehow being duped into doing so, and if only they understood the consequences of their actions they would stop.
Our mainstream parties seem to do little to make the situation better. The left has ill-served us with its tokenism on the issue while the centre and the right talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
David Cameron’s happy to voice his “disgust” at the BNP’s election gains while his own Euro MP’s join forces with Latvian politicians who think it was no crime for their countrymen to throw in their lot with the Nazis.
All democratic politicians should speak out against racism and mean it.
Race hate laws are good and should be used more often. Clamp down hard on the insults and abuse that litter our everyday life and don’t give regard to clogging up the courts with such cases.
And maybe we could heed the advice of Jerry Dammers and The Specials. In a world where the political and the ideological have been driven out and replaced by a smaller, more inward-looking realm of personal experience we could simply think again if we have a racist friend.

Twits

Iran was my first experience of revolutionary violence. As a 12 and 13 year old I sat captivated in front of the TV set as ordinary citizens took to the streets in what seemed a thrilling expression of people power.
To a youngster it seemed a simple story; the public didn’t like an corrupt old king who had failed to use the country’s oil wealth for their betterment.
So, they were throwing him out and replacing him with his fiercest critic, an old guy with a beard who promised justice for the poor.
It seemed fair enough. Replace a tyrant with justice and the chances are you will end up with a better society. But even in 1979, from western eyes at least, it seemed an odd manifestation of a socially-progressive change in the way things worked.
For a start the old guy with the beard was a religious leader and he was creating a theocratic state based on a code of law and governance that harked back to the middle ages, if not before that. To us, it still seems a strange choice for a society to make; reject the new and make way for the old.
But that was to take a secularist approach to history. It ignored the fact that Iran had a high number of pious poor people who perhaps welcomed the certainty that rule by religious fundamentalists brought.
And there now seems no doubt that amongst the educated, more prosperous part of society there was an element of nationalism at play. At a time of Cold War tensions Iran could have swung to the left amid the melting pot of revolutionary fervour. Left-wing groups were involved on the streets in the overthrow of the Shah and perhaps fancied their chances of a secularist, nationalist, left-leaning nation either non-alligned or maybe even a Soviet client state.
But that didn’t happen. Largely because there was little popular support for it. That in turn seems to have been guided by the intermingling of nationalism and religion.
Iran is one of the very few Muslim countries with an overwhelmingly Shia majority. That sense of difference, not just from the western values of Socialism, but also of ‘otherness’ from Sunni countries may have helped convince many of the need not just for a revolution to topple a tyrant, but for a specific ‘Iranian’ type of revolution.
Perhaps. Maybe it was because Ayatollah Khomeini was simply the most prominent, long-standing critic of the Shah. The opponent with the loudest voice and who shouts the longest has the best chance of convincing people of his ideas. You can’t rule out, as well, that his ideas also convinced some within the ruling clique, most crucially sections of the military.
Once you have a revolution, though, you have to sustain it and history tells us the easiest way is through war. Saddam Hussein was largely to blame for the nine year Iran-Iraq conflict. It was a kind of hell for both nations but Iran used it to build its revolutionary creed, entrench an autocratic, theocracy and, in the minds of many, create an image of a united nation-state able to defeat a more powerful neighbour.
The revolution was a success, the war was a kind of success, and Iran, at huge cost, had some reason to feel good about itself. But the power invested in the revolutionary ideals must have suffered a shock with Khomeni’s death.
Crucially, before the old man died, a succession was sorted out. But since then the power struggle has been for the heart of the revolution, played out between conservatives and reformers.
The former always seem to have the upper hand simply because the architecture of state, put in place by Khomeini before his death, gives the religious leaders, not the political ones, all the real power.
Hence the recent election and its aftermath has a crucial subtext; politicians in Iran are elected but have limited power to direct policy. They can’t even stand for office unless they have first been approved by the religious leaders. Mir Hossein Mousavi claims he lost the election fraudulently and his supporters have taken to the streets. He is the ‘leader’ of this new revolution, according to western analysis, but he is an establishment figure.
His supporters shout ‘Death to the dictator’ but they don’t mean Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the man who ‘won’ the election. Instead they want the head of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, because he’s the guy that runs the place; the President is merely his puppet.
There seems little doubt that is what has precipitated this whole crisis. Khameini took one look at the way the semi-democratic wind was blowing and didn’t like what he saw. He would much rather have someone in his own image as the political figurehead.
Which raises the question of what a Mousavi presidency would be like. Some Iranians liked the idea of greater freedom of expression and a more liberal social environment their man was promising. There are some too who weary of all the confrontation with the west and with Israel. But they voted for Mohammed Khatami in 1997 with similar hopes in their heart and got very little in return because he lacked the powerbase and, ultimately, the determination to force his reforms to a conclusion in the face of likely opposition from the religious elite.
Even if they get their wish of a new election and Mousavi wins what are the chances that they will get what they want ? Will they end up disappointed and the Islamic revolution still unwilling to give them the real change they so evidently want ?
That is why the protestors now have to decide what to do next. They have been told by the Supreme Leader to pack up and go home. In effect, he’s saying the party’s over, I’m still in charge, things aren’t going to change so you can like it or lump it.
By continuing the protests they change their meaning. At the outset there was anger at apparent election fraud. Now the state has laid its cards on the table as far as that one goes, the next step from there is an open challenge to the regime itself.
From an appeal to get the ‘right’ President inside the existing framework of the Islamic Republic the only way forward is either to challenge that framework or to challenge the existence of the right of the religious leaders to rule at all.
If they want to end the Islamic Republic then it would appear they need new leaders because Mousavi is not really their man. And, after all, why would someone who had invested so much time and effort in setting up and sustaining the theocratic state want to pull it all down ?
But his response to the intransigence of Khameini and the apparatus of state repression will be crucial. His apparent claim to favour ‘martyrdom’ suggests militancy but he still appears to be a man willing to work within the system. He will accept compromise, that’s for sure, especially if more people within the establishment come over to his way of thinking and more politicial pressure ensues on the clerics. And it seems the majority of those in green would probably settle for the same and go home.
However, those out battling the riot police have moved their own goalposts. The Twitterers are starting to call for freedom. What does that mean, other than the end of the old regime? But they lack one crucial aspect, real leadership. Which, in turn, tends to suggest talk of a 1979 regime-change scenario is unlikely. Those who would use the protests to overturn the revolution have no Khomeini and will flounder without one.
The best outcome for the greens ? More politicians back Mousavi and some limited reforms are introduced. The worst case would be intransigence on both sides and more deaths. With the outside world unwilling to interfere until the dust settles on the internal wrangling it could be more of the latter than the former.

It's Amazing What's On YouTube

And I bet they didn't have problems with kids hanging around street corners drinking Buckfast and White Lightning claiming they had nothing to do.

I love the bit where Willi Stoph, Prime Minister of the GDR and Politburo member of the SED, inflates and plays with his own beach ball. Brilliant !

A Word On Expenses

A work colleague can put £40 worth of petrol in the tank of their car, drive to a job 180 miles away, and back, and claim mileage from their employer that amounts to more than £300. They have done nothing wrong. It is all within the rules.
The same work colleague expresses dismay, disgust and horror that an MP can claim food expenses of £400 a month and can rack up a total expenses bill, in a year, of almost £200,000.
Who is right ? More to the point, who is without sin ? When it comes to the Westminster expenses saga indignation comes cheap and hypocrisy is curiously ignored.
Yes, some MP’s were on the make. But most were only doing what they knew they would get away with. That is the way of the world. Few fiddled their expenses but a lot knew how to maximise them. Many people with allowances from their work follow exactly the same rules. The difference appears only to be one of scale.
By all means punish the buyers of duck ponds and while you are at it you can change the rules so there is less money bandied about. After all, who earns £64,000 a year and needs a food allowance ? But the disgust of the ordinary office worker who would never dream of being out of pocket for any costs incurred as part of a day’s work. That we can do without.

What's left of The Left ?

Not much, it would appear. Even the doyens of socialist thinking are lining up to have a pop after the dismal performance of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in the European Parliament elections.
When no less a person than Professor E.G. Hobsbawm starts carrying on like Dad’s Army’s Private Fraser then it really is time to start worrying. This is the man who taught most of us everything we needed to know about imperialism and why it’s a bad thing. This is a man of the real left. And yet, and yet.
“The left is in trouble everywhere,” he said in The Guardian recently. “The European left relied on a working class that not longer exists in its old form and in order to recover it will need to find a new constituency. That may be hard.”
Unduly pessimistic ? Some would say. Some include Poul Nyup Rasmussen, the leader of the Party of European Socialism in the European Parliament. “There is a need to reflect and reconnect with the voters. But I am not persuaded these (European) elections provide overwhelming evidence of a crisis in European Socialism.”
No ? What about Labour and its 15% at the polls on June 4th ? What about the German SPD reduced to a rump ? What about the emaciated Italian left, seemingly powerless to halt Berlusconi, who wins votes as he makes those same voters wince with his antics ?
The people who care most about this are the party members themselves, especially those still in elected office and who see that power and influence disappearing at the next set of elections. And the policy wonks who float around the sidelines of power.
They are now in turmoil. After twelve years of power in Britain Labour’s now jumping about realising it’s all slipping away. Quick, lads, lets get some new policies, that’ll help.
But maybe old Eric’s right. Perhaps the damage has already been done. How many people who voted Labour in 1997 as thought it were the most natural thing in the world now do so ?
Many fewer, even in Scotland where the party was ten points behind the SNP at the recent election. The writing was on the wall here two years ago when Labour couldn’t even form a coalition government at Holyrood. They have lost their natural constituency, that’s for sure.
But is that down to changes in society or changes in the democratic left ? Are there fewer poor ? There may be fewer manufacturing workers but the number of people who would consider themselves part of a working class can’t be any lower than in days of old.
And yet, when it comes to voting time those people are scattered to the four winds when left alone in the polling booth. In Scotland, of course, many have found solace in the Scottish National Party; broadly speaking, of the left but avowedly independent of thought. Others have gravitated to the Greens or the hard left since devolution although that revolutionary option seems to have passed though what seems to have been, ‘just a phase.’
But why has this happened ? Of course, now the Labour Party has found itself standing on the edge of a precipice its bright, young intellectuals have been given the task of pulling it back from the edge.
Neal Lawson is the Chairman of the leftist Compass group within the party. He says it’s not the people to blame for Labour’s demise, it’s changes to the party.
“The New Labour or Blairite belief is that everything starts with the individual. It is up to us to think and act based on our own view of our own best interest. The role of the state is to empower us as individuals to spend and demand.”
In other words, no wonder people from Labour’s natural pool of voters started to drift away when Tony came along.
This is the view of shattered dreams. The Labour Party in power presented to naturally left-leaning people a great chance. But they ended up disillusioned as the Labour leadership increasingly aligned itself to interests its core vote viewed as incongruous.
Blair had his head stuck up some very surprising backsides whether it was what old-fashioned Labourites would have dismissed as ‘captialists’ or George W. Bush.
And his next door neighbour Broon was busy handing out baubles to Sir Fred Goodwin and his friends at the same time, so even when the mantle of power switched between enemies even the slowest ship in the convoy could see there was, ultimately, no difference. Both were New Labour, appealed to big business, middle England and traditionally centrist voters. It won them elections, of course it did, but those elections were won not in Labour heartlands but in middle class England.
The class comrades were marginalised and the longer it went on the more disillusioned they became.
Now Labour is finally awakening to the reality of the situation. Its old voters won’t vote for it because they no longer see Labour as the party that represents their interests. And their new constituency is rejecting its suitor because they think Labour’s rubbish at the economy and is putting up taxes.
But don’t fear because the party will use this crisis to rediscover its soul.
Lawson’s even started using the ‘S’ word.
“Socialism should be defined as the ability of people to exert the maximum control over their own lives. For this, people have to be more equal; to have the resources to live a free life. But they must also act in concert with others – as citizens shaping the big things in their life and not just as consumers buying the small things that change too little.”
And, never fear, here comes John Cruddas quoting Antonio Gramsci. ”We do not know what the next election will bring nor can we predict the fate of the Labour party. The task now is to begin building a progressive left movement that, unlike New Labour, will break with the legacy of Thatcherism and establish a new hegemony.”
Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of the old time religion. Except that there are still plenty in the party who want nothing to do with Socialism or legendary Italian Communist thinkers. And while some plot against the leader and while others try to redefine the party’s role nothing is done to convince people they should vote Labour. Mind you, that’s hard when so many within the party seem unable to agree WHY people should do so.
They could start by offering a vision of equality. They could do more to appeal to the poor, the downtrodden, the disposed. They could start to do less simply to stand on the centre ground devoid of ideas that appeal to the centrists.
In many ways, the real crisis of the Labour party is a crisis of belief that goes far beyond its membership.
New Labour tried to reflect a trend in society away from belief. Ideology was binned because people didn’t have an interest in it. Captialism was sold to them as a rising standard of living, increasing consumption and general happiness. New Labour accepted that and tried to put its own spin on someone else’s song.
But now we have a bubble that’s burst, anger against greed, the challenge of global warming and the dangers to our environment. People don’t like greedy bankers and they seem happy to recycle their rubbish, buy low-energy lightbulbs and rein in their previous credit-funded spending.
Labour must be ideological again and it must explain why it is so. People face tough choices, they have to be shaken out of their consumerist apathy (if they haven’t already done it for themselves) and be told they cannot go on like before.
By being socialist, green, by helping the poor and making the rich pay their share, by making the case for high taxation and high public spending, by defending jobs and protecting minorities, by encouraging immigration to fill skills and labour gaps, by not being afraid to nationalise key public services, by doing all of these things they can appeal to what is fair and really mean it.
And if people reject it all at the polls and vote for the small government of the Tories, where the poor have to rely on handouts from charities, where the rich get tax break and our key services are run for profit ? Well, they’ll get the leaders they deserve. But at least the left will still be left to survive and fight on.